These are beliefs and activities that seek to confer a certain status and halo upon those that express them, while damaging those who they claim to support — NOS4A2

You’ll never get anywhere in understanding the origin or purpose of these beliefs by dismissing them as personality defects (status-seeking on the part of the economically privileged). If I introduced you to non-affluent woke activists who have sacrificed personally for the sake of their social justice aims would you try to poke holes in their sincerity, or make an effort to accept their ethical intent and try to understand why they think their approach is superior to more conservative politics?

However, I disagree with your claim that Foucault and Deleuze do not offer a full-scale critique of affect. Your statement that “the analyses of Foucault and Deleuze are not critiques of affect per se, but of how affect is disciplined and made legible—subsumed into power/knowledge formations” is only partially accurate. While insightful, it risks downplaying the ontological commitments both thinkers make toward affect and desire.Foucault, for instance, interrogates the bodily, emotional, and relational dimensions of power. Power, in his view, does not merely repress; it incites, induces, and seduces. His concept of the microphysics of power within disciplinary regimes becomes a theory of affective modulation. His method reveals how affect is produced, channeled, and governed. In this sense, his theory of power becomes a philosophy of affect, in the sense that is thoroughly conditioned by and entangled with power relations. — Number2018

You mentioned Ray Brassier as one interpreter you read Deleuze through. His treatment of Deleuze has been described as realist, rationalist, and deflationary, and he appears to embrace an eliminative scientific realism beyond human experience (He was considered one of the founders of speculative realism, although he disavows this movement now). Do you think this is a fair assessment of Brassier, and would you say that you are in general agreement concerning his reading of Deleuze, and his philosophical outlook in general? I ask this because it would help clarify for me where you’re coming from with respect not only to Deleuze but to Foucault, especially concerning the possibility and sense of a critique of affect. As you know, there are anti-realist, or if you prefer, ‘radically relativist’ postmodern readings of Deleuze and Foucault which strongly disagree with Brassier’s take on Deleuze.

What the Civil Rights Movement in the US fought for or labour laws in my view isn't anything to do with woke or wokeism. Just as isn't the shortly lived protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. The proponents of DEI surely might see them as the continuation or those that continue to further these past political struggles, but in fact they are not — ssu

Certainly Marxism and post-colonialism were elements of 60’s activism, but It tends to be the psycho-social aspects of wokism that some surviving participants of 1960’s activism object to. The focus on the power of language and material structural aspects of social practices to create and sustain implicit bias derives from Critical theoretic and poststructuralist sources. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse was the intellectual darling of the 60’s Berkeley intelllectual scene, but didnt have an influence on the theoretical wing of the civil rights movement. Writers like Foucault were writing in the 1960’s but their work didn’t make its way into the playbook U.S. political activists until at least the 1980’s. While 60’s figures like Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky are avid supporters of the pro-Palestinian cause, the anti-zionism associated with it is anathema to some 60’s social justice veterans, and I suggest this may be due to the ‘wokist’ belief that even if one is a well-meaning zionist who espouses equal rights for all citizens of Israel, nonetheless one comes up against one’s own ineradicable implicit bias owing to the religious or cultural nationalism zionism enacts.

It really didn’t seem to last very long. There was a backlash, university administrators took control and protected free speech, due process became a thing again. I think what has happened is that what started as an active policing of speech has morphed into peer pressure. If one cares about and identifies with the perspectives of those who are active within a ‘woke’ community, then one will find oneself making an effort to be conscious of such things as the use of pronouns. Ultimately, it’s positive persuasion rather than threats which cause a movement to spread. Acceptance of gays by mainstream culture resulted from the discovery made by people around the world that their own parent, child or co -worker was gay, not by lecturing from liberals.

About 10 years ago the U.S. news media was filled with stories about how the me-too movement ruined the careers of celebrities like Senator Al Franken and tv journalist Charlie Rose. In academia, professors were fired over the innocent use of words like ‘spook’. It seemed as though administrators were letting a small group of students dictate policy based on arbitrary grievances and the policing of language. Invited speakers were uninvited or prevented from speaking based on their conservative views. Meanwhile, trigger warnings and safe spaces protected students from even the suggestion of uncomfortable ideas, or ‘micro aggressions’.

What was new about wokism was that a huge domain of speech suddenly became the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

I'm not saying there aren't issues, but what I’m looking for are concrete, institutionalised examples, something with real substance, that's meaningfully different from, say, right-wing identity politics where people view all of life through the lens of gun ownership, MAGA, or Christian nationalism, where ridicule and debate are also used to silence dissent. We know this group censors libraries, for instance. — Tom Storm

You mean examples where people got hurt , had careers ended, etc, because they were on the wrong end of wokist politics?

I've wondered about this myself. Simple question: do you think wokism is a significant and growing issue in society? — Tom Storm

Well, ssu pointed out that wokism tends to be used by those hostile to practices they associate it with, so right from the start the term defines behaviors deemed problematic. But I think what makes them problematic is fascinating. If you introduce a new way of thinking about social and political interactions which has not had time to be absorbed into the general culture, and then you proceed to demand that everyone whose behavior doesn’t conform to its standards be cancelled, you will be vilified as a tyrant (or as privileging irrational affect over logic).. It’s not the demand for conformity by itself that produces the hostility, it’s that what it is in service of is incoherent to most people, so your efforts will be explained as a desire for power and control. We already live in a society controlled by strict norms of conduct, but there is a general consensus of understanding about the nature of those norms and standards. My own critique of wokism is that it keeps too much from traditional societal norms (righteous moralism).

