Yeah I think that's compatible with my view.

I have personal experience of it. In my youth I was unsuccessful with women, and I noticed I was feeling a rising resentment about it. I knew this was wrong so I didn't let it develop too far. At the time I did not have many friends, let alone female friends. All of the toxic feelings disappeared once my sex life became as astonishingly rich and exciting as it remains today.

That was 30 years ago. What is different now? Would I have become a misogynist if I had been exposed to the "manosphere"? I don't think so, actually. The answer to "why not?" might be more than just "because I'm a nice guy". That is, it might be to do with the positive social constraints or influences that prevented it, which might not be in effect as much today.

I had in mind something like dharma - which is at once ‘purpose’, ‘law’ and ‘duty’. If described as ‘cosmic’, it is on the basis that human beings are microcosms - the universe in miniature. So individuals realising their purpose - if they do it truly, in accordance with moral principles - just is a way in which the cosmos realises its purpose. — Wayfarer

Well, I can certainly see the attraction.

This sensitive-new-age-guy thing you've got going on is creepy. The strong, stubborn, competent women I know think it's creepy too. — T Clark

:up: :up:

Young people everywhere are struggling with developing intimate relationships (and relationships in general), and that is a serious problem.

I think increasing social atomization is at the root of this, basically forcing young people into an artificial dating scene that for obvious reasons doesn't appeal to nor suit many of them.

The way this topic is treated in regards to young men is especially worrying, and some of the replies to this thread are an indication of that. Trying to force people who are clearly suffering into silence through derision and shame is exactly what creates resentment and pushes people over the edge to commit terrible deeds. — Tzeentch

Yes, I think it's important to try to understand it as a new phenomenon. So I say let's have more sociology and less moralizing. One can do this at the same time as being intolerant of the intolerant, in the words of @180 Proof.

A good analogy is Islamic radicalism (in fact it's more than analogy, because I think they share some underlying causes). There are academics, organizations, and policies specifically aimed at working out why some young Muslim men are attracted to violent fundamentalism, and working out how communities can help them avoid it. It's no use saying oh, that's just regressive dogma. It might be that, but it's more than that.

The incels represent a resistance to the liberation of women, but this is its self-image, its ideology, a manifestation of an underlying problem--and, I would say, a self-consciously countercultural reaching back to a patriarchal worldview that they have not in fact developed naturally from their communities (which again parallels Islamic radicalism). There are specific reasons why in the current situation, the liberation of women might be seen as a problem to these young men. If this is not accepted, and we are merely dismissive, then we end up just blaming, say, the innately sexist nature of men. That is, we lapse into moralism.

And what said. :clap:

Contemporary society is a thoroughly alienating experience for many people -- not everyone, but a good share. Social media, dating apps, etc. bring the chilly competitiveness of business to the more intimate business of finding friends and sexual partners. It's great for the winners, not so hot for the losers. — BC

Yes. I think we're used to thinking of capitalism as an old system that arrived fully formed or transformed society in a short while, but in fact, the commodification of life has actually been quite a gradual process, and the associated social fragmentation and atomization is still happening. I realize it's facile to answer the problem of incels by saying "it's capitalism!" but I don't have anything else. has put some insightful flesh on that bone.

Two questions I can ask myself about cosmic purpose:

1. Is it possible that there is no cosmic purpose?
2. Would life be worth living, or would human existence have value, if there were no cosmic purpose?

I answer yes to both. I think it follows that there wouldn't be much point in arguing for a cosmic purpose even if I personally felt there was one, since I would still admit that I could be wrong. Unless I wanted to advocate a myth, i.e., a noble lie.

I banned @Varnaj42 for low quality and religious spam.

John Haugeland also synthesised the Kantian notion of the synthetic priori and of the phenomenological/existential notion of the always already there in his paper Truth and Rule Following. — Pierre-Normand

Excellent, thanks :smile:

I wouldn’t be surprised if the twentieth century use of “always already” is actually a self-conscious modern version of the a priori, though relocated outside of an abstract consciousness. Kant actually used the same term in the CPR:

[the transcendental subject of thoughts] is cognized only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and apart from them we can never have the least concept of it; hence we revolve around it in a constant circle, since in order to make any judgment regarding it we must always already make use of its presentation. — B 404

Maybe Heidegger got it from there.

the notion that humans did things before there were cultures or societies for their activities to be a product of, is hardly self-contradictory — Mww

Since living in societies is part of what it is to be human, the notion is indeed self-contradictory. A society is a human social group; proto-human apes had social groups; it follows that there have never been humans that didn’t live in a society.

