BEAUTY IS THE TELEOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION OF DEATH: complexity for Whitehead is “thermodynamic robbery”: systems compete in a field defined by the zero-sum allocation of energy: for Whitehead only the realization of beauty – the global aesthetic satisfaction of God – can compensate for life as the perpetual theft of life. Only what death can grow is what this universe is for: novelty can only be produced at the expense of complexity, and complexity introduces a creative outside into the slumbering positivity of nature only as a function of the sophistication of its circuits: the billiard ball simply receives force, the subject transmutes it – the conformation of a billiard ball to the force acting through it leaves no remainder, it just goes: in systems of sufficient complexity, that remainder becomes consciousness: the stanchion of valuation against which these forces are projected and regulated towards some self-project. COMPLEXITY COMPOUNDS CAUSAL INHERITANCE UNTIL MITHRAS IS WRUNG FROM THE STONE: this is why the neural density of sensitives dooms them to shyness and timidity: the intensity of their awareness distinguishes them from the world too starkly, and it's also why it's (unfortunately) true that serial killers are more vertical than last men, insofar as evil is a kind of verticality: evil is also an altar and an (anti-)god. TRUE MASCULINITY IS THE SABOTAGE OF IMMANENCES: a staredown between two men is a contest of will: the slightest flicker of hesitation signifies a loss of control, it tells your opponent you can't resist attending to your second thoughts about him: the proximity of eyes tests the intensity of what Laszlo calls the heteron, otherness as it is internalized, the subject as he is /vacuolized/ by his perception of another: letting someone live rent-free in your head means consenting to their causation /in you/: the heteron reduces you to a satellite on the karmic plane, WHEN A MAN MUST BE A SUN: the self is windowless, otherness is self-inflicted: ideas are constellations in the sky of Mind, and genius is the power to love them without being possessed by them: the power to negate the identification with positive force is precisely what Christ means by “turning the other cheek”: denying in yourself the “natural” response is not weakness, but the victory over causality, and the birthright of the Whiteheadian soul. Learning to see what you will: whispers of Shestov's gnostic eye in The Matrix: it is not the spoon that bends, but our perception. In the film Burning, as the girl mimes eating an orange, she casually relates the secret of a good pantomime AS THE SECRET OF THE OCCULT CONSCIOUSNESS: “don't pretend the orange is there, forget that it isn't”. ¬(¬P) is the name of an angel: mysticism has the priority of negation, what can be negated has no real existence, except that what is left over, that immediacy that vindicates Thales again and again, by a patch of sun on the dresser, a curve of cumulus.
BEAUTY IS THE TELEOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION OF DEATH: complexity for Whitehead is “thermodynamic robbery”: systems...
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Last men refuse their commitment to a heteron: they refuse their density, and what buys it: they are the servants in that famous biblical parable who bury the master's coin, because they mistakenly believe, as with all earthly transaction, that when you are entrusted with something, it should be preserved like papyrus, but God is no tender gardener, he's an arsonist in the Void: when he gives you something, he wants you to burn it to the fucking Ground: in the mind of the genius, there is no noise, only signal. Capitalism hijacks our built-in, ontological fidelity to the aesthetic unfolding of the Godhead as an /economic/ fidelity to objects, because /we can't accept that death fertilizes beauty/. In other words, we lost our stomach for the game, the Christian repudiation of the pagan economy of sacrifice is the repudiation of what William Grassie calls the Whiteheadian /naturalization of evil/: that suffering is not a bug, but a feature. That beauty is a friction – a contrast - and not a property. Zizek is crucial here: when we used to mystify the presence of god-kings, now we mystify the object: the god-king as the embodiment of the totality of the ancient state's libidinal investment, is now the car, or the instagram star as an abstraction of time: with social media, Parmenides gets the last laugh over Heraclitus: the instant of time represented by the photo is the arrest, the /essentialization/, of becoming: the cult of celebrity was originally a cult of celluloid, of our newfound technological power to artificially extend youth into the non-time of the virtual: the photo is the latest and most realized form of what began with the oral tradition, with one caveat: without the room for "interpretation" provided by those traditions, your distance in space and time from their subject matter, which essentialize without /reducing/: there can be no gods in 4K: the camera is the eye ascended: THE DIGITAL IMAGE IS THE CONSENSUALIZATION OF OUR EVERYDAY, PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE OF REALITY TOWARDS A WAVELENGTH OF DIMINISHED POTENTIAL: if this sounds loopy, remember that even pop culture today retains a kind of mystique around blindness, its access to realities from which the rest of us are forbidden by our working eyes. The eye and photo together traffic in the illusion of actuality: a ready-made, ontologically complete field into which we are inserted by birth. Everything is the denial of time, and the generation of circles – immanences – to escape time and death. But not also this: the enemy of the last man is not just the fear of death, but the love of death also: there is no room in these cities for the beautiful suicide. Mishima knew this, Nietzsche knew this. Christ knew this, too. He came to me once, as he'll come to you all eventually, when the shadows are long, the scars had turned his arms to leather, and when he opened his mouth all I heard was the sound of dogs barking in the night.
