Let Dugin Live

'fraid that’s the nature of all philosophical text. one can never say enough and the product always remains open. what you can do, however, is use the tools of philosophy to sort through a text and separate statements that belong in the natural sciences, and statements that reflect fallacious (formally and informally), personal bias and erroneous reasoning. philosophy should be concerned with being critical of its own language rather than attempting to explain or even describe any ‘truth’. science takes care of that. philosophy just tags along. i’m reminded of that quip by stephen hawking; the philosopher is just a failed scientist.

in any case, i guess you could summarize the paragraph you found to be ‘unclear’ as a statement about the limits to any attempt to establish any kind of real altruism in actual practice rather than as just another philosophical concept. what the paragraph shows is that until economics resolves that unavoidable circumstance of ‘class conflict’ that exists in this specific capitalist mode of material relations, no amount of ethical philosophy can be used as a defending justification for it; not utilitarian consequentialism, not virtue deontology, and not normative ethics. instead, these philosophies are conveniently ‘tweaked’ to fit the expectations and advantages of the person who benefits from the system in place. so, for example, you’d find a capitalist putting forth a convincing argument that kant’s or mill’s theory of ethics supports, and leads logically to, a capitalistic free market. it does not, and cannot, by the sheer fact that under the conditions of conflicting class interests, people cannot be said to genuinely want to cooperate. they are forced to compete, and where there is competition, there is no real social contract of ethics with the ‘other’ class. this indicates stirner’s egoism as the default parameters of moral and ethical behavior inside such a system. on the other end of this spectrum is marxism, which symbolizes the resolution of that fundamental problem that so constitutes the conflict of interests between classes; that property should belong only to he who produces it if we wish to eliminate the circumstances that prevent any real social contract.

now we don’t have to, mind you. i’m only showing the limits of this problem and how one is forever approaching one end or the other, whether they know it or not. this means that any philosophical narrative that attempts to defend capitalism on ‘moral’ grounds will be farcical… merely the voice of someone to whom capitalism gives an advantage, and so therefore uses philosophical language to defend and excuse that advantage. simply put, man does not want to work, and will go to any lengths to justify his not wanting or needing to… provided he is kept alive by the fruits of other’s labor, to be able to make such a utterance. it’s an alarming thought, really; a thousand years of philosophical nonsense from the mouth of a parasite, all for the purpose of finding a reason for not having to work. he thought he was on to something, thought he had discovered how he was ‘different’, above and beyond the necessity of labor. despite his attempts, the history of philosophy didn’t end with a noble and aristocratic bang, but a pitiful fizzle, and that is something truly comical.

so yes, to TRULY solve the problem of ethics, we have to slay that great beast, max stirner. and one cannot do this with any ordinary sword. only marxcalibur can do it.

excellent example of what i explained above; that attempt to defend capitalism through any number of informal fallacies. pathetic fallacy; describing capitalism as an agency that is responsible for the products that come into existence in such a system. nay. what is to thank for such technological improvement is human productivity, not capitalism. this is to say that such productivity does not rely on capitalism, or even communism for that matter, to be realizable. it was only that such productivity happened to happen during such a period that we erroneously give credit to the particular system in place in which it happened. that same scale of productivity could have happened under different circumstances, as well.

here’s another example. we would not be able to say that either capitalism or communism, exclusively, are necessary for the improvement of education. why not? because we see this phenomena occur in both; in capitalism we see privatized educational institutions popping up everywhere… and yet during mao’s dictatorship, we watched the literacy rate of chinese people raise some 70 percent.

so we would be misGUIDEd to assume any degree of human productivity owes itself to something transcendent to human nature in general, some particular system that has to be in place for that productivity to become realized. the enormous growth that took place during the rise of industrialism and capitalism is only circumstantial, and defenders of capitalism do not hesitate to seize the opportunity to commit this pathetic fallacy in their attempt to defend it.

or so it appeared. certainly the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism marked a break from that paternalism characterized as the authority of the aristocratic class, but it took an alternative form of that same tyranny shortly thereafter. instead of the common man being a slave to the demands of his lord, he became a slave to the demands of his necessity to labor for a wage, or be ostracized, penalized, or even exiled from the land on which he dwelled. so then while capitalism certainly ‘made no promises’, it still transformed a previous system of tyranny into another, new form, and therefore did not avoid the essential problem it’s origins were thought to be a solution for; the problem of property relations.

the rest of your post was something i couldn’t make heads or tails of. i’m sure there’s something in there… i just missed it.

No. Serious philosophy is always clear. What is unclear is its subject matter. Everyone knows what justice means even without a definition. But, justice itself, the subject matter, is very vague.

