And I, the gauigin. Please don"t cut your ear off, I mean that in all earnestness. Deleuze, was a shadow of a supposedly new era, and now we are into the neoclacissit of that. We are facing a terrible. Quasi prophetic war, which begs every secluded islands, where gaugin found peace.
Remember france joined the alliance, his colors via gaugin primitive and anti cultural, in line with russeai. But france is a dreamer, a performer, a dilettante. Where is napoleon and where is wellington?
Yeah: love ya 2 brother:
always a pleasure hearing from ya…
jamming with you.
My ear is right where it belongs.
Glad to hear it: obe/janus/damian
accurate and profound, obe.
It is always a pleasure to jam with friends as compared to dealing with those that just want to prove their superiority over you.
This is why I consider you an allie, Obe.
You are, perhaps, one of the most intelligent people I have to deal with here.
I enjoy complimenting the intelligent things you say.
Mainly because it feels like you enjoy complimenting the hopefully intelligent things I say…
Love you:
Love what we’re doing.
?: wouldn’t it be legit to think of one of the more important roles of philosophy to be that of troubleshooter of all the other disciplines and fields of expertise: science, politics, art, religion, and whatever….
And wouldn’t this require that philosophy distinguish itself from those disciplines? And in this context, would it really be sensible for philosophy to define itself as playing lip service to any other of those fields? That is, most importantly in our current and contemporary situation, to act as if the role of philosophy is that of a sub-division of science? Even Neuroscience?
But then shouldn’t all those other disciplines include an equally important role of acting as troubleshooter to the other fields of expertise?
I guess the real question is shouldn’t philosophy, rather than bow to science, exploit its role in what should be a system of checks and balance? And could philosophy be the field best equipped to articulate the importance of taking on this responsibility no matter what field of expertise one might be working in, no matter what the flow?
Perhaps philosophy is the discipline best equipped to negotiate all the other approaches to intellectual and creative inquiry.
Hi d63, I just discovered Habermas. I am interested, if I can find the time, to look into any substantial linkage here, to Deuluze.
I’ll always consider you a friend d63, though I must wind through all the cavernous realms of philosophy and in some adapt to them as if I was of them, and so then not always resemble who I once was, or others thought I was. And maybe wisdom, if I obtain it, will lead me back or forwards to where I can be all things to all those who’ve known me as I was or wasn’t.
D63, stuart: philosophy shouldn't "bow" to science. It should be the other way around, otherwise it will be nearly impossible to account for them. The accounting is where we get bogged down, because most likely we will reduce them to the most common denominator, and then, what? Misunderstands will arise within and without, plus doubt, guilt and negative emotion will arise by the thought that perhaps we missed something.(Which we will certainly have because we are going backwards, linearly, and don't notice the qualitative changes)
It’s all about the flow, Stuart: what makes your life better than it would be without it. The rest is peripheral.
And I consider your friendship essential, now that it’s here, to my flow…
Of course, I could go on without it. But it’s just much funner having you here.
(U2OBE(
Just keep winding, brother. It is the Deleuzian/rhizomatic way. It’s life with no other center than life (existence( itself: our point A to point B:
we have just been blessed with the tools to make it shine a little more, to make it a little more intense.
Right on.
Right, fucking, on, Brother!!!
love…
My right-wing friend, within the last couple of days, sent me an e-mail titled “Friend of Yours?” with a link to an article about a Russian man who was shot to death in the process of a debate concerning Kant. And given the heated melees that tend to erupt on these boards, it’s easy to see how an innocent language game could escalate to such a fatal conclusion. And I for one would not want to see anyone on here, friend or foe, shot over this. So it’s hard to question the wisdom of shutting my string down.
And even though I still had legitimate issues to cover, and would still like to do a thorough critique of Satyr’s essay, I’ve come to realize that I can more effectively deal with these issues by referring to the more general “authoritarian personality” and that even if there were anyone I specifically wanted to go after, I can be reasonably confident that they’ll recognize themselves in what I’m describing.
