Schiller is definitely interesting, going beyond Kant in so.e important ways. Hegel was a great appreciator, and even more of Goethe, who he called his "father," but Hegel gets so cerebral at times that you'd hardly know it unless you knew where to look!

IMHO, the Romantics at least partially recover something quite important, although I think the radical deflation of the way "reason," "intellect," and the "will" came to be conceived prior to this era stopped the full recovery of a much richer, earlier aesthetics. Sadly, Beauty and Nature still end up being something somewhat "irrational" (sometimes just to the extent they are truly desirable), instead of being the very thing "sought for its own sake" that can orient any "rationality" at all.

In the Romantic period, this ideal comes to be identified with beauty. Schiller takes on board the notion he finds in Shaftesbury and Kant, that our response to
beauty is distinct from desire; it is, to use the common term of the time, “disinterested”; just as it is also distinct, as Kant said as well, from the moral imperative in us. But then Schiller argues that the highest mode of being comes where the moral and the appetitive are perfectly aligned in us, where our action for the good is over-determined; and the response which expresses this alignment is just the proper response to beauty, what Schiller calls “play” (Spiel). We might even say that it is
beauty which aligns us.11

This doctrine had a tremendous impact on the thinkers of the time; on Goethe (who was in a sense, one of its co-producers, in intensive exchange with Schiller), and on those we consider “Romantics” in the generally accepted sense. Beauty as the fullest form of unity, which was also the highest form of being, offers the definition of the true end of life; it is this which calls us to go beyond moralism, on one side, or a mere pursuit of enlightened interest, on the other. The Plato of the Symposium returns, but without the dualism and the sublimation. Hölderlin will call his ideal female companion, at first in theory, and then in the reality of Suzette Gontard, “Diotima”. But this name returns not as that of an older, wiser teacher, but in the form of a (hoped for) mate. (Of course, it ended tragically, but that’s because reality cannot live up to such an ideal)

From the standpoint of this anthropology of fusion and beauty, we can understand one of the central criticisms that the Romantic age levelled at the disengaged,
disciplined, buffered self, and the world it had built. Beauty required the harmonious fusion of moral aspiration and desire, hence of reason and appetite. The accusation against the dominant conceptions of disciplined self and rational order was that they had divided these, that they had demanded that reason repress, deny feeling; or alternatively, that they had divided us, confined us in a desiccating reason which had alienated us from our deeper emotions.


-Charles Taylor "A Secular Age"

Still, I think Taylor is pointing to a pernicious dualism that remains unresolved here. It reminds me a bit of what made the Desert Fathers stand out from Pagan ascetics, the embrace of the emotions, embodiment, the passions, and the appetites to the extent that they are "rightly oriented" towards true beauty, hence "The Love of Beauty," (as opposed to love of wisdom) being a popular title for anthologies from the Fathers.

:up:

Yes, definitely.

Political Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, by Peter L. P. Simpson.
(See also: Response)

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (reread)
China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties by Mark Edward Lewis

“Infinite Jest” - What’s up with that?

Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

I sometimes feel I ought to read that, but tennis and drug addiction have always been turn offs for me.

sometimes feel I ought to read that, but tennis and drug addiction have always been turn offs for me. — Jamal

Every year - well, for two years now - my daughter and I read a really long book together. Last year we read the “Power Broker.” This year it’s “Infinite Jest.” My younger son and his girlfriend are reading it with us this year. Just a hundred pages a month. The criteria is it must be a very long book that we would never finish on our own.

It’s hilarious. I rarely laugh out loud at books, but I do all the time with this one. It’s also difficult to follow, non-linear, and absurd. I think It would be accurate to call it magical realism. I’m sure many will scoff, but it reminds me of “100 Years of Solitude” sometimes. The language is amazing - obscure, playful, and funny. I’d hate to read this without Kindle. The characters are goofy and damaged, but mostly sympathetic.

It’s clear to me that, after about 250 pages, I would’ve quit by now if I wasn’t under pressure from my family. Which is the whole point of doing things this way.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (reread) — Maw

How does it hold up? Read it in the 1990's.

Very cool TC. I tried to get a "buddy read" going with my brother but he postponed it for so long I couldn't wait any longer and read it myself (One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was (5/5); who knows, maybe DFW was influenced by it, although I imagine the surrealism in Infinite Jest is just as likely to have come out of his love of David Lynch movies).

How disruptive do you find the endnotes?

