Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I feel like Nietzsche is cheating a bit.
Yeah, I mean I can see why you wouldn't say he's continental continental, but he's obviously not analytic either. If someone was coming from an analytic background and wanted to broaden their perspective on what philosophy is capable of being, I'd tell them to start with him.
I'm glad some people like you do the reading to pass on some level of understanding.
Thank you! I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.
Which half though?
Just read Nietzsche. If you don't get anything out of him then don't bother with the others. He represents the "continental mind" at its best.
Girard
Never heard of him.
Continentalists seem to get very mad at Analyticals misrepresenting them, without themselves having a consensus about what was "really" meant by any given thinker.
Think of philosophy as being like one big internet argument. (It basically is that, quite literally. Many of the questions we discuss regularly on TheMotte are philosophical questions.) There has never been any time in history when someone made a forum post on a non-trivial political question and everyone thought "yep, that's correct, there's nothing to clarify or add, he simply got it right". At minimum, there will be a dozen replies telling the guy how he actually got everything wrong. Frequently, these posts will wade into interpretive matters -- asking for further elaboration or clarification on point X, asking if in this particular sentence he meant Y or if he really meant Z, asking if his arguments really support W or if that's really what he even wanted to argue for in the first place, etc. Undoubtedly you've seen this play out many times. This is just what happens when you discuss complex matters using natural language. So it goes for philosophy in general.
Think about how people still, after all these decades, can't agree over whether pro-lifers "really" believe that abortion is murder. I mean, they even say in very plain language that they think it's murder, and people still can't agree what such utterances "really" mean! Skeptics will say, well they can't actually mean that, because it's not consistent with their other beliefs/behavior, or their arguments clearly don't support that conclusion, so they have to mean something else. On and on it goes.
Sometimes the interpretive difficulties with a philosophical text are literally at the level of "I don't know what this sentence is saying". Typically they're more subtle than that though. There's a persistent interpretive difficulty with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for example over whether his metaphysics is a dual substance theory (two types of objects, appearances and things-in-themselves) or a dual property theory (only one type of object, but it has phenomenal and non-phenomenal properties). Kant was an unusually meticulous thinker, the CoPR is 800 pages of densely pedantic arguments, but on this one (rather fundamental) issue he simply never addressed it explicitly. When we're writing, we can't predict every question that every reader will ever come up with; sometimes we think something is perfectly clear even when it's not, or it just never even occurs to us to ask that particular question at all. I'm sure you can again think of many examples from your own experience.
That being said, although interpretive difficulties in natural language debates can never be entirely eradicated, some interpretations of a text are clearly better than others, and Russell was notorious for not being a particularly careful reader of the thinkers he profiled in A History of Western Philosophy. See this for example for a criticism of Russell's interpretation of Kant.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
insanely twisted way of framing that forum
Bruh, this
”The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”
has been the header on /b/ since the 00s. They embrace it.
Thank you for the thorough reply. I love getting to talk about this stuff.
I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future.
Derrida's a heck of a place to start if you're not already steeped in the continental tradition. He'll rapid fire off references to 10 other books and expect you to be familiar with all of them. Not that I'm at all trying to discourage you or anything, just saying that it's normal if you find him frustrating. I only understand what he's saying about half the time.
The Marcuse book on the other hand is rather short and approachable.
Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred.
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
In general, I find that many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty. There's often a more rigorous bent to their writings.
You're right, I don't disagree at all. That's by design of course. In the early 20th century, Russell and Moore and their co-conspirators thought that Hegelianism had gone off the rails, and philosophy needed a new beginning that was self-consciously modeled after mathematical logic. That was the start of the analytic school.
Analytic philosophy was my first introduction to philosophy and I think that permanently shaped how my mind works. Or maybe my mind just already worked like that and analytic philosophy was a natural fit for it, idk. But I do feel that on some fundamental level my outlook will always be analytic in some sense. I'm perpetually annoyed at how, at times, continental philosophers seem to care nothing for running basic sanity checks on their sentences (are terms well-defined, am I making any category errors, etc) (although I'm always equally as sensitive to the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding on my part, or that my whole conception of how one should "evaluate" sentences is wrong in the first place).
But nonetheless here on TheMotte I end up talking more about continental philosophy, partially because that's just what I read more of these days, and partially because continental philosophers speak more directly to the types of culture war issues that we discuss here.
