/lit/ - Literature

>>23194244
It must be some sort of punishment for the right wingers that the best critiques of modern science worship, the degradation of culture, identity politics... essentially everything they hate were written by jewish marxists

>>23194441
Jewish spirit is constant criticism of normativity so it is inevitable that it at some point turns on itself when the lack-of-normativity becomes the norm.

>>23194441
It would be if that were true, but it's not even vaguely true.

>>23194701
Name some of the good right wing critiques. I want to check them out.

>>23194244
They correctly observed that reason is never abstract or "pure." Reason is an activity, and there is always a person doing it. That person is part of a culture. That person has an ego. That person is reasoning in order to achieve some particular end. Saying "I'm reasonable" or "my reason is universal" doesn't free me of my cultural, psychological, or practical context. It only deprives my interlocutors of that context.

The enlightenment fixation on reason suits the conservative, since it's easiest to resist change when the status quo is invisible. Thus one appeals to "common sense" or "natural law" or "reason" -- an unchanging abstraction that masks the fact that there is a status quo, and the status quo can be changed.

The right wing is broadly (though not exclusively) conservative, so it's against their rhetorical interest to call reason into question. At their most radical, theocratic thinkers argue that reason must be made to serve the faith, and fascist thinkers argue that reason must be made to serve the volk. But neither argument critiques reason as such; the extreme right only notes that reason sometimes conflicts with their political goals.

Since the left, even the moderate left, is interested in disrupting the status quo, every left-wing argument begins by pointing out that something is wrong with the status quo. This is a natural conclusion for a critique of the enlightenment, since the values of the enlightenment have become the status quo. Furthermore, criticizing abstract reason allows the leftist to point out that many things we take for granted could change.

To give a concrete example, take gender. A moderate right-winger might say gender is simply a fact. There are people with penises, and we've decided to call them "men." There are people with vaginas, and we've decided to call them "women." A trans person is simply wrong; they misunderstand what it means to be a man. On the far right, one might further say that this is God's will, or natural law, or an important fact for the survival of the race. All these arguments serve to sustain the current categorization, and the social institutions (e.g. the nuclear family) that categorization serves.

A left-winger, on the other hand, is motivated to argue that what seems to be a law of nature is actually a cultural construct. Thus, the sex-gender distinction, or the idea of gender as performance. If a "man" can become a "woman," or vice-versa, then one can freely pursue a wider range of social roles. If we abolish the distinction entirely, one is freer still. Suddenly, very different lives - uncoupled, polyamorous, gay, trans, or simply childless - seem no less sensible than married life with two kids and a dog. No appeal to reason, on its own, can get us to this point; we must first criticize what the average person assumes is reasonable.

>Start book with “the nazis are so bad and the treatment of US was sooooo mean… Let’s figure out where things went wrong so that this ever could have gone so wrong.”
Its not hard to perhaps disagree with their entire whiny premise

>>23195129
Literally any Catholic right-winger.

>>23196012
Yet you don’t seem open to the Nazis being bad guys. Hmmmm..

>>23196012
Pseud alert

>>23195405
>>23194244
there's no right-left in democracy and there is no reactionaries too

>>23196026
They are bad guys, but im also not gonna start agreeing with the Hitler was Voldemort position.
>>23196961
Liking Adorno is the pseud thing to do.

Bump

>>23195129
Carl Schmitt, Alain de Benoist

>>23195405
>reason is never pure
>therefore everything is baseless and we can make any shit up we like
Yeah this is their position but it's horseshit. Acceptance of nature, the counterpart to the ego, that which is given, is what's inherently correct. Adorno etc are even more ego-obsessed than the enlightenment thinkers.

>>23199863
De benoist is a faggot.
Carl Schmidt is good in his catholic phase.

>>23195405
kant and even hume showed this centuries ago

>>23194244
They literally say that reactionaries were right in some bits (especially De Maistre)

>>23200151
Why do you catholic larpers hang around fucking 4chan of all websites? Go to facebook

>>23199871
The argument isn't:
>reason is never pure
>therefore everything is baseless and we can make any shit up we like
It's more like:
>reason is never pure
>therefore anyone who claims their conclusions are universal is ignoring their own limitations

For example, if I tell you that high heels are "transcendentally feminine," you can counter by pointing out that before the rise of pinup magazines in America, the high heel was primarily worn by male aristocrats, who were aping the style of butchers that wore high-heeled boots to keep their feet off the bloody floors. By keeping in mind the history of the shoe, we can shed the illusion that it has a masculine or feminine essence.

