You raise a valid point about the “distancing” nature of writing vs speech but I don’t think the most important distinction is between modes of discourse (e.g. spoken vs written) but categories (e.g. political vs philosophical etc.). In conveying meaning, we’re always navigating discourses that have their own meanings “built in” and which form part of our overall contextualization and judgement of the message we receive. Discourses can bully meaning into corners from which it's hard to escape. Fiction then, I agree, can be a useful way to allow meaning “space to breathe”, especially when done so that the message is presented organically; i.e., it imposes itself naturally out of its context rather than directly exposing itself to the filter of a discourse that protects against it within a subject.

For example, if the message is political and you choose political discourse to convey it, you're in an arena where contentiousness is built in because group identity is at stake by default (political discourse taps into sociality in a fairly primal way with the rule tending to be “fight your corner” rather than “listen”). Fiction gives you a route out of this problem at the expense of making it more difficult to express your message.

The more general upshot of this is that our ideas are products of a symbolic order that can be understood as a complex of discourses that we can use as tools to convey meaning in more or less effective ways. “Truth” is a tricky concept to apply to such a situation but certainly an artist through fiction can compellingly convey an authentic experience of reality without being overly circumscribed by the predisposed notions of “factual” discourses.

I think @Mikie already mentioned just one question each as it's already going to end up a lot of questions without that stipulation the way it's going.

Glad it worked out! But I'm a little nervous -- he's 94 years old! — Mikie

I've seen him online recently. Seems to be working hard and age doesn't seem a barrier. Regardless though there's a limit to what anyone can deal with in a few days. I imagine there might end up being more questions than he can get to.

We're all extremely grateful to @Mikie for setting this up and honoured to have Professor Chomsky contribute to our community here. :clap:

It was game over as soon as Russia was in a position to annex the contested territories because NATO won't go to war against Russia for Ukraine, which would be the only conceivable way to reclaim them. It's not a movie. The bad guys win sometimes. The challenge now is for the West to engineer a situation where this doesn't look like an abject loss. I stick to my idea that a reduced Ukraine gaining NATO membership is this compromise. Russia gets its land bridge and NATO gets to fully hem it in. Ukraine gets to sacrifice just its arms and its legs rather than its head too. Sad, but...

Modern ideologies, religious or otherwise, tend to function like this. They believe for you so you don't have to. There's a sense in which it must be so because the only ideology we really believe in (if you look at our actions, which is the salient point of your OP I think) is capitalism. We act like we believe in capitalism (because we have to) but we don't act like we believe in our ideologies (like religions) because we can't act like good capitalists and act like good believers at the same time. Something must give and since some kind of religion is almost ubiquitous (in its widest form, including New Age stuff, humanism etc) and capitalism is the foundation of our personal security and survival, what must give is the real practice of religion and what stays is its social shell which provides our sense of unity, purpose, belonging and egotistical self-righteousness without interfering too much in our economic functioning. It's a nice neat human solution, i.e. foundational hypocrisy.

Do you like Nietzsche ? When he's joyfully wicked, there's nothing better. — plaque flag

I like reading Nietzsche better than I like Nietzsche I think. I get the impression, having read a biography, he was overcompensating for his own social inadequacies and taking out his frustration on some easy targets at times. But he's one hell of an entertainer and one hell of a psychologist. He's the type of philosopher you could not know what the hell he's talking about and yet fully agree with him. Blonde beasts, yeah, go baby! No, wait...

Almost there. Just one more dust up should do it.

I preferred your version. Had a bit more "je ne sais quoi". Quad et demonstratum! :up:

Yes, and I can see it become an indispensable writing aid though purists will always frown. It's like a friend you can brainstorm with when you're writing and get you going so to speak. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, there will be those who will simply get it to write paragraph by paragraph with very little work of their own and produce passable stories or novels. Sadly, it seems inevitable that the amount of work needed to help it do that will dwindle towards zero for passable stuff and then probably even for good stuff too.

I wrote the first couple of paragraphs of a story and asked GPT to write the next one. Its style is similarly colourful and while maybe more conventional, it did a frighteningly good job.

:lol: Sorry @javi2541997.

Oh, God, give me the patience to read to the end of one of Jamal's posts... But not yet!

Interestingly, being a buffoon is acting the buffoon. Being a fool is, sometimes, acting the fool. Jesters were not always or often mere idiots, but had an act. — Jamal

Yes, hadn't thought of that. Similarly for clown when not meant in the literal sense; "You clown!" references acting the clown. But seems like we would say "playing the Jester"? Something to think more on for sure because the idea can definitely be extended and I feel there's something important to say about it though I don't know what it is yet.

