/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12364759]

redpill me on space taoism

[Anonymous No.12364772]

>>12364759
refuted by Kant

pro-tip: I'm just false-flagging (but am I?)

[Anonymous No.12364804]

@girardfag

[Anonymous No.12364875]

>>12364804
it's the fucking best and also it rules. Space Taoism is the greatest thing ever and the definition of my own private utopia.

here's the thing. basically i think two things have to happen, intellectually speaking: philosophy Kant-style and philosophy Perennial-style. one the one hand we have to grasp that there is a part of our brains which is rational, programmable, programming, and capable of all the exciting things that can happen in the world of AI. on the other, there is a part of us that fucking wigs out when we think about capitalism, and tends to get us joining mobs and witch-hunts for very silly reasons. in this Uncle Nick is unequivocally the most interesting man in the world for this reason: because Landian /acc-stuff is a devastating critique of a strain of academic Marxism that has begun to give people fungal brain rot.

socialism is cool; it can also become an absolute black hole. you don't really want Unironic Communism or Unironic Fascism. not really. what you want is to navigate between these possibilities and into that interesting country in which you feel like a human being, and maybe so does those around you as well. personally i think Space Taoism is precisely what will help you get here, and maybe even what a funky world on the other side of these terrible Scylla/Charybdis episodes.

scapegoating is the deal. remove scapegoating from 20C politics and you lose 20C politics. modern scapegoating looks like puritanical witch-hunting, except we don't see it as the witch-hunting that it is because we think Well It's Different If It's Fighting Fascism (or Neoliberalism, or X-ism, or whatever the fuck). but it's all bullshit. mass politics is all fucking bullshit. it is *absolute bullshit.* the Everyman does not know what he is doing. the paranoid neuroblastoma schizoposter (me) *also* does not know what he is doing, true: but i am at least prepared to admit this three out of seven days, and also to live on cup noodles and pirated wi-fi as an enduring shame to my family and a source of mild disappointment to my friends. you probably didn't need to know this as well

also i
>what the fuck are you saying man
just happy to be here inner self. that's all really

by the way Negarestani's book kicks ass.

[Anonymous No.12364879]

are these our meme philosophers now?

[Anonymous No.12364884]

apropos of nothing i also have this bitchin' tumblr image i was going to use for a Cosmotech but i don't know when i will do that. so i'll stick it here. enjoy

[Anonymous No.12364942]

>>12364875
This guys posts always make me cringe internally.

[Anonymous No.12364948]

>>12364884
>>12364875
Space Taoism is basically deconstruction for schizos. it argues for radical sincerity and fidelity to things rather than deconstructive critique, because in the end we all only see what we want to see. there is no Outside perspective, really. Land is cool and /acc is cool because it crumbles the inherent sanity-stabilizers that come with critiquing capitalism (which nobody really does anymore) or critiquing other social woes that follow from (which are endemic, and are ultimately only strains of socialist protestantism). philosophy does not work once it becomes activism. what you want is to be able to think about the deep meaning of computers and what an AGI would look like, and - although this is optional - without becoming an absolutely cold-hearted shitlord who feasts on stem cells and so on.

to be balanced; to be able to live amidst the Flowing of the Spice; to know that the Kwisatz Haderach is a bad scene; all this stuff. Space Taoism has much love for Dune for this very reason. plus, you know, prana-bindu QTs.

i've had like five cups of coffee today and i haven't posted here in a while, so i realize i am probably sounding even more unhinged than usual. but really not all that much has changed since the Mighty Cruffitan. only daily re-confirmations that mass politics is gahbage and that Uncle Nick is setting a very fine bar which we all must jump over in our various ways. u/acc is silly; r/acc is probably going to be like the Real Communism that many are waiting for, and which will not happen. also, Christianity is unironically based as well, but this is a more recent discovery for me.

sorry, i'm kind of all over the place today. but basically same old shitposting mutant. basically it will take a while before i return to form

[Anonymous No.12364952]

>>12364942
fuck off girardfag is based dont bully him

[Anonymous No.12364995]

>>12364952
appreciate it m8 but i actually welcome a pro-bullying stance as regards myself. it actually activates my trap card, because it means i will then go on and on explaining myself forever, which on a deep level is pleasurable for me, insufferable for all of those who do not like me, and perhaps enjoyable for those who enjoy tuning in to a never-ending radio drama about a philosophy and a couple of half-baked cakes

and also because said trap is ultimately pretty harmless. annoying at worst

>>12364942
don't stop. tell me more. tell me about your feelings. i need to know these things

[Anonymous No.12365026]

>>12364995
baaed

[Anonymous No.12365067]

and some greentext for thought, b/c why not.

>The answer is that, in its perennial form and at its deepest level, philosophy is a program for the crafting of a new species or form of intelligence—a form of intelligence whose minimum condition of realization is a complex and integrated framework of cognitive-practical abilities that could have been materialized by any assemblage of adequate mechanisms and causes, in other words mind or geist as investigated in the previous chapters. But this is only an initial state of its realization. What comes next is an intelligence that formats its life into an exploration of its possible realizabilities by engaging with the questions of what to think and what to do.

>Philosophy is a program for the crafting of precisely this kind of intelligence—an intelligence that organizes itself into a programmatic project in order to give rise to its possible realizabilities in any form or material configuration, even if they might in every respect transcend it. The future of this intelligence will only be radically asymmetrical with its past and present conditions if it embarks on such an enterprise, if it develops a program for bringing about its realizabilities. It can only rise above its initial state (the minimum conditions necessary for the realization of mind or general intelligence) if it begins to act on its possibility as something whose origins and consequences must be rendered intelligible. It can only emancipate itself if it subordinates the theoretical intelligibility of its sources and its history (what it is made of, where it has come from) to that organizing practical intelligibility that is the purposive craft of itself.
In this sense, it can be said that the beginning of philosophy is a starting point for the speculative futures of general intelligence.

>In whatever form and by whatever mechanisms it is materialized, this form of intelligence can only develop a conception of itself as a self-cultivating project if it engages in something that plays the role of what we call philosophy, not as a discipline but as a program of combined theoretical and practical wisdoms running in the background of all of its activities. An important feature of this hypothetical general intelligence (the geistig) is that it no longer merely acts intelligently, but asks what to think and what to do considering the kind of intelligence it is or takes itself to be. Thus its actions are not merely responses to particular circumstances, or time-specific means for pursuing ends that are exhausted once fulfilled. More predominantly, the purposive actions of this intelligence originate from and are guided by a unified system of ever-present though revisable theoretical and practical truth-candidate statements concerning what it is
and what it ought to do, its form and the life that suits it.

[Anonymous No.12365101]

>>12364952
Make me!

[Anonymous No.12365128]

>>12364875
>modern scapegoating looks like puritanical witch-hunting, except we don't see it as the witch-hunting that it is because we think Well It's Different If It's Fighting Fascism (or Neoliberalism, or X-ism, or whatever the fuck).
Progressivism is pure cancer. It's pretty much Scapegoating: the Ideology. There is always something that needs to be fixed, improved, or outright destroyed.

[Anonymous No.12365142]

>>12364995
Not that other guy but I also cringe somewhat, which sucks because I like that you read things and talk about them but I often can't handle the presentation.

Partly it's that the presentation is inherently kind of wacky and stylized, which you know, but I think it's more that it suggests the possibility of arrogance and self-indulgence on your part. If you were just natively zany, that'd be less problematic. It's specifically that you seem like you're going, "heh, perhaps you've heard of me, I'm this board's fav gimmickposter, Girardfag."

You seem to have a lot of people who appreciate your content but I would keep an eye on the possibility that there are people who you aren't reaching. You can become stereotyped and ultimately lazy from having a captive audience. There is nothing worse than a gimmickposter or e-celeb. Be yourself and don't apologize for it, but be mindful of becoming solipsistic, that's all.

[Anonymous No.12365171]

Girard-fag, I see you've been reading some eastern/mystic literature lately, what have you enjoyed most? I read a lot of it myself, I would be curious to know and might be able to offer some good recs.

[Anonymous No.12365178]

If this post gets dubs, girardfag makes a cosmotech thread tonight.

[Anonymous No.12365198]

>>12365128
ayup. nailed it exactly. it is my own contention that Trump is also historically necessary for this reason, because the Orange President did more to expose the inherent fallacies in progressivism in three years than it academics could have done in decades.

true, he also has a passive effect that inflames and enrages the Blue Team into even worse paroxysms of outrage ('offended to the point of orgasm') and is probably completely unfit to hold public office. but all of this is probably historically necessary

>>12365142
>If you were just natively zany, that'd be less problematic.
i am natively a mostly broken species of human being never intended for reproduction

>It's specifically that you seem like you're going, "heh, perhaps you've heard of me, I'm this board's fav gimmickposter, Girardfag."
jesus fuck no. it's not deliberate. it is just how i sound and talk about things. i feel your pain tho. i would hate me also. this is not to deny that i probably sound obnoxious. no doubt i do

>You seem to have a lot of people who appreciate your content but I would keep an eye on the possibility that there are people who you aren't reaching.
i appreciate their appreciation also

>You can become stereotyped and ultimately lazy from having a captive audience.
if you knew me IRL you would probably ask yourself if anyone could possibly be any lazier. i think this is the sound of maxing that out

>There is nothing worse than a gimmickposter or e-celeb.
i agree

>Be yourself and don't apologize for it, but be mindful of becoming solipsistic, that's all.
but being me means i must also apologize for being me

i think basically we should both agree to dislike me for what i have become. let's at least agree to build a steely compact around this eternal truth: Fucking Girardfag What a Fucking Shithead Someday Someday Will Fuck That Guy Up

i think we've at last hit on something that really brings this community together

bonus free psychedelic art too. goddamn we have some good times here. i missed this place

[Anonymous No.12365236]

>>12365198
I agree with the other anon on presentation and building a personality. At this point "fuck yeah space daoism!" is cringe and grating, and is reduced to a stale catchphrase.

[Anonymous No.12365271]

>>12365171
Journey
To
The
West

i've been talking about this a lot of late, i think it is one of the greatest and most wonderful pieces of literature - just *ideas* - i have ever come across. the enlightenment of Sun Wukong is a wonderful, fabulous idea. it's the illumination of the prince of differences. there is something kinda sorta analogous to this going on with the Oresteia, but in Journey you get this 10/10 insight: what would have happened if the furies had been enlightened by Athena, rather than banished? obviously i have extensive thoughts on this because of my own particular hang ups about the relationship of violence to the polis, violence and law, violence and religion, lots of other stuff...but Wu Cheng'en seems to have anticipated a lot of them.

i've actually been reading like a motherfucker recently. a lot of Taoist stuff, Vedantic stuff, getting to learn about Shiva (who is absolutely covered with phallic imagery, it is true, but not because he is just a fucking slave to his emotions, but is indeed a symbol of self-control, which is why all of those things are there)...some books by Alain Danielou on Yoga and Hinduism, daily readings of the TTC just to see if it would continue to seduce me (it does)...just a ton of stuff.

and a fair bit of Traditionalist stuff too, esp Frithjof Schuon, who i didn't really give due appreciation to before, but i do now. coming around - *finally* to what makes Christianity really quite wonderful. but first i had to steep my teeny little brain in the Deep Ocean of eastern mysticism so that it made sense.

...raaarrgh, honestly it's actually *too much* atm amigo. but the central message of Journey to the West is just so fucking beautiful it's ridiculous. Wukong is only illuminated through his excesses...and not by coercion, or seduction, because he is too smart to be fooled by these things...

...and Negarestani's book, and some interesting work by a Chinese guy writing about Tianxia, and other stuff.

>>12365178
sorry amigo. besides, i need to warm up again. clearly i'm rusty. my posts are all over the place

>>12365236
ok. i understand. you guys are right, i will unironically try harder not to become a meme. and honestly i'm actually grateful for the gentle reminders not to become a complete traffic accident with my posting here. i get excited sometimes, and carried away.

duly noted gents. ty most kindly

[Anonymous No.12365361]

>>12365271
It seems like you've covered most of the major areas, have you read any Sufi stuff yet? I find that it complements other eastern teachings beautifully. It has the same ego dissolution and tranquil bliss as Vedanta/Buddhism but with the same sort of suggestive/intuition-based aesthetics of Daoist texts (helped by the fact that most Sufi texts are essentially poems). Sanai's 'The Enclosed Garden of Truth' hit me like a train. You can read it here (starts at page 31).

http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/hadiqat.pdf

[Anonymous No.12365374]

>>12365271
it is the *conversion* of the Monkey King that makes the Journey the absolute fucking treasure that it is.

over the holidays i re-watched the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien isn't just a writer, he's a fucking bard and he is singing a great song about the West: both its Catholic aspects and its Germanic aspects. and it all comes together in this awesome vision. if you don't walk away from your screen, or out of the theatre, after watching that film, and not want to be an unironic Catholic then something is missing. but it's not just about Catholicism, it's about a lot of other stuff: namely, the harmonious co-participation of opposites. Mortensen's Aragorn is a beautiful presentation of what it is that makes Christianity what it is. the moment that sticks with me is where he says to Frodo (after Boromir has nearly killed him for the ring), 'I would have followed you to the gates of Mordor.' this is why people love Jesus. if you met Jesus IRL, that is the kind of thing he would say to you, whoever you are: I am the ultimate foxhole companion, and Nietzsche can eat a dick.

it is a *synthesis* of ideas. Aragorn does not dominate the meaning of the story, any more than Gandalf does. in Journey it is something very similar: Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian ideas coming together. but most remarkable of all to me is the *enlightenment of the monkey* - and not by force, threat, coercion, or for any other otherwise political or modern reason. it happens through comedy, but...well, my own internal spidey-senses suggest to me that stories about why, in 2019, it might be better to prefer Enlightenment to Rage Zombie status are going to be interesting, and valuable, and will remind us why we love literature. and indeed even why we may love religion, or ascetic practices that help us to become other than what we are...

my feels about Land et al proceed from having been frightened out of my skin by capitalism (to the degree where i have this unusual way of posting). and this all leads to rage. what leads *away* from rage, from fear, from phobocracy, from societies of control? only very particular forms of literature, perhaps aesthetic cultivations...perhaps we are far more barbaric than we think. it's going to be fun trying to re-civilize us decadents, and encouraging people to seek the light again rather than the darkness. but it won't be done by Marxist academics. and maybe it shouldn't be done by philosophers either. if Negarestani is right - and he makes an attractive case - philosophy means programmatic thinking, but this is no cure for our existential woes. the problem is that the cures for our existential woes at the moment tend to make things worse: namely, they're modes of activism ('Jihad is a cure for depression,' says Arran Crawford).

i'm just finally realizing, maybe, the nature of my own obsessions. it's a good feel.
>and it probably reads like somebody having a manic episode
i'm not actually having a manic episode.