Right-wingers love appealing to essences, so they tend to avoid such critiques.

>>23202367
not necessarily. Left-wing trite often resorts to what is basically just essentialism and denial of agency, such as the idea that man is always determined by his surroundings and everything he does is never genuine unless it aligns with leftist ideology.
They even approach essentialism in gender ideology.

>>23194244
My favorite part is when Adorko tries to connect nazism to enlightenment science worship because it just shows how retarded dialectics is.

Everything they say can also be applied to them. The only reason they see the enlightenment in this specific way is due to their own culture which they were brought up in and their limitations, etc. In short, no knowledge can be gained from this. It all just leads to endless nihilism.

>>23202429
>In short, no knowledge can be gained from this. It all just leads to endless nihilism.
This but they were too retarded to realize it. They are just as much a product of the enlightenment if not moreso than even the conservatives today who praise it. Even Adorno, when push came to shove, would cling dogmatically to his silly ideas and values, including his homophobia and he would never, not once be able to see the irony in his own existence. He would always just be in his own mind that strong persistent chud who stood up against the forces of decadence and decline in western society when in reality, he was just a autist with masculinity issues who always looked like a massive dork to the students, standing there awkwardly on the platform with his fuba looking like what humans may have all looked like if God had decided to fashion them out of his own thumb.

>>23194244
Reactionary thought is so retarded it makes Marxism looks bright.

>>23194244
>2 gay niggas complaing
nah i’m going to watch steven crowder wear a dress cause i can laugh at that
>>23202507
based centrist

>>23202429
>Adorko tries to connect nazism to enlightenment science worship
In the horoscope book he tries to connect nazism to irrational occultism. European charlatans were very good at extracting sinecures from American universities.

>>23202420
To say "man is determined by his surroundings" is the opposite of essentialism. By implication, if you put a man in a new place, he'll change. Most committed leftists I know don't comment on whether something is "genuine," since to be genuine is for one's outward presentation to match one's inner essence.

I imagine you're misunderstanding the left-wing concept of transness. The center/liberal theory of LGBT life is the essentialist theory, which goes:
>I have a "female brain," but a "male body."
>The brain is the essential part of me.
>So I change my appearance to match what's in my head.

But the left-wing theory is constructivist. There is no "true" gender, no essence. There is only presentation. On a left account, a person isn't trans because they're a "brain in the wrong body," but because they want to inhabit a social role accorded to the opposite gender.

It's fairly common to confuse leftists and liberals, since they often share cultural goals. However, they do have different philosophical and political projects, and these differences come out eventually.

>>23202768
>It's fairly common to confuse leftists and liberals
it's fairly uncommon to say that liberals are not leftists since only autistic communists think this way

>To say "man is determined by his surroundings" is the opposite of essentialism
but it is a form of determinism and can lead to the idea that man or the self does not even truly exist since it isn't causally potent. Just a bunch of atoms in the void, essentially.
You also don't seem to understand social constructionism about gender. This is common, since it is a contradictory and confusing mess to begin with. The problem with "gender" (pretending that it is seperate from sex) being only "presentation" is that you have to explain just what exactly is being presented and how it is socially constructed which you cannot do without excluding someone (i.e. people that want to be counted as women). this is not unique to "leftists" or whatever. Liberally inclined people think this too. You are just describing what is effectively the vulgar or common notion people use to justify the existence of trans-people. And one that many trans people even use.

But do try to define woman and trans-woman. Whinging about essentialism means absolutely nothing.

>>23202768
forgot to add. Social constructionism also cannot say as to whether a smart reactionary should see or refer to the man dressed in drag as a woman even though the man says that he is a woman. The reactionary still sees him as a man and always will as he does not fulfill his definition or role of what a woman is. And again, what even is this role? To have children? shave your legs? to grow out your leg her with the clear intention to forgo established norms about your gender? It's all nonsense. You are all just trying very hard not to be eliminativists.

>>23202814
>>23202834
>[Anti-essentialism] is a form of determinism and can lead to the idea that man or the self does not even truly exist since it isn't causally potent.
That's one way to go, but few believe this. The more common view is that our attitudes are largely, but not entirely, due to our environment. For example, I speak English because I was taught to in school, not because I have an English essence. But I have a different temperament from other English speakers, partly due to my neurochemistry. However, the neurochemistry isn't the thing that makes me "me." It's one element among many, most of which are outside my body.

