[lit-ideas] Re: The life of Walter Benjamin, not very well written
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 06:47:06 +0000 (GMT)
>If I said during some of the recent discussions, that I found something
incomprehensible, where simply saying that I didn't understand it might
have sounded less harsh, I apologize those who were distressed.>
No apology needed as far as I'm concerned. The passage I had in mind reads:
>This post (which went completely ignored), is the only post to this list I’ve
>been able to follow, for some time. A number of people have written a number
>of things that seem to have only a notional relation to each other. Maybe if I
>tried harder I’d be able to grasp the relation between Newton’s Second Law of
>Motion and how Grice in a dream influenced Geach, but for
now, I’ll let it pass. I’m sure I’ll sleep better.>
There is a kind of non sequitur in this passage in that just because the
participants may have been talking past each other ["notional relation to each
other"] would not mean their individual posts could not be followed or
understood [after all, Robert is here commending an _individual_ post by John,
not its "notional relation" to what anyone else said]. But an implicature of
not being "able to follow" any other post than John's "for a long time" would
seem to be that all these other posts were not comprehensible or
understandable. This lack of comprehensibility is even more striking when we
consider that the participants, despite disagreeing and even talking past each
other, did not seem to find each other's posts incomprehensible. (I feel I
understood Walter's defence of JTB theory all too well.)
Donal
Leaving his furniture to be distressed
London
On Monday, 17 March 2014, 22:00, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
*I quoted this paragraph from said life
'Benjamin is here as much a flesh-and-blood representative of
the modern as its theoretician. Modernism was all about the peripheral, the
ephemeral, the accidental, the transient. It was about plurality, not
singularity; ambiguity instead of certainty. Walter Benjamin traveled this
off-road, and his thought was consistent with his experience. He was an
incessant gambler, a serial adulterer, an experimenter with drugs and a refugee
in every sense. In discarding traditional intellectual categories and seeking
new kaleidoscopic sources of inspiration, he showed parallel urges in his
ideas.'
Donal wrote
Robert does not make clear whether he understands this paragraph or claims not
to: if Robert does understand it, it is somewhat remarkable that he
does when fairly recently he claimed not to have understood a long
sequence of posts on this list which, on the face of it, were not quite
so difficult to pin down as the notion that "Modernism...was about
plurality, not singularity". Robert has not announced whether this long
incomprehensible sequence has even ended, so we do not yet know, for
example, whether anything posted on the CTP was at all comprehensible to him.
———————————————————————————————
*I think that the sample paragraph I sent is one of the most lucid,
comprehensible, coherent, articulate and perspicuous pieces of writing I've
seen in years.
*Robert did not participate in the discussion of the causal theory of
perception, if that's the issue. Why
I have a duty to participate in every thread on this list isn't clear to me.
During the past few months few people, around three or four in the course of
several days, usually, have taken part in anything. If I said during some of
the recent discussions, that I found something incomprehensible, where simply
saying that I didn't understand it might have sounded less harsh, I apologize
those who were distressed.
RP
Other related posts:
