The scale is a significant difference. They are not the same event. I do challenge the idea that the difference was the result of a "weak moral anchor."

Hannah Arendt is on to something when she distinguishes religious hatred from antisemitism because of the way the latter developed through an international community. The story of punishing a group that is identified as the cause of one's misfortune changes into one of a People rising up against their oppressors. The story of the Russian Revolution is similar in seeing the fight as liberating themselves from the previous winners of the world order.

This way of becoming who you are through destruction has a different character than taking the confidence of one's superiority to be reason enough to rule over others. The Japanese didn't claim the Chinese were stopping them from being who they were. They liked the fruits of empire and hoped to like it even more. They weren't remaking the structure of their society at the same time.

That's what I was getting at. The particular kind of immorality that created the Holocaust, for instance, could it have been related to a weak moral anchor? — frank

Killing Jews was a crowd pleaser well before the Enlightenment. The Crusades had people doing it at home as well as abroad. For example: The Pogroms of 1189 and 1190

If you are thinking of a Nietzschean narrative of nihilism from loss of faith, it is interesting to consider the intellectuals who were drawn to Naziism as a rejection of modern values that exclude a 'spiritual' life:

In April 1933, Heidegger took on the rectorship of Freiburg University, and joined the Nazi Party with great public fanfare the following month. He supported a political revolution which, he believed, by teaching the Germans discipline and an “instinct for the ultimate”, would prepare the way for a “deeper … spiritual” revolution. What this was really about, he insisted, was that “exposed to the most extreme questionableness of its own existence, this people [should] will … to be a spiritual people”. If the Party did not “sacrifice itself as a transitional phenomenon”, he grandly declared, but instead pretended to be “complete, eternal truth dropped from heaven”, it was “an aberration and a folly”.

The Notebooks document Heidegger’s increasingly bitter realization that Hitler and his chief ideologue Rosenberg wanted nothing to do with this idealism: Germanness, to them, was a matter of race and territory, not of spiritual destiny. — Judith Wolfe

As on many other topics, Heidegger was a poor student of Nietzsche. Fred could tell creatures apart from the sounds they made and the odors they out gassed.

And anomie? — BC

That is an interesting question.
The first thought that pops into my head is the movie The Last Picture Show.


Perhaps more closely related to the topic at hand would be Walter Kempowski's novel All for Nothing. It tells a story of the Germans losing the war in a way that reproduces the condition that made it possible. Don't read near bedtime.

Do you agree that scientism was also a factor? — frank

I think of it more along the lines of John Keegan in his A History of Warfare. Advances in technology has long been a part of why certain methods succeeded but figuring out how to become more lethal with what you have got is not only about the tools used. He has a great account of how deadly the use of the Phalanx was against less organized forces.
Keegan speaks of nuclear weapons as a sort of lethality that conditions people in a way not experienced previously. The pursuit of the lethal leads to a standing wave where there is no progress beyond it. If 'scientism' is a factor from that point of view, it is no different from all the efforts to make better tools to kill from time out of mind.

Regarding ennui, young people get bored where they live confined by certain structures and the allure of fighting in another place has always been more attractive than doing chores for some of them..

Machine guns. Bombs and Missiles. Industrial Project Management. Mass Media. The shrinking of the world as a shared space. Ennui.

You translated my phrasing into other words with your question. I will think about the best way to answer.

It is presumptuous to assert that the ideas are coherent outside of the context of human thought and experience. On the other hand, it is also presumptuous to claim that such a domain of experience is a process that is going on in a fashion self-sufficient enough to have no relationship to this "arrangement."

I am not able to pull together a report to something able to answer the question of 'being qua being.' Looking at various ways of talking about it are interesting. But pursuing some of those while losing interest in others does not seem to me like choosing a favorite.

The act of selection is one of the elements under review.

So I tread water in what I think is the Socratic fashion; There is some arrangement that is the source of what is experienced: I am ill-equipped to say what that might be.

I have no idea what this means, — Isaac

It is a description that shows the result of only considering "groups" of individuals and their opinions to adequately represent people living together in a particular society. All the different ways people work, judge themselves, mate, educate children, and govern themselves are not simply an aggregate of their opinions.

Opinions, by themselves, do not do anything.

Nor does it need to. I'm making a moral argument. Moral arguments are about the way things ought to be, not about the way things are. — Isaac

You present the absence of Ukrainian agency as a fact, authorizing the removal of their voice from any moral calculus. You champion Mearsheimer's theory of International Relations as the best explanation of the events unfolding in Ukraine. You discount previous behavior by Russia as indicative of anything happening in this conflict.

