If x-ray had stopped at the end of the quote, she would have secured her point. This statement about Roark comes from Nietzsche's Overman, his ubermensch. To stay in context Rand is still reading Nietzsche, (going on about 20 years now) making entries in her Journal during the planning and writing of Fountainhead.
Now to move on to Zizek!
The entire article is here.
[PDF]
The_ Actuality of Ayn Rand- The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
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Ayn Rand'. Slavoj Zizek. Ayn Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best ...
Ayn Rand'. Slavoj Zizek. Ayn Rand's fascination for male figures displaying absolute, unswayable determination of their Will, seems to offer the best ...
The properly subversive dimension of her ideological procedure is not to be underestimated. Rand fits into the line of "overconformist" authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself, as the title of one of her books (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; Rand 1967) tells us; according to her, the truly heretical thing today is to embrace the basic premise of capitalism without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare, etc. sugar-coating. So what Pascal and Racine were to Jansenism, what Kleist was to German nationalist militarism, what Brecht was to Communism, Rand is to American capitalism. (The Actuality of Ayn Rand;Slavoj Zizek;JARS 3,no.2;215-227.)....We have thus Roark as the being of pure drive in no need of symbolic recognition (and as such uncannily close to the Lacanian saint - only an invisible line of separation distinguishes them), and the three ways to compromise one's drive: Wynand, Keating, Toohey. The underlying opposition here is that of desire and drive, as exemplified in the tense relationship between Roark and Dominique, his sexual partner. Roark displays the perfect indifference towards the Other characteristic of drive, while Dominique remains caught in the dialectic of desire, which is the desire of the Other: she is gnawed by the Other's gaze, i.e., by the fact that others, the common people totally insensitive to Roark's achievement, are allowed to stare at it and thus spoil its sublime quality. (218)
Here in Zizek's article he takes on Rand's characterization of Dominique at the level of desire in the dialectic.
The only way for her to break out of this deadlock of the Other's desire is to destroy the sublime object in order to save it from becoming the object of the ignorant gaze of others:
You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all.....I never open again any great book I've read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and of what they were."(F 143-44 )
And is this not what Sasha is saying about Barthes: The Lover's Discourse:
Owning Roland Barthes
Doesn't this resonate with Kristen Stewart's refusal to discuss her relationship with Robert Pattinson? "They covet him," she says. "Why would I discuss something that means the world to me with a perfect stranger?"1. POSSESSIONTwo of my friends are currently reading Roland Barthes. One keeps hurling invectives at the page. The other, whom I see almost every day, likes to send out snippets on Twitter, professing her endless love for Barthes’ words, swearing against life itself that this book is hers, it knows her, no other writer could come close to what she tries, in vain, to say about love. This friend asks me, “You remember what he said about absence?” And I itch to rid of the conversation, of her questions, of her testimonials about how fated she and this book are. She offers, “It’s so hard to talk about, no? It’s so personal.” And I itch to rid of the conversation. I think her unworthy, I think her views unworthy, I think her identification with my words unworthy. I think anyone undeserving of this book. I think of everyone who comes to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments as an intruder to my love affair with it, its captivation of me, my willing enslavement to it. I have known this for four and a half years, perhaps felt it for longer:A Lover’s Discourse is mine.
These "other eyes" are the Evil Gaze at its purest, which grounds the paradox of property: if, within a social field, I am to possess an object, this possession must be socially acknowledged, which means that the big Other who vouchsafes this possession of mine must in a way possess it in advance in order to let me have it. ....this gaze of the Other that oversees me in my desiring capacity is in its very essence "castrative," threatening.
....So, for Dominique, the greatest sacrilege is to throw pearls before swine: to create a precious object and then to expose it to the Other's Evil Gaze, i.e., to let it be shared with the crowd. And she treats herself in precisely the same way: she tries to resolve the deadlock of her position as a desired object by way of willingly embracing, even searching for, the utmost humiliation _ she marries the person she most despises and tries to ruin the career of Roark, the true object of her love and admiration. .....she will become his true partner only when her desire for him will no longer be bothered by the Other's gaze _ in short, when she will accomplish the shift from desire to drive.
Shifting now to Atlas Shrugged:
What the hystericized prime mover must accept is thus the fundamental existential indifference: she must no longer be willing to remain the hostage of the second-handers' blackmail. ("We will let you work and realize your creative potential, on condition that you accept our terms"). She must be ready to give up the very kernel of her being, that which means everything to her, and to accept the "end of the world," the (temporary) suspension of the very flow of energy that keeps the world running. In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go through the zero-point of losing everything. (And here we have Nietzsche! Emphasis mine.) And, far from signaling the "end of subjectivity," this act of assuming existential indifference is, perhaps, the veryb gesture of absolute negativity that gives birth to the subject. What Lacan calls "subjective destitution" is thus, paradoxically, another name for the subject itself, i.e., for the void beyond the theater of hysterical subjectivizations.This subject beyond subjectivization is free in the most radical sense of the word.. This is why Rand's "prime movers" are not characterized primarily by their positive properties (superb intelligence, etc.); their innermost feature is their lack of the false guilt feeling, their freedom from the superego vicious cycle - when you are caught in this cycle, you are guilty whatever you do. (Z;222)
248 comments:
1 – 200 of 248 Newer› Newest»I think this explains Kristen's adamant refusal to exploit her relationship with Rob.
The ones Kristen has to fear are the studio suits who want to clone him, make him gain weight for a part so as to become unattractive and ugly if possible. The suits who will woo him for whatever kind of financial reasons. Who will pair him with actresses in hopes she will take him away from that little girl who won't pimp him.
Janet wrote: "This statement about Roark comes from Nietzsche's Overman, his
ubermensch. To stay in context Rand is still reading Nietzsche, (going
on about 20 years now) making entries in her Journal during the planning
and writing of Fountainhead." (end quote)
Rand may well have been attracted to Neitzsche because he 'celebrated the lack of empathy', so to speak.
Nearly all Randian heroes/heroines are devoid of empathy, and I think this reflect Rand's own lack of empathy. I'm convinced that she really could not feel it. The problem manifested itself already at a very young age, in her inability make friends for example.
An unloving mother compounded the problem.
Zizek wrote
"The properly subversive dimension of her
ideological procedure is not to be underestimated. Rand fits into the
line of "overconformist" authors who undermine the ruling ideological
edifice by their very excessive identification with it. Her
over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism itself, as the title of one of
her books (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; Rand 1967) tells us;
according to her, the truly heretical thing today is to embrace the
basic premise of capitalism without its communitarian, collectivist,
welfare, etc. sugar-coating. (end quote)
I suppose Zizek does not think that Rand thought of herself as being 'subversive to capitalism', but advocating as she did, "full, pure, uncontrolled unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism" WILL of course wreak havoc if put in practice.
I'm not sure, but didn't Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, who had favored the deregulation which resulted in the bank collapse disaster, later say that he may have to rethink this or that about Rand's beliefs?
That Rand uncritically embraced capitalism to such a degree is no surprise, in view of the bad experience she had made in Russia with its opposite, communism. It is also no surprise that Rand's work is not widely known in Europe. For the majority of Europeans, as opposed to the majority of Americans, don't have this relationship of love (yes, love) with capitalism.
I venture to say that one could call uncontrolled capitalism the "Order of Seduction" (how's that, Janet? :-) for Ayn Rand and all those who think it is the solution to problems the world is facing both econimically and politically.
I'm also convinced that Rand's work would never have gotten off the ground in the US had she not sung the praise of capitalism and free entrepreneurship in her novels.
Don't use the Order of Seduction as a sound-bite. Unregulated capitalism is what Eric Packer is doing in Cosmopolis. Accumulation which is in the Order of Production. But I would venture to say that Eric Packer's fascination with number patterns and natural cycles is in the Order of Seduction.
Capitalism that is more than capitalism, that is hyper-capitalism, that is obscene capitalism is cyber capital circulating globally.
Yes Greenspan did say there was a flaw. I have posted about this. The flaw is self-interest. Rand did destroy NBI in order to destroy Nathaniel Branden. She herself lost millions and millions doing that. Did she lose? I don't think so. Any more than Francisco did.
I agree that her praise of free enterprise was the key, her placing it on a moral foundation, however shaky it was.
No she did not think of herself as subversive to capitalism. Zizek discusses the 4 permutations: *known/knowns; known/unknowns; unknown/unknowns *and the crucial one here*, the unknown/knowns. *There are things one knows that one does not know that they know. These are the * unknown/knowns*. This is Rand through Nietzsche. Nietzsche knows and says that if something is pushed to its limits and then given another shove, it will crash and implode. Rand pushed just about everything to its limits eh. Certainly capitalism.
Janet wrote:
"No
she did not think of herself as subversive to capitalism. Zizek
discusses the 4 permutations: *known/knowns; known/unknowns;
unknown/unknowns *and the crucial one here*, the unknown/knowns. *There
are things one knows that one
does not know that they know. These are
the * unknown/knowns*. This is Rand through Nietzsche. Nietzsche knows
and says that if something is pushed to its limits and then given
another shove, it will crash and implode. Rand pushed just about
everything to its limits eh. Certainly capitalism." (end quote)
But isn't the apt analogy here that Rand did not know what Nietzsche knew?
Whereas "the things one knows that one does not know that they know" is something else imo.
Example: a prison inmate knows what another cellmate has told him in confidence, but he does not know that "they" (the police) know it too because they have bugged the cell.
Yes on your prison example. Of course. Perfect.
As to Nietzsche you need to read my post on Baudrillard and Nietzsche because it applies also to Rand, both having read Nietzsche very young and very seriously. http://aynrand2.blogspot.com/2012/03/reading-ayn-rand-through-nietzsche.html and http://aynrand2.blogspot.com/2012/03/baudrillard-reading-himself-and-rand.html
There are more reasons I am pushing this. It is not unlike taking your mother in with "mother's milk" her language, her intonations, her well, everything with first your introjection of her and secondly with your identification with her. I am saying that this is what Nietzsche was to her. She has internalized his language style to an extraordinary degree, as also has Baudrillard. Reading Baudrillard after having read Nietzsche is an amazing reading. Rand slides out of things by inverting, in particular her revision in We The Living to scrub Nietzsche out. She doesn't get rid of him, she inverts him and that satisfies the stupid editors. Rand could not have been fooled by this technique. She used it all the time. BUT it orginated with her reading of Nietzsche.
Rand does know about pushing things to the limit and implosion as Baudrillard renames it. Read Francisco's speech to Reardon about tanking the mine and taking all the investors with him. He "lost" 15 million but he itemizes the multi millions adding up that all the other people lost and the fact that Taggert Transcontinental isn't going to recover altho Dagny thinks it will.
so right there in that speech is the confirmation I was looking for. I just found it this past week or so. Big surprise as it has been so long since I read it - over 50 years - that I had forgotten that little revealing speech. I was going on intuition before and gathering evidence but this speech wraps the baby up and puts it to bed. For good.
Janet wrote:
"Yes Greenspan did say there was a flaw. I have posted about this. The flaw is self-interest." (end quote)
But isn't self-interest the very foundation of capitalism? If self-interest is regarded as a flaw, then, going by that premise, capitalism is based on a flaw.
Janet wrote:
"Nietzsche knows and says that if something is pushed to its limits and then given another shove, it will crash and implode." (end quote)
I think L. Peikoff is doing this with Objectivism. He is "more papal than the pope", so to speak; he is more dogmatic than Rand ever was, and thus, ironincally, is contributing to Objectivism's demise far more than the harshest critic could.
Ah very perceptive comment about Peikoff. The flaw is "rational" self-interest. There is an article around and I don't know which of my computers it is on, discussing self-interest and the fact that many other motivations come before that. The other motivational self-interests may not be rational but emotional I agree. But trying to dfine that baby within the dialectic is a hopeless cause. All you will come up with are words, words and more words.Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Zizek: This is why Rand's
"prime movers" are not characterized primarily by their positive
properties (superb intelligence, etc.); their innermost feature is their
lack of the false guilt feeling," (end quote)
The prime movers' innermost feature is more than lack of "false" guilt feeling: it is lack of any guilt feeling. They cannot feel guilty because they are unable to feel empathy.
There is real guilt and false guilt. False guilt is the guilt inculcated by your culture or your super-ego if you are going Freudian with this.
None of her characters have anything to feel guilt about as they are ubermensches to use Nietzsche's overman term.
Are you thinking of the chaos and wreck of the world, the people killed in Atlas? Are you thinking the characters might have empathy and feel guilt over them? These are the masses of unthinking people "human all too human" as Nietzsche says and Rand repeats over and over in her Journal. Another cookie crumb signaling Nietzsche's influence.
Atlas is not about the personal story of the characters. It is a story about "the world" when the prime movers depart. That is the story.
Roark endangers Dominique to make sure the watchman and no one else will be hurt before he blows up the Project. It is Dominique who "accidentally" gets hurt. Roark avoids guilt by being careful. He shows empathy over Dominique's near death.
Sorry my mistake here. Unregulated capitalism i.e. global circulating capitalism "in orbit rising and setting with the sun" (Baudrillard) is simulated reality. It is fascination. When simulated reality is total then we will be in Virtual Reality. This is the danger we face, all unknowing. We are rushing to embrace it.
As you sit in Germany and me in the Ozarks thinking we are really communicating. The Japanese have no word for communicating.
I think Rand doesn't get involved in her fiction with comapassion, empathy, guilt feelings, etc because she does not psychologize her characters. Cheryl falls apart and commits suicide when she realizes the virtues she married James for do not exist.
Her characters STRATEGIZE they do not demonstrate deterministic influences, conditioning, psychological problems, etc. Dominique is a virgin but nowhere does anyone get into her possible "frigidity" - stuff like that. That's not where Rand wanted to go with her fiction. A is A eh.
Her characters are influenced by Nietzsche's Zarathustra.
>>>>Eva Braun opined: "But isn't self-interest the very foundation of capitalism?"
That's an odd way of looking at it, considering the fact that in order to prosper under capitalism and the social system of division-of-labor, one must provide a good or service that others desire and demand. Sounds altruistic to me.
The implications of the whole sacrifice code in Galt's speech is the feeling of victimization it ultimately produces. Unworthiness, the feeling of guilt for not being worthy enough, self-sacrificial enough (which Žižek calls false guilt feeling). What woul be a proper way of empathizing with someone victimized? Encouraging them to continue feeling that way? That's, as Janet would say, a "floating sign", masking the *absence* of empathy.
It is a screwed up feeling, cemented in the dialectic of victimizer/victim in which a victim depends on the very perpetrator of the victimization to somehow step out of it (because of feeling guilty?!) and break the vicious cycle. Where there's self-interest, there's no sacrifice, no sacrifice if sth is willingly given. And I'd say, Rand's prime-movers willingly give (up) because of utmost empathy and understanding of what a thinking mind is capable of.
DW wrote:
"That's an odd way of looking at it, considering the fact that in
order to prosper under capitalism and the social system of
division-of-labor, one must provide a good or service that others desire
and demand. Sounds altruistic to me." (end quote)
It is the wish for monetary profit that is the foundation of capitalism; and this wish is clearly not altruistic.
