lol, it looks like I should have finished reading the sentence I’m responding to, before starting to write a comment, since you’re making a similar point, re legibility.
I’m still interested in who you think is making progress though, even if illegibly to most people.
Re politics, people like Yarvin and Land have been pushing the frontier pretty illegibly. Scott Alexander too. And Vassar is a central example I was thinking about. For others who are a bit less well-known see my curriculum—I like N. S. Lyons, Nathan Cofnas, Ben Landau-Taylor, etc.
Re emotional processing, I don’t have a great sense of the history here. But I feel like there’s been gradual development of stuff like internal family systems, ideal parent figure therapy, circling, jhana meditations, and various kinds of body work over the last few decades. Stuff like The Body Keeps the Score (though I haven’t read that specifically) and Existential Kink have been popularized more recently. Unlocking the Emotional Brain was 2012. I don’t want to hang my hat on any of these in particular, since it’s hard for me to concisely convey my models for when and how each of them is useful. But hopefully that conveys a rough sense of the kinds of things that seem plausibly like progress.
seems like a good place to ask something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while: how familiar are you with the lineage that influenced Land? How much Deleuze, Spinoza, Frankfurt School, Lacan, Foucault, Gramsci, Agamben, Latour, Hegel, Negri, Heidegger, etc have you read?
I like some things about your thinking but often you state things as revelatory, or in this case appeal to pushing the frontier, in a way that makes it seem like you might not have spent much time with the influences of some of the thinkers who influence you. This isn’t a huge deal; attribution is really hard! But at present when you imply originality (or something weaker) in a particular thinker or idea, I tend to heavily down-weight that implication.
To be clear: I’m not intending to be at all censorious or credentialist, and I’m not endorsing any of these thinkers in particular. I’m concerned about things like:
I’m missing something (because whatever point you made didn’t strike me as profound, while it clearly struck you as such), and you’re trying to signal that the reader may be missing something, and I’m down weighting that signal, and so continue to miss it.
You’re sacrificing some credibility among audiences with more canonical background by making what appear to be claims about the history of philosophy, which are actually side points and not well-backed (if they are intended as claims about the history of philosophy). This also limits the robustness of your arguments in the hands of those who are convinced by them.
You’re actually trying to mostly argue about history of philosophy but are just pretty wrong because your survey of the history has been biased away from thinkers you view as political opponents (I don’t think the strong version of this critique is true; Richard is very much not intellectually xenophobic, but weaker versions may be).
My models of the history here are very cracked, or I’m missing extremely important points that happen to come to me in forms against which I am intellectually xenophobic (I am much more intellectually xenophobic than Richard).
I don’t consider your answer to this question much evidence of anything; I’ve been intending to, e.g., go through your course, and consult my library, and share my maps and so on, but I just haven’t had the time, so this is more of an orienting question for some future thinking I hope to do soon*.
I realize this kind of question is usually very adversarial, and we are probably adversaries, so I’d like to point to this comment I made on a post of yours as (some) evidence that I’m asking in good faith!
I appreciate this comment, both in its substance and how careful you’ve been to phrase it non-adversarially. The simple answer is that I am very unfamiliar with the lineage that influenced Land, and continental philosophy more generally. As far as my philosophy tutors at Oxford were concerned, that whole field might as well have not existed; and I never found my way into it independently.
I have been intending to look into several of the people you listed (and other related thinkers) more. Until I’ve done so, I may well say silly things due to ignorance of them, and am very happy to be corrected when I do so.
Having said that, your comment reads like the sort of response I’d expect if I’d made a claim like “Land is one of the most original thinkers ever” or “Land’s thinking is unprecedented”. By “Land has been pushing the frontier” I meant something much weaker, which is totally consistent with him being greatly influenced by the people you named (who also were pushing the frontier in their own eras).
To be more specific and object-level: in a healthy discipline, many people (e.g. most PhD students) will sync up on what the field as a whole considers to be open questions, and then try to push the frontier forward on some of them. However, I think of modern political philosophy as very unhealthy, because the people who do the structuralist theorizing (to borrow your phrase from your other comment) are unwilling to engage with various obvious and important yet tabooed facts/positions. Whereas the people who are willing to engage with such facts are largely uninterested in structuralist theorizing. And so, while there’s no “consensus” on what the open questions are, or what progress on them would look like, merely being willing to combine these two approaches gets you a long way towards (and sometimes over) the frontier in my book.
Thanks, this is very helpful! To be clear, I did take you to be saying the weak version, and I’d probably not contest use of even the strong version in Land’s particular case.
The question wasn’t directly formulated in response to anything in your comment, but has been lounging about quite a while, waiting for a not-entirely-disastrous moment in which to be asked, and one in which your were almost-but-not-quite seeming to do the kind of thing that concerns me seemed like a good candidate.
lol, it looks like I should have finished reading the sentence I’m responding to, before starting to write a comment, since you’re making a similar point, re legibility.
