"The wrinkles and creases in our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights, that called on us; but we, the masters, were not home."

I've finally gotten my grubby paws on that Brassier book (bookshops should really look into their security arrangements - there are some unscrupulous bastards about).

I would like to respond to some of the comments I've received.

This from Montserrat Lombard: "In precisely what sense are Brassier's "diatribes against the 'manifest image'" ... "desperate to the point of absurdity"?"

Brassier describes phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, critical theory and anglo-american philosophy: "What all these philosophies share is a more or less profound hostility to the idea that the scientific image describes 'what there really is' [...]" (p7)
Now this strikes me as a purposely provocative claim, which is bound to be met with contemptuous laughter - which Brassier presumably intends to silence somewhere in the book. 'Desperation' is not quite the right way to describe it I admit, since there is a calculated polemical function to such a claim (and I'm sure I noticed a few more such instances of rhetoric).

And Lombard is right when he asks: "and to the extent that you attempt to challenge Brassier's case in any way, in what sense does it hinge upon Churchland's Pragmatism, given Brassier's merciless demolition of such a position throughout the course of that chapter?"

Most of the weaknesses in the chapter come from Sellars and Churchland. Brassier's analysis of Churchland is incisive and penetrates deep into the Churchland weltanschauung. I am irritated because Brassier spends so much time with these people (hence my little analogy at the end of the last post). Sellars tries to outline some kind of universal picture of how we, as humans, see ourselves, but this is absolutely ridiculous. Sellars has obviously never read The Man Without Qualities.

Thought, philosophy, consists in fighting against the tyranny of ordinary language and 'commonsense' conceptions; two great obstacles on the path to truth. No sane continentalist would ever have anything to do with folk psychology, nor can I see how the manifest image is relevant at all. We all know that we are not rational agents in any straightforward sense; that the body fucks around with our mind, that the sub-conscious is up to no good, that the medicine we're on puts us in a bad mood.

Lombard is right, and I should have been clearer about who I am challenging. I can see that Brassier attacks Churchland on the pragmatism issue, but he's pissing in the wind because Churchland sets his Eliminative Materialism up by destroying an analytic straw-man: folk psychology.

As for devilish Damian's comment, I needn't say much. I don't see how anyone could mistake this post for anything other than what it is (yeah, yeah, haha 'the rantings of an unhinged mind' very funny). The post is clearly attempting - failing - to be humourous. This is a blog after all, not some authoritative site such as, erm, wikipedia.

Although I've had a rough week, and happen to be feeling particularly irritable and perverse, I have looked over my previous post and substantially agree with the position I set out there. Perhaps I don't understand what Brassier is doing, because at the end of that chapter I felt that I must be living on a different planet. Why the scientific image? Why the third person? Surely these are not places where thought is to be found...

"The prevailing system was that of reality, and it was just like a bad play. It's not for nothing that we speak of a 'theatre of world events' - the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life. People make love because there is love to be made, and they do it in the prevailing mode; people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Spaniard, a virgin, or a lion; in ninety out of a hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived as tragic or grandiose. [...] Seen in this light, history arises out of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, so that reality comes primarily of nothing being done for ideas."

"The accepted translation of 'essay' as 'attempt' contains only vaguely the essential allusion to the literary model, for an essay is not a provisional or incidental expression of a conviction capable of being elevated to a truth under more favourable circumstances or of being exposed as an error (the only ones of that kind are those articles or treatises, chips from the scholar's workbench, with which the learned entertain their special public); an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man's inner life in a decisive thought.
[...]
There have been more than a few such essayists, masters of the inner hovering life, but there would be no point in naming them. Their domain lies between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry; they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray."

A world first: screenplay published exclusively on facebook!

Respected academic: "Perfect!!! Sleepily leaving for airport: "tomorrow, tomorrow, i love ya - tomorrow, you're only a day away"!!! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

"Apropos of the bicycle: 'Actually one should not deceive oneself about the real purpose of the fashionable new mount, which a poet the other day referred to as the horse of the Apocalypse'"

"But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of ripening summer, the expression 'the racehorse of genius.' It stood in the report of a sensational racing success, and the author was probably not aware of the full magnitude of the inspiration his pen owed to the communal spirit. But Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when, as a result of his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it."