Liberalism and the capitalist project at large does a good job of effectively disappearing into the natural world. In that, we have much to thank it for in what

Liberalism and the capitalist project at large does a good job of effectively disappearing into the natural world. In that, we have much to thank it for in what it has generated. But it doesn't mean we can't still point that out in conversations like this, and start to consider how much we should reconsider whether we really have two things with compatible ends anymore. Kant, quite famously, set out on his critical project only after reading the Newton's Principia. Today, its easy to read the Critiques in a kind of Philosophical vacuum: something abstract happened, the Enlightenment, and the idealists are all responding to just each other in this context. But the way it played out was much more political (to put it, admittedly, crudely): the discovery/assertion of natural physical laws demanded a reassement of subjectivity, because suddenly things that had up until then been attributed to rational minds had become seemingly decentered, now a property of the world itself! It is a short path from there to the idea of the modern individual, filled with interiority, subjectivity, agency. The same kind of subjects we still reckon over in the humanities. It is also the kind of subject that can thrive in capitalism: the modular individual that can be bargained with others on the labor market, rather then a person who is first and foremost an appendage of a community. But this whole event also helps create the "natural world" that we now take for granted in scientific pursuits. To gleam the world as a bundle of mathematical laws tends to render the whole world as static, as an underlying canvas ontop of which we can paint our experiments on. This too, is not just sufficient but necessary for the boon of capitalist progress we all enjoy today: it is only with an ever regenerating nature that we can even begin to think about scaling the world onto an industrial global monolith coordinated with adept, beautiful precision. I am not sure where I was going with this, I just think even if you really love capitalism and don't see it ever ever going away, you still do yourself an injustice not bringing it into this kind of conversation. It just feels inarguable that it is the ground we stand on, almost literally. If it seems hard or strange to think about ends, or if things maybe are going past their end, it is maybe at least related to the fact that our entire world is in a situation these days where it literally can't slow down, can't even stop accelerating, without crashing.