Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality yeah I may have been wrong, my bad
Primaprimaprima
3d ago
Which side in the Newcomb debate is supposed to have the hangup about free will? Yudkowsky for example is a two boxer, and I don’t think he would perceive himself to have any psychological obstacles regarding free will in this case.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
I think it's pretty clearly a good thing to have non-zero "enemies for life". I don't think you can have a functioning morality or conception of justice without this component of moral reasoning, and I think life without functioning morality or a conception of justice is not a good life.
Conveniently, I was just thumbing through Nietzsche again due to my discussion with coffee_enjoyer:
"To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall for the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he – forgot.) A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; actual ‘love of your enemies’ is also possible here and here alone – assuming it is possible at all on earth. How much respect a noble man has for his enemies! – and a respect of that sort is a bridge to love . . . For he insists on having his enemy to himself, as a mark of distinction, indeed he will tolerate as enemies none other than such as have nothing to be despised and a great deal to be honoured!"
Regarding the broader art world:
I watched an employee of the state at a prestigious educational institution provide affirmation and encourage mutual validation to a series of young artists that their shit art was deep and meaningful because their output flattered their collective biases, and then watched her lead that same group collectively tearing down the one artist whose shit art did not flatter their collective biases. What conclusions would you draw from that experience?
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I have no particular attachment to the particular art institutions that we're stuck with now, and I agree with you that art could survive and flourish without them.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
Why should it start there? Bullshit political signaling seems obviously endemic.
Because the alternative is to simply think, as you already said, that your opponents are your "enemies for life" and there's nothing to be done about it. Then the discussion is truly just reduced to nothing but political power struggles. Sounds a bit... postmodern, doesn't it?
I take Scott at his word that his immediate, honest experience of the Chesterton poems is that he experiences them as surpassingly beautiful. That doesn't mean that I think that someone's "immediate perceptual experience" should be taken as an unanalyzable, unquestionable primitive. We could then go further and ask why he has that experience, how he came to be the type of person who has that experience, how it stands in relation to his other beliefs and his other psychological traits, etc. And someone could of course perform a similar analysis on me to determine how I came to hold the views that I hold. But the important thing is that, on a certain level, I really do take Scott's word for it that he just likes the poems because he likes them. I'm not coming into it thinking that he's just saying that he likes those poems because he has a political angle. I think everyone should extend that same level of charity to everyone.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it.
Part of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (and Buddhism, and stoicism, and etc) is that a lot of things that appear to be or are alleged to be examples of "self-denial" or "self-overcoming", actually aren't. In the majority of cases on Nietzsche's view, followers of various religious and philosophical traditions are just doing what they were naturally going to do anyway, just with some elaborate post-hoc rationalizations to make it sound more impressive. You need to look at each individual action in each individual case to determine whether it's actually coming from a place of strength or weakness.
For example, a guy who's already having no luck with women, and who then proudly declares himself to be MGTOW because he wants to "focus on himself", inspires no confidence. It's not an accomplishment, he's not "denying" himself anything, because he already had no ability to procure the thing he's allegedly denying himself in the first place. Similarly, showing mercy and love to your enemies is only impressive if you actually had any other options available to you. Refraining from crushing your enemies is only a display of strength if it's actually difficult for you; that is, if it's more difficult for you than simply crushing your enemies would be.
The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue).
He never said that it was impossible for Christian civilization to produce great individuals, or that there were no great individuals who were Christian. Otherwise, he would have had to fully discount ~2,000 years of European history, which he plainly didn't. He did think though that by the time he arrived on the scene, Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming, and it was time for it to be transcended (at least as far as higher individuals were concerned).
To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans.
Nietzsche produced the most beautiful prose writing in history (and it's barely even a contest). That's already a pretty staggering accomplishment, even before you get to the actual content of his thought.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
I'm not sure if I can pick something about your linked work where I can say the same? Can you elaborate on that a bit?
I like the color scheme. I like how strangely ambiguous the image is: the figure floating in a strange artificial space (or maybe a "space" that's not-actually-a-space), he looks like he's looking at something, expectant about something, but we don't know what. The image feels "compact" in a way that's oddly comforting.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity.
How so?
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
You're kind of just doing what I warned against in my post though. "No one could really be into this stuff. We all know what 'beauty' is, after all; so artists must just be screwing around because they don't have anything better to do". I explicitly disagreed with all these points. You're still incredulous that people could be pursuing "modern art" because of their own intrinsic interest in its own intrinsic aesthetic value.
