a common theme in my writing about how silly the idealists are is the honest, consistent belief that history has a ley line. that there is a noospherical reality behind it all, which represents perfect order, and history is a ley line running through it.
and people then try and characterise the ley line. a lot of phenomenology is about essentialising the subjective experience, and then using that as a platform to essentialise everything else. so you know, phenomena become *things unto themselves*. history is actually being controlled by these spooky ghosts, phenomena, and we need to understand Them to get history. kant produces an essential phenomena, the noumenon, a sort of moving monad, and he uses this to understand Being on the ley line of history.
at no point does kant stop and go “wait, if everything is just the relationships between things, then the only way to understand this is to understand the things. and then the only *real* things existing between them are social relationships between people. by trying to essentialise human consciousness, i am only abstracting that consciousness *from them*, and thus refusing to permit humans to concern themselves with real things.”
he doesn’t do this, because luckily, the philosophers before him, products of a class society, have been creating positions that preclude that. plato dreamed up a world of forms way back when and so we’re all modernising it or addressing it via the logic systems that emerged from aristotle, which he then originally used to address plato’s world of forms.
the fact that these philosophers are part of a class society and their creation of theoretical positions is about mediating their real position in that class society flies over kant’s head. why? because he’s a philosopher in a class society and he needs to mediate his real position in it through his theoretical positions.
even hegel, who created a very impressive method of critiquing the ley line itself, whose gross intellectual perversity allowed him to have sex with the dialectic so rapturously he managed to understand that ideas aren’t a thing outside of society, but a form of critique within them–he is still treating the ideas as anything but use-values. so the noospherical miasma is still floating around and between us. because he’s got all these Positions, and he’s creating a theory of history, and it looks a bit like the history that happened, definitely closer than anything that came before, but he’s not creating a model that can reliably predict future history, which is the point of all this. but the methods he used to look at history do have a dangerous amount of real utility.
after hegel has impregnated the dialectic with his seed of immanent critique, there’s a bit of tension, because people can use the immanent critique in relation to real things. this is what the young hegelians are doing. they are doing it very badly because they don’t understand hegel, but they are criticising religion and conservative hierarchy regardless, all through the very scientific logic of hegel’s intrapermeating noospherical thought-plasma.
they still think there’s a fucking ley line, running through the noosphere.
we get marx, a student of hegel, and marx is a bit sick in the head, but he also recognises there are now all these proles walking around Doing Things and nobody cares about that. they’re also making fucking everything, and he thinks there’s probably power there.
he thinks, perhaps, these people might have Ideas too, so he looks at their interest.
what he sees is a bunch of fucking savages. he sees people so thoroughly divorced from the positions of civil society that they can’t even propose anything within it. all the tools they need to build anything else are already vested in them by the positive order of capitalist production. they have constitutional law for the first time and all they can really do is destroy it.
marx looks at the state. he sees something that is there to keep you in wage-labour. if you try and build anything to stop doing wage-labour, like a commune, the state will send its men and guns to kill you.
wage-labour, he understands, is selling big chunks of your life to someone else. why? because they own property, and now the proles do not. regardless of what the property-owners think, the proles are going to fucking hate this.
marx looks at the nation. he sees a bunch of different nations, interwoven by world-history through capital, but still divided against each other by a bunch of different state arrangements. when tensions between the instances of capitalist production grow out of control for the property-owners, they start killing each others’ proles, to hamper the productive forces of each nation.
the nation, marx notices, is slowly being dissolved through global trade. but the position of civil society doesn’t let it die entirely. the result is proles get killed. regardless of what the property-owners think, the proles are going to fucking hate this.
the real interest of the proles’ existence is the abolition of civil society. to destroy this so-called ‘general interest’ of civil society, to destroy the people who perpetuate it, to destroy capitalist production, and live for themselves.
this is not a position. this is negation. and because it negates the class orders upon which past philosophy existed, it also negates philosophy by kind of exposing it as not a universal search for truth, guided by the hand of God toward the telos of Reason, but this giant pantomime of thought simply attached to a class society, which actually is what characterised its existence.
marx is using the dialectic, but he’s not pretending it’s anything more than a relationship between people.
marx presents all these ideas to the philosophers.
they take these ideas not as a negation of their ideas, but as a position within their ideas, and so they can apply their logic and their thought systems to this position.
they go, “ugh, this is so crass. you forget about the ley line.”
so marx goes, “i don’t see the ley line.” and it’s like telling a little kid santa isn’t real, everyone screams and shouts and gets really bitter. he’s realised what kant was slowly getting at: that the subjective experience doesn’t actually fucking exist beyond how it relates to other things, and, as he famously says in his theses on feuerbach, the philosophers are interpreting the world, but the point is to change it.
and this practical unity of critique and action is completely lost on the philosophers. they think their words are more powerful than the real world!
but modernity, it’s happening whether they like it or not, and they’ve still got to reckon with hegel, this big old jabba the hutt who’s cruelly mystifying Science to this day.
modernity is a real big problem for philosophers. this is why.
in my arguments against the idealists, i utilise a few techniques of rhetoric:
- the straw man. i am saying these people believe in Souls. but in reality, their systems of thought involve other words than “Soul”. but they say this means i have to use their words, not my words, or else i’m not doing philosophy right.
