Hegel??

"After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough."

That's the first paragraph of an essay I posted here on December 11, 2023. 4 months later, it seems more and more likely that what I understood was a YouTube which purported to be about Hegel. Does that video actually have anything to do with Hegel? I don't know. I don't have any Earthly. I can't even. 

 

What we have here, now as before, is failure to communicate. We're back to where we were before last December. I am not getting the message from Hegel's texts. 

Unless I am. Unless Schopenhauer was right about Hegel's philosophy: that it was pseudo-intellectual gibberish successfully passing itself off as philosophy. But I can't be sure about that anymore. 

It's not that I am afraid to assail the reputation of a celebrated thinker and purported genius. Every word Susan Sontag published or said on a broadcast was pseudo-intellectual garbage, delivered with that smug grin William Gaddis warned us about. Spengler is, im Grunde genommen, pretty silly, and hugely overrated. But at least much more entertaining than Sontag.

It's not that I can't follow philosophers in general. With those up to and including Hegel's most celebrated immediate forerunner Kant, and also with those following him, although I must often read very slowly and repeat certain passages, I don't get this feeling I get with Hegel. Not with Kant himself, not with Heidegger, not with Adorno. Not with the world's most famous Hegelian, Marx. 

Well, as Kierkegaard said -- Kierkegaard, who has often delighted me, often made me shake my head chidingly, but never puzzled me: enten -- eller. Either Hegel has fooled a great number of very smart people, who regard him as a great genius, but not me, or Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard -- or all of those people have significantly smarter than all three of us, at least in this regard.

I can easily admit it when a single person is clearly more intelligent than I  -- okay, not easily, but I can admit it. When an entire group is outdoing me, it's disturbing. 

It sort of reminds me of the historical Jesus question. I've studied it pretty thoroughly. Most of the people who have studied it pretty thoroughly say that it's pretty obvious that a person named Jesus preached in Galilee and Jerusalem in the 20's, 30's or 40's AD, that he said many of the things in the text we today call the Sermon on the Mount, and that he was crucified on Pilate's orders. 

Well, it's still not obvious at all to me. That light bulb above my head, which is supposed to go on when I see how the evidence all adds up to Jesus having really lived and preached and been crucified by Pilate -- that light bulb is not on, it has not begun to flicker. The Biblical scholars go over the evidence, and to me, they're making the case that it's possible Jesus existed, the case that it's conceivable -- and then they say, so you see, it's really certain that he existed! And I shout wearily: No! I don't see!

I also don't see how I'm not keeping up with what those Biblical scholars are saying. Let's take the example of another famous controversy: were the writers of the New Testament wrong when they said that a virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah? Yes. They were wrong. Bart Ehrman explained this to me in less than half a minute. To make a short story even shorter: read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7, and as Ehrman said: shame on all of us supposedly brilliant people for not already having read the entire chapter. It's not long. The Hebrew word can mean "virgin," or simply "young women," somewhat like the English term "maiden." Reading Isaiah 7, the entire short chapter, makes it clear that the Greek New Testament authors were mistaking in translating the word as "virgin" instead of simply "young woman."

I had zero trouble keeping up with that. But understanding what is so great about Hegel...

While I Was Busy Making Other Plans

I'm looking at a copy of The Best American Essays 2017, editor: Leslie Jameson. The name didn't ring a bell -- is she the woman who wrote that ridiculous piece in The Atlantic praising Jordan Peterson and dissing The Left? No, that was Caitlin Flanagan.

Paging through the volume, an author's name catches my eye: June Thunderstorm. Her essay is against anti-smoking laws, maintaining that they have always been "about social control." A former smoker who might very well have died from emphysema if I hadn't quit over 20 years ago, I rolled my eyes and was about to dismiss her and everything she ever stood for before reading the entire first page of her essay, but then I remembered that, on this very blog, I did something similar with an essay by Thoreau on Lincoln, and then later found out that I was mistaken to do so, because the essay begins ironically, with Thoreau posing as the sort of insufferable upperclass American twit, who sneered at Lincoln, which the majority of the text of the essay actually denounces while praising Lincoln highly. Then it also occurred to me that June Thunderstorm might be a Native American, and therefore entitled to some attitudes toward tobacco which are foreign to me. Anyway, I don't feel like reading her entire essay right now, but I won't diss it before I do. Learned my lesson with Thoreau. I can't remember whether I've yet added the necessary PS and apology to that essay.

