Thank you. That's what I was wondering. My understanding is that Dreyfus' reading is now considered somewhat limited, is that your view? Would you class him as a conservative? — Tom Storm

Yes, Dreyfus’ approach was linked to his interest in Kierkegaard. He founded what became known as the West Coast school of Heidegger interpretation, which exerted a strong influence on readings of Heidegger in English-speaking countries for many years, but is no longer the dominant approach.

As an aside, is there any particular reason to use poststructuralist over postmodern? Is it the role of language based theory over the broader philosophical exigencies (of the latter)? — Tom Storm

One reason to do so is that, like relativism , the meaning of postmodernism is hard to pin down. Poststructuralism at least points one in the direction of those philosophers who were influenced by structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, as well as phenomenology. Poststructuralists
don’t reject structuralism, they are concerned with the genesis of structures, how to link structure and genesis.

↪Joshs Is post modernism a critical aspect in obtaining a better reading of Heidegger? — Tom Storm

I suppose it depends on who you put in the postmodern camp. On the conservative side, there are those who read him in close proximity to Kierkegaard , Levinas and Wittgenstein. Some associate him with critical theory types like Adorno, and then there are the poststructuralist readings which I favor ( Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida).

You can certainly read it that way. The interesting question, at least for me, is whether you have to. You can also read it as something like "those with whom you have a sense of community", "those you stand in assumed relation with". — fdrake

Not without profoundly distorting the sense of this line of thought in BT. There are other writings of Heidegger where he specifically singles out the German volk, but this in not at all the point of these passages in BT. The relation between my Dasein and other Daseins here has nothing to do with choosing one group over another, but of how the intelligibility and sense of my engagement with the world moment to moment is guided by a pre-existing context of relevance.

Heidegger is using the terms 'they', 'those', and 'others' as terms of inclusion rather than exclusion.

If we look at The Self-Assertion of the German University address from a few years after the publication of BT I think it is clear who it is that is being included and excluded. — Fooloso4

The point he is making in BT concerns the fact that who we are as Da Seins is a function of our dealings with the things of our world. Furthermore , all of the objects we deal with in our world get their sense from our actual pragmatic use of them, and this use includes other people with and for whom we are using these objects. Thus, who we are does not come before our dealings with things and other daseins. Rather, we are in the world with others in a fundamental way before we are simply who we are part from others. The solipsist self is a derivative form of being with others. This runs complete counter to your analysis of the relevant passages in terms of our choosing one group of others for inclusion over another group. Being with others as he means it here is not the product of a choice.

Nietzsche and Heidegger shared many disenchantments with their cultural milieus. Both admired orders of rank and looked down upon democracy. But this agency Heidegger is putting forward runs afoul of a central observation in Nietzsche's Will to Power: — Paine

The ruler, that is, the designated unity of knower, creator, and lover, is in his own proper grounds altogether an other. — ibid. page 127

Do you mean that Heidegger is positing the overman as agency? For Heidegger the overman is a willing, and even though the will for Nietzsche is a complex system of drives it draws from the tradition the notion of a being present at hand , and this notion is inextricable from a metaphysical notion of time. Heidegger claims in What is Thinking that Nietzsche defines the Being of beings as Will to Power. He says that Nietzsche locates revenge as motivated by revulsion against the passing away of time.

“The revulsion arising in the will is then the will against everything that passes-everything, that is, which comes to be out of a coming-to-be, and endures. Hence the will is the sphere of representational ideas which basically pursue and set upon everything that comes and goes and exists, in order to depose, reduce it in its stature and ultimately decompose it. This revulsion within the will itself, according to Nietzsche, is the essential nature of revenge.
"This, yes, this alone is revenge itself : the will's revulsion against time and its It was'." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On Deliverance)

The bridge to the overman leads to the deliverance from revenge, because the overman frees itself from time.

“…will is primal being only when it is eternal as will. And it is that when, as will, it eternally wills the eternity of willing. The will that is eternal in this sense no longer follows and depends on the temporal in what it wills, or in its willing. It is independent of time. And so it can no longer be affronted by time.”

The important point for Heidegger is that Nietzsche conceives time metaphysically as a succession of punctual
‘nows’.

“This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the "now" out of the "not yet now" into the "no longer now."… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time' which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West…. in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now."

