Qualities ARE phenomena. This cup is red, and the red predicated of the cup is the quality, and it has, arguably, intuitive presence, and AS presence, there is nothing more "real". Husserl went Cartesian on this. He thought the the world out there of facts and science and the naturalistic attitude were a kind of second order of reals, for these issued from a foundation of intuitions, and these intuitions were absolute, unassailable, as say, something Descartes evil genius might try — Astrophel

Qualities are CHANGES, referential differentials, ways of likeness and difference with respect to what came before. They are transitions, transformations.

Husserl did not go ‘Cartesian’ unless you are getting this from Dreyfus’s terrible misreading of him. Intuitions are instants of experiencing that never repeat themselves identically. That is why a real object is transcendent. Our belief in an enduring self-identical object is just that , a belief that makes us see continuing self-identity in a phenomenon that is in fact flowingly changing.

Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically. Actual experience does not subsist, inhere or endure, and this does not produce countable instances.

“…it makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”(Husserl 1964).



“The consciousness of its [the object's] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)

“ Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "Object in the mode of running-of" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.”(Husserl 1964)

In describing an unchanging enduring tone, for instance, Husserl emphasizes “…the incessantly changing mode of givenness of this duration.” “However, …through a continual coinciding of sense a unity of the objective sense can be formed and be maintained through the alteration of lived experiences.”

It would be a mistake to think the temporality of sense data lacks duration because it is instantaneous, momentary or extremely brief. Instantaneity presupposes objective time. Rather, the primordial now returns to itself moment to moment as qualitatively altered. Husserl asserts that the intentional ‘belief' in self-identicality constitutes an empirical object out of what are in fact changing senses. So there is nothing ‘absolute’ about these intuitions other than that they are absolutely contingent and relative.

As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others. We can't go any deeper without making stuff up or drawing from presuppositional theology or some other suspect meta-narrative — Tom Storm

I thought I would butt in here to clarify some things. Would you agree with the following? Our ability to act ethically with others evolves as a function of cultural development. To use an analogy, not too long ago it was assumed that animals had no emotions or cognition and did not feel pain. It s hard to act ‘ethically’ toward a creature when you dont see them as having any of these capabilities. Another example : we used to think that infants were a blooming, buzzing confusion. Now we know that they have all sorts of perceptual and recognition skills, including being able to empathize with others. Again, without such an appreciation of the infant’s perspective, ethical treatment of them is limited. I would argue the entire history of culture involves the growth of insights into how others unlike ourselves think and feel.

So there is a depth to coping with living with others in the sense of a base of understanding that evolves over time.

As I understand him, this is different from what Astrophel has in mind. He is looking for an affective basis for ethical behavior that goes beyond ( in that it is prior to) what we learn through pragmatic interaction. He follows approaches that hold onto a religious metaphysics, albeit of a progressive and heretical kind.

Jphn Caputo wrote a couple of books, The Weakness of God and The Tears of Derrida, that in one way of another defend the apophatic resolution in the discovery that the world that stands before us impossible to understand, and our "totalities" that is, our coherent systems for taking it up and dealing with it lead to this final aporia. — Astrophel

You owe it to yourself to read Martin Hagglund’s critique of Caputo’s attempt to ‘theologize’ Derrida. I’m sure you won’t agree with it , but at least it will articulate the differences in outlook between the religion-beyond -religion approaches of Caputo, Critchely and Levinas (along with religiously oriented phenomenologists like Marion, Henry, Scheler, Anthony Steinbock, Dermot Moran, Edith Stein) and what I see as the post-religious thinking of Heidegger and Derrida.

Good isn't found, least of all by philosophical discourse. That's part and parcel of rejecting the philosophical method of seeking essences, or setting out definitions, or fathoming the a priori...

There is no feature common to what is good, as Moore showed - apart from being good. Like all definitions, those for "good" are post-hoc rationalisations. But that does not prevent our using the term well and effectively. — Banno

Good may not be found by philosophical discourse, at least as a universal a priori, but in saying there is no feature common to what is good, one is still assuming the coherence of the concept of ethical good, and as such is remaining within the familiar territory of religious metaphysics. Martin Hagglund has made this argument in his critique of the Leviniasian ethical stance of writers like John Caputo and Simon Critchley.