Not seeing this, one falls prey to accomplished sophists and academic baby talk like the versicolour reefs seen, distorted, through thick cerulean waters.

The level of discussion here is too low for me.

Goodbye idiot scientism religious freak rhetoric fatuous websight of dreck waste of time!

more churlish defalcating from the meretricious blatherskite. only a inveterate morosoph would commit to this kind of wheedling floccinaucinihilipilification with such lachrymose biliousness!

c’mon, guide, don’t be like this. I don’t know any of those words, man. The truth is I envy your vocabulary and I just threw all that shit together to impress you. It was pretty fuckin’ good though, right? You probably read that shit and was like ‘malodorous pontificating sesquipedalian! Be gone!’

But no, I don’t really think you’re a meretricious blatherskite.

Due to my intransigent efforts, the vile wikimob has made a minor concession, and drawn back from their combative, vicious really, slander on the worthy and courageous thought of Alexander Dugin. Printed now, at the time of this post, is: [Alexander Dugin]" is a Russian political analyst and strategist known for his fascist views."

Now he is said to have “fascist views”, rather than before when he was said to be a fascist. Placation, rather amoeba-sized, of the spiritual authority of intelligence.

“authority of the aristocratic class”

What is an “aristocratic class”? You don’t distinguish adequately aristocracy, rule of the most educated, or, as we would call it today, rule of the most qualified, from hereditary aristocracy. Today, aristocracy is split in a further sense. Technocracy and meritocracy are the two forms it takes. In China, technocracy took the form of rule of engineers for half a century, coming to inception under Mao.

Your account is simple nonsense. There was no “aristocracy” in the sense you mean historically. There were people whose adult life was absorbed in preparing for slaughter. This was not a pleasant life. This was not the FIRST, but, rather, Second estate. The high clergy, with the intellectual authority of RATIONALITY proper, which broke down under the chaos of revolt or Protestantism, leads us to the current period. You are misled by the century of rising commerce which left war waging a defunct manner of life, and so made the second estate, the fighters, seem like parasites in the face of the financiers.

Much greater grasp of history is needed to consider these difficulties. I am a student of the German tradition, established prior to the war, and so respect, therefore, Hannah Ardent, Leo Strauss, Jaspers and Heidegger, and so on, in these matters. The American education system, of which you are the result, is systematically defective. We all must have a serious basis for the discussion in cold and hard-headed analysis, rather than ideological aspiration and political distortions, of the fundamental points of human development to discuss such issues intelligently.

insofar as the concept of ‘aristocracy’ recognizes an inequality of intelligence and talent between people, it is legitimate. but when the content of that intelligence and talent - how/why it is put to use in society and to what ends - is found to be extraneous and superfluous, it is no longer qualified as something necessary as a legislative or administrative power. when ‘aristocratic’ effort becomes an effort to sustain its own power in a context in which it’s absence wouldn’t make any difference in the functioning of that society in which it exists, it becomes an aberration… a vestigial organ of the polis. what then follows is a gradual recognition of the superfluous nature of the aristocratic element in society, by those whom would otherwise be able to sustain the workings of that society themselves. so for example, ordinary working citizens… and this includes specialists/experts from legitimate fields that contribute to the real material relations of that society - take notice of the existing aristocratic class, and that through the mandate of laws which the aristocratic class set up, they are made exempt from any requirement of productive labor. that is to say they neither contribute to menial labor or specialized labor. well, what is it then that they do, asks the citizens. and the answer is; nothing. how then did they rise to power and take their positions as the ‘rightful’ proprietors of society? here’s how. they set to working on a way to convince ordinary citizens that they had a special skill, and that the citizens needed them in order to preserve and organize their society. but this skill wasn’t just a working knowledge of politics… it couldn’t be, because ordinary citizens themselves were quite able to observe social and economic phenomena and make the appropriate adjustments when problems arise. politics and economy is a relatively simple empirical field of study… no special intelligence needed for this. no, the skill this aristocratic class had to convince the citizens they had, was something beyond the knowledge of the natural sciences (in which politics and economy would be included). enter the ‘philosopher’, and the philosopher was a special kind of person who had access to super-empirical truths that ordinary folks didn’t have access to. the ruling class either had to become philosophers, or employ philosophers, to produce a principled mandate that would give them the authority to maintain their positions in society without requiring them to actually produce anything substantial. remember; governing is not a special ‘talent’, not something the ordinary classes couldn’t do themselves.

