According to quantum mechanics, everything exists in a superposition until it is observed. 
Superposition means that different physical quantities (such as waves, forces, or electrical signals) can exist simultaneously and influence each other without losing their individual properties.
So, in my view, this means that what I do not see or am not aware of exists in a superposition—a vast range of possibilities. It only truly exists the moment I see it and become aware of it.
It seems, then, that before something is observed, everything exists—but only as possibility (superposition). 
We live in a vast field of potential outcomes that only become definite once we observe them.

And this puzzles me.... — Jan

Physicist and philosopher Karen Barad favors Niels Bohr’s explanation of the double slit experiment over Einstein or Heisenberg. Bohr does not see scientific knowledge as describing pre-existing objects with independent properties. Instead, the outcome of the double-slit experiment shows that what is observed depends on the experimental arrangement. The electron (or photon) does not have an inherent “wave” or “particle” nature independent of how we measure it. Whether we see an interference pattern (wave-like) or two distinct bands (particle-like) is a function of the measurement setup, not a revelation of some hidden essence of the electron.

Barad takes Bohr’s explanation further, claiming that reality is not made of independent objects with inherent attributes.Instead, reality consists of phenomena produced through intra-actions.The double-slit experiment demonstrates this. There is no independent electron “with” a wave-or-particle nature, only the phenomenon of electron plus apparatus. For Barad, the very concepts of “wave” and “particle” are not properties of nature-in-itself, but arise only within specific experimental arrangements. The experiment demonstrates the inseparability of observer, apparatus, and observed.

The business about seeing redness when one presses one’s own eyeball didn’t impress me. The need to learn from others what redness is makes this possibility dubiously relevant – unless everyone has the same experience, which is, I suppose, possible.
But the idea that one could somehow abolish redness, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of how colour works. Colour words are a system; they segment the colour spectrum, so abolishing redness sounds as if it would leave a gap in the spectrum, which is hard to understand, or just restrict the spectrum. That is possible. Dogs, for example, can’t see red. As I understand it, they see red objects as black, so the abolition is a substitution. But the ability to see red is, for us, a physiological capacity – are we to imagine some feat of genetic engineering?
I think you may be right in comparing colour with pain – in the sense that W is thinking of redness as (grammatically) like pain. Perhaps this is possible if one doesn’t understand the colour spectrum, but we do. That makes a huge difference, because if there is a spectrum of pain, it is a spectrum of intensity, not of quality. We do have qualities of pain – stabbing, aching, throbbing etc. – but they are not on a spectrum. — Ludwig V

You suggest Wittgenstein’s “pressing the eyeball” example is irrelevant because color concepts are socially learned.
Then you shift the discussion toward physiology (dogs can’t see red; genetic engineering). Wittgenstein would say this is sliding back into an explanatory, scientific register (physiology, genetics), which is not the issue. He isn’t denying the biological basis of vision; he’s showing that philosophy generates pseudo-problems by treating “redness” as if it were an inner object. The “pressing the eyeball” example is a reminder that even when we report “seeing red,” the grammar of “red” is not that of an inner sensation, but part of a learned practice. Dismissing the example as irrelevant misses Wittgenstein’s therapeutic poin. He’s not offering data but undermining a picture, the picture of color as an inner object. You also treat “abolishing redness” as a problem of spectrum physics, but Wittgenstein might say “abolishing redness” looks nonsensical not because of biology but because of how the grammar of color words works in our language.


On comparing color with pain, you say that pain has a spectrum of intensity, while color has a spectrum of quality. I think Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that colors and pains are the same kind of phenomenon but that the grammar of the words is comparable. With both, the temptation is to treat them as inner objects we directly access. But Wittgenstein shows that meaning is in the use. “I have a toothache” works like “This is red” not by pointing to a private inner object but by participating in a practice with public criteria. You speak as if “the color system” guarantees a metaphysical space for redness, as though the system enforces an ontological necessity. But the necessity is grammatical, not metaphysical. It comes from how we use color words, not from a hidden structure of reality.

The mysterious concept of ‘temperament’ arises out of creating artificially separated categories out of learning , cognition and affectivity.
— Joshs

Cool. So can we think of temperament as habitual patterns of sense making? I’m assuming you include in temperament people’s preferences for order, simplicity, chaos, or whatever… — Tom Storm

We could say they are habits, but not blind or arbitrary habits. They are shaped by the needs of optimal anticipation of events, so to the extent that a particular pattern of interpreting events reproduces itself stably over time, it does this not because of some inertia, but to the extent that it is effective. Emotion crises arise as indications that the patterns we relied on are brining to fail us, and we either have to construct our world to a small and smaller circle of what we can cope with, or begin the process of re-organizing our system of constructs.

We don’t need Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to do philosophy, since we are already formulating, testing and revising our own philosophical systems all the time.
— Joshs

Of course, but in most cases it often seems to take the contributions of others to promote a significant shift in our thinking. Although I’m sure break through moments can also happen from life events. But what does it mean to read Wittgenstein or Heidegger and see the world radically anew? From what you say above, is it correct to think you might define philosophy as an act of sense making? — Tom Storm

All of our behaviors are acts of sense-making, questions we pose to the world that it may either confirm or invalidate. It is certainly true that other people provide rich resources that we can take average of in opening up promising new avenues of thought. But more important than the contributions of others is the audacity, persistence and ingenuity with which we tinker with our ideas. Nietzsche and Heidegger will do nothing for us if we are not prepared to rethink them in our own terms, relative to our own concerns and history. Because we must already be prepared to absorb the ideas than any great philosophy has to offer, 90% of the work has already been done before we are ever exposed to the likes of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Whenever someone claims that so and so’s thinking had a life-changing effect on them, I suspect that scratching beneath the surface will reveal such a readiness to be transformed.

I keep wondering if there are transformational understandings about time and self and being and truth and reality that would open up and utterly change one. Surely that's the promise of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. — Tom Storm

That’s also the promise of psychologist George Kelly, the one who said that each of us walks around every moment of very day with our own personal construct system. You can think of it as a dynamical, constantly self-updating personal philosophy which doesn’t need to be articulated verbally to oneself or others in order to guide every aspect of our lives and determines our success at coping with emotional, intellectual and ethical challenges.We don’t need Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to do philosophy , since we are already formulating, testing and revising our own philosophical systems all the time. By the way, Kelly collapses these categories together. He gets rid of the separation between will, affect and cognition.

