/lit/ - Literature

Yall niggaz aint gettin me
Im german bitch i got tha brains
Best step the fuck off befo i pop off

Alfred North Whitehead

>>14588933

Retarded ones.

>>14588933
How can aesthetics be metaphysics?

>>14588948
based
>>14590328
and cringe
>>14590342
idealism

>>14588933
Derrida

>>14588948
Jesus who can be bothered with aphorisms these days

>>14588933
>What I feel is what is true and good
collage freshmen and schizophrenics

>>14590363
your entire being is mere feeling

>>14590363
This assumes that aesthetics are subjective.

>>14588933
Rousseau

>>14590347
>based
Fuck no.

>>14590328
Exactly.

>and cringe
No, nutjob.

>>14590342
It can't.

>>14590347
>idealism
No.

>>14588933
Absolute female logic

I fucking hate Nietzche

>>14590363
>experience isn't the primary mode of being
Piss off anglo.

>>14590540
t. incel

>>14590363
It's the only way to build a post-God social hierarchy. Those who see greater truths than others have greater feelings, and feelings are the self itself.

>>14590342
Look up process relational philosophy and radical empiricism to learn how

early schelling perhaps - system of transcendental idealism era

I find Nietzsche to be very hard to stomache. How can one assert that treating others the way you want to be treated is a bad thing and that all morality is just nonsense that arose for social reasons. I want to love everyone bros

>>14590540
This particular bit of female logic has helped me quite a bit, though. It's also true, oddly enough.

>>14591392
Nietzsche is offering a cheeky critique of the absurdity of the rationalists. There were people back then that unironically proposed things like utilitarianism as moral philosophy in polite society. Only a autism/10 lolbert would do such a thing these days, but he was dealing with a lot of nutjobs that normies took seriously back then.

Once you understand that human biodiversity exists then treating other people the way you want to be treated is in fact a form of tyranny. Liberal equality properly understood is a rejection of the plush cognitive biodiversity of mankind that nature has generated, i.e. a rejection of God.

>>14591441
I don't understand what you are getting at. Are you saying some survival of the fittest stuff? Like if I don't compete with others then I'm not pushing them to their limit either and letting genetic dead ends go on?

I feel like if you deny all elements of morality and just think might is right you are no better than a smart monkey, not a human.

Philosophy begins as a deviation from the unanimity present in a ritualistic society. In short, it challenges the established religious mentality. Who will dispute this? It does not matter if ultimately philosophy "proves" anything--the religious authority already had its knives out, ready to prohibit what, for it, were only tedious and distracting circumnavigations in thought. The philosophers were foolish to think that "proving" the veracity of the existing religious dogma would a) win them any credit with priests or devotees (who would have had to entertain doubt in order to follow the philosophers in their self-indulgent mental escapades) or that b) their logical deductions would improve the existing system, give it some foundation which it allegedly lacked, and perhaps remedy any misgivings or distrust on the part of the people. It is foolish because the people never had any reason to doubt the legitimacy of myth, which was curated to their own patterns of thought anyway; nor did the priests care, nor would oracles have suffered competition to dispute their multinational authority. Socrates was killed over this very issue: Athens saw in him a threat to the established order. Nietzsche was at least right that any society does not need truth to survive and it may even be in its interest to do without it. Give the people truth and they will not know what to do with it. Give them ritual, teach them to sacrifice, give them myth, and you will found a powerful civilization. It will not last forever--but its death will give birth to the next. Philosophy cannot claim such prestige.

Philosophy leads inevitably to homoeroticism. Socrates was a great homosexual. Even though this is indisputable, people will remark: "but homosexuality is not pure Eros, nor is any sexual love." In any case, Philosophers are lovers. It is in the very name! It was not until very late, and only for a short while, that Beauty was not confused with Virtue. The obvious inharmony of these two (for instance, in women) led to grand and breathtaking rationalizations of the subtlest sort, not excluding, of course, homosexuality (an attempt to find a more suitable Beloved) which then also had to be purged of its grosser factors, resulting in doctrines of the most bizarre sort, such as the personification of Wisdom in the "divine feminine" and so forth, which were, no doubt, nothing but vehicles for the outpouring of Eros.

There have been a few thinkers who have, for this very reason (in any case it must have been at least on the periphery of their thought) made strict delineations between Beauty and those other singularities, viz., Truth and Goodness, so as to protect these latter from Cupid's arrows. Such was the ambition of Kant and Poe, for instance, who did not deny the elevating power of Beauty, but saw the corruption which would inevitably take place if it where to be conflated with Truth (which gives birth to the Beloved Sophia) , or with Goodness (Romanticism).

>>14591459
One of the central tenants of liberalism is that we're all the same on the inside. This has a variety of manifestations like if we just make the best rational argument people will come to the same conclusions. Facts and logic from Ben Shapiro and what not.

The truth is that we are genetically wired differently. People have different in group preferences, different levels of extroversion, and so on, that generate vastly different moral preferences. For instance, how charitable you are. As such, owing to this human biodiversity, there can be no single "correct" moral schema, much less one arrived at rationally.

