The truth of the deep leftward bias of all legacy and main stream media (ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Wash. Post, CNN, all things Hollywood) is the fulcrum behind Trump’s continued success and appeal - since 2016.

Libs refuse to see it. It’s a total blind spot. It’s why dems will continue losing outside of the areas where Al of their sheep flock — Fire Ologist

Why are liberal communities composed of sheep but your community isn’t? Should we judge these communities by who is ‘winning’ and who is ‘losing’ , as if either side is in a position to determine the objective correctness of the other’s social , political, ethical and spiritual views? Perhaps we need instead to respect the qualitatively different ways of life each chooses to organize themselves on the basis of.
We are not one country now, we are different cultures moving further and further apart. Urban America is a country within a country and all efforts now should be focused on creating as much separation between those communities as possible rather than urban America trying to appeal to conservative society. Trump’s success isn’t due to urban America getting anything ‘wrong’, any more than Erdogan’s or Orban’s or Le Pen’s or Nigel Farage’s success is due to urbanites in those countries making some mistake of political calculation.

We simply happen to be living though an era in which the cities around the world have rapidly transformed their way of life ( including Hollywood, the urban media hubs, and academic centers) while the more traditional cultures surrounding them have not had time to catch up. It’s not that they ‘have’ to catch up, or even that they have to see themselves as needing to change in any way. The point is that I thrive in my urban community and support its values , but would wither away in a conservative environment, and will do my upmost to contribute to widening the intellectual gulf between what my community stands for and what MAGA stands for. And I urge MAGA supporters and social conservatives in general to do everything they can to further the direction they believe they need to go in. Obviously this will go most smoothly if both sides eventually give up the idea that one side must be ‘ winning’ and the other ‘losing’.

I want to enjoy my community and also look forward to travelling to the hinterlands from time to time so I can be a tourist taking in their exotic ways, like visiting an Amish village.

I agree that when it comes to claims of knowledge, justification is required. On the other hand I know many things with certainty that require no justification simply because they are directly known―in these cases justification just doesn't enter the picture.
— Janus

And this resembles the "A or ~A" case, where it's difficult to see it in terms of justifications. Still, I think the conclusion we ought to draw from this is that we're not quite sure what a justification is. What sorts of reasons may play a part in justification? (We noted earlier that a "good justification" is very unclear, in many cases.) If you ask me for my justification in believing "I am having thought X right now" and I reply, "I am directly observing this occurrence as we speak," have I offered a justification? Perhaps so; that's one way of understanding what reasons count as justification, though I'd probably also need to say something about the previous reliability of my direct observations. Or we might conclude that "directly observing" and "having" are two ways of saying the same thing, so no actual reason has been offered. Then, if "I am having thought X" needs a justification, we'd have to look elsewhere. — J

In his final piece of writing, On Certainty, Wittgenstein describes how G.E. Moore asserts something quite close to what Janus claims, that we can know things with certainty that require no justification simply because they are directly known―in these cases justification just doesn't enter the picture. Moore uses as an example holding up one’s hand and stating ‘here is my hand’. He believes one can be certain of this without a need for justification. But Wittgenstein disagrees with Moore’s depiction of this form of certainty as a kind of empirical knowledge. He asserts instead that it is a matter of our enmeshment in a “form of life”, a hinge on the basis of which to organize facts rather than the ascertainment of those empirical facts by themselves.

If the idea is that self-refutation and contradiction are avoided because what is meant by terms like: truth, correctness, constraints, etc. is always changing, and so always equivocal, then it doesn't seem that it can be saying anything at all. Every point in the discourse would be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re trying to run all these concepts through a propositional logic wringer, which, as I said before, presupposes that the terms we are comparing do not alter their sense in the very act of comparison. Without its dependence on the fixity of its terms, logic can’t produce its laws, and you’re clinging to these laws as the ground for your attempt to refute certain philosophical approaches as self-contradictory. If you start from a ground of identiy and then explain difference as emerging from or dependent on identity, then you will always be able to use propositional logic to ‘refute’ philosophies which claim to ground identity in difference.

They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage.
— Joshs

In virtue of what is this "better?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forcing intricately and intimately flowing experience into the artificial straitjacket of reified conceptual schemes takes us out of our intimate engagement with others. This is because the fact that experience is constantly on the move doesn’t mean that we cannot approach it in terms of familiar, recognizable patterns and regularities. But the patterns must be permeable , open to variation without crumbling. The unethical is closely tied to treating morality in terms of laws, essences, facts or real foundations that flatten and thus do violence to the contextually unfolding way that situations present us with ethical issues. The more fluid, open and permeable to change our thinking is, the more we do justice to the real.

it seems there was a time during which life did not exist, just as there was a time during which we each individually did not exist. During that time period, it seems that the Earth did exist. Is it not possible for the Earth to have existed or to have a determinant shape, etc. prior to the advent of life and its schemas? No doubt, the empiricist-analytic view of a "view from nowhere" is flawed, but it doesn't seem to me to follow that, if that view is flawed, then truth and intelligibility are dependent upon man and his practices (or life and its practices).

