The axial age

This is straight brilliant, user.

>I think globalism could be achieved through a type of body-worship
I totally agree. It is the thing everyone agrees on and has in common, language/culture/thought independent.

>My question is, what problem is there in the latest philosophies, after the Death of God, that can't be related to the bodily and sensual very easily?
Absolutely none whatsoever. I mean, this is why psychoanalysis works (although, interestingly, Lacan felt that it didn't work so well in Japan...). Indeed, it's interesting to think that of the four big modernist thinkers, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and Freud, the body plays this central part. Whether it's Oedipus or the labor theory of value or natural selection or the WtP, the body - your body, someone else's body - is a thing. Pepperell wrote that, understood as consciousness, the horizons of the body are effectively infinite, everywhere. I'm fairly certain Merleau-Ponty felt the same way as well.

And this is, by the way, why I am also so fascinated with "spirituality" and new-age stuff; that sense that we live in a world increasingly where it only makes sense to be open, almost to the point of a cosmic sense, to this encounter with others. Existentialism and the tortured individual wearing black and chain-smoking Gitanes only makes sense within a certain modernist paradigm. Everyone's alienated. And that means also that potentially nobody is, or that we could be on the verge of something like that.

I think, in other words, that there is a kind of postmodernism that I really loathe, and another one which I don't think I could possibly disagree with. The former has a Marxist dimension that I think is far beyond its expiry date; the latter has a much more spiritual/religious/deep ecological one. But if I take up the latter position, I am obligated to not shit too much on the former...and so probably it would be better not to take a position at all, etc., etc. Being the kind of asshole who wants to solve the world's problems from inside his basement this is the kind of stuff I like to think about.

>Are videogames not just a form of sublimated body-activity?
Yes. You acquire a kind of virtual body. With all that that entails. Say what you will about icycalm, but I think he tapped into something with immersion and what this entails. It is very difficult to be a Schopenhauerian art critic about video games for this reason, and particularly as these games develop. That is a whole other conversation.

(cont'd)

It also explains the enduring *aesthetic* appeal of futurism: women, food, cars, weapons, speed. These are all things that glorify the body. We are naturally aesthetic beings, and this means way more to us than beauty alone (and of course you know all this). No one is going to be immune to guilt or anxiety about the body either...least of all your satiated, virtualized, media-consuming modern consumer, who winds up paying high price for consumption. Because consumption is what our culture became; I think Baudrillard was spot on the money in terms of how capitalism produced a virtual world around its subjects that indulges their fantasies, and we will now do that at the virtual level.

>The Chinese and Indians have a completely different approach of the body, maybe because they never had Abrahamic (or Egyptian?) influence
Yes. I think this is absolutely true. Ten thousand posts would not be enough to get into everything that is signified by the physical presence of the body of Christ, a crucified body, the Word made flesh, and so on. These things are not so much a part of the Eastern wisdom traditions, as far as I can tell. This is not to say that there aren't huge numbers of similarities; I've read Guenon and he completely convinces me that religions have these basic underlying structures and patterns, just as Campbell persuades me, Jung, and so on. All these things are in play. And I believe that they need to come back. Ken Wilber is a little flaky, but genuinely like his ultra-inclusive framework and developmental psychology; Peterson moves me as well. The psychologists are a kind of an inverse or obverse of the great nondual thinkers; in either case, the world has to be rendered in some sense *meaningful* in a spiritual sense, and that meaning proceeds in some sense from suffering. I think there's a fine line between depth psychology and nondual thought.

>Indian nationalism is on the rise.
True. It's on the rise everywhere. I guess I just don't see as being quite as destructive as the European or American forms. I see this stuff as an issue of repression more than anger, a kind of willed self-destruction and frustration with globalization. Both the political left *and* right in America are playing the victim card against each other (and on themselves!). I don't think it's going to end well.

>but aren't we kind of tired of fighting over culture?
Yep.

Did you watch the Harris/Peterson podcast? What did you think?

It's true. Japan is also pretty into automation. I was actually just wondering why Japanese cyberpunk is weirdly more optimistic (in GITS, at least, not so much Akira) than Gibsonian cyberpunk...interestingly divergent cultural priorities.

