If the labour theory of value has a mathematical representation (i.e. if sets or classes in it are well defined) then there can also be a 'Transcendental Ego' at least for Homo Economicus. Sadly, it appears that there can be no such thing till 'the end of mathematical time' when all choice sequences are known to be 'law like'. Godel's interest in Husserl's ideas did give his system some credibility till about the end of the Seventies. However, to my best knowledge, nothing came of this line of inquiry. Like Kantarovich's work, the thing is a cul de sac because of insurmountable problems of impredicativity, concurrency, complexity, computability and categoricity. Still, a really smart dude can always find gold where lesser minds see only dross.
Dr. Rory O'Sullivan has an article in Aeon titled ' The tragedy of Trần Đức Thảo- How the persecuted Vietnamese philosopher became one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser.'
Thao was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was was far from being 'one of the first anti-colonial theorists' in Vietnam. Previously, anti-colonial philosophy in Vietnam drew on Confucian tradition (e.g. the 'Aid the King' movement supported by poet/philosophers like Nguyễn Khuyến) as well as Buddhism which fostered links with monks in other colonies- e.g. Ceylon, Burma, etc.- and which placed a lot of stress on fundamental ontological and epistemological questions. Thao would have been about ten years old when his country was flooded with more and more nationalist/Socialistic literature written in an engaging manner and featuring 'lived experience' as opposed to doctrinaire jargon. Still, it was mainly the urban and the literate people who were affected by this.
At the popular level, there was Caodaism- a syncretic spiritualist sect- which was founded in 1926 by a group of Government clerks. The French began to crack down on it because it was attracting too many converts and this annoyed the Catholic Church. The literary culture of the Vietnamese was highly philosophical because of the influence of Buddhism, Taoism & Confucianism as well as older indigenous traditions. Young Vietnamese excelled in the new French Schools established by the Colonial power and assimilated abstract philosophical ideas in a nuanced manner reflective of the indigenous philosophical traditions. Unlike Buddhist Marxism, which went completely bonkers in Myanmar, the Vietnamese were fortunate in having a down-to-earth leader in the shape of Ho Chi Minh who was able to steer a middle course at the time of the Soviet-Chinese split.
I think the biggest influence on Thao as a boy was the journalist Nguyễn An Ninh, who graduated from the Sorbonne in 1920 and who brokered a deal between the Viet Minh and the Trotskyites some 15 years later. We may also mention, the Trotskyite, Phan Văn Hùm who was killed by the Communists in 1946. Interestingly, both were initially attracted to Caodaism. Hum also wrote about the Hoa Hao syncretic movement. Another towering figure was Ngo Van, who was 4 years older than Thao and who could claim genuine proletarian status. Exiled to France, he worked in a factory and later took a Doctorate in Religious studies. He gives an enthralling account of both the promises kept and the betrayals perpetrated by the Left in his country. He died in 2005, by which time his country was on a secure path to increasing affluence.
What is ironic is that Thao had no lived experience or active perception of either colonialism or the anti-colonial movements. He was too young or had been too busy swotting to take part in the revolutionary movements sweeping his land. Moreover, he had never produced anything 'material'. It is easy to say 'this philosopher ignores the material origins of 'what is at hand' (zuhandenheit)- i.e. the fact that trillions of disabled Lesbians are being raped to death on factory floors throughout the Turd World just so you can sit comfortably in your arm-chair reading this blog on your i-Pad. But, if you yourself are not a disabled Lesbian being raped to death by Elon Musk in one of his factories, they you too are oblivious to the 'material' condition to which you only have semiotic access. Not till every Libtard chops off his own dick, turns Lezza, and gets raped to death by Musk can we have a truly materialistic phenomenology of liberative dialectics.
Thao had spent his childhood and adolescence swotting to get a scholarship. Then, from the age of 19, he was in France studying nonsense. Thus he was the least qualified of his cohort to apply 'the phenomenological method to the problem of colonialism'. By contrast, revolutionaries like M.N Roy or Ho Chi Minh had lived in many countries- US, USSR, China, Thailand etc. One could say that Thao's horizon was that of a French educated Vietnamese of the mandarin class. His Emperor was a protected subject of the French Republic for purely contingent, historical, reasons- mainly the military decline of China & the excuse that some previous Emperor had persecuted Christians. It was obvious that China's return to super-power status- the US had insisted it get a permanent seat on the Security Council- meant that the French would have to leave. If they couldn't defeat the Japanese, they stood no chance against the combined might of Russia and China. Perhaps, had Roosevelt lived, the French would not have been permitted to return to a territory which FDR believed they had utterly ruined.
Thao, having studied worthless shite, could not make the obvious point that if Britain was leaving India, it must be the case that the Imperial game was not worth the candle. A 'nation of shopkeepers' tends to be very shrewd in such matters. There was no glory to be had in letting the Chinese finish the job which the Japanese had started.
Did Thao make any contribution to 'anti-colonial thought'? No. He had studied a subject which seeks to explain, but fails, why we can tell cats from dogs. The answer has to do with the law of increasing functional information. Evolution, or competition for limited resources, means that information of a useful type tends to burgeon. I can tell that animal hidden in the garden is a cat not a dog because, over the years, I have become good at differentiating cat like noises from those uttered by dogs. However, it must be said, that the reason I am good at this is because of co-evolution with domestic animals which have played a vital part in the rise of our species.
Thao thought there must be a 'normative tie' to action in information. Why did that tie exist in self-interested actions but fail to get 'unversalized'. Was it because people live in different 'life-worlds'? But, if so, how come he was for Vietnamese freedom whereas a French dude born in Vietnam and who had the same education as himself would be against it?
The concept he was groping towards was 'uncorrelated asymmetries' as dictating Eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'. This explains why a French pedant, whose standard of living is higher because Vietnamese resources are being acquired for an artificially low price, doesn't want Vietnam to become free. This does not mean he wants to become the slave of Hitler. Why? That would lower his standard of living. 'Uncorrelated asymmetry' has to do with me wanting more even if this means you get less. It follows from the fact that I am me, not you. This is not to say that Thao did not make a very important contribution to elucidating the 'shitty ass paradox.' Why do people who show zeal in wiping their own bum, not roam around the place wiping every shitty bum? The answer is that an epistemic failure has occurred. The King Emperor did not wipe Mahatma Gandhi's bum because he was constricted by an imperial horizon which delimited what he could perceive as truly possible. In this way he missed out on the opportunity to wipe Gandhi's shitty bum. He also failed to suck off Hitler & Tojo. Churchill was gravely remiss in failing to get the King Emperor to study Husserl.
