#modernist philosophy

[amicus-noctis]

Moravia once remarked that the most important facts of his life had been his illness, a tubercular infection of the bones that confined him to a bed for five years and Fascism, because they both caused him to suffer and do things he otherwise would not have done. 

#albert camus #existentialism #Jean Paul Sartre #classics #Penguin Classics #classical literature #classical poetry #literature #modernist literature #franz kafka #alberto moravia #sylvia plath #virginia woolf #Fyodor Dostoyevsky #the trial #the stranger #to the lighthouse #philosophy #The myth of Sisyphus #fascism #young authors #leo tolstoy #Anton Chekhov #the bell jar #poetry #Poems #french literature #modernism #quotes #classical quotes

[ilya-fox]

Something about concrete ideas

(Shot at Les Olympiades, 13 Arr., Paris / Architect: Michel Holley)

#architecture #brutalism #graphic design #modernism #modernist architecture #concrete #theory #philosophy #urban decay #paris #paris architecture #Instagram

[mailmiocuoredipietratremaancora]

On met des choses en branle sans se soucier du moyen de les faire cesser. Afin de parler. On se met à parler comme si l'on pouvait s'arrêter en le voulant. C'est bien ainsi. La recherche du moyen de faire cesser les choses, taire sa voix, est ce qui permet au discours de se poursuivre.

We set things in motion without worrying about how to stop them. In order to talk. We start talking as if we could stop by wanting to. That's the way it is. The search for a way to make things stop, to silence one’s voice, is what allows the discourse to continue.

#mailmiocuoredipietratremaancora #beckett #samuel beckett #l’Innomable #love #art #beauty #literature #reading #quotes #english writing #english writers #french literature #french language #modernism #philosophy #life #modern literature #modernist literature

[americiumam]

i hate this i WANT to be cool and smart and intellectual but when i read things by intellectuals im like. you’re saying variations of the same thing 50 times and also you’re wrong and this is stupid

#what is it about modernists that make them think their philosophy about art is better than everyone else’s #‘yeah making pretty things bc you enjoy looking at them is actually fascist you need to have deep thoughts like me(orange line on canvas)’ #SHUT UP #95

[uglypastels]

My mom was telling me a story of one time when she was at uni and threw a party and during it, she walked into the kitchen and walked in on 2 guys ready to fist fight because one called the other a "post modernist".

#she studied philosophy #and the guy who called the other a post modernist apparently had the same name as what i would have been called of i was a boy #and he looked like eddie 💕

[frstndlstlns]

After the Beautiful

In the following I deal with a very small fraction of the European and American visual art now more or less commonly identified as “modernist,” itself a fraction of the poetry, novels, drama, music, dance, and architecture often also so classified.

And now when the link forged between us generally and in relation to our common aim has been broken, it is my final wish that the higher and indestructible bond of the Idea of beauty and truth may link us and keep us firmly united now and for ever. (A, 2:1237)

— Robert Pippin

#modernist painting #aestethics #philosophy #2014

[jonathanmorse]

Wordless glare

In 1918 a caption written in American expository prose employed the word twixt. The caption’s author assumed that that word twixt would mean something to his readership, just like the two-word combination Hoffman House. If it has turned out that you don’t know what Hoffman House means, he was wrong. In 1918 his words were part of a lexicon dating from 1918, but that number turned out to be…

View On WordPress

#James Joyce #language #modernist literature #New York #philosophy #photography

[i-merani]

I consume therefore I am

#post-modernist human nature #philosophy #capitalism #consumerism #mine

[irreplaceable-spark]

On Ethics & Morals

Ethics are not the same as morals. One of the problems with our post-modernist society is the conflation of the two, which I believe to be the basis of our culture war today.

For starters, let’s define the two terms.

Ethics:  A set of principles of right conduct; A theory or a system of moral values; The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy; The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession.

Morals: Of or concerned with the judgment of right or wrong of human action and character; Teaching or exhibiting goodness or correctness of character and behavior; Conforming to standards of what is right or just in behavior; virtuous; Arising from conscience or the sense of right and wrong; Having psychological rather than physical or tangible effects; Based on strong likelihood or firm conviction, rather than on the actual evidence.

