I said what I said as clearly as I could, not in a fit of passion, but after days of thought and reflection in which John Hartmann's review, as it were, ate away at me and I resisted writing because I knew my comments would alienate some people I respect here, including him. My post expresses both my considered views and my inner nature, and I stand by it.
I never made the charge of dishonesty against Hartmann, and I still do not--
that interpretation is an utter misunderstanding. In fact, I have defended him vigorously from the charge of dishonesty in the past and I would continue to do so in the future. I spoke very carefully of the existence of an ulterior ("beyond what is immediate or present")
reason for conscious or unconscious hostility. This is structurally similar to pointing out that an official had a conflict of interest without trying to determine what was going on in his consciousness (only structurally--there is
no analagous conflict of interest in this case, for in the first place it is normal to to write a review whose tone reflects one's hostility based on loyalty to schools of thought, and in the second place the supposed conflict is nothing publicly agreed-upon, to say the least, but my mere psychological hypothesis, which one will share or not depending on intangibles, and which I did not expect him or others to accept or read without anger: this is why I said only "
I believe that such a reason exists ...").
To illustrate this, let us take--only for the sake of clarification--what might appear to be the "worst" case, and imagine that Hartmann was
consciously angry not only about Shereshevsky's use of quotations, but also about the way Shereshevsky treated Watson--even in that case I would not think it
dishonest that he should have wanted to manage the connotations of his language so as to make Shereshevsky smell as bad as possible within the denotation: the most I would think (in this imaginary extreme) is that in the strength of his anger he overshot the mark and lost control over the effect of his language, writing words that, rather than merely coloring the picture, induced readers to mistake its shape. This is why I said "it [the review] insinuates," not "you insinuate"--whatever the intent, its language simply functioned that way. In fact, as LeeRoth pointed out, the review undeniably
did mislead a substantial portion of readers (including you, Bibs!) into thinking that there was plagiarism.
What ate away at me in the review, what in the end I felt I could not ignore, and what accounts for the intensity evident in my response, was not this overshooting the mark (I have done that myself). No, it was the use
in the current situation of a
moral attack on the work, an attack which aims not to dispute it, but to destroy it. A moral attack
paralyzes--the author's words fade to silence, he moves his mouth but nothing comes out, everything other than the moral question no longer matters. When I see such weapons used in a situation that is not extreme, I recoil, as if I were watching a spider paralyze and wrap up a human being. How crazy this description seems will depend on how (or even if) one senses the psychology of morality and how far one is willing to go with it. Personally, I feel that one of the most dangerous tendencies of our time is a growing puritanism in public discourse and the use of moral condemnation as a weapon, often relying in the background on the reflexive amoral cooperation of money in the attack.
Since my reputation is now involved, I will speak some of myself. A thoughtful friend noted already when I was a young man that I primarily react to the world aesthetically rather than morally, but with what one might call moral intensity. That is
my nature, embedded in my reaction to a great deal of philosophy, politics and art, and I take pride in the fact that in my own writing (not here, but under my real name) one never reads direct moral condemnation, though one may read descriptions such as "with goodwill," "noble," "higher," etc., or again "cruel," "betrayal," and so on.
I am an artist, not an academic, and though I believe in strict citation in the academy I think it would be a disaster if the world at large became a macrocosm of academia. Nor is this the first time I have reacted here with psychological and aesthetic disgust against moralizing. Here is my reaction to a previous incident:
Quote:It is clear from NN's posts ... that the underlying impulse is not a campaign to raise scholarly standards ... but to discredit and hurt the offender in return for a perceived slight. Like an obedient but repressed driver who remorselessly retaliates within the law against a rival who has broken the law, NN may be technically in the right, but hardly seems to be coming from a higher place...
If you look carefully, you will see that even in my reactions to posts that I think are unfair, I may speak of self-respect or nobility or rationality, but I am at pains not to be taken as moralizing:
ReneDescartes wrote on 03/07/18 at 12:49:32:
Bondefanger wrote on 03/07/18 at 12:14:23:
First off - sorry if I offended some by using the word "suck" to mean "very bad". I didn't expect that. I'll try to use more bland words in the future.
It's not the word "suck, " but reasoning from an exaggeration that sucks. (I thought was happening in your post, no offense intended.) I was also using your expression to comment on the reasoning of those players previously mentioned who react to being called opening experts as if they were being disparaged, some of whom may also be using the same "transition from quantity to quality." Everyone has his own style--mine is more formal, but a diet of bland writing bites the big one.
Not that I endorse lying, cheating, gratuitous cruelty, etc.: in the face of extreme enough cases of them I will at times react with frank violence, myself wishing to destroy rather than refute, even here in the chess forum:
ReneDescartes wrote on 10/06/13 at 14:49:32:
But I also do not wish to be taken for something other than what I am, and although I know I may lose some friends here as a result of these matters, I stand by my post.
"But what sort of difference ... causes anger and hatred among men? ...It is disagreement about what is just and unjust, honorable and dishonorable, right and wrong..." --Socrates, in the
Euthyphro.