Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34

Are you familiar with the concept of the specious present? It was designed to address the problem of continuity that arises from the notion of time as an endless series of punctual nows. William James and Husserl were among the first to argue that past present and future must appear simultaneously as each ‘now’. Husserl depicted this fat ‘now’ in terms of a retentional, protentional and impressional phase. It is because the ‘now’ includes past and future that we can enjoy a temporally unfolding event like music without it disintegrating into disconnected notes.

Sheer change and difference wouldn't really be "change." If one thing is completely discrete from another, if there is no linkage or similarity and relation, then, rather than becoming, you just have sui generis, unrelated things (perhaps popping in and out of existence?). This isn't becoming, but rather a strobe light of unrelated beings. So, leaving aside the difficulty that the past seems to dictate the future, that things seem to have causes, or the difficulties with contingent being "just happening, for no reason at all," it seems hard for me to see how there could be any sort of "sheer becoming." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t know of any philosopher who advocates becoming as ‘sheer’ change devoid of relationality. For Deleuze it is in the nature of differences that they always produce themselves within and as assemblages, collectives. The relative stability of these multiplicities does not oppose itself to change but evinces continual change within itself that remakes the whole in such a way that the whole remains consistent without ever being self-identical.

↪Joshs How can you say there is difference if it is not identified? How is it possible to think difference without thinking (identifying) the things which differ? — Janus

Thinking isn’t in the business of thinking ‘things’ (identities) that differ, but of producing differences that relate to other differences.

How could there be difference unless some difference is identified? Identity and difference co-arise―you can't have one without the other. — Janus

Difference isn’t identified, as though there were some separate subject simply noticing what differs. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is all about this. He shows how it’s possible to think difference prior to identity.

↪Joshs
Einstein said all motion is relative to a chosen frame of reference. You declare a point to be unchanging at the same time you perceive change.

It's not that everything is changing before you declare a frame of reference. There simply is no change without stasis. — frank

That is a good summary of what we get from Einstein. Do you want to treat physics as the ground floor of your understanding of the world, or do you, like me, see Einstein’s thinking as the expression of an era of philosophy which has since been surpassed?

Can there be change without stasis? Aren't they two sides of the same coin? — frank

Derrida, Heidegger and Deleuze say there can be change without stasis. More precisely, there can be difference without a prior identity. So how does that work? One can imagine an assemblage of differences which continually make changes in each other. No aspect of the assemblage remains unchanged by the changes that occur in any part of it. There can be consistencies and patterns, but these are not static in the sense of being able to locate some static center around which the pattern is organized and which give it its sense.

The point is, as with Saint Augustine's "inner word," participation in Logos. Yet I'd hesitate to call this static. In a way it has to be most alive, lacking nothing. For Augustine and later thinkers in his tradition, it couldn't be a being, or even, univocally, "being," but was "beyond being" (or being/becoming). Dionysius says something on this to the effect of "It is false to say that God exists, but also false to say that God does not exist. But of the two, it is more false to say that God does not exist." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this inner word beyond being and becoming certain in itself , and as such the certain and absolute ground of all that is and all that becomes or merely ‘seems to be’? Can there be certainty without stasis?

The verb "to be" in Russian behaves differently than in Western European languages. In the future tense, we say: "Он будет лечить" (He will treat) or "Он будет доктором" (He will be a doctor)—the emphasis is on change, becoming. In the past: "Он лечил" (He treated, where "to be" is replaced by a suffix) or "Он был доктором" (He was a doctor, indicating something no longer current). Similar features are noticeable in Ukrainian and Belarusian. However, in West Slavic languages like Polish (Jan jest lekarzem) or Bulgarian (Той е лекар), the obligatory copula "jest" or "e" returns, approaching the Western European model. Why this occurs is a question for separate research, but it hints at cultural and linguistic differences that generally influence one's worldview. The verb "to be" in Russian is not a frozen snapshot of a state, but a process, movement, becoming. — Astorre

Heidegger’s main argument is that the definition of the truth of a being as adequation, or correctness, between appearance and reality, between how it seems and what it is, was bequeathed to the West by the Greeks and runs continuously through Medieval Christianity and Modern scientific thought. The fact that certain languages which belong to this tradition handed down from the Greeks lack the copula has. or prevented them from accepting the idea of truth as correctness, which assumes the persisting presence of the beings grounding this notion of truth.

Western philosophy, from Parmenides to Heidegger, sought the essence of being—eternity, phenomenon, givenness—relying on the formula "Being — is," rooted in a language where "is" fixes being. Even the understanding of God—from Kant's highest being to Heidegger's mystery of being—followed this logic — Astorre

How does Heidegger’s mystery of being follow the logic of presence? Heidegger did not seek to ground being in the ‘is’, he sought to ground the ‘is’ in the happening of unconcealment.

We will strive to move beyond focusing on "presence" and instead consider reality as a network of processes. Being, in our view, becomes through the establishment of boundaries, through the interaction of presence and change. The question "Being — is. How?" is replaced by another: "Being — becomes. How does it become?" — Astorre

Let’s say beings are always ensconced within networks of non-linear, reciprocally causal relations, incessantly self-organizing , self-creative, in always ongoing endogenous activity, evolving ever beyond themselves toward higher heights (like a chaotic, complex dynamical system.).

Evan Thompson defines such a nondecomposable system as

“one in which the connectivity and interrelatedness of the components give rise to global processes that subsume the components so that they are no longer clearly separable. In such a system, the distinction between preexisting parts and supervening whole becomes problematic. Not only does the whole emerge from the components, but also the components emerge from the whole.” “ Dynamic co-emergence means that part and whole co-emerge and mutually specify each other.”

Perhaps this type of model of creative emergence through relational process is close to the notion of becoming you have in mind.

My point is that the idea that hierarchical thinking is an evil bogeyman is a strawman. Anyone who admits that some values are higher than others is involved in hierarchical thinking. It's just not about power stratification. The power hermeneutic is something that the woke imposes on everyone and everything. — Leontiskos

You may be more conversant with Hegel than I am, but I suspect that thinking a hierarchy of values according to power originates with Hegel’s dialectical ‘stages’ of history. His idea of a totalizing emancipatory telos in the form of absolute Spirit becomes naturalized as dialectical materialism with Marx, and rethought as discursive power relations with CT writers. This is where I situate wokism, more or less. Only with Nietzsche and postmodern writers like Foucault is the logic of an emancipatory hierarchy and telos abandoned.
If to be woke is to be enlightened, then Foucault’s response to Kant’s 1774 essay ‘What is Enlightenment’ is instructive of where he might depart from wokists. He considers enlightenment not as emancipation through reason (as in Kant), but as the use of reason to challenge authority, norms, and institutions. This is true of wokists as well, but woke movements often aim to enforce moral clarity, while Foucault sees that impulse as itself a form of power-knowledge that should be questioned.

