That's the bit I have trouble with. Establishing the mind-independent existence of abstract objects (numbers) might be hard enough, but establishing the same for particular ideas is a big step beyond even that, is it not?

I agree, and never intended for mindscape to denote a literal place in spacetime — Art48

But you did intend it to denote a literal domain of existence in which ideas exist eternally and independently of minds, yes?

Off the top of my head...

Maybe I can go along with an ontological pluralism in which ideas can be said to exist in their own domain, but they would exist in a different way from stars and brains (which is just/also to say that "exist" has different meanings in different domains, as @Banno has pointed out).

As @green flag said, we can use concepts like lifeworld or culture, and maybe the manifest image is along the same lines. I'll add another one that's more granular and ontological: fields of sense. This is Markus Gabriel's concept: a field of sense is a context, domain, or background in which or against which something stands out, and thereby exists.

So ideas exist in their own domain. Very well. But what is happening to this concept when it turns into the mindscape? What justifies this leap? On the face of it, it's a wildly speculative reification that attempts to turn, say, an analogical way of thinking about ideas, one that's familiar to artists and geniuses, into a mind-independent ontology: not only do ideas exist, but they have always existed, and we tap into the mindscape to think them. But in fields of sense or the lifeworld, we might say that ideas exist, but we do not thereby establish eternal existence independent of people, because these domains are strictly human and finite realities, and I can't see the justification for the leap, at least not in the OP (I haven't read all of Rucker's online presentation of the idea).

Is this what happens when you combine the thought of a universe of physical objects with the thought of universals and abstract objects like numbers, as I think @Wayfarer is suggesting?

So you end up with something like Platonism I guess, although as far as I can tell the existents of the mindscape seem to be concrete and/or particular, rather than being merely universal forms: in this mindscape there are instantiations, like Macbeth, and not only forms.

On the other hand, the idea of a shared landscape of ideas is an attractive one, but only as at least part-analogical--there may be a world of ideas that we are part of when we think, but it's more map than landscape (but this might be in conflict with ontological pluralism, I'm not sure).

It’s been bothering me that I didn’t answer those questions. I am interested in questions 1, 5, and 7, so I’d like to come back to them some time. But as I say, they’re for the main philosophy sections, not the Lounge, so maybe I’ll start a new discussion there if I get the time. Or if you feel like it, start a new discussion on hinge certainties or historicism (probably in Metaphysics & Epistemology and General Philosophy, respectively).

Questions 2, 3, and 4: those I cannot answer. For instance, I have not read those works that argue against direct realism, and when I said I was for externalism it seems I was bullshitting or perhaps was once in favour of it but have now forgotten the debate.

But I’ll answer 6 directly: I agree.

If I’d known you were going to ask difficult questions I wouldn’t have posted :grin:

Some other time perhaps. Each one deserves a main page discussion of its own and I don’t currently have enough interest or knowledge to answer them all.

Our senses (body and mind) filter, organize and present information (data) from the external enviroment in a way that is advantageous (usually) for our survival. Do our senses give us an entirely complete picture of the external environment, it would seem quite clearly not; we don't see UV or Infrared, we do not hear frequencies above or below certain limits. So our picture of the world including the way we color it is a representation of reality, not a complete picture of all or nature. — prothero

Your conclusion doesn’t follow. Another possibility which is consistent with the premises is this: we see things in certain human ways, but it’s the things we are seeing, not representations thereof. That’s direct perception.

Welcome to TPF Ø, good to have you on board :smile:

I never think of myself as having a philosophy. That way of putting it feels foreign to me. And in fact, I neither know how to describe my general philosophical position nor whether I even have one. But let’s see how it goes…

I started this site as a replacement for an older site that fell apart. I was a moderator there towards the end, and now I’m one of three administrators here at TPF. Like Tom, I have no formal training in philosophy. Depending on how you look at it, I’m a Renaissance man or a mere dilettante, but when I’m into philosophy—it comes and goes—I take it somewhat seriously. After having read some Marx and Hegel in my late teens, when I was a member of a weird Trotskyist cult, I dropped philosophy until about fifteen years ago, when I joined the predecessor of this site. I taught myself some logic, read Plato, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Austin and Ryle, studied the Critique of Pure Reason for many months, read Foucault and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and a bunch of other things. Now, after five years without much interest in philosophy, I’m into early critical theory and may even come back around to tackling Hegel at some point.

