Re: le style, c'est l'homme

Scottie,

Well, personally I have no problem working hard to understand complex
arguments within a long and specific context and tradition. Even the quote I
cited for you, when read within the entire *Phenomenology of Spirit* and
within its specific, defined vocabulary and within the historical context of
the newly developing Phenomenology at the time, in response, in part, to
Kant, can be understood if one is willing to spend some time working at it.
This does not, for me, make it bad writing at all, just discipline specific.

Again, I think everything you say might well be said by the completely
unaware and unknowledgable reader who pulls *Ulysses* or the *Wake* off the
shelf and just starts reading. That doesn't make Joyce a bad writer. I
think, in another sense, it can be said about Celine as well. "What? I don't
understand any of this. Where're the sentences? This is simply bad writing!"
 And yet I have come to love Celine and his writing, to really enjoy it, just
as I have come to love Joyce and just as I have come to love reading
Heidegger and Hegel and Derrida.

And I would never have the... well the whatever it takes, to simply dismiss
the history of Continental philosophy from 1807 on (with the publication of
Hegel's *Phenomenology*) as "bad writing" just because it didn't take place
in the sorts of sentences I preferred or could easily understand - especially
if I didn't know what exactly was being discussed in those texts or how or
what the historical context of that discussion was. Frankly, I have too much
respect for reading and for the history of philosophy than that. *Being and
Time* may not be your cup of tea, Scottie, but to limit what qualifies as
"good writing" to stuff you can understand without having to work too hard
sounds to me more like laziness than aesthetics.

All the best,

--John

PS: If my students adopted your definition (and many of them do, initially),
there wouldn't be a good poet in all of history.

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Received on Sun Dec 15 08:48:13 2002