May 9, 2018 03:54 PM
(This post was last modified: May 9, 2018 09:08 PM by C C.)
Kanye West says he's writing philosophy book
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter...03831.html
EXCERPT: Kanye West is writing a book on philosophy called *Break the Simulation*. The rapper opened up about the project in an interview with his interior designer Axel Vervoordt in The Hollywood Reporter, revealing that the book would cover art and spirituality. In the conversation, he described his obsession with photographs and the relationship people have with them....
- - - [EDIT] Reaction to announcement - - -
Philosophers don’t think much of Kanye West’s philosophy
https://qz.com/1269787/philosophers-dont...hilosophy/
EXCERPT: . . . Though his recent comments on slavery are offensive and shallow at best, Kanye has shown musical and marketing brilliance throughout his career. In his latest high-profile act of creativity, Kanye announced that he was writing a philosophy book in real time on Twitter. In quintessentially grandiose style, Kanye made this transition into a new and complex field without a shred of self-doubt.
[...] Kanye’s tweets are “superficial,” writes Luvell Anderson, philosophy professor at University of Memphis in an email. “They’re so banal or trite that they can mean almost anything and nothing at the same time.”
Elliot Knuths, a law degree candidate at Northwestern University who’s written several academic philosophy papers, agrees that Kanye’s tweets are not “philosophically significant,” and are unsupported by rational arguments. “Not every mental exercise is philosophy.” “They may indeed inspire contemplation in his readers, but not every mental exercise is philosophy,” says Knuths. Short, loosely linked aphorisms can be a format for philosophy, but Kanye’s efforts don’t have the necessary rigor. “They lack the requisite premise -> argument -> conclusion structure and thus seem prematurely conclusory,” Knuths says. “I am inclined to treat the recent tweets as opinions, albeit ones arrived at through philosophizing, rather than instances of philosophizing itself.”
[...] Kanye attempting to write a book on philosophy is no different than the rapper trying to write on physics or constitutional law. “Philosophy is complicated—arguably one of its central tasks is to show how everything is more complicated than it might at first appear—and it takes time and effort and practice to develop the knowledge and skills to do it well,” Weinberg writes in an email. “You sometimes hear that ‘anyone can do philosophy.’ If that’s true, it is true in the same way that ‘anyone can rap’ is true.”
MORE: https://qz.com/1269787/philosophers-dont...hilosophy/
A Black Existentialist Response to Kanye West
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/kanye-we...-auid-1083
EXCERPT: . . . Philosopher Lewis Gordon discusses bad faith and the difference between freedom, liberty and license
PE: What were your first thoughts when you read about Kanye West’s interview on TMZ?
LG: I wasn’t surprised. But my response was a little different from other people, mainly because I knew his mother. From the moment his mother died — I saw her a few months before she went to LA, I was wondering how he’ll be dealing with the trauma. She was a presence. She was a professor of English. When I met her she had dreadlocks, like me. Then when she went to Los Angeles to be Kanye’s manager she straightened her hair, had all of these plastic surgeries done to her. I can imagine the grief he’s feeling because he too had liposuction, the procedure that killed her. You go to this narrow, narcissistic, shallow world of Los Angeles, the 'me-me-me' stuff and it kills your mother. I can imagine the grief and guilt that occasions. And there really has been a different Kanye since then.
If you think about the closeness of the relationship they had, it’s not going to take just a little time to get over it. I know from my own case that it took nearly a decade to get over a tragic loss. Unfortunately, we’re witnessing the unravelling of a person who’s dealing with public grief. So I am actually concerned for him.
It’s pretty clear that his psychological protection against vulnerability is to push himself to the level of a god. Beyond the marketing, I see this as a personal effort to articulate invulnerability.
People who build up an edifice of pleasing falsehoods to protect themselves eventually lose the connection to certain elements of truth.
Kanye falls into a very familiar logic to many successful black people. There is a tendency in a highly racist environment to treat black people who achieve a lot as exceptions. Many white people with extraordinary achievements would say ‘I individually am special’. But many black people with extraordinary achievements would say ‘I, individually, in being exceptional, am not like them.’
This plays into black conservatism. And white conservatives love it. One of the things that Kanye is doing is that he is sending the signals for access to a particular world of conservatism. When Kanye does these stupid tweets, Trump plays that role and says ‘I recognise you, you are not like others, you’re a smart one’, etc. Remember that when Trump got elected, Kanye said that he would like to run in the future. There is a narcissistic identification between the two.
