JB has had his share of fun giving the egg-headed intellectual types at the Claremont Institute a hard time for their propensity to include wonkish writing in their quarterly review of books. It's not exactly what you would call approachable material for the Joe Six Packs out there.
Now, First Things is one of my favorite magazines and I greatly enjoy their articles on religion, politics, culture, and the arts. But, as I've mentioned in the past, from time to time they too are prone to publish pieces that beggar understanding for those who don't dwell in ivory towers.
Consider a couple of graphs from a review of Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (no need for a link as no one who reads this blog would ever consider buying this book) by Thomas S. Hibbs that appeared in the magazine's most recent edition (sub req):
If the formal and universal intelligibility of the Kantian project invites abstract vacancy, Marion's recourse to incommunicable individuality would seem to court nihilism in an opposite direction. Once again, discernment on the basis of analogous reasoning or prudential negotiation between universal and singular seems doomed.
Obviously.
(Of course, Heidegger's famous lectures on Aristotle's Ethics and on phronesis were crucial for the development of twentieth-century phenomenology, but the problems raised in Marion's recent thought on ethics need less to retrace the path of Heidegger than to recover an authentically premodern understanding of phronesis, an understanding untainted by Kantian dichotomies.)
You know Atomizer said almost exactly the same thing to me the other night over beers. Or maybe he was just talking about how phenomenology has influenced his deconstructionist approach to analyzing how Ron Gardenhire manages the Twins pitching staff.
When you read book reviews like this you have to wonder if the writer is really interested in enlightening his readers or merely impressing his academic colleagues.
No comments:
Post a Comment