WHAT THE GERMANS LACK

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will" — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern "objectivity" — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. @#$@#$

From reality to rhetoric

It's been some years since I last spoke with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick. Today from him I learned of a kind of change in JSTOR's degree of openness, or closure:

JSTOR–Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving “Unaffiliated” Users

Nearly 500,000 articles in more than 200 journals are now freely available on JSTOR

The press release from JSTOR's Laura Brown begins:

I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

The release goes on to spell out details of this alteration and goes out of its way to say that the indictment of Aaron Swartz could have affected the timing and substance of this step, but ultimately did not.

Mr. Heterick concluded his brief email with:

I’m not a big fan of your rhetoric, but in your work as an independent scholar, I thought you’d find this beneficial.

Ok.

Bruce,

I'm not a fan of JSTOR's reality, but such as it is, this is a small step toward acknowledging the factual truth of my argument. Human knowledge, gleaned by humans in taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning, could even now be freely available in toto to all who seek it. Unfortunately, the desires of craven academic publishing houses to continue to subsist in antiquated form, coupled with the highly lucrative artificial scarcification of academic data thanks to the walled garden stratagem of JSTOR and its imitators, continue to transform this potential reality into a chimaera.

This transformation is the real rhetoric, in all its material voracity. Except that this can now be qualified as, "material voracity after 1922."

Thanks for the update.

Tom

In some places, sources are being nicely cared for

If the community of scholars would lend its skills to editing and translating enterprises such as IntraText - it's incredibly rich - click on, for example, Cicero, or his Renaissance buddy, Alberti, and you'll find original texts with concordances -- well, there would be enormous amounts of original source material for all to share.



Kinda makes JSTOR look like...






update: another collection, French this time.