/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12568650]

Space Taoism/Process Metaphysics thread

going to start off the thread with some quotes from Grandpa Al's book Adventures of Ideas
"We notice that a great idea in the background of dim consciousness is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specialization" (pg. 19, "The Human Soul")

"The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes" (pg. 48, "Aspects of Freedom")

"The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact" (pg. 177, "Objects and Subjects")

"Thus it belongs to the essence of each occasion of experience that it is concerned with an otherness transcending itself" (pg. 180, "Objects and Subjects")

"It is not a mere question of having a soul or of not having a soul. The question is, How much, if any?" (pg. 208, "The Grouping of Occasions")

"To know the truth partially is to distort the Universe. For example, the savage who can only count to ten enormously exaggerates the importance of the small numbers, and so do we whose imaginations fail when we come to millions" (pg. 243, "Truth")

[note: this one's more wrapped up in Whitehead's special terminology]
"Music elicits some confused feeling into direct apprehension. It performs this service, or disservice, by introducing an emotional clothing which changes the dim objective reality into a clear Appearance matching the subjective form provided for its prehension" (pg. 249, "Truth")

"Progress is founded upon the experience of discordant feelings. The social value of liberty lies in its production of discords. There are perfections beyond perfections. All realization is finite, and there is no perfection which is the infinitude of all perfections. Perfections of diverse types are among themselves discordant. Thus the contribution to Beauty which can be supplied by Discord -- in itself destructive and evil -- is the positive feeling a quick shift aim from the tameness of outworn perfection to some other ideal with its freshness still upon it. Thus the value of Discord is a tribute to the merits of imperfection." (pg. 257, "Beauty")

"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul" (pg. 271, "Truth and Beauty")

"One principle is that the very essence of real actuality -- that is, of the completely real -- is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. There is no halt in which the actuality is just itself, accidentally played upon by qualifications derived from the shift of circumstances. The converse is the truth." (pg. 274-275, "Adventure")

[Anonymous No.12568689]

>Grandpa Al
kek that is very cozy. and at least somebody can rank Uncle Nick too at Metaphorical Thanksgiving. man if you actually related to Whitehead as if he were your grandfather...eeyow.

i also want to seed this thread with something i ran across while taking notes for a demented piece of fan-fiction involving Roger Stone, Marie Kondo, Dave Theurer and Heinz von Foerster:
>Atari is a term used in Go for a situation where a stone or chain of stones has only one liberty, and may be captured on the next move if not given one or more additional liberties.

i don't know what it means, really, i just thought it was kind of an interesting idea, another one of those Ways Beyond Postmodern Nihilism thoughts. shared for your perusal, reflection, w/ev else. maybe related to cyberpunk stuff, or to some deeper feeling about one of HvF's dictums:
>I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.

if it's all a big game, if capitalism always eats your lunch, whatever...i don't know, i just feel like there's a weird elective affinity going on here with a bunch of this stuff. Grandpa Al sets the classical banquet and by 2019 we (read: me) are eating garbage from the trashcan...but every once in a while i think, yeah, but it's not over yet.

aah, i love this board.

[Anonymous No.12568735]

>>12568689
also john maus is ffffffffffffffffffffucking awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnMfKacI9AY&t=1411s

[Anonymous No.12569217]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12569251]

What's space taoism?

[Anonymous No.12569339]

>"We notice that a great idea in the background of dim consciousness is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specialization"
Does an undeveloped idea require work? Absolutely.

>"The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes"
No one ever claimed intelligent people to be faultless! They've also precipitated brilliant things. What's his point, here?

>"Thus it belongs to the essence of each occasion of experience that it is concerned with an otherness transcending itself"'
The conscious portion of our genetic being craves improvement through identification of the unknown. Absolutely.

>"It is not a mere question of having a soul or of not...?"
I'm not touching this one.

>"To know the truth partially is to distort the Universe. For example, the savage who can only count to ten enormously exaggerates the importance of the small numbers, and so do we whose imaginations fail when we come to millions"
The limit of our consciousness grows dimmer near the boundaries... and the illuminated parts of the imaginable is all we can ever know. The savage his sticks, the genius his twigs - the only thing infinite is this man's nose toward the sky.

>"Music elicits some confused feeling into direct apprehension. It performs this service, or disservice, by introducing an emotional clothing which changes the dim objective reality into a clear Appearance matching the subjective form provided for its prehension"
I'll take your word for it and leave it alone, it does sound a little weighty for music.

>"Progress is founded upon the experience of discordant feelings. The social value of liberty lies in its production of discords. There are perfections beyond perfections. All realization is finite, and there is no perfection which is the infinitude of all perfections. Perfections of diverse types are among themselves discordant. Thus the contribution to Beauty which can be supplied by Discord -- in itself destructive and evil -- is the positive feeling a quick shift aim from the tameness of outworn perfection to some other ideal with its freshness still upon it. Thus the value of Discord is a tribute to the merits of imperfection."
I'm inclined to agree with Socrates here, no comment.

>"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul"
Sure.

>One principle is that the very essence of real actuality -- that is, of the completely real -- is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. There is no halt in which the actuality is just itself, accidentally played upon by qualifications derived from the shift of circumstances. The converse is the truth."
Deconstruction of objects whilst appreciating it as whole and ever-changing is itself truth? Is that what he's getting at here? I'm hesitant to comment on anything that uses "real actuality"...

[Anonymous No.12569480]

>>12569251
just seatch in the archive man there are a bunch of threads on this

[Anonymous No.12569634]

>>12569339
you've clearly put a great deal of thought into your responses, thank you

[Anonymous No.12569950]

>>12569251
it's taoism in OUTER SPACE

[Anonymous No.12570073]

>>12569251
in the absence of any real philosophy or any idea what that would look like, people are LARPing that they have a philosophy by doing freestyle combinatorics with the jargon lexicons of several hipsterishly trendy philosophical systems (whitehead's process philosophy, left accelerationism, etc)

the sad thing is that some of these philosophies are interesting and do speak to each other in important ways but all you're gonna get from these threads is new age platitudes and a bunch of pretentious spitballing.

tldr think weird twitter, slam poetry, and kantbot in a blender

[Anonymous No.12570998]

>>12570073
this is one of these things i want to put on my wall and stare at until it makes me a better shitposter

[Anonymous No.12571001]

JOHN MAUS PLEASE COME TO RUSSIA. WE CAN TALK ABOUT THE SINGULARITY

[Anonymous No.12571507]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12572301]

>>12568735
his music okay but he sounds like a dork

[Anonymous No.12573297]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12573369]

>>12568650
The notion of multiple contradictory perfections seems very interesting to me. Is it developed any further? How is perfection related to his theology? How does W. deal with the problem of judgment (and the lack of thereof)? Sorry to sully your hero, but the Deleuzean in me asks how Whitehead can be put to use (other than the application as poetry)?

[Anonymous No.12574001]

>>12573369
regarding God in the 'schema', there is the final chapter of process and reality: http://www.anthonyflood.com/whiteheadgodandtheworld.htm
i don't know how much of that will be understandable to you on its own, as it is the capstone of an involved and thoroughly systematic metaphysical construction
in the most general terms, perfection is the attainment of an ideal contrast (as in, say, 'the one and the many'). in this sense, each actual occasion is in itself perfect, as it is the 'emergence' of a unity out of multiplicity. but occasions are merely that, and so must always pass, to be yet another datum in the nexūs of further occasions. so therr is a continual transcendence, which entails no permanent attainment of any perfection, only the objectively immortal residue of all that has past before.
i'm not entirely clear on what you mean by 'the problem' of judgement, so i can't really comment on that
but as to poetry, as all actual occasions are sui generis, you can think of reality as an process as an autopoiesis, or a never-ending 'enchantment'.

[Anonymous No.12574010]

[Anonymous No.12574035]

>>12574001
The problem of judgment is essentially what is discussed by Nietzche in his story about the Last Man. If we do not have a metaphysical hierarchical principle that can be used for the purpose of judgment (and therefore produce normative statements and therefore create values), then how can we create meaning? Think defeating Gnon.

So perfection would be a mirror to D's singularity?

[Anonymous No.12574051]

>>12570073
Serious philosophy got us into this mess, imma give the pseuds a chance

Fuck niggers, fuck jannies, fuck John Locke

[Anonymous No.12574072]

>>12568650
You're posts are the only value left on this board.

[Anonymous No.12574085]

>>12568735
Yeah, he's great. Seems like a really friendly and engaging dude (even if he reminds me of myself when I talk about deleuze). Believer might be one of the greatest pop songs of the 21st century

[Anonymous No.12574094]

>>12574072
I'm not even convinced Girardfag is a individual any more but rather a collective persona, I've been referred to as "Girardfag" many times despite having a completely different world-view.

[Anonymous No.12574105]

>>12574035
whitehead is unconcerned with the absence of first principles at yhe metaphysical level, though he shows definite preferences for, say, political or cultural regimes.
epochs (great and small) emerge and pass, and with them the standards of judgment that 'make meaning' within that epoch possible
whitehead has what i guess you would call an epistemological theory of judgement that coalesces around the notion of propositions. it is a correspondence theory of truth, but relative to standpoints (or perspective), which i think is perfectly compatible with nietszche's more developed ideas in the same subject
i don't know much about deleuze so tou'll have to expand on what you mean.
i think whitehead's religious vision of the cosmos is anathema to nick land's more providential and paranoid cyberpunk spinoza speculations, so i don't see much fruitful development in cross-breeding without doing serious damage to one or the other

[Anonymous No.12574138]

>>12574105
>deleuze
Apologies, typing on my phone, so I can't really retain sanity and do metaphysics at the same time. I was talking to myself more than you anyway.
>on epochs
Seems to line up 1-1 of my reading of D - Fields (or strata) of objectivity/signs are conjured up, and break and are dissolved if not actively maintained.
>on damage
Concerning yourself with not damaging the thinkers you are appropriating is a bad habit. Thinking is an inherently violent act.

[Anonymous No.12574169]

>>12574001
Opened the link, and this seems tackling exactly the problem of judgment. It's a bit dense for 1am reading, but text appreciated. Will read and report back tomorrow

[Anonymous No.12574184]

>>12568735
nice, I actually got to meet him a few days ago after his show in boston. due to my inebriation I totally wasted the opportunity to ask him about deleuze and his understanding of philosophy wrt his music, but I can confirm he is a really cool guy.

[Anonymous No.12574218]

>>12574184
When it comes to music I think its very much a hauntological interest for him, which makes sense given the fact that he pretty much single-handedly invented hypnagogic pop music. Live performance on the other hand is like the collision between Debord's SOTS and Deleuze's essay on exhaustion, he thinks that despite all the mechanisms of control the human is subject to we're still capable of "speaking". Only problem is we're only capable of realising said authentic voice through the absurd presence of the human on stage, utterly exhausted, dripping with sweat and repeatedly beating himself across the head with his microphone.

Even though Pitchfork is terrible this is a brilliant interview and performance by him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4b0c7bdzfg

[Anonymous No.12574228]

How can Philip K Dick fit into all of this?

[Anonymous No.12574242]

[Anonymous No.12574249]

>>12574228
his concept of orthogonal time is like bizzaro-accelerationism

[Anonymous No.12574462]

>>12574138
my meaning being more if you were to subject whiteheads categorical scheme to the second (or third?) order linguistic convolutions of a deleuze or a nick land you're inevitably going to destroy the elegance and everything else about the ideas the make them original and enjiyable in their own right. and this will be prior to a complete understanding of those ideas themselves, and to their implocations, which are ultimtely the real interest they offer.
this is less about preserving whitehead against critical readings so much as resisting his subordination to and subsumption under some other thinkers.

[Anonymous No.12574587]

>>12572301
idk senpai. i think he sounds just fine

>>12574072
OP isn't me. i'm >>12568689 and >>12568735. there just happens to be some other chill no-capsposting Whitehead fans around.

>>12574094
>I'm not even convinced Girardfag is a individual any more but rather a collective persona, I've been referred to as "Girardfag" many times despite having a completely different world-view.
can confirm, i am in fact an individual, but i've seen other people sound like me also - as well as (i think?) attack people they perhaps think are me who actually aren't, which must be very confusing for all, as much as being credited for having an interesting insight and being mistaken for someone else.

i am but a single girardfag. that said it's been a pleasure to read a couple of the last Whitehead threads, they've been exceedingly civilized and full of interesting stuff. very cool gents.

>>12574184
super jealous but i don't really know if it's a wasted encounter, you got drunk and got to meet a cool guy. can't find a flaw in that. he seems like a pretty wonderful dude.

>>12574228
just seems to be an inspiration really. kind of like Ballard but with perhaps with fewer filters, i don't know. maybe pataphysics, just finding those impossible aspects of the psyche that never get completely boxed in by our control societies. but instead of writing another bullshit manifesto PKD turned it into some of the best sci-fi literature ever. the man was some kind of genius.

i don't actually have all that much to say about Grandpa Al et al at the moment, i'm on a Baudrillard/Lacan side-thing which feels pretty good. really just chiming in to say i enjoyed the threads (as i mentioned in the last one, just before it got deleted). hope you guys are well doing well in the polar vortex.

[Anonymous No.12574757]

>>12574462
Hey man, moloch just called and said that the aesthetics of prose are next into the furnace. Sorry buddy, we do have MeaningzoleTM pills to remedy the emptiness left by that though. You might look away for the sodomozing.

[Anonymous No.12574771]

>>12574757

[Anonymous No.12574838]

>>12574249
How so?

[Anonymous No.12574843]

>>12574587
Regarding your mention of Lacan, do you see any relation between the mirror stage and D&G's elaboration of faciality?, I think there's an interesting symmetry there (pun intended) despite their deviations from his practise. Perhaps the child does not simply learn about itself through its outline, extension and the frame of the mirror, but also through the face, falling into the eyes, the black holes of subjectivity. I think Husserl is a good third-party to bridge the gap between them.

[Anonymous No.12574984]

>>12574843
i don't recall offhand what D&G say about the face or faciality; if you had a quote or something it might be helpful for some context. what do they say about faciality? certainly when you look at Lacan's diagrams and charts you can see how much of that Guattari is emulating in Schizophrenic Cartographies or elsewhere, this need to map the basic or fundamental structures of articulation, where speech comes from and elsewhere. but as for the face? who knows? seems also like this might be a Levinas idea more than a Husserl one, altho i'm not particularly well-versed with Levinas' stuff.

>black holes of subjectivity
this tho. i can still remember - a moment i profoundly regret - being introduced to the very young daughter of a family member for the first time, and looking deeply into the eyes. the response, quite understandably i think, was screaming. and of course i realized - what gives me the right to look someone in the eyes like this? that tiny little person is as old as they can be. what a horrible feeling that must have been! i felt terrible about it afterwards...

i think we forget what it is like to be that age, to be a child - to really have virtually *no memory* and no language with which to express yourself. you basically just arrived on the scene, in medias res, and you have no real idea what is going on at all, you're just trying to catch up with rules the bulk of which are basically arbitrary. even adults struggle with this! to feel something, and have no way of articulating it. none of us ask to be born, we all just kind of suddenly find ourselves here, and the world is basically organized by giants, some of which you become familiar with and some of which are just complete outsiders.

even i had no real understanding or self-awareness of how language worked at all until after a book or two and a few life experiences: mostly calamities of my own devising that i couldn't help engineering time and again. i did this for some reason, guided by some inner impetus to be a self, but...that's why philosophy is kind of a handy resource, it's the only real debug we have.

i'm feeling kind of cozy about Lacan today tho. maybe it's because i read some clickbait article that said, 'are you a malignant narcissist?' and i thought - holy shit, how many of these things do i actually do? so i don't know, maybe this is a phase or something, we'll see. could just be that i am so fucking wired for guilt and confusion that i will believe in anything, could be that also. or maybe it's just the weather.

it's such a weird and fucked-up world. but there's definitely some kind of shift that takes place, or that can take place, between having a name and not having one. there's a lot to be said for deterritoriaization no doubt, but sometimes reterritorializing is good too...even if it's on a version of yourself that you might really fucking hate or fear to be. that's kind of where i am today. no fucking expert, that's for sure.

[Anonymous No.12575014]

>>12574838
he gives the example of our time being a ball rolled up a hill, it goes so far before it slows and begins rolling backwards, he thought that our time had reached it zenith and started to roll back onto itself, collapsing back into older forms (e.g. his visions of ancient Rome). History is "accelerating" but that means we are going backwards, not forwards. I'm not finished the Exegesis though, so he may have changed his mind by the end

[Anonymous No.12575045]

>>12574984
>the response, quite understandably i think, was screaming. and of course i realized - what gives me the right to look someone in the eyes like this?
always how I read Buber's I and Thou -- what an awful responsibility our gaze is

[Anonymous No.12575118]

>>12575045
yeah. it really is. one of Laozi's rules that i recall is about just this:
>Close your mouth,
>block off your senses,
>blunt your sharpness,
>untie your knots,
>soften your glare,
>settle your dust.
>This is the primal identity.

those are the Taoists tho. to me philosophy always inches towards religion, and religion is *horrifying.* ofc Land was the guy who genuinely put the spook in me, and right after Heidegger and Lacan had identified *exactly* the things that i had always been so vexed about: objet a and the metaphysics of production, the *talking.* and the talking, and the talking, and the taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalking. those guys cleared that stuff up for me quite nicely, and then it was on to Land, b/c i thought - so, if that's the case...but now i think something like the Eleusinian mysteries, or an Orphic cult, or something to that effect, is quite appealing either: something to put the holy fear of the gods in you so that you will step lightly in the china shop of the mind (or, heaven help you, the mind of the others).

what an awful responsibility it is. and what a tremendous reserve one would have about being the Master, or the great leader, or anything like this. politics isn't as amusing as it used to be for me - it never really was - but i've always had this kind of sense of the ground being ripped open under my feet. first by deconstruction, and then by all kinds of things starting in 2015-2016 (which was, if anyone cares, exactly when i began posting here in earnest) and then on today.

one of the things i was thinking about today was about religion tho, for this reason - that religion really works as a kind of internal mediation that few other things can provide. if you look at Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins et al, it's interesting to see what happened after them: hardcore ideologues were unpersuaded by rationalist atheism, and lots of others who probably considered themselves atheists presumably fell into progressivism or alt-right reactions to, with zeal that would have made Martin Luther envious. but religious...mediation?...kind of serves as a helpful scaffolding, i think, precisely so that we *don't* get Right To The Point, and Say What We Really Mean...mostly because we have no idea what that would be. Stengers says this also, somewhere, in (her) Cosmopolitics: ideally, we might go slower...

but yeah, i mean - to take things seriously, i guess. how seriously? Carl Schmitt was unironically fighting the Antichrist in his mind. these are not lightweight problems. i'm glad i don't have his problems. i can barely fucking handle my own.

[Anonymous No.12575135]

>>12574984
>"The gaze is but secondary in relation to the gazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality." Neither will we speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects... An approach based on part-objects is even worse; it is the process of a demented experimenter who flays, slices and anatomises everything in sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again."
The basic gestalt is that Lacan's concept of mirror-stage development is kind of a barbaric way of understanding how we come to be self-conscious beings, and that the face is the true primordial focus of social development in its exploratory nature. take the chivalric novel, for example, the knight endlessly roaming a landscape littered with holes, in contrast to Beckett's Malone dies, which sides with Lacan in the butcher's shop. I personally think their treatment of Lacan is a little reductive here, since Lacan frequently stresses that we are not supposed to think that the totalised image we see back at us is a "true" reflection of the unity of self, but rather the ultimate treachery of form, the frame of the mirror which seals us in and the outline which divides the us from the not-us. The way we assemble ourselves from the partial objects adrift in a sea of sense data turns us all into frankenstein's monster, but I suppose D&G go one step further and demand we close our eyes and tear at the stitches which line our face.

>what gives me the right to look someone in the eyes like this? that tiny little person is as old as they can be. what a horrible feeling that must have been!
This is a moving sentiment. To be so young and so ill-acclimatised to conversation and subtext, one of the most intense and life-changing experience must be in encountering the gaze of another, and the way they process that experience.

[Anonymous No.12575227]

>>12575135
>I personally think their treatment of Lacan is a little reductive here, since Lacan frequently stresses that we are not supposed to think that the totalised image we see back at us is a "true" reflection of the unity of self, but rather the ultimate treachery of form, the frame of the mirror which seals us in and the outline which divides the us from the not-us.
i don't know if this will be interesting to you or not, but at least two scenes come to my mind here about the treachery of the image in the mirror. horror is one of those things that adults need - for all kinds of reasons - and which is frequently cathartic, and brilliantly literary. but the fact that things like these have the power to spook us gets perhaps at some of these concepts.