- the appeal to emotion. i am saying these people are religious, and relying on my readers’ effective atheism to connect the dots, and feel disgust at the cruel lies these idiots are telling them.
- the standpoint. i am prioritising my understanding over other people’s understanding, rather than trying to understand things from their point of view. this is because i am not a fucking Jinn or Dybbuk or Demon and cannot possess their bodies. i cannot commune with their Soul and understand their Emotions as an essence in any real terms. so i use my own understanding, which is more useful to me.
these are called ‘logical fallacies’. i am not arguing according to the proper logic, and therefore everything i say cannot actually be a commentary on philosophy, because i am not accepting philosophy on its own terms.
despite this, i provide a commentary on philosophy, and people are actually fucking reading it and agreeing with it.
but these people say it’s not a commentary on philosophy. philosophy, to them, is everything, and can only be approached from within.
they are fundamentally incapable of reckoning with philosophy as something regular people largely approach from without.
i talk under the assumption of my heuristic of “a spade is a spade”–which, translated to jargon, means “i presuppose the self-evidence of use-values as the only possible relation to Being”.
they will ask me to logically justify this and i’ll ignore them and other people who think spades don’t have souls will listen to me.
this crude and vulgar Realism is the kind of shit that is incomprehensible to philosophers, because they still think that there are actually real rules that exist beyond the basic utility of those rules. they cannot verify this through anything other than ideas, and logic only matters if it applies to real things–which philosophers are not in abundance of.
anyway, this thing is all down to modernity. “modernity” is where philosophy now has to adjust, try to compromise with the things i’ve described. the idea of modernity is basically just accepting capitalism and liberalism being real things and not inflictions of god or satan. this is self-evident to plebs like me, but boy do the philosophers have to think about it for a while.
anyway, they’re still using all their Positions, though.
having read and understand the Positions because i too was once an altar boy in the church of philosophy, i now see how the Idealists try and do to marxism what hegel did to the dialectic. their dicks are too limp to fuck marxism as vigorously as hegel fucked the dialectic, but they can dry-hump it like mormons or something.
we now have academic marxism.
academic marxism isn’t all bad but there’s a lot of them who try to divorce marxism from its real material basis to then navigate their position in a class society. so you have real capitalists funding marxist thinkers, and it’s fucking insane.
marxism is yet again proposed as a thing, an order of logic, that more logic needs to be applied to. and the actual movement of the proles doesn’t matter anymore, and you can develop marxism on its own terms.
this also means the spd can openly praise rosa luxemburg, despite being the same party that had the freikorps shoot her dead and toss her body in the landwehr canal.
marxism can be a secular state religion, like it is in china or vietnam, and once more all is good under god. as long as you give a nod to the portrait of old saint marx, maybe lenin, nothing else matters. you can have bosses and workers and that doesn’t fucking matter because the constitution, the thing the proletariat’s meant to negate, now has the word ‘marxism’ in the preface.
the constitution then goes on to describe how best to organise china’s class society. and marx is fucking screaming in his grave.
you even get postmodernists, who try and move beyond modernity, with their big ideas, they identify modernity as this cage restricting them, and not just a cope by the Philosophers, who are just as trapped by all this as the rest of us. there are postmodern marxists and they wonder why nobody listens to them.
philosophy is now kind of just a weird hobby for perverts and nobody cares about it anymore apart from the scientists who spec themselves into a philosophical method (because the development of Logic can actually be useful, all things considered). but philosophers find it hard to concede that their descriptions of Being are nothing more than that. they’re actually doing something really important on top of it all.
the importance in this is very evident to philosophers but bamboozles the proles, who don’t see their Being accurately described.
i work at a fucking pub. this is bad for me, and while in better times i’d work through this through some kind of political organising, all i can really do right now is be the kind of weird varmint who yells at letterboxes. please, give me my Telos. give me my Essence. give me my Being, design my Truth.
if you cannot do that, if your elaborate philosophical frameworks cannot use their course of scientific progression to reach me or anyone like me, then you are not describing Truth. you are wanking in a corner and screaming about the Philistines, who don’t get it.
because there’s this thing people do, when they discover marx’s materialist dialectical method for the first time.
they find they can look at anything in the world and diagnose precisely how this fucks them and everyone else over. and the marxist method, prima facie, can explain this perfectly.
they collapse to their knees in awe. the sheer power of this method could not possibly be the work of a human hand. marx predicted so many things, prophetically, due to the sheer power of his human soul.
this method, this untarnished, perfect method, it is something more than history.
we’ve peeled back the facade of the “real world”, and we’ve seen the world of forms in its truest, most perfect nature. we need to characterise this world, to mediate our position in a class society.
because we’ve finally found the perfect, Scientific logic.
and these people conclude, consciously or not, that they’ve finally found the Ley Line of History.
Leave a Reply