> and half of the arguments seem to be based on redefining words
I would add to this a slavish dedication to purity of concept, both broadly philosophically, but more specifically, linguistically.
> And yet life is anarchic, and all good things within it; including you.
> Nature is anarchic
This is, indeed, an idea that won’t go away— an appeal to nature divorced from knowledge of it.
It’s an argument that’s been used probably as long as we’ve been making arguments. It’s been used to prop up authority, anarchism, domination, freedom, creationism… you name it, we’ve cited “Nature” as our example and our proof.
“Nature”, which so often seems to exclude us or the things we make.(the word therein defined as just being “anything non-human”).
Nature is not your rhetorical monkey(mine neither, for that matter). It is rigid systems to your randomness, randomness to your rigid systems.
It is symptomatic of the author’s overall method here— craning back from their conclusion, anarchy is THE right state of being— to justify it through cherry-picked examples and fatuous pontification.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way running into anarchistic argumentation. I don’t know if that speaks to bias on my part, a commonality of those arguments, or both.
DreamerofDays t1_j0zno7h wrote
Reply to comment by ValyrianJedi in Anarchism at the End of the World: A defence of the instinct that won’t go away by Sventipluk
> and half of the arguments seem to be based on redefining words
I would add to this a slavish dedication to purity of concept, both broadly philosophically, but more specifically, linguistically.
> And yet life is anarchic, and all good things within it; including you.
> Nature is anarchic
This is, indeed, an idea that won’t go away— an appeal to nature divorced from knowledge of it.
It’s an argument that’s been used probably as long as we’ve been making arguments. It’s been used to prop up authority, anarchism, domination, freedom, creationism… you name it, we’ve cited “Nature” as our example and our proof.
“Nature”, which so often seems to exclude us or the things we make.(the word therein defined as just being “anything non-human”).
Nature is not your rhetorical monkey(mine neither, for that matter). It is rigid systems to your randomness, randomness to your rigid systems.
It is symptomatic of the author’s overall method here— craning back from their conclusion, anarchy is THE right state of being— to justify it through cherry-picked examples and fatuous pontification.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way running into anarchistic argumentation. I don’t know if that speaks to bias on my part, a commonality of those arguments, or both.