Why should Rushdie have to take responsibility? Rushdie should cry foul as much as he likes, and then let the Islamic community take responsibility for that situation.

I have no idea what kind of alienation you're talking about. Religious communities usually welcome converts. Maybe you should write your own Satanic Verses.

Thanks to the internet, I read a pirated ebook of the Satanic Verses decades ago, back when I was in middle school.

I remember feeling that Rushdie expressed the soul-crushing alienation I felt when my mother forced me to conform to the outward rituals of a religion I didn't believe in. I support Rushdie because he gave voice to my pain without, unlike the nationalists, calling for my community to be exterminated.

1. There are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. That said, I'm sure Indian Muslims would say cruel things about Rushdie if they weren't terrified of the BJP.

2. Speaking as an Indian ex-Muslim atheist, my understanding is that mainstream Islam is a more explicit version of classic Western conservatism: It doesn't care what you do in private as long as you don't embarrass the community. In fact, one of the asma ul husna (names of God) is al sittir, the one who hides our sins. Allah is understood to be complicit in hiding our sins out of mercy.

In medieval times, the evidentiary standards of religious courts was so high, it was possible to convict only the most shameless criminals. As a result, Europeans considered Islamic morality "degenerate" upto early modern times. In contrast to the current image of Islam as a fundamentalist religion that curbs all worldly pleasure, medieval philosophers regarded Islam as a religion operating under the astrological sign of Venus, making people pleasure-seeking, lascivious and lazy. Why the change? I'm inclined to think that the Terror Management Theory applies very strongly to "Third World" peoples.

3. This no doubt makes Islam a terrible religion in the 21st century, and I don't condone anyone joining it, but it's no worse than Judaism or Christianity. The relevant factor is that Muslims live in poor and/or repressive countries. Christians in Africa and Northeast India inflict similar repressive measures on minorities. Europe was also very similar in the past. Eg. A Jewish zealot once stabbed Spinoza IIRC.

I created a playlist with excerpts from the Quran that may give you a general idea of Islam's style of religiosity: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLz-S1Fiqsmt52eX9vmjGf3OJlrea4Apg

Just want to say this is strange and strangely interesting thread. Keep it going :) — I like sushi

Sorry, my university applications are in the way.

My goal in starting this thread was to identify mistakes in my understanding of Zizek, and I may have found one. Shame it's a bit esoteric. I said substance is split by the void of ambiguity. I don't think that's what Zizek is saying. I think his reasoning goes more like this: Each substance is an element of multiple categories. What makes a man is being a mammal, being an intelligent being, a potential citizen, etc. This is why it difficult to find necessary and sufficient conditions for manhood. A given being might satisfy some, but not all of them. Where this line is to be drawn is not fully specified by external reality, and this is the ideal form minimally imposed by consciousness. The substance here is the common symbol "man" occurring as an element of multiple categories. So what splits this substance (Stage 3) is the conceptual matrix (Stage 2) itself. The ambiguity (Stage 1) is only the result of this spllitting, not the agent responsible for it. In the other direction, Stage 1 is also the primordial ambivalence out of which the later stages coagulate.

Zizek also says what separates me from God separates God from himself. Reading the Hegelian structure into this, I want to say that the matrix not only splits substance, but also splits itself into ambiguity. Or it could be that the tension separating the subject from the foundational ambivalence is the tension sepaparating the elements between which it is an ambivalence. I need to think about these things before I can be sure of what Zizek is saying.

Have you ever looked in Kojeve? His interpretation of the master/slave dialectic is great. The basic idea is that many famous philosophical positions are just rationalizations of cowardice. We are afraid to challenge the worldly master, so we invent theoretical freedoms and/or theological masters of those masters. — Eee

Not yet, but that sounds interesting.

I think there is a matriarchal vibe, even if it's massively exaggerated. — Eee

Where is it in lived reality, outside libraries of controversial thinkers? Even inside the libraries, I've seen multiple feminists complaining about the people who will probably turn conservative when they get older making a nuisance of themselves trying to prove how pro-woman they are (obsessional neurosis). The tragedy is that these "radicals" occasionally get more grassroots support than serious theorists. The only way I know of to fight this problem is to dismantle the myth of progress. Turns out the supporters of these "radicals" often think that "progress" wins out in the long run, and if they hold the most "progressive" position, then their insanity will be vindicated when they turn out to be on the "right side of history". They don't understand that, eg, second wave feminism was a movement of TERFs. Whatever actually happens is branded "progressive" after the fact. The real future is physically necessary, but semantically contingent. Fighting for it bears little relation to how "progressive" you think you are being. Zizek argues that communist atrocities were carried out with the same hope for historical vindication. He says we should refuse to hold back on our desire without any hope of justification.

Tho some of the thought leaders are probably self-conscious sophists who cynically manage their dupes. — Eee

Alright, how do these exhibits square with your theory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSILkDZI7jk http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=37&p=20949#p20949 (written by a conservative)

It seems to me that the most charitable interpretation is that Trumpists don't "think" anything insofar as their actions are caused by primal impulses originating from underneath their subjectivity. Namely, the impulse to surrender to the silverback. This sounds condescending, but facts don't care about the feelings of conservatives.

As a pet theory, I suggest that maybe this is connected to the egoistic man projecting his repressed desire to submit and believe on the woman. If we think of the man as self-assertion, endlessly critical and unmasking, then the fantasized woman has the ecstasy that the man qua man denies himself. In Sartrean terms, the woman is man's disavowed flight from his own freedom. — Eee

I like this. Although, strictly speaking, the original point probably mentions "enjoyment" in the Lacanian sense, not pleasure. This means repetitively circling the object of desire without attaining it. This could be pleasurable, but it may not be. So it may be that it strokes their ego to imagine women endlessly desiring them. This is probably also a projection. According to Lacanian theory, this is how men behave towards women. Moreover, I have noticed how, in porn, the female orgasm commonly reflects male orgasm in reality. The whole thought form is a projection.