I think life difficulties are much more defined or informed by one's temperament more than what some intelligent person said back in the day.
— Manuel

Well said. A perspective people tend not to consider as they seem to attribute everything to learning and discernment. — Tom Storm

The mysterious concept of ‘temperament’ arises out of creating artificially separated categories out of learning , cognition and affectivity. This prompts us to dismiss a child’s temper tantrum as the product of temperament rather than as their flailing attempts at making sense of social events that impact them.

Will to power may be a metaphysical claim about the structure of existence, but for me it only carries weight if it is also experientially meaningful—can be embodied as a lifestyle. — praxis

My point wasn’t that it is MERELY an ontological
principle as opposed to being experientially meaningful. It is both at once. Like Heidegger’s Being, Kant’s Transcendental Subject, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, or Husserl’s Transcendental Subjectivity, Nietzsche’s Will to Power is not simply an abstract metaphysical thesis but a grounding condition for the possibility of meaningful existence itself. To say “it only carries weight if it can be embodied” is almost redundant: its function as a metaphysical a priori is precisely to determine what embodiment, practice, or lifestyle can mean at all.

Will to Power functions as a perspectival lens: an interpretive key to life understood as force, struggle, creation, and transformation. Its significance does not depend on being translated into “lifestyle” after the fact; it is already lived through the embodied dynamics of drives, values, and self-overcoming. In this way, Will to Power differs from other major philosophical principles: it is not a condition standing behind existence, but an interpretive enactment within existence itself.

Does anyone feel better about the Nietzschean notion of power—embodying it as a lifestyle? — praxis

Yes, I do. Why do you not? Respond specially to the distinction I made between conventional definitions of power and the alternative I laid out. Btw, it’s not a lifestyle , any more than the structure of temporality is a lifestyle. It’s an ontological ground.

Now even if we take a large city, we would have similar differences between the rich and poor places. — ssu

This isnt about the rich vs the poor. Someone can be poor but socially progressive , or rich and socially conservative. Traditional (far right) social values are not correlated directly with level of wealth. They are more closely related to level of education.But even here, we need to focus on a particular kind of education After all, some of the highest ranking leaders within the MAGA movement are ivy league-educated. The sort of education. or intellectual
understanding I have in mind relates to what I call ‘social i.q.’, a set of insights into the way that individuals reciprocally shape each other’s values and knowledge within discursive communities. Social
traditionalists embrace an older set of notions that conceive of personhood in terms of isolated, autonomous subjectivity (like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism). Being a billionaire doesn’t prevent one from having a traditionalist worldview like Trump. I have a number of wealthy friends who are MAGA supporters.

And do notice that especially in Europe in many countries the conservatives haven't gone with the populism similar to Trump. — ssu

Axios doesn’t seem to have noticed what you are noticing. They report:

The populist wave that formed in the wake of the 2015 migrant crisis has not crested. It's surging — and spreading — across Europe, cheered on by a U.S. government eager to see MAGA go global. For the first time in modern history, far-right parties are leading opinion polls in Europe's four largest economies ( The U.K, Germany, France and Italy)

In addition, in Austria in the 2024 legislative elections, the Freedom Party achieved its best-ever result, 28.8%, and is leading coalition talks. In Portugal, Chega became the main opposition party after winning 60 of 230 seats in May 2025, marking a major shift. Other countries with far-right parties in government, either leading or part of coalition, include Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden, where far-right Sweden Democrats prop up the minority government.

There are many parallels between MAGA and Europe’s far-right movements, even if they’re not identical in style or political system.

Some of of the strongest similarities include
populist nationalism. MAGA’s “America First” is paralleled by Europe’s “France for the French” (Le Pen), “Germany for the Germans” (AfD), and “Italy for the Italians” (Meloni’s party roots) . Both MAGA and the European far -right frame politics as protecting the “real people” against outsiders (immigrants, Brussels/EU, elites).

They also share an anti-Immigration focus. The framing of immigration as a civilizational threat is almost identical.
Both groups attack elites and institutions. MAGA attacks the “Deep State,” and the media as “enemies of the people.” while in Europe, AfD rails against “mainstream media” and the Berlin political class, while Orban in Hungary portrays Brussels and liberal elites as oppressors of the nation, and Le Pen denounces the French establishment and globalists.
Both embrace cultural conservatism. MAGA is anti-“woke,” and attacks gender and LGBTQ rights in favor of strong Christian identity politics In Europe, Poland’s PiS government pushed anti-LGBTQ laws, Hungary banned LGBTQ education content, and many far-right parties link national identity with traditional Christianity. Both frame culture wars as existential fights.

Both embrace an authoritarian style and election doubts. Trump allies and MAGA figures have actively supported European far-right leaders (e.g., Steve Bannon worked with Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán). Shared rhetoric often bounces across the Atlantic (immigration “invasions,” “globalist elites,” “law and order”).

Do notice that this has been an universal transition that has happened in all Western (and other) countries. Yet not all countries have suffered similar polarization. — ssu

I have claimed that there is a direct correlation between population density and political orientation in the current era. But by population density , I don’t simply mean how many people live in a country relative to its size. After all, a huge percentage of Australia is uninhabited. What I’m looking at is the density experienced by the average inhabitant of a country or region. One can calculate this by median pwd (population-weighted density). Doing so, one sees that the average person in countries like the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Belgium and Germany lives in a much denser environment than in many U.S. states (like Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc) . So to be fair in our comparisons, we shouldn’t compare the level of political polarization in Belgium or the Netherlands to the U.S. as a whole, we should compare them to states in the U.S. with comparable average lived density, like Massachusetts, Illinois or California. What we find by doing so is that such highly dense U.S. states are no more polarized than their European counterparts, because like those counterparts, a large percentage of their populations are relatively urban and therefore reject strong social conservativism.

It seems that Nietzschean values place power (self-overcoming) on a pedestal, perhaps slavishly — praxis

Would you feel better about the Nietzschean notion of power if you saw it as radically distinct from its conventional definitions? For instance, if we filter his concept of power through interpreters like Joseph Rouse, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, we get something like the following:

Rouse, channeling Foucualt, argues that connventional understandings of power usually come in two main strands. First there is power as possession or capacity: someone or some institution has power because they have resources, authority, or force at their disposal. This is the classical liberal or realist view: power is something one can hold, wield, or lose. The. there is power as domination. Especially in critical or sociological theories, power is often understood in terms of control, coercion, or subordination (e.g., Max Weber’s definition of power as the ability to impose one’s will despite resistance).

