I know Kant took a couple French Enlightenment thinkers quite seriously, so there is precedence. — Mww

That reminds me of my favorite passage in Critique of Practical Reason where Kant distinguishes respect for others from reactions to a person's character:

A man can also be an object of love, fear, or admiration even to astonishment and yet not be an object of respect. His jocular humor, his courage and strength, and his power of rank may inspire me with such feelings though inner respect for his is still lacking. Fontanelle says, "I bow to a great man, but my mind does not bow." I can add: to a humble plain man, in whom I perceive righteousness in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows whether I choose or not, however high I carry my head that he may not forget my superior position. Why? His example holds a law before me which strikes down my self-conceit when I compare my own conduct with it; that it is a law which can be obeyed, and consequently is one that can actually be put into practice is proved to my eyes by the act. — Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck page 77

Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle was the intellectual grandfather of Voltaire, Rousseau and company.

I am not sure that François would agree with the talk of law and he is skeptical toward expressions of humility but there is the following maxim:

230.—Nothing is so infectious as example, and we never do great good or evil without producing the like. We imitate good actions by emulation, and bad ones by the evil of our nature, which shame imprisons until example liberates. — François VI, duc de la Rochfoucauld

The "first" self-love referred to by the Duke is how much we do in the name of helping (or hurting) others that is actually self-serving. The idea of a second version is that we fiercely defend what we have bothered to learn.

The political advantage of RFK for T is that he pulled in the people who believe those kind of stories. That is it.

The group being solicited is deemed by the operation to be necessary for their future existence.

The search function on the site is pretty darn good at locating where this has been discussed in the past.

I will withhold from saying more about it in this thread.

I think experience of loss is needed for situational awareness of what is missing in one's responses. As a lover, a parent, and a worker in an industry, I have had to stop doing some things or abandon the role.

I recognize that I am a slow learner in many ways. Slowing down reactions has helped me a lot. Not saying what first comes to mind. Waiting creates a strange space where you and others don't know what will happen next. It is not a skill that is mastered but grudgingly accepted. I have met a good number who are better at it than me. Some of that is probably from being of a different disposition. Some of that is the application of a strategy.

I don't think we ever get to sort that out.

Yes. That reminds me of La Rochefoucauld saying that education is a second self-love.

I think Kant makes the distinction between objective and subjective problematic. Both the outer and inner intuitions are needed for the "I" to be sure of its existence. The matter is framed as judgements upon appearances. Kant's disagreement with Hume is that judgement is not only what convinces us as stories and arguments but is constitutional to our ability to experience the world. The "I" appears through that experience and is not known only as an "inner" intuition. Otherwise, Descartes would suffice.

Without the outer, there can be no inner. From that point of view, Kant is demanding an "objective" reference for possibility of the "I". That is how he distinguishes his game from Berkeley's. On the other hand, he has to argue about what is real about time in a sharp departure from Aristotle. That is the issue in the quoted passage.

So, the interesting thing about that for me is how to respect the difference Kant insisted upon.

The intuition of time is a condition of "all our experiences" therefore it is the essential aspect of the being which is I. — Metaphysician Undercover

Kant challenged Descartes on this matter. The "I" is not accepted as a given existence.

I quoted the Critique of Pure Reason here where the reality of time is discussed. The expression of "inner versus outer objects" is seen strictly as the activity of the intuitions as the possibility of our experiences. From the quote there is:

Time is certainly something real/
namely the real form of inner intuition. It therefore has subjective real-
ity in regard to inner experience, i.e., I really have the representation of
time and of my determinations in it. It is therefore to be regarded re-
ally not as object but as the way of representing myself as object But
if I or another being could intuit myself without this condition of sen-
sibility, then these very determinations, which we now represent to our-
selves as alterations, would yield us a cognition in which the represen-
tation of time and thus also of alteration would not occur at all. Its
empirical reality therefore remains as a condition of all our experiences.
Only absolute reality cannot be granted to it according to what has been
adduced above. It is nothing except the form of our inner intuition. * If
one removes the special condition of our sensibility from it, then the
concept of time also disappears, and it does not adhere to the objects
themselves, rather merely to the subject that intuits them.