The liberal fancies ideas like the blank slate mind that reasons its way to universal truth. The conservative recognizes that we're hardwired with different and inconsistent values.

>>14591518
The idea of objective morality that anyone can arrive at is as old as Plato. We must be thinking about different definitions of conservatism since most conservatism (at least western) in my opinion is religious in nature and believes their religion to be the correct moral structure (Islam, Christianity, etc.)

If you say there is no truth in the world, you are still asserting that to be a truth, so there must be some truth anywhere. So I think you are wrong in saying that there cannot be a right way to act, since some sort of truth does exist which one can act in accordane with, but the debatable question arises if we can figure it out ourselves. Rationally I don't think so, but some sort of irrational leap like what Kierk says I think makes sense.

>>14588933
Plato, I’d think that would be obvious
>>14590363
Guess the founder of wester philosophy was a schizo.

>>14590363
>uhhh feelings are wrong because uhhhhhh logic? libtards btfo

this is the ultimate bugthink

>>14591494
The point is that the confusion of the aesthetic with virtue (Ethics) is a dangerous error, albeit a common one. Who will argue, however, that the most aesthetic life is necessarily the most ethical one? Certainly they may coincide, but they must not be confused. This is just the very infusion of Eros into the realm of Morality which I pointed to, in which the Beautiful, the Harmonious undermines the Good, by standing in front of it, as it were, so that it becomes admired as an aesthetic phenomenon, instead of being understood as an imperative, a command.

>>14591551
I didn't say there is no truth in the world, but given a lifetime of liberal brainwashing it is understandable that you took it that way.

What we can say is that there is no universal morality. We can point to different humans with genes that wire their brain to be more or less extroverted, and therefore more or less interested in charity. Our disagreements over morality that manifest in spheres such as politics, like how much to tax and how extensive of a welfare state we want are manifestations of underlying genetic differences.

I don't doubt the sincerity of the various positions. They are manifestations of objective truths about this world, namely the variety of genetic sequences that give rise to different personality phenotypes. The problem is when you become a liberal and abandon the material underlying reality, getting lost in a world of rationalism unhinged from the objective biodiversity that leads us to different moral values.

>>14588933

>>14588948
Source?

>>14591518
>If you say there is no truth in the world, you are still asserting that to be a truth, so there must be some truth anywhere.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement.

>>14591602
Not trying to provoke, but how is it logically sound to separate a statement from its context? Seems like you could justify nearly everything if you can do that.

>>14591602
The point is that such a categorical statement cannot be made without certainty as to the conditions of "everything" in order to assert that "everything" is indeed relative and not absolute. Where does your certainty that "nothing is absolute" come from?

>>14591494
>Philosophy begins as a deviation from the unanimity present in a ritualistic society. In short, it challenges the established religious mentality.
Religious mentality is itself philosophy, just an extremely primitive type.
>In short, it challenges the established religious mentality.
It doesn't merely challenge, it attempts to go beyond it.
>"proving" the veracity of the existing religious dogma would a) win them any credit with priests or devotees
that implies they would want any such credit from "priests" or "devotees". Heraclitus lived on a fucking mountain while contempting everyone below as retards. You think that genius would go and ask for the "acceptance" of the retards?
>b) their logical deductions would improve the existing system, give it some foundation which it allegedly lacked, and perhaps remedy any misgivings or distrust on the part of the people
You still imply the philosophers want to "remedy" "distrust", like the religious cultist would. You have projected your feelings onto the great philosophers.
>Nietzsche was at least right that any society does not need truth to survive and it may even be in its interest to do without it. Give the people truth and they will not know what to do with it. Give them ritual, teach them to sacrifice, give them myth, and you will found a powerful civilization. It will not last forever--but its death will give birth to the next. Philosophy cannot claim such prestige.
I think a civilization that has spaceships is a bit more powerful than your religious monk commune, retard. If you disagree with me, just imagine a war between our two communities: we won't even need to leave out country to kill yours!

>>14591664
You're thinking in terms of upvoting propositions of Mindbook, when you should be asking what is involved with relative perspectives. There's really no point to trying to have an intellectual conversation with you, because you don't know how to have one.

>>14591392
>How can one assert that treating others the way you want to be treated is a bad thing
He didn't call it a "bad thing", he called it a stupid thing, because that implies you are equal to the people you are interacting with, which is laughably stupid.
>all morality is just nonsense that arose for social reasons
objective morality is obviously nonsense because it implies an impossible exchange between my relation to the world, and yours.

>>14591664
The context of "everything is relative" is being lost on you. People who would say something like that are doing it within the framework of a primacy of the underlying material reality, which generates human biodiversity, and therefore different phenotypes including but not limited to different moral views.

The liberal rationalist is at root motivated by a sort of schizophrenia, a denial of the material realness of the world. It's a revolt against nature, against god, against some higher authority than their own thoughts. Having rejected the external, the objective, only then is a mind capable of trying to project universal Oughts rather than observing universal Is's.