Rouse’s account of power, drawing heavily on Foucault, shifts away from both of these “substance-like” views. For Rouse, power is not a thing or resource one possesses. It’s not an object or capacity that sits in someone’s hands waiting to be used. Power is relational and productive. It emerges through practices, discourses, and networks of interaction. Power doesn’t just repress or constrain, it also constitutes possibilities for action, knowledge, and subjectivity. Power is inseparable from meaning and normativity. It is bound up with how practices make certain things intelligible or significant. It is “mid-stream,” always embedded in ongoing activities, rather than a force applied from outside.

Rouse rejects the idea that power is something imposed in a top-down, centralized, hierarchical fashion (“the state” or “the sovereign” commanding from above). Instead, he emphasizes that power circulates and operates from below. It is embedded in local practices, everyday interactions, institutional routines, and forms of knowledge. It is capillary, spreading through networks rather than radiating from a single source. It works through norms, practices, and discourses that people themselves enact and reproduce, not simply by external command. Hierarchies are effects, not origins, of power. Institutions like governments, professions, or sciences don’t so much “possess” power and trickle it down; rather, they are stabilized patterns of already circulating power relations.

Nietzsche attempts to ground this circulating, capillary relational nature of constitutive power in a principle
of differentiation. As Deleuze explains,

The relation of force to force is called "will:' That is why we must avoid at aIl costs the misinterpretations of the Nietzschean principle of the will to power. This principle doesn't mean (or at least doesn't primarily mean) that the will wants power or wishes to dominate. As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a "desire to dominate," we inevitably make it depend on established values, the only ones able to determine, in any given case or conflict, who must be "recognized" as the rnost powerful. We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of aIl of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized. The will to power, says Nietzsche, consists not in coveting or even in taking but in creating and giving. Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will (Dionysus himself). The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as weIl as their respective quality in a complex whole.

If philosophy’s puzzles “spring” from this desire for exactness, that makes its own expectation the creator of the issues it thinks it sees in the world and wants to solve. I don’t think we yet have a good sense of why it has this desire, but perhaps it helps to listen when he says “We are unable to circumscribe… concepts….” (p. 25), as if we wanted to, but cannot, draw a limit around them that is complete enough, covering or predicting all possible outcomes (and here “concept” is a practice, like identifying or following a rule — Antony Nickles

If we ask Wittgenstein where linguistic meaning comes from, he directs us to a focus on WHAT we do with it in the context of ongoing social practices. We must immerse ourselves in actual historical processes to gain clarity and avoid confusion concerning the use of language. But if we ask him where desire for exactness, certainty, generality, consistency and completeness come from, he seems to depart from his emphasis on historical embeddedness , and instead attributes this desire to some trans-historical ‘instinct’. Why the difference in description of the use of words vs the desire to use them in certain ways? This just speculation only part, but I’m inclined to link his departure from history with regard to desire to his own craving for ethical transcendence.

In the Investigations, “forms of life” are the background practices that make language intelligible. Witt insists they are not grounded in theory, but in “what we do.”
At first glance this sounds close to historicism or relativism (since forms of life can differ). But Wittgenstein doesn’t historicize them in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense (as contingent, power-saturated events in a genealogy).
He doesn’t valorize becoming.

In ethics, this restraint coexists with a longing for the absolute. From the Tractatus through the 1929 Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein consistently implies that ethical seriousness involves a transcendent demand, even if it cannot be stated in propositions. There remains a hope that what ethics gestures toward is not merely contingent, but somehow absolute and non-relative, even though it can never be said in language. Wittgenstein refuses to explain the ground of ethics or truth in terms of history, power, or metaphysics. Unlike the post-Nietzscheans, he seems haunted by transcendence. Ethics, for him, is not just a historical formation but a necessity of the human spirit.
Where Nietzsche embraces difference as the essence of truth, Wittgenstein says: ethics is what lies beyond the limits of language, a demand we cannot shake.This is why some readers (e.g. Cavell, Diamond) see Wittgenstein as still religious, in contrast to the radical immanence of Nietzsche or Deleuze.

Wittgenstein’s admiration for Kierkegaard testifies to this religious longing. Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk said this about him:
“Wittgenstein did not wish to see God or to find reasons for His existence. He thought that if he could overcome himself - if a day came when his whole nature 'bowed down in humble resignation in the dust' - then God would, as it were, come to him; he would then be saved.”

It is clear from remarks he wrote elsewhere, that he thought that if he could come to believe in God and the Resurrection - if he could even come to attach some meaning to the expression of those beliefs - then it would not be because he had found any evidence, but rather because he had been redeemed.”

If ethical desire can transcend historical contingency, then perhaps this is why for Witt other kinds of desires as well (desire for certainty, generality, completeness) are not simply ‘what we do’ in the historical sense of
contingent discursive practices, but confused expressions of a transcendent feeling.

But for the existentialists it doesn't imply this. They don't ignore the sorts of passages you quoted, but build on this idea of the self in flux to construct a particular sort of framework for "self-mastery" to live up to Nietzsche's admonition to: "Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself — Count Timothy von Icarus

The existentialists (Sartre, Kierkegaard) don’t build on Nietzsche’s radical idea of the self in flux, they miss the point of it by retaining certain traditional metaphysical presuppositions about subjectivity. While existentialists look like they take Nietzsche’s idea of selfhood-in-flux seriously, they actually smuggle in older metaphysical assumptions about the subject that Nietzsche was working to dismantle. For Nietzsche, there is no stable, enduring self beneath the flux of drives, affects, and perspectives. The “self” is really a multiplicity of competing forces (wills to power) that sometimes achieve a temporary organization. To “become who you are” is not to find or realize some essential self, but to actively shape and reconfigure these forces, sculpting from chaos. There is no deep subject that “has” experiences; instead, the “I” is a grammatical fiction that masks the play of forces.

Although Sartre denies a pre-given essence, he still posits a transcendental subjectivity, consciousness as “nothingness” that transcends facticity and projects meaning. The self is not fixed, but there is still an agent-subject doing the projecting. For Kierkegaard, the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, grounded in relation to God. There is still a metaphysical anchor, a responsible, singular subject that must confront despair, faith, and authenticity. In both cases, even though the self is described as evolving or free, there’s an underlying metaphysical subjectivity, a core “I” or relational structure that guarantees its unity.

Some of these things we pit against each other in fact belong together, and complement each other. But our leaders can’t and don’t want to show that — Fire Ologist

Our leaders? You’re telling me the fights over values and ways of life tearing families and neighbors apart is caused by ‘leaders’? The leaders are late to the party. These things start at the grass roots, not from on high. I recently discovered my childhood next door neighbor lives in a different universe from me, even though we were best friends as kids. He wasn't transformed by some leader, he always had those views, but it didn’t emerge until he began to notice how far his thinking was from many of the people around him, including me.

