what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism. — Manuel

To me that’s like asking what aspect of a present day mammal’s functioning hadnt been articulated previously by a billion year old simple invertebrate. If one wants to simplify the notion of function to an extreme degree, then one can see them as similar or even identical. But the nature of nature is to overcome itself. Both natural and cultural history is a process of endless transformation of previous structures and functions. . Postmodernism is inextricably bound to an era of the West just as biological
structures that depend on and transform precious ones are marked by their emergence in a particular era.

Ok maybe you'd follow this up by asking why one would identify with something other then themselves... at some point the answer will just be because we are that kind of beings, social beings. Individualism is a later ideological invention. — ChatteringMonkey

Good luck convincing this group of that. It’s sounding like a religious revival meeting.

This seems plainly untrue.

I feel grief. I desire to be happy. If the desire *was* the feeling, this desire would fulfill itself immediately,
I desire something, and feel pain by the absence of its fulfillment. Its fulfillment brings me pleasure. Here the desire is linked to a feeling which is the opposite of its fulfillent.
I desire something, and anticipate happiness in its fulfillment. Its fulfilment leaves me feeling empty. — hypericin

You’re right. If desire always fulfills itself, there would be no experience of negative emotions. I should instead say that desire connects us up with new experience that either fulfills or fails to fulfill our desire. There could never be perfect fulfillment because all experience is unique in some respect. But even when experience disappoints us , shocks us, makes us miserable , it is still
framed by our relevant concerns and goals. The parallel here with thinking is that we can try to think what we want to think, but unpleasant thoughts can intrude in spite of our efforts, as is the case with ptsd, depression and anxiety.

Given a desire to think about X, I can directly think about X.
Given a desire to feel Y, I cannot directly act to satisfy this desire. Instead I have to do things like go to therapy.

Do you acknowledge this difference? How do you account for it? — hypericin

The way I see it , the desire IS the feeling. Why do I say this? Because a mood is always pointing ahead of itself every moment of experience. The mood isn’t just about our current assessment of a situation. It also anticipates ahead and in this way forms our desires. Our happiness is looking to continue and deepen itself. Our grief is looking for relief or escape. So try desire isnt a blind urge. It is a meaning intention that partially shapes what we think. The context of our immediately previous thinking and feeling and desiring predisposes us toward our next thought. We can liken this to the way perception works. 90% of what we see when we look at a thing like a table isnt out there but what is filled in via our expectations. What we expect to see comprises much of what we do see. Let’s say I try to free associate. This would seem to be an exercise in pure voluntarism. But as the psychoanalysis have shown, it reveals much about our desires and expectations.

reply="James Riley;568973"]

Your post rings of the old "nasty, brutish and short" assessment of our former selves, which also hints of an indictment against indigenous people. Analogizing early childhood development to societal evolution is the same thing. More of that white (?) western (?) justification of the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves to make ourselves feel better about ourselves so we can righteously and indignantly belt others in the mouth with impunity when, in a lapse of judgement, that other might make so bold as to be honest with himself and inquire about the same with he who would belt him — James Riley

Piaget’s developmental model was heavily indebted to Marx’s dialectic , and of course Marx was indebted to Hegel. In fact the psychologies of Freud , the American Pragmatists (In particular Dewey, James and Meade) and so many others within the psychological community who embrace a Darwinian evolutionary framework, all are thinking in Hegel’s shadow. In addition , liberal theologies that hark back to Kierkegaard also are ‘after Hegel , I haven’t even mentioned the various strands of wokeness , critical race theory and BLM, all of which can be traced back to the changes in political thinking that Hegel made possible.l, and Wittgenstein’s ideas on language. Within analytic philosophy students of Hegel include Putnam, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Sellars and Rorty. On the far left are the postmodern, post structuralist French philosophers who filter Hegel through Marx and Freud, filter those two through critical neo-marxism(Adorno, Habermas) , and filter critical marxism through Nietzsche.

I’m mentioning this history because of your stated belief that an individual can leapfrog over their era’s worldviews , and that human nature is stable and relatively unchanging:

not only have we not changed all that much in the last 200,000 years, but we really aren't any better or more worthy than the man who sat at the mouth of the cave and chipped a spear point from a rock — James Riley

we continue to avail ourselves of our nature, — James Riley

One need not be a true genius to leapfrog over his era's level of cultural and scientific understanding. — James Riley

Such a perspective, it seems to me , is at odds with all that came after Hegel in psychology and the other social sciences , in biology , in politics and philosophy. All of the above writings necessarily becomes targets of your accusations of “ apologetics for man in furtherance of his open conspiracy to look the other way while pursing a not-so-enlightened self-interest”.

