Messages

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: September 19, 2023, 08:00:17 AM »

Today I am also reading this long form essay by Doc Burford on writing. It includes a great quote by Terry Pratchett.https://docseuss.medium.com/refuting-the-bullet-so-you-wanna-write-an-interesting-story-but-dont-know-where-to-begin-c67003cce233

>

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
 

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
 

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
 

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book — I think I’ve done twenty in the series — since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
 

P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire — Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it — Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now — a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections — That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
 

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
 

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: What is politics?

« on: September 19, 2023, 04:44:27 AM »

These look interesting too. Thanks for sharing!

EDIT: I am soliciting some comments from my old professor, who is a Patocka scholar. We shall see what she has to say. ;-)

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: What is politics?

« on: September 17, 2023, 10:57:52 AM »

...inquiry cannot stand on its own as a political method, because we can't derive certain basic principles except by reference to axioms: I think that hurting people is bad, that people should have a lot of freedom to choose their path in life, and that all human life has value. I don't really think those things by reference to rational argument, they're my underlying beliefs. In a sense, that's my mythological/affirmation-centric mode of thought, and I think we need to be aware of that mode to think well about politics because we need to understand how those affirmations are underpinning the logical workings that sit on top of them. I agree entirely with you that the larger current problem is one more about affirmation taking over more and more of the political space without room for inquiry, but neither way round is ideal.

Oh that is very juicy and just the kind of thing I was hoping to learn / think more about. I'd definitely love it if you could revisit this subject more for us in a post I want to initiate on the origins of progressive vs. conservative politics. I've written it up already, but I want to refine it a little more before posting.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: What is politics?

« on: September 17, 2023, 10:54:15 AM »

So I think with my historian's hat on, I instictively question Patočka on factual grounds: that is, I think that the delineation between mythological-theocratic and rational-political society is probably not something one can justify, both in that societies like ancient Egypt were a lot more 'political' than one might imagine, and societies like ancient Greece perhaps rather less so. Even in a society like ancient Egypt, pharaonic authority was probably sacral only in certain defined ways and spaces, and there was a political elite perfectly capable of questioning the basis on which things were done. Take for example Akhenaten's famous flirtation with a more solar-monotheistic religion - effecting those changes required at least the temporary acquiescence of a social elite around him, and just as importantly for our discussion here a major re-evaluation of answers to questions about the proper sacral role of the political community.

This is quite fascinating! Thank you for sharing. Patočka is very much coming at this from a perspective similar to Husserl's in his Crisis, which sees the heritage of Europe as having a special significance for the world. Can this kind of claim still be sustained in light of historical research conducted since? From what you are saying it does look tricky. I'd be quite interested in learning more about Akhenaten! Could you recommend any reading?

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Weird Internet Communities

« on: September 17, 2023, 10:44:04 AM »

Interesting thread. Behind the Bastards did an SBF update recently, which was my onboarding for Effective Altruism.
 
I don't find it very surprising that there is a connection there with Utilitarian thinking, through his parents. While I do think we owe some debt to consequentialist arguments for the improvement of social equality, I'm very suspicious of the attempts this tradition makes at 'solving' morality like a mathematical equation. We cannot help but fall into all kinds of absurd paradoxes once we seek to ground morality in outcomes alone.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Burke's Political Meta Thread

« on: September 17, 2023, 08:42:11 AM »

I've been getting more interested in thinking about politics recently. I've always maintained a strong interest, but the developments of recent years have pushed me to seek a better understanding the grounds of my beliefs, and of the beliefs of others.

With that in mind, I thought I could start up a meta thread, which will be used to link to other discussion threads on particular topics. I will update this initial post with links to those other threads. I'd like to request that this thread is used only for meta level discussions about what kinds of topics you would like to have linked back to here.
 
================POLITICAL SUBJECTS======================

What is politics?

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / What is politics?

« on: September 17, 2023, 08:23:40 AM »

What it says on the tin. What is politics? How are we to understand this element of human life? How can we define it? What are its extensions? Let me start with some thoughts of my own here. A basic definition of politics is very broad. If we head on over to Wikipedia, we get this definition:
 

Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

Following this definition, human societies are, we might say, inherently political. This is because all societies have some form of power relations, and all societies have some manner by which decisions are reached, which is reflective of those power relations. From here we get the refrain: "Everything is political." Which means, everything we do can be connected in some way to the structures of power that exist between people, and the decisions that we make on the basis of those structures, or about those structures.

Going forward, I will refer to this definition as the basic definition. It appears to say something meaningful, but it is also very broad. Here I will make one important claim: as with many broad definitions, I think this basic definition can actually work to obscure other alternative, more specific definitions of politics and the political. The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907-1977) has once such interesting alternative definition that I want to explore here. It concerns the connection between politics, myth, and philosophy. In his book Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Patočka argues that politics and philosophy have a unitary beginning. He understands both as arising out of a shaking of accepted meaning. What he means is something like this: It is only once we start to question our myths, and with it the established social order, that we become aware that we do not truly know. What does this mean?
 