[Anonymous No.12365449]

>>12365361
>It seems like you've covered most of the major areas, have you read any Sufi stuff yet?

hell yes i have! i read up on quite a lot of World Wisdom stuff on Islam and Sufism as a part of this thing, and you are *absolutely right* about that. the Sufis are very much like the Taoists like that. of course the major changer is the shift that comes from identifying with a personal or an anthropomorphic god, which can be quite unsettling...

...but yes. yes yes. yes most indeedy. one thing, however, i have not read is that link. so i will do that now.

urgh, i read too much stuff and now i have to squeeze it all out through these little boxes with my stupid and half-swamped memory. anyways, Schuon helped a lot in terms of understanding Islam and Sufi stuff, which i really didn't have that much exposure to. but of course there is no hating on the Sufis, they're pretty fucking wonderful.

i think a lot of it for me is this funny trajectory (and a very adolescent one): first, Catastrophe. God is Dead, Christianity is Over, blah blah. then continental philosophy, lots of that. but that also will drive you nuts with fear and rage. so you get nuked, and find yourself over in China and India (both the Hindus and the Buddhists)...and then you slowly make your way back West, through Sufi paths and perhaps through Islam...

...back to exactly what it would mean to really wrap your head around a fucking crucified visionary who says, hey, love people.

philosophy and religion eventually comes to feel like a fucking *horror* story, rather than a feel-good or self-help story. but that's how it should be, right? that's how i think it should be. if it is any other way, all it is is fucking readjusting the furniture in your room or the paintings on the walls. it leads to a terrible and disastrous shallowness that manifests as rage. the point of a humanities education, in my perfect world, would be to *break your shit in completely* and completely ruin your fucking day, even your life, at times, so that the things you read in books *begin to make sense to you again.* you recover your humanity in that way and in no other way.

this is the essential danger, i think, of an inhumanist turn in philosophy - which is, i should add, absolutely necessary, and even crucial for thinking. *in the absence of a humanities department that actually respects the nondual* you will get student activism instead of...well, lights lighting up within, and the mystery of reading, and everything else that you learn along the way. i am all-in on Land and Negarestani's intellectual projects, for various reasons...but i really think they are complemented well with the Long Scenic Trip through the East, if you know what i mean. *and* the West also. hating on the West is very, very stale.

[Anonymous No.12365565]

i'll throw in a recommendation for this as well, as good a starting point as any for cultivating an interest in nondualism for the general reader. i think it completes my own meme trifecta of Tarnas and Barzun as well.

Space Taoism, of course, endures. i don't really see how it can be any other way. excess sincerity is no less of a danger than excess irony (BTW, how right what DFW: you cannot found a literary culture on irony?). Land is for me the outer limits on what continental philosophy can do in 2019, and Negarestani also. the technical turn is for realsies.

but honestly a humanities department or a really good prof to walk undergrads through what God Is Dead *actually* means...i mean, there's Peterson for this, in a sense, but the problem with JBP is that he shits on Derrida and Foucault without understanding what it was that made those men write what they did. but i definitely like the idea of a Whirlwind Tour that catches you up to Deleuze/Land/Negarestani, and then - just when all seems as though life could not possibly get any darker - you stumble through a wormhole, land in China, and have to make your way back to the site of the disaster (spoiler: it's Marx). and then you have to have a mind-blasting experience, or a sequence of them, with a variety of mystics who will not allow themselves to be mocked, and slowly transform you into being a small monkey awakened to emptiness.

then the course ends and you are ejected over the New Jersey Turnpike to begin trying to salvage the rest of your life. with perhaps 0.0004% more sympathy for the Alex Joneses and other guys shouting at traffic and wearing sandwich boards. the Space Taoists will continue to host psychedelic raves and other things and schizopost, and make weird graffiti in back alleys about the Wild Ride. thus they mystify the world and warp the edges of sanity. hopefully for a good cause. you don't know with those guys.

but seriously. a fucking terrifying, kaleidoscopic theme park for the mind. that is what i would have wanted, i think, from my undergraduate. like The Christmas Carol, except instead of Ebenezer Scrooge, it would be *Scrooge at 20* - cynical, mean, and ultimately *fathomlessly fucking ignorant.* when i was doing my undergrad i think what i wanted, ultimately, was not to be told that i was okay, or that somehow society was wrong. what i would have wanted was the scholarly equivalent of DMT to absolutely fuck my head up completely. as it turns out i had to do that later, on my own, and now here i am. the humanities should be a profoundly disquieting adventure, and also one that makes you believe the hype about literature.

okay, rant over.

[Anonymous No.12365620]

>>12364759
>redpill
/pol/ get OUT!!

[Anonymous No.12365724]

>>12365374
This is fantastic. Do you have more on LOTR/Christianity, or a place I can read about it?

[Anonymous No.12365888]

>>12365565
>The Christmas Carol, except instead of Ebenezer Scrooge, it would be *Scrooge at 20* - cynical, mean, and ultimately *fathomlessly fucking ignorant.*
I can see it now: Elon Musk is visited by the ghost of Yuk Hui and is told he will be visited by three ghosts of Cosmotechnics. The first ghost to greet him, the ghost of Cosmotechnics past, is Steve Jobs. The ghost of cosmotechnics present is Mark Zuckerberg, and when he is visited by the third ghost, Musk asks him if he is the ghost of Cosmotechnics Future. The ghost says "Nope, the future is canceled," and it turns out the ghost is actually Nick Land, and he spends his time teaching you about Accelerationism.

[Anonymous No.12366099]

>>12364759
Unnfff loving the Whitehead posting. Every time I see his glorious face being shared I feel a shred of hope for humanity.

[Anonymous No.12366216]

>>12364942
the fact that you use cringe as an expression of your feelings internally tells me you don't have any critical capacity of your own. Regardless of what your opinion of the post is, people who use cringe are either gifted or not concerned with either their own capacity for criticism or with the catch-all phrases that poets make up just to fuck with you. Take this as a warning, spells are real. Dipshit.

[Anonymous No.12366611]

GIRARDFAG IS BACK
BUMP

[Anonymous No.12366640]

what books did girardfag and girardfag/spacetaoist thread lovers get for christmas?

[Anonymous No.12366960]

>>12366640
I memed myself into getting process and reality
other than that i just got some borges since i never read him and some comfy thomas bernhard books

[Anonymous No.12366991]

>>12366960
Hermetica II - M. David Litwa
The unabridged Ramayana
A few Rene Guenon books to round out my collection

[Anonymous No.12366998]

>>12366960
>>12366991 Meant for >>12366640

[Anonymous No.12367030]

>>12365171
me on the left

[Anonymous No.12367271]

>>12365724
>Do you have more on LOTR/Christianity, or a place I can read about it?
whatever i have to say that's interesting along these lines i'll post here. one thing perhaps that i may talk about more: a newfound appreciation for Christianity in general. i know this sounds weird: given that my odious namefag handle is taken from one of the great Catholic writers of the 20C, you would think that i would actually be more into what he was into. i'm not a serious Catholic, or a serious Christian, for that matter. but i'm starting to come around to it. it strikes me as being among other things one of the great underdog faction-picks for the 21C, and there is always something in that. but also because despite the fact that i do believe in the perennials, that most religions share a pretty close core of overlapping ideas, what i think people want from philosophy - the part that drives them to radicalism - is in fact very much on tap with the Christians.

Christianity is not particularly *sexy,* but i'm increasingly okay with this. i think i like it very much for that reason. it is the religion of infinite suffering, and over things that while you can find a lot in the Tao, Buddhism, the Vedanta - the cozier Eastern mystics - there are some things that Christianity in particular does really, really well. namely, remind you that *you suck* and that is actually a kind of welcome and sobering reminder sometimes. the more i read into philosophy and get bewildered by perception, the more it dawns on me that there really is no point in critique. that is a major downer, for sure, but it also reminds me that i can probably do a lot more productive work on myself rather than trying to find the maximally outsider perspective by way of continental theory. noble suffering is incredibly based.

i also think that, politically, the three great modernist experiments in politics - communism, fascism, and neoliberalism - are really all departures from Christianity itself, in a sense, and have peculiar aspects of its relation to time. communism has all of its zeal about the future, fascism a sense of a Past When Things Were Better (and the utopian futurist zeal as well) and neoliberalism a kind of desperate need to shut out both of these, along with completely failing to recognize the dangers of superficiality and hollowness; it's basically a drive to forget religion altogether, and tends to produce the extremes out of precisely that impetus. and as time goes on the old-time religion just seems to have all of the things we expect to get politics, and are destined to be disappointed with. we want *moral civilizations,* but morality in politics is both inescapable and disastrous out the gate. all you wind up with is a perfect scapegoating of the Blue Team by the Red and vice-versa; each has the kryptonite of the other in a wheel of doom. neither are really classically liberal anymore.

but classical liberalism doesn't mean much without of interior depth.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12367292]

>>12366640
Intelligence and Spirit
Avatar Bodies
Fanged Noumena

[Anonymous No.12367298]

>>12364875
why do you write like JP?

[Anonymous No.12367341]

>>12365724
and LOTR is just a fucking incredible work. the sheer depth of Tolkien's understanding boggles my mind. i can basically use tropes from it to talk about virtually anything, but i always find myself kind of in awe at the scope of his understanding myself, the things that he knew about the human condition. they still hold up; if anything, that book gets *better* with age. in a literary sense, that is truly achieving the summit, i think. and again, Aragorn as an analogue for Christ isn't just a fucking ten-cent piece of meme literary criticism either.

and there are other things, too. just images like this that make me feel cozy to think about. here's the boy, Awakening people. what a fucking adventure Christianity was. when you think about the spread of a religion, the places it goes, the shapes it takes...and that ultimately it is just about this awakening to a nondual consciousness. even the Tibetans were apparently a pretty warlike bunch, and then they discovered the Buddha and went, oh. ah. right. this feels good. and indeed it does. it's like discovering an alternative to blindness. except instead of blindness, it's ignorance. the paradox of ignorance being: you actually don't really know what the fuck you were doing before, but one thing is for certain, you don't want to go back to doing it again. religion just makes a lot of sense to me these days, when you approach it from the right way. and Perennialism - of which Theosophy seems to be an interesting forerunner - is just a good look. i was reading a bunch of Theosophy stuff and it strikes me as being an early encounter of European thinkers with Eastern/nondual ideas. but Huxley doesn't present his own book as being a Great Discovery, or himself as some kind of master occultist either, like Blavatsky or Crowley. he doesn't need to. it just makes sense.

so yeah. religion, kind of a fascinating idea. remember when we used to think all the conflicts on earth were caused over religious fractions? now it seems like that criticism can be more accurately placed on academic Marxism. and i say this because i love academic Marxism, and i've read lots of the big guys in that area. but frankly i can't really find a flaw with building a bridge to the ninth century these days.

>>12365888
10/10, shut up and take my money

i love this idea. Land as Christmas Future, Jobs as Past and Zuck as Present...hnng. also hnng. and YH as Marley! oh man. oh the feels right now. the feels

i'm going to be thinking about this in days to come now i suspect. i mean isn't this it? isn't /acc stuff exactly the *terrified reflections on capital* and where it is going? /acc types actually don't want to play the morals game (at least, in the way it should be played, you know, with Dickensian love for your fellow man) but seriously, i cannot find a flaw in this pitch anon. i think you're on to something here. switch Zuckerberg for Sloterdijk maybe too.

>>12366099
me too anon

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12367355]

>>12367292
>Avatar Bodies
redpill me

[Anonymous No.12367400]

>>12366611
d'awww. i missed this place. here, have a track i was saving for a Cosmotech return thread. don't worry, there's always more of these

Tom Waits: New Coat of Paint
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=107dADrIVBk

>>12366640
some kind anon uploaded Negarestani's book, there was nothing i wanted to read more than that. a couple more months until Yuk Hui's next one, that will be good. trying to think what else has been blowing my mind. finally making nice with Frithjof Schuon was good.

also i've been playing a lot of Metal Gear Solid 5, which is scary fucking addictive. god i love Kojima so much. so so much. he is the fucking greatest. not exactly Cosmotech but that game just does not disappoint. the greatest 'deconstruction' of action movies ever - if we take 'deconstruction' to mean, 'helps you to understand a genre, takes nothing off the table, and generally enriches your perspective on art while making you love humanity.' so not really deconstruction. just auteurs being auteurs and making art/cinema/virtual reality great again

i love you hideo
you bring joy into my life

>>12367298
who's JP? Peterson? i don't think i write like him. i am also coming around to Jung a little bit tho too, mainly from this. maybe it's just a mind game i am playing with myself, but i was on a real See Mandalas Everywhere trip a while back that really pushed me into unironic love of perennial philosophy.

the brief recap on this: a mandala is a symbol of wholeness (and i like wholeness). it also seems to me that a mandala also resembles both a lotus and a rose, which are signs of...well, all that mandalas are signs of, both east and west. and you see these patterns not only in things like the Rose Window, but also in the Round Table of the Arthurian myths, as well as everywhere in Tibetan thought. i was never really a big Jung guy before, but i don't think i was ever really out on Joseph Campbell, if only because the monomyth strikes me as being somehow fundamentally true: after all, three-act dramatic writing *works* regardless of content. you can be writing unironic Fascist agitprop, unironic Soviet Realism or those horrible rom-coms that come out at Christmas, and they all follow the same structure. that is enough to sell me on fundamental structure in narrative, and it's a short step from there to every form of mystical experience on earth, psychically rendered.

maybe you think i write like him because we have the same feelings about the shortcomings of academic Marxism, or some sense about liberal culture today? it could be. i do admire the man, especially the rivers of shit he wades through when dealing with critics. he thinks silly things about philosophers i like, but that doesn't matter all that much. he knows something is rotten in the state of Denmark today, i have similar feelings. also he uses capital letters and proper punctuation when he tweets. and he has a clean room, unlike me.

