We are as inaccessible to ourselves as others are to us and vice versa. — StreetlightX

‘We’ are our ways of construing the world. Those dimensions of sense are implicitly available to us at some level of awareness, because they ARE us. They are the constantly adjusted relations of similarity and difference through which we organize our anticipations of events, and the most complex events are other people.
We may understand ourselves very well at an explicit level. But this ‘we’ that is being understood may be a mess, that is, what we understand ourselves to be is a functionally integral process of interaction with a world, and the process that is ‘ self’ may be doing a piss poor job of making sense of events.
The self is nothing other than this interactive sense making. It couldnt shut itself off from the world even if it wanted to, except in the extreme case of suicide , where one attempts to construct one’s world down to nothing so as to avoid the chaos of an incomprehensible reality.

Interesting. I wonder how much of a modification of language that , as you say, is to used as a memory aid , is required in order to design it for communication. Referring back to my solitary philosopher example, it may be that they are not writing solely for their own benefit but also with the aim of communicating the ideas. But would the style of the writing necessarily be that different from one aim to the other? Can writing ever just function as a memory aid, a mere supplementary tool for thought ? Or does language always instead open up a new horizon, or as Merleau-Ponty says, incarnate a manner of behavior? As such , it seems to me that communication to self and communication with others are of the same
species.

“ just as a man’s body and “soul” are but two aspects of his way of being in the world, so the word and the thought it indicates should not be considered two externally related terms: the word bears its meaning in the same way that the body incarnates a manner of behaviour.” Merleau-Ponty — Joshs

I can pick one to keep you from having a coronary ( talking with you is always so relaxing ) . Or I can make a vain attempt to open you up to the possibility that each of us construes individual meanings in relation to our own larger superordinate background of differential personal constructs. But that would mean you would have to be willing to abandon your attempt to force me to conform your pre-conceived notion about the nature of discursive meaning.
So to simplify things, I will choose ‘interpersonal communication is secondary and derived'.

By the way, I’m not a fan of bullies, and your treatment of commenters on this site often comes close to that.

the language is the same, the difference lies in each individual use of the one language. — Janus

The why not say it is a similar language. There are thousands of languages in the world. They all began somewhere, and it obviously wasn’t instantaneous. Instead , it was incremental. Every user of a language is already contributing in their own unique way to the shifting of the basis of that language. Every time you use English you are helping to transform it into a new language.

What makes a public language public is it's availability, in principle of being understood and mastered by another. — StreetlightX

But it will never be understood in exactly the same way by each user of the language, so it is in fact not the ‘same’ language, only similar.

I’m reminded of Zahavi’s quote from Schultz:

“ The postulate, therefore, that I can observe the subjective experience of another person precisely as he does is absurd. For it presupposes that I myself have lived through all the conscious states and intentional Acts wherein this experience has been constituted. But this could only happen within my own experience and in my own Acts of attention to my experience. And this experience of mine would then have to duplicate his experience down to the smallest details, including impressions, their surrounding areas of protention and retention, reflective Acts, phantasies, etc. But there is more to come: I should have to be able to remember all his experiences and therefore should have had to live through these experiences in the same order that he did; and finally I should have had to give them exactly the same degree of attention that he did. In short, my stream of consciousness would have to coincide with the other person's, which is the same as saying that I should have to be the other person (Schutz 1967, p. 99; cf. Husserl 1976, § 83).

this attempt at breaching the categorical distinctions is employed to all the more enforce the 'enclosure' of the individual from society: no need the public, because the private is always-already public: so much the worse for the actual public. — StreetlightX

If indeed the social begins at a more intimate site than what you’re calling the public , then there is no society in your sense to enclose the individual away from, and your ‘actual’ public is a derived abstraction. But there are better ways of going about this discussion. than my hurling accusations of derived abstraction at your notion of public and you hurling back at me accusations of Cartesian solipsism, rationalism and idealism.

There are consequences to a solipsistic model. In addition to isolationism, there is resistance to change and arbitrariness when change does take place . Take for example, Beck’s cognitive therapy and Ellis’ rational emotive therapy. Exemplifying the oppositional relationship between a rationalist interpretive
template and an assumed independently existing reality that commandeers that schematics, these approaches embody isolationism, solipsism and arbitrariness.Heidegger, Derrida, Gendlin and Kelly offer nothing of the sort.

the OP being mired in the myth of the given, which itself is a concequence of erasing entirely any consideration of the specificity of language. — StreetlightX

The myth of the given asserts that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science. My touchstones for my claims concerning so-called private language are Derrida, Heidegger , n and Kelly. In my reading, Kelly was a radical constructivist. His philosophy of constructive alternativism makes meaning (perceptual, conceptual) amenable to an infinity of alternative constructions. This is about as far removed from the myth of the given as anything I can imagine.

Again, what would a public language look like to you? — Luke

If you could describe in detail an example of public language in its actual functioning, I could attempt to show what it is an ‘imprecise abstraction’ of.

Public conveys a meaning determined within a context determined as a field, ensemble or gestalt. The private language argument thinks of this field as an ensemble of persons. I determine this field as located ‘within’ the individual as an implicit body-environment intricacy. This is the primary site of language. So if I say that a public language in Wittgenstein’s
sense isn’t ‘possible’ , what I mean is that it is an imprecise abstraction.

that capacity is collectively exercised and its content is determined by that collective exercise and environmental effects. — fdrake

In my reading of Heidegger the content of word meanings is only determined collectively in the mode of idle talk , which Heidegger says is not genuine understanding but a closing off of understanding. This is the inauthentic mode of discourse, which flattens and makes generic what originates as an individually distinct process of disclosure.

It seems to me that Heidegger’s notion of idle talk corresponds to the your notion of word meanings being determined by collective exercise.

In idle talk, “Hearing and understanding have attached themselves beforehand to what is spoken about as such. Communication does not "impart" the primary relation of being to the being spoken about, but being-with­ one-another takes place in talking with one another and in heeding what is spoken about. What is important to it is that one speaks. The being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement provide a guarantee for the genuineness and appropriateness of the discourse and the understand­ing belonging to it. And since this discoursing has lost the primary rela­tion of being to the being talked about, or else never achieved it, it does not communicate in the mode of a primordial appropriation of this being, but communicates by gossiping and passing the word along. What is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on a authorita­tive character. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its ini­tial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.”

