User:MontezumaSleeping/RichardDeLeon

Richard Deleon was a Mexican Anthropologist and ex-communicated Jesuit Priest. Inspired by Ricardo Falla-Sánchez, Paulo Feire, Octavio Paz, Julio Borges, Ursula le Guinn, Leonardo Boff, but to some he just comes off as a total Zizek, especially when he makes up his own terminology like "Lacanian Christ" and "Tao of Pure Positivity."

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Biography
McLeary was born on

Early Exposure to Kierkegaard and Christian Existentialism (draft)
Drawn to Kierkegaard and Christian Existentialism for it’s focus on Love, Subjective Relationships with God, and Passion, Idea of Self Fulfillment from following God

Loves the idea of the Self as relating to God’s Plan for the Self, but not explicitly this focus on the Self. That is, he believes that Kierkegaard describes the complexities of an individuals fears and dreads, potentials and responsibilities, but that the conversation always mistaking returns to the Self.

Would grow to tie Kierkegaard’s religious views with Political vies. For example, Aesthetic vs Ethical living in politics and ethics, and the Angst of either/or applied to political action. The Knight of Faith becomes not just religious but also political, but political in an unknown sense.

He believed that Fideism was necessary to understand not just theological truths, but political positions that people hold. In this sense he was greatly influenced by Gabriel Marcel’s idea of communion, a state where both individuals perceive each other’s subjectivity

"Lifelong Response to Nietzche" (draft)
Took up the Active versus Reactive forces debate Agreed with Deleuze that nietzche could be “scientific” scientific Deleon believed that by knowing why we are happy we do not “turn ourselves into active force” but “become one with the active force we were originally aligned with”. Re: If we are happy and do not know why, we are reactive

His ethics is Deleuzian but with an emphasis on community. He believes in a Plane of immanence and Empty Time. His ethics is inspired by Nietzchean affirmation but believes the Will to Power needs to be the shared Will

His drive to understand Christian Anarchism as well as his love for Christian Existentialism naturally led him into Existential Anarchism, but he detested the influence of Nietzche and Stirner. This detest however, ultimately led into his obsessive study and lifelong conversation with Nietzche’s works.

Believes Individualist Anarchism only works with group solidarity, seemingly a contradiction with Nietzche. Enjoys Will to Power but emphasizes shared Will. Always critical of the Ubermensch, but believed some sort of altruistic Ubermench was possible.

Really took his idea of Eternal Recurrence and Active vs Reactive Forces. And this is where he tries to use Nietzche’s own arguments against him.

Interest in Ethics (draft)
Came to look to the answers of his internal Kierkegaard vs. Nietzche in classic philosophy.

From the idea of Forces:

Heraclitus vs Parmenides captured a debate for him. Plato’s Ideals spoke to a truth about universal archetypes.

Then he drew a line from Spinoza to Schopenhuar to Nietzche to Deleuze.

From ethics:

Plato’s Virtues compared to “Aesthetics,” Aristotles ideas compared to “Ethics.” Kant’s Deontology compared to a “logical ethics” while Utilitarianism compared “logical ethics”

Ask Your Bus Driver: An Inquiry into World Scopes
Knowledge is based in practice. But Semantics and Logic do exist. Immanent truths shine through and connect, and create the shared practice of greater survival.

Archetypes and the End of History
First, “Time is real,” and we need to recognize it’s importance in human affairs. That being said, the reason we push to reject it is because of our increasing rejection of Modern Time, and the growing awareness of Infinite Time.

The book begins with a summary of what “four ways we reject time”: 1. That Time is a Dimension, Like Space. 2. The Time is NOT a dimension. 3. That time is a mental construct. 4. That to God Time is nothing. De Leon argues these deconstructions of time are contradictory.

De Leon uses contemporary physics and debates between Heroclitus and Parmendies to highlight what he thinks is problematic about our understanding of time.

De Leon critiques Hiedegger’s Being and Time for prioritizing Time, what he calls too human. He critiques Heidegger’s hypocrisy, that although he critizes techno-rationalism, by falling into a focus on time he was perpetuating the worse of techno-rationalism. He then returns to a critique of the way we attempt to deconstruct time by denying its existence, arguing that this only further fetshizs time. “To truly be liberated from the tyranny of Time, we must accept its existence. And then, gracefully, turn towards something else.”

The book then discusses the “geographic turn” in academia and history. This is put in conversation with the idea of “an end to history,” with De Leon stating that the real end to history will not come with the rise of superpowers in perpetual balance, but the recognition of repeating cycles of history and archetypes that makes the understanding of time as a progression or narrative absolute.

