/lit/ - Literature

why do we must to learn false or obsolete theories instead of true and useful theories in philosophy's career? for example we study leibniz's metaphysics but we don't study a philosophical perspective of his infinitesimal calculus, we learn presocratic metaphysics but not their mathematics, there are many examples

>>12654702
maybe it's just waiting. or maybe it can't be done. Deleuze is arguably the endboss right now, much as Spinoza was in his day. and yet while Spinoza was alive, Leibniz was too, and Leibniz really wanted to be a kind of conservative Spinoza: hey look, it's the best of all possible worlds, let's not let things get too crazy. that turned out to be unworkable, but it's a noble thought. even Deleuze himself seems to have had pretty good feelings about Leibniz near the end of his life.

Land is unique because when he was young he was a radical left Marxist Deleuzian, and now in his age he's a conservative Marxist Deleuzian, which hasn't really been seen before (unless you want to call it bog-standard Boomer neoliberalism, which would be uncharitable). he's showing something that can be done with theory that really hadn't been done before, and it's fairly consistent for all that. perhaps now he has begun to fossilize into being a cranky old wizard, but he's painted a picture of a lot of things that were arguably there the whole time but nobody saw. now we see them. and this in a way is also helpful for disarming identity politics of some of its power also. does it solve those problems with bigger problems? it absolutely does.

there are almost certainly going to be ways to reveal cracks and holes in Land's theory also as things continue, no question. maybe we will discover that a climate of turbocapitalist nightmare fuel represents a threshold for human beings, who beyond a certain horizon simply mob up and take things in a totally different direction. or maybe we will discover that capital in fact fluorishes in conditions of empathy, and not by being a boot stamping on a human face forever. Singapore did not need to be terrified out of its wits to prosper. or, for a less perhaps A+ student example, but one which is no less interesting, look at Rwanda: chronic tribal violence now assembles itself into something that actually has a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

i think ultimately if there is something good to be said for his writing it's that it fruitfully explores both extremes of the spectrum. we ought to know at this point that whatever we are doing to ourselves we are doing in the absence of Trusted Third Parties. intelligence is a good look, and maybe slowly inching back towards a point where after a great age of Feels > Reals we can begin asking about Ideas > Feels again, because we will all be made to look equally foolish in the face of the machines. put another way, if we don't clean our own rooms, we cannot be surprised if the rooms clean themselves for us, and find that the thing that is causing the mess - us - really is the first thing that has to go. most studies of capital are studies of petit-bourgeois anxiety, and we *should* be anxious about the vapidity of those fantasies. they suck. and they're not tenable.