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life.”

“Events of decision that we experience as rational choices, seemingly without the motive force of affect to move them, envelop the complex of the pre-cognitive and micropolitical processes of the event-based situation. The ‘rational’ aspects of the event— judgment, hypothesis, comparative evaluation of alternatives, decision— were mutually included in the event along with all the other co- operating factors.” (Massumi, ‘The Power at the end of the Economy’, pg. 47). Overall, the production of subjectivity and affect underpin wokeness’s enactment of moral discourse — Number2018

This sounds fine, as far as it goes. I’m concerned with an interpretation of the above which sanctions something like Protevi’s concept of political affect. I see a fair amount of overlap between Protevi and Massumi on affect.

Operating from below conscious subjectivity, Protevi proposes evolutionarily adaptive neurological modules that program subjects for prosocial behavior as well as for narrowly construed self-preservation. Impinging on persons from above are socially originating forms of conditioning . Notice the Deleuzian language that Protevi incorporates.

"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged objectifying self-consciousness. But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we can treat basic emotions as modular “affect programs” (Griffiths 1997) that run the body's hardware in the absence of conscious control. As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person “wakes up” to see the results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that there is another sense of “agent” as non-subjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers' subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or equally non-subjective “affect program.”

“A little more detail on the notion of a “rage agent” might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases of rage produce a modular agent or “affect program” that replaces the subject. Affect programs are emotional responses that are “complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction” (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor's notion of modularity, which calls for a module to be “mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access that in other modules]”.

Perhaps second only to the question of adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested. I feel relatively safe proposing a very-widely distributed rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp 1998 is able to cite studies of direct electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage circuits in humans and other mammalian species (190)."

"In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an evolutionarily primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the body's hardware in its place.”"The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state, e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics."

I find this assertion strange because the annals of Woke protest letters/debates are full of assertions of an expansive moral and epistemic relativism/anti-realism.

“The idea that there is a single truth — ‘the Truth’ — is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain,” the students’ letter stated, according to The Claremont Independent. “This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.”

“The idea that truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples,” it continues.

— Count Timothy von Icarus

They are relativist to a point. For instance, social constructionism’s anti-realism is epistemically realistic. Joseph Rouse’s analysis may easily be applied to the Pomona students’ letter.

Realism is the view that science (often successfully) aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Social constructivists typically reject realism on two counts: first, the world that science describes is itself socially constituted; and second, its aims in describing that world are socially specifiable (satisfying interests, sustaining institutions and practices, etc.). Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.(Joseph Rouse)

But things get complicated here. Ken Gergen considers himself a social constructionist, and yet rejects the blameful self-righteousness of identity politics.

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

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

I can’t imagine Gergen endorsing the accusatory language of the Pomona letter, and I think the reason is that his form of social constructionism is ‘postmodern’ and theirs is emancipatory. Emancipatory discourses like Marxism and the various versions of CT carries forward Hegel’s totalizing dialectics, asserting a ‘real’ ethical ground on the basis of which to accuse groups of succumbing to mere ‘myths’ and using these myths to oppress others.

↪Joshs

How is this not an argument against the very possibility of totalitarianism tout court, regardless of the ideology consumed by its practitioners? And yet, totalitarianism does exist, and it does not seem impossible that someone who has digested Deleuze or Nietzsche could practice it.

Likewise, your former objection would seem be an objection to the possibility of self-interested behavior tout court. Yet both self-interest as a motivation, and relative selflessness, also seem to exist; there is a meaningful distinction between them. It's the same with rejections of the possibility of weakness of will or the existence of norms.

Might I suggest that if an ideology demands the denial of the very possibility of many of the more obvious features of human life—if it demands that the ideology be affirmed over the obvious—this is itself a sign of potential totalitarianism? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not a question of denying features of life but of offering an alternative explanation for the motivations behind what appears as those features from a certain vantage. If your answer to the question of how well-intentioned people can produce totalitarian regimes and value systems is weakness of will , and my answer is limited ways of understanding alien forms of thinking, am I denying weak will as an obvious feature of life? Or am I acknowledging what you are seeing but enriching your view with a perspective which happens to be invisible to you? It all depends on the perspective.

You may argue that Ken Gergen’s quietism is a tacit endorsement of totalitarianisms, but he makes a distinction between respecting vs accepting ways of life that one disapproves of. Activism is still possible and necessary for him. He doesn’t pretend that totalitarianisms exist, but his analysis of their genesis differs from yours such that he would claim that you miss the forest for the trees. As a result you have no choice but to pathologize and moralize what he would submit to a hermetical negotiation based on mutual respect. This is how I have been reading approach to ethical debate.

“…to champion relational process is to treat with respect the intelligibility of all participants, even when other views are disagreeable. It is to carry the voices of all value orientations, to respect their validity within the circumstances in which those values were created. Every voice of value, no matter how heinous to others, carries the assumption of its own good. To be relationally responsible is to defend the rights of all to make themselves intelligible. One may surely resist what is seen as 'evil action,' but with a sense of humility -with respect to both one's own lack of fundamental grounds and the realization that under identical circumstances, a similar choice could have been made. What would this expanded form of conscience mean in action? It would favor, for example, supporting movements for social justice, for minority rights, or against tyranny of any kind, but without pathologizing those who might be targets of such movements

A view that advocates the reduction of the human being to a raft of social forces, flows, knots of language, etc., might very well be palliative in that it reduces inappropriate or overwrought anger. However, it can just as easily support callous indifference to suffering and vice. Such a reductionist account also destroys our notions of merit and goodness. It removes the beauty from history and ethical acts. One can certainly study a raft of social forces. One might even try to tinker with it to produce "choice-worthy outcomes." But does one resist serious temptation or suffer hardship for the sake of eddies of social force? Does one stand upon the ramparts in battle and risk maiming and death to save "flows," "sequences," and "concatenations? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Don’t confuse flows and concatenations with value-free causal bits. These flows are anything but value-neutral. And they are anything but motive and purpose-neutral. We strive to make sense of things. Put differently, cognitive-valuative systems organize themselves in order to anticipate events, which primarily means the actions of each other. This is an end in itself, not a means to a ‘selfish’ goal. The appearance of selfishness as an ‘obvious feature of the world’ is a kind of illusion in that it conceals the underlying dynamics behind a monolithic concept like ‘will’. The fact that we are concatenations and flows of values and desire means that no one can stand outside of some stance or other to judge from on high, including the philosopher who writes about such flows. They are not a neutral observer but are writing always from within context , within history, within perspective. There is no perspective which doesn’t already have a stake in what matters and how it matters, but this doesn’t prevent one from talking about it from within one’s relation of care and relevance to the world.