I’m reminded of Andrew Breitbart’s writings. Yes, he was the founder of the alt right publication. I see nothing in your views that indicates you have anything in common with the alt right, except for what you wrote above.
Breitbart recognizes that all of the thinking that I mentioned above can be traced back to, and was made possible by Hegel. So he considers Hegel to represent a crucial dividing line in the cultural wars between left and right. Everything that he considers dangerously relativistic, ungrounded in fixed verities about human nature and morality , he blames on the eras of thought in all the above fields that got their start with Hegelian dialectic.

So it appears that there are at least two strands of thinking that reject Hegelian dialectics and what came in it’s wake. In addition to alt right populism we have MLK styled enlightenment liberalism with its belief in the notion of rational self-interest. The distinction between these two strands has not been lost on intellectuals within the woke community.
They more or less ignore the alt right brigade and heap all their venom on the enlightenment liberals and the ideas that you espouse about the relation between the individual and culture. I think this is because the latter is more threatening to them than Breitbart, being closer in their thinking and also closer geographically.

I certainly could be wrong about where your views stand i realism to the above communities

eply="James Riley;568973"]

Your post rings of the old "nasty, brutish and short" assessment of our former selves, which also hints of an indictment against indigenous people. Analogizing early childhood development to societal evolution is the same thing. More of that white (?) western (?) justification of the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves to make ourselves feel better about ourselves so we can righteously and indignantly belt others in the mouth with impunity when, in a lapse of judgement, that other might make so bold as to be honest with himself and inquire about the same with he who would belt him — James Riley

Piaget’s developmental model was heavily indebted to Marx, and of course Marx was indebted to Hegel. In fact the psychologies of Freud , the American Pragmatists (In particular Dewey, James and Meade) and so many others within the psychological community who embrace a Darwinian evolutionary framework, all are thinking in Hegel’s shadow. In addition , liberal theologies that hark back to Kierkegaard also are ‘after Hegel , I haven’t even mentioned the various strands of wokeness , critical race theory and BLM, all of which can be traced back to the changes in political thinking that Hegel made possible.l, and Wittgenstein’s ideas on language. Within analytic philosophy students of Hegel include Putnam, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Sellars and Rorty. On the far left are the postmodern, post structuralist French philosophers who filter Hegel through Marx and Freud, filter those two through critical neo-marxism(Adorno, Habermas) , and filter critical marxism through Nietzsche.

I’m mentioning this history because of your stated belief that an individual can leapfrog over their era’s worldviews , and that human nature is stable and relatively unchanging:

not only have we not changed all that much in the last 200,000 years, but we really aren't any better or more worthy than the man who sat at the mouth of the cave and chipped a spear point from a rock — James Riley

we continue to avail ourselves of our nature, — James Riley

One need not be a true genius to leapfrog over his era's level of cultural and scientific understanding. — James Riley

Such a perspective, it seems to me , is at odds with all that came after Hegel in psychology and the other social sciences , in biology , in politics and philosophy. All of the above writings necessarily becomes targets of your accusations of “ apologetics for man in furtherance of his open conspiracy to look the other way while pursing a not-so-enlightened self-interest”.

I’m reminded of Andrew Breitbart’s writings. Yes, he was the founder of the alt right publication. I see nothing in your views that indicates you have anything in common with the alt right, except for what you wrote above.
Breitbart recognizes that all of the thinking that I mentioned above can be traced back to, and was made possible by Hegel. So he considers Hegel to represent a crucial dividing line in the cultural wars between left and right. Everything that he considers dangerously relativistic, ungrounded in fixed verities about human nature and morality , he blames on the eras of thought in all the above fields that got their start with Hegelian dialectic.

So it appears that there are at least two strands of thinking that reject Hegelian dialectics and what came in it’s wake. In addition to alt right populism we have MLK styled enlightenment liberalism with its belief in the notion of rational self-interest. The distinction between these two strands has not been lost on intellectuals within the woke community.
They more or less ignore the alt right brigade and heap all their venom on the enlightenment liberals and the ideas that you exposure about the relation between the individual and culture. I think this is because the latter is more threatening to them than Breitbart, being closer in their thinking and also closer geographically.

I certainly could be wrong about where your views stand in relation to the above communities. Maybe you could mention a philosopher or two born after 1800 whose thinking you believe is consonant with the views you stated above concerning the individual and cultural history , and the fixity of human nature.