That’s not the real issue though. The real issue is the one you allude to, regarding the causality. I’d say roughly that it’s a two-way, reciprocal causality between the way we live and the way we think, with, probably, our practices as in some way primary.

Yes, I did expect you to say that it’s precisely the supposed reduction of ideas to the socially material that is characteristic of secular humanist sciences such as sociology. Anyway yeh, it’s for another discussion.

It’s not a particularly Marxist view any more. That beliefs cannot be disentangled from society, or that they do not float free of society, is pretty standard in sociology, anthropology, historiography, etc.

Everything humans do is a product of culture and society, and always has been.

I understand that marxism will generally depict religious ideas as being product of culture and society. But consider Buddhism, if you can call Buddhism a religion. It is certainly a social institution now, but it originated as a renunciate movement, deliberately outside social convention. — Wayfarer

And as such, a product of culture and society. But sure, it wasn’t institutional. Not sure what the point was here.

I believe that you approach a very significant and important ontological subject here — Metaphysician Undercover

That’s the way I roll :cool:

But I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Interesting though.

In the sense of ‘known first person’ not ‘particular to the individual’ or ‘private’. — Wayfarer

Ok. :chin:

There is no way of distentangling religious thought institutions and social reality

Is this a rewording to make a statement that you agree with? If so, what you’ve got here is a truism, since institutions are social reality.

I wonder if by "experiential" you also mean personal, as opposed to ritualistic?

Insofar as I know what you mean, I might agree.

I actually do have an e-copy, I've read sections of it, but must find the time to give it a more thorough reading. I had encountered his criticism of the malign effects of Darwinism on philosophy on another site, that is what caught my eye (but only as a critic of scientific materialism, *not* as an ID sympathizer.) — Wayfarer

I was not quite happy with his criticism of Darwinism, because he often fails to distinguish Darwinism and popular Darwinism, the latter including Social Darwinism.

Otherwise, I found the sections about positivism, pragmatism, and Thomism a bit tedious, partly because they are very much of their time and not fit for purpose--regarding the first two--in a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy or pragmatism.

When I was studying comparative religion, I had a theory that the kind of enlightenment prized in yoga and Buddhism - not Enlightenment in the European sense! - was similar to what the early gnostic schools had been based around. And that the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism. I found a scholar by the name of Elaine Pagels, whose book Beyond Belief affirmed a similar thesis. It concerns exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text that was found in Egypt in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi Library discovery. Through analysis of the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas, Pagels demonstrates its themes of self-discovery, spiritual enlightenment, and the pursuit of a direct connection with the divine. She reveals the influence of Gnosticism on the Gospel of Thomas and examines its contrasts with orthodox Christianity and the political and theological tensions that led to the suppression and exclusion of Gnostic texts from the canon of the New Testament. She explores the power struggles within early Christianity and how the emerging orthodoxy based on the Gospel of John sought (successfully) to define and control the faith. And as always, history is written by the victors.

At the time I was doing this reading, I had the view that this was a watershed in the history of Western culture, and that had more of the gnostic elements been admitted, it would have resulted in a much more practice-oriented and 'eastern' form of spirituality. The fact that these exotic forms of religion have had such a huge impact in Western culture the last few centuries is because that approach was suppressed in, and absent from, its own indigenous religious culture. That's what made it 'weak'. — Wayfarer

Interesting. I'm happy enough to agree that "the victory of what came to be Catholic orthodoxy was because it was much more politically expedient to organise belief, than the esoteric knowledge represented by gnosticism," but since my conception of history is much more materialist (in the Marxian sense) than yours, I don't accept your emphasis on the primacy of ideas. That's not to say, by the way, that I believe in a crude economic determinism or the one-way causal power of the mode of production, but it was no accident that the gnostic element wasn't admitted, and therefore I think that such a counterfactual history doesn't tell us much.

