Looking at documents created in a particular social-historical milieu can give you a lot of information about that milieu that will otherwise be lost in translation. Wojtek
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No shit! In that observation, lays a huge problem with many parts of my education. It does no good to study art history, if you don't know the social history---which they don't teach in art history. This goes for literature classes...maybe even more.
Philosophy is another example (maybe prime example) of this problem. If you don't know and study the social history, you can't really understand the philosophers and why they wrote what they wrote. I discovered this rather obvious lesson by going back to the sources that Strauss used, and studied their social history which on many occassions had chaotic social, political, economic, and intellectual forces working much like Weimar. Take the worlds of Hobbes and Spinoza, wild, violent, and shifting flows of everything that should be quiet, calm, and easy living.
Evidently there is nothing like hiding and running from the cops to make you get all philosophical and start thinking about the human condition.
My all time favorite example is Hegel writing his introduction to Phenomenology of Mind, and getting up the next morning to the sound of Napoleon's artillary barrage to open the battle of Jena. I can see young George Willy in my mind, `Holy fuck! Get me outta here.' It's a kind of Berkeley moment, as in taking a hammer to Bishop Berkeley's toes, perceive this mofo.
CG