Our history is recorded in books and oral traditions and art and dance a — James Riley

Let’s talk about art as an example. Do you notice that prior to the Greeks, renderings of humans in sculpture were rigid, without movement and personality? It has been said that what changed was the discovery of individual personhood and this is depicted not just in Classical art but in literature, poetry and philosophy
of that period. Notice that medieval painting did not understand perspective and a unified light source. This emerged with the renaissance , and reflected not just discoveries in art but larger shifts in thinking about the interconnected basis of the natural and human world. Each innovation in the arts expressed new discoveries about the natural and cultural world., and about human potential and commonality. The point I want to make is twofold. First , individuals learn about who they are from their participation in community. Second, each innovation is made possible by , and builds upon previous innovations. This suggests that it is impossible for an individual to be a true genius in the sense of leapfrogging over his era’s level of cultural and scientific understanding. There is instead a certain range of creativity within any era that amounts to variations on a theme. That’s why labels like renaissance , enlightenment, modernism and postmodern are useful, because they are crude ways of pointing to the contours and limits of thought of a given era.
Isnt there at least one aspect of inter human , psychological understanding that you recognize as evolving from era to era, in parallel with advances in science, literature and the arts ? Piaget wrote about child development as proceeding from greater egocentrism to more and more decentered ways of thinking. By egocentrism he didn’t mean selfishness in the moral sense , but a cognitive limitation that represents an earlier phase in the child’s increasingly differentiated understanding of their world. The child begins with rigid, inflexible black and white categories though which they organize meaning , and progressively diversity and integrate these categories. They become more ‘moral’ citizens as their simplistic , one-dimensional interpretations of others become more relational and empathetic. Piaget argued that cultural development can be likened to child development in this way.
You really think that our ability to get along with and understand others is not something that has evolved era to era in the slightest? You don’t believe that any aspect of what allows us to empathize with others who are different from us , and what allows us to avoid being afraid, hostile , threatened by individuals and cultures who are alien to our ways , builds progressively upon and depends on previous eras of enlightenment?

Now we're just defining our way into believing that everything is conscious. But that's just not the reality. There are all kinds of things I do that I have no memory of, am not aware of, etc. -- from complex behavior like driving to the inner workings of my body. If we want to claim this is "implicit consciousness," then we're off to a computer model of the mind, where rules are "stored" somewhere in consciousness. That's not convincing to me. — Xtrix

Gene Gendlin uses as an example
of implicit consciousness driving a car:

Currently we are said to be “unconscious” of the background. We can drive the car “unconsciously”
while attending to other thoughts. But we don't mean that we could drive if we were unconscious
from a blow on the head. The background is not unconscious, but we need new terms to define
“consciousness” as vastly wider than the narrow scope of attention. And, our “background” is not just vague. We could not drive without attention if what functions were only a vague, peripheral knowledge of driving. Actually each detail of knowing how to drive functions
precisely

We could not act or speak as we do all day without the implicit function of the past, from all our previous behavior and cognition. The body can drive home without our attention, but much more is involved also when we pay full attention, not just the few details to which we are attending. We can attend only to very little at any one time. Vastly more functions implicitly. That includes where we're going, why we're going there, when we need to get there, that we will need to get gas, that that rattle noise is just the stuff in the back seat, that all those cars coming at us are really in the other lane, that a piece of rusty metal in the road might blow out the tires, etc., etc. Countless items function, usually quite appropriately. We don't explicitly attend to most of this. We could do nothing if action were guided only by attention.
Furthermore, it isn't enough for these strands to be known individually. In being implicit they cross, which they must do if we are to drive properly. It wouldn't be enough to know that sharp metal can blow out tires, and separately the height of the car above the road. They have to be crossing to know whether it's safer to straddle the piece of metal between the wheels or to go
onto the shoulder at this speed.
A computer program would say something like “up to such and such a size straddle the piece of metal; over that number go to the right shoulder.” But this kind of “program” is implicit between all the myriad strands and in all kinds of respects and numbers. “Crossing” is somewhat like simultaneous “programs” in all directions and is also an entirely new process with an entirely
new result.
Obviously we are not unconscious of all this. We could not drive if we were. The implicit is an implicit consciousness. Its vast content functions implicitly.

You might relate better to merleau-Ponty’s notion of the unconscious, as related by Thomas Fuchs:

“From the point of view of a phenomenology of the lived body, the un-conscious is not an intrapsychic reality residing in the depths "below consciousness". Rather, it surrounds and permeates conscious life, just as in picture puzzles the figure hidden in the background surrounds the foreground, and just as the lived body conceals itself while functioning. It is an unconscious which is not located in the vertical dimension of the psyche but rather in the horizontal dimension of lived space, most of all lodging in the intercorporeality of dealings with others, as the hidden reverse side of day-to-day living. It is an unconscious which is not to be found inside the individual but in his relationships to others.