[Kant's footnote at "It is nothing except the form of our inner intuition. * is as follows]

I can, to be sure, say: my representations succeed one another; but that only
means that we are conscious of them as in a temporal sequence, i.e., accord
ing to the form of inner sense. Time is not on that account something in it
self, nor any determination objectively adhering to things.

[Kant's note on the manuscript is as follows]

"Space and time are not merely logical
forms of our sensibility, i.e., they do not consist in the fact that we represent actual re-
lations to ourselves confusedly; for then how could we derive from them a priori syn
thetic and true propositions? We do not intuit space, but in a confused manner; rather
it is the form of our intuition. Sensibility is not confusion of representations, but the
subjective condition of consciousness." — CPR A36/B53

I don't understand how

Time is already required — Metaphysician Undercover

in terms of Kant's language. He made a claim of how little we can know about it since it is how we experience what we do.

Perhaps Kant is not accepting the speculation of your model.

Personally, I do not think those in power should wield that power to limit free speech. I believe that is likely unconstitutional, but absolutely believe it is wrong. — Relativist

As a constitutional matter, the call for a free press is clear. What complicates the present issue is that the FCC was formed by Congress to restrict what enough people found to be offensive. That measure was aimed at certain expressions of profanity and extreme references to individuals and groups. Those limits are subject to changes of sensibility over time but also represent a set of negotiated agreements under constant review.

The elephant and the donkey in the room concern how ownership of the media influences that set of controls. That element also introduces the broader problem of regulation of commercial enterprise.

So, the administration uses some of their power to reduce the limits put in place by Congress and heighten other parts when it serves their political objectives.

So, I should not connect all the things you have said as the continuity of your thought?

I suffer from institutional memory.

You are reading off the ledger of the true believers. I don't think they have the last word. The system may be rigged in most ways, but voting is still important. Otherwise, the choice is as Malcom X put it.

The electorate who brought in Trump were seduced. Now that they have tied the knot and headed down Highway 61 with the guy, they are learning stuff. The agricultural support for him is getting hit hard by ICE and starting trade wars with everybody. People are learning the hard way what destruction of government services and regulation involves.

If all that has no effect, I will consider restoring the crossbow.

I recognize that influence. I submit that it is incompatible with the Gerson view of Platonism.

You seem to want to have both at the same time.

In Plotinus, the soul animates matter as far as it can. The source is a power that can only go so far because matter is never completely mastered by form. The origin of that soul is from before our birth. Plotinus has also said he has visited that realm through contemplation.

I will leave off from distinguishing this view from Aristotle since years of our debates have become a circle. I will try contesting this view of "matter" with considerations from a modern thinker, Gregory Bateson.

Our ancestors show that our lives are built with components of past generations. We see that most readily through inherited characteristics in our relatives and ourselves in a mirror. Some very old material is moving through. One natural question is how does that element relate to an individual life. Bateson both ties oneself to the ancestors but separates them from our experience:

Let us start from the evolutionary side. It is now empirically clear that Darwinian evolutionary theory contained a very great error in its identification of the unit of survival under natural selection. The unit which was believed to be crucial and around which the theory was set up was either the breeding individual or the family line or the subspecies or some similar homogeneous set of conspecifics. Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its "progress" ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself. And we may very easily see this process carried to its ultimate reductio ad absurdum in the next twenty years. The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line, or the society.

The old unit has already been partly corrected by the population geneticists. They have insisted that the evolutionary unit is, in fact, not homogeneous. A wild population of any species consists always of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words, potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit. The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment.

The artificially homogenized populations of man's domestic animals and plants are scarcely fit for survival.

And today a further correction of the unit is necessary. The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment. — Bateson, Form, Substance, and Difference

Whatever opinion may have of this thinking, it is not "a view from nowhere."

Voting is good. Supporting institutions as well as we can in relation to our capacities and opportunities is good.

One way I look at it is that MAGA has to reproduce to become a force in the next generation. If they completely "own the libs" the environment of the first generations will lose their meaning. Becoming a victim of one's own success does happen to people.

One contrast I keep in mind is how deeply structured we are by our ancestors. They made their choices and we make ours.

