Aesthetic Materialism

One way of understanding romanticism:  I had a conversation with friends - one of my friends, a sort of "New Atheist" type, was expressing frustration about art, and some of my other friends are in the art world. The New Atheist type said, "I wish there were a group of objective standards by which one could judge whether art is good or bad." All my other friends got very angry about this, and utterly rejected it. To my mind, this shows that all my other friends are still, in some sense, romantics. To me, this shows that modernism is just an extension of romanticism, and postmodernism is an extension of modernism.   We are still romantics.  Even classicism is a kind of romanticism. I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticism. If there were a way out of romanticism, it would be the establishment of some kind of standard that people would agree upon.  But we can imagine what would happen if such a standard were imposed - immediately, there would be people...

  How does limited government happen? 

  Why do I love egos?  It's hard to say....  Why does anyone love what they love?  Why do you love those you love?  In a way, love never has a reason.  (Or at least, not one that one could put into words....)  Because if there is a cause of your love that you could name, that would imply a kind of exchange, or the possibility of an exchange.  It would imply that if something could take away the cause of your love, or present the possibility of getting what you love elsewhere, then you would no longer love the person you love - which would imply that you don't love them in the first place.  So, I cannot assert anything as the reason that I love egos - all I can say is, here are some of the ways that I notice that I love egos. ...And, I'll bet that you love some egos, too.  And I invite you to notice that you love them.  And perhaps notice that you love some egos that you hadn't noticed that you loved. For love is, truly, the answer. ...

  Sometimes you will find textbooks, magazine articles, etc., that date postmodernism as having arisen in the 1960s.  I think this is a perfectly silly, stupid, and arbitrary way of dating it, which should be completely scrapped.  If, by postmodernism, we mean something that arose in the 1960s, then postmodernism is truly meaningless, a totally arbitrary non-concept.  (And even in the sources that cite 1960 as the beginning of postmodernism usually hedge their bets, by putting in disclaimers that say something along the lines of "but we can find precursors of postmodernism even earlier" yadda yadda.) If postmodernism is to be a meaningful division of cultural history, then the most reasonable way of sketching it would be to say that postmodernism gradually arose during the great crisis that spanned from 1914 to 1948, and that it had been fully established by 1945, with the development of nuclear weaponry and the defeat of that particular wave of fascism.  I woul...

If I could characterize Hegel with one word, it would be: unpredictable.  Hegel always has the hot take.  He is predictably unpredictable.  Just when you think you understand him, just when you think you know him, you read another sentence from his work that forces you to reconsider everything you thought you understood. I've said before that Hegel's entire project is the critique of romanticism, that critique for Hegel means immanent critique- thus, so to speak, romanticism's critique of romanticism- and that - brilliantly! - when he zeroes in on romanticism, the essence of Hegel's discussion of romanticism focuses on irony, the irony of the romantic.  Even here, Hegel is being a romantic, because what he seeks is, you might say, poetic justice.  He wants romanticism to be hoisted by its own petard, like the person who is punished in the afterlife in a brilliant, torturous way - the ironic twist that turns everything back on them - "contrapasso".  What mak...

  I am an unabashed egoist (or at least egoish ). I am an unabashed humanist.  I am an unabashed materialist.   I am unabashedly in favor of existence & being.  I unabashedly support science.  I unabashedly believe in nature, including human nature. I unabashedly believe in truth. I unabashedly believe in rights.  I unabashedly believe in progress.  I think all of these things matter, and that they're good. I want to maintain these, to make sure all of these keep existing.  I want to maintain the ego, maintain humanity, maintain the material world, maintain nature, maintain science, maintain rights, maintain progress, maintain existence, maintain being. I believe strongly in maintenance .  We have to learn to be custodians .  We must learn to be the janitors of being. "Another flaw in the human character is that everyone wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." - Kurt Vonnegut  I want to maintain the modern, kee...

Romanticism can be defined in one word: anti-managerialism. Thus, romanticism is opposed to science in so far as it sees science as a form of managerialism.  Question: but is science, itself, also a form of romanticism?

 Romanticism can be defined in one word: anti-managerialism.