All of your 'moral' arguments are made upon the basis of what you have argued to be happening.

The expression: 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.' was made by Lord Acton to strictly refer to those who took advantage of their place in society to prey upon others below them.

I don't know where insecurity comes into the picture.

As to the question of martyrdom and guilt, escape from the cave is escape from the city. Socrates was a citizen of the city in the double sense of place or Chora. — Fooloso4

Your account of the Chora presented in the Timaeus reminds me of a passage in the Theaetetus:

Socrates: Evils, Theodorus, can never be done away with, for the good must always come from the contrary; nor have they any place in the divine world, but they must needs haunt this region of our mortal nature. — Theaetetus, 176a, translated by Cornford

The translation does not fully capture the Greek in regard to 'place' (topos):

τὴν δὲ θνητὴν φύσιν καὶ τόνδε τὸν τόπον περιπολεῖ ἐξ ἀνάγκης.

The word περιπολεῖ is to wander around an area the way a vagrant or a military patrol might do.

The ἀνάγκης is the same 'necessity' that required starting over again in Timaeus.

It's not that there's no polities. One could create any such grouping - {all dog owners} - for example. It's... — Isaac

The word 'polity' does not mean a grouping by means of a shared property. The first meaning given in the OED is: "Civil organization (as a condition); civil order." It comes from the Ancient Greek: polis. The Republic by Plato is titled: Politeia. A better translation than the 'Res Publica' of Latin would be 'What makes a City. The City refers to a place. Different places have different polities.

Polities obviously include formally articulated forms of governance. But they cannot be recognized 'as a condition' without placing them alongside other institutions, both those formally established and those preserved through custom. Who gets to do what varies greatly. Perhaps any discussion of polity requires the context of history. Conditions in a Hindu caste society are much different than a community in the Iroquois nation, for example. Participation and exclusion take place in the context of polity.

This central element of life in society is not recognized by your statement:

The aggregated views of {all the people who live within that border} has no meaning. — Isaac

This atomizes the participation of each individual in their location to the point that they are not in a place. It is like a theater filled with a hundred Descartes who have nothing to do with the other Descartes sitting next to them.

I grant that if one takes this condition as a premise, any sense of a shared space becomes arbitrary. But nothing you have presented demonstrates that people actually live like that.

What role does science play from that perspective?

I think that for Godel, the matter of valid forms of demonstration was paramount. Aristotle certainly was concerned with the matter but also saw first principles as being a proper fit for what was to be inquired into. Some natural things had particular differences that required different primary points of departure. There were other qualities they all shared.

There is substantial debate amongst ancient scholars regarding such a distinction in Aristotle's text. MELINA G. MOUZALA gives a nice summary of the issue.

My impression is that Aristotle was not trying to provide the last word on these matters.

To some extent (currently in dispute), the desire to find out how Nature works is the desire to learn something beyond the aim of accounts given merely to tell a story.

When you say: "There isn't any phenomenal aspect to the third person account, that is to ignore the role of paying attention to phenomena has in moving toward that prize of objectivity. One can recognize the difference without pitting them against each other in a zero-sum game.

He is taking aim from the balcony, not rebutting your thesis.

I carry an umbrella in case it rains.

I quoted you and tried to make sense of it. I am not trying to put words in your mouth.

If one rejects any kind of "thinking alike" in forming polities, that doesn't explain how such polities come into being. Saying: "I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people" does not explain it by itself. There is more to life in society than saying where its boundaries are.

There is a gap between two things you are saying. If you find this observation to be moronic, ignore it.
And if you do so, I will return the favor.

Jeff Beck.

What I want to know, is if our collective goals are wholesome or unwholesome towards one another. — Benj96

I don't understand how your thought experiment connects this question to the results you express interest in. The proposal suggests we are experiencing the immediate result of such decisions.

That sounds more like a thesis than a poll of other people's experiences/opinions.

Was that an instance of a Richardean paradox?

It seems odd then that you would want to say the notion lacked any mechanism. It seems even a cursory glance at any sociology or psychology textbook would provide you with a dozen such mechanisms without having to lift a finger. — Isaac

I was trying to figure out how your view of society worked. You declare the self-identification of persons as participants in a group to be meaningless in regard to the polity they find themselves within:

I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. It does not in any way 'capture' some natural grouping of people all of whom think alike. — Isaac

This line you draw between the appearance of a will and the forces actually driving events is not a self-evident fact. It is a part of a theory you are using to interpret events.

