I meant the comparison to question if someone deserves spoils for exhibiting genius that was attributed partially to their ideological circumstances. It wasn't intended to mean that genius would in some way lead to happiness. That is just in part, some other part might be a result of a will to power, as opposed to a natural gravity to power, at least from my individual centered perspective; but the fact that the power they can achieve comes at a very particular cost, and not simply a universal cost, is an essential element. Though culturally, it is frequently the case where callings such as doctors, lawyers, and such are considered to be 'higher' choices in themselves, there is a strong feeling to question the absolute validity of this.

As for answering your questions directly I cannot do so honestly because I think they’re based on beliefs/views I don’t hold, fully understand and/or agree with

This is the heart of my question, so to speak, that this equation is in part ideological. In my own personal experience, the gesture has always been that even the unintelligent and incapable deserve their form of happiness. Here I could refer to numerous examples but take the Hollywood film 'Ratatouille' for example. The clumsy dim-witted sous chef gains fame by imitating the genius of a rat. He desires so much for it to be true that he tells others it was his own genius. In the end he reaches the realization of his own equity with the rat's genius; the rat who was ironically born not capable of using its genius. But increasingly, I suppose due to the greater ease with which certain results can be achieved with technology, this concept is breaking down. But is it something we still wish to believe in the West?

I don't have a deeply studied comprehension of the value form concept, but I think of it as the locus of collective psychology, the core dynamical agent that dictates how members of a social group intersect as they relate.

…According to this account, information is the value form of the 21st century because it is replacing labor as the locus of collective psychology.

Not sure I fully understand. “Information is the value form of the 21st century because it is replacing labour as the locus of collective psychology.” Do you mean to use ‘and’ here rather than ‘because’? I found the use of ‘because’ confusing since it’s like saying, “if we all believe it it must be true” which is certainly not true.

Take liberty for instance, if we all collectively determine it to be caused by locusts that doesn’t make it true does it? If we all believe value to be attributed to information or it takes up the attention of our psyche it must supplant the role of labour in value? Please clarify, now this isn’t making any sense. The attribution of labour to value is not arbitrary. We will need to expand on that point more if you don’t think this is so.

Maybe it’s side-stepping, but it sounds as if your approach to this is somewhat libertarian in style. You take the circumstance of the individual as to a certain extent bounded or fixed qualitatively and then the task becomes to find the actions required to alter the determination to suit the choice of certain groups or individuals. The choice of the individual seems to take ultimate precedence through the maximizing of subjects with equal powers as a collective made up of separate individuals.

While everything you say is true, and my understanding coincides that these power structures are involved in the relation that makes working class life an ugly and undesirable thing to be eliminated, I detect a certain fault in this as a pure approach being that the plutocracy is exhibiting the same apparatus in it’s motions and ideas only from the opposite point of view. Is your viewpoint in some way related to the dialectical materialism that Enrique is referring to?


While Hegel’s dialectic wouldn’t reduce the role of the material world in divisions of power, it seems almost oxymoronic to produce a purely material form with which to hold it fixed. Hegel’s approach seems inextricably related in concept with a clearly Christian ideology, which is really it’s ultimate source of strength. But isn’t this pure materialism inherently at odds with this diminishing of the role of our attitudes and mediations in the choices we make?

Applying dialectical materialism to the 21st century would probably require an army of intellectuals.

This made me laugh.

Well one need look no further than Marx’s Manifesto to see how just a few words can be more powerful than armies of hundreds of thousands. I do see how money can be made from machines, but they don’t generate value to us in and for themselves. Thus it sounds like both you and I have an idea of this as something of an eventual dead-end as far as capitalism is concerned if that’s not taking too many liberties.

This is limiting our sight to primarily those technologies whose general purpose is to reduce or eliminate some section of the working class. It makes me wonder why there exists this impulse to destroy certain jobs. More often than not the rationale is that it is one job being traded off to create other jobs though usually there is no real measure of these created jobs at hand. It seems unreasonable for individuals seek to lose money by paying more workers when they already pay less, so these new jobs must come as a result of increased overall activity. However, with that activity comes less overall human physical work as more and more of this is automated; and that work is traditionally done by the working class.

