Ostap

Section 1: phi in the 20th century

Marx & Engels

Idealism is dumb, because it disregards the material conditions of people for “ideas.”

Any meaningful philosophy must inspire revolutionary action. Consider the conditions of production.

Philosophy must renew itself by becoming an inspiration for political action.

Nietzsche

Apollo as a logical architect, and Dionysus as the corruptor, changer. Culture is created through battle between the two - dialectics without synthesis.

Greek Tragedy is the only thing that combines the two - we experience grief and misery during it, but affirm life as a result.

The Will to Power is an all-permeating metaphysical entity that expresses itself in all actions. There is no “drive for knowledge” that brings one to study philosophy, for instance. It is but the Will to Power expressing itself.

Philosophy must be renewed through art and artistic creation: in the spirit of Apollo/Dionysus

Freud

Thought is not an attribute of a conscious subject, but an entirely mechanical process.

Gaps in our conscious experience (why do things result in some thoughts, where do our experience come from) make it necessary to posit an “unconsciousness.”

This unconscious is entirely separate from our conscious mind, and anything that must enter our mind from the unconscious must first pass through the “censor” of the consciousness.

Unconscious manifests itself in dreams through manifest and latent dream-content.

The former is the visuals we see, the events that happen in our dreams, and so forth. The latter is the original linguistic content that the unconsciousness produces.

Dreams require suppression, decentering, and condensation.

Suppression makes sure that we don’t wake up from the dreams.

Decentering is basically a simile; to make our dreams not so jarring as to wake us up, we cannot be shown the things in the latent dream-content directly. Instead, we will see things that are designed to liken to it.

Condensation is bringing together different thoughts and putting them forward as one image/concept/whatever.

Parapraxis is an effect of the unconscious.

Cause-effect is difficult to express in dreams. (“if” “because” and so forth)

Heidegger

Metaphysics must focus on Being instead of Beings or Beingness.

Everything after the origin is a perversion of truth and all that came before.

This is why we must return to the Greeks - they were the first to try and thus their access to Being is the most direct/least mediated.

Being is constantly being misinterpreted:
Greeks: Being-there
Christianity: Being-created
Modern age: Being-represented
Technology: Being-exploitable

Truth is not some set of prepositions that are arbitrarily valid in some framework, truth is the “disclosedness” of Being to us. Being is the clearing…

The world picture: a thought of the world as representation.

The world is objectified due to this framework and everything is perceived purely as exploitable.

The mathematization of the world only further worsens this situation: nature/the world is now quantifiable and ripe for exploitation.

We are farthest from Being because of this.

We must renew philosophy by going back to the roots and figuring out what the “essence” is.

Section 2: What is Modernity?

Adorno & Horkheimer

Enlightenment promised to emancipate man from the dominion of myth, but has ended up falling back into it.

Myths were the first step humanity took towards enlightenment: they are designed to explain things, it’s an attempt to accomplish the same tasks as enlightenment, albeit on a “less advanced” level.

Modernity has brought us into new forms of myth; rather than truly making us enlightened, we have become dominated by instrumental knowledge which has replaced any necessity for critical thinking.

Weighing pros and cons - or other thought processes that follow such a mechanistic, mathematical manner, is a ritual we perform to “simulate” thinking.

Knowledge now dominates over nature, human beings, and everything else.

We have also mythologized such a state of affairs into being “inevitable” and “unchangeable.”

Foucault

Discipline seeks to maximize efficiency of the worker by both shaping them into a better instrument and making them more obedient.

It is done by regulating all bodily and social expressions - minute movements, patterns of speech, and so forth.

Discipline arises in the late 17th century and continue to be developed through modernity.

Discipline is an anatomy of power - kind of like Foucault’s discourse but for behavior rather than talking.

Biopower is the regulation of birth/death/sexuality/etc. that the state exhibits

This power has switched from absolute dominion over life and death → dominion over life and death of some special sovereign in exceptional cases → not granting the things necessary for life

Biopolitics: power as a control and preservation of life

Lyotard

When attempting to pursue things - science, the state, etc. - we must somehow legitimate them.

