Matthew Benjamin

"Blessed is he who knows the causes of things." (Vergil)

"A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun." (Valéry)

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

hubris (hyoo͞′brĭs), n.

Overbearing pride, presumption or arrogance (originally toward the gods).

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

In other words, Nazism was enabled by nihilism -- i.e. the absence of anything to stand against it and the boredom to choose it as preferable to indifference -- and is a natural culmination and not an aberration.

My gloss only of course, since he never exactly _tells_ you.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

This is also Strauss' assessment.

Briefly: H's deconstruction of _Wesensschau_ (from Aristotle to Husserl) left him unable to mount any moral objection to the _Zeitgeist_, since once you give this up there is nolonger any absolute frame of reference for critique of politics.

[Aaron Haspel @ahaspel]

Heidegger was not a bad philosopher because he became a Nazi. But he may have become a Nazi because he was a bad philosopher.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

In this sense the moral lesson of Heidegger is a caricature of the general trend of modern philosophy since Machiavelli: if you give up on knowledge of natural invariants, you give up on the idea of natural right, and therefore any standard of judgement of political regimes.

[Mike Elias @harmonylion1]

loving truth >>> being smart

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

@policytensor Capability is obviously there: a boat, some divers, some underwater explosives.

Lots of infrastructure is about this vulnerable, and its continued state of unmolestation depends on alignment of incentives causing nobody to try it. That can change quick, as we see here.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

If you must dither, at least dither resolutely.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

"You give yourself over to the logic of the machine and are rewarded with a feeling of efficacy."

-- Matthew Crawford

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

"Your action of pressing a button produces an effect that aligns perfectly with your will, because your will has been channeled into the spare, binary affordances provided by the buttons: press or don't press."

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

This is the meaning of many cryptic remarks from Plato and platonically influenced thinkers about man's dual nature, summed up in the notion of the 'speaking animal': speech is simultaneously the mother of reason and society. Neither can be eradicated by the other.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

Philosophy as we know it originally defined itself in opposition to sophistry. Sophistry is the placing of thought at the service of politics and passion: the invention of persuasive but false rationales for doing what people want to do for ulterior reasons--philosophy corrupted.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

Plato shows us that the final victory of philosophy in this contest is both improbable and monstrous; history and good sense tells us that the final victory of politics means the death of what is noblest in the human spirit.

Therefore, they must remain in dialectical tension.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

And for the same reason, the perfection of intellect is assimilation to absolute power (=natural necessity) -- which is the one thing worthy of worship, anything less being idolatry.

[Mike Elias @harmonylion1]

Worship of intellect is worship of power.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

@J_Jankovic Vivesecting jokes is one of my many passtimes. :)

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

@J_Jankovic It's a kind of reverse Motte-and-Bailey where the rhetoric about competition is designed to make life harder for _other people_, giving me a freer hand to acquire assets and extract rents because they're all now too busy keeping their head above water to oppose me, etc.

[Matthew Benjamin @unlearnedhands]

@J_Jankovic To be fair, there's no tension there if you suppose this is actually the best we can do, which the same people will also think.

Peter Thiel is refreshingly honest about this: competing is for schlemiels, you capture value by carving out a monopoly and defending it by all means.

[Stephen Diehl @smdiehl]

Crypto is spending more on lobbying than the entire American military industrial complex. That should tell you how desperate they are to get their hands on public money and to secure a future bailout package when crypto all implodes.

https://t.co/HSbh6McHgZ

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

1/7
Germany's massive trade surpluses were a burden for Europe and the world because they represented the externalization of domestic demand deficiencies, but the fact that they have come down so sharply isn't a good thing.

https://t.co/bWWJfjwoSe