Ok cool
It's about justice, not beauty.
Insincerity, the post.
Use your brain to actually do something. That's what intelligence is for. Your intelligence is redundant and trivial to anything outside this universe. What isn't is that you are in this universe. So if you are just writing this shit while actually having a negative influence for everything you stand for, why even live? Go actually use your brain for something. Intelligence is not innately impressive to anyone, dude.
>THE DIGITAL IMAGE IS THE CONSENSUALIZATION OF OUR EVERYDAY, PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE OF REALITY TOWARDS A WAVELENGTH OF DIMINISHED POTENTIAL
Based and camerapilled. The observation of photons is literally the point of the life, as you noted in beauty as being the teleology of death. The only rational outcome of your schizophilosophy is to deafen yourself and maximize the eyesight and minimize the fatuous distractions from the hearing in order to See the greatest beauty.
All he's doing is describing how he's viewing his own perception....
Beautiful. Thanks for this.
Yes, and he've put a transcendental emphasis on the optics (eyesight/camera). I'm only guiding him towards the extreme ends of this idea.
Try spacing your shits and using different pictures so we don't automatically skip your threads whenever you make them.
Sokal flies a fuck out the window
based schizo poster
you and girardfag are why i keep coming to this kazakh milk slurping enthusiast horseman gathering
:The BIG IDEA is the teleological epistemology of God's oneness in a crypt of anihilation: Permanence is that fellatio of the Cosmos defragmented into the telos of Whitehead's God in amazon review form: Donuts are the last stronghold of capital, but also its militarised eternisation: We are born of the heavens unto the post-misogynoir of Brown's unkempt secrets: THIS MUST BE SAID: THIS ALSO MUST BE SAID: BECAUSE IT IS A BIG IDEA AND MUST BE HEARD: Whitehead's God was write about everything: Captain Delano is the physiognomy of God's last Naloxone hit: No eschatology could permeate the living myth of suicide by Gillette razor, now upvoted as a language game of physiophenomenology decrypted into God's post-Whitehead:
>But muh value
yawn
the play by stoppard is worth a read, too
>the heteron reduces you to a satellite on the karmic plane, WHEN A MAN MUST BE A SUN: the self is windowless, otherness is self-inflicted: ideas are constellations in the sky of Mind, and genius is the power to love them without being possessed by them: the power to negate the identification with positive force is precisely what Christ means by “turning the other cheek”: denying in yourself the “natural” response is not weakness, but the victory over causality, and the birthright of the Whiteheadian soul.
probably my favorite line
here is how whitehead ends the chapter on expression in modes of thought:
>The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech and they became souls.
we must take the spirit into our body, and breathe out our life
there's more of you in this one, i think, and it's stronger for that
You know OP, I used to think that you're bitch, but you finally started making sense!
I'm glad you like, girardfag. Hang in there buddy
This is my future...
وايتهد is a pseud, and so are you
Are you actually Zizek?
Damn, Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good
that user is not me but i co-sign this anyways
Replace beauty with meaning in general, and do your best to anthropocentrize Life as little as possible please.