If the 'male' fantasy is autonomy and self-definition, it is also being dominated by female beauty. The beautiful woman is a 'phallus,' the mystical object. To be in love or dominated by the beauty of a woman is OK because she is of a different order than a rival, male ego. Something like that. — Eee

Checks out, but I need to think about it.

Zizek says that a man chooses a woman who happened to be in line with what interested him to begin with. But then, maybe the woman gets to define what being a man means for her lover, and the same goes for Causes?

This is different way of saying the kind of thing I find in Kojeve's Hegel and something I mostly agree with. We can talk about a symbolic reality that has enough weight or force that man can risk his life for it, perhaps to impose it on the world or just to sacrifice his life as a gesture. — Eee

I really need to read this Kojeve. However, caveats are in order about these narratives of self-sacrifice:

Firstly, it is possible to sacrifice yourself without tossing your life into the bargain. It need not be total.

Secondly, these are fantasies of glory. It feels as though you were happy in the past, a happiness "they" (the monstrous Neighbor) took away. You could get a taste of that primordial joy if you could, depending on how worked up you are, sacrifice yourself for your principles or just to stand up to the Man. It doesn't follow that you will actually go through with it, only that this is one impulse contributing to your neurotic ambivalence. The compromise between your conflicting impulses (called the symptom) may be reached in a number of ways. Also, even if you actually follow through (and live to tell the tale), there's no telling how brief your sense of satisfaction will be before reality sets in. It could be that you are unconsciously aware of this, and you are sacrificing your life as a coward's way out of having to live with the consequences of your actions.

Is there a masculine mystique? I think so. Zizek, Lacan,the thinkers I like,...all project it. It's like a violence that cuts through illusion and pettiness. — Eee

Nice. Could you please recommend the thinkers you like best? Maybe also some goddess-centric ones if you still don't think they are patriarchal.

I speculate that on some deep level that everyone is bisexual. — Eee

Thank you for completing my train of thought. I usually just shy away from it.

I've mostly wrestled with early Derrida, and I find him patricidal. The purple velvet sportcoat is the costume of an assassin. It does make sense that anyone who insists on action will read the ironist or anyone who muddies the water as passive. And the ironist can read Mr. Action as cutting the knot in impatience. I don't come down on either side, but maybe that's me coming down on a side after all. — Eee

Zizek probably also thinks Derrida should have been more irrational. And yes, Christian theology should have been more rational. Every theory should follow its guiding genius to the end of its desire. They will then turn into the points of reference between which the foundational ambivalence is unable to commit. And this ambivalence is not even a goal worth reaching. Rather, existential tension arises between this ambivalence and its speciations, i.e. Freudian symptomal compromise formations. It's only after reaching this tension that Zizek is focused on masculinity, the absolute fucking madman.

Is the judge in Blood Meridian still a philosopher? Or a post-philosophical prophet? — Eee

I haven't read it. My excuse is that I'm from outside the Anglosphere. I will read it and write back.

Before I leave, I found a subtitled version of part of that Krishna video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liCn0u093B0

Feel free to elaborate or paraphrase and maybe I'll get at your meaning. — Eee

Apropos of nothing, I really should have clarified that Lacanians understand pathology a little differently from standard psychoanalysts. For Lacan, the goal is to get the patient to "enjoy his symptom" by completing his subjectivation, not to change his behavior to fit social norms.

First, it makes no sense to speak of a relative truth that doesn't apply universally. — review

I will go through the reviews later, but I just want to note that this reviewer doesn't understand what Zizek is saying at all. Zizek is an absolute believer in the hard facts of external reality. What he says is that external reality is shaped by our subjective beliefs when we act on them. If we go extinct because of climate change, that would be because of our power to ignore the facts of external reality. These beliefs are experienced in the form of two subjective positions, masculine and feminine. In masculinity, we take subjectively projected objects seriously. In femininity, we pretend we are above it all. Beyond that is the inability to commit to either position. Zizek is not what anti-postmodernists call a "relativist". Not even a little bit. He just likes to joke around and people who don't pay attention think he's saying everything is a joke.

Right. That's one of the complexities of Zizek. And yet what is the Cause but world-fixing? I'm not against the Cause. I just find it indeterminate. — Eee

Creating temporary crutches so we don't get snuffed out?

Belief in the fight itself seems to require that the world remain imperfect. — Eee

Since no one fixes the world, perfection is never reached.

I suspect that the wicked human heart will always find a new antagonist, a new injustice. — Eee

A new constitutive trauma creates a new world with its own story, complete with mysteries to uncover.

We are meeting 'in reason,' since we are both identified with articulating our positions in a way that assimilates criticism. — Eee

Fair enough, though I suspect Zizek, with his Freudian leanings, believes in reason less than I do.

Well I think there's wisdom in that. It's also just sophisticated Christianity. — Eee

Zizek says he's a "Christian atheist"; that is to say, neither a Christian nor a proper Marxist. What he really believes in is the one thing that every side hates: the Christian messianic component of Marxism itself! Zizek says that with the modern church being what it is, only an atheist can be a religious Christian who loves the Truth as much as he does. After reviewing the links below, can you honestly say he's wrong? He goes as far as to say that God died with Christ on the cross. Therefore, he believes that Christ was God even more literally than Christians do. Who was Christ? Only the most sublime hysteric (Stage 6) and eradicator of hypocrisy. Definitely a God fit for Leftists.