Critics argue that emotional discomfort has become a trigger for restricting speech, displacing debate with moral claims based solely on feeling hurt or offended — Number2018

What do you suppose elevates the role of feeling to the status of sovereign arbiter of justice for wokists? Is the affect doing all this ethical work by itself, or is it the interpretation of the discursive context within which the affect arises which grounds the supposed moral authority of feeling? I’m suggesting it is a certain moral absolutism associated with the attribution of causes for the sources and triggers of pain which is the culprit here, not affect in itself. If I address you with the wrong pronoun and you respond with pained moral outrage, it is because your feelings are expressing your assessment that I am culpable for my slight, even if I insist that it was inadvertent. There are no accidents or innocent mistakes when concepts like while privileged and implicit bias judge us guilty in advance. It is this assumed culpability by association, birth and ingrained use of language that is at the bottom of the hyper-moralism attributed to wokism, not a blind reliance on the authority of affect.

But is there not something of value to be gained from concepts like implicit bias? Do they not act as a corrective to the metaphysics of the autonomously willing subject? What such wokist memes could stand to learn from Focault and Deleuze is that there is no privileged moral vantage from which to judge whose community is more or less biased. What we want to do is to continually follow lines of flight away from the entrenchment within any particular bias, not reterritorialize on a transcendent objectivity beyond all bias.

Does the wokist reliance on a sovereign ground of moral truth amount to an abdication of factual accuracy and logical coherence? On the contrary, the most secure, emancipatory Hegelian logic can be located as an important thread within many strands of wokism, fueling their moralism and providing the metaphysical support for their objectivity. What they need more of factual accuracy and logical coherence but Deleuzian paradoxical nonsense, a logic of sense.

I had edited the post you responded but apparently too later for you to see it. Here’s the edited post:

The analyses of Focault and Deleuze are not critiques of affect per se, but of how affect is disciplined and made legible—subsumed into power/knowledge formations. Critique is aimed at sedimentation, normalization, and instrumentalization—not at affect’s foundational role. Deleuze’s entire philosophical project (especially with Guattari) can be read as a critique of how desire/affect is captured by molar systems—Oedipal structures, the State, Capitalism, Signifiance, etc. Not a critique of affect as such—but of affect when it gets captured by stratifying assemblages that block lines of flight. When it is allowed to become via lines of flight, affect is liberating. When it becomes stratified within epistemological logics, it becomes repressive. It sounds like this is your point, also:

Whereas the wokeness machine induces emotions like shame, guilt, and vulnerability to generate moral authority and political legitimacy, the philosophical machine must resist this affective economy by refusing to be coded within it. Instead, it amplifies its own intensity and its capacity to think and feel. In this sense, the line of flight is an experimental process that exceeds the coordinates of recognition and representation. It constructs an autonomous plane of consistency where thought is no longer mediated by identity, morality, or social function, but engages directly with the real. — Number2018

↪Joshs
Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley appear in the video. They are completely genuine in expressing not just their concerns about fascism, but also about wokism.
— Joshs
But what is your assessment of the academic content of this video—especially considering that Snyder is a leading scholar on fascism and Nazi Germany? — Number2018

I think I’m understanding a bit better the points you’re making about the discursive structures within which affect is captured in wokist thought, but in the case of the contributors to the video, don’t we need to extend that critique to normed practices that I would argue are little changed from what they were prior to the emergence of wokism? And then wouldn’t it be useful to make distinctions between the sorts of affective stratifications you associate with wokism and those that are applicable to moderate conservatives and centrist liberals, both of whom disavow most aspects of woke practices?

I am no fan of wokeness either but I think there are more careful considerations and critiques of it from the likes of Sam Harris to name one, or Zizek, from the little I watched of the latter, but I doubt this guy will fall into that category. I suspect it will just be the usual right-wing dog whistles of cultural marxism and such — unimportant

To effectively critique wokism you have to understand its philosophical underpinnings. As someone drawing from Freud, Lacan, Hegel and Marx, Zizek is actually a lot closer to these underpinnings than you might think. On the other hand, I don’t think writers like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are in a position to do so, given their embrace of conventional aspects of their own field of psychology. Harris and Pinker may be limited by their empirical/rationalist frameworks, which aren’t well-equipped to grasp the continental philosophical roots of woke ideology. Zizek is just as likely to defend wokism from the likes of Harris and Pinker as he is to take their side.

