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Source link: http://archive.mises.org/16940/dealing-with-windbags/

Dealing with Windbags

May 12, 2011 by

As a general rule, we should treat our intellectual opponents with the utmost charity and respect. After all, we are all fallible and presumably united in a common pursuit of truth. BUT (I bet you knew that was coming) when one is continually subjected to ponderous drivel and endless preachments from an opponent whose severely limited abilities belie his lofty reputation and whose pseudo-scholarship is bought and paid for by an interested and wealthy patron, one understandably reaches a breaking point. The great philosopher Arthur Schopenauer evidently reached such a point when he wrote of the Prussian State’s favored philosopher:

Hegel, installed from above by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined in as a perfect chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation. (Quoted in Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, pp. 32-33.)

HT to Max Raskin.

{ 14 comments }

Joe Esty May 13, 2011 at 5:38 pm

What’s wrong with interested and wealthy patrons? Without them we wouldn’t have been introduced to Mises and Rothbard.

Joseph Salerno May 13, 2011 at 7:48 pm

I see your point, Joe. But I was not using “interested” in the more current sense of intellectually curious about and supportive of the search for knowledge, but in the older sense of possessing a pecuniary or political motive in promoting a particular doctrine. In this case, the Prussian State was the interested and wealthy patron who subsidized and promoted, and stood to benefit from, Hegel’s work.

Franklin May 14, 2011 at 12:04 pm

“Without them we wouldn’t have….”
Not necessarily, Joe.
I’m quibbling, of course, and appreciate that ‘wealthy anybody’ is no less deserving of praise than anyone else.
But if someone doesn’t do something, there is always another way.
Always infinite possibilities.
Cheers.

Louis B. May 13, 2011 at 6:35 pm

Who’s the target of these remarks?

Joseph K May 13, 2011 at 8:01 pm

What’s most depressing about this quote is that despite that Schopenhauer is so right, Hegel is still much more widely read and studied. Of course, all of this research and commentary hasn’t lead to any understanding of Hegel. He’s still as opaque as ever, and every Hegel scholar has their own perspective on what exactly (if anything) he’s saying. Schopenhauer on the other hand fell into the unfortunate vice of explaining his philosophy with crisp clearness and in an admirably lucid style.

Virginia Llorca May 14, 2011 at 6:31 pm

Which, so sadly, immediately raises everyone’s suspicions.

Joseph Salerno May 13, 2011 at 8:08 pm

Louis, besides Hegel, no one in particular, intellectual windbags in general, who are proliferating in academia today. Back in the 1970s or 1980s, the JPE presented on its back cover a quote from H. L Mencken eviscerating the intellectual windbag Thorstein Veblen. The quote was sent in, I believe, by Milton Friedman. In his memoir, Notes and Recollections, Ludwig von Mises presented a blistering characterization of Werner Sombart, a leading “professional” German economist of the early twentieth century. Mises described him as a pompous and venal charlatan and Marxist-turned-Nazi synpathizer who eventually claimed that the Fuehrer took his orders directly from God.

nate-m May 14, 2011 at 4:17 pm

What is funny is when they get caught though…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4449651.stm

Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification
of Access Points and Redundancy

AB S T R AC T
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.
I . IN T RO D U C T I O N
Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred. The notion that end-users synchronize with the investigation of Markov models is rarely outdated. A theoretical grand challenge in theory is the important unification of virtual machines and real-time theory. To what extent can web browsers be constructed to achieve this purpose?

That is not a isolated case either. There have been quite a few fake papers to make it easily past any sort of peer review process.

Another one:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html

A sample from his paper “Transgrassing the Boundries”

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz’s analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics4; in Ross’ discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science5; in Irigaray’s and Hayles’ exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics6; and in Harding’s comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.7

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

My approach will be as follows: First I will review very briefly some of the philosophical and ideological issues raised by quantum mechanics and by classical general relativity. Next I will sketch the outlines of the emerging theory of quantum gravity, and discuss some of the conceptual issues it raises. Finally, I will comment on the cultural and political implications of these scientific developments. It should be emphasized that this article is of necessity tentative and preliminary; I do not pretend to answer all of the questions that I raise. My aim is, rather, to draw the attention of readers to these important developments in physical science, and to sketch as best I can their philosophical and political implications. I have endeavored here to keep mathematics to a bare minimum; but I have taken care to provide references where interested readers can find all requisite details.

_h_i_l_a_r_i_o_u_s_

Virginia Llorca May 14, 2011 at 6:36 pm

I believe in Celtic Fairies. One is my muse.

Bruce Koerber May 14, 2011 at 9:58 am

Classical Liberalism Has To Fight Off The Ego-Driven.

Like attracts like. The State at its origin is a corruption of the spirit of the age – when mankind reached the developmental stage of nationhood in the evolution of civilization. Its underlying and distorted motivation was the lust for power by those who were ego-driven.

It is not difficult to see why the perverse ego-driven interpreters and ego-driven interventionists would meld together with the goals of the State just like it is not difficult to see why the State seeks out these evil-minded imposters. The descent into proverbial hell for humankind is directly the result of the ego-driven-derived State and the ego-driven interpreters and interventionists – Hegel and Marx and Keynes – to name a few.

Jake Roundtree May 14, 2011 at 2:55 pm

“There was Hegel. He was a profound thinker and his writings are a treasury of stimulating ideas.” (Human Action, p. 72)

Stefano May 14, 2011 at 10:37 pm

Mises continues:

“but he was laboring under the delusion that Geist, the absolute, revealed itself through his words.”Context matters, huh?

Jake Roundtree May 15, 2011 at 10:11 am

I do not see why context matters here. The only point is that Hegel was a profound thinker who is worth reading. Just because one can see serious flaws with a particular thinker’s ideas does not mean it is not a valuable exercise to study his work, which is what Schopenhauer’s statement suggests.

Ned Netterville May 14, 2011 at 9:07 pm

“…a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” Now that’s what I call a verbal dirk of the highest order, an appropriate description of J. M. Keynes or Paul Krugman.

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