#particularism

[philosophybits]

The problems of life cannot be solved by the automatic application of universally-valid norms. We cannot say that under the same conditions one must act in one certain way, everywhere and always. This cannot be said, first of all, because conditions are never exactly the same. We might state the maxim conversely: man must act individually and solve the moral problems of life individually, must manifest his creativity in the moral acts of his life....

Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man

[dikleyt]

Christianity has conditioned people to say "it's bad for Jews to have their own traditions for their own people," which is a ludicrous and violent statement.

If someone went up to a Native person and said "your traditions must be available to EVERYONE and you're bad if you keep them to yourself," we could all agree that would be shitty, right?

Yet because Christianity appropriated Judaism so long ago and spread to so many people, everyone believes Jewish traditions belong to them. And not just the ones they stole that one time, either—the theft is active and ongoing. See “Christian Kabbalah,” for example, which they began stealing in the late Middle Ages. Or see Messianic Judaism, which aims to integrate the entirety of Rabbinic Judaism with Christianity. This isn’t a case of two groups rooted in the same ancient religion going their separate ways. The theft never ends.

And this is, of course, when goyim don’t fundamentally misunderstand Judaism entirely and think it is, like Christianity, a collection of beliefs about which one can say yes or no, and if one says yes, they’re a Jew. Judaism is the body of religious and cultural traditions belonging to the Jewish people. It’s fundamentally different from a universalist religion like Christianity or Islam, in that it has always inherently been intended for a specific national body, the Jews, whether in Diaspora or the place of origin.

[spell-cleaver]

Particularism

for @ladyvader23

Captain Firmus Piett was on holiday. He didn't want to go on holiday, but it was fine. It was going well. His sister's family were... nice...

Then Luke Lars showed up.

"You..."

"I apologise for interrupting you on leave, Captain," Luke Lars said, scratching the back of his neck, shifting on the balls of his feet and looking all around shifty, suspicious and sheepish. "But I... was on planet, and I had hoped to ask of you a small favour?"

Piett suddenly regretted wishing he was back on the Executor—the moment he heard that, he had the feeling this would not be good.

"A—" Piett blinked. "A small favour?" This evening was getting more and more bizarre.

Lucus had pushed himself to his feet, to see who the young man in the... terribly uncared for Imperial uniform was—was that a rip on his sleeve?—and where he'd come from. Despite the fact that there was no way Lars could see his nephew past Piett, he glanced in that direction and smiled warmly.

"It's nothing, I promise. I hope," Lars assured him. "And I truly don't mean to intrude, I'll be going as soon as possible. But I remembered from your file that you used to work with the antipirate fleet of Axxila—"

"That I did." Piett folded his arms, resisting the urge to glower—at Lars or at Lucus. His past as one who combated criminals, pirates, slavers, was not one to be belittled or judged...

"Well then, I was hoping you could point me in the direction of their headquarters? The headquarters of the public relations branch, at least—the contacts. I have a question to ask of them."

Read it on AO3 or FFN!

[thelonguepuree]

I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism … I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez (1956)

[sunder-the-gold]

[gravalicious]

Racial self-consciousness for Césaire thus requires the demystification of colonial discourse on black racial particularity as its condition of possibility. Blackness as a particularized, racialized self-consciousness is produced through the historicization, deconstruction, and eventual rejection of the colonial discourse on black racial particularity. But the paradox does not stop there. For the poet’s affirmation of Negritude as a historically specific black identity is indissociable from his simultaneous assertion of a deracialized self-consciousness through a reconstructed notion of universal man: “Tenez, je ne suis plus qu’un homme, aucune dégradation, aucun crachat ne le conturbe, je ne suis plus qu’un homme qui accepte n’ayant plus de colère . . .” (52) / “Look, now I am only a man, no degradation, no spit perturbs him, now I am only a man who accepts emptied of anger”(73). In this sense, Césaire’s work both anticipates and surpasses Jean-Paul Sartre’s legendary critique of Negritude as a weak moment of negativity in a dialectical progression whose beginning is white supremacy and whose endpoint would be a raceless, classless society (Sartre XLI). Césaire’s poem suggests both the possibility of the black man’s embodiment of the universal through Negritude, and the profound naïveté of the Sartrean position according to which Negritude as a positive cultural value would be sufficient to propel a larger dialectical movement towards “the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races” (my translation). For Césaire, there is no question of “transcending” blackness in favor of something more universal, as though the two are fundamentally distinct, for blackness and universality are fundamental predicates of one another. Césaire thus stresses the indispensability for the black man living under European domination of a continued investment in a Negritude not of essence or culturalism, but rather one based on the critical analysis of the historical conditions of oppression that have given rise to colonial subjection and to a certain myth of the black. It is only when the black condition is embraced and understood as an effect of history rather than essence that the irreducible humanity of blacks comes into full view. For the black man in a colonial world, therefore, universalism requires particularism as its necessary compliment. Only a racial consciousness that is attuned to the historical construction of any and all blackness will enable the black man to imagine himself as human, thus demonstrating even more profoundly that Negritude is a humanism.

Doris L. Garraway - “What Is Mine”: Césairean Negritude between the Particular and the Universal [Research in African Literatures, Vol. 41, No. 1, Special Issue: Aimé Césaire, 1913-2008: Poet, Politician, Cultural Statesman (Spring 2010), pp. 71-86]

[globalzombie]

Jonathan Dancy on Moral Particularism - Philosophy Bites

Is morality a matter of applying general principles? Jonathan Dancy, a moral particularist, thinks not. In this episode of the Philosophy Bi