/lit/ - Literature

>>12400543
and this is why Whitehead fucking rules. for Whitehead, speculative philosophy was *an adventure in thinking.* he was the fucking bomb like this. Brassier writes that nihilism is a speculative opportunity: not an endgame, but a genuine place of beginning and departure, because

a) we cannot say that we are occupying the Home Square to which philosophy or Truth must return, or depart from, and
b) we cannot say what it is that we are going to find Out There, including The Answers, or even that We Are The Ones Who Can Know, with the given set of tools that we have at hand.

and *that is a good thing.* that is indeed a *very* good thing. because - as we have learned, perhaps, at least from psychoanalysis - we can impose our own symptom on everything around us as a truth-condition, and in that very way cause things to appear before us that fit our own narratives. this can be an absolute disaster probably does not need to be explained, yes? if all you have is a hammer - like this. we do not want to stamp our own certainty on everything we see in front of us if we have a genuine interest in knowing those things, or learning more about ourselves, or both, or whatever else. for 'everything to be in a state of flux' is a very good thing, in a certain sense. it means we are actually prepared to take an interesting and productive voyage out onto the plane of immanence as artists, philosophers, scientists, musicians, and so on.

i want to say, 'if we go seeking God we will surely find Him.' Heidegger was a profoundly conservative man, but a deep theological thinker: he was extraordinarily good at being a mystical hermit. Nietzsche well and truly broke him, but his workaround - Being - was not really such a bad creation. Deleuze does not have Heidegger's theological hang-ups, and probably gets Nietzsche more accurately. he also has more love for Bergson (and Spinoza, who Nietzsche also loved, and who Heidegger did not). back in the day, tiny brave gangs of Christian monastics ventured out of their monasteries looking for God also, armed with nothing more than a little old-school logic. they wound up laying the conditions for the scientific revolution.

but Whitehead is his own man, in many ways. he was neither a stranger to science, philosophy, or God. that makes him a rara avis indeed. he would have said, the adventure in thinking - adventure *is* thinking - is a very good thing. *you don't know what you are going to find.* you won't find anything *beyond* God. and if you are trying to say what God is and then prove it, prepare your anus. the cosmos is bigger than you are. and you may even find that you are wrapped up with it in ways that will surprise you...

Whitehead is the boy. he would be like the CEO and bankroller of the Cosmic Exploration Foundation. he launches a thousand ships. and i think he would want them to come back, too.

>>12039159
damn, muh greentext

>Thus there is nothing barren, sterile, dead in the universe; nothing chaotic, nothing confused except in appearance. Here is an example of that. If you see a pond from a certain distance, you may see the swirling of the fish without being able to pick out any individual fish; it may seem to you that you are seeing confused movements of the fish, but really nothing is confused in itself—what’s happening here is that you are perceiving confusedly.

>Philosophers have been at a loss regarding the origin of forms, entelechies, or souls, ·but not any longer. Careful investigations into plants, insects and animals have shown that Nature’s organic bodies are never produced from chaos or from putrefaction, but always from seeds, in which there is without doubt already some preformation. Rather than something formed being generated from something formless, it has turned out that what is formed always comes from something that was already formed. So these days we think that before conception there is an organized body there, and that this has a soul; which is to say that before conception there is already an animal there. What conception does is to launch that animal into a great transformation that will turn it into an animal of a different kind.

>Each body is affected by the bodies that touch it, and feels some effects of everything that happens to them; but also through them it also feels the effects of all the bodies that touch them, and so on, so that such communication extends indefinitely. As a result, each body feels the effects of everything that happens in the universe, so that he who sees everything could read off from each body what is happening everywhere; and, indeed, because he could see in its present state what is distant both in space and in time, he could read also what has happened and what will happen...

>But a soul can read within itself only what is represented there distinctly; it could never bring out all at once everything that is folded into it, because its folds go on to infinity.