Very well, particularly in light of the emergence of generative AI, or just in general our ability to view and consume any type of content from high art to gutter slop on our phones or multiple devices simultaneously.

I also found the line, "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics to political life," quite poignant.

How disruptive do you find the endnotes? — Jamal

I am not sure what you mean by disruptive. I love them, they’re wonderful - funnier than the main text. It’s another reason I wouldn’t read this without Kindle. I probably would never turn to the back to look at them. With Kindle, all I have to do is push a little hyper text button.

:cool:

Well, since the popular ideal of reading is smooth uninterrupted flow, and I'd heard people say the endnotes were a disruption of that flow, I wondered if you'd experienced them in the same way. But yeah, that kind of thing doesn't bother me anyway.

Maybe those people weren't reading the e-book.

Yeah, that’s why I can’t imagine reading it without Kindle. The flow is barely disrupted at all - and the tumbling, rumbling flow is one of the best parts.

Am reading several papers on Salomon Maimon, probably going to read his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy sometime this year. Very interesting stuff, if not a bit too technical for my tastes.

My Goodreads is in my bio

My Goodreads is in my bio — IntolerantSocialist

Welcome to the forum. You should tell us about something you have been reading that you particularly like or particularly hate.

:up:

Edited.

El asesinato del perdedor (Translation in English is not available) by Camilo José Cela.

Welcome to the forum. You should tell us about something you have been reading that you particularly like or particularly hate. — T Clark

I did not care for B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom And Dignity" because of its attempt to ground human action into non-material qualities. although I think he might have a point here and there I always thought there was more to it than that, possibly a third quality to human action beyond consciousness and the action itself.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset "Revolt Of The Masses" was satisfying though as I sensed much that's wrong with the world is more or less due to the opinions of those who do not examine their life closely.

right now, though, I'm reading John Searle "Mind, Language And Society". So far he seems to be making a case for Enlightenment-era realism such as Thomas Reid, contrary to David Hume, the idea that certain processes in nature must correlate or the various fields of the natural sciences and social sciences cannot "hang together" as he states. Right now I just got done with the chapter on consciousness, he asserts that consciousness is the highest or a higher level of biological brain processes just as say, digestion is for the stomach and intestines. Later on, he used the metaphor of an automobile's different contraptions all the way down to the chemical reactions of CO2 to explain that there's a biological basis for all of it while asserting that we "cannot disprove consciousness" like we can disprove the sun "setting" (he alludes to the illusion of a setting sun as the rotation of the earth around the sun to say how it disappears on the horizon), so its not something that can be reduced further than appearances.

Germinal by Émile Zola

Blinding, Book Two: The Body by Mircea Cărtărescu.

The narrative and imagination of Mircea are just amazing. I am addicted to his trilogy called 'Orbitor' in Romanian; translated as 'Blinding' in English and 'Cegador' in Spanish. Quite good. It is a constant stream of dreams and hallucinations in 1960s Mircea's Bucharest. :flower: :sparkle:

I've read a few critiques of neo-liberalism in the past few months.

Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" is excellent, and extremely accessible for a book that is working with the ideas of Zizek, Badiou, Baudrillard, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari. I can see why it became such an "instant classic."

Byung-Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" and "The Burnout Society" is in a somewhat similar vein, and very good, but is written more in the abstruse style of this sort of work. I think he is a rare writer who can make it work though, rather than making it tedious. He's also a big Hegel guy, which I always appreciate.


Taking up similar themes is Patrick Deneen's excellent "Why Liberalism Failed," but it approaches the same topic from the lens of traditional political theory and largely offers a critique of our current era in terms of liberalism's ancient and medieval antecedents. The key theme here is that liberty was once defined in terms of self-governance at the individual level (which had to be cultivated and could not be taken for granted), with the assumption that political liberty required a citizenry possessed of this individual liberty and capacity for self-rule. It reminded me a bit of Axel Honneth's typology of negative, reflexive ("inner"), and social freedom in his "Freedom's Right " Honneth likewise picks up on the way modern thought tends to stress negative freedom to the exclusion of reflexive freedom, while many theorists never make it to the "social freedom" that is the focus on Hegel.

Reading these also led me to return to C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man," a classic on a very similar set of topics.

Here is an example of Fisher:

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

He writes this in the context of how images of future ecological apocalypse have become a mainstay of the late-capitalist social imagery. As Deneen says, the assumption that looming crises shall all be fixed by "progress" is a faith that borders on the religious.

