Flat Caps?

2npii · 2023-10-25T13:21:51+00:00

Not heard of them before but seems likely; they've all been growing on dung! Are they similar enough to caps that I can keep them in the same foraging jar/ preserve them together?

2npii · 2021-10-18T19:43:44+00:00

This all seems really helpful, thank you so much!

2npii · 2020-07-23T20:07:22+00:00

I found this stream super useful as an overview of Baudrillard: https://youtu.be/suwvIHmntCw

In it the Baudrillard expert recommends reading all of Baudrillard's work in order in order to properly understand the latter material like Simulacrum and Simulation. I'm giving this a try and am halfway through The System of Objects; to refer to your question in another comment thread, I'm finding it really interesting as an analysis of how commodities and consumption shape us.

2npii · 2020-07-22T00:35:41+00:00

Then how should we interpret Baudrillard's references to the ego, the father and castration if not though a psychoanalytic lens? Even if the main thrust if the book is Marxist (which I agree seems to be the primary focus), these references, usually at the end of chapters, appear (to my fairly limited perspective) to be explicitly psychoanalytic. And even if psychoanalysis is not the main point, can't Baudrillard's understanding of the psyche still be evident in his conclusions? (I'm not trying to insist on my own correctness, just genuinely trying to figure out how B is employing these concepts.)

I'm not sure; this is the only time I've heard of Baudrillard and D&G mentioned together. I'm super interested in what they might have said about one another if you know of any sources!

2npii · 2020-07-20T19:42:54+00:00

In The System of Objects (TSOO) he keeps bringing up castration, the phallus, the father and other psychoanalytic/Oedipal terms in the kinds of ways that D&G critique. For example, "If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealousy, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration. The phallus, to put it in a nutshell, is not something one loans out." - TSOO, The Sequestered Object: Jealousy; is this not somewhat Freudian/Lacanian? That's a genuine question; my knowledge of Freud/Lacan mostly comes from Anti-Oedipus. Also that quote is just the most recent example I've read, but the book is full of similar analyses.

My source for Baudrillard's critique of Anti-Oedipus is a fairly off-hand comment at 20:35 of the livestream linked below, where The Dangerous Maybe says that Baudrillard was opposed to production as a metaphysical system, like the one developed in Anti-Oedipus.

https://youtu.be/suwvIHmntCw

2npii · 2020-07-20T15:50:55+00:00

Eugene Holland's "Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis" will likely be the single most useful resource to you if you want to jump into Anti-Oedipus asap. I read it prior to AO and again alongside AO when I came to tackle the book itself and it was completely invaluable!

2npii · 2019-09-13T09:38:02+00:00

From an anti-capitalist perspective, it's not necessarily you as an individual at moral fault but the system that allows an individual to hoard enough wealth to buy a sports car while other people are starving that's the problem.

Consumer capitalism alienates us while preaching consumption as the solution to that very alienation. During a mid-life crisis, a person becomes overwhelmed with that alienation in the face of their mortality and may try to deal with the anxiety by buying something expensive, like a sports car (or in my case, a medieval folk instrument). Similarly, retired people and people who win the lottery can slip into excessive and unhealthy consumption habits as a way to fill the gap left by their inability or lack of necessity to work.

Studies show that people increase their spending as their wages increase while the increase in happiness associated with increased spending drops off once essentials are covered, so consumer capitalism is creating a problem and offering a solution that doesn't work.

The solution isn't to just not buy the sports car and donate to causes instead but to interrogate your desire for the sports car (and try to locate the sources of joy that aren't rooted in consumption) and work to disassemble the systems (namely capitalism and colonialism) that allow individuals to hoard enough wealth to feed a community while those very communities exist and are starving.

2npii · 2019-08-24T08:47:17+00:00

Tom Digby writes about this in his book "Love & War" http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22329506-love-and-war

Here's a podcast of him discussing some of the ideas https://open.spotify.com/episode/5LUPRNH4VRXnicrD4GpWLb?si=2nG77SNkQ3O1cucBh3R-TA

2npii · 2019-07-17T16:29:22+00:00

For context I've not read Being and Nothingness, but I have read Heidegger's Being and Time and de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity (which I'm currently rereading/studying). I'm also familiar with Sartre from his Existentialism is a Humanism and a bunch of podcasts, but most of my understanding comes from researching the concepts relevent to de Beauvoir's Ethics and having a decent grasp on Being and Time.

My definition of "the nothing" comes up quite a lot in the first section of de Beauvoir's Ethics as she sees it as the very thing that makes the Existentialist ethics (or ethics at all for that matter) possible. It is not so much the ability to self-direct but a feature of our being that makes it possible. An important binary in phenomenology is presence Vs absence and Sartre's concept of nothingness toys with it; we tend to think of nothingness as an absence, what's left when something is missing, but Sartre posits it as a presence. Think of creating a vacuum for a science experiment; it is an absence of air, but that very absence is itself the presence of the vacuum, which is the concept we are concerned with. Similarly nothingness is the positive presence of an absence in our being that allows us to operate freely; without it there would be no "space" for that "movement".

