Alexandre Kojeve, the great Hegelian philosopher, used to say that all the Sturm und Drang of the intellectual world ultimately spills over to the political world.
I was poring over the 1996 winter "elective circular," laboring to find an acceptable third course to fulfill one of my distributives.
At least since Socrates, intelligent men have repeatedly attempted to infuse meaning into human life to compensate for its hollowness.
In1896, an unusually astute American misionary in Korea wrote of the typical Korean wife, "... her sway is as despotic as any absolute monarch on earth." This statement overstated the case, but it went a long way in illuminating the real role of women in Korea, as well as much of the Confucian East Asia. But a century later, misconceptions about the status of women in East Asian societies still abound.
When Chris Kelly '96, suggests in his column "Lessons to Learn From 'Spanking The Monkey'" (Jan. 30) that there should be more explicit and widespread campus discourse about sex, he champions a central, and deplorable, aspect of modernity: the replacement of the idea of love with the reality of sex. Kelly is not the first to revolt against love in the name of sex.
Back in 1989, when the cold war was not long over and the worldwide democratic euphoria was at its apex, Francis Fukuyama declared in a controversial essay that we may be on the brink of universalization of liberal democracy. It was a pleasant dream. In reality the disappearance of communism has not, as forecast by Fukuyama, brought about a new flowering of liberal democracy in the non-Western world.
When a radically liberal friend back home heard that I had quit The Review and was to become a columnist for The Dartmouth, he asked: "Will you continue to spit out your fascist ideology, or will you begin to write intelligent pieces?" There are two easy replies to this question: the pompous reply and the gutless reply.
Since that memorable August, when I first arrived at Dartmouth and began writing for The Dartmouth Review, the question in my mind has been: Can Dartmouth students, who seem to be so robust in body and indolent in mind, deal with intellectual diversity and depth in a campus publication?
The word "authoritarian" has a negative ring to Western ears. To set the record straight, "authoritarian" is innocuously defined in the New Webster's Dictionary as "favoring, or relating to, the theory that respect for authority is of greater importance than individual liberty." Authoritarianism has been the successful government of choice for many Asian countries, especially those seeking to quickly industrialize.
If The Dartmouth Review had any claim to seriousness, the paper forfeited it with the abrupt (and perhaps forced) resignation of Daniel Garcia Diaz '95 as editor-in-chief.