You can’t wish away real, entrenched differences in outlook and ways of life separating one community from another by blaming them on the nefarious influence of some powerful individual. That’s insulting to persons and communities who rely on forging their own value system as a compass for guiding their life and making sense of their world.

One may then ask, where did the polarization come from? I think one reason is that people are simply dissatisfied about the political establishment and thus many have eagerly taken on populism. And my argument is that the two political parties aren't doing anything to limit the polarization. On the contrary. — ssu

You’ve got it backwards. The polarization wasn't the result of the make-up of the political parties. It was due to the fact that one part of the country, the cities, moved more rapidly into a post ‘60’s economic, social and intellectual way of life than the slower changing rural areas. As a result, people needed to change what the political parties stood for in order to reflect the growing cultural divide. They have now done that. 60 years ago the republican party was socially moderate , fiscally conservative , supportive of the U.S. as the world’s policeman, and over-represented by wealthy, educated voters. It is now the populist party, is dominated by the poor, lesser educated and working class, is isolationist and socially conservative.

Not all is political, I agree. Universally there is this divide between the urban and the rural, but in the US it's especially nasty. The hostility especially against the poor is very telling, as if it's OK and not bigoted for white people to talk in a derogatory manner especially about poor whites. How hillbillies, crackers or white trash are talked about even publicly is quite astonishing. — ssu

The political divide is not a reflection of hostility against the poor. It’s a reflection of the hostility against traditional ways of thinking on the part of the educated urban elite. This urban elite supports progressive liberal economic policies to help the poor , including a higher minimum wage, government subsidized health care ( Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid), support for education. But rural poor whites overwhelmingly reject progressive economics in favor of small government , socially conservative populism. Many wealthy whites also support this right wing populism, because they share with the rural poor a traditionalist worldview. The best indicator of where one stands on the political divide is not wealth, it is population density. The more sparsely populated the region one lives in, the more likely one will be to support traditional political , religious and economic values, and the more likely one will be to vote for the Republican party.

And the last issue is American political discourse itself, which promotes and encourages toxicity and lashing out. The two-party system creates an environment where there is no reason to be diplomatic or try to reach out to the other side. In fact, it usually seems that the main argument that both sides give for voting for them is that the other side is so dangerous and will destroy everything good in the Republic. If politicians had to form coalition governments, the discourse wouldn't be so hostile. — ssu

It’s not the two-party system that promotes toxicity and lashing out, it’s the polarized cultural environment pitting urban against rural. For decades the two parties were quite cordial toward one another and there was much across-the-aisle compromise and consensus. Israel is just as polarized politically as the U.S. and it’s a multiple-party parliamentary system.

This is a particularly illuminating and helpful perspective. — Tom Storm

Some interpreters treat Nietzsche as an existentialist. You’ve probably read some of their work. They talk about him like he’s a self-help guru trying to get us in touch with ourselves so that we can actualize our highest potentials. Notice that this way of talking assumes there’s a subject sitting inside a body, and this subject continues to be itself as it decides what it wants and needs to fulfill its desires. Now compare this to the language Nietzsche uses in the following quotes, where he says there is no ‘egoism’ and no ‘individual’.

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”.

“That man is a multiplicity of forces which stand in an order of rank, so that there are those which command, but what commands, too, must provide for those which obey everything they need to preserve themselves, and is thus itself conditioned by their existence. All these living beings must be related in kind, otherwise they could not serve and obey one another like this: what serves must, in some sense, also be an obeyer, and in more delicate cases the roles must temporarily switch so that what otherwise commands must, this once, obey. The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable; the continual generation of cells, etc., produces a continual change in the number of these beings. And mere addition is no use at all. Our arithmetic is too crude for these relations, and is only an arithmetic of single elements.”

“Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! - Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.” “Supposing the world had at its disposal a single quantum of force, then it seems obvious that every shift in power at any point would affect the whole system - thus, alongside causality, one after the other, there would be dependency, one alongside and with the other.”

Anyhow, I think this is a point of significant tension for Nietzschean fiction and specifically for Nietzschean heroes. The triumph of the strong over the weak ("the weak should fear the strong") is, for many audiences at least, not appealing. Yet fiction generally can't attain to the same level of distance, abstraction, and ambiguity as Nietzsche's aphoristic and bombastic style. Any victory of the strong over the herd will necessarily be more concrete and visceral. Hence, there is a crossroads for authors where either the Nietzschean hero will fail to be truly Nietzschean or else risks becoming repugnant. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If what you’re really interested in focusing on in this OP is a psycho-sociopolitical analysis of the reception of Nietzsche’s work among specific demographic strata of contemporary culture, that’s fine, but Im not particularly interested in another discussion of fascism among the unwashed and their superficial readings of great philosophers. if you’re seriously interested in understanding the work in itself, let me know because then we can discuss what Nietzsche means by such concepts as egoism , individuality, power, the weak and the strong, and the Overman. My aim is not to secure the ‘right’ Nietzsche in order to rescue him from terrible misreadings. It is to avoid repeating the usual cliches about Nietzschean power, strength and egoism recycled from Marxist and Christian thought, so that another Nietzsche can be made to appear. This would not simply be a ‘kinder, gentler’ Nietzsche, as though we could use the same cliches and position him on the ‘right’ side of them. I dont know ether he is kind and gentle. Whether he is or not, I want to show to what extent this other Nietzsche has been obscured by the preconceptions imported from traditional philosophical thinking about the self, the community, power and ethics.

↪Joshs You remind me of the history forum where everyone thinks the object is to prove the OP and following statements wrong. That could often be a very unpleasant experience that could never become an interesting discussion. I think the quality of the people in a forum makes a big difference. — Athena

Find me any extended discussion on this forum without a point of view being argued , discussed and disagreed with. I dont think you’ll find one. Disagreement and questioning of a philosophical point of view does not in itself mean that proof of correctness is the goal. There are many other criteria on the basis of which to question a set of ideas, such as internal coherence, clarity, aesthetic quality, ethical value, pragmatic usefulness, etc.

I think starting a thread with an interesting AI and asking people to say what they think of what AI said, could be a lot of fun. I can not imagine what the problem would be. I just do not have the experience to know what can go wrong. — Athena

Let’s say I start a thread with a quote from Plato. My readers will take the quote itself as some inert substance waiting to be molded into the OP’s point of view. They will want see that the OP understands the quote, but more importantly they will want to see HOW the OP understands it, what they want to do with it, and how they will deal with reader critiques and disagreements. It is conceivable that the OP could instruct an A.I. to do all these things without the group knowing it. It is even conceivable that readers will learn from the ensuing discussion and may even find it as interesting as dealing with a real person. But most likely, if the creator of the OP is not tightly guiding the A.I. on the basis of a well thought-out direction of argument. , the result will appear superficial and not adequately responsive to participants’ concerns in the discussion.