It took five ill-fated conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre
this could be caricatured as Sartre saying he was free (which he became after the Anglos liberated Paris) and Thao saying he wasn't because Clement Atlee & Ernie Bevan decided that Ho Chi Minh was a Commie hothead. Thus British-Indian forces worked with the French against the Viet Minh. The KMT Chinese let the French advance into the North but, by 1950, both the Soviets & Chinese had recognized Ho Chi Minh's government.
Thao was aware that changing British public opinion was important and did have some articles translated into English. But he doesn't seem to have understood the importance of the Indians. I suppose he was under the impression that Nehru was a puppet of the City of London or some such shit. That's why it was important for him to have conversations with other brown or black intellectuals rather than useless French nutters. Perhaps, if Ho Chi Minh had been able to spend more time in India in 1946, he could have got Nehru to put pressure on Atlee & Cripps to back him. Atlee himself had no problem befriending Aung San of Burma.
before the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo finally broke with French philosophy.
He didn't break with it. Indeed, by focussing on Husserl, rather than the Heidegger championed by the 'generation of 1933' (Satre, Levinas, Kojeve, Blanchot, Merleau Pointy Shithead &c) he was marking himself out as a backward fellow from the Colonial boondocks.
This is not to say that he made any contribution to French Philosophy after returning to Vietnam. Partly this was because, after he was purged, he could not get access to recent publications in French. But, even before that, he had focused on translating and doing original work in his own language to help his people rise. He fell out of favour at around the same time that Mao decided that 'letting a hundred flowers bloom' was a bad idea. Since Ho Chi Minh had to keep both the Soviets and the Chinese happy, he didn't want some stupid philosopher to rock the ideological boat. Once Vietnam broke with China, Thao could be rehabilitated under Glasnost. Sadly, the fall of the Soviet Union made Vietnam's position precarious. Thao was sent to France, at Government expense, to see if he could revive old friendships. But he may have been suffering from persecution mania. He told people he had been sent to be tried by the French Communist Party!
Ho Chi Minh's pragmatism and desire to placate both Moscow & Beijing kept his country safe from the craziness of the Burmese Marxists (or the Indian Naxals) in the mid Sixties. In the Seventies, Trotskyites in Sri Lanka tried to launch a revolution. It showed they were just as crazy as the Burmese. Interestingly, a young French philosopher, Bernard Henri Levi, who was offered a job working for the new Bangladesh Government, was a first hand witness of this infantile Leftism. The Bengali Maoists supported the genocidal Pakistan army, because it was obsequious to Beijing, while condemning Sheikh Mujib as a Soviet puppet!
Between November 1949 and January 1950, Thảo and Sartre recorded and transcribed their conversations on the relation between Marxism and the new philosophy of existentialism, with the intention of publishing them.
The context was 'Browderism'. Should Communist parties fight elections or should they use Maoist tactics? Existentialism was compatible with Browderism but not Maoism. Moreover, the Americans- Marshall in particular- had grown sceptical of Chiang Kai-shek and his 'Christian' generals. It was possible that they would pragmatically support Communist parties and help them industrialize their countries. Ho Chi Minh had always hoped that the US would support Vietnam against China. Sadly, the Americans were seduced by the French and the Catholics into expanding their role (though they did get rid of the Catholic dictator of South Vietnam after Buddhist monks started burning themselves to death.)
At one time, Sartre was saying 'Existentialism is a Humanism' and the Americans seemed keen to promote his psilosophy in the belief that it was like that of the rugged individualist, Ernest Hemmingway. Sadly, a lot of Americans thought darkies or gooks were sub-human. That's why they were bound to turn into Marxists unless Jesus Christ entered their hearts and thus caused them to invite Whitey to help himself to their natural resources.
Sartre hoped to prove that Marxism and existentialism – of which he was the primary representative
He looked like watered down Heidegger. Thao was more thoroughly indoctrinated in Husserl but the latter's philosophy had reached a 'crisis'- i.e. the 'life-world' of 'European Humanity' was not sustainable. The 'Transcendental ego' had become inaccessible because something had gone wrong with science. But, maybe, the East could come to the rescue. After all, Moscow was to the East of Paris. Beijing was even further to the East.
– were consistent with one another: reconcilable projects.
They were also reconcilable with Voodoo.
However, the two men’s exchange of views collapsed before completion, under a series of recriminations.
Sartre was good at recrimination. Still, he would move to the Left probably because the French Communist party was led by proles, not haut bourgeois intellectuals, and thus were little better than the British Labour Party and thus would refuse to fuck up their own country. What to do? Proles are like that only. If only they had been to the right schools and Colleges they would fucking hate their country and do everything in their power to destroy its peace and prosperity.
Thảo remained bitter about this, later referring to an ‘insidious campaign’ among Sartre’s ‘disciples’ to paint him as responsible for the failure of this planned project. Today, the conversations are still lost.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, made it irrelevant. France and Holland had wasted blood and treasure trying to hang on to their South East Asian possessions.
For Thảo, their disagreement lay in the fact that Sartre did not recognise Marxism’s philosophical seriousness.
Thao was aware that there were some similarities between Hegel & Marx's ideas about the foundations of calculus and Husserl's own program. This arose from the fact that they were equally shit.
For Sartre, traditional Marxism offered an attractive social and political programme
Gulags? They are very attractive unless you get sent to them.
but lacked a real or serious philosophical account of being and human nature.
i.e. stupid shite. But Marxism can supply this just as easily as Voodoo.
Sartre developed his ideas about existentialism out of an ambition to provide the foundations for a new Left-wing philosophy for the 20th century
This was true during and after the War. Would it have been true if there had been no War? Probably not. Sartre describes himself as 'in sympathy' with Leon Blum and the United Front but he didn't vote for them. He was a 'liberal intellectual' who felt isolated in an age of mass politics and totalitarian governments.
At the start of the 1940s, Thảo had the same intellectual project.
He was aware that the Japanese were even worse than the corrupt Vichy French. Vietnam suffered a terrible famine in '44-45. Two million died out of a population of less than 20 million.