It's often extremely fluffy, terms will be so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them, and even once you've broken through the morass and divined several possible interpretations of their words, every single interpretation turns out to be endless navel-gazing that has become unmoored entirely from reality.
I get why you say this, definitely. But at the same time, continental philosophy is so wildly heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to make generalizations about it as a whole. It varies heavily from author to author, text to text. You really have to treat each text individually and take it on its own merits.
I was just talking about how difficult Derrida is, but ironically, I think he's actually the closest to analytic philosophy out of all the "big" continental writers. His concerns and methods are ones that analytic philosophers can appreciate, once you cut through all the verbiage. Like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, it's a nice short little book that addresses the question, "do we have privileged epistemological access to the contents of our own mental states?" That's a perfectly comprehensible and "classical" philosophical question, no issues there. And he does have arguments; they're perhaps a bit difficult to extract, and they're not the most carefully rigorous, but they're there.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.) Reading Nietzsche is just such an amazing and wonderful experience. He doesn't provide too many arguments per se (and it would kinda go against his whole project if he did, because he's kinda doing a postmodern performance art deconstruction of the concept of philosophical argumentation itself, which is really not nearly as dumb and pretentious as it sounds, like seriously just read him trust me), but he doesn't need to give arguments because he just like, says stuff, in plain ol' honest terms, and you're just like "damn, that is so true... how did I never think of that before..."
But then of course you do just have the really hyper-weird shit. I wrote a post yesterday where I quoted some passages from Lacan's Seminar XX and, yeah I'll admit, it's fuckin' wild. You're justified in asking, how am I to take this as anything except the ramblings of a very unwell man who is on the verge of a psychotic episode? And I'll admit, I'm not sure how much of it can be defended "rationally". I can give basic definitions of the jargon terms like "jouissance" and "Other", but in terms of justifying why these specific words were put in this specific order and what it means as a whole, such that a sane person would be justified in believing it... yeah, that's tough. But that doesn't mean I can just throw it out, y'know? Something about Lacan's ideas and terminology resonates with me. I don't know what he's onto, but he's onto something. I can't argue anyone into walking that particular path, but I know that there are other people who are interested in walking the same path.
I wish there was more rigorous work done, both philosophical and historical, about how the analytic/continental split came to be and what it means. My current pet theory is that there really is just a certain strain of mysticism in continental thought, and as such it tends to attract people who are more open to mystical thought/experience, and this shows through in the texts, although most of them would strenuously deny this. It's not clear exactly why or how this particular mode of thinking caught on when it did in European philosophy, but multiple of the big "founding fathers" of continental philosophy did flirt with mysticism, to varying degrees of overtness, and this likely set the tone for what "personality type" would be attracted to continental philosophy going forward.
Kierkegaard had his own idiosyncratic brand of existential Christianity, that one is obvious. Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition goes into detail explaining how Hegel's thought was influenced by Hermeticism. And when Heidegger in What are Poets For? is saying things like:
Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. That is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
it's kinda like, what are we even doing here? We're not even pretending that this is "philosophy" anymore. (Actually Heidegger rejected the notion that he was doing "philosophy", he said that what he was doing was "thinking", what exactly that means is up to interpretation.)
And Hubert Dreyfus had the chutzpah to say "oh Heidegger was just doing a philosophical anthropology, the 'unveiling of a world' just means how our social practices influence how we categorize objects, nothing unusual going on here". Come on man.
The result of collecting all these spacey wordcels in one intellectual space, and giving them the freedom to be as spacey as they want without much in the way of outside checks and balances, is a very strange and unique literature that freely transitions between philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, poetry, and religious experience, sometimes all within the same paragraph. They won't announce when they're "changing modalities", that's on you to figure out. You might find it frustrating, but you can't say it's not fascinating.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis. There's been increasing analytic interest over the past couple of decades in doing analytic interpretations/reconstructions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Derrida, all the big names, figuring out what ideas are in there that can be extracted and pressed into a more easy-to-digest form. I wouldn't say there's anything like a "bridging of the gap" between the two traditions but the interest is there. It's not all bullshit.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Officially yes, fascists were opposed to the aristocracy in the old sense of “the second estate”. The monarchists viewed the fascists as upstart revolutionaries rather than as conservatives.
But in practice every society has an elite, and this guy was presumably using “aristocracy” as a synonym for “elite”.
