When I rest as the pure and simple Witness, I notice that I am not caught in the world of time. The Witness exists only in the timeless present. Yet again, this is not a state that is difficult to achieve but impossible to avoid. The Witness sees only the timeless present because only the timeless present is actually real. When I think of the past, those past thoughts exist right now, in this present. When I think of the future, those future thoughts exist right now, in this present. Past and future thoughts both arise right now, in simple ever-present awareness.

The eternal Now, eternally self-present, is the eye of the storm of life, the frame of every picture, or perhaps the canvas on which it is painted. The past is memory. The future is fantasy. Or perhaps the past too is fantasy. Perhaps I have never actually slept (been unconscious) but only witnessed a sudden change in the lighting of the room, the conversion of silence to the sound of an alarm clock (or so I remember or fantasize.) If only The Subject endures, all else is unreal, for only the eternal is real.

Precisely because the ultimate reality is not anything seen but rather the Seer, it doesn’t matter in the least what is seen in any moment. Whether you see peace or turmoil, whether you see equanimity or agitation, whether you see bliss or terror, whether you see happiness or sadness, matters not at all: it is not those states but the Seer of those states that is already Free.

Changing states is thus beside the point; acknowledging the ever-present Seer is the point.

This is a bit of a tangent, but...what a remarkable claim !

Derrida (quoted below) might sometimes be said to exaggerate, but I think the pure witness (which is presented most boldly and directed by that metaphysics which is explicitly mystical) is an excellent crystallization of the priority of presence. That which is ever-present and enduring is 'The Subject,' which in the mystical context is not merely an intellectual but a spiritual goal, an ecstatic realization.
///////////////////////////////////////////////
The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk.In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier." The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism...

...absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning.We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with...the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/ essence/ existence / ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito...

The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic "science" cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified...without the difference between sensible and intelligible, certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to "take place" in its intelligibility, before its "fall," before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God.

Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at first of demonstrating the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently separated. The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth.

Another relevant quote.
/////////////////////////////////////
The voice is heard ( understood ) ­... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many ---since it is the condition of the very idea of truth... Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity --- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility --- as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word," the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in all language and...only this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense of being in general...Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word "being" nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language..., at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity...
///////////////////////////////////////////
What is the relation of the self-present subject and language ? Or between being and language? Since the 'pure witness' seems to gesture at the 'thereness' of that which is there. 'It's not how but that the world is that's mystical.' Does each subject have ineffable private access to Being ? Should one be silent on such matters? Witt didn't mind saying at least his little piece. Or should one dissipate the glad tidings that thou art that ? Or found science on pure intuitions? Or challenge the intelligibility of such claims? Or live half-in half-out of the game? (I think Derrida sets Saussure ajar.)

When I rest in simple, clear, ever-present awareness, I am the Witness of the World. I am the eye of Spirit. I see the world as God sees it. I see the world as the Goddess sees it. I see the world as Spirit sees it: every object an object of Beauty, every thing and event a gesture of the Great Perfection, every process a ripple in the pond of my own eternal Being, so much so that I do not stand apart as a separate witness, but find the witness is one taste with all that arises within it. The entire Kosmos arises in the eye of Spirit, in the I of Spirit, in my own intrinsic awareness, this simple ever-present state, and I am simply that.

https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/

This sounds great, and I believe it describes a possible if probably unsustainable state of the heart. Conceptual rigor is not the point. That might be the best way to defend this variety of metaphysics. Calling it 'poetry' is too dismissive and might dampen its effect. But calling it 'science' flatters something that doesn't prioritize its own correction, confident already in its own completeness.

cf. Plato's Intelligible World (Being), consisting of:

1) First Principle (The Demiurge), having Intellect (Absolute Knowledge).

2) External Personhood (The Self-Mover), having External Intellect (Knower and Known).

3) Pure (Contemplative) Knowledge.

Perhaps you could expand on that?

All of modern philosophy, (....), breaking through in Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

Is it the specific wording in the quote, that makes Descartes not important enough to include with the others? Descartes was the first in modern, re: post-medieval, philosophy to separate the objective from the subjective, but Kant was the author of the transcendental ego as such. Just seems like ol’ Rene got left out for some reason.
—————

The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. — jas0n

Absolutely, and should go far in making analytic language philosophy only that which is mere leftovers from the real philosophy already done.
—————

calling it 'science' flatters something that doesn't prioritize its own correction, confident already in its own completeness. — jas0n

While science as a doctrine, without regard to its objects, is complete in itself, it is logic that prioritizes its own correction. Now if there was a science predicated on logic, and that purely logical science could ground a metaphysical theory, there would still not be a transcendental ego given from it necessarily, but there may arise a purely speculative system by which it is represented, and that can be given to members of the public as an opportunity to look at themselves.
————-

Interesting topic, all in all. If I had a problem with it I couldn’t let go of, it would be including Hume. That guy was an card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant empiricist, with all the negative implications with respect to pure subjectivity that philosophy entails.