Inside the front cover are listed 32 editors of The Best American Essays, 1986 to 2017. I recognized 17 of those names. I've dissed at least three of them in this blog: Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick and Christopher Hitchens. One of those 17, Edward Hoagland, I admire very much,

and several more have some level of my respect.

After I'd first looked at that list of 32 celebrity editors for a minute or so, it occurred to me that all 32 of them, and surely either all or almost all of the essayists whose work is printed in this volume, and surely many if not most of the hundreds of other authors whom Robert Atwan mentions in the back of the volume as having also written notable essays published during the year under review, and many if not most of thousands more writers either printed or mentioned in the other annual volumes of The Best American Essays published since the late 1980's, have one thing in common: they've written entire volumes which were published long before they reached age 57. I'm 57, and I'd always planned to become a big-time celebrity writer long before I got this old.

Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans, as William Gaddis or Readers' Digest or someone else first pointed out. (John Lennon wasn't the first.) Although I feel perfectly justified in dissing Sontag or Ozick or Hitchens as if I could do better, because I think I could, I think I can, I think I do, I think I have for quite a while -- nevertheless, I have absolutely zero credentials to support this attitude. And you, you either agree with me, or you regard me as a conceited crank, which really wouldn't bother me, which you may or may not believe. But not being published, not having any entire published volumes written all by me, that really irks me.

Some people have suggested to me that I self-publish a volume. I don't think that really counts as being published, nor does blogging, which anyone can do. Being published means that a publisher has selected your work and approved and that it gets published and that you get paid for it.

Is it possible to like both Susan Sontag and Quentin Tarantino?

And yes, I am wondering whether Annie Leibovitz ever felt in the middle. (Oh, good news -- Annie Leibovitz is not dead! Really. I double-checked.) For a while, Leibovitz was Sonntag's lover, and the #1 celebrity photographer in the world, and Tarantino was the hottest celebrity in the world -- all at the same time. I have found photos of Tarantino by Leibovitz.

Hey, what the Hell do I know, maybe the three of them were great friends and it didn't bother Quentin that what what Susan wrote seemed to diss him.

Hey, what the Hell do I know, maybe Sontag loved Tarantino's movies, although some surfing seems to indicate that most people who know who she was and who he is seem to assume, as I have, that she really, really did not.

I felt a little uncertain about deciding that I hated Sontag (as a writer -- I never met her personally, and if I had, I'm the sort of person who can very easily hate the writing and love the person what wrote it) after having read just 2 sentences she'd written, but that was nearly 44 hours ago. Now I'm up to 12 sentences or more, and 11 of them made me want to throw the book and/or PC across the room, and the 12th was a cheap laugh at the expense of people suffering a very painful mental illness. There's no doubt about it any more: Sontag was the Hegel of the 20th century, a pretentious jackass who somehow became a worldwide superstar among would-be intellectuals.

(Look, I'm not even a huge Tarantino fan. [Like many other people, I find some of his work tediously pretentious -- hey, maybe he and Sontag bonded over their love of being unbearably pretentious! What the Hell do I know?] I have watched Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown over and over and I'll watch them again, but I'm not crazy about every one of his movies. But it seems to me that you have to be crazy not to see that Pulp Fiction was a Huge Cultural Event -- and in a good way. And the several sentences which I personally have read of Sontag's summary of cinema's first century, which was published in Parnassus 3 years after Pulp Fiction was released, read to me like the work of someone who either had never heard of Pulp Fiction, or wouldn't recognize a Huge Cultural Event if it caused her lover to repeatedly photograph its director.)

