/lit/ - Literature

I find this paragraph from Kant's Critique of Judgment to be interesting re Pynchon's melty LSD ordering of symbols:

Further, beautiful objects have to be distinguished from beautiful views of objects (where the distance often prevents a clear percep- tion). In the latter case taste appears to fasten, not so much on what the imagination grasps in this field, as on the encouragement it receives in the way of invention, i.e. in the peculiar fantasies with which the mind entertains itself as it is being continually stirred by the variety that strikes the eye. It is just as when we watch the chan- ging shapes of the fire in the hearth or of a rippling brook: neither of which are things of beauty, but nonetheless convey a charm to the imagination, because they sustain its free play.

>>14612411
yeah I'll bring a copy of Ulysses to smash those useless xenoestrogen-clogged testicles until your bag breaks

>>14038384
>His work would be a fundamental new step into universal self-consciousness.

>>14023269
Pic related is a good start. The key point here is to understand how, with Hegel, thought for the first time kind of glimpses the movement that it is. He popped Being's hood, as it were, and peered inside. A pivotal moment of reflexion.

>>11893967
I see you

>>11545391
You're on the money, but a few caveats: just because capitalism can create a god doesn't mean it should be created. It's also not being consciously created, its just a runaway consequence of the Kantian delimitation of the subject (among other things). Hegel's more about: thought is something being, the world, does through the subject, the subject does not have a monopoly on cognition, because he is being's cognition (of itself).

Substance is Subject. Hegel paradoxically breaks the subject out of the straitjacket while simultaneously tightening the chain of Thought, totally immanentizing God: God isn't transcendent to the Whole, he just is the whole's self-relating, God as both = x and that which pronounces God being = x (the Subject). God is an internal production of himself. In a sense Hegel is a bit more wholesome than Kant, but accusing either of being somehow responsible for these things is simplistic, there's just causes and effects.

The Hegelian zeitgeist is the zeitgeist proper, thought's first reflexive glimpse of its own activity: this very act of redoubling itself. With Hegel the evolution of human thought is consummated as just the recognition of thought-as-evolution.

Hegel's phenomenology is History finally breaking its head through the surface. God is not a Being but a Sense, an intelligibility that uses the hard kernel of contingency to digest the universe to itself the way some herbivores use stones to grind the foods in their stomachs.

Hegel collapses all dualism into the formal difference of Substance with itself ("Spirit is a Bone": the identity of the crude and the high): Hegel is the slingshot around the pole of absolutized immanence, on the way up again

>>11366339
>and yet if this is the hamster wheel, the question is, why can't we get off of it?

it used be necessity forcing our commitment to it, now it's that question an anon posted itt: what can the earth do? how good can a woman look? how far can something you can actually touch take you out of yourself?

> do you think they have things to teach us about the mind, or are we just going to be reconfirming what the ancients knew in ever more high-res ways with our modern science?

yeah this is the crisis point. we're going to learn whether "god is dead" was a maturation or a regression, a kind of oedipal horror of noumena. here's the thing: were spirits naivety, or truth? did the ancients know too much? if they didn't, how is it so much of this system functions as the repression of their understanding of nature as hierarchical, zero-sum, threatened by chaos and distintegration at all times? did we progress into the kantian horizon of the subject and its sensibility always-already schematized to itself as the next stage in a logical development, or was it just the effect of humans coming together in urban populations? how can we uncouple one from the other if not? was the self-determining subject a pretension of "out of sight, out of mind"? being around like-minded people makes us puff up our chests. there is no reason why this shouldn't have its analogue in philosophy and our vision of the universe.

but hegel would say not so fast, don't be too deflationary, the absolute just is the order exhibited by rational societies.

will our relinquishing of these factors re-acquaint us with gods? "confirming what the ancients knew in ever more high-res ways"? maybe gods will become the names of the phenomenal horizons genetic engineering will allow us to probe. maybe technology is olympus' "back door". i want to say land is right and not: we're creating gods but hopefully ones after our own hearts.