-- GWF/M

>>11989802
not that i know of, but Eco > Ego is where it's at for me in some sense. but that is something i am 100% going to be talking about in my own schizo-ramble contributions to these ideas: namely, the question of the price paid by catastrophic expenditure and loss, however relevant gross overexpenditure is to the continental perspective (in particular, Bataille).

it's somewhat heretical to say this, but ultimately we have to find a way to pull the brakes on a Wild Ride whose only salient feature is that there are none. a responsible acceleration is probably a contradiction in terms, but there is no guarantee for safety physical or psychic on the Wild Ride, and beyond a certain horizon one is required to ask if that really is what life is all about. in one sense the great age of existentialism is kind of over, and yet answers to existential questions are more pressing than ever these days, it seems. they won't be found in politics, however, and there are limits to how far a mind can go before it breaks.

as anon says:

>Whitehead's organic philosophy replaces the centrality with relationships - mutually co-creative perspectives among all things.

but we are also a little too aware today of the danger of hysteria, which is why something more than atheism is called for: it's the Cosmotechnics YH talks about. and then some:

>a true post-atheism, transcending atheism-as-negation by offering an affirmative view of life that solves the problem of omnipresent nihilism and alienation of the present.

i didn't write that, but i sure wish i had. fortunately i have a lot to say about Fuck Yeah Space Taoism myself. i think this is going to be a good thread. i have to pack it in for tonight but more on this stuff tomorrow.

there's something special happening here. i hate to say it gents, because, you know, we're all fucked out and miserable on this godless rock, and Capitalism > your face. but it's true. there's a little too much Interesting happening in these threads for it to all be an optical illusion. and if it is, it's quite an illusion. Deleuze says, if you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked. well, we're all trapped in the dream of Capitalism. and we are all fucked.

call it a *lucid* dreaming, then. you know, when you know you are dreaming. the brighter side of hyperstition. has anyone ever had one of these before? i don't think it's something i need to do IRL, but this is close enough for me. the dream of theory, and the power of meme-magic. crazier things have happened.

it's all too much fun. see you in the next one.

>>11921604
the word comes from the title of one of yuk hui's books (>>11918472). it's essentially a way of talking about nick land, but it includes history (mumford), cultural theory (baudrillard, han), other philosophy (deleuze, lacan, heidegger) and some religious and mystical stuff (marty glass, tarnas, others). in Cosmotech 4 there was a lot of shine thrown Alfred North Whitehead's way also, since process philosophy is not only highly compatible with science, it also allows for process theology also, and i think these things are good in terms of de-escalating the rage and hysteria everywhere in society today, and maybe helping to point the way forward beyond postmodernity and its discontents.

basically as long as i've been on this board i've been talking about philosophy, whether it's deleuze, girard, land, baudrillard et al, but my interest in that has been primarily driven by two guys: rene girard and nick land. i was a big heidegger fan until land ruined my lovely Being-parade, and girard pretty much tells me that most of life historically, anthropologically, or culturally understood can be understood in the way that girard presents it. so i defer to land on a lot of questions related to marx, but to girard on a lot of other things, and girard always makes me inclined to hold the door open in a certain sense.

so i sometimes describe it also as White Hat Acceleration. the way that yuk hui uses it is to describe a theory of technology which *isn't* always and fundamentally rooted in the western perspective, but he is important because he's not a bog-standard postmodern theorist. he's not trying to just write another anti-western or anti-scientific polemic. he is interested in the history of technology in china, but his sources are also western ones: heidegger, stiegler and simondon. he also likes mou zongsan, who read kant and hegel very deeply.

so for me Cosmotech means a theory of acceleration which doesn't always end or terminate with nick land, although i believe nick land really matters. the problem is that land's view of humanity is incredibly dim, and i happen to think that one of the reasons for this is that it lacks an aspect of the sacred and a right relation to it that for me was convincingly argued by girard. but i also really like marty glass' book also, and for him the Traditionalists matter. and then on top of that, if yuk hui is right about some things - and i think he is - then perhaps there is an opportunity to move the conversation beyond land without diminishing what land says about technology and economics and so on.

at least, that's what i would like it to mean. it also means a lot of tumblr art. basically it's accelerationist stuff with less politics and perhaps a little more mysticism to leaven the landian blackpill. Traditionalism as glass understands it is welcome, but so is the possibility of a neo-heideggerianism by way of YH, stiegler and simondon.

