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Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...
Klee was an artist, not a philosopher. Most artists are frankly not very good at talking about their own work. They tend to not actually be that knowledgeable about art theory, let alone philosophy in general. That's why they're artists and not philosophers.
The Klee stuff you quoted seemed pretty bad and uninteresting and I would have nope'd out after a few sentences.
When someone is actually trained as a philosopher, and their work is recognized as philosophy by other philosophers, you can take it on good faith that there is a method to the madness. I quoted that Heidegger comment about poets for example to give an example of one of his more extreme flights of fancy, but at the same time, it's undeniable that Heidegger was extremely well-versed in the entirety of the history of Western philosophy, and (at least some of) his work makes genuine contributions to legitimate philosophical problems. (His What is Metaphysics is interesting and approachable.)
Aaaaa what a tragedy! Zarathustra is a terrible book, it's easily the worst thing he ever wrote. I don't blame people for assuming that it's a natural starting place for reading Nietzsche though. He himself insisted from the day it was published to the day he died that it was his best work. I have no idea why. He was simply wrong about that. I can only assume that he was just trolling and trying to filter people or something.
If you ever want to return to Nietzsche, I would recommend Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, and Genealogy of Morality in that order. I think that would give you a relatively balanced overview of his project and his main concerns.
Like I've been saying, you have to make judgements on a book by book, paragraph by paragraph basis. Almost all the specific books I've recommended throughout this thread are approachable and can be read like any other book, and they do make coherent sense, such that you could explain them to analytic philosophers without too much trouble.
And sometimes you get sentences that function on multiple levels, instead of adhering to a strict "semantic meaning vs vibes-based" distinction. So, for example, when Lacan says "woman does not exist;
Womancannot be said", you can "decode" this to get the "literal" meaning of "there is no single paradigmatic successful example that women can model themselves after, unlike how an individual man can aspire to be 'The Man' (people say 'you're the man, man' but they never say 'you're the woman, girl'); social expectations for women are perpetually and irreconcilably split between the Madonna and the whore". This is how many of his commentators interpret him, especially if they're writing a "Lacan 101" type introduction. But you can also choose to just let your mind run free with the poetic, vibes-based associations. I think some continental texts are very much intended to get your brain to trigger both modes of cognition at once.Thank you, I really appreciate that. Some number of downvotes is actually a good thing. If I only ever got upvotes, then that would mean I was just agreeing with the hivemind on everything and I wasn't saying anything that challenged people and made them push back.
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you. I have obviously not gotten as deeply into continental philosophy as you have, so I hope this doesn't feel like explaining the concept of addition to an infant.
The reason why I removed it is precisely for the reason you stated: he is an artist and not a philosopher. I quoted him initially because IIRC Adorno was influenced by Klee's art and writings, but later decided that it would just be better to quote Adorno himself instead of doing so indirectly through the writings he was influenced by.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in. Perhaps this is a mistake and perhaps I should read more before I comment, but:
On Page 2 Marcuse enumerates the following tenets of Marxist aesthetics: Art is transformed along with the social structure and its means of production. One's social class affects the art that gets produced, and the only true art is that made by an ascending class; the art made by a descending class is "decadent". Realism corresponds most accurately to "the social relationships" and is the correct art form. Etc.
Marcuse's critique is that Marxism prioritises materialism and material reality too much over the subjective experiences of individuals, and that even when it tries to address the latter its focus is on the collective and not the individual. The Marxist opinion of subjectivity as a tool of the bourgeoisie, in his opinion, is incorrect and in fact "with the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity, the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence. Indeed, this escape from reality led to an experience which could (and did) become a powerful force in invalidating the actually prevailing bourgeois values, namely, by shifting the locus of the individual's realization from the domain of the performance principle and the profit motive to that of the inner resources of the human being: passion, imagination, conscience."
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me. Subjectivity could and did become a powerful force in challenging the bourgeoisie? Would be nice to get some examples of this, but I doubt he has any concrete ones. The topic of whether focusing on one's inner world invalidates or bolsters bourgeois values is not really amenable to systematic inquiry. But I would say a person's "inner experience" is very complex, kind of nonsensical and pretty much orthogonal to any political or social system you could put in place, and as such it will never map onto anything that could exist in reality (and that includes Marxism), that's not specific to aspects of capitalism like the performance principle and profit motive. The bureaucratic machinations of a central planner are just as alien to it as decentralised market-based allocation and the incentives it creates.
