Eugene Thacker at 3AM Magazine:
At issue for Kant is not just the employment of reason over faith or imagination, but the instrumental use of reason – reason mastering itself, including its own limitations. This was as much the case for everyday thought as it was for philosophical thinking: “The opposite of the mind’s self-mastery… is fainthearted brooding about the ills that could befall one, and that one would not be able to withstand if they should come.”
Jacob Rosenberg in McSweeney’s:
Damn. That was a really good point. When I started this discussion, which quickly turned into an argument that I keep demanding be called a “discussion,” I had no idea that you felt so passionately or had such a well-reasoned stance. […] It’s been, maybe, 15 minutes that we’ve been talk-yelling, with you mainly talking and me mainly yelling, and not only do I agree with you, but I’ve come to the conclusion I have sounded like an idiot for years about this subject.
Upon realizing that I am totally wrong and you are totally right, I guess I only have one option: double the fuck down.
Whimsical article here by Jenna Krummings on Nietzsche and dancing, with prose of nearly Tarbettian quality. Excerpt:
He was, in any case, ill-suited to the activity. His health was extremely poor, and his energy often low. Many scholars have thus taken his exhortations to dance as metaphor—no, silly, he doesn’t mean it literally. But c’mon, someone who writes that beautifully about dancing has surely experienced its pleasures first-hand, especially someone so insistent on the flawed philosophical tendency to treat the intellect as separate from the body. This is, after all, the man who explicitly stated, “Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing.” Far more likely, in my opinion, is that people simply didn’t see him dance because he did it in private, alone. Several of his letters lend support to this theory.
Take, for example, a 1887 note to his friend Heinrich: “This morning I am enjoying an enormous benefit: for the first time a ‘fire-idol’ stands in my room—a tiny stove—and I confess that I have already performed a few heathenish hops around it.”
This is how I like to imagine him—alone in the mountains, performing heathenish hops like his great hero, Zarathustra.
Richard Velkey reviews Robin Douglass’s Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions. Excerpt:
The critical response to Hobbes has been inadequate, Rousseau argues, due to its failure to grasp the historical contingency of the misery-causing passions and to see that original human nature is free of them. Yet Rousseau makes this move by an appeal to Hobbes in which he takes further Hobbes’s view of the human as originally governed by passion (self-preservation and amour-propre) and as unaware of the “metaphysical” principles of right ascribed to natural reason by natural law theorists (68). Hobbes was radical but insufficiently so: “Hobbes very clearly saw the defect of all modern definitions of natural right: but the conclusions he draws from his own definition show that he understands it in a sense that is no less false.” Hobbes should have seen that his insight into the human as passion-governed leads in another direction: “Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that because he has no idea of goodness man is naturally wicked, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue”. Hobbes’s error is shared by all fundamental political thinkers prior to Rousseau: “The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back as far as the state of nature, but none of them has reached it.” Hobbes like all the others attributed to original humanity passions that could arise only in society. Thus Rousseau would unmask the failure of the whole tradition, Hobbesian as well as anti-Hobbesian, with the help of Hobbes. This is one of several paradoxical inversions performed by Rousseau.
“Thou hast existed as a part. Thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee.”
wow its kind of like you’re going to die without ever having been a real person at all
so it’s kind of like you were never really alive
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint. “I have been harmed.” Take away the complaint, “I have been harmed,” and the harm itself is taken away.”
hi did you know that if you stopped complaining you wouldn’t have anything to complain about, you should try it
“Hast thou reason? I have. -Why then dost not thou use it?”
ok your brain is not there for like, decoration babe, it’s not just there to weigh your head down
USUPhilosophy 