/lit/ - Literature

The concept becomes important with Fichte, and then Hegel, where other consciousness beings become a check on your own circle of consciousness, with which you then develop intersubjectivity, and from that ethics, rights, identity-in-difference etc. that are foundational to both thinkers systems.

The modern left derive the idea from the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, who made the encounter with the Other central. Start there, his naive idea is that looking into other peoples eyes face-to-face will make you recognise and love them, instead of eliciting an aggressive threat response that Konrad Lorenz writes about and we know from practical experience. It's a strange Jewish cope to explain the European enthusiasm for Hitler.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/

The other source is Edward Said's critiques of orientalism.

>>13675971
Thank you, I'll look into it.

>looking into other peoples eyes face-to-face will make you recognise and love them
This sounds very silly tbqh.

>>13675971
>>13675875
Your ideology falls apart without a structuralist Other or manifest destiny. Looking into someone’s face elicits a reaction of disarmed empathy and mimicry from everyone but literal autistics

>>13676037
go to a poor part of town and look a large african american male in the face and see how he reacts

Every ideology has their "Other"

Don't believe the dishonest leftists that say otherwise

>>13676052
Not Judaism. They are an unfairly oppressed people, despite being tolerant and loving of everyone else. Why are they persecuted so?

>concept come into contemporary progressivism
Neoliberalism views conservatism as wanting to preserve status quo, thus being 'afraid' of anything trying to erase it ('progress').

Additionally, the phrasing attempts to emasculate enemy via language - "men who reject morbidly obese women because they're secretly gay" style of arguing.

While in reality it's just one set of values vs set of another (even conservative values evolve).

Basically the reason is liberal smugness and passive-aggressive tendency to voice their superiority complex.

>>13676044
What is your rebuttal to the European militaries having to train people to perceive the foreign armies as non human post WWI because they kept standing there stupefied every time they locked eyes with another soldier? Or the introduction of drones into combat? Face it, the average person is unable to not express at least some form of communication face to face. You are diseased, an autistic whose reality is primarily informed by infographics of statistics and viral videos of black people rioting and Varg people attempting eloquence through vlogs

>>13676101
I work as a security guard in a part of town inundated with niggers and other ethnic minorities, stfu

>>13676037
t. low-test
Coming face to face with a male member of your own species elicits an aggressive threat response in normal individuals. Go to a dog park or a bar after 2am.

>>13676109
Maybe if you weren't eye balling nigs ad a security guard they wouldn't get all offended because they think you're profiling them?

>>13676113
Having a mental disability that leads to aggressiveness in all situations does not mean you are high test or a real man or anythijg other than a brainlet with low intelligence and no self control. it means your mother lived in a house full of cat shit while pregnant and there is a fucking parasite inside your brain.

>>13676005
>This sounds very silly tbqh.
It is. The liberal left are infantile. It was a bizarre early Jewish cope in the aftermath of Hitler that shouldn't have escaped its era.
>if only the SA looked into the face of Jewish shopkeepers
>if only the Crusaders took of their helmets and looked into the face of Jihadis
>if only Asim looked Melati in the face before mauling her to death on their first date

>>13676151
>Maybe if you weren't eye balling nigs ad a security guard they wouldn't get all offended because they think you're profiling them?
stfu already, you literally have no relevant life experience and have no idea what you're talking about. I know better than to "eyeball" people, you think dealing with rabid ethnics is fun? I avoid that shit like the plague

>>13676169
don't assume I have no life experience from one post, if anything this just shows you yourself have little and are projecting. remember that one
and yes there is a great difference between making eye contact and eyeballing someone. I'm glad you know the difference.

>>13676170
subhumans and (some) amimals don't have empathy
what's your point exactly bruv?

>>13676191
I've been in jail, the military, worked on a farm, been homeless, been to foreign countries, lived in foreign countries, studied abroad, studied in the US, worked as a bartender etc fuck you nigger i have plenty of experience compared to the average person

>>13675875
They support their beliefs with simple strawmans. Frankly, I’m not sure what’s the chicken and what’s the egg, it could very well be that lefties are originally swayed over the left by those strawmans and can’t give them up in a sort of sunken cost fallacy.

