Martin Heidegger: In conclusion, a man of contrasts

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Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

glowing-fish posted:

So why does this all matter in 2019, here, where we mostly post about things in the 24 hour newscycle?
I guess my main interest in writing all of that was that many people on this forum seem to view fascism as being just another name/another form of statism, or of economic conservativism. While there is lots of reasons to look at fascism as being allied to state power, and embracing economically conservative positions, there is a deeper strain to what fascism is, and I believe a lot of it is concealed inside of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The idea of wanting to do away with our individual consciousness and conscience, and replacing it with an oceanic feeling of being part of something bigger, is something that we can appreciate. The idea of returning to the unity of a community and a simpler world is something that sounds like a good idea, until we think of all that could mean. Looking at the damage caused by "Western rationality" is a good critical perspective, as long as we don't forget what the alternative has been.

Liberalism may formally renounce the 'oceanic feeling' as a legitimate mode of politics but in practice liberal societies like America are quite noteworthy for the mass esctatic public events such as music concerts, sporting events and megachurch meetings which seem to directly tap into the same psychological drives. Liberalism partially justifies and expands itself through the freedom of its popular culture, and much of American pop culture seems to provide a culturally safe venue for expressing behaviours that a communist or fascist society might channel into politics.

While we might argue that fascism represents a particular marriage of aesthetics and politics but in that case I'd argue there have been fascistic strains in a lot of western countries for some time now and that it's dangerous to present fascism as some kind of totally foreign or alien system when so many of its signature features (propaganda, race law, a colonial mindset toward foreign territory, etc.) were pioneered in America.

For instance, America is generally taken as the prototypical 'liberal' market economy (as compared to the social market economies of a place like Sweden or the state capitalist economy of China) and perhaps it is not a coincidence that religiosity is vastly higher (and also typically more focused on experience over rational discourse) in American than any other advanced country. And you can hardly say that religion is incidental to politics in America given religiosity is an important predictor of who you'll vote for.

glowing-fish posted:

I guess this is why I posted all that yesterday, how it is still relevant to this forum.

There are a lot of critiques of things like state power, capitalist economies, on these forums.

But when I read them, I can't tell whether they are based in rationality or irrationality. Whether they are an enlightenment idea or the type of post-enlightenment that Heidegger started.

For example, say we read someone say "The police will only ever protect the wealthy, the justice system is only used to protect those in power". You can read that about 50 times a day on here.

There are two ways to interpret that. The first is that there are universal moral and ethical laws, that people can learn and understand through discourse, but that presently, law enforcement and courts do not follow laws derived from those principles. That would be the rationalist, enlightenment take.

The second way to interpret that is the Foucault way, that is derived from Heidegger, that "universal moral and ethical laws" are just masks for the exercise of power, a form of disguising what can't even be called Truth anymore, a continuation of "forgetting" our primal truth and that, in effect

Because on the surface these arguments might say the same thing, but they start from different places and have different ends. With the first one, we can at least theoretically talk about what a just society looks like. With the second, we are just left posting disconnected discontent on an internet comedy forum.

I'm not sure it really makes sense to interpret the average person's moral claims as following some clean chain of logic going back to either postmodernism or the enlightenment. I think most people construct a folk morality that mixes their intuitions with social norms and that quite often the formal reasoning they give for their ethical claims is a largely ad hoc justification added after the fact (perhaps without the person in question even realizing this is what they're doing). I think there is plenty of value to examining the philosophy underlying our ethics because this does inform the norms that structure our society, but you're taking it a bit too far when you suggest all people reason and make claims based on a clearly articulated philosophical tradition. Most people are way more muddled in their thinking than that and carry around all kinds of random and not entirely compatible nuggets of belief in their skulls.

