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A big flaming stink posted:sorry if this is too much "babby's first hegel" question, but could you elaborate on the bolded a bit? Is this a result of underlying contradictions within the culture, i.e. capitalism, or is this self-negation fundamental to any concept according to dialetics? The latter. Hegel's idealist (i.e. your brain creates reality, as distinct from the materialist conception where the world structures your thoughts) process stemmed from the idea that interior thought created reality through a process that was not so much thesis->antithesis->synthesis (which is a misattribution and also kind of sloppy rhetoric in general), but abstract->negation->concrete which connotates more that every initial statement both *creates* AND is mediated through its negative/inverse which is internal to that initial abstract mental form, which act upon each other to create a "Becoming". At tremendous length and rigor in Phenomenology this gets applied to everything. There is no day or night, the night is a day-in-becoming is a night-in-becoming is another day-in-becoming. There is no water or beach, there is water washing over sand subducting matter becoming ocean washing up sand becoming beach. The water is liquid, vapor and ice in constant churning interplay, Becoming "beach" again and again over and over. The beach is rocks becoming sand, grains becoming "beach" as their individuality creates and aggregate quality constituent of "beach" and scho on and scho on  So a conception of culture itself defines a negative space of counterculture which mediates culture and shifts it.When Brandor talks about "flows" for seeming no reason, its not no reason at all, the reason is exactly this. That nothing is created or destroyed, that ideologies, matter, resources and wealth are constantly washing back into themselves. Which is why I am confused why Zizek would ever be a counterpoint, because while he has declared leftist beliefs, he is a hardcore Hegelian playing with idealism and would be the first person to admit he's mostly just loving around trying, in his capacity as a fairly famous professor, to get people learning Hegel (and also Lacan) the fun way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmi-cFu5Plw Seriously, that's his technique he does it like five times in this video: here is the main idea. Consider, in fact, the inverse. This, I claim, creates and so on and so on. It's all just a gateway to get college kids to have fun bearing up through Phenomenology. I strongly suspect this is leading up to Zizek's perennial riff on Christianity and Atheism and I contend: perhaps reread it because it's not really negating the core of idealistic/materialistic difference, and furthermore might not be saying what a well-meaning individual thinks its saying (or maybe it does and this is a prelude to a personal catastrophe  )https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tABnznhzdIY The work of Marx and Engels is specifically taking Hegel's work--which they admired greatly! but as you might imagine was subject to empirical criticisms of being uselessly "mystical" or transcendental or what have you--and applying his approach to not just materialism but a historical materialism where social forces were analyzed empirically, laid out in mathematical relation to each other, and then subjected to a dialectic process which eventually led to The Communist Manifesto. Marx in particular was somewhat catty about how they were in effect creating the negation to Hegel in order to render his work concrete to the bourgeoisie; a very powerful Posting Energy on that guy, for his day, if I may say so. They identify, summarized in Marx's own iconic statement, how the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles, and that class struggle was THE fundamental paradox of the world, which then structured our psychologies and conceptions of power and hierarchy in inherently unstable forms whose internal contradictions would tear themselves asunder for entirely predictable reasons etc etc and from how you phrased the question it sounds like you're more familiar with that so I'll stop. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 07:28
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Willie Tomg posted:The latter. Hegel's idealist (i.e. your brain creates reality, as distinct from the materialist conception where the world structures your thoughts) process stemmed from the idea that interior thought created reality ) through a process that was not so much thesis->antithesis->synthesis (which is a misattribution and also kind of sloppy rhetoric in general), but abstract->negation->concrete I realize that summarizing Hegel’s philosophy in a few words is a losing battle, but your articulation is more the subjective idealism of Berkeley than it does do justice to the post-Kantian tradition of German idealism. What makes Hegel an idealist is his wager that the discursive process has the capacity to express the totality of reality in logical categories, as these logical categories are what constitutes reality at its foundations. To Hegel, the only thought that creates reality is God’s. KVeezy3 fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 21:21
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KVeezy3 posted:To Hegel, the only thought that creates reality is God’s. And Zizek's interpretation of that is that nothing creates reality, which is structurally identical to Hegel but ontologically inverted. But he argues that his is the correct way to interpret Hegel. Working on a longer post Willie.
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Nov 19, 2019 21:41
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Fair cop, all around.
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Nov 19, 2019 21:46
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Willie Tomg posted:oh, that big post was just Obama's Big Excuse speech. oh. okay. well then Yeah I was going to dig into it. But I’m going to respond to you first now, so it’ll have to wait. Willie Tomg posted:Zizek is a troll after my own heart, but he is a troll. If he's deviating out of his Heglian wheelhouse, it is to troll. If you don't know this on a fundamental level, you are the kind of person he is trolling. His invocations of Christ are specifically Antichristian in their particulars in order to point out how the Gospel is itself Antichristian and self-deconstructing when subjected to a materialist dialectic. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema is a running joke about how all texts (and in that case specifically Zizek's favorite films), when we pursue their meaning, also create the conditions for their demeaning. Supermechagodzilla has made an entire posting ouevre out of this, and it is highly good IMO to see Marvel and Star Wars fanboys unable to rebut even the most clumsy dialectical readings of their preferred stanned franchises, but I wouldn't loving vote for SMG for Dog-catcher, nawmean? First he’s not deviating to do it. Next it is Christian, that “self-deconstructing when subjected to a materialist dialectic” character of the gospel. Willie it goes further than that. Asserting that it is merely that isn’t getting it. Zizek is joking, we disagree about the punchline. How do I communicate this… The prophetic that breaks myth, what is that in Christianity? It is the cross. When we go looking to find where we expect something to be on the cross, there is nothing. It is that, “when we pursue their (its) meaning, also create the conditions for their (its) demeaning. It’s the content of revelation, of apocalypse. It is the Shaking of the Foundations. It is where things are inverted. Willie Tomg posted:Adorno is, IMO, a more valuable comparison for where you want to go mostly because Adorno and Tillich are contemporaries and also introduced the F Scale of authoritarian personality which it sounds like more where you want this to go. That Adorno had a hard row to hoe while Tillich was venerated and why/how that could possibly be the case is a nontrivial historical factor, as well, IMO. I don’t know a lot about Adorno unfortunately, and I’m greatly appreciating what you’re bringing to the conversation on that topic. Willie Tomg posted:I think this thread is suffering somewhat (to put it lightly) for having you, me, and Helsing being the only real effortposters in it. My best experiences on this forum were people who knew more than me leaping into action telling me the things they knew, and it kind of sucks that a thread like this isn't getting greater traction when it cuts so strongly to the core of so many issues in the contemporary center/left. Mine are in getting in well over my head and risking who I am to get out. Willie Tomg posted:As for my expectation? I strongly suspect that at great length, your process of applying Tillich's dialectic to the current moment will synthetically recreate the "romanticism" you would so castigate and--entirely unknowingly and entirely in well-intentioned earnest!