Unconscious fixations are like certain restrictions in a person's space of potentialities produced by an implicit but ever-present past which declines to take part in the continuing progress of life. Their traces, however, are not hidden in an inner psychic world but manifest themselves rather as "blind spots", "empty spaces" or curvatures in the lived space: in the "slips" in speech and action; in the relationship patterns into which a person repeatedly blunders, in the actions which are avoided without being aware of it; in the spaces which are not entered, the opportunities offered by life which one does not take, and
does. or even dare to see.

The unconscious is thus absence in presence, the unperceived in the perceived (Merleau-Ponty 1986, 308f.). Like a figure blanks out the background from which it stands out, consciousness, perception and language conceal the reverse side of the unconscious, of the unper-ceived and of silence which are always bound up with them. This reverse side, however, does not remain fully concealed but expresses itself in reversals, chiasmatic entanglements, in an ambiguity of con-sciousness: One does not know something and does not want to know it; one does not see something and does not want to see it - in other words, one looks past it intentionally-unintentionally. Consciousness is not fully transparent to itself because it hides itself from itself.”

Your philosophy is just more apologetics for man in furtherance of his open conspiracy to look the other way while pursing a not-so-enlightened self-interest. "They didn't know any better back then!" "Even the best minds back then thought it was okay!" — James Riley

What if my philosophy were true? How would it change the way you look at people who disappoint your moral standards? Im not just just talking about those from previous eras but your contemporaries who violate your standards of decency. You would look them in the eye and say “you are just trying to further your open conspiracy to look the other way while pursuing your unenlightened self-interest”. And they would belt you in the mouth for impugning their motives. Basically describes today’s polarized political atmosphere , with each side impugning the others’ motives as selfish, greedy, dishonest , etc , etc. It never occurs to either side that the other believes deeply that their approach is unimpeachably ethical.

Which is why I agree with Ken Gergen:

“Cobstructionist 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.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

what type of reaction do you think the police would have against a large non-mainstream protest against capital? — Maw

you mean like in Portland and Seattle?
All I can say is that the police weren’t calling the shots in Chicago, the mayor was, and she strongly supported the protesters.

To the extent the greatest modern philosophers held racist views they were, as I implied, just establishment conservatives justifying the maintenance of the status quo. That would include any that today, looking back, we might view as enlightenment icons. The real question (and the one historians love to dig for and often find) is who was challenging their thinking at the time? What happened to their writings? Maybe they weren't "establishment" and didn't get the time of day? Nevertheless, they are often found in obscure, dark recesses of the stacks; but, if they don't serve today's conservative interest then they don't get any oxygen now either. — James Riley

Good luck finding those mysterious hidden ‘liberals’ from past centuries. You won’t find them any more than you’ll find secret discoverers of relativity or genetic theory. That’s because science, technology and social thought evolve together. The previous leading edge of ethical thought is always going to appear backward to contemporary minds.

Thinking that ethical thinking remains static over cultural
history while only science evolves gives you license to demonize those whose thinking isn’t up to your standards It also gives you no way to anticipate how you might help them to see things differently, because you are concentrating on nefarious motives rather than issues of knowledge.

... we’re all mostly automated, unconscious beings. There’s no way around it. From our breathing and heart beating to our internal workings of our organs, there’s far more unconscious activity going on than conscious — Xtrix

Unconscious doesn’t have to mean automatic and split off from consciousness. Enactive, embodied approaches to cognition reveal the body as integrated with mind in a complex and inseparable fashion. Each subsystem of the body is reciprocally interconnected with all the others , so that the person operates as a functional unity. What this means for the idea of the unconscious ia that what is outside of awareness is not necessarily cut off from it. Rather, the unconscious is a kind of implicit consciousness. One can think of this in terms of levels of awareness rather than functionally independent chambers as Freud’s psychodynamic theory had it.

The reason that subliminal
advertising was such a dismal failure is that what is not important enough for me to be consciously aware of it cannot influence me at an unconscious level

Because right-winger extremism isn't largely considered a threat as demonstrated by the muzzled response by guards (some sympathetic to them) during the capital riot. Contrast this to the response of city police during Black Lives Matter protests last summer after the death of George Floyd. Easier to be "emboldened" as the Right, when the red carpet is rolled out for you. — Maw

Oh good grief , I live in Chicago , and have seen blm signs littering the wealthiest and most privileged neighborhoods in the city , as well as in the formerly Rebublican, ultra-wealthy , lilly white North Shore suburbs Every weekend hordes of hipster kids would come into town from the suburbs to create sidewalk graffiti and show their radical cred. In my city , as well
as most large American cities, this was about as mainstream a movement as I’ve seen, except among the police.