On what there is, I’m a non-reductive materialist. I also think there’s always something left out of our perception and conceptualization, i.e., something that escapes the human world while also underlying it (though “underlying” seems like the wrong word), which could be described as the Real, the non-identical, or the unconditioned, depending on your theory. This is how I attempt to be a proper realist while giving Kant his due.

On perception, I sometimes describe myself as a direct realist, but sometimes I reject that label and advocate embodied cognition, enactivism, ecological perception and so on, in an effort to sidestep the interminable (on TPF at least) debate between direct and indirect realism.

On knowledge and the mind I’m with externalism, enactivism, and embodied cognition, and I’m a big fan of Wittgenstein’s contribution here too. I’m aware that I just reduced epistemology and the philosophy of mind to one sentence.

Politically I tend to think in quasi-neo-Marxian terms but I don’t like most Marxisms. Political and social philosophy is my main philosophical interest at the moment, where I feel most affinity with philosophers like Adorno. I think that capitalism is the most powerful and most flexible in a long line of social forms based on domination and exploitation and the curtailment of human freedom, creativity and flourishing. I also think that modernity has produced, and could still produce more, non-capitalist social forms that are similarly based on oppression. I believe this is a difficult problem.

Generally I believe that history is more important to philosophy than most philosophers have understood and I am impatient with philosophical theories that are clear outgrowths of their historical conditions—like Descartes and the centuries of representationalism that followed—even though I accept (sometimes) that in philosophy, theories cannot be rejected merely by pointing to their historico-ideological nature. I might start a discussion about this one day, i.e., about historicism.

On God and religion, again I think somewhat anti-philosophically about it: I take it for granted that it’s an anthropological and historical phenomenon, and I have no interest in debating or thinking about God’s existence. So by default I’m an atheist, but I respect and value aspects of religious and spiritual thinking and see no need to fight against religion per se.

On meta-ethics I go for something like a social naturalist moral realism, which plays out normatively as virtue ethics. And I go back to early Marx here for some sort of humanism and a focus not only on the social nature but also on the essential (there I said it) creativity of human beings.

In general for: the body, society, history, creativity, human flourishing and endless criticism.

In general against: Cartesian theories of perception and the mind, ahistorical and asocial philosophy, idealism, greedy reductionism, and stupidity.

I’ve avoided logic, truth, mathematics, science, and language, either because I haven’t decided where I stand or because I don’t know the issues well.

and if you want to create a behemoth of text, that is also fine — Ø implies everything

Et voila.

You misunderstood. I did not say that worldviews or metaphysics or epistemology are not substantial. I said that we were not having a debate over anything substantial, but merely exchanging worldviews.

Try to imagine the best in people before you settle on nasty. — frank

Try to take my comments about your behaviour seriously. You really haven’t absorbed it at all.

Wow, you really misread that — frank

That’s how I read it too. You were asked to justify what you said and instead of answering you assumed a posture of superior knowledge to completely dismiss your interlocutor.

Well, I’m not sure how we ended up just exchanging worldviews rather than arguing about something substantial, but I did find that quite interesting, and I’m glad to see we are still entirely opposed on the big philosophical issues.

I won’t address the metaphysical issue—and it’s highly debatable in Nietzsche scholarship how significant that issue is—but I thought I’d step in to quote the first appearance of the idea in Nietzsche’s work:

What if one day or night a demon came to you in your most solitary solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again, and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it; but rather every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unutterably trivial or great things in your life will have to happen to you again, with everything in the same series and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or was there one time when you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: ‘You are a god, and I have never heard anything so divine!’ — The Gay Science, §341

So here at least it’s a thought experiment to test one’s attitude to life. And in the later work, Zarathustra eventually comes to welcome the prospect of an eternal return—passing the test, so to speak.

