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bigc wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:09 am Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. A discussion about how modern America is saturated with quick fix dopamine, and what it's doing to us.

enframed wrote: Mon Oct 17, 2022 8:58 pm I heard her speak on Fresh Air, very interesting and serious subject.

One consequence of the Occidental obsession with transcendence, logicized negation, the purity of distinction, and with 'truth', is a physics that is forever pompously asserting that it is on the verge of completion. The contempt for reality manifested by such pronouncements is unfathomable. What kind of libidinal catastrophe must have occurred in order for a physicist to smile when he says that nature's secrets are almost exhausted? If these comments were not such obvious examples of megalomaniac derangement, and thus themselves laughable, it would be impossible to imagine a more gruesome vision than that of the cosmos stretched out beneath the impertinently probing fingers of grinning apes. Yet if one looks for superficiality with sufficient brutal passion, when one is prepared to pay enough to systematically isolate it, it is scarcely surprising that one will find a little. This is certainly an achievement of sorts; one has found a region of stupidity, one has manipulated it, but this is all. Unfortunately, the delicacy to acknowledge this - as Newton so eloquently did when he famously compared science to beach-combing on the shore of an immeasurable ocean (= 0) - requires a certain minimum of taste, of noblesse.

Physicalistic science is a highly concrete, sophisticated, and relatively utile philosophy of inertia. Its domain extends to everything obedient to God (he is dead, yet the clay still trembles). Within this domain lie many tracts that have momentarily escaped cultivation; 'facts of spirit' for example, along with constellations of docility of all kinds, but these are not sites of resistance. Science is queen wherever there is legitimacy; perhaps terra firma as a whole belongs to her. No one would hastily dispute her rights, but the ocean is insurrection (and the land - it is whispered - floats).

Even after the infantile hyperbole of the scientific completion myth has been set aside, there is still a question concerning the success of science that remains untouched. It cannot be seriously doubted that philosophy has been damaged by science, for it has even come to anticipate its extinction: It has now reached the stage where it has lost all confidence in its power to know, where envy has totally replaced parental pride, and where the stylistic consequences of its bad conscience have devastated its discourse to the point of illegibility. For at least a century, and perhaps for two, the major effort of the philosophers has simply been to keep the scientists out. How much defensiveness, pathetic mimicry, crude self-deception, crypto-theological obscurantism, and intellectual poverty is marked by the name of their recent and morbid offspring die Geisteswissenschaften.

The first and most basic source of this generalized neurosis amongst the practitioners and dependents of philosophy is their incomprehension of quite how it was that 'they' gave birth to the sciences. They tend to think that they were always bad scientists, or at least, immature ones. 'If only we had been better at maths' they mutter under their breath, as they take a mournfully nostalgic pleasure in the fact that as calculators Newton and Leibniz still seemed to be 'neck and neck'.

What is lost to such melancholy is the fact that philosophy does not relate to science as a prototype, but as a motor. It was the basic source of investigative libido before being supplanted by the arms industry, and if science has not yet been completely dissolved into a process of technical manufacture, the difference is only a flux of inexplict philosophy. For philosophy is a machine which transforms the prospect of thought into excitation; a generator. 'Why is this so hard to see?' one foolishly asks. The answer quickly dawns: the scholars.

Scholarship is the subordination of culture to the metrics of work. It tends inexorably to predictable forms of quantitative inflation; those that stem directly from an investment in relatively abstracted productivity. Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts - and even pretend to revere them - the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.

Scholars do not write to be read, but to be measured. They want it to be known that they have worked hard. Thus far has the ethic of industry come.

kokorodoko wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 9:22 am Doing a close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason. Ever a captivating text.

Just came upon a section which Hegel is to spend some time on later.

The reasoning here leads to the suggestion that we cannot grasp an immediate apprehension in thought. Thought deals with representations of representations - a representation of an object affecting the senses, being formalized into a concept. The concept, by its nature, is a grouping of many different appearances under one heading. The concept says this thing that I immediately apprehend is similar to or identical to all those other things I have previously apprehended (and all other possible concurrent and future instances of that same apprehension). Thought therefore never gets at the immediate appearance in its singularity, since by setting to work on the appearance, thought alters the appearance, by negating its uniqueness. At the same time the concept is the only way in which such an appearance becomes intelligible, and in which is discovered its relatedness and relations to other appearances, which supposedly is what we're trying to get at when we reach for immediate connection to the appearance.

Hegel's view is of course that the truth of the appearance is really in the concept, but you get some idea of how oppositional views to this are formed, protesting against this forcible grouping together of disparate existences.

VaticanShotglass wrote: Sun Oct 30, 2022 1:15 pmI have more or less lost my ability to seriously engage this book, what little I had. That's not a criticism, just an acknowledgment that one makes choices where one gets to competently dig deep, and this is not the path I went down. I'd like to refresh myself with secondary sources, if for no other reason than the significance for later work I'm more directly interested in.

zorg wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 10:05 am About half done with Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, and it is….a bit sprawling and ridiculous. But it’s nice to see the return to humor. Most Suttree-esque thing since Suttree. We’ll see how the second half and Stella Maris go, I’m definitely along for the ride.