What is your take on this video about contemporary fascism? It highlights the stance of critical intellectuals against authoritarian regimes that are increasingly targeting academic freedom. They are completely genuine while expressing their concerns. The video constructs a stark us vs. them narrative. In fact, its moral binary and emotional framing reflect characteristics often associated with “woke culture”: strong normative certainty, oversimplification, moral urgency, and an appeal to identity and belonging. This resemblance suggests that the crisis revealed by wokeness is not merely cultural or political. Also, it reveals a deeper epistemic, ethical, and moral rupture — Number2018

Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley appear in the video. They are completely genuine in expressing not just their concerns about fascism, but also about wokism. In The Road to Unfreedom and On Freedom, Snyder critiques identity politics and the politicization of group-based grievances. He explicitly criticizes “identity politics” as a divisive force that fuels cultural polarization, framing it as part of authoritarian memory politics. He warns against narratives driven by victimhood and “us vs. them” thinking—structures often associated with woke discourse—even if the label isn’t used. In sum, Snyder’s critique overlaps with what critics call “wokism” — particularly around moralism, identity-based politics, and the erosion of shared facts.

Meanwhile, Jason Stanley offers a theoretical critique of political language and propaganda. Stanley’s work discusses woke moral language, examining “woke” discourse as a phenomenon that has peaked. He has also strongly condemned book bans and restrictions on speech tied to identity-driven moral politics, framing them as authoritarian and illiberal.

I think you’ll find moderate religious conservative like David Brooks and Peter Wehner making exactly the same points as the contributors to this video.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/donald-trump-authoritarian-actions/682486/

Does this fact make them woke? If so, then it seems to me the concept becomes meaningless.

In the case of wokeness, the issue is not one of disagreement or misunderstanding. Rather, it lies in the complete blurring of boundaries between the authenticity of identity performance and the sincerity of moral expression — Number2018

Btw, you never responded to my question to you:

“Are you placing ‘factual accuracy’ on one side of a divide and ‘emotional expression’ on the other side in order to deconstruct and overturn this metaphysical dualism, as Nietzsche, Focault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida have? Or do you seriously want to justify such a reason-privileging split? Or is ‘emotional expression’ as Deleuzian desire, Heideggerian attunement and Foucaultian power the very pre-condition of factuality?”

The similarities lie more in the focus on identity, grievance, narratives of power, skepticism of institutions (instruments of power), and as Doyle puts it, "admission of spectral evidence," (i.e., personal feelings of grievance as indicative of moral wrong). There is also a similar distrust of scientific, journalistic, academic, etc. institutions as mere instruments of power, a sort of epistemology of power to go along with the metaphysics of power. The "nu-right" is a heavily aesthetic movement, drawing a lot from ancient epics and art, and so you also have an "aesthetics of power." The preference for classical art styles for instance, is not mere reactionary preference for the old, but obviously because these are taken to by symbols of imperial power and warrior spirit. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is essential to separate questionable political applications of ‘wokeness’ by individuals and groups who call themselves woke from the mix of underlying philosophical ideas they claim to be drawing from (and in many cases misinterpreting). This is important because I believe many of what are now seen as repressive excesses of the movement will likely be eliminated as the movement becomes more conversant with the most rigorous and forward-thinking philosophical elements it now engages with in an often superficial manner. As a result, far from ‘fading away’ as another regressive fad alongside far right thinking, the substantive grounding of what we
now call wokism will remain and eventually become the dominant political thinking among mainstream cultures around the world.

In order to separate the superficial from the substantive, it is necessary not to settle for surface comparisons like the following: both the far right and wokism is concerned with “narratives of power, skepticism of institutions (instruments of power), and as Doyle puts it, "admission of spectral evidence,"”.
While the Frankfurt school of critical theory understands the concept of power in terms of a willed force concentrated within , controlled and wielded by individuals and groups, this is not at all the case for poststructuralists like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida. Foucault’s notion of power, for instance, is a relation of mutual affecting connecting each individual to other individuals within a community rather than hierarchical weapon of domination. For him power isn’t something to overcome or control, it is the motivational and valuative basis of the reciprocal interactions from which our institutions of ethics, politicos and knowledge emerge.

There is the transformation of the foundations of normative, intersubjective argumentation, particularly in the realms of identity politics and online discourse. In this emerging framework, factual accuracy and logical coherence are increasingly overshadowed by emotional expressions of identity and marginalization, which come to serve as autonomous validations of truth and moral authority. — Number2018

Are you placing ‘factual accuracy’ on one side of a divide and ‘emotional expression’ on the other side in order to deconstruct and overturn this metaphysical dualism, as Nietzsche, Focault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida have? Or do you seriously want to justify such a reason-privileging split? Or is ‘emotional expression’ as Deleuzian desire, Heideggerian attunement and Foucaultian power the very pre-condition of factuality?

it wouldn’t take me very long to demonstrate that he never even attempts to analyze the underlying philosophy
— Joshs

For for it. Review his entire output on this topic, including books, podcasts, lengthy posts and articles. I'm not going to claim to hav ea citation to hand, but he has explicitly spoken about the Marxist, and then Frankfurtian bases through Critical Theory and on into CRT - running that through the milieu of the 60s-70s civil rights activations and then making his conclusions from there. He is not an idiot. I do recall him going relatively deep into this in The New Puritans.

