Maybe I'm missing something because I haven't been following all the posts here, but what would you call Sanders' political ascension? — Maw

Sanders is a profoundly political operator. By this I mean that he's not just offering to tinker a little bit with the system here and there, patching up holes, as it were, in a technocratic manner a la Warren (or the rest of the democratic field, for that matter). His platform is an attempt to pitch power against power: the power of a mass of the socious against those the few who accrue benefit to themselves. He stakes a position in a field and arrays people for and against it. Which is another way of saying that Sanders isn't an 'issues' candidate, tackling this problem here, that problem there. His approch is properly politicaI, seeking to transform the relations of power in society. As such, I see him as offering a unified approach in which the issues tackled are derivative of this larger political program. I see him playing politics as politics, more than anyone else in the democratic lineup. And it bloody works and people love it.

The ruthless seizure of power.

Wasn't it your earlier complaint that insisting morals play a role in politics is naïve? — Benkei

Yes - point was that really shitty people - including HRC - know this all too well. This doesn't make them shitty people, its just the means by which they achieve power. But its not that insisting morals play a role is naive - morals always 'play a role' - but that you simply can't play politics as a morality game.

https://www.amazon.com/My-Turn-Hillary-Clinton-Presidency/dp/1609807561

Look back at SLX's post about how qualia can't be independent items. The same is true of the self. — frank

The point is less that 'qualia can't be independent items', than 'stop thinking in terms of qualia entirely'.

What's even more fun is that if you actually artificially make someone just experience nothing but a saturated, unstructured color field - as with a Ganzfeld - the closest thing to the mytical color patch - you end up hallucinating. Color patch thought experiments are literally insane. 'What it is like', is visual madness.

Clinton needs to be run over by a bus, ASAP.

But, differently from former successful protest movements, none of these movements have become a subject of change of an established political order or a cause of transformation of the symbolic foundation of legitimacy

...Following the recent events, manifesting “crowd agency” in Canetti’s sense, it is reasonable to assume that this kind of collective subjectivity is not able to undermine the existing neoliberal order to produce the long-term irreversible social outcomes. — Number2018

This is true enough. Relatedly, my interest in this comes from reading Jodi Dean's Crowds and Party where she argues that the crowd represents a potential for political action, and that it's weakness lies in an inability to translate that potential into a sustained programme that has temporal and institutional consistency. To this end, she argues that what the left needs is a revival of the party form, and to get over its instinctive distrust of power. While I'm still a bit neither here nor there on the idea of the Party, I totally agree with her that institutionalization and organization is crucial to any possible left politics today. As far as the crowd goes, the need lies in harnessing its potential, in directing and putting it to work.

One thing that always bothers me about 'what it is like to experience X' questions is the assumption - at least it seems to me like an assumption - that the thing in question (X) is already-individuated or 'picked out'. Like, if we take something less generic than 'red', and substitute my cat, 'Tabby', the question becomes far more ambigious.

Is there an experience of Tabby? And what does that mean? An experience of the weave of colors that is Tabby? The textures of her fur and the glossiness of her eyes? Or is there an experience of Tabby's movement as she knocks over the vase? What about her warmth? Do I experience Tabby-the-animal? Tabby-my-loved-cat? Do I 'experience' something named Tabby at all (does one experience a 'named' thing? - what difference does a name make?). Is my 'experience of Tabby' an aggregate of all these? Some but not others? In some situations but not others?

So I tend to find questions about 'what it is like to experience red?' to be a kind of cheat: it doesn't ask an interesting question. It takes for granted a certain 'how' of experience, it 'fixes' - in the sense of nailing down - the 'object' of experinece in a completely artificial way. It's a bad question. Everything interesting about 'what it is like to experience X' happens outside, beyond this question.

---

Merleau-Ponty has some beautiful passages trying to get at this:

"We must first understand that this red under my eyes is not, as is always said, a quale, a pellicle of being without thickness, a message at the same time indecipherable and evident, which one has or has not received, but of which, if one has received it, one knows all there is to know, and of which in the end there is nothing to say. ...

