Quetzil said:
i certainly do not believe that
>what is and the meaning of what is are separable entities,
What is, will be what it 'is', whatever 'meaning' we arrogant 'humans'
decide to give it. Quetzil's version is just one more tired version of the
humanist arrogance that no matter how many philosophical revolutions we
delude ourselves we have gone through we seem to keep repeating. The
epistemological difficulties we encounter in our clumsy attempts to access
the 'what is' should not allow us ala, Descartes, Hegel, Plato, Parmenides,
add as one wishes, to put the real as a transcendent entity, God, Geist, the
Forms, the Lacanian Real, Kantian noumena etc., somewhere beyond our
comprehension. The actual, the here and now, is not necessarily the 'real',
things could always be otherwise and there is much going on behind our backs
that we may never gain access to, which affects our life: the depletion of
the ozone layer didn't just begin when we constructed our narrative of it.
Reality, may well be much stranger than any fiction we can construct about it.
I am constantly amazed at the way people seem to keep reading, if that is
the right word, the likes of Derrida and Foucault as linguistic idealists.
It really does come to something when Derrida has to declare:
"I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration
that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language;
it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is
above all else the search for the "other" and the "other of language"".
Perhaps, Geography might be a subject that all social theorists should be
'forced' to study. Knowing where one is and has been, philosophically
speaking, might enable one to stop going round in circles.
--------------------------------------------------------
Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA
--------------------------------------------------------
i certainly do not believe that
>what is and the meaning of what is are separable entities,
What is, will be what it 'is', whatever 'meaning' we arrogant 'humans'
decide to give it. Quetzil's version is just one more tired version of the
humanist arrogance that no matter how many philosophical revolutions we
delude ourselves we have gone through we seem to keep repeating. The
epistemological difficulties we encounter in our clumsy attempts to access
the 'what is' should not allow us ala, Descartes, Hegel, Plato, Parmenides,
add as one wishes, to put the real as a transcendent entity, God, Geist, the
Forms, the Lacanian Real, Kantian noumena etc., somewhere beyond our
comprehension. The actual, the here and now, is not necessarily the 'real',
things could always be otherwise and there is much going on behind our backs
that we may never gain access to, which affects our life: the depletion of
the ozone layer didn't just begin when we constructed our narrative of it.
Reality, may well be much stranger than any fiction we can construct about it.
I am constantly amazed at the way people seem to keep reading, if that is
the right word, the likes of Derrida and Foucault as linguistic idealists.
It really does come to something when Derrida has to declare:
"I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration
that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language;
it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is
above all else the search for the "other" and the "other of language"".
Perhaps, Geography might be a subject that all social theorists should be
'forced' to study. Knowing where one is and has been, philosophically
speaking, might enable one to stop going round in circles.
--------------------------------------------------------
Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA
--------------------------------------------------------