Janet wrote:
"I think Rand doesn't get involved in her fiction with comapassion, empathy, guilt feelings, etc because she does not psychologize her characters." (end quote)
I think there are indicators that Rand had problems with feeling empathy, and that the lack of empathy, a trait so palpable in her fictional heroes, are a reflection of her own.
I recall having read somewhere that Rand may have had Asperger's.
A while ago, I googled 'Ayn Rand' and
'Asperger' and got some links. Here is an excerpt from a blog:
http://clarissasbox....1/ayn-rand.html
From "Clarissa's blog":
"From what little I have been able to read from Heller's biography, it
has already become clear to me that Rand must have had an exceptionally
strong form of Asperger's. (Many of the things that seem to baffle her biographers become perfectly understandable once you think of them in terms of Asperger's.)" (end quote)
Janet wrote:
"None of her characters have anything to feel guilt about as they are ubermensches to use Nietzsche's overman term.
These are the masses of unthinking people "human all too human" as
Nietzsche says and Rand repeats over and over in her Journal." (end quote)
Nietzsche's 'overman' phantasmagoria with all its contempt for the "unthinking masses" is a celebration of non-empathy.
Are you thinking of the chaos and wreck of the world, the people killed
in Atlas? Are you thinking the characters might have empathy and feel
guilt over them?
I can't see anythig in the novel pointing in this direction.
CHG wrote.
"What would be a proper way of empathizing with someone victimized? Encouraging them to continue feeling that way?" (end quote)
I'd opt for supporting projects that help victims (and have actually donated quite a bit of money to various organizations working in that field).
My replies to you are not getting posted here. I agree with your very original statement of Peikoff's out Randing Rand. Excellent. That is exactly what is happening. But for you I would not have "seen this object" so thank you. Yes. By keeping it a closed system he is following Rand's wishes. I happen to agree with him, but it does have its consequences.
It reminds me of fanfiction, carrying the characters on in a different way. A book is open to paraphrase Borges. But it continues to exist between 2 covers as "closed".Her philosophy can only be extended, argued, discussed, ridicules, adored, etc ad infinitum. As one sees with Plato or Aristotle.
To regard her "philosophy" as a "floating sign", a footnote to her fiction changes it altogether. Borges often made up footnotes. Baudrillard also.
And David Foster Wallace with his 150 pages of footnotes to Infinite Jest were footnotes that were more than footnotes, hyper footnotes, "OBSCENE" as Baudrillard would say. This is Baudrillard's definition of obscene. DFW's footnotes are in themselves another novel. I think that is what Rand's Objectivism is: another novel.
A wonderful contribution by Darren.
overman is not that. That is the sound bite. If you read Babich she goes into that misconception in great detail which is seductive, readable, and touches truth.
I read it the same, but who am I? Just a blogger. Overman is the personal "will to power" to surpass oneself, to create a different self. Read Zarathustra as he goes through his changes.
It is not the "unfeeling Galt or Roark". It is man as man can become. Calchi-Novati uses this in her paper on Twilight here:
http://twilightirruption.blogspot.com/2012/04/twilight-reading-through-lacan-and.html
I'd opt for supporting projects that help victims (and have actually donated quite a bit of money to various organizations working in that field).
Read Zizek on charity notions. IMO it is a way of relieving false guilt. I don't mean the casual donation but a more focussed attempt at charity.
I answered you in a no reply thingy about Clarissa. She is really talking off the top of her head. Why bother to look for clinical syndromes. I can think of plenty for Rand. And Dosteievsky. And Hemingway. To mention a few. So what.
And she comes up with this after reading "some" of Heller's bio. Pffffft!
Janet: "My replies to you are not getting posted here." (end quote)
What is the reason for them not getting posted here? A software glitch?
Or do you mean they show up elsewhere instead of here?
Janet wrote:
"Read Zizek on charity notions. " (end quote)
Could you direct me to the specific passage where he elaborates on it? TIA.
Janet wrote::
"IMO it is a way of relieving false guilt.
I don't mean the casual donation but a more focussed attempt at
charity." (end quote)
But I don't donate out of a feeling of guilt. My donations flow from feelings of compassion and empathy.
It's in his new book on Hegel. No page as I am at the library and I don't really have the time to footnote everything for you. Just check the index.
And if you would register on disqus much would be made easier.
But they do not lead to change of the situation that produced the need for the charity. Like the right wingers who want to bomb, invade (Nicaragua,Iraq, Afghanistan)and then they are the first to go there afterward to rebuild houses, schools, churches etc.
>>>>Eva Braun foolishly blurted out: "It is the wish for monetary profit that is the foundation of capitalism."
Oh, you're SO smart, Eva!!! So well read, in so many subjects! So perceptive!
But I'll side with Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises on this (hope you don't mind).
"Capitalism" is not based on anyone's "wishes", whether for monetary profit or anything else, got that? If "monetary profit" PER SE where the essence of capitalism, then one could gain monetary profit by holding a gun to someone's head and robbing him, right? Wouldn't the robber be "profiting monetarily" from his victim? Yes, he would. Is holding a gun to someone's head and robbing him what Alisa Rosenbaum and Ludwig von Mises had in mind when they used the term "capitalism"? No, not at all. See? You didn't think. You didn't check your premises. You were too concerned with proving how compliant you are with Randroidism and Atlas Shrugged.
"Capitalism" — which Adam Smith and his contemporaries called "the system of Natural Liberty" — is a system of DIVISION OF LABOR founded on the legal institution of PRIVATE PROPERTY. No one forces anyone to engage in production and exchange; if you wish to stay on your own property and grow your own food, cobble your own shoes, and weave your own clothing, you are free to do so. Most people under capitalism voluntarily choose not to do so because — JUST LIKE PEOPLE EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, INCLUDING PEOPLE IN NON-CAPITAL COUNTRIES — most people under capitalism CHOOSE to be prosperous. IN ORDER TO PROSPER UNDER CAPITALISM, AS DEFINED ABOVE, ONE MUST SERVE OTHERS. The executives at Frito-Lay do not manufacture potato chips and other salty snacks for themselves; they prosper only to the extent they succeed in manufacturing products that OTHER PEOPLE WANT.
Get it?
Try reading Mises.
And here we are going into the fact that needs and desires are manufactured to sell what is produced. In other words demand is created. Made up[ out of thin air by sexy women posing next to sexy cars.
Janet wrote:
"Dominique is a virgin but nowhere does anyone get into her possible
"frigidity" - stuff like that. That's not where Rand wanted to go with
her fiction. A is A eh." (end quote)
Didn't Dominique speak of herself as an "utterly frigid woman"?
As for Dagny, she mentions her "inability to feel".
Most Randian heroes/heroines have no problem with feeling hatred though. Often, the 'cruelty' in their faces in mentioned and presented as a positive trait.
Janet wrote:
"Nor does Rand fall into the sin of sentimentalizing emotions. We don't
see Dagny spending pages and pages mooing over Reardon's lack of sexual
reverence towards her." (end quote)
Dagny did not moo over it because she (like Dominique with Roark) gets a kick out of being treated with a lack of 'sexual reverence' and respect by Rearden. Just think of the scene of their first sexual encounter, which was violent the point of her bleeding, and she enjoyed it ('this is how she wanted to be taken').
Janet wrote
"Nor Cheryl's pages of doubt over James before she kills herself." (end quote)
Cheryl has had no doubt over James because her role in the novel is that of a clueless naive thing whose eyes are blind to the obvious.
And as for her suicide, it occurs while she is in a near-psychotic state; the unfeeling social worker was the last straw that broke the camel's back.
"It's in his new book on Hegel. "
I googled Zizek and Hegel and several YouTube links showed up, for example here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR3vfHuOW38
Why is Zizek rubbing his nose and eyes all the time? Is he allergic to something and has a stuffed and running nose? (I could not acoustically make out what he said about his condition being a "problem").
He comes across as pretty disheveled, not even bothering to collect his snot in a handkherchief. Yuck!
You probably need to read recent fanfiction which is the same kind of sex that all the young girls are orgasming over. Sorry to pierce your bubble, but this is the kind of sex many young women and older women want: to be dominated; to have rough sex; etc
www.fanfiction.net Go to the ones on Twilight. There are about 18,000 of them. Many are about Dom/sub relations and rough sex. It's not just Rand. Modern women don't want that old seduction thing. The want to be taken!
Zizek refers to Rand as immorally ethical. Do gooders who would like to do otherwise he refers to as morally unethical. Her characters in Atlas are purely to enhance the story of the relation of power/knowledge in the world. The world is her focus, the characters just to flesh out the story. They are not the main event. Dagny is drive not desire.A Lacanian term for the ultimate hero/heroine.
Yes resistance is necessary. At the same time as Vija Kinski says in Cosmopolis, protest strengthens what it portends to weaken.
"Where there is power, there is resistance." - Michel Foucault
Try studying Foucault. You are closer to him than you think.Oppressive social structures you must learn to defend yourself against. Curioushairedgal has a great new post on that here http://guerrillablog2.blogspot.com/2012/05/se-defendreto-defend-oneself-or-why.html Foucault is lucid on this subject and was a force in leading prison reform by the inmates themselves instead of the neo liberals.
Yes, he has ticks, he rubs his nose and adjusts his shirt, sweats like a pig. No, he is not collecting snot, it's some palatal thing reflected in the way he talks. But it's about the content and not the form, no? Considering that he's a philosopher and all.
He's like this bear of a man, great sense of humor, I think he's beautiful!
Yes, there are many organizations that do that. But when you donate, you can't donate empathy and compassion through that money transfer. You can just offer material support but ultimately depend on the person actually in contact with the person in need of support (a beneficiary as they're impersonally referred to as if they're automatically benefiting from something, which in many cases is not true) to recognize and channel whatever empowers. That person can't do that if s/he is a non-thinker in Randian terms or if s/he is feeling false guilt as Žižek puts it.
Donations are enabling a system, a business system as any other, of charities or relief organizations. They are not providing help unless individuals within that system of careers and successes and personal gain and profit and bureaucracy know within that it would be the best possible solution for their ' beneficiaries' if they could work on ending their project as soon as possible instead of trying to make them go on indefinitely. Donations don't solve anything, they feed the system. Donations shouldn't make us feel better but worse.
Me too. And when he was young he was dazzlingly beautiful and sexy movie star looking. I'm in a snit over Cronenberg's Cosmopolis.
If the PC Feminists would get out of the psychologizing bullshit the problem would not exist. Sado-masochism of Dagny and Dominique isn't correct. Both of them are hot as hell and can't wait for preliminaries, as they have already taken place in their minds. Did you ever have it that way?
CHG wrote.
"Yes, there are many organizations that do that. But when you donate, you
can't donate empathy and compassion through that money transfer. " (end quote)
I donate the money in the spirit of empathy. The money given is the result of an empathic action on my part.
CHG wrote.
"You can just offer material support but ultimately depend on the person
actually in contact with the person in need of support (a beneficiary as
they're
impersonally referred to as if they're automatically benefiting
from something, which in many cases is not true) to recognize and
channel whatever empowers."
(end quote)
As group beings, we always 'depend' on ur fellow human beings in some way or other, for example in that we delegate certain tasks to them, and vice versa.
I don't regard this kind of cooperation as negativeat all.
No resonance with Gradiva eh. Zizek has one on "the disappearing woman" in film.- Laura is perfect - which I've only glanced at in Reading Lacan.
Also read some of Babich on vivisection the way to desensitization of compassion and then extended to cutting everything up in pieces. Well, Cro cut it up in pieces and I don't like the way he reassembled them. Cosmopolis decaffeinated. Shit.
Žižek talks about Starbuck donations,a product designed to sell coffee better while also making the customers feeling less of that false guilt feeling Žižek talks about in relation to Rand.
If the middle person, the one between your money and a kid in Africa (or a kid in Bosnia 20 years ago) for example, is doing what s/he is doing out of false guilt, then your donation is a product too, a mere part of the system that relies on the non-thinking donors donating out of empathy and feeling that they've done a good and proper thing, and the also non-thinking 'kids in Africa' depending on the donation of 'floating sign' empathy ultimately shaped as some material thing and nothing else. The system of non-thinkers doesn't want anything changed.
Nobody said anyhting on the cooperation being bad. It's just that it needs to be right to be good. And for it too be so, you need your 'middle man' to think out of the system perpetuating the false guilt.
I've tried all sorts of donations. US Army lunch boxes looking like somehting you'd eat on a space ship. Biscuits produced in the 70ies. Some despicable sardines, or no, it was just one huge sardine in a can, smelled awful, we used to make bread spread out of it with lots of onions. Norwegians sent good stuff, stockings and lipstick, and small toys for kids. I saved some US pencils, now my son's using them for school.There was Gert from GTC, he bought me a bottle of campari and a pack of cigs for my prom night from this shop only foreigners could go to. I danced with him in return. Crazy hippie, knew every remote village and was welcomed everywhere. There was Francois, 23, killed in a car crash while transporting UNHCR food supplies during night without car lights cause he might get sniped. There was some American journalist or something, doing interviews for his research, so scared and lost my friends ended up comforting him. Romain, who drank a bottle of rakija and ate smoked ham my father sent to my aunt in Sarajevo. Beatrice, my first boss who made me a surprise birthday party.
Getting food was the worst. Freudenberg Stiftung, or maybe it's Mott, has this policy, don't feed them the fish, show them how to catch it. Though they are the types of organizations that come much later. Imagine how wonderful it would be if everyone in the world knew how to catch the fish.
I guess they would be empty for you if you hadn't read Zizek's deconstruction of them.
Darren wrote:
"Capitalism" is not based on anyone's "wishes", whether for monetary profit or anything else, got that? (end quote)
But of course Capitalism is based on wishes. Humans are goal-oriented entities, got that?
Janet wrote:
"And
here we are going into the fact that needs and desires are manufactured
to sell what is produced. In other words demand is created. Made up[
out of thin air by sexy women posing next to sexy cars." (ens quote)
And the motive behind such PR action is the capitalist company's wish for monetaey profit. Does Darren seriously believe that capitalism is not based on wishes? Priceless!
This discussion is much more understandable from the understanding of the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/capital. Wishes? Needs? Take the Nietzschean hammer to these words. They have a genealogical history that will expose their meaning. They are pretty meaningless words. We use them. We have been taught to use them. We hear them. They are part of the air we breathe. That's all they are. That's all this silly discussion is. Breath turned into words. It will never enlighten anyone, no one will ever learn anything from it. It is just a way of ventilating. After all, we have a computer. It is hooked up to the internet. We have a certain degree of education. We express our opinions. We occupy our time waiting for Godot.
CHG:
"Donations shouldn't make us feel better but worse." (end quote)
I don't think one can speak for others in terms of how they "should" feel. Imo this is prescriptive morality that goes against the idea of individualism.
Janet wrote.
"Wishes? Needs? Take the Nietzschean hammer to these words. They have a
genealogical history that will expose their meaning. They are pretty
meaningless words. We use them. We have been taught to use them. We hear
them." (end quote)
Applying the Nietzschean hammer to examine the content of his own effusions ought to be quite interesting.