But seriously that is how I sometimes behave, heroically bringing light where there is darkness. — Jamal

Hope you've got a good stain remover. :lol:

In those cases it makes sense to pull my trick. — Jamal

:up:

Oh and:

bringing light where there is darkness. — Jamal

Nice link to:

the age old metaphor of light vs darkness — Baden

OK, I think I get you now. I guess you can get away with that with "buffoon"--if you ever get a chance. I expect the opportunities will be few. Most likely, either you'll get called a "buffoon" for stupidly bumping into someone on the street while using your phone or something and it wouldn't make sense to celebrate or someone will use the word against you in a deliberately self-consciously ironic way where they steal your opportunity.

Or maybe this is how it will go :

Jamal: *While sitting chatting to his wife, spills wine all over his pants*

Jamal's wife: (Affectionately) "Ah, don't worry, you big buffoon."

Jamal: "Yes! Yes! I am a buffoon and proud of it! Look!" *Spills more wine--this time all over his shirt* "Ha! See! Do you see now?! Do you see?!"

Jamal's wife: *silence*

Well, glad we've uncontroversially cleared all this up. :up:

So, the interesting question for me is: can a word find positive connotations through its negative connotations? — Jamal

How much social power you got in your pocket? The examples are definitely instructive. As well as "nerd", "geek" has become deinsultivized. When I was growing up the term signified social ineptness and physical weakness. No one wanted to be a geek. Now it's just someone who plays a lot of video games. But there's a good reason for this, pretty much every kid (in our privileged societies) has a game console now and probably a phone full of games too on which they spend huge amounts of their free time. Technology has made it so that behavioural norms have changed rapidly over the past few generations and that has demarginalized groups like nerds and geeks.

That change has a clear narrative. Other changes not so much. I remember the phrase "How bad!" meaning "Nice!" or "Cool" colonising us in Ireland when I was in my late teens. Very quickly it became the default term. Why? Who knows? In this case, there wasn't time for cultural change, it just suddenly caught on (despite the general idea of "bad" meaning "good" or "cool" being around for years and having virtually no effect on how we talked (e.g. Michael Jackson's "Bad"). In fact it would have sounded self-consciously stupid right up until it suddenly wasn't.

So, I think the answer to your question is "yes" but it's not something we can control and while "Buffoon" is a word that's just on the edge of having a potential positive connotation, (e.g. the affectionate "you big buffoon"--which through some weird trick of logic somehow sounds so much better than "you buffoon"), the added context and shared understanding is needed.

@bc I agree we're going to cause a huge linguistic and cultural mess if we get into trying to redefine the age old metaphor of light vs darkness from which the idea of white being good and black being bad by extension followed. It might make sense to let words like "black list" vs "white list" fall out of use because there are the potential for obvious misunderstandings but yes, it's stupid to try to ban a metaphor that long predates racism and I think most people regardless of their ethnicity would agree. That's something that could be worthwhile to put on the school curriculum. As for "niggardly", no need to lose that word either, but in a case where there was a potential for immediate offence and confusion amongst the less linguistically aware, why bother using it?

:100:

Is not possible to use words in a neutral point? — javi2541997

We don't have full control over that because meaning is always negotiated somehow between participants and context. But I think it's only necessary to be aware because then when you want to achieve something with a word like a neutral application of "buffoon" in a case where the context works against you, there are usually other options in the form of synonyms, e.g. "jester" or even "clown". Like, if you say "that guy is a clown in the local circus", the reference is happily neutral (it might not be in other circumstances), whereas "buffoon" (sense is usually something like "stupid clown") is generally derogatory and "jester" (sense is usually something like "amusing / clever clown") is generally complimentary. So, you've identified a potential problem but language has got there before you and provided a solution, that is, a bunch of synonyms where the material reference can be the same but the tone different. And in spoken language of course, you can add another layer of tone. Funny I went through this without even mentioning the word "Fool" which is another contextual can of worms that overlaps. But anyhow, cautiousness and nuance are your friends here.

I think it is just our interpretation rather than the pure meaning of the word — javi2541997

There's no "pure meaning", it's just that we have to interpret words in the context they're used. So, to call Hamlet a buffoon might be a compliment as a literary character assessment, to call your brother a buffoon when he spills his coffee might be affectionate banter, and to refer to a political malfeasant as a buffoon might be a serious criticism. Etc.

Hamlet is the paradigm buffoon. Which only adds to his greatness.