The text I quoted was the entirety of the original OP comment.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Bebop and GitS are not good, they have immaculate vibes but that’s about it. I think they’re mostly carried by nostalgia. If you thought that was the best anime had to offer then I wouldn’t blame you for writing it off.
Most of my absolute favorite Japanese stories come from VNs and JRPGs rather than anime/manga. Although I do think there are some great anime-original stories. But if you like Ghibli movies I may not be the best person to give you recommendations, based on the alignment of our tastes. The only Ghibli movie I think is really great is Mononoke.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?
He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!
EDIT: Well that comment didn't last long. Here's the original:
I didn't watch the entire Mehdi Hasan Jubilee video but wanted to comment on that one guy who was fired after he said "yeah I'm a fascist".
After this, Hasan asks if he's afraid this imagined regime might come after his one day. He says no because he'd be part of the aristocracy that the regime comes from. These spoiled children of democracy have no ida what the hell they're talking about. All authoritarian regimes are full of paranoia about who's going after who. And that ruling class is the most heavily policed. They get purged. Your unwavering commitment to the state's ideology might be your best asset one day and your biggest liability the next. I beg any of these people to read a book by someone who grew up in an authoritarian state.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Ah, FC, FC. I believe it's been a little while since we last spoke.
During our earliest one-on-one conversations, I had us pegged as being very similar types of minds. Although in every conversation since then I've gathered more and more evidence to the contrary. That's not a bad thing, not at all; it just is what it is. Either way, you continue to make a surprisingly excellent sounding board for different arguments and ideas, perhaps because of your enviable generalized easygoing nature. And so I'm going to babble incoherently at you for a bit about the topic at hand, in the hopes that at least one person reading this will find that the words contained herein bring clarity to some aspect of their own experience. @IGI-111 will possibly be interested in this as well.
To be perfectly frank, I find most of the typically stated "rational" reasons for the animus against pornography -- "it makes sex workers feel bad", "it's too addictive", "it distracts men from finding a real partner" -- to be, essentially, distractions. They don't really strike me as psychologically realistic, they don't smell vigorous, y'know? They give the impression that something is still being concealed. "Sex is special and pornography is somehow a violation of what makes it special" -- ok, getting closer, but say more, special how? There are lots of "special" things in the world, but they don't all draw this level of persistent sustained ire.
Roughly, my thinking is that there are two principle psychological causes of the general unease that many people feel with pornography:
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Either the animus springs from the same unconscious mythopoetic wellspring as the prohibition against graven images of God, or:
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There is a primal fear of its sheer destructive potential that cannot be reduced to any "rational" factor; although the line between this point and the former is blurry, and they may very well be the same thing. For what could be more frightful than the wrath of God, the wrath that God very nearly visited upon the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf.
Don't for a second think that there is no relationship between God and sexuality. An image of sex is very nearly an image of God, it is reasonable to confuse them, there is a very real risk that people might start worshiping the image as an idol. Lacan thoroughly explores the indissociable link between the two in Seminar 20 (humorously enough, the very same seminar that features the infamous dictum "the sexual relationship does not exist"):
"It seems clear to me that the Other -- put forward at the time of 'The Instance of the Letter' as the locus of speech -- was a way, I can't say of laicizing, but of exorcising the good old God. After all, there are even people who complimented me for having been able to posit in one of my last seminars that God doesn't exist. Obviously, they hear -- they hear, but alas, they understand, and what they understand is a bit precipitate.
So today, I am instead going to show you in what sense the good old God exists. The way in which he exists will not necessarily please everyone, especially not the theologians, who are, as I have been saying for a long time, far more capable than I am of doing without his existence. I, unfortunately, am not entirely in the same position, because I deal with the Other. This Other -- assuming there is but one all alone -- must have some relationship with what appears of the other sex. [...]
There is a little connection when you read certain serious authors, like women, as if by chance. I will give you a reference here to an author... [...] I don't use the word 'mystic' as Péguy did. Mysticism isn't everything that isn't politics. It is something serious, about which several people inform us -- most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of [the phallic function]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. And who also feel just fine about it. Despite -- I won't say their phallus -- despite what encumbers them that goes by that name, they get the idea or sense that there must be a jouissance [enjoyment] that is beyond. Those are the ones we call mystics.
[...] For the Hadewijch in question, it's like for Saint Teresa -- you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she's coming. There's no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.