Sure. It remains that the point of ethics is to act. — Banno

Could we instead say that the point of ethics is to communicate? A good counselor, parent or friend can save lives and souls through words. Well chosen words, backed up by careful thought. I worked as a counselor with severely emotionally disturbed and psychotic young adults. My prior armchair introspections were invaluable in making sense of and coming up with strategies of helping them. My thinking and writing constitute my ‘bible’ , the guide for all my social-ethical interactions. Every significant insight I incorporate into my writing changes my outlook on life and has direct effects on my concrete behavior with others. These days my writing constitutes my acting.

I suspect that de Klerk et al are basically Kantian in their moral stance.
— Joshs

Which is to say very little; perhaps that they were consistent. — Banno

It says that without Kant and his armchair these wonderful ethical actors would have defaulted to ethical positions more authoritarian in nature, which is what typified pre-Kantian moral thought.

And again, the point is to act. — Banno

Plenty of people acting, but not enough people really thinking.

If you do good, your heart keeps rhythm with the universe. It's that stretching out beyond the self, that capacity to see a bigger picture than what one likes or dislikes, that forms the distinction between ethics and mere appetite. And that extension past the self is why armchair ethicists fail.

Name those who have had the greatest moral consequence. Not Kant, the archetypal conservative who deduced the moral superiority of his comfortable middle class lifestyle from first principles. Gandhi; de Klerk and Mandela; King; folk who are active, but who also articulate their stance. — Banno

I suspect that de Klerk et al are basically Kantian in their moral stance.
Keeping rhythm with the universe doesn’t just mean seeing a bigger picture. It’s not about how much of the furniture of the universe you incorporate into your soul or understanding , but how you organize that experience. We will continue to hate and attack to the extent that we aren’t able to relate to, empathize and identify with what would otherwise appear to us as alien and threatening others who we have to defend ourselves against. The ‘self’ isn’t an object among objects, it’s a synthetic activity, always going beyond itself in order to continue to be itself. So the challenge isn’t for the self to go outside of itself, since it is always already doing that. The challenge is how it is able to make sense of the new events it is moving into. If it goes beyond itself in such a way as to see a bigger picture consisting of malevolent, greedy and selfish actors, it is likely failing to organize the larger picture it has stretched itself into in a way that will help it be act insightfully, peacefully and harmoniously with others. 90% of that bigger picture is already in your head. Reflective and introspective discovery directly expands one’s world. That’s why brilliant novelists can contribute so much to ethical thought even though they spend most of their life in an armchair. Thinking doesn’t just recycle what has already been. It can create what has never existed in the world before.

I con't imagine a worse way of dealing with an ethical issue than asking an armchair theorist with no hands-on experience.

I do quite a bit of disability advocacy, and have come to appreciate the need for lived experience in policy formulation…

Ethics is about acting in a public social world, like it or not, and that's where ethical thinking must take place. — Banno

Someone sitting in an armchair thinking can’t tie their shoe or repair an engine while contemplating. And when they are done contemplating they can’t do these things without actual experience in these areas. But hands-on experience is impossible without a network of constructs formed from prior experience providing the larger framework of intelligibility , motivation , relevance and goal
orientation for specifically applied actions in the world.
Our hands do the work but they are just appendages and tools. Our framework of understanding gives the work its sense and direction. If you select 10 people and put them into the same hands-on applied situation , you will get 10 different perspectives on the ‘same’ situation. This fact may not become apparent for a while, because the very specificity of the ‘real-world’ situation masks these differences in interpretive outlook. It may seem as thought the larger interpretive framework that we tap into in introspection is the abstract and genereral way of understanding things and the real-world, hands-on, specifically applied actions are real nuts and bolts of meaning, but it is quite the opposite. Sizing someone up on the basis of such concrete actions gives one a vague and ambiguous sense of what they are doing and why they are doing it when we try to divorce observation of behavior from the larger background perspective of the person.

