Why should I care? Or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong(abuseofnotation.github.io) |
Why should I care? Or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong(abuseofnotation.github.io) |
The author seems to be blissfully unaware of existentialism, French or otherwise, which could have either saved the author 12 years of anguish (OTOH, a very existentialist thing to have) or made the article more interesting. Maybe both. This way I'd say, needs work.
It seemed to all boil down to trying to justify why it's not wrong of him to cheat on his taxes and play loud music in the park at night:
We don’t have to think about what is good for the “society” or for people at large, We only have to care for people that are around us.
But unlike Wolff, the author covers too much ground. Wolff limits his scope to Kant's works and esp. Kant's theory of justice, and excludes the seminal works on social contracts by other authors (which would IMO have impact on Wolff's conclusions) and acknowledges that fact, e.g. immediately in the title of his essay. The author does no such thing.
I respect the author, I myself had an infatuation with Illich and Mühsam in my punk years, but I still think that if you want to make broad claims, you have to have broad knowledge. The exclusion of, e.g. existentialist or other political and moral philosophers, makes the purview too narrow for such a broad conclusion. Aother viable approach -- working from first principles -- is also nowhere in sight. It's like saying "I don't like ice cream" after having only tasted Smurf and Big Red flavor.
It's mentioned at the start:
Our entire social contract boils down to, “I promise not to kill you if you promise not to kill me.” There’s nothing more to it.
That said, I agree that the author subsequently ignores the implications of this, which makes his conclusions rather meaningless in my view.
They’re starting to get it, but it hasn’t quite clicked yet.
This sounds like the core complaint in the article and it leaves me utterly perplexed. Most people live their entire lives, without ever having what i would call an active stance on any political issue. Even the very few who are politicaly active (go to protests, organise) do it only occasionally. Most of their time they are doing other things (working, eating, sleeping, hanging out with friends, reading, whatever). And then there are very few who do activism or politics professionally and full time. This is not the norm but the exception.
So then why does the author think that they are obliged by society to take an “active stance on political issues”? Where is this notion comming from?
Maybe they have parents or a friend group who are politically very active and they live in a distorted bubble where they are made to feel not worthy if they don’t care that much? Or maybe their personal definition of “active stance on political issue” has a very low bar?
“there are people who do intervene with every aspect of our life, including our taste of music, or modes of transportations.”
And provides concrete examples of their desires “I like to listen to death metal, while riding a brakeless bike”.
Who cares about your taste of music? If others don’t like what you are listening get some headphones? Hang out with people who like what you are listening?
And about the modes of transportation… people care that you don’t kill or injure them while you transport yourself. They also know that if you injure yourself you will whine and make a nuisance of yourself until people help you. So that is the two reason why people care about your “modes of transportations”. If you won’t injure anyone else, and we won’t have to deal with your maimed body knock yourself out. Fly your brakeless bike wherever you want to. Attach even JATO rockets to it if you want.
It really feels like someone told this person once that they should turn down the volume on their music, and they should maintain their bike, and they are trying to build a whole moral philosophy around this experience.
To the point that a great many people have had to drop numerous friends and family just to maintain their sanity.
I’m honestly not sure where the ‘that totally isn’t happening’ stance you’re taking comes from. Are you uniquely shielded? Or just oblivious?
This is really not how you should deal with other authors. It would be much better to make the point he wants to make without false witnesses and name dropping.
It's intellectually lazy and rude. Don't grab quotes out of context to make a point the author never made, mentioning that you do so just makes things worse, not better.
My 2 cent, sorry if it sounds like nitpicking.
There is no "categorical imperative" on the plane of existence for the same reason the Tower of Babel collapsed. Once we get above the 23 chromosome pairs defining the standard human, little is enduring.
To govern and coordinate people at scale requires stripping individuality and binding them through, e.g. a UCMJ[1]. That is, some sort of military-ish authoritarian system.
For a glance at history, authoritarianism is both attractive, and transient.
So history seems more a chemical reaction of a variable set of "people-molecules" in an environmental "solution", building up and tearing down structures as we collectively fumble along.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Jus...
Of course, philosophers can be punk (Nietzsche, Marx); punks can absolutely be old and/or wise; all philosophers were young at some point, some of them (Hume, Plato) wrote famous works before they were “old and wise”; a system of thought can be considered philosophy, and varieties of punk at their best are systems of thought; and, very much like philosophy, there is no “punk” as a single homogenous system of thought.
— “If I am free, why do I have to defend my actions against a specific body of people and doctrines?” You don’t, in the sense of some specific body of people. You do, in the sense that you do not exist in vacuum: self-awareness automatically requires the other that the self can be set apart from. What you call your “oppressors” are both 1) parts of the same whole that you are part of and 2) bring yourself as an entity into being in the first place. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be oppressed and shouldn’t work to address that; but it does mean that yes, being a human automatically means having to exist among other humans and act in ways that are not only concerning yourself. I’d be a bit normative and say you probably shouldn’t see everyone else as “oppressing” you just because you have to consider how your actions affect them.
Closed.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Tldr if you're a Christian, you're a punk, and you're wise: and philosophy is a dead end. I don't agree.