It does not follow, for instance, that because the view from nowhere is flawed, and because one needs language to say "the Earth was round before life existed on it," and a mind to know this, that Earth could have no shape prior to the "schemas" etc. that allow for this to be known by — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here we can make use of the work of agential realists like Joseph Rouse and Karen Barad, as well as Deleuze. So far I have been talking about the way the world appears to us as a result of how we interact with it, and that the contingently changing nature of this interaction precludes notions of the way things really are independent of our participation in the world ( even the notion of subject -independence is itself dependent on perspective). They argue that , indepdenent of human involvement, things in the world don’t pre-exist their interactions. Just as human culture achieves a relative normative stability without needing to rely on notions of fixedly real things, so the world outside our involvement with it interacts with itself via configurative patterns which produce a relative stability for periods of time which gives it characteristics which we are tempered to interpret in abstractively fixed ways.

Intelligibility is arguably a prerequisite for understanding, not a product of understanding. But even if intelligibility is a product of understanding and will (pragmatic striving), I can think of no reason to think that it is a product of our act of understanding and willing (either individually or collectively) nor a product of the understanding and willing of life on Earth more generally.

A sort of Euthyphro dilemma seems to hold here. Is what is willed (pragmatically striven for) willed because it is good, or is it good because it is what is willed? If it's the former, then what is striven for must already be intelligible as desirable (good) prior to the act of willing. If it's the latter, we have a sort of inchoate voluntarism where the direction of the will (the pragmatic drive) is ultimately arbitrary in that it is grounded in no prior intelligibility, and is itself contingent. A pragmatism that is not oriented towards some end is not so much pragmatism, as a sort of sheer willing that generates its own end. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The ‘will’ doesn’t begin inside and then point outward toward a world; it is neither inside nor outside but in-between the two. We find ourselves willing in that we find ourselves moved, affected, motivated by the way things appear to us. This isn’t a stimulus-response model. We anticipate forward into new experience based on previous experience, and this anticipatory stance sets up constraints on how things emerge as what they are for us. But what emerges as the things we encounter always involves a dimension of surprise and novelty alongside recognizability.
The things we encounter strike us as funny, sad, boring, undesirable. Our own thoughts come to us in this same way. We don’t will to think what we think, we find ourselves already thrown into the thoughts. To want something is to sap we oneself wanting it. The desire arrives to one from an ourside, not from an inside.

So where do good and bad, better and worse come in here? We find ourselves desiring and striving, which simply means that we find ourselves ‘aiming. toward’ the fulfillment of what was anticipated. Emotional cries are crises of meaning and relevance. To anticipate into the next moment and be rewarded with an experience which is unfamiliar and incoherent is a kind of loss of self, and we call this loss of self , this being plunged into the emotional darkness of chaos and confusion, the ‘bad’. We don’t choose the good over the bad so much as find ourselves in situations of relative intelligiblity or incoherence and label the finding after the fact as what we ‘willed’.

Even if beliefs shift, practices that fail to work or coordinate with the world will disappear, while useful practices will persist.
— Tom Storm

What "fails to work" and what is "useful" is defined in terms of current beliefs, desires, and opinions, no? So, if "not anything goes" because only "useful" practices survive, but "useful practices" are just whatever practices just so happen to be affirmed as useful, I am not sure what sort of limit this is supposed to generate. What is (truly) "useful" is itself a function of current beliefs, right?

Not only does this undermine the ability for "usefulness" to function as a sort of constraint on truth, I think it clashes with our intuitions. It seems possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful. But for it to be possible for everyone to be wrong about what is useful at some time, it cannot be the case that the truth about what is useful is posterior (dependent upon) whatever current practice and belief affirms as useful. There has to be a distinction between reality and appearances/beliefs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your point is relevant to certain readings of pragmatism, wherein ‘usefulness’ is measured in terms of conformity between a belief and ‘ how things are’. But this is not how ‘use’ functions for writers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. They agree with you that we can only know whether a way of thinking is useful, does what we want it to, satisfies our goals, allows for clarity of understanding, corresponds to how things are, because we already bring to the situation a pre-understanding providing the criteria of usefulness. Their interest is in investigating where this pre-understanding comes from and how it changes.

That is, whether things turn out the way we plan, the world is always useful in that both our successes and failures, our validations and invalidations take place against the backdrop of a world which is fundamentally intelligible and familiar to us. They argue that this pre-understanding is not itself a belief that we measure against the way things are. Rather, it is already the way things are. That is to say, it is the overarching totality of relevance within which things can appear to us as correct or incorrect on the basis of particular criteria. It is not a question of a conformity between this overarching schema and some reality outside of it. The schema directly expresses a real world in a way that is as real as it gets, via patterns of pragmatic use.

A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity.
— Joshs

Yet this is itself a metaphysical position about the nature of intelligibility. If it is affirmed over competing understandings of intelligibility without argument, obviously that would be a sort of question begging. But to merely affirm it "alongside" other understandings without argument would still essentially do the same thing. Just because the position allows contrary positions to be "equally correct" doesn't mean it isn't contradicting them, for the opposing positions might themselves deny that both understandings are "equally correct" (because they deny this understanding of the grounding of intelligibility). Even the Protagorean relativist who asserts that "whatever anyone believes is true (for that person)" ends up making a claim that has implications for truth tout court.