“The will is delivered from revulsion when it wills the constant recurrence of the same. Then the will wills the eternity of what is willed. The will wills its own eternity. Will is primal being. The highest product of primal being is eternity. The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.”

Heidegger's discussion of others in BT reads differently once one is aware of Heidegger's antisemitism:

To avoid this misunderstanding we must notice in what sense we are talking about 'the Others'. By 'Others' we do not mean everyone else but me-those over against whom the "I" stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself-those among whom one is too. This Being-there-too [Auch-dasein] with them does not have the ontological character of a Being-present at-hand-along-'with' them within a world. (BT 1.4, Macquarrie & Robinson translation, 154 German 118)

Who are those from whom he does and does not distinguish himself? It is the Volk (the Folk) from whom he does not distinguish himself. Or, as 180 Proof put it Blood and Soil — Fooloso4

One could just as well argue that one’s understanding of Heidegger’s antisemitism will be shaped by how one reads his passages on ‘Others’ in BT. In the passage you quoted, the others he does not distinguish himself from constitute the ‘there’ of the being-there of Dasein, its always already finding itself in a world of relevant concerns and useful things.

“The others who are "encountered" in the context of useful things in the surrounding world at hand are not somehow added on in thought to an initially merely objec­tively present thing, but these "things" are encountered from the world in which they are at hand for the others.”

Notorious Nazi Heidegger
(Whom Hitler had made all-a-quiver)
Tried hard to be hailed
Nazi-Plato, but failed
Then denied he had tried with great vigor — Ciceronianus

Ok, even though I disagree with you about the value of Heidi’s philosophy, I gotta give you credit for originality.

In 1969 Stanley Rosen published "Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay". It can be described as Plato against Heidegger. Rosen said:

"Nihilism is the concept of reason separated from the concept of the good." — Fooloso4

Rosen’s article can better be described as Plato against postmodernism. We already know you’re not a postmodernist so your support of Rosen’s formulation is no surprise.

Being and Time was published in 1927, well before Nazis came to power. There’s nothing in there about Nazism.
— Mikie
Only if you read the text out of context — 180 Proof

There are lots of contexts in which to read it. Those of us who find Heidegger to be many things, a Nazi in political affiliation, someone who expressed anti-semitic views, and one of the most brilliant philosophers of our era, have to reconcile ourselves with these contradictions.

hose lectures are spectacularly incorrect, turning Nietzsche's ideas into something a believer of 'Germanness' could embrace — Paine

I disagree. Heidegger’s main thesis about Nietzsche was that he was the last metaphysician, upholding a certain subjectivism in the guise of the will to eternal return. I thinks that’s spot-on.

You write as if handing in an undergraduate essay. I'm not particularly interested in how well you've understood the sources, I'm not grading you. I want to know why you find those positions persuasive (or not).

All you've given me above is that some sources say X and that you agree. I get nothing from that. — Isaac

Im interested in how well you’ve understood the sources. If you don’t follow them, I can make it a high school essay. I thought i explained why I find the enactivist sources persuasive, and why I prefer them to Prinz and Haidt. Do you agree with Prinz and Haidt or the enactivist critique of them ?

Philosophy was in a different place then. Philosophical treatises contained musings on what would now be called everything from fundamental physics, to psychology, to social science. Any 'Philosopher' engaged in such discourse nowadays is just mouthing off without bothering to do the actual research sufficient to back up their claims and so very few are taken seriously. That leaves modern Philosophy very much engaged with far more niche subject matter than the deeply political issues of church, state and the fundamental nature of society that they used to be expounding on. — Isaac

Speaking of just mouthing off without bothering to do the actual research sufficient to back up their claims, I recommend not just using Alan Sokal as your source, but actually reading Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and so many other modern contemporaries who never abandoned the larger questions of philosophy, and who have the rigor to back it up.

The worldviews we erect to organize our sense-making define the nature and boundaries of what is ethically permissible or unjust.
— Joshs

I think that's nonsense, and quite evidently so. Ethical judgements tend to involve quite different parts of the brain than might be involved in sense-making, and most precede any such activity by many years developmentally, and by many milliseconds in processing terms. I just don't see any evidence whatsoever to back up such a theory. — Isaac

Jesse Prinz argues that ethical values are derived from emotional dispositions that precede rational reflection. He divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity, supporting an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism at the same time that he claims to maintain a relativistic stance on moral values. The resulting position is a mixture of objective rationalism and subjective relativism. According to Prinz, even though moral values are dependent on subjectively relative emotional dispositions, it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being. Jonathan Haidt agrees with Prinz that ethical values originate in pre-cognitive emotional dispositions. For Haidt these inherited dispositions are present in all human beings but in different proportions. His moral foundations theory lists 5 innate moral foundations:

Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation

Enactivist approaches tend to deny the split between rational problem-solving and emotion-based ethical values that Prinz and Haidt support.