I always remember what you said about not lapsing into rage zombie-ism being the only real heroism left today, even if you are a nobody. Thanks.
it is that way. as much as i read very little i find anywhere argues *for* blind rage and frenzy. the depth analysis and other stuff only confirms it. there is something terrible in us that says everything else is just so much talking and we carry on as if waiting for the moment of the knives so that finally the truth can come out in an orgy of violence. this to me is the sign of a real barbarism and darkness that still has not been overcome.
the paradoxical part of this is that it goes against the grain of everything you get in Marx and the rest: if everything is capital, and we are being converted into machine-coin, why not get angry, why not form up in the worst of all ways, why not fall in love with war and conquest? why not concentrate on hate and darkness? i've tried, in my own way. but it doesn't work, it only appeals to despots, tyrants, and lunatics. Lacan is right: it has to be truth over certainty, and love over desire. no completeness and no closure, which means no absolute thing. we float and we float together. if there is any journey to take it is the one towards Enlightenment.
the Greek furies speak from the very earth. even when Athena arrives and pronounces judgment they go back, they are revolted and disgusted - it is this feeling of disgust, of the constancy of shock and horror and outrage, of reaction and explosion, that i think is the sign that we are much less civilized than we think we are. Ellie Sullivan mentions
>the concrete pieces of death that we cling to
and Lacan talks about
>words trapped in the body
it's very much like that i find. old skeletons and dead things in us that get reactivated, things about which we cannot be cynical or dismissive ('the world is not a matter of indifference' - Heidegger). how can we deal with these? we have to talk with each other, and not just talk with each other, but understand that on some fundamental level there is both less difference and more than we think. there's no cure for the rage virus, it comes from the ancient world, it belongs to Sphinxes.
there's a deep gnosis in humility. i had one and only one great epiphany in my life and it was on that theme, on a total shattering of my defensive ego, on the CTRL mechanism that i had had installed in me and had turned into something like a persona. i betray that illumination almost constantly now, but it was a genuine moment of enlightenment.
carry on bravely mi amigo.
>there is something terrible in us that says everything else is just so much talking and we carry on as if waiting for the moment of the knives so that finally the truth can come out in an orgy of violence.
real shit. i had to admit today - or i admit it everyday, really - that there's a venom in me that the social contract and its inhibitions are doing me a favor to muzzle. im reminded of zizek's distinction between online, virtual identities and our "real" identities in the street: who you are is when the inhibitions vanish, like on Yea Forums, not the face you put on as a concession to the social field.
i notice when people give you shit you don't really bristle at them. or maybe you do, and can control it. i want to give up this edge - that defensive ego - but you kinda do need one not to get chewed up and spit out in this world. that taoist ideal of the master like water or air is something to genuinely aim for.
i had an epiphany once, i got attacked by some drug dealers, young kids, always putting trying to act hard, but i know from experience that kind off fuck off attitude is a huge front, a kind of turtle's shell, they're like little boys, and it hit me this is what christ is able to do - i was actually gonna write about this in a new thread: loving someone's inside the way you can forgive your own. idk, just realizing how accidental another person's voice, face, the walls they put up, is to their center. the way your voice, etc. is to yours.
but if i told these guys something like this i'd get socked in the jaw and called a faggot. it's a private thing. and it's not like, i don't think they're fuckboys either. it's weird. one foot in the world, one foot somewhere else. it's this kind of contradiction i was trying channel itt and one i'm sure you're very attuned to. well, keep at it.
i shit you not, the greatest moment of illumination i ever had in my life was that one i was referring to, and it came totally by accident. without giving away too much detail: essentially, i was a completely fake person, with a completely fake voice, and the more i was reminded of this the more defensive and hostile and angry i became. and then there came a moment when i overheard this, i heard what i sounded like, and it was all the way wrong. i was just feeling super pressured and i was lashing out at everyone who was trying to help me. but i was clinging to a part of me that could not be helped because i was locked in a death spiral that said, i know what i'm doing, and also, fuck you.
when it finally hit me it was like a pilot light going on in my head, i lay on the ground, i stood on my hotel bed, i praised Zeus, i acted like a complete fucking maniac. but it didn't matter, something had actually gone in me or cracked through ancient layers of bullshit - and it wasn't even bullshit that was my own, it came with having adapted to layers of generational bullshit that preceded me, the will to be a part of fantasies that went on to infinity. there is no way of being a part of these fantasies, there's only a part of you that is basically All Mask and No Face that thinks this is possible. real engagement is absolutely humble and perfectly sane. everything else is just so much acrobatics.