And it's not obvious to me, anyway, how to get the right politics out of it. — Eee

Look into Alain Badiou's philosophy of the Event. My starting point was Frank Ruda's For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism.

I think of what I'm doing an phenomenology. — Eee

Zizek has a complex relationship with phenomenology. He's not a fan of Husserl's bracketing method because he thinks it turns people into zombies. For example, he notes that Zen training where the warrior reflexively cuts off enemies that "appear" is based on theory that is very close to the phenomenological method. The only way to be a person and not a tool is to let yourself feel emotions. On the other hand, Zizek is a phenomenologist in the sense implied by Freud's "analysis of the transference". Identifying actions that appear emotionally "impossible" is an important part of Zizek's approach.

But what of the gap between 'is and 'ought'? — Eee

Zizek is what would by now be called an old school leftist in that he wants non-pathological subjects to refuse to compromise with what they truly desire. For example, he tries to show that Heidegger's Nazism doesn't come from emotionalism, but from not going far enough. Conservatism comes from people obscuring their true desires out of fear. Universalism is not a metaphysically truer position per se, but a more sublime, hysterical and admirable position, like Christ against the Pharisees in the Gospels. The problem with theology is not the figure at its center, its logical rigor or its desire for truth. These are all good things. What's wrong is its cowardice in not going far enough with all these qualities to the point of rejecting worldly injustice with the sublime master it claims to worship.

Some of them may secretly be self-conscious thugs muddying the water. Others are clearly sincere. — Eee

You can't possibly tell me they support Trump sincerely even now. He's more of a troll candidate than ever. Conservatives like the fact that he pisses off "libtards". I can't prove what Trumpists really think, but don't you think that if conservatives were genuinely politically engaged, then they would at least make an effort to find out whether Fox News talking points match the facts rather than judging them solely by the criterion of whether or not they piss off liberals? It's not hard to discover that this is the quality of reporting you get on Fox News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vMK-p6-M5E Yes, there are complete patsies who are incapable of verifying the truth, but surely they are in a minority?

I thought we already had a fairly good idea of why people support Trump. There are demographics in America that are losing their social status and falling back into the situation faced by the non-white poor. We know from empirical studies that losing what you have creates more fear than gaining more stuff brings satisfaction. We also know from terror management theory that people become more conservative and extremist when they are afraid. There have been extensive analyses of the structure of right-wing talking points commonly found on the internet: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ

Since I can't prove what they really think, all I can do is keep gesturing at the inconsistencies in this picture. I mean, we know that people active in politics tend to at least be aware of the facts themselves. Well, there are 200 women who are accusing Trump of sexual assault or rape. Are you seriously telling me that the women who support Trump now are rationally defending a different set of values? If that's possible, I can't honestly say I understand it. At least I'm not alone in seeing that something is off about these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEpLKRkVFwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMcAwqsk3eg

And many choose Trump as a stand against something they perceive as a matriarchy, a culture of not of the guilty but the sick. — Eee

This is just the thing. There is no matriarchy. Ergo, they hate the truth. They claim to love it, of course, but they are clearly lying.

Anyway, the Trumpians are our neighbors. So what does that mean? — Eee

Personally, I think conservatives are my Neighbors. We should be fighting for their interests too, at least insofar as these are universally emancipatory and not oppressive towards others, while mourning the fact that they are actively trying to screw us over for shits and giggles, but I can't say for sure that Zizek would agree. After all, they are not comrades.

Zizek has said many times that he loves reading intelligent conservative theorists, but I don't remember him addressing their place in the community. He keeps going on about how everyone fighting for universal causes should join one macro-rebellion, and how he sees the perfect figure of this dream in the alliance between Bernie and AOC, an old white guy (like Zizek) and a young colored woman joining forces for everyone's benefit.

Exactly, and liberals are (some of them) trying to install a new type of man. — Eee

Zizek doesn't stand for Leftism per se so much as breadth of vision. Leftism just happens to be closer to universal emancipation than conservatism.

Also is Derrida's Spurs the 'man' (a mode of personality and not a biological sex) identifies his face with his mask. His mask is his face. The woman knows that she is faceless, that she is nothing but a system of masks concealing a void. — Eee

That's exactly right. This is a deep issue.

To a masculine subject, his world consists of objects, though some of them are subjective projections. Some feminists protest against the objectification of women. While agreeing that objectification can be harmful, Zizek points out that objectification is not the primary patriarchal fantasy. The patriarchal fantasy is women enjoying giving pleasure to men. With his usual tact, he illustrates this with the example of porn, where the man is an objectified tool and the primary content is the woman's pleasure. It is this pleasure of the subordinate which titillates the exploiter. This is not objectification so much as a false (secondary) subjectification where the woman is not a monstrous Neighbor but a friendly subject somehow created by a perfect subdivision of society (Stage 7). Therefore, true freedom is the freedom to partially objectify yourself in whatever manner pleases you.

For Zizek, sexuality is a Hegelian triad. Masculinity is the substance, femininity is the void and "transgender" is loosely the real antinomy, the inability to commit to either of them. The rise in sublimity from masculinity to transgender is the radical negativity operative in the return of the repressed. Meanwhile, the desublimation from transgender to masculinity is a form of speciation, a move towards positive substance.