Matthew Ratcliffe writes:

“The inextricability of feeling and world-experience is not adequately acknowledged by philosophical approaches that impose, from the outset, a crisp distinction between bodily feeling and world-directed intentionality. Most philosophers admit that emotions incorporate both world-directedness and bodily feeling but they construe the two as separate ingredients. Some have argued that feelings can be world-directed. But, in so doing, they still retain the internal– external contrast and so fail, to some degree at least, to respect the relevant phenomenology. For example, Prinz (2004) argues that feelings can be about things other than the body but he adopts a non-phenomenological conception of intentionality and continues to assume that the phenomenology of feeling is internal in character.”

Evan Thompson says:

“At the neural level, brain systems traditionally seen as subserving separate functions of appraisal and emotion are inextricably interconnected. Hence ‘appraisal’ and ‘emotion’ cannot be mapped onto separate brain systems.” Pessoa (2008) provides extensive evidence from neuroscience that supports this view of the neural underpinnings of emotion and cognition. He presents three converging lines of evidence:

(1) brain regions previously viewed as ‘affective’ are also involved in cognition; (2) brain regions previously
viewed as ‘cognitive’ are also involved in emotion; and (3) the neural processes subserving
emotion and cognition are integrated and thus non-modular.”

”Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emotion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomenological levels. The spatial containment language of internal/external or inside/outside (which frames the internalist/externalist debate) is inappropriate and misleading for understanding the peculiar sort of relationality belonging to intentionality, the lived body, or
being-in-the-world. As Heidegger says, a living being is ‘in’ its world in a completely different sense from that of water being in a glass (Heidegger 1995, pp. 165–166)
“...appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural
levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, they form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation.’(Thompson 2009)

The point is that sense-making only makes ‘sense’ in relation to an overarching valuative-affective ethical scheme, which is inextricably rational and affective. This is as true of scientific metatheory as it is of specifically labeled ethical stances. One could say its rationality is made intelligible in the way it matters , is significant , is relevant to the pragmatic purposes of the individual. If a particular scientific experiment is deemed unethical, the system of ethical values that is being applied to make this determination is already inextricably intertwined with the metatheorerical assumptions grounding the scientific theory within whose bounds the unethical experiment is generated.

Power doesn’t stand outside of knowledge as a self-contained distorting influence on it. Rather, differential forces comprise the very structure of knowledge.

Big question: what does the following look like in action -
Progress in cultural problem solving is about anticipating the actions and motives of others (and ourselves) in ways that transcend concepts like evil or selfish intent. — Tom Storm

I’m going to be lazy and use my reply to Moliere:

Are there Sadists or are there people who cause pain in others on the basis of a diverse variety of motives that we ignore when we slap the label of sadist on them? Do you remember when you were a kid there were a few kids who enjoyed torturing animals? Do you remember anything else about them, like what their family lives were like, whether they seemed to harbor a lot of anger towards the world, for instance? That is an example of a motive the label of sadist hides from view. When we believe we have been unfairly treated by those closest to us, we can manifest it as anger against the world. We believe the world has treated us badly and it deserves to suffer. We justify our actions as making things right. Our ‘sadism’ isn’t so much an enjoyment of the pain we inflict as the satisfaction we get from correcting an imbalance in the cosmos.

But what I'm highlighting is that there are also sadists. And it's possible to set up a social world where those who get off on kindness go to the kind spaces, and those who get off on violence go to the violent spaces — Moliere

i have the same problem with the label sadist as I do with the concept of a motive to kill. Are there Sadists or are there people who cause pain in others on the basis of a diverse variety of motives that we ignore when we slap the label of sadist on them? Do you remember when you were a kid there were a few kids who enjoyed torturing animals? Do you remember anything else about them, like what their family lives were like, whether they seemed to harbor a lot of anger towards the world, for instance? That is an example of a motive the label of sadist hides from view. When we believe we have been unfairly treated by those closest to us, we can manifest it as anger against the world. We believe the world has treated us badly and it deserves to suffer. We justify our actions as making things right. Our ‘sadism’ isn’t so much an enjoyment of the pain we inflict as the satisfaction we get from correcting an imbalance in the cosmos.