So, in any case, if what is 'good' for the life can change radically, why, say, some 'life-denying' morality could not, in some times, be a legitimate way of the expression of life? Same goes for resentiment? — boundless

When Nietzsche uses the word ‘life’ , he doesn’t mean it in a conventional biological sense. For instance, he rejected what he interpreted as the Darwinian principle of self-preservation. A life-denying morality is indeed a strategy of self-preservation for Nietzsche, but it is not what he means by will to life. Morality is a restriction of the will to life, and therefore is not ‘good’ for life. It is only good for survival.

“Darwin absurdly overestimates the influence of 'external circumstances'; the essential thing about the life process is precisely the tremendous force which shapes, creates form from within, which utilizes and exploits 'external circumstances' ... -that the new forms created from within are not shaped with a purpose in view, but that in the struggle of the parts, it won't be long before a new form begins to relate to a partial usefulness, and then develops more and more completely according to how it is used.” “Everything that lives is exactly what shows most clearly that it does everything possible not to preserve itself but to become more ...” (Last Notebooks)

The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life. (The Gay Science)

I think that one of his 'Untimely mediation' was actually against the idea of 'progress'. And also in later years he didn't think that the future will be 'better' than the present. Could you provide some references?
In fact, it seems the idea that we 'should' seek a 'better future' goes against many things he says. For him, the will to power doesn't have a 'purpose', it is like an innocent play (see the quote below). — boundless

I agree that the will to power doesn’t have a specific contentful purpose. But Nietzsche believed in a progress of strength, consciousness, and perspective; a will to power manifesting as creative overcoming. Growth, strength, and expansion of power lead to richer perspectives, the overcoming previous limitations and a dynamic reinterpretation of the world. Rather simply determining historical ideas and cultural types as ‘good or ‘bad’ he ranked them according to a hierarchy relative to his notion of progress.

“That every heightening of man brings with it an overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every increase in strength and expansion of power opens up new perspectives and demands a belief in new horizons—this runs through my writings.”

So, the mere ability to act in concordance with the will is what 'freedom'. Morality, according to Nietzsche, hinders that ability by constraining it with rules and this is why it is so bad. As I understand him, imposing on ourselves and others 'moral rules' suffocates disables the ability to act according to the will. Rather, Nietzsche would suggest, we should accept to live without putting constraints on the will and accept the suffering that such a way of life entails (due to, say, the conflict that inevitably happens). — boundless

We are always acting in accordance with the will, for Nietzsche. More specifically, we are always acting according to the will to power. All motivations and desires, including will to knowledge and traditional morality, are forms of will to power. The will to power can take ‘unhealthy’ forms which are antithetical to life. These don’t put constraints on the will; rather, they represent a ‘will to self-constraint’. Morality is an example of this will which turns its power against itself. Even so, in negating becoming, morality still represents a strategy for survival, albeit a ‘sick’ one.

Why I believe it is 'voluntaristic'? Because Nietzsche didn't distinguish between good ways in which life manifests itself and bad. Simply, whatever the will wills is good. The only bad thing is to hinder the manifestions of the — boundless

My reading of volunterisric doesn’t depend on removing the distinction between good and bad. It has to do with a metaphysical notion of the will wherein the will is a unitary substance that is in control of what it wills, and can reflective turn back to itself as this same identical will, the view that human action is ultimately self-determined by an inner power of choice or volition. For Nietzsche the will is not a single entity capable of pure self-reflection. One doesn’t choose (volunteer) to will what one wants to will. Instead, one finds oneself willing. One is as much the slave of one’s will as the controller of it.

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

There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition:

… a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.

Perhaps what you mean to argue is that for Nietzsche, like for Schopenhauer, the will is unconscious and irrational. It has no reason or purpose, and it does not choose in any moral or rational sense. What then makes Schopenhauer’s will volunteristic is that , unlike Nietzsche, he believes the will is universal and metaphysical; a singular, unified essence behind all phenomena.

The points I’m trying to make concerning Crrical theory are twofold. First, that regardless of how unconventional their realism was, they should not be in danger of being accused of an ‘anything goes’ relativism.
— Joshs

And Barron does not accuse them of that. What ↪AmadeusD says there is important. To talk about the philosophical antecedents of wokism is not to talk about wokism per se. You keep blurring the difference — Leontiskos

You need to remind what you think the difference is, in specific terms. Let’s start with this: If you agree with Barron that CT doesn’t adhere to an ‘anything goes’ relativism, are you claiming that some wokists do adhere to an ‘anything goes’ relativism? Can you give specific examples here, (besides Amadeus’s assertions)? If
you do think so, I think you are giving wokists too much credit. They are as a whole not philosophical scholars. Most activists are drawing on commoditized , pre-packaged , dumbed down dilutions of the antecedent philosophies. Given that the so-called ‘radical relativists’ (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida) offer ideas that are difficult even for other scholars to conceptualize, I suggest it is extremely unlikely the woke leadership, much less the rank and file, has assimilated any of this stuff. And as I argued earlier, if they have, it would pull the rug out from their moral self-justifications.

Here’s the likely effect of a wokist actually absorbing the ideas of the radical relativists:

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

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

Is it really necessary to emphasize the differences between wokism and CT? Is it your contention that wokist practices are so wildly deviant from the philosophical antecedents Barron mentions that ‘blurring the difference’ deprives us of a vital understanding of wokists? If Barron thought so, I dont think he would have bothered to spend so much time on those antecedents. I’ll give you three names: Adorno, Gramsci and Fanon. I defy you to show me any concrete evidence of a wokist pronouncement or action that isn’t fully compatible with one of these three thinkers. It’s true that, strictly speaking, only Adorno comes from the Frankfurt school, but the other two share the larger Marxist framework with Adorno, and are as much realists as he is.

A better life and society for everyone, wokists included. To disagree with someone is not to treat them as a means to an end. To disagree with someone implies that they have intrinsic worth. — Leontiskos

Are you suggesting that wokists, in treating others as a means to an end, don’t believe they have intrinsic worth? Should I be looking in the direction of Kant to locate the context of your critique of means-ends thinking?