In D.C. , a strongly liberal city , it was the same thing. The population as a whole despised the capital rioters , and the police supported them.

Does that mean the average urbanite supports
critical race theory. No, but they are vastly more sympathetic to it than to Trumpism.

quote="James Riley;568708"]5
I would also add that it represented the most refined and ‘verified’ thinking among the intellectuals
— Joshs

How much of that was just establishment conservatives justifying the maintenance of the status quo?

But the way it is worded, it almost comes across as saying "even the damn ivory tower intellectual elite liberals" were on board back then. That wasn't true then and it's not true now.[/quote]

“I It is by now well known that some of the greatest modern philosophers held racist views. John Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-76), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), G W F Hegel (1770-1831) and many others believed that Black and Indigenous peoples the world over were savage, inferior and in need of correction by European enlightenment.” ( You could add Hannah Arendt to that list).

“Michael Zeuske, a Bonn-based historian and specialist for the history of slavery, on Deutschlandfunk (a German public radio station) on June 13, 2020: “If one seriously intends to enlighten people about racism and the toppling of monuments,” to paraphrase Zeuske, “one must also take such great minds as the philosopher Immanuel Kant […] into account.” Why? Well, because, as Zeuske puts it, Kant’s “anthropological writings helped to establish European racism.”

What George Kelly could ad is that: Man, in his open conspiracy to pursue his self-interest, always claims to be doing it "for the children"; and some of those children in future generations will look back and excuse him for "not knowing any better. — James Riley

Kelly, like the phenomenologists , Heidegger and embodied cognitive theorists , rejects the quaint enlightenment notion of self-interest, which implies an atomized , autonomous subject split off from a world. By the way, your view of self-interest would probably be considered racist by critical race theory adherents.

“ A parable called "The Tragedy of the Commons" haunts social research on ethical concerns. The parable describes a situation in which a number of herdsmen graze their herds on a common pasturage. Each herdsman knows that it is in his self-interest to increase the size of his herd because, whereas each additional animal brings profit to him, the cost of grazing the animal and the damage done to the pasturage is shared by all the herdsmen. As a result, each of the herdsmen rationally increases his herd size until the commons is destroyed and, with it, all of the herds that grazed on it. The concern of the social scientist is how one can get a group of rationally self-interested herdsmen to cooperate in maintaining the vanishing commons.

This disarmingly disingenuous metaphor for our world situation embodies a long tradition of modern thought about the self and its relation to others, which may be called the economic view of the mind. The goal of the self is assumed to be profit-getting the most at least cost. The unconstrained economic man, such as Hobbes's despot,continues his acquisitions until there is nothing left for anyone else. Therefore, constraints are needed: overt social force, internalized socialization, subtle psychological mechanisms. A general theory called social exchange theory, widely used in social psychology, decision theory, sociology, economics, and political science, views all of human activity, individually and in groups, in terms of input and output calculations, paying and receiving. We believe that this implicit vision of motivation underlies not only social science but many contemporary people's views of their own action. Even altruism is defined in terms of an individual obtaining (psychological) utility from benefiting another.

Is such a view experientially validated? We believe that the view of the self as an economic man, which is the view the social sciences hold, is quite consonant with the unexamined view of our own motivation that we hold as ordinary, nonmindful people. Let us state that view clearly. The self is seen as a territory with boundaries. The goal of the self is to bring inside the boundaries all of the good things while paying out as few goods as possible and conversely to remove to the outside of the boundaries all of the bad things while letting in as little bad as possible. Since goods are scarce, each autonomous self is in competition with other selves to get them. Since cooperation between individuals and whole societies may be needed to get more goods, uneasy and unstable alliances are formed between autonomous selves. Some selves (altruists) and many selves in some roles (parents, teachers) may get (immaterial) goods by helping other selves, but they will become disappointed (even disillusioned) if those other selves do not reciprocate by being properly helped.

