It seems to me you are confining “being” to the realm of linguistic tokens and mental concepts, and therefore discussing only our representation of being, not being itself.
But philosophy has long asked whether there is an ontological reality- “what is”- that exists independently of language, mind, or concepts — Astorre
1. Is our freedom threatened when our choices can be forecasted?
2. Can we reclaim unpredictability in a data-driven age?
3. What ethical guardrails should we demand around social physics — Alonsoaceves
There is pre-interpretive, pre-conceptual perception.
— Joshs
I agree entirely, apart from the last sentence. — Ludwig V
Let's take phenomenology, returning to the things themselves as they are given. The method is good, but it essentially records the world in new frames.. Phenomenology allows us to clear our judgments from previous experience. Cleared. And again took a picture. — Astorre
Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Husserl, Phenomenology and Anthropology
I exist within my own reality, whatever that reality is. It is logically impossible to discover what exists outside my own reality using knowledge that is part of my own reality.
Perhaps this is "Dasein".
This means that I am limited to thinking about the ontology of my own reality, and the process of thinking about my own reality is epistemological. — RussellA
We understand ‘same picture’ by seeing it as ‘same picture’. Or as you put it, by seeing something as ‘marks on paper’. The notion of marks on paper is no less in need of interpretation than seeing something as a duck or a rabbit. There is pre-interpretive, pre-conceptual perception.I recognize that "seeing as aspect" is inherent in perception. What's bothering me is that as aspect is always an aspect of something. Wittgenstein's presentation of this seems to me to obscure that point. The duck-rabbit can be seen in two ways. But there is a third way, which is neutral between those intepretations and allows us to say that those two interpretations are interpretations of the same picture. I mean the description of the picture as a collection of marks on paper — Ludwig V
How can you arrive at an ontological belief without first going through an epistemological process? — RussellA
When you talked about shifting foundations, I thought you were talking about dialectics. Becoming analyses out to Being and Non-Being, and that brings us to Heidegger's What is Metaphysics, one of my favorites. :grin: — frank
From the Eastern perspective, continental philosophy looks quite analytical. If you cover the entire Eurasian continent and pave the way from India to Great Britain, you get a spectrum from hot and sensual to cold and analytical. — Astorre
Hegel's roots were Neoplatonic, which is the philosophy Christianity is built on. Maybe he was instrumental in bringing it back to the academic scene, but it had been around for centuries. — frank
↪Joshs Brook Ziporyn. And it's not just nostalgia. Indra's Net is hardly a primitive ontology. — Wayfarer
If we stop fixating on essence and separate the concepts of sushchee (existent) and bytie (being), we can arrive at some interesting conclusions. The very notions of bytie and sushchee in Russian are something different. To exist (sushchestvovat’) simply means to be in a state where your attributes do not change by your own will (a stone lying on the ground, a tree growing according to its program, or an AI operating by an algorithm). To be (byt’) is something more than mere existence. It's roughly what happens when something can change its attributes at its own discretion (a prime example is a human, but not necessarily only them). — Astorre
I don't think it makes sense to talk about time in the first place unless something is already the same across the sequence. If there isn't already sameness, you just have wholly discrete being(s). The very ability to notice difference, for it to be conceptually present, requires that there also be sameness. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure, and like I said, this all feels a little bit like a tangential topic. — Leontiskos
More simply, a philosophy forum is about deliberation, and we deliberate about that which we are conscious of, not what we are unconscious of. The only way that unconscious entities can be brought to bear within a deliberative philosophy forum is by first bringing them into consciousness. — Leontiskos
I get the oddest responses from Wittgenstenians when I tell them that their activity is not being done for no reason at all - when I tell them that everyone acts for ends, themselves included. They tend to see themselves as eternally above the fray — Leontiskos
Wittgenstein writes as if his readers will find it obvious that thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Hegel, and Heidegger were victims of “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI 109) rather than original thinkers who, by using words in new ways, broke new paths of inquiry. He has no interest in putting himself in the shoes of the great dead philosophers, nor in treating them as responsive to the intellectual and sociopolitical exigencies of particular times and places.
Exactly, which requires sameness and identity. Hence, the principles being equal (or even co-constituting, at least in the order of conception), or even three: actuality, potency, and privation. — Count Timothy von Icarus
"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...(Derrida 1978)". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.” (Derrida 1988). “Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.” (Derrida 1978)
“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.”