I have argued for a fundamental parallel between Wittgenstein's hinges and Gödel's incompleteness results: both demonstrate that systematic thought requires ungrounded foundations. By examining how epistemic and mathematical systems share this structural feature, we gain insight into the nature of foundational certainties across domains of human understanding — Sam26

I have argued that this parallel is more metaphorical than substantive, because the two concepts operate in fundamentally different domains and address different kinds of problems. To claim a direct parallel between the mechanics of hinges and incompleteness is to make a category error. There is only a broad formal similarity between the two. Gödel saw his results not as a reason to abandon formalism but as a guide to discovering new, intuitive axioms from set theory that could extend our mathematical knowledge. He was a mathematical Platonist who believed we had access to mathematical truth beyond formal systems. For Wittgenstein, the problem of skepticism is dissolved, not solved. The response is to stop looking for a philosophical foundation and recognize the foundation in our ordinary practices.

I wanted to do a reading group on Ishay Landa's The Joy of the Knife: The Nietzschean Glorification of Crime. It is a chapter from his The Overman in The Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture. It covers a topic I have been mulling over for a while and it is also very accessible and deals with popular culture icons I think most will know (e.g., Hannibal Lector, everyone's favorite cannibal :grin: ). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wonderful. Another Critical Marxist misreading Nietzsche. If you’re going to stand a chance of doing justice to Nietzsche’s prose, it’s a good idea to get some fundamentals right. Landa tries to situate Nietzsche within a Marxist framework as an ideological apologist for a specific, "Dionysian" form of bourgeois crime. This is a reductive and moralizing interpretation which misses the point.

“The Joy of the Knife" claims that Nietzsche performs an ideological sleight of hand by glorifying a specific, immaterial, "spiritual" form of crime (the "joy of the knife") to metaphorically justify the real, material violence of capitalist competition and class hierarchy. The criminal becomes a symbol of rebellious individuality, but only to ultimately serve as a "guardian angel of private property" by directing rebellion away from material critique and towards a metaphysical struggle against "mass society."

This is a fundamental misreading. Nietzsche is the philosopher of **immanence**, not transcendence. The will to power is not a metaphysical entity "inside" us (a ghost in a machine); it is the genetic and differential principle of forces in the world itself. The body is not a vessel for a spirit; it is a complex, dynamic arrangement of forces.

The Nietzschean body is a "play of forces”. The "joy of the knife" is not an abstract idea but a capacity for affecting and being affected. It is the feeling of a force expanding and overcoming resistance. To interpret this as "idealism" is to completely miss Nietzsche's radical materialism of forces. Landa’s claim that Nietzsche ignores "material motivation" fails because it operates with a crude, economic notion of the "material." For Nietzsche, the drive and feeling of power is the primary material reality. Landa claims that Nietzsche's philosophy is a "recuperation for bourgeois purposes" and that his criminal ultimately justifies the existing social order by rebelling against "mass society" rather than property relations. He is a "guardian angel of private property."

But Nietzsche is not a conservative or an apologist; he is a radical genealogist. His project is not to justify any existing order but to show how all orders (including bourgeois morality and law) are founded on contingent, violent, and often ignoble beginnings. Genealogy is not about finding the origin but about tracing the descent and emergence of concepts. It is a history of the present designed to show that what we accept as true and necessary (our morals, our laws, our sense of justice) is historically constructed and shot through with power relations. Nietzsche doesn't defend bourgeois property; he asks “What violent history, what forgotten suffering, what will to power instituted this concept of "property" and made it seem sacred?
The goal is to denaturalize and destabilize the present order, not to affirm it. Nietzsche's "yes" is not a yes to
what is but a yes to what becomes, to what differs. The "individualism" Nietzsche champions is not the bourgeois individual (a product of the market and state power, but the "Overman" , an overcoming of the human, all-too-human type produced by modern society.

Landa links Nietzsche to Sade, arguing that his philosophy is essentially sadistic, advocating the infliction of pain for the pleasure of mastery. It uses the figure of Hannibal Lecter as an exemplar of this Nietzschean sadism. This is a moralistic and psychological reduction. Nietzsche's interest in hardness, suffering, and cruelty is ethical, not psychological. It is about the conditions for artistic and spiritual creation. The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression. It is the feeling of a force being equal to its concept. It is the feeling of the artist wielding the chisel, the philosopher wielding the concept, the warrior wielding the sword perfectly. To reduce this to a psycho-pathology of "bloodlust" is to completely miss its aesthetic and ontological dimension.

Landa also says Nietzsche’s individualism is merely a means to a collectivist, hierarchical end, thus betraying its supposedly liberatory potential. But Nietzsche's "individual" is not the liberal subject. It is a transindividual site of forces. The "Will to Power" is not what an individual *has*; the individual is what the will to power becomes in a specific configuration. The Overman is not a super-powered individual. The Overman names a process, a going-across, a transformation of the human into something else. It is about the creation of new possibilities, new ways of being, new values. It is not about the triumph of one individual over others but about the emergence of a new form of life that transcends the current human economy of ressentiment and bad conscience. His purpose is not to glorify any specific crime or social order but to provide the tools for a ruthless critique of all values, especially the moral ones we hold most dear. He doesn't offer a new system to believe in but a method for questioning,

Landa’s major error is to read Nietzsche as prescribing a content ("be a criminal who loves the knife"). Nietzsche’s rebellion is not against "mass society" on behalf of a bourgeois elite, but against the "herd instinct" within all of us, the instinct that prefers comfortable lies to dangerous truths, that prefers slave morality to the difficult task of creating new values. His war is not between social classes but between different types of forces, active and reactive, that cut across every individual and every social formation.

I don't use GPS while driving or LLMs for my TPF postings either. Call me a luddite ... I'm secure in my own cognitive abilities. — 180 Proof

Would you say that those cognitive abilities have benefited from exposure to the intellectual stimulation and challenge provided by the ideas others offer on forums like this one?
I dont know that I can so easily distinguish the benefits of conversation with participants here and the conversations I have with an A.I. which I then incorporate into my contributions on this site. The concepts it exposes me to are not invented by a machine. The machine culls and parses knowledge and opinion produced by an enormous community of actual human beings. Of course, my conversation with such a community has its limitations. The machine can lie and hallucinate in its parsings, so I need to know to request sources and quotes I can verify.

