Aesthetic Materialism

  What is the purpose of the state?  What is the purpose of government? Philosophers and political scientists have attempted to answer these questions in various ways.  Some say that its purpose is safety, or the securing of individual rights.  Still others say that government exists to represent and enact the consent and desires of the governed.  Or that its purpose is the common good of the people, which itself may be variously defined: as the "greatest good for the greatest number," as Utilitarians say, or at least the least suffering, and so on.  Some understand government in the framework of a social contract, for the mutual benefit of the governed.  The Aristotelian tradition provides a quite different answer: that humans are an organic part of their (city-)state, which exists to promote virtue and excellence.  The Constitution of the United States provides a list of potential purposes of government: "to form a more perfect Union, establish ...

  Kayla: [sobbing] Layla: Kayla! What's wrong? Kayla: I have no free will! Layla: You have no what? Kayla: Free will!  You know, I have no control over my own actions!  I'm just going to do what I'm determined to do, and there's nothing I can do about it! Layla: Lucky you!  I have the opposite problem.  No matter how determined I am to do something, it seems I can never do it. Kayla: Stop joking!  This is serious. Layla: Okay. So... what's the problem, again?  What can't you do? Kayla: Anything!   Layla: Can you jump? Kayla: Yes, I can jump. Layla: Can you swim? Kayla: Yes, I can swim. Layla: Can you clap?   Kayla: Yes, I can clap. Layla: So what can't you do? Kayla:Anything other than what I actually do! Layla: Hm.  So, if I sold you a blob of magical silly putty, with the promise that you can shape it into anything and it will work, so if you shape it into a plane, it will actually fly, and if you shape it into a tv, it will ...

20th century French philosophy's critique is not leveled at capitalism, per se, but rather at the Enlightenment.  It is therefore fundamentally reactionary.

For a while, there was a fad for searching for "the meaning of life."  Viktor Frankl wrote "Man's Search for Meaning".  He had been partly inspired by Nietzsche, who wrote that "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." But in my opinion, all this business about "meaning" is one-sided.  People do not really search for meaning - or at least, not exclusively.  What people want is recognition.  People are not purely seeking for "meaning" or "purpose," a "for which" for all of their actions.  Sure, some people are struggle to come to some kind of understanding of what the purpose of their own actions is.  You get up in the morning.  Why?  To make breakfast.  Why?  To eat breakfast.  Why?  As part of your preparation for the day.  Why?  To go to work.  Why?  To make money.  Why?  To bring home the money.  Why?  To buy things.  Why?  So that you will have things.  W...

First, consider medieval art.  Medieval artists were creating beautiful, fascinating works (painting, sculpture, stained glass, etc.) for their patrons - usually for the Church, but sometimes for a member of the nobility and so on.  These works are often extraordinary, transcendent pieces, but the artists received little if any recognition for them - or perhaps they received a different kind of recognition, one that we can scarcely begin to understand.  In any case, for many of these works, we don't even know the artist's name, or anything about them.  For some pieces, we may know more about the benefactor who commissioned the art work, but that's another story.  (The Byzantine artist Manuel Panselinos and people like him are exceptions that prove the rule, and show that Europe was transitioning to a new phase.) Then comes Renaissance art, a profoundly mysterious transitional period.  It was during the Renaissance that artists began to be credited by name f...

  It will probably cause me to lose friends all across the political spectrum when I say that the problem with Lenin was that he was too moral.  Deal with it.  Moreover, modern-day soi-disant Leninists are even more moralistic than he was - and therefore, all the more romantic and delusional, and their analyses all the more pointless. I do not mean to imply that Lenin was not responsible for the deaths of many people - he was.  Nor am I saying that Lenin did not commit enough atrocities - that he was not violent enough, not ruthless enough, too timid to accomplish his goals, or anything of the like.  No, no, no.  My point is that Lenin's ideology diverted sharply from Marx's critique of political economy, and in part this was because he tried to reinterpret Marxism into a kind of moral campaign, when Marx had intended nothing of the kind - and, by the way, Lenin's moralistic distortion of Marxian analysis was a partial cause of the mass violence of the Bol...