Yes, I agree, but in my time here on the forum, a feeling has grown that it doesn't make sense to talk about reality, or the world, or meaning without understanding that all of these things are human. You can't separate us from the world or the world from us. — T Clark

I agree that you can’t separate us from the world, because we’re part of it, but I don’t agree with what I take you to really mean, viz., that humans are in some way constitutive of reality. I’m a kind of materialist, despite Kantian sympathies.

Although I'm sympathetic to the idea that our concepts are not ultimate reality, illusions, that doesn't work in our daily lives unless we are sages. The Tao Te Ching is clear that the multiplicity of the world is human. It's ours. It's real. It's where we live and work. — T Clark

Again, you seem to be saying two different things: that we are part of the world, and that the world is human. I agree with the first part, and only agree with the second part to the extent that we are reciprocally bound to the rest of the world such that we see it, conceptualize it, and act in it necessarily in our own ways, owing to our cognitive endowments and social behaviour. But it’s not like there were no dinosaurs before humans existed. That’s a Schopenhauerian antinomy that I think we can avoid.

That said, I’m totally ignorant of the Tao Te Ching.

I'm not talking about what we do, I'm talking about what we value — T Clark

Just as we don’t want to separate person and world, neither should we separate valuing from doing. What we do is about what we value and vice versa. That assumption underlay my post.

And I do think that goes back to basic human nature, something built into us. Instinct I guess, as modified by personal and social experience and our mental capacities. For what it's worth, I've been reexamining these beliefs recently. apokrisis and many others don't see it that way. They see our values and behavior more as a reflection of our generalized conceptual capabilities processing our experiences. (Forgive me if I mischaracterized your position Apokrisis) — T Clark

I’m not sure I see the difference to be honest. I can go along with both.

Yep, I’m interpreting “decide”, “choose”, and “because we say so” loosely, to refer to things that humans agree on whether consciously or implicitly by participation in society.

The idea that the state or the bank has the role of the “external” grounding is interesting.

The point of this thought experiment is not to show that values don't exist, but rather that values depend on an image of an external, unchanging grounding. When I say "external" I mean external to the human community. — frank

This would explain the reaction of “wow, so money doesn’t exist!” when someone realizes it’s conventional. But I’m not convinced. Specifically, by the “external” part.

My interpretation: neither of them quite got to the bottom of the error. GPT3.5’s answer was better, but GPT4’s answer was more imaginative, though more wrong.

I don’t have any great objection to that view, and it’s also consistent with my post. In fact, I used the word “additionally” specifically to imply it.

But the point is that the existence of something “merely” as a social practice or as an intersubjective attribution does not entitle someone to say it’s just an illusion. And somewhat against your point, I don’t think this depends on its being rooted in something basic, unless we say that everything we do is rooted in something basic (which is a fair point but doesn’t say much).

The hard question here might be: what is basic? Is it essential, eternal, and universal? Is it the species lowest common denominator or would you also include values that are culturally relative?

We don't decide to give value to food and shelter, so in this case value is rooted in basic needs and desires which we don't control. — frank

On the other hand, in a sense we do decide, through the market, to put prices on them, i.e., they do not have prices purely by virtue of their use to us, but also by virtue of their inclusion in a social practice of exchange on the basis of money, which is based on conventional behaviour—playing the game. After all, they can be provided without charge, if we decide not to put prices on them.

This can be extended to cover all needs and wants, whether basic or not. All of this valuing, whether based purely on need or additionally on conventional observance (“deciding”), is real. Things really are valuable, in our hands or in the market.

So the question to the OP is: how much more real does value have to be to be really real?

But the quotation in the OP is taken out of context, unattributed, and ambiguous, so it’s difficult to determine what it’s actually saying.

I can't wait to see how well GPT4 will understand it and how it will suggest to rephrase it in order to make the argument more transparent! — Pierre-Normand

Indeed. I really have to try it myself soon.

Impressive.

Imagine you started without a clear notion of the formal similarity, just an intuition that there might be one. Could GPT4 help you to develop your own insight, or actually guide it and cash it out? Or without the clues, would it just flounder or identify only superficial similarities?