In general, this is how Hegelian triads are structured for Zizek, by the difference between the two voids. Contemporary philosophers have all but given up trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for empirical objects. This is the ambiguity dividing the idea from what it's not, but this ambiguity is not identical with the other void, namely the negation of an idea. When a subject grasps an object, it follows conceptual categories down to the unit level, such as animal, mammal, human. But at the unit level, it finds the three stages of subjectivation, substance (Stage 3), void (Stage 2) and the ambiguity between them (Stage 1). Human is the substance, the "and nothing else" is the void and the ambiguity is the difference between these two. In line with Hegel, the substance is the thesis, the void is its negation, and the ambiguity is the negation of the negation. It's a bit abstruse, but an example of an really existing ambiguity could be a man created in a lab from scratch, only inspired by the real thing. Is he human or not? He is, as it were, a man who is not a man, in the flesh. This ambiguity is what Zizek calls the absolute Real.

A foundational antinomy or undecidability is the source of Zizek's metaphysics. Immanuel Kant says that Reason as understood by (primarily Leibnizian) idealism runs into antinomies or relativisms in trying to provide a complete description of the world. The dynamic antinomies say that Reason is unable to decide whether or not there are exceptions to the order of the world. Namely, whether or not there are "spontaneous" exceptions to deterministic causality (Bohmian mechanics versus the Copenhagen interpretation) and whether or not there is a necessary entity of some sort within the world or beyond it (theism versus atheism). These dynamic antinomies are a negative point of contact with the noumenal Sublime, of whose positive content we can have no knowledge. How does that work? The Rational Being is confronted by neighbors with immensely greater worldly might than his own, money, health, wealth, and so on, or he feels on the point of being blown away by a natural disaster like a storm. But with the dynamic antinomies in mind, he feels the supernatural weight of moral principles that transcend the order of the natural world. Thus he is enabled to think of natural might as insignificant and sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. In para-Freudian terms, a man acts as though the world is lawful (castration anxiety), but there is an exception to this rule whose existence is ambiguous (object small a).

According to Kant, the mathematical antinomies say that Reason is constitutionally unable to ascertain the extent of the world. Namely, whether or not the world is infinite in extent (multiverse theories) and whether or not the world is composed of elements of finite size (analytic philosophy calls the various possibilities junk, gunk and hunk: search plato.stanford.edu for these terms). Zizek argues that the mathematical antinomies are an alternative negative point of contact with the noumenal Sublime. The Rational Being is confronted with a mass of immense size that, for one's tiny material body, appears impossible to shift. However, Reason presents the mind with the idea of an object exactly like the one present before the senses, except literally infinite in extent. Comparing the immovable object with actual infinity, the Rational Being sizes up sensuous reality, responds, "Is that all?" and sacrifices oneself rather than bending before natural might. The feminine subject thus has an opening to reject boundaries placed on her by Master figures in the form of social roles or biological natures. This coincides with the aims of feminism by supporting women in their quest to lose their traditional chains along with the benefits it may have compensated them with according to Chesterton. In para-Freudian terms, a woman acts as though not everything is subject to finitude (non-all), while at the same time ambiguously admitting that nothing is free from subjection to the law (castration anxiety).

Because femininity locates the transcendence of nature in the terms supplied by the world, not as moral principles insisting from beyond it, femininity is pure subjectivity that does not rely on the perception of external objects such as "principles". Because castration anxiety is experienced as ambient noise in femininity while it constitutes the foremost experience of masculinity, masculinity is a paper tiger that has been contingently cut out from the radicalism immanent in the feminine subject. Since we can never actually access the noumenal, men are constitutionally terrified of being "unmanned" somehow.

Moreover, there is no noumenal world. Kant produces his conclusions by analyzing the gap between the empirical world and noumenal reality. The Ljubljana school says that there is a void immanent to the world of ideas dividing them from within. The void of undecidability is what functions as the "gap" in place of the boundary between the two worlds. Kant says we can know nothing positive about the noumenal and his philosophy positively depends on us being ignorant of what these are, so we lose nothing by doing away with them altogether.

Often the thinkers I like take the side of the woman, the goddess. Her sons are the masks that think they are faces. The philosopher or analyst is like a woman who wears the right mask for the task at hand. — Eee

Zizek would say that men who promote "feminine"-centrism are often disseminating patriarchal ideas by putting women on a pedestal. Have you noticed how often chauvinists argue that women were truly free in traditional society, which lets them be women, cooking and cleaning to their heart's content? Have you noticed how many neopagans, people who, claim to worship goddesses, are Nazis? The founder of Armenian neopaganism was himself a radical ultranationalist. Many forms of traditional paganism are also unfriendly to women's liberation. The danger of conceptualizing femininity as a positive substance is that our very idea of what femininity is has been shaped by traditional gender roles. Truly freeing women means letting them be as "manly" as they want to be (though no more).

Also, if I can be a straight male chauvinist for a moment, there is nothing hotter than a woman doing manly things. Just watch the video of the Primal Father in contemporary media that I will link somewhere. Sometimes I wonder whether the men who want women to be women are all gay. Since when do boys actually want girls to do girly shit? That's just surreal!

There are lots of ways to use these symbols — Eee

Here we return to the foundational antinomy.

The maximally masculine position is something like the mad emperor who no longer bothers to justify his will in terms of the universal. — Eee

I believe this is called the figure of the Primal Father. Surprisingly, Lacanians classify him as a feminine figure. Here's an example from contemporary media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPE0n8mtD_Q Classical examples include Pan and Dionysus in The Bacchae. In early modernity, Casanova and Don Juan were salient. In the 20th century, there was Dr. Frank-N-Furter. The most popular version outside the West is probably Krishna's Rasa Lila: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJLzaCSZQyI https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/10/29/ https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/10/33/

Zizek says perversity is the necessary dark shadow of the injunction to obey the law. I would elaborate, but this is what he talks about half the time. He also says God is the figure of the ultimate criminal. It would be very Hegelian to say that femininity is nothing but maximal masculinity. As you bring each form of consciousness to its limit, you enter the next.

