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i'm following, but to post itt i need more time than i've got atm. it's been a busy few weeks
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Nov 1, 2019 12:23
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 23:51 |
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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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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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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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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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convincing people of socialism is, in principle, easy: you appeal to class interests. this is how socialism became a mass ideology in the first place. high theory like this is useful for explaining why this doesn't always work and which basic human interests are being appealed to - when someone simply rejects the idea of solidarity, what are they actually saying? it is not obvious that scabbing is against my self-interest, and yet it is on a slightly longer term
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Dec 20, 2019 12:36
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status hierarchies are trivial to subvert by the liberal-conservative continuum, as seen by the mobilisation of antisemitism charges against the british labour party or just reactionary idpol in general. a materialist view of things - I.e. the core struggle is the struggle between property and labour - is absolutely necessary to keep a coherent narrative. the abandonment of such a grand narrative in favour of more modern ideologies have resulted in complete routs of the left all over the western world, and there's a great many indications that the conservatives do have a clear central class loyalty to the owners of capital and property
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Dec 26, 2019 04:27
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bourgeois conservativism is increasingly in the thrall of the incredibly toxic and increasingly fluid financial capital. western europe went the way of national unity and class compromise, and what is left is the movements that granted them the power to make such compromises has been completely eroded. 'let us not talk about class' is literally what brought us to the present nadir of left-wing politics. we are simply not going to be able to escape the fundamental conflict between labour and capital, between the interests of those who would see property accumulate value amd those who would not. of course, one can talk about the finer points - as, indeed, the orthodox marxists did to the point of tedium - but we simply have to have that relationship as the central one in our politics, and drat the homeowners
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Dec 27, 2019 16:12
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'those guys are the pawns of those douchebags at the stock exchange' is a perfectly fine populist message and if we can't make it work we're hosed anyway
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Dec 27, 2019 16:14
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caps on caps on caps posted:I dunno I still feel that needing a translation key to talk to any cohesive part of society demands a reformulation of the leftist discourse. Ownership is so god drat opaque nowadays. your proposal to save socialism is to stop being socialist. this has been tried, and it was a miserable failure. in contrast, i propose that there's a real road forwards for, you know, actual socialist policy and a willingness to get down and dirty, but it necessitates moving away from stupid poo poo like honesty or moral standing and just being completely and ruthlessly filthy in our politics. dig up every suspect connection and every inside trade, and be different. the centre-left has been collapsing because there's no point in it anymore, and people have cottoned onto it. the actual proletariat is everyone living off a wage. the conservatives have been clever in tying so much of our everyday consumption into debt and encouraging individual homeownership, but that's going to fail very soon. glooming about "oh but those types are all racists and xenophobes" is the worst sort of liberal hand-wringing - they fell in line when we offered them something and had a movement. building a movement and building trust is a loving slog and takes a lot of time and a lot of failure, but you're a very far way from your initial thesis about "status hierarchies" and have moved onto griping that the right are better at populism than we are. this is true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the primacy of class politics, and rather the reverse V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 17:07
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caps on caps on caps posted:Then the issue is that the status hierarchy within the actual proletariat is so pervasive and defining, that the proletariat in its entirety is divided enough such that the core narrative of socialism has no effect anymore. again though what is 'the actual proletariat' and what the devil are you proposing rather than a basically class-based discourse which isn't exactly what brought us into this mess in the first place proposing the new labour shift in 2019 when that whole ideology is clearly totally moribound is seriously dodgy politics V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 18:10
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 23:51 |
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if a non-capitalist group perceives itself as having reasonable common cause with capital in today's society, they are simply wrong and must be convinced of this by any means. the petit-bourgeois etc are probably not reachable, because they genuinely do have some measure of common cause with capital. we may need the former group, but we cannot and should not chase the latter. this is materially different from even ten years ago, when tripartism was still working under neoliberal auspices. now, it is clear that there can be no common cause between almost all wage-earners and the owners. other conflicts, such as the consumer-worker axis which has become very important since the eighties, must be seen as subordinate to this central conflict. the message is clear and simple: earning by work is superior to earning by ownership
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Dec 28, 2019 01:29
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