The Academic Concept Termed "Hodges"

This morning, I received an email from some fly-by-night online search engine that calls itself "Academia.edu" and purports to find one's publications and set them in order:

Dear Horace Jeffery,

2,411 new papers that discuss "hodges" have been added to Academia since you last searched for it.

Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? They treat the name "Hodges" as some sort of academic concept to be discussed, not noticing that my own search was for articles I had written.

They also don't realize that most of what they find is just intellectual 'dreck,' often from my blog.

And they offer their services, whose results are usually something I've already seen. They offer (intending that I click it) the message below:

See Papers ▸

They then try to get me to pay if I want to see what they've collected.

So transparent . . .

Dog Wood

Extra Extra

Extra Pound in a bound of abundance
Set his sights on some dogwood of substance.
He'd agreed, he had greed,
On that need, he'd concede,
But still held his head high under substance.

Death Penalty

Poor Scholar

Alas, poor Yorick.
I knew him, Horatio.

Many a time had he
published and published.

But perished anyway . . .

Big Throbbing Feet, Or?

A Throbbing Pain
Is Hard To Explain

"A foot in the door" sounds painful.

Ironic Gifts of Death and Life: A Somewhat Fictive Account

Trans-Humanities

I just this past weekend received offprints of my article "Ironic Gifts of Death and Life: A Somewhat Fictive Account" (Trans-Humanities, 2013, Volume 6, Number 3), and here's the abstract:

In an abrupt, yet hopefully plausible transition using serious playful irony -- what the Renaissance thinkers called serio ludere, or playful seriousness -- in order to transit, tresspass, and transgress rigid disciplinary boundaries, as well as difficult, resistant boundaries of various sorts, this brief paper moves abruptly from the secular economics of our contemporary postmodern world through the sacred economy of salvation in the thinking of such varied earlier figures as St. Paul, Mark Twain, and Jean Calvin to such related, if distinct, religious writings of antiquity as the Gospel of John and Gnostic texts on the economy of gift-giving, reflecting upon the relevant Greek terms along the way, and translating from the Hebrew, German, and Syriac, where needed, while also drawing upon the cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas, among other writers on food and drink, and then moving on into the paper's decentered center, an un-derided jack-of-all-trades Derrida, then out again by means of literary critic David Lodge's ironically postmodern comedy-of-manners novel Small World, to an optimistic conclusion through a counter-Feuerbachian deus ex machina move via the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, though with a nod of metaphysical appreciation to the contemporary analytical philosopher William F. Vallicella and his concept of the extramental "external unifier," all the while dealing with the paradoxical notion of the unreturnable gift that can, after all, be returned, such that reciprocity in divine-human dealings is maintained, with the result that the denoument of my essay dwindles ineluctably off into an indefinite ellipse . . .

That's all I have time for today . . .

Regina Spektor . . . and speculations

Regina Spektor

ca. 2004

(Image Borrowed from the Universe)

Since I'm currently swamped in the currentless swamp of student grading, I just can't remain constantly serious, so I investigate music that I've not previously listened to . . . such as Regina Spektor's song "Us," from the unbearable lightness of Soviet Kitsch:

"Us"

They made a statue of us
And put it on a mountain top
Now tourists come and stare at us
Blow bubbles with their gum
Take photographs have fun, have fun

They'll name a city after us
And later say it's all our fault
Then they'll give us a talking to
Then they'll give us a talking to
Because they've got years of experience
We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages
We're living in a den of thieves
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious

We wear our scarves just like a noose
But not 'cause we want eternal sleep
And though our parts are slightly used
New ones are slave labor you can keep

We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages
We're living in a den of thieves
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious

They made a statue of us
They made a statue of us
The tourists come and stare at us
The sculptor's marble sends regards
They made a statue of us
They made a statue of us
Our noses have begun to rust
We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages
Were living in a den of thieves

And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious

I listened several times to the song on video, watching Ms. Regina Spektor's idiosyncratic antics, and then told a friend:

I saw this video yesterday . . . and thought of . . . the "den of thieves" line that encapsulates our current times. Oddly, though Spektor's been around since 2001, I'd never listened to her music, but maybe because I've not been around the US for over 20 years now.