It seems you've rejected his position without knowing it. Odd. — AmadeusD

Yes, he has made his way through some Marxist and Frankfurt school texts. If his critique were based on a perspective inside of the relevant philosophies, he would be comfortable with the following ideas:
Languaged discursive conventions shape the meanings of concepts, so any attempts at ascertaining objective truth cannot look for a position outside of all normative cultural configurations from which to ground truth absolutely. These normative structures and their associated linguistic concepts can ossify into an entrenched status quo, and as a result become repressive in relation to marginalized individuals and groups. But one must be careful in how one points attention to these repressive, self-entrenching tendencies. One cannot simply demand that others change their vocabulary. They should instead attempt to demonstrate the benefits of alternative intelligibilities. This would be a positive use of power rather than a punitive use.

A critique from the outside, as I believe Doyle’s is, rejects the Kuhnian implication of critical theoretic approaches to objective truth, in favor of something closer to Popper’s Kantian notion of falsification. Truth isn’t just a culturally negotiated pragmatic way of knowing one’s way around the world ( although Kuhn doesn’t reject the idea of scientific progress in toto), languaged concepts hook up to objective truths which transcend cultural dynamics. I suggest that Doyle’s rejection of this crucial philosophical underpinning of wokism motivates his rejection of it. Even if wokists no longer tried to impose their notions of discursive openness onto others, he would still find it wanting in comparison with his non-relativistic liberalism. He would simply pivot from an attack on wokism as too repressive to one in which it becomes too permissive and anything-goes, ungrounded in the objective facts of the world.

↪Joshs

What's the objection here aside from him being a "moralist?" It seems like you could describe his basic thesis just as well in the amoral language of classical economics (which just assumes that everyone is always "selfish"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is nothing amoral about the classical economic notion of selfishness, which is why al Gharbi’s thesis is so compatible with it, and in fact depends on the same Enlightenment-era notions of the autonomously willing subject.

the defining feature of our contemporary condition is that we can no longer rely automatically on the continuity of ‘discursive enactment’ grounded in a shared normative community. We must continually renew and reinvent both our discursive practices and our conception of community. This aligns with what Nietzsche called the 'untimely'—a becoming that diverges from historical continuity. Foucault expressed a similar idea: 'The description of the archive unfolds its possibilities; its threshold of existence begins with the break that separates us from what we can no longer say and what falls outside our discursive practices; it begins with the outside of our own language; its place is the distance from our own discursive practices”. — Number2018

We can and we can’t rely on the discursive continuity of a normative community. For Deleuze we must rely on such stability for a time. We spend most if not all of our lives within relatively stable systems. Territorialization is as necessary as deterritorialization. What we cannot do is assume any one social formation as sovereign.

Your OP covers a slew of issues and connects them in a particular way. It begins with Doyle’s critique of wokism, and then lays out a Foucaultian analysis of wokism, from which vantage Doyle’s own thinking is itself a symptom of wokist power relations. This seems to drive more from Deleuze than Focault, since Deleuze insisted that only revolutionary change could break one free from the hegemony of discursive regimes, such as Capitalism. Foucault, on the other hand, was more open to compromise with the dominant cultural , since unlike Deleuze he didn’t see regimes like capitalism as monolithic entities but as already slowly transforming themselves from within their own power dynamics. This allowed him to accept a critique of Doyle from a wokist vantage that was itself open to its own transformation through its own dynamics of power.

he doesn’t understand the basic philosophical grounding for them and ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
— Joshs

This is patently untrue. I think its more likely this stems from those who share views not noticing what it looks like from the outside. For instance. many will claim that "woke" is: — AmadeusD

Patently untrue? Let’s put it to the test, shall we? My thesis is it’s a collosal waste of time to critique wokeness on the basis of specific practices that call themselves woke , and that are felt by many as totalitarian, repressive or McCarhyesque. I’m interested in your knowledge of the underlying philosohies that these practices are drawn from. You see, the practices can change and become much less repressive without significantly altering the underlying worldview that generates them. I’m not a fan of woke overreach either, but I know two things. The fundamental philosophical insights guiding it are here to stay, and will become accepted by the mainstream within the next 50 years. So I’m talking about two sorts of critiques, a critique from within which accepts and is indebted to the innovative philosophical grounding of wokism , but wants to take the next step , which involves transcending the moralistic finger-pointing which Wokism has inherited from more mainstream political theory. The second sort of critique is a critique from without. This critique has no clue what the underlying philosophies are talking about, and just sees wokists as bossy moralistic people who want to act like dictators.

To find out whether Doyle’s ( or your) critique is from the inside or the outside won’t be too difficult. Doyle has written a lot about wokism, and it wouldn’t take me very long to demonstrate that he never even attempts to analyze the underlying philosophy, except by repeating one-line cliches he picks up from others who haven’t bothered to carefully read the authors they cite.

