But I want to provide a bit of caution to the idea that the 20th century was uniquely evil. The USA's extermination of the natives and exploitation of Africans and immigrants were liberal precursors to the evils of the 20th century; only the 20th century is more evil because of our abilities to continue the same with more firepower due to technological progress. — Moliere

That's a deep can of worms. If I wanted to get into it I'd want to reference Dialectic of Enlightenment, J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (sceptical towards the dichotomy of humans variously using or misusing technology; it's more like technology is an expression of us and also remakes us), and possibly Straw Dogs by John Gray, but I'm not sure I do right now. It's a good point to bring up though.

I mean I take your point, and certainly the Frankfurt School were fixated on Europe and traumatized by what happened there to the exclusion of everything else, and I should be careful to correct their Eurocentrism. But still, I'm still inclined to say there is something importantly unique in the evil of the twentieth century, and that this wasn't just a technical issue --- I just don't have any arguments as yet.

I appreciate the reflection you've given of Adorno, but I also think that maybe it wasn't just a rejection and rebellion leading to bad outcomes -- the bad outcomes are just what politics are in our age of the nation-state. — Moliere

Yes, I don't want to give the impression that I think, or that Adorno thought, that the worst disasters were brought on by angry youths and revolutionaries. I'm not making the conservative argument here, not exactly. Certainly I agree it's the case that the disasters of the twentieth century were generated by the capitalist and imperialist order, by nationalism, the reaction against the workers' movement leading to fascism, etc., and on a deeper level the inherent movement of Enlightened Europe towards domination, over peope and nature.

I'm just digging down through the layers of Adorno's deep pessimism and shame on behalf of Europe.

Still, I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate that you seem to be jumping back into active participation feet first. Turns out you have interesting things to say. Whoda thunkit, or as the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it - Who would have thunk it? — T Clark

Thank you Top Clark.

Here's one of my favorites. — T Clark

Yeah it's great. I'm sure I could make it relevant.

: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.

One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse. — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Looking at this again and forgetting about myself for the moment, it's interesting to flesh out the context. It was around the time of the First World War that Adorno was a teenager (not that teenagers existed back then). The world of his parents was the world he and Horkheimer often in their work refer to as something like the classic era of the European bourgoisie. Not exactly the emancipated society but in terms of violence and oppression nothing compared to what was coming. In criticizing his own youthful opposition to them he is putting himself in the category of twentieth century destruction, in the new generation who would go on to violently remake the world and institute more brutal forms of domination, whether with fascism or communism. So the worse world of the quotation is not only the world of political extremism but also the entire world of the Second Thirty Years' War and everything that went with it: industrialized warfare, genocide and the targeting of civilians, mass mobilization, popular nationalism, and at the end, the development of weapons that could wipe out everyone.

There's something different in our histories that I'm not sure is worth investigating or not -- lots of my indignation came from not just my folks, who certainly didn't help things, but also the political changes that took place due to September 11th, which is when I was in my teens with nascent political thoughts. Things were bad then, in a manner which resembled the books we were assigned to read which warned against totatalitarianism, like 1984 and Animal Farm, and they have only progressed in that direction. — Moliere

Interesting. So you're probably around ten or fifteen years younger than me. For me, my radicalization was curiously out of time, disconnected from the real world and in fact flying in the face of it, since it was the late eighties and early nineties.

So while I have no doubt that I have shared your flaws in being attracted to big projects and being caught up in self-righteous anger, there's also always been this reality which has only gotten worse, and which Marxism is capable of explaining better than the liberal theories I was brought up to believe in. — Moliere

Yes, this whole personal issue is only interesting because I do still believe this too, as Adorno himself did.

Which in turn is what lead me down various routes and is basically how I've arrived at where I'm at today, which is whatever it is. Some kind of Marxism, but without the rosey viewpoint or utopian zeal. — Moliere

Yes, and again, a lot like Adorno. But if we want a good society, and if such a society cannot be born without pain, and if one has lost the willingness to countenance such pain on the way to the good society, then what is the Marxism for except an indulgence in a tragic hope? But that's a lot of ifs.

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?

the principles of this very forum are liberal — Banno

Yes, I'm not anti-liberal simpliciter. I'm an immanent liberal-sceptic.