--try and set yourself apart from a repeated pattern of utterly amoral people activating these yearnings. I contend: this inevitable conclusion is why Tillich was elevated among the segments of the German "left" who were beaten like tame dogs until the Soviets--and all their problems and internal contradictions--cleaned the mess a hitherto triumphant Hitler left on the carpet. I contend: your existentialist approach leaves you blind, which is why you are so consistently duped by a materialist liberalism in christian clothing. This is how we arrive at politicians declaring hope for change isn't the way to get elected, a racial justice plan with no nonwhites fights racism, an audience of people clapping that Pete Buttegeig said something they didn't understand independent of whether they agreed or not, and theories of "psychology" utterly and aggressively independent of prevailing psychological writings that conveniently apply to the marginal percent of people with whom we disagree, but not ourselves or the people we hope to win over, and then determine that this moment above all other historical moments is the moment where we have crossed some kind of climactic Rubicon. Tillich is far more important to American thought than German thought. Four names (two not American) Barth, Niebhur (Rienhold), Niebhur (Richard), and Tillich. Quite a lot of American thought hinges on these four theologians. Barth is important because he sets the context of the discussion. Barth says No! In Barth we have the reaction I think you would characterize as existentialist, but it isn’t called that. In the face of the old systematics Barth asserts humanity (of no less than God) as more. This then becomes a new idealism, in his Church Dogmatics and that school of thought that turns into (though he disliked the term) Neo-Orthodoxy. Basically the pattern Adorno identifies in Kierkegard. Tillich is called existentialist, but he’s on the opposite end of the discussion, he thinks Barth is wrong. He thinks Barth is wrong to the point of wrapping up his lectures at Harvard on the history of christian thought with (paraphrased) and this (the whole of the history Christian thought) is why Barth is wrong. Willie Tomg posted:Marxism is, itself, systematized. It is, if anything, pathologically systematized, to the point that one could fairly argue it erases the "romantic"!! This is why I linked those couple passages from Das Kapital! The system exists! Learn the loving system! You're on the loving internet! There is no excuse for not being at least passingly familiar with this! You keep saying you're a socialist and missing the fundamental basics of it!! Oh my loving god!!! I’m coming at it from another source Willie, another tradition. I think in the terms of that other tradition. Willie Tomg posted:if you are then claiming that this dispassionate and clinical analysis misses some kind of localized human/spiritual element, Negri and Hardt (50% of that pair being present in that video I linked, if you may recall, you should watch/rewatch it, it's quite good!) literally made their entire careers writing about that, and how one may reasonably fight in the face of hegemonic control. They have specifically done this alongside South American Liberation Theology! So yes!!! People HAVE been talking about this! You do not know they have, but they have! Willie if we were to magically pop this thread into the brain of say Obama. I’d expect he’d be familiar with most of it. The language, the way things were structured. You’re mistaking the goal here. I am aware of many of those other discourses. I see the direction I’m moving, how do I move others within the myths I participate in, in that direction? I'm not going through this book to critque leftists. Y'all are doing fine and have a robust discussion. I'm going through book because I expect to need to be able to make its arguements, to people who would never ever encounter them, or who like me put off delving into them because we knew where they would go.. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 21, 2019 07:06
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This post in USpol, is related to this threads topic https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3899507&pagenumber=1188&perpage=40#post500203151
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Nov 22, 2019 03:37
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White supremacy is waning, white people going extinct and Trump is a fascist? Pretty intellectually lazy.
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Nov 22, 2019 04:48
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Bar Ran Dun posted:This post in USpol, is related to this threads topic quote:Poor whites would never accept being slaves and any attempt to enslave poor whites would have created outbreaks of violence, even rebellion. motherFUCKER learn literally the first thing about the colonial period, some were chattel and some were indentured but everyone who wasn't gentry was property. White people literally, factually, accepted being slaves in order to escape conditions elsewhere! i'd ask 'em to google "transportation" as criminal punishment but that the word is so vague outside the colonial context perhaps exposes the flaws of latter-day D&D where we just loving post tweets. there's a really big stupid loving rest of the post and i'm doing it a wholly undue service by ignoring the trifling ways its dumb beyond that. KVeezy3 posted:White supremacy is waning, white people going extinct and Trump is a fascist? Pretty intellectually lazy. The Great Replacement Is Real, Actually; And I'm Talking About It Wokely is a helluva take. *goes back in a time machine, to the first time when a southern colonial homestead used habanero peppers to season their food and thinks harder than they've ever thought before in their lives* "This is like.... the Holocaust..."
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Nov 22, 2019 12:06
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yeah I was going to dig into it. But I’m going to respond to you first now, so it’ll have to wait. I acknowledge this and maybe there could be some movement on it, but I doubt it, because for all Zizek articulates what you're trying to say in what you think are sympathetically atheistic terms, you are ignoring his larger oeuvre in service of a (relatively) narrow(er) point--an oeuvre where he consciously and rationally chooses vileness and trivia. It is not his atheism-as-such which informs this lifestyle, it is his academia and to a significant but lesser extent his military service in Yugoslavia.  ^^this is a loving guy who knows what he can get away with. You are right: we disagree on the punchline. The punchline according to Zizek is not one thing, but everything, where the gospel sits alongside the democratic party sits alongside game of thrones sits alongside What's A Mexican's Favorite Sport in entirely equal measure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dr6KLoC8aA&t=906s that nothing is venerated or forbidden is the solidarity according to him. It's fairly useless for having a grown-up conversation, but extremely useful for having a conversation about Slavoj Zizek. Which no doubt *sniffs* pleases Zizek *scratches* but consider, *shifts* perhaps *fidgets* the opposite; quote:Tillich is far more important to American thought than German thought. Four names (two not American) Barth, Niebhur (Rienhold), Niebhur (Richard), and Tillich. Quite a lot of American thought hinges on these four theologians. Barth is important because he sets the context of the discussion. Barth says No! In Barth we have the reaction I think you would characterize as existentialist, but it isn’t called that. In the face of the old systematics Barth asserts humanity (of no less than God) as more. This then becomes a new idealism, in his Church Dogmatics and that school of thought that turns into (though he disliked the term) Neo-Orthodoxy. Basically the pattern Adorno identifies in Kierkegard. Tillich is called existentialist, but he’s on the opposite end of the discussion, he thinks Barth is wrong. He thinks Barth is wrong to the point of wrapping up his lectures at Harvard on the history of christian thought with (paraphrased) and this (the whole of the history Christian thought) is why Barth is wrong. That Tillich is venerated in the USA (home of Operation Gladio), but Adorno is just another brick in the road in Continental philosophy, is most of my point. I suspect we will get to this in more detail when you get to subsequent chapters in the book. quote:I’m coming at it from another source Willie, another tradition. I think in the terms of that other tradition. Obama's tradition was undone in under 100 days of squiggle-signature executive orders except for the immigrant prisons he set up, the drone programs he expanded, and empty court seats almost immediately filled by a conservative majority and now that's everyone's problem until we die, or the judges do. Carter's tradition was no more lasting. Clinton's tradition was spent on the Lolita Express when he wasn't cutting welfare, dropping Tomahawks for PR reasons, and getting impeached himself. If this was my tradition, I would look for a better tradition. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 12:55
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a major problem of existentialist thought (imo universally, which is why it's basically dead as a philosophical tendency) is that it relies heavily on a concept of authenticity which is simply untrue. this is clearest with the french existentialists - sartre builds a whole doctrine of radical individualism on the ability of a human mind to conceptualise things separately from their actual existence ("imagine the pantheon - ok, now how many pillars has it got?"). sartre (and camus, gently caress him he's an existentialist too, as are beauvoir and merleau-ponty) desperately needs there to be something immediate and creative, some core concept of the human being which is protected from external pressures and influences which is really *us*, and to which we can be true. they use all sorts of tricks to legitimate this leap of faith, and my great impression here is that tillich is using some weird religious realism to anchor his concept of authenticity - i haven't actually read all of bar ran dun's posts yet, and i do promise that i will. basically, if "be true to thyself" is a valid moral predicate, "thyself" must be something definite and real to which one may be true. this doesn't seem to hold up particularly well as a philosophical concept - even the analytical nerd squad have found ways around the cogito argument upon which rests the phenomenological argument for the existence of a definite self, and i have a huge problem accepting a religious impulse as a reasonable substitute for this. God as a unifying, purpose-giving entity is certainly real, but it's a package - God contains multiplicities, because to paraphrase feuerbach, we created Him in our image. we cannot accept that a being that mirrors something without an objective core can itself have an objective core - God must be radically subjective, i.e. God is ideology the reason this is important is because without any appeal to authenticity, ethical judgements very quickly become pointless. be true to thine own self - but if that self is basically just a reptacle for the accumulated cultural debris of late capitalism, what is there to be true to?
