manwithoutqualities

Stephen Hicks’ masterful critical survey of the disparate strands and ever-shifting cynical alliances, and as a consequence, dissonant morphology, offers a very accessible first orientation to understanding the shitstorm that we are currently in the midst of: “Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political Left — the same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism — now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism?” There is much to be said for the famous Devitt quote below (in the interim two decades Australia too has succumbed to this intellectual malaise). As a curtain-raiser to the more advanced Devitt discussion, I’d also recommend works by Andre Kukla and James Robert Brown. Speaking of the IYI’s tenuous and disengenuous relationship to reality, Taleb puts it thus: “the public has viscerally detected that some “educated” but cosmetic experts have no skin in the game and will never learn from their mistakes, whether individually or, more dangerously, collectively.” The rationalistic reduction of all forms of experience to the one-dimensional political, illustrates just how uncultivated, vulgar, and narcissistic the mauvaise foi IYIs really are.

Michael Devitt — Realism and Truth

Fredric Jameson’s oft-quoted line—“everything is ‘in the last analysis political”

Here it is useful to recall Derrida: “deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”