>You also don't seem to understand social constructionism about gender.
I'm using Judith Butler's concept of gender as performance, which is often confused with the sex-gender distinction. Butler denies that sex is different from gender, and says several times in her work that when people try to distinguish the two, "sex" is "always already gender."

For example, the assertion that "people with ova are, on average, weaker than people with sperm," isn't a sexed/gendered statement. But any statement that seeks to establish distinct social roles for "people with ova" and "people with sperm" is a gendered statement.

Mass belief in such statements then becomes a part of the environment in which people are raised, thereby shaping their senses of self. This offers us an explanation of the high-heel phenomenon. The statement "women wear high heels" became true because pornography brought it into the zeitgeist; it has nothing to do with the "natural" properties of people with ova.

>The problem with "gender" ... being only "presentation" is that you have to explain just what exactly is being presented and how it is socially constructed which you cannot do without excluding someone...
This is exactly Butler's point. Gender is inconsistent, because it's a collage of many different people's incompatible beliefs. You can't define "woman" for the same reason you can't define "hero;" it's shorthand for many different things we equivocate.

>[D]efine woman and trans-woman.
This is tangential, but I'm autistic so I like word games.
>Woman: The social role ascribed to people with ova.
>Trans Woman: A person without ova who inhabits or aims to inhabit the social role "woman."

Obviously this leads into your next question:
>And again, what even is this role?
To which I respond: it's culturally determined. Women wear heels because pornographers found it hot. Men stopped wearing heels because "dandy" became an insult. People LARP their gender, so it becomes social reality.

Finally, you say:
>Social constructionism also cannot say as to whether a smart reactionary should [see someone a certain way].
Which is true. The theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It only predicts that since you want to conserve the view of womanhood as "person with ova," you'll refuse to accept trans women as women. And you do! What a good theory.

>>23202507
>>23202546
>i have no convictions but this is good actually i'm just too smart to have real beliefs
cringeworthy desu

>>23203063
I just don’t see a realistic way forward in america until the system collapses under its own weight so why would i worry about it? the left is filled with people that arent serious about their beliefs and are instead obsessed with self image/ how they are perceived by others and addicted to capitalism and how it funds their excessive lifestyles. while the base of the right wing is a mishmash of social rejects who want to rip the entire country apart and the geriatrics who hate the results of their own social revolutions in the second half of the 20th century. liberalism doesn’t work for anyone anymore but what can anyone really do about it? vote?

Bump

>>23202955
>That's one way to go, but few believe this
because they generally tend not to think too much.
>The more common view is that our attitudes are largely, but not entirely, due to our environment.
which is impossible to ascertain with much certainty and usually just ends up making excuses for people.
>"sex" is "always already gender."
I agree with this but sex refers not to some arbitrary performance but whether you have male or female genitalia. Judith Butler cannot say what it means to be a woman.
>Mass belief in such statements then becomes a part of the environment in which people are raised, thereby shaping their senses of self.
Maybe it doesn't work like that. Maybe you are just misunderstanding how societies work. I mean, it certainly seems like the only thing queer theorists ever do is make dogmatic statements and try to interpret the world in a very specific way that is convenient to their ideological aims.
>This offers us an explanation of the high-heel phenomenon.
What is there to explain about the high heel phenomenon other than women, who are adult human females, typically wear high heels in today's society? I really don't get why you are trying to construe it into this weird way that everyone who doesn't buy into your silly notions about gender believes women wear high heels because of ovaries.
I'm actually more of an existentialist. my being a man is a fact about me. But I'm not simply or just a man.
>This is exactly Butler's point.
great, you'd expect her to drop this nonsensical word and just be an eliminativist. since, you know, gender is meaningless drivel according to her.
>Gender is inconsistent, because it's a collage of many different people's incompatible beliefs. You can't define "woman" for the same reason you can't define "hero;"
sure I can. It's an adult human female.
> it's culturally determined
again. I completely disagree. It's determined by the things that I can perceive. Thinking like this is honestly quite useless and counter-productive in my opinion and is evidently not the way most people see gender nor think about everyday things.
>Women wear heels because pornographers found it hot.
But it begs the question of why pornographers found it hot to begin with. eventually, you might as well end up in essentialism.
>The theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It only predicts that since you want to conserve the view of womanhood as "person with ova," you'll refuse to accept trans women as women. And you do! What a good theory.
sounds more like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I prefer predictability.