Good advice.

I have to head out for a bit, but I'll be back later on tonight. Cheers anons.

Germany was a nation-state, as was the US, India is not. India is a nations-state, a super-national state of many nations. Calling India a nation-state is just as ludicrous as calling Congo or Austria-Hungary a nation-state. The Indian intelligentsia can critique all they want, but as in the West so in India, critique the truth does not make.

>Trump is a galactic anomaly

Fucking kill yourself you pseud. Galactic anomaly? Jesus Christ. He's just a populist. Trump is a part of democracy, as predictable and inevitable as low voter-turnout or short-sighted economic decisions. You aren't a genius. You're browsing Veeky Forums.

Full Communism is pretty much ready by now. The CPC has mastered the dialectic, Soviets didn't even get close. Uncle Xi just has to press the button and BAM! Full Communism, the bourgeoisie won't even know what hit them.

Prediction: by the mid 21st century India will be an hegemonic superpower ruled by a coalition of Hindutva ultranationationalists and NeoTantrist Accelerationist Brahmins hailing from what was once known as the San Fracisco Bay Are .

ok pal, if you want to make a bet I will give you some pretty generous odds.

>Implying that full communism will ever be ready
>Implying elites haven't planned for thousands of contingencies
>Implying Xi Jinping would do this if he could

you are not being dialectical, you gotta think dialectically. Full Communism is like that scene in Evangelion where everyone melts into orange goo.

Are you the Girardposter?

I was curious as to whether you're mostly self-taught or studied this stuff at University

>thinking dialectically
>references Evangelion
It was a shit show and you're a shithead. What you just said makes sense at a level that is entirely null.

Meh, okay. I was being hyperbolic. And Trump is a populist, no doubt. But predictable and inevitable? I don't know about that one.

Anyways, believe me, I know I'm no genius. But Veeky Forums is legit awesome. Big fan of this place.

Not sure if I'd take that bet, but Hindutva ultranationalists and NeoTantrist Accelerationist Brahmins sounds completely fucking rad.

That's me. I didn't study this stuff at uni, but I should have. I was thinking about it back in undergrad while pursuing the wrong degree, and I wrote my graduate thesis about philosophy even though it wasn't in that field. It's always been my passion, but it's a weird passion to have, wanting to talk about anxiety and capitalism and ideology and so on, things that give me butterflies in my stomach.

I thought, once upon a time, that I would eventually get to the bottom and hit an omega point where I was good. That point turned out to be the abyss. So basically I've just been reading for years and years.

>I guess I just don't see as being quite as destructive as the European or American forms.
I feel that's precisely the reason why it could be even more dangerous. China and America have had decades of criticism on their forms of government, but India? Nobody believes it even has government. Imagine if one of the centers of civilization turned itself on its head seemingly over-night, a sort of Trump situation on a whole nother scale. Imagine the world going out with whimper, but a Bollywood dance.

>Did you watch the Harris/Peterson podcast?
I sadly haven't found the time nor the will.

>I was actually just wondering why Japanese cyberpunk is weirdly more optimistic
Japan has no imperative to update (i.e. still using fax) and has a different relation to the Other vis-a-vis Shinto, so questions of humanity becoming outdated or subjugated simply aren't there. Compare Cthulhu to Godzilla. On that vein, compare the pairs Superman/Batman to Ultraman/Kamen Rider; the one side of the pair are "savior" types, the other are more tragic "hero" types, society is intrinsically good vs. intrisically bad; but while Superman isn't popular nowadays, Ultraman remains respected. Note that the second element in both cases has an aspect of horror: you actually find strands of a type of "romanticism" everywhere in Japanese media, but they're very often modern and Western influenced (the opposite to Western romanticism). I could go on about this, but it's also interesting to note the villain in Rider is pretty much a cosmic horror, while in Ultraman the *hero* is a cosmic horror. It seems distrust for technology and the state stopped on the 70s in Japan. It's funny the examples of technophobia and horror in Japanese vidya all seem Western influenced (MGS, Silent Hill, Resident Evil all influenced by cinema). I wonder how the Japanese have reacted to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

On the point of media and Japan, and to come back to my body point: It's interesting that the most radical genre for the West is nothing but the SoL. Mundanity is aesthetically pleasing nowadays; will high brow literature shift to more speculative fiction? I think nostalgia is very related here: The reason Stranger Things became popular didn't have anything to do with its speculative aspects, which were tried and true but not fresh, but because it was the experience of "being a kid in the 80s". Its appeal is very SoL.