Yes, I've noticed, but isn't it just that in North America liberalism commonly, in popular discourse, refers to social/social justice liberalism, described in the "New Liberalism" section of the SEP article?

(Those who associate social liberalism with the political Left might see these usages as completely divergent, but I think there's continuity enough that continuing to group them under the liberal banner makes sense)

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

Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

:cool: Crossed wires or something

I'm actually going to read one of his books soon, the one about Nietzsche. As for his metaphysics, it hasn't ever grabbed my interest, but that may change. Very difficult stuff, I've heard, but I guess that's par for the course, or dare I say de rigeur.

Yeah, I was talking about Deleuze's metaphysics, not metaphysics generally — and I imagine there might be other philosophers around who do it in the same knowing way (though fdrake's talk of moorings should be noted).

In tandem from 4000BC Sumeria onward? — Vera Mont

An eminently liberal idea: that capitalism is as old as civilization itself :lol:

No, it wasn't disrespect — Vera Mont

Yeah, it really now seems that it was.

:up:

EDIT: I mean, I think that's a big part of how liberalism grew. I'd back off from describing it in conspiratorial terms.

I must be using the wrong dictionary. Oxford has the meaning as — Vera Mont

Not a word about colonialism or slavery, class hierarchy or capital — Vera Mont

What said. What I said about colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy was an expression of a position in political philosophy, and a position with respect to liberalism's historical and social role, which I explained was a common Marxist position --- so you're unlikely to find it in a dictionary. What you've effectively done is just dismissed my position, perhaps because you found my response rude, I'm not sure (if so, I apologize). In any case, you can't engage in a discussion --- unless, that is, you are trying to be positively disrespectful --- using appeals to dictionary definitions.

A better description of liberalism is on Wikipedia:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. — Liberalism

I think it's fair to approach this from a historical perspective to see how liberalism developed, and I don't think you have to be a Marxist to see its association with the development of capitalism. As for colonialism, slavery, and all those bad things, well, there are many examples of liberalism's role in justifying these things. I'll give two.

1. Liberalism's egalitarian principles applied explicitly only to "the community of the free," which meant reasonably wealthy white men, everyone else being either inferior or not quite ready for the benefits of civilization.

2. Colonialism, usually violent and coercive, was justified by liberals as a part of a civilizing mission to save the backward races from their benighted condition.

An interesting question here might be to what extent one can say, trans-historically, that these examples represented an infidelity to some true liberalism. I personally think that's an impossible position, although many hold it, but while I see the way that liberalism was shaped by the social reality of expanding capitalism, the ideas that came out of that were not all bad.

Anyway, probably none of this comes close to responding to the OP, so maybe I should quit now.

I'm going out on a limb because I haven't read him, but I get the sense that Deleuze was doing something like this. I don't know about poetry, but his metaphysical concepts are products of the imagination, knowingly fictional, and designed to be useful for thinking rather than corrresponding to "how things really are". Whether that's really metaphysics or just meta-metaphysics I have no idea.

Nobody anywhere knows how to stop it. — javi2541997

Are you sure about that?

The essence of capitalism is the haves using up the have-nots and keeping them have-nots as long as they're useful. — Vera Mont

And the essence of liberalism is to justify capitalism with the ideology of equality, individual liberty and property rights.

And not only to justify capitalism, but to justify colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy. This is described pretty well in Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, although he goes too far for my liking --- unlike him (as I recall) I do think there is a lot of good in liberalism.

Anyway, what I've just written is a facile and old-fashioned Marxist criticism, but it does remind us that liberalism is bound up with capitalism and is often on the same side, rather than being opposed to it (that would be socialism).

Modern social justice liberalism, and perhaps Nussbaum and Rawls, might represent a late twentieth century patch-up job prompted by the realization that capitalism, the supposed vehicle of liberty, doesn't actually deliver it (as if nobody had pointed this out before).

@Count Timothy von Icarus Interesting OP; who knows, maybe I'll get around to responding to it.

:up:

And as far as I can tell there’s even more to it than that, e.g., the aesthetic sense in general and its connection to morality, and the role of play in the development of the aesthetic sense. So, it seems to be significantly anthropological and more than just philosophy of art.