In days of yore, this used to be achieved by metanarratives: “science must be studied for the good of the people,” for instance. However, in post-modernity, credibility in these narratives falters. There are no “grand narratives” we can easily believe in, anymore.

So, why pursue science?

To preserve itself, science must begin legitimating itself through speculation: by giving itself names such as “Spirit” and “Life,” it gives itself significance as a relation to a speculated whole.

This, however, is exactly the kind of metanarrative people doubt.

The presupposition that sciences rely on to legitimate themselves are simply what we have to “buy into” when you come into their language game.

Language games function that way: a set of rules and regulations that define what is possible in a given “playing” field.

The language game we play when we interact with the sciences is what gives them legitimacy.

There is no meta-narrative that can unite all of these language games into one.

The legitimation is internal to each language game.

Section 3: What is Language?

Husserl

Phenomenology; Intentionality

The intentionality of a word is not the same as its “external” perception.

External phenomena like sight and hearing are what originally perceive the signifier, but there’s an underlying, internal phenomena to it, as well.

Language expresses of 3 things:

• Objective referent
• Given Meaning
• Intimation

Objective referent is the object: “victor of Jena” and “the vanquished at Waterloo” have the same objective referent but different meanings

You could also have the same meaning - “horse” in both of the upcoming cases - but different objective referents: “the Bucephalus horse” and “the cart-horse.”

Language is the hope that an externalization of an internal phenomenological appearance is intimated equivalently in another person

Intimation: the communicative intention or the act of expressing meaning toward another consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty

The meaning expressed in language is the expression.

Words aren’t a “wrapper” around the intended meaning, but are the meaning itself.

In the same way the meaning of a sonata is in the sonata itself.

Understanding others doesn’t require decoding mental states — we directly perceive meaning in their gestures and speech.

Section 4: What is Alterity?

Levi-Strauss

Humanism is a universalizing belief that completely disregards the specificity that cultures present.

Because we are all “human,” and are the same at the core, any cultural differences are accidental.

— Levi-Strauss claims that we must respect the Other’s specificity and singularity if we wish to actual do ethnological work

A humanist account requires that we all be equal. To explain why different cultures are such, it must adopt a standpoint of diachronic “development.”

Because humanism was invented by the Europeans, they’re the “developed” ones, and everyone who isn’t like that is in need of progress, help, and change.

We can define a culture only insofar as they are not another culture. ⇒ both cultural particularism and universalism thus fail.

Levi-Strauss does not deny that there is something identical
connecting all human cultures
• But: this identity can only be obtained through a comparison of relationships
and differences

• Distinction between nature/culture
• “natural” = characters which pertain to the entire species
• “cultural” = characters which can differ from one social and cultural group to
another

• Culture is itself a ‘natural’ fact of humanity
• Culture = what we all have in common
• Culture = that in which we are all distinguished
• ››› point of identity and difference

• Structure allows us to conceive a certain social reality as one
actualization of all possibilities that the structure offers
• Empirical culture = a single variation of the deep structure

Lacan

the other and the Other

the imaginary other is the “I” we construe: our linguistic interpretation of who we are and what we want, which arises during the mirror stage.

This ideal image is the imaginary I — a specular image, a misrecognition (méconnaissance), because the child confuses the external image with their own being.

As we begin to realize our own externality we begin to construe this “imaginary I” through desires which we internalize from other people

the other (lowercase) is either what we identify with or contrast against

Desire exists only in language (?)

Desire for Lacan is not a simple biological or physical urge, but always structured through language.

Desire is the desire of the Other — it is shaped by what the Other desires or recognizes.

Because language is a system of differences and lacks a fixed referent, desire is never fully satisfied or completed.

the symbolic Other is the locus of language, law, culture, and the unconscious. It is external to the subject and operates as the authority or the “place” where meaning comes from.

Desire is the desire of the Other

• Beyond the imaginary and symbolic, Lacan’s Real is the domain that resists symbolization — what cannot be fully integrated into language or the symbolic order.

• The Real often manifests as trauma or an experience that disrupts symbolic meaning.