The past is retroactive. There is no past, and since there isn't a past, the past is also present. The past is in a state of constant birth: about looking for what was, is, and will be born. Likewise, the future is a state of constant death: about looking what did, does and will die.

>China
>Becoming anything other than more neoliberal
Top zozzle

>I sadly haven't found the time nor the will.

Not him, but I wouldn't recommend it either, because it's a circlejerk about ontology and epistemology.

It might be interesting if you actually think arguing about axioms for 2.5 hours is worth.

>new philosophy thread
>let's talk about this Jaspers's idea

I thought that would be the case. I'd like someone that agrees with Peterson and is on his level to talk to him. It seems like he's too preocupied to spread his message when he already has an audience and could get deeper into things instead of talking about generalities so much. I guess reading his book is my only choice.

Honestly, I think he and Harris would agree about a lot of things, but Harris came into that discussion as an adversary and saw it as a debate with a religious crackpot from the start, instead of just a discussion airing ideas.

Wouldn't it be cool if they didn't just leave it at that and talked again when things have calmed down a little (and Peterson has regained some weight)?

If going by Harris' Twitter is any measure of truth(kek), over 80% of around 30000 people want a part 2.

I'm kind of divided on this actually, because I don't think Harris is willing to concede some different presuppositions even to have a talk about what those presuppositions entail to Peterson.

> Imagine the world going out with whimper, but a Bollywood dance.
Pretty much.

>I sadly haven't found the time nor the will.
It's a weird one, but I still found it worth listening to, if only because you can see these two axiomatic positions grinding against each other. Harris is brilliant, and Peterson is a living uncertainty principle. I think Peterson's anxiety comes from seeing himself as deeply, perhaps too deeply, embedded in culture. He's looking at human beings from the inside-out, and Harris seems to be looking at things more outside-in. The kinds of mythic/agonistic/archetypal stuff that Peterson is all about just doesn't interest Harris, but it's all that Peterson thinks about.

>It seems distrust for technology and the state stopped on the 70s in Japan
This is so interesting to me. And amazingly this is where precisely those things began to blast off in the West. There was no May '68 or Woodstock in Japan.

Maybe, for certain authoritarian cultures, you could even say that fascism *was* their Woodstock. When those deep Dionysian forces erupt or are called into political life they don't always look the same from culture to culture...something like that. Even in Europe German romanticism was a different phenomenon than French romanticism.

>SoL
Sorry, what is this? I can't tell what you mean.

I'm actually glad you brought this up, because I didn't realize how weird it sounded.

Jaspers' idea is very modern, and he's theorizing about cultures and civilizations much older than this. But I guess what I'm wondering is: what possible other option lies open today than to adopt Wilber's include-and-transcend perspective? I don't think people are so different at the bottom. So I'm what I'm wondering is, is it possible to derive some kind of general framework for looking at this stuff.

Wilber's perspective on this to me seems, well, properly axial. So in this once sense we have the option to double down on ourselves in this Nietzschean sense: Become Who You Are. And this is completely legit. However, our sense of who we are is always related to others. The broadest possible horizon of this is the entire planet. If you are against heroic destruction and the worst forms of political scapegoating then some system of thought that includes other perspectives without eradicating what makes them different, or subordinating them to a unifying principle, you're going to wind up with a kind of a new age spiritualism. This has its flaws, no doubt, but I think the alternatives are worse.

I think Peterson is trying this by urging for this Jungian/heroic dimension in life. He's going back to the well, and that well is very deep. My own feeling is that if people were more aware of the fact that *everyone around them is also doing this,* that heroic journey wouldn't need to involve quite as much suffering.

We can all relate to the Doom Guy. But what if there were other space marines in hell also? How would things look different?