Chronologically. I'm about half way through and have already discovered many authors that were new to me.

Taking a break now though, because it's massive.

The one I love most of the above is the Schiller book. — Baden

Schiller seems to come up a lot in critical theory but I’ve never paid any attention. Your comment and the description on SEP make the Letters look more interesting than I expected.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. So far: great. — Jamal

That was a hasty judgement, made before Mr Rochester's appearance. From then on, it's bad.

Recently:

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (re-read) 5/5
Russian Stories from Everyman's Library 4/5
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (ongoing) 5/5
Under the Skin by Michel Faber 3.7/5

Currently:

Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno 5/5

I just don't see how one can rationally assume it wasn't much worse back then, particularly way back then in societies that didn't have law enforcement, standardized education, or basically any sort of social service or humane form of justice let alone any intricate, codified system of laws. — Outlander

You appear to think the existence of a codified system of laws speaks for itself, as something that should benefit women, when in reality, legal codes have existed for most of history to restrict women's rights to autonomy, property, and freedom of movement (and not only in the past, of course).

I thought it was widely known that civilization, meaning a sedentary society built on intensive agriculture and characterized by social stratification and state institutions, has usually resulted in an oppression of women much worse than they experienced in hunter-gatherer societies. It happens that way for various reasons, including property and inheritance, which requires the control of reproduction. Even if men were dominant in many cases in earlier societies, in civilized society this was intensified and institutionalized.

I mean, this seems to be the most common view among anthropologists and in associated disciplines, so assertions to the contrary probably need some kind of support, rather than just intuition.

Good question. I think Nietzsche was asking something similar:

There are still harmless self-observers who believe 'immediate certainties' exist, for example 'I think' or, as was Schopenhauer's superstition, 'I will': as though knowledge here got hold of its object pure and naked, as 'thing in itself', and no falsification occurred either on the side of the subject or on that of the object. But I shall reiterate a hundred times that 'immediate certainty', like 'absolute knowledge' and 'thing in itself', contains a contradictio in adjecto: we really ought to get free from the seduction of words! Let the people believe that knowledge is total knowledge, but the philosopher must say to himself: when I analyse the event expressed in the sentence 'I think', I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove - for example, that it is I who think, that it has to be something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an 'I' exists, finally that what is designated by 'thinking' has already been determined - that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided that matter within myself, by what standard could I determine that what is happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? Enough: this 'I think' presupposes that I compare my present state with other known states of myself in order to determine what it is: on account of this retrospective connection with other 'knowledge' at any rate it possesses no immediate certainty for me. - In place of that 'immediate certainty' in which the people may believe in the present case, the philosopher acquires in this way a series of metaphysical questions, true questions of conscience for the intellect, namely: 'Whence do I take the concept thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an 'I' as cause, and finally of an 'I' as cause of thought?' Whoever feels able to answer these metaphysical questions straight away with an appeal to a sort of intuitive knowledge, as he does who says: 'I think, and know at least that this is true, actual and certain' - will find a philosopher today ready with a smile and two question-marks. 'My dear sir,' the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, 'it is improbable you are not mistaken: but why do you want the truth at all? — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §16

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them. — Site guidelines

Personally, I think this says all that needs to be said. I'll close this discussion now but if anyone wants to start a discussion about this aspect of the guidelines, feel free to do so in the Feedback section.

:up:

Gregory should be banned — frank

That happened five minutes ago.

@Gregory was banned for misogyny.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/comments/4660/gregory

As it says in the guidelines, this kind of thing is not tolerated.

I have banned @Arcane Sandwich.

19 days ago I privately asked him to reduce his posting rate and to stay on topic when he did post, as it seemed to me that he was dominating the forum too much, by posting everywhere and so often (he had posted 2000 times in two months), disrupting several discussions. I said I would implement a temporary suspension if he did not comply (this prevents someone from posting but allows them to send PMs) but he said he would just refrain from posting entirely for three months. A strange response, but I said okay. Some hours ago he started posting again and sent me a PM to admit to breaking his promise, and I suspended him. He responded to that with private insults and I banned him.