Plus, it would seem to me that this particular metaphysical position should want to assert itself as "more correct" than others. Otherwise, wouldn't it fall victim to the criticism in the Theaetetus that, if it is impossible to be wrong, the sophist (as a profession, not a derogatory term) is the most useless sort of person, since teaching never improves our grasp of the truth — Count Timothy von Icarus

A human, a dog, a snake and a fish all inhabit their own behavioral niches. What if one thinks of these as akin to metaphysical positions? Leaving aside the evolutionary issues of long-term survival of lineages, does it make sense to say that the behavior niche the dog enacts , and the way its world is perceptually salient to it, is more correct than that of the fish? Each has their own functional norms of correctness (the behavioral criteria for the satisfaction of needs), so each species’ norms of correctness are equally adequate expressions of their mode of functioning. And what about the human? We set up cultural niches including sciences and technologies, and political and philosophical organizations. What would it mean to say that these knowledge niches are more correct than that of other species?

We know that our ability to represent stretches of time far into the past and future allows us to use language concepts in ways that other species can’t, but in what way is this better than what animals can do? In what way does this make us ‘higher’ animals? We could claim that we are capable of a complexity of social organization unavailable to other species, but what makes that better in a biological sense? Or we could argue that metaphysical positions can be ordered on the basis of complexity. We could add that a historical trajectory results in a kind of progress in social stability due to improvements in anticipatory understanding or some such. But making this claim would not require that we deem earlier stages of cultural evolution and their accompanying metaphysics as less ‘correct’, merely less advanced in the complexity of the niches they produce, but heading in the right direction. Key to claiming the superiority for one mode of thinking over others is that it include within itself the other modes of thinking in a kind of dialectical totalization ala Hegel

Such an assumption is problematic for writers like Deleuze, Foucault , Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that whatever criteria of progress we use, whether complexity, stability-survival, rationality, moral goodness or conformity to the way things are, such criteria are subject to continual changes in meaning. And yet one can discern an underlying criterion of progress for these writers that appears to maintain its stability of meaning throughout cultural shifts. They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage. Does this mean they consider their philosophies to be better than those of previous eras based on the criterion of accelerative self-transformation?

In a certain sense yes, but it is not as though they would then claim that the Medieval scholastic period was ‘better’ than the Greek era, the Enlightenment was better than the Scholastic period , the Modern period was even better than the Enlightenment, and postmodernism is better than all previous ways of thinking. Instead, they would argue that each metaphysical era exposes the limitations of what came before it, limitations that could only become apparent within a changed perspective. But the limitations attached to each era are unique to those periods. The ethical task of the postmodernists is defined by their relation to the limitations they expose in the thinking of their time. Every metaphysic holds within itself it’s own dangers, including postmodernism. Foucault wrote:

I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.

But most metaphysics do not set any boundaries for themselves. They speak to being qua being. So if they are all equally correct in their own domain (which is "everything") how is this not the affirmation of contradiction? More to the point maybe, if everything is "correct in its own context," how does this avoid pointing towards "anything goes?" And if some of these theories are right (their claims are affirmed) then the post-modern metaphysics of language and difference is wrong.

But this gets to point 3. "Truth" and "knowledge" seem to be being used equivocally here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity. A metaphysics speaks to being qua being via a stance on what it means to be. All stances are bounded. Metaphysical stances are ‘equally’ correct only in being differently correct. That is, the criteria and intelligibility of correctness changes from one metaphysical stance to the next. But we can’t choose to inhabit all stances at once , or observe them all from a sideways on or god’s eye perspective from nowhere.

Metaphysical stances don’t simply contradict each other. They are connected to each other by genealogical historical relations. New stances emerge
from older ones contingently , neither logically nor arbitrarily.

We ourselves inhabit a particular stance, from whose vantage we interpret history. This gives us skin in the game. But our perspective within that stance isn’t static, it is temporally extended. This means that "what is at stake" for us refers back to ongoing practices while remaining open to reinterpretation through future performances. The meaning of the stance we all participate in within a community is constantly extended, questioned and reinterpreted by each of us as we use it. So the existence of the partially shared social stance provides constraints on what matters to us and how it matters, what things mean and how they show up for us as intelligible, and prevents an ‘anything goes’ relativism, but the very use of the stance extends and redefines its basis.

If this is an equivocal use of truth and knowledge, then it also prevents either of these terms from being rooted in an essence.

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes."

2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Poststructuralists, hermeneuticists, the later Wittgenstein and phenomenologists all recognize that there are certain assumptions in play when we lay out a truth-propositional statement. A central assumption is that the terms don’t change their sense as we attempt to build a chain of relations. When we add a predicate to a subject (A=A), we assume the sense of the first A doesnt change in the process of having it refer to the second A. The coherence of logical refutation depends on the continued self -identity of the elements of a proposition as we construct a whole out of the parts.

When you attempt to translate the idea that postmodern thinking “doesn't allow that "anything goes” because “constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop” into a truth propositional statement, you miss the essential point that the starting point for this assertion is not a view from nowhere, but the view from whoever is speaking , and the here and now of when they are speaking, what they are speaking about and how what they are speaking about shows up for them. The constraints are always discovered anew , with a new sense, in the actual immediate context of speech and thought. One doesn’t convey this in-context thinking as a set of self-identically fixed terms that are then glued together, and then recycled as a refied proof to be indefinitely referred back to as an established empirical truth.