He had arrived in France from a French protectorate in modern-day Vietnam on a governor-general’s scholarship to pursue his studies in Paris.
Sadly, because of his race, he was not allowed to get a job teaching in a public institution.
Influenced by those around him, he became convinced that phenomenology, a new paradigm devised by Edmund Husserl, promised fresh answers to fundamental questions about the human condition.
Maybe the 'transcendental ego' was what Buddhas or Taoist sages achieved.
At that time, Thảo enjoyed a reputation in French philosophy as the most important interpreter and critic of Husserl’s thought.
This didn't mean much because the French were late to that particular party.
By the 1950s, Thảo had changed his mind. After a decade working with Husserl’s phenomenological approach, he came to believe it was ultimately inadequate to the task of understanding human beings since it could not properly account for history and natural development. Thảo was also taken up and transformed by events. By the end of the Second World War, he was a key spokesperson in France for Vietnamese independence.
But people back home suspected he was a Trotskyite even after he switched support to Ho Chi Minh in 1946/47 around the time when the Viet Minh started killing any Trotskyites whom the French had failed to hunt down. There would always be the suspicion that Thao had turned his coat to save his skin. Perhaps, that is why the Vietnamese Communist Party never fully trusted him even though he had been 're-educated' in 1953. His big mistake was to take the 'Hundred Flowers' campaign seriously. He was using Trotskyite language to denounce 'bureaucratization' and to demand 'Democracy and Freedom'. Equally importantly he spoke against 'errors' in 'agricultural reform'- i.e. collectivization.
Stalin's philosophy of language was useful for Third World people because it effectively said that your mother tongue and the 'feudal' literary forms you grew up with are perfectly adequate for any revolutionary purpose. The 'superstructure' is relatively autonomous. Thao, on the other hand wanted to reimagine, on the basis of phenomenology (e.g. that of the Young Hegelian Marx), the relationship between the substructure and the superstructure. But why bother? Comrade Stalin would actually help you train your army and, once you take power, he will send engineers to help you industrialize. That's the only thing which will help the common folk of your country to achieve a decent material standard of living.
As he became increasingly involved with the Viet Minh, his philosophical outlook changed. Only orthodox Marxism’s materialist understanding of history, he claimed, could provide a full and demystified account of where people’s ideas about themselves and the world come from.
Was this 'strategic'? Might he have taken a different course if France had withdrawn from Indo-China in the British manner- i.e. passing power to a Federation with hereditary monarchs serving as ceremonial heads of states? In that case, the US might have assisted with economic aid and 'transfer of technology'.
Thao makes his position clear with his preface to 'Phenomenology & Dialectical Materialism'. The former is simply wrong. The latter may be right for some abstruse reason to do with 'surplus value' & the immutable laws of Capital itself. I don't suppose a lot of people back home could work their way through it. They were too busy fighting the French.
The work that we present to the public consists of research belonging to different times and inspirations. In the first part, written between 1942 and 1950, we set forth the essential features of phenomenology from a purely historical point of view and in the perspective of Husserl's own thought. Our critical objections serve only to make evident internal contradictions found within the Husserlian corpus itself.
Could this be repaired by getting rid of the 'transcendental ego'? Sure. But, maybe, what you'd ineluctably be left with is something like Dialectical Materialism though, no doubt, some 'false consciousness' might tincture it.
In contrast, the second part, completed in 1951,
In other words, after Mao had come to power and showed he would defend Communism in North Korea & North Vietnam, by- if necessary- sending 'human waves' of battle hardened troops. What took the world by surprise was the military genius of General Giap. Ho Chi Minh, too, displayed great statesmanship. He tipped off Hare Krishna Konar, of the Indian, pro-Beijing, CPM, to the completeness of the Soviet-Chinese split. I think he influenced the CPM to abandon 'anti-Browderism' (whose prophet, HN Goshal, would be killed by his own comrades in Burma in the mid Sixties) and do land reform after coming to power in a 'United Front' Government with Leftist Congressmen.
is situated entirely within the position of dialectical materialism.
Which can be a Pragmatism- but this was not known to Francophones at the time.
It is true that there we take up again certain technical results of lived analyses, but only in terms of pure positive data, completely freed from the philosophical horizon that dominated Husserl's descriptive method. However, it is not a question in any sense of a mere juxtaposition of two contradictory points of view: Marxism appears to us as the only conceivable solution to problems raised by phenomenology itself.
We might say 'Darwinian Evolution'. Engels had said, at Marx's funeral, ' Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history'. Behind both is Malthus.
Our task in setting forth Husserl's thought was a relatively easy one, since it was concerned only with the theory of phenomenological analysis under the three aspects that appeared successively in its evolution: the description of essences,
by whom? Smart people add value by their descriptions because they generate a superior structural causal model which enables us to tinker with parameters and thus improve outcomes. If stupid people do it, only nonsense is generated. Husserl's program wasn't attracting smart people (save the idiosyncratically Platonic Godel in the Fifties). Weyl- whose wife had studied under Husserl- moved from Husserl to Brouwer. Turing used Brouwer's 'choice sequences' to establish an 'eidetic' result. Husserl achieved nothing similar. Science was moving in a pragmatic or instrumentalist direction. Still, a smart neo-Kantian- Grete Hermann- was able to find a flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variables' theorem' in the 1930s. But then she had been trained by Emmy Noether.
the static explication of lived experiences, and finally a genetic explication.
Lived experiences don't need 'static explications'. Tell us how they can be enhanced and we may pay you some money.
Its concepts were simple enough, and, in addition, amply developed in the published works. But, obviously, theory is worthless without practice, and for a long time we believed that within the very presentation of the method should be included the achieved results of the method; however, the most important part of this work has remained unpub1ished.
Nobody could be sure, back then, that Husserl hadn't said something worthwhile. But this was also true of Marx. Now, however, we can be certain both were shitheads.
It is here that we have encountered extraordinary difficulties, which are responsible for the long delay in the completion of this work and have radically reversed its orientation. The examination of unpublished manuscripts demonstrated, in fact, that the concrete analyses took a direction that was incompatible with the theoretical principles from which these concrete analyses were elaborated. From the beginning of our study of Husserl (in a work written in 1942 of which we present here only the first chapter), we had surmised the contradiction because of certain enigmatic developments within the published works. However, we thought that we would be able to resolve this contradiction by a simple broadening of our perspective, which would remain faithful to the essential phenomenological inspiration. But, after long hesitation we found that, on account of the actual descriptions that abound in the manuscripts, we had to renounce once and for all any hope of reconciling the concept of phenomenology with its actual achievement.
