Dematerialisation.

[luka]

i really, really want to help you two. i think you're both saveable. i can show you how this game is played but you have to switch off the reactive mind. slow your process down. take time to read and think through what is written, dont react! just try and work out what is being said and why. i reckon you could both be great discipl, i mean, great students and followe, i mean collaborators.

but you need to slow down.

 

[luka]

hell you know I would've been down for hallucinogens and weird cult orgies in a cave on a Greek hillside

I just don't buy into the mysteries themselves - I wanna know their exegesis

nothing but respect for your game tho, you know that

this is a good book

 

[thirdform]

eliade innit. supported the iron guards. the dangerous seduction with mysteries. cold rationality is the only thing the English got right. but then they restricted that to fucking empiricism, like the stenographs they are.

 

[luka]

whats eliade? honestly 3rd form, let me help you with a specific thing. you sweep things into categories and dismiss them on the basis of the category you have swept them into before thinking them through and working out what is unique and idiosyncratic about them. slow down. take it easy.

 

[thirdform]

Heidegger and his authetocratic conception of being. don't philosophise, just think.

 

[luka]

nobody knows how great a racing mind feels more than me. i love it, it's the best feeling, but sometimes we have to slow down.

 

[thirdform]

whats eliade? honestly 3rd form, let me help you with a specific thing. you sweep things into categories and dismiss them on the basis of the category you have swept them into before thinking them through and working out what is unique and idiosyncratic about them. slow down. take it easy.

He was a western orientalist (well, fascist) obsessed with myth and eternal return. I.E: we all try to recreate hierophany (manifestation of the sacred) through religious ritual.

It's romantic generalisation and undialectical. how can you recreate the sacred in islam when the sacred by its nature cannot be routinised. the prayers, ramadan are approaches (or tools) to become closer to the divine,the unity, or the ecstasy is qualitatively different. one can spend all ones life praying and still go to hell. this isn't wibbly christianity, this is far more revolutionary.

That is why just as Marx extracted the rational kernel out of Hegel's dialectic I extract Islam's conception of being from its ruled metaphysical obfuscation, that is being in unending motion that returns to itself (not as ritual but as motion) in order to understand the political project of emancipation. There is no messiah in the quran for redemption, and likewise for revolution: to say that a revolutionary situation exists but revolutionaries don't, is an utter fallacy. One cannot succumb to diochronism. the absolute must be thought but insofar as that absolute is never static. We film, we don't photograph.

 

[luka]

i know who eliade was. i just dont understand the attempt to have a conversation comprised solely of peoples names. i cant do it. i havent read the critique of pure reason. i havent read being and time. i havent read das kapital. i havent read the principles of mathematics. i havent read negative dialectics.

no one here has. im not against reading books or even against theory and concepts. but i cant have a conversation comprised solely so flinging names at each other like some kind of game of philosophical dodgeball.

 

[thirdform]

noone has read the cantos tho here either. yet you keep namedropping it.

 

[luka]

i follow some of these young kids on twitter that are always quoting from some super-heavy tome or other. big big difficult dense books. quote after quote. but none of them have anything to say. they dont make nothing up. dont have any ideas. dont notice anything. just names and books.

im only following them cos i want to recruit them to my cult but its been interesting to observe them and the heirarchies theyve constructed amongst themselves.

 

[thirdform]

this pointless obsession with usury, except we need a literature that speaks about modern interest as being something that has qualitatively transformed. Pure interest hardly exists anymore.

 

[luka]

it's partly to do with the internet making people go to greater and greater lengths to find soemthing to mark themselves out. you cant just listen to noise and 20th century avant garde classical any more. everyone does that. so you find something that is even more forbidding.

 

[luka]

and you end up with 20 year old kids pretending to be au fait with the entire history of western philosophy. i follow quite a few. i think they're intelligent. but i also think they are ridiculous. i will save them and give them positions in the organisation where they can put their undoubted talents to better use.

 

[thirdform]

not really if that was the case I'd be a moronic zizekian or a labour party hack. trust me, left communism is a one way ticket to having no friends, not even in the cool kids club.

 

[thirdform]

I'm more interested in theory of knowledge than philosophy. philosophy makes sense when you're rationalising religion to rule over others. Ibn Sina and even Ibn Rushd understood this. I want to make the theory of knowlege populist.

 

[luka]

but you know what i am trying to say. i didnt go to university. i tried to avoid going to school wherever possible. i come out in a rash when things get overly academic.

thats why if you say, for instance, i get such and such a feeling when i hear such and such a song, and i think the way it acheives that effect is as follows, and it makes me think of the following things,and i link it to these societal trends-

i like it. cos i can compare notes. and it's grounded in something real. but if you say im bang into ibn rushd and heidegger i cant take that anywhere. its a dead end.

ive said this before but conversation for me is a bouncy ball and the responsibility of each participant is to keep it bouncing. give people something they can work with. you can make it hard for them, thats fun, but give them chance to keep it going.

 

[luka]

nothing wrong with saying, im bang into ibn rushd you should check him out, here is the main idea i got from him and this is why its been so useful to me cos it allowed a,b,c and d to come into sudden focus... that's great too. cos then i can pick that frame up and look through it as well

 

[thirdform]

i wouldn't lump ibn rushd and Heidegger together. Rushd was extraordinarily progressive for the 13th century, almost proto-rationalist.

Heidegger's whole shtick was the lament against rationalist modernity.

 

[thirdform]

check the bits about double truth.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/ibnrushd/

 

[thirdform]

the trick then is to take this conception of the eternal prime mover, of Ghazali's idea that god's knowledge changes, of the existentialism of Mulla Sadra and see how they are shaped by history. One has to see the unity of opposites in their historical dynamic.

It wouldn't really make sense to be godless in the 13th century, for instance. yet it does today. why that has to be *dialectically* investigated, and a true dialectical investigation will also go against itself in illustrating the interconnections.