/lit/ - Literature

i just can't a flaw in this. Confucianism doesn't have plans for the state, because the state is about the beings who live in it. it's not an abstract entity, and anything like a master-slave distinction in it makes no sense. and this includes every attempt w/in postmodernity to recapitulate the master-slave distinction without repeating it.

Confucius is not Nietzsche, and he is not Kant, or Hegel. he bears little resemblance to anyone in Europe (except, perhaps, Leibniz). and a Cosmotech imperative probably *would* trade technical achievement for social order. that would not be Simondon's perspective, i don't think, and it certainly wouldn't be Deleuze's, let alone Uncle Nick's.

but we arrive at a point where the tech becomes self-operative, and it's not that this is a bad thing, it's just that it runs up against the question of the polis, and people react. that's my own thing too. and so maybe it's the milieu in which invention takes place that matters...

ultimately, these things come back to just describe cultures, in the long run. Spengler distinguishes between the poetic Culture and the technological civilization, and there's more than a little of this in Heidegger also. everything in continental theory since Heidegger has been a discourse on technics and time as a result, and the fruit of a stalled narrative gives you both idpol and Uncle Nick.

but Confucius is just so cozy. Laozi and the Buddha too; but the Great Learning is Confucius' thing more than theirs.