Thao was killing off his own subject. Not a good career move. But, by then, it appeared he might have an important role to play in his native land. Radhakrishnan was an Indian, anti-colonial, philosopher who had been Spalding professor in the Thirties. He parlayed this into a job as India's Ambassador to Stalin and then, later on, the Presidency of the Republic.
Thảo came to believe that his French philosophical counterparts had chosen their own comfort and role in the Western bourgeois imperialist regime over the morally superior path of supporting revolutionary communism.
It was easy enough to keep your job while pretending to be a Commie. Indeed, if your books sold well, you would be very comfortably off.
In 1951, after the publication of his most celebrated book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo departed for Vietnam. He would not return to Paris until 1991, two years before his death.
Thảo’s time in Vietnam was hard: although the country honours him today, in his lifetime he was persecuted and kept in poverty by the state.
Communism, in a poor country, means being kept in poverty by the State.
Therefore, Thảo’s most important work was all produced in France during the 1940s. Its interest lies
in its straightforwardness. Few people who have spent a decade studying shit say 'this is shit'. Why? Because you then have to study something which isn't shit for a decade before you are qualified to teach that shite.
not only in the originality with which he navigates the prevailing currents in French thought, but how he responds to some of the most important conflicts of the 20th century:
They had already occurred. Twelve years before he was born, Japan defeated Tzarist Russia. Then the Bolsheviks came to power there and they helped China become Communist. China then helped Indo-China to go in the same direction.
the Cold War and the worldwide movements for colonial independence.
Which became sure of success in 1917. Why? The age of multi-racial Empires was over because Imperial cousins had been stupid enough to start a war which would lead to the eclipse of the landed aristocracy. War was no longer 'the sport of Kings'. It had turned into a matter of industrial economics. It was obvious that factory workers- churning out munitions- were the ultimate source of power. The question was whether South East Asia would follow the American or the Soviet model. It turned out, it could follow the Deng Xiaoping model in a manner that greatly improved material standards of living without sacrificing the Communist Party's monopoly of power.
The result is a body of work that raises important questions about how to understand the relation between who we are, and the history and society that shape us. Additionally, Thảo’s refusal to distinguish between the philosophical, the political and the personal led him to become one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser.
This is nonsense. The moment a people are colonised, they are able to theorise what divides them from their conquerors. Partly, this had to do with scientific education and the ability to industrialize. The rise of Japan made this obvious. The question for Vietnam was whether it could keep landowners and Princes and Caodai Popes and Catholic Bishops and rise through free markets or whether it needed to follow the Communist path. Irma Adelman, in the late Sixties, suggested that the Americans should pay off the landlords and give the land to the peasants. The peasants would then have no incentive to side with the Communist insurgents. This would end up saving money. Sadly, the American Defence-Industrial complex didn't want to save money. It wanted to piss it against a wall.
Husserl (1859-1938) had begun his career as a philosopher of mathematics,
His PhD was in math- the calculus of variation. Only subsequently did he fall under the influence of Brentano and move to philosophy. However, it was his close friendship with Cantor- who believed his transfinite numbers were objective, metaphysical entities, which influenced Husserl's shift away from psychologism toward an emphasis on objectivity and essence. Back then, few would have thought the Continuum Hypothesis would remain an open question. Husserl was right to be cautious in this matter but wrong to think 'lived experience' must be founded upon some ineluctable 'theory of theories'.
which he theorised as a system of abstract representations corresponding to how reality appears to us in certain situations. A mathematical theorem is not, strictly speaking, true:
It is a tautology. The problem is that the 'intentions' (sets, classes, functions etc.) may have no well defined extensions and thus Liebniz's laws of identity are violated. X is not equal to x if x is epistemic or impredicative in a certain sense. This is like the 'masked man' (intensional)) fallacy known to the ancient Greeks.
rather it is a statement of the truth,
or it is false because it treats intensions as having well defined extensions when such is not the case.
a kind of roadmap we can follow to reach an objective perception of what it describes.
This is like the notion of 'naturality' (non-arbitrariness) in category theory. The problem is that the purpose (intention) is always arbitrary thus we can only say there is naturality (i.e. every smart person would agree with the result) only for a limited purpose. But this is Pragmatism or Instrumentalism of some type.
Thảo elaborates on this idea in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951) where he explains how ‘a theorem of geometry can be the object only of a confused intuition or of a blind or symbolic representation’.
Either the thing is useful- i.e. saves us time or allows us to make specific calculations- or it isn't. Intuitions don't much matter. Brouwer's are different from Hilbert's but both can provide us with very useful results.
In the first case, we may only dimly remember or partly understand what the theorem is getting at.
Even the author may be wrong about this.
In the second, where we understand it perfectly,
sadly, this can only happen 'at the end of mathematical time' when all 'lawless' choice sequence are known to be 'lawful'. In other words, Liebniz's 'labyrinth of freedom' gets Infinity's Ariadne's thread.
‘the only sensible thing to do is to subject it to careful analysis,
It is only sensible to do useful things. What Husserl was doing wasn't useful. Brouwer, surprisingly, turned out to be very useful.
in which the theorem is presented in the fullness of itself by the performance of the operations which demonstrate its truth.’
Pedagogues may want to believe that they, like Moses, have descended from Mt. Sinai with eternal commandments. But they can be just as useful if they hold no such belief.
The premise of a divide between concrete reality, which can only be experienced,
it can't. What is experienced is 'subjective'. I think this is a boring lecture. A smart dude thinks it is exciting. He can make some great discovery or invention on the basis of what he heard while I was sitting in a corner drawing pictures of naked ladies.
and our representations of it, which inevitably condense or repackage the truth, is the basic insight on which Husserl built his system.
It is the same insight of the ancient Buddhist or Taoist or Jain sages who saw that if one thing was fully understood then all things would simultaneously be known. This is like the 'slingshot'- the notion that all true statements refer to the same thing.
Phenomenology has less mainstream purchase than, say, psychoanalysis; but there are many parallels between the two schools of thought.
I suppose both could replace Religion. But Marxism went further by promising Paradise on Earth.
Both phenomenology and psychoanalysis were devised near the turn of the 20th century by intellectuals – Husserl and Sigmund Freud – who had grown up in assimilated Jewish families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Husserl converted to Protestantism. Brouwer too was a pious (reformist) Protestant.
Freud the medical clinician
charlatan. His first big idea was to prescribe cocaine as a panacea
and Husserl the Kantian logician were each devoted to the methods of rational enquiry. But both phenomenology and psychoanalysis fundamentally challenge the Enlightenment notion that human beings (at their best) and the world (as we can understand it) are rational.
In other words, both are irrational.
They each in different ways dispute the very coherence of rationality as an intellectual principle.
Freud claimed to be doing something useful. Boring people could talk to him- for a fee. There was a Messianic aspect to Husserl, but Heidegger was better at it.
For example, take an ordinary statement that professes to be rationally grounded: ‘The sky is blue,’ ‘I am your father,’ ‘Two lines that are parallel do not meet,’ and so on.
The first two are factual and can be verified. The third is speculative and grounded in a set of axioms which are assumed to be true. All we can say is that if the axioms are true and no logical mistake was made, then the hypothesis is likely to be true.
Instead of treating such observations at face value,
i.e. as things which can eventually be verified
both Husserl and Freud consider them to be surface effects.
That's how paranoia works. Mummy is only superficially nice. Actually she is a robot sent from the future to kill us.
What makes such statements appear rational, in other words, is the false impression they give of being somehow apart from our ordinary human drives and experiences.
Nonsense! The guy who says 'the sky is blue' is telling us it isn't raining or snowing. We have a human drive to picnic when the sky is blue rather than black with rain clouds. Also, it is human to find your son and say 'I'm your daddy' even if you happen to be Darth Vader.
For Freud, this all has to do with the past: in all parts of life, unknowingly, we repeat the dramas of our early years.
i.e. we keep pooping our pants and screaming our lungs out.
Whatever justifications or explanations we invent, however little we may realise, when we act, we follow baby logic.
I wish that were true. Baby logic results in baby getting lots of kisses and cuddles from women in the vicinity.
Meanwhile, for Husserl, the essential thing is the present moment, the experience. At first, his point may seem merely to consist in the trite observation that we all see the world through our own eyes. But the profundity lies in his attempt to describe individual experience in systematic terms and offer a critique of everyday understanding. The sky is seldom actually blue,
Which is why it is useful to comment on it being so. 'The sky is blue' is likely to trigger the response 'let's go out and get some fresh air'. You then suggest we stop at that nice pub beside the river.
and the meaning of the term ‘father’ is different whether we are three or 53 years old.
Not for me. I liked hugging Daddy and asking him to buy me ice-cream both when I was 3 and when I was 53.
What, in more-careless moments, we might call objective descriptions of these things are, for the phenomenologist, really a shorthand we use to develop a shared consistent picture of the world.
If you don't have such a thing by the time you are five, you are mentally retarded.
This is more apparent when speaking about something like emotions, which are often difficult to put into words. Yet phenomenology is based on the idea that whatever we might be speaking about, we cannot fully capture it.
Again, this is an idea we have all grasped by about the age of three. Saying 'Ma Ma' doesn't cause Mum to magically appear. On the other hand, you should never say 'Candyman' three times. I have watched several documentaries on this topic.
Even a chair or a table, the more you look at them, start to exhibit new properties: to catch the light in unexpected ways, to betray their origins as wood formed by a certain hand, and so on. Phenomenology argues that what we normally mean by subjectivity and objectivity puts these terms the wrong way around. Usually, we treat personal things as subjective,
No. We treat things as objective and impressions or feelings as subjective. My Mummy actually exists. Today, I think she is very nice due to she gave me cookies. Tomorrow, I think she is a horrible witch because she says get a fucking job you lazy cunt.
and imagine that common systematic accounts of things are objective. This is not actually the case. Objectivity is what we find in our personal experience,
Which is why we try to sell Mummy's niceness on Ebay.
when we encounter the object; subjectivity is the abstraction of terms and associations that we impose on our experience in order to understand it.
Very true. Baby is engaged in 'abstracting terms and associates' when it cuddles Mummy and coos with delight. The cat, however, is applying Yoneda Lemma when it purrs and rubs against our feet to encourage us to feed it.
It was this system that Thảo spent the 1940s trying to interpret.
He should have studied something useful like Chemical Engineering.
In 1942, he submitted his thesis on Husserl at the ENS in Paris. In 1944, he travelled to Louvain in Belgium to collect some of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts and smuggle them back to Paris. Thảo then kept them in his home for several years as he reworked his thesis into a book on Husserl’s philosophy.
Thao was very diligent. It is sad he wasted his time studying useless shite.
Over the 1940s, Thảo grew more deeply involved in politics.
Vichy Vietnam was fucking horrible. The Japs were utter beasts.
From the mid-19th century, the French had been colonial rulers of the region then known as Indochina, encompassing modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. During the Second World War, the Japanese invaded and occupied the region. When they left in 1945, the Viet Minh, a communist revolutionary force led by Ho Chi Minh, seized the opportunity to declare independence as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Thus began a chain of events leading to an eight-year war between France and the Viet Minh. By the end of the Second World War, Thảo was a leading spokesperson for the anticolonial Vietnamese independence movement in France. As the French state reacted to the movement, he became a target.
He was a brave man. The Vietnamese generally are.
Towards the end of 1945, at the same time as French forces under General Leclerc landed in Saigon, Thảo was arrested and imprisoned in Paris. The arrest divided his compatriots at the ENS, and an effort to support him against the French state did not completely crystallise.
France, like Holland, wanted to hang on to its Asian Empire precisely because they had been powerless to resist Hitler effectively. The Americans were minatory to the Dutch but were seduced by the French. In contrast, the British- who had stood alone against Hitler- couldn't get rid of India fast enough. Even the cunning Mahatma wasn't able to trick them into staying.
From prison, Thảo wrote the first and most important of several articles on the conflict that were published in Les Temps modernes, the intellectual magazine founded by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Thảo would later describe the article, titled ‘On Indochina’, as ‘existentialist’, and it would prove a key influence on Frantz Fanon. Thảo’s ‘On Indochina’ anticipated one of Fanon’s most important ideas: that universal ideals as we usually understand them are improper in discussions between coloniser and colonised, because to be colonised is precisely to be relegated outside the Western reach of the universal.