Have you ever looked into Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence ? For Bloom, the strong poet (the one that forces itself into the canon) resents dying more than others, rages, I guess, against the dying of its little light, which it must see writ large indeed on the public soul. Rorty looks at philosophers through this lens, as poets who command us to look at the world in their way, the proper way. — plaqueflag

Only checked that reference after reading this. The comparison is well made though; both the poet and the philosopher seek to reorganize discourse, only in different ways. The poet directly through transforming it in order to avoid its inherent drag on meaning and the philosopher indirectly in order to extend its interpretability, i.e. its concept-carrying capacity. Both are identity making, the former finding solace beneath language and the latter through it. Discourse loses depth in use like a tire loses its grooves and it’s a constant battle of the emotional and intellectual creative to maintain a grip on the road that is identity. I find myself heavily oriented to the poetic, which has the disadvantage of a tendency towards ambiguity and obscurity but the advantage (for me :smile: ) of being more fun, non-committal, and emotive when it does hit.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure. — Milan Kundera

(This also though part of the reason I was a kind of crappy teacher because I tended to overcompensate against my better instincts in order to toe the line.)

Yes. Genes and memes. Where does he begin and the memes that use him stop ? What is he but a self-referential, self-marketing, bag of memes ? The memes in that bag must work together. Perhaps selves are bags of cooperative memes because they are candidate policies for a community that relies upon coherent strategies for dealing with its environment and its internal issues like law and incentive structures. — plaqueflag

Yes, but again, as soon as efficiency is reached grip begins to be lost. So we’re bags of memes that when they work too well take their grounding for granted and wear out the ape they rely on for functioning because they smooth away the tensions that allow the expression of the energies needed to function. It’s like you have communities with laws and incentive structures that the better they become the worse they become because their path of progress necessarily imbues a self-ignorance that ends up impeding progress (and just so a different path may be taken). The individual here plays himself out in the social through its various recursions, family, community, nation etc. Real progress is the goal of reaching an impasse that requires reverse and repetition. Dialectic all the way down.

Individuals can be thought of as nodes for a parallel and adversarial computation. For Feuerbach , the individual doesn't so much think itself as it hosts the interaction of memes. By growing up in a world, we internalize semantic norms, such as what 'properly' follows from what. Like spinning tops, we can write metaphysics as a castaways, but the we that writes is sediment or software just doing its thing, updating the blockchain, waiting to be reconnect to the enternet. Dennett discusses how our neurons themselves are little fellows that competing employment to earn their glucose.

Thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/ — plaqueflag

I’m not very familiar with Feuerbach. I ought to fill that gap but I think it’s important to maintain a tension between believing and not believing this. You ought to believe it in order not to believe it; that is you commit yourself to your own irrelevance in the face of the social just so that by creating regardless, the logic of your action creates its own justification in the face of what becomes an impotent explicit belief. That way you turn tables on the social which usually acts on you, forcing your actions and rendering your denials that it does impotent. S’all about the powah!

Yes. But toward what ? I think (?) it's just the enlightenment autonomy project. To be superstitious is to be thrown, to be bound, to not have been given the choice. We do we want ? — plaqueflag

We want to exist. “I exist therefore I must exist” is the only coherent ethical injunction (see too: Beckett "I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on") and a more salient corollary to Descartes cogito. We want to exist and we want to exist more. And the only way to do that is to play. And the only place to play is language. Philosophy is one mode of play in pursuit of the ethic of existence.

Distance (for the the view and the safely) and grip (finegrained control) ? Do both the individual and community also need self-representing myths to hold that fattening bag of memes together ? As you say, scared and horny. Fear keeps lust in check, and maybe narcissism substitutes or transforms lust (look at that handsome stoic in the mirror!). — plaqueflag

“Grip”, yes, nice of you to mention that and retroactively justify my earlier tire metaphor :party: . Also yes, the self-representing myth is the myth of personal significance; just as social myths originally rested on supernatural justifications and then philosophical ones. Individual self-representing significance as myth then allows the conditions for individuals to actually instanitate social reality and its myths through the creation of Gods and philosophies. We’re using each other, the stalk and the bale, and we either make a strawhouse out of that that a wolf will blow down or we end up in a bonfire. That’s our lot.

Can we segue back to Zizek by noting AI are brains minus the need for Lacanian psychoanalysis and therein lies the relevance of such gobbledeygook? The symbolic escaped its hairy cell and fully alive in blissful self-ignorance?

I think it really is a question of values. Values form the self and if the values of the self just are the values of the self's environment, the self is effaced.

To the extent that these images become naturalized in the collective psyche, the Self endures, and will endure any assault on it. — frank

:up:

"In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from being false that he is willing to preserve them at all costs.

Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust. To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing. Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well.

