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Mar. 9th, 2010 04:23 pmFuck. I'm on the "reversion list." "High" on it, but whatever.
Mar. 9th, 2010
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Mar. 9th, 2010 07:14 pmHadn't read Medawar's takedown of Chardin before. These two paragraphs seem pretty relevant to the Theory class readings--most recently, Deleuze's rhizomes and post-structuralizings of Nietzsche:
2. It is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity. (At present this applies only to works of French authorship; in later Victorian and Edwardian times the same deference was thought due to Germans, with equally little reason.) It is because Teilhard has such wonderful deep thoughts that he's so difficult to follow --- really it's beyond my poor brain but doesn't that just show how profound and important it must be?
3. It declares that Man is in a sorry state, the victim of a 'fundamental anguish of being', a 'malady of space-time', a sickness of 'cosmic gravity'. The Predicament of Man is all the rage now that people have sufficient leisure and are sufficiently well fed to contemplate it, and many a tidy literary reputation has been built upon exploiting it; anybody nowadays who dared to suggest that the plight of man might not be wholly desperate would get a sharp rap over the knuckles in any literary weekly. Teilhard not only diagnoses in everyone the fashionable disease but propounds a remedy for it --- yet a remedy so obscure and so remote from the possibility of application that it is not likely to deprive any practitioner of a living.
The secret connection of Theory to Religion is something I believe in, but it's perhaps too diffuse to firmly identify and successfully argue for. 3. comes damn close though. Replacing the '50s-ish plight of man stuff with...what, the sickness of all pre-theorized (therefore on Wednesdays and Sundays pre-Revolutionary) human culture? Perhaps as the technology improved the usefulness of fudging exactly what's to be solved, as well as what the solution is, came to be recognized.
2. It is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity. (At present this applies only to works of French authorship; in later Victorian and Edwardian times the same deference was thought due to Germans, with equally little reason.) It is because Teilhard has such wonderful deep thoughts that he's so difficult to follow --- really it's beyond my poor brain but doesn't that just show how profound and important it must be?
3. It declares that Man is in a sorry state, the victim of a 'fundamental anguish of being', a 'malady of space-time', a sickness of 'cosmic gravity'. The Predicament of Man is all the rage now that people have sufficient leisure and are sufficiently well fed to contemplate it, and many a tidy literary reputation has been built upon exploiting it; anybody nowadays who dared to suggest that the plight of man might not be wholly desperate would get a sharp rap over the knuckles in any literary weekly. Teilhard not only diagnoses in everyone the fashionable disease but propounds a remedy for it --- yet a remedy so obscure and so remote from the possibility of application that it is not likely to deprive any practitioner of a living.
The secret connection of Theory to Religion is something I believe in, but it's perhaps too diffuse to firmly identify and successfully argue for. 3. comes damn close though. Replacing the '50s-ish plight of man stuff with...what, the sickness of all pre-theorized (therefore on Wednesdays and Sundays pre-Revolutionary) human culture? Perhaps as the technology improved the usefulness of fudging exactly what's to be solved, as well as what the solution is, came to be recognized.