Criticisms from Dark Enlightenment people aren't supposed to accomplish anything. The downside to wokism is viewed as self-correcting, so if anything, the admonition would be to accelerate wokism. Go faster. Accelerate capitalism. Stop dragging this out. — frank

Is that what Nick Land’s accelerationism is about?

If, according to Nietzsche, all manifestations of life are manifestations of the 'will to power', and there is no ultimate 'right' or 'wrong' way to manifest it (someone in the classical tradition would perhaps say that the 'right' way is what fulfills the nature of the will, but Nietzsche rejects that), it is somewhat inconsistent to write books glorifying some way of living and criticizing others.

Mind you, I think that Nietzsche had pretty interesting things to say (e.g. about how resentment works and can condition our thoughts, about creativity and so on). But his extreme 'voluntarism', expressed in his mature 'amoralism' and 'will to power' etc is IMO more consistent with an empty philosophy rather than a philosophy that can teach a 'way of life'. To put it differently, the 'pars destruens' was so pervasive than no 'pars construens' seems consistent with it, not his. — boundless

Human beings are pattern-seekers. That is how we are able to function in a world which never repeats itself identically from one moment to the next. We have to have a way of anticipating what is coming next in spite of the constant flux we are presented with. Older ways of thinking in philosophy and the sciences dealt with this challenge by carving up the world on the basis of categories. There were now law-governed objects and causal relations that it was our job to properly represent. Nietzsche was among those who attempted to show the dangers of taking the changing patterns we experience in our world and freezing them into such mathematical identities and absolutes. He tried to show that we do the same thing with moral values as we do with empirical objects, and the result has been endless wars and violence over what is right and what is wrong.

Nietzsche’s argument was that trying to locate a value system with the right CONTENT could lead to nothing but nihilism. This didn’t mean that he abandoned all possibilities of distinguishing what is a better way of life from what is worse. What he did was to separate this issue from the particular content of meaning of specific value systems. Instead of focusing on arriving at a final correct content of knowledge or values, our focus should be on accelerating the process of moving through value systems. Process , not content. And speed, not depth of foundation. The best way of living is that which can enjoy the delights of creative becoming and re-invention in the most optimal fashion, which means keeping itself free from repressive attachments to content-based absolutes and foundations of all kinds. He recognized this as an enormous challenge, because we are precisely NOT volunteristic in our decisions.

Contrary to Sartre, the will is not free to choose whatever it wants to choose. We find ourselves choosing, we are driven to choose. This lack of volunteristic freedom is the result of the fact that the psyche is a society of competing drives, and the self is an amalgam of such competing forces. It’s hard to be volunteristic when the ego is a mere byproduct of a play of drives. In addition. the psyche isn’t walled off from the social sphere, but is intertwined with it. As a result, we always find ourselves immersed in larger normative cultural structures, and thus we always run the risk of becoming entrenched within norms that eventually suffocate and repress. We thrive on recognizing patterns , regularities and norms from within the flux, but Nietzsche suggested how we could allow ourselves the intense pleasure of such creative ordering while steering clear of the tendencies to ossify such assimilating activity into life and meaning-destroying certainties. And we can get better and better over time at allowing the creative future to flow into the present. This seems to me to be a promising , growth-oriented way of life. If it is empty, it is only empty of content-based prescriptions, as I think it should be.

This gets complicated, but with NOS4A2 I would say that the act of activism precludes this response to one extent or another. The activist is treating everyone, friend and foe, as a means to an end. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that we should prefer compassion and understanding, the advice that we should treat everyone with an equal amount of compassion and understanding turns out to be false. It is false because it is fitting to treat those who are attempting to use us as a means to their end with less understanding and compassion — Leontiskos

Doesn’t this raise the issue of the difference between theory and practice? Dont we all walk around with interpretive frameworks in our heads allowing us to make sense of our world? Don’t our ethical principles and political instincts come from such ‘theoretical’ structures, and don’t we put such instincts and principles into practice every day in our interactions with others? Is the head of a family not an activist in putting into practice their understanding of moral standards in their child raising decisions? Are their parenting decisions not means to an end, that being the raising of good people? Aren’t all ‘activists’ simply actively putting into practice what they believe to be in the best interest of society as they understand it? How are the critical comments about wokism in this thread not a form of activism? What are the ends the criticisms are a means to?

The subject receives those intensities and translate them into ultimate truth. Feeling of ultimate moral certainty resembles the ‘return of all names and intensities of history.’ It is the result of hyper-intensified machinic affect. — Number2018

But wouldn’t AO argue that it is only on the dimension of the molar (rather than within molecular intensities, the body without organs) where a ‘feeling of moral certainty’ can be manifest? Isnt it the molar regime of social formations which crushes , binds, plugs, arrests, cuts off the circulation of flows, constricts, regularizes and breaks singular points, and imposes on desire another type of "plan”? This crushing and plugging activity of stratification and molarization would seem to be the opposite of ‘hyper-intensified machinic affect’. Moral certainty, a clearly codified, representational affect, is a molar formation, not an effect of free-flowing molecular intensities or the body without organs (BwO).

Doesn’t one have to de-stratify from social formations and make oneself a body without organs in order to free up continuous intensities?

“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions [intensities] here and there, try out continuums of intensities [plane of consistency] segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs.

We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows [intensities], continuum of intensities [plane of consistency]. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.

If so, then an ‘anything goes’ relativist would have to embrace the proliferation of an unlimited multiplicity of diverse and incompatible totalitarian systems.

Why? Are they committed to some sort of inviolable principle that leads from the truth of relativism to this sort of open-ended tolerance? I don't see why they would be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

According to one way of reading Nietzsche on Will to Power, he is advocating the creation of values systems which , in themselves and in terms of their structure, may act in totalitarian fashion. My point about the radical relativist was not that they must tolerate all and sundry systems of power , but that what it means to be a value system is to constitute, for a time long or short, a monolithically self -perpetuating normative totality.

According to Deleuze’s way of reading Nietzsche, heterogeneity and difference inserts itself into every moment of the unfolding of any system of values, such that it is never the exact same system which unfolds itself every moment. As I said earlier, the idea of categorical identity is an illusion, but the most dangerous one. Deleuze writes:

When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return…

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneous opposed to variation, and an eternity opposed to permanence… in univocity, univocal being is said immediately of individual differences or the universal is said of the most singular independent of any mediation…In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and cause only the yet-to-come to return.” (Difference and Repetition)

Deleuze doesn’t deny that values systems are produced out of this riot of differentiation, but these systems are only totalitarian from the illusory perspective of distance.