Maybe if it were possible for us to step back far enough we'd clearly see the Truth of Eternal Recurrence. Everyone's experienced déjà vu, after all. How much more proof do we need? — praxis

Except that Eternal Recurrence for Nietzsche is the recurrence of the absolutely different. Kind of the opposite of deja vu.

I think what I see, from the advances of science, is an increase in ability to do exactly what we want -- and what we want isn't always non violent. So, contrary to a decrease, I'd say we have an increase in violence because we're better at it — Moliere

Violent: violate. Do we want to violate? Is that a motive? Can we be motivated to violate ourselves, or is that an incoherent idea? One might jump in here and mention suicide, self-harm, masochism. But is pain and destruction the motive in these case or a means to an end which is the very opposite of self-destruction? Many psychologists have explained one central motive for suicide as an attempt at self-affirmation. If we establish that want, need, motive, desire is always in service of the prevention of a loss of personal integrity, and is itself the pursuit of self-validation, then the question becomes how we we understand the separation between self and other. If we don’t want to destroy self but are motivated to kill others, is this not in fact our need to kill or destroy what we see as alien within the other? Isn’t our perception of the alienness of others directly correlated with our motives of altruism, kindness and selflessness vs desire to punish, harm and kill others? We sacrifice ourselves for loved ones and go to war against those we demonize as the dangerously alien.

It seems to me assuming the existence of a motive to kill misses the central issue here, which isn’t about desiring violence for its own sake but about the challenges we face in recognizing the value in others different from ourselves, and in thus avoiding the tendency to see malevolent motives (like the desire to kill) in the struggles of others to protect themselves and the community they identity with from what they perceive as harmful ideas and behavior.

How is it that this increase in puzzle solving leads to a decrease in violence? If science enables us to do, and what we want to do is kill, then we have some pretty obvious examples of science helping us to do exactly tha — Moliere

The critical issue here is the origin and nature of motive: what we want to do and why we want to do it. If we explain motive on the basis of arbitrary mechanism( evolutionarily shaped drive, reinforcement, etc) then we’ve lost the battle before it’s begun. We just throw up our hands and say motive is arbitrary and relative. If instead we make motive a function and product of sense-making , and understand sense-making to be a holistic process of erecting, testing and modifying a system of constructs designed to anticipate events with no ulterior or higher motive or purpose other than anticipation itself, then we can unite motive and intelligibility.

... assumes the aim is merely to solve puzzles. What if the aim were to increase human welfare? In what sense does merely finding the solution to a puzzle guarantee progress? Not all scientific investigations are ethical, but their results would have solved problems, so if solving problems equates to progress then why do we shy away from unethical investigations? — Isaac

Kuhn’s assumption that one could separate off the aims and methods of science from the rest of culture made it impossible for him to answer this question. Rorty critiqued Kuhn for trying to seal off science in its own hermetically sealed epistemological chamber m, with its own ethics of goodness in puzzle solving. Rorty realized that empirical puzzle solving is a subset of wider cultural sense-making motives that organize the world in terms of whether , as well as the way things are intelligible, recognizable, assimilable.
The worldviews we erect to organize our sense-making define the nature and boundaries of what is ethically permissible or unjust.

I really like what Kuhn is saying. Is that from "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?" Maybe I should get around to reading it. — T Clark

Yes, it’s from the Postscript that he added to the book 10 years after it was originally published. It was designed as a response to the charges of relativism leveled at his approach.

For me, though, I always ask: progress for whom?

And generally the person performing the analysis in favor of progress is measuring progress in terms of what's good for themself. — Moliere

I guess that I can only speak for myself but I’m not optimistic. Apparently, not even my ultimate authority (Pinker?) can convince me to believe in inevitable betterment over time — praxis

So it’s quite possible to say that progress is an irrational faith and a myth, and also accept steady scientific advance — Jamal

Thomas Kuhn said there is progress in science. What he meant wasn’t that there is a cumulative, logical or dialectical advance that for the most part includes the context of older theories within. the newer ones , but rather the ability to ‘solve more puzzles’, even as the meanings of the scientific concepts which define these puzzles change with each shift in paradigm.
What if we were to assume for the sake of argument that science is inextricably intertwined with the rest of culture, and that if Kuhn is right about scientific progress as development of puzzle solving, then cultural progress as a whole is a kind of progressive puzzle solving.