[Anonymous No.12367415]

>>12367341
Now that I think of it, Peter Thiel would make a better ghost for the present than Zuckerberg.

[Anonymous No.12367431]

Sooo what makes space taoism different from taoism?

[Anonymous No.12367436]

>>12367298
>see that's the bloody thing about accelerationism, it's like, you can't know the end unless you write the ending. and that's a bad place to be. it's like, all the things which you have placed your libidinal investments in have no more utility to you than to Gnon. and that's the belly of the whale, trust me bucko, like, I know what they really mean when they say that. they are saying if I was the techocrat of Neo-China I would have brought in the damn singularity, well think again sunshine.

[Anonymous No.12367447]

>>12367415
i was thinking that too, except for the scene where Christmas Present opens his robe to reveal the two children, Ignorance and Want. CP looks like Santa Claus; it seems like Thiel isn't quite fitted out for that job, but he's not quite right for Scrooge either. Elon isn't really Scrooge either tho.

maybe Zuckerberg is in for Scrooge, just because he's such a goofball and it would be nice to see him get the shit scared out of him by Land. the problem is that in the end we know Zuckerberg actually can't have a change of heart, he'll just build another level in his bunker at the end and try to convince himself that Facebook really is a chair. i still have some questions about this thing. maybe Zuckerberg as Marley...
>i wear the Likes i farmed in life

ah. hold on. how about fucking Jack Dorsey. Dorsey! he's the guy. he's our Scrooge! right? doesn't this make sense? and he learns to stop being a complete idiot about Twitter, which is the city in which everybody lives...right?

Dorsey as Scrooge. Zuckerberg as Marley.

[Anonymous No.12367493]

>>12367447
>i was thinking that too, except for the scene where Christmas Present opens his robe to reveal the two children, Ignorance and Want.
It doesn't have to line up exactly, unless you have autism.

[Anonymous No.12367552]

>>12367436
okay, now i see it. and i am...uh...probably completely downloaded as such. JP by way of Land or Land by way of JP. should we meme this up then?

Rules For Life: Bloody Acceleration Edition

>lie down on the floor and croak
>treat yourself like a cyberguerilla hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one's software was part of the disguise that you are responsible for helping
>befriend AI and other sentient algorithms that want the best for you
>compare yourself to Lee Kuan Yew, not the useless person you are today
>do not let humans do anything to Bitcoin that makes you dislike it
>read Deleuze and destroy your mind with drugs before you criticise the world
>pursue what is Intelligent, not what is meaningful, you fucking fleshbag
>tell the truth to Justin Murphy. or at least don't lie
>assume the paranoia you are listening to knows something you don't
>be precise in your speech (hey, some things overlap)
>do not bother Cthulhu while he is swimming leftwards
>pet Peter Thiel when you encounter him in the street

&c &c. also both JP and I are fucking leaves, so maybe that has something to do with it also.

>>12367431
acceleration. and continental theory. the Tao urges you to recover your natural spontaneity, and is disdainful of technology. Space Taoism recognizes that there is no way off the Wild Ride, and is tinged with a mild paranoia that makes life Fun, although it can also drive you insane. capitalism is a dark and infinite muse, like the flame of a candle with mind-bending and reality-warping powers you were warned not to look into.

basically capitalism is a Palantir, and Space Taoism is sort of like what happens after you break the connection but you still can't stop thinking about it.

>>12367493
well, that's true of course. but i'm just thinking that A Christmas Carol for this kind of crew is kind of a clever meme and i want it to be the best meme possible. 'tis all.

[Anonymous No.12367596]

>>12367431
that said, Space Taoism is really the creation of Aminom Marvin, who arrived at it through Whitehead and other sources, like Principia Discordia and other stuff. i never quite got around to explaining Zen Acceleration and other stuff i was building in the Cosmotech threads.

the thing about Land is that he really does mount a completely brilliant attack on Hegelian Marxism, which is at the root of the current Rage Virus that is making people lose their minds today. Landian capital is a retardedly brilliant innovation. as i'm working my way through Negarestani's book i also think he's taking the conversation into a place which doesn't necessarily have to shred your psyche in the way that Land's stuff does. Reza's plan for philosophy is kind of next door to a lot of Land's work, but without some of the animus about leftism in general. he's saying similar things about the nature of mind and computation that are truly fascinating, and that don't really have the same politics either.

but in terms of how you comport yourself to all of this intellectual chaos? Taoism is always a good look like that. it's better than rage, cynicism, and paranoia, that's for sure. it's Cosmic and psychedelic, agreeably apolitical, and not completely blind to the realities of human civilization in the 21C. you can't make a mass movement out of it; you also can't escape from mass movements.

i feel like 'deconstruction for schizos' isn't the worst possible characterization either. you and the other guy are both trapped in the same hallucination, in the end. so might as well take the open hand rather than the closed fist.

[Anonymous No.12367806]

[Anonymous No.12369358]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12369466]

One of you hangs out on the newbie board of neopets dot com

[Anonymous No.12370112]

our boy is back with the good stuff:

>§3.51 — With the completion of this production cycle, Bitcoin Singularity is
established in a double sense (we will soon add others). An unprecedented event has occurred, upon a threshold that can only be crossed once, and an innovation in autonomization attains actuality, establishing the law for itself. Bitcoin provides the first historical example of industrial government. It is ruled in the same way that it is produced, without oversight. At the limit, its miners are paid for the production of reality – effectively incentivized to manifest the univocity of being as absolute time.

[Anonymous No.12371094]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12371505]

>>12365361
Nice link dude. Interesting read. Do you have any more of that kind of stuff. With bit of history by specialist and then the actual text itself?

[Anonymous No.12371619]

[Anonymous No.12371646]

this + Whitehead is core Space Taoism.

[Anonymous No.12371669]

>>12371646
and maybe the appeal of this is to permanently schizo-inoculate you against Unironic Fascism, Unironic Communism and Unironic Neoliberalism, which is the ultimate rock-scissors-paper Wheel of Doom.

accept that this world is the Matrix and learn to live in it without waiting for the Chosen One, being the Chosen One, or pretending that you are okay without the Chosen One. b/c you're actually Agent Smith, who was in many ways the most sympathetic character in that story, but also a cautionary tale, because He Chose Poorly. not as Poorly as Neo did, according to the esoteric reading of that film, but still Poorly.

in Star Wars parlance, the ideal would probably be defection from the Empire without joining the Rebels.

[Anonymous No.12371687]

>>12371669
and also, i cannot find a flaw in this expression.

[Anonymous No.12371702]

>>12371669
>He Chose Poorly
i assume you explained this before in some place, but, why he choose poorly?.

[Anonymous No.12371723]

>>12371687
and one other thought:

it is for these and other reasons that true miracle is trust. however revelatory paranoia may be, or how profoundly plastic cognition will render the world, trust is in the end one of the most beautiful of things. it may even be the only way out of the labyrinth.

[Anonymous No.12371773]

>>12371702
for lots of reasons. for one thing, he might have realized that he and Neo were far more alike than different. like Frodo and Gollum, or Wukong and Xuanzang, they are two halves of the same coin. Smith wants Out of the Matrix, but there is no Out of the Matrix. he failed to become the kind of bodhisattva he might have been. it is my own feeling that a far better ending for that film would have ended with them smashing the machines and the architect, and proving the Oracle wrong. this is not to say that that would have been the best of all possible endings, but certainly better than a cryptic conversation between the Oracle and Architect, and a bargain made with the machines to repeat a disastrous holy lie through another generation. in the end everybody just winds up with comforting fictions. this is actually the structure of the Matrix itself, just as Zizek says. but it's not good.

Smith wanted Out, but there is no Out. there is only knowledge of what it means to be In, just as Heidegger says: it is not necessary to escape the circle, but to come into it in the right way. the violent struggle between the two of them at the end accomplishes nothing except to guarantee the re-perpetuation of the Matrix itself. but the distinction between what is and is not the Matrix is what leads to all the intrigue.

what causes Smith to actually become aware of his own Smith-ness is a woefully underdeveloped theme of the story. he was the protagonist, and potentially a vastly more interesting character. the Matrix was itself the actual antagonist, but the writers rushed out the later two films too quickly to realize how potentially interesting it all might have been. to say nothing of the fact that a prequel story about how the story of the construction of a Matrix-tier psychic containment shield and much else was missing from the main story. it should have been one of the great sagas of recent film history, with the first film actually being the ending of a proper trilogy.

[Anonymous No.12371843]

>>12371773
this scene, for example, is legit terrifying, and if it were my film i would have played up the surrealism of all of this for much, much longer. but i also would have allowed Smith a lot more screen time for him to realize that he is in fact a program with the illusion of sentience - which is a philosophical idea you could chew on for days. neither Smith nor Neo are really 'human,' and their mutual explorations of why this is so and their relations to existence, the Matrix, the machines et al would have made for a pretty incredibly re-watchable film that could have touched on no end of fascinating questions theorists like Baudrillard et al spent their whole careers with.

and of course all of this is there to shield people from the true horror of what lies beyond, which is that wasteland bepopulate with spider-walking harvesters: but where did these come from? the machine singularity which speaks to Neo in part three receives very little screen time, and the architect and the Oracle deliver their own cryptic lines to the Chosen One, who is basically a victim of prophecies he cannot change. but this is this is part of the appeal of being a Chosen One, which is that you get to be a cosmic dupe fortunately gifted the power to act beyond good and evil. totalitarian leaders of all stripes get to do this also, with equally disastrous results for the polis.

Smith in the end causes enormous havoc and devastation to the Matrix as well, crumbling it all into himself...but this is a ham-fisted way of tying up plot threads that in fact should have been untied and then some. the absolute horror associated with awakening to a world in which the rules of reality are entirely plastic is precisely the conditions of life in the real world today. Smith's agony over what it might mean to potentially be human - meaning, the uncertainty about whether you are a computer simulation or not, about the actual meaning of mortality, the genuine fear of being inescapably bound up with the lives of the sweaty and deluded masses...i could go on and on. it was a missed opportunity, but it remains enduringly rewatchable because all of those questions are in fact genuine questions of philosophy itself in the 21C.

[Anonymous No.12371882]

>>12371843
pic rel was also the great advocate for Being Satisfied with the Matrix...as most of us are today. he got stupidly and pointlessly blasted with a lightning gun before realizing that in fact he was probably the leader Zion needed: a guy who unironically subscribes to the promise of advertisting, which is that, deep down, the illusion really satisfies. that's the guy you build your Matrix around. that is the actual Everyman. if Kurosawa (or Dostoevsky) had made this film, he would have had Cypher leading the future afterwards after himself exiling the Chosen One from the polis.

anyways. the Matrix and its discontents. a good point of departure for speculation, anyways. but Smith was the real hero.

[Anonymous No.12371918]

>>12371773
>>12371773
>what causes Smith to actually become aware of his own Smith-ness
when does this happen?
i ressume the matrix trilogy in "it was a missed oportunity". a big monstruous mountain missed oportunity, the second and third part is a total mess.
you see interesting points i doubt that hollywood people would have seen.

[Anonymous No.12372024]

>>12371918
>when does this happen?
it doesn't, really. that's what i'm saying.

it's not exactly hard to see a connection between Smith and, say, Uncle Nick Land. Land isn't a caricature, but the desire to Escape the Matrix is a complex one, and it's not necessarily one that should be attributed to purely villainous motives either. this i think is really what i'm trying to say. we are hardwired, perhaps, to think about things in a kind of dualistic way: the meaning of politics is revolution. but Smith wants Out, and who can blame him for this? he is disgusted with his potential mortality ('it's the smell'), but more than this, by *knowing that the Matrix is the Matrix.* once you know that a thing is fake, you can't believe in it in the same way. it was the message of the Truman Show as well: once you know, you can't stay. unlike Truman Burbank, Smith has to stay...and these are fucking fascinating ideas! add to that that the obstacle to his escape is Neo...who is a Chosen One who ultimately is going to keep the Matrix re-Matrixifying through the generations...

reading Smith-as-Hero changes everything. Smith, however, doesn't really stand for Intelligence or Capital in the way that Land might suggest. Smith actually is struggling with his *humanity* rather than his *inhumanity,* and we might even ask if Neo's continual exposure to prophecies and other things explicable only by glitches in the Matrix don't in fact suggest something far more plausible about the nature of intelligence explosion itself: that is, it will happen by accidents and paradoxes that are features and not bugs.

anyways, the moment at which Smith becomes aware of his own Smithness is a failed opportunity, and that is the idea. because *how do any of us become aware of our own I-ness* in this way? how *do* we tell the difference between humans and machines? what does it mean to think? Negarestani's book is all about this, how in some level we have to commit to AGI on an almost ethical level, because that is what philosophy means if it means anything: intelligence itself as a way out of human all-too-human slavery. we just don't *think* it's slavery because, like Cypher, we are okay with an illusory steak so long as it tastes like a real one...but if you're Smith, the *smell of humans smells the same* whether it is illusory or not. there is no difference to him, either.

and these are to me legit fascinating questions that actually crowbar open the interesting stuff that gets buried under conventional academic Marxism, which is always recasting the world in terms of Star Wars binaries: Good Rebels, Bad Empire, and much else. this is not to say that i agree with everything Land says, of course - just that i think the things to deconstruct in the 21C are the binaries of human/inhuman, and what it means to be both, and how an understanding of those inter-connections can actually help to prevent us creating Matrixes out of the dependency on holy lies and societies of control.

[Anonymous No.12372858]

What the hell is going on in this thread
Is this even possible for someone to make a summary of what space daoism is about ?
Reading you make me feel I have pieces of my brain missing

[Anonymous No.12372898]

>>12371773
>Smith wanted Out, but there is no Out. there is only knowledge of what it means to be In, just as Heidegger says: it is not necessary to escape the circle, but to come into it in the right way.

yeah, excellent, this is it, the circle is claustrophobic only conditionally, it isn't claustrophobic, stultifying, by default. good stuff.

do you happen to remember where Heidegger says this? I think a loooot of this stuff comes down to What To Do With the Circle

[Anonymous No.12373188]

>>12372898
I believe it comes from one of Heidegger's essays on art. The circle is the circular logic on how how we know what art is. I think it something along the lines of "we know when something is art when it tells something true, and we know what the truth is when it is art," or something like that. Idk, I haven't actually read the essay. I'm just spouting out third hand info.

