A reply to Allin's ope-l 4465.
Thanks for correcting the "whom."
I had written:
"Whom, other than a true believer or misinformed
simpleton, would SEEK to ground his/her thinking in a body
of work that is not only held in disdain, but is *incoherent
in its own terms*?" [caps added]
Allin responded: "Plenty of people. True, few would _knowingly_ ground their
thinking in an incoherent body of work, but that point is
rather facile. David Hilbert, for instance -- and no
simpleton he -- grounded his thinking on an incoherent
basis, but of course this was not at all obvious, even to
the likes of von Neumann, and it took Kurt Godel to point it
out."
"Plenty of people" is surely wrong. Note the word "SEEKS." Out of context,
my sentence does seem trivial, but it was part of laying bare the ideological
function of "corrections" of Marx's "internal inconsistencies," particularly
how they function differently from statements such as "I think he was wrong,"
"I don't happen to agree," "I have a different way of looking at things." The
former suppress the adversary, the latter do not.
Andrew Kliman