st wanted to point out that Pomo should not be taken a coherent doctrine or school of thought, as evidenced by this opposition between him and Foucault. — Olivier5

I can’t speak to pomo culture, but pomo philosophy, or more specifically poststructuralist philosophy is a range of ideas united by a common overarching set of themes. You make it sound as though Derrida and Foucault’s ideas are utterly incompatible, which just isnt the case. Derrida often pointed out commalities between his work and those he deconstructed. For instance, in this comment Derrida both knowledges a shared focus on force in general and and a specific difference in articulation this concept.

2. The words "force" and "power" also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micro­powers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that
still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena
"powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under
three conditions, at least.”

Would you have an example of a specific point that Derrida made and Foucault misunderstood?

Also, would you mind pointing me to a Derrida text that you find clear and insightful? — Olivier5

Here’s what I suggested to Manuel:


If you were to ask me what Derrida books to read to get the most consistent and clear sense of what he is trying to tell us , I would immediately answer , skip the formal works and go for the interviews( Points, Positions , Limited, Inc, Arguing with Derrida) . Here he was forced to do what he hated most, to summarize in a succinct sentence or two his major themes.

There's different levels and then there's wrong? No? If we say Derrida says nothing is true and nothing matters, do we not challenge and to some extent scorn that reading? — Tom Storm

Sorry to trot this out again if you’ve already read it, but I think it demonstrates the difficulty of attempting to distill deconstruction down to ‘ nothing is true’. it neither can we err in the opposite direction and interpret the comments below to mean that truth transcends local normative contexts.

“ For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , 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.”

Derrida, Limited, inc.

I agree with Strawson here as well as Chomsky and Russell. I think Dennett's account can't actually be formulated. — Manuel

I meant in particular that I find Dennett’s account of color perception much more exciting and useful than Strawson’s intrincality-qualia formulation. Like the phenonenologists. , he gets that the blue sky appears to each of us. it as an intrinsic bit of qualia , but as defined by its associations to a rich web of relevant experiences. Each of these associations we remove
from the experience of the blue sky reduces its meaning for us.

I also think Russell could have learned much from Wittgenstein about intrinsicality.

I'm just not inclined to like Derrida. I don't like his followers, I've read a few of his essays and I didn't think them to be particularly interesting. Just like some people dislike or don't think much of Hegel, Heidegger or anyone else.

It's just not the type of philosophy I'm attracted to. But thanks for the pointers. — Manuel

I want to point out that philosophical work is both utterly particular , in its style and language , and an exemplar of a broader approach to thinking. I see Derrida’s thought as closely ties to Heidegger. If you enjoy Heidegger I’d say you are already in touch with much that is central to Derrida. I could widen that scope a bit to include current thinkers associated with the cognitive sciences who have attempted to naturalize Heidegger and Husserl( Gallagher, Varela, Thompson, Fuchs, Slaby, Ratcliffe). If you like their work, you have moved some distance towards Derrida.

Strawson goes over this view in his Realistic Monism. I mean, it ends up becoming a verbal dispute, because even if experience is not at the very bottom of things, it has the potential to become experience given certain interactions, which is almost the same as saying that they are found in the bottom stuff in nature. Only that it arises via certain quantum processes. — Manuel

I was recently following the dispute between Strawson and Dennett concerning Qualia and panpsychism. There are philosophers I prefer to Dennett, but I do think that he is closer to the right track than Strawson in recognizing that it is not what is intrinsic that makes consciousness what it is , but what emerges out of a relational web of mutual influences. These reciprocal causes require a different account than that expressed in the language of quantum physics.

I put most effort in trying to understand Deleuze. — Manuel

If you were to ask me what Derrida books to read to get the most consistent and clear sense of what he is trying to tell us , I would immediately answer , skip the formal works and go for the interviews( Points, Positions , Limited, Inc, Arguing with Derrida) . Here he was forced to do what he hated most, to summarize in a succinct sentence or two his major themes. With Deleuze I’d be hard pressed to come up with anything similar. I’d be inclined to suggest the early books without Guattari (there’s no way two abstract thinkers were on exactly the same page in their thinking. I’m convinced their collaborations are deliberately designed to give us a collage of two minds that frequently strains against itself).