we see the origins of philosophy in every culture that has advanced enough to develop a surplus of wealth, and is therefore a society in which a ‘leisure’ class can evolve. that is, a class that doesn’t contribute directly to production. for example, shamanism and priesthood, both pseudo-scientific fields that add nothing necessary to the workings of the societies they exist in. when a society reaches a point where it is able to accumulate such surplus (these would be the agrarian cultures as opposed to hunter-gatherer cultures), it requires a more complex political organ which has as its task the organization and administration, the ‘governance’, of that society. it is here that the ‘philosopher’ slips in… the class that has been afforded the luxury of performing a ‘skill’ which, due to the general lack of sophistication of the working classes that do not have such luxury, is believed to be necessary in and for their culture. the task of this new class - a class who’s absence wouldn’t be noticed - is to lay claim to special knowledge that ordinary people can’t have, and therefore convince the working classes that they are necessary in that society. every society - with the exception of the nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in which the warrior represented every level of the hierarchy (he was worker, soldier, and spiritualist simultaneously) - one variation or another of the philosopher/priest class evolves, a class which has as it’s task only legislative and governing authority. the ‘aristocracy’, at this point in the development of society, is equivalent to a parasitic organism. traditional philosophy since the emergence of agrarian culture has invariably been the means of preserving the existence of this parasitic organism. the first philosophers were the priests - the liaison between the gods and the people. once the atheistic and/or skeptical movement evolves, the philosopher then becomes the liaison between the ‘rational order of the universe’ and the people, substituting ‘god’ for such things as logos, for instance. the very best example of this would be in plato’s ‘philosopher king’, a foundation for the notion of ‘aristocracy’; that only the ‘best’ should rule, and the best have a unique characteristic that those from the lower classes cannot have; special knowledge. this special knowledge is exhibited in the uncanny ability to make a spectacular word salad out of ordinary language… and even invent words that represent nothing in the real world.

take your time. i know this is a lot to throw at you at once, but i wanted you to gain a level. you now have +4 to your save-throws and the ability to regenrate mana.

oh i love german philosophy, and german beer (i went to an oktoberfest once). one can come up with some pretty far-out metaphysics while drunk on german beer, as nietzsche noted. but i’ve always loved that pomp gregariousness of the german people… something of a personality trait that i share with them (perhaps this is the celtic-half speaking in me?). in fact, i have always thought of the world as my sofa.

Promethean,

Your post is appreciated. It however assumes that there is a zero percent chance of a spirit world.

I’ll tell you this for certain: it is really hard sometimes to judge those who appear to be parasitic.

They are in some cases, doing the entire work of the species.

A person could be outside smoking a cigarette and be doing exponentially more work than a coal miner.

Some people know a lot more than others …

What you are judging is work. For example: someone with a panic disorder is doing 100 times the work of people who don’t - simply by putting one foot in front of the other …

It’s an interesting trick you tried to pull here…

If a person is not visibly producing to YOU, there is no way they can be doing more work than you.

That is a very ignorant stance on how existence works, infantile and narcisstic.

Actually, totalitarian and nazi-ish as the end game of your thought patterns.

The unfit are those who don’t do work as you perceive it.

Without proof.

I, for example, can prove married people aren’t doing work. I have proofs through contradiction for this.

You’re not running proofs through contradiction, you don’t have them. I am absolutely certain of we run this thread for another 10 pages, that I can prove as “aristocracy” (from your perspective) as a philosopher, even to you, that you do no work whatsoever, and that I do work.

So I don’t know why really, you’d want to dip your toes in that water, but, alas, you did.

i in no way definitively stated that we aren’t spirits in the material world. for all i know, natura naturata could very well include one such mode of being.

this might come as a surprise to you, but standing on your back porch smoking cigarettes and contemplating platonic hyperdimensional mirrors is not something your community, or mankind for that matter, needs you to do. you’d be a much more productive citizen if you took that job working the register at taco bell. i’ll have a beefy frito buritto, a chicken soft taco, a nachos supreme, and a water cup… which i will fill with pepsi when you aren’t looking.

we usually define ‘work’ as a force applied over a distance. i’m not sure if this guy is doing considerably more work than anyone else putting one foot in front of the other.

the value of production is not necessarily evaluated only according to how much ‘work’ is done doing it. the amount of resources employed in developing a skill as well as the demand for it, are also to be considered. this judgement is made by the people. a brain surgeon doesn’t do a fraction of the work a lumber jack does, but that doesn’t mean the brain surgeon is less important and valuable.

refuted.

i do more work in one day than you do in one month, and could out-philosophize you on a fifteen minute lunch break if i so desired. it’s not to late to redeem yourself, E. subway is always accepting applications. if you want to help humanity, become a sandwich artist.