>>14591683
I grasp that I am, far from being your equal, not even worthy of being your pupil. Please forgive the audacity of my remark, which was not even coherent enough to merit a response from you.

>>14591703
Why do our worlds have to be considered irreconcilable?

>>14591441
But the Golden Rule prominent in religion.

>>14591647
>>14591664
>>14591602
>>14591518
The statement "everything is relative" is not absolute, since it, too, is contained in my perspective. The same is true of "there are no facts, only interpretations", which is not a fact, since it too is my interpretation.

>>14591723
Because nothing is equal. If you were equal with something else, it would be related to everything else in the exact same way you are. But if this was true, this other thing would end up just being you. It is called the "identity of indiscenables" and was created by Leibniz in the 17th century.

>>14591441
Finally, an intelligent post! But I would drop the "human" from "human biodiversity", if you don't want to be misconstrued as some sort of humanist.

>>14590342
the two subjects are both basically trying to make sense of visceral experience

>>14590342
They mean objective theories of aesthetics.

>>14591680
>It doesn't merely challenge, it attempts to go beyond it.
Your opinion is shared by many, I admit; in other words, early religion is just a primitive attempt at metaphysical speculation. This is what I disagree with--although I again admit that, for instance, creation myths appear to share with philosophy the spirit of an attempt to understand the world. I do not deny this, per se; religion is an attempt to create order, and might be loosely characterized as an "explanation" of human society in its relation with the "outside" world. But if you look at early religion, especially the people of the Vedas, you do not see something resembling modern philosophy until later, much later in history; the earliest texts deal not with explanation but with ritual, with process. Its goal is not a worldview, a circumnavigation, but the perpetuation of a way of life. I mean this in much the same way that the average person nowadays really does not give much thought to metaphysical speculation, and cares more about living, about their role in immediate affairs. What does Philosophy matter to them? A religion then, which perpetuates human life, unites the community, and establishes common practices that are inherited by the next, is something quite opposite to the standstill of Philosophy, which has a paralyzing effect or ultimately leads to escape from society (as you imply with Heraclitus) or places all its hopes in death (in moksha, in conversing with Homer in the afterlife, or what have you); now this is the very opposite effect of a successful and thriving religion, would you not agree?

You cannot show men, in any case, one single civilization which was successful on account of its "advanced religion" which you imply Philosophy represents. No civilization has ever survived on mere Philosophy, not even modern ones.

>>14591739
What do you base your interpretation on?

Whitehead
>Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

>Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.

>>14591718
You are saying that, to try to impose a standard of Truth, or Judgment, or Morality is tyrannous to the "material reality" as you call it, which is for you, presumably, an unknown Source of variation and diversity, not only in empirical reality but in thought in general. According to this understanding, there might be one human type, for whom morality is constituted of what another human type calls evil. What is the pinnacle of Beauty to one is the pinnacle of Ugliness to the other, and on. Now this is just to say that there is no objective Morality, no objectivity in matters of Taste, or even Truth, this latter being the agreement of concept and reality, so to say that the "underlying material reality" might produce the very liberal rationalist you argue against, whose arguments cannot then be refuted by you, for this were cruel, for even the utilitarian is perhaps a legitimate morality under a certain human type which our remarkable material reality has produced. How can you tell this person that his morality is tyrannous without asking him to surrender to the impossibility of understanding the world, or applying some morality to it? Is this your goal, ultimately? To venerate the "underlying material realness" without a common morality, without a common standard of truth, without a common standard of judgment? What will this lead to but anarchy? Pray tell.

>>14591216
Why Anglo? That's the opposite of what you should have written.

>>14591932
The issue with liberal rationalists is that they don't really believe what they are saying. They understand that underlying material reality is real. They understand not to jump off bridges or in front of speeding cars. Their actions betray their convictions and speak louder than their words.

This being the case, the generous interpretation of what we're dealing with in a liberal is a schizophrenic. They have a sort of split personality wherein they deny material reality philosophically in order to abuse other people and society, but accept it insofar as it benefits them personally. Not all liberals are the same. Some are not schizophrenic, but just dishonest brokers, liars, sociopaths.

The first step to dealing with the liberal problem is to recognize it for what it is. Once we're comfortable describing the liberal as they are, as a schizophrenic or sociopath, etc., that is to say, we've become comfortable seeing them as they, then we can begin to wrap our heads around a productive solution.

I can't start my own thread, so I have to borrow this

The dialogue begins on the right page, but the text on left page says "commentary/explanations on page 398", should I read them first, since they're referenced before the actual text? I'm reading Plato

>>14593600
Read source > read explanations > read source again

>>14593319
How to you get from "reality is real" to the idea of an "each to his own" morality?

Bump

>>14588933
How could someone be so right in diagnosing Anglo-autism and their strange obsession with ethics and its relation to mathematics of all things

>>14591814
Not him, but raw, temporary feelings that words can't replace, only serve to reference to. Life extends beyond the veil of language and consequently of thought.

>>14594444
Could you elaborate on that? Im not really well versed in analytic phil