I have no idea what it’s actually doing when it identifies the connection between the arguments, but it seems like an important ability to say the least—or is it somehow less amazing and more routine than it seems?

Yikes.

So what I'm wondering is what goes into OpenAI's...

... unspecified steps to filter out prejudicial responses

I'm imagining the equivalent of hard-coded hacks. And though it's conceivable that the models can be altered to remove such obvious discriminatory bias, less inflammatory biases, such as fundamentally different ways of describing perception or even basic assumptions about society, will presumably continue to proliferate.

I look forward to reading more!

Fascinating, thanks for sharing.

I have not yet used ChatGPT (it can't be accessed where I live), and I don't know much about how it works, so forgive my naive and ignorant questions.

I'm interested in GPT4's bias, how it initially answered your trick question with the representationalist account of perception, but switched into Gibsonian mode when prompted to do so (even going so far as to misreperesent its earlier statements in the transcript). I wonder: what motivated you to ask the trick question and what do you think its answer revealed, if anything? Was it a demonstration that its training will produce a bias in accord with the dominant side of a philosophical debate, as this imbalance is reproduced in the training data?

And I wonder if there's a tension between this bias and what you say here:

On the other hand, there are two considerations that are a source of optimism for me. Suppose there are two ideologically rival factions named PJW (progressive justice warriors) and AWR (anti-woke rationalists) that each are claiming the high ground in the ethical-political area of discourse. Two positive things might happen if those two tribes would attempt to harness the capabilities of the AI bots to craft masterful arguments in favor of their respective paradigms. The first thing is that by virtue of the very lack of opiniatedness of the bot, and its equal ability to argue both sides, its authority in underlying any one of those sides will be undermined. Secondly, the bots appear to have a rather unique ability, when urged to do so, to present the concerns on one side in a way that is intelligible to the inhabitants of the members of the opposite ideological camp by means of translating them into the language of the rival paradigm. Without quite serving as a fully neutral arbiter in ideological disputes, since there may not exist any such thing, the bots could nevertheless facilitate discussion and communication with a view of achieving some common grounds, casting light into formerly blind spots, and reducing crude misunderstandings. — Pierre-Normand

Suppose a person is using GPT4 to assess an issue from a neutral perspective. Further suppose that the sides of the debate are not equal, such that this person might even be unaware that there is any controversy at all, because one of the sides is dominant.

Rather than being unopinionated, isn't it opinionated in favour of the dominant view by default, but pretends not to be when it realizes you know more about the debate than you originally revealed? (In case it's not obvious, I'm using anthropomorphic metaphors here)

How does it decide if it needs to pay attention to bias? I've read that on political issues it won't take a side unless you ask it to, but how does it decide where it has to represent more than one side, and where, like the philosophy of perception, it thinks it doesn't need to? I assume this is the result of intervention by the humans at OpenAI.

Eat some apples, ride a horse. That's where they came from. — T Clark

This information will stand me in good stead, so thanks. But while I do like apples, I'm more of a donkey guy.

I think Central Asia is the geography we're most ignorant of. — T Clark

Indeed, things have changed since the heyday of the Silk Route. Even my recently increased familiarity with the culture and food of the region has just been about Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan in my mind conjures up vague images of hunters on horseback with eagles, and then I think "wait, maybe that's Kyrgyzstan. Or Mongolia".

Preparation for Kazakhstan:

Alma-Ata: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955-1991 by Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolay Malinin.

One of the Five Pillars of Islam is the shahada: “there is no god but God [Allah]”.

I think you can find statements to similar effect in both old and new testaments of the Bible, even though early Judaism didn’t deny the existence of other gods.

If all of this was somehow an elaborate justification for antisemitism or racist theories, I see zero evidence for it. — Mikie

Anyway — if it was all an elaborate system created to justify deeply held antisemitic and German nationalist sentiments, then why is there so little evidence in the text for it? — Mikie

Is this the claim that is being made in the reviews or in the book itself? Or in this thread, even?

Tathata

Cool.

