12.5.2022
[Pharresia] focuses on Philosophy, Culture, Tech, Theology, and more. The content stems from original pieces, curated links, and the occasional podcast.
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Newsletter. The previous Newsletter can be found below, as well as some of the things I’ve been reading lately:
Notes
Over the past few weeks, I had been “flirting” with Catholicism, diving into its theological and philosophical arguments to determine its validity. I must confess, I highly respect and almost considered initiating a conversion process to Catholicism as I think that they are the most “intellectual” of “denominations” (if you can even say that of Catholicism since everything is downstream from it).
I realized after looking at all the arguments and reflecting on my faith that I could not in good faith, convert. The primary reason is that, although I value many of the arguments and justifications for their beliefs, I could not allow myself the position to affirm the world view as neccesairily true. At best, I can only affirm a likelihood of its truthness, but not absolutely.
I started reading Spinoza again and I felt a connection to the Atheist writer that rekindled my Atheistic Christianity that i’ve been working on for some time now.
Neoplatonism and Urbit
I wanted to give some brief comments on Urbits culture and aesthetic. I find that one of the main reasons that Urbit appeals to Christians, An-Caps and Moderate Libertarians is that Urbit is an Idealists computer.
Urbit is deeply rooted in an orientation of the Platonic Good. This orientation is not only a self asserted good in ones self i.e eudemonia or flourishing, but the communal good. The good of the one neccesitates the good of the community, and the goodness of the particular tool or object neccesitates the good in the user or craftsman.
Urbit essentially, is a Neoplatic computational tool. As its primary mantra is computation for the soul, always advocating that it’s what the personal computer was always intended to be. Although many of the users affirm a Libertarian Politics, or a crypto-narchism. I find that this is mostly in regards to sovereignty, and protocol. This is primarily due to the emphasis crypto has in regards to self-sovereignty and individuation in regards to property: Data ownership.
The monkey wrench is that the holism that keeps these disparate groups and political diversity integrated is their appreciation in “the Good”, in this case the digital good, which has a strict telos. Urbits Telos is technologically oriented at reaching 0 kelvin (or as close as it can get to this when it comes to stable code patches) but outside of just this technical “solidification” we have a socio-cultural and philosophical orientation towards the “Form” of the computer, the idealized Computer. This is the pipedream of Urbit and what ultimately still fascinates me about Urbit.
Urbit has a distinct aesthetic despite its superficial anrchic vibe, this is a direct consequence of its Telos which echoes the work of Simone Weil.
Bringing about the necessity of Platonism via Materialism.
Kanye and Performance, and Devaluation
On Absolute Liberalism
I was hesitant writing about this because I was unsure if this was truly worth going over. There are others who have spoken regarding Kanyes recent outbursts on platforms like “Info Wars”. Most of the commentary out there is either following the narrative that Kanye is Manic and just falling under the weight of his own self destructive tendencies, or that Kanye is a misunderstood genius, one of the horsemen of free speech and liberty. As you can imagine these positions exist as well as everything in between, but the way that I’ve been conceptualizing this event is under the model of what I call Absolute Liberalism.
When Fracis Fukuyama stated that History had ended, it was because of the collapse of a primary antagonist to Liberal-Capitalist Democratic forms of Governance. Because of this, the Liberal subject became the default mode of subjectivity. What this means is that under the framework of Liberal-Democracies we have the Transcendental Narcicist. A subject that can not recognize any other subjects, One that confuses contingency with necessity, one that confuses happerstance with Will.
This was no more obvious than the 2016 election, in which Trump came to be president of “the free world”. What Kanyes outbursts show, is not a radical revival of Antisemtism, or a manic individual with too much power and cultural clout spewing non-sense, nor does it exemplify the trangressive performance of the archetypal Fool or Artist, it exemplifies all of these and non of them.
Absolute Liberalism presupposes absolute Idealism. The subject is not defined or structure a priori but always transcendentally contingent. All the positions and possibilities are already subsumed within the codified nodes of the capitalist system, already integrated to be deployed to process an explicatum, I.e there is always a way to define or explain who, what, where, when and why something is occurring. From the left and the right there is a way to explain Kanye in a way that serves their contingent worldview, from a Marxian analyses we can explicate the decadence within a material analysis, one that can even incorporate the work of Baudrillard Simulation and Simulacra.
The truth is, that none of these systems exhaust that which appears to be Absolute, in this case the Transcendental Horizon of Liberalism.
~Links~
“But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it.” - Rene Girard
I would also like to send a special thank you to my Patrons:
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My Patreon is connected to the podcast I co-host with @YAgamben.
We recently opened up a Patreon to help support the expenses to keep some of these operations running, including hosting and things of that nature.
We strictly want to follow a “buy me a cup of coffee” model, so any “donation” is welcome. If you want to support any of our work, consider becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/Decodecast.
-C.N.