I was literally not arguing; how can I “disagree”!? And 3/4 of this discussion is y’all and Joshs bashing on about theories on how we approach things!
I see; sorry I wasted your time with all this. — Antony Nickles
When Joshs and frank debated whether change is possible without rest, I saw a fascinating, yet ultimately still an attempt to reduce the dynamic of "becoming" to two fundamental, "substantial" categories—rest and change. This is the search for the basic elements that constitute being — Astorre
“In accordance with metaphysics, all beings, changeable and moved, mobile and mobilized, are represented from the perspective of a "being that is at rest," and this even where, as in Hegel and Nietzsche, "being" (the actuality of the actual) is thought as pure becoming and absolute movement.” (Heidegger 1998c)
“In asking after what happens, we have in mind a being, even when we name it a “becoming” and attend only to its arising, approaching and decaying.” “This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the "now" out of the "not yet now" into the "no longer now."… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West...”(Heidegger 1968)
And even when Joshs spoke about Heidegger, who, as he correctly noted, grounded "is" in the event of "unfolding," this was, in essence, an effort to find that very first principle, that "root" of our being. — Astorre
if we consider what is happening in modern ontology (Object-Oriented Ontology or correlationism) and science (the constant refinement of AI, which is increasingly used as a weapon rather than a friend and assistant, and which is developing at an incredible speed), a doubt arises: is this train heading in the right direction, or is it a direction where there will be no room for the subject? — Astorre
First, I'll just point out that I think it's a mistake to conflate "emancipatory" with "critical theory" and "definitely not post-modern." Even in less explicitly activist texts, the "free rollicking of thought," the opening of "new lines of thought," or the deconstruction of systems so that new ways of thought and action can come into being are often presented as desirable in themselves.
The freedom of thought, an increase in potentialities available, of lines of action and thought, are themselves only good as a means of reaching choiceworthy ends, better means to those ends, etc. Greater potentiality is, of itself, not actually emancipatory nor is it desirable. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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.
Right, but then this is also taken as a reason for bracketing out or eschewing moral judgement. It's that line of reasoning I find faulty. Consider that Socrates does not need to "step outside his humanity" to judge, universally, that "all men are mortal." He can do this just fine while remaining a man. — Count Timothy von Icarus
They are relativist to a point.
Yes, it varies, but they do seem to tend towards various forms of anti-realism as well, including historical anti-realism. I think you are selling short the level of commitment here. One of the things right-wing media made the most hay over was straightforward pronouncements of the relativism and anti-realism coming out of activist circles.
My general impression is that, broadly speaking, the median Woke position is simply contradictory. It is morally and epistemically anti-realist and strongly relativistic, while at the same time being absolutist. This is, in many cases, an unresolved, and perhaps often unacknowledged contradiction. — Count Timothy von Icarus
What I describe is not very clear, even to me, but I think it is more clear than what I see you describing of Deluze (who I’ve read a little) and Witt (read a bit more). I see carts and horses being moved around, but not much clarity regarding independent circuits being identified. — Fire Ologist
Affect cannot influence rationality from below
— Joshs
Is this a reframing of the source of error? Or are we moving away from error making? In which case we are drifting from our thesis it seems. — Fire Ologist
It looks like you view affect primarily as a disruptive or distorting force — Number2018
Hannah Arendt offered a remarkable account of Eichmann. However, it is not quite accurate to describe him as irrational—he was, in fact, following the bureaucratic logic of the Nazi regime. Most likely, his most consequential decision was joining the Nazi party. From that point on, he became a thoughtless functionary. But that pivotal decision was made at a more subtle level, shaped by unconscious affective forces rather than deliberate reasoning. — Number2018
Eichmann's reason became a slave to his passions, at least if we see Nazism as part of his passions. So Eichmann was involved in a lot of thought and reasoning about how to further his goal of Nazism, but in another sense he was being thoughtless and irrational. — Leontiskos
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
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
↪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
How could there be difference unless some difference is identified? Identity and difference co-arise―you can't have one without the other. — Janus
↪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
Can there be change without stasis? Aren't they two sides of the same coin? — frank
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
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
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
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
“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.”
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
“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
"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."
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.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
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)
“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.
In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Ken Gergen, Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)
↪Joshs
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
“…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
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
“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
“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
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
“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.
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
“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)
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
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