Monday, May 21, 2012

Tweet-versation on Marxism & Factionalism

What follows is a conversation I had with @Thomas_Gardiner on twitter. @RadicalLeftist is me. I hope that this contributes toyour own understanding of Marx!
Me:Understanding Marx's philosophical background in general is ESSENTIAL to having an in-depth understanding of Marx
Gardiner:indeed, a sole focus on historical materialism without understanding how it ties to radical democratic humanism is misguided
Me:True, but...another mistake that has been made - which is the opposite of the 1 u pointed out - is 2 equate #Marxism wit it(humanism)
Gardiner:1 thing I've learned is tht Marxism's doomed unless we all end the factionalism over differentiations in personal philosophy
Me:What we all need 2 realize is that only Marx knew what Marx went. What we call Marxism is only an interpretation.
Gardiner:yep, and therein lies the way to greater cooperation between different Marxist factions

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Nietzsche On Philosophers

Quotes from Twilight of Idols:
"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity."
"They think that they show their respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it sub specie aeternitas — when they turn it into a mummy. Everything that philosophers handled over the past thousands of years turned into concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. Whenever these venerable concept idolators revere something, they kill it and stuff it; they suck the life out of everything they worship."
"The other characteristic of philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end...in the beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower..."
"Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a questioning of value. All the highest values are of the first rank; all the highest concepts, that which has being, the unconditional, the good, the true, the perfect — all these cannot have become and must therefore be causes. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike each other or in contradiction to each other."
Quotes from Beyond Good and Evil:
"We must wait for a new species of philosopher to arrive, who will have some other, opposite tastes and inclinations than the previous ones. Philosophers of the Perilous Perhaps, in every sense!"
After keeping an eye on and reading between the lines of the philosophers for a long time, I find that I must tell myself the following: the largest part of conscious thinking must be considered an instinctual activity, even in the case of philosophical thinking.
"Even behind logic and its apparent sovereignty of development stand...demands for preserving a certain type of life."
"Every one of them pretends that he has discovered and reached his opinions through the self-development of cold, pure, divinely untroubled dialectic, whereas, at bottom, a pre-conceived dogma, a notion, an institution, or mostly a heart's desire...is defended by them with arguments sought after the fact.
"I do not believe a "desire for comprehension" is the father of philosophy, but rather that a quite different desire has here as elsewhere used comprehension (together with miscomprehension) as tools to serve its own ends."
"...the moral (or amoral) intentions of each philosophy constitute the protoplasm from which each entire plant has grown."
"It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise, for philosophy is this tyrannical desire; it is the most spiritual will to power, to "creation of the world," to the causa prima.
"The various philosophical concepts do not evolve at random or autonomously but in reference and relationship to one another..."
"Their thinking is in fact not so much a discovering as a recognizing, remembering, a return and homecoming to a remote, ancient, commonly stocked household of the soul out of which the concepts grew."
Quotes from The Anti-Christ:
"A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious."
"Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction."
"I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the rest haven’t the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies—they regard “beautiful feelings” as arguments, the “heaving breast” as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion of truth."

Friday, May 11, 2012

Sartre - "Existentialism is a Humanism" quotes

What follows is some short quotes from my reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism". These quotes were originally tweeted by me.
"every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity."
"existence comes before essence"
"In the philosophic atheism of the 18th century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not...the idea that essence is prior to existence"
For Enlightenment materialism,
"the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience."
"man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards."
"Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."
"If...it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is."
"God does not exist, and...it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end"
"There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it."
"man is free, man is freedom."
"we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse."
"I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act"
"No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do"
"You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent."
"Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world."
"The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself."
"It is in this world that man has to decide what he is..."
"although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence...there is nevertheless a human universality of condition."
"man finds himself in an organised situation in which he is himself involved"
"There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention."
"the actions of men of good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such."
"Those who hide from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards."
"to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is no sense in life a priori."
"an existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be determined."
"Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist"
"we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself"
"Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."