/edu/ - Education

When it comes to feminism, i tend to listen to women

The biology may not be 100% accurate but remember she is a philosopher.

When it comes to idpol, I tend sage&hide threads.

>>17477
>The author was wrong to believe male privilege extends to a biological level
Yes. Male privilege is completely a social phenomena and the male / female dichotomy should really be considered a cast system rather than a real biological difference. The author of the book is beholden to bourgeois ideology and bourgeois empiricist science.

When it comes to feminism, I do not care that much really.

>>17480
sage is not a downvote.

When it comes to women, I tend not to listen to feminists. Beauvoir is based though

When it comes to feminism, I only listen to socialists.

>>17479
The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted gender; however, the point is to change it

>>17486
futa master gender

>>17479
>but remember she is a philosopher.
Well if your philosophy is grounded in a misunderstanding of reality, you are doing bad philosophy. But ok.

First of all, if you accept the premise that privilege extends to biology, that more or less essentializes sex privilege right off the bat. You make it something inherent and (at least with present technology) immutable. This is pretty obviously a defeatist position because it forecloses the possibility of overcoming at least some aspects of sexism. Somebody who cares about that cause should be at least very skeptical of any conclusions to that sort of effect and seek to disprove them. To say or suggest that sexism is simply natural carries with it the aroma of someone resigned to that status quo, perhaps even trying to defend it. Either way, that is the kind of person who will be attracted to these arguments and who will try to make use of them. So this is both jumping to conclusions, closing off areas of discussion, and socially/politically it's problematic because it attracts/enables the forces tat would uphold sexism.

Now you can look in very obvious ways and see that because men have higher testosterone for example the overwhelming tendency is higher physical strength. But if you do that, you are measuring men and women by a patriarchal standard that focuses on physical strength to the exclusion of other factors. Indeed, any combination of criteria - and more importantly the weight you assign to each criterion - has to be arbitrary to a significant degree (and we don't understand biology well enough to catalogue all relevant traits either btw). It's ultimately a question of subjective valuation. We can discuss these sex differences but to weigh them and especially to weigh them together in aggregate comes down to opinion. Even in examples where there are clear advantages or disandvantages in that regard, to frame them as the same or even similar to (socially constructed) privilege is not only defeatist but also lays the groundwork for reactionaries/conservatives to appeal to nature defending sexist social order, because it lets in through the back door the idea that socially constructed privilege is in some meaningful way the same kind of thing as "natural" privilege. Which is both incorrect and has pretty dire (and obvious) political implications.

A philosopher can be critiqued on philosophical grounds too.

>>17478
Women are no better or worse at theorizing than men, and experiencing an oppressive system does not grant you insight into the mechanics behind it, any more than being run over by a car helps you understand internal combustion engines.

>>17488
>Well if your philosophy is grounded in a misunderstanding of reality, you are doing bad philosophy. But ok.
Thats all philosophy
Its why they dont call it "science"

>>17488
Womens lived experience are objectively superior to mansplaining theoriticians in this case
OP begins with the inherent dismissal of beauvoir since she violates his egalitarian worldview. Feminism is a movement for and by women - if thats not become clear enough. Beauvoirs second wave feminism was about instigating a sex war, which led to all of the political lesbianism of later cultural variation - a politics exclusive to femininity
Beauvoir also described herself as a lesbian yet had sexual relations with sartre - her contradictions give rise to the autonomy of identity, which continues today. Camille paglia too, called herself "transgender" decades ago, yet still sexes herself as a female.
Im a man, so i stay out of it - my side has been chosen. It would be as equally ridiculous to call myself an ally of a radical lesbian man-hating cult. Like how whites jump onto black nationalist theorization. Its not my space to talk, only to dismiss. I am the antinomy.

>>17490
>Will never be pegged by Simone de Beauvoir while I'm her underage student
Why even exist

>>17490
>Womens lived experience are objectively superior to mansplaining theoriticians in this case
More like you are subjectively moralizing about theoretical analysis. If something is right or wrong you can identify why, regardless of who says it. Personal context is a factor in your thinking but it doesn't determine whether you are correct. If you genuinely think that correctness is a function of the source, that's just taking a reactionary turn into tribalism.
>Its not my space to talk, only to dismiss. I am the antinomy.
Further defeatism, this time to shirk the duty of being an ally.

>>17488
>experiencing an oppressive system does not grant you insight into the mechanics behind it, any more than being run over by a car helps you understand internal combustion engines.
I think this metaphor falls short which is to say it's wrong

>>17492
Lets say theres a white guy who reads garvey, malcolm x, MLK, hampton, baldwin, etc.
Does he have authority over any "objectivity" in a black movement? Or is a black movement self-defined?
Is it okay to whitesplain the same way people find it acceptable to mansplain?
I simply allow it to breathe.

