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Neoclassical philosophy

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One definition of Baroque is as a dissembling and many-sided intellectual attack on the neoclassical. It is not yet tied to any body in particular, but is just a sort of "playing the fool" to distract or blunt neoclassical attack on the body.

The Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius, the Renaissance especially in Italy as documented in The Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli, and modern neoclassical economics share very similar assumptions. They were challenged in each age by Celtic, Baroque, and Gaian perspectives respectively. These have much in common, most notably humour, refocus on some "body" which is not the vague national or racial body of The Empire, rejection of a common Imperial concept of "Man" which may exclude women, slaves, workers, apes, or whatever a body view might say is valuable but not part of the Empire's power structure.

In this view one may see parallels between Augustine or Alaric as "the challenger", Johannes Kepler and Diderot, and moderns Michel Foucualt, George Lakoff and Jane Goodall. In effect all three ages had those who challenged the dominant notions of defining Man and what it meant to defy or to approach God.

If neoclassical is about focus on a bad goal, then the movements may be about distraction: Jose Luis Borges claims that "the baroque is the final stage in all art, where art flaunts and squanders its resources."

The baroque is intellectual, and Bernhard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous. This humor is intentional in the works of Baltasar Gracian but intentional (as, it can be said, is also the case in Quicksilver

Michel Foucault agreed with Borges about the inherent humour of such practices as classification. Especially given the unreliability of much history and biography of the time, or at least lingering doubts, it makes sense to list historical and non-historical figures like literary ones on the same list. Many people believed outrageous lies about real people, like George Psalamanazar, and there remain doubts about people like William Shakespeare, and whether they did what people say they did.

The Renaissance, according to Foucault, focused on Signs and similitudes - as does today's neoclassical economics - it is not subjective except for those who define the signs and sameness.

A neoclassical philosophy binds analogy, reason, identity, difference to elite professions, detaching them from the emotional culture, the Church, and the power relations of the nobles... the same dissonance that alienates Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes' novel.

The Baroque (Wikipedia) can be seen as linguistic and focused on power structure and subject-object problems arising from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, reaction to "the crisis of Renaissance neoclassical schemes."

The neoclassical economics of today's neoliberal leads to a market theology of globalization. Its idea of "Man" has been challenged as being that of no body.

The Copernican and Lutheran revolution were also searches for a foundation ontology, as the proof of an ultimate human power, at least to impose the gaze of the wise and good doctor (Foucault), or Panopticon of carceral state (Jeremy Bentham, Foucualt, and Steve Mann)

Alternatives to the neoclassical philosophy expressed in such sources as The Economist include those of eco-feminism, eco-villages, a class war or worker's revolution, an Islamic revolution or that of Green Parties or deep ecology. These last are interesting due to the parallel origins of Gaians as per Buckminster Fuller and the Baroque view:

Johannes Kepler had diverse interests and was quite interested in biology. Some credit him with the first scientific statement of a Gaia philosophy. Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft - and his own sacred geometry of the spheres, which he discarded for the elliptic orbits, is a good representation of the shift from earlier magical thinking to modern scientific models. As the very first person to say (according to Lewis Thomas) that the entire Earth was one living round organism - the thesis of very much later Gaia philosophy - it might be fair to say that he was first to seriously challenge the neoclassical philosophy.

Is history repeating itself? Can it ever do anything else?