- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
Pictured above: Jean Paul Sartre (existentialism), “Saint Max” Stirner (egoism/young Hegelian), Marcus Aurelius (stoicism)
I LOVE INDIVIDUALISM I LOVE ABSTRACTIONISM 
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i don’t understand any of this but congratulations and/or I’m sorry
Also Free Palestine.
I bet this is funny if you’re smart
I’m not sure what “radical” philosophers even means in this context. Marcus Aurelius was the literal emperor of the Roman Empire, writing in his diary about Stoicism, a philosophy co-opted by the Roman ruling class to basically say “don’t revolt just be content with your lot you filthy proles,” so I don’t know how “radical” you can expect him to be. Also the Sartre one seems unfair, is the meme supposed to be about living in Bad Faith? Because that’s a very valid critique of like the impossibility of living “normally” in this liberal capitalistic hellscape where you have to ignore so much suffering and horrors just to get on with daily life, no? How we lie to ourselves about our true freedom and ability of action, how if we were to overcome our Bad Faith together we would realise we have the power and ability to change our world for the better through collective action. His entire philosophical project in his later years was about trying to unify his understanding of existential individualism with Marxist collective struggle and action.
A lot of people think they really “go against the grain” because they’re stoics. Seneca was exiled and later killed himself after being accused of plotting political assassination. Epictetus was a slave and “preached to the women and poors.” The virtues are virtues good leftists should have or something.
For Sartre, I’m riffing on existential comics. I haven’t personally read him, but according to that guy, De Bouviour kept him good and Marxist but later on he was less so. He was also very mainstream in Fr*nce.
I think a lot of the “original” Stoics were fine, yeah, but as a philosophy it was very easy for those in power to co-opt and codify, and it served those purposes perfectly. It’s not really revolutionary in any sense.
Also I like Existential Comics but it’s definitely playing up a caricature of Sartre more than engaging with his actual work. Also I think you have it entirely opposite here. I really like de Beauvoir but Sartre was absolutely far more Marxist and engaged in actual Marxist political practice than de Beauvoir; if anything, he was pulling her more to the left. He was very outspoken in his support of the independence struggle of Algeria, and marched with the students during 1968. He decryed Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” against Stalin and said that every French person was responsible for the horrible crimes commited in places like Vietnam and Algeria. He met with Castro, and called Che the “most complete human of the twentieth century.” He was deeply engaged in actual Marxist theory, and he became more Marxist as he grew older, not less. His early existential works like Being and Nothingness are mostly centred on the individual, whilst his later works like Critique of Dialectical Reason explicitly reject his earlier work in favour of collective praxis. He was almost certainly a sex pest, but he was Fr*nch so not entirely surprising there.
Sure, sure. It’s a meme. I was also going off of ‘Why Theory’s (meh podcast) overview of the silly Being and Nothingness. I wasn’t aware where it fit chronologically tbh.
Seems like Nietzsche would be an obvious substitution but what do I know
True
Seneca was exiled and later killed himself
He was sentenced to death, it was just that the execution was self-administered, like with Socrates.
Honestly I fucking hate how embedded in western left cannon all these inscrutable continental mfs are :losurdo-shining:
I don’t know much about philosophy, but wouldn’t Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat be analogous?
What do you mean by this?
The idea of a lower intellectual caste that cannot achieve a consciousness allowing them to rise above their current conditions.
That’s the NPC meme, I guess. It has very little to do with even Stirner (who, to be clear, I really dislike). You’d find something closer to that in Plato, who believed that most people had “appetitive” (base, animal-like) souls, some had emotional souls, and only a few had intellectual souls, making them fit to run society.
Yeah that’s what I was referring to
Class, not caste. And what you’re describing is the condition of the proletariat as a whole: the limit of spontaneous consciousness is trade union consciousness (see Lenin’s What Is To Be Done)
Wait. Who is that analogous to? Who is the proletariat in this analogy?