…the thesis from Deleuze's late 1960s writings holds identity to be a simulation or optical illusion…identity and fixed markers, which may be considered natural and pregiven or contingently constructed but indispensable, are surface effects of difference. Identities and fixed markers, I want to say, are like patterns on the surface of water, which appear fixed when seen from a great distance, such as from the window of an airplane in flight: their stability and substantiality, in short, are a matter of perspective.” ( Nathan Widder)

If it's inevitable, we should value all the more the restraint our conservative nature gives us: first, do no harm. — frank

I’d rather audaciously stumble into the unknown. It beats a lobotomy.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that wokism’s roots contribute nothing innovative or valuable to the canons of philosophical thought.
— Joshs

I'm certainly not committed to the idea that all philosophy is good...
— Count Timothy von Icarus

-

What I am talking about is humanizing (as in respecting)the claim as if it is made by a serious person.
— Antony Nickles

Isn't it confusing precisely because it involves lying to ourselves? Because it involves treating someone who we believe to be unserious as if they were serious?
— Leontiskos

-

It seems that a fundamental disagreement here is over the question of whether humans are capable of bad ideas. The woke, as well as Antony Nickles and @Joshs, seem to lean into the idea that humans are not capable of bad ideas.

Consider an analogy. Human beings and human culture are, in part, ideational. In part, they are collections of ideas. In both cases the ideas are domesticated into a sort of garden. Now gardens have lots of weeds, and require weeding. The camp that leans into the no-bad-ideas direction is effectively claiming that weeds do not exist, or that gardens should not be weeded, or that weeds can be pruned but should never be uprooted. I think that's crazy wrong. There are bad ideas aplenty, and they should be uprooted. Indeed, I would argue that the very idea that there are no bad ideas is itself a bad idea. This is true even though weeding requires energy and constant diligence, and even though it is possible to learn from bad ideas (because evil is a privation of goodness).

So backing up, do bad ideas exist? — Leontiskos

Let me use your analogy of the garden. It is a human-constructed niche, and like all of our built niches, what constitutes a proper or improper garden, a weed or a non-weed, is subject to criteria that change over time as a result of our ongoing interactions with gardens, people and other aspects of our world. So we can say that for a given person within a given time and culture, there will be specific criteria for the goodness or badness of a garden. What are such criteria of goodness based on, and can we generalize these criteria across persons and historical eras? I do believe in a certain notion of cultural progress, both empirical and ethical, so my answer is yes. But since the criteria I thinking are fundamental have to do with the concept of sense-making, it will be less clear in the case of aesthetic phenomena like gardens and works of art how this applies than in the case of the sciences or political systems.

Our understanding of the world is amenable to an unlimited variety of alternative interpretations. Any of these interpretations can ‘work’ , that is , be predictively useful. That’s why we shouldn’t wait until an scientific theory is invalidated to search for alternatives. It work beautifully in its way , with an underlying mathematics which is accurate to the millionth decimal, and yet we can come upon an alternative framework that we prefer because it reveals the relationships between the elements of the world in a more integral and intimate way. What the previous mathematically precise model assigned to randomness the new model organizes in a more meaningful way.

The one price one pays for abandoning the old model for the new one is that the new doesn’t simply correct the mistakes of the old and supplement it. It changes the sense of the old model’s concepts. As a result, in order to gain entry to this new approach, one must be persuaded to view the world in a different way.

Because the observations and facts are reliant on the overarching interpretive framework of the model for their intelligibility, it is. or necessarily a simply matter to be ‘converted’ to a new way of seeing. Especially if that new way has nothing to form a bridge between it and one’s familiar ways of thinking.

Therefore, our overarching systems of interpreting the world , empirically, politically, ethically, spiritually, have a certain necessary inertia to them. I may have happened on a theoretical or ethical or political model which I find better than the previous one I held, but I cannot foist it on you if your own system of interpretation does not have the resources within itself to form the necessary bridge to allow it to modify its organization to accommodate the new model. I may believe my way of thinking is better for me than your way of thinking, but that’s not the same as believing that my way of thinking is better for you than your present way of thinking.

I believe that all of us are continually evolving within our systems of thought, but at a pace that is determined by the limits of that system. My goal in debating with others is to understand their system of thought from their perspective as well as i can, and to test the validity of my efforts by attempting to plug into the leading edge of their own thinking. If my thinking doesn’t find them where they are at, I will just get the equivalent of a glassy eyes stare of incomprehension or outright hostility. If I am successful in plugging into their cutting edge, they will respond enthusiastically, seeing me as a partner in thought rather than as a threat.

I didn't say the activists who ran the transitioning facilities were idiots. I said we were. The whole society took a vacation from reason. It's a drama that echoes the eugenics craze in the US. That also started with pseudo-science that was caught up in a campaign to engineer a better human. If there is a Spirit of Progress, this is its dark side. — frank

I think it is the eventual fate of all our best ideas to appear from the vantage of hindsight as the ravings of idiots. As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly wrote:

I must still agree that it is important for the psychological researcher to see the efforts of man in the perspective of the centuries. To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.

Getting rid of absolutism doesn't necessitate a move away from totalitarianism; it can in some cases motivate the opposite move (indeed, I think the case in point is such an example). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Totalitarianism has to lock in, to totalize something. Doesnt it totalize a particular value system? If one says that a radical relativist acquiesces to totalitarianism
because they sanction an ‘anything goes’ approach to values and ethics, how are the systems that are ‘ going’ their own way treated by these radical relativists? Doesn’t anything totalitarian have to get going and then ossify into a self-perpetuating structure? Isnt the indefinite temporal repetition of the same system or structure a necessary condition for calling anything totalitarian? If so, then an ‘anything goes’ relativist would have to embrace the proliferation of an unlimited multiplicity of diverse and incompatible totalitarian systems.

But is this way of thinking compatible with writers like Deleuze, Focault and Derrida? Decidedly not. Their method of analysis of texts, discourses and cultures is to
show that belief in the existence of monolithic systems are dangerous illusions that are nonetheless responsible for perpetuating all manner of social violence, repression and domination in the name of their preferred totalitarianism.

I suppose you could argue than the very claim that all supposedly totalizing, monolithic structures are composed of heterogeneous elements that don’t venting to the ‘identical’ structure is itself a totalizing claim. But if so, how does such a claim encourage or excuse the very totalitarianisms it is breaking apart?

Was lobotomy idiotic?
— Joshs

Yes. Have you read much about the advent of transitioning pre-pubescent people? — frank

Yes. Lobotomies were performed in the U.S. for 40 years, sanctioned by all the proper scientific authorities. What’s the point of calling them idiots? Do you call yourself an idiot whenever you agree to a medical procedure which has been approved for 40 years, because you can’t know in advance which ones will eventually be discredited, just as lobotomy was.

