Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Winston Marshall: "We're Getting Close to Kristallnacht Levels" of anti-Semitism in the UK." video.
-
1
-
1
-
On "assimilation" then I hope I have shown that heir can be no general theory of assimilation, in a sense we have the grammar of the word wrong. What's the line I'm after paraphrasing John Lennon: "assimilations happen when you are making other plans. Kant/Aristotle: purposeless purpose, all the people on YouTube who do various activity's like building rocket cars and stuff in sheds and camping with no tent or sleeping bag in Alaska at -30 degrees. Like in Apollo 13, the "assimilation" manual will be used to start a camp fire if no dry tinder is around. If you play guitar but are like me and not at all a natural, its like the rare moment when you can just do that riff and it feels effortless and without using energy like the red line drops to 100 revs. Like Picasso's Dove sketch, very quick and easy but a thousand sketches preceded it. there is architecture to this for sure but not grounded in propositions; the task are not to get people to agree to some high level highly general proposition, what i know about British culture is from being brought up in aspects of it, what I can say about British culture as it is said is from movies that most people of my generation have seen they are a quasi objectivity. The former are more private needing much sharing of salt, the later you can just do. On the other hand i grew up in late seventies and early eighties but at school a mate, and at collage another mate got me listening to the Beatles and then the Stones. I spent the 80's and 90's and beyond ignoring most of the contemporary music just listening to sixties and seventies stuff and reading about them. In this sense it is mediated for me, but not my parents, but it feels immediate. Living the dream on YouTube time machine since 2000.Anyway the Stones are still the eternal immediate and with the Beatles sent us a time capsule from the past for xmas.
1
-
1
-
The second part of discussion from 27:00 to 32 :00 ish , i think requires me at least to orientate it first between Kant and Schopenhauer. So basically Kant claims that we must not begin first by considering the world or nature or things as radically independent of us and our activities, e.g. things in themselves, but rather then begin with a re-orientation towards our experience of the world that is only of things or objects as they appear e.g. appearances. Experience then is an activity of ours in construction. The constructing can be discovered in the construction as that which cannot be determined as coming to us from causation of nature on our senses as natural organs. This Kant calls the a priori in experience, think about it like a play in a theatre that cannot be a play as such from any point on the stage but only as a construction for a audience member. The play is made for the audience as a construction. the paly is structured on the stage in terms of how an audience member will have to view it and so re-construct it. The stage is arranged for the activity of the subjects. A reflective subject will realise this, that the play is organised for them, so although the play is independent of the subject, is is for the subject. The key here is the translation of Kant's term for this: Vorstellung. This was traditionally translated as "representation" but now is often translated as "presentation". The term representation goes with the re-orientation metaphor that we view the world though coloured spectacles, but this implies representation can be both the description of experience as a representation, and that it names the activity of representation by us. The translation as presentation seems the same, as experience as being a presentation, and as the subject activity of presenting. In the former representation there is no room for the place of the play its self as construction representation for us, i.e. viewed from anywhere other than the audience it would be meaningless. But with the term presentation we have the play as a presentation action for a presenter audience. Here we can now articulate the play as an activity for a subject, a subject itself of activity from a view point. With the representation as coloured spectacles the "other side" of the spectacles is seen as greater than and causing the representation, but in this the thing in itself is imagined as if an object like the one in experience as constructed by a anonymous subject or quasi subject or a God. We have imagined the "object" other to representation is a representation without us by a subject apart from us for another kind of subject. There is an object then unknowable for us but thought only as if for and by another subject. With the view from "presentation" we get a better orientation because we don't think of the activity on the stage itself like a rehearsal as if it is being done for a fly on the wall documentary of the making of the paly. No just people rehearsing for and constructing a play for an audience to come.
In the Wikipedia Schopenhauer "World as Will and Representation" David Carus (first published 2008), and philosopher Richard Aquila argue for "presentation"
"It is the notion of a performance or theatrical presentation – of which one is the spectator – that is key in this interpretation. The world that we perceive can be understood as a "presentation" of objects in the theatre of our own mind.[11] Vorstellung can refer to what is presented or to the process of presenting it. "
This is a new take on Schopenhauer for me today, but a view of Kant i have held and hopefully developed for some years now. My own textual support for this is recent articles that claim that Kant's notion of "ideas" (also sometimes translated as representation) and perhaps the whole Copernican Revolution draws from his experience of going to the theatre particularly of the use of magic lanterns and mirrors to "project" an image on the stage of ghost, an image only visible for audience but is an illusion the ghost is not on the stage. This is meant to be an origin for Kant's analysis of transcendent error and transcendent ideas. they are illusion s but also are nominal for an activity without end (reflection, regulation, absolutes, and so on science as understanding nature as a totality a whole complete is an endless infinite task c.f knowing ones self and responsibility, cf. knowing God proof etc consent). Indeed Douglas Burnham has stressed also Kant's use of the image of perspective, view point, the camera obscura in many of his books on Kant. Also i recall Susan Shell.
