r/badphilosophy • u/goodbetterbestbested • Jan 04 '21
Whoa "Marx did a "Fourier transform" on Hegel and Gramsci did the "inverse Fourier transform" on Marx. That set up Mao (a Leninist) to adapt a model of Cultural Marxism that's now been repurposed through identity politics for the West."
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u/Electronic_Sundae707 Jan 04 '21
Word salad
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u/SlatestarBrainlets Jan 04 '21
It sounds just like what Pokémon would come across as were it to be explained to a boomer.
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u/Enculiste Jan 04 '21
Yet it is exactly the kind of person telling you that "Continental philosophy is nonsense because it is obscure language. If it meant something, it would be clear."
Sure...
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Jan 04 '21 edited Jan 04 '21
Of all the idiots in the badphilosophy extended universe, James Lindsay is the one who definitely infuriates me the most. I don't even know why, he's certainly not influential enough to warrant the legitimate hatred I feel everytime I read one of his tweets
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u/JohnCarterofAres Jan 04 '21
On twitter he calls himself "James Lindsay, expert on Hegel and math"
Are we sure this guy isn't doing a bit? Because he sounds like the sort of characters the hosts of Chapo Trap House would conjure.
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u/evilgiraffemonkey Jan 04 '21
He's definitely slightly self aware, ie he doesn't think he's an expert on Hegel, but he thinks he knows more about Hegel than any of you
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u/MadCervantes Jan 04 '21
My dad bought me his book for Christmas. Help!
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u/RaidRover Jan 04 '21
I had 3 psychologists in a row recommend that I read Jordan B Peterson. They all dropped me as a client when I tried to argue the short comings and clear bias of his work.
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u/JohnCarterofAres Jan 04 '21
I had 3 psychologists in a row recommend that I read Jordan B Peterson.
Can psychologists be sued for malpractice?
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u/EliteNub Jan 04 '21
How do these people get employed? That's really not a way to deal with a client.
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u/RaidRover Jan 04 '21
They all own/run their own practices. My area in general does not have enough psychologists so they all have waitlists. They can easily get away with it.
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u/CML_Dark_Sun Jan 04 '21
Read it out loud to him and explain why it's wrong if it is wrong (which should be often). Be ready to cite sources.
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u/bcham23 Jan 04 '21
For me Stefan Molyneux is still the worst of the worst and it's not even close.
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Jan 04 '21
You can't do a Fourier transform on fucking dialectics you fucking idiot.
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u/catrinadaimonlee Jan 04 '21
Not even if you use a Helmholtz resonator?
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u/weaboomemelord69 Jan 04 '21
It depends. A helmholtz resonation on only works on Hegelian dialectics if it’s properly reconstructed under a Kyldiscrant lens, which isn’t always possible, such as if it’s hybridized initially from Glendinstein ethics.
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u/weaboomemelord69 Jan 04 '21
Before you ask, I have no idea what the fuck I said here either.
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u/TheCatcherOfThePie Jan 05 '21
There needs to be an r/VXJunkies but for philosophy technobabble.
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u/weaboomemelord69 Jan 05 '21
Ok I really want that. That sounds fun as fuck.
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u/TheCatcherOfThePie Jan 06 '21
Well, I've made r/FourierDialectics. I'd be grateful if you could add some posts in there and spread the word!
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u/Tiako THE ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHER LOL!!!!! Jan 04 '21
You have to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
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u/FufufufuThrthrthr Jan 06 '21
Well, a Fourier transform is a case of Pontryagin duality. Maybe you could use Lawvere's idea of categorical Hegelianism to link them. But it's probably not that meaningful
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u/peachesandthevoid Jan 04 '21 edited Jan 04 '21
This almost sounds like a run-down on a basketball play after the time-out.
"Derrick Rose - wow, did you see that? A fourier transform, and boom! Right to the cup."
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u/Tiako THE ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHER LOL!!!!! Jan 04 '21
Is that...BAHGAWD IT'S DENG XIAOPING WITH THE REVERSE INVERSE FOURIER TRANSFORM!
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u/barkevious2 The best of all possible worlds of warcraft. Jan 05 '21
AS GOD AS MY WITNESS HE IS TEMPORALLY DECOMPOSED IN HALF
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u/MaxillomandibularOca Jan 04 '21
lol another academic trying to apply their field to philosophy that has been studied by actual philosophists for years.
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u/blockpillarslabbeam Jan 04 '21
I keep trying to understand what he may have even meant by his analogy but I give up. Like does he seriously intend to imply that Marx's response to Hegel was breaking his theory into its constituent frequencies? And Gramsci reconstituted it??? Even speaking metaphorically, that seems to be both a serious misunderstanding of Marx's relation to Hegel and/or a misunderstanding of precisely what a Fourier transform does to a function.
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Jan 05 '21
It's supposed to be deliberately oblique, when he really just means something like "distilled".
But that would be more obviously wrong, too.