I dunno. I mean these folks are bourgeois intellectuals and it shows. Well, Aurelius was a literal emperor. This stuff’s just mainstream, honestly. Petty bourgeois aesthetisticians and PMCs think it makes them cool, I suppose. Maybe critical theory is a bit less popular and still not necessarily revolutionar?
This is just anti-intellectual schlock
Noooo. I’m a philosopher. I read big books. I’m allowed to make memes ridiculing the big books that proles will never read.
Since I’ve only read Stirner here, meme goes hard, but I should reread with a fully developed frontal lobe
No matter how often people say it, this still isn’t what Stoicism is. Stoicism* is about doing what you can and understanding that the end result is inevitably out of your hands. I think there are lots of things to criticize Stoicism for (virtue ethics is goofy and unserious) but this isn’t it. Genuinely, the Stoics hit you over the head so much with immediate circumstances, and therefore any outcome, being outside of your control that I struggle to imagine that the author of this meme got a quarter of the way through Meditations.
That’s functionally also what Radical Freedom is, it’s just phrased in a much less constructive way because Sartre thought he was clever or something.
*as far as pertains to the OP
I get that. Still, Christianity is steeped in stoicism and Christianity is a hegemonic ideology. It’s hard to see how “doing what you can despite circumstances” is a radical proposition when that is the case and capitalism makes everyone calculate their interests given their circumstances. That’s not to say it’s bad either. What’s radical is understanding that interest and power is not located hermetically sealed private individuals but shared among one’s class.
Christianity and Stoicism eventually formed a significant connection, “Christian Stoicism” is a thing and the most famous example is probably Boethius, but I am not sure that it’s really that important to Christianity on a fundamental level and, furthermore, Stoicism does not ascribe much power at all to individuals but does identify common interest as being a major priority, and this also appears repeatedly in Aurelius’s Meditations, where he continuously coaches himself to not squabble with people because they (inclusive) must all work together.
Christianity, like every great revolutionary movement, was made by the masses. It arose in Palestine, in a manner utterly unknown to us, at a time when new sects, new religions, new prophets arose by the hundred. It is, in fact, a mere average, formed spontaneously out of the mutual friction of the more progressive of such sects, and afterwards formed into a doctrine by the addition of theorems of the Alexiandrian Jew, Philo, and later on of strong stoic infiltrations. In fact, if we may call Philo the doctrinal father of Christianity, Seneca was her uncle. Whole passages in the New Testament seem almost literally copied from his works; and you will find, on the other hand, passages in Persius’ satires which seem copied from the then unwritten New Testament.
Individualism does not imply that every individual is powerful. Maybe “moralism” is a better term because it finds the virtue of society in how well individuals behave and subordinate themselves to common ideals. Stoicism more easily lends to “cope within your lowly position” than realizing that in class society regardless of people’s morals different interests are irreconcilable. Instead of determining which groups matter materially, it reifies “humanity,” or I suppose in this instance, “the city/empire.”
I think, while we can obviously extract a political significance from anything, part of the issue here is that Stoicism isn’t a political philosophy in the normal sense of the term, and even in what I read of Seneca he’s mostly doing self-help epistolaries like how Aurelius is doing self-help notes. I think, as an ethical philosophy, it’s a matter of interpretation rather than explicit doctrine what the politics of Stoicism is, and I don’t see there being any issue with a progressive interpretation of its values. We’ve seen many times people say that it directs people to merely cope with their class position, but is that true? Epictetus, who would have been regarded by Seneca and Aurelius as the Greek father of Roman Stoicism, was still born a slave and did not by any means suggest that people should remain where they are, and indeed discusses quite a lot about improving oneself and at least attempting to become something great, along with what we’ve discussed about being in cooperation with others, and Seneca for example is very clear that becoming a good person is at odds with politicking and chasing riches and status (despite he himself doing this).
Self help and morals are fine and all, but some people do seem to think they’re conducive to revolutionary politics and not largely copes.
Forgive my sarcasm, but
“Epictetus was poor, but he did what was within his power and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He preached to others to do the same. Working class icon. Meanwhile, Seneca said politicians are evil, but tried to be a good ruler. Cool dudes.”
Marx:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