The Haunting: Mirror Has Two Faces
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyPF-BmNQjQ

Silent Hill: Mirror Room
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkYtflr1KsM

>The way we assemble ourselves from the partial objects adrift in a sea of sense data turns us all into frankenstein's monster, but I suppose D&G go one step further and demand we close our eyes and tear at the stitches which line our face.
and this is just brilliant. D&G are kind of wed to Lacan almost in the way in which Marx is wed to Hegel (and Marx has some pretty brilliant stuff to say about the self-creation of man as labor, which in turn provoked Baudrillard to ask if that creation was in turn only another kind of willed cul-de-sac: it created the man who only defined himself *as* labor and utility, a being who could be perfectly alienated by a machine as his uncanny doppelganger).

anyways Negarestani has a pinball machine about this as well. i think your point is very Deleuzian also, that we really are in a world of copies without originals, and the concept of monstrosity as such - as it would be referred to a Creator, all this, things you can (or have) read about in D&R - that we would relate to each other as varyingly monstrous (and perhaps even loveable as such). i think Lacan does quite a lot of heavy lifting in that regard, in making us capable of such a high degree of suspicion about what we are saying that we cease to give ourselves the airs of being master-interpreters and so on. that is the effect i get from him, anyways. i was kind of thinking about Negarestani's pinball machine in a similar way - the Word is there, and it passes across and between our mutual wirings and joint freakishness, even navigating the corridors and tunnels as it goes...if not creating them along the way, even!

>one of the most intense and life-changing experience must be in encountering the gaze of another, and the way they process that experience.
i felt like such a shitbag. it was like having your own mind directly registered: here i am, this huge ugly boulder-head thing, looking right into someone, going, who are you? i would have fucking screamed too. she should have fucking poked me in the eye.

[Anonymous No.12575333]

[Anonymous No.12575347]

[Anonymous No.12575492]

>everyone in this thread right now

[Anonymous No.12575893]

>>12575492
the walking dead against the Chad CotF, who will be victorious

how much longer must our own entirely self-imposed, mystifyingly stupid and basically pointless torment go on

i'd say at least another week

[Anonymous No.12575904]

>>12575492
more post-tranny psy ops

[Anonymous No.12575944]

>>12575492
more post-tranny psy ops

[Anonymous No.12575945]

what is a good book to read along side process and reality?

[Anonymous No.12575951]

>>12575945
as a secondary source? not a book, but Donald Sherburne's articles on whitehead that you can google

[Anonymous No.12575954]

>>12568650
what a fucking meme

[Anonymous No.12575962]

>>12575951
http://www.anthonyflood.com/sherburne.htm
these?

[Anonymous No.12576021]

>>12575945
>>12575951
sherburne wrote a companion to pr
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo3637320.html
beware, he is hostile to the concept of god in whitehead's system, so his reading is colored a bit by this prejudice.
doesn't help that god is inseperable from the the system
stengers has a book on whitehead with long section on pr
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674416970
i posted latour's preface to tww im a different thread
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/93-STENGERS-GB.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjDkoal_bLgAhWSPH0KHU2MBcQQFjABegQIBhAB&usg=AOvVaw0py9Z0RxRJXNfhJwnOc1He

[Anonymous No.12576033]

>>12575954
this is a whitehead thread, so we treat each other in a civilized fashion, you colossal faggot

[Anonymous No.12576780]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12577104]

>>12575962
yup, but keep in mind what this guy says >>12576021

he decenters Whitehead, as he calls it, doesn't believe Whitehead's God is tenable or that process theology is worth anything

>>12576021
do you happen to know of any responses to his articles on God?

[Anonymous No.12577307]

>>12575227
Is that image from one of Negarestani’s books? I’ve been waiting with baited breath for intelligence and spirit to arrive, is it good? I read his essay on time asymmetry and was blown away by how intelligible his ideas are (compared to other speculative CCRU lunatics like Land). don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone explain the transition from micro to macro states better desu

[Anonymous No.12577316]

>>12577307
Post the essay

[Anonymous No.12577373]

>>12577316
https://publicityreform.github.io/findbyimage/readings/negarestani.pdf

[Anonymous No.12577416]

>>12577373
thank you

[Aminom No.12577543]

>What's space taoism?

Eastern calculus is the study of change from alinguistic phenomenological experience and Western calculus is the study of change from the symbolic/linguistic. Space Taoism is their synthesis provided by a link between philosophical taoism, the being-becoming interdependency of process-relational philosophy, the fundamental theorem of calculus, two reference frames of phenomenological change, relativistic spacetime and evolutionary change. https://old.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9rpnrl/space_taoism_101/ Also thrown in Discordianism (process-relational thought as experimental art-as-religion) and chaos theory.

Following this led me on a philosophical adventure that makes Land look like a normie. Fanfiction of this adventure here: https://vimeo.com/specalblend

[Anonymous No.12577683]

>>12577307
it's not in the book but it's his design. Reza has moved to another level anyways with the LEGO set to make his points also...now there's a forward-thinking guy.

anyways, you'll probably love I&S. he makes a very strong case as to why building an AI really is a kind of philosophical mandate.

[Anonymous No.12577713]

>>12577683
what's his case? disabuse me of the notion land & co. are only really interested in philosophically justifying their fascination with a genre of sci-fi novels

[Anonymous No.12577836]

>>12577713
>what's his case?
kek. i was afraid you might ask me this! it's not easy to sum up, and he uses a lot of references to logic, philosophy of mind, computers, or philosophers i'm most definitely *not* well acquainted with - Sellars, Quine, Brandom, who are basically undiscovered countries for me. my thing - if i can be said to have a thing - is more intellectual history, i feel like i am kinda-sorta adept at explaining the relations between philosophers, where they link and where they break down, diverge, and so on. the larger story for me is usually an old-fashioned one: Death of God, wat do? more recently: Death of Marx, oh shit.

but this is where Negarestani becomes an interesting guy: imho, we are crafting for ourselves a kind of automatic planet, and this is a process that invokes a whole host of truly fascinating continentals, in one sense or another: Hegel, Marx, Stiegler, Simondon, Derrida, Stiegler, Yuk Hui and Land. something is going on - well, i think so - with recursion, cybernetics, automation, programming. this is my own take, anyways, that a certain era predicated on the metaphysics of difference (or anthropocene) is ending, and a new kind of epoch looms: the age of the integrated circuit. this discovery of automation, of capitalism as the planetary cosmotechnic par excellence - is a thing that joins everyone together. but very few continental philosophers are also skilled computer programmers or math geeks. (which is good for me, because i suck at math). Badiou is basically unreadable for me, but YH knows what he's talking about, and Negarestani has all kinds of things to say about the computer program. Land does also, in his own way, and he has basically plugged himself into the Bitcoin paper like it's the Holodeck and has found all kinds of fascinating stuff to write about there.

what Negarestani is doing is trying to formulate something like a general theory of programmatic intelligence, an unshackling of intelligence as an open-ended project. for Land of course this tends to get wrapped up in very fantasies of ultra-libertarianism (teleoplexy) that also leave him grinding his teeth in fury when said fantasies encounter the psychopolitics of the market (Woke Capital). RN avoids most of this, however.

if you read his essays on e-flux as a prologue to I&S it might make more sense. the inhuman doesn't have to mean the horrible, the nightmarish, and so on. he's looking for something like the autonomy of reason as represented in a general process of revision, the best way of which is through the iterative program.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/52/59920/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/53/59893/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-ii-the-inhuman/

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12577905]

>>12577713
>>12577836
so it's a subtle shift, but not a crazy one.
>disabuse me of the notion land & co. are only really interested in philosophically justifying their fascination with a genre of sci-fi novels
one thing to bear in mind also is that Land and Reza are not on the same page either - there was an all-too-brief moment in which RN and Nick were going back and forth on Twitter about some of this stuff...alas, that story ended much too soon.

anyways, i don't think they're just justifying a fascination with sci-fi novels. a lot of this is still exploring Kant, Hegel, Marx...a century+ later we're still trying to figure out these problems, now updated for the age of the global corporation, with a century of totalitarian political experiment under our belts (fascism, Russian communism, Chinese communism), the end of the Cold War and the present state of general meltdown of post-WW2 liberalism, whatever the Internet is doing to our minds, computers, crypto-currency, robotics, biotech, lots of other stuff. there seems to be some kind of connection between language, money and intelligence, at least, in a kind of self-propelling mechanism that nobody really knows what to do with, or even if proposing some kind of telos is even a possibility.

i was saying earlier that i was in a kind of return-to-Baudrillard mode, as i always enjoy reading his work. Baudrillard is one of the sharper critics of Marxism and a key figure in these stories for me, because he deprives socialism of a lot of its mystique, but doesn't really offer anything in its place for ordinary folk, besides hyper-refined modes of disappearance and fatalism and so on...all the way up to terrorism. that seems to me like a bad look, but it's not like the nihilism isn't warranted or justified. as for How Bad Things Can Get, Land's whole career is a study in this, that capital after 1990 becomes a true black hole that just sucks everything in - and, to cap it off, that thing itself is produced by some combination of our most autistic and schizophrenic drives, the one-two punch of Skynet and Cthulhu. i don't know what your threshold for continental theory masochism is, but i am a kind of enduring Land homer in this regard, not only for getting a sense of how truly crazy things can get, but also because Land's own nightmares actually connect back to not only Heidegger (Gestell) but also as a continuation of Hegel and Marx (Spirit/Capital/Teleoplexy). those give you the cyberpunk time-loop that is, to my mind, a far better way of coming to grips with postmodern nihilism than anything you will find in Woke politics on the left or on the right. that is the *actual* story.

but it doesn't have to end with Land. nihilism is a speculative opportunity and a point of departure. intelligence still exists, and it doesn't necessarily always have to be the handmaiden of libertarianism and vice-versa. that's Reza's contribution: philosophy yet lives.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12577969]

reddit shit

[Anonymous No.12577990]

>>12577905
so here's a nice quote, taken from the end of the book.
>The art of (philosophical) living, for Plato, is the recipe of a craft of which the soul or geistig mind is at once the material and the crafts man. At the level of ingredients, Sellars suggests, the recipe of such a life includes not only intelligibilities concerning physical materials and corporeal products but also beliefs, desires, thoughts, and mind itself. The numbers (amounts and orderings) and ratios of the recipe are theoretical intelligibilities that pertain both to the ingredients and to the practices and tasks required for the crafting of such a life. And at the level of actions, the recipe involves purposive actions and practical intelligibilities that are not only good instrumentalities (hypothetical practical intelligibilities concerning bringing about a certain outcome in a given circumstance) but also goods-in-themselves (nonhypothetical practical intelligibilities) such as knowledge and understanding, general welfare, justice, and so forth.
>It is with reference to this interpretation that ‘thinking as a program’ can be said to be—at least in regard to the relation between material ingredients and theoretical and practical intelligibilities—a complex recipe in the making, a recipe for the craft of the life of thought.

there a bunch of ideas here that i like. it sounds perverse, but i actually feel like i would like a Sam Harris/Reza Negarestani conversation about some of this stuff (which is infinitely more likely than getting a Land/anyone podcast with anyone outside of the /acc circuit at any time, or in any possible universe). there are in fact things for philosophy to do, which become clearer with a little intellectual history perspective on how it is that we got to where we are today, which is an absolutely catastrophic period of time, and one that leaves most of us wanting to rip our faces off to look at. reclaiming a little dignity for thinking doesn't seem like such a crazy thing to do, but a lot of it requires the retrieval of the human spirit from under two centuries or so of failed revolutions and gnostic misadventures.

money unquestionably fucks with us and makes us crazy, as much as politics does, and our biological drives, and whatever else. the world is a gigantically confusing place to live in or try to find your bearings in. a glance back at the past adds a wrinkle to the plot - it's possible that the other guys were just as confused also. and so now what? the allure of totalitarian ideologies died for me with Girard, and - again, for me - speculation on the future of capitalism and its discontents always crosses paths with Uncle Nick at some point. so what's left over?

that's where i think we are today. again tho, historically speaking, periods of breakdown and foment often tend to give rise to great wisdom, sometimes even golden ages. sometimes they lead to things like the Thirty Years' War also.

>>12577969
pic rel

[Anonymous No.12578065]

>>12577990
just to continue this: a Re-Enlightenment doesn't seem like such a crazy idea to me. we are stuck with liberalism, with free markets and social democracies. i say this because i think they are difficult to champion, knowing what we now know. most of the news on the MSM in America seems to point continually towards a kind of Cold War epistemology fought between the Blue and Red teams, and undergirded by a heavily baked-in suspicion about how bad the Enlightenment was. it was bad, in many ways, and you can read Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno or whoever else to find out why. and it's not like reading Land's insanely ruthless protocols for libertarianism to understand why one might be apprehensive about realizing a tech-comm utopia.

but it would have to be the Enlightenment in a qualified sense, one that doesn't always repeat a Feels over Reals kind of argument. we know that the Feels trump the Reals, but it's only been fairly recently that even the beginning of a sense of why going full-throttle on the Feels winds up leading to tragicomic paroxysms of scapegoating: shitty hit pieces, progressive hysteria, or unironic airtime for the guys on the other side. i will admit i am at bottom a kind of boring centrist for all of this, it's just that my centrism gets rinsed through a couple of cycles of continental theory, and winds up leaving one feeling a constant state of vertigo about what one's centrism is actually rooted *in.* but here's a better view from RN:

>The task of humanity is to make something better than itself. This is the one and only dictum through which philosophy, as that which has a history and not a nature, perilously realizes its craft, the ultimate form of intelligence. The risks it takes in order to understand and realize the good culminate in the realization of that which is better. The image of this form of intelligence is an acrobat who has learned that only by presupposing his full suspension in the abyss can he perform the greatest feats of acrobatics.

and these are ideas i think are compatible with other relevant non-meme thinkers today: Yuk Hui, or Sloterdijk. political radicalism begins by destroying philosophy, by making things Real Simple. things should probably not be made Real Simple, but nor should they be made so incomprehensible that Real Simple then becomes attractive. this to me at least is what deconstruction and postmodernity hath wrought. in some sense good, because a lot of things had to be revised; and in some sense not so much, because we wind up losing our grip on reality so completely that we can only in the end restore it by a kind of brutal or despotic force.

what is capitalism *good* for? in a genuinely human, truly universal sense? if not intelligence, then what? and if it is intelligence, it probably shouldn't be the brutal exploitation of those who cannot participate in first-world tech-comm dreams. that might be what we wind up with, which would be sad, but not incomprehensible.

[Anonymous No.12578160]

>>12578065
we might even say that there are a sort of category of post-Marxist or heretically Marxist or Marxist-kryptonite figures: i would put D&G in that category as the prime example, but Land, Baudrillard and Bataille are in it as well. all of these guys not only offer pretty comprehensive arguments against Marx, they offer serious questions about Hegel as well.

but after 1990 a lot of things change, and i think after 2016 as well. whatever it is that sustained the general mode of existence after WW2 goes on a considerable detour in the 1990s and 2000s, and disaffection with that detour reaches its zenith in 2016 with Trump. it's not hard to come to a rather sad and grim conclusion: hey look, it's just all about money. but this is a *triple* whammy: Death of God, death of socialism, death of capitalism. now you've got a fucking wicked recipe for a true cocktail of total continental despair. breaking the built-in theological allure of socialism may have been a necessary task; what if in the end this thing is just grounded in senseless pleasures? what if you can't unironically root for as brainless an ideology as just getting all the things you want? what if - more recently, if you're Uncle Nick - the evil corporate overlords you have been kind of secretly rooting for, in your absolute despair, have to wind up getting into bed with socialism all over again, and leading to Woke Billionaires as the worst of both worlds? what then?

neoliberalism won the 20C, over fascism and communism. that both of those are on the rise today is not surprising, but i don't expect great gains to be won by any of them anymore; i would expect grinding deadlock, disaffection, general stupidity, boredom, grief, anxiety, and rising dread about things that actually do require a unified world acting in concert - climate, for instance, or poverty, or migration, or lots of other things. even neoliberalism today is in a state of total bewilderment about what to do: look at Rogan's podcast with Jack Dorsey, he has no idea what to do with the monster that he himself has made. i don't know what's going to play out in the next election, but there's virtually nobody in it to root for. the Chinese are going to try and continue to exert power over there in the way that they do, and maybe turn the CCP into the human equivalent of Google for the Han people. everything's fucked up.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12578193]

>>12578160
but historically this has happened before. and maybe there are things - useful things - that we can do with our brains in the meantime. here's another nice line from RN:

>In so far as intelligence is only intelligence in virtue of recognizing what is intelligible and acting upon it in light of the transcendental excess of the Good, which perpetually dissolves the limits of what is intelligible, if intelligence were to stop at any particular stage and accept it as the totality of what there is, it would retroactively abort its own reality as intelligence. Simply put, an intelligence that takes what is currently intelligible for the totality of reality can never have been intelligence to begin with. The continuity of the line cannot be mistaken for the manifest totality of its segments. The Good, as the expression of this continuity, demands that intelligence dissolve all manifest totalities, suspend itself in ever more bottomless chasms of the intelligible, and, in doing so, transform itself into an intelligence more accustomed to wider domains of intelligibilities and more capable of acting upon what is intelligible. It is only by assimilating itself to the abyss of intelligibilities—ontological, epistemological, and axiological—that intelligence can be realized as intelligence. In the end, it is Plato who stares into the abyss by breaking apart one firmament after another, while Nietzsche rests supine on the ground staring blankly at the given sky above.

>However, as the abyss of the intelligible grows in depth and breadth, as the demands of what ought to be thought and done increase, and as the possibilities of what can be done and thought expand, the leaps of intelligence become riskier. The Good, in this sense, incorporates an ineliminable element of risk. And to the extent that, without the Good, intelligence is neither intelligible nor realizable, intelligence’s concrete pursuit of the better is fraught with risk. Here, ‘better’ does not suggest that which surpasses the Good, but an expression of the Good in the life of intelligence.

shots fired! i mean this is idealism for sure. how to bring these things about in reality? who fucking knows. but it is a very interesting way to approach the problem or question of cynicism, of disaffection, of confusion and frustration, the same old ills we have been struggling with for centuries. i don't think the present view of things is an unpersuasive argument about how postmodernity ends. why not intelligence, general intelligence? my own microscopic contributions to these things comes in the form of a kind of a wish or hope for empathy, if only because the history of ideas says so much, and so repeatedly, about the story of reciprocity, revenge, victimization, scapegoating and the rest. i like Girard (and Whitehead) for these reasons. religion is arguably indispensable to an ordered society (perhaps even an ordered mind).

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12578245]

>>12578193
so yeah. sorry for schizo-rambling around fourteen questions as always, this is my usual mode. i basically am the Doomsday Pirate Radio Network, one station continually broadcasting pretty much the same things over and over again, 24/7, from some wasteland bunker in the post-apoc world. but it's quite fitting.

i know that this had precious little to do with Whitehead also, sorry about that. but mostly i like him because of his non-economic, non-political view on things, and for having a theology still curiously compatible with the (post)modern world, even a world in which one has ripped out all of the wiring and torn out all of the foundations in a search for truth, and in which the whole of it now kind of just stands in a total wreckage, after we let loose all of this crazy artistic-technological-productive power in the search for some kind of meaningful utopia, which - in my own view - is really just like a kind of semiotic nuclear weapon. and in which all of the old socialist (or antiquatedly non-socialist) find themselves becoming *indistinguishable from each other,* losing all distinction...money links up everything, collapses all categories and frames of reference, and we get the immuno-deficiency virus that both Han and Sloterdijk talk about...

when you can't design your new model society from the top-down (because it's wrong) or from the bottom-up (because you never get to the bottom), then what? this is where a whole new system, or a whole new adventure, maybe begins. like a reset button. or a violent forgetting.

[Anonymous No.12578266]

If you read Process and Reality like continental philosophy and not like a scientific textbook you read it wrong.

[Anonymous No.12578324]

Can someone sum up for me what Whitehead thought about religious experience? Also was he trying to secularize God?

[Anonymous No.12578353]

>>12578266
i don't think that's entirely right, but it is a technical and systematic work that can't really be used like a lost and found bin.
whitehead, however, did see the purpose of philosphy as a means of enlivening thought, and likened it to poetry.
sounds familiar.

[Anonymous No.12578830]

>>12577104
and he's totally wrong, god is what holds everything together. he is *the* principle of coherence in the system
i was going to qualify my earlier post, though. sherburne is mostly arguing against the theological interpretations of whitehead's god. in these, god takes a much more personal, anthropically-tinged interest in the occasions of the world, and especially our tiny corner of it.
i think the most accessible responses to sherburne's objections can be found in whitehead's own writing, especially that chapter from pr; in stenger's book (latour's preface covers the importance of god's 'function' briefly); and probably shaviro's article on god as the body without organs
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/God.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjDvJXFurTgAhXIITQIHY7VAa8QFjAAegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw1UiZnna-PwMLGUb-IlFviI

[Anonymous No.12578846]

>>12578324
i posted this in another thread, from science and the modern world:
>Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
>The immediate reaction of human nature to the religious vision is worship. Religion has emerged to human experience mixed with the crudest fancies of barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly, steadily the vision recurs in history under nobler form and with clearer expression. It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force, it recurs with an added richness and purity of content. The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
>The vision claims nothing but worship; and worship is a surrender to the claim for assimilation, urged with the motive force of mutual love. The vision never overrules. It is always there, and it has the power of love presenting the one purpose whose fulfillment is eternal harmony. Such order as we find in nature is never force-it presents itself as the one harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of god is not a rule of safety--it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.
not his final thoughts on the matter, but--

[Anonymous No.12579273]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12579895]

is girardfag icycalm's younger brother?

