Aesthetic Materialism

Romanticism should be distinguished from Romance, which is an earlier form, arising in the medieval period - fanciful stories which usually involve marvelous events.  Romanticism, as opposed to Romance, developed during the bourgeois era. Romanticism has a tangled, complex relation to bourgeois values.  Perhaps strangely, romanticism is used to justify bourgeois values, but at the same time, it transcends bourgeois values, and indeed can be defined by way of that transcendence.  Romanticism is best understood as the sublation of bourgeois values, or, as it is said in German, the Aufhebung (from the verb Aufheben ) of bourgeois values.  Aufheben is sometimes translated as "abolition," but it literally means "to lift up," and this paradoxical ambiguity is the essence of the relation we are attempting to understand here.  We can sum it up by saying that romanticism upholds bourgeois values precisely by violating them, or even by rejecting them altogether.  To...

Nationalism is the ur-romanticism.  It had several offshoots, including internationalism and individualsm, both of which are also mostly forms of romanticism. Of course, religion is even older than nationalism.  But that's a complicated story that I won't get into right now.   

Non-Cartesian Meditations "I think therefore I am"? - not quite.  After one doubts everything, there is indeed one truth remaining, but "I think therefore I am" ain't it.  It is clear that, even if everything is an illusion, nonetheless, this illusion is being perceived.  But this proves nothing that about the perceiver, or even that there is one, and not several.   To update Descartes' metaphors a bit, we could imagine that everything we're aware of is part of a simulation.  To make the metaphors a little too contemporary, we could imagine that everything is part of some kind of virtual reality game.  (I'm sure that vocabulary will sound hokey and old fashioned in a few years.)   But I want to be very clear, up front, and specify: do I think that the universe is an illusion, and we (or rather I) am merely living in a simulation?  No, I do not.  I think the universe is real.  I do not think I'm in a simulation.  All I'm sa...

 Sometimes some things are better than other things.

    Lenin was exactly wrong: rather than the crisis of imperialism (which reached its apogee in the outbreak of World War I) marking the death of capitalism, after which only "moribund" capitalism remained, the reverse was true.  The crisis of imperialism in 1914 marked the death of the proletarian movement.  Lenin was in denial about that and so he spun up a wonderful fantasy story that capitalism was about to end.  But this was pure delusion on his part.

    [Originally posted on facebook messenger, 8/15/2019] Okay... I read a bunch of stuff on the internet, and took notes. Here they are, if you’re interested.    Somewhere in the galaxy, there was, or is, intelligent life known as the “First Ancestral Race” (FAR). The FAR sent seeds, in vessels known as “moons”, to planets all across the galaxy. There were (at least) 2 types of seeds: the Fruit of Life, and the Fruit of Knowledge, and both types were never supposed to land on the same planet, for fear that the beings that arose from those seeds would be as powerful as the FAR (that is, more or less god-like, from our perspective).  4 billion years ago, there was an event known as the “First Impact”. One of the seeds, known as the “black moon” smashed into, and embedded itself into, the Earth, knocking enormous amounts of debris loose, which became the Earth’s moon (the one we call “the moon”). It also created an empty space inside the Earth, directly under...