Also, and this is really just continuing what that other user was saying about the body. I can't really know what it's like to have someone else's *mind* or lived experience, but I do know what it's like to have a *body.* So a transpersonal psychology - Jungian, Freudian, nondual mysticism - would suggest that we can actually adopt a stance of collective understanding about this stuff.

We can't prevent suffering itself, which to some degree necessary for our development. Total alleviation of suffering is not the point; we fear death and we have desires, anxieties, and so on. It's part of being human and growing up. What I would say is to be avoided is the transposition of these desires into political realms that inevitably produce disastrous cycles of scapegoating and collective murder. I think people desire enlightenment even more than utopia.

This is why Girard matters, to me. Banal literature merely reifies, and the most banal form of all is mere text, purest ideology. Great literature reminds and instructs.

Hell is, in a sense, a kind of crowned anarchy. It is also the forge of virtue; it is not a literal place but a metaphysical one. But beyond a certain horizon only a kind of collective sensibility is capable of doing more than simply telling people the right way to burn out in hell.

The concept of hell, or the wasteland, or the fallen realm, is an interesting one. Consider pic related. We don't relate to him in the same way we do to the Doom Guy. Why? Because we know who this is. And yet, if everything was Mordor, and Sauron was just another alienated subject, we might look at him and go, yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Put on your armor and get out there.

I could talk about the aesthetics of hell and so on all day. In a certain sense maybe it's because we are conflicted in these deep ways about what it would mean to live in hell, whether hell is there because the gods have left, because there never were gods, because we are required to replace these gods...it may even come down to this fundamental question of whether or not someone *believes they deserve to be in hell or not.* If you think you deserve to be in hell, you will draw one set of conclusions; if you think you *don't* deserve to be there, you will draw another.

I think this is why our modern political world is so divisive; people don't have the same feelings about what it means to dwell here, in the year 2017.

Some contradictions are to be expected during the socialist stage of development. In fact, it means everything is going according to plan.

Evangelion isn't real.
There will always be people who consider themselves a little more equal.

>I can't tell what you mean.
Slice of Life, non-adventure, non-drama. My point was that there's a shift from what characters do, to how characters live. No more events, no more villains or morals.

>And amazingly this is where precisely those things began to blast off in the West. There was no May '68 or Woodstock in Japan.
I'm an /m/ dude, so to give you a sense of how ridiculously sudden this shift was, let me give you some /m/ examples: In the 70s you had Mitsuteru Yokoyama directly denouncing Japanese war crimes and Go Nagai putting the most fetishistic things he could in manga; in the 80s you had Yoshiyuki Tomino establishing a dialectic synthesis based around the lack of communication between individuals and generations down to his directing style; then in the 90s you have Patlabor being as grounded as a mecha show could be and Evangelion being as neurotic as you can think. Then the contemporary paradigm for anime and manga begun to form. This all happened in three to four decades; nowadays politics are all but abandoned in Japanes drawn-media.

To continue on with the body disclosing: How much of our culture is based on touch? Let's look at the arts: there's music, there's painting, there's literature, we have cuisine and perfumery; but we don't have an art of touch, do we? Which is interesting, because so many of our metaphores are about touch: getting in touch, attachment and grasping, pressure, being here or there, spatial or tactile words are the ones that we most use when getting down to the base of action or being; everything else we can easily call "the senses"; when we touch we talk of "feeling up". Pain and pleasure are put under this actegory too.

So why there aren't touch work of arts in museums? Because if people touch them they'll break or fall apart--they're transcient. Touch is the most transcient feeling because one must always be in con*tact* with the thing to feel it. So why do religions restrict sex? Sex is touch, touch that almost goes beyond touch (having another sentient body inside or being inside it), it's bound to produce tremendous attachment. You can hum a nice song or think about a pretty picture, but another sexual act is another sexual act. And yet this is precisely the first wall most religions throw at you!

And, with regards to technology, how much of the craftsmanship that has been lost has been manual? It's homo "sapiens", but the first thing we have of are physical tools. Considering the above part is it weird that science first went for this, first served the material, physical needs of people, and that to this day entertainment hasn't managed to include touch? When we describe things, we often assume how they look is how the would feel when we touched, but isn't an illusion precisely not this? Does how something looks certainly tell us how it smells, tastes or sounds? Then why are we so ready to infer touch? Because coming into contact with something is much more dangerous.