Of course the difference between trans therapy and lobotomy was than the policies were rushed into place before the chance for any society-wide debate. Did this happen because of the decisions of idiots, or because this commonly happens when a new conception appears on the scene which blurs the lines between the medical, the psychological, the sociological and the religious and results in polarizing political debates which draw in the medical establishment when they are not prepared to navigate the political minefield.

↪Joshs That has nothing much to do with me. What I'm telling you is they are not synonymous (which is an empirical fact. Wokists do not play out hte tenets of legitimate critical theory. They play dress-up to justify shitty, incoherent moral points of view (on my view)). You can say that you think their actions are justified under CRT and Ill say no, they expressly are not. I'm not personally interested in that debate because it is clear to anyone who has a clue about CRT that things like BLM (2019-2021 type of BLM action, anyhow) were not part of the agenda. We don't need some theoretical approach to notice this. I assume you've read the basic texts. There is no debate here.

If, on the other hand, you are saying that the basis for what's called wokism is something legitimate, so we should trying to tease out what that is - yes, but that has nothing to do with understanding those wokist actors. — AmadeusD

Maybe we can find something to agree on here. Let me say that there are a lot of crazy-ass wokist actions I’m not in a position to attach a CT pedigree to. But I will say that at least one Critical theorist, Theodore Adorno, espoused some positions that on their own merit are a bit crazy-assed, and whose interpretation by activists would predictably lead to the kinds of trouble we’ve been seeing.
So let me propose the following scenario: those wokists following crazy-assed doctrines fall to the wayside, and a new wokist moment arises based closely on the CT ideas of Habermas. No more pitting of power against power. Instead an emphasis on communicative rationality and hermeneutic consensus-building. Does this sound like a palatable scenario to you?

At this point progress means waking up to how idiotic we were. — frank

Was lobotomy idiotic?

Appeals to status seeking can be merely descriptive as well. It doesn't seem they are prima facie wrong. If they were categorically off-base, then it would also be the case that segregationists and white nationalists cannot be acting to defend their own status and interests. Yet that is, quite explicitly, what they claim and understand themselves to be doing. In their newer forms, they just claim that everyone else is also doing the same thing, covertly or not, and that they're at least honest about it. However, earlier defenders of segregation were much more covert about their ends, and yet I hardly think we can avoid the conclusion that these too were also partly motivated by defending their status and control over resources. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Concepts like status, self-interest, power and control can inform diametrically opposed positions depending on how the subjectivity, or ‘self’, they refer back to is understood. If we start from the self as homo economicus, a Hobbesian figure the attainment of whose desires need not have any connection with the desires of others, then we either settle for a Darwinian Capitalism or find a way to insert into this self an ethical conscience which we will not always be able to depend on. If instead we see the self not as an entity but as a process of unification, self as self-consistency, and desire as oriented toward anticipatory sense-making ( We don’t desire things, we desire coherence of intelligibility), then there is no i weren’t slot between the needs of my own ‘self’ and the needs of other selves. The unethical is then not a result of bad conscience but a failure of intelligibility. The unassimilable Other is found wherever injustice occurs (slavery, genocide).

Second, I think I'm the only one who mentioned fascism and the idea (Milbank's, although the seeds can arguably be found in Dostoevsky) is that the logical conclusion of the ontologies of violence is fascism. That is, when there is no transcendent order of peace, goodness, or truth, instead only contingent systems of power, difference, and conflict—when truth, law, and morality are not a participation in Logos, but are rather constructed through acts of force (e.g., discourse, statecraft, capital, language games)—then violence is original, and there can be no counter-violence which truly transcends violence. There is only ever assertion over and against counter-assertion, will to power against will to power (plus or minus some post hoc rationalization, which is itself merely another assertion of value). This is precisely the spiritual logic of fascism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have argued that the doctrine of nihilistic will to power is not a plausible explanation for the moral absolutism characteristic of wokism. Such absolutism can only justify itself on the basis of a realist-idealist grounding of some sort, which happens to be the stock and traded of Critical theory. I suggested in another post that the most noxious totalitarian tendencies of wokism can be moderated or even eliminated as more activists discover Habermas’s hermeneutical, communicative brand of Critical Theory and begin to leave behind the violently oppositional language of folks like Adorno, Fanon and Gramsci.

As for Woke becoming the dominant ideology the way Neoliberalism has been in 50 years, in 50 years China and India will be the world's largest economies. The EU in particular is on a growth trajectory to become increasingly irrelevant, and the war in Ukraine has shown that it seems likely to continue to underperform its economic standing in both hard and soft power. It would take a radical sea change for these ideologies to be allowed to get anywhere in China, even if they were popular there (whereas they are popularly ridiculed on Chinese social media). I don't think India will prove exceptionally fertile ground either. Whereas sub-Saharan Africa will be to that epoch what Southeast Asia was to the 90s-2020s, the main target for new investment and consumer markets, and there are a lot of reasons to suspect Woke would need to be radically transformed to have an appeal there too. I'm just not sure that it will make sense in these settings, and a look at how Woke analogs have developed in Japan and Korea might be a good indicator here. In particular, the Sexual Revolution seems key to Woke, and yet this is probably the number one area where thought indigenous to the developing world has said: "no thanks," and "please stop trying to force this on us." — Count Timothy von Icarus

When I said the philosophical underpinning of wokism would be mainstream in 50 years, I didn’t mean necessarily in China and India. China would first have to find a way to institute representative government. However, one can use the popularity of Gay Pride parades around the world as a measure of the rapidity with which new social
movements spread internationally. The recent one in Budapest even served as an anti-fascist protest.

I think the problem is that the interests and needs of young trans people was created by woke culture. — frank

Is that any different than the interests and needs of gay people being created by gay culture? Onencould apply a Foucaultian genealogical analysis and trace concepts of sexuality to the formation and transformation of discursive systems. When did the Western concept of homosexuality emerge? When and how did it change to gayness, and then Queerness?

The question is: was this catastrophe just the cost of progress? Or is it a sign of something gravely wrong under the hood of wokism? — frank

Lobotomy was once a thing. But it led to progress. After all, we still use ECT.

Do you think there is something internal to Critical Theory that would adjudicate between these many divergent views? Can CT tell us whether Rorty or Adorno or Habermas is the better way? Or is indeterminacy inherent to CT, and we will always need to wait for something even better, and/or always return to something left unfinished? — Fire Ologist

My belief is that to critique CT from the vantage of Rorty, Deleuze or Derrida one must step outside of it in the direction of an alternative stance. Their questioning won’t make sense from within the confines of Frankfurt school CT. But I do think there is reason to hope that the most noxious totalitarian tendencies of wokism can be moderated or even eliminated as more activists discover Habermas’s hermeneutical, communicative brand of CT and begin to leave behind the violently oppositional language of folks like Adorno, Fanon and Gramsci.

