That is quite a program.
Who will execute it?

I do not recognize my comment in your reply. I will put it in other words.

Every restriction of suffrage has been carried out by actual agents, duly assigned by whoever has the power to do so. The measures you call for have been called for by others. It was a central feature of the politics of the Jim Crow South.

How will you make sure that your program does not suffer the corruption so blatantly on view in the past?

Unlike driving a car or shooting a gun, being a good citizen who understands the decisions that need to be made is not a skill that can be directly measured because the people holding the rulers have their own politics and bundles of interest.

Unrestricted suffrage is the only way to get people to buy into results of elections. Otherwise, there is no reason to support elections when "your" side is getting the short end of the stick.

It is true that clueless people are not helping the republic. The need to educate them for that purpose is not the central focus of our present system.

My question is whether this social convention of never uttering the N-word is a reasonable act of respect or whether it's simply a politically imposed rule that can be used to divide and destroy? — Hanover

I grew up when and where never uttering the word was a part of my parents' resistance against those in their generation who did. The Civil Rights Movement divided every group, including my white family.

So, growing up that way and seeing for myself how people tried very hard to stop calling people that name makes having some black people use it as a special word that belongs only to them quite painful.

I don't have an opinion about whether the use of that language is good or bad against the background of some eventual historical end. But I have witnessed the degradation that is fused with the word and that is what it will always be for me.

Are we even responsible for our beliefs in the same sense as we're responsible for our actions? — Dusty of Sky

Maybe even more.

"We" are the only person around while figuring out what is permitted for ourselves. The results of that calculation is what meets other people in the world. A lot of "action" happens without much awareness of what such a thing is or may be.

The boundary is a presumption in every argument that brings the matter up, not an incidental side bar to the real thing.

As the idea developed, being equal in the eyes of the creator was always a simultaneous acceptance of "our" limits as evaluators because none of us are going be creating universes.

As a null set of human judgement, it excludes the divine right of kings along with regimes based upon "natural" principles. The equality is the horizon of distinction, not a replacement for it.

While the idea presents many problems for us as a species and a community, it has demonstrated its value many times against the worst of those who would judge your worth by speaking for God or Nature.

I need to get some experience at starting topics on specific issues before attempting to start a reading thread again.

What do you mean that you cannot start new topics?

Valentinus, as a matter of interest, if the SEP fails to represent a joy Kierkegaard takes in representing his own experience, where do you suggest that subjective, special joy can be found ? In the book itself ? — Amity

The SEP is good. My observation is not a criticism of their work. But every summary is a step back from reading the writing.

Some writers ask you to find them in your attempts to understand what is being said. Others confront you and call upon you to do stuff. Kierkegaard is writing in the second way.

Give it a shot and get back to me if no joy seems possible.

The SEP article is good in many ways but fails to represent a joy Kierkegaard takes in representing his own experience.

Or prohibited. That is the more gnarly part of the right.

The element I have the most difficulty understanding is the matter of corresponding identity. If brain states are matches of cognitive events, the only way to check if that is the case appeals to something beyond either register.

The Establishment of Religion clause in the U.S. constitution was a result of centuries of people attempting to stop certain expressions of religious thought.
The thought in the clause is to permit everything but not let any of those expressions become the basis of civil discourse in the formation of law.
It may not be perfect but may be better than the state acting upon opinions regarding religious expression.

Your observation that the means of production has its own social requirements reminds me of Ivan Illich who said the use of tools can overpower us as the ones who use them. While that perspective obviously is at odds with the idea of markets as a process to find the best form of life, it becomes more ambiguous regarding what Marx thought was necessary.

While Marx said that changes in the means of production allowed labor to become commodities to the degree that workers were in a position to understand that they could not purchase themselves or work for themselves beyond exchanging their value for other commodities, that did not mean that mass production was a benefit in itself. The easiest way to refer to that element is to note his emphasis that the fetishism of commodities created false demand. A more difficult way is to understand the development of the proletariat as filled with unknowns. In contrast to the rise of the Bourgeoisie, the supposed end to this particular arc of history cannot use what has been made before to make the future.

As leader of the elites, I demand that you implement an exclusive forum for us, posthaste, or else I will continue to instruct my sub-elites to create more passive-aggressive feedback discussions like this. — S

It is a buzz kill but you have to accept that you just weren't invited.
I left when it turned out that there were no virgins being offered.