What does the mindfulness/awareness tradition or enactive cognitive science have to contribute to this portrait of self-interest? The mindful, open-ended approach to experience reveals that moment by moment this so-called self occurs only in relation to the other. If I want praise, love, fame, or power, there has to be another (even if only a mental one) to praise, love, know about, or submit to me. If I want to obtain things, they have to be things that I don't already have. Even with respect to the desire for pleasure, the pleasure is something to which I am in a relation. Because self is always codependent with other (even at the gross level we are now discussing), the force of self-interest is always other-directed in the very same respect with which it is self-directed. What, then, are people doing who appear so self-interested as opposed to other-interested? Mindfulness/awareness meditators suggest that those people are struggling, in a confused way, to maintain the sense of a separate self by engaging in self-referential relationships with the other. Whether I gain or lose, there can be a sense of I; if there is nothing to be gained or lost, I am groundless. If Hobbes's despot were actually to succeed in obtaining everything in the universe, he would have to find some other preoccupation quickly, or he would be in a woeful state: he would be unable to maintain his sense of himself. Of course, as we have seen with nihilism, one can always turn that groundlessness into a ground; then one can maintain oneself in relation to it by feeling despair.“
( Francisco Varela, The Embodied Mind)

Racism is a form of laziness insofar as a racist deduces from flimsy and superficial generalizations and does so without verification. Unfortunately, this species of thinking manifests in racists and so-called anti-racists alike. — NOS4A2

I would also add that it represented the most refined and ‘verified’ thinking among the intellectuals of Europe as recently as two centuries ago, just as homophobia was endorsed by the lab history , medical and legal establishments less than a century ago. If this stems from laziness , flimsy and superficial generalizations , then I would predict that a century from now our most refined and enlightened thinking will also be accused of such terrible things.

As George Kelly said:

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

Maybe it is time for the philosophers and humanity to wake up to greater self knowledge and consciousness. — Jack Cummins

Perhaps such an awakening would lead to more
deliberate behavior not because it was more ‘rational’ but because it went beyond the limits of rationality.

“…when we sit down to try to figure out what will happen in the future, it usually seems as if the thing to do is to start with what we already know. This progression from the known to the unknown is characteristic of logical thought, and it probably accounts for the fact that logical
thinking has so often proved itself to be an obstacle to intellectual progress. It is a device for perpetuating the assumptions of the past.”
George Kelly

oops

None of them were racist, btw. — frank

How could they be racist when they didn’t have the biological concept of race?

when you look at your average behavior, it doesn’t involve rational choice and isn’t deliberative. — Xtrix

General Gendlin would say it’s ‘implicative’, which is a more intricate notion and ordered notion than rational deliberation.

If you haven’t read it, you might enjoy Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ‘How Emotions are Made’.

↪Joshs You are confusing the issue .

Your boss barks at you, "think about tomorrows meeting!". You can obey if you choose, because you have at least has a high degree of voluntary control over your thoughts.

Your boss barks, "now be happy!". While you might be so already, you generally cannot choose to obey this command, since emotional state is generally involuntary. — hypericin

CBT, cogntive behavioral therapy, is based on the theory that emotions are the result of cognitve
attributions that we make. To change our emotions , we must change those assessments. But such a change will only be effective if the new assessment more accurately corresponds to our situation than the old assessment . To find this out, we have to test out the new assessment to see if it is valid. happiness and sadness , as opposed to a momentary feeling , are stable moods which reflect the way we are thinking about our situation. So the reason emotion is resistant to change is the same reason that our cognitive assessments are resistant to
change.

So you can choose to think or not think i about tomorrow’s meeting, but you can’t choose your attitude toward the meeting , that is, your assessment of the import and value of the meeting.

But even in saying this much about the choice to think something, we are already presupposing that one is motivated to think a thought. We say that to be voluntary, a thought must come when we want it to come.
But wanting something implies desire, which is an affective process. We want , we need, we desire , we strive , which tells us what to choose. So what we choose is at the mercy of , is controlled and dictated by, what we desire. If your boss says “choose to desire to think about tomorrow’s meeting” , you could no more
comply with this demand that you could choose to be happy on command.

Freud recognized this fact about rationality being at the behest of drives and feelings.

I should also add that the boss telling you to think about tomorrow’s meeting is like him telling you to ignore the pink elephant in the room. The instant he mentions the meeting, you automatically produce an image of the meeting, before you have a chance to resist. This is how language works. The language we share with a community chooses for us every time we interact with others, just as our desires choose for us from below. This doesn’t mean we are completely determined from culture and the body , it just means that these five us our direction and expectations. Voluntary thought doesn’t appear in a vacuum , it is always motivated.

This is utterly at odds with everyday experience. We can say to ourselves, "I will now think about tomorrow's meeting", and then think about tomorrow's meeting. We generally cannot say "I will now be happy" and be happy. — hypericin

Not as much as you might think. We don’t normally say to ourselves “I will now think about tomorrow’s meeting” unless we are sending ourselves a mental memo. Normally , the thought about the meeting pops into our head before we formally ‘decide’ to think about it. We only say we ‘ chose’ to decide after the fact. The thought thinks itself into our head. And this is t the whole story. Thoughts never just occur neutrally. They occur with some attitude. I think about tomorrow’s meeting with trepidation or nervousness , or with excitement. The attitude come over me wrapped up i the thought that comes to me.