But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice—even though he says nothing but "no"—he begins to desire and to judge. The rebel, in the etymological sense, does a complete turnabout. He acted under the lash of his master's whip. Suddenly he turns and faces him. He opposes what is preferable to what is not. Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value. Or is it really a question of values?

Camus "The Rebel".

Cultural was the other half that set of motivations — Vera Mont

I ignored it because the idea of culture is precisely what you're trying to explain with something more ''rational''.

From "Break out from the Crystal Palace" by John Carroll, which I happen to be reading.
[Describing the views of Dostoevsky] "Soon there will be no more adventure, finally no more action, not only will man lose his free will but amongst the graphs, test tubes and timetables he will stop desiring. Desire depends on the unplanned, intense passion, on the fleeting paradoxical unknown."

Then there's Nietzsche's unflattering depiction of the man stripped of wants in his parable of The Last Man.

It ain't all wine and roses.

and the historical basis could be entirely irrational. — Hanover

Or superficially rational which is what tends to happen I think.

much harder to imagine that entire societies routinely followed their irrational leaders — Vera Mont

especially in costly practices like the sacrifice of cattle and male offspring, without any cultural or environmental motive to do so. — Vera Mont

What's the environmental motive for flying a plane into a building and blowing yourself up in the process? Certainly seems like a costly practice. There's a sense in which ideology involves the creation of the terms of its own justification.

And yet the taboos and commandments come from someplace. In the absence of an irrational deity, they must have sprung from the minds of men. — Vera Mont

There is little recognizably irrational or rational outside culture. And culture is based on the sacred and the profane. It's the sacred and profane, including totems and taboos that define rationality in context not the other way around. It's not like ancient societies sat around in a committee and said "OK, we have this rational set of values, let's apply them to create a religion!" The rituals and practices of their religious and cultural beliefs--however they came about--instead instantiated a stable mode of propagation of values.

This is not to try to render environmental or other "rational" considerations absolutely impossible or irrelevant but simply to problematise the coherence of them being a priori necessary.

:up:

There's a line of thought that always looks for sociocultural / environmental reasons for taboos and you can almost always find something to cling to. Whether that something is just a correlate or a cause is the difficult question though. There's absolutely no requirement for rationality as the concept of rationality itself is built around taboos and other social instruments / structures rather than precedes them.

Street too, of course. @Sheps had for a while the tagline "partial Zizek enthusiast" on the old PF, but, yes, he looks like he's not even a member here sadly.

@sheps? I remember getting into Zizek because of him actually. Anyway, yes, subjectivity rather than consciousness per se because his overarching interest is in ideology (if you're in need of a one-word answer to what he works on btw @Mikie, that would be it).

And yeast wants sugar. But there is a difference between the wants that are cellular urges towards needs, and wants that are ideas of the mind created by thought and projected as a better life. — unenlightened

:up: Reprojections maybe. Halls of ideological mirrors here. I wonder though if even your distinction can be perverted by our social puppetmasters pulling on our cilia.

Don't see the connection between those two or what it has to do with anyone's "followers" but OK.

For anyone into Hegel, Marx, or Lacan at the very least he can't but be interesting. I think you would be surprised if you dived in.

Which of his books have you read?

It's in the logic of wanting that we should want not to want, as the ostensible goal of wanting, satisfaction, extinguishes want. But yeah, seems like consciousness just is fundamentally want or the subject is, along Lacanian (and Zizekian-- hey hey @Mikie ) lines, a lack or hole in reality representing desire because filling it in fills our own graves.

:up:

if I already have certain opinions — Eugen

Do you? If so, what are they? If you don't, please simply consult a search engine or chat GPT for this type of thing. We expect those who start an OP to have a grasp of the subject.



You might be confusing his persona with his work. He's written dozens of substantially philosophical books.

What is this, this philosophy ? — plaque flag

Hmm, maybe starts with the philosopher loving an idea in himself and trying to make it real with language in order to give him the sense he is grounded in the social order--because to control language is to control the social and the philosopher confronts social osmosis to avoid dissolution. The primary norms of survival and reproduction of linguistic objects then utilize the philosopher in a kind of symbiotic structuring of his intersubjectivity that socially elevates him and propagates them. Of course, this problematizes the location of the agent, with the norm getting mixed up in process--philosophizing then being to give the self over to particular processes that instantiate counter norms to those of prevalent thought, letting language explore itself as best it can through the medium of a scared and horny ape in order to progress the evolution of ideas. Or something.

Can we finally expect to see Europe steer a more independent course? — Tzeentch

No. I'd interpret Macron's posturing as trying to shore up support domestically where he's in deep trouble. And wouldn't be surprised if he signalled all this to the U.S. privately in advance.