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Nov 22, 2019 23:11
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hey willie, another dialectics question. i know that each new synthesis begets its own antithesis all over again, and that marx identified the revolutions from feudalism to capitalism as a dialectic process. but why did he believe that the revolution to socialism would not in turn beget its own antithesis and contradiction in its society all over again?
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Nov 23, 2019 08:10
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Robert Evans is a goon? I thought he just mentioned that he got banned here for being an edgy teen in the heyday of SA.
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Nov 23, 2019 10:55
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A big flaming stink posted:hey willie, another dialectics question. i know that each new synthesis begets its own antithesis all over again, and that marx identified the revolutions from feudalism to capitalism as a dialectic process. the idea is that history is fundamentally driven by class conflict - the aristocrats' mode of life was what caused the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie themselves cannot but create a proletariat, because that's how the dominant means of production work. it's somewhat more complicated, but essentially for the bourgeoisie to perpetuate itself as a class it *has* to create a proletariat which *has* to be fairly heavily exploited in its essential mode of being. the proletariat, on the other hand, is the purely productive class. they own nothing and can exploit nobody. what the proletariat wants is its own annihilation as a class, I.e. an end to the class system and thus an end to the dialectic of class conflict. effectively, if we're a little vulgar, the antithesis to proletarian existence is the dictatorship of the proletariat. there's a lot of fairly dense theoretical work around this, and some dialecticians tend to get a little lost in ontology imo, but the proletarian being-for-itself does not necessitate the objectivisation of other people, and when it is realised it can only be as a resolution of the class system as such. in practice, this hasn't worked out that well. the dictatorship of the proletariat is very hard to practically establish (it tends to quickly succumb to a weird bureaucratic pseudo-class or be stamped out quickly), and the forces of reaction persist. soviet workers were not free from exploitation because they were still on some level subservient to a global bourgeois economy which necessitates a high degree of efficiency etc. in addition to this there's problems of the producer/consumer conflict and the centre/periphery conflict, which also seem as though they would likely persist for a good long while. marx would object that once the proletariat actually seizes power, such conflicts are much more easily resolved, because they're basically superstructural, but these are real questions with which socialists must grapple.
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Nov 23, 2019 11:47
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I'm reading this thread, though I'll probably avoid saying much. You people do have an audience.
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Nov 23, 2019 11:53
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Willie Tomg posted:that nothing is venerated or forbidden is the solidarity according to him. Yes. In modern protestant Christianity it expresses in Bonhoeffer wrestling with: is it permissible to kill (Hitler). Additionally, when Bonheffer talks of religionless Christianity that is also this! But remember structurally identical, ontological inverted! Anything is permissible for Zizek. Bonhoeffer chooses to be part of the assination plot and to do the forbidden and unpermissable, but the necessity of that choice will be judged by us (his brothers and sisters) and by God (who is God of history). Again structurally identical, ontologically inverted. Willie Tomg posted:If this was my tradition, I would look for a better tradition. Christianity is a big drat tradition. There is very little I could want to be that I cannot be within it. V. Illych L. posted:a major problem of existentialist thought (imo universally, which is why it's basically dead as a philosophical tendency) is that it relies heavily on a concept of authenticity which is simply untrue. this is clearest with the french existentialists - sartre builds a whole doctrine of radical individualism on the ability of a human mind to conceptualise things separately from their actual existence ("imagine the pantheon - ok, now how many pillars has it got?"). sartre (and camus, gently caress him he's an existentialist too, as are beauvoir and merleau-ponty) desperately needs there to be something immediate and creative, some core concept of the human being which is protected from external pressures and influences which is really *us*, and to which we can be true. they use all sorts of tricks to legitimate this leap of faith, and my great impression here is that tillich is using some weird religious realism to anchor his concept of authenticity - i haven't actually read all of bar ran dun's posts yet, and i do promise that i will. Here’s the problem, let's talk about the “existentialist impulse”. The best way to get what it is, I think, is to look at Melville. The “I’d prefer not to” of Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, these works are exemplars of the tyranny of a system (a hegemon or ideology might be good words here) and the individuals protest against that system. That’s the existentialist impulse. And there is an alternative to this: “God must be radically subjective, i.e. God is ideology” That alternative is that God is human. Tell em Jesus was a mother’s child. Anyway the problem I see: Socialism cannot exist without that protest! That protest is bound up in our experience of the contradictions of capitalism! And dialectical thought has that protest built into it! Further there is a leap of faith in socialism and communism (it’s stronger in communism) the expectation of what is possible next. It isn’t here now, the world we live in still has class struggle. And here is my protest, I don't give a poo poo which side of the dialectic of materialism and idealism, I or any of us are on. Sometimes a dialectic is resolved by going further than either side, by asking a new question that makes the old question that created the dialectic irrelevant. I don’t have the language to do that, I’m looking for it. But I can see the water has stopped getting hotter, it’s starting to boil.