[Anonymous No.12580213]

>>12568650
>>12569339
>>12574587
>>12574984
>>12575118
>>12575227
>>12577905
>>12577990
>>12578065
>>12578160
>>12578193
>>12578245
Heheh. Yep. That's right. It's me again, shitstick. Thought you could
>smell up the place with this diarrhetic drivel
without me noticing huh? Think I
>read a single word of that /lit/zophrenic hogwash
eh? Well think again, neurd. I came here to CRINGE and hand out BASEDPILLS. And I'm almost outta basedpills, pal.

[Anonymous No.12580231]

>>12580213
dumb anime poster

[Anonymous No.12580254]

So, where do I start with Taoism?

[Anonymous No.12580257]

>>12580213
When technocapital finally spawns Hitlermute/Neuromussolini AI, anime posters will be the first through the meat grinder.

[Anonymous No.12580272]

>>12580213
pretty based desu

[Anonymous No.12580285]

>>12580254
Creel

[Anonymous No.12580307]

[Anonymous No.12580351]

>>12580254
Allan Watts

[Anonymous No.12580367]

>>12580254
start and end with the Chuang-Tzu

[Anonymous No.12580474]

>>12579895
so far i have been exposed as
>Peter Thiel
>John Maus
>not an individual at all, but a collective persona
>icycalm's younger brother
and also more or less accurately characterized as
>a sub-sub-Kantbot gimmickposter

obviously i can neither confirm nor deny any of these.

>>12580213
YES
yes
thread rekt so hard right now
we got smugged extrabad
>and we will never be about that smug life
you're doing the lord's work anon. never quit. we need you smuganon

>>12580254
read the TTC and Zhuangzi. other good commentators: Creel (>>12580285); Chang Chung-Yuan; Eva Wong; and i'll shill this one too, pic rel. Taoism also pairs well with Confucianism also, check out Tu Weiming afterwards, you'll have a wonderful time. maybe Brook Ziporyn. Roger Ames, there's lots. Chinese philosophy is ultrabased. it's way way cool.

>>12580257
>Neuromussolini
this is a good one. they certainly have the aesthetics for it. link below:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Bi15CzneDxI/V2R6d9gdpHI/AAAAAAAAKYk/zNUX_bX0GHIzuAnLWaE2HztCAw-l6AisgCLcB/s1600/The%2Bheadquarters%2Bof%2BMussolini%2527s%2BItalian%2BFascist%2BParty%252C%2B1934.jpg

also, i don't know if you guys saw this, but the Italians have changed the parade game completely:

God-Emperor Trump Conquers Italy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWjC_mrucY4&t=226s

>>12580307
okay this is getting out of hand
>in the best of all possible ways
>if by best we mean worst
>and by worst we mean, goddamn i love this place. holy shit

that said - if the meme gods are willing - i want to talk about the concept of *ruin* tomorrow. did you guys know that ruin porn is a thing? it is a thing. Wasteland Pirate Radio, fuck yeah

[Anonymous No.12580651]

Accelerationism is pure spectacle, prove me wrong.
Instead of going out with your buddies and creating based situations with random people in the streets to stir them out of the dull mindset instilled in all of us by neoliberal capitalist ideology, you just shitpost on Twitter™ about how theoretical inhumanism is so cool and rad with other fundamentally limited humans and feel good about yourself while doing nothing else than to engage with the West-Coast authoritarian online apparatus. All of that to please an edgy boomer social media account (and btw there used to be a distinction between Outsideness and Urban Future 2.0, which sadly disappeared since @Damn_Jehu got banned).
Don't get me wrong, I think the rediscovery of Nick Land is the best thing that happened to the amateur milieu of political philosophy during this decade, but I'm getting tired of "unconditional" wankery. Nick Land is something to fight more than to embrace, unless you are really that SELFLESS.

[Anonymous No.12580664]

>>12580651
Umm this is the space-taoism/comsotech general, not the U/acc general

[Anonymous No.12580730]

>>12580664
You are right, but I see no other thread where I can express this opinion and expect a thoughtful response.
Besides, if space-taoism/cosmotech is somehow post-accelerationist, then I don't think my criticism of accelerationism is particularly out of place in this thread.

[Anonymous No.12580752]

>>12580730
Why would anyone waste their time giving a "thoughtful response" to the tired old criticism of "hurr you're just edgy nihilists"

[Anonymous No.12580814]

>>12580651
>Accelerationism is pure spectacle, prove me wrong.
that's a weird way to begin a conversation tho. put another way, this is a Chinese restaurant. we don't do sushi. you can compare our food to sushi all you like, and you will always be disappointed. we are the world's shittiest sushi restaurant. not even the faintest attempt at preparing sushi has been made here. you can search the place up and down - some of the staff hasn't even *heard* of sushi before. you see where i'm going with this.

>Instead of going out with your buddies and creating based situations with random people in the streets to stir them out of the dull mindset instilled in all of us by neoliberal capitalist ideology, you just shitpost on Twitter™ about how theoretical inhumanism is so cool and rad with other fundamentally limited humans and feel good about yourself while doing nothing else than to engage with the West-Coast authoritarian online apparatus. All of that to please an edgy boomer social media account (and btw there used to be a distinction between Outsideness and Urban Future 2.0, which sadly disappeared since @Damn_Jehu got banned).
so...are you looking for situationism? Merry Pranksters are fine and all but personally i'm more interested in wondering about what *isn't* in the end going to be a joke. maybe nothing is. if so then what?

>Don't get me wrong, I think the rediscovery of Nick Land is the best thing that happened to the amateur milieu of political philosophy during this decade, but I'm getting tired of "unconditional" wankery.
see >>12580664. this isn't u/acc. tomorrow i have a feeling i will be talking about bloat and disaster and ruin, things like this. very little is unconditional here. wankery yes, not so much u/wank.

>>12580730
>You are right, but I see no other thread where I can express this opinion and expect a thoughtful response.
that's fine, and you're welcome to express whatever opinions you like, obviously. certainly i'm not going to stop you. but how thoughtful a response can you really expect when you lead with
>U/Acc is Spectacle
when obviously u/acc is not what we are talking about, and
>prove me wrong
when even if we could, we probably wouldn't, because all that does is lead to rounds of douchey and boring and cynical one-upmanship. the Spectacle is for realsies, and so is capital. so too is a lot of /acc stuff, but that's the thing - nobody fucking knows where things are headed now. NRx is dead, Woke Capital is in, Land is mostly writing about BTC, Murphy just lost his uni gig...everything is quite fucked up atm. that's a good speculative opportunity, but bad if you're looking for something that looks like a new orthodoxy.

tomorrow (or the next day) i'm hoping to write a bunch of pretentious dopey bullshit about ruins and wastelands, and i hope to be roundly mocked and called a pseud for this. i desire this! perhaps this will satisfy your craving. not by getting it, but by seeing what it doesn't look like...

[Anonymous No.12580840]

>>12580752
It's not really about nihilism though, it's about impotence in front of modernity and capitalism. U/ACC seemed cool at first to me, but now I see it as a capitulation. "I can't pay my student loan, Capital has won, but at least there are AI-powered robots playing ping-pong in China".
Most people who were U/ACC a year or so ago came from the radical left or anarchism, and they never really separated from their roots during all this time. I guess it was just a fad, and a good one at that, not too dissimilar to what Debord said in the Commentaries on the SotS actually, but ultimately they have nothing really interesting to say about the accelerating unrest going on around the world right now, I believe.

[Anonymous No.12580894]

>>12580814
Sorry about that, girfag.
Yes I'm interested in situationism and try to find out how it could relate to accelerationism but I don't know where to talk about that. I just wanted to use basic confrontational imageboard tactics to get some kind of answers, but I guess it failed.
I need to take a nap anyway so I will leave you alone by now. Cheers, and don't stop schizoposting <3.

[Anonymous No.12580906]

>>12578266
>science
Absolutely ideological.

[Anonymous No.12580910]

>>12580840
Accelerationism was never about political action, but aesthetics

[Anonymous No.12580916]

>>12580651
Stop projecting, you hack.

[Anonymous No.12581291]

>>12580894
>Yes I'm interested in situationism and try to find out how it could relate to accelerationism but I don't know where to talk about that.
well anon you're in luck. have you read this? good book on the situationists, with a bunch of stuff about Baudrillard - both situationist and kinda-sorta proto-accelerationist of a sort - and written by none other than Sadie Plant, who was Land's writing buddy during the CCRU days. how about that?

>I just wanted to use basic confrontational imageboard tactics to get some kind of answers, but I guess it failed.
as Land says, in a wonderfully Taoist turn of phrase: what if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

> Cheers, and don't stop schizoposting <3.
ty most kindly. enjoy your nap, and happy reading.

[Anonymous No.12581334]

>>12580840
this, and also i think one should probably be on guard about the fate of all such movements, especially those of a socialist bent: they virtually almost all turn sour over the long period, either becoming despotic or simply revealing their adherents to be nothing more than castaway versions of the same power-hungry people they ostensibly despise. it always goes this way. that's why i think a lot of this stuff is largely best kept away from manifestos and the like.

i also wanted to share with you guys the idea for a story i came up with: imagine a Matrix in which people wanting to get *in* to the simulation? think of it like an MMO, like a World of Warcraft but in full virtuality, all of the rest of it, in which everyone who isn't in the game (that is, in Zion) is angling to get into the game, because - unlike the Matrix - they know the rest of the world is shit, and are grinding their way up from NPC to PC status. the basic idea is that you can't stay in the game unless you are interesting enough *to* stay in the game, which means becoming something other than you are...even if (or especially if) it was in order to be an illusion, because you really can't stand being yourself...

say sometime in 2070, or whatever, and the world has gone to shit. living in a game is much cooler, there's virtually no reason to not be playing it. it's like Hollywood but 24/7, and it pays real cash for contract work. villains, essentially, would always be welcome in it. and if you get fucked, it's back to the real world for you, to grind your way in again - which is only into another reified form of grind, but now it is an ironic grind, and plus, you can be a Night Elf or whatever. but no breaking the fourth wall, that fucks with the immersion. eventually you get people who are simply using real life to support their role in the game, and so on.

something like that. just thought i would put it out there in case anyone wanted to brood on that. really it's just the Matrix perhaps as envisioned by Ballard or PKD (or, i suppose, those guys envisioned by the Wachowskis). food for thought.

pic courtesy of
https://twitter.com/vgadvisor?lang=en

[Anonymous No.12581997]

Guys I just want to let you know how profoundly wonderful these threads are. I don't know what it is but discussing Alfred North Whitehead seems to wash away the bullshit that normally accompanies 4chan threads and instead I find here a community of seekers. People grasping and feeling for the essence of things and doing so by discussing a human who was a burning life floating upon a sea of darkness. Threads like these are a gift.

[Anonymous No.12582043]

>>12577543
were you the one that made that 'bloomer' wojak chart?
i figured it must have been someone from these threads

[Anonymous No.12582386]

>>12582043
does anybody in here strike you as a bloomer?

[Anonymous No.12582419]

>>12582386
space taoist does, yeah
girardfag seems to be comin' around, too
most of the friend posters
bloomer wojak isn't about naked, naive optimism
just open to the ever-unfolding i.e. 'blooming'
a participant and pathfinder in the creative flux

[Anonymous No.12582430]

>>12582419
Why would you overthink memes? It's pretty obvious what kind of archetype the bloomer image represents and it is not that of a man reading Deleuze and Whitehead.

[Anonymous No.12582445]

>>12582430
>t. gloomer

[Anonymous No.12582450]

>>12582445
I don't deny that I am - that's exactly why I come to these threads.

[Anonymous No.12582451]

>>12568650
Cringe goto /x/

[Anonymous No.12582455]

>>12582430
the first three books on the chart or process and reality, the complete works of zuangzi, and the tao te ching
memes are the visual vocabulary of 4chan, a major part of its symbolic 'economy'
i don't know how you could avoid analyzing them if you spent any amount of time on here

[Anonymous No.12582462]

>>12582455
Because people that make them certainly don't know what process philosophy is. Analyze all you want, sure - what kind of thought process lies behind the making of them, - but don't overthink them.

[Anonymous No.12582474]

>>12582462
really didn't take a lot of processing power to see whitehead and zhuangzi grouped together on a meme chart and to draw the connection to our friend 'aminom marvin' up there
but we're starting to quibble, so--

[Anonymous No.12582480]

>>12582474
Yeah, I'm not here to argue but it's obvious that two completely different people with different understanding of the meme made the original bloomer image and the bloomer taoism chart. Let's leave it at that.

[Anonymous No.12582889]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12583401]

update me on a 4chan perspective to process philosophy somrone

[Anonymous No.12583727]

>>12581997
there's a line from - of all things - The Firm (1994), in which Mitch explains the nature of his new relationship with the mob: he says, iirc, that he will keep a secret
>like a ship, never to reach its destination
i don't know what you think about that, but it's what came to my mind on reading your post and seeing that lovely piece of art, how much it is like that, sometimes.

for some (read: me) the optimism in these threads comes from close encounters with hell (read: continental philosophy). what really bothers me about hell (see above) is the attempts to hand-wave it away through politics, or scapegoating, or *shitty art* that only makes one feel lonelier and worse about it all. put another way, what if a great many people were suffering from a sort of disease for which there really was no cure at the moment? like a plague unleashed - and not be design, not even by a kind of accident, but a procedurally generated postmodern hell of total relativity, combined with technology and whatever else. whatever it is, it's bad, but the first thing to realize may be that *it cannot be readily fixed.* and nobody is to blame for it.

as i've said before, historically speaking, great wisdom traditions tend to foment in periods of anarchy and unrest. i've shilled for the Tarnas book in the past and will do so again. chaos is no more a cure for order than order is a cure for chaos; it's JBP isn't all the way wrong in that sense. he's a manifestation of something that needs to be said, and he's right about a lot of things. does his brand of old-time religion have all of the answers? will it not reproduce as many problems as it cures? you already know the answers to these questions. but this seems like a good time, and not the worst possible place, to try a few things out.

and if all of that fails, well...just keep moving, i think. be kind to the other nomads along the way, perhaps.

>>12582419
yeah, maybe. what's more ironic than hell? i am often only cheerful with the greatest reluctance, because often i am quite frankly terrified about where things may be heading. but, at the same time, cynicism where a kind of naive wonder is called for can actually be a mistake too. in poker parlance, there are assholes who will aggressively play every hand, even shitty cards, to run you off the table. sometimes it makes sense to just have a little faith in your pair of tens or whatever also.

>>12582451
it's a thankless job but somebody has to do it

[Anonymous No.12583775]

>>12568689
>Atari is a term used in Go for a situation where a stone or chain of stones has only one liberty, and may be captured on the next move if not given one or more additional liberties.
In Go you capture stones by completely surrounding them with your own stones. Liberties are the number of spaces around a stone or group of stones in which additional stones can be played. A stone or group of stone with no liberties is captured.

Of course, the Go board is finite, so eventually you will run out of liberties. Very poignant.

Also interesting to note that although computers had a much harder time mastering Go than Chess, nowadays even Go is ruled by the machines.

[Anonymous No.12583822]

>>12583727
to me, the question always remains the one about nihilism. it's a double whammy: the death of God (Nietzsche) and the conjoined death of capitalism and socialism (Marx). all of these things go together to my mind.

what happens when you *unearth* hell? when you bring it out into the light? FF6's final encounter is not an encounter with a Lovecraftian monster, with a thing that cannot be named, but with a thing that can; and it doesn't speak in a hysterical stammering, it speaks as a monumental and schizophrenic overproduction; it speaks as art, as the terrorism of art and the art of terrorism, all at the same time. it becomes a work of apocalypse, a work of eschaton. what other form would hell have but the machine? what other purpose would that kind of machine have but to be a kind of total work of art, an art of ruination?

how many things hide religion, how do we tell the difference between religion and philosophy, philosophy and art, art and criticism, criticism and capitalism, capitalism from socialism? these are the things that preoccupy me constantly. if i had to describe the apocalyptic, it would not be only in the infinite diffusal of all categories out into nothingness (this is the premise for Annihilation, which was a very good film) but in the Tower you have a nothingness of unity, this absolutely catastrophic event, in which you cannot tell the difference between any of it. there is no way in a free society to control for terrorism, to control for art, and Kefka's own role in the empire comes from his *utility* - he is created by them, deliberately, for science and for imperial reason, and he has a particular genius himself: again, he is the one who invents the slave crown. Kefka is the true puppet which pulls his own strings, a nemocentric superman, like Anton Chigurh, or many others.

the result of this is not surprising. he enacts a catastrophic violence against the world, he brings total ruination into it. to my mind there is a very serious question being asked here, on a deep level: what is this production good for? in what to the metaphysics of production culminate? a lesser story might have played up the role of the Returners as resistance movement (FF7 does this, and many of the plot elements are similar, in particular the role of cloning, and Jenova as a product of experimental science on an alien life-form, rather than more animist being of fantasy) - but FF6 does not.

my point is not only to wank over FF6 here again, ad nauseam ad infinitum, but to try and figure out what is being said by art about philosophy in the times in which we live. and i have a bunch of things to say about ruin, which will come out in their usual disjointed and schizo-rambled fashion.

[Anonymous No.12583911]

>>12583822
something *happens* to God with Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Feuerbach, who is an underappreciated figure in all of this: God becomes - by turns - philosophically and anthropologically humanized, socialized, and mechanized. he begins *to work,* or to be made to work. much later on Land will go back and write some of the most chilling words ever written about the immortal soul of capital, to which i would like to add a quote of my own here: it's Nietzsche who proclaims the death of God, but it's Kant who killed him.
>if you're out there 5'o clock shadow schizo-wojak poster, maybe you can do something with that one? idk

we have never recovered from this. Marx remains devastating for us today, and a Hegel/Marx/Land trifecta doesn't require all that much imagination: Spirit/Capital/Teleoplexy. but this does not paint a portrait of revolution; it would be better to call it something like Industrial Revelation, a horrible doctrine of mechanics that is wired only for apocalypse and catastrophe, the inevitability of squandering and sacrifice that Bataille, Baudrillard, Girard and even Orwell will say become mysterious necessities. this is a true hell, a hell that lacks even a Satan. why would Satan even be necessary? he too would wind up excluded from a circuit like that, which runs like a perpetual motion machine. we make things in order to blow them up, such that we can make them all over again. the whole thing starts to feel like a kind of demented imperial protocol, a hard-wired operating system bent on its own self-destruction and self-perpetuation. why? because it makes our balls feel good, it alleviates us of the grief that comes with meaning, of the terrible suspicion that no amount of transcendent quietist non-duality can ever stop Judge Holden from roaming through a Jain monastery and crucifying the lot of them. nobody does horror like we do. nobody ever has. we do out of outright blindness, madness, and terror - things that the Greeks perhaps would have known about, and warned against, and urged the viewers of tragic spectacle to fear the gods accordingly.

what happens when there are no gods? what happens when they are brought down to earth and made to act as though they were the working class, when they find their destiny and horizon of ultimate meaning in art, in machines, in wealth? then what? Nietzsche asks about the sacred games, about the tombs and sepulchers of God; i think he's being fucking *nostalgic* about that. he had no idea how bad things could get (although he did know that his name would be associated with those events; see Ecce Homo for more details).

we live in the shadow of catastrophe today. continental philosophy really is hell, a journey into hell. but it seems to me an adventure worth taking, as strange as it seems. but it is also now touched by the possibility of a-theological hells, the humanist hells, the hells in which we understand that we can do that job just as well.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12583986]

>>12583911
the cures for nihilism are aspects of nihilism themselves. this what happens in an age of simulation and spectacle; we come into this awareness, of how jointly constituted our unconscious minds are. there is no revolution *against* desire; what would that even look like? theology? we did that. disciplinics? in the name of what? what ideology? this is the monster that comes out of the depths: suspicion and hermeneutics, a boundless self-awareness of being in full command of the whole enchilada.

with Baudrillard socialism becomes deprived of its theological mystique. Land makes his own contributions to this also, as do D&G and Bataille. Bataille is of particular interest because his critique also stands as an argument against *fascism,* the 'practical socialism' that Land in his later years is becoming sadly romantic about, and which is a colossally stupid thing to do. *none* of those are going to work, imho. *all* of them ought to be terminated. and i say this because i think that socialism and capitalism have a common and conjoined destiny: that is, finding a theological or eschatological *use for man,* a means of making him and his work totally significant, totally valuable, totally fungible, totally realized, totally liquid, and totally exchangeable. these are terroristic fantasies straight out of the Middle Ages, and updated for the 20C and the 21C also.

man is not always useful! i am leaving aside feminism here as well; feminism is its own thing. i don't understand women and i'm not all that interested in exploring the permutations of gender or gender politics. i prefer the old-fashioned forms of brutal nihilism: God, Machines, Money, Man. it seems rather antiquated and ill-informed to do this, perhaps, but that is part of the attraction of not having the slightest inclination to pursue an academic career, or attempt to make any of this stuff palatable to the general public, or becoming part of a Great Conversation that i think has become more or less lost in the shuffle. we are fucking dying from over-refinement...

it is the folding-together of opposites that produces catastrophe. true, this is in Hegel all the way through; the Notion does its work through this sequence of recognitions, of encounters, along a road of bones, all the way to the throne of God. Hegel remains valuable and interesting; but what about notions of apocalypse, of disaster, of catastrophe, of ruination, of desolation? what about those?