If you're interested in the topic, I thought Musa al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke was a good treatment. His main thrust was that the "Great Awokening" following the Great Recession was the result of (relative) elites feeling the need to justify their own rapidly growing wealth and privilege in the face of declining standards of living for the rest of the country (also declining life expectancy). Social justice became a way to justify one's own position in society. It also became a means for those already positioned near the top, and who had been raised in a pressure cooker environment focused on accomplishment and securing one's own spot in the elite, to secure elite status, by positioning themselves as representatives or allies of victimized groups. However well-intentioned though, these movements often tended to slide into (largely unreflective) self-serving behavior. That is, the empirical case for the positive benefits of the "Great Awokening" for its supposed beneficiaries is weak — Count Timothy von Icarus

Al-Gharbi has a thing about selfishness. Since he is really an old fashioned moralist at heart, he sees everything in that light. Nice touch there, reducing the good intentions of wokism to underlying base motives ( in spite of ‘good intentions’). I’ve read al-Gharbi, and if I were convinced he understood the ideas swirling around beneath the catch-all term of wokism I would be more enthusiastic about his analyses. No doubt the inertia of the status quo within a normative community exerts a powerful restraining force on reform, but it will not be solved by pointing fingers at individual weak will. Besides, if you put tighter a list of the top 5% by wealth you will find very few true wokist in that group. The core of the movement is to be found within academia, a cohort which is significantly less prosperous than your typical Manhattan professional. Paying lip service to wokist slogans is not the same thing as understanding the meaning of intersectionality or critical race theory.

When we engage in contemporary online or identity politics discourse, the very act of speaking subjects us to the same conditions that shape what is commonly called ‘wokeness.’ In that moment, we are often not reflecting on our deeper philosophical or political commitments. When we engage in contemporary online or identity politics discourse, the very act of speaking subjects us to the same conditions that shape what is commonly called ‘wokeness.’ In that moment, we are often not reflecting on our deeper philosophical or political commitments. Therefore, it may be useful to distinguish between our discursive practices and their deliberate interpretations — Number2018

I dont think we can distinguish between them. We don’t need to ‘reflect on’ or theoretically articulate our philosophical commitments in order to enact them, because the commitments only exist in their continued discursive enactment in the partially shared circumstances of a normative community.

From a Foucauldian perspective, wokeness can be understood not only as an emancipatory gesture but also as a mode through which power is reproduced via identity. Identity politics thus operates within the current digital power/knowledge regime, simultaneously enabling recognition and reinforcing normative expectations of being 'woke.' As Foucault put it, 'It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects—that subjugates and makes subject to…'" — Number2018

The above analysis applies to any normative community in any historical era. The OP’s critique of Doyle’s attack on wokism misses the fact that he sees the myriad varieties of wokism through a perspective that gets its intelligibility from discursive practices that belong to an older era. Through his Kantian perspective, anything woke is simply marginalized. What is emancipatory within wokism is therefore invisible to Doyle. When Focault analyses identity politics , he does so from a vantage which understands identity and subjectivity as effects of the circulation of power. When Doyle criticizes identity politics, has has no intention of deconstructing the concepts of identity and subjectivity. On the contrary, he is interested in reifying them.

Don’t the regimes of these rulers reveal distinct modes of exercising power? For instance, Orbán and Erdoğan were democratically elected, while Putin maintains only a façade of electoral legitimacy. So, what exactly constitutes this so-called 'school of autocracy'? As for claims of 'Trump’s fascism,' such assertions depend entirely on how fascism is defined. Without a well-developed and nuanced theoretical framework, labeling Trump as a fascist may become an example of a political slogan or ideologically driven discourse. — Number2018

What these regimes have in common is rule by the arbitrary edict of one man rather than by law, constitution and judicial process. In each of these countries, the independence of the judiciary, the press, opposing parties , universities and civil organizations are systematically dismantled so that they won’t present a challenge to the authority of the leader.

It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.”

Would it make just as much sense? People don't generally talk this way at least, right?

It would be sort of bizarre for someone to say: "I was tempted on my work trip, and unfortunately my sex drive was not strong enough to make me cheat on my spouse. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What’s the difference between saying ‘occasionally I have a strange impulse’ and ‘I have an impulse to perform an immoral act’? The difference is that the use of moral language like ‘cheating’, ‘murdering’ and ‘stealing’ as opposed to value-neutral terms like ‘having sex with’ , ‘killing’ and ‘taking from’ follows upon the interpreting of an act as immoral. And Nietzsche’s point is that we only arrive at such moral interpretations after the stronger drive has won out and we justify its success posthoc as being the ‘moral’ choice. If we don’t consider picking up a cigarette whenever we want to be a moral act, it is because the drive to smoke is in a close battle with the drive to quit. If we became fully convinced that there were no solid reasons to quit (health, economic or hygiene), then we would with good conscience consider our decision to smoke not to be the less moral choice.

Certainly, Doyle's critique mistakes the symptoms for the underlying structure. Wokeness is not simply an ideology or a belief system. Instead, it reveals the irreversible transformation of the
autonomous, rational subject of liberalism into a digitized, emotive, and aestheticized form of subjectivity. — Number2018

I would put it this way. Wokism is a loose constellation of political positions drawing from a range of philosophical worldviews heavily indebted to Hegel and Marx, but also extending into postmodernist territory expressed by anti-Marxist thinkers like Foucault. Specific interpretators of Wokism have undoubtedly been responsible for excesses and infringements on personal freedom, but Doyle’s shrill, blanket critique of wokism and identity politics suffers from the fact that he doesn’t understand the basic philosophical grounding for them and ends up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. At the same time, his relative conservativism blinds him to the greater dangers from the far right, leading him to claim that accusations of fascism toward Trump are “unjustifiable and untethered from reality”. You won’t find many thoughtful writers in America these days who still deny that Trump’s playbook comes straight out of the school of autocracy perfected by pols like Putin, Orban, Erdogan and Bolsonaro.