Ethics are based on a moral system, however ethics can neither exist without nor supplant morality. This is the mistake made during the French Revolution that led to public guillotines and a regression to a dictatorship with Emperor Napoleon. This is the same mistake we are making today with the loss of religion, the desecration of tradition, and the rise of ‘wokeism’. 

One way to understand the insidiousness of post-modern ethics is through the rise of history revisionism, allowing for past events to be recategorized or recontextualized using a post-modernist lens. History revisionism is not merely the rewriting of history to fit a narrative, although that tends to be the layman’s interpretation like with the 1619 project. The core of it is the post-modernist ethics which emphasize that history is not relegated the the past, that through their concept of alterity, it also exists it the present and future, thus allowing and demanding alternative versions to be exposed.

What is alterity? Alterity is a philosophical and anthropological term meaning "otherness", that is, the "other of two". It is also increasingly being used in media to express something other than "sameness", or something outside of tradition or convention. By analyzing ethics through alterity, it allows “alterity to mark its radical or unrepresentable difference.” In conclusion, “without this ethic openness, difference could not be carried out as difference” and would “submit to the power of representation.” (1)

Not only does this pervasive theory allow for history revisionism, it opens up the can of worms in all sectors of society - identity, politics, economics, competency, privacy - to name a few. Transgenderism, wokeness, equity, intersectionalism, and degradation of privacy all stem from this post-modernist interpretation of ethics. A cornucopia of genders exists because gender must be analyzed through alterity. Equality of opportunity doesn’t guarantee equitable outcome, so with a post-modernist ethical lens, is unethical and a focus on equity has replaced it.  

What cued me into this was reading What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. by Howard Marchitello. It discusses ethics through a contemporary, post-modern lens and through various post-modernists such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinson. While I am all for a renewal of ethics in contemporary thought, I reject the ongoing ethics revisionism and the eradication of morals for ethics.

For instance, one moral we have is thou shall not kill. It is immoral to murder. However, depending on the context and intent of that murder, the law may find you innocent. Why? Because the law is ethical, not moral. If the murder was in self-defense, you will be found not guilty as the law is interested in why you murdered someone, not the action of murder. 

However, this is where post-modernist ethics come in. It refuses to acknowledge the morality of murder. Instead, if a white man kills a black man in self-defense or vice-versa, the race of the individuals (intersectionality & equity) comes into question rather than the why or the action itself. The redefining of what is ethical based on alterity has usurped morality.

I highly recommend reading What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought. It is a bit of a slog, especially with the circularity of thoughts and the redefining of what is ethics in order to explain the essayists’ positions. But it will increase your understanding of the culture war happening today and how to make some of these post-modernist arguments moot. 

(1) Krzysztof Ziarek, “The Ethos of History,” in What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. by Howard Marchitello (New York: Routledge, 2011) 80.

#ethics #morals #post-modernist #post-modernism #theory #french revolution #guillotine #regression #dictatorship #napoleon #history revisionism #recategorization #recontextualization #1619 project #past #present #future #alterity #philosophy #otherness #tradition #insidious #pervasive #identity #politics #economics #competency #privacy #transgenderism #wokeness

[the-chill-remains]

How the Vandamm House in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ Changed Cinema Forever | Vanity Fair

#modernist architecture #alfred hitchcock #storytelling philosophy #audience psychology

[hadesoftheladies]

queer theory is actually a nightmarish frankensteinian creation of postmodernism, and post-modernists philosophers have frequently and explicitly been pro-pedophilia, because this is a logical consequence of what post-modernism says is true: there is no (epistemic) certainty or stable meaning.