The ‘proof’ of contextual constraints must be enacted over and over again in different contexts, each time producing a new sense of what it means to be a constraint and a truth. It may be hard to see how this amounts to anything more than ‘making stuff up’ while ignoring the real world, and it may be equally hard to see how any sort of stable understanding can be achieved such that scientific-technological and ethico-political progress is possible. But seeing movement and transformation of sense within the fixed terms of logic doesn’t keep them from doing what they are designed to do and show. Rather, it enriches our understanding of what we are doing when we create logical and empirical identities, categories and truths, and opens up paths of intelligibility unavailable otherwise.

It's simply affirming post-modern hermeneutics above all competitors as a sort of default, i.e., absolutizing it, and going from there. It seems to me that this is often done with phenomenology as well. A phenomenology that supports a metaphysics of sheer giveness and difference is affirmed, and alternative phenomenology (e g., Plotinus, the Scholastics from whence modern phenomenology gets its terminology, Hegel, and contemporary Catholic phenomenologists, etc.) are dismissed. Now, I won't claim that something like Hegel's argument that sheer giveness is actually contentless and that it is the higher levels of understanding (Absolute Knowing) that should be affirmed (rather than dismissed as "reification") is air tight against later "post-modern" phenomenology, but neither does it seem like the alternative has a decisive refutation of it. If anything, the issue seems undecidable, and metaphysics (acknowledged or not), aesthetics, and a commitment to certain notions of freedom seem to be driving the choice between the two.

Obviously, if we assume a view like Rorty's is true, we can justify it as true. Why should we accept it as true when it refutes itself though? Why should we accept it as true when most don't, given what it says about truth? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it misses the point to treat postmodern hermeneutics and phenomenology as making arguments designed to ‘refute’ or dismiss the opposition. Rather, they claim to offer a way of seeing that leaves intact the claims of alternative philosophies. You can keep your preferred metaphysics. What the hermeneuticist and phenomenologist want to know is, can you also adopt their peculiar stance which at the same time honors a realist , physicalist or foundationalist approach, and opens up a dimension not opposed to it but beneath it, running alongside it to enrich its sense? If you can’t adopt this stance, this doesn’t make your preferred philosophy incorrect. It is perfectly correct and true, as far as it goes and within the bounds it sets for itself.

Heidegger has a lot of Kierkegaard in his ideas, though he doesn't like to admit it (See Caputo on this in his Radical Hermeneutics). All 20th century phenomenology follows through on K in one way or another in this dialectic between eternity and finitude — Constance

Less than you might think. It’s first necessary to understand the radical way in which Heidegger departs from K. You won’t find this in Caputo’s religious hermeneutical reading of Heidegger, since Caputo entirely misses this radical turn of Heidegger’s ( and Derrida’s as well. I highly recommend Martin Hagglund’s The Radical Evil of Deconstruction: a reply to John Caputo).

"truth," "relevance," "significance", these aren't mapping onto features of the world so much as they're tools we use for various purposes in different contexts.
— Joshs
How can they be tools if they do not in some way "map" onto the world? — Banno

They’re not tools for mapping onto objects, but for enacting new forms of sense in our material and discursive interactions with the world. A hammer doesn’t “map” onto nails. Its usefulness lies in how we employ it to drive nails.Truth is a tool that in some contexts we use to check agreement with facts. In other contexts, we use it to contrast honesty vs lying; in others, to resolve disputes. In addition to the sense of truth as empirical/factual, one can think of grammatical/conceptual truth, performative/expressive truth, aesthetic/evaluative truth, narrative/interpretive truth and many other senses of meaning of that ‘same’ word.

Wittgenstein would emphasize that these aren't competing theories of truth but different tools serving different purposes in our linguistic practices. The mistake is assuming all these uses must share some common essence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ There’s no one metaphysical object “truth” that the word latches onto.

↪Janus You prefer utility to truth?

Do you think you can maintain that distinction? The truth doesn't care about what is useful
— Banno

But ‘caring’ seems to go along with truth. Pesky concepts like mattering , relevance and significance are baked in whenever we ‘use’ the word truth. And those words dont care about universal meaning abstracted away from contextual sense — Joshs

↪Joshs And? — Banno

My point is that the word ‘truth’ doesn’t have any aspect of its meaning that transcends the context of its actual use. It’s not just that truth is affected by contextual relevance, it’s that there is no categorical meaning of the word ‘truth’ that exists outside of the grammar of its use. I’m not just saying that our access to truth is contextual, but that the very concept of truth is nothing over and above how we actually use the word "truth" in particular language games. There's no essence of truth waiting to be discovered, only the diverse ways we employ the concept in different contexts.

When you say “truth doesn't care about what is useful," you seem to be treating truth as something with its own independent nature. But this very statement only makes sense within a specific language game where we contrast truth with utility. The meaning isn't pointing to some metaphysical feature of truth itself, but emerges from how we've learned to use these concepts in opposition to each other. Our concepts don't get their meaning by corresponding to independent realities, but through their role in our forms of life. So "truth," "relevance," "significance", these aren't mapping onto features of the world so much as they're tools we use for various purposes in different contexts.

↪Janus You prefer utility to truth?

Do you think you can maintain that distinction? The truth doesn't care about what is useful — Banno

But ‘caring’ seems to go along with truth. Pesky concepts like mattering , relevance and significance are baked in whenever we ‘use’ the word truth. And those words dont care about universal meaning abstracted away from contextual sense.

