You’re welcome. We are here to extend your mind.

It was the same with me: I learned about embodied cognition and the ecological account of perception from others more knowledgeable than me on TPF and its progenitor site.

Yeah, and I was trying to cover a lot of things: embodiment, sociality, and the ecological view. I should read Lakoff, keep meaning to.

Look it up.

A clue: when you fly directly from London to Istanbul, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to get on a plane and move through the sky to get there. It means you don’t stop anywhere on the way.

EDIT: if that seemed unnecessarily rude or curt, it’s because you failed to observe the principle of charity, and I found this rather annoying. It should be obvious that direct realists cannot possibly mean what you take them to mean.

1. The transformation from sensory media (light, sound waves, chemicals) into nerve signals.

2: The transformation or interpretation of nerve signals into the abstract, fictive qualities of experience (colors, sounds, smells). — hypericin

There is no version of direct realism that I’m aware of that would deny these. A major type of direct realism is distinguished by its claim that we perceive trees, not representations of trees—not that perception isn’t a transformative process.

That said, while I couldn’t resist making that point, I’ve come to think that this whole debate tends to go wrong from the start, that the direct-indirect dichotomy is unhelpful.

What do you think the self is? How would you define it? — Andrew4Handel

Off the top of my head…

The self is the overarching temporally extended narrative construct of a necessarily embodied and social consciousness which turns the animal acting in an environment into a subject. It is that through which the individual recognizes that it is one of many, i.e., an individual in a society of individuals, which are also selves. The self is that which recognizes itself as a self in a world of selves.*

To refer back to the mention of perception and experience in the OP, I’ll note that by “the animal acting” in the last paragraph I mean the animal that perceives and experiences according to its (minimally) biologically-motivated behaviour in its environment. So ultimately I’m telling a story that calls attention to (but does not explain) the difference between animal agency and selfhood, but which emphasizes the importance of the environment for both.

I don’t think it’s “immaterial”, but I don’t think it’s all about the brain, though having a brain is no doubt helpful.

* It’s Friday and I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, so I won’t mind too much if someone tells me this sentence is gibberish

:up:

Maybe after you're through with Marx — frank

One cannot be through with Marx until human emancipation is achieved. :grin:

The way I put it is that numbers are real, but they're not existent in the sense that phenomenal objects are existent, but mainstream thought can't accomodate this distinction because there is no conceptual category for intelligible objects, in the Platonic sense. — Wayfarer

You may have answered this earlier in the discussion, but my obvious question is: what do you mean by real? If you take a Kantian view of the matter, mathematical objects are universal, necessary, and objective. All good so far. But at the same time, this objectivity for Kant is possible only via the subject of experience, by means of the faculties of understanding and intuition. Rather than full-on objectivity, this might be closer to intersubjectivity, in that it's only objective within the realm of human subjects.

Doesn't this almost look more like mathematical psychologism than platonism? The latter would demand that mathematical objects are entirely independent of human minds, and Kant is not quite able to say that, no matter how much he'd like to.

So, do we bite the platonic bullet and assert that Kant underestimated the realness of mathematical objects, or do we retreat to the Kantian middle-ground?

I had a thought while reading this. Which is that perhaps Hegel's approach is to overcome opposition without losing the vitality of opposition. It would be contrary to the critical method to allow oppositions to stand without being overcome but the life of Hegel's system comes from the power of the negative so some element of opposition must remain. — Toby Determined

Speaking as someone who has only read Hegel’s Philosophy of History and a bunch of Hegelian thinkers like Marx, Zizek, and Adorno (and not much of the latter two), I don’t have the authority to answer this. However, what you say looks right. Overcoming is not just a dissolution of the contradiction but its preservation. I believe this is what Hegel calls sublation.

We don’t have many Hegel experts here, but @Tobias might be able to help.

