Alex’s Reviews > Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality > Status Update

continental philosophy is complete garbage about 70% of the time, yeah. plenty of good work out there though!

I can put up with it sometimes, depending on the content. D & G for instance, get a pass with me because they are all about being creative with ideas. They also somehow manage to make a lot of their most impenetrable passages fun. But here the project is supposed to be a new path for the world, a new reality to generate. But for our reality to make a major transformation, we’re gonna need more than just the academic philosophers to get on board. This whole project strikes me as just blatantly dishonest.

Deleuze is my prime example of someone who initially seems nonsensical but there's really a lot going on -- a mad genius for sure.

And yeah, there's often this sense within continental philosophy of = philosophers as being the vanguard for a change in culture (which most of the continentals seem to get from Heidegger) but realistically they're all trapped in a very strange academic cul-de-sac

I'm so sorry to hear this as I believe you picked this up based on my review? The first half is definitely a bit rigid. Did you make it to the middle section and the second half? I can tell you that the main structure he sets up between absolute essence/language on one end and absolute ineffability on the other has stuck with me and become extremely helpful in both life and as a lens for other works. But I can also see how each person has their own types of windows through which it feels right to look out at the world and find meaning for themselves.

No worries at all. I was reading a pdf I found online, so it hasn’t taken any effort/resources to procure or abandon the book. I made it nearly to the middle section, then skipped ahead to later portions to see if I could expect any changes in the style of delivery. It looked as though I could not. A major source of my frustration is that the ideas it contains do hold a certain appeal for me. They were just drowning in what I perceived to be a lot of academic filler. If I didn’t believe there were good ideas contained within that could have been expressed more directly, in plainer language, I might not have felt so compelled to rant about it. I’m glad that you found the book helpful. I value your opinion, and our disagreement over this particular work hasn’t changed that.

I'm glad to hear it and feel very much the same about your opinions.