It seems to me that attempting to create by setting out to eliminate certain jobs without any clear proven plan for job creation is a failure strategy for creating working class jobs. When we set out to win a race we don’t try and do so by trying to lose as much as possible.

The change in value form isn't towards computers as analogous to the technologies that humans operated like machinery prior to the Information Age, but rather consists in the data itself encoded as abstract meaning within software and interfaces. The significance is that physically instantiated work is effectively excised in various ways from its role as focal point of social and economic organization, replaced by information as the engine that drives culture.

It still seems like more explanation is needed to fully explore how information can become the equivalent of labour as a source of value. In labour, both worker and employer engage in a multi-faceted unexplainable phenomena known as ‘work.’ In it both entities enact and reflect it’s qualities. The performance of the work implies a mutual determination that the item or service has acquired a value and exists partly in this determination, or identity, but not wholly. To a certain extent it hardly matters if my work for my employer is considered as work between us if we disregard how it compares against work elsewhere. This raises the inexplicability of how this work comes to be perceived.

When compared with information, I doubt how these two can be made into one. Information seems to me almost the complete opposite concept. What we call information or facts are our subjective determinations and can easily sway one way or another to become mis-qualifications and mis-delineations. It makes little difference if information is retrieved by a person or a machine. Where work is characterized by a certain narrative that is partly a form of expressing a social contract through its form and content, information on the other hand is characterized by almost pure transparent content; once we start to doubt its underlying form it becomes unstable.

Could you go into a little more detail about from where you are drawing their equivalency?

Toil, wage slavery and exploitation are signifiers for income inequality between classes. It sounds as if your view is that processes becoming automated would eliminate this. Is this really true? I myself have worked in places that underpaid and exploited workers which didn’t require traditional physical labour.

To say that there would be no more wage slavery if there were no more workers is a bit of a truism. It doesn’t tell us anything about the happiness of the workers but only the level of their existant exploitation; the negation of which could just as easily increase their suffering.

... seems to me that the value form is transitioning from labour to information, as you in essence begin to suggest. A single individual (or fleet of robots?) can create huge economic value using minimal amounts of traditional labour via the programming of computer systems with information in various forms.

Can computer systems really create value on their own? I'm imagining all workers had made the transition to the so-called elite class with access to a universal education, non-physical highly abstract employment, etc. would the whole class of these people sit and stare at computer machines and just randomly determine who is rich and who is poor?

Wouldn’t the exploitation of robots reduce toil and drudgery and wage slavery, thereby liberating the worker to pursue his own creative endeavours?

So a blue collar worker who lives from generation A to B experiences the loss of his job at a mining plant and must re-structure his or her career accordingly. I'm interpreting your response as implying this will be in the collective interests of happiness or the utilitarian argument. What would lead you to believe that from your own experience?

I have seen one company starts using robots and then the whole auto industry moves to robotics: are there now more happier auto-workers? More recently, I have seen Uber reflects changes in the taxi industry and then the whole industry eventually catches up: are cab drivers now better off? In most of these cases in the short term the worker loses and the businesses win; we get short term increases in profits that eventually level off once the technology is adopted. Furthering this point I could draw from many examples from Christoph Roser's book 'Faster, Better, Cheaper in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond.'

Don't you think that this will cause a collective suffering that outweighs the minor increase in collective comfort, and the short-term notoriety and profit of the product developers and businessmen who made these advancements? They'll soon become universally implemented thus eliminating any short-term increase in profit. After that, all that's left is the collective convenience of the many, but if value relies on the workers themselves wouldn't this too be an argument against the collective good?

I have recently been enjoying the word ‘ought.’ I like to think of love right now as something that ought to be in my life.

I prefer love. Do you feel the same?

In my mind, there will always be good. Good and evil both imply an abstract entity and some quality with which it reveals something about itself in a relation. But when we say ‘good’ in the common sense, we try and bridge the gap between our individuality and an outside objectivity. The relation takes the form of a symbolic appeal rather than an observed quality.