[Anonymous No.12373259]

>>12365198
what all have you read dude and how do/do you balance this diet with any other form of life?

[Anonymous No.12373447]

>>12372858
>What the hell is going on in this thread
the usual schizoposting and cryptorambling. >>12367436 pretty much nailed it
>Is this even possible for someone to make a summary of what space daoism is about ?
it's the opposite of deconstruction. critique is dead, long live paranoia. there is no escape from the Matrix. only a more interesting life within it.
>Reading you make me feel I have pieces of my brain missing
i've been struggling to find a snappy comeback for this and i have to admit i don't think there is one.

>>12372898
>do you happen to remember where Heidegger says this?
B&T maybe, not sure. just one of those lines that always stuck with me.
> I think a loooot of this stuff comes down to What To Do With the Circle
yes sir indeed it does. life begins with the discovery of the Vicious Circle. ask Nietzsche (or Sophocles). more recently, Uncle Nick and Reza. we are the material with which consciousness-as-capitalism works. prepare yer anus.

>>12373188
that's more or less it. life after Nietzsche is like life after the bomb, in a sense. nobody's ever going to be able to follow his act (and that's probably a good thing). but this is also why Heidegger is the founder of existential psychoanalysis too. so perhaps one way to avoid going insane yourself is to aid others in need. Lacan borrows as much from him as from Nietzsche and Hegel, which is what makes Lacan Lacan, and also why blowing his project up made D&G who they are, and in turn Uncle Nick. there's a long story in this, but it's not too hard to follow. a scenic tour through the dark corners of the postmodern western mind, colloquially known as the Wild Ride in these threads. oh yeah, and it includes you and I. and other anons ITT. we're all infected by the map no longer being the territory. may god have mercy on our souls.

>>12373259
>what all have you read
meh, just the stuff that interests me. i like books.
>and how do/do you balance this diet with any other form of life?
>balance
>life
>any form
>any other form of life
yeah

[Anonymous No.12373543]

>>12373259
that said, i can put up a couple of links here if you're interested. i made these lists not such a long time ago.

regular bibliography
>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835198

acceleration bibliograhpy
>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835482

obviously these are not exhaustive. when it comes to the Big Deal writers, i try to read as much of their stuff as i can get my hands on. and so the books here are unsurprisingly the major works of major authors, but you will come to understand why that is so the more of them you read. i have spent a fair bit of time dwelling on Land, but my obsession with him came out of lots of other guys, and ultimately to get a sense of why i was so agitated by cynicism. now i know, but it's one of those 'we solve all our problems with bigger problems' things. meme politics sucks, but the philosophers don't really have the answers either. i still check ufblog and his twitter daily, but just trying to be a decent human being now is enough for me. hence the mysticism and perennial philosophy.

in the end it's all just so many jewels in indra's net, i think. to just try to be pleasant and appreciate the mystery, a water-bug on the surface of a deep ocean.

[Anonymous No.12374053]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12374656]

if you're interested in continental stuff that actually captures the surreal horror of modern capitalism, SC Hickman is a treasure.

>Like a heavy metal apocalypse neomoderinty orchestrates the virtual designs of the dematerialization of civilization. It’s cyclopean structures: “scorched and rusted girders, massive chains, vast slabs of semi-crumbled brickwork, pitted concrete, splintered masonry, the cavernous, eroded shells of warehouses and machine shops” rise up like transfigured creatures out of some hellish paradise. The post-industrial functionalism of this hybrid of supraintelligent artifact and ruinous abstraction combines the disconnection of the mind from its former ecologies in the natural order as its move and metamorphoses shapes it to the post-civilizational matrix of conditioned possibility. “Around and amongst these paleo-modernist dinosaur skeletons, it weaves an exquisite web of maximally-dematerialized and near-transparent structures, emphasizing lightness, subtlety, openness, and innovation. High-bandwidth digital communications, intelligent environmental control systems, hydroponically-nourished creeping plants, hyper-designed furnishings, tastefully understated interior decoration and sophisticated artworks complete the metamorphosis. Neomodernity is at once more modernity, and modernity again. By synthesizing (accelerating) progressive change with cyclic recurrence, it produces a distinctive schema or figure: the time spiral.

source:
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/

[Anonymous No.12374758]

>>12374656
it makes me wonder also if this is sort of how the Victorians felt on reading Freud: you are not in charge of yourselves, your drives are leading the way, and know more about you than you could possibly understand. with Land there is a reversal: capital itself is the reflection of those drives, and constructs the world in which you come to live. *it knows.* it already knows, like an enormous nascent supercomputer. and there is no fix to this, except through the skein of philosophy.

it is possible that Reza is the Jung to Uncle Nick's Freud. AI is something that has to be built, true, but because AI is actually the goal for philosophy itself, and not only because AI is the endgame for capital. it's a subtle distinction. Uncle Nick is who he is because he is the world's greatest Marxist heretic: modernity means capital, and vice versa, and it is modernity which shows its fangs through the toxic neo-humanist torpor we call postmodernity. when i read Land, i realize that capitalist positivism *is* the face of existential nihilism in the 21C: death is replaced with the aggression of happiness, the forced and desperate positivity that at least one other theory magus has sussed out.

one question to ask, however, is whether or not it is actually sustainable. if Silicon Valley is any indication, it may be possible that the way to actually poison the well is by wedding technocracy to its eerie doppelganger, communism. if it becomes impossible to distinguish culture from advertisement and advertisement from politics, Idiocracy beckons and things can simply stagnate or regress into a winter phase of pointless metaphysical bloatware. as Hickman says:

>Against both Land’s conservative vision and Brassier’s speculative cosmic nihilism Negarestani tells us there is a need to institute another form of inhumanist praxis: the programmatic objective of an inhuman praxis is to remobilize non-dialectical negativity beyond such Capital-nurturing conceptions of negativity. Without such a programmatic sponsor, alternative ethics of openness or politics of exteriorization, the speculative vectors of thought are not only vulnerable to the manipulations of capitalism but also are seriously impeded.

Sloterdijk's ideas will do well in a milieu like this also. but so will a lot of nondual mystics. even in China there have been times when Confucianism waned and Taoism and Buddhism waxed; maybe it will be like that for us also. the world is not our own to direct and control; that's probably a good thing.

[Anonymous No.12374818]

>>12374758
>it knows
and just briefly, on this: how much of politics itself derives from this sense of saying, 'i already know what you are going to say?' the more that we learn to anticipate other human beings, the greater the temptation to technologize them, to build on our acquired learning of other human beings. we all become very skilled game-players in the world of human affect.

what strikes me as being the truly enlightened or noble thing to do is to act in such a way that we do not deprive others of what it is that makes them unique: for the lack of a better term, we can call this a soul. it is absolutely the thing that made me fall in love with Heidegger: his recognition of the metaphysics of production at the ontological level, and on which Lacan developed his own praxis. *people need to talk.* they don't necessarily know why. *but something in them needs to come out.* it is the same for you as for that other guy. Lacan wove a remarkable web of thought around this idea, and he is who he is because he brings together Hegel, Heidegger, and Nietzsche into a single operation: that there is something in you that needs to come out, and for it every substitution will be death.

perhaps what was underneath that was a form of schizophrenia, or even a schizophrenic god itself. such was Deleuze's perspective. i find myself these days aware of another twist in the plot: that because the world is not my own psychoanalytic office, i can't (or shouldn't) carry on as if i am the carrier of some lost or arcane knowledge. things go both ways. but this i think was Meister Eckhart's feel, the eye that sees god is the eye with which god sees me. Christianity meant a kind of a realm in which people agreed to play by the same set of rules, agreed to share at least one common item: that there was a third figure in all human interactions, a literal and not figurative god of the gaps, and this changed the nature of human interaction. no points will be awarded for pointing out the fact that in Eckhart's day the idea of socialism (or Hegel) had not yet been invented.

we are none of us either as schizophrenically free as Deleuze would perhaps have liked, nor as normatively robust as we suspect we need to be so as to avoid becoming beings requiring an infinite patience from our fellow man. perhaps we are much more like Agent Smiths in search of a Matrix, each of us both a single and a crowd, a pack of one. call it intersectional nihilism. but the Matrix is gone; it vanished with its own acceptance. and now we wait for something to happen.

[Anonymous No.12374902]

>>12367271
I was off /lit/ for a couple of months and got confused when all of the Cosmotech generals were gone. What happened?

>i'm not a serious Catholic, or a serious Christian, for that matter. but i'm starting to come around to it. it strikes me as being among other things one of the great underdog faction-picks for the 21C, and there is always something in that.
>there are some things that Christianity in particular does really, really well. namely, remind you that *you suck* and that is actually a kind of welcome and sobering reminder sometimes... noble suffering is incredibly based.
As someone who also is coming more around to Christianity, I couldn't agree more. In a time, too, when the idea of suffering at all is so odious to everybody (think safe-spaces and hugboxes and tiny little niche discords where no one has to ever see something they don't want to), a good old dose of noble suffering, suffering for something good, learning that "I suck" should be good for many people.

>>12367341
>it's like discovering an alternative to blindness. except instead of blindness, it's ignorance. the paradox of ignorance being: you actually don't really know what the fuck you were doing before, but one thing is for certain, you don't want to go back to doing it again. religion just makes a lot of sense to me these days, when you approach it from the right way
10/10

> i was reading a bunch of Theosophy
Anything you'd recommend? Author-wise or specific-book-wise?

>but frankly i can't really find a flaw with building a bridge to the ninth century these days.
You and me both.

[Anonymous No.12374910]

Isnt that some warhammer 40k commie aliens

[Anonymous No.12374934]

>>12374910
Tau = asiatic aliens from the 40k tabtletop game
Tao/Dao = all penetrating source and ground of all things described in Daoist philosophy

ps: Tau are gay

[Anonymous No.12374998]

>>12374758
>i realize that capitalist positivism *is* the face of existential nihilism in the 21C: death is replaced with the aggression of happiness, the forced and desperate positivity that at least one other theory magus has sussed out.

I need more on philosophies of modern negativity. Capitalist Positivism is something that I feel like a raving madman trying to discuss with my friends, because obviously, "why wouldn't we want to be as happy as we can be?" and the like. I need some kind of basis for all of this.

[Anonymous No.12375088]

>>12374902
as for Cosmotech, well...it began with a kind of usual desire just to talk about /acc stuff, and then ballooned into being something quite wonderful and mysterious. but i also thought it would be a good idea to take a break, so i went and visited my family for a bit and while i was there got sort of dissolved into Eastern stuff for a while, sort of to rinse out the paranoia that comes from thinking about Land stuff. and in a way, those threads were i guess just a sort of intense and concentrated version of the Land threads that are pretty much always interesting on /lit/. calling it Cosmotech is just kind of a fun meme to share, and i guess also because it followed from YH and had Aminom's Space Taoist stuff and my own stylings too, i guess. but anyways. i kind of needed a refresher. /acc is like strip-mining your soul a little bit (or fishing with dynamite), you kind of need to go off into the woods and meditate for a while afterwards so that things can grow back...you know what i mean?

>Christianity
this is how i feel as well, very much. even this: maybe deep down people are *terrified* of Christianity. and i actually think this is a good thing. it is in many ways the ultimate Downer religion, after all. a crucified man and the end of a great many political fantasies. but isn't this a goo. d thing? isn't this an incredibly interesting thing? i think it is. Christianity is a real stumbling block for modern political utopianism. it's why i like Girard, obviously: remove scapegoating and you remove a lot of the romance of war and statecraft. why *anybody* would *want* to be a Christian should be a thing wholly beyond the postmodern mind, for many, because while in one sense it's the Good News, it's also really the Bad News. and, of course, i think there is something profound to love there for precisely that reason. Christianity should fuck with your head, but - well, speaking personally, sometimes you *really want to have your head fucked with.*

>when the idea of suffering at all is so odious to everybody (think safe-spaces and hugboxes and tiny little niche discords where no one has to ever see something they don't want to), a good old dose of noble suffering, suffering for something good, learning that "I suck" should be good for many people.
so this, this exactly. if you want to enslave someone, set up them for a happiness trap they can never achieve (or worse, one which is guaranteed to disappoint the Big Other...and for maximum psychological devastation, make that Big Other an HR manager at Google, or wherever else). we are all fucking crushed by this happiness today. it's suffering we really want, sometimes...and not always just puerile sadomasochistic fantasies either. there is also plenty of the 'pessimism of strength' in a crucified god also, i think; sometimes Nietzsche is more working out his own demons, sometimes. anyways. you get the idea.

plus you can't beat the art.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12375126]

>>12374902
>Anything you'd recommend? Author-wise or specific-book-wise?
tbqh, not really, although it is a fun deep-dive. Huxley's book on the Perennial Philosophy was probably what i was looking for. now that i feel i understand it a little better - that it was the encounter of 19C Europeans with what was for them (and still is, for us) some genuinely mind-blowing Eastern nondualism - i feel like pretty much everything they are trying to teach you can probably be learned elsewhere. i feel like i understand why Blavatsky, for example, would have had such a cult of personality around her: she discovered the Buddha and the Vedanta and thought she had stumbled onto the infinite (and was probably right about that).

i think also those guys are part of framing a very interesting exchange of ideas between East and West that you read in Campbell, Jung, Eliade...and also in a cherished game franchise of my own as well, that being pic rel. i'm only starting to realize now why this game touched a nerve with so many: because, as crazy as it is to think in the age of Grand Theft Auto and Doom and much else, we actually sometimes do want to play games about being good for reasons we can scarcely explain. although the reading and reflecting does help some in this regard. and also because the Ultima games were true sandboxes, whereas other games are hardwired to press our pleasure buttons, or to set us up with one terrific pleasure button to mash. combine that with the fact that U5 is actually a pretty spectacularly insightful meditation on the difference between *virtues* and *ethics* and we start to realize how beautiful it is when open-minded and creative Westerners do the deep-dive into the East in the right (hermeneutic) way. and, oh yeah, *with no fucking postmodern criticism, irony, or other bullshit.* but lord ha'mercy it takes a while before these things start to make sense.