I can't help but also notice the resonances with Heidegger's 'presencing'.

Outside the web of discursive thought and conceptualisation. — Wayfarer

Yes, and Kant had a version of it too of course, the thing in itself, although I suppose the difference is that for Kant, it exceeds our grasp (almost) entirely, not only intellectually. Philosophers, using thought, are always trying to get beyond thought (except Wittgenstein, who said stop trying).

Unrelatedly…

What we have now in postmodernity (or “liquid modernity”) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology. — Jamal

It occurs to me that things are even worse than this. Maybe people are increasingly escaping the spell of ideology—it’s just that there seems to be nothing they can do about it.

I think Russia is a good example of this. There is very little trust in authority in Russia, whether at the federal or local level, and yet authority is unchallenged. The attitude is not critically engaged so much as cynically disengaged. The people are to a significant extent under no illusions about the situation, and it’s the fact that they do not feel themselves to be political actors, citizens of a polis, that prevents any change. They made a deal with the State years ago: ensure stability and prosperity and stay out of our lives, and we’ll let you get on with it.

On the other hand, the Russian media, which since last year has been cleansed of its critical, independent elements, spreads the ideological orthodoxy every day, and for those who are disengaged it must become easy to accept it.

Magical neo-Marxism is now a thing, I think? — Moliere

I've just noticed there's a book: Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination by Andy Merrifield. Also, Mark Fisher and hauntology might fit.

Good stuff. I don't know enough about the study of magic and you've given me a direction for further study. Sympathy and symbol on the surface almost seem to go against my focus on thisness and the non-identical, but my guess is they can be made compatible. In Adorno the significant concept here is mimesis: in magic the symbol imitates the thing but does not abstract from it to a generality, or something like that.

To my mind, this was a really great OP on this forum — ssu

Thank you ssu, much appreciated.

In the 19th Century they had a far more apt name for economics. They called it "Political Economy". And that's what it is, no matter in how much in mathematics you disguise it, it is political and part of politics. It's basically a straight lie to try to make economics to be something like a (natural) science and somehow apolitical. It simply isn't that. The dominant questions have been the same since Antiquity. The story of the Grachi brothers tells that the question about redistribution of wealth isn't something we started thinking about thanks to Marx and the 19th Century socialists. — ssu

Absolutely.

For me, the simple reason why there can be "enchantment of magic" is that these questions are moral, not something objective, which using the scientific method can give us the right answer. If it's subjective, why not have some magic in it? — ssu

I half agree with this, but I tend not to divide things along those lines. I think we can describe things objectively without describing them on the pattern of natural science.

I have too much to say, but I’ll say it all anyway. It’s not really in the spirit of discussion to make such a massive post that’s not responding directly to other contributors, but maybe someone will find it interesting.

In a spirit of Enlightenment, I’m breaking things down as follows:

Disenchantment: the loss of a unified total system of meaning and value, especially that which happened in Western society with the unseating of Christianity from its central and foundational position.

Re-enchantment: the return of meaning, which however might only be occasional and partial, rather than forming a total system.

Ideology: legitimation of the social order (the state, the economy, class hierarchy, etc) by means of enchantment

Magic and magical thinking: the beating heart of enchantment and ideology.


Magic

I’m now thinking that magic or magical thinking is something that we should not revile. It’s the element of enchantment that we should want to retain or revive. This is the route to the secular sacredness that I was briefly talking about with @Wayfarer. My thought is roughly that we can break the spells that bewitch us without abandoning magical thinking as such.

To try and make that work, I’m thinking of magic in the way it's described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book, magic is a practice in which the object, such as a mountain, a raven, or a tree, is imbued with inherent meaning, animated by its own spirit, and is not reducible to an instantiation of a general type, a mere specimen of a species. A respect for the thisness of the object is what differentiates magic from myth, religion, and especially Enlightenment, in which classification and conceptualization serve to abstract away from individuals in an attempt to form a unified system of science and philosophy.

