/lit/ - Literature

>>11222757
>isn't that just the world snake itself? life feeding death feeding life. what im trying to say is I think capitalism was unavoidable. I don't know how else you'd structure a society of this magnitude, or what you could organize millions of people together around that isn't either war or getting our asses in gear for space colonization because circumstances demand it.

114% this. this is what i'm saying also. it *is* unavoidable, and this is what - although it's a lot more than this - absolutely Makes Philosophy Great Again. we are wedded body and soul to this thing. inevitable. these days i have this other thought: we are heading into a cybernetic revolution that may very well play out like the industrial revolution did. knowing what we know about the mistakes of the past, and maybe doomed to repeat them anyways. with the possible caveat that doing so with some degree of empathy instead of irony. but. that's my own, and speculative, thing.

anyways, yes yes. and also yes. capitalism was not only unavoidable then, it remains unavoidable in the future, and this *in spite of what we know about it.* that's the whole thing. so wat do? is this ideology or is it science? is it an ideology we *consciously engage in,* as in hyperstition? or...what? this is directly at the nerve-centers of my whole thing.

here's more from karatani on kant:

>Enlightenment is the liberation from illusions. If the illusions are errors caused by the senses, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment assumed, it is easy to rectify them by reason. Yet, there is one kind of illusion that cannot be abolished, and which, even if abolished forcibly, is always reproduced in another form. Kant calls this transcendental illusion. Transcendental illusion is that which is produced not by the senses but by the claims of reason itself. Kant writes: “Human reason has the peculiar fate in one of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.” The “questions” which afflict reason are, after all, rooted in the finitude of human beings and in their wish to transcend it. The Enlightenment dismissed religion as a mere illusion. When one is liberated from religion, however, it does not follow that one is liberated from the afflictions caused by finitude. Religion is merely replaced by another illusion, like that of the nation.

so much stuff is coming up for review and has to come up for review in these liminal times. what we do not want to do, i think, is merely substitute one kind of ideology or religion for another. critique of ideology can become in the end ideology itself; anti-imperialism can absolutely become imperialism. i know i'm sperging out on this random guy today but i'm just finding the marx-kant axis super-duper interesting.