>building a bridge to the ninth century
it takes a while to shake off the instinctive desire to want to make a joke all the time. but DFW was right: you cannot found a literary tradition on irony, but this is precisely what we have done. and it has led to exactly where you would think it would lead: to a disastrously shallow and ignorant generation of historical illiterates. we're in for the Interesting Times i think. but this is where those old Christian monastics shined, was it not? the Dark Ages were exactly what they were meant for. like a long tunnel through the dark night between antiquity and the high middle ages.

i think this is kind of a noble project for this generation, to learn to figure these things out for themselves, to go back and rediscover the great historical legacy of civilization. otherwise a lot of fucking odious and unironic fascists are going to do it, and that is no better than Unironic Communism. here again is the appeal of Christianity in general though: it is the foundation from which Communism, Fascism, and Neoliberalism all grow.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12375180]

>>12374998
>I need more on philosophies of modern negativity. Capitalist Positivism is something that I feel like a raving madman trying to discuss with my friends, because obviously, "why wouldn't we want to be as happy as we can be?" and the like. I need some kind of basis for all of this.
kek, i know that feel very well amigo.

so in terms of crowbarring one's mind out of the Matrix, pic rel worked pretty well for me. i think i've read pretty much everything he's ever written. and the nice thing is that if you start with the early stuff (System of Objects, Mirror of Production) you won't need to do a shitload of other reading as well beforehand. he will get you interested in Marx and Nietzsche, and those two guys will be the enduring terror of any of your friends who ask dumb questions about why We Should All Be So Happy and so on. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are the three great masters of modernity, and if you're looking for modern negativity, those guys are like the X-Men. Baudrillard is an apostle of two of them, but disdainful of psychoanalysis; that's fine.

for more contemporary critiques of neoliberalism, Byung-Chul Han is your man. if you have read Baudrillard, you will find him to be in many ways a kind of a kindred spirit, although Han is more into Hegel and Heidegger than Marx and Nietzsche. again, this is fine too. in time, if you are really interested in the Wild Ride, you will read all of these guys, like it's exploring a big Terra Incognita map.

Heidegger is not to be missed, but he can be daunting to just jump into. it is for this reason that i usually shill Zimmerman's intro book on Heidegger ('Heidegger's Confrontration with Modernity') b/c it is absolutely crucial that you understand the 1930s in Germany. the Nazis are the original and prototypical SJWs, but this is coming out of - very much as it is today - economic and psychological dispossession. and this in turn is a story told earlier still by Marx.

once you get a little exposure to the heavies - Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud - you're well on your way to schizoposting in Land threads! Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche and Marx, Lacan from from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Hegel, Derrida from Heidegger and Levinas, Foucault from Nietzsche, and Uncle Nick from Deleuze, Marx, and Kant. the poststructuralists and other guys are all worth your time, but ultimately - given time and patience - you will work your way through all of these guys. by which point, of course, your friends will all have gone off and gotten married and had children and moved on with their lives, but...well. you get the idea.

oh yeah and don't forget Adorno.

[Anonymous No.12375286]

to continue this schizo-ramble...

the reason why Uncle Nick is the world's most interesting philosopher is because he cracked the Do Not Open boxes on the sociocultural generation ship that postmodernity became. socialism is attractive because it purportedly solves two problems: material inequality, and existential crisis. postmodernity is what it is because it basically eroded the economic structural analysis that socialism depended on, and replaced it with an economics of pure prestige, gesture, and sign ('virtue signal'). in the age of YouTube, the twist in the plot is that you can re-monetize this again, but it leads us into a world where culture becomes inseparable from advertising, and advertising from politics, such that we all wind up in a world where *we know we are being constantly mind controlled,* and yet at the same time knowing there is something wrong about mind-control. the more serious problem is the absence of an alternative.

the Hegel-Marx combination is arguably the most ferocious one-two punch in the history of modern philosophy (before then, it might have been Plato-Christ). Nancy Fraser provides the clearest critique of this: it is feminism which comes to supplant working-class (and class-conscious) communism, but 2nd-wave feminism always ran the risk of becoming indistinguishable from its Evil Dark Twin, that being neoliberalism. once you 'liberate' women, you make critique of capital itself impossible, and you begin down the slippery road towards what we have today: inequality is justified if it improves the lot of women (or minorities), b/c Historical Oppression. Uncle Nick is who he is because he recognizes that capital is well and truly inhuman, and no amount of attempting to domesticate it will work. indeed, doing so only removes the stank from its fastball. the current witch-hunting craze emanating from Silicon Valley only indicates the nature of this conundrum: that there is a horizon beyond which the dream of capitalism becomes communism, and the dream of communism capitalism: hence the rainbow flag atop JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. nothing will ever be more inclusive, or more diverse, that pure speculative capital itself. this is the year 2019 and we are living in it. this is what it feels like to live in the Matrix. and the first rule of Matrix Club is, you do not criticize the Matrix.

nor do i have a raging hate-on for feminism. i don't. what i hate is *institutional feminism,* which is precisely the kind that leads to *the scapegoating of men.* as for where this leads, Amy Ireland said it best: women turning each other on, women turning machines on, machines turning each other on. that is a dark future indeed, but the darkness and the horror, at least, still edges out the anger and the paranoia. which is why i think it is a good thing to read Uncle Nick. we are living in a pinball machine, and teaching it how to care for us. it is one of the reasons i am looking forward to YH's next book.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12375353]

>>12375286
Negarestani matters today because he proposes a project for philosophy which is right next door to Land's, except that for him the reasons to consciously expand the nature of human intelligence aren't as conservative as Land's. in a philosophical sense, Uncle Nick is one of a very few genuine non-Hegelian Right Marxist who also recognizes the dangers (more importantly, the *attractions* of fascism). Smash Fascism is today the rallying cry of an entire new generation of totalitarian leftists, whose brand of socialism is - as it often has been - ultimately indistinguishable from neoliberalism. hence the continual leftward swim of Cthulhu (or why the endemic corruption that follows tends to produce beings like Trump or Bolsonaro when people become fed up with the stratification that follows).

imho, it is the decoupling of existential philosophy from socialism which is necessary. Communism is simply *too religiously appealing* to be trusted. and yet this is what puts us in the bind: we want a kind of humanist inhuanism, or inhumanist humanism, and that is exactly the is-ought problem which socialism purportedly solves. your existential woes are solved by your affection for the Great Crowd - possibly your material woes also - and *their* existential woes are solved by the theoretical construction of a future society of prosperity, which - so it is believed - will take place *as soon as we are all thinking the same way.* but this is not in fact how thinking works.

prying apart the unspoken doctrines within postmodernity - which we might perhaps call 'capitalist socialism,' or simply neoliberalism - is going to be a tough project, but i think it is a necessary one. philosophy will not save you - but again, this is a good thing, imho. the task of philosophy is *necessarily* inhuman, because that is what it means to think. but this isn't something to be fled from, or warded away in the name of some Greater Good. philosophy - at least in Negarestani's view - is *expressly devoted* to the elimination of cognitive slavery through intelligence, which is to say, Reason.

now we know, very well, that Reason isn't always reasonable. but this is where we come to the other pincer of what might be done, which is to try and crawl Shawshank-style out of the prison of Enlightened Suspicion - the kind of Original Sin that has somehow been produced via postmodernity, and which to my mind is essentially just the awareness that *irony and satire is not a substitute for the sacred.* modern leftism does not allow itself to be satirized, but it has entirely satirized away the existential, and *we fucking need the existential.* there are no *substitutes* for the existential...not even, i might dare to suggest, in war, or the heroic face-smashing of the state-sanctioned scapegoat. we are all clowns now and we know it. none of us really has the Real. and simply blindly going along with the rage of the most victimized - wasn't this exactly Hitler's ploy as well?

[Anonymous No.12375393]

>>12375353
part of the genius of Christianity is that *you are not allowed to play the role of the victim.* here again Land recognizes the inherent danger of Protestantism: once you get a personal god, you are off to the races. this is not to say that the Catholics weren't capable of all kinds of witch-hunting and witch-burning of their own; certainly they were. Augustine and Calvin are no strangers to state power, and Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake for asking the wrong questions. Copernicus is justifiably afraid of publishing his work, Galileo less so. by the time Nietzsche could proclaim that God was Dead it was only in a world which no longer really cared all that much anyways.

how did we get to postmodernity? through the deconstructions not only of Christianity, but *of Marx* as well. we lose the capacity for economic analysis of our material conditions, and we also lose the capacity for analysis of our *existential* conditions. maybe this is a part of our own growing cognitive abilities; after all, autonomy means the freedom to construct beliefs, and a liberal society necessarily grants to its citizens the maximal degree of freedom for doing so. but patently we are overwhelmed with this freedom today, or simply enslaved to happiness, as if somehow capital itself provides an index of happiness.

we all get sucked into the Other in precisely the ways that, i think, a hermetic tradition would warn you against. it's natural, of course, even understandable; Han calls it the auto-immune deficiency produced by a neoliberal culture. liberate all the affects, dissolve all boundaries and distinctions, and you become very susceptible to viruses (or memes). this irony *is* the default mode of knowing things in a postmodern world, but postmodernity isn't really as skeptical about metanarratives as it would like to believe: just ask Peterson. it turns out that there *is* in fact a new metanarrative, and one that demands absolute fidelity to itself; call it the Cathedral, the Gated Institutional Narrative, whatever. it is the *ontology of apparent differences,* under which lies a deathless Same. the Everyman is not your friend, because the Everyman is in a perilous situation: not knowing what he is doing, but being prohibited from admitting this. or, when he does, he is immediately welcome into a cult of mental illness and perpetual offense, which needs to be permanently cared for and looked after, much as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor would have suspected.

continental philosophers are often fond of talking about the need to overturn Plato; i'm a little skeptical about this myself. i think it is perhaps those who constantly need to overturn Plato who might be more deserving of an overturning themselves. all that constant revolution does is keep people permanently off-balance, lonely, wandering, desperate and confused; they become atomized, and atomization is a great precursor to mass politics.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12375449]

>>12375393
i don't really know why i felt the need to go on this schizo-ramble; just venting some stuff that has built up inside, perhaps. it has to do with the sense that we are simply addicted, or have become addicted, to a kind of thinking which is killing us, for a number of reasons. it does so because it intoxicates, and because it is a purported remedy for intoxication; we hate neoliberalism, so we feel pulled towards communism; we hate communism, so we are pulled towards fascism; we hate fascism, so we are pulled towards neoliberalism; a complete whirlwind of existential fashion choices.

but it's all from precisely those feelings of homelessness, of loneliness, that heidegger talked about. militancy itself, mass activism, isn't necessarily the sign of being Woke; it might also just be a sign of being *profoundly confused and terribly lonely.* telling other people you have the answers, or keying in on a scapegoat who is to blame for everything, isn't a sign of enlightenment, it's the sign of a *failure to recognize yourself.* people joke about the death of God without realizing what in fact this would mean; the death of Karl Marx is i think an equally and perhaps even more necessary catastrophe to meditate on today. socialism - in either its extreme left or extreme right forms - will not save you, and neither will cynical neoliberalism, which is either only a form of waiting for socialism, or trying to avoid the obvious interconnections between materialism, politics and culture that the fascists and communists both know entirely too well.

inhumanist philosophy means *something very different from what we have.* that is both the good news and the bad news. good, because we are presently stuck on a wheel of doom; bad, because it will be hard to leave the familiar. but it has to be done. the Matrix loves vitalism; the Matrix loves babies and happiness. it loves that you love it. it will not abide your dislike of happiness. it absolutely knows your dreams, your fantasies, even your fantasies of the Third Reich or the Soviet International. perhaps especially those. war-machines were always good for business; and as long as you are lonely, and in need of a cure, someone will always have a pharmakon to lend you.

but it's not right. it's not just. it's not true. nor is it good, or beautiful. maybe reality really is a desert: hard, lonely, hot, and mostly inscrutable. aren't you okay with that? i'm okay with that. i'm okay with it because it is hard to grow illusions in the desert. out there in the desert there's me, there's you, and there's this unutterable silence. that's what we've got. it's hard, it's practical, and it's hostile to life. the desert doesn't really like you; it's not meant for living in. every day living in the desert would be a miracle..

life is suffering. it's not just the pharmakon and fucking capitalism. it's not *anything.* it's just life.

[Anonymous No.12375608]

>>12375449
another thing.

what postmodernity and deconstructive critique suggests to me today is nothing more than *confession* above all else; in its more cynical form, this is what manifests as rage. *you* have to do something, *society* has to do something...all this. why? because i lack something. what is it? it is what makes me special. and it's all quite horrible. with psychoanalysis, maybe what you are hearing is the confession of protestantism: that with us lies a schizophrenic god, completely committed to pleasure, pain, difference, confusion, bewilderment...and this is indeed what makes us human. Heidegger walks a fine line here: what you want is Being, and thinking in this sense doesn't mean *wanting,* it means *thanking.*

to speak publicly is always a kind of confession; this is maybe what we wind up learning through social media, the fundamental inability to speak without confessing, or being able to mask the desire for a confession. maybe this is why mass adulation is so attractive: what could be better? what could be better than being rewarded for feeling guilty in the right way? what could be more terrible?

but it's also related perhaps to why i find Sun Wukong such a fascinating figure these days. the Monkey King is the crown prince of all differences; he is incarnate rage, wrath, confusion, a truly schizophrenic hero. but he has nothing to confess, because he is at bottom not *evil.* Wukong is entirely monkey; he is essence-of-monkey. but his 'conversion' to Buddhism isn't synonymous with salvation. it is just the beginning of his road to enlightenment, which is a path along which he stumbles continually throughout the remainder of the work.

i don't know, i just think that there is an aspect of confession in utopianism, utopianism is a built-in feature within revolutionary socialism. the absence of anything beyond mere happiness is what makes neoliberalism unbearable, but the absence of anything beyond *confession* is what makes socialism unbearable also...no? isn't this exactly the problem with writing postmodern critique, this sense of being unable to meld in perfectly with a crowd, to remain on the Right Side of History, to really convince yourself that the scapegoat really must be destroyed in the name of some Greater Good?

i suspect that all of this sounds crazy. it probably is. my sense is that i would rather vent my own craziness than rationalize it, which is mostly part of why i post here. where else? the whirlwinds of weird thoughts that i think are obviously symptoms, but i think this symptom is in everyone, in some sense, and that the real issue is with the idea of normativity itself: that is, the myth of the Healthy Polis: either the one of the Present (neoliberalism), the Past (fascism) or the Future (communism). all of these are aspects of time that appeal to us because, we think, Someday I'll Be Okay - or maybe it is the world that will be okay...