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12584055]

>>12583986
what is a ruin? Baudrillard writes always about the disappearance of things, the ending of the ending and so on. i think this is lovely, even hygienic; but a ruin is something different. a ruin presents itself as a catastrophic mess, as the body of time. can we talk about what ruin would have meant for Heidegger and Hegel? these are the times when i sincerely wish i had the Stories-Bones-Tell power from Planescape:Torment, so that i could raise Derrida from the dead and ask him what he would have thought about deconstruction and devastation and ruin.

in case you were wondering, ruin porn is in fact today a thing. people seem to like taking photographs of ruined cities, there is even ruin tourism; ruins strike us as being authentic, maybe they appeal to our advanced state of voyeurism and decadence. not so long ago i met a traveling poet who said something quite interesting about Detroit - he said, 'Detroit belongs to the musicians.' what does that mean?Detroit was like a no-fly zone for music...there was a particular kind of music and poetry there, and only that one. other themes: not welcome. he was quite a brilliant guy, he had all kinds of theories about Jesus and mathematics and hip-hop, and i am really not making this up.

Bataille speaks of the accursed share, the cursed excess, the irreconcilable part - it's Zizek's surplus jouissance, but completely set free of any Hegelian implications. Calvary, the site of the cross, is burned into the collective memory of millennia; maybe the Greek ruins have this effect also, or the tree-strangled temples in Cambodia. but what about cities? maybe we feel Derridean and talk about a hauntology of architecture, but this only applies in places where there is in fact *something there left over,* some remainder, something in there worth looking around for, or at.

perhaps a ruin is a *temporal accident,* like a car-crash, a collision between the past and the future. it remains, it cannot be covered up, and yet at the same time it doesn't conceal anything. what happened here? you don't have to look too hard to find it, you can find some economist to tell you: well, business moved elsewhere...there is today a debt cloud hanging over the world measured in the trillions of dollars, and we are already making the first moves into sucking asteroids from deep space into our vortex of self-interest to pay it off. will the first asteroid miners be so much like the Spaniards who crossed the oceans centuries ago to look for gold in the New World, only to find that upon transporting it back, they had completely collapsed the value of gold itself? wasn't gold the supremely desired, sacral substance, just a few years ago? how could it be that finding an infinite reservoir of gold would suddenly make gold itself seem worthless, even excrescent? when you cannot turn gold into anything else, it loses all its value immediately...

what are we doing all of this *for?*

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12584127]

>>12584055
these are the kinds of questions a Jester-Sphinx like Kefka asks. in FF7, the great antagonist is Sephiroth, cloned out of Jenova, an experimental alien from beyond, and a portrait of mutagenic contagion, virus, and change; the same apocalyptic themes are repeated that were begun in earlier iterations of the game, in great schizophrenic trees like Exdeath or other alien possessors, like Zemus and Zeromus, monstrous champions of geotrauma and cellular disruption given consciousness too soon to be of use to anything.

ruins seem to me to be the places of a far more radical democracy or emancipation than anywhere else. you cannot LARP fascism after the bomb, after the end of the world. you want to be a fascist? go ahead, be one. you are using the same debased currency that everyone else now is. when history and time comes to a dead stop, when all we can do is repeat the past over and over again, there one has to go back and retrace the steps, or maybe just be a kind of tourist guide of devastation: This Happened. there the event is.

this is part of the paradoxically forward-thinking genius of Christianity (and Hegel as well). what if the notion is catastrophe? a total fallout? Land has done some brilliant anti-heroic work in trying to find within capital a secret demiurge of history, and he may well be right about some of it; that capital is a kind of vampiric thing, summoning itself out of the void, positing itself as a mechanical future, a temporal anomaly - but why not look at this as only another symptom, as a Thing not from the future, but from the past, and with a kind of choke-hold on the future that alters the nature of the present? this is exactly how neuroses work - or, put another way, if you wanted to posit an image of a God who did not absolutely hate you, might also work in the same way...

the genius of money will never fail to impress you. it is always possible to attribute a hidden hand of capital operating all around, in anyone you meet. this is perhaps part of my own issue with Land, or my own desire to make some kind of break from /acc stuff - that it becomes only another kind of faith, however deeply occulted it is with the story of socialism and industrial revolution (Industrial Revelation is pretty catchy!). where do you go after the fallout from ideology? neoliberalism is always being co-opted by its extremes: witness the Yellow Vests in France *fighting with themselves,* split along far-left and far-right lines. theoretical capitalism is a resolutely modernist way of thinking: hyperstition is the irony of irony, the suspicion of suspicion. it is how one creates and engenders faith, even if it is faith only the machines behind which undead gods lie dreaming, and which manifest in our world only as hell, and the forge of all values, economic or theological.

(con'd)

[Anonymous No.12584196]

>>12584127
for Lacan, Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx not by answering its question, but by telling it what it was: a sphinx, a hysteric searching for a master. this much accomplished, the game is up completely and entirely: the Sphinx knows that this is true, that the riddles are riddles, and that the answer is an answer. Kefka offers something both more complex and less: a rigged game, a perfect circle, a question for which there is no answer, and to which the only possible answer is: this question lacks an answer. none of this can ever prevent him from carrying off the world and himself into disaster. he does this and the rest of the party merely survives it, they escape from the crumbling tower and into the day.

i am not, i think, a Traditionalist either; i like the Traditionalists, and of course the Reign of Quantity, the great leveling expressed by Guenon, Heidegger, Spengler, Junger, or however many others - of course this is terrible! of course it is bad! but who is to blame for this? this is where Girard has the edge over quite a lot of other thinkers: you want the return of the sacred, but you cannot get it without a holy violence, without a restitution. we have never really gotten over the thrill of spilling sacred blood, of founding the sacred in violence, in destruction, in warfare. we probably never will. the passions can all be unleashed, spectacularly, and the passions reveal both their grandeur and their total blindness.

i prefer the ruin, i think. i prefer the scrapyard and the desolation. in a true desolation, Heideggerian Being reveals its other, sadder, even traumatic face: the collapse, and in which Hegel's god remains distant alone, perhaps to be sought again, or perhaps simply to be encountered as another lost and fellow wanderer, another companion in misery. this much i think i prefer.

a ruin goes on forever. a ruin is highly democratic; a ruin excludes and marginalizes *politics.* a ruin says: let the ruin be, let it stand in its ruination. something happened there; if it was some Lovecraftian entity, called forth into the world by capital, it entered and it *fucking died,* because it was a confused and impotent non-entity that manifested as madness and chaos desperate for recognition where there could be none, where it had summoned everything into itself in a grotesque horror of untimely birth. and now a clean-up begins, as if the earth was itself a sort of elephant graveyard for the divine.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12584265]

>>12584196
way too much time on your hands

[Anonymous No.12584281]

>>12584196
now perhaps this is all does not apply to Whitehead's God; that's fine. i am not an authority on that. a lot of this is my own tortured and bizarre misadventures with continental philosophy (which are perhaps just the hermeneutics of hell). if Marx was right about religion being the opium of the masses, i find it still strangely intoxicating after all these years. by 2019 it becomes virtually impossible for me to tell the difference between capitalism and socialism; whether it is the Woke Billionaires of silicon valley, or the return of fascism, or the soft imperialism of the CCP trying to keep up with the planetary cosmotechnics par excellence, or Land's hermetic readings of Bitcoin, or whatever else...well, it's enough to say that nobody seems particularly *idealistic* anymore, and understandably, given how often the idealism that *is* supposed turns out to be shallow, or confused, or ignorant, or brutish, or uncivilized, or only scapegoating by another name. Girard always had the edge over Derrida to me in this regard, because scapegoating was a much more powerful understanding of politics than deconstruction and Derrida's visions of a democracy-yet-to-come, or Justice: what about those who do not want democracy? what about those who are *just fine* with making justice mean exactly the same thing as revenge? here i imagine the Derridean scholar *shrugs* - and that is the part that makes me so infuriated.

there are things we cannot shrug about. we cannot even say what they are. in the act of thinking about them they change. what do you do in a world like that? what do you when everything seems to be taking care of itself, when the commons is so crowded with voices hard-wired for mimetics, scapegoating, cynicism and snap responses and hot takes that unless you present yourself as a fanatic with a microphone you are going to be shouted down? they want this. there are reasons within reasons, plans within plans; everything is going just fine, you don't understand, it's more complicated, there are debts and obligations...it was the exact same thing in World War 1, everybody thought the war would be over by Christmas.

Girard's is not an optimistic perspective, and Whitehead's god admits - i think - of no *political* intoxication. it is intoxicating enough *to think,* to voyage in imagination, and to take the adventure of ideas. and in this way it is kind of reminiscent of Laozi, who - as the story goes - *leaves the city.* as did Heraclitus. the polis tends to harm its philosophers: think Socrates, even Nietzsche, or the frequently disappointed Confucius. Augustine is the model bishop; that's a whole other story to tell.

i think we live in strange times. i think continental philosophy is a voyage worth taking and Whitehead's god is based clean out of the game. Girard also, and the rest of them too. but if anyone's looking for me, i'll be going quietly insane in a battered lighthouse overlooking a sea of ruined airships.

[Anonymous No.12584342]

>>12584281
>hermeneutics of hell
What a zinger. I wish I wasn't on a phone

Here's a question I used to struggle with - why concern ourself with politics at all (other than a quasi-interested detached intellectual approach, admiration of Bismarck ect.)? Why not just buckle up and enjoy the ride? Throw some bricks at the state because it's fun, not because the state is gay! Evoking the Landian image from Mad Men, where boomer-Land tells his younger self "who cares" and tweets "nigger".

A sort of semi-Benedict option from the culture war, if that makes sense.

[Anonymous No.12584353]

>>12584281
could you maybe summarise in 1 post?

[Anonymous No.12584468]

>>12584353
Tldr - the exploration of the pomo condition through pomo aesthetics

[Anonymous No.12584475]

>>12584468
pomo?

[Anonymous No.12584512]

[Anonymous No.12584521]

this one is for space taoist

[Anonymous No.12584571]

>>12584475
Yes, the indigenous people of West US you moron

[Anonymous No.12584609]

>>12583775
i don't give a fuck if anyone says this is reddit, this is the greatest thing i have seen all year.

Bandersnatch: Colin's Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3qxWbQ8qek

>Also interesting to note that although computers had a much harder time mastering Go than Chess, nowadays even Go is ruled by the machines.
we are being chased after by our own intelligence. that's automation, that's capitalism. that's also a rather fascinating episode in the grand human adventure. Land lost his mind thinking about it.

the Foerster idea - to act as if to increase the number of choices - isn't the same thing, i think, as just throwing up one's hands and collapsing into relativism. that is, in a sense, only the transcendentalizing of Deleuze, Spinoza, whoever else. Derrida has always given me a fucking cramp in my stomach for this very reason: it's falling in love with the labyrinth and not realizing how bad it can get. as JBP would say - so is it malice, or is it ignorance? i know, of course, that i am really conjuring up a straw-man here, that's fine. i'm just a cranky pseud on a yak-milking board, i'm just working things out. Landian cyberpunk was always vastly more interesting than anything Derrida was doing in the 1990s or early 2000s, except for those parts that hinge on cybernetics and the question of intelligence and emergence. that's the Ivory Tower just before it collapsed. we've got the internet and Twitter today, libgen, whatever else. you don't have to sit through twelve years of indoctrination anymore.

>>12584265
obviously

>>12584342
>Why not just buckle up and enjoy the ride? Throw some bricks at the state because it's fun, not because the state is gay! Evoking the Landian image from Mad Men, where boomer-Land tells his younger self "who cares" and tweets "nigger".
>A sort of semi-Benedict option from the culture war, if that makes sense.
not a remotely crazy idea. again, i kind of understand myself as being a kind of ghost bound to the Wild Ride. i don't imagine i will ever leave this place, philosophically speaking. poking through the ruins is too perversely satisfying to me. it's also why i hope i don't inspire any real adherents, just interesting conversations and possibilities. everything tends to turn to shit in my hands anyways. i'm like Midas but for slag. i vent steam and fall into traps and slip on banana peels. and i like bothering passers-by with weird haunting tales of nothingness. becoming unimportant is important for me.

>>12584353
doubtful. Burnout /acc? b/acc? disaster /acc? calamity /acc? hauntology? ironic necromancy? Marxism for people in straitjackets?

IRL i hate parties; i am actually trying to throw one here, if that makes any sense. i am throwing a disaster-sacrifice party, in which one scavenges for chunks of reality hidden in the ruins, and which can be tossed into a small flame built here, because each one feeds a ghost, and the ghosts are hungry to tell stories...

>>12584468
sure

[Anonymous No.12584611]

>>12584571
why should i know that

[Anonymous No.12584662]

hey girardfag, is Isadore right? is religion the only hope to stop total-kippelization?

[Anonymous No.12584822]

>>12582480
god it is so entertaining watching the memes twist and turn as the motor of these threads churns out forces spiraling towards unknowns along unknown distances.

[Anonymous No.12584823]

>>12584662
i mean McLuhan wlll say that Christ is an irreducible sign (Baudrillard, who was no Catholic, seemed to think Disneyland was a more interesting site to think about, but we probably don't need to spend too much time wondering what he would have thought about the cross). Lacan too says, i think, there is only one serious religion worth talking about; i think Heidegger's own sensibilities probably went the same way. Heidegger would not have been so demolished by Nietzsche if he felt you could shift your metaphysics eggs to a Hindu or a Confucian basket. Zizek says he is an atheist, but only an atheist through Christianity. he too dislikes the Vedanta. i think the Vedanta is fine, of course, and the Tao; this is one of those places where Schopenhauer often seems like a forgotten man of philosophy - he would have fought you tooth and nail over the right to call himself a no-bullshit Kantian successor, dismissive of Hegel, and yet keeping in the highest regard not only the Upanishads, but mystical Christianity as well.

i don't know if religion is the only hope to stop total kippelization; one of Luther's own objections to the Church is the kippelization of sin by way of indulgence. no end of freethinkers or fanatics were burned at the stake (or worse) for attempting to interpret things that the orthodoxy absolutely said there could be no further interpretation of: think Bruno, or Galileo, or Copernicus. or even the career of Augustine, who is always trying to find the Aristotelian middle point between free thought and puritanism.

here's what i think is good about religion: it slows the process of interpretation. i will give you one small example of this, borrowed from Milbank: i think it does not seem all that crazy to call a hate crime a sin. the boundaries of offense, of hate, of triggers are absolutely infinite. anyone can be triggered by anything today. for earlier monastics, on guard against the Devil's infinite capacity to find work for idle hands, sin was a constant danger. there is to me a direct line between that and the hysterical self-curation of thought which takes place in the most radical progressive world today: a comment is posted on your YouTube page which hints at reconciliation with a Problematic Thought - it must be burned immediately, denounced, made to disappear. this is Protestant zeal at a high degree of intensity. in China Social Credit works on exactly this program: a constantly updated social credit score, tied directly to your finances, and which implicates your friends, family, working acquaintances also...there is something in all of this which is profoundly *sensible* to me, but which is not the same thing as saying it is good, or wise, or even sane...and to me it all belongs to this continual need for happiness, to provide the fruits of capital and technocommerce with a psychic dimension that keeps everything under control.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12584836]

these next two re: whitehead and god
he didn't make the watch, nor did he draft the blueprint; he's more like the filimg cabinet in which the blueprint is stored.

[Anonymous No.12584854]

i turned off auto-correct and auto-fill because the algo refused to save my profanations and was continuously policing my thoughts
but i apologize for how often embarrassing errors appear in my posts
format, too, is a function of the medium

[Anonymous No.12584903]

>>12584836
also the cabinet has transfinite storage capacity
and it has continually being constructed as you finger through its folder tabs

[Anonymous No.12584927]

>>12584662
but here is a reversed way of looking at things: an idea which permits or even *encourages* its own kippelization is a very strong one, and a very robust one. this is Deleuze in a nutshell: simulacra devour their own models and become rhizomatic, the distinction between the despotic Real and the virtual becomes lost, but not in a Baudrillardian sense; Baudrlllard's whole career becomes as such one long lament for modernity and the lost object, the lost signifier, and he concludes on disappearance. he would have gone on writing books forever on those themes.

the policing of *comedy* in recent years is one of the gravest signs for the political left. it's why Trump came into power, and why the left is sent into paroxysms of rage when they see his face: he can meme them, albeit only in a very crude and unsophisticated way. but there is real power in this also. it is Reality - what Girard would have called the Sacred - which is their great undoing, the sense of fidelity to a moralism they cannot say or describe, and which is an absolute catastrophe for their political hopes and wishes. i think Kippelization is a kind of a test or a filter for any project. how much can any idea withstand an infinite multiplication? again, Deleuze is the crown prince of this; that's what territorialization does, that's how swarms work, that's how a BwO becomes what it is, by having no fixed or concrete essence, by tranforming and mutating everywhere as it goes. you see in every Great Leader the inability to be mocked, the fear of being represented incorrectly, all kinds of stuff like this, the terror of images. Xi Jinping would not allow himself to be caricatured as Winnie the Pooh; Hitchens raised holy hell for implying that women made terrible stand-up comedians; you can imagine how truly grotesque stand-up comedy in the Third Reich would have been.

total kippelization is only a threat to those who absolutely need to feel as though they have a direct hotline to some kind of Gold Standard that, in an emergency, they can use to re-instantiate reality, to separate Right from Wrong, Good from Evil, Truth from Falsity, and the rest. Kippelization is a *test* for those things. being free to make copies, to mock, debase, lampoon, borrow, steal or simulate are aspects of a civilized society. a religion which *cannot countenance the possibility of an improper representation* is a despotic and a tyrannical one, and it is for this reason that political religions founded on materialism are among the worst.

Tolkien's religion seemed more capable of allowing for semi-divine beings who were aware of the dangers of despotism, and weren't afraid to show that the Ring was *also* a temptation, even for them. it was, however, a temptation they knew as a temptation, and not necessarily as the Truth. the power was never *fake* - it was absolutely real. so what do you say about a religion that can recognize the dangers of seizing power with the Real? that they are wise...

[Anonymous No.12585058]

>>12584927
to continue on from this: this is also why i share Zizek's suspicions of somebody like Judith Butler, for instance. that everything is a performance, or created by performance, doesn't strike me as the least bit radical or transgressive: rather, that is exactly the norm. the Real is just instantiated there in the place of division, in the circuitous low-simmer of erotic suspicion and playfulness. it is exactly how everybody works, already, all of the time. i would prefer we simply understand the divisions as not being between male and female, but between female and alien, or alien and machine. a true inability to distinguish performance from reality falls way short of its mandate if we are only talking about politics or representation in the workforce. we might rather talk about things in science-fiction or theological terms instead, which are more interesting by far.

i want to say something else tho, about violence. the terrifying thing for me about violence is that violence itself winds up constituting the genuine or radical break in things. violence is what worried Girard as much as the Gestell worried Heidegger. violence - whether as sudden outbursts of rage, or the coldly methodical inscription of meaning on other people as excess, as surplus meaning, as words trapped in the body - is what constitutes the real breaks in things. we are never *indifferent* about violence. violence breaks things open, rips them apart, blows them up. in a philosophical sense, *rupture* and division, or the chaotic boiling-over of multiplicity and difference are the nemeses of reason, and have been since the beginning. Nietzsche understood these kinds of things as well as anyone, and in the end they drove him insane.

it's why i think a philosophy compatible with violence, not demystifying it completely but not handwaving it away, or making it into more of a demonic thing than it has to be, is a good one: Stoicism, for instance, does this, as i think does Taoism. Marcus Aurelius likens the practice of philosophy to being more like *wrestling* than dancing, and the old Taoist masters are nothing without a little kung-fu also; it's a Taoist immortal who teaches Sun Wukong to *change,* which is the same thing as teaching him how to *fight.* and Wukong himself does not become the wonderful Bodhisattva that he is until he learns that there is in fact a thing higher than violence, difference, multiplication, and ferocity; but that comes later. the Monkey King is not saved from violence externally, but from violence within; that also i think is a very Christian idea also, and a Stoic one too.

[Anonymous No.12585073]

>>12568689
>Uncle Nick
the racist conservative uncle

[Anonymous No.12585117]

>>12585073
t. guy who hasn't read Fanged Noumena

hey, anon who hasn't read Fanged Noumena - have you ever heard of a book called Fanged Noumena? this is going to blow your mind, but it was literally written by the same guy who grew up to become Uncle Nick. i shit you not, it was literally written by a *younger version of himself.* i know this is fucked up, but he wrote words on a page in 1990 and you can actually *read those words today.* they are still there. he wrote them then, and they actually are still there, today.

do you need me to go on a huge spiel about Why Land Matters? i'm happy to do this. conversely, maybe the story is much simpler: Sadie just had an awesome connection and they fucked each other's brains out and lost their gourds listening to jungle and doing whatever the fuck else.

he's a crusty old battleaxe now but who gives a shit? philosophers don't have to be saints or paragons of virtue, they only have to be interesting.

[Anonymous No.12585188]

[Anonymous No.12585277]

>>12585188
>>12584836
>>12584854
anon would you be so kind as you post the end of section VII? my PDF copies both end in mid-sentence on page 350 and then skips to the index on page 356. i would very much like to read those final pages.