If some of our great minds, who are sympathetic to the French writers, don't get it right, what chance for the rest of us? You can see how people come to a view that this is an exclusive cultural activity for those in academe whose business it often is to pars the ostensibly inscrutable and talk to each other about it. — Tom Storm

No one should worry about getting a philosopher right. A great philosopher is able to reach a wide variety of readers on many different levels. One’s goal should be to learn from a philosopher something that shows the world in a new light.

Rest assured that not every French philosophers tries to impress his or her audience with jargon, and I'm pretty sure there exist obscure charlatans in English-language philosophy too. — Olivier5

This just smacks of anti-intellectualism. If you can’t understand the French writers, then so be it. But don’t blame them for your difficulties. I admit there are some French philosophers whose style so do find obscure , such as Badiu and Lacan. But not Derrida or Deleuze. They were trying to convey new and difficult concepts, so the appearance of obscurity goes along with the territory.

Searle admired Foucault. And Foucault was a brilliant thinker. His critique of Derrida is that obscurity is a way to avoid critique and accountability, because it makes it facile to say that the critique 'does not understand'. He did not say that any and all of Derrida is books was worthless, but that Derrida was too facile in his rejection of other philosophers' critique.

That's the main problem I personally see with some pomo texts and authors, which tend to think 'en roue libre' (free wheeling) i.e. without subjecting their thought to empirical refutation or critical analysis. Too facile. — Olivier5

Searle may have admired Foucault but he utterly rejected the common themes of postmodern thought. I am saying that Foucault didnt understand Derrida based on
my own reading of both Foucault and Derrida. I have never found Derrida to be obscure or trying to avoid critique. I agree with Derrida’s critique of Foucault, such as his tendency toward historicism, turning history into a pre-determining scheme. I’m not sure what empirical refutation has to do with postmodern philosophy , other than the fact that postmodernism as well as phenomenology digs beneath the presuppositions of empiricism in order to expose its limits.

Foucault could be quite clear
Agreed, and he lambasted Derrida's 'obscurantist terrorism', as reported by Searle. — Olivier5

That’s because Foucault couldn’t understand the ideas, and Searle was and is hopelessly behind when it comes to any of the postmodernism, including Foucault.

Chomsky's criticism is pretty well known and well-quoted, and it's... huh?!? When something makes very clever people say very stupid things, it's worth checking out. — Kenosha Kid

You can add John Searle and Steven Pinker to that list.

it's a question of dispute to claim that the postmodernists achieved something of which few people have caught up on. I think Susan Haack, Galen Strawson and Raymond Tallis do very, very good work and none of them agree with Kant on much. — Manuel

I agree they do good work and I think the difference between them and the postmodernists is slight but still important.

Any female pomo theorists other than Kristeva? — Tom Storm

Judith Butler comes to mind , also Hanne De Jaegher, but there are many more.

Joshs, what I am really interested in is do you have a view on Wayfarer's tentative historical timeline QM to postmodern thinking? — Tom Storm

My comments only apply to the range of thinking that I believe is common to the French philosophers who emerged in the 1960’s (although I do see the ideas of Nietzsche , Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as also post-modern). Their thinking is also referred to as post-structuralist , since they specifically targeted and used as their source of contrast the fad of structuralism which was popular in political theory, anthropology , psychology, literary theory , philosophy and linguistics in the 1950’s ( Althusser, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, etc).

As far as relativity and quantum theory is concerned, in my opinion these approaches in physics belong to Kantian and neo-Kantian idealism, which may very well be considered by certain historians and others within the humanities as postmodern based on how they are defining the term. But if one wants to define it strictly in relation to the thinking of the philosophers I mentioned above, then it belongs to an earlier era of philosophy and falls under their critique.

So I'd have to know who you have in mind when you say postmodernism. That's just the thing, is postmodernism over? I have no idea. There's talk of post-postmodernism, I don't know what that means. — Manuel

I only use the term postmodern in reference to a core group of French philosophers (Derrida, Focault , Deleuze, Nancy, Lyotard) and those they influenced or who offer similar ideas.

