treehuggingoctopus wrote: ↑Tue Dec 14, 2021 10:17 am
tobes wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 11:38 pmHaving said that, such cult'ish behavior is still everywhere I look in the humanities/social sciences. Foucault is still by far the most cited scholar. The epistemological die has been cast usually without anyone bothering to do the slightest amount of actual epistemology.
Maybe it is discipline- (and location-)specific? But certainly a major, and maybe the most important problem, is that people are unprepared to rely on the methodology (if one can really talk here about methodology, after all it is so much more than just that) they "choose" to rely on. But then there is no way out of this trap. There is just too much to familiarize oneself with. One of the reasons I think a massive cultural shift (this needs to be read in a grim way) is coming is precisely this: since the 1990s it has been patently impossible to truly digest the developments in our thought. It is so even for specialists, laymen are utterly out of the game. It is probably why much of what we do feels (and is) underbaked. One cannot really bake when the recipe is constantly changing, when the very basics of cooking are constantly shifting, etc.
tobes wrote: ↑Mon Dec 13, 2021 11:38 pmWithin philosophy itself, I personally find
both contemporary traditions of philosophy very disappointing, compared with some other great periods in western thought. I kind of arrived at the realisation that one is better off just reading Marx, Spinoza, Hume etc rather than Deleuze.
I am very happy about, and somewhat committed to, some post-War developments. Frankfurters are generally speaking my bunch, and I love post-husserlian phenomenology/hermeneutics; and I think much else has made incredibly valuable contributions here and there; Foucault would clearly be in that drawer, and Derrida, and so many others. But I guess that, in a sense, the desire to go back to the roots is irresistible (and, of course, this is what the most revelatory/promising post-War thinkers would do, Deleuze included). There are futures in the past, and the meaning of the present -- and nostalgia (utterly misunderstood by the vast majority of twentieth century philosophers/scholars) is not merely a salutary, but profoundly revolutionary drive. (Which is, I am sure, not at all what you had in mind.)
I think that the underbaked-ness is connected to the kinds of conditions that modern academics work under. To much pressure, not enough resources, not enough time - it's simply not conducive to really careful, thorough, diligent scholarship. So you get a lot of half baked thinking, polished up for publication, which lacks the requisite time necessary to really become something exquisite.
As for post WWII philosophy, I agree that there have been some good-valuable contributions, some of which you have mentioned, and across both traditions. I am critical of the way Foucault is deployed (and very often severely misread, especially about power), but some of his work is incredibly prescient. His lectures on biopolitics remain the benchmark for understanding neoliberalism,
and this was in 1982: before Thatcher and Reagan had really even unleashed the beast. To see something like that before it even really happens is quite amazing.
What I have in mind with engaging duly with canonical thinkers is basically to bypass the horribly unfounded dogma - introduced by Heidegger and adopted by many post-modern thinkers - that there is such a unified, generalisable thing called 'western metaphysics' which, we no longer have to deal with because we've moved beyond it. I was taught this in so many places as an undergrad, and I suppose I believed it for a while....but it is just a criminally absurd proposition.