Hm, not sure about all that.

But I’ll leave it there for now. I have enough mental plates to juggle. :smile:

Yeah, but there was no such discovery for bachelors.

It could be the case that all analytic statements were simply one-time synthetic statements that were conventionalized. — schopenhauer1

Was there a time when it wasn’t common knowledge that all bachelors were unmarried men? You know, before it was discovered?

Maybe “all bachelors are unmarried men” seems synthetic when it informs someone who doesn’t know what a bachelor is. So it could be reworded to show that the statement in this case is about the word rather than about bachelors: “‘bachelor’ means ‘unmarried man’”. This is synthetic (as I’m supposing all definitions are) and it follows from it that “all bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically true.

What could he have meant? — Jamal

According to Alexander Stern in the Hedgehog Review, the answer lies in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where enlightenment and myth, reason and unreason, are bound together in complex and paradoxical ways. The irrational and basically aimless activism of the students was the flipside of the administered society. In assuming that rejecting the administered society implied a rejection of rationality itself, they tacitly acknowledged the administered society’s instrumental reason as identitical with reason as such—forgetting what was vitally important to Adorno, which is that we can be rational without treating people as means and as cogs in a machine.

The result was the uncompromising and unthinking movement Adorno was subjected to. The movement was characterized by all-or-nothing thinking, conspiracy theory, and a refusal to reason about ends, which is mistakenly seen as the logic of the enemy. “Every calculated realization of interests,” Habermas writes, “whether of preserving or changing the system, is ridiculed.”

These student movements tended, therefore, to be escapist. In the communes and cults of the 1960s and 1970s and the “occupations” and “autonomous zones” of more recent times, we see a familiar desire to create another world outside the grip of administration. These exaggerated rejections of the system ensured their failure by depriving themselves of the resources of rationality and argument necessary for reform. They also played into the hands of reaction, which took the childish, cultish chaos as an opportunity to reassert control.

As many theorists have recognized, these movements were frequently absorbed by popular and professional culture and provide, often by way of the media, a simulacrum of the transgression that remains comfortably within—and even actively encouraged by—the confines of the existing political, educational, and economic institutions. Any contradictions or harshness are eased by new intermediaries like self-help and self-actualization culture and human resources departments, which form an ideology that absorbs rebellious tendencies and bridges the gap between the personal and the managerial. In the end, the energy of 1968 was used to reproduce the system.

What we’ve witnessed of late is a tightening of this union between the bureaucratic logic of institutions and the pseudo-liberatory logic of affluent students and young people. This is the endpoint of the affinity between technocracy and the student movement that Adorno recognized in 1969. It helps explain why the current movement tends to accept, echo, and appeal to the general logic of the administrative power structure, rather than genuinely criticizing or resisting it. As Adorno put it, “The prominent personalities of protest are virtuosos in rule of order and formal procedures. The sworn enemies of the institutions particularly like to demand the institutionalization of one thing or another.”

With the exception of the police, made conspicuous by their excessive violence, administration is not a target of the current movement, even symbolically. This self-described “left” is much more likely to act in lockstep with this structure, turning its ire on relatively powerless individuals instead. — Alexander Stern

This is complex. I get that students unknowingly ceded ground to bureaucratization while believing they were against it, but what I’m not quite clear on is how that is related to the actual embrace of bureaucratic politics that Stern describes towards the end of this passage.

Nice.

It’s a low-effort OP, a casual undeveloped thought that popped into your head. You’ve been told about this before.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

Why wouldn't it belong in this section? — TiredThinker

What section? It’s in the Lounge, like most of your discussions.

I’m not discussing it any more. I’ll be deleting them from now on instead of cluttering up the Lounge.

The intelligentsia and technocrats butted heads. Adorno, Habermas, Mancuse are part of the intelligentsia. The intellectuals were supposed to be the analysts of what's going on in politics and society. 'The government should be a representation by the common people, not a rule by the elites, etc.' — L'éléphant

Right, and not only that: Adorno had been criticizing technocracy for decades. But the puzzling thing is that he saw the chaos of the student activism as contributing to that technocracy.

Note that it implies they reject the scientific, objective truth as offered by the experts -- engineers, scientists, etc. -- the technocrats. — L'éléphant

You can reject rule by engineers and bureaucrats and the instrumentality of knowledge without rejecting the knowledge gained under those conditions. Certainly, Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse did not reject the scientific and objective truth offered by experts.

@universeness Something’s been bothering me. This discussion has been hovering around on the first page for ages, and I find the title annoying. Is it meant to be Emergence? If so I can change it.

Well, there is truth in Hegelian dialectics, and it comes when the sublation of contradictions allows one to the see whole, and not just the parts—and from there to see the parts again as they relate to the whole, that is, more truthfully. But I’m a beginner with Hegel and might not say any more about this. Feel free to respond but I might not take it any further myself.

Thanks, that’s interesting, and interestingly wrong I think. However, I’m not sure how to tackle it directly. I might think about it and return to it some other time.