There's a sense in which I can understand akrasia -- where I've dedicated myself to do such and such, like quit smoking, that the "rational" frame makes sense of -- but I'm more inclined that Nietzsche is right in that when I quit smoking it's because my desire to quit smoking was more powerful than my desire to smoke, for whatever reason/cause.

I had to work on not-wanting in order to stop-wanting. And that was a desire I built up in order to stop-want — Moliere

Exactly. Daniel Smith contrasts the hierarchical relation between rational will and passion that Timothy seems to be describing with Nietzsche’s subordination of rational will to passion.

Now: to be sure, we can combat the drives, we can fight against them. Indeed, this is one of the most common themes in philosophy, a Platonic theme that was taken up by Christianity: the fight against the passions. In another passage from Daybreak , Nietzsche says that he can see only six fundamental methods we have at our disposal for
combating the drives. For instance, Nietzsche says, (1) we can avoid opportunities for its gratification (for instance, if I'm combating my drive to smoke cigarettes, I can stop hiding packs of cigarettes at home, which I conveniently “find” again when I run out), or (2) we can implant regularity into the drive (having one cigarette every four hours so as to at least avoid smoking in between), or (3) we can engender disgust with the drive, giving ourselves over to its wild and unrestrained gratification to the point where we become disgusted with it (say, smoking non-stop for a month until the very idea of a cigarette makes me want to vomit) And Nietzsche continues with several other examples.

But then Nietzsche asks: But who exactly is combating the drives in these various ways? His answer is this: The fact “that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive who vehemence is tormenting us….While ‘we' believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence [or violence] of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides” (Daybreak

09). What we call thinking, willing, and feeling are all “merely a relation of these drives to each other” (BGE 36). In other words, there is no struggle of reason against the drives, as Plato, for instance, held. What we call “reason” is, in Nietzsche's view, nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions” (WP 387), a certain ordering of the drives. What then do I mean when I say “I am trying to stop smoking”—even though that same I is
constantly going ahead and lighting up cigarettes and continuing to smoke? It simply means that my conscious intellect is taking sides and associating itself with a particular drive. It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.” Instinctively, Nietzsche says, we tend to take our predominant drive and for the moment turn it into the whole of our ego, placing all our weaker drives perspectivally farther away, as if those other drives weren't me but rather something else, something other inside me, a kind of “it” (hence Freud's idea of the “id,” the “it”—which he also derived from Nietzsche).

“The ego,” Nietzsche writes, “is a plurality of person-like forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world.”3 When we talk about the “I,” we are simply indicating which drive, at the moment, is strongest and sovereign. “The feeling of the ‘I' is always strongest where the preponderance [Übergewicht] is,” Nietzsche writes, although the so-called “self-identity” I seem to experience in my ego is in fact a differential flickering from drive to drive.

↪Joshs ↪Count Timothy von Icarus

That "ordering of the appetites" -- I wonder if that's absent from Nietzsche?

I don't think so, given his general appreciation for master morality — Moliere

The ranking of drives would be individualistic, and based on to what extent they enhance life and further creativity and self-overcoming vs encourage passivity, resentment and decay. The rational appetite, or will to knowledge, is itself an expression of , and directed by will to power. If it is used in a way that does not optimize the aims of creative self-overcoming, then they work against life enhancement and constitute self-weakening drives.

t's interesting that a "socially liberal but economically conservative," bloc has thrived within the GOP (the "nu-right"), but there is no parallel "socially conservative but economically liberal," camp in the Democratic — Count Timothy von Icarus

That used to define the majority of democrats in big cities as well as in the South. The civil rights movement stripped away the dixie-crats from the party, and the Democrats’ turn to post-sixties social liberalism pushed the rest of them to Reagan and then Trump.

So weakness of will involves current knowledge, what is understood to be best. If we make poor choices out of ignorance about what is truly best, that would simply be a case of ignorance. Weakness of will is a conflict between different appetites. It's untinelligible in that it doesn't correspond to the intellect. The action is not in accord with what is understood, but is instead contrary to it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems to be a description without an origin. Do you mean to say that whenever any of us encounter a conflict of appetites, weakness of will arises of necessity? Nietzsche would argue that whatever drive is strongest prevails, but this would not constitute a weakness.

I think every intentional act, to be properly intentional, aims at some good. In terms of theft, some good is being aimed at. It isn't wrong to seek such goods. It is wrong to prioritize lesser goods over greater ones though. And the idea would be that prioritizing wealth over virtue is a sort of misprioritization that stems from ignorance or weakness of will (both of which are limits on a perfected freedom). I guess there is a notion of harmony here too. Evil is a sort of unintelligibly in action, it is to be out of step with nature (nature as perfected) or to "miss the mark." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I understand the concept of ignorance and unintelligibility in the context of knowledge. Such limitations occur in spite of the strongest will to know, due to constraints that exceed individual intention. But what is the genesis and nature of the sort of ignorance and unintelligiblity connected to this magical thing called ‘weakness of will’? Isnt it just that, an irreducible mystery?