[...]Thanks to which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra, as long as you put a screen in front of this 'extra' until I have been able to properly explain it. What was attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud's time, what all sorts of decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce mysticism to questions of cum. If you look closely, that's not it at all. Doesn't this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?
[...] [The Other] is barred by us, of course. That doesn't mean that it suffices to bar it for nothing to exist thereof. If by [the signifier of the barred Other] I designate nothing other than woman's jouissance, it is assuredly because it is with that that I am indicating that God has not yet made his exit."
So, essentially, pornography is evil because it gets too close to recording the truth. It risks making a graven image out of this "extra" jouissance ("jouissance" being the French word for "enjoyment", but the specific connotation here is that it's an enjoyment built out of pain, an enjoyment that you can never actually possess for it would simply be the immolation of the subject, it is the "enjoyment" of Exodus 33:20: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live"). That's not the sort of thing you can just put in a picture and go passing around willy nilly! God jealously guards his (her?) secrets.
Whenever I ask people why they think Steam should be allowed to suddenly and arbitrarily delist pornographic games, thus endangering the income of many small artists and game developers ( @gattsuru feel free to consider this a reply to your top level post as well), I am always hoping, begging that they say "because God said so". Because then I at least know they're being honest! They're attuned with themselves. I let them go in peace, I have nothing more to say. It is the sort of thing that God might plausibly say, after all. Maybe he did say that. Who am I to doubt?
Maybe people are just increasingly embarrassed now to say that it's because God said so? Or it could just be a result of where I tend to hang out. I should just go down to my local lower middle class church, because y'know the more salt-of-the-earth people, the ones who haven't had their minds poisoned by so many books and foreign cartoons, their "defense mechanisms" often aren't as developed, if we're going to use psychoanalytic language. They'll give it to me straight. If I ask them what they think of porn they'll say "the fuck's the matter with you? Don't you know anything? Haven't you read the Bible?" And that's really just the answer I was hoping for all along.
Some days I really just feel like I'm done with the whole "argument and debate" thing. Arguments are yesterday's news. What I'm interested in are the mythopoetic symbols that govern your psychic economy. That's where the real shit is. But how to get people to share? They're so often embarrassed to share, or they don't even know themselves. I suppose I could offer a trade -- my symbols for yours. I'm always willing to lay myself bare as far as my powers of introspection will allow me. This could be the next big evolution of internet discourse, huh? It's like "let's talk about our feelings" but on steroids. This idea really has some legs. Just you wait and see.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship (this particular kind of distinguished relationship, as you conceive of it)? Did you only decide that porn was a bad thing afterwards, on the basis of this conception, or did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?
This isn't a gotcha, I have no agenda here. I'm just genuinely and sincerely interested to learn more about how you think about these issues.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
So if they do it for free, is that ok then? Thereby de-commodifying it.
Granted, commodities can be given away freely too, I suppose. But if I were to say, write a poem and put it on my own public blog for free, I don’t think anyone would call the poem a commodity. I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely. So it seems like I should be able to create and give away my own porn and have that be not-a-commodity too.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
but it's also self refuting nonsense that should never have been allowed to have social impact.
What's the self refuting part, exactly?
Reading Derrida is a journey into the most high grade sort of masturbatory thinking about thinking that allows learned men to convince themselves that their worst urges are actually fine just because they're so clever.
What "worst urges" do you have in mind here?
Derrida's work in particular is relatively light on ethics and politics (depending on which period of his work you're talking about). He spends most of his time addressing relatively abstract and "classical" philosophical problems related to language, meaning, and knowledge.
Incidentally, that's exactly how it was received in France at the time
Depends on who you're talking about I suppose? Lacan was a pretty big deal, it was front page news when his yearly seminar series finally concluded after more than two decades. He was a bit like the Jordan Peterson of his day, except culturally lauded instead of culturally shunned.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
Fair enough! I have no interest in defending any of the specific points listed of course. Just one more reason why I'm not a Marxist.
I will point out that 1) the Manifesto was a relatively early work and Marx's political thinking developed as he progressed into his mature works, and 2) it was a polemic intended for general consumption and may not represent the most "nuanced" version of his views. But I don't have any further relevant textual references to cite.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
You really just have to plainly read critical theory to start hating it.
What! But there are so many lovely works of critical theory! Even Marcuse. "The Aesthetic Dimension" is a wonderful book, I always recommend it to everyone.