Philosophers often seem to take their own work out of th equation when they say: "Philosophize with a hammer", "Check your premises", etc.
Let's therefore take that little hammer to your assertion, which you have tried to bolster up by referring to Nietzsche as authority ["truth via authority" is fallacy you frequently seem to succumb to]
You wrote:
"And here we are going into the fact that needs and desires are manufactured to sell what is produced." (end quote)
So if needs [and wishes and desires] are "pretty meaningless words", why did you use them? It would interest me what sense it makes for you to use words if they are meaningless?
Janet wrote:
"Rand too was disheveled BYW! LOL!" (end quote)
But with Rand, I didn't get the impression of 'uncleanliness' as with Zizek. In that video, he looked like he hadn't taken a shower for ages.
He's quite intriguing though. It would interest me whether he fully endorses Marxism, or whether he is also critical of it as an ideology.
"BYW" - what does this abbreviation mean?
Janet wrote:
"He is Romanian I believe. " (end quote)
Zizek is Slovenian.
Janet wrote:
"Why bother to look for clinical syndromes. I can think of plenty for
Rand. And Dosteievsky. And Hemingway. To mention a few. So what." (end quote)
It is not about clinical syndromes as such; but if these symptoms turn out to have a major influence in shaping an individual's ethics, taking a closer a closer look is warranted.
This is an error in thinking that has a history -a genealogical one - as to the intersections that brought it into existence. It is fairly recent BTW and deadly. But u will have to read Foucault for explanatory detail. Madness and Civilization elaborates on it. It followe the occurrence of possession that followe witchcraft and the Inquisition. Noticeable in nuns and at that point the church did not want to deal with the wave of it that was exhibited by nuns and brought the medical profession in for help which they had so far refused to allow in their doors.
They gave up an then the medical profession entered the realm of maness to efine it clinically an so you now have the maness of the meical profession creating diagnoses in order to assign medication, to support themselves and the pharma industry. It is not about cure or help. It is about protecting the "normal" from the "abnormal". This is how the grid happens an how u begin to think in it as if it is "truth". It is all made up.
I am going to try to never argue/discuss Nietzsche with you. Look up what he says about taking a hammer to concepts an ideas.
I use words I would prefer not to use with you because your understanding is so limited.
And yes plenty of people said Rand smelled. And no I am not going to search out the comments and places where I read it to link for you. The last time I saw her was on the street in New York City right beside Altman's I think, and she was disheveled. So what. I am sure you can find well groomed men who have nary a thought in their head.If you prefer them OK.
I could reply to you that what you're doing here is moralizing about not moralizing, or I could go into explaining what are the implications of everybody just keeping to our individual self or how we're always speaking even when we're not speaking or whatever.
Frankly, that doesn't interest me. There's a context behind that statement you quoted, you take whatever you want from it.
>>>>"I donate the money in the spirit of empathy. The money given is the result of an empathic action on my part."
Empathy? Your motive for pursuing a chosen goal is a "spirit of empathy"? So much for narrow self-interest being the necessary driver of goal-directed human action under capitalism. Twit.
It's not philosophers who often seem to take their own work out of the equation, it's humans.
So, my suggestion ( and yes, you could say that here I am moralizing again) is take the hammer to it all the way, push it to the end. Include *yourself* into the equation while you're at it.
Point of departure could be this impression of yours that Nietzsche (and his effusions) is regarded as authority, that Janet is into truth via authority, that Žižek looks like he hadn't showered in ages, that clinical syndromes you talk about above are necessarily revelatory in a way you assume them to be.... Remember that posmod talk we had? That's what this is, exactly. Taking a hammer to everything but not leaving yourself out of it. It seems to me you're quite bent on inferring that writers see themselves as gods preaching to the ignorant masses, that people consider somehting/someone as an authority (in addition to focusing on matters like spelling, countries of origin, appearances, kinda moralizing don't you think?). Which also indicates that you haven't quite understood the postmodern and its very hammering of the notion of authority, of the notions each of us has about what's 'normal', appropriate, correct etc. But this being my personal perception I'm willing to take the hammer to it. After all, the author being 'dead' as Barthes says, there's only what I, the reader, can see in your words. Maybe there's some clinical syndrome that's preventing me from really really understanding what you say. Or maybe it's because I, given the Balkanic origin in common with comrade Žižek, don't shower regularly and you can smell my dirty armpits through the screen, who knows.
Nerrad! You're alive!
Just kidding, your comment made me think of somehting Janet said, then it made me think of somehting else, then something else....now I think I see something I haven't seen before. So thanks Kent!
Janet wrote:
"Sado-masochism of Dagny and Dominique isn't correct.
Both of them are
hot as hell and can't wait for preliminaries, as they have already taken
place in their minds." (end quote)
D & D are "hot as hell" masochists, who get a kick out of being treated sadistically by the male heroes in TF and AS.
As for Dominique, she also has sadistic streak, which Dagny has not.
Darren wrote.
"Empathy? Your motive for pursuing a chosen goal is a "spirit of
empathy"? So much for narrow self-interest being the necessary driver of
goal-directed human action under capitalism. " (end quote)
Empathy and self-interest are not mutually exclusive. So there is no contradiction.
So deciding to help others is perfectly in sync with my own self-interest. There exists no such thing as "altruism" in human behavior. .
"Altruism" only exists as an ideological doctrine where people are told to serve others first.
But when I decide to donate without being coerced to, it is also my self-interest that directs me there. For one's own self-interest and the self-interest of others need not be opposites.
I have always been a generous person who likes to help others because it creates an atmosphere of harmony I desire both for me and for them.
"I am sure you can find well groomed men who have nary a thought in their head.If you prefer them OK.
(end quote)
I prefer well groomed men with intelligent thoughts in their head (am happily married to one actually). :-)
This doesn't mean I want a man to look 'spick and span' like in a soap ad, but think that taking regular showers and putting on clean clothes is a good thing.
Well you know the saying. Cleanliness is next to godliness LOL! Lots of women like their men "dirty".
So you are saying you and your hubby are anal, in Freudian terms. Just a little psychologizing LOL!
It could be taken back to Wittgenstein who says you cannot even know how you feel; cannot say it in language.
Of course I'm alive. Clark Kent's heart always beats a little faster, a little more resoundingly, and with a little more Cuban syncopation, in the company of Miss Lois Lane.
>>>>"Empathy and self-interest are not mutually exclusive. "
Neither are they identical. You first claimed ONLY selfishness was the cause of all human action under capitalism. Now you slyly admit there are other causes.
>>>>"For one's own self-interest and the self-interest of others need not be opposites."
Nor need they coincide. One can choose to help others to one's own detriment and loss, or one can choose to help others and suffer neither psychic profit nor psychic loss but remain completely unchanged.
Your notion that irrespective of the object of one's actions, the action is nonetheless to be defined as "selfish" so long as it's voluntary is ludicrous. Conversely, if you are forced to serve others at the point of a gun, that's actually still a selfish act: you prefer to serve others rather than have the gun go off in the direction of your head. Selfish.
You failed to check your premises on that.
>>>>"I have always been a generous person who likes to help others because it creates an atmosphere of harmony I desire both for me and for them."
It's for others to decide how your actions affect them and how they are perceived and judged. That you're self-impressed with how kind and generous you are is neither surprising nor relevant.
Janet wrote:
"So you are saying you and your hubby are anal, in Freudian terms. Just a little psychologizing LOL!" (end quote)
Humans are prone to pigeonholing people into physiological and "character types".
The Old Greeks categorized people into "sanguinic", "melancholic", "choleric" and "phlegmatic", Ayurveda has the Vata-Pitta-Kapha type, and so on.
Freud is therefore no exception. This does not mean one has to buy the categorizing hook, line and sinker.
Of so-called "anal" types for example, it is said that they are also "retentive" - parsimonious for example.
Whereas I'm quite the splurger when it comes to money.
And while I like being well-groomed, I'm not what one would call a meticulous housekeeper. I'm not in the least disturbed by e. g. dust on shelves or dog hair on the carpet.
The same goes for my husband.
Bottom line: one does not get far with all that classifying. For we human ar far too complex to fit into a few categories.
An additional remark about Freud: every woman with a smidgen of common sense will of course know that the so-called "penis envy" is a male, not a female problem. :)
CHG wrote:
"Taking a hammer to everything but not leaving yourself out of it. It
seems to me you're quite bent on inferring that writers see themselves
as gods preaching to the ignorant masses," (end quote)
But it is also people who give the writers a god-like cult status. This in turn feeds the writer's ego. Imo it is reciprocal process.
CHG wrote:
"Which also indicates that you haven't quite understood the postmodern
and its very hammering of the notion of authority, of the notions each
of us has about what's 'normal', appropriate, correct etc. " (end quote)
I do understand the post-modern attack on authority. After alI, I grew up during the times of the student movement in the late 1960s.
But I think it is entirely possible that one can get the ironic situation where those who attack authority are given cult status again, with their adherents becoming overly uncritical toward them.
So the postmodernist, if he/she is to be consistent, would have to refute all attempts at giving him/her the status of intellectual authority on the subject.
But did this really happen? Imo it would be irrational to underestimate the power of human vanity and seeking for egregiousness, the human pronenes to actions that flatter the ego.
It would interest me if there exist explicit "invitations" by postmodernists to an audience where they told them to pick the pomo's own stuff apart?
Why I added LOL to my comments like you used to add your smiley face to all of yours. Mirroring.
You don't like psychologizing when it comes back to bite you, do you? Why it is futile to begin with. It only attacks the ego and brings the mechanisms of defense into play. As it just did with you. You rationalized, a higher order of defense mechanism than denial. And when one asserts that they are the opposite they are proving your point also. This is Freud and Lacan to understand. Proves my point.
Besides all Germans are anal, aren't they? LOL! Smiley face.
Since it is a useless interpretive intellectual game, why use it for characters in a book. You are the one who called Dominique masochistic, an attribute of the psychology of the person, not a defense mechanism BTW. Yes I know Rand said she was masochistic in her Journal, but I think she didn't know she was composing a character with a Nietzschean strategy rather than an unconscious psychological one. Masochism is coupled with the unconscious. The defense mechanisms are unconscious. (Anna Freud). This is one of their defining attributes. Defense mechanisms are unconscious! So if Dominique consciously decides to marry Keating, become Wyand's whore, divorce Keating and marry Wynand because he is "worse" than Keating, would you say she is doing all this unconsciously?
The masochistic woman might do this, but she would think she was in love with Keating or that he was decent husband material. She might decide to whore with Wynand to further her husband's career. It is done all the time. Then she might decide to marry Wynand because she can, and while more sadistic than Keating - Keating is unconsciously sadistic - he is also a better financial catch. All these might be the rationalizations of the masochistic woman. They are not what a woman who is a Nietzschean strategist tells herself or how she is thinking. Dominique is singular. Most people - and women - once they get into her character find that there is something they just don't get, something that eludes them about her. This was true of Patricia Neal, who was masochistic BTW but just IMO. Dominique is complex, but once you see her through the Nietzsche lens, she isn't. She is rationally and consciously choosing "worse than worse". But as most women wake up after marriage and their prince has become a toad, Dominique after marriage sees that her toad is a prince. Just not as great a prince as Roark.
Okay, I'm cutting Clark Kent, Lois has to go too.
Darren wrote:
[quoting Xray]>>>> "Empathy and self-interest are not mutually exclusive. "
Neither are they identical."
(end quote)
Since no one has claimed that they are identical, what is your point?
Darren wrote:
"You first claimed ONLY selfishness was
the cause of all human action under capitalism. Now you slyly admit
there are other causes."
(end quote)
My position re 'selfishness' goes way beyond the context of capitalism; it is far more radical: EVERY action we take is motivated by our self-interest, without exception.
Feel free to bring up any random examples of human action and I'll demonstrate it here.
As for "other causes", their factoring in does not eliminate the basic element "self-interest" which is ALWAYS there.
So the real issue in ethics is not opposing self- interest vs. "altruism" (the claim that so-called "altruists" have no selfish motive is is simply false since self-interest exists in in ALL human action) - the issue is about examinig what kind of self-interest one is dealing with. What the self-interest is.
Darren wrote:
"It's for others to decide how your actions affect them and how they are
perceived and judged."
(end quote)
Correct, but both experience and common sense have told me that in most cases, people are happy if one is empathetic and helpful toward them.
For example, can you think of anyone who has lost their wallet being 'angry' at the person who has found it and been empathetic and helpful enough to give it back to them?
I once left my wallet in the bus, and to this day am grateful to the person who found it and gave it to the bus driver so that it could be returned to its owner.
P. S: I registered on "disqus" today in order to be able to edit my posts.
Since I got the reply from disqus that the poster name 'Xray' is already taken, I chose "Trafo" (standing for "transformation"); as I'm typing this, I see "post as Trafo" at the bottom right corner of the posting space, so I hope not to cause confusion if I'm suddenly not listed here as 'Xray' anymore.
nerrad is beginning to sound like a sufi about self-interest. Or Nasruddin. Or Indries Shah.
I am trying to get a link at disqus that will allow me to follow you there. Maybe this will do it. Now you don't have to paste the entire thread everytime you want to reply. disqus will do it for you.
It worked. Thanks.
just hit context to see the thread
>>>>Eva Braun wrote: "Since no one has claimed that they are identical
You implied as much by insisting that they aren't mutually exclusive.
>>>>Eva Braun wrote: "My position re 'selfishness' goes way beyond the context of capitalism; it is far more radical:"
(Yawn) You're not a radical, Eva. You're just a fraud with delusions of grandeur about her own intellectual abilities. Anyone who admires George H. Smith and is impressed by Ellen Stuttle has proven she is dull as a bag of hammers.
>>>>Eva Braun / George H. Smith: "EVERY action we take is motivated by our self-interest, without exception."
Another contradiction from your previous position. You previously admitted that ONLY VOLUNTARY actions were selfish without exception; now you arbitrarily assert that ALL action — "ALL" covers "voluntary" and "coerced" — is motivated by self-interest.
>>>>As for "other causes", their factoring in does not eliminate the basic element "self-interest" which is ALWAYS there.
You've reversed cause and effect in typical Randroid fashion. The fact that there might be an "element" of self-interest in an action does not eliminate the universally understood and historically confirmed fact that many actions are done solely for the sake of others. Philosophers, moralists, and historians (among others) understand this; Randroids are unable to. I wonder why. (Might have something to do with them being members of a mind-control cult, perhaps?)
>>>"So the real issue in ethics is not opposing self- interest vs. "altruism" (the claim that so-called "altruists" have no selfish motive is is simply false since self-interest exists in in ALL human action) - the issue is about examinig what kind of self-interest one is dealing with. What the self-interest is.
LOL! So now, according to your lights, there's not simply "self-interest that serves ONESELF", but other kinds of self-interest, too, such as "self-interest that serves OTHERS." I.e., "self-interest" that's not in the interest of self but of not-self." Very good! Talk about multiplying concepts needlessly!
>>>"Correct, but both experience and common sense have told me that in most cases, people are happy if one is empathetic and helpful toward them."
Experience and common sense have told me that most people misperceive their own actions; they think their actions are one thing when, in fact, other people perceive them differently.