I don't hold that they have a special power over our fortunes or anything of that sort. But their life is vivid in the expression of character and disposition of particular individuals. That view does not mesh well with the vision of souls being their own thing but also conscripted to the "material" world.

Now we have Vance taking over as the host of the Kirk podcast while ABC is pulling the Kimmel show for saying the killer has MAGA roots. I don't think these attempts to control the message will succeed but it is about to get ugly.

That importance is undeniable. I only suggest that such a factor is connected to other ways of thinking about our experience. It is not the only map.

Well, Aristotle puts a lot of emphasis on the being in front of you is what actually exists. We have different ideas about how that is possible, but the first thing is the encounter with such beings.

So, that is germane to the issue at hand.

We have been down this road before regarding the "intrinsic existence" of matter in Aristotle. His speaking of matter as having "to be of a certain kind" has long complicated the discussion.

Your synopsis excludes that part.

The mind/matter distinction was the keystone of "Neoplatonism", where matter is only to be seen as the extremity of mind informing what matter could be. The interest in opposing that view was not only to say it was the other way around.

That report points to the problem of expecting a manifesto to explain actions. It also highlights how unconcerned the suspect was about killing someone as a matter of principle. That is something we do not know.

The effort to put this in a box is all that can be known for sure so far.

I don't have a ready answer for all of this.

But there are some interesting gaps.

John Brown. Malcom X.

We do not know what the killer had in mind. The label "fascist" has been pinned to too many donkeys to form a shared idea. We have had experience of the MAGA version of our circumstances. Maybe they have been hoisted by their own petard. Maybe we will find out about that. Maybe not.

What puzzles me about the MAGA message is to be told there is a war going on but also not a war. The absorption of 1/6 as a valid form of political expression versus preventing a hostile takeover by a particular cartel.

By contrast, I submit that John and Malcolm had a clear idea about the difference between war and peace.

I often wonder how the normalization of violence figures into this sort of messaging. There is a blatant political device in particular instances such as pardoning all of the participants in 1/6. But that does not add up to a possible future. The whole theater is oddly barren.

This.. is an interesting concept, at least as my mind is able to process it. Could you go into further detail? What, truly, "defies comparison" as far as something that is not lexicographically or taxonomically similar? — Outlander

For the taxonomically minded, similarities suggest identity. I do that all the time. I have a penchant for it.

But whenever I dig into different texts, a lot of comparisons turn out to be the basis of a particular theory or the introduction of a meta-category by which all others can be surveyed. I get why both of those things happen. I make both of those kinds of judgements myself.

Therefore, a strictly philosophical discipline should not make either of those approaches to be self-evident.

This is something I was hoping to express in my comment upthread. The thoughts brewing in the young killer in the school shooting scene are not political in the way people organize to bring about a change in their circumstances. It is a different culture.

The Malcolm X speech reminds me of the Introduction to John Keegan's A History of Warfare where Keegan criticizes the Clausewitz idea that war is politics by other means. Keegan strives to understand war-making as a culture of different people and not as a natural extension of pursuing political goals. War often interrupts politics.

A ready example of this is when John Brown tried to start a war at Harper's Ferry. It was not as simple a beginning that he had hoped for, but it was a start he hoped to bring about.

The case of Booth shooting Lincoln was in hopes of keeping a war alive. The original plot was to kill all of the leaders of Lincoln's administration.

The civil rights era had intimations of war but also an appeal to avoid it. Otherwise, it would have all been straight up Lenin and vanguard of the proletariat.

The Hatch decision titrated the Second Amendment into an individual right. That is different from the original idea of avoiding standing armies. Or even armies that rake.

All the political shootings of late, whoever they target from the menu of partisan targets, are more like personal messages than a call to arms. The Kirk killing is yet another school shooting. Is that a "cultural war?" Is it not a "cultural war?" Keegan readers would like to know.

I just want to know what “object” gives me that object doesn’t. What do the marks give to object that object doesn’t already have? — Mww

What I mean by that is that the properties of space and time that we confer to existing things in an Aristotle or Aquinas set of givens is upset when those are taken to be primarily intuitions that make our experience possible. The reaction by Kant at A36/B53 shows him insisting upon a strong separation from what things are beyond our experience. But it is not an absolute separation expressed in forms of idealism he opposes. But it is a duality of his own making. In that sense, it does not give more than it takes away.