The brochure promised virgins.

Well, at least I did not charge anybody for it.

The second title is: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation On the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. As the work progresses, what is being approached is how to understand our experience of the demonic in ourselves and others.

As others here have suggested, reading one part of Kierkegaard is always connected to other parts. It can be daunting to undertake. On the other hand, the efforts made by Reidar Thomte and Albert Anderson to bring this web of connections in view through the footnotes is one of the best introductions to it.

But there is a theme that runs through all of the writing and is his voice no matter what else is being said. On page 192 of the linked edition from a draft of the published work:

"I believed that every science should direct itself to this task and that all idle knowledge debases a man and essentially wastes his time, although he may be more deeply debased and waste his time in a worse way. It is said that he who sleeps does not sin, but a man whose life has been absorbed in idle knowledge has nevertheless in a profound sense slept away his life. I believed that in order to grasp and to express this meaning of life it is also appropriate that the single individual who is capable of it should apply himself to studies of a scientific nature, but in such a way that such study would have its validation in an education whose ultimate expression is to impress the idea upon his own life. This something that is not seen in our time. Instead, one sees too often a person who slovenly passes through life, performing all the common tasks of life as if they hardly concerned him; otherwise he is easily aroused when the talk turns to some stupendous idea, like an association of men who separately are unable to accomplish something simple would be able to accomplish something difficult, a performance similar to that of the alehouse keeper who thought he would become rich by selling his beer for a penny less than he paid for and still make a profit on the grounds that it is the quantity that does it."
Pap. V B 53:29 n.d. 1844

There does not appear to be a groundswell of interest in that book here but it can be found at memory of the world library.

So, asking about the use of something called "metaphysical" is on par with a problem of how we use language to describe something. There cannot be a problem in that situation since all that matters has already been addressed by the rules previously agreed upon. But the whole point of bringing special attention to those rules is to point to a desire that is not expressed by them.

It is all about knowing what the creature is, not making sense of it.

Saying: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" is pretty enigmatic. I would not presume to follow such a remark with an exegesis of what is meant.

On the other hand, it is direct and claims something by it being said.

In any case, it is fair for me to ask in what way the Wittgenstein work relates to the question about metaphysics as is asked about here in this here thread.

Represent.

Didn't Wittgenstein turn those questions into other questions? He never dismissed them as presented.

I take your point regarding the importance of presuppositions to any developed argument but isn't the OP more open ended than that?
Now perhaps you are saying that one cannot ask that kind of question without answering some of it first.

Reflection is where we try to understand our desire to understand. You see, you are meeting Plotinus half way.

Hmmmn, pizza sounds good right now.

Saying "thought itself" is a metaphysical statement.
In so far as you framed the question as "do we need metaphysics", that cannot help but ask if it can be dispensed with. Before we can establish what the difference between a "justified" theory and a "working scenario" may be, your question has to be dealt with or it is accepted that anyway we proceed will leave the question unanswered at the beginning. Either of those paths is "metaphysical" in their desire to distinguish what is fundamental from what is not.

So posing that there are agents is a metaphysical activity? Why so? — frank

Because the desire to understand is itself information of a kind. The theory of the intelligible as an integral component of what exists is an expression of that thought. Cognitive agents orient themselves by differentiating what can and cannot be understood.

This is made explicit in the writings of thinkers such as Plotinus but is also suggested in the logic of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" or Bateson's Evolution of Mind.

Expressing the matter as a need is metaphysical in so far as the question recognizes that there are agents and they want to understand what the hell is going on.

The banality of evil was not presented as a doctrine. Arendt presented the trite affect and emptiness of Eichmann in the context of her analysis of totalitarian organizations. The process of terror is not just the outcome of certain beliefs but has its own physics. Consider this from part three of The Origins of Totalitarianism:

"While under present condition totalitarian domination still shares with other forms of government the need for a guide for the behavior of its citizens in public affairs, it does not need and could not even use a principle of action, strictly speaking, since it will eliminate precisely the capacity of man to act. Under conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it no longer help to avoid the dangers man fears. The same is true for sympathy or support of the regime; for total terror not only select its victims according to objective standards; it chooses its executioners with as complete a disregard as possible for the candidate's conviction and sympathies. The consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has become a matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. The introduction of purely objective criteria into the selective system of the SS troops was Himmler's great organizational invention; he selected the candidates from photographs according to purely racial criteria. Nature itself decided, not only who was eliminated, but also who was to be trained as an executioner.