MORE: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/kanye-we...-auid-1083
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter...03831.html
EXCERPT: Kanye West is writing a book on philosophy called *Break the Simulation*. The rapper opened up about the project in an interview with his interior designer Axel Vervoordt in The Hollywood Reporter, revealing that the book would cover art and spirituality. In the conversation, he described his obsession with photographs and the relationship people have with them....
- - - [EDIT] Reaction to announcement - - -
Philosophers don’t think much of Kanye West’s philosophy
https://qz.com/1269787/philosophers-dont...hilosophy/
EXCERPT: . . . Though his recent comments on slavery are offensive and shallow at best, Kanye has shown musical and marketing brilliance throughout his career. In his latest high-profile act of creativity, Kanye announced that he was writing a philosophy book in real time on Twitter. In quintessentially grandiose style, Kanye made this transition into a new and complex field without a shred of self-doubt.
[...] Kanye’s tweets are “superficial,” writes Luvell Anderson, philosophy professor at University of Memphis in an email. “They’re so banal or trite that they can mean almost anything and nothing at the same time.”
Elliot Knuths, a law degree candidate at Northwestern University who’s written several academic philosophy papers, agrees that Kanye’s tweets are not “philosophically significant,” and are unsupported by rational arguments. “Not every mental exercise is philosophy.” “They may indeed inspire contemplation in his readers, but not every mental exercise is philosophy,” says Knuths. Short, loosely linked aphorisms can be a format for philosophy, but Kanye’s efforts don’t have the necessary rigor. “They lack the requisite premise -> argument -> conclusion structure and thus seem prematurely conclusory,” Knuths says. “I am inclined to treat the recent tweets as opinions, albeit ones arrived at through philosophizing, rather than instances of philosophizing itself.”
[...] Kanye attempting to write a book on philosophy is no different than the rapper trying to write on physics or constitutional law. “Philosophy is complicated—arguably one of its central tasks is to show how everything is more complicated than it might at first appear—and it takes time and effort and practice to develop the knowledge and skills to do it well,” Weinberg writes in an email. “You sometimes hear that ‘anyone can do philosophy.’ If that’s true, it is true in the same way that ‘anyone can rap’ is true.”
MORE: https://qz.com/1269787/philosophers-dont...hilosophy/
A Black Existentialist Response to Kanye West
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/kanye-we...-auid-1083
EXCERPT: . . . Philosopher Lewis Gordon discusses bad faith and the difference between freedom, liberty and license
PE: What were your first thoughts when you read about Kanye West’s interview on TMZ?
LG: I wasn’t surprised. But my response was a little different from other people, mainly because I knew his mother. From the moment his mother died — I saw her a few months before she went to LA, I was wondering how he’ll be dealing with the trauma. She was a presence. She was a professor of English. When I met her she had dreadlocks, like me. Then when she went to Los Angeles to be Kanye’s manager she straightened her hair, had all of these plastic surgeries done to her. I can imagine the grief he’s feeling because he too had liposuction, the procedure that killed her. You go to this narrow, narcissistic, shallow world of Los Angeles, the 'me-me-me' stuff and it kills your mother. I can imagine the grief and guilt that occasions. And there really has been a different Kanye since then.
If you think about the closeness of the relationship they had, it’s not going to take just a little time to get over it. I know from my own case that it took nearly a decade to get over a tragic loss. Unfortunately, we’re witnessing the unravelling of a person who’s dealing with public grief. So I am actually concerned for him.
It’s pretty clear that his psychological protection against vulnerability is to push himself to the level of a god. Beyond the marketing, I see this as a personal effort to articulate invulnerability.
People who build up an edifice of pleasing falsehoods to protect themselves eventually lose the connection to certain elements of truth.
Kanye falls into a very familiar logic to many successful black people. There is a tendency in a highly racist environment to treat black people who achieve a lot as exceptions. Many white people with extraordinary achievements would say ‘I individually am special’. But many black people with extraordinary achievements would say ‘I, individually, in being exceptional, am not like them.’
This plays into black conservatism. And white conservatives love it. One of the things that Kanye is doing is that he is sending the signals for access to a particular world of conservatism. When Kanye does these stupid tweets, Trump plays that role and says ‘I recognise you, you are not like others, you’re a smart one’, etc. Remember that when Trump got elected, Kanye said that he would like to run in the future. There is a narcissistic identification between the two.
MORE: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/kanye-we...-auid-1083