This reminds me of Derrida. — Eee

Zizek probably thinks Derrida is too feminine. Femininity is a necessary limit of masculinity, but the ordinary subject is masculine, and that's what interests Zizek. "The day after the revolution..."

The serious political thinker must read the ironist as an irresponsible child. But the ironist can also read the serious political thinker as lost in the illusion that he has a face. — Eee

Zizek is the philosopher of our inability to commit to either. Neurosis is freedom.

The son gives up on the existence of the secret, and the false father gives up on his claim to possess it. — Eee

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analyst is a master who forces the subject to be free. He does this by pretending to be an oracle and letting the subject talk until until she speaks the fateful Word that he must repeat back to her. The analyst's job is identify that Word among all the things she says and keep bringing it up until it is forced to fall into her World and complete her subjectivation so that she can stop repeating her pathological behavior.

And all of this spiel is only bearable or sensible within the fraternity (or sorority if anyone prefers, since the human is not essentially sexed. Reason's only genital is the tongued mouth.) — Eee

I really should point out that according to Zizek, the subject inside Plato's Cave is essentially masculine and the subject outside it is essentially feminine regardless of biological sex. These are two different subjectivities.

The masculine subject is the one who keeps feeling confronted by worldly might that surpasses his, against which he sacrifices his sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. His foremost experience is the castration anxiety of being unable to perfectly fulfill the law and hence not being a real man. You see, Kant says you can never be sure whether or not you are truly upholding the law or being driven by pathological desires for worldly gain. But he ambiguously admits that some figures represent constitutive exceptions to the law, namely the moral principles themselves, feminine subjects and father figures.

The feminine subject is the one that feels confronted by massive barriers and sees no problem with sacrificing herself on the justification, incomprehensible to the masculine subject, that the barrier is not literally infinite in extent and it is therefore insignificant. All the while, she openly admits that all things are subject to the law without any exceptions.

It's the same contradiction with a slight shift in perspective. The manly man relies on others to tell him what to do and feels like a failure if he doesn't obey, but he chooses the people or ideas that he is determined to obey and switches these all the time based on what he himself wants. The feminine subject just does what she wants without going through all this rigmarole of manliness. She has left Plato's Cave.

Nevertheless, it is femininity that is shakier and based on a fundamental pretense of being feminine. Every non-pathological subject is "really" a Stage 4 primary subject regardless of sex, ridden with the guilt of failing to uphold the law. And yet, femininity is a pretense that we really cannot do without.

How this relates to my original post would require another massive rant all by itself. The material is endless, so I'm moving on.

To me the secret symbolizes an immediate access to truth, perfectly present to a perfectly distinct ego. — Eee

For once, Zizek actually agrees that immediacy is a myth. His formulation is something like, there is a void of ambiguity traversing the world of ideas, splitting each idea from within: "A rose that is not X is no rose at all, where X is the void of ambiguity in the heart of the ideal Rose," is the feminine formulation. "That is a rose and nothing else, where that nothing is a thing-like void," is the masculine formulation.

To understand the latter, recall Hegel's attempt to base becoming on being and nothing. Although I have to say, I don't think "a rose and nothing else" works. A better formulation would be "the rose that is not a rose" as a thing that blurs the boundaries of Roseness.

This void replaces the Kantian gap between the experiential and noumenal worlds, serves as the grounding for the Kantian antinomies, and therefore form the basis of dialectics.

I agree that the complexity is part of the fun. When you lose all hope, you spend your time giggling at word games of infinite complexity.

Doubting with Zizek the end of inquiry, I think instead we'll never know who we are. — Eee

I don't know if you'll read all this, but thanks again. Real life beckons once more.

This is what all the fighting about. It's the clash of groups with different notions of the ideal community. — Eee

Zizek thinks we should give up that notion entirely for all the reasons I've been going on about.

A person could also hate themselves in retrospect for 'wasting' their whole life trying. — Eee

The Cause is not tied to any future perfection we're trying to reach. We are fighting out of sheer desperation, because we have run out of options, and we must. Zizek doesn't believe in progress, only the fight itself. If anything comes of it, that's a bonus, though definitely contextual and probably a temporary one. In terms of pessimism, he's right up there with David Benatar.

They are also soldiers of emancipation & truth, in their own eyes. — Eee

I don't believe that they believe it. If they had faith in their Cause, they wouldn't be so consistently wrong about every single detail. But they clearly only care about winning arguments out of pure spite, not being authentic. There is no ideal theory that is specifically Leftist. They can all can be subverted into serving conservatism if people refuse to care enough.

If you want to know what I think of Trumpists, here's a video from a channel I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZkFtTQjF5A I think they are all more or less guided by perverse motivations like that. I think so because I know a Trump supporter on the internet who is clearly aware of the truth about everything, but he still supports Trump because he identifies as a conservative and he's terrified that liberals are out to get him. Honestly, I admire him for having the courage to tell the truth like that.

The idea that race, gender, nationality is a merely surface is an expression of humanism. — Eee

Zizek would beg to differ. He doesn't want us to identify with the humanity of others. There is no comradeship in mere identification. He wants us to choose love despite our differences. Whether comrades are human, robot or alien, if they are on the side of liberating everyone, Zizek doesn't care.

Isn't it also latent in the Cause of emancipating others? — Eee

If you believe Zizek's theory, we love the Neighbor to save ourselves. Dedication to the Cause might lead to more physical pain, but everything else Hurts lots more in a spiritual way, as explicated by materialist psychoanalysis. That's the theory whose outlines I tried to explain above. I see three choices:

1. Die to uphold the Sinthome. Makes no sense if you don't believe it was created by God.

2. Try to fix the Sinthome by splitting people into finer and finer subdivisions. Won't work because yours is a spiritual sickness whose pain can only be dulled by freely choosing love.

