I used to be interested in philosophy back in highschool, but now it’s just not doing it for me. Alot of it just seems to be like I think therefore I am, but if I wasn’t I wouldn’t be because if I was I would, but if I couldn’t, then I wouldn’t be able to, and if i… like bro maybe I’m dumb, but wtf are these dudes on about??? 😭
On another note, some of the worst of it like Nihilism goes so well hand in hand with capitalism.
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brother, gabriel rockhill just blew my brain waaay the fuck open with how he so clearly and thoroughly enunciates the shit that i’ve been thinking about for YEARS holy shit
i am so relieved in the fact that even if i am insane, i am not alone in my insanity
thank you
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On your first point’s note, I’ve started reading the Tao Te Ching recently, and it’s also been changing my life, although it’s kind of the polar opposite. The edition I own has this intro and glossary that goes into detail comparing the tao to other other philosophies of the time and it’s just so fascinating.
I was actually baffled when I found many concepts around the tao to be so similar to dialectics. Made me wonder if it was culturally easier for the Chinese people to assimilate Marxist concepts due to these elements they already had carried on since 400 BCE. It felt like reading On Contradiction all over again… Well, maybe not so much, but some parts were scarily reminiscent.
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Definitely, and I understand and agree with what you say. I just love Laozi because he’s taught me how to navigate my recent struggles and it’s been massively helpful to me. I’d say I’ve been a somewhat principled confucianist for a while, even if I didn’t know I was. Arguably, Marxist sentiment is fueled by the same solidary vein.
That said, my understanding from what I’ve read, which I must say isn’t Confucianist literature but rather some commentaries and quotes on it, is that Confucius believed the relationships one is born into are of utmost importance, with feudal loyalty being at the top and loyalty to fellow humans (benevolence) being at the bottom. Since you’ve read more Confucianist texts, pray tell me, did I get it right, or is there something I’m missing?
I know it also said something along the lines of “lords are worth serving because if one weren’t he’d be deposed by the people”, but as Marxists we know how far that goes. Truth be told, the nuance of historical context is important, but I was just thinking if that part of the whole wouldn’t be problematic to a contemporanean reader.
I know I probably have a very flawed understanding, since I (very regretfully) haven got around to reading more works yet, so I’m very looking forward to your instruction on the topic.
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I think Confucius and alot of other Eastern philosophers are pretty cool. Alot of it just seems to be principally about being nice, respecting the world, and contributing to order.
sigh when in doubt, it’s probably the CIA.
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Taimur Rahman also did an interview here where he discusses precisely the kind of thing Gabriel Rockhill does - how postmodern philosophy came to function as a distraction from class analysis -
https://probablycancelledpod.libsyn.com/postmodern-neo-marxism-enter-the-void-w-dr-taimur-rahman
(can’t vouch for every episode of that podcast but this one is great)
edit: for those who prefer articles, Rockhill has published some good ones here:
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Rahman is a very well-respected and legit Pakistani ML. He recently did a great episode with Luna Oi on the whole Imran Khan situation.
WTF? How the fuck is relegating answers of how the world works to precisely the only method that is actually made to understand the world without bias is “a dark age” ? What kind of idealism is this?
And how is it bad that we use more specific therms of study and scientists instead of a broad and blur name as phylosophy, that basically can be anything and any charlatan?
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Aaaah, I see, I see. I agree, then.
I am just very visceral with idealism and very opposite to it… My nickname is quite a tip lol.
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Very interesting.
What do you like so much about Confucius? As someone with zero experience with him
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Oof, damn, yeah I’ve been there that fucking sucks. I would spend a whole ass hour writing a perfect response in an internet argument just to press one stupid effing button and nuke myself.
But that sounds really nice, actually. I definitely think compassion is underrated. It’s cool that this is the philosopher that (IIRC) many Chinese build off of. I will have to check him out when I’m up to read some philosophy.
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Yes, I love that. Very kind and wise. People are a product of their circumstances and most don’t have the tools to escape it, simple. I myself don’t even truly hate our enemies (most of the time), I know they are just as hurt by these systems and victims of a high pressure current.
I’ve got a master’s degree in this field and I can honestly say that the only purpose of it is to be fascinating by itself. There are no practical application of philosophy in general because practice is a controversial topic like everything else. I’m just a pretty privileged dude that got into it at univ because it’s the biggest luxury I will ever afford in my life.
However there is one thing I am certain of is that a non-elitist teaching of some philosophy would be great in a socialist school, to get to fully know dialectical materialism and how it differs from other positions.
If you have questions about the subject don’t hesitate replying
I think philosophy could have the potential to help people out with some existential big-think problems in their head (or make it worse, lol). Intros to a variety of stuff made easily understandable would be very valuable in K-12 IMO as it could help show people how broad thinking styles can go, most of us are taught one way to think and we think it’s the only way everybody on the world (besides perhaps a spooky “Other”) thinks.