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Nov 24, 2019 04:58
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Gautama the Buddha taught The doctrine of greed’s wheel to which we are bound, and advised That we should shed all craving and thus Undesiring enter the nothingness that he called Nirvana. Then one day his pupils asked him: What is it like, this nothingness, Master? Every one of us would Shed all craving, as you advise, but tell us Whether this nothingness which then we shall enter Is perhaps like being at one with all creation When you lie in the water, your body weightless, at noon Unthinking almost, lazily lie in the water, or drowse Hardly knowing now that you straighten the blanket Going down fast – whether this nothingness, then Is a happy one of this kind, a pleasant nothingness, or Whether this nothing of yours is mere nothing, cold, senseless And void. Long Buddha silent, then said nonchalantly: There is no answer to your question. But in the evening, when they had gone The Buddha still sat under the bread-fruit tree, and to the others To those who had not asked, addressed this parable: Lately I saw a house. It was burning. The flame Licked at its roof. I went up close and observed That there were people still inside. I opened the door and called Out to them that the roof was ablaze, so exhorting them To leave at once. But those people Seemed in no hurry. One of them When the heat was already scorching his eyebrows Asked me what it was like outside, whether it wasn’t raining Whether the wind wasn’t blowing perhaps, whether there was Another house for them, and more of this kind. Without answering I went out again. These people here, I thought Need to burn to death before they stop asking questions. Truly, friends Unless a man feels the ground so hot underfoot that he’d gladly Exchange it for any other, sooner than stay, to him I have nothing to say. Thus Gautama the Buddha. But we too, no longer concerned with the art of submission Rather with that of not submitting, and putting forward Various proposals of an earthly nature, and beseeching men to shake off Their human tormentors, we too believe that to those Who in face of the approaching bomber squadrons of Capital Go on asking too long How we propose to do this, and how we envisage that And what will become of their savings and Sunday trousers After the revolution We have nothing much to say.
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Nov 24, 2019 12:56
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yes. In modern protestant Christianity it expresses in Bonhoeffer wrestling with: is it permissible to kill (Hitler). Additionally, when Bonheffer talks of religionless Christianity that is also this! But remember structurally identical, ontological inverted! Anything is permissible for Zizek. Bonhoeffer chooses to be part of the assination plot and to do the forbidden and unpermissable, but the necessity of that choice will be judged by us (his brothers and sisters) and by God (who is God of history). That seems uselessly onanist if you can't figure out whether to resist Hitler (e; at the precise point of contact with which the Nazi state will meet you with vigor) till past the point he kills tens of millions and the Soviets solve the problem for you for historical reasons despite having countenanced him previously for also historical reasons! If God is either Pure Ideology or otherwise aloof perhaps we should look to another heuristic, because if the post WW1 period has conclusively demonstrated any one thing beyond doubt its that God at His most generous has left us to figure this bullshit out with the brains that we've got. Which is why it triggered the authors to whom we're both referring to have these discussions more than any internal meditations about divinity! I think you are correct that an imminent crisis point is being reached in the world, I think we're eating around the edges of the whole meal, and perhaps we should plow forward to the rest of the text around which this thread is based because I suspect we're getting to the good bit. Fond remembrances of posting the D&D Accelerationist thread as a mostly shitstirring attempt of my own. It wasn't great, and I don't have archives, but I wonder how some of those posts aged in the Trump Years? 
Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Nov 25, 2019 |
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Nov 25, 2019 07:02
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V. Illych L. posted:a major problem of existentialist thought (imo universally, which is why it's basically dead as a philosophical tendency) is that it relies heavily on a concept of authenticity which is simply untrue. this is clearest with the french existentialists - sartre builds a whole doctrine of radical individualism on the ability of a human mind to conceptualise things separately from their actual existence ("imagine the pantheon - ok, now how many pillars has it got?"). sartre (and camus, gently caress him he's an existentialist too, as are beauvoir and merleau-ponty) desperately needs there to be something immediate and creative, some core concept of the human being which is protected from external pressures and influences which is really *us*, and to which we can be true. they use all sorts of tricks to legitimate this leap of faith, and my great impression here is that tillich is using some weird religious realism to anchor his concept of authenticity - i haven't actually read all of bar ran dun's posts yet, and i do promise that i will. This is basically the exact opposite of my understanding of Sartre's Existentialism. "Existence precedes essence" suggests that there is no "true self" to which one can appeal - we are nothing more than the choices we make. You can never say "Yes, I did this, but that's not who I really am," because that concept of the inner self does not and has never existed independent of what we do. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I've read him, and even then I didn't get too far into the reeds at the time because it was somewhat orthogonal to my interests, so I'm willing to be schooled here on how I've fundamentally misread his ideas if you'd like to enlighten me.
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Nov 25, 2019 23:16
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yeah i did frame that as a form of essentialism on a second reading, which isn't right and you're correct to call me on it the point is that sartre's authenticity relies fundamentally on the cogito, I.e. the knowledge that i am, well, me! sartre needs the uniqueness and identity of the cogito to make his basically deontological argument work - i am x, but i could be y presupposes a coherent 'i' subject. basically sartre is grounded in the inherently subjective. this requires a subject; the subject is not am unproblematic assumption. the subject can define itself to a huge extent, but it cannot deny its own facticity nor its transcendence - and this statement rests very heavily on some actually quite shaky foundations
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Nov 26, 2019 14:03
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the essentialism sartre wants to fight is a form of reification of one's situation - e.g. 'i am a drunk', implicitly 'i will remain a drunk'. to sartre, this is bad faith - actually being a drunk is one thing, existing as a drunk is an active choice just as much as stopping is. when we do not own our decisions, freedom and rationality, we are being inauthentic. here he echoes the ancient Stoics to an extent - there's nobody but you to say that you're a hero. it would take a seriously postmodern reading to suggest that the subject can radically interpret rationality itself, though i'm open to the notion
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Nov 26, 2019 14:09
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The Bourgeois Principle and Its Tension So we have the two breaks with the myth of origin. The prophetic and the humanistic. In the Western Tradition these breaks occur in Protestantism ( especially in Calvinism) and in the Enlightenment. The prophetic element give the western Bourgeois spirit a world transforming element. Here Tillich basically then goes: yep Marx nails it in the Communist Manifesto. But then he makes his own assertion : “Western Bourgeois society, viewed from the standing point of universal history, is an attack on the myths of origin and the bond of origin everywhere on Earth. It is the proclamation and realization of an autonomous this worldliness even for the most remote, most myth bound human groups.” For Tillich the Bourgeois principle is the dissolution of all conditions relating to origin, they are to be mastered and reassembled to serve the aim of thought and action. Goals instead of being, tools instead of intrinsic values. It is objectification and analysis. To objectify is to wholly condition and to remove all relationships to origins. To objectify and subjugate everything by the reduction of all things to systems. (We could and probably should digress on the topic of systems. I’ll link to things I’ve previously written on that subject after this post.) Anyway the bourgeois principle leads to the subject-object problem and its corollary the problem of freedom and authority. Two answers follow within the bourgeois principle from these problems. One is natural harmony, Laissez faire, laissez aller, of liberalism. The other is democracy and metaphysical harmony. This commonality of harmony links liberalism and democracy within the bourgeois principle. Tillich calls this “interpenetration”. From this there is an important conclusion. “ If the belief in harmony is shaken the bourgeois principle is shaken. “ (!) Further the metaphysical harmony necessary for democracy is dependant on the natural harmony! What this means is, if poo poo ain't harmonious the bourgeois has to either blame the powers of origin or ditch democracy and return to pre bourgeois feudal structures! Tillich observes “the latter path as the one “actually followed by advanced capitalist powers.” I would observed in USpol talk about centrists valuing decorum. It’s not decorum they value it’s the metaphysical harmony necessary for democracy under the bourgeois principle. If the natural harmony Laissez faire, laissez aller, is already broken (and I think it is) this amounts to having a superstitious irrational faith. Here Tillich’s analysis stops in this chapter. My thoughts continue : It (the metaphysical harmony) is also under attack by the elements in society attempting to bring back feudal structures. A response ( and until recently mine) is to try to restore a harmony and reduce inequality by creating a synthesis with socialism to make the economy work for everyone. In following sections he will describe the “radical bourgeois.” It is probably fair to say that’s where I was, and it is where Obama and Buttigieg are. That project is probably doomed (eventually though, who knows when eventually is) because of the revolutionary political romantics. It might have been doomed by the conservative romantics and elements reasserting feudalism anyway. It is probably doomed because harmony doesn’t exist when there is inequality and capitalism I think is proven to increase inequality overtime (eg. Piketty) But that effort I think had found an alternative foundation for the metaphysical harmony (to the broken natural harmony) in Christianity, in being-itself. That's going to be important shortly in a couple chapters.