So fucking interesting.

>No more events, no more villains or morals.
This seems like a mature way of thinking, too. I love big epics: LotR, Dune, and so on. But I know that it's because they are very seductive, and call things back to simpler times and clearer distinctions that are now gone.

>politics are all but abandoned in Japanese drawn-media.
I'm tempted to say that they're more self-aware than we are. This wouldn't be true. But beyond a certain horizon our (read: mine) obsession with self-interest leads to more blindness and paradox than actual life. Or to insanity: Land, Nietzsche, Holderlin, and probably Peterson if he keeps this up.

>How much of our culture is based on touch?
It's completely true. I would also say that, as you have also suggested, this concept of touch - because it is so dangerous - is always being deferred. Zizek and Baudrillard have totally shaped my view on how it is we modern consumers consume ideology in these deep and recursive ways: ideology proceeds from this injunction to Enjoy, and our inability to enjoy leads to guilt and repetition and so on. Baudrillard is neat like that because he morphed into a Nietzschean playing weird fatal games of seduction with objects, whereas Z is always trying to produce the revolution in some sense by criticizing ideology, but ultimately we require something like ideology to function, I think, as psychologically stable beings.

I can see why you're interested in video games as well. Controllers change the way we consume cinema, after all; we ourselves move from spectators to players, this simultaneous actor/viewer/director individual. You could almost say that giving the game-player control over the image in this way is what allows them to acquire a kind of virtualized body, although of course it's not a real body, but a kind of a mask or an emptiness.

Who, or what, or where is one, exactly, when one steps into their FPS identity-persona? You're there, and you can be shot at, and the camera can jump around, and you can bleed...but it's kind of amazing to think about how much we can construct the image of a body in our heads by being streamed the right amount of semiotic clues in the right way. Even the classical Hollywood mode of cinematic storytelling emerged by essentially *hiding* the presence of the camera, so that where the camera went followed this unseen logic; a bomb goes off, the characters on-screen turn their heads, and the camera pans to what they were looking at. It's the same thing with games, in a sense. Some of them, at any rate. Dragon Quest, for example, doesn't try to reach out and immerse one in the same way.

I would be tempted to say that the more 'lifelike' that VR becomes, the more it will continue to occlude touch and actual physicality. You will feel more and more like you are in there. But back in real life you will be sitting in a tank of pink plastic goop, perhaps like the Wachowskis suggested.

Also, you have given me such a fucking brain-wave by bringing up this concept of touch I just wanted to come back and give you a salute for that.

This whole idea of virtual bodies is, and I will create an appropriately silly portmanteau for it, huge-normous. Everything, as you have said, is predicated on this centrality of the body. But what is so interesting about media and simulation today is this creation of virtual bodies that can affect the world in real ways. We have been virtualizing ourselves for years; simulating, replicating, prostheticizing, tele-everything-everythinging. It's extraordinary to think about. The indistinguishability of reality from illusion is what a huge amount of 20C philosophy is all about; I go again and again back to professional wrestling as this theatre of signs that is both less than real and at the same time completely hyperreal. Video games continue this process, because games become interesting to us right when they cease to be ideological; this is what icycalm has been saying for years: less gimmickry, less meaning, more physicality, more power.

What is an arcade but a meta-movie theatre? With coin-op quasi-cinematic experiences in miniature? Now, of course, the arcade comes into your living room, or is there in your Steam library...

Huge, huge stuff user. Just wanted to say thanks for opening up a couple of trapdoors in my head that really needed to get opened.

>I love big epics: LotR, Dune, and so on. But I know that it's because they are very seductive, and call things back to simpler times and clearer distinctions that are now gone.
The ironic thing about it is that the fiction that opposes that is exactly what Tolkien was for: remember, it's the small people, not the great ones, that save the day. It's the Hobbits in their love of mundane life that are most incorruptible to the Ring. War isn't a positive thing for Tolkien but it's something tragic and a fight where, while there are clear parties, nobody is ultimately the bad guy for no reason. And Herbert is the same: power attracts the pathological; want a whole race of badasses? Here, the scarcity necessary to breed them ends up making them into a natural catastrophe. In the end the epic was always a tragic thing and what people really wanted wasn't to be badasses and killers.