So you can see why many previous comments have questioned the validity of ‘good’ usage on the internet, where our identity is temporarily veiled by a mask of anonymity and the entities and interests we represent are implicit rather than explicit. For me it wouldn’t be surprising if you were to meet some of them in person that they would not surprise you with the exactitude of what they consider the right and proper way.

The late George Simmons taught at Colorado College, not far from where I live. He is a marvelous author, and his Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis is my favorite math book.

Wow, what a coincidence; I agree that his writing was superb. This happened to be the book that really acted as a gateway for me into Mathematics. It seems at times to give the history, essence, and practise of the topic equal weight with the memorization of formulae.

What you call computing seems to be simply looking at examples - frequently involving numerical calculations - that give students a more comfortable framework for understanding concepts. Examples of this sort go hand in hand with formal theory, making the latter more palatable. There is no conflict. No pitting one approach against the other. Examples and graphical interpretations are part of heuristics. There is no "opposition".

100% correct. And this is exactly my position in a nutshell, that computation and the concept or theorem are different but that their opposition rests on a sort of ‘grounds’ for their being so. Their meaning is denatured when reduced permanently to a real and tangible, fixed and absolute opposition. That’s part of a much more complicated idea from Hegel’s philosophy, but that wasn’t invented solely by him; we are all practically aware that this is true.

If we did in fact take the dichotomy to be real, fixed, and absolute, it would look a bit like a sort of computation that is fully a means. The concept would take the form of a sort of thing with a real existence in its place and the result would be a dogmatic form of mathematics where ideas are handed down in themselves without recourse to each other. In our minds it is closer to a type of negation that we reveal through action. I think you would find it difficult to explain why 5+5=10 simply through reasoning and theorizing alone without demonstrating any relationships, differences, or identities. Computation constitutes a form where we take the concept as most opposed to the act for a specific purpose.

Let's have a look at another example of a concept and if this doesn't get us anywhere we will throw in the towel. This paraphrased excerpt is from a book called 'Calculus and Analytic Geometry by George F. Simmons. I have added some headings, cut out a few things, and perhaps made some errors in the translation.

Hypothesis/Theorem - Concavity and Points of Inflection Based on 1st/2nd Derivatives

One of the most distinctive features of a graph is the direction in which it curves of bends... A positive second derivative, f''(x) > 0, tells us that the slope f'(x) is an increasing function of x.

This gives us a general overview of the theorem, or more generally the concept as we're calling it in it's most opposed form. This is enough as it is for some, but most textbooks will go further and demonstrate how this is the case.

Further Intuition

This means that the tangent turns counterclockwise as we move along the curve from left to right... Such a curve lies above its tangent except at the point of tangency... Similarly, if the second derivative is negative, f''(x) = 0, then the slope f'(x) is a decreasing function, and the tangent turns clockwise as we move to the right.

Here the writer demonstrates the phenomena, or 'shows' us it in action. This helps the reader to believe the notion is real and to see how it relates to past experiences or concepts, particularly the concept of the tangent and the derivative about which the reader is assumed to have some experience with.

A point across which the direction of concavity changes is called a point of inflection. If f''(x) is continuous and has opposite signs on each side of P, then it must have a zero at P itself. The search for points of inflection is mainly a matter of solving the equation f''(x)=0 and checking the direction of concavity on both sides of each root.

Here is the argument for the second concept is put in place.

3x Examples With Discussion But I Will Only Show One for Reference

(Example Function) is very easy to sketch by inspection if we notice the follow clues: it is symmetric about the y-axis because the exponent is an even number, its values are all positive, it has a maximum at x=0 because this yields the smallest denominator, and y->0 as |x|-> inf. It is therefore intuitively clear that the graph has a shape shown in fig 4.10. There are evidently two points of inflection, and the only question is, what are their precise locations? To discover this, we compute... (calculations and further discussion)

Here the author 'computes' directly the above mentioned theorem showing various easy ways to implement it. Here the 'identities' and 'differences' present in the conceptual definition are given higher precedence than its grounds; we can more closely see the relationships at play, how they could be related to other theorems and to themselves. This is borrowing some more language from Hegel.

