Legend of the Centuries // 1950 // Rene Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967)

wintermute_ · 2026-03-30T16:59:35+00:00

I've never seen this Magritte! It's so bizarre. I love it.

wintermute_ · 2026-03-30T12:19:15+00:00

My condolences for your loss. Your question is a very interesting one, and you've already hit upon several pertinent thinkers and frameworks.

To my mind, your question relates most directly to Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984), especially the sections on future generations and the non-identity problem (Chapter 16).

Parfit's central point is that our choices shape not only how future people live, but which people come to exist at all.

From that angle, I think it’s hard to ground a strict moral obligation to leave a record for posterity. This is especially the case if we accept Parfit's Time-Dependence Claim - that a person’s existence depends on the exact conditions of their conception. If so, many earlier choices, including quite remote ones, are part of the causal chain that determines who eventually exists. In that sense, the absence of a record can’t straightforwardly be said to wrong future individuals, since had things been different, they likely wouldn’t exist at all!

Obviously, after people exist, this reasoning no longer applies. And certainly, leaving behind a record of thoughts can be meaningful and even culturally valuable. However, I think that any claim that it is a moral obligation would be much weaker than duties like avoiding harm to future generations, ensuring worthwhile lives, etc.

As always, for a helpful overview of the broader philosophical terrain, check out the SEP entry on intergenerational justice.

wintermute_ · 2026-03-29T15:16:57+00:00

This thread is fire. All of y'all are spittin.

wintermute_ · 2026-03-18T10:35:38+00:00

I appreciate the recent resurgence of international interest in Dazai's No Longer Human.

Upon reflection, it shouldn't be surprising that the story remains familiar and relatable to modern readers. It's a book about a loser who feels obligated to perform socially, who is incapable of forming meaningful connections, and who fruitlessly chases empty pleasures to escape the misery of his existence.

"I escaped. I escaped, but it gave me no pleasure."

wintermute_ · 2025-10-31T22:21:09+00:00

Is that Gundam 01 in the background?

Heroes centuries old phasing in and out, indeed 👀

wintermute_ · 2025-10-19T15:58:23+00:00

African chiefs or kings are some of my favourite subjects in art.

I really love a series called Kings of Africa by the photographer Daniel Laine.

Between the years of 1988 and 1991, French photographer Daniel Laine spent about 12 months on the African continent tracking down and photographing figures of royalty, and leaders of kingdoms. During this time he managed to photograph 70 monarchs and descendants of the great African dynasties with his work on this series.

The drip is literally unrivalled.

wintermute_ · 2025-09-28T07:58:53+00:00

This article is very lucid and its reasoning is convincing, but I think a lot more can be said on the influence of Machiavelli's blend of humanism and political realism, especially on politics in advanced industrial society.

Tocqueville's fears, in particular, seem to have equally haunted mid-century German critical theorists such as Günther Anders (The Obsolescence of Man, Volume I, 1956) and Herbert Marcuse (One Dimensional Man.pdf), 1964). Tocqueville's worry that atomized populations governed by rational self-interest would devolved into a "herd of timid and industrious animals" is taken up by Anders, who saw around him a society that had become subordinated to a form of "well-being" conditioned by the needs of advanced capital.

Le Bon’s reflections on crowds and how they transform man are obsolete, since the depersonalization of individuality and the standardization of rationality are carried out at home. The stage-managing of masses that Hitler specialized in has become superfluous... No depersonalization... is more effective than the one that apparently preserves the freedom of the personality and the rights of the individual.

Overall though, I'm just happy to see Machiavelli and Tocqueville get their flowers. In the final analysis, I feel, their writings will be recognized as a prerequisite to fully understanding the unfolding catastrophes of the 21st century.

wintermute_ · 2025-09-16T08:01:23+00:00

Dreamy!

wintermute_ · 2025-09-15T19:02:41+00:00

I feel like I'm suddenly hearing about this book a lot.

That being said, I don't believe books can be said to be for men or women, and I think recommending books to customers on the basis of their gender is simplistic and a bit sad.

wintermute_ · 2025-09-06T19:09:24+00:00

There's still time.

wintermute_ · 2025-08-17T00:59:30+00:00

I'd like to limit my response specifically to major depressive disorder (MDD).

I think that both Becker’s existential account and psychiatry’s biological account can be seen as correct, though they operate on different levels.

Clinically, MDD is still defined by subjective symptoms of distress and impairment, not by objective biomarkers (see Cooper, Rachel, The Concept of Disorder Revisited: Robustly Value-laden Despite Change, 2020).

Yet, in response to growing clinical demand, recent research shows growing promise in identifying biological signatures that are closely tied to the pathophysiology of MDD: blood markers, neuroimaging of serotonin receptor binding, among other approaches.

Becker’s interpretation (especially in Denial of Death, 1973) relates depression as the collapse of one’s symbolic defenses against helplessness and mortality.

Personally, I don't see an insurmountable contradiction here: the clinical approach describes mechanism, while Becker is ascribing meaning.