What specifically did you read that made you hate critical theory? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I'm just curious what you read that caused you to form your opinion.
Have you ever read any Derrida? He has some beautifully poetic writing, his writings on art are a real pleasure:
everything will flower at the edge of a deconsecrated tomb: the flower with free or vague beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and not adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). It will be, for (arbitrary) example, a colorless and scentless tulip (more surely than color, scent is lost to art and to the beautiful: just try to frame a perfume) which Kant doubtless did not pick in Holland but in the book of a certain Saussure whom he read frequently at the time. "But a flower, zum Beispiel eine Tulpe, is held to be beautiful because in perceiving it one encounters a finality which, judged as we judge it, does not relate to any end"
(This is such a great closing paragraph because earlier in the chapter Derrida quotes Kant as saying "examples are the wheelchair of the mind", and then here in the final paragraph he again quotes Kant as saying "zum Beispiel eine Tulpe", and it's like, huh I thought you said examples were bad, but here you're giving an example, what's up with that eh? It's a really great mic drop moment. Because the whole chapter was Derrida taking Kant to task for his position that the frame/ornament(/example/footnote) has to be excluded from art proper, but Derrida's argument is that the picture can't be distinguished from the frame, so he finds a footnote in the Critique Of Judgement where Kant gives an example, so it's the innocent flower in the innocent footnote that brings the prohibition against the frame/ornament/example/footnote tumbling down and ahhh he was just so delightfully clever with stuff like this.)
I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism.
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China. I just want to help people understand what classical Marxists actually believe, so that when they reject Marxism, they have a better idea of what they're rejecting.
"A state governed by the principles of Marxism" is a bit of a misnomer (besides the fact that Marx thought that advanced communism would bring about the dissolution of the state). Marx was intentionally very light on specific details about how a "communist society" would work; we can say what communism is abstractly, but not concretely. Because communism will involve a fundamental transformation of human subjectivity (according to Marx), it's impossible to predict exactly how it will work, because we can't extrapolate from human behavior under capitalism to predict human behavior under communism.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland". What he did say is that there needed to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order
That's largely the point, yes. The best way I heard it explained was, "Marxism was not the proletarian socialist movement; it was the self-critique of the proletarian socialist movement". And I think that's correct. Marx certainly did not invent socialism, the workers' movements preceded him, their demands preceded him. Marxism was intended to be a type of self-criticism that would bring the socialist movement to self-consciousness. The incessant Socratic questioning of the Marxists was directed just as much at the socialists themselves as it was at broader capitalist society, if not more so.
their vision for society is extremely ill-defined
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system
Yes of course. I'm no pacifist. I was mainly asking that question as a way of probing faceh's thoughts on value.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
“In conclusion” was already bad writing long before AI.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
They’re equivalent because they’re both equally fine, and both equally unworthy of further attention.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I believe I value multiple things, as one might expect. But I suppose if I had to put my "highest" value in as concrete terms as possible, it would be "that which pays respect to the mystery":
"[Object a] represents God. Object a is the unsymbolized object-cause-of-desire. [This position] is fundamentally unknowing, fundamentally hysterical [in the precise Lacanian sense] because at the very core of his position is an unsayable, unknowable mystery. Christ is the barred subject, because Christ goes, 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' And this is why it's beyond theism and atheism, because technically object a doesn't exist, right? But let's say it's the unsymbolizable real.
"It confronts the congregation to create knowledge. I want to create a church where the liturgy is hysterical. Where the liturgy embraces doubt, complexity, unknowing, and mystery in the music, in the art, in the ritual, in the sermons. You, the congregation, kind of without knowing it, we have an ideology. We have an ideology of wholeness and completeness. We would be confronted by an hysteric discourse that causes us to rethink and generate new ideas and we start to enjoy not knowing. We start to enjoy the process of life itself. And what sustains this entire project is a fundamental ontological mystery."
(I recommend listening to the whole video if you have time, it's really quite lovely.)
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
No it’s not a pejorative! The thoroughness of your empirical research is rarely observed among the brainrotted younger generation.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
You know what gap moe means?
Man I had you pegged as a 50 year old Fox News boomer.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
Pretty close? Is there anything closer?
You may have an answer, or you may not. It's fine to say you're not sure.
develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there.
Wouldn't this just be the sort of pursuit of pleasure/leisure that you've been criticizing? Or do you not see it that way?