I guess I can somewhat legibly interpret it if I assume the truth of the critical theorist belief that their ideas are uniquely liberating, but I think that their proscriptions for society are just as artificial as anything that came before. Human emotional experience is so disordered and contradictory that expecting it to align with any model of social organisation is a mistake. People are a hodgepodge of instincts and reflexes acquired across hundreds of millions of years of geological time, some of which are laughably obsolete; it won't agree with any principle at all. Hell, it's not even compatible with granting people liberation, whatever that means. Even if you wave a magic wand and give people full freedom the expression of their instincts will often inherently conflict with the wishes of another, and in addition humans get terrified when presented with unbounded choice, and make decisions that don't maximise utility for themselves. The full realisation of human desires is an impossible task. It will always be stultified in some way or another.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone." I can't really reason my way into the conclusion that Marcuse has reached here, and in fact the more I think about that passage the less comprehensible I find it to be. The Lacan passage seems similar, but I have not read it in full context yet so I won't judge. But the reason why analytic philosophy tends to be restricted in its scope compared to continental philosophy is because there are rules that govern what can be legibly said within that philosophical framework.
I suppose I want and need a lot more substantiation and rigour in my academic work than what many of these writers are capable of offering. If you look at my post history, that becomes very clear; I think I demand it more than even your average Mottizen does.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
I probably should have defined "meaningless" better and generally articulated my argument more systematically, that's my bad; I was writing down my first reaction to the passage and had not yet properly distilled how to explain my point. What I mean by "not meaningful" is that there might be no way to prove or disprove the statement, and as such it can be considered an example of a statement that's not even wrong. In terms of its utility in shining light on the world around it, it's not particularly helpful; this is the case due to the fact that it has not been and perhaps cannot ever be evaluated through reference to formal logic, mathematics, or any natural sciences. Marcuse has presented a statement of fact without proof or rigorous logical argumentation as to its validity. He's not even built his conclusion based on reasoning from other assumed priors (not perfect, but better). As such it is a bare statement.
Right, I think that this elaborates the difference between our epistemologies and our opinions on the standard that academic scholarship should ideally strive towards. I generally adhere to logical positivism (very INTP of me, I know /s), and while I don't act like this all the time in practice, I do believe that principles of falsifiability and offering up proofs/disproofs are the kinds of standards that scholarship should exemplify. As Scott describes it: "The truths of science are verifiable empirical claims and ... the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies. These two constitute the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else is nonsense."
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact. Every argument surrounding aesthetics will be vibes based as a result, and the point of it is not to get closer to any truth; rather, it's to impress upon someone your subjective experience and make them viscerally feel it on a deep level. The point is to impose your personal feelings on someone. The reason why people structure it like a rational argument is specifically because we assume that other people believe certain things are good too, we assume other people share our own cognitive characteristics. We create premises and then we can possibly use logical (more often, pseudo-logical) argumentation to show how these premises result in an inevitable conclusion.
Of course, there is a point beyond which you can't get much closer to agreement through this method of argumentation. Say a film critic enjoys films that are talky and philosophical and idea-based and the ordinary viewer enjoys stuff that's more action-packed. There isn't really a way for these two parties to come to any consensus on the quality of films. While it's possible to try to argue it if there's some other related point of commonality you can reason from, a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level. Discussions surrounding aesthetics proceed with the inherent assumption that truth is not what is being discussed, and as such they do not need to meet the criteria for evaluating a truth-claim. (There is a way to discuss aesthetics which is amenable to proof or disproof by appeal to the majority or analysis of human neural structure, but when most people discuss aesthetics they're not trying to make a claim about whether most people like something or not but instead getting someone else to adopt their own subjective evaluations of a piece of media.)
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action. This automatically raises the bar for the kinds of arguments that should be accepted when evaluating these statements. Because when you agree with that statement, you're not agreeing to adopt a certain personal evaluation of things. You're agreeing to a statement about how the world operates. Discussion of such things needs to proceed among logical or empirical lines, and if it cannot, all you are doing is relying on your own emotion or personal bias to try and divine a fact. When discussing this one cannot subject themselves to the same criteria that one would subject a movie review to.
