/lit/ - Literature

>>12661823
>for me the great existentialists that i am sworn to unto death are great precisely because the question of race in this way just never comes up.
i'll qualify this one too, because it is deservedly roast-worthy: isn't Heidegger anti-semitic as fuck? he is. but i've never really had a hard time decoupling what makes his thought from this: Dasein as a concept is massively more interesting (and 21C-compatible also). would Confucius probably prefer his own people? yeah, probably.

but i guess my sense is that we don't have to. i'm kind of cosmopolitan like that. feel free to throw bricks at me accordingly, it's entirely deserved, but i thought it was worth pointing that out. i've read my share of Heidegger and i find myself in kind of the same place i am when i wind up talking about Land: trying to get people to read a guy with some questionable views, and then saying, no no, let the questionable views go, and...it is how it is. i ultimately think you learn some pretty awesome stuff by reading the philosophers in a kind of charitable way, even if - in the case of Heidegger, for instance - he would have said, And By Philosophy I Mean Western Philosophy, and that he still hates the Jews, and will give no further comment on his remark about the mechanized food industry, and so on.
>and he will continue to think about Hannah Arendt wistfully, &c &c. Emmanual Levinas too has some remarkably Old-School feelings about the Chinese also, it was a game-changer for me to learn about that - isn't this the guy who's family was wiped out by the Nazis? you can forgive the Nazis, but you still talk about the Chinese as The Yellow Peril?

so yeah, i don't think there is anything more destructive on earth than racial holy war. it is both the Victory and the Game Over screen at one. it is something we ought to handle carefully, but the way of doing so is precisely not by turning it into a semantic bludgeon that people rapidly develop a tolerance to and counter-weapons of their own. you can rip up the foundations of your universe like this.

i would like to remove the taboo on talking about fascism that it might be understood as a sociological and psychological phenomenon, and i would also like to get past the point we are today where things can only be understood through the purview of race and racial identity. all this does is produce spirals of self-marginalization and angry reciprocity that will in the long run be disastrous for the common good. hate is a luxury object the West cannot afford, especially now that China is a world player again.

>>12661828
for sure

>>12661865
the good ones are, as is the case everywhere