I agree. The emphasis has been on what can be confirmed by shared and repeatable experiences. The point Chalmers is making about the use of reductive means to discover functions is echoed by the early cheerleader of modern science, Francis Bacon:

But my course and method, as I have often clearly stated and would wish to state again, is this--not to extract works from works or experiments from experiments (as an empiric), but from works and experiments to extract causes and axioms, and again from those causes and axioms new works and experiments, as a legitimate interpreter of nature. — Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Book 1, 67

It is from the dialogue of Plato named Parmenides. Here is the bit about time:

Does the one also partake of time? And is it and does it become older and younger than itself and others, and again, neither younger nor older than itself and others, by virtue of participation in time?

How do you mean?
If one is, being must be predicated of it?
Yes.
But to be (einai) is only participation of being in present time, and to have been is the participation of being at a past time, and to be about to be is the participation of being at a future time?

Very true.
Then the one, since it partakes of being, partakes of time?
Certainly.
And is not time always moving forward?
Yes.
Then the one is always becoming older than itself, since it moves forward in time?

Certainly.
And do you remember that the older becomes older than that which becomes younger?

I remember.
Then since the one becomes older than itself, it becomes younger at the same time?

Certainly.
Thus, then, the one becomes older as well as younger than itself?
Yes.
And it is older (is it not?) when in becoming, it gets to the point of time. between "was" and "will be," which is "now": for surely in going from the past to the future, it cannot skip the present?

No.
And when it arrives at the present it stops from becoming older, and no longer becomes, but is older, for if it went on it would never be reached by the present, for it is the nature of that which goes on, to touch both the present and the future, letting go the present and seizing the future, while in process of becoming between them.

True.
But that which is becoming cannot skip the present; when it reaches the present it ceases to become, and is then whatever it may happen to be becoming.

Clearly.
And so the one, when in becoming older it reaches the present, ceases to become, and is then older.

Certainly.
And it is older than that than which it was becoming older, and it was becoming older than itself.

Yes.
And that which is older is older than that which is younger?
True.
Then the one is younger than itself, when in becoming older it reaches the present?

Certainly.
But the present is always present with the one during all its being; for whenever it is it is always now.

Certainly.
Then the one always both is and becomes older and younger than itself?

Truly.
And is it or does it become a longer time than itself or an equal time with itself?

An equal time.
But if it becomes or is for an equal time with itself, it is of the same age with itself?

Of course.
And that which is of the same age, is neither older nor younger?
No.
The one, then, becoming and being the same time with itself, neither is nor becomes older or younger than itself?

I should say not.
And what are its relations to other things? Is it or does it become older or younger than they?

I cannot tell you.

That means ∞∞ time has elapsed and the now we find ourselves experiencing is the termination of this particular infinity — Agent Smith

But Parmenides said: "Then the one always both is and becomes older and younger than itself?"

Aristotle was too busy looking at how creatures lived to get stuck in that bottle.

That is an interesting analogy. I read Chalmers as breaking from the Cartesian theater where the duality of a first person being separated from the rest of the movie is the explanation itself.:

With experience, on the other hand, physical explanation of the functions is not in question. The key is instead the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience. This basic conceptual point is not something that further neuroscientific investigation will affect. In a similar way, experience is disanalogous to the élan vital. The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination. — Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

The question is not whether we are only physical beings but whether the methods to establish what is only physical will explain experience. Chalmers is introducing a duality that is recognized through the exclusion of a phenomena instead of accepting the necessity for an agency beyond phenomena.

To that point, we don't know enough to say what consciousness does to understand how it may relate to the specific event of being a 'first' person. Compare this circumspection to the boldness of Identity Theory where that aspect of the 'physical' self is the first order of business.

I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. — Isaac

In other words: "the willingness to fight a common enemy is merely an illusion." Fighting people who kill your friends and neighbors may look and feel like a shared purpose but in reality, it is merely the struggle by elites to control people and territory.

It is an interesting theory of social organization. But it does not include a self-evident mechanism for how the coercion is brought to bear. Is there some kind of fear of anarchy as depicted by Hobbes? Repression of instincts ala Freud? Or more like the class struggle discussed by Marx? It certainly rules out a view of 'natural' society put forward by Locke.

Where have I said that? — Isaac

Still don't. There's no such thing as a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainians identify in all sorts of different, occasionally completely incompatible ways. That's why there was a civil war going on before this invasion.