The panic disorder example went way over your head.

Another example in that line is chronic fatigue syndrome.

There’s something called existential work, working the suicide, homicide, rape angles, suffering angles above and beyond examples like the one above.

The married people are using self contradiction to vampiristically suck power from the species to not have to do the existential work of the species in order to maintain existential value. Putting one foot in front of the other with less existential effort.

What’s the difference between a shaman and a psychologist? As another example to bring up?

Emotional work, dream work?

A councilor?

Working with aggressive populations, like criminally oriented teens?

Etc…

The whole of what you wrote is patently idiotic. Aristocracy is the name of the regime type where people are chosen for offices for competence rather than on the basis of property qualifications (oligarchy) or by lot (democratically).

What you write is an interpretation, claiming to be best, aristos, therefor it is aristocratic.

These problems didn’t arise in antiquity because economics and politics (so far as politics, the good of the country, is non-philosophic, and not connected to a pursuit of wisdom attacking the spirit of civil-social tradition) were not theoretical pursuits, but empirical, they did not become theoretical for interested reasons, but through necessity because of essential changes in the realities of life such as the industrial revolutions and the rise of commercial societies.

" legislative or administrative power"

There must be teachers of the legislators. The depredation of the lawmaker’s art, political philosophy, has produced the problem of a terrible lacuna of political intelligence, such that only interest bartering, compromise (i.e., corruption), is left. Legists cease to understand the meaning of deliberation even theoretically, not to say in practice.

PS
You make yourself laughably odious, or whatever is still worse, by cyber stalking and giving low-brow literary advice, derived from authoritative manuals produced by mediocrities (which cover you and your imbecile contempt for whatever deviates form the idiot authorities), to your betters, they who have a sense of language of their own and who, in vast contradistinction to you, can think.

"then at the other end of this spectrum is marx, who represents the correction of this irreconcilable conflict that capitalism has created, and a solution to the stirnerite conclusion (on which capitalism unwittingly rests). the great ‘meanwhile’ of the world is spent approaching one or the other, as there is simply no other direction it can go. "

If Stirner had gone to the limit, he would have found the ego to be a spook It’self , therefore, may have supposed some kind of transcendentalism, to be of use.
It may have occurred to him, but dismissed it, to limit the concept -alienation- within a then current philosophically pregnant understanding.

As a New Heglelian, he dissolved the failing idealistic formula, for Hegel’s appearant short sightedness, caused by his lack of predicting vast changes.
Never the less, it is the ego, with it’s lack of insight, that is incapable to overcome it’s limitations. The ethical problems, as a nod to Nietzsche, appear irreversible and as such, limit Marx’s claim, to begin with history.
It may as well continue with an eye toward a vast semblance of mirrored images, hoping for a few occultist gifted to glean an intended idea.
To sustain a dressed up idealism in ways which could pass the mustard to those anarchists, who don’t for a minute think that metaphysics is all sown up.

I love it when you talk dirty to me, guide.

Anyway you two lads just hold tight and I’ll get back to ya. Long day at work and I’m beat. I got soft sitting on the couch for two weeks and today really kicked my ass because of that. It’s 7:00 here and I’m ready to crash.

Everyone thinks better on a nights sleep, so, I look forward to it.

This means you don’t understand the thesis of Hegel. One must say, the old Hegeleans were surely correct so far as confronting the teaching of Hegel goes (his thesis, too, is obviously correct [properly understood, of course]). And Stirner was not a new Hegelian (attending some lectures of Hegel’s does not make him even an unspecific Hegelian). The fiasco of the most dishonest pimple, Zizek, operating on the university crowd, to make one believe that a remark taken down in lecture notes by students proves Hegel did not believe his own principle is the secret mad passion of nihilistic frivolity come to share “the news” with all. All that can be expected of a political thesis beyond that of Hegel is the dissolution of the human being to the stage beyond civil society, where that is already understood as a stage beyond nature. Marx does not change Hegel’s thesis at all, except verbally, in his claim that we are not yet in history. Since Hegel understood the already arrived at principle as the motivator (which, in the case of Engels Marx is patently true). A post-history as the emergence of another kind of being is the only thing, but then, it would no longer be rational. Also, very likely so. Of course, Nietzsche does suggest this, as does Stirner. For there is no nature (knowledge), but only essence (Denken). It is a rejuvenation of early nature (pre-theoretical phronesis, Socrates, knowing as [practical] virtue rather than principle) and encouragement for the kill shot of everything worth burning oneself down for because it is what one lives in and by. Sysypus as relief as Camus saw it ultimately. Perhaps it won’t be like that at all.