>>17489
anglo moment

>>17491
Patrician fetish

>>17495
Yes i am anglo
How do you do? Greetings.
Cheerio, now.

>>17494
Who is claiming authority? Maybe you need to do some self-crit about your own white guy thinking if you automatically perceive commentary from outside as mighty whitey trying to force people to be different, because the only one I see talking to that effect is you.

I offer thoughts freely to be considered or not by anyone interested in the subject. And I do this with an understanding that most people theorizing about any special interest like this are doing so with an agenda - both in the sense of having personal stakes and in the sense of having an ideological line to uphold.

>>17493
You are entitled to your opinions.

>>17497
based and unashmedly earl grey pilled.

>>17498
I recognize myself as the mighty whitey, seeking to wrap different people into my grand universalist narrative. I think this is just an anglo particularism though, not an "objective" perspective.
Quantity isnt quality.
Can we have common truths this way though? Thats what i wonder. I think what i think, like everybody else, but thats all i can do.

>>17500
Sounds like you are content with rationalizing problems instead of confronting them. It'd be a lot cooler if you didn't wrap it in faux-left jargon though.

>>17502
I am a faux-leftist though
>rationalizing rather than confronting
Thats just my personality though

>>17500
>I recognize myself as the mighty whitey, seeking to wrap different people into my grand universalist narrative. I think this is just an anglo particularism though, not an "objective" perspective.
Whites can form non-universalist narratives as well, though. Are the rationales of these narratives inaccessible to non-whites, hence uncriticizable? Either there is a universalizable form of reason or not. If there is, all such narratives can be critiqued; if there isn't, every rationality is only particular to its milieu, yet the latter still requires a "meta-rationality" to explain why the rationalities in each milieu are incommensurable (i.e. you have to understand them to be incommensurable in some way), which presupposes some standard of reason to which you're appealing in trying to convince others you're right.

It's strange that the insistence on incommensurability between cultures or races has appeared when these have never been more "commensurable." It feels too much like staking out a "copyright" claim on the usage of signs or ideas through one's identity, hence "cultural appropriation" as if cultural heritage or knowledge is itself property that can be "appropriated."

>>17490
"lived experience" is a buzzword used by undergraduates and professors who are afraid of the dread M word (Marxism). It's a bad reheating of Foucault, which is also a bad reheating of Heidegger, who was a fascist, anti-Marxist reactionary. Post-structuralism is dead.

>>17504
Its less about "ideas" strictly, and more about phenomenology
I appreciate your transcendent critique, but then again, i ask, what is the acceptable limit of criticism, especially as it pertains to superseding the consciousness of a separately-configured subject, like a black person or a woman?
Whiteness is universalist, as an anglo weltenschauung - it collects european identity into one package, alienating the ethnic diversity of the continent.
In the old days there were racial groups treated respectively as the nations, the french, the german, the english, the italian…
Part of being critical for example would be to see the EU not as an international body, but as a german project, which is still lead by the USA, suppressing each perspective under the democratic illusion of a parliament. Same way the british parliament has the quality of representation, yet all members are hereditary figures of the ruling class.
Do you think being critical of critique is my naivety, or is it on the path to a resolution?

>>17505
Impersonalizing the process of science is equally ideological
Even the soviets gave their own aesthetics to agriculture
Like how mao attempted to concentrate time to beijing.

>>17507
>Impersonalizing the process of science is equally ideological


Nothing about rationality is impersonal, it is a great universalist achievement. Marxism is a child of the Enlightenment and it is not an ontology. Seriously man, most academics nowadays are going back to Hegel and getting rid of their cringey Deleuze and Derrida obsessions from the 80s-2000s. It revealed itself as an explicitly ideological project that prevented serious discussion of Marx, and this has registered with all serious Marxists who are critiquing "the cultural turn" that ultimately degenerated into post-structuralism.

I'm linking this debate because the Marxist guy absolutely destroys Spivaks university udnergraduate post-structuralist bullshit with facts and logic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVfTgiE4FAY

Jump to the 44 min mark if you're interested.