I also strongly dispute the idea that all claims to universal morality derive from the Enlightenment. If that were true then what is your take on the various monotheistic religions of antiquity?

suck my woke dick posted:

Now, I'm sure I'm pissing over centuries of philosophical thought by taking positivism �ber alles as the fundamental assumption of the argument, but I fail to see how we could possibly discuss the idea of natural or universal morality without taking into account that humanity is essentially apes transplanted into new habitats and societies vastly different from natural ones due to rapid advances in culture and technology. ~~~human nature~~~ is a mess of adaptations and maladaptations to living as small tribe/family group omnivores who might occasionally meet another group (new findings suggests some core behaviours are more ancient, but this doesn't change the overall argument). As a behaviourally-complex and flexible species, we would have evolved general behavioural rules that broadly encourage behaviour consistent with performing everyday functions of paleolithic life such as optimal (or sufficiently good) resource sharing, conflict resolution, group-level decision making, etc in line with the need to survive and reproduce. The underlying rules form a 'natural' system of morality, and it is in principle possible to discover them.

This is a highly politicized theory of how evolution impacts our behaviour that relies on a lot of 'just so' reasoning and which involves all kinds of assumptions that can't actually be easily tested or evaluated. You shouldn't present it as obviously true or even as representative of the scientific consensus.

quote:

Secondly, why the gently caress is 'natural' morality supposed to be universal, good, and/or prescriptive? Core assumptions of moral arguments typically include something along the lines of 'suffering bad', and arguably 'suffering bad' is part of natural morality. It's obvious to us that less suffering is generally desirable, but this can again be explained through pure biological adaptation. If you're suffering, poo poo has gone wrong, and it's adaptive to do something about it. As a group animal, we are capable of empathy for anything that shows a recognisable response to stimuli we understand. However, it's equally obvious that inflicting suffering to a clearly morally repugnant degree is possible without running into an insurmountable obstacle of natural laws. Inflicting such suffering merely makes other people consider you a loving rear end in a top hat, and maybe inflict some retribution or justice on you after the fact. Since this is an extremely online argument, I'll point to exhibit 1, literally Hitler . There is also no way to show that suffering is universally bad without making unprovable prior assumptions (critics will attempt to argue for universality by pointing out that a lot of non-human life will also attempt to avoid suffering, or whatever state of being comes closest. This again boils down to the fact that "if you're getting hosed up try to stop getting hosed up" is a useful response for anything adapted to survive). Hence, natural morality cannot be seen as universal, or objectively good, but merely as a behavioural adaptation of humans.

You come off as someone who is trying to make confident generalizations about a field you have only a passing familiarity with, and its kind of obnoxious. I'm not saying everything you say is without merit but it's very obvious you're just debating against what you assume other people think rather than having done any work to investigate the beliefs you're trying to refute. For starters, I don't think you can reduce all ancient ethical systems to some kind of vulgar utilitarian 'suffering bad, pleasure good' principle.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2019 21:04

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 10:05

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Being grandly important yet somewhat obscure and difficult to parse seems like the ideal writing style for your career if you're an academic trying to make good in a literally totalitarian society.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 18:59

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

wateroverfire posted:

What if POMO is right and the argument doesn't mean anything in particular except that a person is signaling to other people that they are mad about a thing?

I suppose that would invite the question of what got you mad enough to come start signalling in this thread?

# ¿ Mar 4, 2019 19:36

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Norton the First posted:

Yeah, but the assertion that anybody readable isn't really worth reading leaves out, say, Plato. I can't see how he could possibly be serious.

Plato may be readable but if anything that often makes his real meaning harder to grasp. See, for instance, the all too common tendency even among people who read it in university to assume that The Republic is a book about designing a government rather than an extended metaphor for human nature.

KVeezy3 posted:

The actual contention here is that philosophy doesn't deserve the respect afforded to the maths/sciences for any impenetrability and therefore must at minimum be entertaining or reduced to the level of self-help books.

That's true, but if you over correct for this too much you end up with neoclassical economics, which is an even worse outcome.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 18:40

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Norton the First posted:

Ehhh, I seriously doubt that his real meaning would be easier to grasp if he wrote like a German.

At least most people are comfortable admitting they don't really know what those guys were talking about, whereas Plato still somewhat regularly gets trotted out any time some blowhard hack like Andrew Sullivan needs to polish his latest turd on the failures of democracy. Arguably - and let's hope I'm not doing exactly the kind of superficial read on Plato that I just warned again - thinking you know something is a deeper form of ignorance than knowing that you know nothing. That, after all, was said to be the reason why the Oracle declared that no man was wiser than Socrates.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 19:55

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