As Nietzsche said:

“ As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that 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”

what we call emotion. is no more or less voluntary than thinking. A thought occurs TO is, we FIND OURSELVES thinking a thought. Only on reflecting back on what we thought do we declare it to be what we ‘wanted’ to think or a thought which surprised us. We tend to think of emotions in terms of being surprised or overcome( overwrought, overjoyed, overwhelmed, etc) but emotions are just more intense forms of the affectivity which is always part and parcel of thinking. Most of the time , our affective tone stays in the background as a more or less subtly modulating feeling(a feeling of boredom, interest , calmness, everydayness), but it is never purely voluntary, and neither is it ever purely alien to thought. Training for the increased ‘voluntariness’ of negative emotion is like training to be surprised.

It is definitely not intelligent to reach a racist conclusion. I said "weak-minded", which means that the person arriving at a racist conclusion is weak-minded, stupid, not using the intellect or rationality correctly. — Christoffer

Until about 150 years ago many, if not most, philosophers and scientists in Europe and the U.S. accepted as fact what we would now label as racist ideas. Was it because they were weak-minded, stupid and not rational? Or was it because ideas about many aspects of human nature evolve over long periods of time?

you’re no fun

The parties are no longer out to prove each other is correct rather deviated at the same logical point. So, objective or less bias whichever you prefer. — Cheshire

So a triangulation on an inter-subjectively negotiated point of intersection? Sounds very hermeneutic.

Subjective proof is pretty cheap in the world. Have you ever considered an objective argument where the goal is to discover what other fact or matter must also be in disagreement. It forces the process through a lateral flow of logic toward agreement regarding a disagreement. — Cheshire

Objective proof is an illusion, since the object must be interpreted via language and there is no intersubjective translation manual, so say Quine, Putnam, Sellers and Davidson and Rorty. For most limited practical
purposes within scientific and technical domains, such issues are hidden, and we can proceeds as though the object were identical for all to potentially see. but they become major obstacles in the social sciences and philosophy, where the subjective basis of all ‘objects’ becomes apparent .

I've neither stated nor implied a cause or mechanism for violence. — 180 Proof

You’re welcome to do so here. What do you mean by ‘natural’ when you say violence is natural and define us by species name?

Are you suggesting we prove the opposition doesn't understand what we are talking about well enough to assert we are wrong? Is this the course being navigated — Cheshire

Yes, we prove it to ourselves. Then we can stop wasting our time focusing on surface details of our model ( which is like arguing biblical verses without knowing through what perspective of faith the other is reading the bible ) and try and make its deeper plumbing understandable to the other.

H. sapien violence is natural (thus, the species-wide adaptation of eusocial risk-sharing). Racism, however, is ideological (and maladaptive in the long-term). — 180 Proof

Your thinking is awfully reductive. Either violence is a product of genes or of socially imposed forms. That doesn’t seem to be any room in your thinking for an interpretive interaction between person and world.
That makes your thinking violent , and not because of a one-way imposition from nature or nurture. It’s violent to the extent that it gives you no way to understand others’ thinking from their vantage in an empathetic way, only as a potentially malevolent arbitrary shaping , to which you will find you have no choice but to respond to with hostility.

We should never have split off emotions from intellect. They were never separate to begin with. Some psychologists and philosophers have done away with the distinction completely.

”That which is hateful to you, do not do to anyone."
~Hillel the Elder — 180 Proof

Often that which is hateful to you defines the very essence of that which defines the thinking that goes beyond you.

Just about every innovation in social ideas was despised as immoral, dangerous, regressive , by the old guard.

Sometimes we are conflicted and at odds with oneself. Pl — Fooloso4

Being conflicted and at odds with oneself is another way of describing the idea that experience is becoming. Conventional ways of thinking about agency, subjectivity and the self make change derivative of self-present entities and objects.An object appears to a thinking, experiencing subject whose ‘self’ can be differentiated from what it experiences. Nietzsche spearheaded a revolution in thinking that places difference, change and becoming as prior to presence. This is the essence of Will to Power. Being at odds with oneself simply IS what the self is.

Even if the position is incoherent, it should at least have a faux-coherency that they can express. There is going to be a reason they believe, even if it's not good, you should be able to see how they got tricked and why the trick has a convincing allure. If they won't bother to be flexible enough to grasp where the other is coming from, then they lose, and the audience or moderator can vote on this. Of course a close minded person won't admit it — Yohan

I’m not talking about when the other person’s position really is incoherent. I’m saying when we disagree with someone’s point of view, it is often because the worldview grounding that position is incomprehensible to us. We then have no choice e to see it as either an outdated version of our own position or incoherent.