And since the machine doesn’t create its own point of view , I have to direct the conversation at every step, which keeps the challenge to my thinking at a more superficial level than is the case with a direct interchange with people. Still, I find the access it gives me to preliminary background information indispensable to the process of organizing my arguments, just as submitting a draft for peer review does. It doesnt make me lazy, or cause me to doubt my own cognitive abilities, any more than refreshing one’s acquaintance with a topic through background reading or conversation does. It sharpens those skills. Which is why I sympathize with on this issue. Most contributors to this site will use A.I. in spite of the rule, since it’s easy to cover one’s tracks. The rule is useful for reminding everyone that A.I. does lie, and more importantly, is not a substitute for presenting and arguing one’s own thesis.

But when he says our judgments (“A has a toothache”) have “always coincided” with our criteria for them (the “red patch”) it seems to open a can of (skeptical) worms, i.e., like it is a coincidence (that could disconnect at any moment). But I take it to be the sense of “coincide” that they “correspond in nature”; or, “are in accord” (Merriam-Webster) — Antony Nickles

But the specter of skepticism remains, because a referential relation is implied between judgement and criteria. And this implication is deliberate on Wittgenstein’s part. As he elaborates later, what grounds the meaning of a phrase, its use, is not determined by a comparison between judgment and criteria.

This is how I would put it. In the late 19th century Nietzsche came along and from a critique of such predecessors as Hegel and Schopenhauer produced a radical new vision for philosophy . 20 years later Husserl did something comparable, and Heidegger and Derrida pushed this thinking even further. Sartre read Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche but missed the point of their work. Instead, his existentialism remained confined to the period prior to Nietzsche , the Hegelian milieu of such figures as Kierkegaard and James. So yes, his writing offers its own unique vantage, but it’s a vantage which belongs to a metaphysical framework and era that Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger strove to overcome.

I'm not sure Sartre is a lightweight compared to Husserl, at least (and thereby Heidegger, whom I respect less).

Concerned differently? Mistaken about what his priors were saying? Sure.

Lightweight? Naw. — Moliere

It took me years to understand Husserl. His writing is extraordinarily dense with ideas. When I pick up Sartre’s Being and Nothingness after reading Husserl (or Heidegger’s Being and Time), it’s like going from Mozart to Salieri.

Who do you find more convincing, particularly in relation to solipsism, and why do you think Husserl went off his original track the way he did? — Baden

Some believe he ‘went off track’, and that’s usually because they prefer a realist notion of essences, and a world-directed empiricism. One of my favorite interpreters of Husserl is Derrida, and in his major works on Husserl he always emphasizes the profound continuity over the course of Husserl’s career. It seems when people make the claim you’re making they usually have in mind his turn toward transcendental subjectivity, as though that werent already hinted at in his earlier writings, and as if it represented a retreat from an original world-centered empiricism into a solipsistic Cartesianism via Kantian Idealism. Misreadings of Husserl along these lines abound, and Sartre is one of the most egregious examples of it, according to Derrida:

It is true that in my work Sartre was very important, in the beginning. When I was a student, he was already there, and it's by reading Sartre that, in a certain way, I began to get into the field of philosophy and literature. For this reason, it would be absurd for me to try to absolutely distance myself from Sartre. That being said, quite quickly I thought it clear that Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger. And so since then I have never ceased, in a certain way, to see better into all of that. [Lights up a cigar.]

FT: But do you mean that from the point of view of the legitimacy of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought, for instance, or of a critique of the reading offered by Sartre of Husserl or Heidegger?

JD: Yes, I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader. And from that point of view, it turns out that the work done by him in France was very ambiguous. I am not saying that it was simply negative, but he and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. This is not to say that it was simply a question of finding our way back into Husserlian and Heideggerian orthodoxy against Sartre. Not at all. But I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. The point is not here to issue some condemnation; since that's how it happened, it couldn't have happened otherwise, in those conditions and in a certain number of historical conditions.

But it is a fact that Sartre's thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted. And so, from that point of view, we have to deal with a huge sedimentation of thought, a huge philosophical sediment that covered the French scene for quite a few years after the war and that, I think, has marked everyone from that generation. I would say that there was a lot of dissimulation, and subsequently it has been necessary to undo this sedimentation in order to find again what was dissimulated by it, in a way.

Sartre no doubt, well, guided me, as he did so many others at the time. Reading him, I discovered Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge-whom I now think one could have read otherwise. But finally, Same was himself the "unsurpassable horizon". Things changed when, thanks to him but especially against him, I read Husserl, , Heidegger, Blanchot, and others. One would have to devote several dozen books to this question: What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?

Sartre was a philosophical lightweight compared to Husserl, which is why Heidegger called his work ‘dreck’ ,and why Merleau-Ponty considered his work a continuation of Husserl’s project and distanced himself from Sartre’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is explicitly a development of Husserl’s later work, emphasizing embodiment, perception, and the lifeworld.

Regarding your question about solipsism, I thinks Sartre’s notion of subjective freedom is more solipsistic and voluntaritistic than Husserl’s. What is needed is an account of subject-world interaction which doesn’t oppose subjective will to external circumstances and then proceed to privilege one side of the binary over the other. There is neither outside nor inside prior to interaction. We always understand ourselves though participation in normative discursive communities, but these are partially shared circumstances, subtended by perspectival positionings do not allow for their being swallowed up and dissolved into a flat social totality. We mirror ourselves in others as reciprocal interaffecting, but it is an interaffecting that doesn’t remove the utter particularity of individual vantage.

It might also help to shed light on this if I clarify Sartre’s concept of consciousness that I’m making use of here, especially non-positional awareness. So, from a phenomenological angle, we can say consciousness is always consciousness of something, and from this we get intentionality. I look at the lamp in front of me and that is the object of my consciousness. But, of course, that is not the whole story, for I am not only aware of the lamp. It doesn’t fill my awareness. I do not become the object. For even to have an object, we must have a subject and implicit to non-positional awareness is that separation—what is going on is an observation that requires an observer, i.e. me. So, this is a moment to moment background knowledge and is pre-reflective. It is not me saying to myself after looking at the lamp, “I looked at the lamp”, it is included in, immanent in, the experience of looking at the lamp — Baden

I wonder how your argument would change if we substituted Husserlian for Sartrean phenomenonology. In this case there is no subject or object outside of the intentional acts by which the subject engages with the world. The subject only exists in its acts, and in these acts it doesn’t simply observe objects, it constitutes or enacts them. The subjective pole of the subject-object relation supplies an anticipative thrust (protension) drawn from its past (retentional) history. My awareness of the lamp is not just a passive gaze but an active constituting act. The ‘physicality’ of the lamp is not something intrinsic to it as a material element of the natural world. It is a product of objectivizing idealizations we perform. Similarly the otherness of the other is an otherness which is constituted within my own subjectivty on the basis of consonance’s which allow me to recognize the other as a person. Thus, no matter. how alienated my experience of myself or another, this alienation emerges from within an overarching comportment of familiarity and recognizability.