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Nov 27, 2019 07:09
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This is a bookmark post because I'm tied up doing holiday stuff until the weekend where in my scarce free hours I'll be reliably either shitposting or sleeping some stuff off. Which is unfortunate: because i think this last post is really where the rubber hits the road ITT. And I don't want to gently caress that up in a first response. Which is bullshit, and not what this thread deserves, but frankly I'm wondering if this thread deserves to be put in CSPAM so it gets some traffic beyond literally just Brandor and some people who also semi-consistently post in CSPAM. It'd get more shitposting, but it'd also get more: posting. And with this last chapter in particular I think we're really getting, if not somewhere, then decisively nowhere.
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Nov 28, 2019 06:15
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Bar Ran Dun posted:It's jumping all the way to the end of the book, but the since word has already come up. I'm trying to hold off on making too many commentaries so that I can get a better sense of the direction you want the thread to go in but I want to note that you still haven't answered my original question. "Expectations" are not a concrete way to differentiate between political tendencies. I'm not even really clear on what 'expectations' means here: I can see a few different ways to interpret what it means to have shared expectations in politics. Same thing with "romanticism". I'm not really clear on what that means in this specific context, to the point that I would not confidently say that my own politics are devoid of Romanticism. Depending on what you mean by that term I'd actually say that probably all political projects might necessarily have an element of romanticism within them. For instance, with this post: Bar Ran Dun posted:The Cultural (translators note Geistige also rendered as spiritual or intellectual) Expression of Political Romanticism If I read you correctly you're saying that George W. Bush was practicing political romanticism but Barrack Obama wasn't. Really? The idea that contemporary Democratic politics in the United States has some deep linkage to reason and disdains political mythology or sentimental appeals to a 'myth or origin' is a genuinely bizarre argument. Obama is easily one of the most blatantly traffickers of political romanticism in contemporary American history and yet you set him up as Claiming that there's literally a spectrum going from 'mythic' to 'rational/scientific' and that trying to classify ideologies by locating them along this spectrum is such a ludicrous and blatantly self serving intellectual maneuver, especially when you're literally citing Nietzsche's thought as you do it. One of Nietzsche's core scholarly insights was arguably to collapse any attempt to create such a distinction and to demonstrate that seemingly 'rational' things are always built upon irrational origins and that even our ideal of 'truth 'is itself merely a refined series of errors that developed in a blind evolutionary fashion. Then we get to this: Bar Ran Dun posted:The Bourgeois Principle and Its Tension Bourgeois liberal society is to a large and consequential degree founded on white supremacy, and even though some major thinkers in that tradition have condemned racism the presence of racist and racialist theories and the use of legal apartheid to protect private property are recurrent and common features of liberal societies. Nor are these 'irrational' primitive beliefs emerging from pre-liberal prejudices. We can directly trace the implementation of racial segregation and the development of 'scientific' theories of race in the various colonies over a period of many centuries. Racism, colonialism and liberalism have an inseparable and deep history that you are not only erasing but literally reversing with what you write here. John Locke, the preeminent liberal philosopher, is not coincidentally also the last major philosopher of the Western cannon to explicitly champion racial slavery. America, the liberal exemplar, developed the Jim Crow laws that were the literal blueprint for Hitler's Nuremberg laws. The liberal distribution of private property and the system of property rights and contracts that made the expansive growth of liberal societies possible at the dawn of capitalism was secured through a military system of white supremacy. This isn't some incidental detail that can be brushed away to reveal the 'true' character of liberalism: this is it's true character, or at least one aspect of it. Yet everything you write here feels designed to whitewash that reality and preserve this invented idea of liberalism as a scientific wager undertaken by fundamentally decent people that if only we stop being so prejudiced then we could all live together in harmony. I should note that I say all this while still believing that many of the pluralist values of contemporary liberalism are valuable innovations worth defending. But I demand that we understand the development of this political tradition without sentimentalism or bizarre attempts to transform the theory into something completely separate from what it actually is. Also, I would add that even ignoring all this history and focusing on say, the last thirty years, that the proposition that liberalism is scientific and rational simply does not hold. Holding up Obama as the opposite of a political romantic is, I just cannot emphasize enough, a seemingly ludicrous position. How do you possibly justify that argument?
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Nov 30, 2019 17:59
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my dad posted:I'm reading this thread, though I'll probably avoid saying much. You people do have an audience. Same, the effortposts are great and I really appreciate reading them.
