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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.
It seems strange that a Rabbi would proclaim himself agnostic and have his first sermon be about how Adam ought to have eaten the whole fruit of knowledge and not just part of it, but I have to agree with the introduction that there is an authenticity to it. Beerman, if he is to be believed, was inspired by the Spinozan God-as-nature idea, and argued that authentic doubt can be a religious stance.
The tropes fit perfectly into today's leftism: social justice, activism, inequality, racism, oppression, but these things must have made a different impression before Current Year. Various dubious aspects pepper the narrative, like support for the Rosenbergs. If there's one thing I've taken away from it, it is the reminder that I'm not exactly a church-goer myself, and that perhaps a renewed study of my relation to God is in order.
Plutarch’s Athenian Lives: if you have any interest in history, human nature, or human greatness, you owe it to yourself to read Plutarch.
Walter Ong, Fighting For Life: picked this up because I wanted a different perspective on some of the stuff in The Mountain. The first 40% or so of the book is awful, one of the worst attempts at psychoanalytic writing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some stinkers. It’s just starting to get good now as he dives into a field he’s qualified on - agonistic competition in academic and intellectual history. Cautiously excited to see if he can turn it around, since I’ve greatly enjoyed his other work.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: well, the section on linguistics drags, but now it’s heating up again. I’m frustrated at times, cruising at times, mindblown at times, but it’s a hell of a ride.
Machiavelli, The Prince: like Plutarch, a re-read, but very interesting to compare the two directly. Machiavelli has this very incisive, diagrammatic way of analysis that, now that I say it, reminds me of some stuff Deleuze says. He writes in a very “arborescent”, binary-tree way, but the cumulative effect is a tremendous deterritorialization that rips the prince from the feudal order. I don’t think Strauss’s claim that Machiavelli and Bacon are the beginning of modernity is at all a stretch.
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