Bertrand Russell had been brutally frank. Though imprisoned for his Pacifist writings during the Great War, he said that wars against less advanced peoples were justified.
‘On Indochina’ (1946) is of more than just historical interest
It is stupid and reflects the parochialism of the French intellectual. The fact is, the Brits were handing over power to the Indians while China had been helped to get back territory from the Japanese and to exercise sovereignty. Obviously 'Indo-China' would go the same way as the Indians and the Chinese. The French should follow the British policy of making friends with their former enemies and thus preserving economic and cultural ties. Obviously, Indo-China would want French support against the Chinese reassertion of claims over their territory.
– Thảo does not merely argue for colonial independence, but tries to explain how the gap between the perspectives of coloniser and colonised makes it impossible to have debates on shared terms or to appreciate the other’s point of view.
If the Vietnamese really have a different 'life-world' then they are too backward to rule themselves. The sheep-dog doesn't have the same life-world as either the shepherd of the sheep. Thus he obeys the shepherd and herds the sheep. Thoa should learn to be a good little sheep-dog. We should have handed him over to the Gestapo for re-education. The White race is the race of shepherds. Brown peeps ought to say 'bow wow' and lick the hand that whips them.
He refers to ‘a radical misunderstanding, which no explanation would be able to dissipate, since all expressions are understood in a sense opposed to the one in which they are pronounced.’
Beating would help Thao overcome his 'radical misunderstanding' of his place in the world.
For the French, the so-called Annamites (as the Vietnamese in Indochina were known, and as Thảo calls them in ‘On Indochina’) were not truly French.
D'uh! The fiction was that Thao was a subject of Emperor Bao Dai.
But nor, since the community to which they had belonged was premodern and precolonial, did they fully count as a people in their own right.
Like the French under Nazi occupation. In theory they were under President Petain. In reality, they were the slaves of the Germans.
They were, for the average French person of good faith, in need of modernisation and proper integration into the international community. The Annamites, of course, saw the situation completely differently: they considered themselves part of a people who had been occupied and put to the service of a foreign power. ‘When one [side] says “liberty” or “progress”,’ writes Thảo, ‘the other hears “liberty-” or “progress-inside-the-French-system”, such that in order for Vietnam to be free, it must first remain inside this system, by force if necessary.’
Thao wanted to get rid of the Emperor. Indeed, he wanted to uproot the whole 'mandarin' system though himself belonging to that class. Don't serve the Emperor if he is a tool of foreign exploiters. The Chinese had gotten rid of their Emperor. Vietnam must do the same.
The notions of liberty and progress presuppose that Vietnam should be a Western-style society with its accordant economic and social structures.
i.e. a landed aristocracy and an elite administrative class. Merchants in the Cities might displace the former and co-opt the latter. But Rural Society would remain feudal and backward.
To the extent it lacks this, it may be classed as a less developed society in need of Western help – which may amount to Western control. Thảo is arguably the first theorist of how the language and culture of Western imperialism is based on an erasure of the peoples colonised by Europe.
Thao wasn't a complete fool. He knew that France hadn't 'erased' Arabic or Islam even in Algeria- forget about South East Asia. The Brits had actually fostered Indian languages and encouraged Indians to discover the glories of their own ancient history and civilization.
Another of Thảo’s examples of how a word can mean virtually opposite things to colonised and coloniser centres on the word ‘treason’ (trahison) and describes a situation similar to his own experience.
There was no reason to do so. The French knew that yesterday's traitor is today's patriot demanding the execution of the Vichy scumbags.
From the perspective of the colonising French, an intellectual, he says, who is suddenly lifted out of the oppressed class to receive all the benefits and privileges of the powerful
Fuck off! A darkie with a diploma was still a darkie. The lowest White man was still his superior.
‘is now a member [of the elite], and to purport to pass back to the side of the exploited class, is to commit treason.’ Yet the coloniser’s view is based on overlooking the fact that such a person is, and already considers themselves, a citizen of their own country: in this case, Vietnam.
He was a subject of the Vietnamese Emperor. He wasn't a citizen. Only about 300 or 400 Indochinese families were granted French citizenship in the Thirties.
Thảo argues that what certain Vietnamese intellectuals such as himself experienced, from their own point of view, was their colonisers bestowing an array of privileges along with a subsequent demand for loyalty. In other words, a dishonourable bribe.
Thao could have applied for naturalization. The fact that he didn't showed his patriotism.
Resistance and opposition by the privileged colonised, he says, is not only inevitable: for them it is the only honourable course, since ‘to abandon one’s own for a personal advantage is the very definition of the concept of treason.’ Thảo was claiming that the French were cultivating a class of native informants or loyalists.
They weren't even doing that. They were a gang of thieves. The Brits were astonished at the high level of corruption in the French administration when they helped liberate Vietnam.
Over the course of the 1940s, the tensions of Thảo’s position as a Vietnamese philosopher at the top of the French system seem to have weighed more and more on him. The burden began to colour his relationships with French intellectuals. He became disillusioned with the Parisian philosophical milieu, and his activism led him to a more radicalised Marxist point of view. In 1948, he wrote ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit in its Real Content’, a critical review for Les Temps modernes of Alexandre Kojève’s (still) influential presentation of G W F Hegel.
Kojeve influenced Francis Fukuyama thanks to Leo Strauss. He ended up a Euro-crat. I suppose, he spun a good enough yarn at a time when French intellectuals were aware that they had been overtaken by the Germans and maybe even the Yanks.
Kojève’s lectures on Hegel were a sensation in Parisian intellectual circles at the time, and Thảo himself considered this critique his break with the French philosophical scene.
He was right to think poorly of it. What he could not have guessed was that America would help it degenerate yet further. By the end of the Sixties, the Maoists were a powerful force on French campuses. Vietnam held aloof from that mishegoss because it was too busy kicking American ass.
Essentially, Thảo’s criticism was that Kojève mystified the relation between Hegel’s concepts of Nature and Spirit,
which were already mystified
or the world as a whole and the human consciousness that emerges within it, in a way that left the door open for theological interpretations.
Kojeve was a charlatan. At least the Cao Dai Pope was rich. Graham Greene unkindly suggested that the Americans were stupid enough to back that cult rather than fulfil their world historical mission to allow the Catholic Church to fuck up darkies.
