Hegel has reduced everything to propositional conceptual knowing. He has left out the perspectival participatory knowing, he has left out the anagoge, he’s given us only epistemic transcendence, he hasn’t given us existential ethical self-transcendence, personal transformation, and transformative experience that are necessary for returning to / making deeper contact with reality.
So I feel like there’s a Schopenhauer-like response here, which is something like… “development is the joke that the civilization plays on the individual”? That is, you might go about your life thinking there’s some deeper purpose to your life or some great spiritual growth on offer, but actually what really matters is a hundred thousand people all being gears in a giant machine to make slightly better semiconductors, which then serves as gears in another giant machine, and the whole thing is aware of this process of using material progress to advance material progress. One can view the scientific / capitalistic revolution eating the world as the narrowly propositional / materialistic forces competing against the balanced / spiritualistic forces and just actually delivering the goods in a much more obvious way.
Like, it’s a coincidence that this paulfchristiano post came out yesterday, but it somehow feels very relevant for thinking about material dialecticism.
My inner Vervaeke responds with “but you pay a terrible price for that!”, and he’s right; if you give up on individual development / experience, then the bottom falls out and you end up with Bostrom’s Disneyland with no children.
So I feel like there’s a Schopenhauer-like response here, which is something like… “development is the joke that the civilization plays on the individual”? That is, you might go about your life thinking there’s some deeper purpose to your life or some great spiritual growth on offer, but actually what really matters is a hundred thousand people all being gears in a giant machine to make slightly better semiconductors, which then serves as gears in another giant machine, and the whole thing is aware of this process of using material progress to advance material progress. One can view the scientific / capitalistic revolution eating the world as the narrowly propositional / materialistic forces competing against the balanced / spiritualistic forces and just actually delivering the goods in a much more obvious way.
Like, it’s a coincidence that this paulfchristiano post came out yesterday, but it somehow feels very relevant for thinking about material dialecticism.
My inner Vervaeke responds with “but you pay a terrible price for that!”, and he’s right; if you give up on individual development / experience, then the bottom falls out and you end up with Bostrom’s Disneyland with no children.