Finally, the book discusses archetypes and Borges’ “Platonic Man,” arguing that we should and in many ways already identifiy with the “Platonic Man.”

He quotes an old Sufi Poem, that describes a questioning of a young boy about the nature of Heaven. “My father, will he be in Heaven as that youthful boy who made so many errors, as that man who was so respected, or the weak and lost old man he became?” At the end of the poem, heaven is described as encompassing all of these moments at once. De Leon uses this to argue that at each moment we have an infinite archetypes within us, and that Time is simply the force that beads these “shinning” moments together.

Finally, in classic De Leon style, the book ends with a note towards the transcendence of universal solidarity, struggle, suffering, and love as the highest archetype.

Truth and Human Limitations
Intro

De Leon attempts to create a working theory of knowledge based on the tension between human reasoning and universal logical, responding to post-structuralist claims. Ironically, while De Leon set out to create an Epistemological Text, dealing with Existential concepts like Facticity and Lived-World,  the work was marked as the pinnacle for his Ethical and Political reflections. This is because De Leon ties his definitions of Truth and Knowledge to Praxis, explaining that “All human-beings, when confronted with the forces of evil in the world, will base their lives out of

Summary

First, De Leon examines the question of the “active or contemplative life.” He explains that in the He explores three types of Truth, “Revolutionary Truth,” “Reformist Truth,” and “Rejective Truth.” He also outlines how “Forces” determine our Practice and Theory within three plateaus: The Plateau of Structuring Practices (Biological, Habitual, Economic), the Plateau of Practicing Theories (Forces of symbolic influence, group think, social pressure for belief systems), and the Plateau of Theorizing Agency (Internal and external forces of desire, identity, self-reflection). The book argues that our Truth is limited to Forces beyond our control.

Historians situate the text in the context from which it was born out of. The Island of Fufufu was going through a period of Democratization where faith in institutions, in contrast to most other Latin American Countries at the time, was relatively high. However, growing problems in the Koo administration revived old revolutionary sentiments. This fed a dived in the nation’s left between establishment liberals and revolutionary leftists. De Leon’s categories of “Revolutionary Truth” and “Reformist Truth,” Thorquis argues, reflect the Leftist and Liberal divide, respectively.

The “Reflective Truths” are then the “third path” suggested by De Leon, where actors are engulfed in realities that are not engaged in either overthrowing or reforming the established order, but instead seek realities separate from the State. De Leon mainly pulls from the autonomous indigenous community of Zozozz to argue for this “third way” of political knowledge, but then argues that “Aesthetic Modes of Resistance” would also fall under this category, such as the Digital Punk Urban Pirate scenes he walked with in the 2X82 revolutions.

The major critique of De Leon’s categories is that he assumes all “Actors” accept the same “evil non-human forces” as him. That is, De Leon offers no categories for understanding modes of the modes of knowledge of actors that do not accept Capitalism, Colonialism, Fascism, and Patriarchy as “evil.”

One response to this criticism is that De Leon’s “four evils” was a concept created in later works, and should not be applied to this work. Truth and Human Limitations definition of “a priory morality” is instead based out any hierarchical power relationships and alienations between meaning and action. Thorquis argues that these phenomena, while traditionally associated with capitalism, State powers, etc., can be bracketed away from their cause. “Whatever your stance on Capitalism, we can agree that being at the bottom of a hierarchy or being separated from decision-making processes is disagreeable. De Leon simply proposes three attitudes to these phenomena: One where individuals work within the power-relations to change, one where individuals fight the power-relations, and one where individuals seek alternative power-relations.”

De Leon has also been criticized for positioning the “Rejection” category as vague and misleading. At times, he refers to this category as a third option for resistance, similar to Holloway’s argument for Changing the World Without Taking Power. Other times, the category seems to refer to any “non-political” lifeworld, a category that is so broad “it comes to include anyone and ceases to be meaningful.”

Ask Your Gut: An Inquiry Into Evil
This book critiques Nietzche, Rand, Friedman, and Crawley. It then suggests that their philosophies of following Wills and Forces is just, but that they do not take into account the collectives we are a part of. He argues for indigenous autonomy,

Briefly he mentions self-help authors and their main problem, critiquing the medium of books as knowledge for being individualist. Rather than focusing on sharing knowledge to the community, they are intrinsically focused on the individual. This is why Bryne can only write about the “You.” De Leon argues instead for philosophy that is shaped as curriculum for discussions, arguing that textbooks and interactive media are the way of the future.

Liberation Theology and Critical Theory (draft)
Takes Boff's question “How do we show the poor God loves them?”

Asks instead, “How do we tell the poor critical Theory is about them?”

Attempted to synthesize Nietzchean and Deleuzean Ethics with Critical Theory