This opens us on to many things of relevance here So just to begin then with a kind of twentieth Century Phenomenology standpoint of Heidegger, when i see the St. Pauls i immediate know it is a human shaped buildign so to speak a willable space, i also know it is for others as well as me, but i also know its was made by others before me. With an aim for me. This new Kantian view then rather than a radical idealism subjectivism solipsism after Descartes and Berkeley, is rather pointing to a new kind of realism, just one that does not see the real simply as an object like a representation but before my representation.
Contrast say the lack of structure in experience for one of the astronauts in the movie Gravity, or a film made by a camera in a washing machine. Now we cant jsut say chaos as the other here since we also ways imagine a coherent view on a kind of object called chaotic object Kant say less than a dream. The key is the role and place of ethical terms and moral terms, my view about whether ethics and moral are: absent from Kant's experience, present or constructed with Kant experience, or ethics and morality are in a separate realm primarily of practical reason only eg noumena alone as regulative ideas. another view is mine i think, that experience is directed in science to the diminishing of the ethical and moral by apparatus and architecture and institutions a value free notions of experience is a regulative idea a task of science to remove asymptotically the moral and ethical agent. the removal of a will and consent for structural external notions of legitimacy alone. A task that I think is seeking "autoimmunity" or will result in legitimation crisis a kind of obligation within science that in the end is a kind of self contradiction and transcendental removal of its own conditions of responsibility. This would be like Nagel's "View from Nowhere" or Gods eye view as Nicholas Maxwell's God cut in half. A grasp of totality or a project for it, wherein man the human disappears to be a pure point in infinite space and time forwards and backwards a point in infinite political space of a rights holder only. its like radically opposite of Agamben's Bare Life a subject of the law without Rights protection. I'm a Eddy Cochran fundamentalist on this.
Note: it seems the theatre performance projection view is becoming a new legitimate view now. it might seems that Schopenhauer use of Vorstellung translated as representation or idea, hides that, for Schopenhauer the faculties of intuition is pulled in towards understanding both as representations which is pulled towards and reason eg ideas. So he makes a special place for Platonic ideas as not merely errors and links this to reasons motivation though aesthetics and particularly music and opera. I was taught there is a direct link here from Schopenhauer though Wagner to modern movies particularly say epics with the synthesis of music and image morality ethics and reason the motif. To the Marxist Cinema of misery perhaps from Lukas and the media spectacle the icon symbol. I used to know this stuff but forgotten long ago.
1
-
1
-
There are a number of themes in part two that really need the above ground laying to address. Particularly the issue that came up several times of "scaling up". On the arts censorship and creativity. I must say the great art i think of is as such because it has to work within some kind of limits. Great art and the limit seem necessarily linked, else its just: cultural reproduction and repetition; science as Truth; or culture as always for some purpose. Art and imagination find a way that logic says is closed.
But then some politician will respond by saying the more censorship the greater the art and creativity. Indeed the online censorship bill discussed this morning on LauraK has marshalled the children, without their consent, through extreme examples that they clearly will use for anything. Protecting the children the new political tool. In this both political sides will join in each collecting their own horror stories as sensory harm architypes for universal law of complaint against the companies facilitating, not preventing, some harm, such that they have to be responsible for the possibility of a statistical long tail event. Each side will take turn to use this to attack their opponents selectively. It is the use of risk duty of care, suing for damages that will be the mechanism since it is not legislating against actual harms but leaving it to the individual suing insurance compensation legal market. It could be described as the privatisation of law, but really the people suing and getting cash and regulators will constitute and entirely internal process lawyers making lots of money long incomprehensible cases, patronising TV interviews with the victims before turning to the professional lawyers as experts in the new ethics then. But his is really theatre as the victims are tools by both sides for greater silencing even though it looks like they are in a political struggle with each other representing their chosen victims, but really they are in tandem heading in the same direction, while everybody thinks its a real political struggler.
Thank you Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs and Winston Marshall.
1
-
1
-
1