It is hard to know how much is about splitting the past and future, or how much is holding on to the consequences of what has happened and likely occurrences in the future. It may be possible to switch this off, but awareness of the past casts a shadow, especially on mood. For example, if I had a bad day it may effect me for some future days. If I had some disagreement with someone it will have to be faced. If I have spent too much money one day I am likely to run short later — Jack Cummins

When one talks about experiencing the past or the future , one emphasizes a certain style of approach , a certain mood or attitude. I am ‘pre-occupied’ rather than just being occupied with my future. I am ‘dwelling on’ rather than flowing though the past. I suggest what characterizes these experiences as negative dwelling on and pre-occupation isn’t their temporal position as past or future but the way we move through recollection or anticipation. Since I hold to the view that recollection is a constructive activity, I don’t give it lesser status in relation to the supposed freshness of the now. Recollection is essential to imagination and thus creative thought. As far as anticipating into the future , this also depends in part both on recollection and experience of the present. If we stare into a night sky and let our mind drift off into vast futures , it can give us a sense of profundity peace view of breadth of perspective. It can make the problems of the now fade into insignificance.
How can it do this if it is not keeping us within the now?

Because the ‘now’ is the flow of nows, and this flow is always characterized by a style, an attitude, a mood. It doesn’t matter whether this mood is generated from a reflection on a long ago event , an event far off in the future or one occurring right this moment. What matters is how we are understanding the flow of events to unfold one out of the previous. Are they harmoniously intercorrelated one with the next so as to make some kind of referential sense to us, or are they a puzzle to us , a chaos of unpredictability and alienation? This is what determines ether our experience of the ‘now’ is enjoyable or miserable and isolating.

There are times when we feel stuck in our thinking and our feeling, for instance when we are depressed, and typically this stuckneas is inescapable regardless of whether we dwell in memories , focus on the present or imagine into the future. What is often needed to snap us out of this depression is to create a fresh meaningful way forward. Being in the moment isn’t enough. It’s HOW we are being in the moment. This can be accomplished from out of any of the three temporal modes , but will ultimately involve all three. I rethink my past in relation to a changed present(sometimes just rethinking the past will change one’s present) , which anticipates freshly into the future.

Or one could say keeping one’s present from becoming a stale, stuck recycling of habits of thought involves dipping into the future in order to reinvent one’s past.

God is not a seiendes (being); a claim Heidegger would have seen repeated explicitly over and over by the Patristics if he had made it further back than the nominalists (e.g., the opening of Eriugena's Periphyseon). You cannot plop the Trinity on a Porphyrean tree alongside the world. Ipsum esse subsistens, not ens supremum, i.e., act not thing. God as an in-itself is a category error. Teleology doesn't come from above, but from within, through participation in infinite plentitude.

Likewise, knowledge is not the imposition of the "in-itself," but participation in the Logos. To speak of the "in-itself" at all often gets written off as a capitulation to modern univocity. It is God "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28; repeated at every liturgy). The groundedness of ethics here is not an external in-itself, but being as intelligible, given, and above all gift. This isn't violence against difference, but the very gift and sustainment of its intelligibility (the "virtual" being a secularized paradoy of participation in critiques), which is grounded in the relational love of three persons (not a static in-itself). — Count Timothy von Icarus

So ‘ God’ is just the gift of difference that repeats itself in the contextually relative becoming of experience from
moment to moment? And the intelligibility of understanding arises from the pragmatic enactment of new sense in discursive engagement? Or is there some element external to the utter contingency of contextual becoming, but essential to the Logos we participate in, and essential to god?

This narrative is not a fiction in our lives. We have to believe in its reality. Otherwise our own identity would be unmoored.
So my pragmatism doesn’t put an end to the need for a transcendent narrative. It just opens the way to a self-conscious discussion - a philosophical discussion - of the evolution of the jumble of such narratives that we find being handed down. — apokrisis

You may believe in the reality of these narratives, but you don’t believe each is transcendent in itself. You believe they are historically contingent. What is transcendent for you is the ‘semiotic technology’ of becoming, what grounds the fact that “social theory tells us why humans have to organize under transcendent narratives”.

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God. — apokrisis

At a certain point these begin to sound awfully similar. Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss…

The importance of living in the 'here and now' is one emphasised by many authors. One author, Ken Keyes, in, 'Handbook of Higher Consciousness: The Science of Happiness', states,
'If you are not enjoying every here and now moment in life, it is because your addictions (otherwise known as desires, attachments, demands, expectations, emotional programming, models of how life should treat you) are making you dwell in the dead past or the imagined future. They are keeping you from being here and now. All there is in life is the eternal now moment- and the experience of the moment is created by the programming in your head'. — Jack Cummins

Being trapped within the ‘dead’ past and imagined future are of a piece with being stuck within the punctual ‘now’. The problems you list don’t come from privileging the past or future over the immediate present, but from splitting these three dimensions of time off from each other. We can never experience a pure in-itself present. That would make all experience vanish. Imagine trying to enjoy a piece of music without thr ability to retain the prior note in mind while listening to the presently appearing note. The meaning of the music as music would disappear. Imagine reading these sentences without anticipating into the next letter and word. What we call the ‘now’ gets its sense and meaning by retaining the just past and anticipating into the future. These three dimensions all belong to the same ‘now’. It is when we treat our past, future or present in a refied and isolating way rather than as belonging to a continuous creative flow that we run the risk of reducing our experience to meaninglessness.