What does it mean to solve a puzzle? Let me offer the following definition. Cultural problem solving is not about accurately representing an independent world. It is about construing and reconstruing our relation to the social and natural world from our own perspective in ways that allow us to see the behavior and thinking of other people in increasingly integral ways. Progress in cultural
problem solving is about anticipating the actions and motives of others (and ourselves) in ways that transcend concepts like evil or selfish intent. It is not that we become more
moral or more rational over time (Pinker’s claim is that the formation of the scientific method made us more rational). We were always moral and rational in the sense that we have always been motivated to solve puzzles. What progress in puzzle solving allows us to do is to see others as like ourselves on more and more dimensions of similarity.
So I think Pinker is right that there is a trajectory of development that leads toward less violence and conflict, but he is wrong to define it in relation to conformity to a certain Enlightenment and Eurocentric-based notion of empirical rationality.

John Gray, who has been criticizing the idea of progress for years and is probably much more pessimistic than I am, accepts that there is progress in science, but only in science. Elsewhere, it’s a matter of gains here and losses there, because, he says, there is no general moral improvement over time.

So it’s quite possible to say that progress is an irrational faith and a myth, and also accept steady scientific advance. — Jamal

The problem I have with that thinking is that it is impossible to separate science from the rest of culture. Changes in scientific thought run parallel with changes in ideas in the arts, politics, philosophy, moral theory, because they are all inexo intermeshed. If we’re going to argue that progress occurs in science and technology, then we have to concede that it takes place as a general feature of cultural history.

Let’s start with technology and science. Do you think we can reasonably say there has been progress in either of these fields?
— Joshs

There's been change. How would you measure 'progress'? — Isaac

Kuhn said “In its normal state, then, a scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigms define. Furthermore, the result of solving those problems must inevitably be progress.”

He goes on to ask “Why should progress also be the apparently universal concomitant of scientific revolutions?”
After all, “the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be.”

His answer is the following:

“Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.”

“Imagine an evolutionary tree representing the development of the modern scientific specialties from their common origins in, say, primitive natural philosophy and the crafts. A line drawn up that tree, never doubling back, from the trunk to the tip of some branch would trace a succession of theories related by descent. Considering any two such theories, chosen from points not too near their origin, it should be easy to design a list of criteria that would enable an uncommitted observer to distinguish the earlier from the more recent theory time after time. Among the most useful would be: accuracy of prediction, particularly of quantitative prediction; the balance between esoteric and everyday subject matter; and the number of different problems solved. Less useful for this purpose, though also important determinants of scientific life, would be such values as simplicity, scope, and compatibility with other specialties.”

The cause of the upward trend is technological advancement... People invent something like a wheelbarrow... it boosts their productivity and becomes common use because it was useful. Then someone figures out a new farming technique that further boosts productivity, and humans are able to store knowledge and teach future generations about this improved technique. It's an inevitable consequence of our ability to learn and teach. — Judaka

Are you familiar with the changes that have taken place over the past few hundred years on how philosophers of science have treated the concept of progress? For instance , the change from inductive to deductive understanding of scientific method , and from cumulative-additive to Popperian falsificationist progress. And then there’s the Kuhnian view of scientific progress, which abandons linearity in favor of the idea that to understand better is always to understand differently.

Give us a good single example from this 'mountain of evidence' you think best proves 'general progress in history' — Isaac

Let’s start with technology and science. Do you think we can reasonably say there has been progress in either of these fields?

I think there are individuals out there who have been in the depths of despair, a bit of motivational quotes here and there and the think positive thinking and they’re back to their normal self-esteem…some however forget their despair and turn into arrogant fools once more only for the cycle to repeat. — invicta

Here’s how the cycle goes. Only the person who struggles with constant deep-seated doubts about their self-worth evinces to the world behaviors associated with what we call a ‘big ego’. In other words, ‘big ego’= fragile ego.
Many of us who have to deal with such bullies , narcissists and egotists don’t understand this about them and assume they just enjoy being that way or are in ‘self-denial’. This makes us angry, we let them know we are angry, and this reinforces the egotist’s self-doubts, causing them to need to become even more boastful. Thus the self-reinforcing cycle.

