still on my reading kick.

started going through plato's phaedo for the first time, and i'm waiting to find the passage about materialism that leibniz talked about in the discourse on metaphysics.

i also spent time going through the stanford uni philosophy encyclopedia. i read the articles on leibniz and wilfrid sellars very carefully.

over the last two or so years i have been having a weird crisis of faith in the traditional materialism and atheism that is the orthodoxy in australian radical leftism.

it's not so much that i have any religious or spiritual faith, but that, like leibniz, i am very worried that radical leftism is in a state of chronic forgetting.

large sections of the left are fans of taking a scalpel to the history of ideas and cutting concepts out as if they had never existed.

it is at this point that i look at this zeal for leftist iconoclasm and despair. i truly feel like being faithful to the revolution requires not piety and purity of the mind, but a critical understanding of the sum total of history.

it does not work the way they say. you may erase something from cultural memory, but history has its own plans. i am no nietzsche fan, but his concept of the 'eternal return' seems to capture what i am getting at.

my personal attitude is that i would rather know and sit uncomfortably with the truth than live in blissful (wilful) ignorance.

like hegel said, you must 'tarry with the negative'. mere negation is half the process of achieving truth and finality. the only way to solve a contradiction is to go through the contradiction, not just simply suppress it.