Aesthetic Materialism

  CURTIS YARVIN IS A POSTMODERNIST  "They Hate Us For Our Freedom"   Since 2007, there has been a tiny, marginal movement on the internet, or several overlapping movements, started by a person named Curtis Yarvin, better known by his assumed name, "Mencius Moldbug."  (I'll use that name; it's less obscure.)  Spreading out from Silicon Valley, where it first became trendy, the movement(s) have been known by various names.  Moldbug originally called his political philosophy "formalism" - at that time, he was advocating for the government being run in the style of a corporation - especially a Silicon Valley startup - with a powerful CEO.  But that never caught on, and he abandoned it in favor of "neo-cameralism."  But this turned out not to capture anyone's imagination either, and so other names appeared: the Dark Enlightenment, neo-monarchism, and most famous of all, the "NeoReactionary movement" - NRx for short.  Are all thes...

One book that somebody should write, and I would read it with great interest and curiosity, would be "Why Wasn't Kant a Phenomenologist?"  We almost got something like that in Heidegger's book, "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics," but I need someone to go further than Heidegger, to explain much that Heidegger leaves unexplained.  Because I, for one, when I read Kant, cannot help but feel that he is tending towards phenomenology - and, of course, after Kant, phenomenologists sprouted up like mushrooms.  To oversimplify matters entirely, the problem is essentially this: Kant seems to have recognized something like the antinomial character of metaphysics - therefore, he "should" have renounced metaphysics altogether and insisted on focusing simply on the phenomena themselves, refusing to allow any of the phenomena to acquire any metaphysical residue, so to speak.  It almost seems inevitable that a philosopher, having confronted the Kantian antinomie...