“ The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its being public, but encourages it. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding every­thing without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk already guards against the danger of getting stranded in such an appropriation. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner­ worldly beings. “

“ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”

In its entangled absorption in the "world" average everydayness has the character of stiflingness, of ambiguity as curiosity, idle talk, publicness, the they. A novelty that is flat, alienating, tranquilized, uproted distraction, unreflective, ambiguous, outward apearance, noncommital just-guesing-at, indifferent, approximate, superficial, generic. “What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.”

"Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness.
Tranquilized, familar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Da-sein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentialy and ontologicaly as the more primordial phenomenon."

"The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamilar" "Even as covered over, the familar is a mode of the unfamiliar ." To meaningfuly understand is not to
interrupt and uproot but to stay with, dwell with, reflect on, to contemplatively wonder rather than superficialy know and move on, to carry out what was guessed at in the ambiguity of idle talk and curiosity. This is authentic Dasein. Publicness is not the same as conditoned inter-
subjectivity because it originates in foreclosing projecting. It’s Dasein’s own ambiguous meaning. Not a shared definite meaning. Publicness “does not first originate through certain conditions which influence Da-sein "from the outside”.” Communication is an illusion born of the ambiguity of the supposedly shared meaning between people.

in these philosophy discussions the specific words which we use do have private, personal meaning but as we use the words in exchange with others surely we are moving more into others' meanings and partaking in the shared meanings, which lead us to expand our personal ones. — Jack Cummins

No doubt our interchange with others leads us to expand our personal meanings.It is true that each party’s participation in interaction changes the other’s way of being, but the question is whether there is not an underlying thematic consistency that is maintained in each person throughout all their interactions , a self-consistency that resists being usurped by a larger
self-other ‘system’. A mutuality, fusion, jointness cannot be assumed simply because each party is in responsive communication with the other. One party can be affected by the interaction by succeeding in subsuming the other’s perspective and as a result feeling an intimate and empathetic bond with the other. At the same time, in the same ‘joint’ encounter, the other
party may become more and more alienated from the first , having failed to subsume the first party’s system and finding the first party to be angering, upsetting and threatening.

In both situations of superficial mutual understanding and those where core role meanings are involved, those that pertain to issues deeply important to a person, a ‘meeting of minds’ is not a matter of shared understanding in the sense of a same or similar meaning becoming disseminated among the members of the group. Instead, effective social understanding requires the successful subsuming of each other’s construct systems by each participant in the group.

When I subsume another’s outlook within my system, for instance as a therapist understanding a client , or a
parent dealing with a young child, I am not converging on the same or similar way of looking at the world as the other. My system may remain very different from theirs as I understand them from within my own vantage point.

I’m saying both that unspoken thought is not private language in the sense that Wittgenstein means, and that spoken thought is not public in the sense that Wittgenstein means. When we speak with others , our words have their own sense which is unique to us as individuals , because it belongs to a a mesh of and implicit , intricate web of body-environment interaction unique to each person, and so communication is about sharing across , but never breaching, this divide.

Unspoken thought is not equivalent to a private language. — creativesoul

What if I write it down and refer back to it. What if I am a philosopher who has gone as far as he can go in studying the works of other writers because he find that in some way his ideas have moved beyond the limits of those thinkers. So he writes down his thoughts using words in ways that appear incoherent to others but express exactly what he wants to say. His primary purpose in writing them down is isn’t to share them with others but to share them with himself. Referring back to what he wrote yesterday or last week or last month is like studying someone else‘ s ideas to some
extent, because the very act of writing his thoughts down changes his perspective in some small
fashion. And in the interim between his previous writing his perspective continues to be enriched simply by living. So web he returns to his previous thoughts
he finds that he has already transformed
them a bit. Over time he creates an evolving language , and perhaps never meets another person who understands it. Oh yes, if it is written in ‘English’ that will mean that a fellow English speaker will at first translate the words into ‘conventional definitions’ , but these will
likely bear no relation to what the author intended. But surely this is not true of every word the author uses.
What of simple verbs, nouns , adjectives? If language
functions as a gestalt whole , then , yes, in some respect even the simplest elements of the language belong to the author’s ideocyncratic world. (Essentially, Heidegger’s Being and Time was about the his changed understanding of the meaning of the word ‘is’.)

We don’t have to learn it, it is presupposed by experiencing.

“ just as a man’s body and “soul” are but two aspects of his way of being in the world, so the word and the thought it indicates should not be considered two externally related terms: the word bears its meaning in the same way that the body incarnates a manner of behaviour.” Merleau-Ponty

“If our interactions are attributed to ‘culture’, we may seem culturally programmed since we are born into a world of language, art, and human relationships. Culture may seem imposed on human bodies. But we can ask: How can a body have cultural patterns such as speech and art, and how can it act in situations? If we can explain this, we can explain how culture was generated and how it is now being regenerated further and
further.

“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always diferent and much more intricate than the cultural generalites. A situation is a bodily hapening, not just generalites. Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's
implying of behaviour posibilties. Our own situation always consists of more intricate implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that he individual can do no more than chose among the cultural scenarios, or ad mere nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturaly apropriate has only a
general meaning, it is the so-caled ‘nuances’ that el us what we realy want o know. They indicate what he standard saying realy means here, this time, from this person.
Spech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social. The curent heory of a one-way determination by society is to
simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require chanels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic suport, and asociations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public atitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In al these ways the individual is highly controled. Nevertheles, individual thinking
constantly exceds society.” Eugene Gendlin

Is it a language? If so, in what sense is it private and not a public language (such as English)? — Luke

If the use of a ‘public’ language like English is idiosyncratic to the individual users of it , that is, if the precise sense of each word used either in private reflection or interpersonal communication is unique to each user, then English is ‘private’ in my sense.

