Friday, December 02, 2005

Hegel’s Haircut


On January 21, 1801, Hegel arrived [in Jena] and took up residence at Schelling’s place at “Kipsteinishchen Garten.” The only likely picture of him at this time (a silhouette) shows him sporting the very fashionable “Titus” haircut (probably best known as Napoleon’s haircut), a style identified with “modernity” (and sometimes with the Revolution), which he was to keep all his life. (A silhouette of him during his university period shows that he probably never sported the more traditional, long-haired, braided look of the generation immediately preceding his own; indeed, he seemed to have had an unkept, rather spiky, “revolutionary” haircut during his university years.)

–Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge UP, 2000) 106
***
Nietzsche writes somewhere that even the best poets and thinkers have written stuff that is mediocre and bad, but have separated off the good material. But it is not quite like that. It’s true that a gardener, along with his roses, keeps manure and rubbish and straw in his garden, but what distinguishes them is not just their value, but mainly their function in the garden.

Something that looks like a bad sentence can be the germ of a good one.

–Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 59e
***
  I hate anything that asks me to participate in being a sensitive person
  And I don’t want to read thoughts that are markers of that package which is some writer’s sense of his or her own specialness

–Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001) 38

2 comments:

Norman Finkelstein said...

"And I don’t want to read thoughts that are markers of that package which is some writer’s sense of his or her own specialness."

The irony here is that this quotation is itself an instance of that which she claims she doesn't want to read.

E. M. Selinger said...

Hey, Norman! She never said she didn't want to WRITE them.

Wickedly,
E