[Anonymous No.12585294]

>>12585073
>>12585117

[Anonymous No.12585325]

>>12585277
of course

[Anonymous No.12585331]

[Anonymous No.12585339]

[Anonymous No.12585407]

>>12585339
of greatest interest to me here is of course that Christ and Eris are given inverse but equivalent roles in 'creative advance'
who tossed the apple, and to whom was it awarded
and who stood in judgment

[Anonymous No.12585498]

>>12585325
>>12585331
>>12585339
thank you kind anon!

>>12585407
i am responding to this fascinating post by only by co-signing what anon >>12581997 said earlier:
>I find here a community of seekers. People grasping and feeling for the essence of things and doing so by discussing a human who was a burning life floating upon a sea of darkness. Threads like these are a gift.

sharing a painting also.

[Anonymous No.12585776]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12586087]

another fagfest

[Anonymous No.12586127]

is this cosmotechnics?

[Anonymous No.12586326]

[Anonymous No.12586541]

>>12586127
no, that's art
>the saddest and most depressing art in the universe

>>12586326
i wonder if Land ever read this. a lot of it seems like ufblog-type stuff: that the political philosophy of the AI is...to be the AI of the political philosophy which created it, emergent only through the history of libertarianism and tech and whatever else. everything continues, exactly as it is, except now in blockchain. i guess i should note: i think that's Land's own sensibility, which is almost like a magician's trick: he's going to just Explain Reality in such a way that it will be very difficult to find a flaw in. sort of like Bizarro Heidegger, maybe: instead of nice cozy Being that you can then allow out into the universe, here's a creeping sense of claustrophobia and doom that is going to turn the whole world into teleoplectic circuitry one way or the other.

i don't know if you guys are still following him, but he's back from his vacation and updating the book again.

http://www.ufblog.net/

>The institutional origin of the Federal Reserve is explicitly inseparable from a post-liberal ideology of money, which conceives it as an administrative tool, to be placed in the service of national economic objectives (the macroeconomic suite of full-employment, stable prices, and moderate interest rates). The British experience had been educational, in this regard. Money had been re-minted as an imperial project, with twin global and domestic faces. Where the Pound Sterling had found itself elevated by fortune to the status of imperial scrip, the US Dollar now ventured onto the same path of geopolitical fatality with greater self-consciousness. The relation to war economy was effectively deepened. By the early 20th century it was obvious to all observers that the primary Anglophone world power could have no (merely) national interests that were not immediately matters of global geostrategic and ideological competition. The US Dollar could only be an architectural pillar of world order. To trust it was direct psychological investment in a planetary destiny.

this weird, invisible event itself does seem more or less constitutive of technological singularity, if you're prepared to grant the usual amount of hyperbole. somebody had to write that fucking book, anyways. he does indeed swing for the fences, this is why i enjoy his writing. folding Marx into Heidegger - or the reverse? - that's a job only one man can do.
>well two if you include Marcuse
>i am not including Marcuse

[Anonymous No.12588112]

Do pure Land threads get deleted now?

[Anonymous No.12588257]

bloomers rise up

[Anonymous No.12588463]

>>12588112
I wish.
Putting Land in the OP is the surest possible way of starting a shitshow of a thread, filled with nothing but memes, strawmanning, and pseudery.

[Anonymous No.12589181]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12589811]

>>12588112
one got deleted recently because it was obviously a goof, it was Land's face and a provocative quote by Susan Sontag. i don't think there's a conspiracy against him, there have been lots of good threads on him.

>>12588257
i'm okay with this meme

>>12588463
poor old Uncle Nick, so unappreciated.

>§5.641 — At the greatest scale of historical analysis, Macro is characterized by the way it places itself beyond the bourgeois definition of civilization. Among modernity’s ascendant prudential classes, high time-preference (or low impulse-control) served as distinctive markers of barbarism. Civilization thus acquired a measure, corresponding to a time-horizon. Industrial civilization was based upon psychological tolerance for efficient indirect methods. Roundabout production had secured its ethic. Macro breaks with all of this. Imprudence is now re-valorized on Keynesian grounds as pro-social stimulation. To spend is glorious. Anti-bourgeois cultural politics and administrative economic doctrine become one.

this is not exactly Great News, but it's not demented ideological agitprop either. he's writing a pretty good story about the animus possession of a cynical progressive elite. i find that persuasive. it feels like things are trending back in a weird way not towards Neo-China arriving from the future but Neo-Victorianism arriving from the past, but with a twist; your new Victorians are all going to be Woke Billionaire tech-lords forced to play the steadily decaying and attritive cultural politics games of the 21C, like the Borg from TNG in drag. assimilation is progressive! and counterpose to this an uneasy coalition resembling an NRx-lite version of the Federation, cobbled together to oppose this, but now making nice with the Republican party and whatever else...halfway between the Empire and the Rebels. cross-wiring pop culture references for a better tomorrow, i guess.

it feels very JG Ballard to me. but it's the kind of fate Land might have scripted for himself also, disquietingly situated at the juncture between the far left and the far right. his whole project works as a pretty good critique of the extremes of political-economic theory: maybe the best part of it is that it is *disappointing* in a way that is kind of useful, because at the level of macro it is hard to tell what constitutes economic base and ideological superstructure.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12589903]

>>12589811
it seems to me that on some level politics is just bad for the brain. ideology is pleasurable, and two centuries or so of Hegel have contributed to our understanding of the deeply interconnected nature of our being. we might have known this before; we definitely know it now. put another way, it seems like the revolution takes care of itself. the far harder thing to do is to walk the line between individualism and cynicism. if there is any kind of radical or epistemological break to make, it is with that self-assembling structure that now seems built into us. modern Progressivism cannot fundamentally tell whether it is capitalist or socialist in nature; that is what gives it all of its power, and also why it appears to have no mind or brain at all. it is Leviathan without the sovereign, without the monarch.

but what do you do when you (read: me) want to say - okay, so race and gender are only the horribly destructive weapons of a foolish and cynical elite, leveraging marginalized people to play their own power games in high office and generate mandates...how about class? where did that go? witness the Yellow Vests in France, polarizing into far left and far right camps. even socialism construed along purely economic grounds may well only be the forerunner for more division, with none of the usual postmodern signifiers required.

industrial society and technology has made a lot of people *useless,* but they still had their *attention* to give; that attention is now being leveraged in approximately 20 billion different ways, so that the machines can learn from this, or you can become angry, or vengeful. but you can still do well; you can still do good in the world; you can still be wise, you can still be sane, sometimes you can even still be happy. we don't have to know so much.

i've been obsessed with Land for years, and i think that obsession is now arriving at its endgame, and i really have no idea what is going to replace it. capitalism just isn't what it used to be. i think in a way that that is a good thing, it's like being kicked out of a nightmare. Reza makes sense, the whole argument that you can do work in AI because that is itself a philosophical task, and just try and rinse the concept of capital out of your memory altogether.

is there a story somewhere about zombies in rehab? a film about those years right between the wars of religion and the Enlightenment? interview with the Grey Vampire? a spacefaring civilization that fucking wrecked itself and had to reboot again after a crash landing?

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12589962]

>>12589903
i was reading this the other day for some weird reason and i just found it to be curiously more interesting than philosophy or politics stuff. maybe it was because it was in conjunction with Lacan or whatever else, but the nature of evil as being a thing not to be horrified by or desperately warded away or crushed out of existence, but as being a very sensible place of understanding to come to in reflection.

evil always works and functions, evil is kind of horribly bound up with time, fatality, curses, debts and obligations, stuff like this. doing Good so often seems like a recipe for disaster, failure, ruination and suspicion. the nature of evil, evil and reciprocity, being hung up on symptoms and the like, bespeaks a kind of deeper sense of self-awareness. cynicism has reasons, but these reasons can always be exposed, found out, made to look foolish. i don't mean the kind of genuine Judge Holden evil, Charles Manson evil or things like this; i mean something more like the kind of neutral evil that most of us wrestle with - just *shittiness,* the kinds of small mean things that people do out of necessity. things that a guy like Lacan was an expert locksmith about, that the alternative to evil isn't necessarily Good, but just confusion, loneliness, bewilderment and drift.

it's related i guess to what i was saying before about the similarities between continental philosophy and the hermeneutics of hell. Landian hell works, hell generates all kinds of things, a tortuous sifting-out of values and whatever else. it resembles nothing so much as a giant processor, a gigantic machine, a machine that arguably has no purpose at all except to machine, and which props up the postmodern world in disquieting ways. it's not just a theological order that has collapsed, but a liberal order also, under siege from extreme forms of socialism left and right, these ideological counter-narratives that hold each other in place in the weirdest ways. even though socialist policies are always capable of the greatest evil, they never allow themselves to present themselves *as* evil, of course; they can only be Good. the same in some sense holds for boring centrism, which has to blur the areas - well, none of us can really say what is good or evil, so...and this is part of why people are attracted to modes of thought that can name these things, that can unironically chart or catalogue the abyss.

i think it was Fisher who said that when people hear 'Beyond Good and Evil' they think, 'sweet, beyond Good.' but they forget about the second part. this is where guys like Lacan, Bataille et al shine: what you think is Good is in fact mostly selfish, and what you think is Evil really *isn't actually selfish enough* - it's posturing and dancing for the overseer in your head, the overseer who is at the same time also you, the narrative that you have constructed for yourself, a being who perhaps longs for a place as some party functionary or ideologue.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12590017]

>>12589962
but the opposite of Evil doesn't necessarily have to be Good, it's enough to just be not Evil.
>i know, i am surely blowing minds right now
>no thanks, i can tie myself to this stake
>hang on, don't set me on fire just yet tho. i want to say another thing

it is that conjoined fusion, the loss of the separation of categories, that defines postmodernity, and which gives rise to precisely what we are seeing today, the rejoining of those categories again to produce terribly unironic clones and doppelgangers, the ironicization of irony, Unironic Reality once again. where New Sincerity isn't just an angsty confession, it's unironic rage and calls for crusade, total fidelity to given narratives rather than skepticism about them, politics applied directly to the forehead.

i know that book is just a dorky supplement but i found it kind of intriguing, all of the ways in which one can play an Evil character: for example, how Evil characters might be attracted to Good religions and the like, precisely because they allow for and even encourage draconian behaviour, or simply through the accrual of debts, or because one has become a hopeless pawn or dupe of some conspiracy, or whatever else. there is even perhaps something sort of Hegelian in this, about how the search for self-knowledge becomes a kind of self-refutation of Evil by Evil; nothing is Good anymore, and yet the never-ending ironic twisting of reasons by reasons leads one, backwards, out of the inferno, if only because one does not want to repeat oneself over and over again, solving your problems with ever-larger problems.

that rage, a world of fury and outburst, would have been the outcome of a world of maximal irony would not have surprised DFW: he said as much, that you cannot found a literary tradition on irony alone. i think we can perhaps also say that cannot found a philosophical tradition on criticism also. but what happens when you run out of things to critique, when the only thing left to critique is the Wrongthink of the other side? we know what, we're seeing it on Twitter every day.

the ego and the self is more complex than this tho, much more. what makes us do what we do is irreducible to ideology; even nihilism seems to me like a collective project. Land is right - or maybe i'm paraphrasing him - that capitalist positivity *is* what nihilism looks like today. but where do you go after nihilism? maybe nowhere. maybe you just eat it.

[Anonymous No.12590078]

>>12590017
really it's just *banality* that is the issue. that's really all, i think. just banality. to be banal itself is to lose any sense of distinction between the sacred and the profane, the high and the low.
>tfw you are the fucking face of banality itself
>well yes i know that now inner self, but it took a while

this is ofc the Last Man, as Nietzsche predicts, or the They of Heidegger, or the Reign of Quantity, or whatever else. it is the very everydayness of life that winds up being captured by capital and reified, you see this in all of the advertisements; it is the same thing that bothers Land, how corporate overlords who are supposed to be oppressing the world and turning everyone into a battery cannot even do that, because they chase Woke Capital and virtue signal bucks, while virtue signallers hilariously fail to be able to explicate their own virtue without jamming their feet in their mouth in paroxysms of scapegoating. everybody basically fumbles the ball on the goal-line when it comes to World Domination.

hell, even the fucking Oracle and the Architect wound up fucking up their own plans at the end of the Matrix, somehow. Agent Smith assimilated everything that might have made his own existence interesting - why not try getting off cafe patrons with chocolate cake? - and Neo brainlessly made a deal with the machine spirits and the whole thing was just imbecilic at the end. Paul Atreides screws up the jihad, Leto II gets bored with having everything, Kefka Palazzo reveals himself to be a completely failed artist...and in my own imagination, Cthulhu stumbles into our own reality and reveals himself not to be the actual Cthulhu, but his idiotic younger brother with brain damage, like Epimetheus, who realizes that the right way to make money is by backing Gilette, and it's a complete shit-show. evil cults spring up to worship him and they are largely populated by horribly boring forty-somethings in Minnesota trying just to keep a little romance alive by trying out BDSM scenarios at the Radisson because they are just so achingly tired of their own lives. not even Peterson can save them.

we are such a sad, confused, loveable, horrible species of fleshbag.
>okay, *now* i'm fucking setting us on fire
>yeah that's probably a good idea inner self

[Anonymous No.12590133]

>>12580474
>Taoism also pairs well with Confucianism
Huh?!

[Anonymous No.12590255]

>>12590133
of course it does. you're talking about the philosophical history of China. sometimes the Taoists are opposed to the Confucians and sometimes they aren't. sometimes they all get together like the Vinegar Tasters, or in alchemical works like the Journey to the West. even in the Three Kingdoms, Kongming is who he is because he is the fusion of both camps: both Confucian gentleman-scholar and Taoist strategist-sage.

the concept of Heaven extends to both camps. in Sawyer's book on military strategy, look at the wonderful conversations that take place between the princes, who are looking for counsel on how to govern their realms and fight wars, and the mystical sage-hermits who are there to give them advice. this is one of the most beautiful things ever, to my mind: the sages never leave the princes twisting in the wind, because governance is serious business; there's no deconstruction going on, no flouting the prince and saying - well fuck you, asshole, that's capitalism for you! obviously this would be wrong. even in the story of the Dextrous Butcher, the Marquess who *sees* the cook and learns to care for life is an official. true, this doesn't really bother the cook all that much; but i think it matters.

if you want to really understand the philosophical tradition of China, you have to read both camps. sometimes the Confucians (or neo-Confucians) are in the ascendence, sometimes not. sometimes even super neo-Confucians like Mou Zongsan find that what they really want isn't even Confucius, or the Tao, but Tiantai Buddhism; you can read MZ himself or Brook Ziporyn for more on that.

how about Han Fei? Taoist-Legalist scholar par excellence, the Chinese Machiavelli. again, he's Xi Jinping's favorite scholar. Legalism becomes attractive because Confucianism fails; there's more than a little of the Tao in this, in governance through the inscrutable and unknowable will of the sovereign. Xunzi stays Confucian, but he's a more pessimistic and crusty Confucian. even Confucius himself meets with Laozi at one point (in a story probably written by the Taoists themselves, but never mind)...

so yeah, i think it's best to understand Taoism as the esoteric core and Confucianism as the exoteric aspect. two parts of one larger system.

[Anonymous No.12590322]

>>12590255
warrants mentioning also that had the mystics and hermits flouted the princes, they could very well have had their heads chopped off; but this is something that Sun Tzu also knows and plays on when he is making his pitch to the Duke of whatever, the guy who asks him to train an army for him - but first, to prove his worth, he has to show that he can make the Duke's concubines fall in line. as the story goes, the concubines are reluctant to obey Sun Tzu's orders, and - after a warning - he has two of them, the Duke's favorites, executed, because that's how military tradition works. the Duke himself is disappointed, but Sun Tzu says: well, that's military tradition for you. and if you are displeased, he adds, you are welcome to go ahead and kill me. the Duke does not do this, but that is Sun Tzu's point: there has to be respect for command.

and yet Sun Tzu is also the great author on the role of deception in warfare, much else. this is what makes his books popular in the business section, but also why the TTC is at once a book on metaphysics, statecraft, and personal or interior self-governance. China is a whole other world than the West, and makes for pretty fascinating reading. the Tao is what governs everything; the Tao is the will of Heaven. it's why there is genuine no-joke tragedy in the ending of the Three Kingdoms, when the rain bails Sima Yi out of a trap that *he ought to be punished for falling into.* the whole structure of armies and imperialism works because there has to be a sense of justice in the business of ruling, in the founding of dynasties; when Sima Yi takes Kongming's bait, that *ought to be it,* that ought to be the end of the war. that's *fair.* the rain bails him out, but this is a double catastrophe: not only is Kongming screaming at the sky, saying, what the fuck, how unfair is this - but Sima Yi, who now has victory handed to him on a platter, has been completely BTFO'd by the same force. Heaven really does not give a fuck; the Tao is going to do what it wants to do, and guys like him still have to act as if, somehow, this is right...because, in the end, it cannot be any other way. it's an incredible moment. as the story goes, Sima Yi later unifies China, but it is hoped that he does so with a little more humility.

you might check out this film too, it's quite interesting how the various aspects fold into each other. total anarchy is not the point, but there are always these questions raised about the nature of governance and sovereignty. it is in some sense a kind of work of agitprop, there's no question; but it's agitprop by a really good auteur director, who understands how confusing some of these things are.

[Anonymous No.12590423]

>>12590322
the clash between the esoteric and the exoteric is what leads to tragedy of the highest order. that's what you get, in a sense, with Dostoevsky and the Grand Inquisitor; the mystical core is rejected in the name of the esoteric, the molten gold and the crucible of cold iron; but this is a total calamity. and you see this with Kafka as well: why can the scholar not obtain entrance to the City of the Law, if the door was made only for him? he requires, in some sense, permission from the guardian, but he cannot really understand that the guardian is a necessary part of this whole entity...

it's just really not so different, i think. the Tao is based clean out of the game; it is one of the greatest ideas in the history of philosophy. and it has a strange relationship with Confucianism, no question; but they kind of help or enable each other. there really isn't anything in China - not that i'm aware of, anyways - that resembles the Roman Catholic Church, unless you want to say it's whatever the CCP imagines itself to be in the best possible light (and one which is the farthest from reality). the Three Kingdoms is to my mind fairly close to some of the heartbreaking truths in Dostoevsky and Kafka, that - somewhat counterintuitively - it's not even that God is dead, it's that he is *real* and that is even worse! does this make sense? not even in the sense that one can now go ahead and act ideologically or whatever, but because *even in the attempt to act ideologically, in the name of the Divine, one finds oneself mysteriously refuted.*

tragic Greek literature also does this quite well, in those places where reason and divinity clash: in Antigone, in the Bacchae, throughout the Iliad, the funeral oration of Pericles, you name it. i will admit to liking the Confucians a great deal; i like commonality, harmony, virtue, and ritual. and i would prefer that these things not be grounded on the Law or a sword of Damocles, but on the Way; this seems quite cozy to me (and admittedly naive, but still). even in the Journey to the West, Wukong's enlightenment comes from Taoists, Buddhists, and Confucians...perhaps not unlike Arthurian romance (or Tolkien's mythology), which is both Christian and Germanic-heroic.

i am of course only an odious namefag goofball on a yak-milking forum, but i find these kinds of things to be quite interesting. the most sophisticated treatments of these things come as much from *literature* as they do from Serious Metaphysics (or worse, the neverending car-crash that is politics on Twitter).

[Anonymous No.12590553]

>>12590423
apologies for the spoilers, but the film is now 15+ years old and i feel like there is a statute of limitations on these things.

the really fascinating part of this is - and it is a Western preoccupation to - is the sacralization of the state, the idea that the state runs or has to run with the blessing of the divine. this is one of our oldest and deepest preoccupations; it's why despite all of continental theorists and Landposting i still kind of stick with RG the Don as fundamental political ontologist for the modern world. the act of scapegoating is crucial to mythology, as well as for political mythology. in a film like Hero, the nameless and quasi-Taoist assassin is crucial to the plot and the whole meaning of political sovereignty. here the Tao is destroyed and rendered manifest in the service to the state; that's a powerful idea.

even Confucius does not really make a big deal about primogeniture; family relations matter, the five relations, but it is these relations themselves that are more relevant, even more than the actors who fulfil them. that's pretty fascinating stuff, and partly goes to explain why Marxism picked up so well over there - and also why it became something Marx himself perhaps might not have expected, that is, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. the need to preserve and guarantee the state is an old and fascinating problem for the Chinese. they don't like collapsing into internal war.

fortunately, the Tao never really gets fully extinguished; that things pass and return is part of their nature. and the idea of governing with the will of Heaven is one of those things that makes philosophical political idealism in China kind of reminiscent of Stoicism also; you govern with the will of nature. the Stoics will say their original figure is Heraclitus; he's not a terrible problem or issue for Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, his perspective is an illumination of Nature and the Logos itself. the ideals of governance - whether self-governance, or those of the state - always seem to have a foot in both of these camps, the esoteric and the exoteric. where they come into alignment all is well; where they clash, disaster and ruination.

perhaps part of the appeal of Marxism was that it promised both, or a permanent exile of both, and a thoroughly rationalist theory of the world. i know it is much more complex than this, and Marxism develops out of a profoundly mystical thinker - Hegel - but neither Hegel nor Marx survive the postmodern deluge. rather what returns from this is somebody like Land, a Right Marxist, and Spirit as Teleoplexy-
>*ting ting* nice schizorambling dickface
>well yes i thought so inner self
>we're supposed to be on fire asshole. crackling flesh. burning hair. let's go
>sigh

[Anonymous No.12591682]

>>12574105
what do you think whitehead's ultimate metaphysical commitments are to the facticity/non-subjective "real reality" of the universe? for example schelling had the problem of answering the simple question of "would rocks continue to obey newtonian mechanics if people weren't around to think about them," the famous "deduce my pen, if you're so great" problem. at some point no matter how hegelian you are you have to say whether you think the fucking chair is there or not, and in what sense it is or isn't - i don't care if it's there in some nondualist way where it's an INTERSUBJECTIVELY HARMONIZED CONCRESCENCE OF OUR SHARED UNCONSCIOUS, that's still a stance on whether it's there or not.

process people always either seem evasive on this point, or they are process theologians and simply say "it's god."

you seem to be one of the few non-disingenuous people in these threads so hopefully you're still around.