>>17506
>Its less about "ideas" strictly, and more about phenomenology
Phenomenology has logic to it as well, though, and isn't exempted from rational interrogation.
>I appreciate your transcendent critique, but then again, i ask, what is the acceptable limit of criticism, especially as it pertains to superseding the consciousness of a separately-configured subject, like a black person or a woman?
Part of the problem is that the acceptable limits of critique are also what you're wanting to criticize if you're wanting to attack universalism (white or not) as insufficiently universalist. There's no way to set bounds to critique without also setting bounds to the expansion of universalism, such that others can be recognized as being external to this universalism (as unintegrable in terms of this universalism, although the "this" implies recognition of the universalism as particular or exclusive, hence implies some other universalist perspective in which this is judged to be so; the logic here is what drives universalism into encompassing increasingly more).
>Whiteness is universalist
If so, how am I to make sense of this:
>Whiteness is universalist, as an anglo weltenschauung - it collects european identity into one package, alienating the ethnic diversity of the continent.
If whiteness is being criticized for being insufficiently universalist, then it can't be equated with universalism per se. Even if you argue that this is only a criticism of whiteness from within its own universalistic pretenses, this already demonstrates that such a perspective of universalism beyond those pretenses must be possible insofar as you're rejecting some determinate content within the universalism of whiteness. If you're attacking no determinate content but the methodological element of universalism itself, it would undermine the critique leveled against any sort of universalism.

Leaving that aside, whiteness need not be universalist. There are obvious counterexamples like the KKK, so the two shouldn't be seen as necessarily equivalent.
>Part of being critical for example would be to see the EU not as an international body, but as a german project
Yes, but I can indicate why it functions as a German project and say that the idea of a united Europe doesn't necessarily imply such a thing, even if the European Union in its current form does and will likely do so for the foreseeable future.
>Do you think being critical of critique is my naivety, or is it on the path to a resolution?
I don't see being critical of critique as itself a problem, yet this process can also get turned back on itself if it attacks the bases of its own position, leading to "critiques of critiques of critiques…" until exhaustion. If the problem is critique or else rationality or universalism as being too "Western" or "white," this critique has to be more determinate than a critique of critique or rationality or universalism as such for it to avoid futility and self-contradiction.

>>17508
I dont doubt the possibility of reason
Or the technique of science
I simply see contradictions, and a peace only sustained within this struggle - to the new left this would be seen as the "contradiction" present in publicity. The internet, for example, is not an environment fit for an enclosure under self-critical grounds, but is a self-generating issue, the very issue of subjectivity.
I heard an hegelian call marx a right winger, since he wanted to eleminate all contradictions, and thus promote an absolute negation, whereas this guy wanted a critical environment, built on an ontological alienation, a "progressive" politics.
To me, there is no end of history, since revolution always implodes its energies into opposing forces.
I am critical of marxism, but like you say, that is my inheritence of a post-structuralist dogma. I am pluralistic to a fault.
Yet i would say that marxists are far too optimistic.

>>17510
>since he wanted to eleminate all contradictions, and thus promote an absolute negation, whereas this guy wanted a critical environment, built on an ontological alienation, a "progressive" politics.

This is an interesting kernel but it reveals something quite profound. Yes, Marxism's end can be described as 'messianic' in that it desires to redeem history by an absolute negation of class society, an end to alienation, a class in and for itself etc. What the fraud academic reveals is that he believes there is something essential, and even aesthetic about alienation in human subjectivity, maybe it's true, maybe it's not - but at the end of the day it obscures the historical specificity of how our subjectivity is formed through our day to day social relations, the critique is no longer based on trying to understand the object/subject relationship. This is why pomos and other frauds will talk about things like "producing a subject", thinking about something as illusory as identity and its unveiling. It comes across as pseudo-mystical language because in many ways it is, this is Adorno's main critique of Heidegger and in my opinion it extends to all of Heidegger's offspring.

>>17477
This whole question depends on assumptions framing what an "advantage" means. And the whole concept needs to be thought of in terms of statistics.

Depending on how you frame it, either sex has several biological advantages over the other.

Take women. They tend to live longer for biological reasons.

Women have higher concentrations of estrogen, a hormone which has been associated with protective effects on the cardiovascular system. Additionally, women generally have a higher ratio of HDL (good) cholesterol to LDL (bad) cholesterol, which can reduce the risk of heart disease.

Behaviorally, women are less likely to endanger themselves or act brashly in a testosterone fueled craze. Behavior, while not entirely biological in origin, is heavily influenced by biology at the core genetic level.

Women are less prone to cardiovascular disease and hypertension . It's been theorized that women have stronger , more sophisticated immune systems than men, because their immune systems are biologically organized to sustain the life of a child in utero. Hence why men get "man colds", there's actually some truth to the idea that men have a poorer immunological response to viral infection.

Of course men statistically have a physical advantage, because of the androgenic boost in muscle mass and bone density etc. But those parameters do not encompass the whole of "physical advantage" broadly construed.