he lays out an ultimately different (from yours) existential program: one should not maintain and preserve any stable identity. Why? Because they are not authentic anymore. They are created and reproduced primarily for valorization or utilization purposes. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. One cannot discover or retain any authentic experience. One should live in 'the middle of things.' — Number2018

He is absolutely right. I could t agree more. I want to take his direction further. If you radically dissolve the basis of identity , you don’t end up with power relations or relations of force or a subjectivity created and recreated like a ping pong ball through conditioning by the social milieu. If your starting point is deconstructed enough, it has too little force to lead to the kind of political model that Deleuze offers. A truly mobile self - transforming self will be founded on such an insubstantial basis that there will be nothing to prevent it from appearing to be radically self-consistent. A conservative retreat from Deleuze, which is what the above quote is referring to , sees a substantial self. Many different philosophies of dialectical self-transformation , such as Hegel and Marx , begin from such a substantial base , and it shows. They are dominating, violent and arbitrary compared to what Deleuze and Foucault accomplish. But a philosophy to the left of them dissolves even Deleuze’s
claim to an irreducible violence in experience.

It is more about an ethical question: How should one live in our time? You claim that your 'radical time' could help us maintain ‘a thread of assimilative self-continuity.' That means that one should be extremely attentive to one's most profound, usually indiscernible mental processes. The result could be the achievement of a culminating gestalt, of discovering and preserving one's authentic identity. (Despite all your claims that your philosophy is beyond any subjectivity). Yet how is this program related to our social realities, to our ordinary identities that we need to play out continually? — Number2018

It’s not about maintaining a thread of assimilative self-continuity. It’s about recognizing that this is always already the case for everyone. It is built into the very structure of temporality. Put differently , radically temporal approaches are more effective at understanding others, as individuals and as groups, than Deleuze’a approach. What he would see as arbitrary , they would perceive a finer order hiding within.

As a ‘psychotherapeutic’ approach , Deleuze would look for how individuals are defined and created by their positioning within a social arrangement. Radical temporal approaches see the social rearrangement as secondary and derived in relation to the social movement that already defines the individual.

Let me know if you are familiar with John Protevi’s work, and if you see it as consonant with Deleuze’s. We could analyze his psychological model in relation to Heidegger et al.

Let me clarify how I view Heidegger’s use of understanding in relation to conventional uses of terms like thinking, intentionality, cognition, perception, theorization, etc. Heidegger says that these terms are all forms of interpretation and interpretation is a modification of understanding.
Understanding is initially inexplicit, indefinite, undifferentiated totality of relevance in which something is still veiled. Being falls prey to, gets tempted by, and lost in beings as understanding is modified into interpretation. Interpretation develops understanding into the 'as' structure of 'this as this'. Definite conceptuality, perception and theory are all modes of interpretation and thus are all derivations of primordial understanding.

I see understanding and all its derivative modes as conveying the ‘content’ aspect of experiencing, the ‘what it is’ Dasein falls prey to, and attunement as conveying the ‘how it is’ aspect, how what I fall prey to affects me.

Your account t seems to assume one can separate thinking from language and expression, but I follow Merleau-Ponty and others in arguing that all thinking is expressive , that there is no
such thing as non-languaged thought.

To perceive a Spanish ship is already expressive language in that it involves a linking together a rich fabric of contexts into a hypothesis of what one is seeing. There is the filling in of detail from one’s previous experience to add to the simple
perceptual information from the ship , and this embellishment is already language. There is the connecting of this with anticipations and also perhaps an awareness of how the experiencing of the ship makes one feel in one’s body. The feedback from the body is an additional source of expressive language
that becomes a part of the context of the sense
of the ship. When one articulates this contextual complex further by forming it as a word, one has simply further enriched a process of languaging that was already in progress. If the word was whatever I chose to use , then so were my bodily reactions and the way I perceptually filled in for the simple perceptual information I began with. All these phases in the experience are both mutually referential and expressive, and at no
point could we identify a thought that preceded this process. Certainly the description of the ship , as concept, is not the identical concept when the words used in the description change , or the language of the description changes from English to French.

As a referent they can only use the image formed in their imagination, but I can use my memory of this morning. That thing that I saw this morning, that is what I'm referring to. — L'Unico

the word I use ( that ship) refers to the context of meaning that it embellished and enriched , but in understanding the word I am understanding a richer experience of meaning than existed before I came up with the word. The word is not just tacked onto the experience any more than my bodily reaction to it was just tacked on, or my perceptual filling was just tacked on. Each of these are enrichments in the very meaning of the experience.

when a poet struggles to find the right word, and he spent days working on it, do you think that that right word leaves the thought unchanged? Does the new word simply refer to that unchanged thought?

Or does that right word that the poet finds Transform and enrich the previous thought?

there is still a HUGE difference between the apple in front of me and my concept of the apple. The concept it's just a definition. A collection of propositions. The apple is a collection of impressions. — L'Unico

So let’s say I discover a fruit I’ve never seen before.If i try to label it to my self or someone else I may say that it looks a little like an apple but it’s not really. It s this thing with a mix of features that I can describe separately. But can I describe it with a single label like ‘apple’? Well, yes, preverbally I already know that it is a ‘this mishmash’. I. fact the preverbal sense of it is already language, just less articulate than the verbal articulation. I am thus already labeling it for my purposes this. new mishmash. Now, if I try and share my new label , it will only at first be understandood by my companion who has shared in this new discovery. Together, we have shared in our experiencing of the mishmash as this particular
label.

Thus makes me wonder. Can we separate the word mishmash as it is used by the twoof us from the ‘referent’? Any time I think about the referent , am I not thinking about it as a ‘this’ ? If we say language refers to..
what is there in our experiencethat does NOT refer to?

