No, I did not distort your story. — god must be atheist

Yes, you did distort what I wrote to you. And I already responded to that. I can't take you seriously because of how you distort an other's words; it looks to me like you'll say anything to prove yourself right. That's sad, hostile, manipulative and solipsistic.

Perhaps I was/am looking for a magic wand...witchcraft or wizardry in the art of... — Amity

That I can supply!! But my description will be a bit poetic, because the experience is profound for me.

I also write copius notes on the empty pages at the beginning of a book, the title page, etc. It's very important that I start "dialoguing" with the book by beginning my own writing process. There was a book that I read repeatedly and ended up erasing and whiting out notes once I had moved far beyond them, in order to begin synthesizing my own ideas, putting what I understood into my own language.

With this particularly difficult text, translated from the Russian, on the first couple of reads, I summarized each main idea and numbered it on each page. Then I'd start at 1 again on the next page. This helped me to remember the sequence of the construction of particularly complex concepts/arguments. (Actually, it was Bakhtin, which we are discussing on my Bakhtin topic.) https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6713/mikhail-bakhtins-dialogic-imagination

I erased all that when I totally understood how he constructed his ideas.

After I understood the steps of the construction, then I could begin to weave all the textual elements together and see wider patterns and designs (textiles). There are a series of movements in the act of synthesis, as ideas can be synthesized in different ways and combinations.

Then I started writing my responses and interpretations of what he was writing--and even objections and disagreements in places. For me, this entire exercise has always been about creating my own ideas and syntheses; I've never been good at spouting dogma. I always look for what hasn't been said.

I think you meant to write 'can't' - my initial hopes dashed.
I didn't expect you to draw an arrow from your book notes to the finished product. — Amity

No, I meant "can," but I had to rush off after I wrote that part.

What I don't understand is why your hopes were dashed; surely you have a system of your own that helps you to tackle the more difficult texts. I'm wondering if you're putting me on.

I don't think that someone else can teach me to be a good, close reader; that's something I have to teach myself with lots of practice.

Do you read differently each time and with a different purpose? — Amity

Interesting question: Do we ever read the exact same thing when we re-read? For myself, each reading deepens and broadens the interconnections I make among ideas and concept. Each reading fills in some of the blank spaces that weren't synthesized on the previous reading. Also, keep in mind that in between readings, I may read various other things that make the next reading easier.

The 10 readings was my practice in graduate school when I was teaching myself critical theory, and that was only for the most difficult books, like Bakhtin, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, etc. I should have clarified that I no longer need to read a challenging book that many times. Of course, I read Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte over and over for the pure pleasure of the prose.

I can describe the process to you, because all the notes are in my books, and of course the article itself is different..

I have notes all over my books that make their way into my publications. It's just how I do it.

Have borders between monological and dialogical become blurred and indiscernible? — Number2018

Actually, "Epic and Novel" was never the most important essay to me; "Discourse in the Novel" was. I could imagine him in Siberia, rolling his cigarettes with manuscript paper, writing and smoking away. I also loved what he wrote about medieval carnaval. I liked the "Speech Genres" essay as well.

Ultimately, after reading some of these essays multiple times--especially "Discourse"--I came to an understanding of what he was saying. It's been a good 30 years since I read him, but the notion of two people in a dialogue, each deepening his/her own understanding of what the discourse means by understanding the differences and nuances of how the other uses specific words. I imagined a kind of dialectic which continued to deepen understanding of all the inflections and contexts of any given word as used by each speaker. Which ultimately assists me to understand both myself and my interlocutor better, and makes my understanding more flexible.