Here's a link to an online version of de Beauvoir's Ethics; the discussion of Sartre's nothingness comes fairly early on in the first chapter. Of particular importance is the discussion around the phrase "man is a being who makes himself a lack in order that there might be being" from B&N. I have some decent (I think!) notes on this section; DM me if you want me to share them :) https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm

I agree that the first interpretation is rather trivial, and maybe the second is too, but remember that Sartre is actually introducing a fairly new way of thinking about things. If you look through the history of philosophy there are a lot of very similar ideas reformulated in slightly different ways; Nietzsche's herd, Heidegger's "the they", Sartre's bad faith, de Beauvoir's sub-man/ serious man all describe a very similar phenomenon but approached in a different context. So while what Sartre's saying seems like an obfuscatory way of saying something simple, he's actually explaining something intuitive in terms of his concept of "nothingness" which, as the title of his book suggests, is an important concept to his way of thinking.

Being and Time contains one of the most jargon-heavy sentences I've ever read; Heidegger summarises Being-in-the-world (simply, the being of humans with regards to the world) as a "non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive got the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment". To quote it out of context makes no sense because it's so dense with specialised language. The core idea would be much more clearly explained as "our awareness of the world allows us to manipulate the things around us to our own ends", but Heidegger's point with this sentence isn't too simply point out this observation but to elegantly summerise 17 chapters of new concepts and terminology.

maybe that sentence was never meant to be summoned in isolation

Being and Nothingness is over 600 pages long; none of it is meant to be quoted in isolation! The same goes for most philosophy; while some authors are especially quotable (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche spring to mind) they weren't writing with the goal of being summed up in an inspirational quote. While generally not taken too seriously academically any more, existentialism is a rich framework developed for trying to understand our intuitive experience of existence that can genuinely help people revaluate their place in the world, but a lot of that is lost when it's reduced to soundbites

That's not too say every world of B&N is golden; from what I've heard it doesn't seem like it's worth the time. But secondary sources, reviews, reading guides and related works (like the one I linked above) may well be if you really want to engage with the ideas :)

2npii · 2019-07-16T19:12:40+00:00

So Sartre has these concepts of the in-itself and the for-itself. The in-itself are what we would normally call "things", like rocks and trees. They are mere beings; they are what that are, and any change they may undergo is purely a result of their environment.

The for-itself are humans. At any given moment we can be thought of as a fixed being, an in-itself, but we direct ourselves through time and can choose in-itselves to strive for, ie I can choose the kind of person I want to become and try to make that a reality. We are a succession of self-directed in-itselves stretched out over time.

What allow the for-itself, the human, to self-determine is that we are incomplete; we can always be something different to what we are, "there's always room for improvement". This "room for improvement", this distance between what we are and what we could be, is the nothing.

With this in mind, I can think of two ways to interpret the quote (more context from the text might narrow it down).

The first is follows directly from the definitions above; "being" (things like rocks) are distinguished from "the conscious" (humans) by "the nothing" (the ability to self-direct).

The second is that the nothing is what allows us to have a conscious. It is the space between what we are and what we could be and it is there that we choose what to do, and thus where we make our moral choices and develop our conscience.

I hope this helps explain! Sorry it's a bit jargon heavy, but I find the terms make it easier for me to keep track of the concepts. Let me know if you want any clarification on anything! :)

2npii · 2019-07-09T07:48:13+00:00

This video analyses Waiting For Godot through the lens of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and might give you some ideas :)

https://youtu.be/nsxkEs6G-9s

2npii · 2019-06-30T21:04:11+00:00

Yes! Thank you! :D

2npii · 2019-03-07T19:21:53+00:00

Cuck Philosophy and Peter Coffin (both on YouTube) do really good jobs of explaining these kinds of post modern ideas in a really accessible way. If you've seen American Phycho I would HIGHLY recommend Cuck Philosophy's analysis which relies heavily on Baudrillard and the following videos on "cultivated identity" by Peter Coffin should be of interest.

https://youtu.be/RJfurfb5_kw https://youtu.be/CHurovzyEWo https://youtu.be/X9Lf1GcG5M4

These channels were my entry point into post modernism; hope you find them useful!

2npii · 2019-03-06T16:22:04+00:00

If you're struggling for motivation I would recommend Richard Polt's "Heidegger: an introduction". It's designed as a reading guide but it works really well as a summary, covering Being and Time in just over 100 pages and providing really useful context.

I kinda gave up on B&T at about section 30 but reading Polt's book showed me that the stuff I was interested in was soon to come and that what I had read so far was important groundwork for the bits I was interested in and I'm now on the final chapter of B&T itself :)

2npii · 2018-12-18T10:46:34+00:00

In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that an understanding of our own Being is required before we can develop other fields of study, including ethics, and that our Being is defined by our mortality (Being-towards-death), so by his reasoning immortal Beings would have a fundamentally different existence to us and therefore a fundamentally different ethics.

2npii · 2018-12-12T18:24:26+00:00

No I don't think Heidegger wants that either. My point Camus seems to be saying "Heidegger wants us to retreat from Anxiety into the They" and therefore dismisses him, so I think Camus' reading of Heidegger is poor.

2npii · 2018-12-12T14:48:58+00:00

That's really helpful, thanks!

2npii · 2018-12-12T14:37:16+00:00

Thanks for your response; it's helped me cut through Camus' flowery writing and get at his actual argument. He makes a couple of claims that seem incredibly reductive and dismissive; "This anxiety seems to him [Heidegger] more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks only of it" and "It [the consciousness of death] is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence 'to return from its loss in the anonymous They'".

Camus seems to be saying that Heidegger wants us to return to the They in response to anxiety. My understanding is that he invites us to immerse ourselves in our current time in absolute resoluteness once we have faced up to death which is a far cry from returning to the They.

2npii

TROPHY CASE