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Nov 30, 2019 18:58
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I’m just lurking in the thread, but I would observe, with due deference to the OP and others effortposting here, that it would benefit from a summary of the argument (key premises and conclusion) at the outset, with later posts fleshing it out. I looked around to see if there was something adequate available online as a possible starting point, and all of the sources seemed unsatisfactory to a greater or lesser degree, but pages 7-10 of the below link seem to do a reasonable job: https://www3.nd.edu/~undpress/excerpts/P03372-ex.pdf
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Nov 30, 2019 19:01
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Helsing posted:How do you possibly justify that argument? Obama probably fits best as a radical bourgeois and the centrist democrats would mostly fall there too. W is a conservative political romantic pre Trump the GOP would have been run by conservative political romantics with a mixed revolutionary/conservative romantic base. Trump is a revolutionary political romantic and it's pretty safe to now characterize the GOP as that too. The chapter on radical bourgeois is soon ( it might be next). Helsing posted:One of Nietzsche's core scholarly insights was arguably to collapse any attempt to create such a distinction and to demonstrate that seemingly 'rational' things are always built upon irrational origins The structure is rational and systematized; the content and origin isn't. And the bourgeois principle ends up having to fall back to origins because of its contradictions. Here's a way to say it. Linear programing is rational. It is math, just complicated algebra. But what we set as the objective function for a system of equations, that is subjective, it is arbitrary, it is our chosen goal. So think of those two parts. Those parts are a rational structure and an arbitrary content/goal. We build rational coherent systems. The content of those systems is arbitrary and often irrational. A business is a rational system. Its content, producing as much money as possible for the shareholders, is irrational. The material situation of this rational structure / arbitrary irrational content produces the contradictions of capitalism. It produces the existentialist impulse. It produces the situation of the proletariat. Helsing posted:Yet everything you write here feels designed to whitewash that reality and preserve this invented idea of liberalism as a scientific wager undertaken by fundamentally decent people that if only we stop being so prejudiced then we could all live together in harmony. That would be the radical bourgeois position. I’m not there anymore. I still have sympathy for it, some of its goals are still worth accomplishing. Its systematizing is probably necessary. Nude Hoxha Cameo posted:I’m just lurking in the thread, but I would observe, with due deference to the OP and others effortposting here, that it would benefit from a summary of the argument (key premises and conclusion) at the outset, with later posts fleshing it out. I looked around to see if there was something adequate available online as a possible starting point, and all of the sources seemed unsatisfactory to a greater or lesser degree, but pages 7-10 of the below link seem to do a reasonable job: That's a good link and it is appreciated. I’m super time crunched unfortunately, I’m barely getting to the effort posts. There is also a decade plus of context of D&D religion conversations that I'm probably not going to get around to summarizing either. There isn’t what their used to be on the internet on Tillich. As for the key premises and conclusion, I went into this looking to create a conclusion from the discussion. I'm close. In a couple chapters he is going to use Heidegger's categories of sein and da-sein to build to the following statement : "Socialism is demanded by being-itself." That line of argument is already becoming apparent in my response to Helsing. In the context of his later theology (and where it has been inserted in American Christianity)... this is a stunning assertion. That statement in conjunction with his Systematic Theology, Courage to Be, and Dynamics of Faith is where my conclusion will come from. The Socialist Decision forces a reinterpretation of those later works, if one has not previously encountered it. Large parts of those later works are widespread within American Christianity and just American culture in general.
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Dec 2, 2019 22:12
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Obama probably fits best as a radical bourgeois and the centrist democrats would mostly fall there too. W is a conservative political romantic pre Trump the GOP would have been run by conservative political romantics with a mixed revolutionary/conservative romantic base. Trump is a revolutionary political romantic and it's pretty safe to now characterize the GOP as that too. The chapter on radical bourgeois is soon ( it might be next). This is not a justification this is a description. I'm asking for you to support this premise with evidence and arguments because so far I do not find it convincing. What actually makes George w. Bush more romantic than Obama here? How do we actually sort politicians into these different categories? What are the actual criteria? quote:The structure is rational and systematized; the content and origin isn't. And the bourgeois principle ends up having to fall back to origins because of its contradictions. Here's a way to say it. Linear programing is rational. It is math, just complicated algebra. But what we set as the objective function for a system of equations, that is subjective, it is arbitrary, it is our chosen goal. Can you find a way to actually show how these categories have merit and are useful and reveal interesting facts about the world that we could not reveal if we relied on other schemes of categorization or other forms of analysis? It is not enough for you to demonstrate that your ideas are internally coherent, you need to show how they actually map onto the real world. That's why I keep bringing this back to specific politicians like Bush and Obama. Both seem to rally their followers around equally inspid and ridiculously false national mythologies about America's unique national mission and character. So why is Obama's liberal version of that myth any less romantic than Bush's conservative version? quote:That would be the radical bourgeois position. I’m not there anymore. I still have sympathy for it, some of its goals are still worth accomplishing. Its systematizing is probably necessary. I wrote two paragraphs detailing why I do not agree with that and you just cut that part of my response and then reasserted your initial position without any further attempts to explain or justify it. I still do not have any idea whatsoever how your political position has actually changed. I guess you mentioned that you're now planning to vote Sanders over Buttagieg in the primary but that seems to be the sum total of the concrete political differences between your worldview now and your worldview in 2015. I don't mean this as a purity test. I'm not demanding you stand up and denounce things or demonstrate your fidelity to some specific political programme. I just want to actually understand how your thinking has changed on the key debates between liberals and socialists, i.e. topics like class struggle, foreign policy, private ownership, electoralism, bourgeois democracy, reformism vs revolution, etc.
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Dec 5, 2019 21:12
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The Leading Groups and the Limits of the Bourgeois Prinicple So where are the places we find the bourgeois? Tillich’s answer here is where we have alienation from myth of origin by one’s social situation. Generally this occurs in public officials, high ranking corporate employees, workers with “labor power” (their work is commodified but is highly valued), and often intellectuals. Basically in groups where the material conditions of class have separated them from their origins, separated them nearly entirely from their narratives that shaped them. He goes on: “ Liberalism prevails, in bourgeois society, among the groups that require the free play of forces for their development, and for whom the idea of harmony provides justification for their unlimited economic aspirations.” But this belief in harmony transitions to “merely an ideology” as commercial interests combine into power groups. As this happens : “ the Enlightenment’s paradoxical concept of harmony is being more and more transformed into the feudal, stratified concept of organism espoused by political romanticism” In bourgeois groups that are public but lower in economic power (eg. public officials, intellectuals) they tend more towards the metaphysical harmony of democracy. But they also tend towards the state and restraining and reducing Liberalism occasionally in conjunction with proletarian groups. But they more often side with liberalism to “preserve their own autonomy.” Here Tillich talks about the proletariat. “The masses that as a result of competition have become mere objects” the proletariat struggles for democracy, for an “equal share of social power and economic profits” against bourgeois class rule. But if the proletariat believes that this isn’t possible because of the “established patterns of domination” they may side against democracy and demand a dictatorship of the proletariat. For Tillich if that final step is taken, they ( the proletariat) may come to align with the revolutionary political romantics while simultaneously the forces driving feudalization can come to align with the conservstive political romantics. Here Tillich asserts this (feudalism and facism) was the implicit end of bourgeois class rule from the beginning. The root of why lies in the bourgeois principle. “ It dissolves things and brings them together in a new way, but does not create anything original”. To be the bourgeois principle is supported by a reality it did not itself form. It has to unite itself with the myths of origen (that it breaks!) to exist. It is a critical principle and cannot make itself a truly universal one. (Eg. To try to be universal it takes it’s universality from the prophetic in religion, it can’t be universal on it’s own). It is a “corrective not a normative principle”. He compares the relationship between feudalism and the bourgeois principle to Catholicism and Protestantism. Protestantism’s existence depended on Catholicism existing first and it attempts to dissolve and reshape it. That in Tillich's thought is the nature of the relationship between feudalism and the bourgeois principle. Bourgeois class rule can only exist because it is made up of dissolved and reconstituted feudal elements. This dependance defines the limits of the bourgeois principle and where it must turn towards powers of origin. Tillich goes on the describe these turns: historicism, nationalism, idealism, religious forms of life, self criticism that does not entail a real radical self negation. Which bring us to the answer to your question Helsing what is the difference between Obama and Bush in regards to all this? When we look at Obama he is often making these turns. (If we need to get specific here, let me know) To do this isn’t a false consciousness, but a recognition of where the limits of bourgeois principles are and an attempt to support the bourgeois principle by turns to myths of origin and to the roots of our society and history. In Bush and the GOP prior to Trump that’s not the goal. The goal is to go back, to return to the older forms of life that the bourgeois principle dissolved and reordered. This is a false consciousness and that’s what makes it a romanticism. We can not reverse the direction society has developed in without destroying society. Now something has changed because of Tillich. When he wrote the book what the radical bourgeois response was differs from what it was then, and I think that is because of his influence, but that’ll be next chapter. As for me, well I’m gunna get to me. I’ve already indicated where it is going. I cannot escape Tillich’s coming statement : Socialism is demanded by being-itself. I cannot deny that statement without giving up my faith. I had been doing what Obama was doing. I cannot do that any longer. But, that doesn’t mean I’ll reach the same conclusion you (or Willie) do(es). But the important thing is this I can no longer engage in self criticism that does not entail a real radical negation. Edit : and this character of not being generative, not being creative, of only dissolving and rearranging, of the bourgeois principle Tillich identifies... Remember apocastatis, here is another neoplatonist greek concept: logos spermatikos λόγος σπερματικός: the generative principle of the Universe which creates and takes back all things. The bourgeois principle departs from the logos spermatikos. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Dec 7, 2019 |
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Dec 7, 2019 04:18
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Jesus. I get the plastic straws and the light bulbs but what's the poo for?