Exceptions - Written as Three Remarks But I Will Only Show One for Reference

As we have tried to suggest in these examples, knowing that f''(x0)=0 is not enough to guarantee that x=x0 furnishes a point of inflection. We must also know that the graph is concave up on one side of x- and concave down on the other. The simplest function that shows this difficulty is y=f(x)=x^4. Here f'(x) = 4x^3 and f"(x)=12x^2, so f''(x)=0 at x=0. However, f''(x) is clearly positive on both sides of the point x=0, and therefore -- as we already know from the graph -- this point corresponds to a minimum, not a point of inflection...

This section shows us a few examples where the above stated theorem appears not to work. The author chooses to demonstrate the invalidity/error as it would appear in a solution. Note that they have left it to the reader somewhat to develop their own 'narrative' regarding why this particular case does not fit the universal mold.[/i]

This is a textbook designed for learning rather than a journal where a theorem is actually proven, but I think if you looked to those sources you might find something of a similar structure. Why choose this form of showing various examples and exceptions to the rule at work as opposed to trying to summarize the concept through more basic language?

Philosophers do have sort of prerogative to elucidate essential meanings from a language that has been deformed by convenience.

fair enough. To be clear, I’m not using the word ‘concept’ in that sense but with a somewhat different meaning. If that maybe gave you the idea I was attempting to butcher Hegel I’m sorry.

Phew is it just me or is there a great deal of anti-Hegel sentiment here! What gives? It’s like going to a physics forum and finding out that everyone hates Isaac Newton.

By computation do you mean reasoning?

Yes, I do mean that in a certain sense too. Do you suggest it is an example of reason and no computation?

can you clarify a little more, I’m not sure I’m totally following. You mean if you were to say, ‘x is red,’ someone may think this is invalid because it is a determination? These would be kind of misinterpreting Hegel’s work pretty badly though, wouldn’t you agree?

My point is that Peirce in particular offered a foundation that absorbs both horns of the dilemma to leave the Hegelian synthesis.

Out of curiosity, why is it a dilemma?

My intent wasn’t to claim that there is no difference and only unity, so if that was what came across it must have been miscommunicated. Yes, what you say is true, and the fact that you included computation in your definition of proof only goes to show that it is not quite so different and separate from the Mathematic concept. However, your statement that,

… reasoning depends on being able to divide the world in a way that allows it to be reduced to a model.

is where our thoughts depart, because I’m not sure how you mean the word ‘model.’ And the world does not need to be divided for reason to exist; that is, if we take division to mean creating separate mutually exclusive parts from a whole. Take reference to post-Newtonian physics (an area I admittedly don’t have a great deal of experience with), wherein many new and interesting discoveries have taken place in which divisions in reality — as you call them — have been blurred; space, time, mass, acceleration, etc. A model is something man-made and man-invented that is fashioned in the likeness of something else. But on the contrary, much of what constitutes reason could be attributed to factors beyond the reach of the individual.

Yes of course computation and proof aren’t the same thing, but to prove involves a lot of showing, that has a lot in common with computation. Most mathematicians start to prove something to themselves first by carrying it out and seeing if the results are as expected. We are not seeking a mindless computational model but we seek to carry out computation to expose something. An example from Euclid:

If in a triangle two angles be equal to one another, the sides which subtend the equal angles will also be equal to one another.

Let ABC be a triangle having the angle ABC equal to angle ACB; I say that AB is also equal to AC. For, if AB is unequal to AC, one of them is greater. Let AB be greater; and from AB the greater let DB be cut off equal to AC the less; let DC be joined. Then, since DB is equal to AC, and BC is common, the two sides DB, BC are equal to the two sides AC, CB respectively; and the angle DBC is equal to the angle ACB; therefore the base DC is equal to the base AB, and the triangle DBC will be equal to the triangle ACB, the less to the greater, which is absurd. Therefore AB is not unequal to AC; it is therefore equal to it.

In this proof Euclid employs some computation of a number of prior theorems of his own to demonstrate the relationship. Who knows, maybe that’s even how this theorem was proven in the first place.

Does driving an automatic transmission give you a deeper experiential understanding of how transmissions work? Does flipping a light switch give a deeper experiential understanding of power generation and distribution? Of course not. The higher-level the interface, the less actual understanding is involved.