>>>>"For example, can you think of anyone who has lost their wallet being 'angry' at the person who has found it and been empathetic and helpful enough to give it back to them?
Bad example. You are merely assuming for the sake of convenience on your part that the finder of the wallet felt your silly notion of "selfish empathy" as the motivation for returning it to you; but the fact is, he is just as likely to have returned the wallet from a sense of selfless duty — especially if he were poor, hunger, unemployed, and there was plenty of cash in the wallet that he could have made "rationally selfish" use of.
You should check your premises a little more often, or at least ask George H. Smith to check them for you (as a selfless act on his part).
>>>"so I hope not to cause confusion if I'm suddenly not listed here as 'Xray' anymore."
How very unselfish of you to think of us by worrying if you're causing confusion or not. However, you needn't worry. You'll always be Eva Braun (Hitler's mistress) to me.
Clark is vexed you feel that way. He's very fond of Lois.
People know what they do. They frequently even know why they do what they do. But what they don't know is what they do does. - Michel Foucault
Darren:
"Nor need they coincide. One can choose to help others to one's own
detriment and loss, or one can choose to help others and suffer neither
psychic profit nor psychic loss but remain
completely unchanged." (end quote)
No one performs an act because they want to feel worse. So if one concsciously decides to perform an act to one's detriment and loss, it means that the individual, for whatever reason, still values performing the act over not performing it. How outsiders judge the act is irrelevant in this context. For it is about demonstrating a principle that is at work without exception.
Darren wrote:
"Your notion that irrespective of the object of one's actions, the action
is nonetheless to be defined as "selfish" so long as it's voluntary is
ludicrous." (end quote)
How so? Can you give an example where you think this not the case?
Darren wrote:
Conversely, if you are forced to serve
others at the point of
a gun, that's actually still a selfish act: you prefer to serve others
rather than have the gun go off in the direction of your head. Selfish." (end quote)
Thanks for provng my point. So If a person is held at gunpoint and complies, it means that his/her self-interest is to stay alive.
"Anyone who admires
George
H. Smith and is impressed by Ellen Stuttle has proven she is dull as a
bag of hammers." (end quote)
It would interest me why you have such a grudge aganst against Ghs and E. Stuttle.
Darren wrote:
"You implied as much by insisting that they
aren't mutually exclusive." (end quote)
Wrong. For "not mutually exclusive" is not the same as "identical".
Darren wrote:
"You've reversed cause and effect in typical Randroid fashion. The fact
that there might be
an "element" of self-interest in an action does not
eliminate the universally understood and historically confirmed fact
that many actions are done solely for the sake of others. "(end quote)
You still don't get it. If people peform an action "for the sake of others", their selfish motive can be for example: to be accepted, to avoid conflict, to get a seat on the glory train to heaven (like e. g. Mother Teresa), to feel better about themselves, etc.
Mahatma Gandhi for example stated that he was totally selfish because everything he did was to attain Moksha.
Moksha:
In Hindu religion, moksha (Sanskrit: मोक्ष mokṣa) or mukti (Sanskrit:
मुक्ति), literally "release" (both from a root muc "to let loose, let
go"), is the liberation from samsara and the concomitant suffering
involved in being subject to the cycle of repeated death and
reincarnation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha
Ghandi is saying what the Sufis say. That's all. One kills to eat and live, whether it be a lettuce or an animal or another human. Once can choose to starve (Scott Nearing decided to when he hit 100) and I guess you could call that self-interest.
What I don't get is this BONE of self-interest that you keep knowing at x -ray. What's the point. Do you want dareen to yell UNCLE! Darren please yell UNCLE so she will stop! She can't stop herself, she really is incapable of stopping this repetition compulsion of hers. I am telling you darren, she literally can't stop. Not that she won't. She can't. Help her!
*whispers* You do know that Clark is not his real name?
Anyone with a brain has a grudge against Stumblin' onto Smith. They both are such lightweight intellectual punching bags who really don't know how little they know, and they won't sit in a quiet corner and learn from their betters. I am always so grateful when someone comes along who knows something I don't know that I want to pick their brains not argue over chicken bones with them. Learn from Darren. He has a superior mind. Ask him good questions that will lead to more knowledge on your part. Really x-ray, he has a wonderful mind and sadly, you do not. But you could if you were able to learn from him. It is a difficult jump to allow oneself to learn from someone they don't like. It's easy to learn from someone you love, like, want to get close to and so hard to learn from someone you want to punch out. I'm telling you, just stop this nonsense and learn from him. You don't get many chances in life like this. Don't blow it.
Darren wrote:
"How very unselfish of you to think of us by worrying if you're causing confusion or not."
(end quote)
It is not unselfish at all. For my sense of self, the standard I set for myself, includes being as clear in my statements as possible.
Darren wrote:
"However, you needn't worry. You'll always be Eva Braun (Hitler's mistress) to me."
This is perfectly in sync with you being delusional about so many other things as well.
Your delusional belief that I'm an Objectivist is just another example. Priceless! :-)
Janet quoting Foucault:
"People know what they do. They frequently even know why they do what
they do. But what they don't know is what they do does. - Michel
Foucault"
This is epistemologically correct, but imo one still make a pretty good guess in several cases about the effects of one's actions.
Janet wrote:
"Learn from Darren. He has a superior mind." (end quote)
If that were the case, it would long since have become clear to Darren that I'm no Objectvist.
It does not even require a 'superior' mind to see this.
Rarely have I come across a poster with such blinders on. Do you have an explanation why he can't see it?
For example, post after post in the recent discussion about self-interest, I have confronted him with arguments against the Rand's idea about "altruism" (my position being is that altruism does not exist), and against the Rand's idea regarding "selfishness/selflessness" (my position being that selflessness does not exist) - but Darren is still as diehard a believer as ever that I'm a Objectvist. This is just plain absurd.
Darren wrote:
>>>>"No one performs an act because they want to feel
worse.
Wrong. Many people do things precisely because they purposely want to
feel worse. Ask any shrink.. (end quote)
You don't dig deep enough. People often fear to leave a situation and thus can repeat detrimental patterns of behavior; they do this because the fear of the unknown or the fear of a 'new life' makes them feel worse that staying in the known situation.
Darren wrote:
"You are merely assuming for the sake of convenience on your part that
the finder of the wallet
felt your silly notion of "selfish empathy" as
the motivation for returning it to you; but the fact is, he is just as
likely to have returned the wallet from a sense of selfless duty —
especially if he were poor, hunger, unemployed, and there was plenty of
cash in the wallet that he could have made "rationally selfish" use of." (end quote)
Returning lost property is a legal duty. And a person can well derive a good feeling about themselves if they act according to a duty. I'm a duty person in many respects. Fulfilling one's duty can be satisfying, even enjoyable.
>>>>"You don't dig deep enough."
You invent "evidence" as you go along.
And even if it were SOMETIMES true, it is by no means UNIVERSALLY and NECESSARY true. Do, please, try stop being such a silly twit and ASK A SHRINK. He or she will verify that you are wrong and that I am right.
>>>>Eva Braun invented the following: "People often fear to leave a situation . . . [etc., etc.]"
"People"? ALL people? SOME people? ALL people ALL the time? ALL people SOME of the time? SOME people ALL of the time? SOME people SOME of the time?
You don't know. You didn't think about it. You didn't ask yourself these questions, because you're too busy psychologizing and pretending to divine people's innermost motivating thoughts in order to support a viewpoint that you can't support in any other way (neither empirically nor logically).
That's one of your bad habits that marks you as a Randroid.
>>>>Eva Braun: "And a person CAN well derive a good feeling about themselves if they act according to a duty."
"CAN" well derive a good feeling. But he need not necessarily do so. He might feel absolutely nothing. He might feel worse about performing his legal duty than he would by not doing so.
Thanks for using the conditional verb "can". It shows you realize I was right.
>>>>Eva Braun: "it would long since have become clear to Darren that I'm no Objectvist.
Obviously you're lying about that. Or you're in denial. Maybe a bit of both.
I have confronted him with arguments against the Objectvist stance on "altruism" (my position being is that altruism does not exist),
The Randroid stance is wrong, but yours is just plain stupid.
>>>>Eva Braun: "(my position being that selflessness does not exist)"
If "selflessness" did not exist, then neither would "selfishness." The two stand as opposites and complements, like "day" and "night." If "night" didn't exist, then neither would a concept like "day". As a concept, "day" is intelligible in contradistinction to "night." Similarly, "selfishness" is intelligible in contradistinction to "selflessness." If the the second doesn't exist, then neither does the former.
>>>>Eva Braun: "but Darren is still as diehard a believer as ever that I'm a Objectivist. This is just plain absurd."
It's your position on these issues that is absurd.
A good feeling acting according to a duty. this is what Zizek calls unethical morality. In his Hegel.
Perhaps you are just more of an objectivist than those who call themselves objectivists. Only you omit the label, but your Discourse is objectivist.
All of this from x-ray is a "mask", so what is the mask masking? That is the secret.
Your culture conditions you to feel those obligations and duties. "Returning lost property is a legal duty?" We could probably go for a year here on that sentence. Legal? Are you talking about the corrupt legal justice system? Is that what you are referring to? I'm not saying I would or I wouldn't. I have and I haven't. I am grateful when my wallet is returned and that makes me more likely to return someone else's. However when people steal constantly from me (I have good taste in things)I find I am less likely to be virtuous. I have read where a poor person has returned a great deal of money, objects, etc to a very wealthy person and given a pittance in return. Doesn't make others want to emulate the "good" person and that's how we learn many things, by modeling.
trafo it is your Discourse that brands you, not whether you say you are or are not an objectivist. Most of the "ones" on SOLO and OL are not in the slightest and make no attempt to even create the illusion that they are. Rand is just a name for pimping their sites. It draws people in via name recognition or people who really do want to know more about objectivism and/or Rand. There's nothing at either site remotely with any affinity to Rand's thought and anyone who seriously does want to talk about her goes so far over their heads they get threatened. Me. They don't want to be serious about Rand. They just want to chit chat about this and that. Sit down with a glass of wine or.... at their computer and talk to some people about nothing in particular. You have to search out the sites that are saying something you really want to read and contemplate. It takes time but is not impossible and it is rewarding. But one does have to gt out of the arguments one way or another to move on.
I liked your observation that Peikoss in being popish with Rand and Objectivism is pushing it to the limits. I hadn't really looked at him that way, but then I don't read him or listen to his tapes. I find them too embarrassing as I remember the bright witty boy who was a fine lecturer in beginning philosophy. He was an addition to NBI but no way could he carry the film on his own, as they say in Hollywood.
Sorry these are going to you nerrad instead of trafo. I hope she will figure that out.
Janet wrote: "A good feeling
acting according to a duty. this is what Zizek calls unethical morality."(end quote)
I'd say it depends on what kind of duty one is dealing with.
P. S. those ever narrowing posting
spaces
are toaly unnerving! doesn't there exist a better working layout for your blog to prevent such illegibility? l
are totally unnerving!
Darren wote: "ASK A SHRINK He or she will verify that you are wrong and that I am right."
(end quote)
Go ask any shrink and he/she will tell you that there exists the phenomenon "Krankheitsgewinn" ("morbid gain" in English according to the dictionary. It's GAIN, not lose.
So what you see as people "wanting to feel worse", the patient sees as getting positive attention, for example via yammering over his/her situation.
No none performs an act because they want to lose and feel worse. People want to gain from their acts and feel better. Whether they get what they have bargained for is another story.
Re narrowing replies. Just re-start at the very top, no worries, people who wanna read you will do that, place is irrelevant.
x-ray the only way to get rid of the narrowing on my blog is to take it up with google. Not my piece of cake. the other way is to take responsibility for my own actions and ignore reply and start over. This is what happens when one uses disqus because the format does not narrow on disqus so I don't even think about it. But if you notice then just start over and reply in your own header. Darren already does this, but I forget. As long as you are on my follow list in disqus I will pick you up and reply to you when I want to.
A good feeling acting according to a duty. this is what Zizek calls unethical morality. In his Hegel.
This is my mistake here. In acting according to a duty, the duty is irrelevant. What is relevant is the feeling you bring to your act according to the way you feel or think is your duty. If you perform the "duty" but feel reluctant, antagonistic, conflicted, ambivalent about it THIS is what Zizek names unethically moral. You are taking responsibility for what you consider your duty (returning the wallet) but you really don't want to, you want to keep the money but you don't. Whereas the person who has no temptation concerning the money or the return, who returns the wallet is acting ethically moral as Zizek would say. This avoids all the bone gnawing of the starving person doing the right thing returning the wallet and all that philosophical moral baggage that goes with such an argument, the pages of the books it is in, the trees that are curt down for those stupid pages, etc. His pages on this in his Hegel are unputdownable.EditReply
Darren wrote:
"If "selflessness" did not exist, then neither would "selfishness." The
two stand as opposites and complements, like "day" and "night." If
"night" didn't exist, then neither would a concept like "day". As a
concept, "day" is intelligible in contradistinction to "night."
Similarly, "selfishness" is intelligible in contradistinction to
"selflessness." If the the second doesn't exist, then neither does the
former."
(end quote)
Both "selfishness" and "selflessness" are connotatively loaded terms which have a judgemental character.
This is the reason why I prefer the term self-interest because it is more neutral.
Self interest is a given, biologcally hardwired in humans.
From me a trying to be retired shrink who is finding it impossible to retire.
This is analyzed in terms of resistances.
1. The first resistance is the resistance to treatment. Treatment is like a chess game, so think of it that way. The patient - or client as the renaming names the one paying - who comes to treatment is already planning to leave treatment. Even in the first phone call to make the first appointment. How you handle that phone call begins to establish the dynamics between the two of you. Do you answer the phone very businesslike (you think) or do you say a breezy hello? Do you say when you can see the person, or do you set the appointment cooperatively. How do you do the first visit?
The poorly trained therapist has only learned by the seat of her/his pants on this. Nothing of the technique, the feelings or thoughts of the therapist or patient/client are carefully deconstructed. What is going on here?
All this is way long before anyone gets into actions that are against the patient's or therapist's interests, which make either one feel worse not better, but are done anyway. All that stuff falls into resistance to progress and if you read Foucault's book on psychology - his first - you will read a master at work in this field. BTW he disowned it, disowned his revision of it, tried to stop publication of it, but it is still available. I recently read it and wished I hadn't. The first version was very destructive for me, the second edition was a lot better. Both are in the same binding and both, of course, disinherited by Foucault.
Darren wrote:
"Alisa Rosenbaum committed an equivocation on the use of the term
"altruism", insisting that it could ONLY have the formal, philosophical
definition given to it by Comte . . . this, despite the obvious fact,
that NO ONE uses the word that way in 99.99% of contexts. So she chooses
the 0.01% context that SHE prefers, and then insists that it accounts
for the rest of the 99.99% usages." (end quote)
The problem with the term 'altruism' that it was orignially coined as an ideological term (by Auguste Comte),
belonging to his code of prescriptive (not descriptive ethics).
Comte's 'altruism' is to be understood as an "ought to": the individual is to submit to the collective.