Just seems like ol’ Rene got left out for some reason. — Mww

Good point!

Absolutely, and should go far in making analytic language philosophy only that which is mere leftovers from the real philosophy already done. — Mww

So...would you say that reasoning is ultimately independent of language? Philosophy tends to be understood as that which should be especially translatable, while poetry, depending on the sounds of contingent signifiers, is on the other end. Is 'thought' a kind of content which is clothed in words? Or is an equivalence class of intersubstitutable strings a better approach?

While science as a doctrine, without regard to its objects, is complete in itself, — Mww

I was thinking in terms of a body of theories and conjectures that continues to grow. We had Newton. Then we also had Einstein. And so on.

that purely logical science could ground a metaphysical theory, there would still not be a transcendental ego given from it necessarily, but there may arise a purely speculative system by which it is represented, and that can be given to members of the public as an opportunity to look at themselves. — Mww

Care to elaborate? Do you mean the transcendental ego could be invented as a concept and shared?

If I had a problem with it I couldn’t let go of, it would be including Hume. That guy was an card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, unrepentant empiricist, with all the negative implications with respect to pure subjectivity that philosophy entails. — Mww

Husserl is eccentric perhaps ?

would you say that reasoning is ultimately independent of language? — jas0n

Yes. Reasoning is what the human intellect seems to do, by its very nature, pursuant to brain machinations. Language, or objective signage in general, merely stands as representation of the intellect expressing the reasoning it appears to do.
————

Is 'thought' a kind of content which is clothed in words? — jas0n

I prefer the doctrine that the human intellect functions in the private domain of images. In that regard, yes, thought, which is reasoning proper, is clothed in words, insofar as it is impossible to inform similar intellects by means of images.
————

the transcendental ego could be invented as a concept and shared? — jas0n

Invented as an explanatory device in accordance with a theory from which its possibility arises, yes. No empirical theory is in principle provable with apodeitic certainty, but theories with purely logical predication at least obtain their own kind of “if this, then that necessarily” certainty, so sharing a purely logical conception presents its own difficulties. You get a whole boatload of blank looks when you say a guy’s entire rationality is determined by his transcendental ego. Hence, Berkeley’s “vulgar caste”, Hume’s “vulgar understanding”, Kant’s “most commonplace reason”.
————

Husserl is eccentric perhaps ? — jas0n

Nahhhh....I wouldn’t say that. Ed just wanted to be a better Kantian than Kant. Or a more complete Kantian, perhaps. But he was never the metaphysical paradigm shift as Kant, even while presenting stuff for his peers and successors to think about.
————-

Question, if you don’t mind:

The ruling metaphor here is the eye which can see everything but itself. — jas0n

How would you translate the ruling metaphor into a definition? Or is the metaphor sufficient for a definition?

OK...two questions.

the ultimate reality is not something seen, but rather the ever-present Seer.

Have you thought about how this ties in with Taoism and other eastern philosophies. The ultimate reality in Taoism, the Tao, is not human or conscious. In a sense, consciousness creates our world, the multiplicity, from unspeakable oneness. This view seems contradictory to the one you describe.

The eternal Now, eternally self-present, is the eye of the storm of life, the frame of every picture, or perhaps the canvas on which it is painted. The past is memory. The future is fantasy. .) If only The Subject endures, all else is unreal, for only the eternal is real. — jas0n

This is the absolute antithesis of phenomenology. To be self-present is to be altered in the very act of turning back to oneself. So there is no eternal present , no pure self-reflecting subject. The present , the ‘now’ does not exist outside of the tripartite structure of retention and protention. All three of these phases belong to the immediate now.

Heidegger argues:

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is
in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger’s unification of the components of time.
“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37)

This is the absolute antithesis of phenomenology. To be self-present is to be altered in the very act of turning back to oneself. So there is no eternal present , no pure self-reflecting subject. The present , the ‘now’ does not exist outside of the tripartite structure of retention and protention. — Joshs

I don't know if it's truly an antipode. You still seem to present an eternally present tripartite structure or primordial form of experience.

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37) — Joshs

Good stuff.

How would you translate the ruling metaphor into a definition? Or is the metaphor sufficient for a definition? — Mww

I think the transcendental ego is mostly a failure, or let's say it succeeds until it's looked at sufficiently closely. I emphasize the metaphor as a kind of seductive picture. To deduce the seer from the seen might be just chugging along in grammar. If you start with a given understood as seen (or as appearance), then 'of course' there's an intellectual eye and something 'behind' appearance. I think Witt is right on this one, that philosophy is largely a battle against language, and yet of and within it.