(However, should they read this, I want to publically apologize to Ecclesiast for referring to them as “Ick”. It was a cheap tactic resorted to in the heat of the moment. It was wrong. And I hope to avoid it in the future.)
That said, I want to deal with references to nature and how they can often be abused by the authoritarian personality. First of all, let us admit that almost everyone turns to nature to underwrite the rightness of their assertions. This would seem perfectly natural (huh?) since we, and everything about us is rooted in nature. It is what we as a society have evolved from. Nor do I see any reason that we shouldn’t lay it on table as one kind of tactic in a language game among others. But the problem starts when we start to act as if it has some kind of privilege, a privilege that could only rest on a circular assumption that I would refer to as The Perfectly Natural Criteria of the Natural. And like most assumptions I have seen, it is a human construct and, by virtue of that, floats on thin air.
For one thing, for all our throwing around the term nature, it’s never really clearly defined. It’s always understood in terms of difference. A tree would seem to be natural. A canoe cut out of it would seem to be a little less natural. And a canoe made out of fiberglass would seem to be less so. However, if we approach it from Ambig’s emphasis on Dasein, we have to ask what could be any more natural than kayaking in a fiberglass vessel in a natural environment. Since there is no clear point at which human ingenuity has gone from the nature it is rooted in to the unnatural, there is no clear distinction between the natural and unnatural. And for good reason, some thinkers such as Gary Snyder (poet, naturalist, and Zen scholar) have argued that the distinction does not exist.
Yet the authoritarian personality acts as if such a clear distinction does exist without ever really clarifying where that threshold in the continuum is –that is outside of what they feel it to be. For instance, I have many times heard it argued or implied that because there are alpha males throughout nature, apes for instance, it would be perfectly natural for certain human individuals to accumulate power and use it as they see fit. Of course, the response we could pose against this is that by that same token, since power seems to be the main criteria of right and the “natural”, it would be equally natural for weaker members to pool their power to act as a check to the power of the alpha male, thereby insuring circumstances that are better and more just to the weaker members. Of course, the authoritarian personality will immediately resort to this threshold or dividing line they can never truly pinpoint by acting as if the group exercise of power is somehow not natural. It is this fallacy that underlies such notions as the feminization of man and the leveling of mankind. And it is what underlies this popular notion among right-wingers that Capitalism is somehow natural while socialism is somehow the unnatural construct of man –the hypocrisy of it being that the rules of Capitalism are as much a human construct as anything.
Of course, always piggybacking this questionable notion is a kind Social Darwinism that TlBs use to justify their nonsense. The argument is that competition is essential to intellectual growth. In other words, it rides on the Nietzscheian notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you strong, that you can only grow through opposition. The thing is, I tend to find, on these boards, that my most productive moments come from interacting with people who have the same live and let live attitude I do. What I mainly find or get from interactions with TlBs is myself too busy swatting off flies to actually engage in anything that might prove intellectually productive. At bottom, when you truly look at it, all the TlB’s reference to nature proves to be is little more than an alibi to act like assholes –that is while hiding under the banner of authentic intellectual inquiry.
But even without all that, even if I was inaccurate in my description, we still have to look at the naturalistic fallacy of assuming that because something seems to be in violation of nature or our nature, we are obligated to base our ethical, social, and political decisions on it, a notion which hangs itself on the perfectly natural criteria of the natural: a human construct if there ever was one.
I don’t recall all of the significance of Satyr’s arguments on nature, if you’d like I’ll reread them and respond to that. But, right now I want to address the idea of the weak being strong in numbers with out a strong hierarchy. That issue goes directly to human nature. I just can’t imagine the apes having evolved into humans without this constant necessity for every male to prove he’s worthy to breed. You may notice that all supposedly charitable organizations’ focus turns from charity to maintaining itself in competition against other charitable organizations and the people running it are in fierce competition to be on the top. It’s because we naturally feel we must dominate, obviously no matter how weak any individual is and how weak his father and his father and so on for several generations may have been, if one goes beyond 5-10 generations then nearly every father from then back to the dawn of humans was one who fought for his right to breed and succeeded (occasionally a weak one gets lucky even in the most hostile environment). So we have a nature to compete and to be on top that is impossible to ignore.
