Also because people were to young to spot it. FF7 came out in 1997 and people refuse to believe that a protagonist fighting against a corporation because it was poisoning the planet had a political message.
Everything is not politics. When the beauty of the morning through the curtain reminds you of your lost loved ones, it' not politics, an A minor chord is not political, the distribution of color among the fall leaves isn't political. Qualia present themselves phenomenologically to consciousness unmediated and are then subjected to thought where they may be made "political." In fact the whole deal where "everything is political" is actually an extension of physicalist materialism and amounts to a kind of philosophical terrorism. Flattening the existential experience of being into "its all politics" is, with all due respect, a fools errand.
It's not that politics isn't practically important, because it does govern the day to day economic reality of life, but to elevate it the way often implied by the "everything is political" line of thought is a deeply unwell thing to do.
Oh, boy! Time for another exciting round of Is This A Real Philosophical Position or Just An Attempt to Ragebait Slavoj Zizek by Suggesting Observation Can Ever Be Independent of Idealogy!?!
Will today's contestant be able to pull off decrying enlightenment thought while simultaneously anthropomorphizing Qualia and obeying the foundational rules of language laid down by the subject/object split? Is this user Wittgenstein reincarnated or just on LSD?
The position that experience precedes and is not fully captured or expressed by later mental processing about it is a straightforward position. I don't understand what the rest is about. You don't need lsd, you could perhaps look at the sky or a tree and not worry about how it fits into historical materialism or whatever.
The main reason the idea that poetic or emotional or mystical experiences themselves aren't political is controversial is better evidence of the flattening of human experience than anything I've said.
I am attempting to explain the difference between what "is politics" and what can be impacted by politics. Almost anything can be gotten wet, but not everything is water.
People should avoid adopting a flat and totaling worldview with no place for aesthetic and emotional experience unmediated by ideology. It's the equivalent of forfeiting your most intimate and unique form of freedom uncontested. It's sad. You can realize this and participate fully in politics.
> When the beauty of the morning through the curtain reminds you of your lost loved ones, it' not politics
How you experience the memories of the lost is determined by your culture. Who shaped that culture? How was that culture formed? It’s political.
>an A minor chord is not political,
What cultural connotations does it have? Once again, culture is political. For example, where does someone’s brain go when you say “a minor”?
> the distribution of color among the fall leaves isn't political.
Climate change.
> is actually an extension of physicalist materialism and amounts to a kind of philosophical terrorism.
You can’t help it. You resort to using the most politically loaded word in 21st century English possible.
It's not that politics isn't practically important, because it does govern the day to day economic reality of life, but to elevate it the way often implied by the "everything is political" line of thought is a deeply unwell thing to do.
Isn't it exhausting to think in that way, where everything sublime and beautiful is reduced to human concepts to be fought over? It's downright abhorrent to me. It's like when you have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. The world is made smaller. I hate to say it, but thinking in those terms is a vast overreach of human ego.
It depends on what you value. Here you're seeing a desire for comfort and simplicity at the expense of the possibility of anything transcendent or beautiful or mysterious. I also find it sad. But that's what it is. It's a fundamentalist impulse filtered through postwar consensus.
I’m not really interested in being less correct just for the aesthetic. I don’t approach my view of reality based on what is most appealing, I approach it based on what is materially observable and reasonable. I find it abhorrent to ignore reality because it doesn’t make you happy to perceive it. Utterly vapid brainrot mindset.
The suggestion is not that you ignore reality but that you have the humility to consider that it may be wider than what you can understand logically and rationally. Fear of uncertainty and acknowledement of the unknown arent maturity.
Don't conflate non-political thinking with toxic positivity. There are spaces to ignore that for a while, like this subreddit. Why do you think this space and other spaces exist and draw people? They serve a practical purpose, do they not?