I didn't really mark out an aristocracy of suffering. — Bitter Crank

Yeah, you kinda did. And I think it trivializes this discussion.

foot binding, castration, female genital mutilation, circumcision, etc. — Bitter Crank

I can't believe that you put these practices all on the same level. Castration has never been a universal cultural practice the way that female gen. mutilation is, and I'm sorry, but circumcision is almost insignificant compared to foot binding. What does circumcision do? You lose a little feeling. Maybe the head of your penis gets cold in a breeze. But foot binding? You're fucking crippled for life. Unable to walk, skip, jump, run, dance. You can never go anywhere under your own steam. That's hellish.

men and women were in constant war with each other. — Bitter Crank

This has clearly never been the case; nor is it now, although feminist philosophy etc. has had serious cachet for the last 40 years. Clearly, for the vast majority of the time, women were tied down to taking care of babies and men were tied down to hunting and foraging. I can understand the physically-stronger and more aggressive sex being bossy, but then it turns into all sorts of wretched ideological systems when writing becomes serious business. Which is when the really sick shit gets carved in stone, so to speak.

I know how the history of humankind developed; and you've got to be joking if you try to argue that Greece wasn't as phall-logo-centrically patriarchal as they come.

a ghastly tale of universal, unending female oppression — Bitter Crank

Who said that? I don't recall anyone saying that??? You're not trying to manipulate us, are you? The above unfortunate statement doesn't in the least reflect what this discussion has been about--at least according to my understanding of what we've been discussing.

Patriarchy puts men in charge of the socio-cultural institutions.

No one denies that things have changed a lot in the past 40 years.

It's fucking about time Me, Too happened. (Oh, sorry, went off on a tangent, but the point is there.)

This is how I see it, and you may not at all see things the way I do:
* change is slow to occur;
* only recently did women have equal access to education;
* even more recently women obtained more freedom from domestic thralldom (and I'll bet if you'd asked them if they wanted to go out and work some and let the men stay home washing poopy diapers, they'd have said yes); (and this would have been good for some men, too, who would have benefitted from staying at home);
* much of humanity continues to see women fundamentally as sex objects and inferior beings;
* too many men disrespect women's intellect by telling them they're brainwashed (and when they do that, they owe an apology);
* women have never had the chance to share equally in the decision-making apparati;
* men and women are oppressed and made sick by the dysfunctional dynamics that pervade.

We are a truly primitive species who may extinguish itself long before it gets a chance to truly grow up emotionally. I find this thought so sad cuz we were in charge of the whole planet.

I see this as primarily a psychological issue because humans have such intense emotional cathexes to their own beliefs and behaviors. It seems to be nearly impossible for the majority of people to self-reflect or self-examine, to take stock of their own behavior and to seek "healthier" was of dealing with the inner world of the mind/emotions and the external world. Hence, humans are so destructive and self-destructive.

Freud went a goodly ways in describing the workings of the mind, but our egos are often too fragile, or we don't believe we need to change, or our rationalizations are so perfectly crafted that nothing can penetrate them.

Perhaps I just described human nature...???

I have found that the books I've read 8-10 times are the ones I understand really well. I always have my trusty pencil in hand and write copious notes and responses in the margins.

I'd like to propose another way of experiencing existential depression, which I've felt deepy and consistently since November 2016. It's not depression about what's going to happen to the people I care about: it's a sense of utter helplessness and despondence about what's happening to the planet and all species.

It pains me to no end to ponder the loss of all life on the planet because of one specie's fuck ups.

How is the need for gender balance demeaning to either gender? — Noble Dust

The feminine becomes evil when lacking the masculine, but the opposite is never true. At least in Lurianic mysticism, the masculine principle is always the dominant one.

What do you mean by "cultural creation"? — Bitter Crank

I mean the creation of cultural institutions as well as art. Cultural institutions include religion, politics, education, military organization, govt., distribution of weath (class system), etc.

but disagreement with your views really shouldn't be taken — Bitter Crank

It's not that you disagree with me--I have no problem with that--it's you beginning your response by telling me flat out I'm brainwashed. So I respond flat out you're rude.

"It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they never have understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation? Until the ear tunes into another music, the voice starts to sing again, the very gaze stops squinting over the signs of auto-representation, and (re)production no longer inevitably amounts to the same and returns to the same forms, with minor variations." ---Luce Irigaray

I see what you are saying, and it's a very good point!! But I never took responsibility away from women: I wasn't talking about women as mothers and home makers throughout history. I never suggested that women are pure victims.