Interesting that Comte himself called his "Positivism" a religion. Many ideologies have religious characteristics indeed.
But over time, the orignial (purely ideological) term "altruism" has
grown legs and is now being used in all kinds of other contexts - to
such an extent that one can develop a (philosophical) allergy against
it. At least that's how I sometimes feel when watching animal films
where some apes groom each other and the commentator calls this
"altruistic" behavior.
Due to the confusion the term "altruism" can create, I try to avoid it and replace it by explaining the act in question.
So as for the grooming apes: it is no benevolent act they consciously
decide to perform or have had to learn; it is something their brain is
dispositioned for, it is biologically hardwired, so to speak. Just as
our impulse is biologically hardwired to pet a young puppy dog or other
baby mammals.
Ayn Rand is Comte's ideological antipode, so to speak. Rand is as rigorous as Comte, only from the opposite end of the scale.
Both Rand and Comte advocate an 'either-or' ideology and seem to condemn any "both-and" scenarios as 'moral grayness'.
So what is required here is a "genealogy" of the word / concept altruism. If x-ray will do that then she will be astounded by what emerges.
>>>>Eva Braun and George H. Smith wrote: "Both "selfishness" and "selflessness" are connotatively loaded terms which have a judgemental character."
They can also be understood in a non-judgement way. That's how I understand them, and that's how I'm using them in this discussion.
>>>>Eva Braun and George H. Smith wrote: "This is the reason why I prefer the term 'self-interest' because it is more neutral."
A difference without a distinction. "Self-interest" = "Selfishness"; "Other-interest" = "selflessness".
Both of you are quibbling.
>>>>George H. Smith wrote: "The problem with the term 'altruism' that it was orignially coined by Auguste Comte as an IDEOLOGICAL term, belonging to his code of prescriptive (not descriptive ethics)."
That's not a problem with the TERM; the TERM is fine. That's a problem for ALISA ROSENBAUM and her merry Randroid cultists. They are the one who EQUIVOCATE on the USE of the term. THEY are the problem; not the term.>>>>George H. Smith sang: "Comte's 'altruism' is to be understood as a "moral commandment": the individual is to submit to the collective."
No problem with that one. Too bad Alisa Rosenbaum equivocated on the term.
>>>>George H. Smith shat: "But over time, the original (purely ideological) term "altruism" has grown legs and is now being used in all kinds of other contexts - to such an extent that one can develop a (philosophical) allergy against it."
Yeah, and over time the term "gay" meant one thing, and now it means another (darned inconvenient!). The term not only grew legs, but genitalia, too.
And over a somewhat longer period of time the terms "objective" and "subjective" became switched (I'll bet, George, you never knew that).
And over time the term "liberal", which originally meant "freedom, small unobtrusive government, little political regulation in the economic sphere, a commodity-backed paper currency (usually gold)," came to mean quite the opposite, at least in the United States.
And over time the word "spirit" came to mean something internal, akin to (but not identical with) mind or consciousness, when originally it meant something literally physical and external, viz., wind.
And over time the term "wrong" came to mean a moral deficit, when originally it meant "sour".
And over time the term "express" came to mean a revealing of our thoughts and feelings by many means — language, body movement, music, etc. — when originally the term literally meant "to press out".
And over time the term "sad" became a psychological term referring to an inner state of consciousness . . . when originally it meant "heavy."
Try reading C. S. Lewis's brilliant "Studies in Words" for a change, instead of rereading Galt's Speech for the 200th time.
Yes, let's all move to Alisa Rosenbaum's Happy Valley where we can sleep in peace knowing that words — including philosophical terms — will never "grow legs" and change their meanings over time . . . THE WAY ALL NATURAL LANGUAGES DO, EVERYWHERE, AT ALL TIMES.>>>>George H. Smith wrote: Due to the confusion the term "altruism" can create . . .The term "altruism" creates no confusion in anyone, EXCEPT Randroids, because they will only accept Alisa Rosenbaum's usage of the term, and she would only accept Comte's. Listen up, George: TODAY THE TERM "GAY" DOESN'T CAUSE CONFUSION IN ANYONE (EXCEPT HOPELESS PEDANTS), AND NEITHER DOES THE TERM "ALTRUISM" (EXCEPT IN HOPELESS RANDROIDS).>>>>George H. Smith lied: "I try to avoid it and replace it by explaining the act in question."Explaining? No you don't. You've admitted in recent previous posts that you will NEVER, at any time, take issue with an opponent's ARGUMENT, but instead, will pretend to divine PSYCHOLOGICAL MOTIVES.. That's not "explaining." That's nothing but an excuse to practice ad hominem. Your "explanations" on this blog, without exception, have all been attempts to uncover psychological motivations for having made certain statements, as opposed to taking issue with the statements themselves.
I give up. Nietzsche's genealogy addressed altruism. Genealogically. Someone stop arguing and just do a genealogy on selfless, altruism, etc and you may just understand it, Foucault, will you please yell down or up from wherever you are and say something!
It's called spinning.
Psychological interpretation. How up to date intellectually these people are. I don't think I believe I am even reading this junk from Smith et al.
to infinity.
I grew up during communism. What does that imply? Why do you think you understand the postmodern attack on authority?
Cool C S Lewis reference.
Gen hannon.
x-ray there is no - NO - group, organization, anything with the label post modernist. Nada. It's a very loose term to say that the "modern" era is over and something else is going on. There are many writers, artists, musicians, etc that think in a post modern way or are beginning to do so. The classic dialectic Discourse is being eroded. Stay there at your peril. It is ceasing to convey information, knowledge or any knowing at all. Those who are still stuck there are being marginalized as they are beginning to sound sob muccled the way they use language, words, syntax,etc, that it is difficult to understand anything they are saying. Here's a link for a documentary on philosophy. For the first hour, until you get to Zizek they are confusing, muddleheaded, using words imprecisely, obtuse, and I don't know what else to say. I couldn't listen very far into any of them before I moved the cursor forward. The old dialectical Discourse is becoming incomprehensible to me in terms of conveying any meaning whatever. As to the philosopher's personal psychology, from a therapeutic POV, it is a different ball of wax. But as far as meaning, it is just Discourse to me. Maybe it's just me.
http://biblioklept.org/2012/06/06/see-astra-taylors-documentary-examined-life-featuring-judith-butler-peter-singer-and-cornel-west/#respond
Darren wrote:
>>>>George H. Smith shat: <....>
Littel Darren is throwing one of his tantrums again, lol. Just another indicator that he has run out of arguments. But as I' m experienced with tantrums since I work with kids, I'll let the little Rumpelstilzkin stomp his feet and stay calm myself.
Darren wrote:
"Yeah, and over time the term "gay" meant one thing, and now it means
another (darned inconvenient!). The term not only grew legs, but
genitalia, too." (end quote)
You have missed the point. The issue is not that words can change their meaning (a normal linguistic phenomenon).
As for "gay", virtually no one uses is in the original sense of "merry" anymore because its meaning has shifted exclusively to 'homosexual'. 'The original meaning of "gay" = merry has become obsolete.
Whereas a term like "altruism" is used with different meanings and connotations, without Comte's original meaning having become obsolete. This is what causes confusion in discussions on ethics, where one is confronted with a semantic mishmash like "altrusitic" apes, "altruistic" ideologists, even "altruistic" capitalists (!) (by you for example). And this kind of confusion is the reason why I avoid using the term.
I have not done a genealogy of altruism but i do have this to say....I find it extremely ironic that Rand, a person who has given so much to the world in her liturature would claim being anti-altruistic.
She was anti-FORCED altruism and considered this, coersion.
Is it not altruistic to be self sufficiant? Aren't we an asset to all others when we are creative, inventive, intelligent and independent?
THIS, i think, was Rand's idea of giving. To BE John Galt (or at least strive to).
In all Eastern religions, there is a law to altruism.
It is the law of a pure intention or what you explained Zizek called "ethical morality".
An intention is attached to a deed, an act, a service, a gift to others.
The recipient of a gift that holds an impure or unethical intent will suffer guilt or embarrassment upon recieving such a gift. They will have resentment about feeling indebted to the giver.
The recipient of a gift that holds a pure or ethical intent will be a joyous reciever.
Ethical or Pure means that there is no expectation bound to the thing given. It is given (selfishly) because it feels good.
Mother Theresa is deemed a saint of sacrifice by the Catholic church. She sacrificed NOTHING.
Helping orphaned children filled her heart with love. So one could easily argue that pure altruism is selfish and that Mother Theresa was selfish because what she did filled her up and filled her life with meaning and purpose.
No child ever needed to thank her.
>>>>George H. Smith fantasized: "As for "gay", virtually no one uses is in the original sense of "merry" anymore because its meaning has shifted exclusively to 'homosexual'. 'The original meaning of "gay" = 'merry' has become obsolete."
Wrong. No dictionary I've checked lists "gay" as obsolete. That includes Dictionary.com, the American Heritage Dictionary online, and the Oxford English Dictionary online. The PRIMARY usage of the word is "homosexual", but NOT ITS EXCLUSIVE usage. NO STANDARD DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LISTS THE OLDER USAGE OF "GAY" AS OBSOLETE.
See what I mean about you being a Randroid? You didn't actually check (i) your premises, or (ii) your sources. You simply invented a conclusion and then imagined you had arrived at it by means of a rigorously logical process of reasoning. You even fooled yourself!
>>>>George H. Smith lied about the following: "Whereas a term like "altruism" is used with different meanings and connotations, without Comte's original meaning having become obsolete"
The meanings differ only slightly, as opposed to the wide variance in a word like "gay." For example:
dictionary.com
1. the principle or practice of unselfish concern for the welfare of others
2. the philosophical doctrine that right action is that which produces the greatest benefit to others
[C19: from French altruisme, from Italian altrui others, from Latin alterī, plural of alter other]
altruism
1853, "unselfishness, opposite of egoism," from Fr. altruisme, coined or popularized 1830 by Fr. philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), from autrui, from O.Fr. altrui "of or to others," from L. alteri, dat. of alter "other" (see alter). Apparently suggested to Comte by Fr.
American Heritage Dictionary online:
Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.
Only in technical or historical discussion of philosophy would one encounter the usage of the term "altruism" as a doctrine teaching something like the idea that one ought to replace the concept "God" with the concept "other people", and worship accordingly. No one else uses the word that way, and no one else is confused by the word.
>>>>"Gen hannon"
;)
No galu govad gen
I don't disagree with any of this. BUT. And this is a big but - no pun intended - it is muddled. I read it and wonder why it ever had to be written in the first place except for this out of hand long thread from Randroids.
I heard Rand say clearly that it wasn't altruism say to give up your life for your highest value. A mother jumping in front of a car to push her child out of the way for example.
What I think is that the term when Nietzsche does his genealogy of it in Genealogy of Morals, he is showing how to look at a concept and amsh it into pieces instead of trying to reason with these befuddled idealistic words in our mouths. When I listened today to a philosophical documentary I had to move the cursor ahead through them as to me they were saying really wonderful things, but without any practical relevance that increased understanding. When I listen to or read Zizek he is thinking out loud or on the page, he is not reciting words learned long ago and put together to mean something.
The "gift" is a profound concept in anthropology. Levi-Strauss has spent some serious downtime on it. So has Baudrillard. And Nietzsche which is where he startes with "God". God has given one the gift of life. It can never be repaid. The person must ritualistically express gratitude forever, but s/he can never do so enough because the gift is so great. Then God sacrifices his sone on top of it who dies for our sins so we don't have to suffer for our sins anymore. They have been taken care of. So God adds even more to the orignal gift of life so our indebtedness is doubly increased. So we can never repay God back. We can never sacrifice enough to pay God back. We can never suffer enough to pay God back. We will be in his debt FOREVER! So we must spend our lives doing the best we can to pay God back for his great gift to us.
Now that's altruism in the mind of Nietzsche. All these petty stupid examples are just fluff, deterrence, masks to disguise the fact that nothing is being discussed. All these words are just air leaving our mouths meaning nothing.
So Nietzsche says, "God is dead." He doesn't say God does not exist. He throws a challenge to God. If you are not dead, then show yourself. So far God has not done so.
If Nietzsche begins altruism genealogically with God, what would be interesting would be a genealogy exposing the intersection of altruism with other practices, historical occurrences etc which in tukrn would change its meaning, its shades of meaning. That is about the only way one is going to get at altruism's transformation, not this endless example after example, Rand said, so and so said, as all that will tell us nothing.
Chinese wisdom: Be careful before you save a life. The saved one will owe you a debt that can never be repaid. The saved one will feel the guilt to repay you when there is not and never will be any way to repay you. And they will come to hate you because their guilt will be too heavy for them to bear. - Jean Baudrillard and he may have gotten it from Canetti in The Human Province. Neither of them allow any index of their work so it cannot be systematized, produced, easily taught, rote learned, memorized or used for examination.
All this is expressed in the aphorism. An aphorism is to be mediated on, pondered over, for perhaps a lifetime. It cannot be consumed! Oh happiness. It cannot be argued with. Oh double happiness. It will not fit into the Order of Production.
DeLillo has written Cosmopolis aphoristically. DeaLillo is following Nietzsche and Baudrillard. Aphorism. Fragment. No authoritarian drumming in of the message of the author. The author - DeLillo - disappears!
Thanks for making me think this out.
The meanings of altruism and selfishness were being discussed.
I thought it relevant to look at those words in a different way.
If it is muddled then i didn't articulate well. I earnestly wanted to express a belief that i have about the concepts of these words and used the best example that i could think of to increase understanding.
I accept that it means nothing to you and is fluff.
Darren wrote:
"Wrong. No dictionary I've checked lists "gay" as obsolete. That includes Dictionary.com,
the American Heritage Dictionary online, and the Oxford English
Dictionary online. The PRIMARY usage of the word is "homosexual", but
NOT ITS EXCLUSIVE usage. NO STANDARD DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
LISTS THE OLDER USAGE OF "GAY" AS OBSOLETE." (end quote)
C'mon Darren, you know that I was referring the active use of a term in communincation. So while "gay" may still be listed in dictionaries with its former meaning, virtually no one today who has a good command of English use it anymore in the former meaning of 'cheerful' because it will cause misunderstandings in communication.
So if you did a test and told people about a "gay" party - no one would think you mean "gay" = 'cheerful'.
That's why "gay" in the meaning of 'cheerful' is listed as 'dated' in my German-English dictionary:
http://www.dict.cc/?s=gay
Darren wrote:
"... the usage of the term "altruism" as a doctrine teaching something like
the idea that one ought to replace the concept "God" with the concept
"other people". (end quote)
One could argue that both Comte and Rand merely replaced "God" by something else: For Comte is was the people, the collective, for Rand it was "Man" as the individual belonging to an elite.
Their worshipping at the altar of the new gods they put on the pedestal is only a logical consequence. It is not without reason that Comte called Positvism a religion, and that Rand called Dominique Francon "the perfect priestess".
It looks like neither Comte nor Rand really succeeded in getting rid of the God principle.
