Aesthetic Materialism

  Hegel in 4 words: the critique of romanticism.  (Maybe we can cut it down to 3 if we get rid of the "the".) Hegel in 5 words: the immanent critique of romanticism.  This is equivalent to the 4 word version, because for Hegel, critique is immanent critique.  Anything less than the immanent fails to rise to the level of critique. All too often, when we attack someone else's views, whether on the level of everyday political disagreements or on much more abstract philosophical topics like, say, the existence of free will or the meaning of being, we tend to attack these views from an external perspective - and therefore these debates often go nowhere, with both sides talking past each other, and not listening to each other.  In other words, people who engage in this kind of rhetoric are merely monologuing, not engaging in true dialectic.   Immanent critique means critique, not from some external standpoint, but rather the critique of something from the s...

Just kidding.

  Marxists aren't opposed to technocracy.  Nietzcheans are opposed to technocracy.  And understandably so.  They have a point! But Marxists aren't opposed to technocracy.  When Engels claims, in Anti-Dühring (1877), that "the government of persons" will be "replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production," this is a perfect description of technocracy.  Technocracy is the administration of things.  It is not the government of persons - indeed, the human element has been completely removed.  This is what Nietzsche would call the Last Man, or what Kojeve would call the end of history and the "disappearance of Man," in which humanity, having lost all meaningful ambition, "remains alive as an animal in harmony with Nature or given Being."  Foucault recognizes this world as the world of "biopower": "Starting from the 18th century, societies took on board the fundamental biological fact tha...

Obviously, I am not the first person to whom the problem of glory has occurred, nor do I claim to be. How can the problem of glory be solved?  There are a variety of strategies for working on this problem, which can be utilized by thinkers in the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, the Muslim tradition, and other traditions. One way is to simply deny the premise: that all things exist for the glory of God.  Perhaps existents, like humans, exist not for his glory, but simply by dint of his mercy.  He doesn't so much will us to exist; rather, he simply allows us to exist.  As finite beings, we cannot substantially diminish his perfection, so why should he care about us?  In other words, it's not so much that he created us, let alone that he created us for a purpose - it's just that so far, he hasn't bothered to destroy us.  We are so meaningless that we aren't even worth the trouble of destroying. Another, perhaps related strategy, is not so much to d...

  Everyone thinks of themselves as being higher status than they really are.  This is probably mostly true of people all over the world, and probably mostly true of people throughout history, but it's especially true in the contemporary United States.  According to a recent Gallup poll , 54% of Americans consider themselves middle class.  This is actually considerably down from historic levels - according to the same source, from 2002 to 2006, 61% of Americans considered themselves middle class - after the 2008 economic collapse this dropped sharply, and it has mostly held steady since then, sometimes rising a bit and sometimes falling.  Go back into the 20th century and the number was much higher.  Of course in reality, people who can afford to survive on their investments alone, without working, are the bourgeoisie.  Everyone else - everyone who, in order to live, either needs to work and receive some kind of wage or salary or pension, or who depends...