I think I'm strong; I will express and argue my opinions and my beliefs without trying to force them on anyone; but am I stubborn? I don't think I'm a particularly stubborn person.

I truly love a mobile, enlightening dialogue with others whom I can take seriously. I hate interacting with rigid, authoritarian minds who shout at you like Hitler.

Again: we don't know how it would have been had men and women shared power equally. I won't build an argument on speculation, but history leads me to draw various conclusions.

Research demonstrates that men are more prone to suffer from malignant narcissism, Machiavellianism and sociopathy/psychopathy than women.

We can agree to disagree: I don't engage with insulting or hostile people.

I am convinced that a culture of hostility dominates here and acts as the fragile mask in front of an awful lot of misery and insecurity. When people have to go out of their way to put others down, I have to conclude they're miserable beings.

Your hostility is such a turn off that I can't be bothered to read your response to me. You are a hater.

off topic: deleted

That's a point that might negate the idea that patriarchy itself is bad. — schopenhauer1

But it just so happens that our world has been largely man-controlled, and history tells the story of men behaving badly on the grand stage of things. There's no current need to neuter the term when men systematically kept women outside of all spheres of power and cultural creation.

Off topic: deleted

1) How fundamentally different are women and men in terms of human thought-process and proneness to aggression? If it is fundamentally different, is it biological or social for most of it? Would a women's economy really be that much different than a man's? Is this binary division arbitrary or falsely correlated?

2) If women acted aggressively like a man, are they "patriarchal"? What if throughout history, all women acted like what is traditionally attributed to men when in power? Would that change things? Would that even be called patriarchy or would that just be called "an inclination for domination in power and control"? — schopenhauer1

1. I won't make any generalizations about men and women thinking and behaving differently, because it's just too easy to disprove and find the exceptions to the rules. I do think the psychic economy is very different for men and women; I tend to conclude that this is mostly due to socialization and have no idea how much of it is biological.

2. Your "what if": If men and women had had equal share in composing the philosophical and religious texts, along with all other literature; if they had equal share in establishing all the socio-cultural institutions; if they had chosen to divide all realms of labor equally; if they had shared power and decision-making equally...
There would have been no need for the term patriarchy, for the founding mothers and fathers would have shared equal responsibility for the results.

There is a definitive translation of the Torah and that is the JPS Study Bible. It's easy to choose the right translation.

Jewish mysticism has a tradition of viewing God as male and female — Noble Dust

Yes, but even the Kabbalists demeaned women in every way possible. Shekhinah becomes an evil being when she is imbalanced by the lack of the masculine qualities. Isaac Luria is hopelessly spermatocentric...

If you read his essay on Epic vs Novel, he establishes a clear opposition between the closed monological world view of the epic and the problematized and dialogic world view of the great novels.

Bakhtin’s
project was about the universality of dialogic relations so that any monological
would be essentially dialogical. — Number2018

I'm not sure I understand what you wrote, I don't see it (if I understand you correctly). Bakhtin made it quite clear that a monological novel is a mediocre work because of the author's inability to bring truly different minds and world views into collision. I've read enough mediocre novels to know that this is true: it's like you can see the author behind the scenes pulling all the strings, but all the voices have the same, flat tone and there is no genuine problematics presented in the material.

But Capitalism isn't about men exploiting women — Bitter Crank

I do not agree: I see capitalism as quite a patriarchal edifice, along with all the other major institutions. I shouldn't have to repeat that it's all been controlled almost exclusively by men, with very few exceptions. No one ever said that men have a problem exploiting other men. The fundamental power paradigm throughout history privileges male strength and aggression (duh!!) and subordinates the role of those who menstruate and carry babies for 9 months. Clearly menstruation and pregnancy are going to limit certain kinds of activities for limited periods of time, but what does that mean? That women can't reason? That they aren't as smart, if not more so? That they shouldn't be Pope or study Torah at a Yeshiva? No one ever talks about mens' moodiness like they do about women, but violent, aggressive men are extremely moody. Just a different kind of moodiness.