I reject the notion that it makes sense to talk about a ‘real’ object. There are only construals of objects. I like Husserl’s definition of a ‘real’ spatial object. Forgive the length.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

Where is the equiprimordiality of attunement and understanding to which Josh is referring -- in Being and Time or anywhere else? And how does it reduce to something like "feeling and thought" being integrated? Heidegger never talks like that. — Xtrix

Heidegger wrote:
“ In terms of fundamental ontology it can also be expressed by saying that all understanding is
essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself. To be affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beings, although they do not by themselves alone make such comportment possible but always only in one with understanding, which gives its light to each mood, each passion, each affect. Being itself, if indeed we understand it, must somehow or other be projected upon something. This does not mean that in this projection being must be objectively apprehended or interpreted and defined, conceptually comprehended, as something objectively apprehended. Being is projected upon something from which it becomes understandable, but in an unobjective way. It is understood as yet pre-
conceptually, without a logos; we therefore call it the pre-ontological understanding of being."(Basic Problems of
Phenomenology)

Gendlin writes:"Heidegger says that Befindlichkeit refers to what is ordinarily called "being in a mood," and also whatis called "feeling" and "affect." But Heidegger offers a radically different way of thinking about this ordinary
experience. Befindlichkeit refers to the kind of beings that humans are, that aspect of these beings which makes for them having moods, feelings, or affects. But Heidegger thinks about this human being in a very different way than mostpeople do, and so he also thinks about mood and feeling very differently."

Matthew Ratcliffe writes :

“ schematic causal interaction between body states and meaning intentions.

Ratcliffe writes;

“...a mood is not an intentional state but a condition of possibility for intentionality .According to Heidegger, moods are not intentional states that encompass a wide range of objects. Rather, they are modes of Befindlichkeit, ways of finding oneself in the world. This, he says, is presupposed by the intelligibility of intentionally directed experiences, thoughts and activities: „: “The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something” (Heidegger, 1962, p.176/ 137). A central characteristic of Befindlichkeit, in its various modes, is that it determines the ways in which things can matter to us and, therefore, the kinds of intentional state we can adopt.” (Ratcliffe 2012)

We have a definition of "apple". So we have a concept of "apple". The word is referring to the thing described by the definition. Does it mean that an apple is a concept? Well, no. This apple that I'm eating it's not a concept. It is not the concept of the apple. It's the apple. — L'Unico

I’m co fused about the use of the term ‘referent’.
How do we keep the referent separate from the concept? That is to say , don’t we have to assume that the concept represents the referent? Don’t we have to believe that there are apples ‘out there’ independent of our construal of them? But if language enacts
rather than represents, then the referent is itself
only a concept.

Are you familiar with the work of Eugene Gendlin? He began as assistant to Carl Rogers and then established his own version of client-centered therapy using a technique he called focusing.
It argues the internal process generating meaning operates in the background implicitly, and can be referred to directly in order to think creatively.

we've not just randomly grouped some behaviours together and labelled them all 'good', 'right' or 'moral', those groupings very much appear to have common threads - threads resulting mainly from psychology, culture, and religion, with a very strong emphasis on psychology. — Isaac

This is true, but then I think there are close analogies between moral standards and scientific theories, if you take a Kuhnian position as I do. Cultural definitions of
morality change constantly throughout history, and each one , like a scientific theory, has to begin somewhere, typically with a tiny community, or perhaps a single individual ( Einstein first conceived e=mc2 as a private thought experiment).

Often, the originators of a new language of science or morality are treated as weird or even alarming outcasts. When their movement grows, the size of it is denied by its opponents. When it becomes too large to deny, it’s opponents accuse its followers of being brainwashed ( by fox news or cnn, perhaps). Eventually , what began as fringe becomes the new standard, but the cycle inevitable begins again.

As George Kelly wrote:
“ ...yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive
doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.”

Kant’s categorical imperative hasn’t yet reached the status of petty superstition, except in the eyes of radical
atheists like Dennett, Dawki s and Harris, but it may get there eventually.

The point is that defining the requirements for a claim to moral status by reference to the SEP (my favorite part of that essay wasn’t the part you quoted but the part where it discussed the lack of any consensus on even the most general features of morality. )or any other normative text risks performing an act of violence ( and immorality) against a group who may represent a new normative
community.

I'm glad you brought up Deleuze. Declaring himself to be a philosopher of irreducible difference, he presents a good source of comparison with those I am calling philosophers of radical temporality. I think what is at issue in determining how 'radical' a notion of temporality is has to do with the fact that , although for Deleuze as well as Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida,etc, the isolated self-inhering presences forming the ‘nows’ of objective time are derivative abstractions of the fundamental relationalities composing phenomenological time, there is still more that can be said about what is internal to a moment of time. A way of being a sense of meaning implies a valuative content. What can we say about the internal content of meanings apart from the retentional-protentional structuration within which they are ensconced? This is the crux of the matter. For instance, for Merleau-Ponty, the body of perception is the underpinning of being in the world, and the primordial basis
of perception is the gestalt structure.

“Each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. When Gestalt theory
informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’.” (Phenomenology of Perception, p.4)

When Merleau-Ponty says a figure appears against a background, we can understand this to mean that the background is the system(ensemble, constellation, environment, setting, scene) that the figure belongs to. Figure -ground together form a ‘spontaneous arrangement of parts’ in which , ‘its parts together make up a whole to which each is related without leaving its place’
(Phenomenology of Perception, p.16). The figure cannot be understood outside of its role in this
systematic totality . The ensemble has properties which are irreducible to those of the assembled
elements.

In sum, Merleau-Ponty makes internally centered structure irreducible. Gestalt is a founding
configuration. The significance of this fact for the present discussion is that Merleau_Ponty's gestalt configurations sit smack dab in the middle of the retention-presncing-protential structure of temporality. So what , you say? Is this a problem? It depends. Lets make clear the effect of the primitive of sense content being treated as irreducible gestalt. The 'fatter', the more complex the content we begin from in determining subject-object experiencing, the more powerfully such content acts a a resistance to change, and the more polarizing and arbitrary change must be. Put differently , how intimate, integral, coherent and self-consistent the minute to minute and day to changes in my exeriencing are allowed to be is a direct function of the way the irreducible primitive of content is modeled.

