Comment by selridge
2 days ago
Lmao. I love Kant. He’s great. I love dead white guys. One I’ve been banging on about in this thread is Bourdieu, who wrote a whole book on taste in France, Distinction. Here Bourdieu has the matter rightly and Kant doesn’t. Sometimes that happens. When you read a lot of dead white guys you find lots of them said very wise shit and also stuff that’s harder to find the wisdom in.
Here I don’t know what the trouble is. I’m sorry for calling your phrasing the equivalent of “hafalutin” (a word Marx has used more than twice—he’s dead and white), but what do you expect having come in to cloud the waters with 2 extra syllables to little end?
I know that I'm both pretentious and inarticulate. It's a rough combo. But I resented the idea that what I was saying was inauthentic. I legitimately love Kant, even though reading him is like trying to hammer nails through my skull.
He's quite good sometimes. But we don't always need to reach for that kind of writing if we struggle. If you want something from that era which is written by a young man who is trying to set the world on fire, you should try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_Discourse_to_the_E...
This dude, Diderot, is gonna make a new encyclopedia of the world with his friends which breaks the monopoly on printed and well-regarded learning that was held by the traditional humanities. He wanted articles about the trades, about objects and engineered things, and he was PISSED OFF that he had to fight for it.
Is this guy's idea of how to organize knowledge "right"? Probably not. Will it light your brain on fire and make you grumpy or nosy or suspicious about categories of knowledge that persist still? YEAH.