I’m not sure I want to encourage you here MU, but what the hell: you’re going to have to unpack that.

I'm not familiar with Adorno, but going by this crib-sheet, he seems a bit unenlightened. — unenlightened

Yes, although I feel duty-bound to forestall the common misinterpretation that Adorno was simply anti-Enlightenment. As he saw it, what he was doing was trying to intensify its own self-criticism from within, because an Enlightenment that is not self-critical is no Enlightenment at all—and you end up with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

So a movement of resistance to the dehumanising tendencies of 'the establishment', as arbitrary rules about hairstyle, sex, venal politics the Bomb, The Vietnam war the cold war, the prison of consumerism and suburbia, etc, could not sustain itself, and dissolved into the same greedy and unprincipled mess that it had set itself against. — unenlightened

Rejecting the great god Mammon, the hippies became mere thieves, no different from their forebears — unenlightened

And this sort of thing suggested to Adorno that revolutionary action was actually impossible, that there was, at least at the time, no break in the wall of the status quo that could allow any progress to better ways of life. This was his main difference with Marcuse, and it meant that he was more likely to support the freedoms of liberal democracy than the far left protesters who seemed to just want to destroy it all.

Perhaps Adorno interpreted the anarchic protests of the student movement as agitating for 'universities to be administered by student groups (councils) at the expense of bourgeois, ivory tower, tenured scholars'. — 180 Proof

Although you’ve put it cynically, I agree. He did treasure the independence of the bourgeois scholar and the liberal tradition in education, against which he saw a bureaucratization in the student organizations, despite the anarchy of their activism, that merely reflected the “administered society” that he’d been complaining about for decades.

I’ll say a bit more. Although you frame the history differently from the way I do, I think you’ve identified what I’m most interested in, namely progressive neoliberalism, which can be said to have started with Clinton and Blair. Where you see them as a break from neoliberalism, or from Reagan and Thatcher, I see them as a continuation economically—despite the differences you mention—but a break in terms of social attitudes. In other words, they represented the formation of the left wing of neoliberalism, of which identity politics and wokeness are the latest developments on its left wing. (To clarify in case anyone takes this too weakly: I mean that identity politics and wokeness are the politics of the progressive wing of the ruling class of neoliberal capitalism.)

And this might have something to do with postmodernism, as you allude to here:

Philosophically, Michel Foucault’s idea of Biopolitics and “Left Governmentality” are worth checking out. Some say he was flirting with neoliberalism in those lectures. — NOS4A2

I’m trying to pull stuff together. Currently I’m not sure how postmodernism fits, though it’s a common observation that neoliberalism and postmodernism fit together pretty well.

This presented a problem for disaffected socialists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both ideologically and politically. They could no longer deny that central planning was a failure, and that their popularity was waning. This led critics of the "neoliberalism" of Reagan and Thatcher, and newly disaffected socialists and social democrats like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerd Schröder, to re-brand as free market progressives. They tried to push it as a global movement. It's odd; though they were explicitly critical of the supply-side economics of Reagan and Thatcher, they are somehow considered in the same pantheon as Reagan and Thatcher, with neoliberalism flowing through them.

Personally, I take a different approach. I would call their agenda and the period since Thatcher and Reagan (and perhaps Bush Sr.) "neosocialism", because it better represents the spirit of its architects and reflects their turn away from the Old Left socialism into what Bill Clinton called the New Democrats, or what Blair called New Labour. This political triangulation flows right into "compassionate conservatism" of Bush Jr. and David Cameron. Tony Blair stood in front of the International Socialist Congress in ‘97 and pleaded for a "modernized social democracy", and this modernized social democracy prevails. — NOS4A2

I don’t think the differences are as significant as you’re making out. The fact is that deregulation, privatization, and globalization continued apace, no matter the rhetoric. Reagan and Thatcher laid the groundwork for an abnegation of political control over the economy, the establishment of a system in which voters are not able to decide on the basic structure of society, capitalism being mostly left to do its thing except when things go wrong.

As others in this discussion have pointed out, echoing Quinn Slobodian and the SEP article I linked to in the OP, neoliberalism is okay with an interventionist state, if it’s interventionist in the right way. This doesn’t make it non-neoliberal unless you take neoliberal to be something like right-libertarianism, which it never was.

To me the term “neosocialism” doesn’t really work unless you’re just negatively fetishizing government, in the popular fashion of the American right; socialism is about common ownership and control, and we don’t have anything like that.

really do look similar to many of what I'd term neoliberal interventions on behalf of the market. I know what you mean there, which is what really distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism and the limited state types and is a reason to call it something different. — Moliere

Yep, exactly what I was getting at.

Fascinating as always NOS. I may say more tomorrow.

We seem to be in agreement. :scream:

That's probably why I wanted to define it: I found myself using it a lot and it occurred to me that I might not know what I was saying.

