/lit/ - Literature

>>13211701
Jesus, what an idiot. I'm in awe that people take this guy seriously. "For reasons that aren't obvious the west has got some things right"? Doesn't he also go around talking about IQ? I know for certain I've heard him say Jews have the highest IQ on average, and that there are groups with sub 85 IQ that are totally unfit to function within society. So he's willing to discuss the biology of IQ but then suggests "it isn't clear" why the west is so dominant and enlightened? What a fucking charlatan!

>The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level of the economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.

>Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement.

>One should mention here the well-known concept of "future shock" that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.
>One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.

Even if "God is dead", belief still functions as a social category, it just stops being direct first-person belief, a form fairly peculiar to mainstream Christianity. We are just as spiritual as ever, but holding a specific set of Church doctrines in mind has become far more difficult which prompts other kinds of spirituality like westernized Buddhism and neo-paganism. Christianity still survives however as "belief in belief" - we cling to the idea that there are pure believers out there who don't struggle with believing in it, even if we ourselves are practically atheist.
Whether this is a positive development is anyone's guess, guys like Žižek have argued that contemporary spirituality just enables global capitalism and tried to defend an alternative emancipatory view of Christianity, and I tend to sympathise with this but I just don't know. I'm kind of a clueless agnostic monist.

>>10776626
Žižek's transcendental materialism as a consequence of the Hegelian reversal of Marxism, is the next stage of history tho

I contemplated sending a question to Slavoj, but I feel an anxiousness about it similar to that other anon.
We should not contaminate the brain of a philosopher with 4chan memes, but admire his serious project of re-evaluating the whole revolutionary tradition from afar.

>The crucial paradox of this relationship between the social effectivity of the commodity exchange and the 'consciousness' of it is that - to use again a concise formulation by Soth-Rethel - 'this non-knowledge of the reality is part of its very essence' : the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic ; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants - if we come to 'know too much', to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself.
>This is probably the fundamental dimension of ideology: ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological' - ideological is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing'.

"Starting with the greeks" has become a paradoxical meme because it has obvious utility, and skipping the greeks is very unwise. The real lesson to be learned, though, is that the Greeks are not "started" or "finished" ever. You will always go back to the greeks, and continually interpret their thought in light of modern philosophy. One does not finish reading Aristotle and henceforth abandon him for the rest of time. His works are studied for the rest of your life.
Therefore, the real joke in "starting with the greeks" is that you always have to start with the greeks. We are all starting with the greeks.

>>9890265
>zizek is in this thread

Do you think there's an essential human nature that's not produced by historical and social development?
What are your arguments for this?

>>9331027
Is there anyone more braindead than a utilitarian? How in the fuck am I responsible for some Bangladeshi prostitute half the world away? And isn't it incredibly racist to suggest these people need our help? It's some weird leftist co-opt of the white man's burden. I'm not falling for it. Everyone has the right to self-govern, it's inevitable that some governance would be inferior to others.

>>9315828
>tfw looking forward to the forced miscegenation procreation orgies
I can't wait to muddy my white seed

*sniff* HI WHERSHE ISH THE IDEOLOGY :DDDD

those legs