Aesthetic Materialism

    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 ...

  Romanticism has two sides, which I call the self-destructive tendency of romanticism and the self-creative tendency of romanticism. Self-destructive romanticism is epitomized in the legend of Tristan und Isolde , particularly in Wagner's version.  The essence of this is ecstatic pessimism .  You also see a different side of it in The Flying Dutchman .  There's something Dionysian about it.  (One can see a trace of this in Foucault's work, and perhaps also Bataille?  But that's a more complicated question.) But there has always been another side of Romanticism: self-creative Romanticism, or Promethean Romanticism.  Blake epitomizes this, and perhaps Shelley even more so - not to mention Byron.

  People complain about the overuse of "like" in contemporary culture.  They say it's just a "filler word" that has no meaning, like "um".  (I'm not even sure that I agree about "um," but that's another story.) When people use "like" in its modern, slangy sense, what people are expressing is the inadequacy of language to give a comprehensive account of a given reality.  Consider the difference between a simile and a metaphor: Sentence 1) Simile: You're like a dog. Sentence 2) Metaphor: You're a dog. In a sense, these sentences seem to mean the same thing.  In neither case is the speaker asserting that the addressee literally belongs to the species canis lupus familiaris .  In both cases, it would totally miss the point to respond by demanding DNA evidence.  These sentences are not the assertion of a scientific fact that could be proven true or false, nor is there any expectation that they could be on either the speak...