For Patočka, in the mythological world, answers always come before the questions. You can certainly ask a question. But it is a question posed to an established understanding. You can imagine an Ancient Egyptian or Archaic Greek child asking their parents why it rains, or what thunder is. There is an answer that can readily be given to such questions. In such a world, we certainly still have politics in the broad sense. Wherever there is a society, there is power, after all. But we do not have an awareness of the political dimension of human life as something distinct from our mythological framework. To extend on his point using my own language, the Emperor of Ancient China or the Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt was an intermediary between the powers of gods or heaven and the world of everyday human affairs. They were not rulers in the modern day sense. They were responsible for upholding order, or lawfulness, that is imbued with a kind of cosmological significance. For example, the Nile River needs to flood regularly, so that the surrounding land receives the rich silt that benefits agriculture. The Pharaoh was responsible for helping this to occur through ritual. Meanwhile, in China, too such flooding might become the thing that needs to be prevented, and the Emperor had his part to play here through performing the correct rituals. A mythological people are therefore at home in the world. That is to say, the world makes sense for them, through their myths.
 
But in Ancient Greece, we see a kind of rupture with this mythological understanding, where a new space opens up. A space where questions can come before the answers. Patočka thinks of politics and philosophy as having a unitary beginning, because in the sense that he understands them, both activities are really only possible once this rupture has occurred. A space must first exist, within which questions can genuinely be asked, a space that refuses to be covered over once more by any new answer, that might assume the stature of myth, or absolute authority. This space is characterized by the mode of wonder. Hence we have the figure of Socrates in the Theaetetus speak of wisdom beginning in wonder (thaumazein). Patočka understands such wonder as a "wonder in the face of the world", a wonder about the fact that there even is a world to begin with, and a wonder about our own position in relation to it, a position defined by fundamental ignorance. Let's put it another way: Only once we realize that we simply do not know, can we start to ask genuine questions. The questions we ask about the nature of things includes the nature of human affairs. What is justice? What is morality? What laws ought we to have? And why? No certain answer is available that everybody agrees upon, or that is sanctioned by an absolute central authority. Rather, different people offer different answers, and they attempt to justify those answers by giving reasons.
 
To boil this down a bit: Patočka offers us a way of understanding the difference between "activities associated with making decisions" (the basic definition of politics), and people actually gathering together and having arguments about such decisions. The former definition is so broad that it can encompass the actions of an ancient Theocratic Empire, as well as modern party politics. But the latter definition is focused specifically on the emergence of this awareness that we now have, that we ourselves can (and must) decide how we ought to live. This understanding of politics, for Patočka at least, first appears for a time in Ancient Greece.
 
Some closing thoughts: I really appreciate how this narrow definition cannot be easily subsumed under some other specific (theoretical) interpretation of human beings as having a certain nature. We have a bunch of such interpretations that have emerged in modern times, and they have their associated interpretations of politics. For example, maybe we think of human society as a kind of organism, and politics as a process of mediation with the 'surrounding environment' (like classical pragmatism). Or maybe we think of human beings as 'inherently selfish', and therefore much of politics (understood as the mere organization of the social body) ought to be left up to the invisible hand of the market. Etc. In an age of scientism, naturalism, and (dare I say it) very partisan politics, we need to continually reinvigorate this "space for genuine questions." I also appreciate the connection this definition has to collective responsibility in the so-called modern age. We are the kind of being that does not know. We might think this, or that. But ultimately, in the domain of politics, as with philosophy, all we have are our arguments. This situation calls on us to be responsible for ourselves and our beliefs. We can abrogate our responsibility, and refuse to engage with politics. We can try to retreat from it into modern myths, or unthinking tribalism, but that responsibility is there, nonetheless.

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: September 17, 2023, 07:01:20 AM »

That sounds fascinating!

I am reading Fool's Fate, Book Three of the Tawny Many trilogy. I finished book two a couple of weeks ago, and marched right on to book three. I've decided to then push ahead with the rest of her books that are set in the same world (The Realm of the Elderlings).  So, 4 Rain Wild Chronicles books, and then the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy. Reviews are a little mixed on the Rain Wild Chronicles, but the agreement is they deliver a lot of background world lore that is really important for Fitz and the Fool, which is very highly regarded. It seems that the very final book in this 14(!!) book series is extremely highly regarded (4.65 on good reads!), so that is what pushed me to accept the time commitment needed to get there. I'm really enjoying Hobb's writing. Particularly the character of Fitz. I would need to think on it a bit and write some reviews in the future.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI

« on: September 04, 2023, 05:23:38 AM »

An old essay from 1964 that has some continuing relevance here.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.