Tzvetan Todorov

“typology of relations to the other” (3 levels):
• the axiological level of value judgement: the other is “good or bad”, “I like
him or I don’t like him”, “he is equal or inferior to me”
• the praxeological level of rapprochement and distancing: submission of the
other or submission to the other, with a third term which is neutrality
• the epistemic level: knowledge or ignorance of the identity of the other
››› The recognition of the other’s otherness depends on these axes but is not reducible to them.

Cortés understood the Indians well, even perhaps admired them, but did not recognize their alterity

las Casas (in Christian universalism) loved and understood the Indians, but nonetheless denied them their otherness; they were judged by the same universal value he applied to European civilization.

Guerrero assimilated with the indians but lost his former identity, and is thus not “other” to them anymore.

de Vaca - Neutral image: axiological level (+); praxiological level (+); epistemic
level (+)
• Possible recognition of the other’s alterity
• Under the condition of an evolution to a third position

Las Casas’ late ‘perspectivism’ -

• Las Casas’s perspectivism: the indian God is not reducible to a version
of the Christian God
• Christian God is only valid for Christians

What is universal is the idea of the divine in general; ‘religiosity’ rather than ‘religion’

“Even as he asserts the existence of one God, Las Casas does not a priori privilege the Christian path to that God. Equality is no longer bought at the price of identity; it is not an absolute value that we are concerned with”

He stopped alluding that the Indians also pray to the Christian god [is this a form of reductionist Christian humanism?], and recognized simply that they’re other, only marking that they have a shared practice: religiosity.

Seems similar to Levi-Strauss idea of identity from difference.

• Complexity of our relationship to the other; three levels
• Value, action, knowledge
• Preserving the other’s alterity is independent from these levels
• Perspectivism takes into account the other’s point of view without reducing it to a version of oneself

Gross conclusion

• Different forms of otherness: the other human being and the other in
myself
• Structural intertwining of other human beings/cultures and one’s own
being/culture
• Otherness as a necessary feature for self-identification and selfhood
• Otherness as the unthinkable

Section 5: What is Capitalism?

Marx & Engels (again!)

• Capitalism = universal production of commodities
• Commodity = use-value & exchange value
• Exchange-value stems from ‘socially necessary labor time’
• Fetishism is based on exchange-value: in exchange, commodities
come to incarnate social relationships
• Fetishism = social characters appear as properties of things
• ‘Metaphysical’ dimension of commodities = things have a social force
• In capitalist society, things represent/incarnate social power

In a very reductive conclusion, fetishism is when you forget money only has value by force of social agreement. To think money is inherently valuable, or, perhaps, the embodiment of value is fetishism.

Althusser

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In Marx, Ideology is a set of beliefs originating from the ruling class — as they are the holders of the means of production, and thereby create the dominant ideas in society — that serves to perpetuate and obscure the relationships - of production, of domination, etc. - that the ruling class stands in towards the proletariat or other classes.
The ruling ideas serve the ruling class’ material interest.The ruling class and the proletariat are generally unaware that these dominant ideas serve ruling-class interests because ideology appears as common sense or universal truth.
Ideology is thus a false consciousness that is part of the superstructure (resulting from the base economic and material conditions) that serves to legitimate and mask existing social relations.

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In Althusser, ideology stops being simply a set of ideas: it becomes a system that serves the same purpose (legitimation and perpetuation of existing class relations), but operates through the individual’s mere participation in it. It becomes a material practice embedded in social institutions. Drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist ideas (such as those later developed by Foucault), the subjects are shaped through this system, and the system requires subjects to perpetuate itself.

By responding to a “hail” from the system - say, for example, a policeman - we already become a member of it.

interpellation as a concept

We believe that Ideology provides us with the means to know the world and recognize ourselves in it, however, in truth, this is only a misrecognition (méconnaissance)

• State = State Apparatus: the sum of the institutions by which the ruling class maintains its economic dominance – the government, the civil service, the courts, the police, the prisons, and the army, etc.