Unless, maybe, we ask, "what would society have had to be like to allow gnosticism to take hold?". But then, gnosticism is what it is owing to its heretical, outsider status, and how much of that character would have been preserved in its institutionalization? Think of how much the words of Jesus, as accepted in Catholic orthodoxy, were performatively contradicted in medieval Europe.

There is no way of distentangling religious thought and social reality or of preserving the purity of a set of ideas, unless they have become museum pieces. And even then, we interpret them.

There’s an interesting tension in it. On the one hand he doesn’t openly lament the loss of the old manifestations of objective reason, motivated no doubt by the hope that some sort of Marxist humanism is the right kind of objective reason for the twentieth century; but on the other hand the tone is often one of lament, nostalgia, and pessimism.

EDIT: It might also be worth noting that in his later years he became even more pessimistic, and more sympathetic to religion.

Yes, Horkheimer's account is pretty much in line with yours, but there are three things to note here.

First, with the Greeks, subjective and objective were not separate, logos being originally subjective--"I say"; so subjective reason is not new. Second, logos as the animating principle of the universe was just one manifestation of objective reason, another being the reason of the bourgeois Enlightenment. Thirdly and most importantly, he does not lament the loss of past manifestations of objective reason and does not see objective reason as necessarily transcendent.

He discusses some attempts to bring back objective reason:

Today there is a general tendency to revive past theories of objective reason in order to give some philosophical foundation to the rapidly disintegrating hierarchy of generally accepted values. Along with pseudo-religious or half-scientific mind cures, spiritualism, astrology, cheap brands of past philosophies such as Yoga, Buddhism, or mysticism, and popular adaptations of classical objectivistic philosophies, medieval ontologies are recommended for modern use.

But the transition from objective to subjective reason was not an accident, and the process of development of ideas cannot arbitrarily at any given moment be reversed. If subjective reason in the form of enlightenment has dissolved the philosophical basis of beliefs that have been an essential part of Western culture, it has been able to do so because this basis proved to be too weak. Their revival, therefore, is completely artificial: it serves the purpose of filling a gap. — Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason

Then he launches a critique of modern Thomism.

:up:

I’ll add the associated superstition that workers are free and equal parties to their employment contracts, rather than coerced by and subordinate to those who own and control private property.

Impressive.

I've been sort of following some of the debates in this thread. On the one hand I agree with @Wayfarer's and @Metaphysician Undercover's criticisms of @Christoffer's individualistic, idealist, and ahistorical arguments for unbiased thinking--which is revealed to be quite biased itself (not to say that it's a bad bias, necessarily). On the other hand I heartily agree with @Banno's criticism of @Wayfarer's support for esotericism and denigration of philosophy's democratic openness. I’m also slightly vexed by @Wayfarer’s use of secular humanist Horkheimer as a weapon in his battle against secular humanism, although it’s fair to do so.

I was going to write a grand summary at this point but I’ve got nothing.

The 'original' Husserlian phenomenology in fact w a s concerned with language. Husserl's Logical Investigations was mostly about the difference between signification and intuition i.e. meanings or expressions vs. intuitive-perceptual comprehension or 'fulfillment' of the sense. — waarala

Good point, although in the same book he does say that he wants to get away from “mere words” and “back to the things themselves.” That’s not to say that getting away from “mere words” is to get away from language as such, or that the things themselves are necessarily pre-linguistic, but maybe it does show that his concerns were wider than just language.

I was disappointed that it didn't actually describe any “post-linguistic turn,” didn't elaborate on the statement in the subheading that “new questions have arisen”--except to very briefly mention environmental issues and virtual reality--and didn't say anything about the basis on which the linguistic turn is being overcome. I was hoping it would go into the return of metaphysics in both analytic and continental philosophy.

Also, note that it ignores phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory, which were concerned much more with experience, life, and society than with language. On the other hand, I guess maybe that by 1967, post-structuralism had become dominant, and represented a rejection of those philosophies.

What I think is this is an excellent, coherent and articulate analysis and summary of the role of philosophy to humanity. It clearly has a rightful place in tying together all human disciplines, and steadying them, moderating their dominance over one another, and thus danger to one another. Philosophy does this by being innately flexible and applicable.