>>13676191
Ive figured out a way to defuse that situation, you have to give the hard look to the guy, you dont look away but then you give him a little downward nod, and practically every time he just nods too and you can look away instead of engaging in autistic staring contests that sometimes lead to conflict.

This is only for the guys who are going to stare you down, almost every guy will just look away.

>>13676219
security guard anon, here. i already know this. i have to go through this head nodding ritual several times daily

>>13676219
>>13676225
gesturing your head in the direction of a pretty woman has a similar effect

>>13676170
We truly are tigers, aren't we, brother?

What is all this horseshit about looking in people's faces always having the same effect? Wouldn't one think that context would matter just a little bit; looking into the eyes of a defeated enemy might evoke an empathic response just as looking into the eyes of a tense or raging man might evoke a threat response. Levinas' idea seems to be a gigantic begging-of-the question because it presupposes that:
1. Conflicts of interest don't really exist
2. The will to otherize is solely resultant from propaganda made in bad faith
at the least he would need proof for both of these claims. Without it, as other posters have pointed out, the theory would seems to be nothing but kumbaya BS

>>13676479
I think it's a dialectical tendency that you find among left wing people. They always seem to dichotimize in the most extreme ways. Either looking into someone's eyes ALWAYS leads to empathy or it NEVER does, either you are CAPITALIST or you are COMMUNIST, etc. I think there were actual studies done to confirm that conservative people tend to work with a broader spectrum of categories and values that they balance among each other while left leaning people were more dualistic.

>>13676169
>no relevant life experience

Imagine listening to joe rogan on your night shift and calling the actual cops on black people while you larp as one is “life experience”

>>13676479
>1. Conflicts of interest don't really exist
the left are not fond of this idea. hence marxist dialectic supposedly inevitably leading to a stateless society with no oppression lol. the progs also think 'if only we could just eradicate hate and bigotry and whatever we could live in harmony, because there is no human nature and we can just morph into being like fucking bees or something'

I think the clearest expression of this blindness is the fact that the words power and freedom mean essentially the exact same thing in the English language, if you have the power to do something or the freedom to do it, it's the same thing, yet power is seen as basically negative, and freedom good. It comes from the more powerful oppressing the weaker(their freedom to oppress them) being seen as evil, while the less powerful gaining power over the powerful is seen as freedom. It's basically slave morality, except that leftists envision some state where this process of the powerless gaining power and the powerful losing it ending in some kind of equilibrium where everyone is equal and free. Every society that has ever existed evne huntergatherers show that this is blatantly retarded, because even political equality could never end natural inequality, and poliitcal equality can't even exist in the first place.

Their entire belief system is based on the idea that we should collaborate instead of fighting each other, which is an admirable ethic. But universal harmony is not possible, because we want things that are in limited quantity, and will always be limited, the easiest example is how we want other humans as spouses, and here the left see very clearly that communism of sex is insane totalitarianism that only incels and Brave new World espouse. But they want to do it with material wealth, which is just as limited, only the ridiculous mentality that is produced by money's arbitrary nature makes it seem otherwise, material wealth is not numbers that can be divided, it is specific phenomena that produce it, not quite as real as a human person, but still existing in their unique material situations, that you can't just add together into a totality and then cut up and allot each person a portion. You destroy them by trying to do this.

cont. post got too long

>>13676537
all that leaving aside that many people don't give a shit about collaborating and just want to gain at the expense of others, and these people are not easy to control, they usually end up in power, even in communist and progressive attempts to change things. and we all have a bit of that in us, we can't just always collaborate, because we come from nature, and nature is red in tooth and claw, conflict inheres in our dispositions just as much as our real world struggles to create harmony in a world that is limited in a way that precludes everyone getting what they want, because there is not enough of what we want for us all. life through natural selection could never have occurred otherwise, see the word 'selection', as in not everyone wins. And technology has not changed this state of power struggles between entities, only made it operate on a higher level that still involves our biological struggle, as all the levels are intermingling constantly.