No guiding principle of behavior, taken itself from the realm of human action, such as virtue, honor, fear, is necessary or can be useful to set into motion a body politic which no longer uses terror as a means of intimidation, but whose essence is terror. In its stead, it has introduced an entirely new principle into public affairs that dispenses with human will to action altogether and appeals to a craving need for some insight into the law of movement according to which the terror functions and upon which, therefore, all private destinies depend.

The inhabitants of a totalitarian country are thrown into and caught in the process of nature or history for the sake of accelerating its movement; as such, they can only be executioners or victims of its inherent law. The process may decide that those who today eliminate races and individuals or the members of dying classes and decadent peoples are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed. What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology."
-Page 165, Harvest Hill edition

From this explanation, we can see the psychology of Eichmann as a result of this process in himself. This is a lot different than saying evil could just come from any "ordinary" person.

Kierkegaard does for Christianity what Freud does for the Greek myths; as the Greek gods are many, so, to compensate for the unity of the Trinity, there are many Kierkegaards - discuss. — unenlightened

That is an interesting comparison. As a matter of translation, Kierkegaard was arguing for less of a summary than Freud did. Kierkegaard's often repeated complaint that Hegel got ahead of himself involved using the language of progress in a sarcastic way. That is not a register self identified psychologists employ.

I did not object to using the Blue and Brown books in that thread.

I have generally argued for reading original texts before considering commentary and have also expressed reservations about the use of author's notebooks. But the problems I have with those kinds of works are not at all the same.

Getting an outline made by some other reader of what is going on in a text is different from getting to see into the process of how the writer worked. Regarding the latter, authors vary greatly in their difference of expression between what is published and what is not. If one is looking to work less hard, pursuing notebooks is not the way to go.

But all that to the side, it would dilute Kierkegaard to let others speak for him. He worked hard to clear a place where his words pushed out others. Right or wrong.

Provide some companion to work with if you don't mind. I want to see more psychologizing about psychologizing here. — Wallows

As I understand his writings, Kierkegaard is mostly interested in pushing people (including himself) to accept a responsibility for themselves that goes well beyond any narrative they or bystanders could produce. There are only clues or excuses. Explanations can only serve one purpose or the other. No one gets out alive.

So, in thinking about contrasting points of view, there are a number of theorists of developmental psychology that look hard at what he observed.

Are you mostly interested in seeing what is there or talking about how we talk about it?

From a task point of view, my work experience suggests to me that people don't actually perform acts simultaneously but some are agile at switching jobs quickly and others are not.
Put that way, those who are agile at this skill are not always performing at the same level at all times. When one has a job with a lot of responsibilities, it becomes really important to understand and shape when work happens on each thing.
Being able to change quickly is helpful but not always the best approach to solving actual problems.

How about Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety? It explores the psychology of sin while looking at the limits of such an endeavor. On the way, he makes observations about adolescence and child rearing that are interesting in themselves, even if the reader rejects many of his premises.

Long term relationships are odd. Tolstoy said that what was the easiest sort of thing to understand but he was wrong.

Desire does not explain itself. It is mostly just there, like a homeless person on a bench.

Adherence to socialist or capitalist principles, like choosing a strategy for the survival of you or your tribe, is a gamble (a wager that following X principle will tend to lead to individual or overall success). — VagabondSpectre

Arguments against "planning", in the economic sense, are made in the "tribal" register used in your narrative. Hayek, for example, was not a Libertarian on the basis of saying restrictions upon individuals were bad upon principle but that it stifled productivity of the whole process. The language Hayek used developed to the point where the Reagans (he was cloned repeatedly) argued that the free market was the only guarantor of beneficial social ends.

And so what started off as an argument about governmental involvement in the production and the marketing of goods became a view that all functions of government would be better served by commodities developed through a market environment. Resistance to that movement argues that forms of civic planning may be the only way to protect individuals from the unrelenting demand of being a consumable commodity.

Kind of ironic, really.

Tomorrow, then.
I will try to represent.

It overlooks, and often even suppresses, the potential genius of the slave population. — whollyrolling

You got to read Hegel.

Active enough?

Are you familiar with Aquinas's argument for Just War?

Have you read the City of God?

My grammar?