Reasoning is what the human intellect seems to do, by its very nature, pursuant to brain machinations. Language, or objective signage in general, merely stands as representation of the intellect expressing the reasoning it appears to do. — Mww

To me this is plausible and useful, but perhaps Derrida and others destabilize this position. In any case, it seems close to the physical/mental distinction. 'Meaning' is the essence of the mental, which, like a ghost, is only visible/objective when under the sheet of the spoken or written word.

Invented as an explanatory device in accordance with a theory from which its possibility arises, yes. No empirical theory is in principle provable with apodeitic certainty, but theories with purely logical predication at least obtain their own kind of “if this, then that necessarily” certainty, so sharing a purely logical conception presents its own difficulties. You get a whole boatload of blank looks when you say a guy’s entire rationality is determined by his transcendental ego. Hence, Berkeley’s “vulgar caste”, Hume’s “vulgar understanding”, Kant’s “most commonplace reason”. — Mww

I willing to think that 'pure logic' along with 'pure meaning' (stuff behind words) are something like points at infinity, elements within a transparent/white mythology. So-called necessity can often be interpreted instead as a shared habit or a social convention. The boundary is tricky. Philosophers sometimes argue from the purported fact that they can't imagine X or can't help but imagine Y. Building/founding a theory on such introspection strikes me as problematic. All of that said, I think the transcendental ego is alive and well in the thought of its critics in a modified form as 'tribal software' (habits of reaction and interpretation, especially linguistic-logical habits.) The 'subject' is a sign/concept of great importance in such a system but does not mark the origin or source. Something like a 'we-self' is understood as prior to the 'I' which can be understood as an additional module. Schopenhauer's notion of genius as a parasite on an otherwise generic man is analogous.

Ed just wanted to be a better Kantian than Kant. Or a more complete Kantian, perhaps. But he was never the metaphysical paradigm shift as Kant, even while presenting stuff for his peers and successors to think about. — Mww

That makes sense. He came too late, I suppose. Back to back to Kant...

I don't know if it's truly an antipode. You still seem to present an eternally present tripartite structure or primordial form of experience. — jas0n

What does. it mean to say that the repetition. of change is ‘eternally present’? There certainly is no content or feeling here that is eternally present. If the now is a formal
structure, then it is one that is always filled with a different content. This is why Heidegger says that time is finite rather than infinite, becuase it is about an always unique meaning rather than a countable sequence.Not time as a ‘how long’ or ‘how much’ but as each
moment t a new way of being. And what about the alternatives to this notion of temporality within modern philosophy? They all posit , in different ways , an objective time associated with movement. This is also an ‘eternal’ notion of time, but conceived as an infinite succession of punctual nows.

There certainly is no content or feeling here that is eternally present. — Joshs

Does the 'subject' always experience in terms of a tripartite structure? If Dasein 'is' time, then frame if not the canvas is ever-present. This 'problem' haunts all ambitious philosophy...any discourse that would conquer the future by imposing a structure on 'possible experience' or its analogue.

Does the 'subject' always experience in terms of a tripartite structure? If Dasein 'is' time, then frame if not the canvas is ever-present. This 'problem' haunts all ambitious philosophy...any discourse that would conquer the future by imposing a structure on 'possible experience' or its analogue. — jas0n

Heidegger’s Dasein is not the frame , it is the in-between frames:

“Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon." "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar.” (Heidegger 2010)

“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence...Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.” (Heidegger 1995)

Heidegger’s Dasein is not the frame , it is the in-between frames: — Joshs

Good quotes! Perhaps I'm not choosing the right metaphor. The issue I'm getting at is that philosophy tends to search for and postulate deep structure. Physics gives us 'laws of nature,' and philosophy (often) gives us 'laws of reality' or 'laws of being a subject' or 'laws of meaning.' Clearly the world changes, people change. But we can find whirlpools in the chaos, shapes that are constant while their material or content changes. Braver paints Heidegger as setting us radically adrift. An era's 'understanding of being' or conceptual scheme just is reality. Or Foucault, similarly, can talk of one episteme being replaced by another. But the old criticism of relativism applies: what is the status of Heidegger's claim or Foucault's claims? Is it too a creature of its time? Will Heidegger remain true? Or is he just the barf of a moment, replaced by the next age's self-referential, self-defining barf?

Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. — Joshs

Why make it fundamental?

Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment -being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing. — Joshs

Sexy! To me this is as much poetry as philosophy...and maybe it gets a certain state of being right.

