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To: dukeman
"Something sick lies at the heart of Western civilization"

Yes, but what? If you review the charges, you will find they are exactly those leveled by the philosophers of fascism. If you review European intellectual life, you will find it is saturated with German philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If you scratch a postmodernist, you will find Heidegger.

It was all comprehensively smashed at the level of political reality. It was not defeated at the level of philosophic thought. In the US, it can seem incredible that any of it even needs defeating. But it does. The underlying ailment is not in the domain of politics but in that of thought, and the symptoms will recur as long as that remains.

The same, incidentally, is true of our Islamic opponents.

It is necessary to engage at the level of sincere philosophic thought, not mere polemic and ideology, let alone mere politics. And you don't engage with flip dismissals, pretending it can't matter because you don't agree with it. It must be fully understood, its psychic causes sympathetically diagnosed, and answered. Not with admonitions or lectures directed at changing others, but with testimony about the reality of human experience freely offered to the world at large.

I believe that is fully possible. But it has not happened. All the critiques of the core of modern European thought are ideological or shallow, or both. Yes that thought is diseased. But the things being peddled as cures are not directly at the actual problem, but are just panaceas being peddling by the usual suspect sects.

30 posted on 01/10/2006 9:06:40 AM PST by JasonC
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To: JasonC
It was all comprehensively smashed at the level of political reality. It was not defeated at the level of philosophic thought.

You're right -- too many people continue to see all that as a good idea.

33 posted on 01/10/2006 10:03:09 AM PST by Yardstick
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