[Instead], Its precise form is bound up with a certain wooly, metallic, or porous configuration or texture, and the quale itself counts for very little compared with these participations. ... The color is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom.

If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world— less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility." (The Visible and the Invisible)

OK. I've tried to do a split without totally messing up the flow of the thread, but some things may still be a bit messy. If there's anything that seems out of place, let me know.

New thread on 'what it is like' is here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6895/what-it-is-like-to-experience-x/p3

Would you guys like a split thread about this? ('experience of...') It seems like an interesting conversation.

If you think there's such a thing as a problem of evil, then the same logic should lead you to question parenthood. — csalisbury

I think it's important to distinguish between the motivations of the two. For the theist, the whole problem bears on how a Good God can allow Evil to be. That God is Good (and all the onmis) is key to the problem. Take that away and you don't really have a problem anymore: there is evil because well, it's not like there was any supposed guarantor of Good to begin with.

That: 'there is evil in the world, why would you procreate?' - is simply a different problem. Theodicists actually have to account for the fall - that's their whole problem. If you take the fall for granted and then ask about ways of dealing with the aftermath, you're simply dealing with a different problem altogether. Not saying that it isn't a problem, or can't be constructed as one.

Sure thing bucko :)

Not here to play twenty questions. Just to point out your idiosyncrasy.

If the problem of evil is generated... — Bartricks

The etiology of evil is irrelevant to the problem. Or rather, that's the question that demands solving, not the given from which it proceeds.

Irrelavent, although perhaps a different, derivitive problem.

The problem of evil is simply that there is evil at all. Everything else is apologetics. If you think Epicurus wrote otherwise than lol at you again.

Lol at anyone who thinks the PoE is a problem of procreation. Odd duck.

Anyway, do you think that a god who creates a universe that is similar to ours but devoid of all innocent sentient life has done something morally bad? — Bartricks

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? In any case, your OP is not about the problem of evil, but something perhaps tangental to it.

That's what creates the evil — Bartricks

But it doesn't, on your own terms: the evil must be there for innocents to be 'introduced' to it. What creates the problem of evil is the existence of evil. Seems odd that this needs to be said.

Huh? Problem of evil is about the sheer existence of evil at all, not about forcing 'innocent, sentient beings' to live in a world.

Good?

--

Michel Feher - Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age

Crowd: transitory, unorganised, social group consisting of people who have undergone deindividuation.

Deindividuation: loss of self (personal and social) identity and acquisition of anonymity, caused by sensitivity to circular interactions with others which affect the arousal system, and result in:

1) Intersubjective affect.
2) Disconnection of social norms.
3) Anti-normative collective action. — Galuchat

Agree on the emphasis on deindividuation - the crowd has a flattening effect, a de-individuating force that is most strongly brought out when the crowd is masked, making every one indistinguishable from the other. But what I want to focus on is a kind of sublimation of individuation, where the subjectivity of each is sublimated or translated into the collective subjectivity (singular) of the crowd: an individuation of the crowd itself. Correlative to this I think it's important not to see such deindividuation as negative: the individual can gain something from this. Canetti again:

"In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries."

This is what I want to think of as the agency specific to the crowd, an agency not available to the individual on their own. This kind of agency tends to run counter to the predominant ways in which agency is often talked about as a capacity or possession of the individual. Crowd agency, the correlate of crowd subjectivity, tends then to pose a pretty massive threat to social orders where individual atomization (the predominant effect of modern neoliberal governance - "there is no such thing as society") is championed as the only kind of agency available.

Also, what did you mean by (3), 'Anti-normative collective action'?

Partly its a weird dialectics of trust - I don't trust people to trust me (nor do I trust me) to not be another peddler of idiosyncratic theories. I can fall back on something. Partly it has to do with my limitations and training - I think best through engagement with literature - it's the material out of which I fashion things - I'd be lost without it. I jettison jargon so I can understand this stuff. Zizek says somewhere that unless he can translate Lacan into stupid pop culture, he's not satisfied that he understands it. Same.