It was clear to me that while he was knowledgeable in philosophy, his attention-seeking behaviour and apparent need to be heard on every topic was not good for the forum. And if he had really wanted to stay here and cooperate he would have ridden out the suspension and refrained from sending me unpleasant messages.

I'm sorry to see @fdrake go. I've got used to his support, knowledge, and guidance. I hope he hangs around and continues to post.

This old thread is attracting stupid comments so I'm closing it.

Jamal deserves it; either with British pounds or Russian rubles. — javi2541997

2 * 0 = 0 :grin:

I agree that a celebration is in order.

October 20th, 2015: I remember it well. At my desk in the chateau perched on a mountaintop just inland from Nice, one arm broken (mountain bike accident) and struggling to type with one hand. The weather was clear and fresh.

Maybe Vancouver Island?

My favourite is a journey that goes bike -> train(s) -> ferry -> bike. But that’s a leisure thing so maybe it doesn’t count.

I like air travel when I’m taking a multi-part journey through different countries and spending a lot of time in airports. One enters a world out of time, a world parallel to the mundane, that works by different rules. It’s exotic, weird, and exciting. I enjoy the actual flights somewhat less, because the seats are uncomfortable, but sometimes you get an amazing view—not just an impressive or beautiful view, but an amazing one. Most memorably, flying over Greenland and the Northern Canadian wilderness on the way to Calgary, flying past Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, and flying over the Alps, the Swiss and Italian lakes, and the Balkans, seeing the glinting Danube snaking away to the Black Sea.

Train is generally my favourite non-self-powered mode of transport but in Scotland it can be miserable because it’s too unreliable on Sundays, too crowded, and Scottish people are very noisy in public (I only really noticed this last year, after living in Russia, where people are very quiet in public). Favourite train journeys: Glasgow to Mallaig, Edinburgh to London on the East coast main line on the old GNER with the restaurant carriage, the high speed from Valencia to Madrid, and Toronto to Quebec City then back to Montreal. The last two were great largely because of the company — they stand out as special, adventuresome moments in my life.

Ferries: the big ferry to and from Vancouver Island, and several smaller ferries between Vancouver Island’s islands (very beautiful); Nice to Corsica (saw a whale while drinking Corsican beer on the top deck); and of course the West of Scotland: I’ve been on seven ferries just since June last year (saw dolphins a couple of times).

I’m pretty anti-car but I can’t deny that I’ve enjoyed a few road trips.

Bicycle, electric scooter, and walking are my favourite ways of getting around a city.

Metro/tube/subway is fine, but it’s underground and that’s never positively fun. Trams I like.

Buses, it depends. The double decker buses in Edinburgh are the best way of getting around after walking — I enjoy riding the top deck at the front, above the driver, as much as I did when I was a kid — but buses in other places, or between cities, are no fun at all.

A very interesting and diverse selection tonight.








(listen to that one for at least 2 minutes or don't bother)

EDIT: that last track was released just a few years before Mr Bungle's first album. Was it in the air, or were Mr Bungle aware of that album? :chin:

And this is what I, personally, get out of jazz that I can't get out of other genres of music. — Arcane Sandwich

Each to their own :cool:

You seem to be speaking from the point of view of a musician. When I first heard Coltrane, my ear was also uneducated, but it didn’t matter: it hit me on a gut level. I loved the way it sounded and how it felt. It didn’t sound abstract and it wasn’t something I had to learn how to like.

So I took up the saxophone and found out how hard it was to play like Coltrane. But from the point of view of the listener, it’s not about abstraction or technicality. Or rather, it need not be (I admit that abstraction and technicality can be attractive in themselves).

Another reason that a focus on technique and theory is not appropriate is that many of the greatest jazz musicians have not been virtuoso players, i.e., they played idiomatically and they were were not necessarily able to play in other styles. Ornette Coleman and Miles could only play the way they played, stylistically and technically—they were a world away from the music school virtuosos like Branford Marsalis and Michael Brecker. And yet they were jazz giants.

Fair enough. It's hard to elucidate exactly what I meant by "intense" and "hard", etc., but it sounds more penetratingly intense to my sensibility, particularly things like this:



I agree that metal and noise might be often more brutal, though.