The kinds of statements I consider meaningful are exemplified in this quote from Scott in his post about logical positivism. "[W]hat is there such that, using reason rather than emotion or made-up pseudologic, we can actually change our minds about and correctly judge as having one probability of truth rather than another?" It really doesn't matter much to me that the majority of philosophers seem to think the Vienna Circle has been invalidated; if I'm to judge the effectiveness of these principles I distinctly note that these institutions that operate under things that look and sound a lot like positivism do far better.
Perhaps that makes me a pragmatist instead.
Correct, I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list. It contains a clear statement of fact that can be pretty straightforwardly understood. I do believe this is true for much continental philosophy, though they fail other epistemological criteria and sets of standards.
I think we've talked past each other on this point, I don't mean to say it's mystical. What I mean is that people would accept Marcuse's claim not on the basis of formalised reason or empirical proof but on the basis of the fact that it resonates with them and they deeply feel it is true; they think it sounds right and seems reasonable in spite of the lack of concrete reasons they should believe it.
Also, the distinction I've made between a value/moral judgement and a statement of fact, as well as the different burdens of proof which should be placed on them, rears its head here. Statements such as "I base my values on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" and "You should not base your own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" are value judgements. "Emphasising subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" is a statement about how the world works.
Haha, yeah that stuff has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm very much an NF type. I have an appreciation for both the strictly logical side and the vibes-based side.
I'd say that's basically mission accomplished then.
I don't particularly disagree with what you've said here. I just don't draw the same judgements that you do with regards to the text.
If someone writes a review of Star Wars that starts with "Star Wars is the worst movie franchise of all time.", you don't say "ah, the author has presented a value judgement as a statement of fact. Confused as he is about this basic distinction, I must now consign his words to the flames". Instead you say, "he's presenting his value judgement in a hyperbolic manner as a rhetorical tactic. If I already have preexisting reasons to trust this author's judgement, I will continue reading with the reasonable expectation that he will provide reasons for his value judgement that I may be responsive to”.
You were quite correct to say "a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level". That's part of what Marcuse is doing here. When he says "the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence", you're not supposed to go "erm, doesn't he know there's only one dimension of existence?" You're supposed to go, "ok, he's sort of painting a picture with words here. He's communicating his value system and inviting me to share in it. Is that something I'm interested in exploring? If yes, why? If not, why not?"
If there's one thing you should take away from continental philosophy, it's that your values are not set in stone. You can choose to change them.
If you already have a strong prior against Marxism (as I do too!), then you're obviously not going to be interested in sharing his value system exactly. And that's ok! You might still be able to mine his work for concepts and ideas that you can repurpose for other ends of your own.
Right, that's another part of what he's doing. He's suggesting that his way of looking at things might have pragmatic value for advancing a certain political agenda, and this is a claim that is at least conceivably subject to empirical verification and falsification. Can he prove his claim? No. But I don't think he necessarily needs to. It's fine to just throw stuff out there and speculate sometimes. We can just chill and mull it over for a while. We're just brainstorming. Opening ourselves up to new possibilities.
The question of "standards of academic scholarship" is an interesting one. This is, again, something that will vary heavily based on context, but I'd say that in general continental authors would have some issues with your conception of academic rigor, and would be more likely to see their work as being continuous with "ordinary" thought and speech, as opposed to being distinguished by a particular kind of academic methodology. More like internet shitposters than scientists. (And your revealed preference is that you do see a place in the world for internet shitposting -- you're here, after all.)
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Just seconding this.
We need some nutters around the place to keep things interestingConventional English strongly associates quality with clarity, for good reason IMO (see C.S. Lewis and Orwell’s critiques of bureaucratese and the superiority of clear sentences and everyday Anglo-Saxon derived words, with which I largely agree).
But I do see the force of the Continental claim that writing something is not actually the same as expressing it. It can even be the reverse - an inoculation that robs an idea of all its true interest and allows you to lock it in a mental drawer without further thought.
The problem for me is that I find all the continental attempts to circumvent this process to be tedious in the extreme :) Which is why I appreciate having you around to try and indicate why it is not so.
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