↪Joshs The letter you quote from makes an excellent case for why computer programs are not agents in anything like the sense a human is. Do you agree that we should try to avoid using language that appears to reify such programs as 1st-person entities? (or however you might phrase the latter idea) — J

Absolutely. I think of them as appendages or human-built niches, like a nest to a bird or a web to a spider.

We can transact in meanings with them, since they do understand what our words mean, but their words do not have the same significance and do not literally convey assertions, since they aren't backed by a personal stake in our game of giving and asking for reasons (over and above their reinforced inclination to provide useful answers to whoever happens to be their current user). — Pierre-Normand

In a letter in Trends in Cognitive Science (LLMs don't know anything: reply to Yildirim and Paul), Mariel K. Goddu, Alva Noë and Evan Thompson claim the following:

The map does not know the way home, and the abacus is not clever at arithmetic. It takes knowledge to devise and use such models, but the models themselves have no knowledge. Not because they are ignorant, but because they are models: that is to say, tools. They do not navigate or calculate, and neither do they have destinations to reach or debts to pay. Humans use them for these epistemic purposes. LLMs have more in common with the map or abacus than with the people who design and use them as instruments. It is the tool creator and user, not the tool, who has knowledge.

Linking empty tokens based on probabilities (even in ways that we are in a position to know does reflect the truth of a given domain, be it a summarization task, physics, or arithmetic) does not warrant attributing knowledge of that domain to the token generator itself.

We said above that LLMs do not perform any tasks of their own, they perform our tasks. It would be better to say that they do not really do anything at all. Hence the third leap: treating LLMs as agents. However, since LLMs are not agents, let alone epistemic ones, they are in no position to do or know anything.

Davidson's reply is that there is no law-like relation between physical states and intentions — Banno

A ‘physical state’ is a certain kind of language game. An intentional state arises within another game. Each offers their own kind of meaning. Davidson seems to be fine with settling for the physical state language game , without recognizing what he may be missing by excluding the other game.

The missing bit is that a description of an intentional state is not a description of a physical state. — Banno

If we’re trying to capture the meaning of a statement and the meaning is encoded in intentional terms, how does switching over to an account in terms of physical states not lose the meaning?

So the question is, do we attribute belief and desire to ChatGPT?

And the partial answer is that we do not need to do so, in order to give meaning to the sentences it produces.

Which is another argument against the idea that meaning is speaker intent. — Banno

The answer is that Chat GPT uses parallel processing A.I. chips but its logic is linear, digital ( binary) and deterministic. In about 10 years we may have A.I. architectures that integrate complex dynamical systems (CDS) models, which will diverge radically from today’s parallel architectures (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) by embodying principles like self-organization and intentionality. CDS-based AI chips may blur the line between computation and biological processes, resembling intelligent materials more than traditional silicon. The interesting thing about complex dynamical systems is that they organize subordinate linear deterministic elements via superordinate recursive intentionality. If we reduce the higher order intentionality to lower order determinism we lose the meaning of their sentences.

Science is not trying to give an account of what the universe would be like were there no observers. It is trying to give an account of what the universe is like for any observer — Banno

I would think it important to add to this ‘for any observer participating in the particular community of scientists who share a domain of study.’ Many scientist are quite humble this days about the reach of their theories. They appreciate that no overarching account of the natureof reality is possible, no reduction of all disciplines to some fundamental science (such as physics). Approaches, methods , theories , vocabularies concerning a given phenomenon differ depending on what aspect of that phenomenon is being examined, and for what purposes. In sum, ‘the view for everyone’ is a regional goal of science, not a universal one.

Williams’ approach evinces a lingering attachment to the platonism inherent in the distinction between the real world and the apparent world. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s 6 stages from Twilight of the Idols:

1)The wise and pious man dwells in the real world, which he attains through his wisdom (skills in perception warrant a more accurate view of the real world).

2)The wise and pious man doesn't dwell in the real world, but rather it is promised to him, a goal to live for. (ex: to the sinner who repents)

3)The real world is unattainable and cannot be promised, yet remains a consolation when confronted with the perceived injustices of the apparent world.

4)If the real world is not attained, then it is unknown. Therefore, there is no duty to the real world, and no consolation derived from it.

5)The idea of a real world has become useless—it provides no consolation or motive. It is therefore cast aside as a useless abstraction.

6)What world is left? The concept of the real world has been abolished, and with it, the idea of an apparent world follows.

Williams seems to be on stage 2 or 3

On the relation between Williams, Nietzsche and Platonism, you might enjoy Rorty’s To the Sunlit Uplands

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n21/richard-rorty/to-the-sunlit-uplands

↪Joshs Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was saying the opposite: Self-reflexivity is virtually definitive of philosophy. I was contrasting this with what I took Antony Nickles to be saying -- that there is no difference between the problem situation of reflecting philosophically about, for instance, science, and reflecting philosophically about philosophy. — J

What I meant was that for the philosophers I mentioned, the act of philosophical self-reflection is not an inner process of solipsistic self-confirmation. Instead the self comes back to itself (constitutes itself) from the world. To reflect is to self-transform, to be thrown elsewhere. The objection to scientific thinking is its tendency toward platonism (subject-object dualism) in the presuppositions guiding it. Anthony will be able to show how for Wittgenstein traditional philosophy gives into this platonism alongside the self-conception of the sciences. Williams’ approach devices the li geri f attachment to the platonism inherent in the distinction between the real
world and the apparent world.