Most of the world hasnt yet caught up to these writers, in my opinion. I know of only a tiny handful of thinkers who have gone beyond them. Gendlin is one of them.

“An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created between experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience—that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always
exceeds culture, history, and language.”

“ The Postmodernists were wrong to deny the objectivity of scientific concepts (especially when they wrote the
denial on computers, and took airplanes to conventions to say it). Their real contribution was destroying the representational assumption. But since they saw no alternative, they glorified ‘limbo’. We see exactly how logic builds the world further, and how logical consequences add to implicit understanding. We see why our two systems must be kept apart, and also how
they relate.” Gene Gendlin

t if you can't make your own case without name dropping, I'm going to be suspect. — James Riley

All I meant was , Heraclitus said, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on“ and James said “ Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness’.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. — James Riley

Or things continue to be the same differently. You’re not a fan of Heraclitus or James?

There are no valid p0m0 arguments (Sokal, et al), they echew 'logocentric' discourses; so what's your point? — 180 Proof

Well, to begin with , a good thing to point out would be that there ARE valid and invalid arguments from a pomo perspective, as Derrida just told you. But their validity is relative to the norms of intersubjective communities, which can remain more or less stable for long periods of time. Think of Kuhn’s paradigms. If epistemes has no relative stability there could be no science.
Logocentrism is the belief that objects are present-to-themselves things, locatable as independent of their relation to a subject.

there's no "need to prove" my/any "point" when the meanings of all "points" are episteme-relative or deferred. (Anyone who has read Derrida & Foucault against themselves (i.e. in Nietzschean fashion) would "know" that.) :wink: — 180 Proof

Not quite:

“ For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n 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.”

Derrida, Limited, inc.

I thought Witt was a huge fan of James. And that Feyerabend’s work was in opposition to Popper’s pragmatism.

quotes:

"In itself life is insipid, because it is a simple "being there." So, for man, existing becomes a poetic task, like the playwright's or the novelist's: that of inventing a plot for his existence, giving it a character which will make it both suggestive and appealing. ... .. — James Riley

And so the static notions inherited from classical physics rear their ugly head. Gasset was a student of Heidegger, but apparently didn’t read him very well. I would prefer to say that life in itself, as ‘being there’ , is incessant change and transformation. We need to invent plots in order to impose some
order on and find patterns in what would otherwise be an overwhelming chaos.

That comes out of phenomenology, which precedes postmodernism. Merleau Ponty died in 1961, whereas post-modernism came out in the late 60's early 70's — Manuel

We’re not talking chronology , but similarity of ideas. There are loads of papers connecting MP to postmodernists like Deleuze and Nancy. In fact, in terms of content, I would argue that Heidegger’s phenomenology ( and Gene Gendlin’s also) comes AFTER postmodernism. In fact , in 1997 Gendlin held a conference at the University of Chicago titled ‘After Postmodernism’. Trust me, what he had in mind had nothing to do with what the critics of pomo on this thread are advocating for.

My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. — 180 Proof

To prove your point convincingly you would have to be able to summarize the arguments of Derrida or Foucault.

what's missing from analytic philosophy is that they "do philosophy" as if nothing has happened in 20th century history, as Derrida said, — Manuel

. Rorty made this argument also, meaning that most analytic philosophy was simply regurgitating Kant and hadnt absorbed Hegel’s lessons yet.

But I don't see what's new about the thought, besides the jargon. — Manuel

What’s new is that it rejects representationalism and the neo-Kantian notion of a world out there we can only approach through interpretation. Philosophical postmodernism might become clearer in you in the guise of enactive, embodied cognitivism. Zahavi would also be a good place to start.
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

non-Jamesian/Rortian pragmatisms + left-libertarian critiques of – alternatives to – the neoliberal, military keynesian status quo is still the only "viable" oppositional stance given that 1960s-80s p0m0 was DOA — 180 Proof

Who are these non/Jamesian pragmatists? Certainly not Dewey or Mead. Do you mean Peirce?
And where do you stand on critical theorists like Adorno and Habermas, Badiu , Lacan, Zizek or pomo theologians like Caputo , Critchley, Charles Taylor?

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