>>23194244
Adorno wasn't Jewish … (Italian Catholic mother)

>>23203063
>the left is filled with people that arent serious about their beliefs and are instead obsessed with self image/ how they are perceived by others
this is evident in their theories, which all boil down to reducing everything to what is essentially the way people try to attract mates for sex, with the added assumption that it is all "culturally determined" but who knows what that really means. Take women shaving their legs. Why do they say that women are "expected" to shave their legs? Simply because they are expected to do so chud! Ok, but why? What environmental thing caused this phenomenon? Could it be that men find shaved legs attractive? But of course, who can blame them? Shaved legs are attractive. They're smooth and soft and give the legs a refined look. It's definitely not a new phenomenon. Now what environmental factors could have caused this desire? At the end of the day. It's always something else and since most people have already realized this and what it leads to, they tend to assume that it's just something about men that makes them desire smooth legs and if some man doesn't like smooth legs then there must be something else about him that leads him to wanting smooth legs. Something other than simply himself. So they think that some human nature is the ultimate determinant to make things simple, as we are born with a given body and hardwired way of perceiving the world already and everything that is in the environment gets filtered through this human nature. Hello biological determinism.

>>23204263
but he was definitely a latent homosexual

>>23202367
>>therefore anyone who claims their conclusions are universal is ignoring their own limitations

The left only do this out of power, once power is achieved their values become absolute. You also seem to be simplifying everything into left and right, you essentially just said fascists are pro-reason because they are of the right when that is utterly wrong and goes against everything they stand for.

>>23194244
Is this readable and understandable if I'm kind of a layman to philosophy? Thr subject looks interesting

>>23204267
i suppose it's associated with cleanliness, it's the same with bathing, 1000 yrs ago most cultures were fine with bathing once a week in the river depending on ease of access, now that everyone does it, you have to do it too, not only because it's comfortable but also because of psychological effects like groupthink, its due to the survival of desirable memes as dawkins puts it

>>23204291
I think it's just magnified sexual dimorphism and neoteny. Women and girls are not as hairy as men even without the help of epilation.

>>23204361
>Women and girls are not as hairy as men even without the help of epilation
you only know this because they shave, you've never had the experience of seeing hairy women all over

>>23204380
The neoteny part still stands (both parts do but whatever, girl).

>>23202955
>>23204256
Interloping the discussion, why does the clash between cultural determinism and biological determinism always weight much more on the former than the latter? I think that it is obvious that a constructivist approach to culture has its merits, but it is not always founded on a void.

>>23204380
This is unironically one of those retarded untrue things that I think American university students would actually believe and say while feeling smart about it.

>>23196022
hahahaha good one pedro

>>23204733
do you walk around and see hairy women in short pants and tanktops and imagine them as attractive

>>23194244
It's easy when critique is the only thing you're good at
People act like it's hard to complain for 300 pages

>>23204256
>What is there to explain about the high heel phenomenon other than women, who are adult human females, typically wear high heels in today's society?
That's just an example. Wearing a particular item of clothing is an act, not a biological function. If one class performs an act and another doesn't, then we have to explain it in one of the following ways:
>A: The members of the class have an essence that makes them more likely to do so.
>B: Society is organized to encourage them to do so.
>C: Some combination of (A) and (B).
>D: It's just a coincidence.

You and I agree that it isn't (D). If it were (A), then women would have always performed that act, regardless of the society they belonged to. But this isn't the case, so it must be either (B) or (C). If it were (B), you wouldn't be arguing with me, so we agree it's (C). In which case society matters, and changing our society will change what the class does.

Returning to the example of shoes, if the porn and fashion industries produce more films and shows with women wearing chunky black boots, more women will wear boots, and some of them will stop wearing heels in order to do so. The social role "woman" will come to include boots.

You now imply that even though social organization plays a role in what people wear, there's a biological component too. Fair enough. Maybe it's the case that heels make women's butts look bigger, and men have some innate attraction to big butts women. Maybe a woman who's looksmaxxing will wear heels for this reason. But this theory has trouble accounting for three factors.

First, plenty of women wear heels in conjunction with outfits that minimize their butts. Flowing dresses, loose pants, trenchcoats that reach the knees, and so on. If making oneself attractive were the primary motivation, women wouldn't wear such outfits.

Second, for most of history, women haven't emphasized their butt. This, I hope we both agree, was due to the influence of "modesty cultures" the world over. As these cultures dissolved, women began to wear more sexualized clothes. So, even assuming an innate drive to show off one's ass, culture still plays a role in whether women do.