after that i was actually capable of understanding Heidegger and Lacan at least, who at *that* point were not telling me anything i did not already know, they were just providing a conceptual vocabulary to talk about what i already understood - the metaphysics of production, objet a, all the rest. just ways of talking about something that has to be kindled in you, and can only be kindled in you after drilling all the way through the layers upon layers of aggregrate horseshit that become what we are through long accumulation, imitation, gesture, and so on. speaking for myself personally there is nothing more than this and there does not need to be anything more than this. all we can do is listen to each other and try and fish out the thing in each other that has a right to truth and love and will not be denied.
this is why i like Lacan these days, because he's the master narcissist who will not let you go, will not leave you fucking twisting in the wind and shrug and smile. he knows that there is in fact no wind to twist in. so i don't really get trigged because mostly people are lonely af and angry about it and the anger and the hate is justified, but the frenzied passage a l'acte that tries to speak what cannot be spoken in words is understandable also, but there has to be a greater mind beneath this to be cultivated.
the real voice of truth i think is absolutely boring af, to the point of being enigmatic. Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction makes political sense, but only after the fact.
>the will to be a part of fantasies that went on to infinity. there is no way of being a part of these fantasies, there's only a part of you that is basically All Mask and No Face that thinks this is possible. real engagement is absolutely humble and perfectly sane.
yes, absolutely this, i've been studying stuff like this for years, but only lately internalized it. why? because of that voice that always goes "yes, yes, the objet petit a is a shadow of the cartesian void of the cogito, yes, yes, I am not my thoughts, yes, yes, in time all things pass, but what if... ?" and on we'd go down another libidinal spiral, another investment that will finally net me that = x I'd been seeking since basically I was old enough to know it.
I guess i'd put it this way: it was an inability to accept that humility and sanity you're talking about is really All There Is. I'd been conditioned, by everything around me, and the desires I'd stoke in myself, as well, to believe these fantasies are JUSTIFIED in haunting me, why? just because they do. a complete tautology. and resisting that pull has been a lifelong endeavor.
>the real voice of truth i think is absolutely boring af, to the point of being enigmatic
yes, that's why this hunger for a paradigm shift, for a postmodern nietzsche, is, I think, really us just trying to obfuscate the mundanity of the truth, again, basically that there's not much more to it than the body, nature, people, and a little art.
i think it's an incapacity to believe the truth's an open and shut case, and everything else, almost the entire western tradition of thought (not to be too reductive), is just an unfurling of defense mechanisms to shield us from its banality.
THE SPIRIT IS A BONE
>we
Based redditor telling his own kin to fuck off.
it's time we return home
just want to say you have some wonderful anime art tastes.
>yes, absolutely this, i've been studying stuff like this for years, but only lately internalized it. why? because of that voice that always goes "yes, yes, the objet petit a is a shadow of the cartesian void of the cogito, yes, yes, I am not my thoughts, yes, yes, in time all things pass, but what if... ?" and on we'd go down another libidinal spiral, another investment that will finally net me that = x I'd been seeking since basically I was old enough to know it.
best feeling in the world is finding that conjoined spark in the next guy. that voice has a direct hotline to things well and truly beyond rational ken.
>I guess i'd put it this way: it was an inability to accept that humility and sanity you're talking about is really All There Is. I'd been conditioned, by everything around me, and the desires I'd stoke in myself, as well, to believe these fantasies are JUSTIFIED in haunting me, why? just because they do. a complete tautology. and resisting that pull has been a lifelong endeavor.
that episode was one of the very few times in my life i could call truly *ecstatic,* as if i was dwelling - however briefly - in a place really beyond fear. it was a place of absolute grace and absolute sanity. there was nothing to fear, because everything was just so, so, *sane.* it was i think a kind of Stoic bliss, i was heavily into the Stoics at those times. whatever it was, it felt completely perfect. authority comes from the bottom-up, and CTRL is a complete fucking spook. you can do things with language that give people a chance and a way to think that have nothing to do with language as it is reflexively practiced. that there is a natural order to things and it is really, really good. that was my own feel, what it was like to not dwell constantly in existential dread and panic.