The least effective way to promote positive change in the world is to put blinders on and treat persons as if they were merely stimulus bound creatures of concrete action. The best way to change the world is to creatively transform the worldviews animating and guiding our subordinate hands-on skills. This is what introspection does. Certainly it needs to be translated into concrete action, but the feedback from such actions have much less of an effect on the overall worldview than directly confronting the whole framework.

Introspection is fine, but it will not tell you how to treat the homeless, or what abortion laws should be in place, or how much to donate to charity. — Banno

Considering that introspection is the means by which all of the great ethical doctrines have been generated, I can’t imagine a better way to prepare oneself to answer any of the above questions. Your comment sounds awfully Cartesian: real world out there vs subjective noodlings in here. Thing is , the most world-changing ideas are produced by such noodlings all alone in a windowless room. That’s because the inside is already outside.

If it needs saying, I of course reject the notion that consciousness is an entity rather than a process. Either way, however, it remains a beetle in a box in terms of Witt’s philosophy. — javra

Anthony Nickles grappled with the question of whether for Wittgenstein there is relevant sense in private experience. I believe he concluded that it not the case that everything must be thrown out except what is communicated between people. Rather, when talking to ourselves we cannot expect the sort of language that was designed to be shared with others to be meaningful in private reflection, at least not in the same way. But that does not preclude a different form of usefulness.

one can ask, why make the world a more creatively anticipatable place? If there is no answer to this, then the mundane objection still holds: there is question begging in the assumption that "we should do X". Why? — Astrophel

The thinking goes this way:
There is no such thing as bad intent. We all
want the same thing, to be able to make sense of the world, and the behavior of other people most of all, in the most assimilable and internally harmonious way, and that means not force others in our worldview but rather expand our worldview so that we are able to emphasize with others. What we call evil is just the shortcomings of those attempts. Feeling has no intrinsic content, it is nothing but an organizational feature of our construing of events that indicates how well we are making sense of things. Giving affect some primordial content leads to the danger that we substitute a conformist impulse for the attempt to see things from others’ perspectives.

One's misery may bound existentially to ready to hand environments, and the temporal structure of this carries misery into a future creation of a "displacing" future, but misery exceeds utility, it is, again with Levinas, something in the "ideatum" of misery that exceeds the ready to hand. It is a presence at hand that "speaks" the injunction not to do X if X makes misery. — Astrophel

I wonder if maybe what you’re after is an idea of feeling that can be found in the German Romantic writings of authors like Schelling and Fichte.

But it’s quite specifically not a question of whether you want to do the right thing, but whether you can muster the courage to do so. Are we wrong to admire that sort of thing? — Srap Tasmaner

I think we should admire insight, not mythical ethical attributes. Terms like courage are dangerous, because they imply a hostility toward and condemnation of those who we judge as lacking in courage.

The courageous person could just as well be described as sensation-seeking, reckless or simply someone who has a closer bond of understanding with those they try to help than others who are not ‘courageous’. If we don’t recognize use that we all
live within different worlds of interpretation , we end up forcing everyone into a single world and then have no choice to but to explain differences of behavior in terms of ethical intent and associated concepts like courage and altruism.

The question is asked, “Does conscious awareness occur in myself, in humans at large, in other lifeforms?” To which Witt replies, “It would be a beetle in a box, so who knows and who cares? It’s irrelevant.”

As always before, I, personally, am not satisfied by Wittgenstein's answer to this and like issues — javra

Phenomenologists like Husserl doesn’t think such questions are irrelevant , but his method of answering of them I think has much in common with Wittgenstein’s. That is, consciousness would not be an object but a relational, synthetic activity organized by pragmatic use.

So are you basically suggesting a 'reincarnation' wherein your previous life experience is present but hidden but it acts as a depository which may/will influence decisions you make in your new incarnation? — universeness

Yes, something like that. This transition would be just a more extreme version of the changes re-make the self on a continual basis. We aren’t the same person from
day to day, and certainly not from year to year, but there is a continuity through change, a slowly changing thematics.