I look at young Regina in the video and wonder if I had made better decisions would my [academic] life be better? I had a great junior year at Baylor, but after that year, I made a series of bad decisions that . . . affected my career. Those decisions reflected my character, which in turn reflected the culture of the place where I grew up. I was independent and opinionated and disdainful of consequences. That worked well enough in the Ozarks, where people didn't have careers anyway. The years have brought some perspective, and I look back on arguments that I've had [with other scholars] that did little to further my career . . . .

I suppose that some people could criticize others even more harshly than I have and yet prosper, but those people are smarter than I . . . . Now, I expect little from my career. I'm not depressed about that. I just have to pursue my scholarly interests and . . . my job. Things are not so bad, actually . . . for a den of thieves.

And one never knows what the future might have in store.

That's both a hope and a fear, of course. I'm in the odd position of seeing my scholarly life work out fairly well even as my academic career stalls, for I've managed to publish on John's Gospel, Gnosticism, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Natural Symbols (Mary Douglas), The Clash of Civilizations (Samuel Huntington), Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks, the future of Christianity, Korean identity, and a smattering of other things.

But who reads -- or even cares about -- scholarly articles, anyway?

Hans Blumenberg: "sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time"

Hans Blumenberg

"wasting time"

(Image from Suhrkamp Insel)

Hans Blumenberg has a lengthy Otis Redding moment in discussing the process by which curiositas came to be justified through its centuries-long trial in the Christian West.

I mentioned yesterday Blumenberg's argument that Augustine's radical application of "the lust of the eyes" (warned against in 1 John 2:16) to his critique of curiosity would logically lead to a rejection of the Ancient and Medieval assumption that the world was teleologically organized for mankind's benefit and thus was open to mankind's observation in the interest of knowledge appropriate to mankind.

Even the teleological assumption entailed at least a mild rebuke to curiosity, for teleology implies that the knowledge appropriate for mankind to obtain should be readily available in a cosmos oriented to human needs. Going beyond those needs into deeper knowledge was considered improper, as though one were a 'busybody', a 'nosy' person, and such knowledge would have the status of 'gossip.'

Augustine's 'gnostic' distrust of the cosmos, however, and its concomitant distrust of the senses, especially the eyes, as leading one astray and into a curious, time-wasting attention to empirical matters and a dangerous inattention to God at the expense of one's soul, should logically entail the rejection of belief in a cosmos teleologically arranged for mankind's benefit.

Although Augustine himself retained a place for useful knowledge, his implicit rejection of teleology worked itself out through such High Scholastic intellectual endeavors as Nominalism and thereby ultimately engendered the legitimization of curiosity as a part of a necessary human self-assertion against divine absolutism and therefore the right, contra Augustine, to "waste time":

Waste of time seems at first glance to be quite a superficial standard for the legitimacy or illegitimacy of posing purely theoretical questions. But in this criterion the conceptual pattern of curiositas reappears: In the boundlessness of his cognitive will, man denies his finitude precisely in his dealings with time by behaving as though he does not need to apply any measure or to bring forward any justification here. If the modern idea of science will be characterized by its forgoing an evaluation of its objects and a distinction between what is worth knowing and what is a matter of indifference, this will only be possible through the elimination of this very objection based on the finite time given to the subject, an elimination accomplished by the integration, through 'method,' of a potentially infinite sequence of inquiring subjects active in temporally extended functional complexes -- subjects whose individual lives and needs (in regard to truth) can be neither the point of nor the standard against which to measure the totality of knowledge to be realized.

To both the ancient world and the Middle Ages, a knowledge that neither related to nor could be made to relate to the capacity of the individual and his existential fulfillment was still an altogether remote idea. The basic idea of the teleological serviceability of natural objects that are available and can be singled out from the whole had excluded the possibility that only a knowledge directed at the whole of nature could enable man to assert himself in his personal existence both against and by means of nature. Only the metaphysical suspicion that nature could function without regard to man in its lawfully regulated processes makes urgent and necessary a knowledge of nature that can examine each state of affairs merely for its potential relevance to man and that must therefore reject the criterion of the 'appropriate expenditure of time' as a point of view associated with a teleological contemplation of the world. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 317-318)

Augustine's unwitting destruction of teleology, understood more fully in the Nominalist speculations of High Scholasticism, thus paradoxically engendered a legitimization of the very curiosity that he had considered illegitimate.

If Blumenberg is correct, then the rise of modern science -- and of rational Modernity generally -- results not from Christian assumptions about the rationality of God and his creation but from suspicions that this God and his creation are not rational!

But is Blumenberg correct?