I had this social studies type of class back in highschool and I remember learning about Utilitarianism. I thought was cool because it actually dealed with how society organized itself, but of course, it lacked any real enforcement mechanism because it would rub up against Western notions of liberalism (as do pretty much all other philosophies).
Alot of the other shit just seemed so unnecessarily heady. Like how many times can you expand and expound on the idea of the universe being so oh so pointless. Like I get it, alot of people probably did a bad job of quotemining Nietzsche, and they’ve now come to conclusion that waaah nothing has meaning.
I just look at philosophy as something interesting and thought provoking, which maybe really at the end of the day it is meant to be just that. I think a lot of people take it too seriously, usually online, and try act out a branch of philosophy as if it was a religion.
Some of it is more helpful to a person and some less. Like nihilism doesn’t really help anyone but a bit of stoicism would maybe be handy.
Machiavelli is based…
But for real, philosophy lost its meaning after the fall of the roman empire. It became a sort of academic topic only, instead of schools that teach people how to see and live in the world.
But, like you said, this second aspect of philosophy is coming back now, but is being, of course, co-opted by capitalism, similar to what religion is, but for more upper class ppl ‘who know better’.
Phylosophies were also coopted by ancient imperialism, theocracies and feudalism, wtf do you mean that it is now that they became meaningless?
I’m not saying you are wrong, but we should remember that history, clasism, reactionarism, etc, didn’t begin in the Industrial Revolution.
Philosophy was seen as more than an academic subject before the fall of the Roman Empire (in the West). This implies ofc that it was co-opted by the Church after the fall of the roman empire, afterall, it was not in the interest of the Church to advocate of other styles of life and thought othen than Christianity… The Church relegated philosophy only as a means of academic subject.
Afaik, this paradigm is changing only now, where this view of Philosophy as more than an academic subject, but a way to live your life, is growing, but also being co-opted by capitalism.
Ofc that in ancient times philosophy was victim of politics. Hell, Socrates died because of this (btw a good text on this subject).
I mean, both Christianity and pre-Christian sophism during Rome’s Empire were lead to propagandize or tranquilize the population during different times, also as shown how Athenian Aristocracy coopted Sophism so it could be in their favour, not in any sort of criticism or actual real observations. Plato, for example, the father of current Idealism, was a super useful fool because basically made an school of thought that validated every single deity and religion regardless of how enormously and obviously absurd was, to the point we still see charlatans using the same idealist excuse when the demonstrated evidence go against their reactionary rethoric.
Also, gotta point out that before we were giving more specific names to studies, a phylosopher could be anyone from a conman and charlatan, to a mathematician, which thankfully, this sort of semantics disappeared.
The reason about why Marxism works is because its based in science, not idealist phylosophies, or simply “ways of living”. Dialectical Materialism is basically trying to observe the world as it actually is and live towards socialism without dogmas and without any sort of idealism and anti-dialecticalism, which btw, “Dialectical” isn’t about “speaking good”, but about evolving. Literally, Dialectical Materialism means: “Reality is physical an evolves”, which is how science demonstrates reality. Which, curiously, Socrates made some sort of simmilar observations regarding dialectics… But still… We lose tome on rethorics and spirituality and shit instead of focusing on the only life we have, giving our most fidelity to frivolous idols that have been… Manmade and obvious, to the point we harm a lot just because we fear some hell or whatever made up shit.
I cannot… be forgiving to the rethorics that are giving just a minimum consideration to this as even deserving some respect or good faith… I cannot anymore and I am done for in this, so this is my naked heart, my personal bias, exposed, because I am honest and sincere, and I am not willing to go with mental gymnastics nor intellectual dishonesty.
Greek philophers are based tho, socrates was forced to kill himself because he was too based.
To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”
It is not dumb. Basically, the actual question is “Do I know anything for sure?”. And answer is “I know that I exist for sure, because I am thinking about these questions.”
Basically that forms the basis of knowing. We can now build up knowledge because we know we exist for sure.
I think the major flaw is that you had to translate it into modern layman English for that to make any sense, because now that you say that it’s like “oh okay” but without a translator it feels lost in translation. I had the same experience in my Intro to New Testament elective course I took in community college, reading old things like the Bible is cool but feels impossible without a modern guide. All these philosophies need to not only be modernized but translated into easily understandable language as opposed to obtuse academic jargon IMO.
Yeah. So many great philosophers feel so inaccessible due to how complex and abstract the language they use is —which is fair, they deal with complex and abstract ideas they try to sum up neatly. But nobody’s got time for that, and a middleman translator that dissects these ideas and lays them out in simpler, albeit lengthier ways make it so much easier and more enjoyable.
As I’ve said in another reply, I’m reading the Tao Te Ching currently. Not only would it obviously be impossible without a translator, but also a good translator is a must, as I understand Ancient Chinese was an incredibly compact language so to speak, so you might need whole pages to unwind what a single, apparently simple verse is trying to say. It’s thanks to the thoroughness of the translator in communicating these ideas that I get to read the cool based book.