Obviously something historically unique did happen in the late 19th/early 20th century that changed the trajectory of high art. But that was due to many competing factors and isn't just reducible to "linear perspective was solved". Nor were modern artists the first artists to do anything weird/experimental: see for example Hieronymus Bosch.
Primaprimaprima
7d ago
Angelus Novus is a beautiful painting in every (authentic) sense of the word, and only philistines think otherwise
Scott just published Contra Everyone On Taste:
Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly forgot to respond to them until now, but I appreciate how they forced me to refine my thinking. In particular, they helped me realize that “taste” and “good art” are hard to talk about, because the discussions conflate many different things [...] I will take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these.
This post is a followup to the earlier Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste. It seems that the track of the discussion went roughly as follows: Scott was reflecting on how the tastes of art connoisseurs (either self-proclaimed or credentialed) tend to a) differ sharply from the tastes of the much larger mass of non-experts, and b) show a preference for art that the majority of people consider to be ugly or incomprehensible. He essentially argued that the opinions of the "experts" are grounded in bullshit status games, political power struggles, arbitrary fashion trends, etc, while normal people are free to enter into a more natural relationship with artworks that are actually beautiful and pleasant:
Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.
When people responded to the post and argued that people with more "elitist" tastes actually are responding to features of artworks that are both objectively real and deserving of attention, like the artwork's historical and social context, philosophical content, etc, it eventually prompted Scott to respond with his latest post.
He argues that many of the proposed features of artworks that are allegedly worth appreciating, like the art's historical context or its position in an ongoing artistic dialogue, are essentially extraneous, and will only serve to hinder one's natural and immediate appreciation of the art's "sensory pleasures" (or lack thereof). He really seems to be pushing this idea of a pure and natural response above all else, abstracted away from any possible considerations of context. I think this dialectical maneuver of his is ultimately grounded in his incredulity that anyone could actually, really enjoy the types of "weird" artworks that art elitists claim to enjoy. I think he thinks that if he can just cut off all of the "escape avenues" for the mustached hipster -- "no, you're not allowed to talk about the history of this or that movement, or the artist's biography, or the dumb pseudo-philosophical artist's statement, you have to just look at the thing itself and tell me what it actually looks like" -- then the snob would be forced to admit defeat and admit that, yes, when you remove all possible external variables and immerse yourself in the pure visual experience (or aural experience or whatever), it actually is just a dumb ugly looking thing. At which point Scott could claim victory and his assertion that the snobs were never worth listening to in the first place would be vindicated.
His incredulity is on display, for example, when he discusses Benjamin's essay on Angelus Novus:
I’m not usually one for art history, but Benjamin has caught me. As a writer, I tip my hat to him: I will never compose a paragraph this good. If Angelus Novus can spark commentary like this, surely it - and the artistic project itself - is deeply valuable.
Except that I guarantee you that you will not be prepared for the actual Angelus Novus painting. Whatever you imagine it to be, it’s not that. I read Benjamin’s commentary first and I Googled Angelus Novus second, and I thought somebody was playing some kind of prank. Better if I had never seen it, and had kept the beauty of Benjamin’s prose unsullied in my mind.
I've actually brought up this painting once or twice before on TheMotte in the context of other art discussions, always to the same perplexed reactions. I'm quite fond of this painting, and I couldn't just let Scott dis it like that, which is part of what compelled me to respond to this post in the first place.
Scott raises a number of interesting points and arguments throughout the post; I'd be happy to discuss any of them individually, but, I don't think that a point-by-point breakdown of the post would actually be persuasive in getting anyone on either side of the fence in this debate to change their minds. So for now I'll settle for the more modest goal of trying to dispel some of the incredulity. Yes, I am a real living breathing human who thinks that Angelus Novus is authentically beautiful. Not for any particularly "intellectual" or "contextual" reasons either. This is, as far as I can tell, simply my "natural" response to the painting (as "natural" as one can get anyway, seeing as one's "natural" response is always already impacted by one's life history, cultural upbringing, background philosophical assumptions, etc). Similarly, my "natural" response to the Chesterton poems that Scott loves so much is that they're, well, I have to break out the word he dreads here: kitschy. I'm not even saying that to be mean! Either to Scott or to Chesterton. I have no agenda here (or at least, whatever agenda I have, there's a pretty large chasm between it and the agenda of the modal blue-haired MFA student). I'm just calling it like I see it. (Full disclosure, I only sampled a small selection of Chesterton's poems, and I'm not much of a poetry fan in general to begin with.)