Here we can see clearly the dichotomy, so if it were unclear before it should be very much clearer now. In our day to day life we have light switches and power generation as separate entities. In the mind we have it organized that way as well. Our subjective relation to technological means conditions us to believe in things that do and things that make do. Shouldn’t it make sense that we think of Mathematics in the same light? After all, we all use Matlab/Octave/etc. Nobody wants to compute a giant integral that will take all day.

This type of reasoning is tempting but can be fallacious, for the reasons previously explained. The concepts of mathematics are most commonly acknowledged as valid through proof; proof that heavily involves the form of computation. We can only create once we have seen for ourselves that the dualism was never wholly and fully mutually exclusive. If you had never heard of power generation perhaps the best way to prove it to you might be to use the switch, at least as an aide as opposed to persuading you by recourse to theories of electron interactions that haven’t been observed and haven’t been synthetically proven from prior knowledge. Those theories are like light switches to the subject of what that switch means to us as human beings.

certainly I owe most of what I know about philosophy to others, but we’re here to do philosophy and that’s not easy having to avoid using others’ methods and ideas to some extent. I’d prefer not to directly credit other writers in the forum because I’ve found it tends to be less creative that way; if you’re accusing me of plagarism, it was not my intention at all to say all this came solely from my own mind. But if you want to discuss those writers’ and their bearing on this topic please be my guest.

Well imagine a perfect programming language so easy to use every citizen could create any program they wanted no matter how complex by simple computations without having to know much about programming. What would be the long term effects of having these types of programs? Would you say it would promote a deeper experiential understanding of the mechanics and interrelationships within those functions not to have any experiential interaction with them any more? Certainly it could, but do you think it would?

@Gregory I am taking it that you disagree that in our lives there is this type of opposition I’m referring to? Developing a consumer product requires knowing various concepts it’s true. However, few companies are developing products by investing in ‘reinventing the wheel’ when they can just as easily use an off-the-shelf model. Those models are developed by companies who invest heavily in building new concepts but usually don’t directly implement them into products for mass production.

So more and more we work in such a way that the idea is that there is one entity whose ‘job’ it is to develop the ideas and another that implements them. It’s more of an analogy to computation than anything; in ideal form the implementer sees a ‘black box’ —not of course how it would practically happen — that they need not understand anything else but the output for the given input. It’s just one example.

Are you trying to say that I’m simplifying my observation that as a whole Western civilization has built this dichotomy through it’s activity, or are you saying the dichotomy itself is oversimplified as an absolute fixed idea?

@Gregory I'm a little confused, are you trying to say that computation and the theorems and axioms of Mathematics are opposed, or that in our society we don't seek to reify that opposition? That computation enriches and supports concepts is as if to say that you believe them to be to some extent different or separately defined ideas, which is really how I interpreted that; is that true?

To a certain extent what we really call 'computation that is not conceptual' occurs when we are told that two things are mutually related and we have a natural need to see this for ourselves. Most rigorous students of mathematics will require some form of proof. But I argue that proof is not so separate from what we consider as computation. When we think of the meaning of the word 'proof,' associations come to mind of testing, demonstrating or approving. In some ways what renders those concepts valid is that they can be shown, so much that this showing exposes the conceptual relationship.

This is why we don't learn simply by being told that the relationships of mathematics are true but are given our own problems and examples in which to demonstrate that the relationship to a certain extent is part of an abstract whole with it's context joining with it, and that we only separate the two in a sort of contingent manner.

of course, intuition frees us from the baseless dichotomy of the act and the concept. Recourse to intuition overlays the dichotomy with universals that have not yet become integrated with our subjectivity.

Once the intuition is fully ‘subjected’ such as “we do addition to…” then we are fully back in the dichotomy again. But without a doubt the recourse to intuition is essential to mathematics.

It would be great to see education that focused a little more on the creative side of mathematics. You know, there are many now who understand, elaborate, and compute the formulae and concepts, but something in me just wants to see students that have some room to experiment, play, and take side-tracks. It would be great to take some of the pressure off being the next Gauss or Euler, and to just enjoy the beauty of the subject.

