8 ideas
| 21852 | Nomads are the basis of history, and yet almost unknowable [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: There is no history from the viewpoint of nomads, although everything passes through them, to the point that they are like the noumena or the unknowable of history. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Many Politics [1977], p.107) | |
| A reaction: Nomads have the same place in society that indeterminate 'stuff' has in an object-orientated metaphysics. Deleuze seems to be romanticising nomads the way the late Victorians romanticised gypsies. |
| 22049 | Transcendental idealism aims to explain objectivity through subjectivity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The aim of transcendental idealism is to give a basis for objectivity in terms of subjectivity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: Hume used subjectivity to undermine the findings of objectivity. There was then no return to naive objectivity. Kant's aim then was to thwart global scepticism. Post-Kantians feared that he had failed. |
| 22055 | The Idealists saw the same unexplained spontaneity in Kant's judgements and choices [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The Idealist saw in Kant that knowledge, which depends on the spontaneity of judgement, and self-determined spontaneous action, can be seen as sharing the same source, which is not accessible to scientific investigation. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010]) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'spontaneity' of judgements and choices which was seen as the main idea in Kant. It inspired romantic individualism. The judgements are the rule-based application of concepts. |
| 22054 | German Idealism tried to stop oppositions of appearances/things and receptivity/spontaneity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A central aim of German Idealism is to overcome Kant's oppositions between appearances and thing in themselves, and between receptivity and spontaneity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 2) | |
| A reaction: I have the impression that there were two strategies: break down the opposition within the self (Fichte), or break down the opposition in the world (Spinozism). |
| 22056 | Crucial to Idealism is the idea of continuity between receptivity and spontaneous judgement [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A crucial idea for German Idealism (from Hamann) is that apparently passive receptivity and active spontaneity are in fact different degrees of the same 'activity, and the gap between subject and world can be closed. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 3) | |
| A reaction: The 'passive' bit seems to be Hume's 'impressions', which are Kant's 'intuitions', which need 'spontaneous' interpretation to become experiences. Critics of Kant said this implied a dualism. |
| 6017 | Nomos is king [Pindar] |
| Full Idea: Nomos is king. | |
| From: Pindar (poems [c.478 BCE], S 169), quoted by Thomas Nagel - The Philosophical Culture | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the earliest recorded shot in the nomos-physis wars (the debate among sophists about moral relativism). It sounds as if it carries the full relativist burden - that all that matters is what has been locally decreed. |
| 21853 | We are currently extending capitalism to the whole of society [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: What characterises our situation is ….the extension of capitalism to the whole social body. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Many Politics [1977], p.110) | |
| A reaction: This is driven by the naïve people who think all problems can be solved by market forces, and that to everything that goes bankrupt we should just say 'good riddance'. |
| 21851 | The State requires self-preservation, but the war-machine desires destruction [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: There will always be a tension between the State apparatus with its requirement for self-preservation, and the war-machine in its undertaking to destroy the State, to destroy the subjects of the State, and even to destroy itself. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Many Politics [1977], p.106) | |
| A reaction: This seems to fit WWI quite well, but the desire of the war-machine to destroy the State which pays for it sounds unlikely. Nevertheless war is appalling for the state, but it is the whole point of the war-machine, which gets restless. |