Premature synthesis prior to judgement opens the door to fallibility of belief in the possibility of truth value in either the one or the other, before judgement.

Multiple ideas, is what characterizes insecurity in the development of the ego, its like the philosophical notion of the psychological concept of multiple personality.

Just a general comment, regarding the.task of Hegel and his followers, who had to contend with the exact nature of Kant’s unresolved duplicity, of getting out of it while mired in it.Hegel solves this by relating the infinite to an undefined absolute.

this is the order of exchanges that got us to this present dispute.

first you mistakenly assume that the transition into capitalism was an escape from paternalism in general, in the way that it existed in feudalism and the monarchy:

then i claim that a qualitatively similar kind of paternalism evolves in the new capitalism:

next we start quibbling over the definition of ‘aristocracy’, and this takes you away from the direction i was heading to show how aristocracy is just another form of paternalism:

these distinctions are well and good, but what i’m saying (and explained in that last post) is that regardless of how these aristocrats are put into power, the end result is the same. the role the aristocrat plays in relation to the ordinary citizen, in all cases, becomes another form of paternalism based either on some authority granted to them by citizens who were deceived into believing they are necessary (in government), or on the power gained by owning the means of production (in capitalism).

i then went off on a tangent explaining the farcical history of traditional philosophy and how it was intimately related to establishing governments. you, being a philosopher, would obviously object to that. but part of that objection is my fault, since such a radical new interpretation of what traditional philosophy is would require much more than what i provided. you might say i just threw that out there to see if anything would ‘click’ in your head, and save myself some time. alas, it did not.

i should probably also give a little clarification about my position or point of view, here. i’m coming from a unique position, ‘philosophically’, which gives me a vantage point many others don’t have. from the analytical perspective i share the view that a large percent of philosophy involves linguistic confusions rather than conceptual confusions; this means that most philosophical activity is innocuous and benign, a practice consisting of occupying oneself with asking questions that can’t be asked about problems that don’t really exist in the world (but only in the head of the philosopher). next is my stirnerism; not only do i agree that man is not something that can be fully comprehended… i’m also not alarmed by this. i don’t need to understand, care, or justify why i want, and do, what i do. i share the view with stirner that the only thing ‘certain’ is just this, and i need not bother with trying to figure out ‘why’. i leave that to the ‘philosophers’. as an anarchist, i do not involve myself with worrying about the future of man. and finally, as a spinozist, i cannot believe that at any moment the universe is anything but perfect. when you roll all this into one, you get a free spirited fellow who can only ever approach ‘philosophy’ with a light heart and an eye for the comical. really, it is the only attitude one can have when in the company of people who are so confused it’s impossible to remove even a single misunderstanding. a philosophy forum then becomes more of a study in psychology than anything else; ‘why is this one making this particular error in reasoning? what is it about him/her that ties them so tightly to this kind of nonsense?’ and out of this approach one can gain some great insight into human nature. what i personally find much more interesting than philosophy is the kinds of philosophical trends i find repeated over and over again, and the type of people these trends are practiced by, or styled by, rather. i’ve got this down to such a science i could almost devise a personality-type system that would rival even myers-briggs.

Promethean,

A little insight here:

Until you actually answer one of our posts, this is kinda a thread killer.

You replied to guide a bit.

I ask you, what’s the difference between a shaman and a psychologist ?

Who does more work? Someone who pushes through with chronic fatigue syndrome or someone without it?

HE… IS… THE THREADKILLER!

THIS… IS… THE THREADKILLER!

AAAAAHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! :music-deathmetal:

I didn’t asume, I gave a specific example of what I meant. You’re inracinating your brain with verbal trash.

What you write is a waste of time since you’re begging the question. I don’t accept the fundamental buried claim that your interpretation is not aristocratic.

You’re just talking around that emptily while the tangles grow in the black earth.

There is a blind world, and there is a enlightening revolt against the intellectual powers of civil life. Socrates is the most clear, shining and absolute, example, but he is not its origin, rather he is its most dominating representative and articulator. All such revolt is an attempt to educate. You present an interpretation meant to be the best education. Ergo, an aristocratic statement meant to educate. Tacitly you unearth the roots of the regime types because you want a total aristocracy, one where everyone, so far as innate ability allows, is the best educated. I.e., that they accept your account and act on it. The democracy then is identical to the aristocracy, because all are the best educated and any one, chosen at random, will suffice to occupy a position of administration just as well as might any other.

I think relatively short answers in the Socratic style of dialectic is the only way to approach this issue. I don’t find any sense to what you write, since it is manifestly an aristocratic, or in your own vague sense (you give no exact example) paternalistic manipulation.