Yeah that’s on my list too. :grin:

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno — Jamal

Finished it. Pessimistic but also utopian, outrageous but also convincing, obscure but also polemical, bitter but also humane, anti-enlightenment but also pro-enlightenment. Dialectical thinking is addictive and I'm seeking contradictions everywhere. Adorno believed that the dialectic couldn't be set out theoretically, only shown in practice; I think this work is a good exemplar.

One of the keys to appreciating the work comes in the third chapter:

only exaggeration is true

It turns out that this was probably written by Horkheimer, not Adorno, and I appreciated it, because it showed me how to understand the whole book.

Generally, it's really interesting to compare the styles and approaches of the two authors. It seems that while the chapters "The Concept of Enlightenment" and "The Culture Industry" were 50/50, the chapter on Odysseus was mostly written by Adorno, the chapter on Juliette almost entirely by Horkheimer. Horkheimer is the clearer writer and seems to build arguments more explicitly, while at the same time is more brutal, caustic, and pessimistic. He is motivated by love and despair for humanity. Adorno is all over the place but is more playful and even sometimes mystical. He is motivated by love and despair for the fading Western tradition of literature, music, and philosophy.

As aficionados will notice from what I've just written, I've begun to mimic their style. It's like the first time I saw The Karate Kid only more Hegelian.

I won't say more because I want to start a discussion about it, but I'm not sure how to go about it yet.

I now have a rabbit hole of supplementary reading — Jamal

I'm even seriously considering reading Hegel.

In a good way :grin:

You’re in your own special category.

I suppose I could try doing the same and see what happens. How do you do it again? :lol:

What's up with that? Any solutions? — T Clark

That image shows ok on mobile for me and I don’t recall having trouble viewing images. I don’t know why your mobile browser wouldn’t show it. So … I can’t think how you could solve it.

A few questions to think about or confirm if you haven’t already:

1. Are you sure it happens to different images and not just your notorious thumb pic?
2. Are you sure it’s only when you link to one of your uploads?
3. Does the problem ever resolve itself or does the problem image forever remain broken on mobile?

I wouldn’t dream of making such an outrageous claim.

Agreed. So here’s my version.

Canonicals (includes some Anglos and many continentals, as well as those who are neither. Focused on or knowledgeable in the tradition, well-read in the great works going back to Plato)

Analytics

Contrarians

Sciencey dabblers

Politicos

Woomongers :wink:

Yep, seems useful, although you might find that each person has their own taxonomy reflecting their prejudices, which becomes reinforcing when made explicit.

Another point: when I first saw the term “canonicals” I was expecting it to be the people who are into Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, etc. So-called continentals are as steeped in that tradition as the Anglos, so splitting them up in the way you’ve done has its problems.

Cool.

At various times I think I’ve been in all of those categories except “original sythesizers”.

“Continentals” should probably also include critical theory and Marxism. Come to think of it, they could come under counterculturals as well. Come to think of it more, I’m guessing that American-style libertarians and anti-woke folk think of themselves as countercultural too.

But then the countercultural category begins to look strained. Maybe “politicals” could be added.

My main problem is that your definition of the countercultural type doesn’t imply anything actually countercultural, unless you just want to restrict it to secularism-sceptical spiritual seekers or something like that.

Despite all that, apparently Adorno was a big fan of the TV show Daktari, starring Clarence the cross-eyed lion.

Cool!

I just occasionally hear bits and pieces of hers and haven’t taken a deep dive.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno — Jamal

My attitude going into this was that I wanted a brief palate-cleanser between heavy works of fiction, which could also neatly fill a gap in my philosophical knowledge. What a fool! I was forgetting that philosophy is quite hard.

The upshot is that I’m still on the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” reading it repeatedly and more slowly each time, and I now have a rabbit hole of supplementary reading, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, among lots of other material.

It’s great though, otherwise I wouldn’t continue.

I wasn't questioning your decision to review the book, only pointing out a difference in our approach — T Clark

I know. I was describing my own approach in your terms.

I rarely write negative things about books. There are so many wonderful books out there and I want to point them out to people. — T Clark

By the same token, in writing a bad review I’m providing a service. I’m saying, it’s ok not to read this, try something wonderful instead.

