A Marxist philosopher, Roy Bhaskar, passed away on November 19, 2014. May he rest in peace.,
He is of interest to me only because he was such a magnificently terrible writer.
Marxism doesn't necessarily produce an awful, impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose style. Hell, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, Terry Eagleton were all Marxists of one sort or another (were or are -- I believe Eagleton is still amongst us). Yet each could write quite well.
But Bhaskar? Here is a sample of his work (chosen with malice of course, but all the better for that):
"Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/ Aristotelian provenance, of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and-or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike, of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual, or the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard."
Indeed.
Damn those actualist monovalent analytic reinstatements. Damn them to hell.
He is of interest to me only because he was such a magnificently terrible writer.
Marxism doesn't necessarily produce an awful, impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose style. Hell, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, Terry Eagleton were all Marxists of one sort or another (were or are -- I believe Eagleton is still amongst us). Yet each could write quite well.
But Bhaskar? Here is a sample of his work (chosen with malice of course, but all the better for that):
"Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/ Aristotelian provenance, of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and-or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike, of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual, or the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard."
Indeed.
Damn those actualist monovalent analytic reinstatements. Damn them to hell.
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