octoberallover wrote: Sat Aug 14, 2021 10:21 am

benadrian wrote: Mon May 03, 2021 3:42 pm Considering a re-read of "Dune" in anticipation of the movie.

Did you end up doing this? A buddy of mine is reading it rn and really enjoying it, confusing terminology notwithstanding. Will probably do the same.

You know, I did not. I kind of forgot about it. However, not long before you posted this I picked up the book and got a few more pages done before falling asleep.

kokorodoko wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 12:35 pmI'm thinking of starting to acquaint myself with British empiricism. Thinking of either Locke (because he's very prominent) or Hobbes (because he's one of the early ones). Can I jump into blabla Human Understanding right away or is reading Hobbes first better? Any secondary lit that might be helpful?

Surprising to me, Locke and Hobbes both talk a lot about words and language, and not really about "stuff" at all.

I think Berkeley gave the right response to Locke, that the latter's "ideas" cannot be spoken of outside of the thing in which they are perceived or from which they are derived. Per Locke's own reasoning, there are no grounds for claiming that a certain idea derived from one kind of sense impression is identical to or has any essential relationship to an idea derived from another kind of sense impression, even though the ideas look the same to the understanding. Since ideas do not have an essential connection to the thing, but are mental representations (which must remain fuzzy), and the names used to refer to them (the only clear part), it is wrong to extract them from the context of their encounter to be treated as universals, based on an assumed similarity between them, since their only provable similarity is their name. Ideas are not properties of things, Locke says this. Maybe he could fast forward to Kant and call them categories of understanding instead. Berkeley insists on the idea being in the thing always, even though it is not a property of it. I see prefigurations of Hegel and phenomenology.

I couldn't wrap my head around Berkeley's main thesis though: Being is impossible without being-perceived, since I cannot conceive of a thing existing while not also being perceived??? What does my ability to conceive of it matter?

I haven't even gotten to the commonwealth part of Hobbes yet, but this is the idea that spontaneously crystallized itself to me:
I have always regarded, as I think is pretty common, Hobbes' idea of the polity as cold and brutal, because of its apparent amorality. Thinking more about it however, his kind of political order is considerably less oppressive (potentially) than one that seeks to use law to instate and maintain a kind of moral order. In Hobbes, the law is pure power. The function of the law is to make the people scared enough of the sovereign that they are protected from each other. There is thus a clear distinction between law and morals - morals have to do with relations between people. Since the actions and values of individuals at their root (this is Hobbes' view) are results of "passions", they are not rational and cannot be rationalized. No principles can be derived from them, they can only be negotiated, and they remain perpetually in an unsteady state.

In Kant's view, by contrast, law should be moral. It is possible to work out binding principles which must be agreed to given correct use of a reason accessible to everyone. In this view, human co-existence is possible without Hobbes' sovereign - in theory without an external coercive power (a state) altogether. However, every member must now bind themselves to a principle which is absolute and non-negotiable. The coercion is internal rather than external. The unique individual (Stirner) is obliterated since the moral law is super-individual. This kind of thinking continues in communism and some strands of anarchism. It underlies communist re-education - since our order is the supremely rational one, if someone resists it, it must be because they haven't realized the truth and rightness of it yet.

kokorodoko wrote: Wed Sep 15, 2021 7:09 am

kokorodoko wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 12:35 pmI'm thinking of starting to acquaint myself with British empiricism. Thinking of either Locke (because he's very prominent) or Hobbes (because he's one of the early ones). Can I jump into blabla Human Understanding right away or is reading Hobbes first better? Any secondary lit that might be helpful?

I haven't even gotten to the commonwealth part of Hobbes yet, but this is the idea that spontaneously crystallized itself to me:
I have always regarded, as I think is pretty common, Hobbes' idea of the polity as cold and brutal, because of its apparent amorality. Thinking more about it however, his kind of political order is considerably less oppressive (potentially) than one that seeks to use law to instate and maintain a kind of moral order. In Hobbes, the law is pure power. The function of the law is to make the people scared enough of the sovereign that they are protected from each other. There is thus a clear distinction between law and morals - morals have to do with relations between people. Since the actions and values of individuals at their root (this is Hobbes' view) are results of "passions", they are not rational and cannot be rationalized. No principles can be derived from them, they can only be negotiated, and they remain perpetually in an unsteady state.

I was going to give my best summary from memory of Hobbes from my 15 year recollection from intro to philosophy. This is where my mind was going, but better stated.

Hobbes seemed very frightened of human nature and wanted a big bad government to scare everyone. Maybe a distant relative of Machiavelli's view of humanity and government?

losthighway wrote: Wed Sep 15, 2021 9:43 pmHobbes seemed very frightened of human nature and wanted a big bad government to scare everyone. Maybe a distant relative of Machiavelli's view of humanity and government?