The question, then is whether MP's gestalts are indeed irreducible primitives of meaning or whether they are derived abstractions hiding within their 'fatness' a more intricate structure of sense. Similarly, we must ask whether the irreducible primitives of content in Deleuze and Massumi are not in fact over-determined abstractions resulting in a model of inter-personal change that is too arbitrary and violent.

Derrida can help us out here. The point where Derrida steps in is before you get to start with your structures and then show how they relate to each other. He breaks apart the ability to claim that there is a structure of any kind ( or force, energy, power, quality) in the first place that isn't already divided within itself prior to its claim to be an itself.
The practical significance of this is not only to unravel the presuppositions of psychoanalytic
models , not only to problematize Foucaultian or social constructionist notions of a socially
created subjectivity determined and redetemined by cultural interchange( and Deleuze's approach
I think belongs to this zone), not only to recognize the site of culture within the so-called subject
even before expose to a social-linguistic community, but to situate the place of this decentering even before a single mark or fold can claim to be an entity ,an itself.

What Eugene, Gendlin, Geoge Kelly, Heidegger and Derrida have in common is that they don't being with gestalts, patterns, configurations, flows, concepts that interact with each other to form bodies and worlds. They begin from something more intricate, a simple referential differential. Not a difference between concepts or pattern or any other form, but differences of differences of differences.

How should this make any pragmatic difference in how we understand interhuman relations, affect, etc?It makes a great deal of difference. There is nothing in Deleuze like Gendlin's or Heidegger's or Kelly's ongoing thread of pragmatic thematic self-belonging that characterizes my continually changing relation to my self moment to moment, day to day. That's because he begins too late. What is reified content for him is temporal process for these authors. There is nothing in Deleuze that allows for the fact that each of us in social relations maintain a thread of assimilative self-continuity above and beyond the way that we are mutually shaped in interaction with others. There is nothing in Deleuze
that recognizes that affect and intention are the same thing, not interacting elements

I found an interesting counter-argument to Benatar’s position that clearly respects it as a legitimate moral
stance.

https://philosophy.osu.edu/news/archive/2014-logos//brian-mclean

try refreshing your browser. Meanwhile, I’ll repost my reply.

I was trying to point out that the fashionable hypothesis these days in psychology is that sociality can be seen as more primitive for humankind than individuality. In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.

'Moral' is just not the right word to describe a desire to remove all suffering even at the expense of there being no one to benefit from having done so — Isaac

You’re probably aware that anti-natalist movements have cropped up numerous times in different cultures
through history.

From Wiki:

The Manichaeans,[13][14][15] the Bogomils[16][17][18] and the Cathars[19][20][21] believed that procreation sentences the soul to imprisonment in evil matter. They saw procreation as an instrument of an evil god, demiurge, or of Satan that imprisons the divine element in the matter and thus causes the divine element to suffer.

Julio Cabrera,[30] David Benatar[31] and Karim Akerma[32] all argue that procreation is contrary to Immanuel Kant's practical imperative (according to Kant, a man should never be used as merely a means to an end, but always be treated as an end in himself). They argue that a person can be created for the sake of his parents or other people, but that it is impossible to create someone for his own good; and that therefore, following Kant's recommendation, we should not create new people. Heiko Puls argues that Kant's considerations regarding parental duties and human procreation, in general, imply arguments for an ethically justified antinatalism.

Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that we should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the total amount of happiness. It can be considered as a version of utilitarianism that gives greater priority to reducing suffering (negative utility or 'disutility') than to increasing pleasure (positive utility).[

are you saying that you would not accept any of these historical justifications for anti-natalism as a proper
moral argument, or are you focusing exclusively on the the ones in this thread?

I am not sure what point you are making by your reference Sheler and Wittgenstein approaching others' emotional states on the basis of facial expressions — Jack Cummins

I was trying to point out that the fashionable hypothesis these days in psychology is that sociality can be seen as more primitive for humankind than individuality. In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.

I think you need to initially cognize what you are interacting with, and what else is there other then personal constructs to do it with? Initially you have to construe it as a sound. No? — Pop

Here’s another quote and then I’ll try to interpret.

For we certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person's joy in his laughter, with his sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his entreaty in his outstretched hands, with his love in his look of affection, with his rage in the gnashing of his teeth, with his threats in the clenching of his fist, and with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not “perception,” for it cannot be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a “complex of physical sensations,” and that there is certainly no sensation of another person's mind nor any stimulus from such a source, I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address himself to the phenomenological facts. (Scheler 1973, 254 [1954, 260];

Let’s compare this to recent approaches in visual
perception. From writers like O’Reagan and Noe, we know that when we look at a visual scene , very little of it is actually there in front of us. We look at a three dimensional chair, but all we actually see is one perspective on it. Our brains fill in the rest of the details from memory and anticipations of what we’re are
likely to see if we change the position of our eyes, head or body with respect to the object.

In other words, our mind primes perception to see what we believe we should see and then provides that information alongside what we are
actually seeing. Optical illusions where we see a complete figure where there was only a partial
pattern are examples of this, and so is what happened s when we read. We will swear that a complete word was present when in fact only some of the letters were actually there.This is because we anticipate the next letter in a word, the next word in a sentence, etc.

Even before we see the first letter of the first word of a text, we are already primed for the fact that there will be a text to look at , simply by the act of going to the message app on the phone or reaching for the book.
We hear the train whistle rather than a complex of auditory data because in the context we find ourselves in, we expect there to be a train nearby. If a train whistle
blows when we are on flying on a plane , we will likely not at first recognize it as a whistle. Instead, we will
interpret what it sounds like in relation to our context on the plane. Maybe we will think it is a crying baby, not because the interpretation begins after the sound , but because it begins even before the sound.
So perception is as much filling in as it is building up.

I cannot get past the idea that ultimately everything only matters in terms of the pleasure or pain it provides us. — Pop

One can read Racliffe’a model of existential feeling as oriented along a binary of meaningfulness vs lack of meaning. Situations and people can appear more or less enticing , exciting, appealing, salient. You could
say that he keeps your notion of pleasure but re-interprets pain as meaninglessness. Depression isn’t a. experience of painful sensation, it’s an inability to care about the world or find meaning in it.
Like you, Ratcliffe explains the perceived
salience of events by virtue of an interaction between intentional meanings and bodily felt sensations which reinforce and orient cognition.