Gadamer’s phronesis is not at all ad hoc, and I’m pretty sure Josh wouldn’t recommend that.

Amusingly, this is a case of not having rules for knowing when and how to apply rules! And as we know, the lack of “rules for rules” doesn’t make everything ad hoc and chaotic. — J

:100: :up:

I cannot accept that there are no binaries, and everything is a formless soup of amorphousness.

I cannot accept that Tyrannosaurus rex did not have an existence outside the human mind, a real, living and breathing existence outside of our concept of it.

I cannot accept that there is no binary between the mind and a mind-independent world, even if I accept that discovering it is philosophically difficult. — RussellA

The issue isn’t whether the dinosaur existed before humans. It’s that the meaning of ‘T. rex’, it’s place in our world, is a product of our engagement now. That’s the intertwining I’m pointing to. Empirical knowledge is not a passive representing of what’s out there. Discovering the world always also involves inventing new ways of doing things with it. As Evan Thompson wrote:

I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favour of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making. To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

However, the meta-level constraints that make any justificatory practice possible , publicity of criteria, other minds, an external world, and sufficient stability of meaning to teach/correct, are not optional add-ons. They’re what Wittgenstein would call hinges: not evidences, but conditions of sense for giving and asking for reasons. — Sam26

I think what you’re looking for is not some meta-level hinge, but the interwoven threads (family resemblance) that run though all hinges, not as a general overarching category (Wittgenstein never placed the general above the particular) but as that which emerges always in its own particular and unique way in actual use. Put differently, it seems to me what you’re talking about here is not itself a hinge, a belief, whether certain or not, but the condition of possibility for any hinge, any belief. For instance, the structure of temporality is a pre-condition for hinge beliefs, but we dont have to believe in time in order for it to make hinges possible.

I reject two further moves in your reply:

1) that “securing the validity of a belief is not the reference to facts/rules/criteria,” and

2) that rule-following requires a “creative, intuitive” modification of norms to count as knowledge.

On my account, facts still bite, and public criteria remain the arbiters of epistemic “I know.” There is skilled judgment in application, yes, but it’s judgment inside guardrails, not free-form creativity. That is a core difference. — Sam26

The question is whether justification is fundamentally a matter of rule-following within stable criteria, or of creative, situated responsiveness. You interpret “creative, intuitive” norm-use as “free-form ad hoc improvisation” unless tightly constrained. But I mean something more like Gadamer’s phronesis — a context-sensitive application of rules that inevitably alters their force.

As Joseph Rouse interprets Wittgenstein:

We can’t appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances,

You emphasize that “facts still bite” and “truth as thin correspondence.” This is consistent with a realist bent, but I don’t see Wittgenstein as a realist. Wittgenstein sees “fact” not as a metaphysical anchor but as a role within a language-game. This is how “facts” remain practice-constituted and reality-constrained.

When a qualitative pattern of practice changes (say, pre- to post-Copernican astronomy; pre- to post-germ theory), some cultural–historical hinges and method-norms shift. My layered-hinges view predicts that: bedrock hinges (external world, other minds, stability of meaning) remain; practice-level norms adjust; what counts as a good reason evolves publicly, not privately. — Sam26

Wittgenstein stresses that criteria gain their force through use, not through a fixed “guardrail” independent of practice. Are your guardrails themselves subject to evolution within forms of life, or do they function as transhistorical constraints? What does it mean to assert that some meta-level bedrock hinge remains? Why should it? Your inclusion of the concept of other minds and the external world as transhistorical reminds me that these are the very concepts that Husserl bracketed as part of his method of phenomenologically reducing presuppositions. I think Wittgenstein would be sympathetic to Husserl’s aim here. All hinges are ultimately contingent, because they are formed within ongoing historical processes of discursive interaction.

Non-linguistic foundational beliefs are certainties carried in stable patterns of action, pre- or non-verbal, but still beliefs in my sense, acquired and held within a form of life. For example, our practiced confidence in a stable, manipulable environment, the way ordinary engagement presupposes a world with enduring objects and reliable regularities. We do not typically state these as propositions; they are expressed in what we unhesitatingly do. — Sam26

I would emphasize the ‘how’ more than the ’what’ in forms of life. Not just that the world has stable, reliable patterns. After all, all forms of life open up stable, patterned ways of engaging with the world. What is intrinsic to any particular form of life is how it opens up such a stable comportment. What is the qualitative nature of the way these patterns are organized, and when a qualitative pattern is transformed as one form of life becomes another, how does this change the way the world appears? It also seems to me that what is most significant about justified true beliefs for Wittgenstein is that securing the validity of a belief is not the reference
to a pre-existing fact, rule, picture, criterion or norm.
In his discussion of rule-following , Wittgenstein indicates that this is not enough for knowing what is true. Justification requires a creative, inituitive use of criteria, norms and facts that modifies them for the contingencies of actual situations.

Does this world exist within the mind or external to the mind? Is our world the construction of our mind. As Schopenhauer wrote "The world is my representation". As Abai Qunanbaiuly wrote “A person’s mind is the mirror of the world. If the mirror is clouded, the world appears distorted.” Wittgenstein avoided such a problem by never giving his opinion where his "world" exists. A strategic decision that does not seem to have affected his reputation — RussellA

Is it that he never gave his opinion, or that his answer is implicit in his later work, but has been missed by many because they are still looking for answers within the old binary:either mind or world, either inside or outside? Merleau-Ponty directs us to this way beyond the inside-outside trap:

” “[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” (Phenomenology of Perception)

Ontological idealism of being is the view that being is fundamentally of the mind, where reality does not consist of mind-independent particles or forces, but is grounded in consciousness and reason.
Husserl's phenomenology is certainly that of ontological idealism, where any belief in the world's independent existence is put aside to focus on human experiences.

Heidegger's Dasein is also about ontological Idealism. It is about "being-in-the-world", in that we are not detached observers of the world but embedded in our experiences — RussellA

Right, but these are peculiar forms of Idealism. Heidegger’s Idealism puts into question the priority of mind, reason and consciousness, associating all of these with the Cartesian subject, which is still operative in Kant and Hegel. Dasein is more radically in the world than any notion of a conscious subjectivity perceiving objects can convey.