As someone who began studying for his doctorate in Paris in 1989, Barron knows a fair bit about figures like Foucault and Derrida. — Leontiskos

Based on the video, I would say he knows next to nothing about them, but in order to demonstrate this, I would have to locate a more extended text of his on the subject and compare through it line for line with actual quotes from the authora.

As someone who began studying for his doctorate in Paris in 1989, Barron knows a fair bit about figures like Foucault and Derrida. — Leontiskos

Based on the video, I would say he knows next to nothing about them, but in order to demonstrate this, I would have to locate a more extended text of his on the subject and compare through it line for line with actual quotes from the authora.

Critical theorists and realists are distinct groups, but there is overlap between some critical approaches and a philosophical position known as critical realism. In general, most critical theorists are not realists in the traditional philosophical sense—especially within the Frankfurt School tradition and related approaches, which often critique the very idea of objective reality and emphasize the role of social constructions and power in shaping what counts as "truth"...
— Perplexity AI

So my intimation that your claim is highly inaccurate is now stronger. Note too that the folks on TPF who gravitate towards Critical theory generally do not consider themselves realists. — Leontiskos

Run Adorno through Perplexity. I ran him through ChatGPT and found this:

“Postmodern relativism (as seen in thinkers like Lyotard or some interpretations of Foucault) often claims that truth, meaning, and values are socially constructed, contingent, and plural, with no overarching meta-narratives or objective standpoint. Adorno rejects this kind of relativism. He believes that there is an objective world and that truth matters, but that our conceptual frameworks and societal structures distort our access to it.

Habermas, a member of the Frankfurt school born a generation later than the original group, endorsed a hermeneutic approach influenced by American Pragmatism. According to ChatGPT:

“Habermas does not endorse naïve or metaphysical realism (the idea that we have direct access to objective truths independent of any interpretive framework). Like many post-Kantian thinkers, he acknowledges the linguistic and intersubjective mediation of knowledge and meaning. In this sense, Habermas shares some insights with postmodern and pragmatist thinkers: all understanding is mediated, contingent, and historically situated. Despite this, Habermas explicitly and repeatedly rejected postmodern relativism, particularly as found in the works of Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault (at least in his earlier interpretations of them).He argued that postmodernism undermines the possibility of rational critique, normativity, and consensus, leading to epistemic and moral relativism—which he viewed as self-defeating and politically dangerous.”

The points I’m trying to make concerning Crrical theory are twofold. First, that regardless of how unconventional their realism was, they should not be in danger of being accused of an ‘anything goes’ relativism. Instead , they beleive that material and social formations are grounded i. truth , and truth is grounded in metaphysical certainties. Rorty had endless debates with his friend Habermas ( one of which I attended) over the latter’s insistence on Kantian rational norms. My second point is that, to the extent that wokists draw form critical theory, their moral absolutism gets its justification from theblatter’s realist stance.

Deconstruction shows what continues to bind together groups on either side of an oppositional divide, so one can never simply overcome what one opposes.
— Joshs

Now apply that to your post, because you transgress this principle multiple times. You say, for example, that Derrida was critical of Marxism and therefore Marxism cannot be used to explain his thought. On the contrary, a critic of Marxism is by that very fact informed by Marxism - especially one who holds that one can never simply overcome what one opposes. — Leontiskos

Congratulations. You have just summarized a a central feature of deconstructive reading. it can one be ‘informed by’ and at the same time move in a wholly other direction? Derrida say yes. Even repetition of the identical meaning
returns the same sense differently. Absolutely other but at the same time informed by what it differs from.

critical theory moves away from Cartesianism by showing the subject to be formed through structures of bodily, material and social interactions. Postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault go much further, making the subject nothing but an effect of these worldly interactions.
— Joshs

I just wonder why this process which sounds like it should be neutral as to outcome always yields the same political conclusions. Liberal wokism is the only result of postmodernism - how is such uniformity of outcome possible given such undefined unformed clay as “bodily, material and social interactions.” Why is there no legitimate facist dictator, but there can be a legitimate woke pontificator? — Fire Ologist

As I mentioned earlier, wokism, to the extent that it can be connected with Critical theory, is realist in outlook. So it shouldn’t be surprising that it is not neutral concerning what is real and true with respect to material or political structures. The situation is quite different for post-realist postmodern writers such as Foucault and Derrida. Unlike wokists, they do not point moralistic fingers at those who fail to take the ‘right’ course, and do not articulate social and political change via a legitimate/illegitimate binary.

There’s a lot that needs to be absorbed in order to situate the various positions within and after wokism. For instance, among Critical theorists, why does Habermas reject Adorno’s negative dialectical realism in favor of a positive hermeneutic model of communicative action? Why does Rorty believe that Habermas’s reliance on Kantian categorical norms of rationality is too metaphysical? Why does Deleuze attack Rorty’s pragmatism as platonic dogmatism? Which of these positions is most or least compatible with the moralistic blamefulness of wokism?

reform of wokist excesses can take place within the bounds of these philosophical ground
— Joshs

They can't, it appears. Theory isn't particularly of any moment here — AmadeusD

What if that theory appreciates, as Antony appears to, that ‘rationality’ can’t be separated from what’s being dichotomously treated as merely “feeling -based’ and emotional? Let’s say one articulates what arises incipiently in the guise of an intuitive feeling into a system of logically coherent assertions amenable in principle to empirical test. How far does that articulatory effort go toward alleviating the need to do what Antony is prescribing, making oneself responsible for stepping outside of one’s system of rationality in order to have the chance of glimpsing another’s affective-rational system from their own perspective? Or should one only be responsible for anchoring discourse to some overarching meta-rational facts of the matter?

the problem with Nietzsche's philosophy is that it is inconsistent here IMO. If the 'highest form of life' is a life where we impose our values and there is no critierion in which we distinguish, in a non-arbitrary manner what is the best way to 'affirm life' then a 'life affirming' stance is no 'better' than a 'life denying' one, as both are said to be manifestations of the 'will to power'. Why should a manifestion of the will to power be better than another if there aren't criteria to tell which is better? In other words, I do not see in Nietzsche's philosophy enough convincing arguments for avoiding a compeletely arbitrary stance of life where absolutely any stance is no better or worse than any other. — boundless

We always have criteria for the best way to affirm life, but those criteria come from within the contingently produced perspectives we create. Within a value system we inhabit for a period of time, perhaps our whole lives, that stance is clearly better than the alternatives. When we transition from one perspectival valuative system to an another, our criteria change along with it.

