kokorodoko wrote: Tue Jun 27, 2023 11:34 am Karl Kautsky's commentary on the 1891 Erfurt Program ... published under the English title The Class Struggle,

and oops, looks like there's some problems with this one:

Few are even aware that the existing English translation - first issued in 1912 - is a bowdlerised abridgement that serves only to obscure what someone like Lenin might have taken out of the book.

- from Lenin Rediscovered (Lars Lih, 2005)

I spent yesterday relaxing and reading A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño. It made me think a lot about being young and biding my time as I waited for a discernible direction in life to take shape. I expect I’ll go down a Bolaño rabbit hole soon. Had only read 2666 before this.

zorg wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 10:30 am

Dave N. wrote: I read the new Cormac McCarthy joint a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed the first 2/3 immensely, but I found the last 1/3 to be a bit of a slog. I get the sense that these two parts of the book were written at different times, as the momentum and humor let up after Bobby Western visits his grandmother. I’m going to read it again. Maybe it was attributed to distractions in my own life.

I finished it as well...and while I enjoyed the entirety, an honest appraisal of the scenario at play here verges on the ludicrous. I mention this only because previous books seemed much more concerned with not presenting such a wildly romanticized world for his characters to play in.

Well,, fuck, it feels like sacrilege now that he's met his maker, but Stella Maris was a steaming pile. If you thought The Passenger stretched the limits of believability you can almost feel Cormac's complete boredom with writing as he proceeds to plagiarize his own article on language while offering up a few saucy details about how sexy incest is for beautiful suicidal violin virtuoso mathematicians. I could go on, but I think this review nicelyf captures the shark-jumping nature of the material.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/ ... literation

too bad.

zorg wrote: Fri Jun 30, 2023 12:36 pm

zorg wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 10:30 am

Dave N. wrote: I read the new Cormac McCarthy joint a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed the first 2/3 immensely, but I found the last 1/3 to be a bit of a slog. I get the sense that these two parts of the book were written at different times, as the momentum and humor let up after Bobby Western visits his grandmother. I’m going to read it again. Maybe it was attributed to distractions in my own life.

I finished it as well...and while I enjoyed the entirety, an honest appraisal of the scenario at play here verges on the ludicrous. I mention this only because previous books seemed much more concerned with not presenting such a wildly romanticized world for his characters to play in.

Well,, fuck, it feels like sacrilege now that he's met his maker, but Stella Maris was a steaming pile. If you thought The Passenger stretched the limits of believability you can almost feel Cormac's complete boredom with writing as he proceeds to plagiarize his own article on language while offering up a few saucy details about how sexy incest is for beautiful suicidal violin virtuoso mathematicians. I could go on, but I think this review nicelyf captures the shark-jumping nature of the material.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/ ... literation

too bad.

This last one sounds like it'd be found in the "intellectual" corner of the adult book store. Someone's jerking off to that one.

Hume's Treatise.

There isn't any essential difference between "pure" thoughts (e.g. universals, here called 'ideas') and sense impressions, the only difference is their degree of vivacity, the duration they linger in our minds, and therefore how likely we are to consider them as real (a fantasy-creation is identifiable as such by appearing as a fluke, the impression of them will not last since they have no referent outside of that specific occasion).

All kinds of things we take to be true therefore are in one way or other the result of repeated encounters with the same phenomenon, so that eventually our minds have become habituated to expecting a certain outcome of a certain occurrence. There is no determinable connection between two phenomena other than such a spontaneous association, one which is formed over the course of encountering a certain series of events multiple times. Nothing intrinstic to any one event or thing can tell us what might follow from it - what tells us thus is only ever what we have previously observed to follow from it, and what we therefore have become habituated to expect. On the basis of such expected result we assign a probability to an event that will plausibly follow from another, and such probability is as close to certainty as we can hope to get.

All ideas formed by habit in this way are considered beliefs, and all conceptions we have whatsoever are beliefs. A belief is an idea which is strong and vivid enough to influence our behaviour.

The way a belief influences behaviour however is in the same essential way as a sensory impression might - there is no specific intellectual quality to it, and neither is there any special intellectual faculty in addition to that which perceives impressions (as objects or as "passions", i.e. emotions and bodily sensations, both of which again are identical in their function, and are considered in the same manner as sources of mental representation and impulses of will - there is iow. no strict separation between inner and outer, leaping over the Cartesian problem).

Since there is no special intellectual faculty, there is no "reason" considered as apart from perception. "Reason" is used here for the ability to combine and compare different ideas, and the ability to infer a successive event from a preceding one. Reason is thus wholly dependent on habit. It can, by its own operation, influence action - this very expectation of future events influencing how one is likely to act - but it does so not as reason but as another passion.

Fichte: Foundations of Natural Right (1797).

