#shit philosophy

[elli-incarnate]

Diogenes to Plato: BEHOLD A MAN

[swordsman2]

If hating the person you used to be indicates growth, does constant and pervasive self-loathing indicate a state of enlightenment?

[cathriana]

Just watched the last two episodes of Picard season 2 and I am now experiencing a level of existential awareness and dread that I never felt before, trying to figure out what exactly is *me*, at which point, if ever, does the thinking entity that I am ceases to exist. Am I me if I become clinically mad? Am I me if I just have brief episodes where I don't act as usual before coming back to consciousness ? Am I me if I suffer from heavy Alzheimer ? Am I me if I suffer brain damage in some way or another that changes my usual behaviour and way of dealing with things ? Am I the kid I used to be ? Is the only moment where *I* exist is the present and do I die and is replaced with every seconds that passes ?

[ninjaruski]

thoughts on Ayn Rand and her philosophical standpoints?

I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy is trash, and should only be read to understand the underpinnings of some of the social and political ideologies that are enacted in American society today. Let me put it this way, this is a woman who got to her position with the support of the very structures that she attacked in her philosophy, and then spawned an entire collection of individuals who proceeded along similar lines and advanced similar arguments.

The real problem I have with Rand is where Objectivism throws out anything that is considered “supernatural,” and her reliance upon rational self-interest as a guiding force in her ethical theory. The former runs into all the problems of analytic philosophy, especially when you think about her reliance on sense data for her thesis. There are things that our senses tell us that we cannot understand, like being affected by a piece of art, that Rand’s philosophy cannot account for and throws out due to their basis in the “supernatural,” which proponents of Rand have reduced to the metaphysical. This point largely depends on the individual Objectivist, but largely they lump “metaphysics” in with the “supernatural,” when speaking with philosophers, while failing to realize that there are a whole bunch of metaphysical claims embedded in Rand’s stuff.

The “rational self-interest” thing is just messed up from the get go. Let me put it another way: it might be in my rational self-interest to ensure that I keep an entire population subordinated through the manipulation of legal and social structures so that they contribute to the advancement of society while receiving the least amount of benefit from it. Rational self-interest, and Rand’s philosophy in general, presents compassion and altruism as ultimately harmful to the forwards progress of a society (you can really see this in her formulation of individual rights), which is a bad fucking idea, for obvious reasons. Though, this whole rational self-interest thing has a lot of appeal to people who possess a measure of social privilege and need a philosophical system to justify said privilege. Anyone who claims to be progressive on human rights and a proponent of Rand is either a liar or they don’t fully understand Rand’s philosophy, or both.

Now, I might give her some credit for her aesthetic theory, especially when she says that art can allow advanced concepts to be presented in ways that are easy for people to understand, but she never does anything with it. Further, her entire aesthetic theory is in service to her bullshit ethics and epistemology, and only limitedly grants the role of art in cultivating man’s consciousness: for Rand, I’d say that those things that are the “best” art are those things that reinforce rational self-interest and the kind of crass individualism that her philosophy seems to advocate. Since I’m unwilling to remove a single theory from the context of a thinker’s whole system of thought, her aesthetics is implicated in the same bullshit that the rest of her philosophy is mired in.

So yeah, she’s worth reading only to understand the underpinnings of some of the worst people in philosophy and American culture, or if you want an example of how to create a philosophical system to justify oppression.