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"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
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1d ago
Why are schizophrenia and depression mutually exclusive?
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1d ago
Thank you, that was highly interesting.
This same concept has been independently rediscovered in multiple communities (including the link to the historical practice of shamanism) which increases my confidence that there's something to it.
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1d ago
I suppose that was ambiguous.
In terms of the sheer number of people around the world who (claim to) adhere to his ideas, no one can really touch Marx. But within academic circles, self-professed "followers of Marx" I think are more willing to be critical of Marx when compared to followers of certain other philosophers.
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1d ago
I believe it is a significant outlier yes, in terms of providing a comprehensive metaphysical worldview, an ethics, an eschatology, etc. I think it's more of a religion than any historical form of fascism is for example.
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1d ago
Nietzsche certainly. Kierkegaard too.
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2d ago
I don't think that the way Marx is treated is all that out of the ordinary compared to how other canonical historical philosophers are treated (and you can find other historical thinkers who have a bigger cult of personality, like Lacan imo). I think the locus of emotional investment is more in the cause of socialism itself rather than Marx as a person.
The particular attention paid to Marx's writings and Marx as a person may seem strange to people with a STEM background, where primary historical sources are never read by anyone except dedicated historians. But that's simply how things are done in philosophy. If you want to do serious scholarly or intellectual work using X thinker’s ideas, then you're expected to read what X actually wrote.
No one treats Marx's thought as an infallible edifice which can never be criticized or amended. The Frankfurt school thought that Marxism had to be supplemented with psychoanalysis and cultural criticism in order to address some of its blind spots. Wokes are intrinsically suspicious of Marx because he was white and male. Etc.
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2d ago
Marxism and the History of Philosophy:
Most people in most places, including intellectuals, have never worked out their basic worldviews, and thus, they flounder without foundations. This is what Marxism has to offer: foundations and meaning.
We have a worldview that is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and credible. We bring a way to think that combines totality with historicity, a way of processing experience that is both integrative and empirical, and a way of synthesizing that is not an abstract unfolding of a mystified idea, but a constant and dynamic interaction with nature and with labor in a material historical process.
We need to show how the system structuring people’s lives, capitalism, is responsible for the terrible injustices of the world, the ecological destruction of the world as well as for the cultural decadence and psychological disorder of the world. We offer not only analysis in understanding the nature of the system generating the most basic problems, but also a solution in a movement to expose this system and to bring about an alternative system, socialism. We offer both meaning and purpose. [emphasis mine]
If this sounds a lot like a religion, then that's because it should. Marxism undoubtedly shares many structural features with traditional religions in its fundamentals.
(I have argued previously that wokeism is not identical with Marxism. The relationship between wokeism and Marxism should be understood as being something like the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Adherents of the newer religion incorporate the sacred texts of the older religion as their own, but they also make a number of modifications and additions that adherents of the older religion would stridently reject. Nonetheless, the two traditions are united in certain ethical and philosophical commitments that more distant outsiders would find baffling.)
Much ado has been made about the "crisis of meaning" in the contemporary West, and how "we", as a civilization, "need" religion (and how in its absence, people will inevitably seek out substitutes like wokeism). But speaking at this level of generality obscures important and interesting psychological differences between different individuals. Many, perhaps most, people are actually perfectly fine with operating in the absence of meaning. And they can be quite happy this way. They may be dimly aware that "something" is missing or not quite right, but they'll still live docile and functional existences overall. They achieve this by operating at a persistently minimal level of sensitivity towards issues of meaning, value, aesthetics, etc, a sort of "spiritual hibernation".
It is only a certain segment of the population (whose size I will not venture to estimate -- it may be a larger segment than the hibernators, or it may be smaller, I don't know) that really needs to receive a sense of purpose from an authoritative external social source. And this segment of the population has an outsized effect on society as a whole, because these are the people who most zealously sustain mass social movements like Christianity and wokeism.
Finally there are individuals who are seemingly capable of generating a sui generis sense of meaning wholly from within themselves. This is surely the smallest segment of the population, and it's unlikely that you could learn to emulate their mode of existence if you weren't born into it -- but you wouldn't want to anyway. Such individuals are often consumed by powerful manias to the point of self-ruin, or else they become condemned to inaction, paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties they have placed upon themselves.
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2d ago
TheMotte was intended to be a neutral meeting ground where different factions of the culture war could come together and have cordial discussions.
If the forum puts forward the appearance of a consensus on sensitive issues (e.g. “we all know the 2020 election was stolen”) then that would be antithetical to our goals because it would make the atmosphere more hostile to factions with different opinions.
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5d ago
I just wanted you to know that I’m not ignoring this, but I only have so much time in the day for typing long replies, and this thread is already buried. I’ll save my thoughts on this for the next time this topic recurs.
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6d ago
I didn’t take it as an insult lol, just thought it might be a fun factoid for people who didn’t know how much overlap we had (I know of a couple high-profile mottizens who have confirmed they post there)
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6d ago
You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't.
I am literally the guy writing the posts on 4chan that make you think “that guy wouldn’t make a good mottizen”.
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6d ago
At what ages does one normally outgrow Santa belief in America?
18, in my case.
I figured that if God is real, then reality is intrinsically magical anyway, and I may as well keep believing in Santa too.
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6d ago
Excellent post.
Just wanted you to know that in spite of (or because of*) our stringent disagreements on certain issues, you remain one of my favorite posters here and you're one of the posters who continues to make TheMotte worthwhile, so I really appreciate what you do.
(* Ilforte once told me that my "value system deserves oblivion", and I still cherish that as the nicest compliment I've ever received on the internet. You don't want an interlocutor who's just going through the motions of nitpicking this or that argument. You want an interlocutor who opposes you on a deep spiritual level. That's where the good stuff is.)
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6d ago
Fair enough! Catholics have always been very tolerant of iconography of Jesus though.
I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way.
Very much so, yes. It's important that we think clearly about what we mean when we talk about "the sacred". And the best way to clarify your concepts is to stretch them to their logical limits, so that you're forced to draw distinctions and clearly demarcate the boundaries of things.
But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful.
It would be extremely helpful, if it were genuinely a part of your ultimate motivations. I'm less interested in debating policy and more interested in understanding why different people think the way they do, regardless of what those reasons turn out to be. (Sometimes people aren't honest about why they think what they think. Sometimes they genuinely don't know why they think what they think, or they're lying even to themselves. That makes it a difficult endeavor.)
At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children?
Sure. But that doesn't really seem to be addressing my question, because this new criteria (about what's appropriate for children) seems totally orthogonal to the dimension of the sacred. The sacredness of the phenomenon or object in question is no longer relevant; we just have to look at whether it's safe for kids (or addictive or whatever other criteria you want to propose) and that will determine what types of prohibitions we need. But the reason I asked the question in the first place is specifically because I wanted to clarify what exactly the sacredness of sexual acts consists in.
I do believe that you (and not just you of course, but many people, both religious and non-religious) correctly perceive that there is a certain type of spiritual power in sexuality, and that this power can be dangerous if left unchecked, and this perception is what prompted you to use the word "sacred". A spiritual power that is not present in booze and guns and etc. We can quibble over whether "sacred" was the correct word choice, or if the category of the sacred needs to be subdivided further in order to account for different types of sacred phenomena, and so forth. But regardless, I think you were at least directionally correct.
I was gonna say that if this all blew over with nothing happening then I would finally admit that the pendulum is swinging and woke is on the downturn. But I see that a few people have already stepped down, so, yeah. Anyone trying to say that “the era of woke is over” is coping.
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