Very interesting. What author/translator?
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Nietzsche is worth reading as the most baldfaced articulation of reaction, as an apologetic for class distinctions and literal slavery. Losurdo’s Aristocractic Rebel book is invaluable here.
I’ve recently been delving into Hegel. Great stuff, he thinks like a stoned teenager, but more well read. It’s important to understand his concept of sublation (aufhebung).
Is “thinks like a stoned teenager” a compliment or a slight, 'cause god help me I can’t tell and it’s the funniest descriptor I’ve seen in a minute
Compliment, of course! Dude was at the apex of knowledge of his time and still managed to ask the important questions, like, what if you’re looking at something, and then the something changes, and now you’re looking at yourself looking at something?? [12 minute guitar solo]
Wow, what a quote from Nietzsche: …"This aristocratic praxis began to crystallize in Human All Too Human where the thinker envisioned a future utopia based on suffering. Spiritual suffering ‘could be achieved if society was split into two classes: the caste of forced labour and the caste of idlers, or those capable of true leisure and capable at the same time as suffering deeply’ ”.
Something always did rub me the wrong way about this guy.
I don’t know if this is taken out of context, but man that doesn’t read too well.
It’s throughout his work, from the beginning to the end. From BGE:
In the past, every elevation of the type ‘human being’ was achieved by an aristocratic society—and this will always be the case: by a society that believes in a great ladder of hierarchy and value differentiation between people and that requires slavery in one sense or another. Without the grand feeling of distance that grows from inveterate class differences, from the ruling caste’s constant view downwards onto its underlings and tools, and from its equally constant practice in obeying and commanding, in holding down and holding at arm’s length—without this grand attitude, that other, more mysterious attitude could never exist, that longing for ever greater distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more far-flung, extensive, spacious inner states, in short, the elevation of the type ‘human being’, the continual ‘self-overcoming of the human’, to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.
I can now go to sleep knowing my deep seated resentment for Nietzsche was in fact more than justified.
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for anti nihilist shit read albert camus
I think philosophy is valuable as an individual, no guiderails pursuit, but this is heavily biased based on my personal life. I’ve barely read any proper philosophy besides what quoteminers deliver to me in media, maybe the occasional more detailed article etc. but definitely never picked up a tome and took a dive into it. However I spend a lot of time (much more time than I would like, if I had a choice) thinking. Thinking about all sorta shit. I kind of damaged my mind with drugs and misc trauma and for a long time the thoughts I had were very disturbing. However I pushed through, falling deeper in a “hey, I’m already in the abyss, could it really get any worse?” sort of way (secretly fully fearing I was going to discover some sort of new, terrible, inconceivable layer of hell that would render me catatonic or be a final push into suicide). But eventually something just…clicked. First here and there and then slowly all at once. And now things just make sense. And I really like my understanding of reality and it has a lot of complexity and depth that I hope I can share one day, that as user witlessworm said of older philosophy in this thread encompasses other fields (politics, psychology, science, religion, etc.). I beat a lot of my illnesses with it, it helped soothe a lot of unsolvable internal problems I had and couldn’t be helped with by anyone else. I don’t think my thoughts are particularly one of a kind, when I DO learn official concepts and such I find a lot of what I felt I had “discovered” has been around hundreds or even thousands of years (or likely just as long as humans have been sentient) but it felt valuable to have came to such conclusions myself instead of being handed them. Like how you can know something versus BELIEVING something, if that makes sense.
I’m really not trying to huff my own farts, like I promise most of this is just the luck of my circumstances both good and bad and I really don’t have shit to show for my life besides what my noggin cooked me for dinner. But I do wish others could have a similar end product as I have without all the pains along the way and I wonder how this could be accomplished, perhaps by taking existing philosophy and breaking down stuff into fundamentals and trying to give people not the crazy ideas but the tools to find the crazy ideas themselves slowly over time. A lot of pain led me here but this same thing, my thoughts, which tortured me for so long, are what ultimately provided my relief.
This all being said, I do wish to read some actual philosophy books, I just wish I had more time in the day. Definitely one day I will gobble a couple I’m sure, just got to find ones that aren’t too obtuse and written in a language easily processed by me.
I also am not trying to knock the experience of others who have learned through books because ultimately I recognize that different people learn things different ways, of course!
Since science has been implemented as the way to go of progressing, phylosophy (and religions, frankly) has been basically obsolete since. And I don’t mean ethics. I mean what phylosophies where meant for, in “search of knowledge” and stuff.
Phylosophies that go against Dialectical Materialism (which is basically the scientific method but not just in some areas but in everything else), shouldn’t be taken for granted, since they are basically idealism, frankly.
Study Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, all facets of Eastern philosophy instead… peace