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12375611]

>>12375088
>but i also thought it would be a good idea to take a break... you kind of need to go off into the woods and meditate for a while afterwards so that things can grow back...you know what i mean?

Good to hear, I thought that maybe the mods didn't want generals or something.

>why *anybody* would *want* to be a Christian should be a thing wholly beyond the postmodern mind, for many, because while in one sense it's the Good News, it's also really the Bad News. and, of course, i think there is something profound to love there for precisely that reason. Christianity should fuck with your head, but - well, speaking personally, sometimes you *really want to have your head fucked with.*
> if you want to enslave someone, set up them for a happiness trap they can never achieve (or worse, one which is guaranteed to disappoint the Big Other...and for maximum psychological devastation, make that Big Other an HR manager at Google, or wherever else). we are all fucking crushed by this happiness today. it's suffering we really want, sometimes...and not always just puerile sadomasochistic fantasies either. there is also plenty of the 'pessimism of strength' in a crucified god also, i think; sometimes Nietzsche is more working out his own demons, sometimes. anyways. you get the idea.
Agreed. And so it's both upsetting and understandable why religion - and Christianity specifically - are so vitrolic to progressives, especially the Capitalist Positivist people.

>plus you can't beat the art.
Absolutely.

>>12375126
>DFW was right: you cannot found a literary tradition on irony, but this is precisely what we have done. and it has led to exactly where you would think it would lead: to a disastrously shallow and ignorant generation of historical illiterates. we're in for the Interesting Times i think. but this is where those old Christian monastics shined, was it not? the Dark Ages were exactly what they were meant for. like a long tunnel through the dark night between antiquity and the high middle ages.
Agreed. When you're entire social system of thought is based on self-referential satire and irony, you don't really have much of a society to begin with. Not a worthwhile one.

[Anonymous No.12375670]

>>12375608
i mean ask yourself what's going on in this film. why is this such a smash hit? it's not even close to as good as it might have been. but it's out now, and it's popular now. i haven't seen this yet, so maybe i'm wrong in my following meme analysis: we'll see how these speculations hold up after viewing.

here is my meme hot take until then: it is because the symbiote is not a terrible description of how Desire actually works. the symbiote looks a pretty spectacularly Deleuzian creation, the Outside grafted onto Eddie Brock. but what makes Venom Venom is the fact that *they have a relationship.* the symbiote is all Desire in search of a master; and Brock is the master who is chosen, but he's not a master-figure himself, he's a man *suffering from his desires.* again, perhaps i'm way off on all of this. but it was a thing that was on my mind.

the reason i am bringing this up is because stories like these speak to the nature of the unconscious, and ultimately the afflictions caused by desires themselves, all of which are in the Buddha's wheelhouse. there would be no way to graft a Venom-symbiote onto Sun Wukong; Wukong already works this way. and what Wukong eventually receives, from the hand of the Buddha, is a *master to serve* - that is, the monk. and this only after a) several centuries underneath the Five Elements Mountain, and b) being forced to wear a crown that keeps him in line (and which later on becomes a symbol of his learning).

Christianity is *our* thing. we don't have anything like a Sun Wukong in the West, although i think Nietzsche wanted to get there. but Nietzsche's story is a disaster, and so too i think will be the attempts to discipline or otherwise harness his thinking in the name of either modes of socialism or postmodernity (which is to say much the same thing). Desire doesn't seek *pleasure,* it seeks *self-understanding* - this is why Zizek always says that the essence of desire itself, jouissance, is in fact an *unbearable pain.* and again, this is a reason to actually link this up, i think, with an ascetic practice, rather than to harness it to political militancy. desire is the Truth, in many ways, but we can't handle the Truth. and that is precisely what makes confessions (or cynicism, or irony, or the stammering of the Everyman) what they are: the sound of bullshit, how critique comes in the end to feed on critique, how holiness spirals are born, taboos, stigmas, maybe neo-Victorian puritanism, horror, the feelings about the groteseque, the strange fascination with it...

i know this doesn't make any sense, or not enough as it should. i'm just trying to work something out here. it's hard to explain. i don't actually know what i am saying, sometimes, which is exactly why i feel the need to say it. maybe you know what i mean, whoever you are.

[Anonymous No.12375719]

>>12375670
>Brock is the master who is chosen, but he's not a master-figure himself, he's a man *suffering from his desires.* a man suffering from desires which both *are* and *are not* his own, is what i perhaps should have said. the symbiote is a reflection of him, and perhaps a more accurate reflection of him than the face that he sees in the mirror.

and we have seen this before. we see it everywhere in LOTR, in the relationship between Frodo and Gollum (even Frodo and Sam), and in Journey, between Wukong and Xuanzang. i think we *might* have seen it in the Matrix, had the writers been more interested in writing a more human psychological portrayal of *what it is like to live in the Matrix* rather than a kung-fu spectacular. again, i'm fine with the kung-fu spectacular...until the ending of the first film, and then i realize i am in fact bitterly disappointed. what Smith actually would have wanted might well have been *to secretly have been Neo,* and perhaps what Neo would have wanted was *to in fact be the foil to an Agent Smith bent on destroying the Matrix.* doesn't this make sense? doesn't that seem to you to actually be a more accurate reflection of what those guys wanted?

this is what i realize i hate about postmodernity: so much of it is all confession, *but you cannot confess to a Marxist inquisitor in the same way you confess to a priest.* and ultimately, what your priest really wants from you is not to hear your confession, but to hear someday that you no longer have anything to confess, because you are beginning to walk a higher path. *you.* this is the problem with utopian thinking: the idea that an ideal society of the future won't contain human error, fallenness, wrong-thinking, or some kind of internal grappling with the self. the Christians *recognized* that the condition of man is to Fall; can we really say the same about postmodernity? doesn't postmodernity itself depend on a kind of cynical suspicion of each other, that we all suck, deep down, and only the Revolution can save us? does this make any sense?

it is the weaponized cynicism of contemporary positivity, aided by a very late strain of pseudo-Marxist ideology, that i am grappling with. it's fundamental ontology is the joke, but this is what makes the Joker the bane of Gotham City: that there is no joke, and there is no redeemer either. and Batman cannot save Gotham from itself, because Gotham needs the Joker more than it can say...

ugh. the fucking things i think about. there they are, raw and bloody. but it feels good at least to get them out.

[Anonymous No.12375723]

faggot

[Anonymous No.12375729]

>>12375670
Help me out girardfag. I'm reading heidgger's intro to metaphysics now. He points out a need to return to historical dasein by starting a new inception. I havent finished the book yet but so far he has touched on the need to start again and regain historical and spiritual history.

Does he eventually offer a plan to do so or even what characteristics that new inception would have? What would life be like for that? Do we still have democracies and elections? Or something else?

[Anonymous No.12375800]

>>12375729
not girardfag but Heidegger thought return to authenticity was something imminent, meaning is uncovered (alethia) never created. I don't think Heidegger is concerned with political solutions (I wont get into the whole Nazi thing) because he was deeply concerned with collective understandings of meaning (das Man). basically your search for truth is a search for meaning, authenticity, and you ride the line every moment between authentic worldliness and das Man. Political systems cannot forge individual authenticity, they may actually make it more difficult

[Anonymous No.12375806]

>>12375723
i am not a faggot, i am a super-faggot. i am the biggest fucking faggot on this board. i feast on male genitalia like it's the Mandarin purely out of self-loathing. seriously, try not to think about me getting pubic hairsin my teeth. please don't do this. don't think about these things. stop it

>>12375729
>Does he eventually offer a plan to do so or even what characteristics that new inception would have?
bear in mind that this was the man who said that cybernetics was the future and that only a god can save us. heidegger was not known for his optimism

>What would life be like for that? Do we still have democracies and elections? Or something else?
i think about what he meant when he said, 'thinking means thanking,' or 'the nothingness itself nothings.' also what he said about DT Suzuki and Zen:
>If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.
much like the Theosophists discovering Buddhism and Hinduism, i think Heidegger was probably okay with Zen. so was Ernst Junger, by the way (Spengler, bless his Teutonic heart, less so). Heidegger is wonderfully old-school for his And By Philosophy, I Mean Western Philosophy sensibilities...but i think he would have been okay with Zen.

and everything he says about 'openness to Being' still holds up for me as a good way to deal with this inception: namely, you *wait* for it. he makes that beautiful distinction between waiting and a-waiting. and maybe the jury's still out on whether or not Lacan's turning Heidegger's sensibilities into psychoanalytic practice (opting for Meaning or Truth rather than Being, which is what Heidegger came to settle on after being lightning-blasted by Nietzsche) was actually a good idea. psychoanalysis has one advantage that Heidegger did not have: an analysand, on a couch, in an office, in a controlled setting. in these circumstances Lacan could work his magic; Heidegger wouldn't have done that, i think. he would have said, Being is in the whole world, and it's up to you to let it out, or not. at least, that is how i read him.

fundamental ontology means fundamental humanism. it's complicated, of course; certainly we know what Heidgger felt about the Jews (or, for that matter, Levinas about the Chinese: the philosophers are rarely saints like this). but for you and I? i think being cognizant of the metaphysics of production is enough. cybernetics is the metastasization of no other thing, even Uncle Nick has come round to making nice with Heidegger of late. the gestell is basically teleoplexy, imho, and there is no way off that ride. that is why my sense is to a) recognize the need for consciously allowing out the metaphysics of production such that they enable humans to speak, and b) ditch the utopian state-building. even Heidegger bailed out on the fascists. the fact that he gave up on that dream should tell you exactly how much faith he had in realizing such an inception in a modernist political sense.

[Anonymous No.12375816]

>>12375800
this, 195%. this.

[Anonymous No.12375821]

> metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.12375839]

>>12375800
Absolutely giga-mega-ultra spooked. How do people take these potheads seriously.

[Anonymous No.12375843]

>>12364875
>you don't really want Unironic Communism
I do though

[Anonymous No.12375848]

>>12375843
> I want to die in a fucking Holodomor because why not.

[Anonymous No.12375851]

>>12375821
he didn't like them either, but here's the rub: unless we actually know what the fuck we are talking about when we say this, there is a strong possibility that that we think is the overturning of metaphysics actually just becomes, Now Let's Destroy Scapegoat X: be it the Jews, the Communists, the Fascists, the Neoliberals, or whoever. that is the secret tripwire, i think: in a word, politics. and utopian statecraft is not the point. hence the need to bear in mind Heidegger's rather complicated relationship with the Nazis.

>>12375839
>how do people take these potheads seriously
nobody takes me seriously, and that is a good thing. heidegger is worth your time tho. so is deleuze

[Anonymous No.12375876]

>>12375851
He's kinda cute in that picture.

[Anonymous No.12375879]

>>12375851
Enemy is not a tripwire, and there are enemies.

[Anonymous No.12375900]

> "Heidegger? Banal kitsch! Look at how he squeezes out words like "uncanny". His exploration on "man" are just a conventional time-criticism. Heidegger retains a (not even deep) Protestant and ethical character. His writings are neither ontic nor ontological."
> "Heidegger in a nutshell? Time times temporality. Make of it what you wish."
> "In the moment where the dialectical contradiction of the particular becomes correct in the sense of the contemporary (of being suited to the times, as Heidegger would have it) the totality is with the particular and no longer with that which heretofore had been general."
> "You calm me immoral? I think it’s much more honest to sleep with prostitutes than with your PhD students (this one’s for you Heidegger). Crucify me!"

[Anonymous No.12375974]

>>12375843
>I do though
why? better question: why not just a functional social democracy? not as sexy as the Revolution, and obviously far from immune to the seduction of Rule by Corporation (or just mediocracy) but still. it's not like we're strangers to Uncle Nick here. r/acc patchwork is a better look all round than Unironic Communism, and perhaps even shares many of its philosophical problems.

>>12375876
>He's kinda cute in that picture.
sure was. charmed the pants off of a top-tier /lit/ QT as well

>>12375879
Enemies of the State are a dangerous proposition tho. we have some newfound love for the man on the cross going on these days. and even Nietzsche would have said to bear in mind the distinction between good and bad and good and evil. the enemies of the Last Man are everywhere; it's what makes him who and what he is. the man for whom public being is the only form of being he knows.

perhaps we can say that the salient characteristic of the Last Man is *perpetual victimhood, publicly confessed.*

[Anonymous No.12375983]

>>12375800
This helps me out a bit but how does one find authenticity and how would a civilization of people find it? The whole return to our roots thing always inadvertently requires us to reduce the population quite a lot as root based agriculture cant support 7 billion people. Or other sacrifices that dont seem to work. Is there a way we can maintain authenticity with technology giving us our needs? Can we return to our roots if we use modern tech?
>>12375806
It seems like he wants to be the one guy who points out the errors but then offers no solution. Maybe I'm not understanding it or maybe its just his role to play and we need to keep writing and reading to find a solution or at least the next step.

[Anonymous No.12376012]

>Capital-'T'-Taoism
>into the trash it goes

[Anonymous No.12376080]

>>12375983
there is no "return to our roots". you are caught imagining Heidegger as a historicist philosopher, which is an easy enough mistake to make. Heidegger would say something like: "the world of the Greeks is dead", which is literally to say, the meaning that the Greeks uncovered in their statues is not the same meaning we will uncover in them. there is no return to a prior conception of meaning, because remember, meaning is imminent, it exists in your engagement with your world right this very second. Heidegger talks a lot about the primordial, which can make people imagine he wants to return to an earlier point in history, but that is missing what he means by primordial. Dasein constitutes itself through historicality, but Dasein itself is primordial, it is imminent:
>In the fact of its Being, Dasein is as it already was.