↪DifferentiatingEgg

Nietzsche was a literary artist whose personal interactions were no more remarkable than other literary artists of his day. His special value lay in his ability to create. He was only an immoralist in terms of a kind of fantastical advocacy he left almost entirely on the page. — Baden

Does ‘literary artist’ mean he was not also a philosopher? I don’t know about you, but when I develop a philosophical insight and validate it to my satisfaction, it becomes a guide for my interactions with others. I can’t go back to seeing the world the way I did before the insight. Do you think that after producing his evolutionary account of the origin of species, Darwin persisted in perceiving animals in his daily surroundings as having arose out of independently founded lineages?

You argue that modern liberalism, in the guises of personal
improvement, self-help and wellness programs, gives preference to the desires of the individual over the community, but you don’t question the split between personal and collective desire this presupposes. You also don’t mention that an ethic of the collective good and an ethic of self-actualization have in common the grounding of will in a metaphysical subject. The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired. More enactively inclined approaches reject the idea of an innate ethical disposition in favor of a notion of phronesis, an ethical wisdom or attunement that centers on the attainment of compassion. This compassion, in turn, arises out of the realization of no-self, the awareness that the grasping ego is a mirage we cling to. Shaun Gallagher explains how Francisco Varela derives this notion from a melding of enactivism and Buddhism:

For Mencius , the Good is tied up with natural
kinds of innate dispositions plus the cultivation of those dispositions. This notion of a natural disposition may not satisfy everyone as a concept of the good and indeed it doesn’t satisfy Varela, even if he retains it as a kind of implied starting point. Likewise, natural disposition
should not satisfy enactivists, since nothing in enactive principles pre-ordain natural disposition as in any way intrinsically good. It’s in his third lecture that he takes the analysis I think one step, or we might even say, he has a quantum Leap involved here. One step further, providing a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless
virtual self , an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes and he then links this conception up with Buddhist practice. and I think this leads us to Varela’s core thesis , where he says ethical know-how is the progressive firsthand acquaintance with the virtuality of self. the emphasis in his analysis is going to fall on cultivation.

Putting the self in question is a kind of deconstructive phase of Buddhist mindfulness practice, out of which comes something more positive, and here he quotes a Buddhist scholar who says when the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born and compassionate arises without pretense. So it’s funny because Mencius’s kind of natural disposition is implied here but what is added to this idea is the notion of compassion. so if we ask where precisely is the notion of the good in Varela’s work, the answer is the Buddhist conception of compassion. The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering. So for Varela and for Buddhist theories this is closely tied to the conception of or the elimination of the self as a source of suffering.

Yes. But you seem to me to be laying down an essence of "same" and using that as a rule which outlaws the ways in which we actually use "general" and "generality". — Ludwig V

Do you mean that I am using “same” as a rule which outlaws beforehand certain ways among others that we may use general and generality, or that general and generality are exclusively associated with specific ways of use (“the” ways we actually use them, versus a potential infinity of possible uses)?

What I was trying to do was not outlaw any particular use of “same” , but to point to a use of same which relies on the consultation of a picture. If we say that two photos of an object depict the same object, or we stare repeatedly at an object and report that our perception continues to be of the same object, should we say that the sense of ‘object’ here is unique to the specific context and instant of use, or that what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use? If the latter, then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture.

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.
— Joshs
Yes, you get that result if you think of same in the light of the logical axiom that A=A is the paradigm of sameness. Actually, for me, it is the limiting case of sameness and is the point at which it is deprived of all real meaniing. Obviously, any generalization must be applicable to a range of particular cases, which may will likely not be identical in all respects, as required by our paradigm. But the concept of a paradigm allows for differences. In short, your argument suggests that generality is, strictly speaking, impossible. That may not be a reductio ad absurdum but it is certainly a reduction to pointlessness — Ludwig V

Generality is possible whenever we use that word. But what is the difference in what we are doing when we think the endless possibilities of grammatical use of a word like paradigm, general or game, and the uses of a word like particular? Is Wittgenstein invoking a theory of generality (“the concept of a paradigm allows for differences”), or would he eschew the search for the essence of generality and instead look at the various ways we use words like “same,” “general,” and “particular”? Would you agree that if there is no essence of meaning of any word , then there is no essence of meaning of ‘particular’, and likewise no essence of meaning of ‘general’, paradigm, game, category, etc?

The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.
— Joshs
I'm a bit puzzled about what "swallowed up" means here. We only ever encounter particular houses and particular people. Even though they are particular, they can be described in terms of generalities — Ludwig V

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.

Illiberal leaders in previously liberal countries do not justify their authoritarianism or interventions in opposition to liberalism. In general, they position themselves as saviors of liberalism

Likewise, dictators across the world still feel the need to have rump legislatures, to hold votes on reforms, etc. They still feel the need to hold sham elections. Even Assad did this during the civil war. They still go by "president" or "prime minister" instead of "king," "emperor," "emyr" or "shah." When they attack the West, they normally do so while tacitly accepting the values of liberalism. They deride the West as not being truly democratic, as having become an oligarchy, or just as often, as having fallen into a sort of technocratic socialism. Such criticisms accept liberal values however. When they attack "Western values" such a LGBT issues, they do so using the same language used by conservative liberals within the West, speaking to "freedom to differ" and "freedom of religion" or "freedom for traditions."