But, while I was reading these, at night I was also reading Origen's "On Prayer" and "On First Principles," St. Gregory Palamas' selections for the Philokalia and the Triads, St. Maximus the Confessor's "Centuries on Love," and St. Isaac of Nineveh's "Ascetical Homilies". The interesting thing here is how these come off today as in some ways much more radical and transgerssive than the most radical cutting-edge critiques of neo-liberalism from the contemporary left and right. When Han talks about the death of the "Other," and so of Eros, and he and Fisher (and their sources) talk about the reign of cynicism and death of the sacred, it's very interesting to see the ancient counterpoint (also written by citizens of decadent empires in decline—although St. Isaac and Origen were persecuted minorities in their time). But what also comes out is the unabashed optimism and total lack of cynicism and irony in the older works. It's almost transgressive to be this earnest. David Foster Wallace was another figure who spoke on the tyranny of irony in the era of late-capitalism, and I think any student of the nu/alt-Right can pick up on how cynicism and irony absolutely dominates those spaces (and their leftist mirror images).

Fisher talks about how protest has become a permanent part of late-capitalism. Anti-capitalism itself becomes a product to consume. He speaks of the 1960s spirit as being in some ways childlike, built on this image of a greedy, irrational father figure who restricts the young's access to pleasure out of a sort of sterile and dogmatic I'll will. What needs to be liberated is access to pleasure (e.g. the sexual revolution). This goes along with Han's insight that epithumia, sensuous desire, has come to dominate and push out thymos (spirited desire), and logos (intellectual desire). This is why anger—and Trump's movement is very much one of thymos and anger—is so transgressive today. This trend also means the dominance of what Charles Taylor calls the "immanent frame," a focus on immanent, sensible goods, which seems to dominate even religion and religious politics today (which have been swallowed up by the "Culture War (TM)") In this context, St. Isaac's assertion that:

The world" is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.

...is quite radical. So is St. Gregory Palamas' contention that the only true death is separation from (lack of focus on) the Divine, and that it is a death the living participate in, making them a sort of "living dead," struggling tooth and nail towards nothingness.

But the thing that really struck me is this:

Han has no recommendations. It's straight critique.

Fisher ends in a hopeful note, but it's very vague.

Deneen likewise has extremely vague advice about "building local communities."

Lewis is the only modern author I mentioned who has a strong sense of "what should be done?" This is in pretty marked contrast to Saint Gregory Palamas, Saint Maximus the Confessor, Origen, and Saint Isaac of Nineveh, who are all very confident about "what is to be done." And the difference is not them living in better times. The former two were subject to military raids and dramatic instability. Origen was born in a flourishing era in a rich city to an elite family, but he was a persecuted minority. He watched his father get executed when he was a teen and he would go on to be tortured to death (without recanting). Maximus likewise had his tongue cut out and writing hand lopped odd when he refused to compromise. And yet... the optimism. And this is an optimism that even drips down into the metaphysics. For Origen, Maximus, and Gregory, the "world" is every bit as ugly as Fisher finds late-capitalism—perhaps moreso—and yet being is almost shockingly beautiful, possessed for soaring symmetries, the whole of "what is" a sign of unfathomable beauty. It is very much a study in contrasts.

Anyhow, I particularly like how Fisher and Han call on literature and film so much; it's a great element in their writing. Fisher in particular had a real gift for tying pop culture to complex theory without making his connections feel contrived; his early death was a terrible loss.

I also reread the Divine Comedy for a book idea I was working on recently and it led me to pick up Attar of Nishapur's Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds. If I like this I will probably do Rumi's Masnavi next, which I've tried starting a few times before.

I had the idea for a fantasy novel that would borrow some of the imagery and messaging of the Commedia but put it in more accessible (and action-packed) terms. But then the book would also have a "book within a book" story within a story based on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius now being a powerful sorcerer vizier of course), since the themes of both go well together.

Neil Davidson has a great book on Neoliberalism, What Was Neoliberalism? Studies in the Most Recent Phase of Capitalism, 1973-2008

Just finished re-reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

About to start The Sceptical Feminist.

Imagination in Hume's Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. Costelloe

If you are interested I wrote some gibberish here: https://matthewroffey.substack.com/p/the-state-of-beauty-part-i?r=48ctos

He viewed On the Aesthetic Education of Man as his best work. It really does explore more than mere 'Aesthetics' and looks to approach a means of uniting two distinct parts of human society.