I let philosophy consume my life for a few years to the detriment of everything else.
I'm a values/ethics/aesthetic/desert/metaphysics nihilist with a keen interest in epistemology. Most recent relevant read I've enjoyed of late has been Popper and his work on falsifiability.
I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand.
Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.
> I've been trying to work through Marx recently too, but I find reading him to be a lot like reading Ayn Rand.
> Insufferable and they expect you to swallow the bitter pill of their ridiculous foundations they use to prop up the philosophy they work backwards from their personal preferences to justify. I'm going to continue for the sake of trying to extract some sense of analysis with respect to Capitalism, but it's slow-going.
I'm sorry, but what on earth are you reading? Ayn Rand was a rambling novelist, while Marx' Capital is a brilliant work of economic analysis. Parts of it are completely outdated, and some predictions proved drastically false, but it's nonetheless got some brilliant insights at its core. If you happen to be reading The Communist Manifesto, it's a political pamphlet for agitation and not a work of philosophy.
I'm reading Das Kapital, not a pamphlet. Try to lend other people a little more intellectual credit than that.
With regards to Ayn Rand, in a similar spirit, I'm not talking about her crappy fiction work (which is similar in purpose to the Communist Manifesto), but rather her more deliberate and directly philosophical tracts.
Interestingly, as a result, I can only assume you committed the mistake you thought I did, judging the philosopher on the basis of their secondary output rather than the core subject matter.
I don't adhere to objectivism and I think they're fucking cultists, but I do know their philosophy well and the basis for it bears a lot of resemblance to how Marxism is grounded and justified philosophically speaking. Marxism is somewhat more empirical but not by much.
My perspective on the similarity of the bases of each may be colored by the fact that I come from a strongly skeptical and deconstructionist background.
In general, I'm willing to entertain a priori suggestions for the sake of exploring an interesting thought. An example would be that I'm willing to suspend disbelief long enough to discuss the subject of "desert" with a philosopher who isn't a nihilist if it leads to interesting conversation.
What I am not willing to do is suspend disbelief long enough to swallow an overarching socio-political theory on how the whole world should be run regardless of social context (Marxism and Objectivism) based on some ridiculous presumptions about truth and human nature.