  Reverse Modernism  At a recent art event - a live video performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi of Signal Culture, at Visual Studies Workshop, using the software tools that they developed - renowned video artist Peer Bode (who had been their teacher) stood and spoke about how contemporary artists were not only making art, but also creating instruments for making art.  He also reminisced about a conversation with Nam June Paik in the 90s, in which Paik had said that he felt bad for painters, because painting was no longer the vanguard of art.   But what this leaves out is that nowadays, people are not only making art, and they are not only making instruments for making art - they are making artists.  The production of artificial artists - coupled with the rapid adoption and permeation of the new artificial culture into both the highest strata of commercial society and the broader public - undebatably signals a new moment in the history of art,...

    I don't see myself as in favor of capitalism, or opposed to capitalism.  I have a very realistic view of capitalism. I aspire to have a scientific understanding of capitalism.   Many people today seem to have metaphysical or supernatural beliefs about capitalism, about which I am increasingly skeptical.  My realistic perspective on capitalism leads me to 3 major observations about it: 1. Capitalism has powered the development of institutions that have made human life the most prosperous, healthy, safe, and free it has ever been. 2. Nonetheless, of course, any reasonable person must admit that capitalism has issues.  Nothing is perfect, and capitalism is no exception.  It is not omnipotent, or omnibenevolent.  (And despite what Austrian economists may say about "calculation," capitalism is not omniscient, either.)  It has its problems, like everything else.  And it has its unintended consequences.  Among them are, most obvi...

  One of the greatest tactical mistakes of Karl Marx and Marxists generally was the failure to join forces with potential religious allies.  Imagine if the Democratic Party in the United States said that if you're religious, you're not allowed to be a democrat.  They'd be finished in a week.  Likewise, imagine if the Republicans said the same thing.  It would be automatic death for any political movement, but especially for a movement like Marxism, which claimed that "The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves," and thus sought to build a mass movement of the industrial proletariat.  Perhaps the prohibition of religion might be a more achievable tactic in a movement composed of highly educated elites - either professionals, aristocrats, or the bourgeoisie themselves.  But a purely secular workers' movement is doomed from the start.

  Tier list of the greatest intellectuals of all time: S: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Euclid, Plato, William Shakespeare, authors of Genesis, Franz Kafka A+: Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Henri Poincare, Joseph Fourier, William Blake, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Hafez, Archimedes, Baruch Spinoza, Edith Massey, Zarathustra A: James Clark Maxwell, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Dante Alighieri, Georg Cantor, Gottfried Leibniz, author of proto-Isaiah, Rumi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mileva Marić A-: Lao Tzu, Siddhartha Gautama, Epicurus, Erwin Schrödinger, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Hendrik Lorentz, Johann Sebastian Bach, John von Neumann, Edward Witten, John Coltrane, Michelangelo, Leonhard Euler, Guy Debord, Aristarchus of Samos, authors of Mahabharata, composers of the Purusha Sukta B+: Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Milton, Charles Darwin, author of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, author of John, author of Matthew, Galileo Galilei, Pythagoras, Ornette C...

  At the moment, art is a deep disquiet.  It is a meditation, but not for the purpose of discovering an inner peace, but rather for eliminating distractions and focusing on this fundamental disquietude.  It's also a little drunk. 

Liberalism, no less than socialism, -indeed, perhaps much more so than socialism- is defined by praxis.  And liberalism might be considered dialectical, in that it offers no positive doctrine, but proceeds by a kind of via negativa .  The practice of liberalism is tolerance; the positive program of liberalism is the establishment of social institutions that promote and defend tolerance.  Liberalism does not tell you what to believe.  At most, it tells you what not to believe - that is, not to believe any belief that would cause you to be intolerant towards other people and their beliefs - presumably, "absolute," "dogmatic," "totalitarian" beliefs.  But then again, it may not even tell you that much.  It may allow you to believe intolerant beliefs (that is, it may tolerate intolerant beliefs) so long as you do not act on those intolerant beliefs.  Indeed, liberalism developed within the context of the wars between and among Catholics and Protesta...