For Thảo, Hegel’s dialectic, as reinterpreted by Marx, was a powerful means of showing how the mind is a product of the way living beings interact with their environment.
Very true. Marx enables you to understand why pussycat chases mice.
Thảo defended the Marxist notion of human history as essentially the history of production,
which, not having studied econ, he knew nothing about
by framing it in terms of a broader biological theory, claiming that consciousness and mind developed from mediation between the organism and its surrounding environment.
Back then, there was Lysenko and a mischievous type of Marxist Lamarckism.
Thảo depicts an upward trajectory of evolutionary development from the smallest biomes to human beings, with more complex levels of awareness resulting from biological features such as the capacity to move oneself or to wield instruments.
In other words, he was ignorant of biology. To be fair, it wasn't till the Sixties and Seventies that people like Haldane & John Maynard Smith developed the modern, game theoretic, Neo-Darwinian synthesis.
In 1950, two years after his essay on Kojève, Thảo’s dispute with Sartre arose. As had been the case with Kojève, Thảo believed the disagreement with Sartre was both political and philosophical.
Back then, orthodox Marxists- like Lefebvre & Lucacs- were attacking Sartre. The fellow was bound to fuck off to Hollywood one of these days.
From the 1940s to the ’80s, French philosophy attempted to chart a third way between the US and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and Marxism.
the subject was taught in High School. Everyone wants to escape from teaching nonsense to credential craving apple-polishers. Sartre's pen had made him money & gained him fame. Also the fucker was getting laid like nobody's business. On the other hand, Arthur Koestler did fuck the Beaver. When Sartre tried to cuckold Koestler, he threw a glass at his head. Had he not done so, maybe he would have seduced Sartre and pushed him down the road Aron had already taken.
What happened, instead, was the slow de-Marxification of the French intellectual elite,
unlike the rapid de-Marxification of China which had begun in the countryside even before the fall of the Gang of Four. By the Eighties, Chinese ideologues were quoting Marx as saying 'to each according to his contribution' till the abolition of scarcity.
as it gradually became a mouthpiece for US capitalist ideology.
Mitterrand did try Leftist policies till it became apparent they didn't work. Thatcher's England was rising. The working class element in the French Communist Party wanted what 'Dagenham Man' was getting- i.e. more pay, ownership of his council house, shares in privatized companies, and cheap holidays abroad. Already, British 'yuppies' were overrunning the countryside buying up car loads of Beaujolais. Soon, they would be followed by the affluent working class. Nice chateaus would become second homes for Thatcher's children.
Thảo seems to have grasped all this at an early stage, in part because he never believed in the possibility of a third way.
He knew the French could not reform themselves even in the face of the Nazi threat.
Looking back on the postwar period from the vantage point of the 1980s, Thảo would later describe how ‘the surprise offensive of the Marshall Plan with the purging of Communist ministers from the governments of Western Europe’ left him and others with a choice between two alternatives: ‘Faced with the rise of colonialist imperialism, I could only choose Marxism.’
Clement Atlee ensured that British colonies in Africa and Asia could choose some stupid third way of their own. So too did the French in the Sixties. This tended to mean support for cannibal Emperors.
To say so implies, of course, that his counterparts tacitly chose capitalism. Thảo fought his battle with Sartre on philosophical grounds: idealism or materialism? The individual or the collective? The disputes between the two and their ideas came together in Thảo’s major work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, a much-revised version of his 1942 thesis, which appeared in 1951.
He killed off the former- which was pretty much dead already- but failed to bring the latter to life. Could it have been done? I suppose, one could say Ho Chi Minh actually achieved the thing. But it was no panacea.
Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism is regarded as Thảo’s most important work, and the most significant introduction to Husserl’s system for a generation of French students and thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Paul Ricoeur.
In other words, his influence was anti-Marxist. Macron was Ricoeur's secretary. Also, he married his drama teacher who slaps him silly. Admittedly, she is gorgeous still, I mean to say, WTF?!
What makes Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism philosophically important is Thảo’s argument that the phenomenological system ultimately undermines itself (see below).
Everything undermines itself. But, since undermining undermines itself, everything still remains as shitty as it ever was.
Thảo argues that to move beyond this paradox intellectually requires us to abandon phenomenology for an orthodox Marxist position,
We can go beyond the paradox that nothing dies save what has lived, by abandoning sodomy and marrying our drama teacher except we don't really have to abandon sodomy even if our elderly wife keeps slapping us silly.
and claims that, instead of experience, natural and social development are the best philosophical foundations for an understanding of the world and human nature.
Most people understood Communism well enough to keep the fuck away from Communist countries.
In this sense, the book is also a record of its author’s own political and intellectual transformation during the 1940s. What had begun as an account of Husserl’s system became an attempt to highlight and transcend its weaknesses using a Marxist dialectical materialist framing; it reads like two books in one.
Indeed. The good news about dialectical materialism is that you can ally with Hilter today and with Churchill tomorrow. But just telling lies has the same effect.
In Thảo’s account, Husserl’s phenomenological system is essentially flawed because,
it gasses on about essences?
in seeking to avoid intellectual abstractions, it counsels a return to ‘experience’ – which is itself an abstraction.
No. It is an intension with an unknown extension.
For Thảo: ‘The lived is just an abstract aspect of actual real life’
Only in the sense that it is equally an abstract aspect of an imaginary life or wife or knife.
which consists in ‘the real movement by which nature becomes conscious of itself through biological evolution and human history.’
Nature does not become conscious of itself. It isn't the case that the Grand Canyon may suddenly wake up one day and decide it is Gay and wants to train as an actuarial scientist in Seattle.
In other words, experience is not just a random flux from which we make our own ideas; it is a product of the biological and historical conditions in which we live.
Very true. My idea that I am not a cat is not based on my experience of getting slapped any time I purr loudly and try to climb onto the lap of a pretty woman. Rather it is a product of the biological and historical conditions prevailing in our galaxy.
Husserl demonstrates how people’s concepts about the world come from their experiences,
Very true. The concept of God must come from our experience of having bumped into him at the Supermarket.
but these too come from somewhere.
The Supermarket was created by Spiderman. It is all part of Dr. Strange's devious plot to get Thor to stop fucking the Hulk.
Human psychology, if taken to mean the study of how individuals come to their ideas about themselves and the world, is a subdiscipline of human evolution and social history.