Yet they decidedly do not recommend some sort of alternative ideology the way the Soviet Union did. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I prefer ‘philosophical perspective’ to ‘ideology’. Ideologies lend themselves to empty slogans abstracted away from how people actually understand themselves in their pragmatic relations with others politically, economically and ethically. Positioning oneself as a ‘savior of liberalism’ or calling one’s party ‘National Socialism’ are examples of marketing slogans that mask the profound philosophical differences that separate, say, adherents of MAGA from social liberals. What’s important is not whether two competing groups use the same language, but how far apart the meaning those concepts is in their actual use by those groups.

The failure to articulate and hold the liberal center allows for growing encroachment on the political center by far right wing thinking and 'left of liberal' thinking on the left side. MAGA and some of the so-called Democratic Socialists both pose problems for central liberalism, whether rounding up 10 million illegal immigrants or abolishing the police — BC

I agree with your overall analysis. I would say that in order for liberals to gain the ascendancy again in the U.S., what is needed isnt so much an articulation and holding of a liberal center but its creation. That is, a movement needs a critical mass in order to deserve the label of ‘center’. There simply isn’t a large enough percentage of the country identifying with liberal values right now to produce such a critical mass. Achieving this will rely less on the strategies of political leaders than on the slow process of social evolution.

I believe there has been a significant overestimation of the percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe who ever supported liberal democracy for philosophical rather than just reasons of economic self-interest, because the ranks of liberal political parties were for a long time inflated with voters who were in fact philosophically anti-liberal, and who have now organized right-wing populist parties like MAGA that more purely reflect their anti-liberalism. Rural people in countries around the world have followed a pattern similar to MAGA , reorganizing their political parties in a rightward direction politically to reflect the traditionalism and conservatism they have always believed in.
— Joshs

If I understand correctly, you think we have misinterpreted the fact that liberalism won (which is what Fokuyama's main idea was built on)? Well, your arguments cannot be argued with, in this regard his ideas seem idealistic. — Astorre

My point is:
1) Many, including Fukuyama, explain the recent rise of rightwing populism and authoritarianism as a form of ‘backsliding’ away from the ideal of liberalism.
2) My claim is this should not be interpreted as backsliding but rather as an overestimation of the percentage of the world population who embraced liberalism to begin with.
3)This does not mean liberalism ‘lost’. I agree with Fukuyama that the world has been and will continue to be to move in the direction of liberalism, but I find his ethical reasons to be less relevant than his pragmatic reasons (people will eventually find that liberalism works better for them). But this does not mean there cannot and will not at some point in the future be a ‘post-liberalism’ that subsumes and exceeds the best of liberalism.

In that case, do you agree with these ideas:

In the Marxist perspective, society is divided into a base (production relations, means of production) and a superstructure (ideology, politics, culture). The base is primary: changes in the economy (for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism) give rise to new ideologies that justify or disguise these relations.

It follows from this that it is impossible to "invent" an ideology and impose it as the "pinnacle of evolution" - it will collide with the reality of the base. — Astorre

I would move away from Marx’s narrow definition of the base in terms of economic and class structures, in favor of epistemic and values-based norm-producing social structures which include but arent simply determined by the economic aspects of society. Rather than producing ideologies which justify or disguise the base social normative structures, these structures themselves instantiate and imply a certain constellation of philosophical-metaphysical stances. Every individual participating within a social structure contributes to the invention of these partially shared philosophical
worldviews, which include within themselves attitudes toward political and economic theory. Individuals neither simply march in lockstep with the social norms nor deviate wildly from them, since they are partially shared. A person who offers a new philosophical-economic-political perspective that they believe represents a ‘pinnacle of evolution’ can influence others but not simply ‘impose’ their vantage on the community unless that community is already receptive to such a perspective. There is a philosophical-economic-political evolution but the ground of its becoming is collective rather than strictly individual.

. I think that W is right to point to the importance of explanations after the event. But it seems odd to say that understanding is not "present" during communication. Surely understanding is expressed in communication and in even in non-communicative action. In any normal action, there is a huge amount of complexity and we may be unable to resolve various ambiguities simply of the basis of a single action. Then we need to clarify after the event. But a great deal of that complexity can be expressed in the processes of planning and preparation, before the action. — Ludwig V

I read W as making a distinction between what phenomenologists call the mode of givenness of an object and the object taken in a theoretical sense. It’s not that a mode of givenness doesn’t give us to understand a thing, but that what we are given to understand is a contextual sense of an object that cannot be swallowed up within a more general categorical definition on it. The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.

↪Joshs Your solution here would appear to avoid infinite regress. As a general rule do you find infinite regress problematic? — Tom Storm

Not so much problematic as illusory. When we stand between two mirrors facing each other, this seems a good exemplar of pure self-repetition. But we tend to miss the way that repetition sneaks in alteration, if not in the objects then in how they strike us. We think what we want from science is pure repeatability as the same, but what we really are looking for is relevance.