Kelly, like Ratcliffe, sees the affective binary in terms
of construed meaningfulness-coherence vs emptiness-chaos-confusion, but he sees this as inherent in intentional organization rather than as depending on the feedback from the body.

I’m assuming your formulation of moral consensus based on natural
grounds wouldn’t be accepted by someone like Rorty because he would consider the notion of the natural
to be itself ungrounded in anything but contingent pragmatic use. But I’d have to refresh my reading of him to be sure.

We have to internalise the outer experience to process it, in order to connect with others and relate to our surroundings. The inner world is also the source of appreciation, enjoyment and ways of engaging with other beings in a meaningful way. — Jack Cummins

w

Do we have an outer experience first and only later internalize it, or is our very access to the ‘outer’ already filtered , directed and thematized by the inner context of understanding we bring to our perceptions of things and people?

To quote Scheler and Wittgenstein:

For we certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person's joy in his laughter, with his sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his entreaty in his outstretched hands, with his love in his look of affection, with his rage in the gnashing of his teeth, with his threats in the clenching of his fist, and with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not “perception,” for it cannot be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a “complex of physical sensations,” and that there is certainly no sensation of another person's mind nor any stimulus from such a source, I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address himself to the phenomenological facts. (Scheler 1973, 254 [1954, 260];


We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. (Wittgenstein 1980)

Is there some other function the inner world serves in your opinion , other and beyond the intending of creative acts of reflective , imagination and dreaming? This is what I meant by outer. Thinking and imagining always intends beyond itself.

So you describe a system of construing which acts in a way such that future events have causal power over what is presently occurring, through the means of anticipation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes indeed. Not only that, future events have causal
power over my past, because my past as it participates in forming my present is reshaped by my anticipations. This is why Heidegger says that “Having been arises from the future.”” Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general."

Attunement - Heidegger - it is an emotional attunement in my understanding - it occurs for all life. Every moment of consciousness has its corresponding feeling, this is what primarily tunes us to the world, not the cognitive constructs. — Pop

Except that for Heidegger the cognitive and attunement are not separate constructs or processes. They are co-implied aspects of a single event, the event of transition that is how I am thrown into a world
moment to moment.

Initially we we must integrate novel information into our personally constructed reality, then subsequently we recognize it in terms of our integration of it. — Pop

I’m with Heidegger on this:

“ Hearkening is itself phe­nomenally more primordial than what the psychologist "initially" defines as hearing, the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hear­kening, too, has the mode of being of a hearing that understands. "Ini­tially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north
wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire.
It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the-
world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Da-sein is initially together with what is understood.”

I wonder if you might agree with Ratcliffe’s formulation of existential feeling as the ever-present background that shapes and organizes intentionality.

“ According to Damasio, background feelings are ever-present, although ordinarily tacit. They serve to structure the everyday ways in which we encounter the world, the basic ways in which we find ourselves in the world:Ratcliffe 2002, p.298) Damasio wrote:”. . . I am postulating another variety of feeling which I suspect preceded the others in evolution. I call it background feeling because it originates in “background” body states rather than in emotional states. It is not the Verdi of grand emotion, nor the Stravinsky of intellectualized emotion but rather a minimalist in tone and beat, the feeling of life itself, the sense of being.” (1995, p. 150)

Ratcliffe fleshed out his approach with elements drawn from the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger:

“Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. When I see or think about something, when I am afraid of something, and when I am in a bad mood about a wider situation, I already find myself in the world, in a way than differs in kind from intentional experiences in one or another modality (e.g. imagining, perceiving, or remembering something). This ‘world' is presupposed by intentional states of whatever kind with whatever content. We can think of it in terms of a possibility space, a receptivity to types of possibility.”“Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer.” (Ratcliffe, 2020)

“...what Heidegger in Being and Time calls ‘Being-in-the-world' is exactly what we gain reflective access to by performing the phenomenological reduction...This conveys much the same broad conception of ‘world' that we find in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty:...something that we are already practically, unreflectively immersed in when we experience something, think about it or act upon it.” These globally structured patterns of existential feeling amount to “ ‘ways of finding oneself in the world'. As such, they are what we might call ‘pre-intentional', meaning that they determine the kinds of intentional states we are capable of adopting, amounting to a ‘shape' that all experience takes on.” (Ratcliffe 2015

So why do we refer to a distinction between imagination and sense perception in terms of outer and inner? Well, for one thing, our ordinary concept of space is based on geometrical logic. From that vantage , the person is an object within a surrounding. Thought is located inside that object and sensory perception enters from the outside. Of
course, embodied enactivist approaches to cognition insist that thought is not inside the head. It is a embedded in the body and extended into the world as an interaction.

But another sense of the inner-outer distinction, one that may be more relevant for this discussion, is between exposure to novelty and recycling of already-existing knowledge. We tend to think that in dreaming, with access to ‘outer’ stimulation cut off, all that can happen is a reshuffling of existing concepts in the head.

But, as phenomenology points out, there is no exposure to ‘raw’ external stimuli. The ‘ outer’ comes to us already interpreted , filtered and directed by the ‘inner’. Meanwhile, reflective contemplation, dreaming and imagination is perhaps the richest source of access to truely new worlds.

1: Senses input information
2: Information is integrated to reason
3: Reason is experienced
4: Experience is translated to emotion
5: Emotion is translated to a feeling
6: A feeling is located as a point on a pain / pleasure spectrum
7:The point on the pain pleasure spectrum causes affect — Pop

Do we perceive raw data and synthesize reason out of it or do we perceive events already pre-interpreted by us? In other words, do we hear a series of acoustic pitches or do we hear the train whistle and only later, as a derived d artificial act, dissect it into objective data pieces? You said we are anticipating beings. Do we reach out to the things we perceive with expectations and anticipations? Do those expectations co-create the perceived object or can we separate ‘raw’ perceptual data from our expectations and anticipations?