I’m still interested in who you think is making progress though, even if illegibly to most people.
Re politics, people like Yarvin and Land have been pushing the frontier pretty illegibly. Scott Alexander too. And Vassar is a central example I was thinking about. For others who are a bit less well-known see my curriculum—I like N. S. Lyons, Nathan Cofnas, Ben Landau-Taylor, etc.
Re emotional processing, I don’t have a great sense of the history here. But I feel like there’s been gradual development of stuff like internal family systems, ideal parent figure therapy, circling, jhana meditations, and various kinds of body work over the last few decades. Stuff like The Body Keeps the Score (though I haven’t read that specifically) and Existential Kink have been popularized more recently. Unlocking the Emotional Brain was 2012. I don’t want to hang my hat on any of these in particular, since it’s hard for me to concisely convey my models for when and how each of them is useful. But hopefully that conveys a rough sense of the kinds of things that seem plausibly like progress.
seems like a good place to ask something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while: how familiar are you with the lineage that influenced Land? How much Deleuze, Spinoza, Frankfurt School, Lacan, Foucault, Gramsci, Agamben, Latour, Hegel, Negri, Heidegger, etc have you read?
I like some things about your thinking but often you state things as revelatory, or in this case appeal to pushing the frontier, in a way that makes it seem like you might not have spent much time with the influences of some of the thinkers who influence you. This isn’t a huge deal; attribution is really hard! But at present when you imply originality (or something weaker) in a particular thinker or idea, I tend to heavily down-weight that implication.
To be clear: I’m not intending to be at all censorious or credentialist, and I’m not endorsing any of these thinkers in particular. I’m concerned about things like:
I’m missing something (because whatever point you made didn’t strike me as profound, while it clearly struck you as such), and you’re trying to signal that the reader may be missing something, and I’m down weighting that signal, and so continue to miss it.
You’re sacrificing some credibility among audiences with more canonical background by making what appear to be claims about the history of philosophy, which are actually side points and not well-backed (if they are intended as claims about the history of philosophy). This also limits the robustness of your arguments in the hands of those who are convinced by them.
You’re actually trying to mostly argue about history of philosophy but are just pretty wrong because your survey of the history has been biased away from thinkers you view as political opponents (I don’t think the strong version of this critique is true; Richard is very much not intellectually xenophobic, but weaker versions may be).
My models of the history here are very cracked, or I’m missing extremely important points that happen to come to me in forms against which I am intellectually xenophobic (I am much more intellectually xenophobic than Richard).
I don’t consider your answer to this question much evidence of anything; I’ve been intending to, e.g., go through your course, and consult my library, and share my maps and so on, but I just haven’t had the time, so this is more of an orienting question for some future thinking I hope to do soon*.
I realize this kind of question is usually very adversarial, and we are probably adversaries, so I’d like to point to this comment I made on a post of yours as (some) evidence that I’m asking in good faith!
I appreciate this comment, both in its substance and how careful you’ve been to phrase it non-adversarially. The simple answer is that I am very unfamiliar with the lineage that influenced Land, and continental philosophy more generally. As far as my philosophy tutors at Oxford were concerned, that whole field might as well have not existed; and I never found my way into it independently.
I have been intending to look into several of the people you listed (and other related thinkers) more. Until I’ve done so, I may well say silly things due to ignorance of them, and am very happy to be corrected when I do so.
Having said that, your comment reads like the sort of response I’d expect if I’d made a claim like “Land is one of the most original thinkers ever” or “Land’s thinking is unprecedented”. By “Land has been pushing the frontier” I meant something much weaker, which is totally consistent with him being greatly influenced by the people you named (who also were pushing the frontier in their own eras).
To be more specific and object-level: in a healthy discipline, many people (e.g. most PhD students) will sync up on what the field as a whole considers to be open questions, and then try to push the frontier forward on some of them. However, I think of modern political philosophy as very unhealthy, because the people who do the structuralist theorizing (to borrow your phrase from your other comment) are unwilling to engage with various obvious and important yet tabooed facts/positions. Whereas the people who are willing to engage with such facts are largely uninterested in structuralist theorizing. And so, while there’s no “consensus” on what the open questions are, or what progress on them would look like, merely being willing to combine these two approaches gets you a long way towards (and sometimes over) the frontier in my book.
Thanks, this is very helpful! To be clear, I did take you to be saying the weak version, and I’d probably not contest use of even the strong version in Land’s particular case.
The question wasn’t directly formulated in response to anything in your comment, but has been lounging about quite a while, waiting for a not-entirely-disastrous moment in which to be asked, and one in which your were almost-but-not-quite seeming to do the kind of thing that concerns me seemed like a good candidate.
Likewise I would say that Yarvin is influenced by (roughly descending importance)
Older reactionaries: Caryle, de Maistre
Libertarians/Austrian schoolers: Rothbard, von Mises, Hoppe
Italian elite theorists: Mosca, Pareto
Also Burnham