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
I'm much more interested in the way you think about value than the way you think about Marxism.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself, or if you think it's only good insofar as it can be a means to other ends.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things
What kinds of other things?
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
the continuation of your genetic line
Well, there are multiple ways to read that.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
Primaprimaprima
1yr ago
The word "Dialectic" is almost exclusively used by (my) outgroup
The word "dialectic" has had multiple incompatible definitions throughout the history of philosophy. When Marxists use the term, they're using it in the sense that Hegel used it, which is... well, you could argue that even Hegel and his followers didn't have one consistent definition of the term. But I think you can reasonably say that all usages of the (Hegelian) term "dialectical" revolve around the idea of an "immanent internal critique of a concept or position via the concept's internal contradictions". Many common arguments against naive libertarianism could be classified as dialectical (in the Hegelian sense). If you tell the libertarian that libertarianism is bad because freedom is bad, that's an external critique. But many people accept libertarianism's presupposition that freedom is good; they just think that libertarianism fails to live up to its own ideals, that the particular kind of formal freedom offered by libertarianism fails to secure certain actual freedoms that we value. Freedom can in fact give rise to its own opposite, unfreedom (an isolated individual in a pure state of nature is "free", but he's also rather unfree, since the physical world immediately begins to make strenuous demands on him). That's an internal, dialectical critique.
Marxists have a dialectical view of history because they think that the internal (and material, according to them) contradictions of a given mode of production are what give rise to social and historical change.
Why the word "Materialist?"
"Materialism" has two distinct meanings in philosophy. There's materialism as a metaphysical thesis, which is the thesis that everything that exists is material (this is the "God doesn't exist" version), and there's materialism as a sociological thesis, which is the thesis that material conditions are the driving force of social and historical change (as opposed to "sociological" idealism - the thesis that people inventing and adopting new ideas is what drives historical change). In contemporary analytic philosophy, you basically only see materialism/idealism used as metaphysical terms, while in continental philosophy (the tradition that Marx and Marxists belong to), people will freely switch between both usages. The type of materialism that Marxists place the emphasis on is really more of the sociological kind (although they're almost universally metaphysical materialists as well).
See this for an overview of the debate between Marx's sociological materialism and Hegel's sociological idealism.
If we're talking about a "satisfying human desires" contest, that seems pretty fair.
But human desires are malleable. They are not static across history. That's the point.
A century ago, not wanting to have kids was seen as much more eccentric than it is today. Now there's a whole "childfree" movement and the birthrate is dropping precipitously. Biology didn't change that fast. A change in material and social conditions caused a change in desires. So before you say "well this is the best way to satisfy human desires", you have to ask whose human desires.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around. But even then! There have been plenty of people who chose to live an ascetic life and managed with very little.
a tribe that was bringing home more meat and berries and could use its surpluses to make things like fur coats and better tools and weapons were 'winning' in some meaningful way.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
Are you using the system of production as a means to your own ends, or is the system of production using you as a means to reproduce itself? (Marxists of course think that under capitalism, it's the latter.)
Capitalism's great "insight" was that you didn't have to go over and raid and pillage the neighboring tribe to benefit from their bounty. Instead you can identify things you have, that they want, and trade such things for mutual gain, then use those gains to bolster your productive capacity again. At some point someone invents 'money' and its off to the races.
This is not how Marxists use the term "capitalism". Not the intelligent ones anyway.
The sophisticated Marxists recognize that there's no single identifying feature that separates capitalism from other "economic systems" in previous historical epochs. Money, trade, wage labor, private property, and even financial speculation have existed essentially since the beginning of human civilization (I believe Max Weber talks about this in the preface to The Protestant Work Ethic). "Capitalism" for Marxists essentially means "industrialization", or perhaps more specifically, "the contradictions in liberal humanist social relations engendered by industrialization".
such things only ever came about because Capitalism made us productive enough to spare more resources for leisure and alleviation of suffering, and to give workers the leverage to demand better compensation for their labor.
Yes, that is literally just the orthodox Marxist position.
Capitalism is not an aberration or a mistake. It's a necessary phase of development; albeit one that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is in fact the only thing that can give us the tools to go beyond itself. It is always and only the master's tools that dismantle the master's house (if you believe Hegel).
I thought baggy masculine clothes were the style for zoomer girls? (I know of a couple irl examples.)
Could be a regional or Blue/Red thing.
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