Rorty (review)

While I might not have all the necessary background reading in language philosophy (Quine and Sellars, as well as Putnam and Davidson are notably absent from my purview), I admire Rorty's attempt to bring Marx, Freud and Sartre under the aegis of academia and its banner of legitimation. I finished Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature today, as well as John Dewey's Art as Experience, which I thought was a pleasure to read in comparison with what were in my opinion Rorty's misplaced attempts to reconcile revolutionary philosophers like Heidegger with the unhappy consciousness of reactionary philosophers like Kierkegaard. I see Rorty's writing of his book as stemming from a professional philosopher's desire to establish his own self-worth -- and that of his discipline -- amid a host of academic discourses, and I see his philosophical position as developing from a longing to negotiate the cultural policies that would carve out a place for philosophy without making a good deal of compromise; the afterward says that he wrote other books, which I would like to peruse, as he seems to be a thinker I could use as a friend.

Work (review)

This work concerns Zola's fantasy of the growth of a new society guided by the formation of a healthy association of labor groups and the overthrowing of the wage-system that the author sees as enchaining humankind to a system of rewards and punishments. It leaves one asking, why did this society of the future not come to fruition at the time it was written, in the early 20th century, or sooner ? The masters of war saw to it that man would be continuously divided along racial and class lines, along any lines they could devise that would serve as a pretext for the exploitation of capital, to make any flickering flame of intellectual talent but to bend to become the slave and the penitent of capital. The invention of atomic weapons was the final triumph of the real politics of war, the two great wars of the 20th century saw to it that humanity would forever be unsatisfied with reality-presented-as-fact; humanity withers and fades away in the triumph of commercialism and mass-culture, religion disappears under the fallen edifice of a church not longer supported in a world where money is God and greed becomes society's sole guiding principle. When work becomes a matter of manipulating the instruments that one has been accustomed to since just after leaving the nursery, as in Zola's society of the future, the postmodern age begins as the workers reconstruct society on the basis of a female-centered empathy for the poor and abused, those citizens previously relegated to society's contemptuous negligence. This book is very relevant for 21st century America and, specifically, for a post-Trump political age.

Mansfield Park (review)

I read this book and simultaneously thought of Harold Bloom's student who voiced her opinion that she didn't have to read Mansfield Park in order to argue that it was about the corrupting influence of patriarchal society and Austen's view of the desultory influence of male desire on the lives of women in early modern world. However, now that I have read this beauteous novel, in my opinion Mansfield Park is a personal story, a model for women to emulate rather than a cautionary tale about the debilitating constrictions associated with a patriarchal world. Jane Austen offers the story of Fanny Price as the story of a woman who attains full maturity and finds her place in society, as she traces the psychological solidification of a woman who successfully navigates the hazards of an early 19-century coming out as a coming-to-be. I feel I feel these types of Marxist renderings of classic literature entail a twisting of meaning and a lack of ability to experience pleasure in reading, as the experience of the text is placed under a regime of signs regulated by an absolute value in terms of the velocity of money. I have thought long and deep about how this kind of thinking has influenced the women I have known and my conclusion is the following: to me it is a sign of how love has become alienated as a result of our superficial contact with politics in daily life. (This paragraph is too compressed for a short review, but it contains my basic reaction to the text.) The danger of a superficial reading of philosophy stems from an overly logocentric, semiotically surface-level, interpretation of the Bible. The retreat or detour into the surfaces is wrong-headed because the wholly conceptual realm of Truth is imageless and why God is invisible to us. This is my philosophy, January 23, 2021 - Andrew B. Noselli