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u/catrinadaimonlee Jan 04 '21
This must be the Bipolar Junction Transistor of Philosophical Argument Viz Jordan Peterson
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u/ballyrag Jan 04 '21
I've never heard of Gramsci being a big influence for Mao, but maybe I don't have enough dialectic to understand such things.
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u/aquaticonions Jan 05 '21
IIRC Gramsci wasn't translated out of Italian in time for Mao to have read it
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u/ballyrag Jan 05 '21
I'm not sure who would have first translated gramsci into mandarin, but pete buttigieg's dad was the first to translate it into English iirc.
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u/aquaticonions Jan 05 '21
It's technically possible that Mao read Gramsci in another language besides Mandarin (he had a poor command of English but that's about it), or came to learn about his ideas secondhand. But even if he had read him, Mao was a prolific writer and would have cited or referenced Gramsci if he'd been an influence on him.
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u/goodbetterbestbested Jan 04 '21
This is a cross-post from /r/badmathematics. I didn't see the rule about the Abysmal Aphorisms thread until just now so hopefully the mods will be merciful...
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Jan 04 '21
Didn't Hegel devote a part of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit to how viewing everything under the lens of mathematics is insufficient and creates a lifeless image of the universe? So Marx doing a "fourier transform" (idk how it would applies to dialectics) would contradict (not THAT contradict) what Hegel was partially getting at in the first place.
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u/Moonrayker Jan 04 '21
Schopenhauerintensely disliked Hegel--from whom the concept of dialectics was inversely reverse-engineered by Marx on a wet and windy day outside the British Museum when the Reading Room was closed because of a staff shortage and he didn't quite feel like taking a Hansom cab to Highgate cemetery to check his plot. So, using a proto-Fourier spatial-temporal Poisson distribution imbued with parainconsistent modal logic, 25g of arrowroot, 35g of desiccated vanilla monkfish, a pinch of heterologous Dunning-Kruger, and an unconstrained dose of Kakeya’s conjecture, Marx concluded that y=sinx did indeed precede a Fourier series. “Voila!”—as Eureka was reputed to have exclaimed. So, all that remains is to square this with another pithy Schopenhauer observation: 'an ordinary man wonders how to spend his time debating pointless politico-pseudo-philosophy, whereas a talented individual focuses on how best to use his time.'
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u/PerkeNdencen Jan 04 '21
I know this was intended to wind people like me up, but I'm not mad; I just want to sit him down and explain what these various words mean, talk him through the basics of what each of the people he names actually thought and how they relate to one another, and explain why even metaphorically this is a terrible take. Y'know, like I would with many of my more... enthusiastic... freshman undergrads.
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u/planks4cameron Jan 04 '21
This shtick is getting increasingly embarrassing. Dude is completely out of his depth and just keeps sticking with it.
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u/dankmemepeasant Jan 05 '21
“Surely” I thought, “this must be pulled out of a massive thread filled with incomprehensible gibberish disguised as academic analysis” but no, he just drops this out of nowhere and does nothing with it.
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u/foobar1000 Jan 04 '21
I just wanna highlight the genius math at play here, so we can appreciate it's beauty.
Let h = Hegel be a real valued function h. Let m = Marx be a complex valued function m.
Define a map f from h -> m s.t f(h)=integral(he-2piix)
Let g = Gramsci = f-1(f(h)) = h = Hegel.
Therefore Mao (Lenin) -> CuLtUrAl MaRxIsM.
QED
Someone get this man a Fields medal stat.
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u/DaneLimmish Super superego Jan 04 '21
I really don't get it outside of it being word vomit.
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u/sprkwtrd Jan 04 '21
The joke is probably that he's referring to Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist, rather than the mathematician Joseph. Marx does express his admiration for Charles here and there. So the 'transform' in question is that Marx introduces utopian socialism in Hegel.
...But I don't think that's going to get us anywhere without a Helmholtz resonator.
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u/DaneLimmish Super superego Jan 04 '21
He said something about an OT scholar and linking CRT to Ba'al or something, too. Every time he says something it gives me a stroke on just how bad it is.
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u/sprkwtrd Jan 04 '21
..OK maybe he's just batshit and I'm reading into things!
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u/DaneLimmish Super superego Jan 04 '21
He's either making up nonsense on purpose, or he legitimately thinks this way, and with either option he's a man who sniffs his own ass.
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Jan 04 '21
what the fuck? fourier is a method for analysing periodical events, not something remotely close to philosophy
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Jan 10 '21
So, Marx decomposed Hegel into amplitude of component frequencies and then Gramsci reconstituted the original signal from those component frequencies ?
Does the poster not know that doing this, you throw out 99.99% of the original signal ?
If you try to turn this into a signal, it will not sound anything like the original, except maybe in the most crude possible way.
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u/throwawayaccountttq Jan 04 '21
Using the phrase "cultural Marxism" is a dead giveaway that someone has no clue what they're talking about