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Zohar Atkins Profile picture
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4 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Don't cancel me.

For What Does Your Worldview Overcompensate? by @ZoharAtkins whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/for-what-doe…
"There’s a folkloric saying that Breslov Hasidim are obsessed with joy because they are depressives; Karliner Hasidim are obsessed with controlling their emotions because they are angry; and Chabad Hasidim are obsessed with nullifying their egos because they are ego-maniacs."
"What’s the worldview that reduces worldview to a psychological theory of overcompensation all about? Probably the fact that the world is messy and challenges a sense of control. Psychological models are socially acceptable transitional objects."
Pictured above, a shot from Ordet. One of my favorite moments in the film: one neighbor says to the other, "If you think life is about joy, why are you so miserable?"

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More from @ZoharAtkins

Zohar Atkins Profile picture
4 Mar
Adorno would recoil at being subjected to a @threadapalooza as it turns him into a commodity, his thought into a kind of brand or currency. Still, his ideas are timely & influential; if you want to understand today's left, internecine conflicts & culture wars, he's a touchstone.
He would have hated being on social media for 1000 reasons, which we will get into, but the first is that limiting oneself to bite-size short form is not dialectical; it "reifies" (glamorizes, distills) the hot take, but leaves little room for the nuanced "yes, but also." 2
He would find followership to be not only a vain metric, but a distraction from "truth" which should be indifferent to popularity, and may more likely negatively correlate with it. 3
Read 101 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
22 Feb
Let's do a @threadapalooza about Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, a philosophical prodigy who started as a formal logician and ended as a kind of avant-garde artist, sage, and Zen-like monk. Throughout his life, he was obsessed with language.
Here is Wittgenstein in the second half of his career, having distanced himself from his Tractatus (the work that launched him to global fame): "Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) 2/
Wittgenstein started out a #positivist (focused on distinguishing between valid propositions and nonsensical ones). But he ends up concluding that language is far more more robust and meaningful than what the analytic categories of sense and nonsense can say about it. 3
Read 104 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
22 Feb
Is Effort the Basis for Esteem? by @ZoharAtkins whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/is-effort-th…

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that we esteem those things we work for more than those we are gifted.
Socrates's two examples are wealth and poetry. Inheritors don’t esteem their wealth the way the “self-made” do. Similarly, poets admire their own work (which they labor for) more than the work of others (which they inherit, as it were, but don’t create themselves).
A lousy poet prefers his or her own work to that of Homer, Virgil, and Dante.
Read 8 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
8 Feb
Time for a @threadapalooza about Hannah Arendt, a versatile contrarian, public intellectual, original mind, child prodigy, and postwar refugee, equally at home in the study of the Classics and in the contemplation of 20th century totalitarianism.
Arendt is a great in her own right, but also responsible for the transportation of the thought of Heidegger and Walter Benjamin to the U.S. (and the anglophone world). She was responsible for defending Heidegger (her former teacher and "lover") in the era of de-Nazification. 2
She was celebrated for her cold-war liberal classic, Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she explains Sovietism and Nazism & scorned for her coverage of the trial of Adolph Eichmann for the New Yorker, but her first work was a study of Love in St. Augustine. 3
Read 101 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
7 Feb
There's another Straussian critique of Schmitt worth considering: Schmitt thinks the problem with liberalism is that it places morality above politics, or at least thinks morality and politics are separable domains...
But Schmitt is the pot calling the kettle black b/c the argument that we should choose a life devoted to politicizing everything (and agitating against enemies) is a moral argument about how we ought to live.
Robert Howse argues that Schmitt can defend his view of the supremacy of politics over morality only by appealing to faith and theology.
Read 6 tweets
Zohar Atkins Profile picture
24 Jan
Leo Strauss was one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of the 20th century and deserves a @threadapalooza. His thought is both controversial and poorly understood. He argued for the critical relevance of ancient ideas and great books.
Like many greats, there's a lot in Strauss to highlight and a lot to de-emphasize, meaning that each person will have their own different version of him. The word "Straussian" gets thrown around a lot, but it's probably impossible to be a Straussian. 2
For me, Strauss is best appreciated as one of a handful of diverse thinkers (including Heidegger, Benjamin, Gadamer, Derrida, Freud) who understood that texts don't say what they seem to. They say both more and less than what meets the casual glance. 3
Read 101 tweets

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