WWP

[Justin Schwartz]

Ravi, you don't get it. Chomsky is of course an elitist, as am I, and he 
reserves his right to sneer at stupid remarks by greater and lesser 
lights--Heidegger is certainly no lesser light as far as brains go, but he 
had his quota of dumb and obscurantist notions, even leaving aside the 
Nazism. However, Chomsky would, like the Enlightenment liberal he is, and I 
am too, defend to the death Heidegger or Faurrison's right to make stupid 
and obscurantist, as well as racist and fascist, remarks without fear of 
legal sanction. But freedom from legal sanction is not exemption from the 
rough and tumble of scholarly debate (sorry, Steve, Ia'm not a professor any 
more, but I used to play one on TV, and I still have the habits).  In short, 
just because you should have to worry about the police doesn't mean you 
should have to worry about Chomsky!

jks


>
>so if chomsky could see it fit to defend faurisson's right to speech,
>how come his gratuitous slam of martin heidegger ("the truth is the
>revealing of that which is beautiful" roughly), in the chomsky
>reader, supposedly to critique intellectual sophistry, though one
>might be justified in suspecting that the choice of heidegger is a
>clever one, motivated either by the much popularized heidegger nazi
>connection, or perhaps by the ongoing chomsky, sokal, znet wars
>against the academic left or the humanities (or whatever they are
>calling it these days. see znet archives on the albert/chomsky/
>ehrenreich debates with pomo and other thinkers, and chomsky's
>recent pieces in z magazine with sarcastic remarks about the
>intellectual content of non-scientific fields, surprising since
>chomsky's field itself, linguistics, is really nowhere near a hard
>science, unlike physics or math that he refers to).
>
>in all matters political i have great admiration for chomsky's views
>and actions, but i am a little bothered by what seems to be his
>attacks on individuals based on a sort of elitism.
>
>	--ravi
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>man is said to be a rational animal. i do not know why he has not been 
>defined
>as an affective or feeling animal. more often i have seen a cat reason than
>laugh or weep. perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also
>inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the 2nd degree. -- alasdair 
>macintyre.
>

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