agreed.

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

-Slavoj Žižek

hear, hear

Masters of suspicion

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."

-Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

Ricoeur names Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the 'masters of suspicion', thinkers who abandoned the idea of truth, or saw it as plastic and not absolute and dominating. They are suspicious of truth claims in part because the use of truth is so tied up with the use of power, and rightly so. (EDIT: I'm not totally sure how to phrase this, what I wrote makes it seem like they think truth is still a "thing," is still out there in some form. Which, as that Nietzsche bit above will tell you, they most certainly did not.) From what little I've read of Nietzsche and Marx, that seems pretty accurate. What I question is Ricoeur's inclusion of Freud with these other two. Psychoanalysis abandons truth on a micro scale, saying that we lie to ourselves all the time, but from a macro perspective it has a surprisingly barefaced and even naive faith in truth. Truth not only exists but is codified, "fixed, canonical, and binding," particularly when we head in the direction Jung took Freud's ideas (not that that's Sigmund's doing, or fault). It's a sophisticated, modernist version of phrenology: we no longer believe that physical features correlate to the truth, but the revelatory medium has been shifted to feelings, actions, dreams. Those things, while complex, still correspond to some truth, one so bedrock we don't even know it's there—they only need to be prodded and questioned in just the right way to reveal themselves. Freud still believed in a nature that could be read like a book, only this book is dense and convoluted to all but the sharpest, most skilled interpreter. (I don't know how connected Freud was to his Jewish roots, but it's interesting to think about the similarities between his method and Talmudic interpretation and tradition.)

Which is maybe the reason I don't really care for Freud. It's one thing to say there is no absolute truth—that at least levels the playing field—but it's quite another to make yourself its gatekeeper. There is in Freud the tang of elitism, of knowledge-as-password, knowledge-as-phallus, which is one of my biggest academic pet peeves. And it seems that that's exactly what Ricoeur's other "masters" were calling out.

Ben, I know you're on a Freud kick and have read much more than I, what do you think? Am I right here?

Captured

Auden sums up precisely my unease about photography:

"Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism. "

Paris Review "Writers at Work" interviews, 1972

In Praise of Great Men, part I

For some time now I have relished finding articulate praise of great men. I love the humility it takes to praise another, and the sporting nature of it. And it is such a more difficult task to be articulate in praise; articulate detraction is much easier. The other day i thought it would be good to gather the quotes that i have found over the years, and thought that here might be a good place to do so. So I shall try and find some of them again. To begin this recurring theme, a quote by Robert Whittington (1520) on Saint/Sir Thomas More:

"More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."

Yes.