3. Love the Neighbor in a spirit of comradeship.

Are you proposing a fourth?

To answer playfully, from you & Zizek. — Eee

The "community" you quoted me referring to consists of the subject inside Plato's Cave, the subject outside it and the "difference" between them. That is as far from ideal as you can possibly imagine. That "we" are the people who see each other as a monstrous Neighbor that pokes their psychic wounds.

This is not to say that all community is bad in Zizek's philosophy. The "good" community comes from comradeship in the same Cause of universal emancipation. As you might imagine, there is no perfection here either, virtual or otherwise.

Thank you for the clarifications. I hope you're not tired of this debate because I finally found time for it.

I can't love the neighbor. I can't hold that occasional love fixed. Nor can I believe in the shattering of pride, but only in the transformation of its object. — Eee

The love that's required is not a sentimental outpouring, only joining the same Cause as comrades. Don't be too proud to love your Neighbor. That's the only way to prevent the Sinthome from killing us all.

And who are we emancipating for what? — Eee

Once you can leave Zizek's version of Plato's Cave, the only Causes that makes sense are universal rebellions against oppression. For example, Zizek endorses ultimately creating a society where everyone will be free to develop their latent potential to the fullest.

As to method, Zizek proposes advancing in steps that are so reasonable that they are hard for the powers that be to argue against, but so "ideologically" shocking that accepting them creates a slippery slope. Personally, I think that's a bit naive. There is no step so small that the powers that be won't be able to rile up their base against it. If you ask for the right to breathe, conservatives will be up in arms, demanding that the government ban air. I think we should begin by asking for their necks and have them negotiate us down to what we wanted from the start.

Stop dreaming and fix the world, you fakers! — Eee

No one is endorsing this, Zizek least of all. His motto is "Don't act. Just think!" The world can't be "fixed" by creating totalized utopias. But if you want nothing fixed, then you want me to compromise with what I desire, and I won't live like a monk to please your ideological tastes!

Even the GOP thinks it fights for freedom. — Eee

Not being an American, I'm not familiar with the specifics of the GOP, but from what I do know, their approach is fundamentally obscurantist, appealing to the preservation of the American way of life, etc. Obscurantist "justice" corresponds to Stage 7, and represents everything Zizek is fundamentally opposed to. Stage 8 revolutionary justice starts from the standpoint of those left out by the system and potentially appeals to everyone.

Hate is silly. I think the basic understanding is that if my boss refuses to hire people who are willing to do each job for the least wages out of compassion for his employees, then any competitor who lacks these scruples will use her edge in profit to expand beyond his means and put him out of business in the (extremely) long run. If my boss must is forced to buy my labor at competitively cheap prices on pain of bankruptcy; that is, if he gets to be my boss only on the condition that he exploits me as much as everyone else, then we are dealing with a systemic problem, not a moral one.

How did you reach that notion of ideal community? Who says that a community within those parameters is ideal? Zizek says that the "end of inquiry" is itself an impossible fantasy.

Regarding emancipation, dedication to the Cause leads to salvation in the purely negative sense that you'd hate yourself if you didn't do it. But you're right, why you'd hate yourself needs to be motivated by a lot of material from Badiou. Unfortunately, I haven't read a single one of his books.

Yes, but personal behaviour is a lot more important than the policies they advocate. It's easy to advocate the good from a distance. It's easy to "love mankind" from far away. Anyone can do that. But when it comes to loving real men and women who are closeby, not many are able to. — Agustino

I don't agree with this at all. There are a lot of people who are nice to people they know, but don't advocate love for people they don't. It is important to do both, since both have a measurable effect, but the latter has a much stronger effect. In the past, I would have said that your immediate relations have a stronger effect on the world, but I have come to disagree with my past self. I don't agree that Bertrand Russell had a net negative effect on the welfare of mankind even if I thought he was particularly horrible to those around him, which I don't to begin with. There are people who pretend to be loving to those around them, but with their insincerity, destroy them emotionally. Bertrand Russell was not one of those people.

(And that last class of behaviors is made worse by those who preach selfless love. Honesty is better than going through the motions of selflessness. (Of course, some people might be such good actors that they fool everyone forever. That wouldn't be particularly harmful. Here I'm thinking of the studies which show that children of divorced parents do better than the children of parents who fight all the time, for example.) Those who can achieve true selflessness are of course saints, but I don't believe in the existence of training regimens that can turn ordinary people into saints.)

I think it's naive to assign a 100% credibility to science (even science doesn't claim absolute knowledge). — TheMadFool

As I have already explained, your claim that I am assigning 100% credibility to science is a false statement. I am not assigning 100% credibility to science. I am simply using the argument from science as one rational argument for the nonexistence of vitalism, which is a fair move. After presenting an argument for the nonexistence of vitalism, I await an argument from your side that seeks to rationally establish the existence of vitalism, contrary to the argument I have presented for its nonexistence.

Secondly, using mathematical tools to reject, as you put it, the universal set is a misapplication of math. — TheMadFool

I do not think it is a misapplication of math for the following reason: We study the properties of objects using logic, and logic is a field of math. Just as there is no total object in math, there is no total object in logic either. We cannot discuss the meaning of totality as such if we cannot enumerate its properties by means of logic.

Now perhaps you do not mean totality as such but the totality of something called "life". This brings us back to square one: What do you mean by "life"? On the basis of two reasonable interpretations of that word, I have presented two meanings of life in my first post.

