Self Subversion

[troyfromportmacquarie]

Dr Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess and Hitler, location and date unknown

[brother-asleep-deactivated20181]

[mythsofmodernity]

“He does something more interesting: He argues that liberalism has failed precisely because it has succeeded. As we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satiation of all our earthly needs. We’ve forgotten the human flourishing that comes from a common idea of virtue, and a concept of virtue that is based on our nature. This is the core of Deneen’s argument, and it rests on a different, classical, pre-liberal understanding of freedom. For most of the Ancients, freedom was freedom from our natural desires and material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of self-control, restraint, and education into virtue. It placed the community — the polis — ahead of the individual, and indeed could not conceive of the individual apart from the community into which he or she was born. They’d look at our freedom and see licentiousness, chaos, and slavery to desire. They’d predict misery not happiness to be the result.”

— Sullivan: Things Are Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?

[fourthdiscourse]

"By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent the extent of its loss."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

[fourthdiscourse]

Bucolic and empyrean, your worldliness extends into the absolute.

[syntheticphilosophy]

At the absolute north, north no longer exists. Things can come only from the south. At the heart of the social, the social no longer exists. Things can come only from elsewhere. At the heart of the subject, the subject no longer exists. Things can come only from elsewhere.

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments (via syntheticphilosophy)

[fourthdiscourse]

[philosophybits]

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (via philosophybits)

[historicaltimes]

Wehrmacht soldiers at attention, 1930s

via reddit

[serpentmadness]

Wilhelm Dilthey - Die Philosophie des Lebens

[asyoulikeitnow]

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

Wilhelm Dilthey (via asyoulikeitnow)

[fourthdiscourse]

[cmbodayle-deactivated20240322]

In contrast to [the] historical path toward an understanding of the concept of world, I attempted in Being and Time to provide a preliminary characterization of the phenomenon of world by interpreting the way in which we at first and for the most part move about in our everyday world. There I took my departure from what lies to hand in the everyday realm, from those things that we use and pursue, indeed in such a way that we do not really know of the peculiar character proper to such activity at all, and when we do try to describe it we immediately misinterpret it by applying concepts and questions that have their source elsewhere. That which is so close and intelligible to us in our everyday dealings is actually and fundamentally remote and unintelligible to us. In and through this initial characterization of the phenomenon of world the task is to press on and point out the phenomenon of world as a problem. It never occurred to me, however, to try and claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram.

Heidegger, 

Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 177

(via cmbodayle)

[syntheticphilosophy]

The meaning of a word is its use.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (via syntheticphilosophy)

[philosophybits]

We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed… What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action.

Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (via philosophybits)

[earthstory]

View this post on Instagram

[arcusxx]