give us a break

while the humor will be missed (laughing "at," not "with"), i am going to make
a motion that all petty and bitchy disputes be moved off-list.

>===== Original Message From Omlor@aol.com =====
>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.

" I would gladly trade all my friends for the company of children."
                                                -Albert Einstien

Matthew S. Mahoney
Station B 8209
matthew.s.mahoney@vanderbilt.edu

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Received on Sun Dec 15 16:58:31 2002