great chaos under heaven

 ☭

[seafood-disco]

“It is good to rely upon others. For no one can bear this life alone.”

‘Gut ist es, an andern sich Zu halten. Denn keiner trägt das Leben allein.’

-Hölderlin, ‘Die Titanen’

[perestroika-hilton]

I have a 450 word free will vs determinism essay due soon what's my stance like plz choose for me

[perestroika-hilton]

Soon is in 6 hours btw

[seafood-disco]

That the ‘two truth’ compatibilist model capitulates too much to our ingrained Augustinian cultural biases, and it furthermore isn’t supported by recent developments in the cognitive/brain sciences.

When we talk about the freedom of the will being some universal aspect of phenomenal experience, we are merely enacting our own provincialism. Our ‘intuitions’ are relics of a past that we’ve long forgotten, even though they continue to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

On ‘two truth’ compatibilism, Heidi Raaven, ‘The Self Beyond Itself’—summarizes the position (which is not hers) in the following way:

“The human perspective of experiencing ourselves as choosers and deciders, originators of our actions, and hence alone and individually morally responsible for them, is valid because it is phenomenologically true or real—it is a true (and universal) account of how we experience ourselves as human beings, they propose. At the same time, they hold that the naturalist perspective of our actions and choices as within and resultant from the complex interactions of various biological, psychological, social, cultural, historical, quantum, and cosmological systems is also true. Nevertheless, the authors claim that by giving up the idea that there is a faculty in our minds that is a will, free or otherwise (as the philosopher Hume did in the seventeenth century), science can be left to its kind of explanation—causal determinism—and at the same time, a second description from the insider human subjective perspective of experience can also be true. The insider subjective description of ourselves as originating our actions from ourselves alone is compatible with the scientific causal explanation, they say, because it makes no claims about a faculty in the natural brain that can be located and proven to exist or proven not to exist. One explanation is about natural causes, and the other is about presumably universal human experience. The human and the natural are separate self-contained systems of explanation.”

[seafood-disco]

We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?

Edward Said, preface to the 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism

[vladtheunfollower]

intellectual men really think they are too smart to be misogynists it’s so funny

[ardor-mohr]

“The main function of the news is to chase yesterday news off, to force it out from attention and memory – and to agree in advance to be driven away in a similar way by tomorrow’s news.”

— Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992)

[seafood-disco]

“What does the ethnologist write but confessions?”

-Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology vol. 2

[seafood-disco]

“All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of “man” as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestations of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become… But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.”

-Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

[seafood-disco]

“It is a long superseded idea, and one derived from superficial appearances, that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances.”

-Freud, Observations on ‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis

[seafood-disco]

In the end, atmospheres must be seen as the most real things of all.

Peter Sloterdijk, Learning is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself - interview with Reinhard Kahl (2001)

[seafood-disco]

“It happens, of course, when we wrongly fear some evil, that the fear disappears on our hearing of the truth. But on the other hand, it also happens, when we fear an evil which is certain to come, that the fear vanishes on our hearing of false news. So imaginations do not disappear through the presence of the true insofar as it is true, but because there occur others, stronger than them, which exclude the presence of the things we imagined...”

-Spinoza, Ethics IVp1s

[seafood-disco]

“[A]lthough each of us a person, separate from others, whose interests are consequently distinct, in some way, from those of the rest of the world, nevertheless one should remember that one cannot maintain oneself in existence alone, and that one is, in fact, one of the parts of the universe, and more particularly still, one of the parts of this earth, one of the parts of this State, of this society, of this family, to which one is joined by one’s residence, or by one’s oath, or by one’s birth. It is necessary always to prefer the interests of the whole of which one is part to those of one’s own particular person.”

-Descartes, K 172 [Letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia]

[seafood-disco]

“Truth or true ideas have no superadded power by virtue of their veracity. There is no force proper to truth qua truth. To use Althusser’s interpretive vocabulary, truth is not a “gel.” True ideas do not “take hold of” or exert themselves upon subjectivities any more forcefully than do absurdities. How can this be? How can a rationalist philosopher [Spinoza] claim that truth is impotent? My suggestion is that ideas, no matter how clear and distinct, cannot take root in the mind without a fertile environment. True ideas, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by contrary ideas, need other compatible ideas to sustain them.”

-Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

[woodsandhearth]

This world in its present form is passing away.

1 Corinthians 7:31

[anarchblr]

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

—Antonio Gramsci

[noneedtofearorhope]

[noosphe-re]

Verily, Glaucon, I said, glorious is the power of the art of contradiction!

Plato, The Republic (translated by Benjamin Jowett)

[probablyasocialecologist]

A reminder from 2013.

[40ouncesandamule]

You have to work really hard to make people this wrong. People don’t accidentally become this wrong. This is the result of billions of dollars and a lot of “education”

[philosophyquotes]

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (via philosophyquotes)

[one-divides-into-two]

Theory is understanding and foresight - even if one-sided - of the process [of capital’s] objective tendency. Politics is the will to invert this process; it is subjective action so that this objectivity is blocked and unable to triumph. Theory is anticipation; politics is intervention.

Mario Tronti, “Tactics = Organisation.”