I mean when we get down to it, what philosopher actually is *for* the destruction of life? Schopenhauer, but isn't he basically a defeatist when it comes to the Will? Even Nick Land is for a larger form of being, not against being. Everyone seems to share a basic instinct of social and individual preservation and multiplication; the will to do "evil" is mostly either ignorance or comes down to "because it's necessary". Even those who actually want to see people die, want to see only people die.

The direction is always more and more away from violence, chaos and destruction, and ironically this ends up giving even more leverage against the world (in the form of techonology, mental ones included); and actually the more power you have, the less you want to use it or need it.

>Just wanted to say thanks for opening up a couple of trapdoors in my head that really needed to get opened.
I'd say you've just got a bigger cage, but that could be too Kafka of me.

>I'd say you've just got a bigger cage, but that could be too Kafka of me.
Nah. I would say it would be appropriately Kafka of you. Because it would be true. See pic related for more details.

>The ironic thing about it is that the fiction that opposes that is exactly what Tolkien was for: remember, it's the small people, not the great ones, that save the day.
Totally true. And easily overlooked, because the man could write great combat/war stuff without bashing your head in about The Tragedy of War. What a guy he was.

>And Herbert is the same: power attracts the pathological; want a whole race of badasses?
Herbert *really* saw this, to my mind. That was what was happening in Paul's nightmares. I like the Dune books, but I wonder if Herbert wouldn't have preferred to have wrapped those up in a trilogy. Personally I don't think he could have, and I have some ten-cent psychoanalysis to go with that claim; but it's still interesting to think about. Anyways, you're absolutely right. Herbert knew very well that power corrupts and that badassery was not the point. And I don't think he had Tolkien's Catholicism to fall back on.

>I mean when we get down to it, what philosopher actually is *for* the destruction of life? Schopenhauer, but isn't he basically a defeatist when it comes to the Will?
I'm not a strong Schopenhauerian, but I never thought of him as being pro-destruction. I think he just accepted it as being part of the nature of a blind and restlessly striving universe, which was why he was so pessimistic. And he didn't seem to have been defeatist about the Upanishads (which is *extra* weird, because the Bhagavad Gita is pro-"war," in a spiritual sense.) Schopenhauer is a bit of a mystery to me. I do like him, but boy is he crusty.

>Even Nick Land is for a larger form of being, not against being.
Yeah...mostly. If you put Nick Land in one of those boats at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, I still don't think he would push the button. He might hope the other side did, but I don't think he'd push it himself. He's just got to be among the most god-awfully burned-out Marxist who ever lived. He's like the voice of the revenge of failed Marxism returned from the dead like a revenant.

(cont'd)

>Everyone seems to share a basic instinct of social and individual preservation and multiplication; the will to do "evil" is mostly either ignorance or comes down to "because it's necessary".
Yup. This is what Zizek has been trying to do, get people to become aware of how ideology works. He's also conspicuously near to Christianity these, days ("I am an atheist, but I am a Christian atheist") and so on. There's room for a correspondence between Christians and socialists, guys like Ernst Bloch. Evil Bizarro Zizek would make a great Grand Inquisitor.

>The direction is always more and more away from violence, chaos and destruction, and ironically this ends up giving even more leverage against the world (in the form of techonology, mental ones included); and actually the more power you have, the less you want to use it or need it.
Man, I fucking hope so. I sincerely fucking hope so. But I think this is another thing that has totally transformed the way we think about politics: victimhood. I would like to agree with you, that the more power you have, the less you want to use or need it: I would like to believe that that is true. I think for responsible leaders that *would* be true.

It's actually interesting: isn't Schopenhauer the guy who says we should understand each other as companions in misery? Now there's an idea I can get behind. Because part of that means *not blaming someone else* for that suffering. Or at least not so much that, you know, their total annihilation will somehow bring about the alleviation of your own stuff. That's the part of Schopenhauer I actually really *do* like.