Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've read some Adorno and his work appears to me as meaningless chewing around. After all, he was inspired by Marx and Hegel. E.g: > What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. To quote Hume: > If we take in our hand any volume; of di…
It takes a lot of hubris (all too common in the software engineering community) to suggest that Marx and Hegel, two of the most influential philosophers of all time, produced nothing of meaning.
Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
101–110 of 190 posts
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a lot of hubris (all too common in the software engineering community) to suggest that Marx and Hegel, two of the most influential philosophers of all time, produced nothing of meaning.
I wouldn't say it's hubris as much as it's ignorance, dogmatic positivism, and scientism that tends to show itself here and there; I'd say it's more common among those who have made it their life course to be in science or engineering - and I don't mean this disparagingly, as I study EE myself. It's not only ignorance of Marx and Hegel either, Slavoj Zizek regards Marx not as a philosopher but as a sociologist and ec…
There is a bit of an incommensurability problem too. I find that most resistance to understanding thinkers/alternative discourses stems from a lack of foundational vocabulary/knowledge of the tradition they work within, and, seeing as it takes a good deal of work to acquire this knowledge, most instead default to interpreting the work under the terms and limitations of an interpretive framework (e.g. positivism, structuralism, etc.) they already understand rather than approach the new one.
There's a certain degree of bracketing--almost in the phenomenological sense--that must occur if we really want to give a text an honest chance to affect us--Nietzsche had a few illuminating aphorisms on this point, I think most of them appear in The Gay Science and Human, All Too Human for those interested.
It's a lack of a sort of meta-theoretical awareness required for resolving incommensurate theories and gauging and weighing them against each other. It's easy enough to select a theory, join in covenant with it, and retain your stance. It's much harder to bring said theory into critical questioning and reevaluation on encountering other approaches (after all the opportunities are boundless--one could levy this very critique against this post).
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a lot of hubris (all too common in the software engineering community) to suggest that Marx and Hegel, two of the most influential philosophers of all time, produced nothing of meaning.
Let's narrow things down. What did Hegel produce of meaning? Can you answer that question concretely without the gaseous word bending that is typical of Hegelians?
If meaning has a minimal requirement of historical impact it cannot be denied that Hegel produced a tremendous amount of meaning in the world, as entire traditions of thought have developed out of his notion of dialectic. Hell, the whole idea of Communism presumably would not have developed were it not for Marx's reading of Hegel, and it's nigh impossible to deny that idea has had no 'meaning' given its historical impacts.
If you instead conceive of meaning as some intelligible object or unit which must occur within Hegel's text--irrelevant of the interpretations and eventual historical impact of said text, well you could more readily argue that Hegel's work is 'meaningless' theorizing--this is essentially the empiricist/positive demand Hume echoes that a theory must give us something pragmatic and directly connected to the world--e.g. it must say that for such and such an x, do y to get z.
However this is a very naive approach to 'meaning' the positivist approach to language (Russell, Frege(to an extent), Quine) has more or less fallen out of favor as linguists and philosophers of language have recognized that the vast majority of 'meaning' stems from context and other incredibly variable data which is almost impossible to account for with any general or predictive theory or quantificational analysis.
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say it's hubris as much as it's ignorance, dogmatic positivism, and scientism that tends to show itself here and there; I'd say it's more common among those who have made it their life course to be in science or engineering - and I don't mean this disparagingly, as I study EE myself. It's not only ignorance of Marx and Hegel either, Slavoj Zizek regards Marx not as a philosopher but as a sociologist and ec…
Couldn't agree more. One only needs to poll some of the opinions of vehement analytics to discover that very intelligent people too, are victims of dogmatism. I think most progress past this once they study a bit deeper, age, and generally engage with disparate perspectives--Rorty's willingness to engage with multiple discourses of philosophical tradition is something I think we all ought to try and emulate. There is…
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#105But I think it's a mistake to believe the ideas he was exposed to as an undergraduate lead to him becoming the unabomber.
In his manifesto he works through a lot of these ideas and shows us the world view he's developed around them, but the impetus for it all -- it seems clear to me -- comes from his inability to come to terms with living in a society.
It causes him great pain and distress and he's been unable to find a way to make it stop. He's finally decided that society needs to go, and violently. And he's come up with a meticulously constructed world view to support this... (1) that this is somehow OK and (2) that it's possible.
While it looks like he clearly used ideas from his Harvard days to create his world view, the motivation existed independent of them. I think he was simply using the materials at hand and would have used other ideas had he not been exposed to the the "Gen Ed" ones... a world view different in details but supporting the same conclusion.
It does seem reasonable to wonder whether severe psychological experiments might have pushed a mind on the edge over a precipice, though.
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#106> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…
> Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, Isn't this true of every human endeavor? It's not really that remarkable that any given action has positive outcomes X, negative outcomes Y -- this in itself is not a reason to do something nor a deterrent. Seems like you can argue for or against anything on this basis. Hard to see it as anything other than a bunc…
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a lot of hubris (all too common in the software engineering community) to suggest that Marx and Hegel, two of the most influential philosophers of all time, produced nothing of meaning.
Let's narrow things down. What did Hegel produce of meaning? Can you answer that question concretely without the gaseous word bending that is typical of Hegelians?
Honestly if you've made up your mind that there's nothing worth reading in Hegel or Marx you're like a frog at the bottom of a well.
[1] https://github.com/mattearnshaw/lawvere/blob/master/pdfs/199...
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#108Very interesting article. But I think it's a mistake to believe the ideas he was exposed to as an undergraduate lead to him becoming the unabomber. In his manifesto he works through a lot of these ideas and shows us the world view he's developed around them, but the impetus for it all -- it seems clear to me -- comes from his inability to come to terms with living in a society. It causes him great pain and distress a…
Kaczynski was a genius, among other things, and his views deserve better than armchair dismissal and handwaving.
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's narrow things down. What did Hegel produce of meaning? Can you answer that question concretely without the gaseous word bending that is typical of Hegelians?
It depends on what constitutes 'meaning'. If meaning has a minimal requirement of historical impact it cannot be denied that Hegel produced a tremendous amount of meaning in the world, as entire traditions of thought have developed out of his notion of dialectic. Hell, the whole idea of Communism presumably would not have developed were it not for Marx's reading of Hegel, and it's nigh impossible to deny that idea ha…
Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a links to alt right writings and thought leaders that push forward this view? I hear endlessly about this alt right ideology from the left but I can't seem to find a single person other than a few clearly fringe white nationalists who use this label. I try to follow both left and right, anarchist and libertarian groups, on Twitter and elsewhere quite closely and I've been struggling to connect the breath…
> Do you have a links to alt right writings and thought leaders that push forward this view? You mean like White Supremacy groups or neo-Nazi groups along the lines of Vanguard America? Have you ever read Mein Kampf? Doesn't seem like it because then you wouldn't ask such a weird question akin to "Is the sky actually blue?". You should hang around more "social media", especially YouTube and reddit has certain "circle…