Word: hegelizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What a great debt we all owe to the great philosophers! Yet, to be candid about it, in these great times who needs another great debt? For the wisdom of men like Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hegel tends to be preserved in sedimentary chapters of books more likely to be found in the attic than on the coffee table. Lives there a middlebrow who does not resent the great philosophers...
Goldfein's comedy manages the odd trick of being broad and donnish at the same time. He does Hegel with a sauerbraten accent: "Veil, now, vot ve got here? Ve got, for shtarters, ve got Descartes. Him and his Cogito, ergo sum ... Dot's an insight?" Not every one of these brief sketches works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus...
Goldfein, a former teacher of history and economics, is also a highly gifted mimic, and this fact permits a discovery whose triviality cannot be exaggerated: all the great thinkers of history (except maybe Hegel, dot krautkopf) talk and think in exactly the same speech and prose patterns! A further discovery is even more exciting: These patterns are also those of Alan Goldfein! Naturally it is for philosophers to decide the implications of this. In the meantime, we are greatly in Goldfein's debt...
...progress of From the Diary of a Snail is all too consistent with the author's snail principles. On the way to almost any point, the reader is likely to get a favorite recipe from Chef Grass (simmered tripe with caraway seeds) or a growling epithet on Hegel: "Thanks to his subtlety, every abuse of state power has to this day been explained as historically necessary." Another snail detour documents the diaspora of the Jews of Grass's native Danzig during World War II. Here the narration seems to match the sinister creeping pace of anti-Semitism...
Fanon's books, though not highly original, gain an undeniable authenticity because they spring so intensely from what he lived and observed. He had read Hegel, who wrote in the most abstract way of the distorting effects of the master-slave relationship on the psychic life of the slave. He had also read and been deeply influenced by Sartre, who (in Anti-Semite and Jew) gave Hegel's master-slave analysis labyrinthine new twists. Hegel was not a slave, however, nor Sartre a Jew. But Fanon was black. His most significant work came out of his sudden realization...