What about the idea that the new life picks up where the old life ended? Since the new life begins as a baby, and a baby doesn’t process experience, including memories, via verbal language, memories of the old life will not be recognizable in verbal concepts. So there would be an ‘identity carrier’, but one that would remain hidden to the new life, being only implicit and ‘unconscious’.

Isn't there something a little mysterious about moral courage? What's so awful about acknowledging that? — Srap Tasmaner

I just don’t know what moral courage is, except something we pat each other on the back for, a weapon we use against those whose motives we can’t relate to. Other words that work this way are selflessness, kindness, compassion. They reveal more about the person using them than those they are intended to describe. In particular , they reveal that the user of the word believes the self is some sort of fortress that has to be breached by force of will in order to want to do things for others. The user of the word doesn’t comprehend that the self is already social, that we can’t help but want to do things for others we identify with, and are threatens by those alien to us. The problems in the world aren’t due to ignoble intent but lack of insight. Words like selfish, uncourageous and immoral are part of the problem rather than the solution.

I think the jury is still out on whether phenomenology is doomed to failure here. — Srap Tasmaner

What phenomenology has going for it is that it doesn’t leave personal intent dangling in mid air by presuming it to be guided by mysterious impulses toward good or evil, selfishness or self-sacrifice. Instead, it ties motivation with sense making, and sense making with an interaubjective community. The idea of good or evil intent is a kind of superstition, a failure to understand motivation in the light of a need to anticipate events, which is neither selfish nor selfless.

Where does greatness lie? My thought: it lies in sacrifice, unsung, often as it goes. — Astrophel

”But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return, – perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself – that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more in general, or just to feel like “more.”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

“I dealt especially with the value of the ‘unegoistic', the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had for so long gilded, deified and transcendentalized until he was finally left with them as those ‘values as such' on the basis of which he said ‘no' to life and to himself as well.”
(On the Genealogy of Morals)

You are thrown into a world of givens. Choice intervenes, but choices are only among what is given to choose; and so many are now beyond choice: I can't choose to hate chocolate or adore traffic noise. — Astrophel

Our choices are made relative to a pre-existing system of understanding. But those choices alter that pre-existing system to some extent. Affectivity is a measure of the organizational dynamics of our system of understanding.
Our feelings express how effectively we are able to assimilate events along dimensions of similarity with respect to our prior experience. Negative feelings like guilt, anxiety, sadness and anger indicate impending or current chaos and confusion in our engagement with the world. Our audacity as experimenters , explorers and questioners determines how successfully we are able to
move beyond these crisis of intelligibility. It is up to us to re-construe our world , since there are no limits to the ways that we can re-organize how we make sense of things. Our feelings will tell us which channels of construing make the world a more creatively anticipatable place and which channels lead to the incoherence of negative moods.

Dennet has at least one intuition pump that does much the same thing in "Quining Qualia", except he's arguing against the notion of private sensations or some such and using something like the private language argument to make the point of how socially constructed the notions actually are.

I highly recommend reading that to anyone who has not. — creativesoul

I love that article. I think Dennett does a great job of demolishing g Strawson’s argument for panpsychism. I just wish he had gone a little further in Rorty’s
direction.

Is there anything that can survive, that is, be intuitively free of, the "play of difference and deference," free of "taking something AS"? The answer, it seems, is yes nd no. No, because, and I am still working on the way to caste this, no, because language is the "through which" the given is given. Yes, because language does not construct affectivity (to speak broadly of feelings, likes, dislikes, etc.).
I don't want to freeze history. I want to discover what is "presuppositionless" in historically structured occurrent affairs, and affectivity (broadly conceived) is this. — Astrophel

You mention the taking of something AS something, Heidegger’s depiction of the interpretive mode of understanding, and you use it as an example of contextual, contingent play. You oppose this contingency and historical relativity to affectivity, which you say is presuppositionless. But the ‘as’ structure not only depicts interpretation , it depicts temporality.

“ Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a
peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)

Because the basis of affectivity for Heidegger is temporality, the ‘as’ structure at the same time depicts the origin of affectivity. In experiencing something as something, Dasein comes back to its having been from its future, which is to say, it interprets a global context of relevance via the ‘as’ structure. In so doing, it “takes apart’ the relation between what it encounters and a previous instance of it by coming back to it from a fresh context of relevance. Seeing something as something makes sense of what is encountered in a new way, on the basis of a freshly modified totality of relevance. It is produced rather than discovered.

"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "(Heidegger 1994)

Beings can only be produced because the foundation of their being is created anew as a ‘ground-laying’ every time we see something as something. The creative re-making of the ground, which Heidegger says is the essence of feeling, is at the same time the productive seeing of an intentional object.

“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground“(Heidegger 1994)

Heidegger(1994) refers to this ground-laying as displacement, because the act of laying a ground is the displacing of a previous ground. This self-transcendending movement is the basis of all attunement( affectivity)

“What we are now calling displacement is the essential character of what we know under the name of disposition or feeling. A deep-rooted and very old habit of experience and speech stipulates that we interpret feelings and dispositions—as well as willing and thinking—in a psychological-anthropological sense as occurrences and processes within an organism, as psychic lived experiences, ones we either have or do not have. This also means that we are “subjects,” present at hand, who are displaced into these or those dispositions by “getting” them. In truth, however, it is the disposition that displaces us, displaces us into such and such a relation to the world, into this or that understanding or disclosure of the world, into such and such a resolve or occlusion of one’s self, a self which is essentially a being-in-the-world.”

So affectivity cannot be presuppositionless. Rather, it is the change in the frame of presuppositions( a way of comporting ourselves) that interpretation develops further in our everyday dealings with others. And the frame is always being reframed.

studies in the principles of historical progressions presuppose something more basic, and this is the intuited presence of value-in-the-world. — Astrophel

If these studies conclude that history is a progression, then they are already assuming a fixed basis of the movement of history, a founding value defining the progress as progress rather than mere change. Progress is a ‘good’ kind of change, a change that conserves its origin. This conserving of the good isn’t a placing of ethics in first position as Levinas thinks, it’s a confusion of ethics with Nietzsche’s aesthetic ideal, the attempt to freeze history by keeping the ethical impulse at a distance from the contingency of time.

For background, what is your stance on the proposition that lesser animals do not convey propositions? — javra

I agree that verbal language isn’t necessary for cognition, that is, for forming expectations that can be met or disappointed, which is the basis for belief in a very general sense, although obviously not belief as the structure of a verbal proposition.

Does the beetle in the box argument affirm that my honestly saying “I am in pain” has a relevant referent? Such that, though you might not instantly discern what it is, it is nevertheless that which I intend to refer to via the sigh of “my pain”. Last I read it affirms the opposite, that whether or not there is a referent to this phrase is irrelevant. Meaning being strictly attached to the abstractions of language rather than to intents, which are intrinsic. — javra

If I claim that I am referring to something intrinsic by saying that I am in pain, what I mean is that there is a simple and direct relation between my words and a sensation. Wittgenstein argues that such an isolated association between word and thing doesn’t say anything at all, it is meaningless. In order for the expression ‘ I am in pain’ to mean something to others,, it has to
refer to a socially shared context of background presuppositions, and do something new with them that is recognizable to other speakers. If I am alone, and I think to myself ‘I am in pain’, then the thought is only meaningful to me if it refers to my own network of background presuppositions and carries them forward into a new context of sense.

I believe it nullifies the importance of the beetle in a box argument - for, in this argument, if it isn’t linguistic it is irrelevant. Whereas to claim that nonlinguistic beliefs can occur is to claim the relevance of nonlinguistic givens. The two appear to stand in direct contradiction. — javra

The beetle in a box argument isnt about verbal language, it’s about social behavior, and a rejection of the idea that any meaning can be intrinsic (like qualia).