The main thing is though, I find I can’t write anything interesting about books I love, or I just don’t feel motivated to do so. I seem to need some friction, something to get worked up about. Anger is an energy. In the case of Crash I was close to throwing the book across the room a few times (until I remembered I was reading on an iPad).

Very much in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War. Walter Benjamin, who was an esteemed member of their circle, had been forced to suicide on pain of being captured by the Wehrmacht, apart from all the other massive destruction that had befallen everything around them — Wayfarer

Yes, their outrage about it leaps off the page.

Kind of the same with me: I’ve only read about it and read bits of it before. So far it’s quite angry and declamatory.

I kept on reading for three reasons: (1) the absurd perversity was quite funny and I was curious how far it would go, (2) I wanted to write something about it and couldn’t do that in good conscience without reading the whole thing, and (3) I suppose it was compelling or mesmerizing enough to draw me back in (I did actually abandon it one evening, but returned to it the next day).

Thanks for the recommendation, I’d never heard of it. Looks good, so it’s now on my list :up:

And do you think this a reasonable argument? — Banno

No, it’s an imaginative leap. I’d call it an insight, but that would imply it’s right. As you said, and unlike Kant, he “invents a thing-in-itself about which nothing can be said, then proceeds to tell us all about it.”

Yes, I agree.

I don't know if I agree that this is entailed by Schopenhauer's argument — Wayfarer

Yeah, Schopenhauer is not arguing that objects have subjectivity, only that they have an inner aspect, the inaccessible object-in-itself. He calls it will or will-like on the basis that the thing-in-itself is undivided, so what is inmost in us, being part of the wider thing-in-itself, is what is inmost in everything.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

:grin:

Well, I finished it. I didn’t like it much, but often it’s the books I dislike that I want to talk about…

Crash by J. G. Ballard: a novel about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes.

It’s very good in some ways. It’s bleak, alienating, repugnant and joyless, and that’s what Ballard was going for—he described it once as a “psychopathic hymn”. Occasionally the images and the similes are extraordinarily good. The psychogeography of highways, transit hotels, and multi-storey car parks is nicely done, and quite haunting. The writing is tonally flat and stylistically unshowy, but it’s strong, and it sometimes surprises you with an unusual but perfect word.

Academics like to write about this novel, and it’s easy to see why. I’m tempted to say it’s all content, no style. That would be putting it too strongly, but what seems to matter is the shock, the message, the social commentary. Thematically it’s a warning about where we’re going, or even where we are already (rubbing our faces in it).

A writer of fiction according to Nabokov can do three things: tell a story, teach, and enchant. Crash is concerned with teaching us about the evils of postmodernity, and is mostly unconcerned with storytelling and enchantment (by the way, enchantment in Nabokov’s scheme is what the greatest writers do, and it includes formal innovation, language play, and unique imagery, not only great ideas and worlds of wonder).

But that’s not quite fair. It does more than an essay could do, and it has an enchanting style of its own. The clinical descriptions of technofetishism, of sexual gratification at the “junction” (a word Ballard uses a lot) of bodies and machines—a junction marked out by injuries, wounds and scars—wouldn’t be as powerful were they rendered as non-fictional speculation and meditation. And I do admire the way that it defamiliarizes the everyday world—this again is the job of fiction.

But the fascination begins to wear off after the first couple of chapters, and it gets numbingly repetitive and pretentious, an interminable gimmick. I think that as a conceptual piece or cautionary tale it would have worked better as a short story or novella.

Although I said the book was joyless, it’s sometimes delightfully bizarre and funny. It’s not clear if any of the humour was intended, though it did feel like a satire on post-sixties sexual freedom and violence in the media, or else a parody of transgressive fiction or pornography. But judging by what the author himself has said about it, I think it’s meant to be taken very seriously indeed.

A quotation from the book can serve as a nutshell summary:

A blend of semen and engine coolant.