Your critique of “wokeism” focuses on certain highly visible activist actions and social media flashpoints, whereas I’m more interested in the underlying intellectual currents that can, at least in principle, inform fairer treatment of others, without inevitably leading to the authoritarian excesses you’re concerned about.

It is the intellectual currents that inform their treatment of others, and that treatment manifests into the highly visible actions and social media flashpoints we’ve seen too many times, and the countless ones we haven’t seen.

As I see it the necessary mental segregation required to understand and believe these currents begets actual segregation, such as race or sexuality-based “affinity graduations”, or diversity hiring. — NOS4A2

To the right of these intellectual currents (dominated by Critical Theory and post-colonialism) are political
models showing little or no influence of Hegel and Marx (such as classical liberalism) To the left of the intellectual currents shaping wokism are postmodern social constructionist models, also drawing from Hegel and Marx but moving farther beyond them than wokism does. I support such perspectives, and am arguing that the intellectual ideas which both wokism and postmodern approaches draw from need to be assimilated in order to get to a politics beyond the wokist practices which you reject. Beyond means going forward, keeping the positive ideas which wokism draws from, rather than simply discarding this philosophical heritage and returning to older political thinking. Going forward means embracing thinking along the following lines:

By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.

In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Ken Gergen, Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

↪Joshs It just occurred to me spontaneously - don't want to make too much of it. — Wayfarer

A lot depends on what we want to make of the concept of the unconscious. For Husserl there is no unconscious, only the implicit. For Heidegger there isn’t even consciousness.( Maybe he was anticipating Trump)

Questions about the underlying vision of wokeism:

1. Is everything about politics? Or economics? Or race? Is anything in the public sphere simply not about these things, and if so, are those things good or bad for the community? Or should we focus on power structures? — Fire Ologist

Your critique of “wokeism” focuses on certain highly visible activist actions and social media flashpoints, whereas I’m more interested in the underlying intellectual currents that can, at least in principle, inform fairer treatment of others, without inevitably leading to the authoritarian excesses you’re concerned about.

If we zoom out from the noise, there are some core philosophical frameworks that have shaped what people call “woke” thinking, such as Implicit bias, the idea that people’s perceptions and decisions can be unconsciously shaped by stereotypes, even when they consciously reject prejudice. The value here isn’t in “shutting people down” but in cultivating awareness so we can interact more fairly.

Intersectionality is another woke concept. It is a way of understanding that people’s experiences aren’t shaped by just one identity category (race, gender, class, etc.) but by overlapping ones. It’s not a mandate to divide everyone into rigid groups, but a reminder that context matters in how people experience opportunities or barriers.

Then there’s critical race theory, which at its most basic is a scholarly framework for looking at how laws and institutions have embedded racial disparities over time, not as an accusation against individuals, but as a way to ask, “If these patterns exist, what’s sustaining them?” Discussed philosophically, these aren’t inherently about censorship, purity tests, or stripping away free speech. They’re tools for noticing complexity in human relations, and in that sense, they could enrich the very kind of civil discourse you value, if applied with humility rather than dogma.

So, I’d argue it’s possible to explore these ideas, even agree with parts of them, without signing on to every activist tactic or extreme proposal you’ve seen in the headlines. We can be critical of bad implementations without dismissing the frameworks entirely, and in doing so, maybe get closer to that “clear vision” you’re asking about.

Why does this remind me of the Libet experiments? :chin: — Wayfarer

Never thought of that connection. Course, one difference from Libet is that for Heidegger we know and feel this transcendence toward the world as it is happening via the authentic mood of anxiety. It is the feeling of being transposed into the ‘nothing’, that pregnant anticipation of a world coming to be in its mysterious potentiality.

For the woke, there is no debate or winning the argument - just shutting someone down who won’t agree. That’s what wokists don’t understand - they are oppressive, not liberating. They are self-contradictory, not a clear new vision. They want to defund the police, and are outraged when the police don’t serve them in time of need — Fire Ologist

Kind of hard to decide whether there’s a clear new vision floating around in the background when you haven’t said a word about underlying philosophical visions, just the stunts some activists who have gotten the attention of the media have pulled.

if such an alien were to arrive and tell us, we would likely have no difficulty in understanding it.
The secrets of existence may be very simple, like a biology lesson. We are just in the unfortunate position of being blind to this truth.
There may be sufficient information, or clues in the world we find ourselves in to work it out. That it just requires some clever, or intuitive thinking to work it out. — Punshhh

We are confronted by aliens all the time: alien cultures, politics, ethics and philosophy. We have enormous difficulty in understanding these aliens, and they are right in our midst. They are our neighbors. Thomas Kuhn said that new scientific paradigms become accepted not because everyone is made to understand the new science, but because the old generation dies off.

Accordingly, I argued that ontology was, properly speaking, concerned with the nature of being (literally, 'I am-ness') rather than of 'what exists'. This distinction I held to be an example of what I considered fundamental to the proper distinction of 'being' from 'existence', which is hardly recognised by modern philosophers. I was told that my definition was 'eccentric' and completely mistaken. Finally, I was sent a link to a paper I mentioned to you before, 'The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Problem of Being' , Charles Kahn, whom I was told was an authority on the subject. But I learned that rather than challenging my claim, this paper actually supported it, through passages such as:

[Parmenides] initial thesis, that the path of truth, conviction, and knowledge is the path of "what is" or "that it is" (hos esti) can then be understood as a claim that knowledge, true belief, and true statements, are all inseperably linked to "what is so" - - not merely to what exists, but what is the case (emphasis in original).

[The] intrinsically stable and lasting character of Being in Greek - - which makes it so appropriate as an object of knowing and the correlative of truth - - distinguishes it in a radical way from our modern notion of existence.
— Charles H. Kahn
--

Finally, this conceptual divergence was definitively cemented in early Christian theology
— Astorre

hence Heidegger's critique of 'onto-theology', the 'objectification' of the being. While the basic fact of the matter is that Being is an act, not a thing. (Something that is hardly news to Buddhists.) — Wayfarer

For Heidegger, Dasein’s Being is its existence, but existence understood as the transcendence of a self , an exiting from itself in being ahead of itself in already being in the world. The ‘I am’ , the self, does not pre-exist its relation to the world, but only exists in coming back to itself from the world. The direction of this ‘act’, occurrence, happening, is from future to present, from world to self, rather than the other way around. In the happening of Being, what is the case is secondary to how it is the case, which is in turn secondary to why it is the case. The happening of Being always begins again and again from this wonder.