>yes, that's why this hunger for a paradigm shift, for a postmodern nietzsche, is, I think, really us just trying to obfuscate the mundanity of the truth, again, basically that there's not much more to it than the body, nature, people, and a little art.
i think so too user.
>i think it's an incapacity to believe the truth's an open and shut case, and everything else, almost the entire western tradition of thought (not to be too reductive), is just an unfurling of defense mechanisms to shield us from its banality.
yup. or, in GRRM terms: how do you defend against a sentient defense mechanism? for Lacan we are always asking for protection from what we really want. i think capital works the same way: it's an entelechy of blocked hopes and failed dreams. we want/don't want what we want/don't want and this shit will shiver us to pieces. but the only way out is through, and through means understanding, in ways almost beyond comprhension, things only the butterflies in your stomach can sense.
everyone that thinks OP is wrong loses
You are the devil. BE GONE FROM MY MIND!
A good one.
>that episode was one of the very few times in my life i could call truly *ecstatic,* as if i was dwelling - however briefly - in a place really beyond fear. it was a place of absolute grace and absolute sanity.
I've touched this, and know what you mean, but its the oil to everyday life's water.
i agree, but thinking about these kinds of things reminds me that my concept of Utopia really wouldn't have anything at all to do with political economy. it would be a kind of state, and governed with a kind of sensibility that well and truly understands what it means to be and think as a human being, with others in ways that go entirely behind materialistic reductionism, or even certain modes of speculative idealism as we today understand them. there's a way of being in the world that even gets beyond Heidegger, who is good when you are trying to walk backwards from the ruination and devastation, or Lacan, who is good for when some piece of shrapnel has become lodged in you and it causes you and everybody around you to suffer for its presence and the hole that it leaves in you.
it's neither a society that is to be built or a certain anthropotechnical model of man or anything like this but only a kind of set of conditions in which we can actually think and work and act in such a way that identity as it is understood never even comes into it. it's pedagogical in some sense but in the absence of a proscribed horizon for teaching, and irreducible to capital. the Stoic universe seems to me to be a highly mechanistic one and yet not the kind of mechanistics that strike us as being somehow life-destroying or brutally industrial. there is just a Way or State of minds-being-among-minds that is really noble and fundamentally bent on discovery and enlightenment in forms that have only a tangential relation with marginal utility (and nothing at all to do with desire, or the Unconscious, or any of the rest of that stuff).
i had a teeny-tiny glimpse of it and i never really got it in quite the same way since. but Neo-Stoicism arriving from the future seems like it has within it a lot of the fantasies i might otherwise attribute to /acc posthumanism or CCP science-fiction fantasies and the like. and to some degree i think it can be practiced in daily life. it felt better than i could have possibly imagined to Get Smashed by something that had other plans for me, something that the more i tried to put under my own control just filled me up with neurosis and phobia. whatever that Thing was it was meant to be shared, and it wasn't shared as evangelism but in fact as a kind of technical expertise and a way of handling thought-objects. quite based indeed.
great stuff, especially this
>the Stoic universe seems to me to be a highly mechanistic one and yet not the kind of mechanistics that strike us as being somehow life-destroying or brutally industrial.
in reading coomaraswamy's essays on metaphysics, i was really struck by how "mechanistic" the vedic universe is, without any of the traditional western - life-destroying as you call it - connotational baggage, basically they recognize causality without recognizing "mechanism" - without stripping us our agency as it is embedded in that causality, as it can only be realized by it.
it's amazing how a system filled to the brim with the parrots of reductioism need to be lead by a cow to the most basic long-term effects of their behaviors - nofap is basically a generation of porn-addled, confused men who frittered their youth away onto a napkins finally waking up to the neurological devastation it has wrought on them. i mean, really? you couldn't see it coming? i suppose hindsight is 20/20, they couldn't have known how they'd end up until they got there, but the Guys At The Top are under no illusions, which is why I echo you and basically all the accposters on this board that we're being socially and psychologically engineered into mongrels.
there's something about the western mind that sees cause and effect and throws in the towel, where the metaphysician sees inexorability and his agency is only empowered by it. i do think there is a spiritual physiognomy at play here that i will leave others to deduce.