Crash by J. G. Ballard.

So absurdly perverted that it’s often quite funny:

The elegant aluminized air-vents in the walls of the X-ray department beckoned as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice.

Marx seems to have seen the expansion of new needs in a positive light. — Jamal

The notion of false needs has been popular among Marxists since the Frankfurt School, and their analysis has moved on from Marx to suit the times, as it should. All the same, I still find myself more sympathetic to Marx himself:

It is characteristic of the economists that Storch expresses this thusly: the material of money should should ‘have direct value but on the basis of an artificial need‘. Artificial need is what the economist calls, firstly, the needs which arise out of the social existence of the individual; secondly, those which do not flow from its naked existence as a natural object. This shows the inner, desperate poverty which forms the basis of bourgeois wealth and of its science. — Marx, Grundrisse

Even if I'm comparing apples and oranges, because Marx and Marcuse were writing about different things, I still tend to think that the comparison reflects the way that theoretical Marxism moved from the staunch advocacy of the ambitions of the working class to a basic disappointment in and suspicion of that class.

I won't take this digression any further.

The focus on consumerism is likely a holdover from the Protestant Work Ethic's idea that work, even in atomized, meaningless form is best and sacred. Consumption must be the problem then, not production. — schopenhauer1

I agree that there's a Protestant aspect to the critique of consumerism and I'm really not on board with it either. Socialism has always had a puritan stream, but Marx seems to have seen the expansion of new needs in a positive light.

seems only to establish will as the "inner side" of representations — KantDane21

Yes, but it does at least help answer the question in the OP. I’m not going to attempt to set out the overarching argument that the thing in itself is will, mainly because I can’t remember it and I don’t want to read Schopenhauer again. :smile:

From §19:

The double knowledge which we have of the nature and action of our own body, and which is given in two completely different ways, has now been clearly brought out. Accordingly, we shall use it further as a key to the inner being of every phenomenon in nature. We shall judge all objects which are not our own body, and therefore are given to our consciousness not in the double way, but only as representations, according to the analogy of this body. We shall therefore assume that as, on the one hand, they are representation, just like our body, and are in this respect homogeneous with it, so on the other hand, if we set aside their existence as the subject's representation, what still remains over must be, according to its inner nature, the same as what in ourselves we call will. For what other kind of existence or reality could we attribute to the rest of the material world? From what source could we take the elements out of which we construct such a world? Besides the will and the representation, there is absolutely nothing known or conceivable for us. If we wish to attribute the greatest known reality to the material world, which immediately exists only in our representation, then we give it that reality which our own body has for each of us, for to each of us this is the most real of things. But if now we analyse the reality of this body and its actions, then, beyond the fact that it is our representation, we find nothing in it but the will; with this even its reality is exhausted. Therefore we can nowhere find another kind of reality to attribute to the material world. If, therefore, the material world is to be something more than our mere representation, we must say that, besides being the representation, and hence in itself and of its inmost nature, it is what we find immediately in ourselves as will. I say 'of its inmost nature,' but we have first of all to get to know more intimately this inner nature of the will, so that we may know how to distinguish from it what belongs not to it itself, but to its phenomenon, which has many grades. Such, for example, is the circumstance of its being accompanied by knowledge, and the determination by motives which is conditioned by this knowledge. As we proceed, we shall see that this belongs not to the inner nature of the will, but merely to its most distinct phenomenon as animal and human being. Therefore, if I say that the force which attracts a stone to the earth is of its nature, in itself, and apart from all representation, will, then no one will attach to this proposition the absurd meaning that the stone moves itself according to a known motive, because it is thus that the will appears in man.

Here he seems to admit that it's an assumption and an analogy. However, he does want the conclusion to be taken seriously, that the world in itself is will. It's a long time since I read it but I remember finding it too much of a leap.

