You're not from around here, I can tell.
Well, I start a new job on Wednesday. I got hired at a cell phone and electronics repair store as an entry level repair technician, thankfully they'll provide on the job training so I'll learn what I'm supposed to be doing while I'm there. I find it somewhat unfortunate that I wasn't able to get another job on the night shift at a hotel because I won't have as much time to read once I start working, but at least I won't have to completely demolish my sleep schedule again. I wonder how long waking up in the mornings will take to get used to. When I mentioned my interest in Dungeons and Dragons the people interviewing me seemed more interested in hiring me, I guess there's perks to being a dungeon master.
This month I started reading a small collection of some of Feuerbach's writings that I intend to read before moving onto Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which I prefer to call the Paris Manuscripts for short. My copy of the Paris Manuscripts is sandwiched with a couple of other early writings like On the Jewish Question and his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. I'll be using an edition simply called Early Writings from 1964, edited by T.B. Bottomore, which is the collection of Marx's early writings I remember seeing referenced a lot in footnotes and bibliographies. Even though chronologically the Critique comes first I'll probably read that after I finish the Early Writings. My collection of Feuerbach has a couple writings that I'm interested in and were apparently influential on the young Marx's intellectual output, they're called Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Hopefully some time this month I'll finish posting my selections from his Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy.
I made a little more progress on Baumgarten's Metaphysics, I finished his chapter on what he calls Empirical Psychology and I'm thinking of uploading selections from that section since it was one of the more interesting parts of the text to me, I can see Baumgarten reaching towards phenomenology but not quite capturing it effectively. The text itself simply titled Metaphysics is a very systematic textbook of metaphysics from the 18th century that Immanuel Kant would lecture from when discussing metaphysics, and there's a collection from Cambridge called Lectures on Metaphysics that has both Kant's lectures but also convenient numbers which refer to the numbered paragraphs from the textbook—the series of lectures themselves also date across the entirety of Kant's intellectual career and will serve as a useful prerequisite to my reading of the Critique of Pure Reason. Baumgarten describes metaphysics as a collection of four different sciences with Ontology being primary, but also included are his Cosmology, Psychology and Natural Theology. There's a certain level of craftsmanship in the text that I both revile and admire, after you've read through it long enough you start to get an intuitive grasp of the way he systematically develops his subject matter, but consequently his intellectual moves become a tad predictable. There's exactly 1000 numbered paragraphs and I can't help but think of the work as a cathedral conjured through words, brilliantly architectured. I find myself quite interested in the thesis of Robert Pippin's text Hegel's Realm of Shadows, where he investigates how Hegel's logic in the Science of Logic is also his metaphysics which becomes possible through certain breakthroughs in Kantian philosophy so I'm hoping to read that as well as all these other texts at some point.
I think my obsession with metaphysics stems from an attempt to understand how Marxist dialectical materialism presents itself as an alternative or antidote to metaphysical thinking, which to me would be quite a significant achievement since systematic metaphysical investigation presupposes a certain level of development in human societies and finds itself in every part of the world, Hegel goes so far as to remark that trying to imagine a cultivated people without a metaphysics would be significant in itself—like a temple without a holy of holies. Metaphysics I see most simply as an investigation into the nature of reality which I think is a high enough level of abstraction to hold dialectical materialism within it. How dialectical materialism distinguishes itself from metaphysics is something I still don't fully understand and find myself compelled to investigate.
The last thing I wanted to talk about was my history and eventual abandonment of 4chan since I think that mirrors my personal history quite well, before you continue reading I need to issue a strong content warning (obviously) and I demand that if a minor should stumble upon this blog post to please stop reading here. This isn't for you. Now, I began browsing 4chan when I was maybe 16 or 17 while the majority of my other friends were Redditors, they were the type to make what time does the narwhal bacon?
an in group signifier. When you start browsing there's a macabre pride that you get from embracing the atmosphere of vulgarity you've entrenched yourself in, you feel proud of yourself for being able to withstand and even command the sledgehammer blows of /b/. Occasional screamer, pornographic frenzy. Now—you see brains outside of a skull on sidewalk. who the fuck does zoe quinn think she is?
it infects you. it infects you. did we really need another thread about this? fucking newfag can't even triforce. did you really need to watch that beheading video someone posted to /pol/? what about that video from the middle of bottom surgery? you hate it when they post their furry shit here instead of the /d/ containment board where it belongs. post moar of her pl0x, sweet fuckin rack. oh great, another tripfag with a retarded opinion what a shock. the bronies are getting their own board? what a waste. 3 AM again—regret bleeds from your every pore the way hot white hate screams from every hair. You've started to gather Wikipedia articles to justify your growing hatred of Muslims, you've never met one. Most of the light you see doesn't come from the sky, moon, or stars, but a nexus of pixels, pixels that calcify your every pathetic prejudice. You've taken to emailing advertisers about the latest GamerGate controversy, you were excited when Milo and Alec Baldwin posted about it on Twitter. Your playlist becomes an assemblage of /mu/core as your glossary of words to dehumanize grows. Your fingers writhe over the keyboard like worms scrambling to feed. By now, you've seen every limb removed from a human body and you revel in it.
Shaking myself out of that, strangely I don't think there's anything wrong with the imageboard format itself and I actually quite enjoy the way 4chan works as a website. Actually browsing it and making the mistake of allowing yourself to be influenced by it in any meaningful capacity is another story. Although I don't think every poster is an unhinged lunatic, it can serve the fuction of amplifier of your worst behaviors and grow a garden of rotting fruit within. The question I still find myself asking is, why? What exactly is it that produces this result in this specific imageboard? I've browsed others with a marginally better community, 420chan comes to mind. 4chan lives a tragic existence, for the people that run it and the people that convince themselves to browse it. If you're interested in any media that explores the process of poisoning yourself with the internet quite well, I can't recommend Arby n the Chief enough despite its low production value. That or Agony of a Dying MMO which I think is only a demo at the moment. Arby n the Chief I credit with helping me work through a lot of the negative effects that came from browsing 4chan on a daily basis.
Eventually Trump won the election and I started to distance myself from my own reactionary, quasi-fascist beliefs but I didn't really know where to turn for an alternative. Somehow, my resentment of socialism faded away and I was excited to learn as much as I could about the subject since there was a lot more variety of belief than I expected and eventually I discovered Kropotkin and anarcho-communism. But, that interest didn't last very long since I discovered Marx and actually started to learn more about him and his works in greater detail. The more I learned about just how much work he poured into his intellectual output the more I found myself inspired by him and I started reading Hegel in an attempt to emulate this newfound role model and that eventually lead to the reader of philosophy that I am today. I couldn't adopt the beliefs and practices I have now without shedding others and I'm thankful to myself for at least having the strength and initiative to change, although I still have many other contradictions within that must be worked through. I'm no longer the misanthrope or pessimist I was and I think that's ultimately for the best.