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Dec 7, 2019 15:56
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Jerry Cotton posted:Jesus. I get the plastic straws and the light bulbs but what's the poo for? I think it's supposed to be a well-done steak?
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Dec 7, 2019 17:19
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I think it's supposed to be a well-done steak? Oh god I'm dying  Is she sucking the catsup off it?
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Dec 7, 2019 19:47
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The Radicalization and the Shattering of the Bourgeois Principle in the Class Struggle. Let's start with a note, I’ve departed in previous posts from Tillich’s use of “radical bourgeois” with my own use of the terms, I think the situation has changed and will explain in this post. So the bourgeoise principle has to turn back towards powers of origin to support itself. Doing this opens it up to being suppressed or expelled by both forms of romanticism. When that starts to happen groups of bourgeois react and attempt to reassert the bourgeois principle. These are the radical bourgeois. In Tillich’s work he identifies that, the radical bourgeois, with groups we would now recognize as libertarian. Now in our current particular situation I would characterize libertarianism as affiliated with both feudalism reasserting itself and our growing facism. The bourgeois attempting to reassert the bourgeois principle are now the ones that turn to origin, eg. Obama, Buttigieg, etc, to support the principle. So when I use the term I believe the groups referred to have inverted from where they stood in the thirties in Germany. Anyway, the root of the radical bourgeois is an attempt to fully realize the bourgeois principle. The goal of the radical bourgeois is to extend the benefits and fulfill the promises of liberalism and democracy ( which are not being fulfilled ) to everyone. In other words the radical bourgeois recognize that the system isn’t working, but they have belief in harmony and progress. Incrementalism would be a current expression of this. Tillich contrasts this with the proletariat. The proletariat does not experience harmony or progress. They experience the opposite, disharmony and regression. This separates them from and sets them as opposed to the radical bourgeois. This is the split we see in the Democratic Party right now. The proletariat sees harmony, freedom and progress as only possible in a classless society. But it’s important note both groups ( radical bourgeois and the proletariat) are seeking the fulfillment of the promises of the bourgeois principle, the difference is that the proletariat perceives that the bourgeois principle cannot deliver what it promises. Socialism responds to this problem with deliberate planning. This concept of deliberate planning has been reacted to by neoliberalism basically asserting that it isn’t possible. Helsing I was looking back at my posts in another thread and think i found any way to describe the most basic way my thinking has changed and it is directly related to this. The lack of designed controls is an existential threat. One of the defences for free markets, “harmony” , has always been: It’s too complicated to solve we cannot deliberately plan. Freidman’s: Nobody knows how to make a pencil. That particular instance is a good one to focus on now. It is what neoliberalism rests on, they are asserting harmony (whatever its problems) is all we’ve got as a viable solution. But something has changed, we do know how to make a pencil! We can (and do) now model that supply chains from raw materials to point of sale. But those models are a radical bourgeois project. They objectify, they commoditize, they alienate. And they still have clear limits. And Pete is a good example of where they, the radical bourgeois, can see those limits and make the turn to origin to support the existing system and the bourgeois principle. I mean this in a very literal sense, look at the title of his autobiography “Shortest Way Home”. That is a return to origin in support of the bourgeois principle, to the point where the only way it could be more clear was if he used the same words exactly. The radical bourgeois are responding and reacting to the bourgeois principle being turned into feudalism/facism. That is playing out in front of us on television in both impeachment and the democratic primary. Thing is, I think the D electorate only cares about not descending into facism. A concrete example would that Biden voters as a second choice tend towards Bernie. Anyway this problem of controls being needed to prevent the existential crisis (both economic and climate) creates a question. What are these controls for, what is their substance? Merely to support the existing system is a failure to address the existential threat. Additionally, authoritarian states (and even monarchy!) are also engaging in deliberate planning. Deliberate planning is now something the other classes and powers are also embracing. The new question is what will the substance of the end and goal of deliberate planning be? It must be a humanism it must be for all of us, it must be socialist. But there is another problem, the metaphysical harmony, democracy is also failing. If socialism is democratic, this is a problem. Getting a majority for socialism is thwarted by class rule. Tillich says this the following way: “ In the face of the split between classes, the democratic belief in harmony as held by the bourgeois is shattered; in the face of bourgeois class rule, democratic belief in harmony as held by socialism collapses.” Here Tillich again asserts that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat rises (with the risks of that concept as discussed in the last chapter.) It also raises a question he addresses in the following chapters, how can socialism deliver on the promises of equality, progress, and democracy as these things collapse in the face of class struggle? Tillich concludes that in Germany that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be necessary, that the socialists could not win by election and that the Nazis would. But he posits that to go that route was to sacrifice the future of socialism for its immediate survival.