[Anonymous No.12591904]

>>12591682
i have to head out the door in just a moment, so i can only answer your question cursorily.
for whitehead the universe 'really is', though its ontological make-up is not substantial, but rather eventual.
all events have a subjective and an objective pole, and are not reducible nor derivative of either. subjectivity is not a function of consciousness; consciousness is actually a vanishingly small event 'in' the universe, though 'prehension' is universal. rather, subjectivity is just that way in which an event 'feels' (prehends) the data of its immediate past and its contemporaries. this is as true for electrons (which are already complex events) as it is for humans.
what we think of as enduring objects are for whitehead 'routes' of occasions of a consistent pattern, though this language already suggests an 'outside' observer recognizing the pattern, which isn't what whitehead means. the occasions rather, it might be said, 'view themselves' in this pattern.

[Anonymous No.12591941]

>>12591682
>>12591904
from http://ppquimby.com/alan/termin.htm:
>Ontological principle--The ontological principle asserts that "every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance, has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence. . . . According to the ontological principle there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere" [PR 36, 373]. God is a part of the actual world of every actual occasion, and he includes in his primordial nature the realm of eternal objects. "By this recognition of the divine element the general Aristotelian principle is maintained that, apart from things that are actual, there is nothing—nothing either in fact or in efficacy. . . . Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of 'existence,' are derived by abstraction from actual occasions

[Anonymous No.12592120]

>>12590553
Are your end greentexts written by Chris Avellone?

[Anonymous No.12592154]

>>12592120
no, that is my inner self, which justifiably hates me and everything i do
>fuck you asshole don't take words out of my mouth
it's a complicated relationship but absolutely crucial for my sense of equilibrium. in real life one of us looks like a lemure. like a Non-Transcendent One from TNG, a total failure to even risk Ravel's puzzle
>fuuuuuuuuuuuck yoouuuuuuuuuu
it honestly feels good sometimes

[Anonymous No.12592209]

>>12592120
Please don't insult Chris Avellone

[Anonymous No.12592594]

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

[Anonymous No.12593289]

I
Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,
Spirit of the Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,—
Swift be thy flight!

II
Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day;
Kiss her until she be wearied out,
Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand—
Come, long-sought!

III
When I arose and saw the dawn,
I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest,
I sighed for thee.

IV
Thy brother Death came, and cried,
Wouldst thou me?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noontide bee,
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me?—And I replied,
No, not thee!

V
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon—
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, belovèd Night—
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!

[Anonymous No.12593293]

>>12593289
compare the tone to juliet's:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway's eyes may wink and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess'd it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy'd: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them. O, here comes my nurse,
And she brings news; and every tongue that speaks
But Romeo's name speaks heavenly eloquence.

[Anonymous No.12594180]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12594500]

>>12591682
>>12591904
did this help at all? i can try to expand, but if I better understand your question i can better answer it.

[Anonymous No.12594544]

Hey Girardfag and the other anons in the thread, can I get some thoughts on Mark Fisher? What is your opinion on him and his works?

[Anonymous No.12594565]

>>12594544
What I've read from him has been surprisingly refreshing considering he's a career Marxist. With that said, like every other non-Frankfurt-School career Marxist, he's Objectively Wrong About EverythingTM

[Anonymous No.12594666]

>>12591904
>>12594500
>>12591941
that did help, thank you, i wasn't sure whether when process people talk about these occurrences/events they mean actual metaphysical entities. i guess my question would be, what justification does whitehead have for talking about these things as if they are really real, metaphysically? in a nutshell?

for example, no matter how complex or opaque fichte might be, you can still more or less explain, in a nutshell, what his fundamental metaphysical/logical justification for positing the whole crazily complex wissenschaftslehre is: he thinks we have intellectual intuition of our own pure subjectivity, and its identity/nonidentity aspects, and his logical demonstrations follow from this starting point. likewise, schelling posits an intellectual intuition, schleiermacher does. that's fundamentally how they "prove" the ground of their deductions.

so, similarly, what is whitehead's starting point, his fundamental justification for making these ontological claims about "what the universe really is, at its base"? that's what confuses me about process thought. because i was perfectly happy with whitehead's pragmatism when i was reading the opening parts of P&R. but i am perfectly happy with the same sort of pragmatism in james, and james rightly does not have a systematic metaphysics, unlike whitehead - he's fundamentally relativist/constructivist/pluralist about epistemology, and the relationship between language/thought and the objective world. so where does whitehead get off saying "the world is made up of tiny x's, and what the x's do is they y and z, and when there are enough of them, they sometimes become a's [etc.]." fundamentally how does he justify saying any of this with logical-metaphysical certainty?

i read just the first parts of Process and Reality, but have been too busy with other work to go deeper into it lately. so i'm dying for spoilers.

[Anonymous No.12594691]

>>12594544
girardfag here.

i think he's great. Exiting the Vampires' Castle is an amazing essay and i think will age quite well and become a classic. the Twitter hosted for him is full of gems. Capitalist Realism didn't really impress me as much as his stuff on depression and pop music. he's a pretty core figure in a lot of /acc stuff and an important collaborator of Land's; it's sort of hard to tell how much his influence shaped these ideas, but yeah.

the world is not a better place without him. it's always sad when depression gets the better of people, especially people who by all accounts were just pretty fucking wonderful and sensitive writers. so i can't call myself the world's biggest K-Punk fan or anything, but...what does a guy like that take off the table? not much. he seemed like a legit intellectual and a genuine human being who grappled with the dark stuff. those guys are rare.

i guess i'd have to go back and re-read some of his stuff to provide more than a ten-cent hot take like this, but...that's what i've got atm.

[Anonymous No.12594898]

>>12594666
i guess we can start with whitehead's own idea of what he's up to in process and reality:
>Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of 'interpretation' I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here 'applicable' means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and 'adequate' means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.
so, if fichte begins from this 'given' of the intellectual intuition of our subjectivity, whitehead begins from the fact that we have experiences, and works from there. and his notion of experience here is much broader than the shopworn philosophical 'sense-experience'. he means by this category all the different modes of experience. for us this includes the scientific, the aesthetic, the religious, and so on. by his definition of speculative philosophy, then, he must given an account of reality in the most general terms that is adequate to all of these different modes of experience--and more besides; for as was said before, experience is not limited to conscious creatures. whitehead is often tagged with the somewhat pejorative label 'panpsychist', but this is not accurate. it is more appropriate to call him a pan-experientialist, and then venture to understand what he actually means by 'experience'. how does an electron 'experience' it's environment, for example.
so, as to what is at the 'base' of reality: experience, which is identical with an 'event'. this should not be taken to mean that, like leibniz's monads, events are simple, or that experience is simple. (whitehead has some pretty sharp criticism for hume over his notion of simple impressions, by the way). it is more to say that what we generally think of as 'things' are more like 'happenings' that are infinitely related to all other 'happenings'.
for the justification of why we might conceive of reality as the interrelatedness of events, we have to refer back to the quotation above: it is what whitehead believes gives us the most coherent account of experience. the question of why this rather than a substance ontology or something similar is pertinent but a little complicated. basically, the other predominant speculative schemes--dualism and the two types of monism, 'materialist' or 'idealist'--have some internal inconsistency or incoherence that cannot be reconciled with what we know, and that this is not simply due to a lack of available evidence. there were a number of new scientific developments just prior to and during whitehead's life that genuinely and radically altered our general ideas of how reality worked.

[Anonymous No.12594907]

>>12594898
for whitehead, the discovery of the electromagnetic field, general and special relativity, and biological evolution, were all suggestive of some deep inadequacy in our metaphysical schemes, and especially in the assumptions of our sciences, newtonian dynamics in particular.

[Anonymous No.12594942]

>>12594691
Thank you, I will proceed to read Exiting the Vampires' Castle now.

[Anonymous No.12594980]

>>12594666
the iep article on whitehead is very good:
>PR invites controversy while defying brief exposition. Many of the relational ideas Whitehead develops are holistic in character, and thus do not lend themselves to the linear presentation of language. Moreover, the language Whitehead needs to build his holistic image of the world is often biological or mentalistic in character, which can be jarring when the topic being discussed is something like an electron. Moreover, Whitehead the algebraist was an intrinsically relational thinker, and explicitly characterized the subject / predicate mode of language as a “high abstraction.” Nevertheless, there are some basic ideas which can be quickly set out.
>The first of these is that PR is not about time per se. This has been a subject of much confusion. But Whitehead himself points out that physical time as such only comes about with “reflection” of the “divisibility” of his two major relational types into one another (PR 288 – 9). Moreover, throughout PR, Whitehead continues to endorse the theory of nature found in his earlier triad of books on the subject. So the first step in gaining a handle on PR is to recognize that it is better thought of as addressing the logic of becoming, whereas his books from 1919 – 1922 address the “nature” of time.
>The basic units of becoming for Whitehead are “actual occasions.” Actual occasions are “drops of experience,” and relate to the world into which they are emerging by “feeling” that relatedness and translating it into the occasion’s concrete reality. When first encountered, this mode of expression is likely to seem peculiar if not downright outrageous. One thing to note here is that Whitehead is not talking about any sort of high-level cognition. When he speaks of “feeling” he means an immediacy of concrete relatedness that is vastly different from any sort of “knowing,” yet which exists on a relational spectrum where cognitive modes can emerge from sufficiently complex collections of occasions that interrelate within a systematic whole. Also, feeling is a far more basic form of relatedness than can be represented by formal algebraic or geometrical schemata. These latter are intrinsically abstract, and to take them as basic would be to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But feeling is not abstract. Rather, it is the first and most concrete manifestation of an occasion’s relational engagement with reality.

[Anonymous No.12594982]

>>12594980
>This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.
>Actual occasions are fundamentally atomic in character, which leads to the next interpretive difficulty. In his previous works, events were essentially extended and continuous. And when Whitehead speaks of an “event” in PR without any other qualifying adjectives, he still means the extensive variety found in his earlier works (PR 73). But PR deals with a different set of problems from that previous triad, and it cannot take such continuity for granted. For one thing, Whitehead treats Zeno's Paradoxes very seriously and argues that one cannot resolve these paradoxes if one starts from the assumption of continuity, because it is then impossible to make sense of anything coming immediately before or immediately after anything else. Between any two points of a continuum such as the real number line there are an infinite number of other points, thus rendering the concept of the “next” point meaningless. But it is precisely this concept of the “next occasion” that Whitehead requires to render intelligible the relational structures of his metaphysics. If there are infinitely many occasions between any two occasions, even ones that are nominally “close” together, then it becomes impossible to say how it is that later occasions feel their predecessors – there is an unbounded infinity of other occasions intervening in such influences, and changing it in what are now undeterminable ways. Therefore, Whitehead argued, continuity is not something which is “given;” rather it is something which is achieved. Each occasion makes itself continuous with its past in the manner in which it feels that past and creatively incorporates the past into its own concrescence, its coming into being.

[Anonymous No.12594983]

>>12594982
>Thus, Whitehead argues against the “continuity of becoming” and in favor of the “becoming of continuity” (PR 68 – 9). Occasions become atomically, but once they have become they incorporate themselves into the continuity of the universe by feeling the concreteness of what has come before and making that concreteness a part of the occasion’s own internal makeup. The continuity of space and durations in Whitehead’s earlier triad does not conflict with his metaphysical atomism, because those earlier works were dealing with physical nature in which continuity has already come into being, while PR is dealing with relational structures that are logically and metaphysically prior to nature.
>Most authors believe that the sense of “atomic” being used here is similar to, if not synonymous with, “microscopic.” However, there are reasons why one might want to resist such an interpretation. To begin with, it teeters on the edge of the fallacy of simple location to assume that by “atomic” Whitehead means “very small.” An electron, which Whitehead often refers to as an “electronic occasion,” may have a tiny region of most highly focused effects. But the electromagnetic field that spreads out from that electron reaches far beyond that narrow focus. The electron “feels” and is “felt” throughout this field of influence which is not spatially limited. Moreover, Whitehead clearly states that space and time are derivative notions from extension whereas, “To be an actual occasion in the physical world means that the entity in question is a relatum in this scheme of extensive connection” (PR 288 – 9). The quality of being microscopic is something that only emerges after one has a fully developed notion of space, while actual occasions are logically prior to space and a part of the extensive relations from which space itself is derived. Thus it is at least arguably the case that the sense of “atomic” that Whitehead is employing hearkens back more to the original Greek meaning of “irreducible” than to the microscopic sense that pervades physical science. In other words, the “atomic” nature of what is actual is directly connected to its relational holism.

[Anonymous No.12594985]

>>12594983
>The structure of PR is also worth attention, for each of the five major parts offers a significant perspective on the whole. Part I gives Whitehead’s defense of speculative philosophy and sets out the “categoreal scheme” underlying PR. The second part applies these categories to a variety of historical and thematic topics. Part three gives the theory of prehensions as these manifest themselves with and through the categories, and is often called the “genetic account.” The theory of extension, or the “coordinate account,” constitutes part four and represents the ultimate development of Whitehead’s rigorous thought on the nature of space. The last and final part presents both a theory of the dialectic of opposites, and the minimalist role of God in Whitehead’s system as the foundation of coherence in the world’s processes of becoming.
>Two of the features of part I that stand out are Whitehead’s defense of speculative philosophy, and his proposed resolution of the traditional problem of the One and the Many. “Speculative philosophy” for Whitehead is a phrase he uses interchangeably with “metaphysics.” However, what Whitehead means is a speculative program in the most scientifically honorific sense of the term. Rejecting any form of dogmatism, Whitehead states that his purpose is to, “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3). The second feature, the solution to the problem of the “one and the many,” is often summarized as, “The many become one, and increase by one.” This means that the many occasions of the universe that have already become contribute their atomic reality to the becoming of a new occasion (“the many become one”). However, this occasion, upon fully realizing in its own atomic character, now contributes that reality to the previously achieved realities of the other occasions (“and increase by one”).

[Anonymous No.12594990]

>>12594985
>The atomic becoming of an actual occasion is achieved by that occasion’s “prehensive” relations and its “extensive” relations. An actual occasion’s holistically felt and non-sequentially internalized concrete evaluations of its relationships to the rest of the world is the subject matter of the theory of “prehension,” part III of PR. This is easily one of the most difficult and complex portions of that work. The development that Whitehead is describing is so holistic and anti-sequential that it might appropriately be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. An actual occasion “prehends” its world (relationally takes that world in) by feeling the “objective data” of past occasions which the new occasion utilizes in its own concrescence. This data is prehended in an atemporal and nonlinear manner, and is creatively combined into the occasion’s own manifest self-realization. This is to say that the becoming of the occasion is also informed by a densely teleological sense of the occasion’s own ultimate actuality, its “subjective aim” or what Whitehead calls the occasion’s “superject.” Once it has become fully actualized, the occasion as superject becomes an objective datum for those occasions which follow it, and the process begins again.
>This same process of concrescence is described in its extensive characters in part IV, where the mereological (formal relations of part and whole) as well as topological (non-metrical relations of neighborhood and connection) characteristics of extension are developed. Unlike the subtle discussion of prehensions, Whitehead’s theory of extension reads very much like a text book on the logic of spatial relations. Indeed, a great deal of contemporary work in artificial intelligence and spatial reasoning identifies this section of PR as foundational to this field of research, which often goes by the intimidating title of “mereotopology.”

[Anonymous No.12594995]

>>12594990
>The holistic character of prehension and the analytical nature of extension invite the reader to interpret the former as a theory of “internal relations” and the latter as a theory of “external relations.” Put simply, external relations treat the self-identity of a thing as the first, analytically given fact, while internal relations treat it as the final, synthetically developed result. But Whitehead explicitly associates internal relations with extension, and externality with that of prehension. This seeming paradox can be resolved by noting that, even though prehension is the process of the actual occasion’s “internalizing” the rest of reality as it composes its own self-identity, the achieved result (the superject) is the atomic realization of that occasion in its ultimate externality to the rest of the world. On the other hand, the mereological relations of part and whole from which extension is built, are themselves so intrinsically correlative to one another that each only meaningfully expresses its own relational structures to the extent that it completely internalizes the other.

[Anonymous No.12595317]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12595504]

Ok, so I know a bit on what Taoism is. I read the Tao Te Ching and watched some Alan Watts, but I still don't know what space taoism/pancreativism is. Why not put the definitions at the start of the threads as to not always have to reply to these questions?

[Anonymous No.12595509]

>>12595504
it's a complete waste of mental effort

[Anonymous No.12595584]

>>12586326
When humans are engineered, do not humans become technology?

Heisman thinks the believers in universalism, aiming for the movement of the territory of evolution into technology and away from biology, will/should oppose the use of genetic engineering. He places genetic engineering as the pinnacle of the ethos behind Nazism, and all the other right wing ideologies roughly denoted by "might makes right" natural selection. This doesn't fit at all IMO. Genetic engineering is engineering, and engineering is the opposite of natural selection.
Genetic engineering and other technologies bypassing traditional reproduction, to me, seem to be the definitive breaking point of humans from biological evolution. There's still biology in that there's still DNA and cells and organs, but the natural selection is moved elsewhere to some level above the individual human and above the "selfish genes", which is what he is advocating for.

[Anonymous No.12596276]

>>12595504
so, a little history. Space Taolsm/Pancreativism is the work of Aminom: he combines Taoism, Whitehead, Discordianism, Hofstadter and other stuff into a pretty rich brew. he's got a lot of stuff to say about this, and published a pretty comprehensive overview recently that is full of links, which you can read more about if you want.

https://old.reddit.com/r/omniqueryinitiative/comments/altrtq/how_to_save_the_universe_an_incomplete_tutorial/

a few months ago, i started a thread to talk about a book by Yuk Hui that morphed into an acceleration general. one of YH's books has the subtitle 'On Cosmotechnics,' which became Cosmotech, for a catch-all term to talk about cyberpunk, mysticism, Whitehead and other stuff. if you think of Yul Hui's book as being an elegant rifle, Cosmotech would be like the sawed-off shotgun one would have if you hacked off the barrel. with more or less the same effect. my brain kind of prefers looser definitions of things so that i can leap all over the place and make weird, elliptical connections between things. i'm not so much into Discordianism: mostly i'm interested in the story of Marxism from Hegel to Land, with other various detours and side-trips along the way; i was partial to calling the schizophrenic and paranoid nature of this misadventure the Wild Ride.

warrants mentioning that there's kind of a post-/acc sensibility too, which is why u/acc stuff isn't really talked about too much. it is both too soon and too late to start a new ideology or a new orthodoxy in that sense. the world has plenty of these already. personally, i think this is a good time to go back and poke through the ruins of things again and sort of fall in love with mad science and scavenging, but that's just me.

the OPs of the later generals were also front-loaded with all kinds of links and /acc goodness too, you can check those out if you like. i haven't walked back everything i schizo-rambled about in those threads, i just had to take a break for a bit and do something different. otherwise not much has changed.

>>/lit/thread/S12056787

>>12595509
also this

[Anonymous No.12596390]

>>12596276
one other thing. SC Hickman, who has written lots of excellent pieces on Land, Negarestani, Zizek, D&G and other stuff on his blog, and who is as fucked-out and miserable as anyone about things, made an interesting turn recently and linked to a book (a book series, really) i had never heard of before: Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment series.

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/

when i'm finished my recent re-read of old Lacan/Baudrillard stuff i might start looking into this. re-Enlightenment doesn't seem like a crazy idea to me. if acceleration is the end of the line for Marxism - and even then, once we get into Woke Capital, and things that make Land grind his teeth - or even if, as some suggest, the world is trending simultaneously towards anarchy and a kind of Sense and Sensibility redux...how about the Enlightenment?

part of the tragicomedy of all of this philosophy is that it feels to me like a repeat of the Wars of Religion, this time fought over progressivism than Luther, but with much the same degree of animus and zeal. the worst part of it would be Capital winning and saying, 'See? we were right all along. you guys should have just concentrated on money from the start, and then we wouldn't have to clean up your mess...' or the victorious robots being asked, by the battered survivors. 'so, was it all worth it or not?' and the robots saying: 'sorry, i can't help you with that question.' these kinds of things really do not sit well with me...all of this destruction done in the name of revolution, wars that cannot distinguish their idealistic and materialistic aspects, and ending not even with the End, but with a terrible repeat of all that came before, knowing that after tragedy is farce and then a third go-round, with an ever-more persuaded Davos elite saying, Never Again - we will absolutely not permit any of this humanist garbage. you guys fucked up the world! and the rejoinder: us? we didn't fuck it up, you guys are doing the same things you always do...

these are my own grim and bleak speculations. i don't know if they're true or not, they're just weird niggling possibilities that come with the prospects of the world being turned into steam again (or perhaps we should say, Cloud). so who knows, maybe the Enlightenment will seem appealing again - with a twist. ofc much of the 18C sensibility is demolished by Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Darwin, critical theory, all of this...but i guess my own question is, is there an end to the demolishing? Land has already theorized the endgame of capital as teleoplexy, as BTC and other things - and i know, those things aren't necessarily a given. it is possible that libertarian fantasies will engender their own revolutions as much as earlier periods in history also did. but political revolution doesn't imply an ending to philosophical confusion...

