I once had a conversation with an actual philosopher wherein I sheepishly confessed my difficulty with reading Kant. He was incredulous. "You are reading KANT? On your OWN? For FUN?" He likened it to deciding to take up mountain climbing then immediately flying to Nepal to see whats up with those Himalayas. There's a reason that most 101 level philosophy courses dont have students read more that brief excerpts of primary texts--it takes a lot of practice and a little
professional guidance to parse that stuff.
I hate reading philosophical texts. I mean the actual ones written by the philosophers. Give me the intermediary (any intermediary who wants to wade through the archaism and whatever jargon they were using) to make it comprehensible. I honestly don't care if I get Marxist readings/interpretations of Robert Nozick or if Robert Bork and Leonard Leo give their hermeneutical analysis of the development of Hegel's history with the power triad of "Fukuyama-Kojeve-Hegel"
I'm kidding about the above, but not about the sentiment. The only reason I can tell you about the any part of the concept of Hegel's philosophy of history is because you can actually understand Francis Fukuyama, a man who was completely mocked by some of the French lit crit guys and is still much maligned for writing a book that I could actually read.
Holy heck this got long. Just memories below. If you feel obligated to read all the posts, skip to ASCII guy shrugging.
Aside: I had a kind of wild class with an "unconventional" professor who was "unconventional" (read: lone right-wing survivor on campus?!) because he was a straight, married Catholic who was a father of about eight or nine kids (maybe more?), which made him pretty traditional and anachronistic. But he was very wry and I guess he had a touch of mischief in him. He would do things like take a page from William F. Buckley, Jr.(none of us had any clue) and sing John Lennon's "Imagine" in class and tell us, “please don’t repeat this” and then talk about how he wasn't entirely crushed when Lennon was no longer the voice of his generation. Or he’d ask me really funny, personal **** about about my roommate of three years, who was on par with the professor in innate intelligence—the professor stopped one of his other classes and said, “I want you all to listen when Dan says something because we can all learn something when he does”—and also his Catholicism (Dan spent a year after graduation in a Rhode Island monastery).
I remember him asking me one day (and I didn’t know this guy at all at this point),
“Why is Dan all lovesick and following that girl around like a puppy dog all the time?”
“Huh? Dunno. Who?”
“She’s in your class. You know, the blond girl who looks like a refugee?"
I was a bit shocked and just genuinely laughed. That refugee-looking girl was our friend Kelly. She was stunning. She also happened to dress in that ‘90s style that hearkened back to the glory days of the Peace Corps. ****, I was 22 and I’d been to a high school where the blue in the American flags never saw the top corner anywhere but officially, and then the investment bankers and identity studies at college. Speaking freely while also not saying dumb **** felt like massive amounts of air back in one’s lungs. Things were a heck of a lot quainter in 1996, even if the decade was much weirder than the next three would be. Maybe not quainter. Maybe just nicer.
So we read Francis Fukuyama, Allan Bloom, Kant, and Nietzsche in a seminar that seminar, which was called "Freedom and Authority," and the class was all over the place temporally, but completely riveting because it was not all eggheads by any stretch; so you got to speak a touch more freely like I did when I did an oral presentation about men and women in Nietzsche's "The Gay Science," and I think I said something like "It doesn't matter if I never play professionally because she's going to revere me even if I'm stuck in Kalamazoo playing in Division II of the local men's league wearing my Pizza Hut jersey," which actually caused this girl named Lisa __man to corner my girlfriend in a bar that weekend and accost her about the substantive points in my presentation, something I could have played innocent about while crying about political correctness (or "wokeism" these days), but **** all if I didn't know exactly what the hell I was saying despite pointing to the text over the howling. Oh dear God. In fairness to myself, I think the professor had assigned the topic. I’m sort of remembering it that way—wait, I think it was by mutual agreement. Regardless, I took that cilice like a champ and sprinted straight into the arms of all my welcoming bros.
Kant was borderline impossible, but I could read Fukuyama and Bloom no problem. Bloom's book was like swimming in a crisp mountain gorge after five years of that squalid nutcakery or the future consultants Nodding Towards McKinsey —anyway, that class was such a welcome respite. I needed it.
This is the last bit: I remember the professor would teach us the categorical imperative by standing up, walking around, and booming out the words "DUTY" and "KINGDOM OF ENDS." In retrospect, the guy was really funny. He would ruefully remind us that the Constitution had no duties. I really miss people like that. The oldsters who taught Civics and smoked through the chalk dust in their classrooms.
Anyway, I still think that Fukuyama is one of the most impressive political scientists and political philosophy intellects that we have.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fukuyama’s reading of Hegel seems to come from the understanding that there will come a time of self-realization, of final Actuality…
medium.com
I just read the article I posted above and did a double-take. Holy cow. Thank you for the information, Augustus, but has anybody told Fukuyama? Hey Frank, your thesis that was once debated and known the world over? We've got some news. It was wrong because you read a freaking appended footnote by Kojeve incorrectly! You thought it was THE End of History, but it was really AN End of History! Check your articles, bizznatch! LOL.
There's a lot of documentation out there that Tolkien wrote it as one book and that the publisher split it into three books for cost reasons.
Just kidding, a quick check of the @ function seems to indicate rockaction isn't here right now. On the plus side, the thread might not fall to page two today. There was good reason, of course, given the excitement about up/down voting.