>>17511
The guy is also educated within the psychoanalytic tradition (speaking of mystical systems) and describes himself as a christian (agnostic).
To him, the essence of alienation is the "lack" which constitutes desire - so we begin as subjects with a lack that creates the yearning inherent in our experience, obviously exploding into the varieties of available identities in society.
Alienation to him is the fall of man, which contradictorily also is his elevation into consciousness.
This guy also says he wanted to be a monk when he was younger, so he has clearly always internalized his repressions (he's a vegan too).
He has directly called himself an idealist before, since he rejects the materialist worldview, and opts for "psychological" causes of phenomenology.
Im just listing all this off cause he seems to me to be characteristic of the high new left, vocalized by a radical centrism, exemplified in a figure like zizek, one of his idols.
Another idol, mark fisher, too, was interested in psychoanalysis, as a method of analysing the bottomless pit of desire, and another post-marxist, concerning himself more with cultural critique than any materialist stability: a man entranced by the superstructure, who ends up killing himself, like his original mentor, deleuze (who famously rejected psychoanalysis).
The first guy has a name, todd mcgowan, and i remember, he was mocking deleuze because he jumped out of a window, offering credence to the effectiveness of "verticality" as an organizing method.
So i suppose the new left, like all things in nature is defined by who simply remains, to articulate their theoretical spandrels. The new left itself is not new anymore, but littered with corpses and zombies.

>>17511
To abolish contradictions is to reach the state of death since you now have union with nature - which is why some characterize the absolute state of fascism as pure negativity, since it is uniformly a movement that seeks to overcome history while also outwardly being a religion of death and finality.
Contradiction always implies its revolutions however, but a variable grinding itself down to zero sounds more like heat death than a utopia.

>>17478
Literally not a feminist then. Sexist

>>17513
If this is the same Lacanian who wears a backwards baseball cap in his 50s, then yeah it might give you an inkling that this ideological project has serious pitfalls. I am not against psychoanalysis and delving into the unconscious on principle, however. Only if it is used to promote irrationalism or distort Marx's theories.

>>17514
I don't disagree with anything you said, the struggle continues etc. But dialectically the proletariat represents a negation of the bourgeoisie and an end of capitalism. Some scholars say that it would be the beginning of true history. There's a cyclical element of the struggle, but also a linear progression.

Death and finality if ontologized are fetishized by Fascists absolutely. The overcoming of capitalism through struggle is based on a fundamental belief in humanity, that is the difference in my opinion.

>>17516
> I am not against psychoanalysis and delving into the unconscious on principle
I think the point i was making is that adopting psychoanalysis is only aesthetically viable to people who are already repressed and seek to justify it by mourning their "lack". Deleuze as a frenchmen, a spiritual liberal, rejects psychoanalysis and likewise embraces nietzsche, something impossible to zizek or fisher in their depressive rationalism.
Nietzsche himself as an anti-deutsche traitor revokes the gloomy romanticism of wagners german nationalism, later forged by hitler, who himself saw life as a struggle, yet also sought death in transcendence. "If i die, Germany dies" was recorded from hitler - it was clearly a suicide pact.
>But dialectically the proletariat represents a negation of the bourgeoisie and an end of capitalism. Some scholars say that it would be the beginning of true history. There's a cyclical element of the struggle, but also a linear progression.
Yes i agree - i dont think the end of capital-ism is the end of history however. I think something of a new frontier represented in the soviet union for example shows the internal struggle of the communist state, externally and internally, fighting for survival against the forces of both revolution and counter-revolution.
>Death and finality if ontologized are fetishized by Fascists absolutely.
I feel like this isnt emphasised enough. Fascism is not just racism and chauvinism, it is pure spiritual desperation, swallowing young men into pacts with the devil, as a necessary confrontation with modernity.
A marxist humanism is not enough for some who lust after excess, in realms that the market cannot supply for them, because this would likewise be too contradictory for the market to sustain. Same reason almost every liberal country still bans weed.

>>17514
Another interjection on this, Mao is relaying DiaMat in 'On Contradiction', while I'm being more modest and only considering HisMat as the "grand narrative" that is being deconstructed.

>>17518
HisMat has a disturbing linearity to it
Whereas a circular notion of both time and history fit a more "eternal" model, rather than a totally negative one, but the circular model is pagan and based on rebirth, whereas the christian conception is based in progress unto singularity.
Death is the agony where we also have communion with God and dwell in him forever, a final subtraction. Marx was well acquainted with the christian religion as too was engels.
Engels in "socialism: utopian and scientific" describes the communist man as in a state of apotheosis, "a god on earth", like the christian revelation.
Engels also calls himself a "deist", as a deferment to science as the way in which we understand the world.
Science itself is a contingent discourse, like today's discussion of the "sexual marketplace", or darwin's fashionable malthusianism being extrapolated as "the survival of the fittest", a maxim appropriated by the mystical herbet spencer. Darwin also believed thaf negroes were the step from apes to man, a fixture of his whig rationalism.

>>17477
Was this posted by a GPT bot?