Nor did Nietzsche as it seems:
Janet wrote:
"So Nietzsche says, "God is dead." He doesn't say God does not exist. He
throws a challenge to God. If you are not dead, then show yourself. So
far God has not done so." (end quote)
It is the Übermensch, overman, occupying the God position then.
>>>>George H. Smith the moron wrote: "C'mon Darren, you know that I was referring the active use of a term in communication."
C'mon George! You know that the function of a dictionary is to record a word's meaning (and spelling) as it is actually used in communication. The days of the classic "prescriptive dictionary" went out long, long ago, with the passing of the old Merriam-Webster Second Edition. Dictionaries no longer inform its users how they OUGHT to use a word; but, rather, how certain groups actually use the word in communication. In all dictionaries I've checked, "gay" still has an active meaning of "cheery" (though it is no longer listed as the word's primary usage); and no dictionary I've checked lists the word as being "obsolete." Were it obsolete, it would be so listed in the dictionary.
Try to do a little research before shooting off your mouth and making a fool of yourself, OK?
>>>>"if you did a test and told people about a "gay" party - no one would think you mean "gay" = 'cheerful'."
Completely wrong. The context would clarify the meaning. Someone who said "The party was festooned with gay, festive colors everywhere" would not be understood to mean that the colors were homosexual.
Looks as if you dropped context, George. Rosenbaum frowns.
You're also doing a typical Randroid thing: you're trying to come to a conclusion based on nothing but your own limited sphere of personal experience, and then attempting to extrapolate that to everyone and everything else. I'm not your personal army or your personal research assistant. Do your own research. Get up off your duff and check a dictionary.
An obsolete word is one that has dropped out all current use in communication, appearing only in literary quotation or reference from the past. In English, the original 2nd-person singular and its modifications — "thou, thy, thee" — are obsolete (except among certain old Quakers, and I understand it even dropped out with them a few decades ago); as is the original 2nd-person plural nominative-case — "ye". English retained the 2nd-person plural possessive and objective cases — "your" and "you" — and uses them for both the plural and singular. That practice started many centuries ago.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. - G.Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Pedich Edhellen?
I don't really, always wanted to though.
Why do you think it's either/or God/overman?
No no no you misunderstood me. I appreciate what you said. Unfortunately I miss said it for you. It is the concepts and ideas we use that confabulate our thinking. Yes, I know you were saying it the best way you could. And I didn't mean your words and thoughts were fluff. What I meant was the entire way of discussing this problem of altruism and selfishness and all other things we discuss using unhammered concepts and ideas are getting us nowhere in the world.
I am trying to learn and continue to try to think in a new way. I have spent my entire educated and social life NOT thinking this way and it dies hard. Dictionary meanings are not going to clarify anything enough to get us to resolution of anything.
I think the old discourse and our old way of thinking from it has got to go down. The problem we face in the world today is not being able to acknowledge its irreversibility. It cannot be fixed, anymore than an argument/discussion with x-ray can be fixed. It is irreversible, unfixable. How can things change unless we acknowledge that the way we are going about trying to fix a world order that is irreversible is just. not. possible. Just as a playing ping-pong with x-ray is an irreversible game of ping-pong.
You forced me to think about what you said in as new a way as I could. That's all. I know our old way is just air sounds coming out of our mouths,
as the numbers on the screen were just lines of code to Eric Packer at the
end. There was no money involved. It was just numbers. Anyone who has ever
played this currency game, or futures etc, knows that it is really the
numbers that are fascinating, not the money the numbers are supposed to
represent and don't. That's what we do here in words. We play with words
that have no meaning in these tugs of war. They are just a game we play.
stupid is acquiring a different meaning now. It means you are there,
but you are not. No self is there, no ego is there, you are just there the
way a stone is there, a tree is there, just stupidly. Now that I have said
it you will begin to notice how the word stupid is being used. A dictionary
isn't going to pick this up. It is coming from context. DeLillo uses it
when Eric has disappeared all his money and lights a cigar "feeling proud,
stupid, etc.".Just there. Like zen there. No thought, no me.
Sorry.
Nietzsche said, "If there were a god, it would have to be me." Foucault says, "We must cut off the head of the king." Lacan discusses "the Big Other". Nietzsche may have said god was dead, but Baudrillard has said his ghost will be around for a long while yet to come.
And it was Nathaniel Branden who said to Rand that Objectivism was patterned after religion. That she and he were two Jews who made another form. Rand disagreed with him. But yes, I think he was right. Objectivist has that flavor. It feels like a religion to you when you accept it totally to try to live it. It produces a conversion in you. I experienced it. It was total and it got me out of the muddle of bourgeois life and public school teaching. I just didn't know where it was going to lead but I felt confident I could figure it out. Until I got into statistics and experimental design and had to learn to think that way which was anathema to objectivism. I still have many traces of it, but they are deep and everlasting. A sort of fatal way of looking at the world. I think this comes from Nietzsche through Rand. And I think 16 year old Rand found that unacceptable about Nietzsche. She was too young. She was no 19 year old Lou Andreas Salome. So it went underground in her and came to me. And I see it in Baudrillard. Both Rand and Baudrillard have this concept of irreversibility of the system of the world. Both saw the way out. Rand through her fiction and Baudrillard through imaginary action: implosion. Learn to see it and you will observe it in the micro.
When I was in China about 20 years ago I became fascinated with Chinese. I was wandering the streets of Shanghai one day alone, and one of the doors of a house/shop ? was open and people were there so I looked in. An artist was there with some of his paintings and drawings. I liked his work, especially his little drawings and I bought a couple of them. His paintings were beautiful and academic, but his drawings were special. He spoke English and I was asking him questions about Chinese. He sat down and wrote the character for "wisdom" showing the complete etymology of the word wisdom in the character. I no longer have it at my finger tips but here's some. In "wisdom" is the moon and the sun, the character for 4, and sorry it's gone and so is my Chinese dictionary. It was like a tiny aphorism as I began to think about it for months and months. Sun: light, male, yang, heat, Apollo, Icarus, growth, life, etc all the associations resonating with the word "sun" the homonym "son", the opposite "dark" "moon' which is also there in the character, the feminine, the woman, yin, receptive, pliant, flexible, yielding, birth,cool, reflected light, mysterious, cyclical, phases, menstruation, and so on in a never ending series also. The character for 4 is also "generalization", observing all corners, all the way around you, unfocussed, aware and it is clear why so few in China before Mao were literate. Studying the language and the characters, writing them, drawing them was the work of a lifetime that could never be finished. A beautiful life, art form, meditation,
And the importance stressed by Foucault, the characters were not
connected to SOUND! This is what Benno muses on in Cosmopolis about our
obsession with linking sounds to signs that never quite fit. As long as
sign are not linked to sounds, language is quite different. Now since Mao
and universal literacy the goal in China, even taxi drivers can read well
the characters as they are translated into sound. I forget the word the
Chinese use for the translation into sound and the elimination of
characters. But very good is nowhen hao with the diacritical marks
indicating stress, stress straight, stress going down, stress lilting up,
stress lilting up then sliding down, or down sliding up. etc. Very hard for
the foreigner so when they translate into English they sound like robots,
as they remove all stress which is formal. English stresses but it is to
convey emotion. MOTH - er! A sort of frustration. Mo- ther, a pleading.
Well you get it. How could the Chinese avoid being superior muscians! And
mathematicians!
I think one of our problems is in linking signs to sounds which don't quite
fit. Then not having an etymology in front of us to tell us. Soon the
Chinese will lose this, and only recluse scholars will read in this way and
it will all be lost in pinyin I think it is called.
Darren
Completely wrong. The context would clarify the meaning. Someone who
said "The party was festooned with gay, festive colors everywhere" would
not be understood to mean that the colors were homosexual.
Looks as if you dropped context, George. Rosenbaum frowns.
Whether "Rosenbaum frowns" is of no interest to me. I'm no Objectvist.
It goes without saying that the context can clarify the meaning, and if you look at the contexts in which the term term "gay" is used today, you will see that it is nearly always with 'homosexual'. Just google "gay colors" and you'll see what you get.
So if one speaks of "a gay party" (this was my example) it would be understood as homosexual in the first place because that's what its primary meaning is now. Whereas when I learned English as a foreign language in the 1960s, "a gay party" was understood as a cheerful party.
Let's stay focused on the original term "altruism" though for that's what the discussion was about.
As opposed to "gay" which has merely shifted form its former primary meaning 'cheerful' to the now primary meaning 'homosexual', "altruism is a typical, connotatively loaded, 'fudge word', and it is those fudge words that make it difficult to communicate in philosophical discussions.
If often results in semantic quibbles, which can escalate intto veritable quarrels about the "true" meaning of a term, and with the 'battle ground' having shifted to linguistics, the original issue gets "lost in altercation".
I am glad you explained my misunderstanding.
Agree...nothing that has happened up to this moment can be reversed but is that what we are trying to do? or are we creating a new world order every day?
Agree...debates are just a game.
Is stupid acquiring this different meaning to you (personally) or just in general (for everyone)?
I will pay attention to the word stupid and it's context because i dont get this.
What makes you think that Eric isn't feeling Webster's stupid?
I respectfully disagree with Mr. Orwell.
First, Standard English today (2012) is probably in much better shape than, e.g., standard French, whose rules for formal usage are decided on bureaucratically by appointed "elites" in the famed French Academy. In natural languages, the "value" of a word — its meaning — is analogous to the "value" of a good or service in a market that is set by providers of that good or service, and buyers/users of the good or service. No bureaucrat in a market economy can set the price of a tomato or a shoe-shine. Similarly, no entity like an official "Academy of the English Language" should be able to set the "value", or meanings, of words and how they ought to be used. I favor the approach we hhave now in the U.S.: we all argue about meanings — editors, journalists, novelists, lexicographers, etc., and we each employ the meaning that seems best suited to the context, or situation, each one finds himself in a given moment.
>>>>"Pedich Edhellen?"
Tancave.
Well do you disagree with Mr. Toynbee? And his civilizations in disintegration?
Janet is going to throw a tantrum if you persist in this x-ray. Either do a genealogy on altruism or drop it.
Starting over as it is narrowing.
On stupid. Eric also feels proud, calm (I think) in a series of words that include stupid.I just imagine how he is sitting in the limo and looking right after this huge buy spree of yen. Baudrillard talks about a photograph of a person who is "stupid". Some of Kristen's are like this and some of Rob's. They are just objects standing there stupid for the lens. They are not smiling, posing, pretending, they are just "there" as a native in front of a camera is just "there". Just standing there "stupid like a tree or stone. Oe in his book Shoot the Kids uses it. The children are "in confinement" and he says that in a confined surveillance situation like this it is best to be just simply observed as an object like a stone, a tree, an inanimate object, so as not to be noticed. The exact same observation is what Baudrillard has said about photography only he adds the adjective stupid. This is something I have been noticing in articles also, so the meaning is changing. This is also Saussure, the drifting and shifting of the language. La Bove made a career of it; this linguistic drift. Someone please tell x-ray. We can see it in Darwin's study of birds and the changes in songs when they migrate to another place. Song drift? Did Darwin do this is did some student do this in research? I forget.
Anyway I have just been noticing "stupid" when I come across it. And I think, "Aha, here's another instance."
Oh and I forgot the beautiful and brilliant Hedy Lamar's use of stupid. "Anyone can look glamorous. All you do is stand there and look stupid."
Abbeysbooks, this comment is so horribly wonderful.
Every word is true.
My brother forced me once to ride a very scary ride at the fair. I just held on tight, shut my eyes and put my mind somewhere else because the ride operator was not going to stop it just for me despite my protest.
Keep being original and appreciating other (rare) originals and be stupid to everything else.
Your way of thinking/understanding is a dying art that may make a come back someday after the ride breaks down.
We have a different perspective in my tradition: In the Torah, these are called Gifts from G-d:Life, Torah, bread (food, sustenance), chessed (might be defined as grace, kindness), intelligence, etc.We do not earn them; they are Gifts. But we are also given a way to pay back the Gifts: Very early in Torah, G-d says humans are created 'btzelem Elokim'-- not really the 'image' of G-d, as we believe G-d has no physical image, but it is kind of like reflection, or spiritual/creative parallel. By Giving to fellow humans and ourselves (and we are told to love our fellow humans as ourselves, indicating also that we are to love ourselves as well), we Give to G-d. The way to Give to G-d, according to G-d, is to Give to fellow humans.
This is reiterated (over and over) in the rest of Tanach: the neviim (kind of mistranslated as prophets, because the word means bringer/brought; they are brought to bring the words of G-d) constantly tell us that G-d is saying: What do I want from you but to love kindness, do justice, walk modestly in the ways of G-d? and What does G-d want from you but to loosen the chains of poverty, despair, oppression; to champion the widow, the orphan?
G-d tells us, in our Tradition, what He wants us to give, how He wants us to give back to Him.
Orwel takes a verse from Esslesiastes and turns it into Modern English. Point being words are 'worn out', their metaphorical quality reduced or completely lost without the process ever questioned or examined by the speaker/s.
"(...)modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug."
I agree, the "value" of the word is the one the speaker imbues it with. Like that Anais Nin quote you liked, we see things (words) as we are. Orwel draws attention to that, that it is perceived as "outside" how the language develops,as if an entity unrelated to/independent of the users.
Here's another quote from the book which talks about "effective surprise" in relation to any creative enterprise and especially metaphoric effectiveness, an indispensable part to make a surprise effective, in relation to lit. In great lit works (author quotes Melville, Mann, Jean Anouilh) diverse experiences are connected mediated by symbol/metaphor/image."Experience in literal terms is a categorizing, a placing in a syntax of concepts. Metaphoric combination leaps beyond systematic placement, explores connections that were before unsuspected. (...)all of the forms of effective surprise come out of combinatorial activity - a placing of things in new perspectives. But it is somehow not simply a taking of known elements and running them together by algorithm into a welter of permutations.(...)The triumph of effective surprise is that it takes one beyond common way of experiencing the world." Rand takes a very familiar concept, the meaning of which is perceived as self-evident and known and easily traced in a dictionary, ethmologically clear etc. and turns it upside down, hammers it to pieces following Nietzsche as Janet would say, tears it apart and puts it back together in an obviously unobvious way. Altruistic selfishness out of selfish altruism. Selfishly unselfish altruism, selfish selflesness...She makes the concept her own in an effectively surprising way.Dictionary talk won't help.
re: Tancave.
Endregol vaer!Ni lassui.
N'uir thiad gîn' ell.
Janet wrote:
"Janet is going to throw a tantrum if you persist in this x-ray. Either do a genealogy on altruism or drop it."
(end quote)
Do a genealogy on altruism?
Do you really believe that doing a "genealogy on altruism" would produce anything that has not been addressed here already?
The dynamic of permanent transformation and rich variety (dialectal, sociolectal) is characteristic of living language, and all attempts to artificially hamper this process go against the nature of language.
Trying to keep a language "pure" by e. g. frowning on the use of 'foreign' words is therefore absurd.
CHG wrote:
"I grew up during communism. What does that imply?" (end quote)
For example, it implies that if you are speaking about communism, you are speaking from the personal experience with the version of communism you have had in your country (ex-Yougoslavia).