But suppose you don't want my arbitrary interpretations. What you want is the meaning of life in the sense of "life, the universe, and everything". That sense of "life" is identical to logical totality as such, and for the above reasons, it doesn't exist.

Look, take the word "dragon". By itself, it's just a word that can be used to refer to phenomena as diverse as fire-breathing dragons, Komodo dragons and leafy seadragons. Now suppose I were to argue that because Komodo dragons and leafy seadragons exist, we know that "dragons" exist. Now that we have established that "dragons" exist, fire-breathing dragons must also exist. This example clearly exposes the structure of the fallacy. Whether "dragons" exist or not depends entirely on the kind of "dragons" we're talking about. Komodo dragons and leafy seadragons exist, but fire-breathing dragons do not. Similarly, biological life exists, but vitalistic life and life as totality do not.

On that basis, what I'm saying is that whether life exists or not depends completely on the definition you attach to the word "life", which by itself, is just a word. In accordance with your chosen definition, "the meaning of life" also changes. Biological life exists, but it does not lead to a "meaning of life" of the kind that we are talking about. If you do pick a "meaning of life" of the kind that we are talking about, then you are left with definitions of life like vitality or totality. But if you pick those definitions, then life does not exist. The existence of biological life is completely irrelevant to the existence of vitality or totality. I don't know how much more clearly I can put it.

(Try reading my first post again in that context. See if that makes more sense. There, I present two example meanings of life using two distinct definitions of "life" that I see being commonly used.)

The biological definition of life - nutrition, growth, reproduction, irritability, etc. very basic. — TheMadFool

Let me get this straight: When you are asking me for the "meaning of life", you want to know what biological life means? I don't think that is at all the usual sense in which most people use the phrase "meaning of life". I think most people use it in senses like: what it all means (totality), what is the meaning of spontaneity (vitality), and so on.

I don't think you want to speculate on what biological life means. The world of biology is a cruel place. Biologically, life means eat or be eaten, grow your raw power to levels that outstrip the competition, find the healthiest mate and pump out lots of babies every season: http://ia902506.us.archive.org/25/items/shortpoetry132_1406_librivox/spc132_ishallforgetyoupresently_ss_128kb.mp3 Because that is what the existence of your species depends on and what you have been selected for. If you don't, then your life is a failure as far as the interests of biology proper extend.

That's the meaning of life, biologically speaking. It's like you're a character in an RPG. Not what anyone is asking for.

In my humble opinion, Life is a definition and can't be argued unto. — TheMadFool

Having a definition of "unicorn" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to argue for their existence. Why should it be different for life?

Your definition of life is different. Please clarify it further. — TheMadFool

I have already given several definitions of life including vitality, totality and biological life. What is your definition of life?

Definitely.

http://ia801300.us.archive.org/25/items/thebabballads_1507_librivox/thebabballads_13_gilbert_64kb.mp3

I think the problem with the premise of this thread is the idea that if you can find a truly virtuous thinker and learn his ideas, then you can be virtuous too. I don't believe that's how human nature works. There are all too many people mouthing virtuous phrases and simultaneously making nuisances of themselves in the realm of action. These people think certain ideas are wonderfully virtuous, but when they try to put them in practice, they find an inner resistance they cannot overcome. Listen to that rebellious voice in yourself. Unless you are clinically insane, you will probably be a better person if you carefully work out what exactly you want to do and then do it instead of holding on to virtuous-seeming ideas like fetishes that shield you against having to make the effort to be a nicer person like you've always wanted to be.

As for Bertrand Russell, his philosophy has very little to do with personal morality, so charges of sexual misconduct are irrelevant when evaluating his ideas, but I really don't believe that adultery is always wrong. I'm not just saying that.

It is absolutely true that most of our ideas are socially constructed, but it still does not follow that they are not constructed with reference to something else. Those other things are true facts insofar as we know them. The problem is that saying our ideas are ONLY socially constructed tries to abstract away entities that, in fact, bear high degrees of logical relevance to our practice of reasoning. The other problem comes from people who insist that our ideas are not socially constructed at all. For example, if Newtonian mechanics was taken to be a true fact instead of a social construction, then we might have tried to burn Einstein as a heresiarch for proposing relativity. So the element of social construction cannot be abstracted away either. We cannot do without either true facts or socially constructed theories.

I was comparing the Buddha's philosophy with his life in accordance with the theme of this thread. I did not know your position on Buddhism. Since you mentioned the Buddha, I wanted to find out.

The one great thing the Buddha did was his vow to sit down and not get up until he gained understanding or died. I'm largely pro-desire even in cases where most people would disagree. I was on the Buddha's side when he desired understanding more than his own life.

I don't agree with much else in Buddhism. I particularly dislike his parable of the arrow. When you are shot by a poisoned arrow, you should do that which you truly desire. If that desire is to understand the characteristics of the arrow more than saving your own life, then that is exactly what you ought to do. How else did the Buddha reach awakening? Not by loving his own little life, that's for sure.

Of course, in the Buddhist context, "life" is to be understood as freedom from suffering, abandoning desire is the cure, and so on, but I think those are all the wrong generalizations from how the Buddha actually found freedom from suffering in his own life: By giving in to the desire to understand more than holding on to little scruples like prolonging his life.

Life long celibacy is as acceptable as marriage in Christianity - in fact it is even encouraged more than marriage. — Agustino

So you reject Luther's interpretation of the "command to marry". I'm not saying he required everyone to marry, but Protestants usually consider marriage to be a component of a perfect Christian life. Considering Kierkegaard was lucky enough to actually find love and have it reciprocated, the idea that Protestants wouldn't be more in favor of marriage than not confuses me. Assuming you're in Western Christianity at all, you must be a Nondenominationalist or in a denomination that is relaxed about personal interpretations.

