Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-ThesesOnFeuerbach

Main entries

618. 618Theses on Feuerbach [1] -> very short text from Marx which is literally just a proposition list.
     funny how when after I've been making a big proposition list, I look at a proposition list now and it's like, "same hat!"
618. 618Essence of Christianity

Motifs or claims

618. 618human activity as thing / human activity as object / Hyper-Materialism (meta-Marxism; generic)
618. 618Feuerbach does not conceptualize human activity as "thing"

Motifs or claims (Feuerbach)

618. 618In eating, man declares Nature to be insignificant (Feuerbach) / Asking for the universe to provide or do amazing things is wholly unreasonable, because to eat nature is to hardly understand it; in eating, man declares Nature to be an insignificant object -> what. this is insane. this text is the most alien thing to read because the sentences are not hard to parse but on each sentence I am struggling to understand how any of it actually makes any sense.
618. 618When man tries to explain nature it is the bigoted extinction of nature (Feuerbach) -> I swear I have seen this proposition in Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Pokémon. it's bothered me every time for reasons I couldn't explain, because I couldn't clearly say what the wrong proposition actually was.
618. 618The shape of an origin myth reflects the existing opinion of a thing, rather than the shape of the proposed origin creating opinions -> so Trotsky is credited with compiling the correct version of Leninism because people think highly of him, not necessarily because an actual event of him compiling the one correct version of Leninism created that opinion. got it.
618. 618The shape of an origin myth reflects the existing opinion of a thing, rather than the shape of the proposed origin creating opinions -> what this is really saying about religion and Materialism is.... hard to figure out. it's like, everything except you has an inherent right to exist and be respected without being understood but you have no right to understand it? I have no capacity to understand how that's not utterly terrifying. the kind of thing that actually fills you with fear to the point of just about being a cognitohazard. the thing is, if a bunch of things or people just exist, and they can do whatever they want, you have no guarantee they don't want to hurt you or kill you. you can't just say "well it won't be that bad" — if they can do whatever they want, they can do whatever they want. this world is terrifying. the universe is full of car crashes, plagues, volcanoes, -100° winters, lead, uranium, carbon monoxide, supernovas, and planets containing constant storms of glass, as well as rapists, murderers, atomic bombs, and black holes. it's not like things that could kill you won't kill you. most of the things that can kill you aren't even animate, so it's not like they can decide not to. and you want to put people and cultures into the same category as raging glass storms? how do you think that would help anyone get along? a raging glass storm is scary. you don't want to be anywhere near it. and that's because you can't control it. that's because, for an ordinary person, understanding it is no help in diverting it or surviving it. if people start to feel like other people can't be made any less dangerous than they are currently, how does that not lead to prejudice and avoidance?
618. 618Polytheism and monotheism come from the core principles that manufacture countable cultures; polytheism comes from open-minded core values while monotheism comes from core values of selfishness -> there is definitely some thought going on here, but I don't think it's correct. when I look at ancient Greece that isn't what I see. I see Greece as a huge empire that absorbed several separate city-states or small kingdoms (? I don't know the whole history of Greece, but I know its development approximately paralleled Egypt on a smaller scale), and "the Jews" as a very small society that is scarcely a very large tribe. a tiny society in conflict with everything else doesn't really have room to absorb a bunch of other gods or principles versus primarily think about itself. that's just what you expect it to do. this whole "analysis" feels uncomfortably similar to First World countries suddenly deciding other countries are inferior for not having the same ideas basically for reasons of size or shape or age, for instance because North Korea is smaller than the United States and barely got through its very earliest stagest of development before being attacked, and so countries need to be Kantianized. I have to wonder if all the suffering in South Korea is because it's a small country being held to the standards of way bigger countries containing more subpopulations like the United States. it's a terrible irony that Idealism aims to supposedly commit less abuse on the external world by not analyzing it, but in trying to apply arbitrary ideas to material things can end up horribly abusing them anyway.

Subjective themes

618. 618Why is Feuerbach so anarchist? [2] -> I swear the opening paragraphs of this chapter sound almost exactly like the stuff anarchists say. I'm going to guess that Idealism is the answer, and that likewise, the reason that both Pokémon and anarchism remind me of this text is that they're both Idealist.
618. Why do we do anything? / If aesthetic appreciation is inherently better than taking action to survive or accomplish goals, why do we do anything rather than avoiding existence? -> this is either a silly question you'll laugh at or one of the scariest cognitohazards you'll ever come into contact with that. uh. could maybe lead to actual suicides (pronounced redacted).

Ideologies or fields

• ML / early Marxism
• ML / Marx