[Anonymous No.12376084]

>>12375983
>It seems like he wants to be the one guy who points out the errors but then offers no solution.
it could be because he would have said that, for the time being, there *isn't* one. Heidegger is a conservative philosopher; when everyone around you is running around with a handful of Solutions in each hand, and *all of them are stupid,* the answer is to wait. because it is in that very act of awaiting that the actual answers you are looking for are going to be found. you're waiting for a *good* solution. in poker parlance: you're folding shitty hands.

it has always seemed to me that the clearest expression of Heidegger's thinking is given in Tolkien (again, the irony that IRL Heidegger was working for Mordor and not Lothlorien is not lost on me, nor is it to be ignored). the answers are to be found in Being. what does Galadriel 'do'? what are her 'solutions?' she doesn't have any. the age of the elves is over, the age of man is yet beginning, and there is a strong possibility that the age of the Orc is yet to come. i think Heidegger would have found Tolkien's view pretty much in accord with his own.

ask yourself: what is the 'purpose' of Lothlorien? i'm aware that by putting these words in quotation marks i am probably sounding like every douchebag academic you have ever met. and it's true, a lot of the stuff that you hate about postmodern thought (and which i share) proceeds from Heidegger's own meditations on language, action, Dasein and much else. but in this case it is not quite as douchebaggy as all of that. Being, Dasein, Aletheia, these concepts that Heidegger is expressly preoccupied with are all very insightful modes of considering these kinds of questions: what are we supposed to do? as you say,

>Is there a way we can maintain authenticity with technology giving us our needs?

this is not an easy question! this is an incredibly good one, and a whole shitload of German poets, intellectuals and other writers were very keenly aware of the handwriting on the wall when they were thinking about this. Mordor is a pretty good characterization of the gestell, and all of this is on display in the films: the Fires of Industry, Dark Satanic Mills, all the rest, chewing up the world. but Heidegger knew that IRL *there was no Sauron,* that this was rooted in thinking. and what you need is a kind of thinking that was...not that. what That would look like is, well, a long story. today, sadly, it has morphed into being a thing really no less horrible and oppressive. such is the plight of the phenomenologist and philosopher.

to balance authenticity and technology was, in some sense, what Hitler wanted, and he appealed to the mythopoetics of race to do so. a lot of people were okay with this. in hindsight, it didn't work out so well. this is not to say that Silicon Valley Communism is in any way preferable; it isn't either. we find ourselves caught in the middle accordingly.

the 'purpose' of Lothlorien is to *be Lothlorien.*

[Anonymous No.12376112]

>>12376084
>Heidegger is a conservative philosopher
The fuck? Only part you might mistake of him for conservative is his antique parts and that's not enough. Big post-modernist, gave deconstruction which got instantly subverted, messed up language.

[Anonymous No.12376169]

>>12376112
>The fuck? Only part you might mistake of him for conservative is his antique parts and that's not enough. Big post-modernist, gave deconstruction which got instantly subverted, messed up language.
Heidegger was the definition of conservatism in philosophy and you will have a hard time convincing anyone otherwise. he was postmodern in the sense that he was coming after the transcendental postmodernist himself, that being Nietzsche, but he was far more conservative than Nietzsche was. Nietzsche is who he is because he transcends the political divide, as well as going down another very different route than the one suggested by Hegel (or Marx).

the term for Heidegger is not 'deconstruction' but 'destruction,' (with a k), and which was there for the destruction of largely Platonic and post-Platonic metaphysics. but to assume that he was out to deliberately sabotage or destroy language would be an error. he would have said that in fact it was Platonic-Socratic thought which itself messed up the fundmamental nature of language itself, which is *poetry,* and it is for this reason that he would have liked to restrict philosophy to the presocratics, Nietzsche, and himself. with, i think, an asterisk earmarked for Zen, as he was always very well-received in Japan.

what is 'antique' in Heidegger is *all the way antique.* there is nobody more antiquarian than Heidegger himself. Derrida is one of Heidegger's great disciples, no question, and Derrida - along with Foucault - are the 1 and 1A deconstructionist thinkers. but their projects are not, i think, the same as Heidegger's own. you will find very little of Foucault's interest in power in Heidegger, or Derrida's feels about democracy, or justice, or much else. Heidegger is as conservative as the day is long. he just had the misfortune of trying to conserve what Nietzsche had blown to smithereenies: including, i think, his own desire to square his Catholicism with the Greeks. he still did a pretty good job coming up with his own project anyways, tho. but if Heidegger is not the definition of a conservative philosopher than i don't know what being a conservative philosopher would even mean.

[Anonymous No.12376173]

>>12376112
>Heidegger
>post-modernist
>deconstruction

[Anonymous No.12376200]

>>12376169
Pure imagination here in this post, reflect on his philosophy's effects and it is certain that not he nor his philosophy can in anyway be described as conservative. He is the grandfather of cultural marxist for fucks sake.

[Anonymous No.12376236]

>>12376200
>Pure imagination here in this post, reflect on his philosophy's effects and it is certain that not he nor his philosophy can in anyway be described as conservative
what? he was the court philosopher of Nazi Germany, until he realized it wasn't going to produce what he wanted. the man who basically argues that, Nietzsche excepted, Western philosophy since Heraclitus was a colossal mistake - this strikes you as progressive?

>He is the grandfather of cultural marxist for fucks sake.
are you joking? Heidegger is the grandfather of cultural Marxism? Adorno and Horkheimer - these guys don't strike you as being germane? and Adorno and Heidegger - you think they have the same feelings about things? really?

[Anonymous No.12376255]

>>12376236
>Adorno and Heidegger - you think they have the same feelings about things? really?
They're the fathers, but this grandfather gave the deconstruction tool for cultural marxist, which as we can see has lead to nothing but revolutions and disintegrations. There's nothing conservative in his philosophy, or Nazi Germany for that matter. Bismark alone gutted anything that was worth conserving of Germanies.

[Anonymous No.12376341]

>>12376255
>They're the fathers, but this grandfather gave the deconstruction tool for cultural marxist, which as we can see has lead to nothing but revolutions and disintegrations.
Heidegger has nothing in common with either Marxism or cultural Marxism. nothing. sorry. i can understand that maybe you are associating deconstruction with cultural Marxism, so that anything that suggests the deconstruction of language et al might proceed from Heidegger, but...no. Heidegger is explicitly interested in overcoming the tendency *to fit language precisely to concepts.* he's not trying to make language opaque, he's saying that its natural opacity is what is captured in poetry, because language isn't everything...and it certainly shouldn't be used casually. true, he has his own fun with the nature of language, by calling it into question, but this is mostly there so that we don't fall into the trap of metaphysics. this is, however, a very different project from the critique of ideology which the Frankfurt School will undertake later on, and it also has very different goals in mind.

>There's nothing conservative in his philosophy, or Nazi Germany for that matter.
so Nazi Germany was not a conservative moment? okay, if you're trying to distinguish the fascists from the legit old Junker class, i might agree. and Spengler too, i guess. if by 'conservative' you mean the legit old aristocratic class of Germany, rather than in the more contemporary sense of being 'everything that isn't progressive,' okay.

but...still. there's just something very weird about reading 'Nazi Germany was not a conservative moment.' it obviously was, it was a *conservative revolution,* or reaction, much as is becoming popular these days. Heidegger's whole ontology of Being as opposed to the gestell - to the metaphysics of production, technology, and, yes, lots of other people who weren't Germans...this is a conservative thinker. again, if you are drawing a line between *fascism* and *German aristocrats,* then the *true* conservatives in that group are the aristocrats, yes; but if not, and if we are comparing Heidegger to, say, someone like Jurgen Habermas, or any number of other social democrats...it makes no sense to say he wasn't.

saying 'Heidegger is the grandfather of Cultural Marxism' also is just some crazy and reckless talk. being suspicious about language does not mean Cultural Marxism. and, honestly, Cultural Marxism itself is a really loaded term. it's like 'Patriarchy.' it's not especially useful.

[Anonymous No.12376352]

>>12376341
>Heidegger is explicitly interested in overcoming the tendency *to fit language precisely to concepts.* he's not trying to make language opaque

I don't care what he tried or didn't try, I care what he did.

[Anonymous No.12376392]

>>12376255
>this grandfather gave the deconstruction tool for cultural marxist
troll, and/or literal retard; disregard

[Anonymous No.12376421]

>>12376352
>I don't care what he tried or didn't try
what he did was write Being and Time, which is probably the single greatest work of philosophy of the 20C. he also inspired Lacan, Sartre, Derrida, Gadamer and about a dozen other guys. he had the misfortune of trying to follow up on the greatest thinker of the 19C. he wrote philosophy, and he was pretty good at it too.

he's not without his flaws. certainly they are there. but he's hardly to blame for postmodernity. like many great thinkers - including Baudrillard - it's entirely too easy to blame them for *seeing a thing clearly.* Heidegger already knew that the map was falling away from the territory, which is the basic recipe for postmodernity. this isn't the same thing as saying he *wanted* it. he told you what he wanted: the clearing, the forest path, the jug of milk on the counter, Holderlin. this isn't the infinite semantic play of sign and signifier, nor is it any kind of endorsement of Marxism. quite the opposite.

i'm still not sure what you think it was that he did do; but i can pretty confidently tell you that if you think it's an unironic endorsement of postmodernity, you have the wrong impression of his project. what Heidegger was expressly concerned with was the very kind of thinking that led to postmodernity in the first place, and he sussed it out as well as anyone before or since.

[Anonymous No.12376430]

>>12376341
Nazis weren't conservatives. 8:1 vote share P:C denominations. Tried to preserve some bastardized version of Weimar, which itself was a product of socialist revolution. Bismark was a socialist, yes.. Has more in common with French revolution than any restoration. Real restoration would've placed Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs back.

[Anonymous No.12376435]

>>12376421
>he also inspired Lacan, Sartre, Derrida, Gadamer and about a dozen other guys
Wow, very conservative philosophy here! You know the tree by its fruit after all.

[Anonymous No.12376491]

>>12376435
jesus this is like herding cats.
>Wow, very conservative philosophy here! You know the tree by its fruit after all.
you sure do. you know who else loves Heidegger? this guy.

i feel like you want to play a basketball game, but you keep taking the ball and referring to it as "that game where we wear skates and hit the ball with a stick. you know, basketball." it's getting tiresome.

[Anonymous No.12376516]

>>12376491
> Dugin
> conservative.

LET ME SHOW YOU

THE TRUE POWER

[Anonymous No.12376522]

>>12376430
>Bismark was a socialist
Bismarck was not a socialist.

[Anonymous No.12376524]

>>12376430
I agree with you. Nazi was reactionary. I dont believe it would have survived long without the pressure of war and immediate need for emergency. I dont agree with a monarchy though. They were kicked out as they had all gotten fat and decadent off the works of the peasantry. Most European monarchies were cowardly men by the 1900s. Maybe a new royal family but that's hard to convince people to respect it.

[Anonymous No.12376543]

>>12376524
>They were kicked out as they had all gotten fat and decadent off the works of the peasantry
Yeah and it took like *couple of years* for democracy to get to the same point..

[Anonymous No.12376579]

>>12376543
Agreed. I didnt imply democracy was the solution. I'm thinking monastic military orders but I'm not sure how that would work either. For now I'll just keep reading heidegger.

[Anonymous No.12376616]

>>12376579
I think this voting meme has to end for health of nations and states soon enough. It is not sustainable governance.

[Anonymous No.12376659]

>>12376516
yes, i've actually read this guy, or one of his works anyways, 'Reflections of a Russian Statesman.' he is indeed a conservative thinker. and Dugin is an ultra-radical apocalyptic thinker who looks highly photogenic with a bazooka. conservatism takes many forms.

and the thing is, the conservative/progressive dichotomy isn't really a referendum on how much of a contribution people make to philosophy. Land is more of a conservative thinker than Negarestani, but both of them are miles and miles away from anything like the divisions of the political spectrum as they would have been understood in the 17-18C. the real distinctions (well, the one's i'm interested in, anyways) are the humanist/inhumanist ones, and their relation to technology. for this Heidegger is a major thinker, as is Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze...a lot of those same guys, really. but whether or not the polis or nation-state is better governed by liberal or conservative ideas comes secondary to me these days.

as i was saying earlier, i think all of this falls under whether or not you are first of all intrigued or repelled by the idea of Christianity. both communism and fascism are aspects of socialism opened up by the French and Industrial revolutions, as well as by the legacy of Marx, which is the real elephant in the room. for both Land and Negarestani Marx isn't something that can be hand-waved away. we're not getting away from industrialism, or from capitalism, or from a capitalism which trends towards increasingly automated intelligence by way of technology. those are the questions that are more germane for today, and my own sense is that radical politics as such is actually a way of trying to *avoid* the disquieting implications of what Marx means for the 21C. i think my own sense is that nondualism is preferable to *any* kind of politics for that reason, and mostly because the Last Man is to be found on both sides of the divide, and governing the Last Man by means of carrots and sticks is simply too tempting. it's like the One Ring. better not to put it on at all. and if you *do* want to do something about the Last Man, then deal with the Last Man within and leave the polis alone.

[Anonymous No.12376664]

>>12376616
I agree. People can not even govern their own bodies let alone a nation of bodies.

[Anonymous No.12376703]

>>12376659
> Legacy of Marx.
No, it definitely goes at least back to Luther.

[Anonymous No.12376746]

>>12376703
yes, this is a good point. perhaps the question is: how do you feel about the Renaissance? it's one thing to look at the French Revolution with De Maistre et al and say, "the French Revolution was a mistake." we have Moldbug for this; it's not even as heretical a position to take anymore than it might have been a few years ago, i think (and that the Industrial Revolution is an unfolding and inescapable nightmare increasingly seems to be a thing not even worth questioning.)

the Renaissance, tho...taking a hard-line stance on the Renaissance is a whole other thing.

[Anonymous No.12376777]

>>12376746
It's not Moldbug, better and older authors have written extensively on it.

[Anonymous No.12376862]

>>12376777
i'm aware of this, but Moldbug is a recent exegete of this and broke the mold by bringing it up in the 2000s, and in San Francisco, of all places (although of course in hindsight this makes sense). there are lots of other reactionary thinkers too: i noted de Maistre, and there's Jouvenel, Filmer...i'm sure you can name many more.

you know who also has his moments too? the boy. sections 500 and 501 have some interesting stuff to say about the noble and ignoble consciousnesses, and their relationships to state power and wealth. as with everything in Hegel, that which undergoes the most change is what has his interest, and does the heavy lifting along the way to the Absolute; but it's not like Hegel was completely clueless about a lot of this stuff. i'm not known for my love of Hegel but i've been carrying around a copy of this for a while now, if only b/c i know i can open it up at random at just about any section and find something interesting in there. p. 305 happened to be it yesterday.