when my conservative parents tell me they basically associate "lgbtq" with "maps" and pedophilia, they have reason to do so, given how "queer culture" is fundamentally a creation of post-modernist values, and post-modernist estimations of sexuality. everything is fluid, no binary exists, no meaning is fixed, so there are no defining lines, which means lines cannot actually be crossed. homosexuals can be bisexual, man and woman are interchangeable meaningless terms, and attraction to children is just one of the many ways sexual fluidity is expressed in humans, a benign and normal thing that should be released from modernist moralistic confines

that is queer philosophy, and it is actual queer culture. so not only are LGB folk being told they should celebrate the reclamation of an awful slur that explicitly others them as "perverted" and "strange", but now they are told to embrace queer culture (which means queer identity and philosophy) which not only declares their reality as abnormal and unreal (same-sex attraction is myth, since there is no such thing as sex and attraction is fluid), but also defines them explicitly with sexual perversions like pedophilia and bdsm: which IS EXACTLY WHAT HOMOPHOBES BELIEVE ABOUT THEM.

when queer culture is predicated on subjective feelings of identity needing to be validated, celebrated and "set free" from modernist (read definable, material and epistemological) structures, then the distaste for MAPs from queer folk doesn't mean anything, because even if MAPs are publicly rejected by queer culture, they are embraced and validated by queer theory and post-modernist philosophy.

what is doubly baffling to me is how the lgbtq+ community has tainted a movement for gay rights, you know, people who are being killed and ostracized for being same-sex attracted. not only nullifying their experiences and struggle in being same-sex attracted, not only associating their neutral, normal orientations with perversions and kinks, making something neutral political . . .

but they have also actively decentered a movement for homosexuals and bisexuals in order to accommodate identities that have NOTHING to do with that struggle or fight. intersex conditions, gender dysphoria, and asexuality have nothing to do with the oppression LGBs have faced for their sexual orientation and gender nonconformity, their culture of genderlessness. the idea that men and women can wear and present however they want, love and be attracted to the same sex, without it altering their material status.

EVEN MORE INFURIATINGLY, queer politics has offered almost ZERO challenges to patriarchy. by throwing out definitions, throwing out distinctions, it has relegated the essence of oppression to an individualistic, liberal fantasy that is powerless to change the system, and so can only grant us "spicy" patriarchy. dominance and submission, patriarchal inventions, are now cool kinks that every couple should try. gender is now open access (but still necessary), so men can wear heels and still call women slurs and violently harass them. transmen can go by he/him and still be refused abortion access! gay people are gender fetishists, not sinners. nothing has structurally changed, it's just we have cool names now! :)

so now LGB and women all over the fucking world are relegated to this homophobic misogynistic hell whether we turn to the left or right, and when we speak up about it, conservative homophobes and misogynists confuse us with liberal perverts, and liberal homophobes and misogynists conflate us with conservative sadists.

the structure doesn't change. there is no actual progress. like, same-sex right and women's movements all over the world have suffered for this. because white liberal westerners wanted to play around with words and have that count as activism.

i fucking hate queer theory and politics. i fucking hate how rich western whites shit on every human rights movement while capitalizing on them.

#queer theory #feminism #radblr #lgbtq #queer

[curtwilde]

Henry vs Julian

I have been thinking about this a lot. While Henry clearly admires and models his scholar self on Julian, their essential difference is in how they perceive the Ancient Greeks.

Julian's interest in the Ancient Greeks is true interest, he admires their high and exalted values. For him, the Greeks were the highest point of human civilization, and the closer he comes to his own time the more his disdain increases - the Roman Catholic Church he holds in contempt but it's still a 'worthy enemy' not as bad as the Presbyterian Church. It isn't mentioned but he must hold modernism and it's philosophy with disdain - modernist moral vacousness being a direct contradiction of the idealist values loyalty, honor, chastity etc. that were so exalted by the Greeks. Which is why he is always cherry picks, sees only what he wants to see, and invents what he can't - both for himself (his ambiguous involvement with the Isrami government) or for his students (encouraging Richard to lie about his life in California). Since he can't time travel back to Greece himself, he must try to live that life as much as he can and believe himself a character in a Greek play. But it comes, not from a place of wanting to escape his current reality, but true admiration of the ancient Greek way of seeing and doing things.

