[Buddha-l] Zen War Guilt/Zen and the Sword

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 10:11 -0400, curt wrote:

> I'm sorry, Richard - I didn't interpret your post as a serious
> critique of Said, but more as an attack on his credibility.

Yes, that was my intention. I don't do serious critiques. Suffice it to
say that I once had the pleasure of seeing Bernard Lewis lecture on the
work of Edward Said. Although I normally find it distatsteful to see
anyone subjected to penchant criticisms, I have to confess I found it
delicious to see Said's work dissected in public and shown to be little
but ill-tempered sophistry. (Wikipedia also has nice article on Bernard
Lewis, with several mentions of his work on Said.)

Several years ago I taught a graduate seminar in which we read Said's
Orientalism, along with many other works dedicated to making academics
all look like complete fools. (It seems as though the obsessions of
American academics for the past forty years has been to discredit
themselves at every opportunity and then to wonder why nobody respects
them. I see it as part of America's undeclared war on science and
reason.) Most of what we read was silly beyond belief, but Said's work
stood out as being silly to a degree I had previously thought
unimaginable. I just couldn't believe that people actually took him
seriously. I still can't. 

> Said argues that there is a strong tendency
> for Westerners to project their fantasies and desires on to
> everything "Oriental", and in doing so, they fail to see what is
> really there.

That is not at all what Said says. But if he had said it, it would be an
explanation (albeit a very shallow one) of a phenomenon, albeit one that
doesn't exist.

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"Above all things, take heed in judging one another, 
for in that ye may destroy one another...
and eat out the good of one another."-- George Fox