Aesthetic Materialism

Begging the Question   I have no problem with structuralism in general - only with a specific, narrow trend within structuralism, which became briefly popular in the 20th century.  Indeed, I would consider myself a structuralist (with a lower case "s"), or at least, in my own naive way, sympathetic to structuralism, in at least two senses: first, mathematico-ontological structuralism, pioneered, in my opinion, by Henri Poincare, and developed more famously by Paul Benacerraf (and in this I am chiefly indebted to my many conversations with the contemporary mathematician, Howard Blair); and secondly, political structuralism - that is, the insistence that the best strategy in politics is not to focus on individual people, but rather to demand nothing less than to change larger, impersonal social structures.  Both of these are called "structuralism," but neither of these are the topic of the current essay.  Instead I want to narrowly discuss the brief fad called ...

  What I would say about Jordan Peterson is that he is confused, and that, because of his attitude, it is unlikely that this confusion will soon end.  He has built very successful defenses preventing any information from getting in. "What is the meaning of life?" This is a question that philosophers have pondered for millennia.  Well, Dr. Peterson wrote a book called "Maps of Meaning."  Dr. Peterson thought that he could answer this question, and not only that, but draw little pictures - charts - maps, as he calls them, just to clear it up once and for all.   But he wasn't done there.  He ventures into all kinds of topics, about which he has no training or education at all, such as global climate change, and dares to pronounce his dictum about what should be believed about these issues - not only to the general public, but to the experts in the field.  Their evidence is worthless, compared with his passionate, emotional appeal.  I recent...

    1. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels say that the bourgeoisie has imposed "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" upon the proletariat.  In the next couple of sentences, they identify 5 specific jobs that the bourgeoisie has converted into its "paid wage laborers," i.e., proletarians.  What are these 5 specific jobs, the first - and only - examples provided for proletarians in the Manifesto? a) Factory worker, construction worker, sewer worker, coal shoveler (trimmer), tanner. b) Factory worker, peasant farmer, plumber, carpenter, electrician. c) Nurse, teacher, secretary, clerk, janitor. d) Doctor, lawyer, priest, poet, scientist. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say that the immediate aims of the communists are the same as those of all other proletarian parties.  The first of these is what? a) Formation of the proletariat into a class. b) Equality of outcomes for all people. c) Equality of wages. d) Nationalizati...

    It should be pointed out that most people are neither utilitarians nor deontologists - not really.  Most people are indeed very moral*, but only some people are primarily motivated by moral principles - and even fewer people are fundamentally motivated by a single principle, whether that principle be "Do that which brings the most pleasure to the most people," or "Do that which prevents the most pain to the most people," or "Act in such a way that you could at the same time will that the maxim of your action could be a universal law of nature," or even "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," or anything else.  (Nor, for that matter, do people generally act according to the moral principles of Ayn Rand or the Austrian economists, or anyone else.)  Sure, they tell themselves that this is what they are doing - principles like these, applied with elaborate enough complexity, are the ways that people rationalize their behavior, af...

    National sovereignty is the result of international diplomacy. It is, I emphasize, the result - not the cause.  It is remarkable how many people get this backwards.  So far as they get it backwards, they are using a romantic (ultimately religious), mythical concept of sovereignty, rather than anything based in scientific materialism.   Indeed, diplomacy, and agreements, often between very distant powers, long precede the existence of the nation state.  Nomadic humans, who often traversed territories many hundreds of miles long, often had longstanding relations with quite distant peoples.

In Zarathustra, Chapter 3, Nietzsche (through the mouth of Zarathustra) addresses the "backworldsmen" (Hinterweltlern).  This is his term for people who believe in a world beyond the world of appearances - an otherworldly realm free from the exigencies of our benighted realm.  It's clear that he is not only speaking of religious mystics and members of ancient schools such as the Pythagoreans and Platonists, but also of the ideas of many of his philosophical contemporaries.  Indeed, he starts by saying that he too was once a "backworldsman," himself - he once "cast his fancy beyond man."  He goes on to say that he remains, in a certain sense, tender and understanding towards backworldsmen, though he enjoins them to grow out of their backworldliness. Despite his remarkably perspicacious psychological insights, mostly drawn from introspection, Nietzsche himself was not totally free from self-deception.  Frankly, Nietzsche had not fully developed as far ...