But as for subjectivity - I also simply like the richness of this word. And my disclaimers aside, there's definitely an element of trying to reclaim the word too (in the way that people reclaim slurs). Orienting subjectivity toward doing instead of thinking has an interesting retroactive effect. It gives subjectivity a history, or at least participates in a history, which allows us to think of it in different ways. I mean, there's a way in which one might want to work consciousness 'back into' the account above (not forgetting that phenomenology, the whole study of 'what it is like', takes as it's starting point a cogito that can, and not 'just' a cogito that 'thinks') and enrich the one with the other.

And as for collective subjectivity in particular - that's new for me too. One of the things I've always struggled with in continental approaches to 'the subject' is a kind of 'who or what is the subject'. There's always this kind of uneasy tension between the various theoretical accounts of the subject, and exactly which 'entity' was supposed to take on or bear these theorized qualities. I've never felt easy about simply identifying the subject and the individual, and thinking about it in terms of collectivity allows me to think of subjectivity as a really open-ended process that can 'take' various entities or formations as its... subject ('what is the subject of the subject?'). So I'm working through that too.

So yeah I'm selfish like that too I guess. But then I also like Zizek somewhere else saying that there's simply got to be a space for unapologetic, shameless philosophizing. Self-recrimination is priestly too.

Yeah, it's a lesson I learnt from Isabelle Stengers:

"The question of complexity... is truly a product of the analytical spirit. Analysis and reductionism are too often lumped together in the same critique. But ... it is quite possible for the analytical method to directly contradict the generalization of reductionism. Far from entailing the idea of a more simple world, analysis can lead to the conclusion that we do not know what a being is capable of. One way or another, reductionism always ends up "... is only"; the analytical method, on the other hand, may lead to "this...., but in other circumstances that... or yet again that....' "(Power and Invention)

So I'd be even more stringent than you about Wayfarer: it's not that his problem is with education and politics, and he's focusing on the science. He doesn't even get the science right, as far as I'm concerned.

If I may: reductionism = context-invariance of explanation (changed/changing conditions do not/can not alter how something works).

I guess it's drawing on a well of resources that are already there; a well that's public, explorable by others, extendable (and already extended) into other areas of interest. It's as much enabling as it is limiting. I'm here. We can talk about it.

Yeah, it is true. Atheism only refers to the lack of a belief in gods. You can think that evolution--or even all of science--is complete hogwash and still be just as much of an atheist. — Terrapin Station

I don't know why people find this so hard to get. Like, is it something in the water?

Like - you can believe in Harry Potter and Hogwarts and still be an atheist. Still an idiot. But idiot atheist nonetheless.

Or it's like telling a theist that he or she really must believe in animal sacrifice. Like, no, you complete intellectual incompetents.

. What kind of questions might arise out of a faith in some particular god, do you suppose, that weren't there before? — Isaac

[Complete non-answer] — Wayfarer

Yeah, PM is fine.

Required Reading.

http://chuangcn.org/2019/09/three-months-of-insurrection/

"Years from now, we will continue to look back and marvel at all the incredible things that emerged in response to the concrete problems that insurgents have faced over the course of the past three months.

In response to teenagers having no homes to return to because they were practically “disowned” by their parents for attending demonstrations and remaining on the streets when states of emergency were declared, people created a network of open apartments to which young partisans could retreat and stay temporarily. In response to minibuses, buses, and subway trains no longer being safe for escaping protesters, carpool networks were formed via Telegram to “pick kids up from school.” We encountered elderly drivers who didn’t even know how to operate Telegram, but who drove repeatedly around the “hot spots” reported by the radio news, watching for running protesters who needed a quick ride out of danger.