Exactly. The reason why so many in this discussion cannot seem to get their heads around viewing this in any other grouping than by nationality.

Of course Ukraine does not have its own history, language and culture. It's an arbitrary line on a map, it's absurd to think it somehow contains a natural grouping of language, history and culture. — Issac

These are the moves you have repeated for hundreds of pages.

Memories are fleeting, as mortal as we are.

I will give it a shot.

Science, as a practice, developed through a lot of discussion about separating causality from coincidence. Given that we are creatures who base much of our knowledge upon lining up what happened at the same time as evidence of a cause, it was only through suppressing this tendency that we became aware of systems that were not simply extensions of our assumptions. Establishing what is happening and building models for why it did was the beginning of looking for functions rather than accepting we have been shown what there is to know.

After some time of doing this, the method starts to consider what it dismissed at the beginning of its enterprise; The inclusion of observations made isolated from other people.

I understand the folk psychology of “experiences”, but I don’t actually imagine I carry a “set of experiences” with me wherever I go, so I never need to appeal to them. — NOS4A2

You probably remember what you did and what has happened to you in the past. That 'set of experiences' is probably the closest you will get to what your body can report.

How do you experience it? I don't ask that as a trick question. I am not accusing anybody of misrepresenting their experiences.

The element of Chalmers' challenge that I don't see well represented in this thread is that he focused upon how the conflict of methods developed to establish facts beyond personal experience came to be used to explain that phenomena itself. Something deliberately built to avoid a problem was turned upon the potato deemed too hot to pass around. Observing that problem is different than insisting upon the existence of a being beyond what 'science' can establish.

I have yet to understand what “phenomenal consciousness” is, I’m afraid, so I draw a blank upon hearing it. — NOS4A2

I am puzzled by your puzzlement. Your life is different from mine. That comes from you being stuck with your set of experiences instead of mine. It does not take the invention of a 'ghost in the machine' to notice that is an inescapable fact.

It is also surprising to see you object to this quality of privacy after arguing in so many other places that all restrictions upon persons are a violation of their rights. I am not sure if you have thought this all through.

I tried googling the numbers and did not get matching results. What is your preferred database?

Edited to add forgotten not. Apologies.

None of these states have militaries that are on a modern operational level, nor have they taken any steps towards making them so. — Tzeentch

From what sources are you getting this information? Most sources that I have seen do not reflect this view. There has been a long ongoing call from U.S. to have other NATO members fork out more dough. But that gets complicated when reviewing how nations develop defense on their own compared to their commitments to NATO.

He accepted his punishment but did not accept that he was no longer a citizen. He performed the work of being a mid-wife for the birth of thoughts till his last breath. With that in mind, I think Plato was saying that there was no way to get rid of him. The purpose of Phaedo being, in part, something like Auden speaking of the death of W.B. Yeats:

The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
the current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

I was not objecting to your consideration of different motives. What is fallacious is your argument that the diversity of motives proves that the willingness to fight a common enemy is merely an illusion. You take the lack of commonality as a premise and act surprised when it appears in your conclusion.
You repeat Putin's thinking verbatim: Ukraine does not exist. The resistance being encountered by Russian forces is not Ukrainian. Therefore.......QED.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend from Baluchistan after the Coalition forces took Kabul. He said:

"I appreciate the U.S. trying to put down the Taliban but I don't think they realize that there are millions of the motherfuckers."

In regard to mutual respect, how do you see that in the context of Nietzsche's attempting to undermine Christianity, as such? Or the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.?

To put it most broadly, the arguments did not assume mutual respect was the order of the day. Even if some of the arguments were relatively civil in comparison to the alternatives.

The U.K. recognizes that pandering to Russian Oligarchs was not double plus good.

My personal experience has been only learning the virtues of the dispassionate after losing my cool over and over again. The lessons keep coming.

It may be germane to point out how the matter of contentious arguments were the bread and butter of Classical Greek culture. One of the central themes in the Republic is how the rude and abusive challenge by Thrasymachus was transformed into the well-reasoned debate of later chapters. A number of Plato's dialogues were brawls peppered liberally with personal insult. That element was recognized as part of the "dialectic" even when criticized as inferior.

Another influence for me on the subject is Nietzsche saying that one has to be careful about who one bothers to oppose because the effort is also a recognition of their importance. That suggests that there is a balancing point where expressions of contempt cancel the object of defeating an idea.

Otherwise, all contentions between ideas are a spasm of opportunistic sophistry.

I, too, will miss Olivier5.