Aesthetic Materialism

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give 5 examples of proletarians: doctors, lawyers, poets, priests, and scientists - in that order.  Of course, they don't claim that these are the only kinds of proletarians - they're just the only ones specified.   It's interesting that, today, people tend to think that, in Marx's class analysis, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and so on are often thought of as "petit-bourgeois".  This is quite inaccurate.  (Perhaps a doctor who owns his own practice would be petit-bourgeois, but a doctor, who, let's say, works in a hospital - even if she is head of surgery - would be classified as proletarian.) So who are the petite bourgeoisie, then?  Of course, there's a section of the Communist Manifesto that concerns that, as well.  "In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing i...

  Woke: 1. v. past tense of wake. 2. adj. (inf., AAVE) alert, aware, vigilant. 3. n. disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism. 4. n. the legal theories that derive from this disbelief. Here is as brief a definition for that third definition of "woke" as I can muster: woke is disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism.  That would include (but not be limited to) disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination. I can understand why people find this confusing - for one thing, it contains a double-negative: disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination.  (And by the way, yes, double-negatives exist in English, and a double-negative doesn't always equal a positive .)  This is one more example of a double-negative that is not equivalent to a positive (so, disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination is not the same as belief in the ideal of discrimination). Wokeness can therefore be seen as a kind of di...

Ian MacKaye used to joke that there were two Ian MacKayes: (1) Ian MacKaye (rhymes with decay), a mostly media-invented symbol, who represented some pure, totalizing, moralistic force of the straightedge movement; and (2) Ian MacKaye (rhymes with guy), who was the real, fairly normal person. Similarly, sometimes I think that there are two entities: (1) Occam, the pure, simple, abstract being that emanated one of the fundamental rational principles of science, and (2) William of Ockham, the flesh-and-blood human being who historically lived in the 14th century and devised a system of theology that was, ironically enough, quite elaborate and complex.  But we needn't multiply entities beyond necessity. Why is the sky blue?  Why are good things good?  Why are bad things bad?  It's remarkable how "Because God wanted it that way" works as a catch-all answer for so many questions.  (Of course, so does "Because I said so.")  Does that mean that it's the simplest...

  The Lenin Maneuver Lenin was a brilliant strategist.  Anyone who wants to be a successful politician should study his example and the clever tactics he used.  For instance, I think Hillary Clinton is an example of a politician who might have been more successful had she learned a few things from his playbook.  (Steve Bannon, the Chief Executive of the Trump campaign in 2016, was unabashed about his being influenced by Lenin in political strategy.) One of these many tactics is a particular tactic that Lenin used so often and so effectively that I think it ought to be called "the Lenin maneuver," although I don't mean to imply that he was the only politician, nor even the first to use it.  Lenin used it so successfully that, in my opinion, it was his defining characteristic. The Lenin maneuver is useful when one is competing against rivals for leadership within a political movement.  The Lenin maneuver is a two-part move, a move in two, seemingly opposite d...

On this blog, I've argued that the aesthetic of materialism is boring. I've also stated that philosophy is whatever I find interesting. Therefore, to be a materialist philosopher means learning how to say something interesting about the boring. 

    It's true that Nietzsche wrote a book entitled "Beyond Good and Evil".  But don't be too quick to assume that, just because Nietzsche wrote a book with this title, that implies that Nietzsche believed that good and evil don't exist.  It's perfectly possible to believe fully that there is a real difference between good and evil, and, at the same time, to be able to speak of something that is "beyond" this distinction.  In an analogous way, "north" and "south" are real directions, but there are places where this distinction is no longer so clear or relevant - such as, floating in intergalactic space.  Likewise, "port" and "starboard" are meaningfully and usefully distinct, yet they have little applicability outside of a boat or some similar vessel, "stage left" and "stage right" only make sense in the context of a stage, and so on.