I join J.G. Michael of Parallax Views for an Interview on Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics. We discuss Dugin's core ideas in the light of Russian invasion of Ukraine, aggressive Russian messianic politics, the role of space in Dugin's geopolitical eschatology as constant in Russian history of foreign conquest, the notion of Russian universalism, Martin Heidegger and much more.
In this podcast we address the problem of "maps of meaning" as an inadequate and dangerous attempt to "make sense" of the world mediated through flow of information. The subject is nothing new for KT, yet Russians were kind enough to provide us with some original examples and incentives to revisit some problems we already discussed at length, such as: limits of human intellectuality, inadequacy of "meaning" as the substitute for "purpose/end", incomprehensibility of evil, nuances of the blanked term "West" that get lost to most Westerners, Russian information offensive, how one evil doesn't justify other evil, etc.
In today's KT podcast we address a number of issues related to the deeper significance of the shift in mentality produced by the advent of Internet. We point out the peculiar instability of political and religious convictions people acquire online and try to offer some guidelines to understanding whence this quality of fleeting unreality that nevertheless informs lives of the real people to an increasing extent. For this purpose we once again throw an analytic glance of the ultimate metaphysical subversive - system thinking and its ability to represent the unreal as real.
Listen to Pt.1 , Listen to Pt.3
In the second episode of our series on Hegel as an exemplar of the modern metaphysics, we go with some depth into main points of this metaphysics – the notion of encyclopedia, absolute knowledge and, above all, his attempt to abolish “the given” in identifying essence and appearance. We proceed to point out his relative convergence with Jacob Boehme in an idea of nature as the “body of God” and why this naturally follows from Hegel’s Science of Logic and why it is, rather than being an instance of Christian metaphysics, in reality its almost total inversion, ending up with the notion of absolute knowledge as absolutely secular “wisdom of the world”. Throughout we give remarks on Hegel’s influence and his congeniality with those who were apparent opponents. In the third episode this congeniality in disparity will be the focus of the discussion.
"No more great art, no more great figures of art. No more, even, great interest in art. But, above all, no more great writers especially of 'greater than life' variety". This is the lamentation that begs the question, why. In this podcast we'll attempt to indicate why in our day some of the most valued and comprehensible spiritual forms vanished, seemingly, overnight, focusing on the figure of great writer as an exemplar. We propose that dialectical character of modernity, consisting of permanent flux and an attempt to retain stable forms of the flux, eventually dissolves everything formed by modernity into nothing.
In this episode we talk about objections to Stoicism and "Stoic attitude" in our own day. We discuss two seemingly different, but in fact quite congenial, attacks, i.e. about APA's document Guidlines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men" and the survey "Stoicism and Well Being". In the process we discuss fruit of contemporary "dissolution mentality", clearly expressed in the first document and lay out the origin and nature of the pleasure principle which is at the base of the critique laid out in the second one. Finally, we discuss Christian evaluation of Stoicism.
Metaphysics is due to be resurrected! Or zombified? In this podcast we compare the Traditional understanding of Being with its inverted counterpart, we might, for the lack of the better term, call infraphysics, exemplified by its contemporary philosophical proponents. We proceed from somewhat simple framing of Traditional understanding of knowledge as a three phase process of Being-Logos/Intentio-name to its exemplary inversion in materialism and Kant's transcendental philosophy, ending up with fruits of modern inversion of metaphysics in contemporary "object oriented ontology".
We touch upon Rene Guenon's analysis of the main discrepancy of materialism and how this analysis is being reiterated by some contemporary thinkers bound to reach beyond and below the materialism; we expound on transformation of thinking into computation and the centrality of self referential systems for subphysics; also we explain why we will soon see the drive to liberate inanimate things and individual bodily organs from human tyranny and throw in some insights on various contemporary issues along the way.
It is often said that dignity of person is in itself the greatest moral "given"; that person is "a purpose unto itself" (Kant); that it is inviolable "given" of humanity. And so on and so forth, from the popular moralizing to the real basis of legislature, this perpetually used, yet rarely pondered upon notion strikes us as something that should be the most comprehensible and closest thing to our minds, but, on closer inspection, it is hard to be sure where it really stems from and how we came to understand it as a self evident "given". In this two parts essay we'll inquire about the origin of this "given" in the singular event in history when, quite literary, the "given" was handed to us, while employing help of our regular assortment of traditional authorities. In the first part we treat metaphysics that can prepare the mind for the approach to the heart of the matter, beyond the subject/object split, but that can nevertheless take us only one part of the way. Also we juxtapose the traditional understanding of the relationship of intellect and being against Immanuel Kant's idea of "transcendental philosophy", which could be understood as an epitome of all attacks on metaphysics, by metaphysics, in modernity.
We have often pointed out the peculiar quality of the present day: praise of the modern ideals of humanist values, economical growth - sustainable or otherwise - human rights and scientific achievement are repeated ad nauseam, yet there's a strange atmosphere of vacuity about them that for the most people's sentiments was not as obvious in the final decades of 20th Century.
We posit that reason for this may just be that those ideals do not exist any more in any meaningful way.