In response to young people not having any work or enough money to buy food at the front lines, working people prepared supplies of supermarket and restaurant coupons and handed these out to people in gear before large-scale confrontations. This remarkable fact is often used by conservatives to suggest that foreign powers are behind this “color revolution,” because… where did all the money for these coupons come from? There has to be somebody bankrolling this! They cannot fathom that any worker would be willing to reach into his own pockets in order to help a person that he does not know.

In response to the suffering, trauma, and sleeplessness induced by long-term exposure to tear gas and police violence, whether experienced first-hand or via graphic live feeds, support networks appeared offering counsel and care. In response to kids not having enough time to do their homework because they are out on the streets all night, Telegram channels appeared offering free tutoring services. In response to students “not being able to have an education” because they were on strike, people organized seminars on all manner of political subjects at schools that were sympathetic to the cause and also in public spaces."

. It isn't really the god that does it, it's the kind of thinking that allows god in in the first place. — fdrake

:up:

I actually hated that scene in the movie itself. For some reason it really left a profoundly bad taste in my mouth when I watched it originally. I still can't articulate why (maybe its a class thing?), but I suppose I'm not surprised by the appropriation.

Lmao.

In a broad stroke, I'd say that aesthetics deals with sensation, form, taste, and art. It's often associated with the study of beauty, but I think that's a rather narrow and constricting definition: one can consider the aesthetics of ugliness no less than the aesthetics of the weird, for instance. When parsed out between the ancient dualism of sensibility and intelligibility, the aesthetic often lies firmly on the side of the sensate (of bodies, feelings, space and time).

Once you get the basic 'feel' for aesthetics, you can start to ask pertinent questions: what is the relation between beauty and truth? (Plato). Or: what is the relation between sensibility and perception? Sensibility and knowledge? Sensibility and politics? What kind of influence does culture have on taste? What is the relation between class and art? How have our approaches to aesthetics changed across history? Can approaching taste from an evolutionary standpoint tell us anything about it?

All sorts of questions.

Jean-Claude Mishea's - Realm of Lesser Evil. — 180 Proof

Charles Mills - Black Rights/White Wrongs — Maw

These look great! At some point I want to read Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, and these look like they'd make for good companion reading. @Maw, you gotta tell me how you like the Brown book.

Ray Brassier - as always - put it best: "Religion obviously satisfies deep-seated human needs, but it has been a cognitive catastrophe that has continually impeded epistemic progress—contrary to the pernicious revisionism that claims monotheism was always on the side of science and truth. Human knowledge has progressed in spite of religion, never because of it. Philosophers should simply have no truck with it.

...Religion’s rational credibility can be rebuked without evoking modern science or nihilism: Democritus and Epicurus did so over two thousand years ago, using arguments that are still valid today, even if theists prefer to ignore them. But of course, the irrationality of religious belief has never impeded its flourishing; indeed, it is precisely what immunizes it against rational refutation, since religion is designed to satisfy psychological needs, not rational requirements. Marx was right: religion will never be eradicated until the need for it evaporates. Obviously, this evaporation will have to be accomplished practically as well as cognitively."

(c)

Its kinda funny to me all these terrified theists who simply cannot fathom that atheism entails nothing other than the rejection of God(s), all clamouring to import this or that positive valence to it. It's like, no, I don't have to believe any of that tripe, I'm just allowed to reject your bullshit and that's it.

A World Without Why, Raymond Geuss — 180 Proof

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West by Wendy Brown — Maw

:cheer:

I voted atheism and 'core', but for perhaps different reasons than some. In a nutshell I understand theism as a failure of explanation: all (philosophical) theism as I understand it is of the 'God of the gaps' variety - in lieu of providing an immanent, naturalistic account of things, God or Gods are invoked as (non-)explanations. God indicates a failure of thought, and a certain inability of intellect.

So my atheism is 'core', but not in a way the demands a disproof of 'God' at evey turn (the existence or not of God is an irrelavent question, as I see it - that God does not exist, or better, is entirely senseless, is a starting point, not an end-point), but in a way that demands that thought simply be consistent and thorough. Only atheism does full justice to thought itself. God demeans thought, and with it, humanity.