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I'm not quite happy with it, but I never will be. Enjoy!

Sex and Moral Sight

Goethe, Sex, Idealism, History, BDSM, and More

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they're going to be calling it the most powerful lit review the department has ever seen

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can't tell if this post is just stupid and bad or so stupid it wraps back around to being good

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I think it's just stupid

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can't tell if this post is just stupid and bad or so stupid it wraps back around to being good

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i was talking to my ex about how you can look up AI summaries of tumblr bloggers and it said I was "highly trained in continental philosophy." Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me

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"you are continental because you work on figures who predate the continental-analytic divide"

???

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i was talking to my ex about how you can look up AI summaries of tumblr bloggers and it said I was "highly trained in continental philosophy." Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me

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I don't know what happened. Sometime in the last two years I started to really like Bach. Maybe I am just more Wise and Mature and have Better Judgment.

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Too much alienation is a problem. But I think complete non-alienation would be a form of democratic totalitarianism—the kind which Berlin and Mill (rightly) fear. A little alienation is good. The issue is that utopias are always being imagined by people whose main hobby is politics and the result is something I can only regard as a vision of hell in which we are all touchy-feely and in some nebulous form of "community" with each other. Everyone's whole life becomes public. And the arguments in favor of privacy are always rather instrumental and it's fine to have such arguments. But I think they miss that what makes privacy so nice is that it's privacy! I want time and space all to myself. Anyone who's breathed a quiet sigh of relief when everyone else has left their house knows this. Increasingly everything is for everyone.

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You're not interested in thinking about this seriously so you're only reacting to the least thoughtful versions of these ideas.

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Well the Kaba story is making the rounds and I think it's fine to respond to views that people actually hold. If you, like Socrates, want to guide your opponent to the best version of their view before unleashing the real criticism, then you have to at least start by saying why the flimsy version is wrong. But even putting that aside, I think there's something interesting about the structural role alienation is supposed to play in our moral and political schemes. Like I think the claim that we're not trying to completely get rid of alienation is an interesting one. I don't think Mill and Berlin are just stupid people because they're worried about it and I don't think they're worried about "shallow" versions of these views. Do more sophisticated communitarians exist? Yeah. Riggle can say things about discretionary valuing that ameliorate the issue and feminist communitarians of a care ethics bent can talk about other-recognition. That's great. And it would be nice if everyone held such sophisticated views. But you have to talk about what people actually believe sometimes.

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Re communitarianism— I think it’s fascinating that, in Mariame Kaba’s short story Justice, the heavily communitarian utopia is only disrupted by someone who doesn’t vibe with the abstract notion of community or something? Idk where I was going with this but it seems connected to what you’re gesturing at. All problems stem from individuals not being community-oriented enough or something

I have to admit I was prompted by reading that story and thinking "I would kill myself in such a society." Caught vaguing 😳

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I guess the thing is a lot of people really like going to political marches and so on and feel really good doing that stuff but I just do not at all

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The (strawman) communitarian might think "you are but expressing the perverse deformities of the character of late liberalism par excellence—snobbish, individualistic, unable to even imagine being subsumed into community." To which I say proudly yes!

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Too much alienation is a problem. But I think complete non-alienation would be a form of democratic totalitarianism—the kind which Berlin and Mill (rightly) fear. A little alienation is good. The issue is that utopias are always being imagined by people whose main hobby is politics and the result is something I can only regard as a vision of hell in which we are all touchy-feely and in some nebulous form of "community" with each other. Everyone's whole life becomes public. And the arguments in favor of privacy are always rather instrumental and it's fine to have such arguments. But I think they miss that what makes privacy so nice is that it's privacy! I want time and space all to myself. Anyone who's breathed a quiet sigh of relief when everyone else has left their house knows this. Increasingly everything is for everyone.

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Thinking about a few different kinds of artworks, both fictional and real. "Pale Fire" is in some sense a fictional poem, but its one we have reason to sensuously and imaginatively engage with and in fact can do this with. John Cage's 639 year long organ piece is in some sense something you can sensuously engage with, but it's not really meant for you to listen to. You can't listen to the whole thing. The "point" of the artwork is really the idea (I mean this in the non-technical sense). Then there's a decadent novel (I don't remember what it's called, I just know it exists) that is supposed to reconstruct the phenomenology of boredom. It demands you sensuously and imaginatively engage with it but it's not enjoyable. And then there's Chesscourt, the fictional novel in the Northern Caves, which you can't sensuously (or really even particularly imaginatively in the sense I have in mind—primarily sensory imagination) engage with because it's not "real." There are things that are true of it in the fictional world but it's metaphysically not something you can engage with in the sense I have in mind.

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I do "live on paper" so to speak and the post-literate world seems to be killing my prospects of an afterlife in that sense

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A lot of the graduate courses in my masters were crosslisted which I think is kind of bad, but the graduate students had to do more work so it's not like we were being babied too badly. But a lot of the older, non-traditional students greatly respected me and my chops, and they asked me for advice. And they would always kind of misgender me. And I could tell they weren't doing it intentionally or to be mean. Like there wasn't any cruelty there, just like genuine not-seeing or not-understanding.

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I probably do slightly better ecologically than the average person. I don't eat meat. I take public transit or walk basically everywhere. Pretty much all of my clothes are second hand. Some of these things aren't on principle, they're just products of being somewhat (but not devastatingly) poor. I do unfortunately fly a lot though, which is pretty bad, but comes as a product of my job.

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The thing is that environmentalism, like any political movement, is really a messy mix of incompatible tendencies. Part of the magnetic attraction to it is the charm of pastoral idyll and connection to wild nature. The imagery is organic, free nature versus organized, orderly society. But the ecologically best way for us to organize ourselves, as far as I can tell, is for the vast majority of people to live in densely populated urban areas that are developed around enough explicit design principles so that you don't get the heat effects of a bunch of asphalt and the grid can be arranged efficiently and so on.

The urban character of What Must Be Done clashes with the organic, spontaneous vision of rural communities in woodlands as far as the eye can see. And, you know, part of it is that cities are just cooler when they've had hundreds of years of unregimented development; when improvized little cutaways are created, when people adapt spaces to changing needs and desires. Chairs and tables join tattered tiles on improvized balconies. Streets made for cars bustle with people eating and chatting. And so on. So maybe the world will be less cool when organized this way. And we will have to tolerate being around people much more. So again, here there are tradeoffs.

I suppose the anarchist response is "local communities are only prevented from being environmentally responsive by the blinding effects of centralization processes." Maybe. I am not so confident that this would really happen if we are anything short of remaking the whole culture. And I am just never sure what to make of these sorts of proposals. By the "Seeing Like A State" crowd's own lights I think we should be skeptical that such a thing is even possible. Scott, just as well as Burke, gives us reason to skeptical of exactly this kind of utopian vision, exactly this kind of rational planning. So it makes it difficult to argue for the ecologically inclined anarchists' vision if it involves this kind of transformation. The spectre of the incredible state power needed for someone like mass education and value inculcation hasn't been exorcised.