>we're being socially and psychologically engineered into mongrels
we are. we unironically are, and we do it entirely because we are now getting tangled up with an incredible process that we have brought out into the world that knows no sign of stopping. i have more to say on this and i have to head out for a bit but i wanted to put a few things down here.
we've basically wireheaded ourselves at this point. nobody ever tries heroin and says they were *disappointed.* it's the same thing, in a certain sense, with planetary capital: the more nihilistic and fucked-out we become, the more the appeal of Just Do Capitalism grows, and...how can we not say that nihilism European-style doesn't show some sense of being a massively collective-developmental project?
if you were the truly cynical leader of a control society, *you would want Orcs,* and you would probably feel very cozy indeed about looking in the mirror and seeing something that looked like Eldrond or Galadriel there also. as Orcs we become predictable and controllable, it becomes patently obvious that we like what we like and we fear what we fear and all of the rest. this is the unironically mutagenic aspects of this process that we are seeing now: decadence and depravity have no natural in-built failsafes or off-switches. the name for that historically is *war,* the periodic Great Filters and paroxysms and Black Plagues and brushes with nuclear holocaust that periodically reset the clock. why are we not living in a Fallout universe right now? because one guy on a Russian submarine defied not only his superiors, but the whole fucking Kremlin, and the Americans were ready to fucking trade shots too, and even Mao said the Chinese could weather the storm of a few hundred million deaths...
anyways, more on this later perhaps in a similar vein (if in fact you're interested in carrying on a rather gloomy conversation, but imho the gloom is absolutely vitally necessary in terms of understanding what alternatives or multiverse-paths might be proposed). it's been a real joy and pleasure talking with you tho. until then kind sir.
btw, the art is just there as an homage to your usual style.
>Is Orcs we become predictable and controllable, it becomes patently obvious that we like what we like and we fear what we fear and all of the rest.
from the top, we must really seem like lemmings, which is why i'm slowly trying to phase myself out of what is basically a whole culture around twittercaps: he said, she said. so fucking tired of it.
ok, i just wanted to share some other stuff tho. because a certain amount of philosophical dynamite is warranted in times of cynicism and boredom and malaise, the kinds of things that so quickly turn to rage and anger. the very based Herr Kafka says:
>A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
it is mine as well.
the thing that attracts me to Hegel is that very sense in which there is a kind of deep relation between people under the hood. Lacan is good for this too, he basically sees ressentiment and cynicism the way a hawk looks at a lamb. Nietzsche does this too, but Lacan does Nietzsche in a kind of clinical way that is far better for sanity and civilization (tho arguably worse for Nietzsche, i suppose).
there really are no absolutely Lemming-free beings in the world either. as Zizek says, it's more like a choice between idiots and morons, the one repeating the same dumb thing over and over again and the other doing something so incredibly original (and stupid) that it cannot be explained, and Zizek argues for the latter. it's a kind of hilarious conundrum like that: originality, in a certain sense, just means an inexplicable break from stupidity that is nevertheless not any less stupid than what it breaks from, but it is *different.*
and then, when you come at things the other way, you wind up perhaps where i would like to be today: saying that we have to take the reign of difference and simulation for what it is, and perhaps going back to imitating or simulating in good faith in such a way that we don't put the other guy in a position where they have to explain their novelty in ways guaranteed to make them self-destruct. postmodernity in its worst aspects today kind of does this, in a sense, but ofc i am imagining something much better, the sense in which we say we may very well be all trapped in a kind of collective hallucination, and given that that is the case, we might encounter each other in good faith. the appeal of communism is that idea of a conjoined and collective mutual laboring for the greater good, which obviously can be lampooned by Nietzsche and others to the moon and back. but in the absence of this we get something like what we have today, the Laughter Unto Death.