I have no idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me, because the word is used sometimes as a loose term of abuse—a mere “polemical tool”—everywhere as far as I can tell.

Cool, but it doesn’t show that there’s a difference between American and European uses, which is all that I objected about in your first post.

I'm happy to be persuaded, just don't see it so far.

I think it’s the same here. The difference is more likely between popular and academic uses.

Interesting post, but none of it goes against neoliberalism as understood in Europe, as you imply. I don’t think there’s much of a difference between US and non-US uses of the term. It has globalized itself successfully.

Interesting, thanks. On the other hand there’s a difference between neoliberals, who want to reduce taxes, and libertarians, who might be against tax in principle.

From now on I’ll be deleting discussions like this rather than moving them to the Lounge, whether or not they’ve received replies by the time I see them. @TiredThinker has been asked many times to stop posting low-effort OPs, and the Lounge is not the place for them either, because it’s meant to be for casual chat.

Thanks in advance for your financial support :up:

Probably in the way you’d protect any online account: use a strong password and enable two-factor authentication.

Any alternative to subscribe without going through PayPal? — jgill

PayPal is as safe and secure as any good online payment system and I don’t have plans to gather money in some other way.

:up:

I really don't know who is who — Mark Nyquist

https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/members/staff

You can easily upload your images to the internet somewhere and then link to them in your posts. If you want to upload them directly to TPF, subscribe to TPF here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/367/subscribe-to-tpf/p1

I don’t know why you think you should have an automatic right to use TPF to both store and display your images.

It's something that is relevant to memory, time perception, consciousness and re-creation of past events that are imperatives of the fundamentals of philosophy. — Mark Nyquist

I have no idea what this means.

Also, why did you entitle this discussion “i” and why did you post it in “Philosophy of Mind”?

Please start another thread if you want to have a discussion. This thread is solely to collect questions.

Yeah. I still haven’t seen it.

Preferred the parrot.

But Wittgenstein, and also Ryle, Strawson and Austin, were insistent that, when intelligence and mindedness are at issue, what leads us to be puzzled by the phenomena is our tendency to subsume them under theoretical categories that just aren't apt at making sense of them. They weren't targeting science but rather scientism. — Pierre-Normand

But, except for the bit about scientism, couldn’t this describe any philosopher who wants to overturn the thought of their predecessors? They reject those inapt theoretical categories in favour of their own, apt ones.

But I take Wittgenstein to be saying something more like: theoretical categories as such are inapt in some cases. (Incidentally, this is somewhat in line with Hegel and Adorno, who try to strike a balance between theory and the overcoming of theory).

Now I do not think that you do hold to such a view; and so I am at a loss as to what it is you are supposing we are doing in philosophy. — Banno

A charitable interpretation of @T Clark’s position is that he is not saying, for example, that in a discussion entitled “What is truth?” we have to agree on what truth is at the start to make any progress—that obviously couldn’t work—but that in a discussion about something else, some other concept, one that depends on the concept of truth, a way of directing the debate is to decide on the definitions of those dependencies, otherwise the wrangling over definitions never ends.

I happen not to agree with this either, because we can usually set aside or ignore any concerns about the definition of these dependencies, relying on shared meaning.

I think of it as loose constraints and tendencies, some of which are pretty heavily embedded. — Moliere

Yeah, I guess that's how I think about it too.

Is communism realistic/feasible? — jorndoe

I voted yes, but I have no idea how it could be achieved. To the extent that I'm optimistic and believe that freedom is possible, I believe that communism is possible, because freedom is possible only in a society of abundance in which individuals are not under pressure of poverty, are not exploited or dominated, are not merely used as means to the ends of others, and are not treated merely as representatives of a class, race, or other kind of group.

Notice that according to this description of communism, it is not anti-individual. The needs of society and the needs of the individual are reciprocally linked, at least in my conception and the conception of Marx.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. — The Communist Manifesto

As I say ("I have no idea how it could be achieved"), this is Utopian. However, if we look at the variety of the forms of society in which people have lived, I do not see any great impediment to communism in principle, i.e., according to human nature. I could be wrong about that. If I am, human emancipation is impossible.

I voted yes. I don't believe human nature is fixed, and I don't believe human beings are bound by necessity such that a "system" is in place to make them behave this or that way.

The future is open. And we can demand the impossible. — Moliere

:up:

On the other hand, I am still unsure about how to approach the concept of human nature. Is the claim that human nature is not fixed the same as the claim that there is no human nature at all? Is it enough to say tempting things such as, "if there is a human nature, it is in its endless flexibility," and so on?

But I actually do think it's crucial: what distinguishes us from (other) animals is history, the fact that the future is open. So we could say that the openness of the human future is human nature.

On the other hand (how many is that now?) that is rather vague. Maybe that's as it should be?

:up:

Yes, communism is merely the best taxless society among alternatives.

Why is taxation the hot topic here? In a communist society there would be no state, no money, no social classes--and no taxation.

Describe a society without taxes — Christoffer

So one answer is: communism.