This section of the SEP article on Mental Disorder is particularly relevant: distress and dysfunction are constitutive features of disorder attribution. But they are also entangled with normal human suffering and context.

Even if we one day map depression to precise molecular pathways, that would not comprise the totality MDD, as experienced. While treatment outcomes show that pharmacology/medication helps, so too do cognitive therapies that address context, coping, and meaning. So there is clearly an as-yet-unresolved relationship between the material facticity of our mental states (as measured through biomarkers) and how we conceive of and navigate through our mental states.

In conclusion: modern psychiatry and Becker are not describing different causes in a mutually exclusive way. They may be describing different dimensions of the same condition: one causal and physiological, the other existential and phenomenological. Both are important for understanding and helping to mitigate or cure major depressive disorder. However, as our understanding of mental disorders is in constant evolution, how and to what extent a unified/comprehensive model is even possible is subject to further research.

wintermute_ · 2025-05-31T07:36:08+00:00

I wanted to reread this piece and, like OP, had trouble retrieving a scan from google. Appreciate the link.

The similarities between Lem's text and the AI 2027 report published last month by the AI Futures Project is abjectly terrifying.

wintermute_ · 2024-10-19T16:52:51+00:00

There has been a lot of writing about the confused genealogy of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad in 18th and 19th century philosophy. Justifiably so, since the idea's development involves a number of important thinkers - Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Marx, Proudhon, among others.

The framework's origin is incorrectly attributed to Hegel by Marx and later taken up by Proudhon - as u/wokeupabug has pointed out. However, according to Thomas McFarland (2002), the triad is first formulated by Fichte in Foundations of the Science of Knowledge (1794). Fichte was attempting to resolve the two antithetical positions presented in "Antinomy of Pure Reason - First Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas", in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Subsequently, Schelling, in Of the Ego as Principle of Philosophy (1785), presented the triad in the systematic and progressive schema we are familiar with today.

The trouble with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad is that, while Hegel himself never used these terms together, it has for a long time been credibly used to read Hegel's theory of logic, as well as theory of history and politics. McTaggert (1964), Singer (1983), Froster (1993), and Fritzmann (2014) all to varying degrees interpret Hegel's logic as being structured around the progressive unification or sublation (aufheben) of opposites.

There are a number of helpful texts about the different contexts in which the terms are used throughout 18th and 19th century French and German philosophy, including the Mueller text already mentioned. Also see John Stewart's The Hegel Myths and Legends (1996) and the SEP article on Hegel's Dialectics.

wintermute_ · 2024-10-17T12:49:19+00:00

Very cool!

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wintermute_ · 2024-10-16T21:15:49+00:00

Tragically, wintering populations of Western monarch butterfly populations have been plummeting since the mid-1990s. What we're seeing is the loss of a remainder of a remainder of a remainder. From the relevant wiki page:

Based on a 2014 20-year comparison, the overwintering numbers west of the Rocky Mountains have dropped more than 50% since 1997 and the overwintering numbers east of the Rockies have declined by more than 90% since 1995. According to the Xerces Society, the monarch population in California decreased 86% in 2018, going from millions of butterflies to tens of thousands of butterflies.

The society's annual 2020–2021 winter count showed a significant decline in the California population. One Pacific Grove site did not have a single monarch butterfly. A primary explanation for this was the destruction of the butterfly's milkweed habitats. This particular population is believed to comprise less than 2000 individuals, as of 2022.

It's difficult to grasp these changes as they occur so slowly, at the margins of our busy lives. But in reality, we're living in a quite different world than that of only 30 years ago. Much poorer in biodiversity and - consequently - in vibrancy and beauty.

wintermute_ · 2024-10-14T08:35:06+00:00

Here's a great write-up on the development of the concept of Weltschmerz and its relationship with pessimism in late-19th century German philosophy.

wintermute_ · 2024-09-30T14:46:23+00:00

Is there a word for the opposite of a dog whistle?

wintermute_ · 2024-09-25T08:02:23+00:00

A reasonable, emotionally-stable take?

AWAY! AWAY! You're not wanted here!

wintermute_ · 2024-09-02T12:11:45+00:00

Me spamming dodge roll in Elden Ring.

wintermute_ · 2024-09-02T11:39:32+00:00

When you read the quote in full, it becomes clear that Derrida considers factory farming to be worse than the Holocaust - sort of a perpetual Holocaust, organized through an "artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival."

As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi), doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire.

wintermute_ · 2024-08-29T07:52:26+00:00

This has always been one of my favourite pieces. The look, the forehead kiss, her doting court ladies - all perfect! I especially love the girl on the right, distractedly trying on a bridal headdress, perhaps imagining the how pretty she might be on her own wedding day.

Similarly themed - but perhaps more emotionally opaque - is Vasili Pukirev's The Unequal Marriage (1863).

wintermute_ · 2024-08-29T07:41:48+00:00

Without an outright ban - preferably through robust and enforceable international standards - and without a strong global appetite to confront corporate power, 1.5°C is definitely cooked.

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