The question for me becomes, Would things have been any different had men and women shared equal power and voice throughout history? Can estrogen claim a place beside testosterone, or is that irrelevant? What about the dearth of estrogen in post-menopausal women?

I perceive many patriarchal characteristics in most public women: patriarchy is the master brain-washer.

how we behave when we're not conscious of some philosophical position we're committed to, in contrast to consciously expressing ourselves in accordance with that philosophical position. — S

How you behave when you are unconscious of what you're doing reveals a lot of truth. Peoples' behavior is frequently at odds with what they espouse as a position or belief. But the proof is in the pudding.

Big difference between collision and collusion, and certainly both are dialogic in any number of great novels I can think of. From "Dialogue in the Novel":

“The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of compelx interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, itnersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse....The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object.”

When I wrote above about harmonious intersections of voices, I was thinking of parties coming to mutual understanding--like Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy do at the end of Pride and Prejudice; but yes, there was a lot of collision between their words in the first half of the novel. As Bakhtin writes, this is what all great novelists are capable of creating, where the mediocre novelist can't.

The mills of the economy grind away without consulting ideologies. — Bitter Crank

The economy is the most concrete form there is of how ideology is operating in a given society. I don't know about feminists "blaming" patriarchy; the ones I've read describe its operations in a given social realm or institution.

I am sorry, this is a philosophy forum, where logic is supposed to reign. — god must be atheist

I don't see any logic to your arguments above. I see you wilfully distorting some of the things I wrote, and I conclude that it amuses you to do so. You call it employing logic??? What is logical about concluding that a professor teaches one thing only? This is crazy.

I also conclude that you have an urgent need to "win arguments."

Many people read these posts, not just you and me. — god must be atheist

I will be surprised--nay, amazed--if anyone has the patience to read the above exchange. But of course, anyone has the right to chime in.

Not very pedagoguical, I'd say. You fail them for doing precisely what you teach them to do.

Exactly what I had predicted. — god must be atheist

Go back and read again, buddy. I work at a university and I'm paid to teach a subject matter. I don't teach or practice anarchy.

So back to the crystal ball with you to seek another prediction!

Do I detect that you don't teach what you originally told us you teach?

You told us origianlly that you teach your students to question authority.

Now you tell us you teach something different. — god must be atheist

I teach many different things to my students. Is that really so hard to understand? I don't think I've ever known a professor who only taught one thing in the sense that you seem to mean.

Who is this "we"? Is that the royal we?

If I assumed that they had special circumstances, then I'd also have the right to assume they were Martians, or that they were Cantaloupes, or that they only speak Sanskrit while your teaching language is English. — god must be atheist

I wrote, concrete circumstances--not special. And certainly, you can assume any number of absurdities that you wish. I don't think you and I mean the same thing when we refer to questioning authority.

I don't know if this will help or just send us farther down the rabbit hole. I teach a subject matter; students pass or fail my classes. I hand out a syllabus and I tell them that they have to follow my rules or they can take the course with someone else. Then I proceed to teach my subject matter.

However, I consider this the least important aspect of what I teach my students. There are moments, either in class or in my office, where a real teaching moment, a genuine dialogic moment can occur.

"And what do you answer, when the kids don't question you? But slavishly write in their notes, "We must question authority. We must not tell him that we follow this advice." — god must be atheist

I'm not da man; I'm da woman. And if you knew the concrete circumstances of my students, you would realize that this isn't an exercise in following the logical consequences of questioning authority to its limits, but rather one more along the lines of pedagogy of the oppressed. Are you familar with Paulo Freire? He wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

What do you answer when the kids ask you, "Why ought we question authority?" — god must be atheist

You asked me what I answer. I told you. Next you write that it doesn't address your question at all. That is confusing.

And I was not calling you a troll, not by any means!!! I'm saying that there's no dialogue with a troll.

I still think “patriarchal” is a valid adjective — NOS4A2

For me, it only conjures up negative associations and a fundamental imbalance.