Good lord, why does everyone miss the absolutely most central feature of differences in scientific theories, political positions , ethical schemes? You make a colossal mistake in not recognizing that grasping where the other is coming from is the single most difficult thing to do. 99% of the threads on this form concerning racism, gender politics, rationality vs irrationality , logic vs emotion , morality in general and scientific progress would not exist if people realized the monumental difficulty of seeing the world from another person’s perspective rather than impugning the other’s motives ( they’re lazy, deliberately misreading my position , ‘not bothering to be flexible’, ‘close-minded’, racist, emotional, irrational, indoctrinated , lying , etc ). The reason foe the enormous difficulty in achieving this empathy is that worldviews are extremely complex and therefore only can change slowly. Most don’t even have a way to recognize that they operate on the basis. of worldviews. Popper himself didn’t realize it , and empirical scientist , being realists for the most part, still tend to think of evidence as ‘out there’ rather than an interpretative product of worldviews.

To to be clear, I’m not talking about disputes over relatively minor features of a scientific model. These can certainly b lead to both sides coming to see the other side’s argument. But as soon as we find ourselves in the terrain of abstract ideas , political principles , religious and philosophical concepts , in almost all cases incomprehension of the others views will predominate but be masked by accusations of bad or lazy intent.

I do think there is a better way to argue and Karl Popper defined it as an attitude that “I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.” — Cheshire

I’d throw out Popper in favor of Kuhn, abandon the idea that we’re aiming to mirror an independent truth , and instead view both positions as valid but pragmatically useful in different ways. To choose one over the other is to make trade-offs in usefulness. The steel man approach may be useful in showing that one side is unable to comprehend the other’s position well enough to pragmatically compare it with their own.

soul of subjective multiplicity,

But this isnt a functional unity, and it isnt an inside as opposed to an outside. In sum, it is very different from Sarte’s notion of subjectivity and agency.

What do you mean by independent? In what way are they dependent on my subjectivity?
— Joshs

"ONE thinks" — Fooloso4

ONE what? Where is the unity in order to talk about a singularity? In what sense is a subjective multiplicity a unity? Didnt you just quote Nietzsche saying we need to get beyond the ‘one’?

perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined itself).(BGE 17) — Fooloso4

This solves the problem of the seeming mystery of a thought that comes when it wishes rather than when I wish. It is not that the thought has some kind of independent existence and comes to me from elsewhere, but simply that there is not something within me, an “I” or “ego” or “little ‘one’” that is the agent of my thoughts. This is not a denial of agency, it is a denial of something within me, some substance or soul-atom that is the agent. — Fooloso4

There would have to be agency for Nietzsche in the sense of a subjectivity, since Will to power is grounded in subjectivity. The question for me is what sort of agency or subjectivity is this? How does it differ from Kant’s , for instance? You say thoughts don’t have independent existence for Nietzsche. What do you mean by independent? In what way are they dependent on my subjectivity? If we follow the postmodern readings of Nietzsche ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault , Deleuze) , subjectivity for Nietzsche is a difference of forces. This means that subjectivity is always outside of itself. Not outside in the sense of being ‘caused’ by empirical objects in the world , but outside in the postmodern sense of a subjectivity whose very essence is in that it is produced by an outside.

If anyone is interested I'd like to have a steel man competition with a materialist, myself being an idealist. — Yohan

Steel manning won’t prove the other wrong because they may interpret their inability to understand your position as a result of faulty reasoning on your part.. They can say your position is incoherent.
I’m neither a materialist nor an idealist, but I’m game.

Our intellect and intelligence are the shields against this irrational construct since we can understand that it is irrational and fight the urge to surrender to it. — Christoffer

Actually, it is precisely our intellect and intelligence that is behind what we call racism. If the problem were simple irrationality it would be a it easier to solve it. But when people do their best to act as ‘rationally’ as possible and still end up behaving in ways that others call racist it should teach us that the cause of racism isnt irrationality, it is the limits that are imposed on intelligence in any given era.

Nietzsche repeats Pindar's urging to:

Become who you are. — Fooloso4

But who are ‘we’ according to Nietzsche?

“What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?””

“…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.“

“On the one hand, we are, under the circumstances, both the one who commands and the one who obeys, and as the obedient one we are familiar with the feelings of compulsion, force, pressure, resistance, and motion that generally start right after the act of willing. On the other hand, however, we are in the habit of ignoring and deceiving ourselves about this duality by means of the synthetic concept of the “I.” “