but without the good time.

Maybe a tumour was the wrong analogy. Fungal infection?

Yeah, like a tumour.

:yawn:

think this is the theme you highlighted in your recent post on Dialectic of Enlightenment — fdrake

Possibly. I do recognize that my post in the Shoutbox describing the disappointment I experienced yesterday when eating a plum pie was a good example of the divergence of use value and exchange value.

By the way, when it comes to Marx’s political economy, I read Capital volume 1 many years ago but haven’t revisited it much since then and haven’t read the Grundrisse. I’m interested—I only wish I could get over my antipathy to anything in the vicinity of economics. Sublimated anxiety over money, probably.

Keep up the great work :up:

I believe that Marx provided a very unique and informative approach (in the form of basic assumptions) toward the interactions between things, both animate and inanimate. He has very insightful principles which ought not be ignored by anyone interested in the interactions between beings, things, and both. — Metaphysician Undercover

Without knowing exactly what you mean, I tend to agree. However, it’s probably essential in understanding Marx to see that he was attempting a philosophy of praxis, a realization of philosophy in history:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

This isn’t an anti-intellectual dismissal of philosophy but rather an imperative: philosophy ought to be more than simply speculative metaphysics (and certainly should not be less than speculative metaphysics, which would describe empiricism and positivism).

The question is moot, it looks like, from an antirealist standpoint. — Agent Smith

Enough with these comments Smith.

I agree, the "purely negative effort to clear up some deep confusions" is precisely what I understand to be philosophy's "transformative process of liberation". I can speculate that Wittgenstein may have meant that philosophy leaves the world just as it is, in the sense of not adopting any metaphysical view about the nature of reality, and I would agree with that.

I see philosophy as a propaedeutic to spiritual transformation, to learning to see non-dually. Still, I would say that although philosophy cannot effect a far-reaching spiritual transformation, it can help to liberate us from being concerned with "views", just as Nagarjuna's dialectic is intended to do, and that that counts as a "transformative process of liberation"; albeit merely an intellectual one. — Janus

Sounds lovely. But I’ve run out of things to say about this, because I haven’t worked out what I think about it.

I guess it's a matter of interpretation: to me an "understanding of how things can come to be as they are" suggests some kind of causal account of the genesis of the world, and i don't think Heidegger was concerned with that. Of course I might be mistaken, and I could be persuaded to change my mind by being presented with anything he wrote which would suggest otherwise. — Janus

No I don’t disagree. It does look too ontic.

I see. Yeah, I don’t entirely agree with him. At the same time, I don’t think I’d want to promote philosophy as some sort of personal comfort. I think it is fundamentally important to humanity and society as a whole.

I don't understand Heidegger as ever being concerned with the "understanding of how things can come to be as they are". — Janus

As I understand it, his deep project was about the meaning of being, so wouldn’t that entail an “understanding of how things can come to be as they are”?

What if debating philosophy gives us social and spiritual fulfillment? Some philosophers like the perplexing madness of it. Certainly "going about your day" can be very mundane so not sure why he couldn't circle back to that idea at least pragmatically speaking, being that he was kind of a linguistic pragmatist. — schopenhauer1

I don’t understand what you’re saying here schop.

This discussion has gone off-topic. I have a feeling it was my fault.

Wittgenstein cannot have really believed that "philosophy leaves everything as it is" since he saw it as a therapeutic, transformative process of liberation from reificatory thinking, of "bewitchment by means of language" — Janus

I don’t think it’s a contradiction but I’m unwilling to work out exactly why it isn’t. The main point is that what you call a transformative process of liberation, others would call a purely negative effort to clear up some deep confusions. Getting our house in order so we can all get on with whatever it is that we already, with no input or comment from philosophy, regard as important in our social and spiritual lives. It is in this sense that some critics have labelled him as basically conservative.

I think they’re pretty much right but I also think Wittgenstein is great.

Fair enough. For my part I could apply the first few sentences of the Searle article to myself. — Banno

Even the best of us have a fatal flaw.

It’s clearly related to his work elsewhere on the ‘instrumentalisation of reason’ — Wayfarer

Exactly. He wrote it around the same time he was writing DofE with Adorno. But it’s much clearer.

I think it can be coherently argued that the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly. This does not only apply to the hypothetical tree, apple, or coffee cup which is the perennial stand-in for ‘the world’. If you go back to the beginning of philosophy (with Parmenides and the Eleatics) the understanding of how things can come to be as they are is the fundamental question. I *think* this is what Heidegger was attempting to revive with his question of ‘the meaning of being’.