The true driving force has never really been physical gains, fame, or notoriety, has it? I always imagine the geniuses as being very much adverse to those types of motives. It might help individuals to ‘see math in everything’ if they saw it as something taken for itself, since in my view it has developed a reputation for being laborious, wretched, and ugly, which just doesn’t fit it right.

They involve juxtaposition of individual and group ideals with practicality

For this I will appeal to the textbook definition:

nar·ra·tive
- a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.
"the hero of his modest narrative"
- the narrated part or parts of a literary work, as distinct from dialogue.
"the dialogue and the narrative suffer from awkward syntax"
- the practice or art of telling stories.
"traditions of oral narrative"
- a representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values.
"the coalition's carefully constructed narrative about its sensitivity to recession victims"

Contrasting this with the word 'story.'

sto·ry
- an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.
"an adventure story"
- an account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something.
"the story of modern farming"

So, what do you think it means in the definition mean where it says, "...in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values"? The word has an admixture of usage in psychological and sociological writing, but why choose this word 'narrative,' as opposed to just 'subjective reality'? The word is sometimes used as a type of metaphor for form and content that represents to us something about individuals and the group. In a narrative, what is the main purpose of the protagonist?

In the stories we typically see narratives revolve around some clear quest of good against evil or conflict to be resolved. But ideals are more than just our goals and desired outcomes, they can also be states that reassure, confirm, satisfy, and amalgamate. In a story, when you see the hero fail, doesn't it become so much more powerful when he does so because of some trait we envisage as being worth overcoming? And it makes it more satisfying to see when they do finally confirm and satisfy our shared beliefs about such things as the need for bravery, friendship, and so on. So it is in individual and group life, where failed states do not follow only cold machinations, but can take on a narrative tint in the sense that they reflect what is considered good and right by the group and the individuals that make it up.

Narratives are distinctively human. They involve juxtaposition of individual and group ideals with practicality. Their role as a whole masks their implicit and symbolic side, which constructs their transitory existence to appear like something static. But essential to it is that it differs on each viewing and is constantly reordering and reimagining the ideals of individuals and the group.

Narratives also tend to craft language with which to express themselves, like “narrative logic.” From my own experience, the magnitude of the language is related to it’s form and content. The more radical, sexual, or violent the form and content is, the more so the types of desires and ideals that tend to present themselves. This is no surprise if you think of it as being expressive or at least something that can only be fully realized through expression.

Each of us "narrates" by internally characterising, contextualising, narrativising, emphasising and interpreting the content of one's observation of and interaction with one's environment. Our narration is biased, generally going unchallenged, its production is on one hand composed of elements outside of our control, in that others perceive or would perceive what you do, largely, as you do. On the other, how we narrate is influenced by our biases and intentions.

Why are narration and bias connected, is it not possible to narrate in an unbiased way? By the word ‘biased’ I’m taking it to mean being exposed as predisposed to making decisions in an unfair or prejudiced way; is this the way you mean it?

What’s frequently called ‘objective truth’ is like narration. However, narration is associated with unreality, but narration is the sublation of unreality so as to appear in the guise of plainly concrete reality. In film for instance, narration guides the story but has the common characteristic feature of being real events experienced by a subject. As I see it bias and challenging of narration is opposed to this because it’s about emphasis and definitiveness.

To talk about narration as if the real and unreal could be easily distinguished is something like weaving a narrative within a narrative. As if there is a position from which our actions - in a narrative sense - could be judged like a movie where we claim to know what is real and what not, isn’t that a kind of illusion don’t you think?

There seems to be a growing need for a more intricate vocabulary to discuss this topic. Having two or three words such as ‘racism,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘prejudice’ to describe the myriad of complex anthropological phenomena is simply outdated in the twenty-first century. I think it was Hobbes who wrote that to give a name to a thing is to exert a power over it. With such a feeble vocabulary is it any surprise that there are so many disagreements as to the definitions of these words?