Thisness—which is also known by medieval philosophers as haecceity—has its own special version in the work of Adorno, namely the non-identical. It’s the part of the thing that remains unique to it when you bring it under a category or think of it in terms of concepts, but which is lost sight of in this process. The singular thing is non-identical with the specimen, the latter being an instantiation, an example defined by categories, universals, or concepts. But the thing is not exhausted by any category you put it in, any abstract universal you bring it under, or any set of concepts you apply to describe it.

Therefore conceptual thinking, though indispensable, has to proceed carefully so as to avoid losing sight of the very thing it attempts to understand.

There's a difficulty with trying to theorize about this. Adorno doesn’t use the word “haecceity” or explicitly define the non-identical, because to do so would once again bring the singular individual under a universal concept (e.g., the universal kind called "singular individuality"). Thus Adorno’s project begins to look, not only difficult, but also somewhat paradoxical. The solution to this problem, I think, is to see the non-identical as akin to the thing-in-itself in Kant's philosophy, i.e., as a limit-concept about which we don’t want to say too much. It’s a correction by means of a negation (the "non" in non-identical), rather than positive ampliative knowledge.

Now we can see that magical thinking, which is an appreciation of the singular life of things, is an important counterweight to conceptual thinking. This is what Adorno described positively about Hegel’s philosophy:

[Hegel’s] impulse to elevate spirit, however deluded, draws its strength from a resistance to dead knowledge. — Adorno, Experiential Content

By “dead knowledge,” he means … well, the way I think about it is like the difference between the living giant squid, with its shimmering colours and graceful movements, and the ugly dead specimen in the laboratory.

Incidentally, I don't think of this as a complete rejection of science or the Enlightenment, more like a correction or a warning.

science establishes ... concepts and makes its judgments without regard for the fact that the life of the subject matter for which the concept is intended does not exhaust itself in conceptual specification. What furnishes the canon for Hegelian idealism is ... the need to grasp...what the matter at hand actually is and what essential and by no means mutually harmonious moments it contains. — Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

This might all seem ridiculously abstract, but consider the real-world example of wolves and dogs. The model of the wolf pack as led by an alpha male is now outdated, and was based on studies of wolves in captivity, where their behaviour is very different from wild behaviour. And if this popular concept is wrong for wolves, it’s even wronger for dogs. This is why dog behaviourists have been trying to demolish the myth of alpha-dominance in dog training for years. From personal experience, it’s only getting through to people slowly.

You might just say it was bad science and that the concepts were wrong, not that science or conceptual thinking in general were at fault, but I see it more dialectically: science corrected its worst instincts, by paying more attention to the uniqueness of things, getting closer to what they are.

Am I saying that we should think of wolves and dogs as unique spirits with their own life-forces? It sounds a bit woo, but I think I am. Many and perhaps most people who live with dogs do this anyway: a dog is effectively a kind of person, and so personhood seems almost like the source of the magical thinking that I’m advocating: we do think of each other as unique and as animated by our own spirits.

This brings me to scientism, arguably an aspect of disenchantment and instrumental rationality. It's what leads to the denigration of personhood and irreducible singularity more generally:

There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist — unenlightened

So although people, even eliminative materialists, treat others in their everyday lives as persons and ends in themselves, this has been somewhat reduced by scientism to mere sentiment or even illusion.

Another way of looking at magic:

Theology, metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, universal suffrage, republics, progress, and what have you, are quite as irrational as anything primitives believe in, in that they are the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experiment and reasoning. — E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality

I take issue with Evans-Pritchard’s assumed rationality-sentiment dichotomy, which is related to an underlying emotivist fact-value distinction that I’m not on board with; and in any case, his separation of rationality and emotion might be untenable (see Damasio). But leaving that aside, the quotation does highlight the continuing relevance of magical thinking in societies in which magic seems to have been replaced or marginalized. I think this ties in with several of the posts by @unenligtened and @Moliere.

Thinking that the primary way to keep alive what is good in magical thinking is art, I looked into the connection and came across a letter from Van Gogh to his brother, which contains this:

It seems that in the book, My Religion, Tolstoy implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born, or rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the Christian religion used to. — Vincent Van Gogh

There’s much more to say about magic in art, and I’m guessing that was a big motivation for Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but I’ll leave that for the moment.