Even if that is so, there's nothing much to get out of this only life. — Agustino

But this statement is empirically false. This life does in fact offer many opportunities that people do in fact desire if their own words are to be believed.

Not all people are meant to marry. K. knew that if he had married he would have to abandon his devotion to God and to philosophy. — Agustino

Isn't Kierkegaard's behavior especially strange from a Protestant perspective? Marriage is supposed to be an expression of one's devotion to God. The love between God and His church is the love between husband and wife united in holy matrimony, right?

But I have never been a Christian, so any of that is liable to be a misunderstanding.

>:O So what? There's not much to get out of life anyway. — Agustino

On the contrary, this life is all there is to get anything out of at all. There is nothing else.

I'm not a Catholic ;) — Agustino

Sorry, please excuse my brain's automatic pattern matching.

I'm surprised you like Kant. Isn't he on the Catholic banned books list?

Epictetus
Marcus Aurelius
Socrates
Musonius Rufus
Epicurus (I know he was supposedly a hedonist but he lived an exemplary life by most accounts)
Aquinas
G.K. Chesterton
Blaise Pascal
Sören Kierkegaard
Immanuel Kant — Agustino

I like some Stoic ideas about changing what you can and accepting the rest, but their theories of what it is possible to change were seriously flawed and turned them into obsequious supporters of traditional power.

I don't like Pascal's unabashed support for inauthentic ways of life. "Do it and you'll come to believe it" is not even good Christian doctrine and can be used to support any number of criminal enterprises.

Kierkegaard... Look, I have nothing against bachelorhood, but having a lady love, believing in marriage and never proposing to her? I want to believe there was something more to his choice than cowardice, but I have not yet been able to figure it out to my satisfaction.

I love Kant. If I force myself to come up with a criticism, I can't deny the dude lived his life like a wind up toy. His withdrawal from the specifics of everyday life allowed him to discover an abstraction whose beauty and wonder hasn't aged to this day. Kant is my favorite reasonable ascetic.

A lot of you guys seem to like Christian thinkers. One name I haven't seen mentioned so far is Rudolf Eucken. He wasn't perfect, but I like him. His philosophy was called "activism", so you can already imagine what his life was like.

I'm ready to agree to disagree. I have never been involved in adultery or fornication myself, but I honestly don't see the harm in all circumstances.

Does Chesterton's support of WWI not move you the tiniest bit?

I am against divorce when poor men dump wives who are unable to support themselves. Bertrand Russell moved in other circles.

I'm not particularly opposed to adultery and fornication, depending on how much others were hurt and in what ways. But even if I were against it in all situations, I would still say that level of commitment in opposition to unjust war is on a different scale of moral courage than minor sexual infractions. Do those even count when compared side by side?

Bertrand Russell founded analytic philosophy and sat in jail for his opposition to WWI, which some for perspective, GK Chesterton gleefully supported.

By the same standards using which you are evaluating whether it is a question or an answer, that is true. However, it is still possible for the same thing to be a question by one set of standards and an answer by another. That's what I was trying to explain.

Wait a minute, when you say "meaning of life", are you referring to life in the biological sense? The biological definition of life involves passing down genetic traits through reproduction. I must say, calling that the "meaning of life" is a bit cruelly reductive even for me.

Science is not the ''soul'' authority on truth. — TheMadFool

Maybe not, but the argument from science is at least one rational argument. Where is the argument that life exists?

But the set of all living things is not a living thing. So, if you talk of the universal set, you wouldn't be talking about ''life''. Let's talk of the subset of the universal set - living things. — TheMadFool

Maybe I was unclear about what I was doing. I have already addressed that sense of life in point 1. Some people use life to mean "everything". This other definition of life is addressed in point 2.

This whole approach of distinguishing between definitions and addressing them separately is my meta-solution to the meaning of life. All that desire and politics stuff were examples of how such an approach might play out in practice.

I worded that in a very specific way: "But when you have to choose..." If you must choose between enjoying yourself and storing up the means to enjoy yourself, then as a rule of thumb, it is better to go with the latter lest you run out of resources. But whenever possible, it is better to do both.

This is going to sound strange, but I believe that the only difference between a question and an assertion is a sense of dissatisfaction that is produced in the former case. This is my take on the fact that if an answer is analytically derivable from a problem statement, then it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish the answer from the problem itself. Every question is an answer if you are satisfied with it, and every answer is a question if you are not.

Wherever I say "satisfaction", I am actually using the formalizable concept of type checking. When you call something a question, you are saying that's not the type of thing you are looking for. When you call something an answer, that thing passes your quality controls, whatever those might be. This is why a lot of the, "The answer is that the world is a question." theories are actually category errors. It is possible for a question to be an answer, but only in the context of a type hierarchy.

What I mean by this is that a question can be an answer when the type of thing that passes your quality controls produces a dissatisfaction in a way that is unrelated to the evaluation you are currently undertaking in a self-referential way. There are at least two levels here: At level 1, there is a thing X that produces dissatisfaction in process of evaluation P. At level 2, there is a distinct process of evaluation Q that is satisfied with X in case it fails for P. In that case, X is a question for P and an answer for Q. Confusing P with Q leads to the class of category errors where one thing is simultaneously a question and an answer for the same process of evaluation.

Having said that, quality controls are relative to the agents undertaking processes of evaluation. For example, there is nothing inherently wrong with an agent which is satisfied with an answer like, "The meaning of life is, 'the meaning of life'." Such an agent produces no dissatisfaction when presented with the phrase "the meaning of life". For it, "the meaning of life" is an answer in the same way as 2+2=4. Whether such an agent is suitable for any of your purposes is a different question.