165 karma · joined May 30, 2020
The nuance that capitalist businesses do not hold an exclusive interest now or historical pioneering of labor exploitation is valuable to keep in mind because no matter how far the project of labor power spreads, all we workers must keep in mind that we have a primary and vested in empowering the most diminished of our society.
I am skeptical of an arrangement where those incentives are at odds with care for critical infrastructure like our political process.
That being said, the current arrangement makes it vastly more profitable to destabilize the economy and sell short than stabilize it and buy long, which is clearly unacceptable to me.
On a personal note, I want to say that I drifted to continental philosophy in my undergrad after studying and appreciating formal logic. I realized that mainstream analytical philosophy had a lot less to do with logic than I had imagined (no symbolization, no commonly agreed upon rules of deduction), and at a certain point the question of "why logic" presented itself. I haven't found many opportunities in my writing to use the more technical concepts of modality or nth-orders, let alone anything from category theory.
e: Replaced induction with deduction, a typo
Is it better for people who are trying to break into the housing market now? No. Is it better for people who are trying to sell and move out in a low-demand area? Probably not, except it might speed up the process.
Anyways, MH says 'so if we should reserve that term "ontology" for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (page 12 of the German edition). Wouldn't the meaning of being, as one of those theoretical entities, be an ontological question? Ontic being, on the other hand, would be ontic man, or the subject of the sciences? It could also be presence in the Derridean sense, but that is not really meaningful in the ontic register, since negation necessitates a Being...
I am not really a Heidegger guy so I would love some insight here.
The way it reckons with your question, is that these points of tension, even when they are not fully resolved, allow us to come to a place of improved understanding about the systematic and historical functionality of the language and culture that produced them. This is really nothing new: we do not need to come to the same conclusion about any other subject, anthropological, historical, even hard-scientific, to deploy our provisional understanding. A concrete example of this is talking about moral reasoning- considering similarly non-philosophical work by Levinas, I have come to the conclusion that many of the ethical dilemmas I struggle with in my health care work are not neatly decidable, and are frequently more a question of how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice for my clients... or how much I can hold back for myself in good conscience, rather than a logically and arithmetically guaranteed minimum or maximum fair ratio. This is why deconstruction + pragmatism is such an interesting subject for people like Brandom and Rorty, I imagine.
I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).
You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.
I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.