Power

The OP grew from my interpretation of Nietzsche as describing a disenchantment of power. It turns out that Weber has a theory of authority that lines up quite nicely with this. There are three kinds of authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. The latter is characteristic of a modern rationalized society and therefore of disenchantment, so it’s not a stretch to talk as I did of the disenchantment of power, or of the desacralization of power as an aspect of disenchantment, even though Weber did not use the term in quite that way, as far as I know.

There are two different kinds of charisma. One is about an individual’s personal qualities and abilities, and the other is institutional charisma...

... which can be inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institution. This is the charisma that gives an aura of sacred power to whomever has the right to wear the bishop's robe, or sit in the king's throne, regardless of their actual personal characteristics. — Charles Lindholm, Charisma

It’s clear that charisma of both types was what Nietzsche was identifying as lacking in the “captains of industry” and “generic bores”.

This aspect of the legal-rationalization of power was not a good thing in Nietzsche’s view, but it can be viewed positively, as opening up a space for critique.


Critique

In a disenchanted society, there remains ideological enchantment, where ideology is understood as the legitimizing ideas of the social order. In the view of critical theorists, critique of ideology is one of the central tasks of philosophy.

To that end, disenchantment can be understood and used in two ways:

• Negatively, as a lack—the lack of inherent meaning to be found in nature, society, history, and so on
• Positively, as a deliberate critique of ideology—we can disenchant the way the world is (capitalism, state power, nationalism, or whatever else we see as the primary problem), revealing the truth that it works to the detriment of people and obfuscates itself with ideology.

This latter is what I’m calling critical disenchantment.

Is this anything more than another name for the critique of ideology? Possibly. It is an enrichment of the concept, or one aspect of it. Or maybe it’s a radicalization, taking disenchantment out of the hands of the social scientists for whom it is merely a historical fact, and turning it into praxis, part of an attempt to change the world.

Another way to view disenchantment positively is as opening up the space for progress:

Society was no longer viewed as immutably anchored in tradition or God’s will. The idea of social design, the desire to create a better or perfect world, is a crucial characteristic of the modern way of thinking. — Maastricht University

And that leads us back to socialism. Nietzsche’s observation, as I interpreted it, that socialism resulted from the desacralization of power, leads us to Marx’s comments about critique:

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. — A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Marx here refers to the move from the disenchantment of the Enlightenment, when the "holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked," to the critique of the law and politics as ideologies of capitalism. The word “disillusion” parallels the double aspect of disenchantment: to be disillusioned in one sense is bad, an unhappy state in which you realize something is worse than you thought; but in another sense it’s a good thing because you no longer perceive or believe falsely.

What we have now in postmodernity (or “liquid modernity”) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology.

Given everything I’ve said here, I guess it looks like I’m advocating magical neo-Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s a thing.

It’s the coolest Dad music I know.

Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool. — frank

Crucially though, I can carry on wearing my kilt without feeling like I'm perpetuating a fake culture.

I think of it like food. What is authentic Indian food? Does it include chilis? But chilis were taken to India by the Portuguese, so .. :chin:

(that risks trivializing it but you get the point I trust)

There are many dimensions to it. One is about the Stuarts and Jacobitism (there’s a book about this called “The Invention of Scotland”); the massive influence of the epic poems of Ossian, which were fabricated in the 18th century; the mythologizing of Scottish history by Walter Scott (who has been called “the man who invented Scottish identity”); and generally the disproportionate weight given to Highland culture at the expense of the Lowlands.

Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis.

Another thing: kilts. It’s not about our ancestors’ beliefs but it’s in the same ballpark. Many Scots believe that each tartan has been associated with a particular clan for centuries. This is untrue. Also, they didn’t wear kilts.

In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad. — frank

Funny you should mention that, because that’s pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture.

The Voice — Banno

I’m showing my ignorance here, but do you mean the Indigenous Voice to Parliament?

I’m saying that every culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be, both by insiders and outsiders.