If I am in a room and the lights are suddenly turned off , is the violation of my expectation for continued illumination the result of a translation of reason into emotion, or is my surprise a direct perception, prior to any translation?

If your ability to experience affect were eliminated, describe to me what it would be like to function as a reasoning person. Give me an example of how you would interact with others at a party. Would you be like Mr Spock?

You commented that I offered

an even poorer explanation of what depression is. — khaled

I wrote:”

Severe depression is never just about physical struggle. poverty, etc. It is fundamentally a disconnect of social belonging , a sense of alienation with respect to other people or groups. Others appear to me as callous and cruel and unfeeling. — Joshs

Matthew Ratcliffe , in his book, Experiences of Depression, wrote:

In depression, “The person feels alienated from others, unable to relate to them, and she also feels lacking in some way.”

Others appear to behave in ways that cannot be sincere, as they are no longer experienced as offering the kinds of possibility that would be associated with honest expressions of support and concern. In the absence of those possibilities, their well-meaning utterances can only appear disingenuous.

“People in general seem more hostile and uncaring when I am depressed and more likely to make fun of me or criticize me.”

“One therefore retreats from the social world, even though some sense of what it would be to connect with others remains, along with a profound feeling of isolation.”

Let me know if you believe Ratcliffe, one of
the leading researchers on affect, should be considered an authority on depression.

Where is this arbitrary point at which we say "no this is too risky"? And why is it that you get to decide it when you're not the one taking the risk? — khaled

Decision is what this discussion is all about, making a decision to conceive or not to conceive for the sake of preventing suffering in another. But that decision depends on an earlier decision concerning the meaning of terms like suffering, pleasure, value and morality.

I'm waiting for an actual rebuttal to the position — khaled

If you want a refutation of the logic behind your formula
of the risk versus reward calculus, you won’t get one. Your logic may be flawless. But then again isn’t that what logic is supposed to do? Isnt a logical proposition a kind of truism , presupposing what it sets out to demonstrate in the way it defines the terms in its premises?

I kept expecting you to actually argue against the position, but instead all you said was basically "Most antinatalists are depressed, you might change your mind in the future, and our ethical positions are a result of our experiences". Agreed. Now, are you actually going to argue against the position or not? — khaled

Actually, implicit in what I said above was a philosophical argument countering anti-natalism, which I could have made more explicit ( although I suspect a number of contributors to this forum recognized it). Let me make it more explicit now. I am a moral
relativist. More specifically, I take a post-Wittgensteinian position on the origin of language in local pragmatic contexts of use. I don’t believe anyone coming from this perspective could be an anti-natalist. Not because the logic of the premise “ Preventing suffering takes precedence over the creation of pleasure, especially when not creating 'good lives' does not harm the unborn” isn’t ‘sound’, but because I dispute the assumption that the sense of the terms ‘suffering’, ‘pleasure’, ‘good lives’ ‘harm’, etc can be kept stable enough , long enough for reliable interpersonal agreement. That doesn’t make your logic wrong, it makes it meaningless.

So my disagreement is not about anti-natalism per se but the understanding of use of language that it presumes. To continue such a discussion would require a new OP, I think.

I was disappointed in that whilst emotion and feeling is mentioned often, the connection was not made that feelings are either painful or pleasurable, and that the intentional aspect of being is always one of either avoiding pain or seeking pleasure, or thereabouts. We are a pain avoiding, pleasure seeking creature, and in my understanding this is the carrot and stick that provides impetus to behavior. — Pop

This still sounds like feeling is a mechanism
separate from thinking-cognition, as if we can manipulate it independently of cognition, or even remove it. This is what many researchers who make use of self-organization models believe. Ratcliffe cites William James’ description of how sterile and directionless a cognitive system would be without the orienting impetus of affect. I think this is a failure to understand what feeling and thinking mean. From a radically temporal perspective, talking about experiencing without affect is like talking about experiencing without time.

The reason I don’t talk about affect in terms of pleasure and pain is that they imply a scheme of reinforcement. I don’t view affectivity as reinforcement. Instead , I follow George Kelly. He said we are always in motion, from moment to moment, meaning change in experience, not physical movement. Each new moment of time is a new, never before occurring event. We don’t directly perceive events, we construe them. That is, we assimilate each new event to a pre-existing internal scheme
of understanding. At the same time, that pre-existing internal scheme must slightly alter itself to accommodate itself to the novelty of each new event. So each construal is equal parts assimilation and accommodation. More specifically , it is a differential structure, organizing each new event as a dichotomous or bipolar dimension of appraisal, determining each new event in terms of a way in which it is like previously construed events
and a way in which it differs from those previously construed events.

The important thing to understand is that the whole
construct system functions integrally as a unified whole in the construing of events. This is important in understanding how Kelly treats affect. For Kelly the aim of construing is to anticipate what lies ahead. The construct system is wholly oriented around anticipation. It is not designed this way by some arbitrary inner mechanism or evolutionary adaptation. Anticipation is an a priori feature of subject -object interaction in time.

So each new event is both familiar to us in some
respect, else it would be invisible to us, and different from our previous experience. But some
events we make sense of better than others. That is to say, we can align some new events in a rich manner along multiple dimensions of similarity with respect to our construct system. Other events lie mostly outside the range of convenience of our system. That is, our system is impermeable to these events. This is where affect comes in. Affect is simply the organizational state of the system with the respect to its effectiveness at assimilating a new event. Put differently, affect is how much sense new event makes to me. If my construct system is struggling to assimilate an event, to make sense of it in terms of likeness to what I already understand, if I only experience the event in terms of incoherences, then my experiencing will be one of chaos and confusion. This is what anxiety is for Kelly. If I anticipate that an event may lie outside the range of convenience of my system , this is threat. So basically all affective terms for Kelly describe my relative success or failure to make sense of my world. It is important to understand that feeling is not a RESPONSE. to such success or failure, not a mechanism that detects such organizational changes after the fact and then relays them to one’s consciousness in the guise of kinesthetic or proprioceptive receptors. Feeling simply IS the organizational dynamics as they are directly experienced.