So it's controversial to Wittgensteinians because it doesn't accord with a philosophical preference for language-centered epistemologies, cosmologies, etc? — ZzzoneiroCosm

I don’t know why it would be controversial to Wittgenstein. He famously wrote 'If a lion could speak, we could not understand him'. By this he didn’t mean animals didnt think, but that their social behavior constituted language games we couldn’t relate to.

There's plenty of scholarly writing on the link between Wittenstein and Skinner. — ZzzoneiroCosm

And plenty arguing that Wittgenstein was not a behaviorist, which I find much more convincing.

I think before we can talk about Mill or Kant, or the nature of moral obligation or how moral attitudes figure into morality itself, and so on, we have to ask a more fundamental question: what IS ethics? — Astrophel

What is a proper analysis of the "parts" of an ethical problem? — Astrophel

What makes you think we should talk about ethics ‘in general’ before talking about Mill or Kant? This reminds me of what Foucault does with concepts like sexuality
or morality. Rather than giving us a history of something , which pre-supposes the meaning and then inserts it into the history, he gives us a genealogy of a concept, showing us that its history isn’t a history of changing applications or attitudes towards what has already been assumed in its basic structure. Rather, a genealogical analysis reveals a thoroughgoing transformation of the concept itself from one historical
period to the next. So in looking for the ‘parts’ of ethics which are transcendent to cultural contingency, we have to ask what it is that belongs to the genealogical structure in general. That may bring us to something on the order of local systems of intelligibility and their transformations. Ethics ‘in general’ may then be analyzed in terms of a drive toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation oriented around diversification of values.

Religious people and non-religious people live in a different world. Any supposed agreement between them will be based on a new misunderstanding. — Eskander

Whether or not they live in different worlds has to be determined by the context of the game. With endless religious denominations living in different worlds from each other , and just as many variants of non-believers whose outlooks oppose each other, there is as much likelihood of misunderstanding among the religious as between self-described religious and non-religious. By the same token , one could gather together adherents of liberal and heretical religious faith with self-described atheists , and find a surprising overlap of thinking on issues of faith. My point was that the words religious, non-religious and God by themselves don’t tell us how individuals and groups will align themselves with respect to each other in a language game.

One might read "Here is a hand" as a definition of what counts as a hand, or as a real object. That's a way of understanding Moore - "This counts as a real object, therefore there are real objects". Moore would be seen as setting out the rules for discussions of reality.

While there are issues with unjustified knowledge I don't see an issue with unjustified truth. The alternative would presumably be some sort of antirealism. — Banno

I don’t read Wittgenstein’s discussion of hinge propositions as a justification, defense or foundation for realism. On the contrary, the ‘rules for the discussion of reality’ are themselves only the pragmatic basis for one more language game.

403. To say of man, in Moore's sense, that he knows something; that what he says is therefore unconditionally the truth, seems wrong to me. - It is the truth only inasmuch as it is an unmoving foundation of his language-games.(On Certainty)

If there is a god then David Lewis should qualify for eternal damnation for writing such an asinine article.

Hence, red is not a thing, but a way of talking about sunsets and sports cars. And beliefs are not things, but a way of discussing behaviour — Banno

And yet the spoon remains in the drawer, as this particular spoon, whether I think about it or not. So particular spoons are things but the color red and beliefs are not, right?

In play is the indefeasibility of affectivity (this being a general term for a classification of existentials like pleasure, joy, bliss, happiness, disgust, hatred, revulsion, misery, and on and on. I take facts to be Wittgesntein's facts: sailboats are sailing in the distance, or an ox is stronger than a chihuahua. There is nothing of affectivity in all of these. Facts are accidental, that is, they could have been otherwise and there is nothing that makes them necessary. This is on edge of talk about possible worlds, worlds of logical necessity, or worlds of causal boundaries. I take Wittgenstein to be talking about logically conceivable worlds, and in them, there is no affectivity — Astrophel

My central interest since college has been the relationship between affectivity, feeling, mood and emotional on the one hand, and cognition, intentionality and understanding on the other. My view is that the two phenomena are utterly inseparable, that there is no expereince that is without affective valence and quality. I would argue that the sense of a world for Wittgenstein, as use context, is that way in which the word matters to us , its significance and relevance. That is an affective feature. There are no facts without relevance, there is no relevance without value, so understanding a fact is already an affective process.

if I deconstruct my cat, and the arbitrariness of the signifier cannot be made non arbitrary independently of a context, then the context is the ontological foundation for what my cat is. — Astrophel

The signifier-signified relation is never arbitrary for Derrida, s there never is a sign diver by itself, but I understand where you’re going.