Henry is a true modernist. The monologue about feeling dead is central to his understanding his character:

Maybe it stems from his near death experience but he sees the world as inherently meaningless, God is dead and heaven and hell have been revealed to be man-made constructs, there is no punishment for evil and since there is no moral line. I think he subconsciously realised all of this before coming to Hampden, but to truly accept it would have been soul-crushing. So he tries to escape it by immersing himself in the Greeks, I imagine the absolutist values, vague representational ideas pertaining to each god might have interested him but really, it could have been anything else, the Medieval Age or the Victorians, anything. He just needed something to be obsessed with, to give meaning to his existence which he subconsciously knew to be meaningless. So is his adoration of Julian, he admired and wanted Julian's ability to almost half-live in another time when, in his view, things mattered more (we have divinity in our midst). It also explains the Bacchanal which is otherwise so out of character for him. The appeal was to escape the soul crushing knowledge of meaninglessness - even if for a while. To worship and call on Dinosiyus with the blind belief of the Ancient Greeks, a kind of belief that simply cannot exist anymore in the postmodern, post-Neitzche world. His harebrained plans also came from the same impulse, including the poison plan, and the one way ticket to Argentina.

I suspect that what subconsciously drove him to murder bunny, aside from the obvious fear of getting caught - is the same thing that drove Mersault to murder the Arab - it's the old existentialist question, if good and bad are relative and there is no punishment for evil, how far can one go? Bunny's murder was Henry's existentialist experiment with himself. And, I think in a way it confirmed for him what he already knew, they escaped unscathed and he didn't feel any of the fear or remorse he expected to feel. While it did give him the momentary sense of power, the feeling that he could now do whatever he wanted if he can be clever enough to not get caught, since he won't be punished for it otherwise. While it gave him enough courage to go get the girl he always wanted - it did confirm for him the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Also, conversely, Camilla could have been another experiment - something must matter, was it love? Camilla was the only girl he knew and he was fond of her - he may not even have thought of her romantically before considering he never cared to act on it in all the time he had known her. But either way, Julian's abandonment broke him.

Coming back to Julian, Julian's abandonment omakes perfect sense to me - he was disgusted by the modernist moral vacousness in his students. He himself was a moral man, but his morals operated on his own standards. He based it on the Greek sense of Honour, not the more modern sense of Justice. His basic instinct was the preservation of his own purity - he couldn't possibly keep on as their teacher. But also, to turn them in would be against his sense of honour - he must have very little respect for the police and law enforcement as institutions being the kind of person he is. Not to mention it would mean his having to be in frequent contact with the police and court. From his point of view atleast, leaving is the only thing he could have done, really.

For Henry however, he sees that his obsession with the Greeks as well as his admiration for Julian as the sham that it really was, is disillusioned with the world, shattered. Except for his fondness for Camilla he didn't really have anyone he loved, he saw his friends as pawns, wasn't close to his family, didn't have any goals in life with everything in his reach with his father's money - the only person he had really loved was Julian, and there he was betrayed. His obsession with the ancient Greeks was also thus tainted with Julian's betrayal - since it wasn't true interest at all, only a disguised attempt at escapism - it wavered and fell apart, and he didn't have a reason to live anymore.

.

Side note : Richard falls between the two. Like Julian, he had a real interest in the ancient Greeks, but he didn't put them on a pedestal like Julian did. He realised that like his own time, and like all other times in history the Greek civilization too had its own good and bad aspects, and he wanted to learn about it for its own sake. But he doesn't make it his life, or use it to escape his own reality - outside of his classes he was very much rooted in his own time.

#the secret history #tsh #donna tartt #henry winter #julian morrow #richard papen #camilla macaulay #charles macaulay #francis abernathy #bunny corcoran #tina rambles #lit

[inbabylontheywept]

Alright. So. I have a confession to share with you. In middle school, I strongly identified as a libertarian. In my defense, I was 13 and I had autism. Against my defense, I was literate, and capable of using common sense. I confessed this to you willingly, so go easy on me.