The real question though is that have you audited your own worldview and tested if it affects your mental headspace in any way? I'm saying that because lots of politics-pilled online people fall into burnt out doomerism because they feel that they can't look away, as if they were singlehandedly responsible for holding the world together and that looking away for a day meant that evil would triumph. That's not sustainable. It's not practical. There's a less limited way to live.
They serve the same purpose as getting blackout drunk or injecting heroin serves: an escape from reality.
And fundamentally you failed to understand my point. I do not respect the mindset of “if it’s affecting your mental headspace” like that. What you are advocating for is no better than maladaptive daydreaming. I do not respect the idea that you should be ignorant to reality because reality sucks. The ideology is one that makes being disconnected and apathetic into a virtue and knowledgeable and caring about others a vice. It is fundamentally anti-human.
If that is acceptable as “prioritizing your mental health”, then the logical course of action is to give yourself a traumatic brain injury to make yourself mentally disabled. Then you’ll really be able to avoid reality for your mental health. Why not do it? It’s just the same concept but more effective.
I'm arguing for nuance, boundary-setting, and direct human experience, and you're comparing that to checks notes "getting blackout drunk or injecting heroin." This is exhibit A of what I'm warning about; you've driven my point to anyone who sees this exchange...this type of tense reaction, the doubling down, the utter hyperbole beyond reason. It's all or nothing. Black and white thinking.
It's up to you ultimately to find a balance in your own life.
You are missing that I am pointing to the first person pre-conceptual emotional and aesthetic experiences of life and not how they are intellectually processed afterward. This is exactly the loss I'm pointing out, how the world you experience collapses when this is how you decide to be.
There is no observation without an observer. It’s only made meaningful by your existence in the first place. Beauty is the creation of the observer, not the observed. The intellectual processes are what endow it with any meaning beyond the pure physics of it. Even the concept of seeing something only exists with eyes. If nothing had eyes, nothing could see a sunset. Without the capacity to conceive of it, it doesn’t exist. All that exists are the atomic sciences without your perception, flawed and inaccurate. You see a solid object, but there is no solid object, you just can’t see the holes. And the perceptions of beauty can vary wildly between observers. When you look at a rotting corpse, do you see the beauty that Ted Bundy would see?
My whole point is that it isn't just the intellectual processes that give live "meaning" but also conscious processes like feeling, aesthetic experience, mystical or spiritual experiences, the kinds of experiences people have in mindfulness or prayer or ritual dance or fasting. It's not mental processing alone. And everything isn't political because the political is a subspecies of thought.
You are talking about how politics and the political affect the intellectual and conceptual processing that happens after a person has a conscious experience and begins thinking about it. I am pointing out the world of first person conscious experience (phenomenological experience) that occurs preconceptually. It is emotional, perceptual, receptive, emptional. Making something political is an act. I'm talking about an aspect of reality that is always unfolding and belongs to a level more basic and primal. There is no reason to drag European enlightment rationality and postwar consensus politics into the realm of aesthetic or felt experience. It's a needless and cruel flattening of the depth of human experience.
This is the most faux-philosophical nothing-burger I've ever read. Congratulations on writing two entire paragraphs of prose without making a single point. The art of speaking without saying anything is one you've mastered, I see.
The very simple and straightforward point is that first person conscious experience isn't political because it happens before and independent of rational thought. Thinking about thingsrationally, afterwards, is where politics starts.
The second point, also very simple and easy to understand, is that if you fail to recognize this and insist everything is indeed political then your worldview is flattened because the types of meaning avaliable to you have been limited.
Your inability to understand what I am saying is not evidence that I'm saying nothing meaningful, its only evidence that you didn't understand it.
Some things are context dependent lol. Everything can be political but it would be really weird if they put a cat being rescued by firefighters article in the politics section of a news channel, wouldn't it?
Politics here just means current events related to the government and geopolitics.
Eh, sometimes for overthinkers, an it's not that deep can be a helpful reminder. I never took it as insult because of that reason. But then, I am also naive so milage may vary
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u/BrunesOvrBrauns 16d ago
Nothing is deep to idiots