Aesthetic Materialism

I subscribe to the American Ontology, which can be stated as follows: An entity can be said to exist, if and only if, and to the extent that, it is, or pertains to, a celebrity. Places, material objects, and animals exist to the extent that they are the places, material objects, and animals of celebrities.  Events don’t happen unless they happen to celebrities.  Entire regions of the world don’t exist, because they don’t contain celebrities.  The American Ontology can be seen as a logical consequence of Berkeley’s famous esse est percipi : to be is to be seen.  And therefore, the more seen something is, the more it is .  Everyone else can be dismantled, and used for spare parts. In turn, the American Ontology has its own logical consequences: celebrities only exist because of their relation to other celebrities.  For instance: Jordyn Woods is famous (i.e. existent) because she was living with Kylie Jenner.  Kylie Jenner is famous because she...

The conclusion I come to, if it can be called a conclusion, is that the concepts of "ethics" and "morality" are far profounder and more mysterious than either religious people or people like Nietzsche - or for that matter pipsqueaks like utilitarians or Kantians, etc., etc. - are willing to face.  Perhaps the term "concept" should not be used at all.  Marx was right to leave these matters virtually untouched in his writings. These are things we know - but we don't know how we know them, and to put a finer point on it, we don't know what we know.  They are there before us, but when we reach out to grasp them, our hands move right through them.  The philosopher who comes closest to expressing this situation is Wittgenstein.... ...When Alain Badiou speaks of "philosophy," what he means by this word seems to be something like the work of Hegel.  But it's significant that Hegel tended not to use the term "philosophy" - he pref...

Who is Game of Thrones for ?   We hear it is about dragons and wizards and giants and dwarves, and we say - okay, it is a children's story.  But then we hear it is a story filled with sex and prostitution and violence and murder and rape and incest (lots of incest) and mutilation and torture and castration (lots of castration) and geopolitics and economics and heads getting chopped off (a lot) and people being burned alive (so many) and other things which seem inappropriate for children. And then we find out more: George R. R. Martin (did he change his middle names so that he would be more like J. R. R. Tolkien?) started writing "A Game of Thrones" in 1991, and it's very much a 90s phenomenon.  A young man, brooding grimly, dressed all in black, with a sword, in a cold realm completely covered in snow, surrounded by black trees, standing next to a white wolf: aesthetically, this is totally Black Metal.  Perhaps the most famous Black Metal musician (unfortunate...

  (A certain type of) Formalized ethical pluralism > (other kinds of) Virtue ethics + Desirism > Virtue ethics without desirism > (Certain forms of) Non-Kantian deontology > Consequentialism based on the avoidance of existential risk > Moral intuitionism > Kantian deontology > Some really dumb types of non-Kantian deontology, like propertarianism and the NAP > Desire utilitarianism > (Certain forms of) Preference utilitarianism > Alethic utilitarianism > Negative utilitarianism > Hedonic utilitarianism > Ethical relativism > Command theory > Sociopathy   [first posted to facebook, March 30, 2019]


 The Will-to-Innocence and the Spirit of Mockery (and their children): The Further Adventures of the Absolute Spirit I recently heard about The Owl at Dawn: a Sequel to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , by Andrew Cutrofello. I became so excited that such a book exists, that I immediately looked through the local library to see if they had it. They didn't, so I'm happy to pony up and buy a copy. It's on order. I haven't read it yet. But in the meantime, my mind can't help spinning tales of what it might say, what a sequel to The Phenomenology of Spirit might look like. For me, Hegel is the philosopher of liberalism, par excellence. But what people like Francis Fukuyama miss, in their revival of the notion of the “End of History,” (or as Hegel himself put it, the “annihilation of time”) is that Hegel, good German enlightened limited monarchist that he was, never saw liberal democracy as the end of history. For Hegel, the end of history, or the purpose...

  The integration of the integrated spectacle is a double-edged sword, which, by combining incompatible narratives, creates new contradictions - even as it silences not only all resistance but indeed all rational thought. According to the spectacle, the United States are the good guys. And the good guys must win. The good guys are unconquerable. A defining feature of the spectacle is its happy ending. But at the same time the spectacle must reproduce itself, not only in endless sequels and reboots but also in endless prequels, as tangled as the chronology of the Fast and the Furious franchise. It has always been the happy ending. History was over before it began. Since we all already lived happily ever after, there can be no more antagonism, and yet there must be more antagonists, or else the story cannot go on. The role of the bad guys in the spectacle must therefore become more and more spectral, virtual in both senses, powerful and powerless, the same ...

This blog is an experiment , a literary experiment, an extended “essay” - a word coined by Francis Bacon, in imitation of Montaigne, which means, literally, a “try,” an “attempt," even a kind of “stab,” in the sense of taking a stab at something.  I am attempting to draw out, in various ways, the consequences of a simple hypothesis, which is, as I’ve already said, the idea that materialism is not something that can be proven by any scientific experiment: materialism is an aesthetic.  It is a matter of taste.  Even, I am will to go so far as to say, an aesthetic choice - with all of the baggage that that word “choice” entails.  Even an incompatibilist does not deny that choice happens, or that choices exist - she merely insists that our choices are determined by forces beyond our control. By asserting that materialism is an aesthetic, I am attempting to restore agency to the materialist, though I can, of course, appreciate that a certain part of the aesthetics ...