Progressive Music as Objective Music

CPicard wrote: WHAT??? Zappa is overrated.

Now what do you mean by THAT, sir? I didn't say Zappa was as great as Duke!

fuxi wrote: CPicard wrote: WHAT??? Zappa is overrated. Now what do you mean by THAT, sir? I didn't say Zappa was as great as Duke!

I never said I was serious.

Make light of those who don't make light of themselves, for nobody will inherit the earth.

Slartibartfast wrote: I don't buy into Ayn Rand's political philosophy or those who admire it politically and economically speaking.  Noam Chomsky or Orwell anyone?  I'd recommend you check out their writings too if you haven't. I don't have a problem with reality though.  The selfishness aspect is where it falls apart as a functioning philosophy for how to run things in human societies.  Laissez-faire capitalism is all about having masters and slaves.  Those with money and power are the masters, the rest of us are their slaves.  Another way to look at it is leeches and hosts.  All of these are of course over simplistic...

Here here.

I've only read this far in this thread but there you go, that just about says it.

I would add too what others have said: Prog emerged from the 60s causally modernist counter-culture. Prog was/is a broadly modernist art form in a period of decline for social modernism and the period of ascent of post-modernist art forms, which really came into their own with Punk coinciding with the final gutting of what was underlying Prog socially in the 1970s.

Consider "Back in NYC" from Lamb Lies Down: Animals, The Final Cut, "you must believe in the human race" from Tarkus... this is spontaneously modernist, materialist music, Neil Peart aside. The ideologues of Capitalism, like Pierce, began with a Pragmatism (or Pragmaticism with Pierce) that was still much like materialism, but starting with William James and developing rapidly until you get Rorty you have Pragmatism turning into a post-modernistic ideology.

Interestingly, one of those who inspired Orwell to write 1984, James Burnham, was a New York intellectual who went from being a Trotskyist to being one of the founding fathers of Neo-Liberalism, a cold war hawk and the winner of a medal from Reagen. Orwell was on the same path. The rejection of modernist principles of society, social contradictions and historical development leads into the dead-ends of post-modernism, skepticism, positivism, solipsism and always the crassest individualism and worshiping of the accomplished fact (namely, capitalism and society as it is today).



Edited by RoyFairbank - November 10 2009 at 21:39

Proletariat wrote: Also i feel that it would be pop rather than prog that would dominate in your "perfect" capitalist world

keiser willhelm wrote: MovingPictures07 wrote: keiser willhelm wrote: MovingPictures07 wrote: People on this forum are so misinformed about Rand's ideology. You should have never posted this thread; you'll mainly get sh*t responses. Most people around here take any chance they get to bash it; I've since stopped even mentioning it. have you studied it at all? il grant you enjoying her books but her philosophy is LOGICALLY wrong - objectively flawed.  I've read all 4 of her books 5+ times, and also many of her other writings. Just because you don't get it doesn't mean it's objectively flawed. Don't insult other people simply because you disagree with something, thanks. It makes you look like a jackass. 4 or 5 times each! That must have taken years. Just because i "dont get it" ? Now who's insulting who. ive read atlas shrugged in my own time and most of fountainhead as well as "The Virtue of Selfishness", the later of which ive STUDIED. in depth. and i wasnt just disagreeing with her philosophy, i was telling you that its inherantly flawed and her arguments dont make logical sense, which is ironic seeing as she tauted rationality as the highest order of existence (the only order in fact)  i had no intention of insulting you, your post was just condescending enough to warrant a response. I just got uptight when you implied that everyone on this forum who disagreed with ayn rand was misinformed and eager to spew sh*t from their frothing, foaming mouths. my bad, i guess that makes me a jackass.

Not everyone on this forum; it's simply extremely annoying when people completely disregard Ayn Rand's books when then thereafter they illustrate hardly any understanding of her philosophy. At times it seems like pretty much everyone is that way, but I do know that's not true.

If you think her arguments don't make logical sense, then there's nothing I can do.

Epignosis wrote: Ayn Rand is an awful fiction writer. Otherwise, Objectivism ftw. And I'm a Christian. How do you like that?

To be a real objectivist I'd say you'd have to give up religion. Religion is anything but objectivist, it's subjective and while religion can be a perfectly fine way to live your life, it's not objective. I am an objectivist myself, and while I'd love for people to get involved with the philosophy, I really don't get how religious people can so proudly call themselves objectivists.

if the tenets of Objectivism have anything to do with Prog music, or music in general, it can only be inasmuch as we like to think that it is the creative product of an individual purely for the sake of that individual's desire to create. This is an absolute ideal, and so likely a stretch, but beyond that what is it about prog that makes us say this? nothing. it can be said about any genre from classical to country. i mean this in the nicest way possible, but stop using your pop-philosophy to uphold your personal aesthetics.
Objectivism is flawed from the get-go by merely assuming the objective existence of an external reality; i'd go so far as to say that it begs the question by assuming the nature of what it's epistemology out to deduce, but even if that isn't the case it's just silly. Rand pulls together a weak version of Platonic epistemology, grafts it to out-of context versions of Kantian ethics and politics, and just otherwise ignore the rest of Western Philosophy. I strongly suggest that you go and pick up The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant if you want a real philosophy, one that utterly destroys Rand's feeble attempt (she obviously chose to ignore it)
ultimately the only thing that makes music meaningful is your own subjective perception of it, and ultimately the only thing that differentiates it from mere noise or the jumble of the senses is your own subjective mind. objectivity, in any case, has no place in a discussion of aesthetics, and only a limiting role in epistemology or metaphysics, i'd say.

Prometheus wrote: Objectivism is flawed from the get-go by merely assuming the objective existence of an external reality; i'd go so far as to say that it begs the question by assuming the nature of what it's epistemology out to deduce, but even if that isn't the case it's just silly. Rand pulls together a weak version of Platonic epistemology, grafts it to out-of context versions of Kantian ethics and politics, and just otherwise ignore the rest of Western Philosophy. I strongly suggest that you go and pick up The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant if you want a real philosophy, one that utterly destroys Rand's feeble attempt (she obviously chose to ignore it)

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Ayn Rand basically set out to push the reset button on Western philosophy post-Kant: She thought that the Soviet Union's totalitarianism was the logical practical conclusion of German Idealism (e. g. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer) so it would be weird then if her ethics are of mostly Kantian origin. I'd have thought she'd borrow more from Locke but then again I've only read short excerpts of Rand.

In a way Ayn Rand was like a right-wing version of Theodor Adorno, who considered totalitarianism the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment.