3 1/2, I think, for me. All of my romantic partners and close friends have been in the same region. Obviously, I'm a small sample size, but I wonder if people tend to stick together with people from their 'region.'

What texts of Deleuze are you basing this analysis on?

Perhaps one response to this is to transform the question from 'what transformations can't we think?' to: 'what transformations can't we live?'. This, perhaps, is what gets to the heart of what Cavell takes from Wittgenstein: at the end of the day, of course we can say - and think - if we want, with all abandon, that houses can turn into flowers. We can think this. We do think this, insfoar as we do (a tautology). We say it: houses can turn into flowers. But can we 'live' this? To say this, and perhaps more importantly, sustain it's 'saying', is to have to transform how we relate to houses and flowers, insofar as we live those relations. This is why, I think, when Cavell asks the question, he immediately turns to questions not 'immediately' related to houses and flowers, but to questions about 'growing' and 'gardens' and 'seeds' and 'stones':

"What would "houses" or "flowers" mean in the language of such a world? What would be the difference between (what we call) stones and seeds? Where would we live in that world, and what would we grow in our gardens? And what would "grow" mean?"

I think the 'style' of questions here are significant, and they remind of Deleuze's dictum to not ask 'what is?', but "who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?": Cavell's questions are in this vein, it seems to me. Even when they ask 'what', they are not 'what is?' but 'what would we grow?' and 'what's the difference?', questions that bear on relations and their significance, on how we relate, how we live with our ways of speaking, and how ours ways of speaking (and thinking) and embedded in ours ways of living.

Another way to put this is that the question 'do houses turn into flowers?' cannot just be about houses and flowers: it's also a question about growing, about gardens, about stones and seeds, all of which it carries in tow like an umbra which is easily missed if one doesn't make sure to pay attention to it. So to bring this all back to transcendentality: would it answer your concern to say that the 'missing bridge' between 'deep transcendentally' and 'local transcendentality' is just us? — StreetlightX

I like the transition to living versus thinking. On this, we're on the same page.

Still - I'm not going to let this go - we can live [the example] just as well as we think it. I mean, maybe not us, in our apartments. But whoever has the fancy house-flower thing. And we all recognize what that kind of access is - as people living the realm where that's possible, or aspiring to it, or shut off from it. Here, we're close to something sort of close to the world we live in, almost. The house-flower thing is a little awkward, class-architecturally speaking, but at least it gets closer to some sort of shared situation we care about.

I'm still not clear on whether Cavell is doing the cinnabar thing, or means, precisely, houses and flowers. It's confusing. Cavell can ask - 'what would we grow' but he either means this as a pure example (which is my impression) or: he does have some experience with gardens, as such people sometimes do, but in a way that has nothing to do with sustenance, or anything more life-impacting that any hobby, and so, again, the significance of the example is not really significant.

I mean, if it is about hobbies, no harm no foul. Plant peas away from beets, or however gardens work. But this seems to be some bigger point?


[frankly, I think Cavell, in these quotes, is saying nothing more profound then: there's a difference between statements pertaining to frames and statements pertaining to framed content. Which, true, but most people would agree, and, hey, get in here Derrideans. The equivocation between that and the cinnabar stuff is just muddying and I'm struggling to figure out what I would take away from Cavell that most of us wouldn't have already known going in.]

get out of town, i responded in non heidi terms, and so did a few others.

a gathered field. — Joshs

I haven't read the whole essay through, though I will try to soon.

What I did really like was that phrase, 'a fleeting identity, a gathered field.'

I wasn't sure about forms and differentiation. I think if you can transport back in memory and remember childhood games- king of the hill, capture the flag etc - you can see how forms and transitions can occur very naturally, with people spontaneously understanding them. It's only later, when you try to fix things, that the confusion arises.

It's how people ordinarily talk. This can be observed, and most of us pick it up to the extent that by our age, it is easily identifiable. We know that we don't ordinarily talk of existence in a way which leads to seemingly absurd consequences, like that the Empire State building doesn't exist. — S

It's very clear. So, for instance, people prior to the enlightenment wouldn't talk of 'human rights' (clearly language on holiday) and so forth. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition of true OLP thought is that everything it says you already agree with (that's why an 'olp' philosopher circa , idk, 1340 would correctly mock people who didn't believe in God.) A sufficient, but not necessary, condition is that there're Terry Pratchett or Kurt Vonnegut style barbs about how things are absurd and we live in a society.

I write and mean something right now, right this moment. Except that now that I refer back to it , it has changed. No center. Yet there is a way of belonging to a thematic without there being a center . There is relative, differential belonging which is changing itself in an ongoing manner ,yet in ways that allows relative consistency. Thus we have at the same timer difference and continuity. And my claims to 'no center' are self-reflexive. They have built into them this consistent- changing rubric. So it is perfectly possible to articulate a notion of transformative that carries along with it relative stability and have this built right into our discourse about it. This is, after all, how meaning operates anyway. — Joshs

(Responding a bit late, so I'll understand if you've moved on from this.)

The beginning of you post reminds me a lot of Hegel's analysis of sense-certainty in Phenomenology of Spirit. I assume that's what you're drawing from. If so, I understand that section to be a sort of ur-contradiction which contains the rest of the book in embryo. There's what I mean, and then there's what I say. If I try to refer back to some singular this (what I meant), I only say "this" which is a universal.

I can't say what I mean [ ...] Absolute spirit. (Except Derrida would see an ever-widening spiral, rather than a self-completing circle?)

But what does the 'center' have to do with any of this?

Let's say that this analysis is about the center and do a quick deconstruction of Hegel.

The 'center' he was drawing on, in Sense-Certainty, is closely connected to the revelation in the Eluesinian mysteries (Hegel explicitly draws this connection.) Already this 'origin' is itself derived. Doubly derived in fact, because looking back over his ouevre, we can see, from his early essays on Christianity that his understanding of the dialectic probably derived in large part from his reading of the bible. The 'center' here is something like the holy of holies within the tabernacle, as a sort of semitic mystery cult.

Now we have a triple derivation, because the holy of holies was itself a late stage in the biblical dialectic. (Eden, the flood, the patriarchs, the exodus, the tabernacle.) Moreover, the tabernacle has to constantly be moved (taken apart, stored, set back up.) We know that the god who speaks from the holy of holies, is ever-changing, even fickle. Plus the presence of god himself is overwhelming, impossible even, and can only be broached through mediators. When god doespresent himself, he emphasizes the contingency of his desire, and how his mission is sustained through equally contingent covenants.

And we know, in addition, that this center was constantly violated (and so is violable) causing changes in the religious and social economy. And that the Israelites were aware of this (otherwise the entire genre of prophecy wouldn't make sense.)

At this point, it's hard to say what we really mean by 'center' here, except something that changes in an on-going manner, but with enough consistency to allow relative continuity. Ancient people seemed quite aware of the fragility and fickleness of a 'center'.

The expression of this more sophisticated theoretical idea of a center seems analogous to a person who didn't understand social cues, but slowly observed people interacting and put together a theory and then announced to a group his theory of human behavior - 'yes, we know' most of them over the age of 30 would say, 'We were waiting for you to get it. Only we're not sure you do, because you still think we don't.'

And so the question arises, who is really defending 'center' qua what derrida is saying a center has to be? Hegel isn't really. It seems like the person who needs this center is....Derrida, through the projected desires of others.

[and then, of course, you can deconstruct the need for him to need a center, and so it goes.]

The point is - the whole enterprise brings you right back to where you started. I think it's necessary for thought, but I think that's also just thought catching up to reality. And that's why, in the end, the same philosophical questions survive the deconstructive storm. Integrate the storm, but there's no point in bringing everything back to it.

But I think what I want to say that local conditions of sense are already this 'deeper' sense of transcendentality; or that the deep manifests itself in the local, and only as the local. So in this sense one can speak of something like a 'transcendental empiricism' in the vein of Deleuze: in which the transcendental is manifest at the level of the empirical, without collapsing into it. Or: the two senses of the transcendental can't be - should not be - treated as separate. — StreetlightX

Yeah, that makes sense. My cosmogenic framing doesn't really work, since regularity can't arise without some singular situation which exhibits regularity. You can't treat one as temporally prior.

Still, there is a sense in which regularity is separable in principle from local conditions*, in the way any platonic idea is separate from its instantiations. [deleuzian caveat that ideas are themselves emergent, rather than imposed from without.]

The reason I mention this is that you'd responded to my focusing on the specificity of the example, by bringing it back to cinnabar, sunrises etc. The only way I can understand that response is to see 'houses become flowers' as really meaning 'things can't just turn into something else willy-nilly (tangential historical curiosity : Didn't Husserl, in Ideas, use this idea to try to show how consciousness can survive the destruction of the world?)

Or to put this another way - if the example is meant to show how local conditions are enough, without drawing on 'deeper' transcendality, then something has gone wrong when the example is shored up by explaining how its not houses and flowers per se, but the cinnabar thing.

The only reason I'm being so nitpicky here, is that I'm really, really interested in what the current situation is. If the example doesn't work except as an illustration of a more general principle, I think that does leave it very open to a Derridean take. Houses can turn into flowers, easily enough. What transformations can't we think (which transformations really make us strain)? I think that that by definition is a more challenging question, but its exactly what thinking otherwise is all about. (one more plug for Sloterdijk. Love his views or hate them, this is what I belive he tries to do.)

For all the (justified) spleen against Derrida (which I share), the OP seems to be right in his wheelhouse, so maybe @Joshs is justified in his approach to the OP


-----------
*maybe 'distinction of thought' is more approprite here.

@StreetlightX

I've been thinking about this a bit more. Building on what's been said. It seems like there's two conversations going on, and most of the confusion comes from that.

One is a kind of Wittgensteinan conversation about local conditions of sense. This was what I think I was going on about.

The other -cinnabar, sunrises - is far more general. It's also transcendental, but a deeper -or logically prior - transcendentality, which is about the necessity of regularity to talk about anything at all.

If you were to write a cosmogenic poem, you'd have chaos first, then a baseline regularity, then the emergence of specific concepts - houses, flowers etc. The deeper, or prior, condition would be the condition for later conditions.

One conversation brings us back to Kant. The other is an invitation to create some kind of 'cogntive map' of the present in order to pinpoint areas with some potential to disrupt/create new senses. (Though that makes it sound like disruption or novelty are intrinsically valuable. It would probably be better to say something like : if you know where you're at, then you'll know where to go.)

This latter approach characterizes thinkers like Sloterdijk or Lyotard (I'm of course evangelizing for my faves).

In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure
implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in
fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such
singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that
it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of
sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the
central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences. — Joshs

Sure, but then :

This argument, this structured argument relies on a central concept. This center is the desire for presence, or a center. In order to maintain it's structure it has to has to characterize all metaphysical projects as having, at their core, some desire for a self-present center.

But this is a mischaracterization and such attempts to impose such a center at the heart of all metaphysical inquiry can only be a violence of thought. So it is necessary to begin to think that there is no such center

and then you can perform the same operation on that structured argument, to make a new one, and so on forever, just spinning your wheels, not being able to say anything. And then you want to say - this not being able to say anything is itself what I'm trying to say. So maybe you write being but cross it out, or come up with a term like differance.

Hey, but wait this seems a lot like a center around which a discourse is structured!
No, no, we thought that too, that's why we crossed it out. It's being crossed out signifies that all attempts to talk about it just replicate endlessly into a void and its ultimately futile, but we keep doing it anway, because...


It is sort of like when the alcoholic - it was a good metaphor you used - no longer thinks he'll find satisfaction in drink, but keeps drinking. Before, he was looking for a good time. Now, he's looking for a good time.

But he can't stop. Why?

My hunch: Derrida isn't really talking about 'metaphysics', whatever that is. He's talking about a particular kind of anxiety, and then projecting that anxiety onto everything. And anxious people, or a certain sort of anxious person, can't stop talking.

And as I also mentioned to Banno, this kind of question finds its lineage in Hume on induction (maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow), and in Kant on knowledge more generally (the cinnabar that turns red and black and light by turns); More recently in Meillassoux on radical contingency (physical law might and can change at any point, for no reason whatsoever). — StreetlightX

ohhh,ok, yeah. I'd missed your post to Banno. Now I'm in the embarrassing position of more or less agreeing entirely.

That bit about physical 'univocity' and weaker categories and all that was kinda cool, though, right? I felt pretty clever as I was thinking about it and posting, like I was doing DIY marxist epistemology or something. I smoked a triumphant cigarette on my lunch break after posting, lol.

I 'm not sure about all of that.

I know that in regard to this:

(1) Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers.
(2) Acorns do not turn into flowers.
(3) Houses do not turn into flowers

you were gesturing toward the possibility of deconstructing the difference, so that there was no real difference in kind.

But - there is a factual difference in kind. Namely, the understanding of them as different, by english speakers. That has to be accounted for. As does any distinction between center and margins. We couldn't deconstruct the opposition between center and margin if we didn't already understand the distinction. Maybe the distinction is grounded in this or that; still the difference is there, as a fact of distinction.. So deconstruct away, but you'll need to reconstruct in order to explain the fact of the distinction itself.

. There are certainly regions, modalities, groupings to be pointed to, with associated normative features, but when it comes to the 'between regions' , I don't Heidegger or Derrida as wanting to accord any special relevance to this in-between such as to imply a centeredness to normative conventions. — Joshs

But in talking about the triplet of examples (in cavell, or wittgenstein) there's clearly a felt, intuitive, difference between the first two and the third. Maybe there's no ultimate metaphysical difference, but then you have to explain how the indifferent background creates the felt, intutive, difference between the first two and the third. So, ultimately, the long derridean detour brings you right back to where you already were.

I'm in good company then. :grin: I often enough feel the same way, but haven't been able to find a stringent argument for it. — javra

The best I can gesture toward is something like - experience has to have some kind of temporal element (having just been, is, moving toward) so it can't emerge at a moment. But that would need a lot of work to support, and it still feels just slightly tangential to some more central thing.

Yeah, but you're still treating things in terms of purity and impurity. As far as the second, argument - I don't know why life's structured so you have to make it meaningful, but it is, and as far as I can tell there's no one who made it that way, so there's no one to ask for reasons or to argue with that it should be otherwise.

If you're born, then I think the only way forward is that way. If you're arguing for antinatalism, 99.99% of people don't have or not have children based on philosophical argument, so it doesn't matter.

(I also have an idea similar to Javra's maybe, that people aren't brought from nothing into the world, its more like a redistribution of consciousness, so antibatalism wouldn't work anyway, but I can't really argue that, at least not anytime soon.)

Just add in “mystical unquantifiable mix of the two” of you want. I’ll allow it. — schopenhauer1

But then the first argument, based on ratios, wouldn't work.

Given that actualizing nothingness is a metaphysical impossibility, I’d say that the quote-unquote mission is there because there is no other way—metaphysical or otherwise—of alleviating existential suffering at large than via increased understanding. — javra

Three cheers. This is my view as well.

What if I said I predicted this idea was going to be brought forward? — schopenhauer1

I don't know, what if I said I predicted you were going to make a post defending nothingness instead of experience?

But, my point isn't that your categories aren't exhaustive, or don't carve up reality in the right way. I mean the entire approach of dividing life into good versus bad experiences in the first place, and then thinking about the ratio of one to the other.

I disagree that that's why it was in quotes. The way one differentiates between mental and physical illness is simply to use the word "mental" or "physical." The reason mental illness was put in quotes was to question whether there really was such a thing. — Hanover

Well, there are definitely things that happen to people that are not good and are not primarily physical. I don't think anyone was denying that. But calling it 'mental illness' is to suggest that it is a certain kind of thing - like a physical illness, only mental. So the idea is that this is misleading, and contributes to methods of treatment which are not felicitous.

I have sympathy for your personal experiences, but this comment seems to admit to the two things I was arguing for (1) that there is such a thing as mental illness, and (2) psychologists can and do help. Your complaint seems to be that you were burdened with some really bad therapists, but if you're acknowledging there is such a thing as good therapy, then the failure is in systematizing it so that it can be predictably available to everyone. — Hanover

Yes, I think there is such a thing as good therapy, though I probably overstated the degree to which it's contributed to my relative stabilization. It's a big part of it, but only one factor in a sort of recovery ecosystem.
When this works, I think it usually works in spite of the existing paradigm. 'Systematizing it so that it can be predictably available to everyone' - I don't know. It makes me think of studies that show religion and a sense of community are good for people. But there would be no way to systematize it so that it could be predictably available without, in so doing, creating something totally different than what you were trying to make available.

I have a hunch that looking at life as something that can be carved up into discrete experiences which are either good or bad contributes majorly to an overall despair, or at least melancholy.

I don't know much about Kripke but it seems weird to talk about 'houses' as a rigid designator. don't those only apply to individuals or natural kinds?

All I'll say is that I what I'm arguing for can accommodate this (as I've already acknowledged!), and, that this is not an example of reading meaning off physics. — StreetlightX

Oh, Iagree, I didn't mean that as an example of reading meaning off physics.

What I mean is that our understanding of what makes something something is very bound up with physics. By that, I'm not making any metaphysical claim, where physics would be the ultimate, or most literal, description of what is. I just mean the process by whichwe determine the disruptiveness of a certain claim often relies very heavily on physical possibility/impossibility. Even if our concepts of houses and flowers weren't read off the physical, we've since read the physical back into them. Since most people today are working with a background idea of a kind of physical univocity, most people have no problem with houses becoming flowers, provided everything checks out on a physical level. I think I understand the point of the OP, but I also think the example literally doesn't do what it's supposed to (by relying on an outdated man-made vs organic dichotomy)

What I mean is that our singular situation is one in which many categories (especially ones involving physical objects)are treated much more fluidly than in older societies, because there is an underlying sense of ultimate physical equivalence. Anything can be something else, or both, with a little help

Which is why i think the people discussing physical reality both are and aren't missing the point. I think it does matter that the example has to force itself to work, it needs a lot of intepretive scaffolding.

So a few people now have mentioned 'physics' - as though 'physics' could tell us what we call houses and what we call flowers; but this of course is a silly idea, as though one could read our language 'off' the physical characteristics of the world. As though a kind of pre-established harmony existed between word and thing. How ironic that those who speak of physics are theologians in disguise. What is missed is language - human language, and what we do with it. — StreetlightX

Hey, I'm on of those people, and I don't think I'm being theological! (though if I am, I guess there are worse things to be)

I mentioned physics because I think that's the only level on which the example comes close to doing what you're saying it's supposed to do. So, again, we can imagine an architect working with biological materials, creating a house that, literally, becomes a flower. This would be a novelty, and a lot people would 'gram themselves in front of it, but more or less everything we understand 'house' and 'flower' to mean would remain intact. It's not difficult at all to integrate the phrase 'houses turn into flowers' into our current understanding. What would be difficult, for us, our language-community, is to imagine a house not designed to become a flower, spontaneously coming a flower. But why is that hard, for us?

It's a matter - or at least, this is how I read what you're bringing up - of bringing history and 'materiality' back into the fold: what are the singularities of the situation that we need to pay attention to; the inflexion points, the points of instablity or opportunity or pain (in this time and in this space) which can be exploited or brought into play such that something new (= new meaning, new significance) can be introduced (in the most pragmatic(?) way). — Sx

Our understanding of physics is part of our situation, part of our singularity. So, double-ironically, you seem to be treating physics, theologically, as some pre-given reservoir from which 'our' language ought to be separated. But of course, our understanding of physics is, itself, part of our language, our situation. And it's that part of our language, our common understanding, which could be shaken by the example. Otherwise, all you have is the grammable flower-house, which is cool, but doesn't really change much.

@Anaxagoras You're getting ready to venture out into the jungle. What are your thoughts on borderline personality disorder (or NPD, HPD etc)?

Why is mental illness in quotes? Does it not really exist? — Hanover

Well, based on the context, the quotes are clearly meant to differentiate it from physical illnesses, and associated approaches to curing them. The picture of the Aurora guy is lurid and eye-grabbing, but based on what Leo's saying, it seems clear to me that he isn't suggesting the aurora guy was ok, mostly. He's suggesting that pills would help less than acceptance, respect, support and a listening ear. The best diagnosis they had for aurora guy was borderline personality disorder, something famously resistant to pills, or any attempt to treat it as some kind of contingent affliction which can be treated in isolation from the person as whole. It's a very serious 'mental illness' which takes a long time to treat, and the success of which treatment depends on very, very careful handling. Which, to be fair, the last psychiatrists he came into contact implicitly admitted, by wiping her hands of him after he repeatedly sought help, saying she thought trying to treat him would just make him mad.

And what do you base your suggestion that the majority in the mental health field reject, disrespect, ignore, and refuse to support their patients? — Hanover, just before posting a pic of James Holmes as a trump card

Anyway, this is not an unusual approach to people who present with BPD, as any in-the-trenches psychiatrist will tell you. This is very clearly a bad example, not in service of you argument. So why did you choose it?

I think it's telling that your response to someone who is discussing how people with mental illness are shamed and stigmatized, making their problems worse - how the response is to post a highly inflammatory image meant to evoke the worst fears that people have about mental illness (fears shared by the mentally ill themselves.) Damn you're right, that's the aurora guy for christ's sake, look at his eyes, people really do have mental illness, they have them bad, so it is a good thing the mental health community was there to say 'we can't help' and help ingrain an idea of unable-to-be-helped' into his sense of who he was and what he was dealing with. Checkmate, new age Laingians.

It's this approach, and others like it, that leads to such stuff like: a pilot can be grounded if it comes out they have mental illness because fears of suicide-by-plane, so they hide their mental illness, so they can't work through it, so they get worse, which makes them more like to commit suicide by plane, which they're able to do, because they haven't revealed they have mental illness, so they're not grounded. (moral: even if you don't want to yield to some virtue-signalling idea that we should be concerned for the well-being of one person, because that's less important than the safety of society as a whole, you still make it unsafe for society as a whole. Arguing brass tacks here ultimately makes you defend Ideas at the expense of brass tacks.)

[edit: fired up, because this is a personal topic for me. I was lost for a long time in the system, out of the system, back in the system - untiI Ifound a therapist who actually seemed to care, or think me as something other than an in-the-wild example of a DSM species. The mental health industry in the US is terrible, from everything I've seen. There are exceptions, but they're exceptions. Most seasoned psychiatrists will admit this off-the-record. I don't know if anyone's to blame - but its a fact.

Restraint seems to be a value in political correctness - "Gasp! You can't say that! No! You can't do that!" - but I question such a value. Sometimes I just think, "No, fuck that". — S

A little tangential, but I think it's essentially related.

One thing I've noticed in contemporary discussion is a kind a dialectic, where someone argues against something, only to become its mirror image.

Maybe you don't care about the manichaean culture war and you just do what you've always done, ignoring it. But, at some point, just doing what you've always done, someone lodges an unreasonable, uncharitable complaint. Ah, you think, so this is what people mean by 'political correctness.' I get it now. It's not just about protecting the powerless. At bottom, there's some malevolent, recalcitrant intent, some dissimulating eagerness to punish those who aren't party-loyal.


So maybe you pull a Stephen Fry and say, look, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but this is something I think is harmful. More attacks. Which is infuriating. These people are even more unreasonable than you thought. Fuck them, I'm going to stop even pretending to entertain them. And you're mad, so you start focusing on things they believe, in order to furnish counterexamples.

Frog in boiling water, before you know it your driving force is no longer to defend your values against a misguided, vocal minority.Now your driving force is to show that theyre wrong, by any means. @ssu for example raised a moderate complaint, but was soon pointing to maps of muslim migration, with the same graphic design as war-charts, and asking why wouldn't you call that invasion, doesn't this chart look like one? I've read many of his posts before and he doesn't strike me as someone who would typically be prone to mixing up design choice and fact, but all of a sudden...

What I'm saying is be careful of framing stuff this way. It's easy as hell to justify oneself in terms of what other people are doing.

Alright, but to be blunt, that wiki description also applies perfectly to some like Andy Dick, say, who is just an asshole.

I think there's a false dichotomy going on. There's a difference between only saying things so long as they accord with the nomos, or doxa and saying things impudently.

Now, I'm not opposed to impudence in general, tho I think there's good and bad ways of doing it. But the point of impudence and shamelessness is to evoke an emotional, rather than reasoned, reaction. If you don't want that, then deliver those non-nomos insights in a different form.

I think that discussion probably really only meant to be a criticism of weaponising psychology. We all do that here to some extent, even those arrogant and deluded enough to think of themselves as innocent, whilst thinking of someone like me as a villain. I think that the author of that discussion confused frankness for malice. That happens to me a lot, because I'm very blunt, and funnily enough some people react emotionally to that. — S

I have a close friend who had a similar complaint. His style was to be blunt, and it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. (But also, he's tall and good-looking, and, in his teens and early 20s, it rubbed a lot of women the right way. So it took him a while to become actually concerned about the fact that a lot people thought he was a dick.)

There's a hairs-breadth between being frank and being an asshole. It's no good to be deferential to good taste, just to make sure the boat isn't being rocked, but it's also no good to just be like : you're wrong, I'm right, what are you gonna do about it?

Because an emotional reaction isn't a deficiency in a person (I'm differentiating here between genuine reactions and performative outrage. Another duo, where each looks confusingly like the other.) Emotional reactions are a fact, and to act as though they shouldn't be taken into account when talking is to replace the world one's in with an imaginative ideal world and to blame others for not being in accordance with that imaginary ideal.

(this is the 'good, reasonable' part of me speaking from a soapbox. I'm as guilty as anyone. But it's something I try, poorly, to keep in mind.)

See, this seems very productive to me. And yet we see people fighting against this sort of discussion, against taking a psychological angle. — S

I guess psychological approaches can go two ways. You can use them to undermine people's arguments, as a below the belt punch, for the sake of victory. Or you can genuinely feel that there is some kind of block that is beyond the argument itself, and the only way through it is to address is it to talk at that level.

It sounds like you're referring to a recent discussion on here, which I've missed, so I'm not sure what was going on there. The tricky thing is the two approaches can look a lot like each other, so it's not always clear what's going on. It's definitely an approach I take a lot, and I think it really can be productive, but honestly sometimes I'm not sure what my motivations are, and which of the two approaches I'm using. Multiply that times five, if I'm posting after having hit the bars.

It irks me that people advocate what seems to me to be so wrong, and I am driven to correct it, even if I am destined never to convince anyone — S

Yeah, I feel you. That might be my primary motivation for posting too, if I'm honest, only different things irritate us. I feel like it's a way of externalizing self-frustration. Like, the more obstinate the parts of you that frustrate you are, the more you seek out obstinate opponents. Which is why it's not really that satisfying if someone agrees with you, because now the opponents gone, and you still have the self-frustration. I guess that's well beyond the scope of this thread though.

I'm not disputing that you're arguing in favor of the truth. Everyone is, or believes themselves to be, if they're ingenuously engaged in philosophical debate. What I'm saying is that that isn't a motivation. You do, it's true, argue about other things. But - I'm making assumptions here - you don't spend time studying weather patterns and arguing on meterology forums. Of the set of truths, there is only a subset that you're interested in - as is the case for anyone. You have to be motivated to pick out certain things to argue about, in favor of the truth.

And there has to be something you're trying to achieve in those arguments. Maybe you want them to agree with you (why?). Maybe you're trying to achieve a certain emotional state. Maybe you're playing a role to be witnessed by someone else. Maybe you're trying to work out your own thoughts in the matter. Maybe you think that argument in and of itself is therapeutic and works out conceptual knots which are troubling you.

What I'm asking is why Idealism, and what are you trying to achieve?

My suspicion is that there is a an element of jousting in public for the sake of a certain banner, or lord. That's something I've done, a lot, throughout my life, so maybe I'm projecting, but the way you talk about truth seems to mirror that, as though arguing in favor of something, truth, is itself a motivation.

And I'm not arguing against them because I'm arguing for someone else, I'm arguing against them because I'm arguing in favour of the truth, as I see it, and for no other reason. — S

The truth will take care of itself though. As you know, being a realist, a truth is indifferent to whether someone knows it.

Plus also, people are wrong about all sorts of truths. Why aren't you arguing about those other ones?

'Arguing in favor of the truth,' then, isn't an explanation of why are you're arguing against idealists, or the way in which you're doing so.

If this doesn't matter, then why aren't we all solipsists? — S

Well, there is something performatively solipsistic in arguing against people on your own terms, knowing they won't argue on those terms.

(Though solipsistic isn't really the right word. You're not arguing with them. You're arguing against them, for someone else.That's a rabbit hole worth going down, imo. Who is your implied audience? I think that's a personal meditation everyone ought to do every now and then.)

But no, you really mean that houses turn into flowers. After a moment of shock, assuming you're not joshing me, I realize I no longer know what counts as a house; nor a flower. The world in which these terms took on their significance has been totally upended for me. Note that something has shifted massively between the first and second 'receptions' of the claim 'houses turn into flowers'. The 'metaphorical reception' 'fits' into the world I know: I still know, despite the metaphorical use, what here counts as a flower and house. The literal reception throws that all out of what: what counts any more as a house or a flower? I'm no longer sure, the grammar of my concepts needs to be revised; what kind of thing(s) I say about houses and flowers needs to be revised. — StreetlightX

But I think if fdrake really did say that to you, in real life, and you had established he wasn't joking, what would actually happen is (1) you would worry for his mental health or (2) you would expect some kind of explanation of what he means. You would expect him to expect that you'd be shocked, you'd expect that he would be aware of the effect that sentence would have on you, and so be prepared to help you make sense of it. It would be meaningful that he said it 'out of the blue'.If he kept it at that level, maintained it's out-of-the-blueness without aiding you - then you would probably ascribe to him either some sort of hostility or a zen-like approach to koan you into a higher understanding.*

But say fdrake told you that with every intent to guide you through the meaning. He DM'ed you, but then his internet went down, leaving you to puzzle over what he meant. I think there are a lot of steps you would take before jettisoning your conceptual grammar. (There are a lot of levels here, but I think what this example is essentially playing with is our understanding of the physical and biological world. It's less about houses and flowers, and more about what physical transformations we think are possible. Like, if some architect created a house with biological materials, such that it really did, at some point, become a flower, I don't think that would mess with our heads too much. I mean, I'd almost be surprised if there isn't some architect who really has already done something like this. This might be one of the things you take fdrake to mean, before moving to deep conceptual revision. )

I know this could seem like I'm missing the point by focusing too specifically on the particular example, rather than what it's meant to show. But - if we're talking about statements the acceptance of which would entail major revisions of 'conceptual grammar', I think the pragmatic dimension would play as important a role as the semantic/syntactic dimenions (etc. I don't know enough about linguistics to know if I'm saying this right.)

Considering this idea from the lens of D&G's' conceptual personae'. Absent any pragmatic specifications (besides establishing that the ohter person isn't joking), the conceptual persona in this example, the one sent reeling by learning that 'houses turn into flowers,' would be a sort of tortured, childlike, prophet (God will destroy the city, god will build it back up) whose cognitive defenses against categorial chaos are tragically underdeveloped,

A: Giving birth is how you log onto the internet.
B: Ha, good one!
A: No, I'm serious
B: WHAT IS REAL?