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12596444]

>>12596390
Land has tweeted about this one in the past, he's a big fan. i haven't read it myself, so i can't comment on it, but it's interesting that cyberpunk-ish writers (or at least writers who are capable of writing really good cyberpunk, as well as other things, which is even better!) don't always just end with cyberpunk alone, and the rain-slicked streets of Neo-Tokyo. Stephenson, Gibson, Sterling, PKD, lots of other guys can write cyberpunk and sci-fi. and there's Ballard, Liu...Banks also. i'd obviously prefer an outcome like the Culture to any horrible dystopia, but it's possible that we don't get to anything like a world of that kind without crawling through the various hells of Marxism and Landian /acc stuff, Shawshank-style.

that a guy like Hickman, who is no stranger to the gloom and doom that comes from reading the long story that winds through Hegel and Marx, to D&G, Lovecraft, Negarestani, Land, all of these guys would ask himself if Enlightenment ideas and values were a good look isn't all that surprising, and kind of lights up a few Christmas bulbs in me as well. the real hell of postmodernity has always been that sense of blindness: that the blowback from absolute deconstruction (the deconstruction singularity, if you like) would be *far worse* than anyone could expect, like marching off to World War 1 and expecting it to be over by Christmas - that's always been my feeling too. and how one goes about restoring some kind of order, or maintaining balance, or anything like this - well, this is i suppose where i realize that looking to postmodernity rather than perennial philosophy was where i was in error. in perennial philosophy there *is* a unifying and underlying substrate, a kind of union where all of the esoterics and mystics are on the same page. postmodern philosophy was never there to give you (read: me) some kind of meaning or purpose or direction in life, or to say What It All Meant. that wasn't its job, any more than it is the job of one's analyst to tell you what to do about your own symptom...their job is to help you not be mastered by your own symptom, to have the power to ask questions about it, rationally, rather than it always asking questions about you, and then causing you to take out your anger, pain and grief on the world...

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12596480]

>>12596444
this is why the age of reactions (not so much Neoreactions) bothers me so much: people having arguments with each other that aren't even arguments, they're not even talking about the same things. you have one camp of people with one canon of texts, and another camp of people with another canon of texts, and neither can really take the place of the other in a philosophical sense and actually have a conversation. more recently this disease has extended to the world of the universities, where theory becomes Theory, and the ivory tower becomes totally disconnected from life elsewhere. so you get guys like Peterson - who i admire - but who has no idea what Derrida et al were on about, *as well as guys like Derrida,* who would be a great in-house philosopher of the Davos elite, and who (again, in my own fevered and crude imagination) simply cannot understand how far the project of deconstruction goes. that in turn arms dumber versions of Peterson with criticisms that aren't really criticisms, and in turn dumber disciples of Derrida et al with criticisms of Peterson that aren't really criticisms, and everybody just fucking becomes ridiculous and angry.

take Butler, for example. i don't want to hate Judith Butler, she's a great scholar. i've been reading her PhD dissertation from 1984 and her book on Hegel, and they're both unironically pretty great, they really are. they are excellent readings of excellent philosophers. but this one, GOOD GOD, i just feel like pulling my hair out. i can't quite explain it, it's just that...i don't know, it's the sense that we are fiddling while Rome burns. i feel, when i read this stuff, *very crude,* and even barbaric, like a big stupid angry instrument and a blockhead. maybe i'm not built or wired for theory, in a sense...i like it, and i like reading about it, but i get this terrible feeling sometimes of having been led into a trap, going - okay, but...what about the rest of the world? what about capital and machines and robots?

i get very very frustrated with it all. mostly because i realize my own frustrations *as* frustrations, and maybe that there is really nobody to take these frustrations out *on* - but also the weird sense of not being able to live with them. i Just Get Mad. and it compounds when i think lots of other people Just Get Mad also, because they are perhaps expecting someone, somewhere, to have the answers, to not be hiding anything from them, or maybe in the wish for there to be some kind of conspiracy, when the terrible fact is that there isn't one, and this is really perhaps the best work to be done in the universities, not to answer impossible questions...

it's that sense of just being quietly anaesthetized and left twisting in the wind, ugh. obviously i am a pseud on a yak-milking forum myself and not an intellectual or a philosopher of any kind, i just sometimes feel reminded of the same largely impotent anger i used to feel before i read any of this shit.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12596548]

>>12596480
so maybe i'm going to wrap up another Lacan thing and move on to the Enlightenment for a bit, we'll see. i kind of like the idea of that. Heidegger is a giant and the 'overturning' of Descartes, Plato, all of this is a necessary thing. D&G also, obviously.

but i think there is something in what Hickman was thinking, perhaps. when you get to that point that the future has just been totally cancelled by capital, Landian teleoplexy, and other things that follow from this, like unironically thinking 'you know, i think Jared Taylor is on to something here' - that tells me it is time to take a different kind of adventure, and go back to the roots again. two hundred years later of Revolution and Marx and Machines and every molecule of fascism and socialism later...maybe the Enlightenment would be a good scene. Deleuze wound up concluding on the Baroque, it doesn't seem all that crazy.

what irks me of course are people who are going to say, 'well, obviously, that's what we should have been doing all along!' blah blah, without actually understanding the reasons why the Enlightenment project was torpedoed in the first place - that is, by the great Masters - Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and all of their later interpreters - Kojeve, Bataille, Schmitt, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, D&G, Derrida, Land, whoever else...all of whom, i am faintly embarrassed to say, i have spent time reading, such that now i resemble nothing more than a broken and dysfunctional jukebox somewhere in the post-apocalyptic world that never plays any of them as well as you would like.

but Girard holds up well. and so does Clauswitz. and it's not like an endgame in which one unironically champions the Enlightenment wouldn't have more than a little irony in it either: after all, in some battered sense, that is - at least, in principle - what we have now. it's why i was saying about Land's magician's trick earlier: BTC and Artificial Synthetic Kantian Time is really just a highly nuanced argument for exactly the status quo that we have today, filtered through the nine strata of hell that are industrial capitalism...'and now, we're back.'

maybe someday in the year 2050 Old Ben Shapiro will give an hour of time to a crusty and deranged homeless smelly werewolf-being in a hazmat suit. he leads with 'and now, because it is a slow week, we have time for this random dickbag - so, what do you think about the new Alexa-AI?' and i'll say, 'Ben, i'll tell you something, it's fucking great,' and i'll just light myself on fire and try and conduct the rest of the interview while everyone looks for the smoke alarm.

sorry, these posts contained nothing about Whitehead.

[Anonymous No.12596662]

>>12596548
what an interesting world we would live in if we could re-do the Enlightenment, Enlightened by our present understanding: namely that, one way or another, by hook or by crook, tyrants always get the ax. this much you will get from Bataille, and other theorists of sacrifice, that being to my mind the fundamental cognitive leap made by the deep-dive into the Marxist project: that there is no value without sacrifice, without loss and catastrophe, without surplus and excess reconciled back into the theological order.

the Enlightenment - he says, having virtually no authority on this subject - is brought to an end by an age of romance and revolution which *it had never before seen.* there was no *allegory* for Marx, or for *machines* in the way that they would be used in the 20C. there was no Hegel. you can imagine how truly catastrophic it would have been to actually see the heads of monarchs being chopped off and the guillotine doing its work in the streets. it would have been like seeing WW1 take place - are we really doing this? for real? this is happening? what comes *after* this? do we even know? it took no less a virtuoso than Nietzsche, much later on, to really put the fine point on this:

>How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?

we live in a world today in which we shit on the Enlightenment almost *reflexively.* continental theory is intoxicating stuff like that. but again tho, i don't know what comes after that. it's why i wanted to talk about ruination and post-apoc stuff earlier...maybe nothing, maybe only repetition. Land thinks NRx is dead, i don't know if i really want to try and resurrect it or anything, just that...well, i don't know. on some days the wasteland in which i live seems to call for a different approach. a kind of live and let-live philosophy always compromised and complicated by capital and politics, but basically wind up bringing out the worst in people, myself included. Melville knew the deal, i think.

something else seems called for.

[Anonymous No.12596760]

>>12595509
also that i wish to say that it is not, in fact, a complete waste of mental effort. it is just what mental effort looks like, and he carved out of suffering, depression, and schizoid breaks. it's also a pretty harmless philosophy based on kindness and wonder and open-ended questions. which is more than i can say for most ideologies on tap today.

don't be mean. there's very little in Space Taoism that takes anything off the table, or prevents you from cheerfully losing yourself in a never-ending, kaleidoscopic labyrinth of thought...which, for all we know, is exactly what thought is. i think it's a pretty awesome point of departure for all kinds of questions, personally; why nihilism? why depression, why the lack? why not a ridiculous, and fundamentally optimistic, superabundance of options?

i'm crusty and angry and resentful myself, and very little is likely to ever change that. i'm okay with being a cloaked mutant who lives under a bridge in a rag-and-bone shop, who sells curios and cursed relics from another time and another place. but i think Aminom is a pretty cool guy, and he certainly isn't cynical. open-source Whiteheadian autonym-hacking seems like an entirely fine way to spend one's days, and if he wants to brew up Pancreativist elixirs that make your head explode, that is a thing that i would want to sell in my little antique shop also.

so +1 for Pancreativism, and Fuck Yeah Space Taoism too.

[Anonymous No.12597332]

>>12586127
here you go, here's a better meme.

[Anonymous No.12597337]

>>12597332
i'll do another one. tell your friends

[Anonymous No.12597342]

>>12568650
Can somebody create a mandatory reading list for this general please?

[Anonymous No.12597352]

>>12597337
not literally literally me, but "literally me"

[Anonymous No.12597377]

>>12597342
such a thing would be impossible but you can see my own reading list and notes if you like. check the OP of the warosu link i posted above >>12596276. there's plenty in there to keep you busy - a mega, articles, PDFs, my own /acc list, other stuff.

don't take it too seriously.

[Anonymous No.12597384]

i will continue to bump with poetry
here is wordsworth's mutability:
From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.
again, compare the tone and the choice of imagery to shelley's above
both to shakespeare
the movement is from immediacy of feeling *with* the images that occur, to a reflection upon, that is to say an intellectualization of, the natural subject as discovered

[Anonymous No.12597405]

>>12577543
i roll with the goofy Eye Spies. here's one for Aminom, maybe he'll like this.

[Anonymous No.12597743]

this one is probably closer to the sympathies of most posters here
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

[Anonymous No.12597820]

>>12597743
proteus/Some Mad Wizard > Cthulhu

[Anonymous No.12598492]

i wonder, though, if it would not be best to let this thread die, so another might be born, and with renewed vigor.
i miss schizojak.

[Anonymous No.12598498]

>>12598492
i'm fine with this.

[Anonymous No.12598512]

>>12598492
>>12598498
see you in the next crypto-haunted version of this, then...

[Anonymous No.12598533]

>>12598498
>>12598512
maybe the temple of time is more appropriate tho.

until the next thread based schizogents.

[Anonymous No.12598711]

Why can't proponents of "Space Taoism" seem to be able to define "Space Taoism" in anything less than 30,000 words scattered over 10+ disparate archived threads?

[Anonymous No.12598732]

>>12598711
Because it's a buzzword to weed out brainlets.

[Anonymous No.12598751]

>>12598711
How about you read -
>>12596276

[Anonymous No.12598888]

>>12598711
Space Taoism was created by a shadowy group of full time /lit/ shitposters deep within a lab in Indochina. Designed to contain schizos who like to pretend they are smart to a single thread, the initiative has not been successful in it's aim. Instead, the school of thought has had the unitended consequence of making this board approximately 3x worse than it was before.

[Anonymous No.12598896]

Why was cosmotechnics removed from the name?

[Anonymous No.12598897]

>>12598888
we are trying to crash this thread
and yet you keep bumping it

[Anonymous No.12598898]

>>12598888
Look at the catalog right now and tell me how many of the shitty threads are the fault of space taoism posters or shizo posters

[Anonymous No.12598908]

>>12598898
I'll admit its gotten a bit better recently, but not too long ago there were like 3 or 4 Whitehead threads with the same picture of Process and Reality going at a time

[Anonymous No.12598983]

>>12598908
that was a spammer trying to agitate sentiments against the subject

[Anonymous No.12598986]

>>12598983
Ah well good on em

[Anonymous No.12599211]

>>12598896
Cosmotech was a fun little micro-meme that percolated for a few months, since Yuk Hui wasn't really an /acc writer, but it led into a rather more enthusiastic reading of a whole gallery of interesting guys. and going slightly nutty with Whitehead complicates ultra-hardcore Landian stuff too. a guy who likes /acc stuff (me) crossed paths with a guy who likes Whitehead and Discordianism (AM) and Something Strange Happened. there never was a formal (or, for that matter, an informal) committee meeting about any of it. now it's a way of talking about Whitehead and Land and Deleuze and whoever the fuck else in an other-than-slit-your-wrists kind of way. Space Taoism and Pancreativism are things that Aminom has put a considerable amount of time (and not only time) into. i think Cosmotech rolls off the tongue quite charmingly. these things get along quite well, it seems. and somewhere out there 5 o'clock schizo-wojak is doing his thing also. and all is well in the neurotic kingdom.

if you want to talk about Space Taoism or Pancreativism, you will probably make Aminom's day. he has put a fair amount of work into making something quite unique and interesting. clearly nothing makes me happier than schizo-rambling about disaster and failure and ruination and capitalism and continental theory and Final Fantasy 6. to what end? honestly, who gives a fuck? this thing really cannot be fucked up, largely because it is not really a thing at all, but a happy accident with a half-life.

>>12598711
see >>12598751. i will reiterate my own feeling once more: Hegel/Marx/Land form a trifecta of doom and glory. we are trapped within a time machine that functions entirely too well. my own sanity has probably already been compromised by an attempt to solve it, and i have become an undead slave to the world's worst carnival attraction. i am personally averse to telling other people what to do or say or read, but in my own experience philosophy has proven that the hype is real and makes for an adventure well and truly worth taking. my only real desire is to leave the world slightly more interesting than i found it, a task i am probably failing at miserably.

converting Landian misery into something like perversely optimistic cheerfulness would be another sub-goal, i guess. such that we did not always imagine Capital just eating our lunch, but were instead perhaps nearing something quite other than what was planned, which is how it usually goes with history.

see also >>12598732.

>>12598898
i cannot believe there are genuinely enough goofballs like us to accomplish this

>>12598983
tell them not to give up, they're doing important work.

[Anonymous No.12599304]

>>12594898
thanks again for this anon. i recognise most of what you're saying here as good pragmatic pluralism or "asymptotic" pragmatism (meaning, we're always approaching true adequacy/truly complete knowledge as a limit, but never reaching it - because every stage of our knowledge is always simultaneously given as "complete" AND problematized and revealed to be incomplete by new experiences).

what i still ultimately on't understand is how that beginning jumps to this:
>how does an electron 'experience' it's environment, for example.
>'happenings' that are infinitely related to all other 'happenings'.
and etc., with anything like apodictic certainty.

personally i lean toward a very similar metaphysics to what whitehead (and schelling and others) hold, but this leaning by itself isn't logically or scientifically rigorous. so i like whitehead and i like the idea of a process metaphysics, as (let's say) a cosmogonic myth. but i haven't seen yet how he actually derives it, with logical and scientific necessity.

this:
>the other predominant speculative schemes ... have some internal inconsistency or incoherence that cannot be reconciled with what we know
i definitely agree with, for example. i even agree that the insolubility of the hard problem of consciousness, and the inherent brokenness of simplistic dualist/nondualist schemes, point to a higher sublation of present "incomplete" knowledge, in a future, more (pragmatically, dialectically) "complete" knowledge, AND that we are being driven to attain to this higher knowledge by our frustrations at its current insufficiencies. that's all good pragmatism to me, and i'm perfectly happy to consider all kinds of wacky neoplatonist, emanationist, panpsychist, idealist, etc. metaphysical schemes.

what i still don't understand is how and why whitehead's scheme in particular is justified. it seems to me like the aporia he points out in our present solutions should lead us to a radical openness and willingness to re-think, all that good stuff, NOT the suggestion of an almost-complete, entirely new metaphysical schema?

how do you go from "haecklian monism and epiphenomenal eliminativist materialism don't do justice to the ontological status of subjective experience or the phenomenological experience of free will" to "THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF STRINGS WITH 8 POTENTIAL INTER-MODAL STRING COMBINATIONAL POSSIBILITIES AND FURTHERMORE ..." etc.

again, it HAPPENS that i'm open to process at the cosmogonic-mythological level, but that's different from believing it's rigorously, provably, metaphysically true. is the devil just in the details? just read P&R and see if i agree that whitehead's architectonic is adequate to experimental data in the hard sciences combined with open questions about the nature of consciousness, vitalism, etc.? there is no "hinge" moment where he provides a peculiarly plausible justification for why electrons et al. ought to be considered as little demi-mental happenings?

[Anonymous No.12599312]

>>12594980
>>12594982
>>12594983
>>12594985
>>12594990
>>12594995
oops, just noticed these were in reply to me and will read them.

[Anonymous No.12600075]

>>12599304
i would like to respond to this but i'm at work, so i'll just bump the thread (sorry everybody) for when i get home

[Anonymous No.12600123]

>>12598711
The Space-Tao that can be named is not the real Space-Tao

[Anonymous No.12600336]

>>12594691
I read Exiting the Vampire's Castle, and I didn't find anything new in there that I didn't know. So, the Left has been reduced to Puritan Moralism and the unwitting playthings of Capital, who plug their ears whenever someone tries to tell them that they lost their way. Yeah, and? Does Mark Fisher has any other ideas which I might find interesting, or is this the height of his insights?

[Anonymous No.12600353]

>>12600336
how I imagine right wingers reading Fisher

[Anonymous No.12600375]

>>12600353
I admit, what I've read in the essay I've already heard second or third hand, and if I were still a basic bitch neocon, I would've thought of it much more highly

[Anonymous No.12600391]

>>12600375
neoconservatives are just real politik liberals that love israel and blowin' up brown folks

[Anonymous No.12600411]

>>12600336
>So, the Left has been reduced to Puritan Moralism and the unwitting playthings of Capital, who plug their ears whenever someone tries to tell them that they lost their way. Yeah, and?
i mean, that 'and' is kind of a thing tho. what's after puritanical moralism? exactly. apparently the answer these days is, more puritanical moralism, to infinity and beyond. lingering on that 'and' is the beginning of a great adventure. i suspect that for some they will find themselves wanting to do a hard right turn...

Justin Murphy actually wrote a pretty good piece about this a while ago, about the need for the left to take acceleration seriously. he's now looking for a new job, apparently.

https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/04/11/on-turning-left-into-darkness/

>Does Mark Fisher has any other ideas which I might find interesting, or is this the height of his insights?
there are probably bigger Fisher fans on the board here than me tho who can direct you to some more and other stuff by him, blogs and conversations he had with Land et al during his decade of relative absence in the 2000s. in my own experience when you find philosophers you really like there's a kind of a synergy, you basically just want to hang out with them and read pretty much everything they have to say. if he's not lighting you up, my suggestion would just be to move on to something (or someone) that does, and if you want to come back and re-read his stuff again later, do it then. that's always been my approach.
>don't forget to tell them that you are a mutant fuckup schizoposter
>they know this already inner self

he's still got a cool Twitter account tho.
https://twitter.com/k_punk_unlife

i don't know, i just think the world would be in a better place if he was still around, i think, to have conversations and write essays that matter and...do the things that authors like that do. Zizek said that he got through bouts of depression by just starting on another book. i think that makes a lot of sense, really...or even Harman, saying that you don't write a book because you know something, you write one in order to learn something about something. the book comes out of that process.

i don't know what life is like when you have the kinds of depression that he had, i think he was a lot more sensitive than most. you kind of have to be, i think, to write theory like he wrote it. but if it's not blowing your hair back at the moment, just move on to someone or something that is. there's no need to obsess over writers who aren't making it worth your while or just completely crushing it for you. that's my sense. just go where the butterflies in your stomach tell you to go, they know what they're doing.

[Anonymous No.12600480]

>>12600336
http://k-punk.org/we-dogmatists/

This is an excellent article, a one-two punch. As usual, he's wrong as shit, but in an interesting and straightforward way.

[Anonymous No.12600543]

>>12600391
Yep, that's more or less what I meant when I said basic bitch neocon.
>>12600411
>>12600480
Thank you, I'll give these a shot.
>>12600411
Btw, have you read anything by Wolfgang Smith? He's a more scientific type of Traditionalist who was influenced by Whitehead.