becoming-computer in a way might be a way of learning how and why to debug each other as necessary, in other words. and also such that we could share information, or memories, in ways that enrich and enlighten us. i have likened my own experience of reading philosophy as being like being a Gameboy trying to run PS2 software. i think it holds up. there is no absolute difference between mind and machine, but perhaps there is something to be gained from psychoanalytic transference yet...
there's something going on now interesting in China too that i wanted to ask, the sense in which the Chinese government is prepared to simply let technology lead the way in things, and with the role of the CCP being a kind of political warden or gatekeeper for whatever holes in being and time technology opens up. these are things that the West can't do, and it's not lost on me that this may only lead to a repeat of the calamitous romanticism the West gets up to overseas either. but it is interesting. and also terrible, if Social Credit is what is required to put these fantasies in order. although even there that seems to me like a pretty good glimpse of where the future is headed everywhere...
>in reading coomaraswamy's essays on metaphysics, i was really struck by how "mechanistic" the vedic universe is, without any of the traditional western - life-destroying as you call it - connotational baggage, basically they recognize causality without recognizing "mechanism" - without stripping us our agency as it is embedded in that causality, as it can only be realized by it.
i like this also. one of the things that it's easy to overlook is the temptation to assume what is in reality a rather crude OS for how we think of ourselves: I Am, I Caused [x]. this is certainly not the Eastern perspective. and the appeal of collectivism: We Are, We Caused [x] also. there's a whole host of little hang-ups and tics about deriving our sense of self-worth from The Future in ways that are characteristically modern, perhaps, and still rather old-school existential...and maybe it's that we want *relief* from these things rather than some kind of proof of our own agency that might wind up only being traumatic. participation mystique is for real, but there's a kind of moment where we are required, as Sloterdijk says, to float.
>there's something about the western mind that sees cause and effect and throws in the towel, where the metaphysician sees inexorability and his agency is only empowered by it. i do think there is a spiritual physiognomy at play here that i will leave others to deduce.
we're just fucking barbaric, and we struggle to come up with reasons why we should not be. but we're suffering these days from the feeling of the lost horizon, or alternatives to barbarism that might give us back the feeling of meaning or purpose that went missing (or were always missing, but unrecognizable as such).
for me, although this is quite recent, it's about the question of Freedom in its most unironic sense. the Death of Marx is what gives you Land, and i'm very interested in finding something other than Land that makes sense and does not require me to basically lobotomize myself, even for the best of all possible reasons. imagining something like a neo-Enlightenment has been helping me sleep better at night, as has thinking about the parallels between the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Journey to the West.
we might even get really crazy and ask about this question of a planetary domestication: what is it that brings the anthropocene to an end? clearly something is going on here. how the fuck is it possible that the Apex Predator winds up domesticating himself in this way, that our fabulous meatbrains and their riotously weird imaginations wind up synthesizing their plans for future development? i'm with Land (and Deleuze) on this, that capital is a kind of epoch, a threshold. i don't ultimately think it should be overthrown, mostly because
a) we are ultimately just going to reproduce it anyways, and
b) it is tremendously good at civilizing barbarians. the problem is
c) what do you do with a civilized barbarian afterwards.
Sun Wukong to me is a spectacularly interesting literary figure; he is who FF6's Kefka might have become had there been anyone there to teach him. see also the Beast of Kung Fu Hustle, the Great Antagonist converted into the Great Disciple. these are to me some of the most hopeful and powerful works of literature i can think of (yes, including FF6!).
planetary capital doesn't have to mean the worst parts of Land. and i'm not a fan of Pinker. and i think that the way to the truth leads through and perhaps only through a genuine fucking kaleidoscopic nightmare horrorshow. but i can't help but think that this is also just what it means to live through Interesting Times or a Copernican phase shift in things. it's giving history a *meaning* and not just a narrative that is kind of required. what else could it be in the end but mutual co-enlightenment? not necessarily mutual prosperity, but an ongoing charting of the Terra Incognita of this strange new world in which we find ourselves?
postmodernity gives you the sea, the storms, and Land has found dread sea monsters at the bottom. but it's also quite possibly a riotously interesting time for some speculative adventure also, charting out new places in the psyche and the soul that are befitting the great Memetic Drift. and Land too is something that is to be overcome.