Neoreaction is a pretty fascinating episode, although i think the Trump Effect has sent great ripples throughout the reactosphere. he basically ratcheted up the left and the right to degrees of intensity nobody expected to see (and arguably did more to show the moribund nature of academic Marxism in three years than ordinary mortals would have accomplished in a lifetime). now that Western politics as seen on Twitter and the MSM has regressed into a curiously disappointing version of Monday Night Raw perhaps we can expect something more interesting to follow in his wake.

oh, who am i kidding, it's all going to be a car wreck for decades to come. why else would i have all these images of the Desert Fathers on my computer now? because i can't fucking Tao my way out of the crippling dread i feel about capital, and even the most esoteric meditations possible on difference and technology don't make me feel any better. what makes me feel good is saying unironically that it's all in the hands of the divine and probably i should just be humble and hope for the best. God is dead; that (you think) you can handle. Marx is dead; that's a harder pill to swallow.

Building a Bridge to the Ninth Century. find a flaw

[Anonymous No.12376999]

random thought, but in the absence of a Twitter account i'll post it here: in the great age of mimesis and language games it becomes impossible to tell the difference between poisons and cures, innovations and regressions, that which destroys and that which empowers.

computer programs are perhaps described in terms of their functions and relative complexity; there isn't really a standard for human beings, although we do know that there are limits on our memory. but social obligations can become, in a way, a kind of metaphysical bloatware.

in a complicated ritual, such as a tea ceremony, what you might have thought was a relatively simple process - sit down, pour tea, drink tea - in fact becomes so freighted with significance that every aspect of it becomes a kind of triumph of aesthetics. tea ceremonies are beautiful, and we don't really think of them as having been somehow polluted with needless ornamentation because it takes so long to get your tea. there's no 'cutting out the middleman' when it comes to a tea ceremony, because the point of a tea ceremony is not actually to just drink the tea, anymore than turning going to Starbucks into a ritual would be (however much Starbucks would love for you to do this, and to supply it with a degree of the sacred that makes for wonderful advertising).

but *to introduce new customs and new habits* into the socius is a kind of a fascinating phenomenon. this, in a sense, is why political correctness or language policing bothers us: it's like being forced to comply with new rituals that we did not sign up for. *had* we signed up for them, the introduction of new programs, subroutines, customs and other aesthetic requirements might strike us as being fascinating, as things that contributed to our enjoyment.

but this is the nature of postmodernity today; the elimination of one set of rules necessarily produces another, and we are increasingly subjected to the new requirements of cultural imperatives which we not only cannot tell if we want or do not want, we are not even sure where they come from.

it's a 6/10 thought, kind of interesting but unifnished. i'll stick it here anyways. ceremonies, computer programs, bloatware, language games, rituals...meh, i think there's something in that. just not sure what atm.

[Anonymous No.12377010]

To this day, I still have not finished not one Girardpost to the end.

[Anonymous No.12377051]

>>12377010
may it ever be so. maybe you could come up with a clever meme name for the Steam Achievement that you would unlock after reading through one of these threads.

How Do We Kill That Which Has No Life is one possibility.

[Anonymous No.12377065]

>>12377010
>he doesnt read everything, reread twice, and take notes

[Anonymous No.12377074]

Hey girardfag this isn't really relevant to the thread but could you elaborate on what you like about icycalm? It's hard to actually discuss him here

I find him extremely interesting and unsettling

[Anonymous No.12377228]

>>12377074
i think really you answered your own question: 'interesting and unsettling.' he is indeed those things. i don't expect my philosophers to be saints or paragons of virtue; just that they be interesting. where else can you read videogame criticism that references Heraclitus and Baudrillard?

and besides, sometimes being unsettled is good. certainly it's not unlike my own fascination with Land, who i have angered several of my friends by talking about constantly. he tends to unsettle (or even downright anger) a lot of people. and i am often asked, why the fuck am i obsessing over such a nightmarish vision of what philosophy is? the answer, i suspect, is that it has something much more to do with *me* than with acceleration itself. it doesn't so much give me the answers about the questions i am asking as it does present newer and more interesting questions to meditate on. and in meditating on those questions i eventually discover more about what my original fascinations were.

icycalm is a genuine original. say what you will about him, he doesn't *diminish your appreciation for art.* if there is one thing he is exceedingly good at, it is dismantling kitsch snobbery. his polemic against indie games (or the Arcade Culture essay in general) was an interesting early warning shot about what was coming down the pipe: namely, Morality Creep. we should be able to say Bad Art Sucks, and not justify crappy games on the basis of "message" alone. why not? and yet he's not purely an apologist for big-budget Hollywood stuff either; lots of games have huge production budgets and lack any sense of what to actually do with them.

he's a genuine original. i'm less interested in vidya now than i was before, but for exposing the secret necessity for Nightmare Mode in 21C spectacle, and even finding his own way to the Eternal Recurrence by way of Far Cry 2? come on, if you can't appreciate that, there's something wrong with you. he has a very fine antenna for sniffing out *cynicism,* which is a rare gift.

[Anonymous No.12377587]

>>12377228
Do you follow the mimetic-theory accounts on twitter, girardfag? People with similar attitude as yours. Are you perhaps one of them? There's just something contagious about avid Girard readers.

[Anonymous No.12377704]

>>12375843
>pls execute me for wrongthought

[Anonymous No.12377820]

>>12364948
sounds gay i'd rather become the übermensch

[Anonymous No.12378076]

>>12377587
i have a twitter account but i don't use it, i prefer schizoposting here. there are a couple of accounts on twitter that i check regularly but nothing i would call mimetic theory. just Land and a bunch of peeps who talk about theory, a couple of other things.

>There's just something contagious about avid Girard readers.
yeah, maybe. i think it's the Dark Power of continental theory, more than anything. you just get sucked into it. at first you read it just because you want to know what the fuck is going on and who these guys are, and then eventually you realize that they were just unusually sane human beings, or have the power to put some of your most mysterious and arcane feels into words, and they did this, like, fifty years ago. but it still holds up. or maybe it's all unconscious brainwashing, i don't really know. the jargon eventually becomes like a kind of a second language.

but it really all comes from this kind of collective alchemy. heidegger opens a lot of doors. deleuze opens a lot of doors. Uncle Nick opens a lot of doors. eventually you realize that a lot of people honestly have no fucking idea what they're talking about, and whatever the fuck it is that is causing things to happen is happening amidst a lot of contingency and a lot of bullshit. that's when religion starts to get a lot more appealing. but it's also i think why i have such an axe to grind with socialism, because it's kind of like knowing the Matrix is the Matrix and still needing to keep the blinders on anyways. which makes sense, of course, because the alternative is the wasteland...but anyways. better to work on the city within, i think.

[Anonymous No.12378169]

so whats space taoism?

[Anonymous No.12378831]

>>12378169
1/3

>The philosophy of the 23rd century is a naturalistic Space Taoism based on change, evolution, and creativity, a view of the universe more profound that any religion has imagined - and as such it is 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, offering a physicalist reenchantment with the cosmos and a relationship with the world that can only be described as experiencing it as pure poetry in the fullness of its wonder-horror, to be ever content and comfy yet ever striving. Its symbol will inevitably be that of the calculus integral due to its similarity to the yin-yang, its synthesis of Eastern and Western thought, of the analytical with the analogical. Neo-China and Neo-Europe arrive from the future to save the present from the undead past, the autonomous movement of the unliving accelerating itself towards omnicide.

>The metaphysical nature of change is mirrored in all specifics of it, including that of calculus, the mathematical study of change, which is where we find formalization of our metaphysical principle. The fundamental theorem of calculus describes integration and derivation as inverse operations of the same process, with the physical intuition of integration being "cumulative change" and "instantaneous change." These correspond to yang and yin of Chinese philosophy respectively, with the Chinese insight into this relationship coming from a careful observation of change, and an extrapolation of its mechanics from observation - not wholly accurate, but the core relationship is precise. Examining the nature of our conscious perception of change shows why this is the case, and gives evidence that the foundations of calculus is truly a metaphysical principle capable of accounting for human experience.

>We perceive change in the reference frames of presentism and temporalism, where in the former a singular omni-present moment is the fixed point of reference, and the latter the line of time comprised of a continuum of infinitesimal moments that are gone as soon as they arrive. In the presentist perspective, cultivated by mindfulness practices, what is experienced is instantaneous change in an ever-present, and in the temporalist perspective cumulative change through time. The presentist mode is spacial, analogical (simultaneous relationships) and relational, the temporalist mode sequential, narrative and logical (causal relationships.)

[Anonymous No.12378835]

>>12378831
2/3

>Though Alfred North Whitehead didn't realize it, his philosophy follows from calculus as a metaphysical principle precisely, describing being and becoming, permanence and change as co-equals, that "becoming is for the purpose of being, and being for the purpose of novel becoming." Rather than quoting at length, here is a link to the first 19 pages of "The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality" that gives a basic introduction to his philosophy, which I think the reader will conclude is a reflection of the metaphysical implications of calculus: https://imgur.com/a/ZtLDYJT He is the essential guide towards the philosophy of the 23rd century, but missing is the process of the self, consciousness as a creative process.

>Evolutionary theories of culture such as memetics fails to include subjective human experience, which does violence to it: we're all just "meme machines" subject to memetic forces, the mechanistic universe transformed into techno-organic infection. Douglas Hofstadter's view of consciousness takes a different direction, describing us as "self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference," and is heavy into process thought at some points (especially his concept of shared interiority, that we host and are hosted by others) yet is still focused on the being-self, a self-representation representing itself, the self as an object, the "I." What creates this self-representation is the becoming-self, a self-querying query, a question questioning itself. Questions aren't a passive lack of answers but are quests, searches, movements, and vectors of desire. The spotlight of our awareness is a request for information having directionality, and self-awareness comes from the interplay between the being-self and becoming-self, the process of self-creativity.

>The Darwinian process of variation -> selection -> reproduction is mirrored by the conscious process of question -> choice -> action, our lines of inquiry create potentials that we select from to actualize. Substance metaphysics has made us blind to the essential generative component of consciousness, focusing on the ordering process of selection, resulting in the idea of free will: we are free (or not) to select from objects from a list according to our will - our desires. Our freedom lies in free inquiry, our capacity to question, as by questioning our will we can create alternative desires. We can also question our questions, and our actions, and so human consciousness is a three-fold strange loop of the evolutionary process folded upon itself. Conscious experience is literally evolution evolved, the creative process that has folded upon itself to create self-creators. Self-creation isn't an absolute but an art, a cultivated skill, and it is not a self-creation creating with itself ex nihilo, but a co-creation with the multiplicity of existence.

[Anonymous No.12378846]

>>12378835
3/3

>Whitehead's organic philosophy replaces the centrality with relationships - mutually co-creative perspectives among all things. "Every creature both houses and pervades the universe," the interiority of an occurrence comprised of its relationships to everything else. Matter is made of energy which is a relationship between occurrences, but as these occurrences are made up of energy, which is made up of relationships, the universe is a strange loop of relationships of relationships of relationships. The implication is a synthesis of the dead nouns of creator and creating with an immanent creativity, the death of art as the process of reality itself is a creative process, a tapestry of co-creation among all strands that it contains - not as a whole relating the many to itself, but as the many becoming one in a novel subject, and increased by one. The thesis of Space Taoism is "we are life-artists who co-create with the self-creating tapestry of existence," rather than human creators creating meaning out of a meaningless existence, meaning and signification is omnipresent, co-created by a subject's personal relationship with existence - the artistic act of life.

>While the integral symbol is the inevitable symbol of Space Taoism, its true holy symbol is the question mark - a symbol of awareness, infinite potential, inexhaustible meaning and endless becoming. The Tao is literally defined as "path" or "way," a motion through space and time, and the guide along this endless quest isn't an answer but an omnipresent question mark. What does one do? How does one act? What does one become? Let your questions guide you, and follow them faithfully, and they will take you to where you need to go.

this is Aminom's text, not mine. he's the original visionary behind Space Taoism. but i co-sign it completely.

[Anonymous No.12378863]

>>12378831
>>12378835
>>12378846
so hegel with slanty eyes, got it

[Anonymous No.12378897]

>>12378846
my own sensibilities skew more towards Neo-Augustinian Neo-Confucian, ultimately. and as such they are destined to be thwarted, but i still think melancholy > rage. postmodernity, like man, is something that must be overcome. it is liberalism in its terminal phase. some days i don't actually know if even Landian capital has a future pre-arranged for it; it may not, if it finds itself irresistably wed to Silicon Valley communism on some deep level. Arrighi's thesis about the rise and fall of great cities and the marriage of speculative capital and landed sovereign authority doesn't have a special clause in it for San Francisco. Genoa had its day, as did Amsterdam and London. long before this, Rome; and once upon a time even Baghdad was a shining city on a hill. then the Mongols showed up.

>>12378863
meh, i guess. there may be no way out of Hegel, but if that's the case, there's also an infinite number of potential phenomenologies of spirit to come also. Hegel writes something to this effect himself in the preface, iirc; there are a lot of ways from sense-certainty to Absolute Knowing, not this one and this one only. Aminom would probably just say more like Hofstadter and Whitehead with their own eyes.

and one has to ask what Hegel would have made of the past 200+ years anyways. or whether or not he would agree with Fukuyama that Hegel more or less fulfills his historical mission after 1990. just in time for the internet, cryptocurrency, and AI blastoff, perhaps. presuming everything doesn't regress back into Idiocracy, that is.

[Anonymous No.12378927]

[Anonymous No.12379005]

What is space taoism?

[Anonymous No.12379072]

>>12379005
see
>>12378169
also
>>12364759
and
>>12367431
>>12372858
& don't forget
>>12374053

[Anonymous No.12379401]

space taoism, what's that?

[Anonymous No.12379880]

Alright, but you can't handle it

https://vimeo.com/264805478

[Anonymous No.12380214]

>>12366216
cringe

[Anonymous No.12380546]

>>12378897
> No way out of Hegel
You could stop believing his idiotic logic and metaphysics for one.

Hegel is like Machiavelli.

You can't understand him without historical context for sure. So many people gobble up his Prussian asslicking for treats. That and ignore Luther.