Anglo philosophy is now as Banno pointed out overwhelmingly realist (and I would add naturalistic) in orientation. It starts with the assumption of ‘the reality of the tree/apple/coffee cup’ and then tries to work backward from that assumption without ever really calling it into question. Whereas what is generally categorised as idealist philosophy and also phenomenology, does call the ‘normal attitude’ into question. — Wayfarer

I have two modes that I haven’t quite been able to reconcile. One is my Anglo mode, in which I’m a plain-speaking direct realist, and the other is my sort of phenomenological, sort of Marxian, quite traditional, wannabe Hegelian mode, in which philosophy has ambitions as grand as you’ve set out here. From the latter point of view, Wittgenstein’s statement that philosophy “leaves everything as it is” is an abomination.

That “the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly”, in a wider sense than is meant in this here discussion, sounds good to me. I think you’d really appreciate Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, which I’m reading now. He has a notion of “objective reason”, which aims at universal truths and might line up with your own conception of philosophy.

Great philosophical systems, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism, and German idealism were founded on an objective theory of reason. It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man’s life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were derived. — Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

It’s not just me who thinks so by the way. The view is set out nicely in Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Arthur Collins.

That is what is most objectionable — hypericin

I’ll tell you what I think is most objectionable. It’s when people are explicitly and politely told that what they are attacking is a position that nobody holds, and they ignore the information completely. Or when someone helpfully cites the philosophical literature and sets out the state of philosophical debate on the issue, and likewise is ignored.

Direct/indirect realism is like grammar controversies: it attracts those who are sure of themselves but at the same time unwilling to do the most basic research.

Do we not, by our very thinking nature have "immediate" background structures of his categories? — schopenhauer1

I suppose you could say that. I felt it confused the issue to use “immediate” in that way, because Kant is using it specifically with regard to the perception of things in the world.

The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. But that is indeed the naive assumption; that our eyes are like windows through which we look out onto a world of real objects. Naive realists like Banno don't seem to be able to let go of this primal picture. — Janus

I think it’s more that he is reacting to the equally incoherent claim that we don’t perceive things “as they (really) are”.

And thus, I would say, not quite a direct realist — schopenhauer1

Ok, I confess: to describe Kant as a direct realist tout court is an exaggeration. But as Horkheimer said, sometimes only exaggeration is true.

By the way, it’s not immediate access to the categories that we have, but immediate access to things in the world around us.

Yes, he was a transcendental idealist; that’s implicit in what I’ve said already. I’m emphasizing his system in a particular way to bring out what I see is the thrust of his thinking on these matters.

I admit that for Kant, objects of experience are real insofar as they are conditioned by the transcendental conditions of experience. In other words, we experience things that we are able to experience, as we are able to experience them.

It would be wrong to interpret him as saying that we just see things in our heads.

Even Kant supposed a thing in itself — schopenhauer1

An appeal to the supposed authority of Kant will not carry much weight here — Banno

Kant was a direct realist. The external world is the “empirically real” and the tree is an empirical object that we experience “immediately”. See the “Refutation of Idealism”.

here it is proved that outer experience is really immediate — B276

Not that it’s remotely relevant.

It is immaterial in the sense it is not correlated with anything physical and in the sense it is not objectively visible or in a one to one relationship with any particular brain state. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, although I’d put it a little differently just by saying that it is not reducible to physical explanations. But crucially, I wouldn’t say that this irreducibility entails immateriality. In other words, I’m going with some kind of non-reductive materialism.

Individuals do not recognize themselves. They learn to be themselves in interaction with other selves. There is no process of recognizing others as selves, or rather that skill is an integral part of learning to be a self. — Ludwig V

If recognizing others as selves is an integral part of learning to be a self, then isn’t it going too far to say that individuals do not recognize themselves?

Basically though, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’re saying, and my attempted definition could certainly do with some refinement. Note that if I seemed to imply a process, this was more in the way of a kind of mythical history to make the definition clearer, rather than an account of individual self-formation.

my narrative is not constructed. It is lived. Afterwards, narratives may be constructed. — Ludwig V

I’m not sure I understand this. Stories are not lived, they are told. Life is what is lived, and this life becomes a narrative (but again, I’m not implying temporal stages here) in the representation an individual has of itself, i.e., the self.

Once again, I doubt we differ much here.

I can't even imagine wanting to try. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure why you think anyone is interested in the fact that you are not interested in Hegel, in a discussion specifically about Hegel. There are other discussions that you might find more edifying.

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: