Today I was searching the Internet for ideas on writing a position paper for a course I’m following this period. The course could be translated as ‘fundamentals of history’ as it aims to teach students the principles of the science of history. For this course a position paper needs to written consisting of approximately 1.500 words, this seems like a walk in the park after you just finished writing a bachelor’s thesis of 12.000 words. I’ll blog about that later. The subject of the position paper I had in mind was criticizing the Sonderweg thesis in favor of the chaos theory.
While searching on ‘chaos theory hitler’ (to filter results which relate chaos theory with nazism, because the Sonderweg thesis is related to nazism) I stumbled on this blog post by Anders Rasmussen. Rasmussen writes many interesting things, but I was specifically interested by his post on postmodernism. I agree with him that certain texts can utilize a smokescreen in the form of difficult language, making it difficult to dissect the information they provide and that once dissected the provided information could disappoint. I’ve been told Foucault and Kant can be hard to understand, I haven’t read those myself. I also often question the benefit of certain areas of science, a lot of scientific knowledge in the field of the humanities doesn’t provide the public or scientists with any benefits except for the satisfaction of our curiosity.
Rasmussen targets Judith Butler specifically. I agree his citation of Butler is incomprehensible, but I’ve had to read Butler during the course ‘Research Seminar 3’ which had ‘history of the body’ as it’s subject. Butler’s insights on gender were quite interesting in my experience, fortunately Butler has also written works which are sanely understandable.