I discern two main theses in the OP. First, there is an anti-Fukuyama argument. He famously claimed that with rise of liberal democracy around the world, we had reached the end of history, a Hegelian-like pinnacle of political and philosophical organization. But the recent global trends away from liberalism and toward various forms of autocracy and totalitarianism would seem to argue against the idea that history has been moving in the one direction Fukuyama described. The second argument seems to be a relativistic one. Not only are an increasing number of countries rejecting liberal democracy, but we have no ethical grounds for judging such choices to be incorrect, and to proclaim liberal democracy to be divinely sanctioned. There is no such thing as being on the ‘wrong side of history’, because the unique histories of different cultures around the world produce a diversity of political systems tailored to the particular values and needs of those communities.

As to the first argument, my response to the claim that there has been a massive worldwide flight from liberal democracy is that we must be careful to separate political trends from changes in philosophy. Let me use the rise of MAGA in the U.S. as an example. What do we make of the supporters of Trump who applaud his authoritarian tendencies, many of whom once were loyal members of the Democratic party with its liberal agenda? Have they changed philosophies? Did they used to be liberal concerning issues like climate, covid science, gender, authoritarianism, multiculturalism and immigration and suddenly decided to change their minds and “reject” their former liberal views?

I suggest they always held traditionalistic, conservative beliefs about these issues, but maintained their allegiance to liberal parties only as long as those parties benefited them economically. I believe there has been a significant overestimation of the percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe who ever supported liberal democracy for philosophical rather than just reasons of economic self-interest, because the ranks of liberal political parties were for a long time inflated with voters who were in fact philosophically anti-liberal, and who have now organized right-wing populist parties like MAGA that more purely reflect their anti-liberalism. Rural people in countries around the world have followed a pattern similar to MAGA , reorganizing their political parties in a rightward direction politically to reflect the traditionalism and conservatism they have always believed in.

If anything, I would argue that the actual parentage of the worldwide population that supports liberal democratic philosophies has grown steadily over the past 100 years. But this fact is being obscured by the reshuffling of the political parties.

As to the second argument of the OP, should we maintain a relativistic stance toward the type of social and political
organization a culture adopts? To a certain extent, yes. I think in many places it is both true that authoritarian regimes maintain a ruthless hold over their populations, and that those populations historically gravitate toward strong leadership. For instance, El Salvadorian dictator Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.

But I do think that liberal democracy has advantages over more authoritarian political systems that can be described in pragmatic rather than in abstract ethical terms. If one thinks of political organization as a complex dynamical system, we may say that such systems tend toward their own evolution. As they become more complex they become more stable. The enlightened self-interest of individuals will steer them towards modes of social
organization which foster communication, commerce and creativity rather than stifle it. This parallels and expresses a philosophical evolution which increasingly favors experimentation, innovation and symbiosis over static stability. So while I think we can find many who now still prefer some degree of authoritarianism over liberalism, the longer term trends favor the evolution of more complex forms of social organization, which may even at some point shift from liberal democracy to some kind of loosely organized anarchy. With its economic liberalization into a Capitalist-technocracy, China is likely halfway to a more full-fledged political liberalization that may take another 50 years or more.

science is not about absolutes; it is about contingencies. The scientific method is a future looking construction of the conditionally structured sentence, "If...then...", that is, repeatable results are always grounded in finitude, and there is nothing in reason's logic to apodictically guarantee things will continue in this way (Sartre's notion of radical contingency is about just this: the world's behavior is not logically constrained). But ethics has a completely different ground: Good and Evil, without argument, the strangest thing in all of existence, though this is hard to acknowledge. Take two states of affairs, one ethical/aesthetic (Wittgenstein conflates the two), the other factual only, like the sun rising in the east or facts about the order of numbers; just a plain fact. what is the difference? What makes an ethical state of affairs ethical? Good and Evil, and here, unlike in science, the extralinguistic reference is itself (is such a thing even possible?) qualitatively makes the difference, evidenced by pain and pleasure. — Constance

So all empirical facts are subjective and relative. One could say with Michel Henry that they are the product of ecstasis, the securing of experience by relation to other experience. Does one need then to ground experience in some ethical substance absolutely immanent to itself to put a stop to this apparent infinite regress? That would be the case if one considered the only choice to be a binary opposing pure self-affecting immanence and alienating , mediating reflection. But there is another option: an ecstasis whose repeating act of self-difference is always original , fecund and productive rather than derivative and secondary to an immanent self-affecting ground.. This ecstasis is already a language prior to the emergence of verbal speech, the social within nature , inseparably nature/culture. Pain, angst, desire, attunement, feeling are the very core of ecstasis as self-displacement and self-transcendence.

↪Joshs While "grammar is a product of the mind", it is also embedded in the world. Rather than being forced to choose between realism and idealism, we might reject the framework that juxtaposes the two. The world is our successful interpretation and communication within our forms of life. — Banno

You’re sounding like a phenomenologist. All you need to do is drop the ‘successful’. After all, is t that just one more piece of grammar?

But it would be a mistake to think that therefore the rock could not fall unless there is a mind present - that the rock's fall is inherently a mental phenomena. — Banno

Would you say that grammar in Wittgenstein’s sense is the product of a mental phenomenon? If a word like truth only gets its sense from how it is used grammatically in public discourse, do we then say that such discourse is grounded in the interaction among minds? But then what do we do about the grammatical possibilities of ‘mind’?

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.