I can't recall specifically how the argument here is related to fourfold root, other than that this leads to the two-aspect view of self as object and self as consciousness or will, which when applied to objects leads to the characterization of their own inner aspect as will-like too. On the basis that the thing-in-itself is a unity, whatever is inmost in us is what is also inmost in objects, though taking different forms.

It seems that we have become so preoccupied with practicalities that we have lost touch with the abstract and speculative. Religion, while perhaps no longer a productive avenue for speculation, at least offered a framework for considering the world in a more imaginative way. The monotony of our daily tasks - from crunching numbers and programming data to constructing material objects - may be necessary for the functioning of society, but it leaves little room for speculation. Even drug experiences, or escapist entertainment such as movies, have become our go-to for exploring the non-mundane. Unfortunately, speculation about the nature of existence and metaphysics, is not popular and remains a niche pursuit. — schopenhauer1

In other words, the pleasure of hard tasks is rooted in the accomplishment of a specific, concrete goal, while the pleasure of speculation is rooted in the stimulation of abstract and imaginative thinking. Both can be enjoyable and rewarding, but they offer different types of satisfaction and involve different types of thinking. — schopenhauer1

Let me reframe this. I really mean to get at, that in our daily lives, there seems to be lack of "meaningfulness in the mundane", whereby the meaningful informs the mundane. Again, religion tried to inject that (but usually one day a week in Western culture, and in a poorly delivered way to the masses). However, there is something about the minutia-mongering aspect of the post-industrial that does its best to take this away. The "workplace" (a social construct just like any other, but one whereby the majority of people garner their subsistence to maintain their material comforts and very survival), is often a killing floor for connecting what one does to anything broader, "mysteries of the universe" or otherwise. It is soul-crushing, demoralizing, and indeed leads to things like "End Stage Capitalism" and "Boring Dystopia". But it's more than just your token memes of ridiculous societal behavior, but the very connection of one's actions with the cosmos. — schopenhauer1

I think these are different questions. One is about the dying art of abstract speculation, and the other is about the lack of meaning.

The end of abstract speculation: Kant signalled the end of speculative metaphysics. Thereafter, abstract speculation was replaced by science and mathematics.

The lack of meaning: Weber, and Horkheimer and Adorno, described the disenchantment, desacralization, and intrumental rationality of the Enlightenment and of capitalism.

Both of these came out of the Enlightenment, so how do they go together?

In the enchanted world of religiously-dominated, pre-Enlightenment society, most people were not in the habit of engaging in abstract speculation--the so-called enchantment of the world amounted in the field and the marketplace to a set of hard socio-economic limits to freedom and thought. But the meaning inherent in the world according to religion--your "meaning in the mundane"--made it reasonable for educated elites to subject it to rational speculation, rather than leaving the world to experimental scientist-technicians as would happen later. (Of course, religion imposed limits on the content of this speculation, but the very idea of abstract speculation was legitimate).

In the disenchanted world of the Enlightenment, even the educated elites found there were limits on their ability to speculate--intellectual and ideological ones, imposed respectively by the increasing success of science and the instrumental rationality of capitalism. Abstract speculation didn't cut it any more, and nothing had to be meaningful anyway. (On the other hand one could equally say that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were part of one of the most fertile periods in philosophy, almost as if this transient crossover between philosophy and science stimulated speculation in a way that religion could not do--and from that point of view I'm tempted to view it, very vaguely, as a crucial lost opportunity, as the period may have ultimately been in politics also).

How have things changed in our postmodern world? On the face of it, all of the above has merely accelerated. In the post-industrial, consumer society, the last vestiges of meaning have been eroded too: social institutions, civic life, and the very idea that society can be changed through collective action, leaving us with "capitalist realism".

I don't know if I'm terribly concerned about the lack of abstract speculation in ordinary life, unless this is taken to mean that most people remain excluded from the world of ideas and do not have the leisure or education to take part in intellectual discussion. What would be nice are two things: (1) a non-religious re-enchantment of the world, and (2) a re-organization of society to make this possible.

That's extremely simplistic and cartoonish, but there it is.