There are more names, such as ‘oppression,’ ‘systematic racism,’ and so on, but they seem to end up being utilized for the purposes of practical action rather than abstract thought. They are names to describe something inappropriate in day-to-day life, but they are useless for conceptualizing the essence of the phenomena. In my opinion, there is a definite need for words somewhat exclusive to both domains in public usage.

@Ori Your question seems to me about soul and spirit, which have very different meanings to different kinds of people. You are right to consider it as something conditioned, because you can see in all the explanations here it is somehow presupposed. Before you refer to yourself or anything else you implicitly presuppose your identity with yourself (I am ‘this’). It seems reductive to take this Cartesian individuality to be everything that is your soul and spirit; that is not what Descartes meant through it.

Many who do philosophy have the aim of enriching ourselves, including what you might call spirit or soul, rather than accepting the belief we are already fully enriched without considering the negation of ourselves and our existence.

But if the individual acts solely on the basis of an end, he is acting precisely on the inexistence of a world around him. With or without the world, he would act the same way. Acts

Not that I disagree, but would you care to elaborate on this point? Most importantly, how the individual encumbered by future ends relates to his having a type of existential ‘blind spot.’

Are you trying to express that some of us lead fuller, richer, or better lives than others? If we focus our attention elsewhere than on the here and now we get less out of life, and experience less out of the overall choice of options that life has to offer?

It sounds as if you are really asking, ‘are the husbands actions moral, or could they be?’ Moral responsibility or accountability takes morality directly into the realm of what others think and feel. This is a problem because a large section of the impetus to moral action is supposed to come from the individual. There are cases in which someone doing something perceived as moral could be done for immoral reasons, for instance; such an act is often not as easily categorized.

So if the question is, will the domestic abuser be morally accountable, then that depends on where and when you are living. In some places that’s not considered as collectively abhorrant as in the West. If the question is about why an individual should or shouldn’t abuse their wife, then there is a path for finding that answer as well.

, I can answer your question with yes, no, maybe, and everything in between and on the sides, A question for which all possible answers are correct is not much of a question.

@tim wood
Your efforts to clarify the question are right, but this is taking it to excess. We should not judge the quality of the question based solely on the answers it produces. To say so would be to as if to claim nobody should ask any questions for which the respondents around them don’t seek answers. There are accounts online (sources obviously not wholly reliable) that in ancient times many philosophers were tried and killed for asking questions that individuals considered to be unfit for a response. Is that kind of excess conducive to free and worthwhile thought?

Taking your English education as an example. You must run into writing that is full of defects all the time. But if it were common to step in and act, then you'd expect to see a sort of dogmatic strictness applied to ordinary language that would be very foreign to it. But if you didn't know the subject as well it would be more acceptable, because you would be closer to the same 'level.' So someone who knows less about the subject should have more ability to alter reality than someone who studied the content of their subject.

Maybe it depends somewhat on the faith societies have in the content of those subjects; we expect a certain fear of rebuke that keeps those who do not have academic knowledge of certain subjects from burdening others with it's content. Social media groups come to mind. But an environmentalist group that spreads a sort of enviro-propaganda can actually do good things for the environment, and similarly a zombified feminist group can protect subjugated women. However, I feel there needs to be a source of fear that makes us are aware that we are only actors and not in full command of modulating the concepts behind these actions.

Your response sounds reasonable that there exist 'filters' through which academic thought passes to become culturally disseminated: the arts, media, technology, social relationships, etc. If these institutions were to become unconcerned with academic thought and focus inwardly on money or notoriety then instead you'd have an essentially impotent set of dogma that would have really no reason to exist at all besides immediate actions like matching individuals with certain careers and such. Perhaps this is the reason why you see these interventions, as a type of expression of frustration when these dissemination medium aren't seen as effective enough.

I don't really understand your question of whether academics have the "right" to impose their ideology onto the non-academic". Where do they have the opportunity to directly impose their ideology as academics?

Take the first film example from IANYN. Mr Weiss explains to James Baldwin that we should avoid excessive cataloguing by race. His background being one where he himself had never been separated, he explains bluntly what would not sound at all out of place to another academic of similar background. But because he explains it to Baldwin, he does more than simply explain his universal viewpoint, but instead presents a kind of offered reality to Baldwin. Baldwin did not have a choice to separate by colour because it was central to his reality and his mode of understanding the world.