I'm so angry as a result of having ingested those 12 sentences in less than two days that I'm going to have to stop now. (Also, I have a couple of things that I need to do.) I might return to the subject of Sontag, or I might not. I don't know if it would be fair to her to continue to write about her writing having only read a dozen or sentences of it, and I don't know if it would be fair to myself to continue to read writing which I dislike so intensely. One need not drink the whole ocean to be sure that it is salty; on the other hand, if one stays hundreds of miles away from the ocean, one may not be the best qualified to write about it, nor necessarily the most interesting writer for those who like to sail.

'The Force Awakens': Box Office Is Slowing Down

Box Office Mojo's weekend forecast reports that the box office revenue of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is slowing down. When it comes to the North American box office, the US plus Canada, Force Awakens is playing in 2556 North American theatres, 809 less than last weekend. Box Office Mojo predicts the film will earn $9.86 million in North America this weekend, a drop of over 30% even though the winter storm greatly impacted last weekend's ticket sales.

The latest Box Office Mojo all-time worldwide box office chart shows Force Awakens still holding at #3 with $1.9497 billion, still $237.1 million behind the all-time #2, Titanic, and its total of $2.1868 billion. $237.1 million seems to me like a long way to go when the domestic weekend box office is expected to plummet to under $10 million.

I would imagine that almost all of the real die-hard Star Wars fans in the world have now seen Force Awakens at least once. I'm no expert -- my previous posts on the box-office earnings of this movie have made that much abundantly clear -- but it seems to me that the chances of Force Awakens overtaking Titanic for all-time worldwide #2, let alone surpassing all-time #1 Avatar and its total of $2.788 billion, have very much to do with how many of those die-hard fans are going to buy tickets to see the movie in theatres again. There may be very knowledgeable wizards somewhere with actual reliable estimates about how many such repeat tickets can be expected to be sold from this point on, but so far I have not found nor even heard about such wizards.

There's also the possibility that suddenly, for some reason, vast numbers of people who were not interested in the movie up until suddenly will become interested -- like The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a larger financial scale -- but I would guess that such a sudden widening of a movie's appeal must be like a show-biz version of winning the lottery, not realistically to be expected, and very hard indeed to predict.

My predictions: Will Force Awakens pass $2 billion in worldwide box office? Yes? Will it overtake Titanic for #2? Yes -- but perhaps not until a re-release. Will it catch Avatar? No. Well, maybe. But definitely not before a re-release.

And as I've said before on the blog, I cannot emphasize how strongly how silly it is to focus on these numbers which the movie industry for some reason (tradition? I don't know why) makes public, without access to the huge amounts of revenue which movies earn without the exact figures ever being made public, from cable and broadcast TV and home video and merchandising, the last of which is especially huge in the case of the Star Wars franchise.

PS: I've seen Avengers: Age of Ultron now, and I liked it but didn't love it. I had a bit of a meh-there's-not-so-much-here-that-the-earlier-Avengers-and-Iron-Man-and-Hulk-and-Captain-America-and-Thor-movies-didn't-have feeling -- and I haven't even seen every single one of those earlier ones.

PPS: Susan Sontag REALLY sucks! Publishing an oh-if-only-there-were-a-rebirth-of-passionate-cinema piece of nauseating pretension three years AFTER 'Pulp Fiction' was released?! Get out of my office!

Translation

So the other day I began to read a piece by Sartre, "Les maos en France," which begins:

"Je ne suis pas mao. C'est pour cette raison, je pense, qu'on m'a demandé de présenter ces enquêtes."

For a moment I was confused, and thought that Sarte was saying that he had been asked to write about Maoism in France because he wasn't Mao. Then of course I realized that he was saying that he had been asked to write it because he was not a Maoist, and that "mao" is French for "Maoist."

I think that for many people whose native language is English, not just me, saying "mao" instead of "Maoist" will sound very strange and wrong. Perhaps more so the weaker our French is, and mine is not Proustian. Even before we begin to wonder just exactly how "mao" is pronounced in French.

But of course, unless we have some familiarity with Chinese -- and I don't -- we can't judge which is the more quaint transliteration, "Maoist" or "mao."