One thing about this that I can share with you is that I, as a 13 year old boy, read Atlas Shrugged. I read it as someone very committed to the ideology, who wanted to believe it, who wanted to like it, and there are two things I can share with you about that book from that time period.

The writing is terrible. It has the slowest, most boring, most pretentious prose you could possibly imagine. Calling it glacial would be a compliment. It makes glaciers look like Formula 1. There is no description for the pacing outside of hellish torments. It is like being condemned to watch a dog with an itchy ass wear the Himmalayas away only by scooching. It is like counting the grains of sand on a beach while Alexa reads off random phone numbers. It is like dipping saltines into lukewarm tapwater while listening to white noise in a beige room with no doors. It is like wearing a blindfold and being told to guess what a man is painting by sound alone, but there is no man, there is only a dog licking cold vaseline off a window. Forever. It is all of those things and more.

There is a multipage rant about how affairs are Good and Rational that is so insanely desparate that even middle-school-autist me thought she must have been having an affair while she wrote this. And then I googled it, and the answer was yes, she was. She called her philosophy Objectivism, because she believed, like everyone else in the world, that her ideas and motivations were Pure and Rational and Ojectively Correct, but I still find the name accurate, because it was really written with one Objective in mind, and that was finding a way to never admit that Ayn Rand had ever made a mistake in her life.

I was going to rant more about this but I kind of lost my train of thought. The book fucking sucks. It was propaganda of such remarkably low caliber that it actually helped me move out of those circles. Every time someone talked about liking the book, I'd reply with something along the lines of "Yeah, I especially loved the part where she destroyed the post modernists by unequivocally condemning affairs", and if they agreed with me, they would have lost my respect forever, and if they looked very embarrassed, I could at least acknowledge that they had a soul, albeit small and malformed. I had dozens of people claim that they read the book, and only three or four actually passed the test.

And now, goodnight.

#rant #rant post

[max1461]

I think something that many people of the high-modern bent (leftists, rationalists, etc.) tend to forget when they talk about society is this: many people (I would conjecture, most people) are not hedonists, either in philosophy or practice. There exist many things which people value inherently, above and beyond the capacity of those things to produce pleasure.

One ready-to-mind example is morality: people will often sacrifice their happiness significantly to do what they believe is right. If they happen to have a hedonist ethics, then we might say that they're still trying to maximize net pleasure overall, but if they don't have a hedonist ethics this is certainly not the case. They might, for instance, have a virtue ethics or a deontological ethics, and make great sacrifices to their own happiness in order to behave in a way they believe is just.

The above example is, I think, a special case of a broader class of example, whereby people make sacrifices to their own happiness in order to embody their ideal self. If your ideal self is very skilled at something, you may forgo a great deal of pleasure in pursuit of that skill. Think if Olympic athletes, who I frankly doubt tend to recoup the total lost pleasure of all the strict dieting and regimented lifestyle and so on via the pleasure they get from training and competing. Think of anyone who makes great personal sacrifices for achievement. Or think of the tortured artist, the virtual archetype of a person who cares more about the quality of their work than their own wellbeing. But cases need not be so extreme: I can think of many people who I would consider normal, healthy, happy individuals, who just happen to be a little competitive, and who I suspect are not pleasure-maximizing by spending so much time practicing at their skill of choice. Am I meant to tell them they are wrong for doing this?

There is a tendency in contemporary society to pathologize this way of interacting with the world, even among people who don't conceptualize themselves as hedonists, but I reject the idea that it is something to be avoided. I myself value my own pleasure, of course, and other people's pleasure too. But I also value things above and beyond the degree to which they give me pleasure: I value knowledge, I value success at my endeavors, I value aesthetics, I value the wellbeing of my friends and loved ones. All of these things I would gladly sacrifice some amount of net pleasure to advance. It is furthermore the case that I have been happiest in life, experienced the most pleasurable existence, when I have felt that I was successfully advancing these goals. It is possibly the case that I could experience more net pleasure by abandoning these goals and totally changing who I am (through, perhaps we can imagine, some sort of brainwashing), but I would of course be vehemently opposed to this. And so it is notable that maximizing satisfaction of my non-hedonic goals is also the state which achieves the local maximum of pleasure. Anything greater would involve greater changes to my psyche—wireheading, in short. I think this too is true of many people.