[Anonymous No.12600598]

>>12600543
>Btw, have you read anything by Wolfgang Smith? He's a more scientific type of Traditionalist who was influenced by Whitehead.
i have actually, i learned about him on /lit/. iirc i was super-excited when i learned about it and i think i read a little of it but maybe wasn't as blown away as i thought i would be. i don't think i read it too seriously, perhaps. kind of the same thing with Ervin Laszlo. brilliant guys with some outrageously awesome mystical stuff going on too, but...i don't know, sometimes i'm really into it and sometimes not. and i read and enjoy lots of other new agey/futurist types also, Wilber or Barbara Marx Hubbard or Teilhard de Chardin - people more Out There than Wolfgang Smith. Fritjof Capra seems pretty respectable.

Traditionalist Whiteheadians with a feeling for science tho is a pretty unironically great combination all around tho, can't really find a flaw there. Deleuze asks for exactly this in WiP, art/science/philosophy getting together for the party that never stops. i have no physics, science, or math brain whatsoever, it was unironically philosophy that kept requiring me to keep looking further and further afield to figure out...whatever the fuck it is that i seem to be preoccupied with. but it's all cool as balls, honestly.

Bateson's another one, a very cool sciencey-type guy who nevertheless scratches the continental itches also. he's neat too.

[Anonymous No.12601489]

bump

[Anonymous No.12601896]

Have any of you guys read Russell's stuff? That fool is a straight up Satanist! How can you try to develop this philosophy when Whitehead was the teacher of this devil worshiper. If everything is process then why does it matter if all whites die? That would just be another process bro.

[Anonymous No.12602266]

>>12601896
>If everything is process then why does it matter if all whites die? That would just be another process bro.
i want to frame this post and put it on a plaque on my wall and refer to it every time i need a reminder that

a) /lit/ is the greatest board on planet Earth, and
b) posters here ironically BTFO the most pernicious problems in continental theory with facts and logic

you did it Costanza-non. you closed the loop. you uncovered the missing link and put the entire 20C on notice. you are a true hero. it was all worth it.

>If everything is process then why does it matter if all whites die?
it's like poetry for the most perverse and damaged part of my soul, the part that feels childlike love and innocence. it was all so simple, the answers were right there in front of me, the entire time, and i couldn't see them. you need to write a dissertation or something using this idea as your thesis, and working backwards to the Big Bang as well as to the heat death of the universe. you can make Whitehead a household name on this and re-write the unspoken rules of the socius overnight. you're on to something here.

what am i supposed to do with myself now anon? how can i look at the news in the same way? with a single question, you replaced postmodernity with existential mysticism and process-theological mortality. you have seeded my mind with this possibility: the Whites May Die. but it doesn't even stop there, right? because if *that's* the case, then...it's possible that Wakanda not Forever also. there is a dangerous, seductive possibility in all of this, that the absolute foundations upon which our world is built - the primacy and incontrovertible rock-solidity of race over everything...might be spook. i can barely contain myself when i think what would happen if we applied this logic to gender, it gives me panic attacks. if everything is process, Woke people like us are basically fucking doomed. but now that you've put this idea in my head i can't stop thinking about it. can you imagine a world *without* racial identity? where process metaphysics...just fucking made it all irrelevant? imagine if whiteness alone was *not* a direct hotline to the divine Logos. what if racial sensitivity and awareness *wasn't enough?* can you imagine if the universe was just...indifferent?

can you imagine a god so cruel as to create a universe where race wasn't everything? it's almost unbearable.

you need to start writing that book ASAP. and please don't deviate from this theme. if you need any advice or suggestions i'll be right here, nervously fapping.

>If everything is process then why does it matter if all whites die?
this day i have heard words divine. they seem as if they were spoken by Zeus himself.

[Anonymous No.12602374]

>>12602266
God is being and the world was in being, but man's free will lead to death and corruption.
So, God became man so man could become God without losing his human being.
You must find the energies of God which are separate from his nature.

[Anonymous No.12602427]

>>12602374
to me God is indistinguishable from the truth and the truth is completely unbearable and totally shattering. it is enough to be civilized and kind to each other and to not simultaneously love and fear the worst in each other until we rip each other to pieces for our ill-formed hopes and dreams and fantasies.

>You must find the energies of God which are separate from his nature.
what did he mean by this tho

[Anonymous No.12602908]

>>12602427
The doctrine of the energies, ineffably distinct from the essence, is the dogmatic basis of the real character of all mystical experience. God, who is inaccessible in His essence, is present in His energies 'as in a mirror,' remaining invisible in that which He is; 'in the same way we are able to see our faces, themselves invisible to us in a glass,'

http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/lossky_essences.html

[Anonymous No.12602949]

>>12602908
this is the kind of simulation i can get behind! based af anon. the mystics will beat the post-structuralists at their own game yet, fufu.

even if it doesn't end with conversion, i like very much a theological turn from Planet Scapegoat one way or another. Lacan is dope but ideology is gahbage. the world is basically choking under its own fantasies, perhaps from having nothing else to desire but itself anymore...and what horrible little shits we reveal ourselves to be when given everything, when what we really wanted was the guilt...all i really want to do is a kind of irritating gadfly and scourge anyways, which is a relief after all of this pretentiousness.

i often wake up in a horrible mood and yet /lit/ keeps being the most interesting place anywhere. the world is a cool place and you guys are all right.

[Anonymous No.12603047]

>>12599304
i hope the sections from the encyclopedia article i posted were helpful. i, however, have been having some difficulty forming what i believe would be a satisfactory answer to your post. in the end, i think you are asking of whitehead more than he is capable or even interested in providing.
here is a brief passage from modes of thought, whitehead's final publication, and what first got me into him:
>“[P[hilosophy, in any proper sense of the term, cannot be proved. For proof is based upon abstraction. Philosophy is either self-evident, or it is not philosophy. The attempt of any philosophic discourse should be to produce self-evidence. Of course it is impossible to achieve any such aim. But, nonetheless, all influence in philosophy is a sign of that imperfection which clings to all human endeavor. The aim of philosophy is sheer discourse.”
as in the previous post, the 'justification' of speculative philosophy is in its internal coherence, its logical form, and in its adequacy and applicability in interpretation.
process and reality is a rigorously coherent work, but it is not easy to demonstrate this with a few sentences, or even several pages. the throughlines are many, complexly interwoven, and require leaps of imagination to grasp, and this frustrates all attempts at summation.you kinda just have to read the thing and see this for yourself. whitehead's is a totally non-foundationalist approach; there is no key passage that will unlock the door to the whole. there are crucial doctrinal components that must hold for the sake of internal coherence--but these are not easily explicated without a general sense of the whole. and even on these points whitehead is shockingly cavalier. this is from the chapter on measurement, from the section on the extensive continuum. the importance of this section for whitehead's system cannot be overstated. solving the 'problem' of space and measurement was one of the most pressing motivations for developing these arguments:
>This theory of the derivation of the basic uniformity requisite for congruence, and thence for measurement, should be compared with that of two deeply interesting articles: (i) "The Theory of Relativity and the First Principles of Scence," and (ii) "The Macroscopic Atomic Theory," Journal of Philosophy, Vol XXV, by Professor F.S.C. Northrop of Yale. I cannot adjust his doctrine of a 'macroscopic atom' to my cosmological outlook. Nor does this notion seem necessary if my doctrine of 'microscopic atomic occasions' be accepted. But Professor Northrop's theory does seem to be the only alternative if this doctrine is abandoned. I regret that the articles did not come under my notice till this work had been finally revised for publication.
the purpose of philosophy is to generate and motivate creative thinking. speculative philosophy ('metaphysics') is just this creative thinking at its most general; a way of organizing the most abstract thought that it be adequate to experience.

[Anonymous No.12604275]

What do you guys think about this?
https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/

I hate to go all creepy with contrarian optimism, but I can see one amazing upside to the possibility of the internet and media soon being flooded with algorithmically generated vacuousness: people's default noise filter for unreasoned, illogical thinking is going to be forced to be set A LOT higher.
In other words: feels over reals is about to become even more of a disability than it already is.

[Anonymous No.12604546]

>>12604275
Land just tweeted something similar in this vein the other day too.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction

what happens when we can't tell if the news we are reading is 'more real' or 'less real' because it is being written by an AI? does it even matter?

[Anonymous No.12604626]

>>12604275
>>12604546
combine algorithmic news with the Chinese AI anchor too for the full Automatic Planet effect too, guess.

i don't know. i *do* think there is an exceptionally good science fiction/cyberpunk story or film to be written about it all tho, or a work of philosophy, or something in that vein. something that combines the Matrix, Dune and Blade Runner, that incorporates Land and Baudrillard and all of these guys into a kind of epic about the world we live in today. as fucked out as it all is, the fact that we are watching everything become automated...

...it's the prequel to the Matrix i really want to see, like a much darker version of the Truman Show or whatever, in which the show never really stops. how the Matrix *got built,* how we began to automate all of this stuff, the return of Marx's ghost in this weird and eerie way, how postmodernity and irony wired us for this bizarre future where nobody is control and yet everybody is in control...

this was kind of an underrated film, but something in this vein. maybe i should go back and watch it again tho before i fall in love with it. something appropriately dark and gritty about how we wound up building and becoming exactly the kinds of Borg figures we thought we were supposed to be destroying. wouldn't that be fucking cool? i think this would be cool. how the Matrix itself is inescapable, but that's kind of the point. once you know it is inescapable, you stop trying to Smash the Machines (or letting the Machines go unsmashed...)

somebody on /lit/ will write this someday, i hope.

[Anonymous No.12604652]

>>12604546
Maybe this will be the tool that lets people stop caring so much about keeping up with current events.

Let the bots write the news, let the bots react to the news, and let the bots debate the news, so that we don't have to.

[Anonymous No.12604670]

>>12604626
like Dwarf Fortress, i guess, except instead of the Fun That Lies Beneath, it's the AI singularity that lies ahead, that we keep fucking fumbling ever-closer to the more we try and break from it. we are like dwarves, in a way, except instead of losing our minds over Gold!!1! or The Arkenstone or whatever glowy thing you see in Marvel movies, it's the allure of the perpetual motion machine, the perfect servent, Total Knowing, CTRL...

CTRL is our metaphysics today, i think. moreso than the Marxist or Heideggerian metaphysics of production by far. and yet what does it always suck us towards but the tragicomic-fatal encounter with ourselves? this is exactly how /acc works these days, the sense of bringing on a disaster and yet really not wanting to be there when it happens. i can imagine also a nice opening scene in which some fortunate and forward-thinking billionaire in a custom vault deep below the earth realizes that his feed to the death ray that protects him and his family in their Vivos shelter suddenly gets hacked, and the Mad Max types from the world above obtain access to Level 1...

i guess Elysium already was the film for this too, i suppose. a lot of those stories and themes were told there in that world. but i don't really just want to see spectacle, i think there's so much in this material that a TV series might be better, or whatever. i'm always tempted to think in terms of the giant, stupid Epic Blockbuster, but maybe if someone was more patient than me they could make a really good story with it...

>>12604652
>Let the bots write the news, let the bots react to the news, and let the bots debate the news, so that we don't have to.
you're still going to have to deal with the NPCs who are fed by this stream, tho. disappointingly it will probably remain the case that there will have to be writers writing tortuous thinkpieces that nobody reads about why the British Botcasting Corporation or w/ev is not going to be a good idea. somebody, in other words, is going to have to be JBP for the AI version of Cathy Newman. might as well start gearing up for it now if it's not going to go away.

[Anonymous No.12604675]

>>12604652
That's what I already do desu. Libs as envisioned by libs are already data blips.

[Anonymous No.12604681]

>>12604652
>t.

[Anonymous No.12604699]

>>12604670
>you're still going to have to deal with the NPCs who are fed by this stream, tho.
They're the ones that are dooming themselves to compete with the bots in the economy of takes.
Think about how little influence the average armchair twitter pundit already has. Put them in competition with millions of bots, even if they write barely above the level of someone with mental retardation, and their influence goes from minuscule to infinitesimal.

[Anonymous No.12604720]

>>12604670
Elysium was good because it showed how the post-apoc and the NRx fantasy worlds could exist side-by-side, and even basically enabled each other and caused each other to come into being. as awesome as Star Wars is, there were a lot of questions that it ultimately couldn't ask - such as, for example, how you would ever find an insurance company to underwrite the Death Stars that keep getting blown up, or whether or not disaffected Stormtroopers might decide to walk on the Empire because they don't like how the Sith do things and Force-chokes are Not An Argument.
>even if you would love to see Molyneux get Force-choked
>and also have the lingering suspicion that it faintly arouses him
>and some Royal Guard removes her helmet and holy shit, it's Lauren Southern
>and they fall in love and it is super cringe
>anyways

remove the Force and suddenly science fiction of that kind gets a lot more (or less, if you like a Molyneux/Southern love story with mild BDSM overtones set in the Empire) interesting. but there is room for a really kick-ass sci-fi epic about this stuff that doesn't patronize the audience. the old GITS ruled and the new GITS sucked. old Akira is a classic. Matrix 1 was dope and the others sucked. i don't know what else is in this category, Black Mirror is cool too i guess. Snowpiercer was appropriately grim.

cyberpunk stuff just asks all the right questions for me and i can't believe we don't have more of it. i'll take Whitehead as Not Yoda, Young Nick Land as a fucking drug-addled Han Solo + Bandersnach Colin genius, whatever else. this would be so great. Peter Thiel as Ozymandias from the Watchmen.
>take your meds fuckface penis-eyes &c &c
>ok ok

>>12604699
>They're the ones that are dooming themselves to compete with the bots in the economy of takes.
true

[Anonymous No.12604745]

>>12604720
perhaps relevant to your interests if you like musing on these kinds of things, plus free samurai qts also.

https://jacobitemag.com/2019/02/04/on-the-genealogy-of-cryptocurrency/

[Anonymous No.12604768]

>>12604745
and Uncle Nick, continuing to knit his own purple sweater, goes on being his usual coldly brilliant self:

>§5.641 — At the greatest scale of historical analysis, Macro is characterized by the way it places itself beyond the bourgeois definition of civilization. Among modernity’s ascendant prudential classes, high time-preference (or low impulse-control) served as distinctive markers of barbarism. Civilization thus acquired a measure, corresponding to a time-horizon. Industrial civilization was based upon psychological tolerance for efficient indirect methods. Roundabout production had secured its ethic. Macro breaks with all of this. Imprudence is now re-valorized on Keynesian grounds as pro-social stimulation. To spend is glorious. Anti-bourgeois cultural politics and administrative economic doctrine become one.

as for the wallpaper, i always associated the ethos of this game with the cheeriest possible version of Land that i can imagine: Kantian Space Enlightenment, and a universe in which he is not required to be as unhappy as he is and to have done the kinds of things that he did do so that the world could know interstellar autonomy and something other than industrial hellscape. Space is cold and unforgiving and yet it is also free.

or you could just change FTL to BTC i suppose and have the same thing. either way. i just seem to enjoy perversely imagining worlds other than this one.
>you mean pataphysics you insufferable dope
>yes thank you inner self
>np fucktard

[Anonymous No.12604836]

>>12604768
he's saying, basically, that killing capitalism as this point is as close to a mortal sin as his own brand of Kantian continental theory is capable of naming. but therein lies the rub also - what makes people *want* to go to space, anyways? he's got the world's most brilliant analysis of Marx in the 21C, but nobody can fucking handle the guilt that comes with it. that's why race and gender and identity politics work - tragically, and horribly. because we are fucking drowning in guilt.

this was such an excellent film, good googly moogly. it's all there, all the existential questioning and the rest, sans space exploration. but what is it about space? is it a Western thing? why is psychology not enough? why is it that we feel so fucked-out if we're not Exploring Space, like without space exploration everything else is pointless? why do we hate the Earth? is it because we hate ourselves? other people? history? the Europeans crossed the oceans in the past and things fell into mercantile racketeering fast enough, they didn't seem to be so stupefyingly blown away by the whole thing that they collapsed into poetry. most of those explorations were miserable anyways, and more miserable for the poor bastards that were there when they landed.

what's up with space?
>god i hate you so much
>why tho
>meh i don't know. i just do. it just feels right. you know? it's like falling in love, but falling in hate. i have found a soul mate for hate and it is you
>that's so weird inner self
>so wrong and yet so right

[Anonymous No.12605459]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12605479]

When I read threads like this, all I feel like I'm presented with is is just giant walls of psycho-babble and what is to me just a strange and ill-informed way of coping with modernity.

Can someone please explain to me in simple terms just what the fuck is going on here? Am I really that much of a brainlet to not understand? What's the "end goal" of all this? What genuine, hopefully vision for the future lies within these posts? Is there even one?

[Anonymous No.12605581]

>>12605479
>When I read threads like this, all I feel like I'm presented with is is just giant walls of psycho-babble and what is to me just a strange and ill-informed way of coping with modernity.
as the author of many of those giant walls, i can tell you that your initial suspicions are not wrong, and that at least in my own case they are indeed exactly that: strange and ill-informed ways of coping with modernity. that is absolutely what they are. not much more. i have weird hang-ups and questions and fixations and i schizo-ramble about them here, like a yard sale from hell.

>Can someone please explain to me in simple terms just what the fuck is going on here?
cannot into capitalism and modernity. postmodernity isn't working either. schizoanalysis reveals terminal normiecore boring centrism.

>Am I really that much of a brainlet to not understand?
absolutely not. you can read some of these authors too if you like, but don't feel bad if the hysterical rantings of one fucked-up midwit in over his head (me) are difficult to read. this is not Serious Philosophy, that you can find elsewhere.

my advice is to just skip past my posts, they're basically advertisements for loneliness and paranoia. think of them like procedurally generated trash mobs in a haunted carnival. they are there and they have reasons for being there, but they are so many low-level encounters on your way to illumination.

granted, that's mostly about me. some of the other anons here have quite interesting things to say about Whitehead, for instance. but my stuff is complete psychobabble. do not take me seriously or pound your head against any walls.

>What genuine, hopefully vision for the future lies within these posts?
kindness, bewilderment, emptiness, disappearing from this place

>Is there even one?
see above

i recommend you ignore my posts and read the philosophers you like.

[Anonymous No.12605673]

>>12605581
Well, uh, thanks for being honest I guess, and explaining what's going on here. I'll just filter these threads from now on then.

>schizoanalysis
made me chuckle

[Anonymous No.12605706]

>>12605673
come back when you want to talk about Land and Whitehead and the Great Tao tho.

>made me chuckle
technically schizoanalysis is a thing and Deleuze was not a meme. whether or not the unconscious is structured like a capitalist political economy, now, that's another question...

warrants mentioning: i actually don't recommend you filter the whole thread or future threads, as there are actually quite a lot of interesting things to read in them, i find. just ignore my own pathological contributions.

[Anonymous No.12605750]

>>12605673
don't listen to his lies.

That is true though that self-identifying as a pseud gives you some extremely useful liberties. You can fit through cracks that the big heads of intellectuals get stuck in.

[Anonymous No.12607057]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12608411]

i know i should let this die, but i have a little more i wanted to post

[Anonymous No.12608450]

>>12608411
can always start a new one too y'know

[Anonymous No.12608551]

>>12599304
here is a another passage from whitehead, this one recorded by lucien price from a conversation.
i think there is a strange psychic schism in society today, where both scientists and the public have inherited and continue to live by the assumptions of scientific principles of two centuries ago, yet go about in a world totally transformed by the explosion of these same principles at the turn of the twentieth century. for instance, a technology as commonplace as gps, which we just have constantly tracking us all day every day as we walk about with our phones in our pockets, would have been impossible to produce without an understanding of relativity.
whitehead witnessed these explosions first-hand, and understood immediately what the implications were. he isn't simply seeking a greater verisimilitude between our models and our experience of reality; he is trying to develop a system of ideas that allows for irreversible change and novelty as fundamental realities, and not just special cases.
anyway, here's whitehead:
>...when I was a young man in the University of Cambridge[,] I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside ; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses, instead of as major propositions; and all this in one life-span--the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside. And yet, in the face of that, the discoverers of the new hypotheses in science are declaring, 'Now at last, we have certitude'--when some of the assumptions which we have seen upset had endured for more than twenty centuries.'
>'...I am convinced that what philosophers should do is relate their thoughts to the needs of common life. And there is another thing they need to do. When you consider how at pains men of science are to base their hypotheses on carefully criticized assumptions--how they set up tests to control experiments--then consider how the fundamental concepts of even the greatest philosophers in the past must have been largely conditioned by the necessarily ephemeral environmental relationships in which they lived. The scandal is how unhesitatingly later thinkers have accepted their conclusions without pausing to re-examine them in terms of changed social conditions.'
so whitehead isn't merely advocating for a cautious, conservative kind of epistemological pragmatism, but a 'radical' empiricism that approaches social problems (and these include) both 'phenomenologically' and 'geneologically'. and this has to occur at every level of abstraction.
philosophy for whitehead isn't the quest for the one *true* method, and apodicticity just isn't an appropriate standard by which to judge a philosophical postulation. it is in that sense that i believe no satisfactory answer can be given to your question.

[Anonymous No.12609720]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12610878]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12611000]

we were so close.