[quoting Xray] "It
would interest me if there exist explicit "invitations" by
postmodernists to an audience where they told them to pick the pomo's
own stuff apart?"
Why do you think there should be any such "invitations"? (end quote)
I think it would mark them as true radicals.
I had a schizophrenic patient once - heavily medicated by someone else before I began to see him - and after a certain time in treatment he began saying "thou" when referring to me. I knew he was telling me that I was not the impersonal "you", but the intimate "you" that French has - vous and tu.
Heidegger uses "thou".
Do your own research. Get up off your duff and check a dictionary.No don't get out the dictionary, Do a genealogy.
Last night I was rereading parts of Discipline and Punish (Foucault) which for me is the most difficult of his books, only because of the horror that sleeps restlessly beneath each sentence of such clarity, power, spiraling brilliance that the feeling is like that of reading a mystery that compels you to keep turning pages while your stomach cramps in fear.
A quote from this marvel of a book shining a flashlight on a "CUT":
The moment that saw the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man, that moment when the sciences of man became possible is the moment when a new technology of power and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented
Is this not the theme of the entire interrogation Eric Maddox conducts in Irag in order to find Saddam? The Order of the Sacred versus the Order of Production: the ancestral, the memorable man, versus the technology of power, the power of technology that is the US military.
The new body being made is The Inscription of the Body first described by Nietzsche. We see this in Eric Packer's observations in Cosmopolis. His observations of decay (organic and inorganic)(always ongoing - Death) in Didi's sagging arm flesh after sex, in the scars of taxi drivers, of Ibrahim's eye, etc are all Inscriptions of the Body, some by the secret torture of age signifying Death, some by torture perhaps almost to death. We see these inscriptions of the body in Rand's descriptions of her characters. The weak and evil ones and Francisco's many bodily inscriptions indicating what he is going through, Dagny, Reardon, Lillian, Galt. She spares no one. Lillians's is especially brutal..
So if you get out of the "continuity" of Discourse you are all in over this, and instead train your focus on the "cuts" your arguments will disappear. A new and different understanding of "altruism" will emerge. I was also thinking about this last night and Rand. By "altruism" Rand meant that "I will not live my life for another man. I may die for him/her, but I will not live for him/her." She did not mean an individual act of altruism such as jumping in front of a car to die in order to push one's child out of the way. She meant a lifetime of living for another. Of course it never is so clear cut when you are in it because sometimes you are and sometimes you are not. But your entire lifestyle can be constructed and designed to live for another - a person, a pet, the corporation you work for, etc.
Are you committing the falecay of the false alternative? Tut tut.
Then read Toynbee on the "disintegration" of language in a disintegrating civilization. He does not tell us of specific things like "pure" or the use of "foreign" words, but the inability of its people to say anything of complexity and discrimination, and so renders them unable to think in a complex way about anything at all (except perhaps in a specialized field). Listen to football and baseball players when they are interviewed. they can barely say anything at all. Yet they are capable of making very fine discriminations within the game they play, but that is the extent of it. It doesn't mean they are stupid, just that they are sort of like savants.
Kidkennedy wrote: "So one could easily argue that pure altruism is selfish and that Mother
Theresa was selfish because what she did filled her up and gave HER life
meaning and purpose." (end quote)One could also easily argue tha there exist no such thing as pure altruism since the self-interest of the "altruist" factors in as a driving force.
Yes, agree. Every single act in life is a trade.
Janet wrote:
"And it was Nathaniel Branden who said to Rand that Objectivism was
patterned after religion. That she and he were two Jews who made another
form. Rand disagreed with him. But yes, I think he was right.
Objectivist has that flavor. It feels like a religion to you when you
accept it totally to try to live it. It produces a conversion in you." (end quote)
And it is a typical of both the founders of a (non-secular or secular) religion/ideology and the believers that the "truth" of the 'sacred' texts is never questioned.
As for those who later 'de-convert', they often become the harshest critics of their ex-religion/ideology.
Kidkennedy wrote:
"Yes, agree. Every single act in life is a trade." (end quote)
Absolutely. And we always act in order to gain from the trade (with "gain" being seen from our subjective perspective).
"Rand takes a very familiar concept, the meaning of which is perceived as
self-evident and known and easily traced in a dictionary,
ethmologically clear etc. and turns it upside down, hammers it to pieces
following Nietzsche as Janet would say, tears it apart and puts it back
together in an obviously unobvious way. Orwell also mentions the
reversibility of the bereavement of meaning. Altruistic selfishness out
of selfish altruism. Selfishly unselfish altruism, selfish
selflesness...She makes the concept her own in an effectively surprising
way. Dictionary talk won't help." (end quote)
I don't think Rand's personal "redefining" of concepts was the result of such thinking.
Imo it was more the result of a fundamental error on her part to seriously believe that a term's "true" meaning was what she personally connoted with it.
Orwell's not talking about purity, or new words, or foreign words. He is talking about 'known' words and 'known' meanings, the emptying of meaning by knowing it too well. Or masking the absence of meaning by being more verbose. Just words coming out of our mouths like air. Like ' I love you' used too much implodes the meaning of the phrase, like thank yous now carrying an overbearing signification of responding in polite manner, so *real* thank you loses it's power, is it just politeness, or does the person really mean it.
You are dazzling Curioushairedgal. and Bruner is a different book from the book I read 50 years ago. Actually your last paragraph sounds like Zizek thinking out loud.
Okay, let's take it a step further. More.
What does my speaking from the personal experience with the version of communism I had imply?
Re your expectations/perceptions of explicit 'invitations' by true radicals.
Isn't Hassan talking about conceptual difficulties of pomo in that text we already discussed, considering the possibility of a model of postmodernism having particular styles, features, attutudes belonging to a specific historical context?
"Having constructed such a model, does postmodernism develop along the same lines in every artistic or cultural field? Does it manifest itself identically in architecture, painting, music, dance, literature--and in the latter alone, in poetry, fiction, drama, the essay? What are the correspondences and symmetries, but also disjunctions and asymmetries, in various artistic genres, indeed in distinct fields like science, philosophy, politics, popular entertainment? Obviously, the challenges to a comprehensive model of postmodernism are daunting. Do we need such a model? Do we still need the word? "
Why do you think there is "the pomo stuff" to pick apart?
Foucault talks about his work as toolbox. If it would interest you what he picks apart, maybe reading him would be a good idea. Why not?
If you pick something apart you must do it in the dialecic Discourse. POst modern thinkers disagree all the time with each other. What they say is "I differ in my reading of X's reading of the text of Y ." And then they say why, giving their own reading. there is nothing of this hair-pulling about it. Kauffman's translation of Nietzsche is a good example from what he says in his introduction. He quotes the older translation of a sentence or two from Nietzsche in the German, and the so far accepted English, then he gives his own translation and why he differs. A completely different Nietzsche emerges. His point is that Nietzsche has been misread in English and so has not been very influential in English academia. Babette Babich goes much further than Kauffman and she is recognized as the great present translator of Nietzsche and the founder of a recent journal on NIetzsche.
Arguing differences of opinion is not radical. It is the template of revolutionary thought and action. The time for revolution is over. "The Revolution Will Be Televised." The world of the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/capital is total. There is no outside. But Nietzsche, Baudrillard and Rand saw a way out. It is not fixable and this is Dagny's dilemma throughout Atlas Shrugged. She cannot come to terms with"the fact that it is irreversible!"
The Occupy movement knows this so they are not presenting prescriptions for change. Zizek disagrees and fights. But he fights in a unique way if you watch his interviews or if you read him. He uses Tae Kwon Do in words.
LOL! This reminds me of my ferris wheel ride. I have vertigo. So I dropped acid in the late 60's, went to a carnival in NJ - alone - and bought $30 worth of ferris wheel tickets, got on and stayed on. My stomach heaved, I was terrified, but I flooded myself way before I studied with Edna Foa. I discovered the queasiness became more subtle, and I felt that drop in my stomach, the way you did as a teen when a certain boy walked by in the hall, or you saw him unexpectedly. Then I began to enjoy it, the stomach dropping stopped, and I could look around and watch everybody else. girls were screaming and their bf's were rocking the seat to scare them even more. I became exhilarated. About this time the young carnival guy came and sat with me on the next stop. I explained to him my fear and that this was the way I was dealing with it. We talked and he got off the next time it stopped. I think he was thinking suicide, or tripping or something and wanted to check me out.
It did desensitize me for awhile until I went up in the Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona when it came back with a vengence. Spontaneous recovery! This is the flaw in Behavior Therapy.
Absolutely. I even dare you to do it.
No. NIetzsche uses the overman in the sense of a person's "will to power," or maybe a "will to knowing," a "will to become what one is." Babich takes Nietzsche up on this but I won't go there. It is a matter of rising out of the mass conditioning, the cultural conditioning that restricts and imprisons us, one of which is the dominating Discourse and use of words within this Discourse that keeps one from even knowing what they might think if they were free. Zizek says we don't even have the words to imagine freedom. We need the words before we can even try to go there.
Yes. Right on x-ray!
Why hasn't anyone thrown in Nietzsche's The Gay Science?
And you have a nice day, CHG!
Yes, we act in order to gain.
Now your going to smash "giving without expectation bound to the gift".
Trading without consciously evaluating whats in it for us is trading purely or giving.
We might act to break even. Or to "lose" as Eric Packer did, as Francisco did!
I've only just begun with Bruner, it may seem different but it is in you, it was evident from the start. Žižek's Examined Life part was that one I looked for, where he talks about love of perfect imperfection, how true love is seeing the ideal in the everyday person. Now I just need to remember in connection to what I thought of it.And how very Baudrillard of him to talk about imploding the ecology ideology surrounded by junk, smelly man LOL
It's not my ;thinking. I am writing through Baudrillard. Seeing through Baudrillard. I cam to Baudrillard after 24/7 of Foucault for about one year. I thought of nothing else but Foucault. I never read anyone about,/b> Foucault. I never disagreed with him simply because he is so impossible to disagree with. Even Baudrillard does not disagree with Foucault. He proves every one of Foucault's theses and makes Foucault even more radical than he ever dreamed of being. This is what Vija Kinski does when she tells Eric "There is no outside," and Eric , negatively suggestible character that he is, immediately sees the flaw in her thinking, just as Baudrillad saw the flaw in Foucault's thinking. (As Cronenberg saw the flaw in the qustion that was making Rob stumple and ramble in the press conference. Rob doesn't question authority, he reacts against it. Big difference.) Baudrillard's assessment of the flaw in Foucault's thinking, was that he didn't see "irreversibility". In other words he didn't take Nietzsche at his word, he didn't go to the edge of the abyss (where irreversibility lives even tho Alice doesn't anymore) and push it over. Foucault didn't follow Nietzsche far enough - his big mistake. I notice now that it makes a huge difference in my thinking that I spent so much time with Foucault before I read Forget Foucault! After scrubbing my mind clean and ordering it, I jumped into Baudrillard and messed it up for a good long while. B doesn't make it easy to understand him any more than Nietzsche did. Foucault wants to be understood by all, not just academics. And he writes that way. Relentless. Baudrillard plays.
"The dynamics of permanent transformation and rich variety (dialectal, sociolectal) is characteristic of living language, and all attempts to articifially hamper this process go against the nature of language. Trying to keep a language pure by e.g. frowning on the use of 'foreign' words is therefore absurd".
"Rand's personal 'redefining of concepts was not driven by that kind of thinking...a result of a fundamental (and quite naive) on her part to seriously belive that the 'true' meaning of a term was what she personally connoted it with."
The dynamics of permanent transformation and rich variety is characteristic of living language (of a work of art, a novel written in a language), and all attempts to artificially hamper this process (by psychologizing, by interpreting/hermeneutically approaching, by assuming there's a 'true' meaning Rand thought of when using a language, what thinking she was driven by) go against the nature of language. Trying to keep a language pure (believing in the 'true' meaning of the word Rand mistakenly belived was the meaning she personally connoted with it) by e.g. frowning on the use of 'foreign' words(or meanings 'foreign' to the one believing to be in possession of a 'true' meaning of a word, believing there actually is an enclosed, defined, fixed 'true' meaning of a word)is therefore absurd.
I remember how much Stauffer respected him, how much he quoted him. He was developing "reading as a thinking process" of hypothesis setting, or proving and disproving, not of putting words in a child's mouth, but waiting the child out until s/he could think it over. He stressed this. and you know how I am, something in me is unconsciously wondering if he really means it.
One of the children assigned to me was a 2nd (3rd?) grade boy with red hair named Rusty. So my first day with him, after his having been tested and correctly placed at his instructional level was a story. I gave him maybe the first page, maybe all the pictures, I forget of course, and asked him what he thought was going to happen. He looked at me with this blank bored look and said nothing. Nothing! for the rest of the hour. We had been cautioned not to prod, to try to put the words in the child's mouth, but this was excessive. I sweated bullets but I did it. Tuesday we sat down and I asked what he thought ......and he did the same. Two fucking days! And I had burned all my bridges behind me!
Wednesday the same. Thursday I took in some knitting just in case. The same. Friday we had off. The following Monday I was scared shitless. Did Stauffer really mean this! But I started the same way again and I had my knitting.
Rusty looked at me with horror on his face. OMG she is going to do it again! and he predicted something. I asked him a few questions why that choice and he gave me a few perfunctory answers and I asked him to find out if he was right. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF INSIDE BOTH OF US!
My first case presentation, and I just realized it right this minute, was Rusty's case. My supervisor, who was also the assistant director must have picked that case for me to present. Shithead!
Well Stauffer was marvelous, relentless, a terrible misogynist, caustic, sarcastic and totally intellectually focussed. He grilled me for the entire hour. I sweated more than bullets. Then it was over. Stauffer left and everyone clapped and cheered. I was in shock and totally surprised. I didn't even know why they did. Now, writing this, I realize I had taken one of his "And I mean it" instructions and carried it to excess. It was either he was right or he wasn't. Was his hypothesis correct or not. That was what I had been doing. The only thing that kept me from caving was Rand during those horrible 4 days.
It's times like these threads that one can only appreciate and love Wittgenstein. You can't even put in words what you feel. You cannot even ever know how anyone else feels. Everything is a word game. A jargon game. A sound-bite game.
Thank you! *smiling back with my most American reflex smile*
What if God gives the gift of life without expecting anything? What if man feels the debt forever? NIetzsche talks about exchange as the first transaction between men. He adds a negative connotation to it. Rand wanted to rpove him wrong there with her businessman and business transactions being moral.
So when did "gift" enter the world? What was the intersection that brought in expectation? Trade?
Interesting story: Foucault was at one of those faculty seminar after gatherings and a young woman was introduced to him. She has recently completed her PhD dissertation on him and was thrilled to meet him in person. When he was told of her work, he said,"Why are you spending time on me? Do genealogies." He had boxes and boxes of genealogies he had worked on. Baudrillard said he thought genealogically but in relation to present events.
But I am not very critical of it. I just outgrew it like organized religion. It didn't meet my needs anymore. What stayed was this attitude of watching something that appears totally illogical or rotten and knowing exactly what and why it is so I am not surprised or outraged. I just seem to see that that's the way most people are. It took me quite a few instances that were very different so see that the pattern was the same. Again no surprise.