If Baldwin said to himself, 'I'm not going to separate people based on colour' and someone separated him by race, he would be sacrificing his very power to question race at all. My point is that to some extent the same thing happens whenever specialist academics interact outside their specialization, and there ought to be some type of reasonable basis for when they should be representatives of their knowledge and when they should remain silent; both these extremes seem to be problematic. If they were forced to never represent their specialization it would no longer make sense to pursue it.

If we believe that an academic should act primarily among other academic-minded individuals, then in most senses wouldn't it mean not to search for truth at all, but rather to concern oneself only with actions and immediate consequences? Thus we'd have a type of action or career-centered education system, training women's rights writers to be women's rights writers and not to explore women's rights as a subject existing in itself and with other subjects. Adhering to the dogma of the subject would be more beneficial both in terms of individual interest and social interest than learning it and rendering oneself unable to act.

I want to say that it reaches beyond the question of whether an uneducated audience would understand or agree, but if the academic has the right to impose their ideology onto the non-academic. It seems like this unquestionably happens in daily life, but I don't know of any analysis or compendium on the subject to determine if it is being correctly applied. But there do seem to be cases, take this example (only the first 1.5 minutes) from the recent US impeachment case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqmhfyH09jM

Aside from the controversial content of the case, you can clearly see Prof. Dershowitz outlining his academic views of impeachment that could not be followed as a common rule without err. But he speaks of the principles of impeachment themselves, their origins, which would present a disastrous meeting of the academic and non-academic worlds if the content of his speech were treated as objective reality. Yet he presents it as a sort of necessity, as if some line had been crossed and academia needed to step in, but where is this line?

@kudos thinks, if I understood him, that things out of our control are chance occurrences. This, to my reckoning, isn't correct.

I'm not exactly sure where this syllogism came from, but I don't remember writing anything about it. I wrote this:

It sounds like you are both making a similar point if I'm not misreading it. That to a certain extent chance is a phenomena that occurs external to an individual, and separate from weakness.

The idea of chance as something occurring external to an individual is also generally conventional and is loosely based on the definition of chance via google:

DEFN(2) The occurrence and development of events in the absence of any obvious design.

Note the subjectivity present in the definition ̶ 'obvious design'. Obvious design is dependent on how it is observed. The word obvious here makes this impression of the meaning most strongly. I should also like to mention that the structure of saying something is true about chance, that it occurs external to an individual, doesn't make the reverse true or mean that both are the same thing or completely separate.

As far as I'm concerned, since we're talking determinism here, chance is uncertainty in outcomes, a situation brought about by the lack of an observable pattern or if there's a pattern, it's probabilistic with a value between 0% (impossible) and 100% (certain). In other words, if things out of our control were chance, they should be patternless which isn't so.

This definition seems to be taking the activity of chance to be the same thing as chance in itself; the quantitative, describing, analytical activity of chance. Your elimination of the subject in "brought about by the lack of an observable pattern," gives this impression, because it negates the subject that is doing the observing and their freedom to choose in applying their methods of understanding. This leads you to the conclusion that everything must be determined because you must determine it. Imagine if we took the activity of philosophy to be the same as philosophy in itself. We would be at risk of limiting ourselves to what our present concept of philosophy allows us to know. Here you are exhibiting the reverse by eliminating what chance allows us to know and treating what it means as obsolete.

Chance allows us to know weakness, because through the negative activity of denying the institutional methods of quantification, reduction, efficiency, we lose their sense of perspective when forming judgements based on those methods. For instance, positing that strong animals survive and the weak ones die might lead one to believe that to be strong were what we should all strive for, where this is not a scientific truth but a regular judgement. If everyone were to follow it then strength would cease to exist.

So you feel it is frustrating to you for others to strive to be as strong as possible. Why is that, do you think it is an overall bad trait? Just bad for some and not for others? Would you vote for a political leader who had this type of drive?

Maybe you can explain how just using the word 'weakness' implies that it is not relative? I'm not seeing it, you'll need to clarify.