What I find really interesting is the way the conflict passes up the chain, changing form as it does. The initial conflict is presented as: proletarian versus upper bourgeois, with the latter being denied - extremely aggressively - the right to speak on a topic of special concern to the former (work), by a mysterious third party speaking in the name of "we".
Amongst the most interesting statements here: "really, do we have to let him write about it?" Perhaps we should kill him, or send him to the gulag, or break all of his pencil leads, one after the other. As a side point, the same basic argument outlined here could also be made against the factory owner's son Engels, with respect to his book on the English working class.
But this initial argument also has a number of other threads. Botton's status as an intellectual is denied - he is an "'intellectual'" who has only "pretended they've read Plato..." So the subplot here concerns intellectual authority, who possesses it, who does not.
Botton does not, I guess, because of his class background - but then what about Engles? Or as de Botton himself points out, Tolstoy. The circle doesn't square - the real objection seems to come from elsewhere. Where? The subsequent translation into a conceptual conflict, strange under the circumstances, given the fairly unconceptual terms in which this argument began, doesn't resolve this question, but instead only anchors it, in the idea of universal justice and an axiom pertaining to the proper assignment of philosophy. The terms are now Oxbridge and the Ivy League, versus "the rest of us" - which may mean the red bricks, it isn't easy to say.
One party asserts that they speak from the (authentic) position of universal justice, thus legitimating their position - a position otherwise not easily justifiable. A similar move used to be made by the French New Philosophers, who used to say that they spoke on behalf of the victims of the holocaust and the gulag. So a positional and class conflict - between two intellectual classes - turns into a universal battle between justice and its enemies. Meanwhile, the cleaners - on whose behalf this battle is apparently being waged - stay silent.
I cannot understand how this is at issue here. I've never read de Botton and have no idea what he says, and these terms are in no way apparent in what is presented here.
NB - IT... is a she..
Amongst the most interesting statements here: "really, do we have to let him write about it?" Perhaps we should kill him, or send him to the gulag, or break all of his pencil leads, one after the other. As a side point, the same basic argument outlined here could also be made against the factory owner's son Engels, with respect to his book on the English working class.
But this initial argument also has a number of other threads. Botton's status as an intellectual is denied - he is an "'intellectual'" who has only "pretended they've read Plato..." So the subplot here concerns intellectual authority, who possesses it, who does not.
Botton does not, I guess, because of his class background - but then what about Engles? Or as de Botton himself points out, Tolstoy. The circle doesn't square - the real objection seems to come from elsewhere. Where? The subsequent translation into a conceptual conflict, strange under the circumstances, given the fairly unconceptual terms in which this argument began, doesn't resolve this question, but instead only anchors it, in the idea of universal justice and an axiom pertaining to the proper assignment of philosophy. The terms are now Oxbridge and the Ivy League, versus "the rest of us" - which may mean the red bricks, it isn't easy to say.
One party asserts that they speak from the (authentic) position of universal justice, thus legitimating their position - a position otherwise not easily justifiable. A similar move used to be made by the French New Philosophers, who used to say that they spoke on behalf of the victims of the holocaust and the gulag. So a positional and class conflict - between two intellectual classes - turns into a universal battle between justice and its enemies. Meanwhile, the cleaners - on whose behalf this battle is apparently being waged - stay silent.
I cannot understand how this is at issue here. I've never read de Botton and have no idea what he says, and these terms are in no way apparent in what is presented here.
NB - IT... is a she..
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