The "art of thought" can approach any field of study.
As nothing can be mastered without thought other than pure ignorance. — Benj96

Thanks Benj. Your view is shared by several people in this discussion. I think, though, that I wanted to emphasize something else: not just philosophy's innate flexibility but its innate subversiveness. Plainly it's flexible, applicable to anything, and one can use the tools of philosophy not only to question religion but to support it. However, I'm saying two things. First, even to philosophize in support of religion (or other prevailing beliefs and institutions) is to bring it into question, which makes philosophy innately subversive. Second, to do this knowingly, that is, in a biased fashion to criticize prevailing beliefs, is more in line with this innate subversiveness and thereby more philosophical (or is at least better philosophy).

One way of flipping things around is to notice that the heuristics of philosophy, the cutlery, might be considered as ritual. That seems the thrust of Jamal's critique: that in invoking tools one is reducing philosophy to a religion. — Banno

That's certainly an interesting flip-around, but I don't think it's the thrust of my critique. I think I was just saying that alongside the development of the cutlery there is also its biased application in criticizing prevailing beliefs (though also at the same time its biased application to shore up those beliefs), and that reducing philosophy to cutlery is to miss out on one of the things that makes it good. I tried to support this with the observation that philosophy cannot be neutral anyway.

To take your notion seriously in the light of what I've just said, we might say that philosophy as ritual merely reflects prevailing beliefs, such as religious beliefs, and thereby stands as yet another theology.

Philosophy as a neutral toolbox also suspiciously parallels the thesis that in the modern and especially the industrial era, reason became instrumental, with no thought to ends. If there is such a parallel, I don't think it's a coincidence.

The insectuous relationship didn't do it for me though and so I dropped it. — Baden

We all draw a line somewhere.

More lectures by Adorno: An Introduction to Dialectics — Jamal

Finished it. Tremendously enjoyable and stimulating, but because the lectures are improvised it’s definitely not a “Dialectics for Dummies” or a useful introduction to Hegel. It’s more like a rambling demonstration of how to think dialectically, how that differs from other modes of thought, and the problems with doing so. One thing about it that does make it useful in approaching Hegel is that he gives concrete examples. Another highlight is when, over several lectures, he goes through the four rules of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method to show how dialectical thinking differs from it.

Next:

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson
Beyond Good & Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche

Yes, I’m pretty sure I thought it was great but it’s fallen through a memory hole.

I can recommend all three of the books set in the same world: Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. Haven’t enjoyed his others as much.

I won’t say more until Manuel is finished.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville — Manuel

I read it 15-20 years ago and was amazed. What do you think?

I don't know about this; Kant's categories at least seem to ring true and space and time as the pure forms of intuition too. Are they no longer viable? Aristotle's categories? Goethe said “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” "The poverty of historicism" says Popper. — Janus

I just wrote an elaborate refutation of the transcendental deduction of the categories, but the dog ate it. So I'll just say that I don't think I'm an unqualified historicist; as I say, I'm confused about the issue. I think Kant and Aristotle were great, but I also think their philosophies suffer from a lack of historical and social awareness (although it occurs to me that it's precisely because they ignored all that that they achieved what they did, rather than despite it).

It's more difficult to see in their theoretical philosophy than in their ethics and politics: Aristotle defended slavery philosophically without considering that his defence was a result of his class and his society, and Kant's emphasis on autonomous reason in retrospect clearly reflects his Enlightenment bourgeois milieu.

Right, though in saying "monolithic" I wasn't thinking of the dichotomy between fixed and dynamic, I was thinking more of the 'monistic/ pluralistic' dichotomy: meaning that I don't think historical moments have just one "zeitgeist" but are rather boiling cauldrons in which many geists grapple with one another for supremacy. From where I stand "the state" looks like a kind of monstrous fiction. — Janus

I see what you mean. Interesting point. I don't know what Hegel would say to that.

interesting. It has the power to take me back through time to the early nineties. It’s as if it was the soundtrack to my life at the time and I didn’t even know it.

It has dated very badly. Is that the music’s fault or the way the music seeped through the culture? I don’t know, but I didn’t even like it at the time anyway.

We could assign points to a piece of knowledge based on how many other pieces of knowledge depend on it, which is the same as how many facts would lose their factual status if that piece were either disproved or forgotten.

The trouble with that is, knowing you live on planet Earth would have more knowledge points than knowing that there are 12 stars with planets in the Pegasus constellation, even though the latter contributes to knowledge much more than the former, which is trivial and obvious.