Anyway, I'm not a utilitarian (for mostly nitpicky philosophical reasons), but to a first approximation I am a preference utilitarian. To me, acting justly towards someone means working to make it that their preferences are satisfied in addition to your own, in some sort of appropriate balance where the two conflict. This is not, to a first approximation, hedonic utilitarianism, which differs obviously in how it handles wireheading but which I think also disagrees in more nearterm ways, like (perhaps) "whether we should pathologize highly competitive people" and so on.

Anyway, if you are a local high-modernist dreamer (affectionate) (self-recognizing), and you find me on your post grumbling about something, I think there's about an 80% chance that something amounts to "not preference utilitarian enough!". Or whatever.

#society #navel gazing

[thatlonelycactus]

Crowley was 100% besties with the renaissance thinkers. He and DaVinci were always talking about some kind of invention or painting or just making fun of people, Michelangelo let him in on all the hidden meanings in his paintings and they’d always complain to each other about their bosses, and him and Galileo talked about the stars. In fact, it was his friendship with Crowley that solidified his belief in the heliocentric model of the solar system.

Aziraphale fraternized with the Enlightenment thinkers. He discussed morals and ethics and philosophy with Kant and Rousseau, Locke and Voltaire. Unlike Crowley with the renaissance figures a couple centuries beforehand, Aziraphale shared very little of his angelic wisdom. Partially because he didn’t want to but also because everytime he’d talk with any of them they would beg him not to. This resulted in, whenever they said something completely wrong, Aziraphale trying to hide a sly smile, failing completely and having a cup of tea thrown at his head. Very pleasant.

At the start of the 20th century, Aziraphale found himself surrounded by the likes of Joyce, Woolf and Wilde. He enjoyed it immensely. Who wouldn’t? This is how he got many of his first editions from the period. Whilst he and Wilde were very close, he probably spent the most time with Woolf. Whilst modernist literature was never his favourite period, he loved the writing of Woolf, many of her shorter works he read prior to them being published, were some of the most beautiful works of prose he’d ever read. He thought that Crowley might like Huxley’s works if he liked to read but he didn’t so Aziraphale never tried to convince him to but he always keeps an extra copy of Brave New World in his bookshop just in case (it’s signed too).

Later on in the century, Crowley befriended the men whose names most people only ever expect to hear used from time to time in a science lesson but never truly understand who they were or what it was that they actually discovered. Einstein, Schrödinger, Doppler, if they changed the science world, Crowley knew them. He had a good time with them, providing little “what if”s and queries that would stop them in their tracks. Most of them initially thought he was pretty, how to put it, stupid, at first, I mean if anyone saw they way he looked at the maths they did tragedy think he was pretty brainless too despite the fact he was only trying to figure out why they had done all that maths to get a simple answer. But his value was quickly realised because, unlike his companion, Crowley was much happier to give little pieces of information he learnt during the creation of the universe.

Sorry for my rambling. Also Aziraphale and Sappho were definitely friends and he still has full copies of her poems in the back of his bookshop but he’s not gonna tell anyone about that.

#Crowley also knew Ea Nasir #Like 100% #who else would have been involved in a scam #That is still remembered millennia later? #good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #aziracrow #good omens shitpost #My ramblings

[foursaints]

what do you think Evan's favorite book would be?

okay this one threw me for a loop.. i think barty primarily reads the russians (deep down he’s sentimental & it’s pushkin and turgenev for him) and regulus reads austere modernist marxist german playwrights like Brecht

does evan read?? it must all be philosophy for him right... actually his favorite book is 100% siddhartha by hermann hesse

#a #evan probably reads the beats let’s all point and laugh at him. #but also i think he really like schopenhauer and bataille and lacan. just on vibes