It does remind you of the latter, because of their similarity in focus, which puts them apart from others of their era. Though I don't suppose that Plato had a brighter view of human nature - he just chose a different direction. Ideal government rather than actual government. Hobbes and Machiavelli fully dispense with the notion that the purpose of government is to make people good.

re: Machiavelli I find myself thinking: Is this written only for the Prince? It's in the vernacular, in simple prose, with short chapters. It's like while it's saying to the Prince: This is how you should rule; it's saying to the people: This is how your leaders rule. A touch of idealism on my part maybe, or just an instance of se non è vero...

kokorodoko wrote: Wed Sep 15, 2021 11:37 pm

losthighway wrote: Wed Sep 15, 2021 9:43 pmHobbes seemed very frightened of human nature and wanted a big bad government to scare everyone. Maybe a distant relative of Machiavelli's view of humanity and government?

Though I don't suppose that Plato had a brighter view of human nature - he just chose a different direction. Ideal government rather than actual government.

re: Machiavelli I find myself thinking: Is this written only for the Prince? It's in the vernacular, in simple prose, with short chapters. It's like while it's saying to the Prince: This is how you should rule; it's saying to the people: This is how your leaders rule. A touch of idealism on my part maybe, or just an instance of se non è vero...

Yeah, I remember idealizing Plato as the great wise man and getting psyched to read him as an older teen. Then I got to the bit about the noble lie. It's just religious mythology made to reenforce a caste system- terrible. In fact I wonder if all of classical philosophy is centered around the elites, until you get to Marx or whatever. At least Nietzsche's ubermesnsch is anyone with the will to move beyond the box. Sounds like you've put in more time than I have, but it seems a long journey to the enlightenment.

But Machiavelli I've not really read, just the quotable passages. But I can totally imagine it as a nice bedtime story for a prince to learn how to care for the unwashed masses.

losthighway wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 1:53 pmYeah, I remember idealizing Plato as the great wise man and getting psyched to read him as an older teen. Then I got to the bit about the noble lie. It's just religious mythology made to reenforce a caste system- terrible.

I wrote a paper on how, especially in the light of Plato's other work, Politeia can be read as a defence of (a kind of) democracy, and how the member of this society is the ideal of the Athenian citizen - the self-governing individual. Won't bore you unnecessarily, but there are many things pointing this way.

I had to ignore the noble lie though.

In fact I wonder if all of classical philosophy is centered around the elites

Ugh, yes. It's actually insidious to notice how enslaved you have become to certain kinds of thinking just by having these as your philosophical authorities (and because we live in a society which, unsurprisingly, continues to value this kind of thinking). Even Marx is so inundated in an environment and an intellectual current that is fascinated with despotic power, with managerialism, linearity, uniformity, massive integrated systems. Yeuch. Only in the post war era it seems do we really start to get things that are spontaneous, dynamic, liberating. But at least Marx gave us the means to realize how the philosophy of elites is in fact philosophy of elites.

Geoff Dyer - Working the Room.

Collection of criticism. As you'd expect, it's mostly worthwhile even when you're not in agreement. Recommended.

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other

I love every sentence of this text.

What I resent the most, however, is not his inheritance of a power he so often disclaims, disengaging himself from a system he carries with him, but his ear, eye, and pen, which record in his language while pretending to speak through mine, on my behalf. I thereby do not oppose to eliminate. I'd rather make of writing a site where opposites lose their essential differences and are restored to the void by their own interchangeability. [...] I am profoundly indifferent to his old way of theorizing - of piercing, as he often claims, through the sediments of psychological and epistemological "depths." I may stubbornly turn around a foreign thing or turn it around to play with it, but I respect its realms of opaqueness. Seeking to perforate meaning by forcing my entry or breaking it open to dissipate what is thought to be its secrets seems to me as crippled an act as verifying the sex of an unborn child by ripping open the mother's womb. It is typical of a mentality that proves incapable of touching the living thing without crushing its delicateness. I undeniably prefer the heterogeneity of free play in a dice game to the unity and uniformity of dissection, classification, and synthesis toward a higher truth.

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-language of "clarity." [...] Clear expression, often equated with correct expression, has long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric, whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade. [...] Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, impose, instruct, redeem, or save - at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be used to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. [...] Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. [...] To write "clearly," one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify

Like any common living thing, I fear and reprove classification and the death it entails, and I will not allow its clutches to lock down on me

Recently finished Richard Flanagan's Living Sea of Waking Dreams. Wow was it fucking BLEAK

Gulliver's Travels. The book is 295 years old, and I'm surprised at how readable it is, in the sense that Swift's English is similar enough to our English that the experience remains immersive to us in the present day.