I am not convinced our understanding is locked within a totality of the Same. — Astrophel

I assume you’re getting this from Levinas. I respect the Levinasian-Kierkegaardian way of thinking, but I think Levinas misreads Heidegger and Husserl when he accuses them of totalizing phenomenology.

His talk about death is fascinating but eventually frustrating. I get the impression that he himself didn't quite know what he meant, that it was more of a feeling-clump than a thesis. — ajar

Some find his account of being for death the most
valuable feature of his ontology, but I agree with you. I find it muddled and unconvincing. Derrida did a great deconstruction of it. I like the idea his model of
temporality implies, that each moment is finite and so the passage from moment to moment is its own kind of death and re-birth. He should have focused on that instead.

I reaffirm my position which is there's no samyak-dṛṣṭi (right view) when it comes to Wittgenstein; in fact I would take this a step further - Wittgenstein wishes to endorse anekantavada (many-sidedness/perspectivism) — Agent Smith

Derrida’s and my point is that there is a difference between ‘no right view’ and anything goes. For both him and Wittgenstein, what is correct and right can be constrained and determined in quite precise ways in relation to linguistic contexts of interaction within communities and cultures. What they deny is the idea that rightness can be fixed from some
culture-independent view from nowhere.

Yep, Wittgenstein is a form of relativism:the language game, the form of life has no rationale, it can be anything we want it to be (meaning is use, the rule following paradox). There is no correct Wittgenstein, there's only Wittgenstein just like there's no correct taste, there's only taste. — Agent Smith

To the extent that Derrida has also been accused of ‘anything goes’ radical relativism, I think his response to this charge is relevant to the understanding of Wittgenstein’s language games, because they share much in their analysis of social conventions and the role of language in creating and sustaining such conventions.

“ For of course there is a "right track" , a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”

In a world of relativity there would be no objective truth to whether the envisioned affective end pursued by a mass-murder is right/correct/real and thereby obtainable or else wrong/incorrect/false and thereby a fictitious end to pursue - this in contrast to the envisioned affective end pursued by those who intend virtue as best they can — javra

In relativistic discourses, there can be subjectively generated and intersubjectively validated or invalidated goals based on pragmatic considerations.

Tantalizing. So this last line would seem to rule out idealism or is my idea of idealism handicapped by the Greeks? — Tom Storm

One could say that this line of thinking would not have been possible without German idealism.

But doesn't the "difference" make indeterminate any spoken utterance at the level of the most basic analysis? I do see that undecidability is preferred if there is a purpose that contextualizes, or "totalizes" (I think that is a Heideggerian term, borrowed by Levinas) such that terms can be set and played against each other. But beneath this, there is indeterminacy, beneath all undecidability, there is indeterminacy in the full sense of the term: what is singular in thought and expression is not singular in its essential structure. Singularity "steps out" of plurality of regionalized signifiers. — Astrophel

Singularity doesn’t step out of plurality, but the other way around. There is no such thing as a centered structure. A play of signifiers is a differential structure with no center.

“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)

This system of differences must be thought as a temporal process rather than a simultaneous whole. The system unfolds itself from one singular to the next. Each singular is determinate ( even though it never repeats itself) but not decidable , since it borrows from another element in order to be what it is. It is a double structure. You are right to at there is no determinability in the sense of an ability to retrieve and hold onto an exact same entity or meaning. Determinability for Derrida at the level of social structures is a relative stability of thematic meaning.