Could you tell me the reference (Zizek, sorry I'm not marking the letters correctly)
"When did "gift" enter the world? What was the intersection that brought in expectation? Trade?
This is kind of fun to think about. It's hard for me to express big things in my little way.....but im thinking maybe the first trade had to have been food because that is the first need.
When a mother gives her child her breast, is she thinking "I must give this person food so that i can feel a satisfaction from it"?.....i dont know.
And what constitutes a "gift" as opposed to an exchange?
Is it a gift if it is something needed (by the other)?
"What if God gives the gift of life without expecting anything?"......then God can not be terribly disappointed in most of us. (thats a joke).
"What if man feels the debt forever"?.....this is the basis of organized religion.
I have a friend who's teenage son is mad at her for creating him.
Janet wrote:
"Why hasn't anyone thrown in Nietzsche's The Gay Science?" (end quote)
Would have been an illustrative example indeed. Although the in the German title "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft", "fröhlich" did not go through a change of meaning like "gay".
The subtitle Nietzsche chose was "la gaya scienza". I first thought this might be Rhaeto-Romanic, but in the link I went to, it is listed as coming from the language of Provence.
GHG:
Intersting and impressive act of merging!
ITA with the merged content as well.
Great story.
Behavior Therapy...the head Dr.'s trying to help one overcome a fear.
In my experience, they tried planting fears that were not there for me. They wanted to talk about these assumed fears i would have forever.....but i didn't have them and told them that.....then it was determined (by them) that i was repressing fear. I felt they were telling me (demanding, almost) how to feel. Thats what i meant when i said i thought they were trying to make me sick (yes, along with meds). This is why i sought my own way of recovery.
We might act to break even. Or to "lose" as Eric Packer did, as Francisco did!
gain is not to be undetsotd as gaining in an objective sense. For example, an individual can decide to give away all his/her money, [which could interpreted as a an objective "loss" by most since they no longer own that meoney, but the the person (subjectively) wants to "gain" something else form this action. Tolstoj is a classic example. Somehtig that they consider as of higher value to them.
In every single decision we make, this operative principle is work.
So if for example, a person acts to break even, they perceive breaking even as gain, and prefer it to a downright victory over the other party.
In the case of Francicso, his acting to (objectviely) "lose" his wealth, what did he expect to gain from it? What was his motive behind it? It is always the motive that leads to the actual goal directing the action and it is this goal that contains the "gain" for the agent.
Once the goal is known, everything else falls into
place.
KK wrote:
"Yes, we act in order to gain.
Now your going to smash "giving without expectation bound to the gift".
Trading without consciously evaluating whats in it for us is trading purely or giving." (end quote)
Even if one gives without expecting reciprocity (as in 'Do, ut des'), or to expect at least some gratefulness on the part of the receiver, giving without expectation bound to the gift is still a form of trade:
The expected gain from the trade is the positive feeling which the giver expects to experience as result of his/her act.
Janet wrote:
So when did "gift" enter the world? What was the intersection that brought in expectation? Trade? (end quote)
I think it was way before the concept of "trade began to form itself in human thought. Animals offer "gifts" to each other as well, in mating rituals for example.
Give and and take for mutual benefit is deeply ingrained in human nature because it is a survival advantage.
Janet wrote:
"But I am not very critical of it [Objectvism]. I just outgrew it like organized religion. It didn't meet my needs anymore.
Interestig reply. So as for Rand's premises and body of ideas, you don't have the feeling that she had it downright wrong in many respects?
Darren wrote:
"The moment one begins to look closely at Objectivism, the more it falls apart and the sillier it becomes: definitions that are empirical in one context, and then axiomatic in another; bombastic statements, supposedly factual, that are actually based on nothing but a strongly-held wish; etc.
The epistemological muddledness of Rand's ITOE stand out indeed. She was a writer of ideological fiction, and overall an ideologist far more than a philospher.
Darren wrote:
"Conversely — as I wrote earlier — if one thinks of Objectivism as simply a continuation of Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged; as a footnote within the novel itself; and takes it as FICTION masquerading as non-fiction scholarship, then it makes sense.
As much sense as the grammar and syntax of the invented Elven language by Tolkien. The main difference is that Tolkien (to his credit) did not end "Lord of the Rings" with a resounding "And I mean it!" (end quote)"
Good points
And imo is precisely this "And I mean it" why any filming of "Atlas Shrugged" can only esult in a disaster.
"But Nietzsche, Baudrillard and Rand saw a way out.
Rand believed there was way out but since her assessment of reality was wrong in so many respects, it had to result in the bitter disppointment she experienced in her later years when I think it began to dawn even on her that the John Galt-like heroes she she had tried to transfer from her fiction into her own life (by e. g. projectg galt into N. Branden did not exist.
In my reading of B. Branden's book, there have been several moments when I felt very sorry for Ayn Rand being so delusional, for example in her trying to recreate via N. Branden a "Dagny-Galt" - like relationship in the bedroom she shared with her husband.
I'm also convinced that Rand really had no idea that Frank would be hurt because she lacked the ability to empathize, to feel what others felt.
"She [Dagny]cannot come to terms with" the fact that it is irreversible!"
Nor could Rand when she saw how delusional she had been about her relationship with NB. This explains her revenge crusade against him.
Janet
"The
Occupy movement knows this so they are not presenting prescriptions for
change. Zizek disagrees and fights. But he fights in a unique way if
you watch his interviews or if you read him. He uses Tae Kwon Do in
words."
Zizek as a Marxist argues "in the dialectical Discourse" then?
http://biblioklept.org/2012/06/06/see-astra-taylors-documentary-examined-life-featuring-judith-butler-peter-singer-and-cornel-west/ Žižek is second to the last I think.
All these musings pop out at you when you begin a genealogy. So you keep going. Foucault was dead serious about doing them, but I play with them. Jaycee Dugard and Eunice Williams for example, only because there are detailed diaries about Williams by her father and her brother after the father died. And of course we have the internet blow - by - blow for Dugard. But nothing touches me about Dugard like Savage's Hide and Drink.
I would say that the mother gives the child her breast because it is full and becoming painful,so the relief is reinforcing. Pure Hullian positive and negative reinforcement. Does she think of it as a gift? The infant must "gaze" at her in a unique way.Many an early mother would have "gazed" back.
"Gift" is separate from trade, exhange. Exchange belongs in the Order of Production, Gift in the Order of Seduction, so I guess that means there is no "exchange" possible, only the "counter-gift", which must be returned, it must be greater than the gift, but it doesn't need to be right away. I think it is Levi-Strauss who I remember first talks about the "gift" in my memory.
If it is something needed, useful, then I would think that kind of "gift" would not be the "Gift" we are discussing. That "gift" would belong in the Order of Production, not the Symbolic Order of Seduction. Rob Pattinson certainly makes all this much easier to understand, doesn't he? His pure existence in the Order of Seduction and the fact that he can't be
reproduced on the assembly line of movie stars. He can't be cloned. He is
irreplaeable. All this doesn't have much to do with his superior or
nonsuperior acting ability IMO.
Now that we are thinking about the genealogy of "gift" the world will will
information to seek us out.
I am discovering Malabou. She will be at Lebenon Valley College in
2012-2013 academic year. I told loisada whose daughter is to go into her
freshman year this year. LVC is 8 miles east of Hershey in PA. I went there
once. The air really does smell like chocolate. I was taken there by a
friend to tour it with Frank Lloyd Wight's nephew. This was when I was a
Randroid. Oh if only loisada's daughter could go there. If only I could go
there next year. If anyone I loved could go there next year. Can you?
MALABOU WILL BE AT LEBANON VALLEY COLLEGE NEXT YEAR (2012- 2013)! Go if
you can! Audit if you can! Visit her class or seminar if you can!
If he were my son then I would sit down and read Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals aloud to him over a few days and nights. Think of all you would have to talk about with your teenaged son.
Janet wrote:
"It's times like these threads that one can only appreciate and love
Wittgenstein. You can't even put in words what you feel. You cannot even
ever know how anyone else feels. Everything is a word game. A jargon
game. A sound-bite game. " (end quote)
Although Wittgenstein used the term "Sprachspiel" ('language game')', imo to call everything a word game has too playful a touch.
For the inadequateness and deficiency of language when it comes to expressing certain issues has no 'game character' at all.
Nor does "Everything is a word game" account for the fact that many issues in communication can very well be adequately expressed in language.
Why are you asking what Francisco's motive was? You do know, don't you? If not it's in y latest post on moviesand film, on cosmopolisfilm2, and 2 others randroid belt being one and Ayn Rand the other. Also my Epiphany one from ST. Vincent's.
Janet wrote:
So
what is required here is a "genealogy" of the word / concept altruism.
If x-ray will do that then she will be astounded by what emerges. (end quote)I doubt I would be be astounded. For there are few things that would astound me when it comes to human behavior.
You really have to spend some serious downtime with Wittgenstein to understand him. The Discourse is a language game. It is a game that can "kill". It is not a playful game. But then neither is chess.
And I see you have not read Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Shame on you.
No. Rand was a post modernist in her thinking. She just didn't know it. By default.
I answered you about Zizek but I don't see it. He does not do classical Hegel. He out Hegels Hegel.
Only by what you didn't know when it smacks you in the face as irrefutable.
You misunderstand. Doing a genealogy will not bring out new and different behavior in humans. What it will do is make clear the intersections - the cuts - that transformed a concept or idea into something different. Such as altruism.
I see the error in the philosophy. You are correct but "expected" implies that we are contemplating what feeling we are going to recieve from the act BEFORE we act and i don't think that we always do.
I can't. But maybe we could get transcripts of her lectures. Is she a professor teaching or a guest giving talks? WHO is she? What is her field of study?
What I am saying or really asking is what is the gift and at what point is it called the gift? When does it enter the order of production? What intersects? With expectations? Haven't read Levi-Strauss on this. Material? Immaterial? Toys? The doll? Muddled
I mentioned this because it tied into the question i have about thankfulness being essential to living.
I think its strange that we all had the same intuit that he might take his life (if he is not grateful for it). Where does that feeling come from? Is it a rational conclusion we make based on what we know about teen suicide rates and depression etc...or is the intuition from an unknown wisdom in us that knows one can not survive without feeling beholden?
This is what the Cathars believe. That the world is evil. Why children need fairy tales not ones redone to be PC or propaganda for something or other. The feelings that he might are picked up by him. It needs to be joined as a feeling. It is a philosophical existential question.Very important. Time to read Holocaust lit.
Yeah, time for me to read a lot of things. There are too many things i dont understand but i am worried that there will be even more after reading. lol
KK wrote: "I see the error in the philosophy. You are correct but "expected" implies that we are contemplating what feeling we are going to recieve from the act BEFORE we act and i don't think that we always do." (end quote)
I didn't mean that "expect" always implies contemplating what feelings we are going to receive from the act; the reason why I chose "expect" was because one doesn't always get what one has bargained for in a trade, whether it is in buying or in giving a present. I realize that "expect" can have a too contemplative connotation, but I couldn't think of another word that coud express more adequately what I meant.
"Expect" as I meant it in this context is to be understood as a more 'implicitly present' attitude which does not require an explicitly contemplative activity preceding the act.
Example: when buying a new car, one implicitly expects it to be in good condition. One expects to 'gain' from the trade. But still, it is possible that one can get a bad new car, a so-called 'lemon'. In that case, there won't be any good feelings about the trade on the part of the buyer.
Another exmaple, this time with 'gift':
When John gives another person a present and the receiver throws it back at his feet, yelling "You altruistic idiot!" at him, John's implicit expectation of getting a good feeling from the act of giving has not been fulfilled.
Janet wrote: "And I see you have not read Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Shame on you." (end quote)
My first and (so far only) encouter with a Hesse novel was 'The Steppenwolf' (one of the 'cult' books of the late 1960s), but which I soon put aside because I could not relate at all.
My husband is a big admirer of Hesse's work (although he thinks Steppenwolf is not among his best books), and I have heard many ravings about the "Glass Bead Game" from him; we have the book here.
But as for recommendations to read this or that; my experience has told me that one reads what one's soul and mind are seeking for.
My interest has strongly shifted from fiction to non-fiction in recent years, so that's where my soul and mind are currently headed.
This doesn't mean it will stay that way. Vita in motu.
There's one poem by Hesse which is among my all-time favorites though: "Stufen".
KK wrote:
I think its strange that we all had the same intuit that he might take
his life (if he is not grateful for it). Where does that feeling come
from? Is it a rational conclusion we make based on what we know about
teen suicide rates and depression etc...or is the intuition from an
unknown wisdom in us that knows one can not survive without feeling
beholden?
(end quote)
I think that both rationaity and intuition factor in here.
Imo the intuitive aspect does not originate from come from an "unknown wisdom" though. Intuition is the ability to grasp what a person is feeling. All adults were once youngsters, and therefore have personal experience regarding the 'emotional roller coasters' young people are on.
Janet wrote:
"Why are you asking what Francisco's motive was? You do know, don't you?" (end quote)
I thought was clear from the context that it was a rhetorical question.
What I wanted to point out: no one acts to lose, although acts like e. g. those of Franciso present themselves as if 'losing' were the goal. But this is only on the surface. The motive behind his acts reveals his real goal, and his real goal shows what he wanted to gain.
It is always a person's intended goal that directs a conscious action and it is this goal that contains the "gain" for the agent.
Once the goal is known, everything else falls into place.
Janet wrote:
"Gift" is separate from trade, exhange. Exchange belongs in the Order of Production, Gift in the Order of Seduction, so I guess that means there is no "exchange" possible, only the "counter-gift", which must be returned, it must be greater than the gift, but it doesn't need to be right away. (end quote)
Both in gift and trade, there is the same operative principle at work: acting to get what one subjectively values higher, i. e. acting to gain.
Example: you see in a bookshop Zizek's book on Hegel listed as costing 45 dollars.
You will only buy it if you value X (= having the book) over Y (= keeping your 45 dollars).
If not, the trade exchange won't take place - you won't buy it and keep your 45 dollars instead.
With the seller, it is the other way round: he values Y (= having your 45 dollars) over X (keeping the book).
The same principle is at work with giving: we would not give if we valued X (keeping the gift) over Y (offering it to the receiver).
The expectation is always: "to gain" on the part of the trader or giver.
Janet wrote:
"You
really have to spend some serious downtime with Wittgenstein to
understand him. The Discourse is a language game. It is a game that can
"kill". It is not a playful game. But then neither is chess." (end quote)
"Game", always has this playful connotation to me. "Spiel" even more so. It's a personal thing.
Janet wrote:
"He [Zizek] uses Tae Kwon Do in words." (end quote)
You can say that again!
For example, he says about his parents: "I didn't spend a minute bemoaning their death."
Suppose Zizek means it (and was not just trying to shock the interviewer), one gets the feeling that this is either an individual who is totally devoid of empathy or that he had an absolutely horrible childhood. Or both.
Why would you think that? And where are all these things coming from, how he talks, how many showers he takes, devoid of empathy (as Rand?), horrible childhood....how about continuing beyond this both. Or it could mean...?
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