• The State apparatus consists of two overlapping but distinct sets of
institutions.
• (a) Repressive State Apparatus: the repressive institutions through which the ruling class enforces its power
• “The State Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the
Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.,
which constitute what I shall in future call the Repressive State
Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State Apparatus in
question ‘functions by violence’ – at least ultimately (since
repression, e.g. administrative repression, may take non-physical
forms).” (LP: 136)
• (b) the Ideological State Apparatuses:
• “the religious ISA (the system of the different churches); the
educational ISA (the system of the different public and private
schools); the family ISA; the legal ISA; the political ISA; the trade
union ISA; the communications ISA (press, radio and television
etc.); the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports etc.).” (LP: 137)
• RSA functions primarily ‘by violence’, whereas the ISAs function
primarily ‘by ideology’ (LP: 138)
• They work together to maintain the order of the state.

• Ideology addresses me before I am even born, as I grow up and throughout my life, as an ‘I’, as a subject, as a site of identity, thought and action.
• ‘Interpellation’ = ideology calls me into being as a subject, as if it were calling me by my name in the street.
• It causes me to believe that I am a subject.
• Subject & subjectivity = the product of ideology
• Produced by the ideological & repressive state apparatus

Deleuze & Guattari <3 <3 :3

• Desire:
• ≠ a psychological or mental process
• ≠ something neither interior nor private
• ≠ a state of a subject
• ≠ a representation in the subject
• ≠ does originate in a lack
• …but: a transindividual (collective) activity of (social & material)
production
• analyzable in economical terms of ‘energy’ and ‘production’

Machines everywhere. Everywhere is machine, not as a metaphysical or transcendental principle, but simply because it is so. It’s meant to be immanent.

There is no “why?” no meaning to the production. The production is the desire, and what’s produced are flows of affects, signs, matter, and these flows are constantly being connected and disconnected by desiring-machines.

Coding is placing limits along which limit the flow

Decoding is the removal of said limits

Overcoding is a routing of all flow through some specific node (like a despot)

Machines can couple together

The schizophrenic is the horizon for capitalism, and the point of its full breakdown; the full decoding that goes on in their mind allows for arbitrary coupling of desiring-machines.

This is somewhat similar to capitalism. A lot of social and cultural taboos were broken down with capitalism, a lot of possibilities for trade were opened, and so forth. It undertook a large process of decoding. At the same time, it replaced the very notion of code with money, with capital, and thus binds the flow inside that concept.

Section 6: Feminism

Freud

• Young children: amorphously sexual, no distinct self or desire direction.

• Libido: biologically based sexual/life energy.

• Pre-Oedipal period:

  • Symbiotic, unstructured relation with the Mother.

  • Libido concentrated in genitals over time.

  • Beginning of self-recognition and separation from Mother.

• Oedipal period:

  • Emergence of distinct bodily self and sexual identity.

  • Ontological separateness from Mother.

  • Father appears as rival for the Mother’s affection.

  • Identification with Father:

    • Represents separation, distinct selfhood.

    • Symbolised by the Phallus (signifier of Mother’s desire).

  • “Mother” and “Father” = symbolic positions, not literal parents.

• Entry into society/culture:

  • Requires development of distinct ‘I’.

  • Demands rejection of primordial Mother attachment and alignment with Father.

  • Splitting of self into conscious and repressed unconscious.

• Boys:

  • First love-object: Mother.

  • Father becomes rival.

  • Identifies with Father (symbol of selfhood/separation).

  • Fear of losing penis = fear of losing selfhood, becoming undifferentiated.

• Girls:

  • First love-object: Mother.

  • Difficulty detaching from Mother to reorient love-object to Father.

  • Physical similarity to Mother prolongs identification.

  • Struggle to construe clear object-relations.

  • Tendency toward symbiotic, less distinct selfhood.

  • Feminine selfhood marked by:

    • Ambiguity.

    • Weaker boundaries between self and other.

    • Tensions and incomplete individuation.

    • Some women may never fully transition attachment from Mother to men.

Simone de Beauvoir

Man → human beings in general, the default state of being

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral

Woman is the limiting factor, the incomplete, “differentiated with reference to man and not he
with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.”

• Existence = capacity to project oneself beyond the concrete situation
• …to realize one’s possibilities beyond factual reality into which one is ‘thrown’
• Existence/consciousness/transcendence (Sartre) = ‘nothingness’; movement of transcendence; free capacity for creation