Third, men haven't always valued big butts. Body types go in and out of style the same way clothes do. In the 1920s, flat-assed flapper girls were in fashion. In the 50s, the hourglass figure came back into style. In the 60s, hippies valued a "natural" body. In the 70s women envied Twiggy, a model named for her characteristic lack of an ass. In the 80s, MC Hammer wrote "Baby Got Back." In the 90s, "heroin chic" brought thinness to new heights. In the 2010s, Nikki Minaj repopularized Hammer's view.

If culture affects behavior, all of these are easy enough to explain. There are trends, we participate in them, and as we do, the trends change. It's these culturally-influenced acts that Butler refers to as "gender." Remember, for Butler, it's a performance. It's nothing more than what people choose to do.

>>23204404
It's pretty easy to prove that culture shapes behavior. Advertisers do it for a living. It's much harder to prove that a given gene or brain structure shapes behavior. When we do prove a biological-behavioral link, it tends to be extremely specific. Certain neurchemical makeups cause depression, but depressed people with similar brains act very differently from each other. The intellectually honest thing to say regarding links between biology and behavior is, for the most part, "we don't know."

Arguments about biological determinism also have a poor track record. We used to believe black people got heart disease more often because they were black. Turns out, only American black people are more likely to get heart disease, and it's because they eat more salt and fat than other demographics in America. Africans and European blacks aren't more at-risk than the general population. The same is true for Mexicans and diabetes. The term "hysteria," which we now apply to psychiatric patients regardless of genetalia, was coined to describe a "madness of the womb."

In general, you should be skeptical of anyone who says something is innate, inborn, or otherwise due to "human nature."

>>23202367
Universal transcendental / pure social constructionism is an egoistic dichotomy. It completely ignores nature, which is not a choice. Jung completely blows this shit out of the water.

>>23205887
Well I meant mostly general biological differences between man and woman and how they reflect different behaviors, these are not determined because of culture. I don’t think these observations are too specific as what you had in mind in order to avoid an assertive claim about innate biological conditions.

>>23195405
"Reason" is not an activity. "Reasoning" is an activity. "Reason" itself can refer to invariant objective logical principles which exist independently of human minds.

Your own argument against the universality of reason assumes the universality of rational principles of argumentation. You keep using words like "is" (as distinct from "is not"). To assert that something "is", or that things "are", is to say that there's an objective state of affairs to which these things are affixed independently of the subjective viewpoint.

Your whole argument assumes that just because the subject is phenomenologically prior to the object, this means that the subject is also ontologically prior to the object. This is an obvious non-sequitur and there's no reason to read past your first paragraph.

>>23208113
>"Reason" itself can refer to invariant objective logical principles which exist independently of human minds.
How can we discover these principles? Your answer must involve the act of reasoning, in which case it involves human minds. So any attempt to discover transcendent/universal/objective reason must first overcome any factors which cloud our objectivity. Nobody has succeeded at this.

In practice, contemporary logicians don't try to show that their logical systems are the "one true system." Instead, they argue that for a particular set of uses, their system is effective. But this means that logic is invented, not discovered, and that it's invented with particular ends already in mind.

>Your whole argument assumes that just because the subject is phenomenologically prior to the object, this means that the subject is also ontologically prior to the object.
No, I'm arguing that the subject is epistemically prior. Before we know anything about things other than ourselves, we know that we exist and experience phenomena. This is a basic point that goes all the way back to Descartes.

>You keep using words like "is" (as distinct from "is not"). To assert that something "is", or that things "are", is to say that there's an objective state of affairs to which these things are affixed independently of the subjective viewpoint.
The fact that I adopt a system of argument doesn't mean I recognize it as universal. It just means I find it useful for a given conversation.

For example, I might say something like "the Grinch is stealing Christmas," even though the Grinch isn't real and it's impossible to steal a day of the year. But for the purposes of talking about Dr Seuss, we can adopt this shorthand to make our lives easier. For a more academic example, look up merological nihilism.

If I wanted to be really pedantic, I could couch everything I say in qualifiers, but it's easier to use shorthand. Don't get bogged down in the language.

>>23208674
>Before we know anything about things other than ourselves, we know that we exist and experience phenomena
DAH, but this is retardedly false.

>>23194244
>reactionary
Meaningless term for useful idiots. I bet you use the term "revisionist" a lot, but wouldn't dare apply that term to the card-carrying commie and liar Howard Zinn.

>>23197005
Democracy is gay. It's a good thing America is a republic.

>>23204263
>According to Holy Scripture: lineage determined by father
>According to Pharisee Talmudist tradition: lineage determined by mother