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happy new year, plus grimmer meditations
Jan. 2nd, 2011 11:32 amThere have already been so many evaluations of the late Denis Dutton, some of which contain valuable links to other, less self-consciously old-school aggregator sites for intellectual topics, that I don't feel the obligation to add my incoherent ramblings.
I am embarrassed to realize that I added The Art Instinct to that vast collection of books with which to have a more detailed and reflective quarrel someday, and that was as far as I got.
My sense is that there is a slowly emerging consensus as to what the issues are as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century—I have summarized them previously as the necessity of combining not Marx, Freud and Darwin, but the interdisciplinary successors to Marx, Freud, and Darwin—which is something that the major theoreticians are still disinclined to do as they have recourse to the sacred originary texts. (A reflexive recourse to ancestors and origins that would make the few remaining Jung-tinged Eliadeans chortle.)
Dutton was having none of this, being biologistic and opposed to social constructionists to the point of being unable to perceive the combination of environmental challenges, socially formed expectations, and genetic predispositions that even Joseph Campbell incorporated into his oeuvre, in his own irritating, erroneous and thoroughly quirky way. But Dutton argued his positions well, wittily and memorably.
And he argued his positions most memorably in the order in which he chose to arrange (and phrase the teasers for) those links to the articles he collected on Arts & Letters Daily. His tendentious agendas sometimes became unpleasantly transparent, but the articles themselves, taken together in sufficient quantities were first and foremost evidence for the interconnected nature of knowledge, as the NY Times obituary remarked. Dutton refused to admit how interconnected, but all of us try to avoid the implications of what we know when we don't like the conclusions to which we ought to come. As H. P. Lovecraft pointed out in one of his few aphorisms not to incorporate the word "eldritch."
I am embarrassed to realize that I added The Art Instinct to that vast collection of books with which to have a more detailed and reflective quarrel someday, and that was as far as I got.
My sense is that there is a slowly emerging consensus as to what the issues are as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century—I have summarized them previously as the necessity of combining not Marx, Freud and Darwin, but the interdisciplinary successors to Marx, Freud, and Darwin—which is something that the major theoreticians are still disinclined to do as they have recourse to the sacred originary texts. (A reflexive recourse to ancestors and origins that would make the few remaining Jung-tinged Eliadeans chortle.)
Dutton was having none of this, being biologistic and opposed to social constructionists to the point of being unable to perceive the combination of environmental challenges, socially formed expectations, and genetic predispositions that even Joseph Campbell incorporated into his oeuvre, in his own irritating, erroneous and thoroughly quirky way. But Dutton argued his positions well, wittily and memorably.
And he argued his positions most memorably in the order in which he chose to arrange (and phrase the teasers for) those links to the articles he collected on Arts & Letters Daily. His tendentious agendas sometimes became unpleasantly transparent, but the articles themselves, taken together in sufficient quantities were first and foremost evidence for the interconnected nature of knowledge, as the NY Times obituary remarked. Dutton refused to admit how interconnected, but all of us try to avoid the implications of what we know when we don't like the conclusions to which we ought to come. As H. P. Lovecraft pointed out in one of his few aphorisms not to incorporate the word "eldritch."