An honest dialogue should begin with the recognition that people can have idiosyncratic or even "elitist" tastes that aren't just based on bullshit political signalling. Scott would of course be the first to acknowledge that "taste is subjective", but I'm not sure if he really feels it in his bones. He's still looking for the angle, looking for something that would explain why all these ivory tower types have seemingly conspired to convince everyone that these obviously-ugly artworks are actually good, because surely no one could just simply believe that. Of course it would be utterly naive to suggest that politics and fashion play no role in "high art" trends. Of course they play a prominent role. But at the same time, they're not the only factor. It shouldn't be surprising that the types of people who dedicate their lives to becoming artists or art critics would also tend to converge on certain idiosyncratic aesthetic tastes, naturally and of their own accord, due to whatever shared underlying psychological factors drove them into art in the first place.
One of these "underlying psychological factors" might simply be the desire to grapple with the complexities of aesthetic experience as such, and a willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by that experience in radical ways. Scott treats "sensory pleasure" as essentially an unexamined, irreducible primitive, the bedrock of certainty that would be left over once one has abstracted away everything "extraneous": as though it were simply obvious to oneself when one finds an artwork to be "pleasant" or "beautiful" in the first place, as though it would be impossible or undesirable to call these modes of experience into question, to become unsure of and estranged from one's own perceptual experience. Tellingly, he does include "Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You" as one of his markers of artistic quality, but suggests that it may be "emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making." But, the authentic work of art opens up the possibility of transforming what you experience as delightful in the first place, what you experience as a "valid point" in the first place. Conceptual groundwork of this nature calls for phenomenological experiences that are multilayered and complex rather than merely "pleasant"; it calls for engagement with the world and other people.
For understandable reasons, non-leftists get anxious whenever anyone brings up words like "historical" or "transformative" in relation to art and culture; any call to be mindful of "context", especially "political context", is seen as somewhat threatening. For decades in the West, these concepts have all been associated with the forceful imposition of leftist political strictures and leftist assaults on traditional (especially religious) culture. "You're asking me to 'be open to' being 'transformed' by art; so you're asking me to allow myself to be transformed by these people? The ones who run our universities and art galleries today? Really?" I'm not saying that your concerns are entirely unfounded. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be this way. Recognizing that art is ineluctably embedded in its social and political context is intrinsically neither left nor right; a more holistic way of appreciating art that goes beyond simplistic notions of "art for art's sake" can and should be reclaimed.
Primaprimaprima
9d ago
So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior.
It's not that there's something inherent in Marxism*. Rather, it's that Marxism was built by, and continues to attract, the types of people who already have a preexisting psychological disposition to suppress ideological dissent and view it as threatening. You see the same dynamics (that is, the dynamics of ideological suppression and the fear of wrongthink) play out everywhere from indie video game circles to "serious" leftist political organizations, it's plainly one and the same underlying phenomenon at work.
(* The notion of "communism" in general predates Marxism specifically, but, the Marxist and Marxist-inspired ideological strands are the ones that have been the most evolutionarily successful.)
Don't totalitarian rightist governments have a dim record on free speech too? Yes, but, it's different; it's subtle but different. Flipping things around for a moment, consider how Heidegger in his "Introduction to Metaphysics" lectures, delivered in 1935 (two years after the NSDAP came to power), argued that The Human Being As Such is ontologically grounded in "violence" and "struggle". I view this as an authentic expression of "the rightist mind" (or at least, a particular subtype or strand of it), and I view this as a legitimate difference between leftists and rightists. A committed Marxist simply wouldn't think or say that; even though they have engaged in a great amount of violence themselves in good conscience, and even though they have a certain degree of libidinal investment in the continuation of certain struggles that they claim to want to bring to an end. For all that, they are still not invested in the abstract concept of struggle itself; it doesn't structure their imagination in the same way. And this is part of what makes them leftists in the first place, and ultimately structures all the really-subtle-but-still-clearly-there differences in the ways that leftists and rightists think, talk, organize themselves, etc.
Analogously, rightists will suppress dissent for all sorts of reasons; because it's tactically the best move, because they legitimately believe that the target views will cause great harm if left to proliferate unchecked, because they simply take pleasure in the fear of their enemies; but they won't do it because they love suppressing dissent as such. The mind that loves struggle needs, first and foremost, enemies to struggle against. The mind that loves peace would rather see their enemies simply disappear into the mists of time. Or the mod queue.
TheMotte has never recommended you a winner? Ever?
Why do you think that is?
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