>>11260822
>more master xiong?
go here.

>Hence, Tu clearly sees in Xiong’s life history a transformation taking place, personal and contextual in character but exhibiting a defining trait of what it means to be committed to the Confucian personality ideal or even to be a Confucian at all. It is this existential decision to take up the Confucian way that constitutes the initial milestone necessarily to be passed if the quest for authentic existence is to be real in a Confucian sense. As pointed out above, Tu identifies Xiong’s main concern as “to live authentically as a Confucian thinker amidst depersonalising forces in contemporary China.” It is to these depersonalising forces and to the context of Xiong’s China, as well as Xiong’s attitude to the appropriate philosophical reaction demanded by the challenges of his time, that I want to turn now...

source:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ralph_Weber/publication/36384176_Xiong_Shili_Revisited_Tu_Wei-mings_Perspective_and_Authentic_Living/links/53e49a2f0cf21cc29fc9147b/Xiong-Shili-Revisited-Tu-Wei-mings-Perspective-and-Authentic-Living.pdf

tu weiming likes him and he's a pretty awesome scholar: centrality and commonality is a really good book. and so does neo-confucian heavyweight mou zongsan, who is also a pretty awesome scholar. the new treatise i quoted from is on libgen, it's interesting. i like it because it is full of descriptions of Mind and Fundamental Reality read like analogues of capitalism rinsed through a google translate cycle about a dozen times. or maybe this is just my own pet project: capitalism takes over the world, but cyberpunk/sinofuturism/shanghai &c are just infinitely interesting to think about. and b/c eastern thought on Desire and Representation and so on always kind of tweak my mood in variously interesting ways.

>>11260822
just bee urself, obviously

>>10187892
kek. sorry

>>10187581
will do.

death spirals of progressivism are fun to watch, i guess...it's just only when they produce something which is genuinely interesting, something that i guess is so perfectly parodic that it sums up the whole thinking of a period in an image or two that i get excited. culture contains within itself - maybe we're just sort of discovering this - a limitless potential for parody and irony. it's exhausting, though, also. isn't this why, or part of why, DFW ultimately decided to hang himself?

to get back to OP's original question on this, then, is sort of to ask ourselves: if we do require some dimension of the sacred, or even just a sense of noumenal reality in life...and if the absence of this is really a kind of feeling detrimental to life itself...is violence warranted? is warfare necessary? heavy questions.

my own thought is that they are not, but that warfare - and especially gnostic warfare - is a kind of 'great resuscitator' for exhausted or decadent periods. this is basically nietzscheanism, or a form of it: when all is lost, at the bottom, *pick a fight.* even if it's only with yourself. and, in a sense, it works...

...maybe the problem - more of a question for human psychology - is that the most animating fights are the gnostic ones. that's where we really get excited again, that's when we get the total commitment, the total mobilization towards things that seems to bring an end to our nihilism, sense of futility, failure, etc. the problem lies in justifications, though. it's why girard is, again, perhaps, not as popular in academic circles tinged with marxism. holy war, in whatever form, gets the juices going...or *keeps* the always-already flowing juices going so as to ward off the inevitable collapse into despair that follows from not having any wars to fight (and not, for example, ready to commit to buddhism or whatever else.) plus your consumer society that already runs on agitation, stimulus, and seduction...

...we need the sacred, in some sense, maybe. and you know, just regarding the mind itself, in all of its awesome complexity, should be sufficient. i think it's more that we are inclined to put the mind to work for capital or whatever that leads to this disaffection. if land is right, and everything is just market formalism, it's kind of a recipe for malaise...and this, maybe, is why a guy like guenon (or JBP, or many others) matter. because there is more to life than either holy war or consumerist disaffection & irony. it just requires a different kind of thinking.

we have minds and maybe we don't know what to do with them. but they're clearly good for something more than politics, warfare, or making widgets. all those things make us feel good, but...we would like, maybe, a greater and more inclusive feeling, a feeling of belonging to the world that is more than a way of just possessing everything in the world, or being possessed by it.

cool mellow jellyfish b/c why not.