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Dec 12, 2019 06:39
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Forgive me if you've already mentioned this, but what exactly makes this group a "radical" bourgeois? As in, what event radicalized them and what extreme actions do they take as a result of this? The example you have, Obama, seems especially ill suited because he favored absolutely nothing besides a status quo you also seem to use bourgeois interchangeably with liberalism, ie enlightenment ideals
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Dec 12, 2019 20:56
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A big flaming stink posted:Forgive me if you've already mentioned this, but what exactly makes this group a "radical" bourgeois? As in, what event radicalized them and what extreme actions do they take as a result of this? When Tillich talks about "radicals", he's talking about a specific movement in 19th and early 20th Europe, splitting off of liberalism, that focused on universal suffrage, republicanism, disestablishmentarianism, constitutionalism, universal rights, land reform, social welfare systems and so on. In England there were the Radicals and the Chartists. France had two radical parties...the Radicals and the Radical Socialists. In Germany, you had the LiberalPeople's Party/Progressive People's Party, and so on. There's not really a good American equivalent, although the Radical Republicans of the 1860s might count, or the Progressive Party at the turn of the century. Tillich's trying to develop a theory of early 20th century Western European and especially German political movements. It doesnt always map all that well to contemporary American thought.
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Dec 12, 2019 22:24
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Epicurius is correct for Tillich's use of the term. The closest group we have now are the Libertarians. But they are all in on fuedalism and fascism now. Edit libertarians are now romantics. For me reading it, the essential characteristic is: groups of bourgeois reacting to romanticism and attempting to reassert the bourgeois principle trying to fufill it's promises. Edit: and the groups attempting to do that have changed. A big flaming stink posted:you also seem to use bourgeois interchangeably with liberalism, ie enlightenment ideals Yes Tillich has the bourgeois principle orginating from enlightenment ideals and the protestant reformation (especially calvinism) and it is important that it is both and not one or the other. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Dec 13, 2019 |
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Dec 13, 2019 02:57
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Which bring us to the answer to your question Helsing what is the difference between Obama and Bush in regards to all this? When we look at Obama he is often making these turns. (If we need to get specific here, let me know) To do this isn’t a false consciousness, but a recognition of where the limits of bourgeois principles are and an attempt to support the bourgeois principle by turns to myths of origin and to the roots of our society and history. In Bush and the GOP prior to Trump that’s not the goal. The goal is to go back, to return to the older forms of life that the bourgeois principle dissolved and reordered. This is a false consciousness and that’s what makes it a romanticism. We can not reverse the direction society has developed in without destroying society. George W. Bush was not a paleoconservative who was trying to turn back the clock on big government or return America to some mythic past. Quite the opposite, he was a market evangelist who aggressively pursued a dramatic series of changes to both American domestic politics and the global order. He invaded and tried to dramatically alter the domestic constitution and economy of multiple foreign states, he enacted the most sweeping change to the national security state in decades and he oversaw a massive privatization of state functions. By European standards Bush was a liberal. Attempting to shoehorn him into the role of traditional conservative - as carved out in a book written about Germany in 1933 - doesn't work at all. As for Obama, if we're going to step back and a take a long view - i.e. comparing America in 2019 to Germany in 1933 - then his similarities to Bush are a lot more striking than any differences. They're both men with elite educations who rose through the ranks of their respective parties, gained the backing of key corporate sectors of the economy, and pursued remarkably similar policies on trade, foreign policy and bailing out Wall Street. Both of them made serious attempts to cut the social safety net and both of them made large expansions of healthcare spending that were largely to the benefit of insurance companies. Both of them oversaw the continuing militarization of the police. Both pursued similar trade deals and while they had some differences on fiscal policy both supported a largely privatized government and a regime of comparatively low taxes and high military spending. Both of them pursued an aggressive right wing policy in foreign affairs and showed no compunctions about enacting coups or other forms of pressure against countries that didn't follow the US foreign policy line. Both of them were actively committed to the idea of America as world policeman. Both of them refused to take meaningful action on climate change. Both of them supported the expansion of American domestic energy production. The really deep divisions between the parties aren't in the ideologies of their ruing cliques but in the demographics of the party's differing constituencies. The leaders, donors and consultants often have far more in common with each other than they do with the groups they nominally represent. A vast professional class largely controls both parties even as those parties compete for different slices of the electorate. Both mainstream Democrats and Republicans also tend to be much more in favour of the status quo than their most vocal supporters. This is rather different than the late Weimer Republic in which the leadership of the parties of the extreme left and right openly called for the destruction of the status quo and large parts of the judiciary and civil service wanted to transition to an authoritarian system. tl;dr - I am really not seeing this supposedly fundamental difference between Obama and Bush, both of whom seem like radical liberals who were actively reshaping both domestic and foreign politics to conform with a sweeping neoliberal vision of an American centered 21st century capitalist world order based around free trade, high finance, American militarism and endless consumerism propped up by constant technological innovation.
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Dec 17, 2019 17:50
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This thread has all the words. I though the point of being right was that the theory was simpler becuase you didn't have to invent ways to gloss over where it doesn't work.
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Dec 18, 2019 08:00
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Helsing posted:The really deep divisions between the parties aren't in the ideologies of their ruing cliques but in the demographics of the party's differing constituencies. I do agree with this. But I also think there is a difference and it is the relationship of each of those Presidents to the narratives of our society. Bush is a naive idealist, he is clearly romantic. Obama is a ( again explicitly) a Christian Realist. Obama’s failure is a double irony, ironic critique that failed to see the irony in the present. But yes they are also similar! Both of these categories are in the bourgeois class. But they are two different responses to the inequities and disharmony that capitalism creates within the bourgeois class. Helsing posted:This is rather different than the late Weimer Republic in which the leadership of the parties of the extreme left and right openly called for the destruction of the status quo and large parts of the judiciary and civil service wanted to transition to an authoritarian system. Of course it is a different particular situation Helsing. But this topic has a universal element and a particular element, sein and da-sein. Telling me the particular now is not identical to the particular then, isn’t particularly convincing. Another interlude related to this difference. So we have these questions of materialism and idealism, faith and atheism, being and nothingness. I always seem to have an odd stance that is between, that leads me to different conclusions, often that seem rather both simultaneously, why? Well what are the foundations of thought? If we look at Tillich he initially appears structuralist and logocentric, and he is explicitly ( at least the logocentric part). But Tillich is also not… Derrida uses the phrase Shaking of the Foundations, he talks talks about how inversion of primary of one of the two (from the positive to the negative term) can break apart structure. Well Tillich also does that (and before it appears elsewhere, he is doing when Derrida is 15), his most famous sermon is The Shaking of the Foundations, and the cross in his systematic is where inversion occurs! We could call Tillich’s later thought undecided ( intentionally so) The root of this is that he is Lutheran. But this quality like the often used example of a zombie is one of being both and neither, for the zombie alive and dead and neither alive nor dead. Instead a zombie is other. That might be a good way to think of the later Tillich, other. This is going to be the root of most of my differences, with most people. It is also related to this book and its conclusions.
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Dec 19, 2019 04:24
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Its 2019 and some people still think communism still works
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Dec 19, 2019 05:21
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 13:06 |
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Helsing posted:
Your opinion is so out of the political mainstream that you might as well not have it. You'll never convince any substantial group of people that this is true, which is what you kind of need to enact change in a democracy.
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Dec 19, 2019 05:26
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