My interpretive arrangement so far has been to try and make sense of what Kant seems to not explain. When I read certain passages to be restrictions upon how to understand representations, for example, I am not claiming insight into the role of objects in Kant's system.

The "real" involved in this case is not my opinion but a citation of where Kant answered a challenge on the matter by his contemporaries.

Is your question about "object" such that you remove yourself as a peer capable of reviewing the text?

The passage you quote puts it in a nutshell; All instances of "objectivity" are also moments in consciousness. The emphasis upon objectivity that Wayfarer finds fault with is, by this account, already too "subjective" for some thinkers.

Kant was wrestling with his contemporaries on the question of what was "real" in this context when discussing the existence of time outside of our experience of it. This is touched upon in my quote upthread:

I admit the entire argument. Time is certainly something real/
namely the real form of inner intuition. It therefore has subjective real-
ity in regard to inner experience, i.e., I really have the representation of
time and of my determinations in it. It is therefore to be regarded re-
ally not as object but as the way of representing myself as object But
if I or another being could intuit myself without this condition of sen-
sibility, then these very determinations, which we now represent to our-
selves as alterations, would yield us a cognition in which the represen-
tation of time and thus also of alteration would not occur at all. Its
empirical reality therefore remains as a condition of all our experiences. — CPR A36/B53

As the rest of the passage demonstrates, there is an aspect to experiencing an object that points beyond the representations of it. Kant is saying that that element is not a representation in its own right.

Many of the objections to Kant, as they played out in his lifetime and afterwards, concern his treatment of the "object" as a product of what we do. So, the effort is different from someone who looks at the attempt of explanation as a product of talking per se. I am not up to speed with Buddhist texts, but Zhuangzi put it as every attempt at division.
So, I submit that there is an importance difference there.

That point is also made in many other places, including the issue of method put forward in my quote.

The topic of "rational psychology" is often brought up in the CPR as a fusion of personal experiences with universal conditions. That response opposes, for instance, the presumptions of Neoplatonism and other depictions of what is rational in regard to our existence.

Reflecting upon your responses to that particular text, it prompts me to wonder how Kant's objections to the theories of a "rational psychology" relate to explanations that base themselves on some version of that.

As in so many matters, the permission granted in those orders is contingent upon whether or not Congress resumes the power granted to it by the Constitution. The illegality of ignoring existing statutes is not enough, although a helpful stumbling block going forward.

I want to take a different approach from my previous expression of skepticism regarding measures of personal significance.

I like 's weighing the benefits against the disappointments possibly caused by presence or absence. Some of those elements are sharply drawn by regret or pleasure. A huge amount is made ambiguous by the paths not taken. Some of that must have been wise to some extent. Some of that must surely have been a loss of benefit for each or all involved. I think it is why Aristotle said luck could not be a cause; But also why he was wrong about that.

It seems like the speculation and fiction that most vividly describe the isolation of an individual build an enormous world in which to become isolated within.

Maybe Dostoyevsky is the exemplar for this sort of thing because so many of his "nihilists" are so damn gregarious.

I guess that I am just imagining oneself as negative space, which is only fantasised projection in the sense of removing oneself from pathways of causal chains. — Jack Cummins

I am only suggesting we do that all the time. It is an element of what we do. It is easier to imagine that our species did not exist than imagine what you propose.

You say that your role doesn't exist outside of one's participation and, in a sense one's nonexistent self is a limbo phantom self. However, if one had not existed that doesn't mean that others would not have existed, so life would have been different for them. — Jack Cummins

I am not saying that. I don't have access to those kinds of facts. The awareness of different outcomes does not let me know what they might be in other cases. I did not go there.

On one hand, I do know and remember stuff and am well aware that different choices would have meant a different life. I don't get to live that other life while living the one chosen.

On the other hand, those choices do not give me insight into what might happen to other people absent my participation. The subtraction of my involvement runs into the problem of adding it.