Now that would be an "anemic" response, as in lacking substance — Ciceronianus

Fair.

But don’t take it personally and don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending the Will to Power, elan vital, macho glamorous clamour, or anything like that, and I think my posts show that I don’t do that kind of philosophy and that I’m not a fascist. I just felt that philosophy defined so generally or neutrally, and without the critical aspect (in the sense of social critique), was somewhat anemic.

That’s the spirit!

I banned @invicta for persistently low quality posts even after multiple warnings and a one-week suspension.

I don’t disagree with your description of medieval thinking, but it’s significant that Horkheimer does not identify the loss of objective reason with the Enlightenment’s rejection of medieval philosophy and religion:

This [subjective] relegation of reason to a subordinate position is in sharp contrast to the ideas of the pioneers of bourgeois civilization, the spiritual and political representatives of the rising middle class, who were unanimous in declaring that reason plays a leading role in human behavior, perhaps even the predominant role. They defined a wise legislature as one whose laws conform to reason; national and international policies were judged according to whether they followed the lines of reason. Reason was supposed to regulate our preferences and our relations with other human beings and with nature. It was thought of as an entity, a spiritual power living in each man. This power was held to be the supreme arbiter—nay, more, the creative force behind the ideas and things to which we should devote our lives. — Horkheimer

So for Horkheimer it’s not only traditional societies that had objective reason. In the Enlightenment, reason was still supposed to help us determine the right ends and not merely the means. The change comes with industrialization.

Of course he does also say that the Enlightenment was a step towards subjective and instrumental reason.

That's a good summary of the Pinkerian arguments for progress, but I'm not going to get into it here, since that would take things way off-topic. All I will say is that when progressive Enlightenment leads to the transformation, in just a few years, of a country of high culture and learning into a racist war machine that goes on to kill millions, there is something very wrong which cannot be dismissed with your statistics (which have in any case been heavily criticized) or even with the claim that "oh, that was just an unfortunate backward step".

I said I wasn't going to get into it and then I kind of got into it. Never mind.

I'm afraid I haven't read anything except After Finitude, and that's not even object-oriented ontology.

I found an interesting blog post that partly answers your objection:

Like correlationism, object-oriented philosophy begins with an affirmation of the epistemological limit: we can never know the reality of the objects we encounter. Like speculative materialism, object-oriented philosophy then radicalises the correlationist position, but where speculative materialism pushes finitude into a positive epistemological premise, object-oriented philosophy simply extends finitude beyond the bounds of the human to bestow it democratically upon everything. — Ontology for Ontology’s Sake

Right. I probably haven't read the thread thoroughly enough. — Janus

You are forgiven.

I've since watched the video — Janus

Incidentally, did you notice that he mentioned woke politics? That's possibly a clue to his motivation: he sees "wokeism" as a civil religion, and since he questions it, he's questioning religion and is therefore a great philosopher.

I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about Hegel's notion of thinking one's time, as though historical moments are monolithic and pure. In any case it needn't be a self-conscious thinking of the times if it is true that our thinking is inevitably constrained by the historical "moment" we find ourselves in. — Janus

I find this topic difficult so I won't get deep into it. I will say that if it's true that philosophers cannot start from a neutral transcendent foundation, that their thinking is conditioned by their time, then it might help to be aware of it. Those philosophers who were not aware of it imagined they were building up from an eternally valid ground and producing knowledge applicable for all time, and they produced systems that were fundamentally in error partly for this reason. Kant, for instance, though self-consciously critical and non-dogmatic, in some ways did not take his attack on metaphysics far enough, and ended up with his own elaborate system, dogmatically rationalist in its own way (not to mention quintessentially Enlightenment and bourgeois).

Ever since then, philosophers have been acutely aware of human finitude, our inability to transcend our time, culture, point of view, and so on. This would include phenomenology, post-structuralism, Wittgenstein and much else. Incidentally, this century some philosophers got fed up with all that and started doing what has been called speculative realism, which says, among other things, that we can get access to things in themselves after all.

I doubt that Hegel's notion of thinking one's time entails a view of historical moments as monolithic and pure, since the whole point of his philosophy is to see things in their dynamic, historical, conflictual context, rather than as fixed.