Just came across an interesting interview of French presidential candidate Sarkozy by the French philosopher Michel Onfray. Things got deep:
“I tend to think,” says Sarkozy quoted by Onfray and later in the magazine, “that one is born a pedophile…. There are 1,200 or 1,300 young people who kill themselves each year, and not because their parents didn’t look after them. But because they had a genetic fragility…take smokers: some develop cancers, others don’t. The first have a hereditary physiological weakness..”
You could interpret that as a denial of free will (btw, the above is from a post by someone who translated the Onfray interview). If so, wow. Imagine a presidential candidate here denying free willl. If not, still, I don't think I've ever heard a rpes. candidate weigh in re: nature vs. nurture questions at all. And in France Sarkozy is considered something of a Philistine.
A little more Sarkozy vs. Onfray phiosophy debate:
Sarkozy then says that he has never heard anything as absurd as Socrates’ “Know yourself” “This admission turns me to ice – for him. And for what it says about him….In other words this person who wants to lead the destinies of the French nation believes that knowledge of oneself is a vain undertaking?” Onfray reminds his readers that the last three heads of state have all had need of expert psychological help at different times during their mandate. Clearly Sarkozy feels this sign of fragility is not for him.
Struck by the cultural differences again. We'd never have an atheist philosopher arguing phil. with a conservative pres. candidate here. And criticizing the candidate for not itnending to undergo psychoanalysis while in office?
...a note on American philosophers' view of the French. by and large US phil. academics are jealous of the greater role philosophy plays in public life there. This Onfay fellow had a recent book that sold 300,000 copies and was tops on the non-fiction, best-selling list in France. Plus Onfay is regularly all over TV. How many people in the US can even name a living, practicing philosopher?
But phil. academics in Britain and the US, even while admiring French culture generally, look down on their philosophy. It's all fuzzy headed mumbo-jumbo according to the reigning conventional wisdom in the anglo world. French philosophers rarely get invited over here except by critical theory or literature departments.
When I was an undergraduate and Derrida came to speak at Cornell, the philosophy dept. joked that it was sending a professor to his talk just to make sure that no students from the philosophy department attended. The comparative literature dept. had invited him and the phil. dept. wanted nothing to do with it.
Anyway, if I read French I'd read the whole interview:
http://michelonfray.blogs.nouvelobs.com/archive/2007/04/03/le-cerveau-d-un-homme-de-droite.html
Since I don't I read the following translated excerpt:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/blog/franceprofonde/
Sarkozy is trying to cut into the Socialist's spurt
(#38526)At least, that's what it sounds like. The Economist has Sarkozy as the front-runner but it's a close call.
"I think BDog would make this place interesting." --catchy
All around it's a pretty fun election to watch
(#38549)Unpredictable and messy.
Don't know if Sakozy has a prayer of appealing to the socialist left, but can't think of why else he'd do an interview with an atheist, communist, philosopher.
One idea of Sarkozy's that surprised me is that he wants to publicly finance mosques and remove their foregn patronage, no doubt in order to better integrate Muslims into French society...
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parentHaving been on the fuzzy-headed side of the
(#38488)academy (viz., English lit), I'll say this about modern Anglo/analytic philosophy: from what little I've read, analytics is nigh useless for interpreting any kind of literature. Continental philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, Arendt, Habermas, and applied theorists like Adorno, Derrida, Lacan, etc. spent the 20th century focusing on linguistics and communication, rather than formal logic. You can "read" a text like Derrida or even Clifford Geertz, but not like Wilfrid Sellars or Richard Rorty (I've actually tried). But if you're writing literature as opposed to critiquing it, the opposite might be true. I'd watch a movie based on Daniel Dennett's ideas before I'd even think about sitting through a Derrida film.
Anyhow that probably explains why the MLA has paid so much more attention to the Ecoles Normales than to the homegrown philosophers right across campus. Linguistic philosophy makes a good dancing partner with literary criticism, and the humanities in general. Analytic philosophy, well, it's not like everyone's a good dancer. :)
As for why American academics have to climb a tower with a deer rifle in order to get TV coverage, well, I have no idea.
Thank you! Vote Republican!
Great post, Jordan
(#38544)The great problem with the Continentals, from where I sit, is this: the Continentals are not sufficiently grounded in the practical application of communications theory. They wish to apply logic to the fundamentally illogical. Eliot said
I've been up since about 0400 this morning, coding away on a set of sixteen rules for an insurance company. These rules are enumerated in a document, many of them overlap. I have several choices to implement them: one would be one gigantic rule. This Big Rule would be somewhat more efficient, but marvelous difficult to fix. There is benefit to some overlap in each rule, therefore, I am implementing all sixteen, each in its own rule. I can then concatenate all the results of each rule, thereby obtaining all the failures in one fell swoop. Inefficiency in this case is preferable to a single logical solution. The Continentals would turn around to the client and demand a new set of non-overlapping rules.
Words, like any symbol set, convey meaning. Those who wish to meddle in politics, as Derrida did, endlessly and often stupidly, must know words are given meaning in their utterance. Shock and Awe. Surge. "Françaises, Français ! Aidez-moi ! Contrived phrases such as Monica-gate point to the malleable nature of language, these contrivances are predicated on previous knowledge. Analytics, if it is to have any usefulness at all, must operate on discrete subsets of language, and joins etymology and philology on the Language side of the fence. Analytics is not philosophy, whatever else it is not.
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parentWell, Derrida would play with the word "code"
(#38546)as programmers use it, pointing out that codex & caudex are connate (if not cognate) with coda & cauda. What is it, he'd ask, that software coders are trying to hide? And what hides from them? Well, bugs hide from them, and programmers are constantly swatting at bugs in the code, by means of the code. So the code becomes their tail, so to speak, their coda. But if to code means to hide something, as well as to swat something, then it is the bugs hiding in the code which are the true coders, while programers are merely the codas swatting at the bugs, like annoyed cows. Cowda. But maybe the real code here, accessible only to the initiate, is that the bugs don't exist at all, and programmers invent them to create job security. Chasing bits of error that may or may not exist: something Derrida knew all about. This would of course make it the bug pursuing the tail, rather than the other way around. Because at the end of the day, coders are all about chasing tail just like anyone else.
And that makes all the differance.
Thank you! Vote Republican!
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parentHeh, heh. We programmers have what Derrida only dreamed of
(#38557)The Backus-Naur Format, the rules whereby our "code" may be passed through a compiler.
Actually, Sanskrit does obey enough rules for a Backus-Naur. Panini codified its rules.
See, these Continental poseurs want to be Philostophers. They lack the mathematical and logical backgrounds. Genuine philosophy requires more rigor than the Derridas of this wicked world are willing to apply to the problem.
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parentAwww, you guys gotta cut Derrida some slack
(#38564)the normaliens all go through rigorous training in dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar, formal logic, linguistics, all that good stuff. They've got the background, they're just bored of looking at the world through formal logic. Who wouldn't be? It's not like they're building bridges or guidance systems or studying protons, something where you actually need rigor to get results. Science proceeds at a crawl: how many decades are you willing to wait for a mathematical proof of the novel, an algorithm for human sacrifice?
Thank you! Vote Republican!
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parentI see no reason to cut the Continentals any slack.
(#38567)I know less-than-rigorous programmers, too, who should know enough to apply formal logic. I get to redo their systems.
Here's the drill, to mix several metaphors at once: language is a very slippery hog. The hog cannot be taught to sing: it wastes my time, annoys the pig, and the audience keeps asking for its money back.
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parentSee, I always thought
(#38551)that the purpose of education was to make the world more comprehensible, not less. I leave the word games to Sunday morning crossword puzzles.
I can see why this approach is so popular, though. It's basically a full employment act for philosophers and lit professors.
I blame it all on the Internet
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parentThat pomo nonsense.
(#38478)Derrida, et al., were done no favors - by themselves or their epigones - by being associated with literary 'Theory'. My undergraduate philosophical education was considerably more amenable to that 'mumbo-jumbo' than yours was, but there was still some derision for the folks in comp. lit. & related depts. (And, often enough, rightly so - sticking with Derrida, if one's going to come to a reasonable judgment about his work, one needs a fairly strong grounding in the history of philosophy. Lacking that grounding, some seem to be overawed by his writing [its heavily stylized character contributes, of course], and to accept him all too uncritically. [The same lack, I suspect, may incline some to the opposite problem.])
Bene vixit, bene qui latuit
If anyone's interested, I'll slap out a translation
(#38457)well, I'll do it anyway, it's worth the read.
First installment
(#38458)The mind of a man of the right.
A Portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy, part 1.
Boston Tuesday April 3, 16h00 standard time.
( translation BlaiseP, all notes in square braces are translator’s comments )
The editors of Philosophie magazine asked, on principle, if would I agree to meet one of the presidential candidates and question him about his cultural program, get feedback on spiritual matters, his philosophical relations. In the course of gaining my assent, the recruiter asked me if I had any objection to Nicolas Sarkozy.
No more objection [to Sarkozy] than any other [politician]. I might even interview Jean-Marie Le Pen [trans: military hero and xenophobe, think of a cross between Pat Robertson and R. Lee Ermey] as much as any other political animal, much as one might visit a zoo or a museum of horrors such as the Faculty of Medicine (trans: a vast collection of medical curiosities) Thus I came to interview Nicolas Sarkozy.
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parentThat's above and beyond, but of course I'd be interested.
(#38460)Seemed a bit wordy, though! Don't burn yourself out!
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parentNot really... what fun I'm having. I'll put it up in bits here.
(#38461)Here's another chunk.
All too possibly, [as] in past times, now long lost, as with Doc. Gynéco [French musician, a big sell-out, once lauded to the skies, now viewed as a fake reggae/rapper] or Johnny Hallyday [the French Elvis, with all the cheezy bits thrown in for good measure] , I would now try to play the card of general information and the notes of my coterie of finks. In fact, my introduction had already been made far more rapidly… in my blog, [in a post] devoted to this august personage. For the record, its title was “The clothes of Grandmother Sarkozy”, wherein I portrayed this official candidate wearing wolf hair in a brand-new republican cloak. [trans: Little Red Riding Hood, my what big teeth you have.. ]
I found myself in the lobby of Grandmother Sarkozy, in Place Beauveau, [trans: Ministry of the Interior]
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parent