Starts with defining a rational being, "the I", equivalent to a subject, which is defined as an activity, and identical to this activity. The activity which a rational being is, is self-reflection. The subject comes into being by positing itself, by declaring itself to be. In the very act of declaring itself to be, it declares itself to be something over here, confronting another thing over there, which is taken to be distinct from it (that over there is called the object, the thing, or the world - 'object' in German is Gegenstand; that which stands opposed to).

It is the very act of declaring itself that creates the division between subject and object, therefore the world as it appears to a subject is only insofar as it has been posited - indirectly, through the subject's own self-positing. The world is only insofar as it is an object of consciousness for a subject, and a subject is conscious first by declaring itself to be (thereby being conscious of itself), and in and through this very activity having emerge the thing to which it is opposite.

This sure is a puzzling way of talking about being (we've seen it before in Berkeley's "being is being-perceived"). What I could guess it means is this: When we say that the world which we encounter is, we talk precisely about this thing that appears to us. Any thing whatsoever that is said to be, is in this way, as something we encounter - I encounter this world, this thing, that means it is; I might encounter some other thing in this manner, that means that thing is. There is no actual way in which the word 'is' or 'being' works, which is not referring to things encountering us in this way - as objects of our consciousness. Fichte writes that "being is a determinate modification of consciousness".

A disctinction is made between things having being and having reality. While no thing "is" independent of our consciousness, things are certainly "real". They are proven to be real by the fact that they resist our comprehension of them. Fichte puts it in a lovely way: "the I is constrained in its presentation of what emerges". While the subject can choose to engage or not engage in trying to comprehend the thing, it cannot choose what is to be comprehended, or how this is to go about - there are certain conditions that must be met and certain steps that necessarily follow one another once one engages in such an attempt.

The subject in itself is completely free, since it is a being of pure thought. It came into being by thinking itself into being, but also there was no thinking before it was, because it *is* thinking. Thus it is fully unconditioned. But though it is free in itself, if it wishes to comprehend the object, it must limit itself in such a way that this becomes possible. Though imposing limitations on itself, this is done voluntarily on the part of the subject, and the comprehending activity is therefore still considered to be self-determined.

We can probably surmise how this is to proceed wrt the individual living among other individuals in a political community.

The activity of the subject, when this activity is engaged in comprehending the object, is called the "concept". This also seems an odd usage, but we can probably think of it like this: A concept is a thought of or about an object, and thinking of an object means being engaged in the activity of comprehending it - if, that is, the thinking is truly about the object, and not only seemingly so (as we might sometimes use 'concept' to mean simply an idea, which may or may not refer to something real). The correspondence between concept and object is guaranteed by defining the concept as specifically the thinking activity which is engaged in comprehending the object, thereby at the same time the thought which emerges through this activity (or rather, is this activity).

A kind of thinking which is properly philosophical (and also "scientific"), is one which grasps thinking as this self-positing activity - a self-positing through which a world/object/thing necessarily emerges as distinct from the subject, AND grasps these distinct parts as a single act of comprehension, which IS the activity that is the subject. This formulation is carried on unaltered into Hegel. Marx is then to spend some time on the coinciding of object and concept, and the idea of consciousness-as-activity.

Off to a thrilling start, and we're barely past the preface!

Reading "Don't Stand in Line: A Memoir" by Gerda Barker.
Gerda worked at Wax Trax in the 80's. She married Paul "Ion" Barker, and the book includes a lot of Ministry history and drama, while she's trying to raise 2 kids in Austin. (So far. I'm about 75% through it.)
very interesting view on the early WaxTrax industrial scene, with Ministry featuring prominently.

All The King’s Men - fucking great. I’d gone from You Can’t Win (mentioned by others a couple pages back) to this, which was like going from drinking dishwater to heavy cream. So it took a minute to get reoriented to florid Rich Man Prose, but once I did I was hooked.

I’m at the very end and will re-read The Last Temptation Of Christ afterwards, then moving on to a re-read of Carrère‘s excellent The Kingdom that. Then I might continue to orbit the Bible or I might not. You never know

I really enjoyed all of the titles mentioned in this post

I Don't Want To Talk About it: Overcoming The Secret Legacy Of Male Depression by Terrence Real

Really nailing it for me, but I don't really have much early childhood trauma to investigate, so that part feels a little unmoored and confusing for me. But the depression, and resulting shame and denial? Very, very on point.

bigc wrote: Fri Jul 07, 2023 9:24 am I Don't Want To Talk About it: Overcoming The Secret Legacy Of Male Depression by Terrence Real

Really nailing it for me, but I don't really have much early childhood trauma to investigate, so that part feels a little unmoored and confusing for me. But the depression, and resulting shame and denial? Very, very on point.

I feel you. Everyone says and everything I read (or am told to read, then I check it out and put it down, and "every" is not an exaggeration), point to past trauma and operating within so-called "trauma bonds." That everyone has them. Maybe some people just don't, and have some of these issues anyway. I find it not helpful.