To assume that one could impose a criterion for the goodness of a value system, the ‘best way’ to affirm life, from outside of all contingent perspectives, a god’s- eye view, view from nowhere or sideways on, is to impose a formula which is meaningless. In Nietzsche’s sense such aesthetic ideals are the definition of nihilism. And given the fact that most of the suffering in this world comes at the hands of those who act on behalf of supposedly perspective-free principles and criteria of truth and righteousness, it may be time to think differently.

0. Suffering is not the problem to solve, but the meaninglessness of it.
1. Aesthetic justification: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
2. The Will to Power. Suffering acquires its meaning through overcoming it. — kirillov

Just to clarify, for Nietzsche suffering is necessary because life is eternal , creative becoming, and suffering is that phase of becoming in which something must be negated in order to move onto a fresh, transformed meaningful perspective on the world. This cycle is endless, and suffering plays a substantive and positive role in the heightening growth of experience.

That the world's "Value lies in our interpretation (- that somewhere else other interpretations than merely human ones may be possible -); that previous interpretations have been perspectival appraisals by means of which we preserve ourselves in life, that is, in the will to power and
to the growth of power; that every heightening of man brings with it an overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every increase in strength and expansion of power opens up new perspectives and demands a belief
in new horizons - this runs though my writings. The world which matters to us is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fictional elaboration and filling out of a meagre store of observations; it is 'in flux', as something becoming, as a
constantly shifting falsity that never gets any nearer to truth, for - there is no 'truth'.

The 'meaninglessness of what happens': belief in this results from an insight into the falseness of previous interpretations, a generalisation of weakness and despondency - it's not a necessary belief.

I think you may be missing a trick wihch is implicit in all our comments here... These are not synonymous. At all. — AmadeusD

Then you’ll need to inform Bishop Barron of your tricks, because apparently he hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s clear from the video that he believes Critical theory is, if not synonymous with, then the basis of wokism. He specifically states that Critical theory has expressed itself as wokism (24:54). If what is implicit in “all your comments” is something contrary to this, then I’m not sure why Leonstikos directed me to this video.

I’m watching the Bishop Barron video. The first factual error I noticed is that he claims Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault belong to the Frankfurt school of critical theory (he says Derrida is the patron saint of critical theory) , which is not true. Instead, they were critical of Marxism and the Frankfurt school. Deconstruction overturns the assumptions of Marxism. The second one is where he says that critical theory privileges the subject over the body in a radicalization of Descartes. On the contrary, critical theory moves away from Cartesianism by showing the subject to be formed through structures of bodily, material and social interactions. Postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault go much further, making the subject nothing but an effect of these worldly interactions. Barron also claims that gender theory privileges subjectivity over the body, as when someone claims that they were born in the wrong body. But at least some within the transgender community accept the biologically-based theory that psychological gender is a function of brain ‘wiring’ that one is born with. Furthermore, as someone who is apparently so concerned about protecting the truths concerning the body, Barron should know that many of today’s leading theorists associated with the new synthesis approach to evolutionary biology as well as embodied approaches to cognitive science are sympathetic to critical theory.


Barron also argues that Critical theory is radically relativistic. It isn’t. It adheres to a form of realism and as a result believes in the notion of social progress and emancipation. Only postmodern writers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida reject realism and grand narratives of emancipation, but wokism embraces these narratives and their accompanying moralism.

Barron blames Derrida’s use of binary oppositions for the sorts of black and white oppositions used by wokists (oppressor/oppressed, master/slave, privileged/marginalized), but unlike in Crrical theory, Derrida’s binaries are not dialectical oppositions. Deconstruction shows what continues to bind together groups on either side of an oppositional divide, so one can never simply overcome what one opposes.
Finally, he asserts that for Critical theory power is the central principle of society, and that it supersedes truth (such as that 2+2=4). But there is no central tenet of wokism arguing that 2+2 can equal anything we want it to (in spite of a handful of wokists who may or may not have made that claim), because critical theorists are realists, not radical relativists.

Left and right with Andrew Breitbart:
https://youtu.be/ftZfdrqVpOk?si=2ZxxQ3vVX16y4xwW

But I think wokeness is correctly construed as wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. — Leontiskos

And I think the superficial characterizations of the grounding presuppositions of wokeness i’m seeing in this thread are also wanting to throw out the baby with the bath water. And what is the baby? if one remains at the surface level of ‘things wokists do that annoy us’, the baby is nothing but these arbitrary and wrongheaded actions. In the hands of the better journalists delving into this socio-political phenomenon, the baby is a spectrum of philosophical positions, bookended on the right by Hegel and on the left by 1960’s French thinkers like Foucault. Throwing out the baby then means that one refuses to accept that reform of wokist excesses can take place within the bounds of these philosophical grounds, that these philosophies were unnecessary in the first place given that there are already perfectly workable, intellectually superior ethico-political frameworks to guide action. Much of the critique Ive read so far ranges from ad hominem attack on character flaws in the activists ( status seeking) to historical regressiveness ( it’s a return to fascist thinking or a twisted variant of Romanticism.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that wokism’s roots contribute nothing innovative or valuable to the canons of philosophical thought. Arent development and innovation qualities to be expected of political thinking? Doesn’t progress in thinking about justice move in continuous cycles from counterculture to mainstream culture? Isnt it a sign of progress that what was once deemed
socially acceptable is now considered cruel and unnecessary? And if so, what contemporary counterculture would you point to as superior to wokism? Or are we supposed to rely on tradition rather than evolutionary transformation in considering how to think about justice?

A terrible line has been crossed when transgression is valued for transgression's sake, but I want to say that the precursor is the undervaluation of the conservative instinct, or the status quo, or tradition (or whatever else one wants to call it). I don't think that line ever gets crossed without this preliminary — Leontiskos

Antony’s contributions to this thread I think exemplify the kind of thinking that doesn’t throw the baby out, but instead occupies a position (later Wittgenstein) within the philosophical spectrum that includes wokism, from which vantage he can reform and moderate its excesses.

I’ve read only one work by Brassier on Deleuze, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy’, so I’m not familiar with his overall perspective on Deleuze. However, I read a few works by Brian Massumi, who is an affect theorist — Number2018

Have you read John Protevi’s work on political affect?

Protevi, J.: and Christian Helge Peters. (2017). Affective Ideology and Trump's Popularity. http://www.protevi.com/john/TrumpAffect