Philosophy may talk about science by looking at scientific criteria; the assumption is that philosophy's criteria for how to do this are not on the table. But when the inquiry turns inward, we don't have the luxury of bumping any questions of judgment or method to some off-the-table level. — J

This is not at all true of the whole lineage of philosophy arising from Nietzsche’s work (Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida). The self-reflexivity you are suggesting is missing from philosophy is at the very heart of their method.

what if the basis of such human behavior, unlike computer behavior, lies in the unknown for a person of his own ultimate goal, and the desire to act (make a decision without a task) is based on a person's understanding of his own finitude?

this is the development of Heidegger's ideas to modern challenges (AI and machine decision making. — Astorre

Heidegger’s concept of finitude isn’t simply a reference to the chronological fact that we dont live forever. It is more centrally about the moment to moment structure of temporality itself. Each experience of the ‘present’ is finite in that the meaning contained within it cannot be logically derived from the previous present, nor be used to deduce the following moment of time. We are radically future oriented in that we reach out and transcend ourselves into the future. This is what makes experience fundamentally uncanny. We can’t design machines to be this way precisely because it is we who are designing them. This having been created is what makes them machines, and no amount of fancy hardware or software tweaking will ever give machines more than the illusion of finitude.

You ask us whether the universe has meaning and then when we say "no" you jump up and say "Ah ha! You recognize that meaning and purpose are important." Well, for most of us, the answer to the question is not "no," it's "I don't think about things that way. Life's purposes and goals are not things I think about unless someone like you brings them up." I don't ever remember thinking about life's purpose except in a philosophical context. I think most people are like me in that sense — T Clark

What do you think about, and why? Do you think about things because they are relevant and meaningful to you, in relation to your goals and purposes? If so, then maybe you are thinking about life’s purposes all the time. That is, not some single overarching purpose, but a contextually-focused network of significance that you consult as motivator of your actions. I think that is Wayfarer’s point.

The blithe assurances of scientific positivism—that the universe is devoid of meaning and purpose—should therefore be recognized for what they are: a smokescreen, a refusal to face the deeper philosophical questions that science itself has inadvertently reopened. In a world that gives rise to observers, meaning may not be an add-on. It may have been that it is there all along, awaiting discovery.
— Wayfarer

This is pretty outrageous. You've lost track of the fact, if you ever recognized it, that you can't answer scientific questions with metaphysics and you can't answer metaphysical questions with science — T Clark

Because a scientific stance is itself a derivative or expression of a metaphysical stance, answering its questions is already to engage with the metaphysics that guides it. A scientific evolution is likely to also constitute a metaphysical revolution.

if refutation is based on non-shared assumptions there is no way to dialectically persuade those who do not share those assumptions with arguments based on those assumptions. Under this predicament, if we want them to act in accordance to our views, then we are left with the only option of imposing our views on them by brute force (or treachery?). But if we feel JUSTIFIED in doing this, this is because we take our views to be the valid ones, and their views the invalid ones. — neomac

Why are these the only two options? Why couldn't I teach someone a different way of looking at world, the way which grounds my own arguments and facts, so that they can understand the basis of my criteria of justification? It would not be a question of justifying the worldview I convert them to, but of allowing them to justify the arguments and views that are made intelligible from within that worldview.

Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. ( Wittgenstein, On Certainty)

Adopting certain beliefs and norms as conditions for validation, already implies refusing to adopt other beliefs and norms as conditions for validation. And as long as beliefs and norms do not enjoy a special status of conditions for validation, then they can be scrutinised in light of beliefs and norms adopted as conditions for validation, and possibly refuted. So I get that mutual understanding presupposes shared assumptions. But ideological refutation is based on non-shared assumptions, so shared assumptions is not a requirement for ideological refutation — neomac

One dictionary definition of ‘refute’ is: to prove (a statement or theory) to be wrong or false; disprove. If you accept this definition as consistent with your use of the word, then to refute is to access a vantage beyond ideology, an objective meta-position that transcends bias. In the philosophical literature one can find critiques of ideology from the left and the right. Critiques from the left tend to locate the concept of ideology with Marxist discourses. One can find such critiques among postmodern and poststructuralist writers. What they object to about the analysis of social configurations of knowledge in terms of ideology is not its assumption that knowledge is socially constructed, but that it can be totalized on the basis of a logic of development, that it moves toward an ultimate end.

What the leftist critics of ideology keep from Marxism ( and Hegelianism) is the notion that knowledge is only produced within social formations, and the development of these formations does not proceed by way of refutation but revolutionary transformation. Common to Wittgenstein’s forms of life and hinges , Heidegger’s worldviews, Foucault’s epistemes and Kuhn’s paradigms is a rejection of the idea that social formations of knowledge progress via refutation. It sounds like your critique of ideology is from the right, which places it as a pre-Hegelian traditionalist thinking.