Kelly(1961) writes:
“In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event.

I hope you can see how this notion of feeling differs from a reinforcement mechanism that signals pleasure and pain. In such a model, pleasure and pain are no more than a dumb bodily system of feedback sensors.

In Kelly’s model, on the other hand, what we call pleasure and pain points directly to the varying fortunes
of our meaning system in its attempts to cope with a world that always , from moment to moment, presents it with new features. So how does feeling, as this experiencing of the relative effectiveness at assimilating events, relate to such notions as cognition and perception? Each new event, as a way of being alike as well as different with respect to my construct system, appears to me both in terms of its coherence and its content. These aspects are not separate from each other. What something is construed to be, in terms of its intentional or cognitive content ( a shoe , for instance) and its relevance for me, are both implied, simultaneously, in the construing of it. We don’t just see a shoe, we see a shoe in the midst of our relevant, purposeful, goal-oriented engagement with the world. The shoe emerges for us in its meaningfulness out of that context of goals as useful or not useful, surprising or not surprising, important or insignificant, strange or not strange.

Some psychologists have suggested that PCT is not a psychological theory but a metatheory because it is a theory about theories. — wiki

It was Kelly himself who wrote “ Some have suggested that personal construct theory not be called a psychological theory at all, but a metatheory. That is all right with me. It suggests that it is a theory about theories, and that is pretty much what I have in mind. But I hope that it is clear that it is not limited to being a metatheory of formal theories, or even of articulate ones. “

Don Bannister’s discovery of Kelly’s work and his importation of it into Britain was a game changer for a whole
generation of psychologists who felt utterly stifled by the stranglehold positivism had on the British psychological scene in the 1950’s.

Kindly explain to me what becoming an antinatalist has to do with embracing my own suffering and finding meaning in my life. This is the most false false dichotomy I have seen in a while. I am glad I was born (the sentence makes no sense, what I really mean to say is "I find my life worthwhile") AND I am an antinatalist. Mindblowing. — khaled

I believe anti-natalism is an ethical position, and like all ethical positions , there is no God’s eye view, no ability to channel som eternal divinely dictated moral truth. Thus, forming a moral precept is an empirical endeavor. Which means we have nothing but our own experience directly, and indirectly our interpretation of the experience of others, to guide us. It seems to me that the disagreements that will form between various forms of anti-natalism and various natalisms will be the result of different personal experiences. You claim to find your life worthwhile and yet you are an anti-natalist. Illl have to take you on you word about that. I strongly suspect that most anti-natalists are more like Schopenhauer1 in extrapolating from their own painful lives in order to form their anti-nataliat stance.

How we experience our own suffering plays a central
role in our position on this issue. The thing about suffering is that it only exists as a relational dynamic in a changing environment. In order to feel suffering, one must have had something taken away from one, which pre-supposed a state of non-suffering that the suffering takes away from.
Since human life is constant change , suffering appears and disappears constantly. At one moment life is t worth living, and then the next we find a way to re-adapt to our circumstances and life becomes worth living again.
The same is true of deciding to conceive. At certain. times in our lives , the prospect of bringing children into the world may seem cruel to the child for any number of reasons, and at another point , it appears justified. So most of us are naive anti-natalists sometimes and natalists other times. But then there are some people whose suffering seems unrelieved. For instance , those with chronic severe depression may have has few happy times in their lives. Unlike others, they fail to adapt to circumstances, fail to thrive. Severe depression is never just about physical struggle. poverty, etc. It is fundamental a disconnect of social belonging , a sense of alienation with respect to other people or groups. Others appear to me as callous and cruel and unfeeling. Is the depressive’s view of human suffering then to be considered as distorted , abnormal, pathological? Or are they the realists in the world?

I would prefer to say that their circumstances (perhaps even more that biochemistry) are not conducive to effective adaptation. In this case the role of adaptivity and suffering must be looked at in a larger sociological context. Adaptation isnt simply an individual
process, it takes place within a larger human ecosystem.

So in many periods in human history, entire groups fail to thrive as the larger adaptive systems of culture shift and change, leaving them in states of despair and dysfunction as a result of a shift of dominance to other segments of culture.( native Americans, Aborigines). So from this perspective, anti-natalism is an illustration of evolutionary adaption at work. Those who are failing to adapt stop having children, while other groups who are succeeding become fertile and multiply.

For instance , rural America is a veritable ‘breeding ground’ for anti-natalism as despair and depression , addiction and suicide run rampant. Meanwhile , huge urban areas become centers of greater and greater concentration of wealth and thriving among certain groups, causing them to be unabashed supporters of natalism. So throughout history, one will find anti-natalist movements popping up where a segment of society fails to thrive as a result of a shift of the larger ecosystem’s center of gravity.

Perhaps the current anti-natalist
movement can be seen as a symptom of the violent economic and social transition taking place throughout the world. My guess is populations will
progressivevly shrink as larger segments of culture become obsolete thanks to automation.

At any rate. I think it’s a mistake to believe that a changeable and complex notion like suffering can be ossified into a single moral category. To me , the lesson is not that life necessarily tends toward improvement toward happiness rather than perpetuation of suffering, but that it is each at different times and places. Even within anti-nataliat movements, there are likely to be many changes in attitude about the interpretation of human suffering as individuals go through different experience in their lives.
Even you, at some point in the future. might find changes in your personal circumstances lead to a shift i. your calculus concerning the risk-reward benefits of procreation.

I can even imagine how some individuals
drawn together by common purpose into anti-natalist groups, particularly those struggling with depression, isolation and aliemation, might for
the first time find meaningful social bonds with other suffering souls, leading to romantic pairing, and perhaps a mini baby boom or two.


I know that I will likely change my attitude toward the worthwhileness of life many times.

“ So if I find purpose in your suffering I get to cause you to suffer?” No, if I find purpose in MY suffering , and know a great many other people in my life who share my view on the value of one’s OWN suffering, I will suspect there is a very good chance, although no guarantee, that you will also embrace your suffering in this way and be glad that you were born. Or you could become an anti-natalist.