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March 29, 2024, 12:54:16 PM

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Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now

Started by gloria, February 18, 2018, 12:57:36 PM

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Cioran wasn't a lonely person: he had a long-term partner, a wide social circle, frequently visited the theatre etc, was always out and about. He was also (by his own admission) an optimist, not a pessimist, albeit a perverse, ironic and highly nuanced form of optimism. But anyway, separate thread stuff really. Carry on.

Quote from: Retinend on October 20, 2020, 01:55:11 PM


The main question, though, is what I'm talking about when I say that intellectuals have a moral responsibility to eschew supporting dictators... I just think so. Don't you? Even if I know that some intellectuals will continue doing it some of the time, it's still bad. And I don't want to fall into that trap due to being intellectually primed that way, as so many men and women more intelligent than I (and I never said "lazy") have been.


I don't know. I don't know how you square the idea of intellectual freedom with the idea of authors having a moral responsibility towards society. I bet most people who love books have read a few things that they personally found provocative and interesting, but which, at the same time, they wouldn't like to see placed on the National Curriculum.

Your last point above is the most relevant to what I was getting at before: Do you think Pinker's book is going to make anyone less likely to make this kind of error( -intellectuals praising dictators) in the future? What's needed here is a more sympathetic and honest analysis of how and why this kind of problem keeps occuring.

Take a look at this, it's one of the pieces Foucault wrote in favour of the Islamic Revolution, one of the episodes listed in Pinker's rogue's gallery of treacherous intellectuals and their love for dictators:
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/007863.html
(Warning- it's fucking boring)
My contention would be that the above piece is completely lacking in 'smoking gun' quotes like the ones from Nietzche Pinker picked, and that there is no trace of any of the flaws like like narcissism, contempt for the common man, fanatical art-worship, adolescent fascination with power etc. that Pinker claims lie behind intellectual support for dictators. Foucault made a huge mistake, but an honest one, and if we want to make fewer honest mistakes we need a really different sort of help than the type Pinker is offering us. It's for that reason that I thought he would have been better picking what's interesting or challenging about Nietzche to wrestle with rather than the most obviously repellent bits.



A pessimistic thought of my own.

Enlightenment values (science, reason, humanism, free speech, free trade)do  allow new forms of technology to be developed, but the free trade part of that cluster means that new technology always ends up in the hands of people who don't share any of those values: every new weapon, every new form of method for disseminating propaganda, every new method of data collection and storage that gets invented in the kind of enlightened culture Pinker is praising is going to end up in the hands of totalitarian theocracies

#153
Something like this happened in Nazi Germany, where reactionary thinkers whose philosophy was based on a rejection of enlightenment values were nevertheless able to put the latest products of enlightened scientific thought at their disposal. Jeffrey Herf writes about this in his book 'Reactionary Modernism'

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I can't but help liking them, though, that's the thing. You're alright, too!

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Retinend

Quote from: Ominous Dave on October 20, 2020, 07:43:51 PMBut there's no contradiction between being satirical and ironic and being deadly serious. I mean there's that entire bit of Beyond Good and Evil which reads like a (very weird) one-liner standup act ("One is most dishonest towards one's God: he is not permitted to sin!" is basically a joke, isn't it?).

Well I don't think it's a joke, I think it's a trenchant criticism of western religion, but that's just me. Obviously he did have a bitter sense of humour in the way he mocked the ignorance of the modern world, but I take issue with the word "satire" as I did with the word "coherence". I'm just being picky, basically. Agree to disagree.

Chveik - I merely said that I don't think Nietzsche - he, specifically - was intending to be satirical or humorous in his works. He didn't spend his life in cafes or salons making witty remarks, as Voltaire did, but rather he was a philologist by profession (spending every day studying and teaching ancient texts) and loner by temperament who, what's more, suffered from chronic illness that constantly prevented him from doing normal everyday activities. He was forced into a daily "mind over matter" struggle that lasted his whole life, and that he eventually lost before he even died, in losing his mind. This everyday struggle led him to realize his philosophy of "der Wille zur Macht". Neither that philosophy, nor his others, were satire, but rather an expression his very being. That's how I see it. He was an extraordinarily serious-minded man who made few friends in his lifetime for that reason. He hated women and never married. He disdained weakness and expressions of compassion alike, and admired the hard, emotionless character of the persons of ancient texts which he read every day.

Anyway that's all I have to say about Nietzsche: a brilliant, brilliant intellect; a great stylist; a visionary and social critic of unusual acuity who, nevertheless, was anti-social to the point of uncivilized in his views, and, as much as he contributed to philosophy per se, also contributed to the glamorization of the "great man in history" and, in so doing, vindicated the ideals of violent dictators to come. Just my opinion.

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Leopardi is better. Better at philology, pessimism, being a loner, the lot. Weird how he's pretty much unread in the Anglophone world, despite massively influencing Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and being a great poet into the bargain.

He sounds very interesting, where would you start?

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The Canti and the Zibaldone are the obvious things. The latter is c.2000 pages, though...

Retinend

Start a thread (genuinely - I've never heard of the guy either).