User:RD/9k/existential materialism (Q86)
Main entry
existential materialism
/ exmat -> one of the core methods of meta-Marxism.
the first and simplest summary I would give of exmat is "creating a Materialism which strictly begins at small scales rather than large scales, especially and particularly when talking about societies". another way to say that would be "model society through upreductionism".
that by itself doesn't guarantee a dialectical materialism, and suggests you may end up with something that represents slices of a larger process that apply during specific stretches of time. in my opinion that is still valid, for the same reasons that Newtonian physics can approximate the large-scale results of quantum physics. to have a complete model of physics you'd have to include how processes in reality at least as small as quarks interact with or produce time itself in order to stack up to larger-scale physics. but people often get by with models of physics that effectively tell you what happens the moment after quantum interactions happen and produce such things as atoms. so, I think there is a place for using seemingly 'static' models of social processes to teach what they each are before fully introducing antagonisms.
a second summary I might give is "creating a Materialism which respects the fact that individual objects or people can interact together to produce history without being directly connected to each other or directly influencing each other until they suddenly collide". this is the same as saying "apply relativistic determinism to all objects". concepts like the golden rule are erroneous in that they attribute more horizontal causality to interactions between objects than there really is, but in another sense, the basic concept of metallic rules is fine if you allow for the behaviors of individuals to be truly independent events most of the time and only influence each other sometimes.
existential materialism is a study of people that treats people somewhat like quarks or electrons, and states that individual people form material objects or processes as they interact socially, consisting of people arranged into larger objects or processes, and not consisting of "ideas" or "culture" or "narratives" — these are not material objects. said another way it is the study of sociophilosophies, or the "socio-politico-economy" process. so exmat is one of the most central frameworks of violet Marxism, which basically starts out by focusing much harder on small-scale human interactions than on a broader timeline of historical periods, but still ends up with a conception of what a historical period is anyway because they're always made out of people arranged into specific kinds of repeatable patterns.
you could presumably twist this framework toward bourgeois ends, but the staunch commitment to Materialism within existential materialism and judging the nature of everything by the actual consequences of people's actions rather than by their intentions makes that somewhat hard.
Existentialism and existential materialism
existentialism
/ early existentialism -> the "existential" or "ex" in "existential materialism" refers to the human individual, also known as "the subject". picking the specific word "existential" for this is basically in reference to existentialism, a cluster of philosophies which became popular and got their name at a particular time in Europe, which center around the concept that human agency and choices are the primary thing that construct the shape of human lives or existences. depending on what writer you're talking about and what other philosophies you group this with, it can become a horribly egocentric philosophy at times; the concept of "human purpose and meaning being decided by humans" can vulgarize very quickly into "my life revolves entirely around me because I am the center of the universe; this is why I decide what's correct and incorrect, and you can't tell me otherwise".
a thing that bothered me about existentialism is that people often advance it because they think it promotes "freedom", but in the grander scheme of things, freedom is a very morally-charged topic that to most people is considered almost unequivocally Good and the antithesis of things that are unequivocally Evil. morality, in general, is a very difficult topic where people argue a whole lot about whether things are actually Good or Evil, and whether certain ways of assigning the labels of Good or Evil are themselves Good or Evil. so, to even say a philosophy is about freedom is going to make it hugely polarizing and set up a situation where people are ferociously arguing about whether something really is or isn't Good or Evil, or is or isn't "freedom". so, you can begin to see exactly how when human beings are allowed to decide their own meaning, many people will quickly pick meanings other people think are Evil and call those forms of purpose and meaning "freedom", and then claim their actions other people find Evil cannot be questioned because you aren't supposed to question freedom. worse, some people will pick actions people think are Evil that actually harm nobody, and everyone will debate those actions every bit as heatedly as the things that do harm people. this will always happen because existentialism divides people into the purposes they pick for themselves, but offers no actual way to decide what meanings are good or bad besides different islands of purpose deciding they hate each other. people hating other groups of people becomes the way that particular forms of purpose and meaning are deemed Good, not just the way they are deemed Bad, and every single person must become blind to some forms of utter hatred in order to be aligned with Good; hatred becomes universally Good to people of all moral codes, and cannot be criticized without breaking open all of morality. so.... I decided to take the hard path, and actually break open all of morality so nobody has to hate each other.