>>13676496
Well I know that Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations stuff proved that liberals generally have "simpler" value systems because they only care about the first 2 of his core 5 values (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity) whilst conservatives care about all 5 to varying degrees, and thus have moral systems more open to potential contradiction. This is probably too normie a take for /lit/ but it might be helpful

>>13676557
That's probably what I was thinking of, but I also vaguely remember some studies, maybe something with neuroscience

>>13676544
final addition- that total harmony the Left wants, I think it's their sublimation of a desire for a God they no longer believe in, made immanent in this world instead of the next they no longer believe in. The entire thing sounds very much of Christianity.

>>13676564
>>13676544
>>13676537
interdasting posts, man, thanks

>>13676537
Human liberation from ARTIFICIAL inequality doesn't mean levelling all natural inequality. Marx never argued for this for example. Conservatives persistently refuse to comprehend this very simple point, which makes them appear to be fundamentally intellectually dishonest.

>>13676571
Every time the right wing critiques the things left wing people say, one of you nuts comes out the woodwork with the true and final esoteric teachings of Marx.

>>13676571
I know Marx didn't, Marx was racist after all. I was talking about progs with that bit, who really do think you can end that. However I think that artificial inequality is not fundamentally different from natural inequality, technological civilization is a part of nature in my view, and it follows the same basic rules, just in new particularities.

>>13676594
>technological civilization is a part of nature in my view, and it follows the same basic rules, just in new particularities.
This desu, cordoning off civilization from nature is arbitrary. humans are natural, thus the products of their activity are natural as well. isn't that basically de maistre's argument agains Rousseau

>>13676571
There is no hard distinction between natural and artificial inequality though, this is what the left doesn't get. If someone wants power and resources at any cost he will use his natural qualities to create "artificial" political systems, laws, mores etc that have the effect of amplifying his perhaps only modestly superior personal qualities, if not for himself for his class or posterity. It just feels like the left can't accept that the struggle for resources is total. Artificial inequality is an inevitable result of natural inequality; for it not to be you would have to prove that there is some moral imperative for the naturally superior to hamstring themselves, to not utilize their superiority to its fullest extent

>>13676598
de Maistre was a smart and honest man, though he went kind of too far at times. Rousseau was a narcissistic fuckhead who hypnotized people with language and ideals which he never even vaguely defended. I remember reading Rousseau's autobiography as a kid and thinking 'is this faggot actually for real? he defends nothing he says, and sucks his own cock the entire book'.

And yeah that's the point, look at the totality of things and see the patterns common to them all, don't divide shit up and create new logics of reality for each, they all exist in the same reality, but have their own characteristics of functioning.

It is possible that this isn't true, that things are hugely different in whatever level of reality, and reality doesn't even mean anything at all in a universal sense. I have gone down that path myself in thought, so I wouldn't wholly discount it, if someone is going to make a real argument for it, but men like Rousseau just do that without any higher metaphysics, they don't explain shit.

>>13676571
Because conservatives are shills who get dirty Israeli money, they’ll misread Marx as intentionally as possible

>>13676654
I already explained I wasn't talking about Marx in that particular bit, but about progressives. I know Marx didn't think that. I probably worded it poorly in the original post, it was a kind of ramble.

>>13676654
>Because conservatives are shills who get dirty Israeli money
umm are you referring to Neoconservatives? because quite a few of them are ex-trotskyists so I think they know their marx rather adequately

>>13676537
>

>>13676666
Yeah neocons are Marxists. Based frogposter!!

>>13676654
This type of comment as an expression of the Zion Don/MIGA shill campaign is pretty interesting because the "radical" crowd online seems to be attacking the alt-right for contradicting their own antisemitic convictions by supporting Trump. The idea that the left would adopt ironic antisemitism as a tactic would have seemed impossible 5 or 10 years ago because antisemitism has long been viewed as evil itself, a kind of crystallization of the object of horror that is "illiberalism" broadly defined. This shilling is probably proof that the taboo around it is eroding, if not in itself then through the mere preponderance of ironic antisemitic content coming out of the left, who are undoubtedly smirking and sniggering at their very own Jew jokes. Even though this is all ostensibly at the expense of the alt-right, one has to wonder what the aggregate effect of all this will be on the Overton window and political discourse? Adopting a cavalier attitude towards our old pieties, even if in defense of them, seems to adumbrate just a dash of contempt for them