 
The focus of course is political, but I think this kind of underlying paranoia within U.S. culture is deeply interwoven with the rise of the UFO mythos, which is also originally a U.S. phenomenon.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Elemental Survivors [Launching Early Access August 25]

« on: August 26, 2023, 02:32:50 AM »

Welcome to Exilian!

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: August 25, 2023, 03:31:46 AM »

Curiously enough, Ursula Le Guins 'The Dispossessed' is sitting on my desk right next to me, in my queue of books to read or re-read.

Enjoy!

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: August 25, 2023, 03:31:20 AM »

I read The Third Man And Other Stories, a book of short stories by Graham Greene: I'd never read or seen The Third Man despite it being one of the most famous works relating to the city I live in, so I thought I'd give it a go. And it's fine! It's a pretty good little murder story set in a grim part of post-war Viennese history, the core concept is clever and it's well executed. I don't think it's going to make a long term major impression on my brain by I'm glad I read it.

I was not even aware that it was a book! I should have guessed. Truly an excellent film though.

I've never read The Dispossessed, but really should do, I love le Guin though I should read more of her work. Also never read the Wheel of Time, though it is famously long and I don't know when my personal Wheel of Time will revolve to a point where I have that sort of space...

I can only recommend it in the strongest terms. Alongside The Left Hand of Darkness.

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: August 23, 2023, 04:22:58 PM »

I had always been aware of the series but never actually got around to reading it. I watched the first season of the show and thought it was so appalling, I had to read the book to see if it was yet another example of dreadful book to screen conversion (it is). I actually deeply enjoy the books and the themes and ideas that they explore.

Yeah there sure were a lot of misteps with the writing and editing. It can't all be blamed on covid and losing the actor for Mat at the end. Still, I think part of it was possibly amazon exec interference, and not giving them 10 episodes. I'm not going to write Rafe Judkins and his team of just yet. Let's see if they learnt their lessons for season 2. I'm cautiously optimistic it will hit more at a 7/10 for me, while season 1 was a weak 6/10 overall.

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: August 23, 2023, 01:28:28 PM »

I am currently about 3/5 of the way through The Shadow Rising in the wheel of time series, which I am still greatly enjoying. I do occasionally have to crosscheck names as it's getting to the stage where there are A Lot of characters to follow, as is common for this way of telling a fantasy story. But overall I find a lot of the themes very interesting.

Oh neat! Was the new show on Prime what got you into reading it? Or was it always on your list to try?

I've sometimes thought of revisiting the series one day. But I feel there's so much else out there I should be reading as well.

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Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Re: What are you reading?

« on: August 23, 2023, 01:08:18 PM »

I just finished The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I think this might be my favorite of hers. It is hard. They are all so good in different ways. But this is a veritable masterpiece. Her depiction of Anarres is very grounded. We get so many dystopias in contemporary fiction that I think part of me was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this anarchist utopia to have some fatal flaw. But rather it was just human. Believable. Nuanced. The way she describes it you can grow attached to it, and even almost nostalgic for this place that does not and has never even existed. But just might, one day. That's really something.

I am currently reading Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb. I once read the Assassin's trilogy,  as well as the Live Ship trilogy, way back when they came out a few decades ago. It's been enjoyable to return to this world and Hobb's style of writing. Given the pressure in the industry is now to have a first sentence that grabs the reader, and a first page that grabs the reader, and a first chapter that grabs the reader, and so on, Hobb's style is refreshing in how measured it is in pace. Just as an example... The first 200 pages of this book is just the main character (15 years after the events of the Assassins's trilogy) living in a hut with an adopted kid, with various people from his past life coming to visit. We have pages upon pages of descriptions of meals, drinking, talking, arguing, gardening, hunting, etc. After 50 pages I thought, surely, we would start to get moving soon. Then 100. At 150 pages I was starting to chuckle. At 200 pages I thought I'd be OK if that was just the whole book, as it was fairly enjoyable. But we finally got moving.

Otherwise, my bedside stack is currently...

• The Joyful Science. I do not like the first half at all. Nietzsche picks up in the second half when the works gains some focus (bit of a prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
• An old biography / overview of Confucius.
• Complete Works of Plato. I needed to re-read the Symposium for a class I'm tutoring this semester, and it got me itching to revisit Plato's dialogues. I've long had the complete works and I thought I might start a habit of reading a little each day. Still been putting it off in favor of SFF. Hah.
• Children of Dune - I am struggling to pick this back up. I enjoyed Dune I. But Dune II was much harder for me to appreciate. It wants to be a work of literary fiction. To explore complex themes and not just tell some entertaining story. But I'm not sure that the themes Herbert is interested in are fully coherent, or ultimately that worthwhile. I am not sure.
• Magic in the Middle Ages - Kieckhefer. I've started this one to help me come to grips more with magic in Innkeep's world. I've put it down but want to get back into it.