Which is a subdiscipline of galactic history and the evolution of the Higgs boson.
For Thảo, Husserl took to its limit the Cartesian mode of philosophising from the point of view of an individual consciousness.
No. He wasn't smart enough to do any such thing.
But his mistake was to regard pure formless experience as the ultimate zone of philosophical enquiry and to claim everything else was built on top of it.
Einstein got quite far with some such notion. But Bohr was able to defeat him at Solvay. Still, it wasn't till laboratory proof was available that we could be sure that things like non-locality genuinely existed.
For Thảo, this meant that, despite himself, Husserl could not avoid falling into a solipsism by which one’s personal perspective becomes virtually the centre of the universe.
It is not solipsist to believe in a transcendental ego or Godel's God.
In the second part of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo
talks yet more bollocks.
aims to offer a way beyond what he has shown to be Husserl’s solipsism. So Thảo offers a foundation for a full materialist account of the human condition: the development of the species, the trajectory of history and civilisation, the formation of the individual human being, and the relation between these epistemic layers. This account delves deeply into human evolution and child psychology. Throughout his work, Thảo accepts and represents the Western-centric, human-centric, teleological view of history he inherits from 19th-century Europe: somehow, things move from the earliest farmers to ancient Greece, then to the Middle Ages, and finally into capitalism.
It was obvious that 'total war' meant that the State took over functions previously performed by open markets. Schumpeter, in America, was saying Socialism was inevitable. Over the course of the Fifties and Sixties, many economists adopted the 'convergence hypothesis'- i.e. the Soviet and the American systems would become functionally equivalent with 'administered pricing' taking the place of market forces. The difference was that the Soviets would avoid periodic 'shake-outs' leading to mass, structural, unemployment.
At its best, Thảo’s Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism is an effort to engage seriously with Marxism’s philosophical depth:
by ignoring his actual philosophy and gassing on about Evolution
it is not just a sociopolitical agenda, but an ambitious account of being and human nature.
It was pretty much what a lot of Turd World intellectuals believed. Communism was a shortcut to 'catch up' growth. Instead of market incentives, scolding the bourgeoisie would cause them to fuck off and die. This would mean everybody would become enormously productive and affluent.
Look at the war-time famines in Vietnam or Bengal. You can't tell me bougie bastards didn't eat up all the rice just so they could watch millions starve to death. Fuck you bougie scum! Fuck you very much!
The second part of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism is less successful. It sometimes falls into the same naive materialism that Thảo elsewhere warned so forcefully against, viewing the world purely in a mechanistic manner, absent the wonder and nature of consciousness.
The nature of my consciousness isn't wondrous at all. It is shitty. Most people are like me. There are very few Terence Taos.
After completing Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo left France for Vietnam. The rest of his life would prove tumultuous and tragic. In 1956,
when the 'Hundred Flowers' campaign began in China
a few years after his return to Vietnam, the communist regime became tolerant of dissenting voices in the wake of the Soviet Union’s leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in Moscow. Gradually, there developed a culture of satire and criticism of the regime by intellectuals, most infamously in two journals respectively called Nhân Văn and Giai Phẩm (Thảo wrote for the second). What is known today as the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair resulted in the state banning the journals and punishing those who’d been involved with them.
Mao was very dialectical. First give the intellectuals enough rope. Then hang them. He played the same trick on the Students. He got them to beat their teachers and then brought in workers to beat the students and drive them into the countryside.
In 1958, Thảo was forced to make a public self-criticism, and got sent for re-education to a farm at the foot of mount Ba Vì, near Hanoi.
One reason to steer clear of the education racket is that there are murderous thugs who want to re-educate you.
Thảo’s intellectual life afterwards was less a trajectory than a series of aborted moves and battles against the odds. When he finally returned to France in 1991, he was like a ghost:
Ho Chi Minh's successor won the war but mismanaged the economy.
‘The more we spoke,’ says one account from someone who met him during that period, ‘the less I knew what distinguished our conversation from a dream, or a nightmare.’ Thảo died in Paris in 1993, aged 75, leaving behind thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts.
He has been rehabilitated and his oeuvre may be preserved in an increasingly affluent Vietnam.
Thảo is a tragic figure, both in philosophy and in life.
Because, first France and then the US did stupid shit in his country. But some of the country's economic woes were self-inflicted.
His work on phenomenology remains one of the clearest assessments of the scope and limits of Husserl’s system.
It was shit.
But his intellectual legacy is much greater than this.
Because some stupid French Professors read his shite. What they didn't get is that they were teaching nonsense.
Despite the education and privilege France had bestowed on him,
It wasn't very much. The top collaborationist families in Vietnam lived the life of Kings.
Thảo refused to commit anything like ‘treason’ against the Vietnamese to whom he felt he belonged. Instead, he devoted himself to their cause, including on the plane of ideas, where his postcolonial critiques of liberal universalist language and his analysis of the perspective of the colonised influenced generations to come.
He had no influence on the Global South. Fanon's Martinique decided to stay with France.
Thảo’s greatest strength is how he strove to bring together the philosophical, the political and the personal,
a turd brings together much of the food you have eaten. This doesn't mean you should eat it. We may all produce philosophical shit. But coprophagy- i.e. teaching philosophy- isn't a great life choice.
and to organise these all with some consistency. But this was also his weakness and, at his worst, it made him dogmatic.
He served his people by translating and writing in his mother tongue. Had he remained abroad, he could not have contributed much to nation building.
It was also the reason why he returned to Vietnam where he met his ruin.
He did what he could. The Vietnamese are hard working and patriotic. They will rise and rise.
The life and work of Trần Đức Thảo bring us face to face with some of the hardest subjects: what kind of creatures are we?
Not cats. I discovered this the hard way.
What is this world in which we find ourselves?
One where purring loudly does not turn you into a cat.
How should we live?
Emigrate somewhere still ruled by bougie Whites? Fuck that. Dubai has lower taxes. Vietnam is now being discovered by Indian tourists. Also it is cheaper to qualify as a Doctor there.
These questions are just as pressing today, and the answers no easier to find.
These questions only arise if you are teaching shite or are running some sort of cult or Ponzi scheme. The answers are very easy to find. They entail quitting Skool and getting a fucking job. Sadly, Socioproctology doesn't pay very much. Still, it beats being a non-Socioproctologist with zero money.
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