_____________
* [edit: Or maybe a narcissistic indifference, even unawareness of its effects. But here, and I think this important, this wouldn't fit your relationship with fdrake. It would better characterize the attitude of adult to whom it wouldn't even occur that a child wouldn't make sense of what he said. Or an an expert talking to a layman. I think these traumatic irruptions probably happen a lot, but in different settings, and this relativity of effect to setting seems key]

@StreetlightX I do think @S answered your question.

But I didn't ask you to spell everything out. I asked you quite specifically about what force of necessity the distinction you've drawn has. What motivates it? Why this distinction, and not any other of the rather fanciful ones I came up with? — StreetlightX

It's this distinction, rather than others, because a bunch of people came up with the philosophy of idealism — S

There is a motivation there. It's just a reactive, rather than creative one. It's taking something that's already there and using it, in order to define oneself against some clearly demarcated, monolithic tradition of Hocus Pocus.

I feel like that is a type of philosophy. It's not OLP, tho. It's whatever New Atheism is, in essence. More charitably, I guess you could call it Voltairism.

in any case, on to joshua!

Hebrew poetry reminds me a little of 12-bar blues: repetition and resolution. Maybe that's a leftover from oral transmission? — frank

I'm supplementing my reading with lectures from the Yale Open Course on the OT and the professor seems to think that might be it - that or, maybe it was written down, but read aloud, and the repetition would help the key points stick for the illiterate audience.

I think there's something to what you said. I found the end of deuteronomy beautiful, and part of that was the delayed release. (also appreciate, being done with it, the repetition. a lot of stuff about e.g the role of levites stuck that wouldnt have if they didnt say it eighteen times.)

Yeah, I've meant to read it for a really long time. I like it mostly so far, though the repetition in the pentateuch can be wearying at times.

The Bostonians Henry James
The Bible

He's also really got a thing against the Roma. The settled/unsettled distinction that runs through the essay is unpleasant and has unpleasant implications.

I know the essay on nationalism, per se, isn't the focus of this thread, and I don't really have an opinion on whether Scruton should be tarred and feathered, but I think it's interesting how he proceeds in his essay, because it's wildly incoherent.

The whole first part is about how the EU is bound to fail because it's artificially imposing economic and political homogeneity on a deeply heterogeneous group of cultures. This can only be disastrous. What must be attended to are particular cultures, what makes them distinct. This must be the basis for unified, organic goverment

So, what makes Hungary distinct?

All that is distinctive of the Hungarian experience – the shock of the Treaty of Trianon, which divided the Hungarian people from each other, the distinctive culture of a land-locked country in which a large population of Roma has never properly settled, the still present record of the country's struggle against Islamic domination – all this too has been ignored. — Scruton

Disunity and political shock, apparently.


Later, Scruton makes a distinction between nationalism and national loyalty.

Nationalism is an ideological attempt to supplant customary and neighbourly loyalties with something more like a religious loyalty – a loyalty based on doctrine and commitment. Ordinary national loyalty, by contrast, is the by-product of settlement. It comes about because people have ways of resolving their disputes, ways of getting together, ways of cooperating, ways of celebrating and worshipping that seal the bond between them without ever making that bond explicit as a doctrine.

The undercurrent here is Burke. Customs, culture etc are built up over time, organically - Centuries of trial and error streamline them in a sort of evolutionary process. Those customs which work survive; those which don't, die out. This makes them much more resilient and successful than any kind of organization imposed top-down.

This is what Scruton wants, not 'nationalism.' That's great, but, by Scruton's own conception, it can't simply be implemented. It can only come about as a by-product of something else.

So what does Scruton really mean when he says the following?

For there is no alternative to nationality. If the government in Budapest is to enjoy legitimacy, that legitimacy must come from below, from the people whose unity and identity is expressed in the workings of government. This legitimacy must be inherited by each government, whether right or left, whether minority or majority. It must not be a loyalty of cliques, or a reprimand to the peasantry issued by the intellectuals of Budapest, or an edict issued by the true Hungarians in the villages against the traitors in the city.

-----
Recap:

The EU is traumatic for Hungary because it doesn't govern according to the particular, settled culture of Hungary, which is characterized by unsettled Roma and historical trauma. Hungary should instead be governed according to its shared culture of not having a shared culture. This shared culture can only develop very slowly over time, and we need it right now.