I envy people whose guardians educated them well and took them on international tours while they were still small children, they must have a much better instinctive grasp of the size and diversity of humanity. It was not until my late 20's that I first traveled to a non-English-speaking part of the world and saw bookstores with familiar worldwide bestsellers on their shelves with titles which looked bizarre to me, and had to grasp, not just know, but also feel and see, that Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit was no more bizarre and wrong a title for Gabriel García Márquez' masterpiece than One Hundred Years of Solitude. And then on semester break I went to Paris and was confronted with Cent ans de solitude. And, for example, La guerre et la paix, when I was still just getting used to Krieg und Frieden, and still having a hard time accepting that Krieg und Frieden was every much as legitimate a falsification of Tolstoy's novel -- because to translate a text means to fuck it up unless the translator is as great a writer or better the original, and often even then -- as the War and Peace I'd read for the 1st time before I was full-grown.

Of course, no one had to explain to me that things are translated into many different languages, especially things like great works of literature. But I had to actually be in those bookstores in order to really feel it, in order for a sense of what world literature is to begin to sink in to my consciousness.

I happened to be reading some French newspapers in 1998 when Joschka Fischer was the brand-new Foreign Minister of Germany, and was confused at first by the frequent occurrence of the word "baskets" in the headlines. Until it clicked: sneakers. Fischer had caused a bit of an uproar when he first rose to national prominence as a legislator in Germany and came to work wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Fischer was the first Green politician to appear in legislatures. Greens in the 1980's didn't wear suits. Occasionally tweedy jackets and-or loosely-knit ties with their uniform jeans. Looking at the chronology, it seems to me that the Greens may have been a major international force behind the creation of casual Fridays.

Anyway: sneakers. Basketball shoes. That's how and when I learned that "baskets" is French for "sneakers." "Baskets" sounds silly to you? (It surely did to me at first.) Stop for a moment and meditate on how "sneakers" sounds. It has been speculated that the majority of the universe, the greatly prevalent element, is stupidity. That may be. Or maybe it's just silliness. Compared to stupidity, a universe made of silliness wouldn't necessarily be so bad. Think of how Kevin Smith, who I gather believes God exists, portrayed God in his movie Dogma: a smiling, mute, very sweetly silly and childlike Alanis Morissette. Where was I?



PS: Susan Sontag SUCKS!!!

Thrift Stores And Norton Anthologies

Today at the Salvation Army thrift store I got a copy of vol 3, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920 of Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought, for 21 cents including tax. I wish I had examined the volume a little more closely before purchasing it: whatever intrinsic interest Parrington's ideas might have had for me is impaired by the low quality of the paper of the book's acidic pages, yellowing and fragile and unpleasant to the touch. I don't know when this volume was printed: a Harbinger Book H023 $2.45.

Still working on this vol 3 at the time of his death in 1929, Parrington writes "Marxian" instead of "Marxist." For some reason I like that much more than I can justify or explain.

What a great contrast is presented by the various Norton anthologies familiar to several decades' worth of American English majors! Do English majors still read Norton anthologies? The paper is great, thin and strong like the paper in some well-made Bibles -- some Norton volumes are over 2500 pages long without becoming at all unwieldy -- a delight to the fingertip's touch and barely yellowed even when several decades old (Do English majors still read books printed onto paper?) -- but the content is frustrating, because the longer works are usually abridged and leave you wanting more. Put that same paper into all of those volumes Norton abridged, and then sell those to me at the thrift store for 21 cents a volume!

Okay, actually, the Norton anthologies are actually pretty good -- or perhaps I'm doting and nostalgic at the moment, looking at the ones I still have from my undergrad time. Actually, I think I have more from thrift stores than from my student days. I know I got this 10th edition Norton Reader, copyright 2000, over 1200 pages, at a thrift store very recently. I just opened it at random and saw pieces by Amitav Ghosh and Susan Sontag. I'm pretty sure I've never read an entire piece of writing by Sontag. So I was thinking just now: maybe it's time to remedy that. So I read the first 2 sentences of Sontag's Century of Cinema, closed the volume again and said: no, it's time to put more trust into my own taste, even my taste from rather long ago. No Sontag for me just now, thank you very much.

I like Ghosh, though.