Those who consider themselves to a part of the organized weak feel proud and strong to be a part of that group. Their rhetoric is that they are proud to not be a stereotype of the typical overly masculine male. They believe they are strong through their numbers and their shared ideals and have no need to form hierarchies when they can instead vote on their group’s actions. But, it is an illusion that one is proud to be weak and not will their power. They are actually willing their power when they are a part of a group with ideals for which they agree with. This group may maintain a unity as long as all the members agree on the ideals behind it, but they will not be able to merge with other groups of weak individuals to create further strength in numbers unless the other groups share the same ideals. If they don’t share the same ideal, the members will use the rhetoric that the other group has wrong or evil ideals, but the real issue would be that their will is their ideals and to compromise them would be to lose power.
Then the group itself will disintegrate as the members begin to disagree on the interpretation of the original ideals, because each member was only happy to a part of the group with equal standing as each other member because he felt that the ideals of the group were his own, almost as if he thought of them himself. So if others begin to differ each individual will feel his power being diminished, and fight for his ideals within the group itself, even if the differences are actually very petty, because it’s not about righteousness it’s only about power.
The scenario I just described doesn’t even mention the fact that many members of the group will never even have the illusion of ideals separate from their will to power, but will have no ideals except that they wish to take control of the group. If they are smart they will be the ones to create confusion among the members as to what the original ideals it was founded on really meant. Furthermore, my scenario didn’t mention that the strong are often quietly controlling this group of weak individuals and only letting them think they are making progress through strength in numbers.
Strength through numbers in a democratically run group was an idea I once thought made sense, but the more I think about it and the more I experience human nature for myself the more of a mess it seems. The cold hard reality that is living naturally is all that seems coherent to me. And within that context one may still show strength through more subtle means, almost as if it was strength through weakness, and can love one’s friends and family. One simply has to get over the idea that no one in the world should be left behind.
In these last post utopian stages of ideology whether be it how we define capitalism or socialism, fascism or whatever, spengler comes to mind, the decline of the west.
Universals or not, new world or not, the sleeping dragon china, is rising, and the east beckons at the door. The authoritarian personality is not really inherent in the east, the extended family is the thing of the future, social darwinism has brought us to the era of great phallic symbols of rocket power and atom smashing.
Technology may be a natural progression of ideas, but is it the way nature intended it to be? Intentions are like yesterday’s paper, we cast them aside for what’s upcoming and new, existentialism’s only remaining function is in the ontology of bundling phenomenon: vis: the last bastion against total disintegration. It’s a comfort, a psychological comfort come necessity. We can not let go of our primal perceptive processes. But that is all.
Beyond that, the natural/artificial anomalie brings fort the possibility for the leaders to emerge, now on this twilight, perhaps existentially and exponentially, at an ever increasing rate. There will come a time, and it is probably in the near future, when the east will meet the west head on, the quietism of letting go with the aggression of conquest by the alpha male.
At this point confusion will reign except in the supreme authority, will apparently be able to draw the lines. The uncertainty principle can rule only up until the critical moment, and. Then, divisive action will either further divide the world, or, the two sides meeting head on can quietly and subtly let go, inter penetrate and avoid the ultimate power struggle that an evil genius can manipulate. Total eclipse, regression to descartes’s absolute doubt would again bring in a new, catastrophic reign of terror.
Before I go in to your posts, I’m getting about ready to tackle the original Deleuze text of Difference and Repetition. I may be ordering another secondary text on it, Jeffry A. Bell’s: Philosophy on the Edge of Chaos… But before either, I’m going to start a study, tomorrow, of those online lectures that I and you, Obe, talked about. I’ll start with his lecture on Spinoza:
gold.ac.uk/media/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf
Then I’ll go on to:
deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/200 … chive.html
Hopefully this will give me some useful information and background before I go into the original text.
I hope you guys will join me.
I’ll be carrying it out on my Deleuze string.