T Clark I thought to answer that Clarky is my philosophy teacher in this site. But I didn't want to get scolded by Eugene again — javi2541997

Eugen may get scolded by the mods.

Those are not ''my terms". — Eugen

This is not a philosophy forum dedicated to a narrow subset of thinking within analytic philosophy , it is a general forum. Concepts like emergence, qualia, functionalism and materialism can take on entirely different meanings depending on which branch of philosophy , and which particular philosopher, is using them. How about giving us names of philosophers who you are aligning yourself with so we have a context Whose thinking do you feel overlaps most closely with the claims of the OP?

But, even aside from how controversial his evidence is (which someone else might address), this is precisely the blindness of the narrative of Progress. Those conditions are not characteristic only of primitive or scientifically unenlightened societies. — Jamal

Think of primitive as another word for embryonic. Key here is the assumption of a necessary hierarchy of stages of progress, in which the end stage is prefigured in the beginning stage via an algorithm of change.

. Of course he is acknowledging that those conditions exist in the present, but for him this is first and foremost because they are relics. — Jamal

They are on their way to becoming us, the enlightened West.

Another interesting wrinkle in regards to the progress narrative is the role the Muslim world played during the middle ages, while Europe was mired in the "dark" ages. — Noble Dust

I think it goes something like this. In its heyday between 700 and 1000 A.D. , Islamic culture thrived by discovering and reinterpreting Greek philosophy. As these readings made their way into Europe along with Islamic innovations in various other domains, Europe began to catch up with the Middle East. The Enlightenment and Reformation, unmatched by a comparable movement in Islamic countries, secured Europe’s global hegemony with its arrival at the rational telos of historical progress.

↪Joshs I think beyond Nietzsche by bypassing him. — Jamal

But you’re still a moralist, not yet beyond good and evil.

The truth is that nothing can absolve humanity of its crimes and nothing can make up for the suffering of the past, ever. Nothing and nobody will redeem humanity. Nothing will make it okay, and we will never be morally cleansed. We certainly ought to strive for a good, free society, but it will never have been worth it. — Jamal

My temptation is to think beyond Nietzsche and say: one day we'll get it right. This would not be to endorse Progress, only to admit that we can find better ways of living. — Jamal

I wouldnt exactly call this ‘thinking beyond Nietzsche.’ More like bypassing Nietzsche. If you haven’t read it already, I’d recommend Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything. It is a critique of Darwinist progressive accounts of anthropological change as seen in Pinker, Diamond and Harari. Graeber shares your moralist individualism, asserting that each culture in each era of history makes valuative choices ( equality-inequality, hierarchy- nonhierarchy, statist- non statist) above and beyond geographical, technological and other material determinants.

I'm wondering if anyone knows any good resources on this topic? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You might enjoy ‘Consciousness and the Computational Mind’ by Ray Jackendoff, a critique of computational approaches in psychology. Other critiques of computationism in cognitive science can be found dani. the work of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Shaun
Gallagher.

"The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the chickens dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the chickens and the Ideas dominate the spaces — bert1

Sounds a like a scene in Pink Flamingos

Is there egg before chicken? — fdrake

Yes, according to Deleuze.

The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a
staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles and the Ideas dominate the spaces.

, being is prior to consciousness in the order of events. Or, if you will, being itself. — fdrake

Is there being before becoming? Is there identity before difference?

When is something in evolution a difference in kind and not just a difference in degree? — schopenhauer1

For Deleuze, there is no difference in kind without a difference in degree, and vice versa, either with regard to biological or psychological phenomena. The challenge he presents is how to rethink natural structures and organizations starting from this basis.

In general, I think this requires subsuming the subjective and objective into a larger whole, not one subsuming the other, as in physicalism and many forms of idealism.

However, assuming the primacy of one or the other is certainly pragmatically useful (see most models in the natural sciences, phenomenology, some aspects of psychology, etc.). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Phenomenology may appear to subsume the objective within the subjective, but it redefines subjective such that it becomes merely one pole of an indissociable interaction. It is this interaction which is primary, not a pre-constituted ideal subject.

↪Wayfarer Yep. So we need to be clear as to whether we are talking of existence or being. — Banno

We may want to include the idea that existence and being point to the same concept, that of becoming as difference.