Life revolves around you
/ All events that occur while a particular person exists occur within that person, as part of "life" / in life... (motif) / in our lives... (motif) / You are the main character of reality / (9k) -> this is the place existentialism generally starts, that at a certain point I simply could not agree with. I don't think reality has a main character. I don't think the planet has a main character like Goku is in Dragon Ball, or that any country has a main character, or that any city has a main character. the concept that we live in a thing called "Life" is just wrong. we live in reality. we live in cities and towns. we live in ecosystems or biomes. and all of them are made of a bunch of objects all running into each other at once. your biography is not the story of the world, so the story of the world is not "Life". it can't be. if you live in Canada or Australia there are a bunch of people just existing in South Korea who have no idea you exist. those people are not covered by the concept of "Life". but they're still real.
some people have tried to plug this gap by coming up with secular animism and insisting that everyone is connected by one long hotel hallway of interacting subjective perceptions and that we live in "Lives". but that's also wrong, because there are always genuinely clusters of living things that have never interacted with you and have never heard of you. to that group of toads on the other side of the world you might as well be a rock. there is a particular transition where when two living things are far enough apart from each other that they could not possibly have any direct influence they more or less become inanimate from each other's vantage point. not because they hate each other, but because they can only leave inanimate trails for each other to find. this inherently disrupts "golden rule"-like constructions because they all require a chain of people continuing in the middle and at that old dusty trail the chain is broken.
- existentialism -> so, existential materialism begins with the statement that "an existence" or "a life" is the same thing as an Animal; an individual human is conceptually similar to an individual cat. from there, you just begin to take any statement about individual humans that doesn't apply to individual cats or individual dogs and hard doubt it. of course, species are not identical to each other, so it's not as if every one of these statements will apply in exactly the same way. but it's a very good rule of thumb. does your cat do what is considerate just because "it should"? or does it only do the things you want under specific conditions? assume that this general observation is the same for humans.
Kantianism and existential materialism
- There is no correct verdict on anarchism / When a charcoal anarchist believes that attacking a retail store is morally Right and all the non-anarchists in the area believe that there is a universal thing called "stealing" and persecuting anyone who attacks a property and is not named Leon Trotsky is morally Right, there is no "reasonable" answer to what is morally correct, and the Kantian conception of moral truth values has failed
- Ethics is morality again / Ethics is merely morality all over again, this time seen from an eclectic-materialist perspective where it is believed that morality itself can become objective, as opposed to always being a fundamentally subjective topic of argument where a much deeper break from the inside of a system to the outside is required to actually comprehend ethics in a way that is truly descriptive and truly compatible with Materialism
- One man's crime is another man's law / Actions described by a particular legal system as "crimes" are often in fact the law enforcement actions of another population's legal system or the informal equivalent of one -> often not accurately understood by Stalin's Marxism, Trotskyism, Liberal-republicanism, or anarchism. one of those things you truly need meta-Marxism to accurately characterize.
Societal building blocks
Relationships are not ideas
/ A relationship is not an idea / A relationship between two individuals is not an idea, it is a material process composed of two objects in motion that we call "individual people" -> think about it. if either of two people in a social connection try to reduce a relationship to an idea in their mind, they negate the other person's ideas about the relationship. so as long as "idea" and "Ideal" refer to the same thing, an idea simply cannot summarize a relationship within the real world at all. if "idea" instead refers to a hypothetical model of a physical thing, the results may be different.
Studying ethics ethologically
reverse ethics
/ converse ethics / reverse deontology -> the motif of doing materialist inversion on ethical statements so that instead of them going 1) I believe that everybody 2) people do things, the process goes 1) people do things 2) we judge them as good or bad. or some distinctly ethics-sounding content on step 2 anyway
the phrase "reverse deontology" came up in a context where I was trying to imagine a version of my username 'reverseDragon' in a world where the characters were 'already' dragons, so the "D" had to be something else. R.D., reverseDeontology.
sounds a little like a homestuck username to be honestexistential-materialist metallic rule
/ new metallic rule (existential materialism) / atomic table of behavioral rules / (9k)
Class monism
Class is a single substrate
/ The substance dualism advanced by early Marxism is not fully accurate because its dual substances, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, operate under substance monism internally / Social darwinism and class society are a monistic process / (9k)- Liberal-republicanism starts as a non-hierarchical one-class society and separates over time / Existentialism begins as a non-hierarchical society with one class and separates into two classes over time -> I am so close to logically proving that, on account of stationary combinations of heterogeneous elements and molecularization, capitalism is anarchic regardless of how anarchists want to define "anarchy", and there is no meaningful distinction that makes anhierarchy part of a strictly different category of things than anarchy
Related
dialectical materialism
/ diamathistorical materialism
(specific-sense) / histmatargument for general-sense historical materialism
/ (9k)
Ideologies or fields
- (none)