Not time as a ‘how long’ or ‘how much’ but as each
moment t a new way of being. — Joshs

Alluring. Many might agree that no moment (however smeared you prefer to conceptualize it) is like any other, that life never repeats itself exactly.

I think the transcendental ego is mostly a failure....., — jas0n

Yeah, true enough. As long as transcendental philosophy fails, so too will the transcendental ego.

Braver paints Heidegger as setting us radically adrift. An era's 'understanding of being' or conceptual scheme just is reality. Or Foucault, similarly, can talk of one episteme being replaced by another. But the old criticism of relativism applies: what is the status of Heidegger's claim or Foucault's claims? Is it too a creature of its time? Will Heidegger remain true? Or is he just the barf of a moment, replaced by the next age's self-referential, self-defining barf? — jas0n

But that’s the whole underpinning of ‘the ‘becoming-based’ thinking that took off after Hegel. That the barf of one age is replaced by the barf of the next is the basis of Nietzsche’s eternal rerun of the same, an endless parade of value systems with no ‘progressive’ direction.

Let me put it this way. Before Hegel, getting it ‘right’ in philosophy meant producing a scheme that conformed to the way things really, really are. While Kant deprived us of the ability to claim to know things in themselves, he assumed there was a real order independent of us that we could asymptotically approximate. But after Hegel , ‘getting it right’ was no longer about accurately mirroring and representing the furniture of the universe and their relations. Instead it became about capturing the nature of the becoming structure of experience. For Hegel this becoming structure could be totalized as a dialectical progression. Becoming was a ‘good’ progress with a specific logic that explained why things should get better and better as history unfolds, why social, moral, political and economic systems necessarily move towards improvement, why science can progress , even if not linearly. So there was still an element of ‘getting it right’ here , not in the capturing of the supposed fixed organization of a real universe , but in getting the dialectic logic of becoming right so that one could see history not as just any sort of random change but as a ‘good’ progress.

Nietzsche was the first to jettison the idea that there was anything to ‘get right’ about the structure of becoming, because he dumped the idea of a ‘good’ progressive direction to history. With Nietzsche and those whole follow him ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze)
one no longer critiques philosophies or sciences for ‘getting it wrong’. Instead, one can only do a genealogical analysis that sees any philosophical or scientific point of view as valid just as it is. That is, they all, in different ways, perform Husserl’s transcendental reduction. This leaves intact any system of values, beliefs , theoretical postulates, and burrows beneath it to reveal presuppositions and conditions of possibility hidden from those who espouse them. This is what deconstruction does, for instance. It is significant that , unlike earlier eras in philosophy, in critiquing each other, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault and others who follow after Nietzsche don’t use a language of correctness or incorrectness , truth and falsity , validity and invalidity, proof and falsification. Each doesn’t insist their philosophy is more ‘correct’ than their predecessors. Rather, they seek to explore becoming in richer and more intricate ways.

I would argue that we are past the era in which philosophy needs to make claims with a ‘truth status’ meant to conform to the way things ‘supposedly ‘really are’.

When people ask ‘how does a radical relativist know they are getting it right?’ they confuse what the relativist is doing with. They are inviting you to take a ride with them on a boat down the river as they act as guide. Everything you see from the boat, including yourselves and the boat , your guide will take as an example
of something that you might want to take as a fact, an empirical object , something that can be explained on the basis of laws and regularities. As guide, he doesn’t want to dissuade you from these claims , only to invite you to see if you can experience a mobile flow of change underneath your claims, not invalidating them but embellishing them in such a way that what you previously took to be simple, solid and self-identical now shows itself as harboring within itself a vibrant flow of change. Either you see this added downtime within the laws and facts or you don’t. If you don’t , your view is still valid and useful from the relativist’s perspective.

The ruling metaphor here is the eye which can see everything but itself. — jas0n

A curious metaphor, as there is no eye that sees anything, really. Our eyes don't see. We do. And we see ourselves with some frequency. So, just what is intended by this "metaphor"? What does it describe?

A curious metaphor, as there is no eye that sees anything, really. Our eyes don't see. We do. And we see ourselves with some frequency. So, just what is intended by this "metaphor"? What does it describe? — Ciceronianus

I don't think the 'pure witness' makes sense upon close examination. But the eye seems to refer to 'awareness itself' or some kind of pure consciousness that makes experience possible, a synonym for being. 'It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical.' It's what some folks seem to be trying to gesture at with 'the hard problem of consciousness.' Hard to know for sure, but it seems like what Heidegger is reaching for with being. It's noticing that 'there is a here here.' Or that 'the world worlds.' Or it's the notion of 'the given.' For some it's that which is most elusive and profound. For others, often more practically oriented, it's hysterical confusion. I'm somewhere in the middle. 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is not an empirical question. It might just be a lyrical expression of wonder, like a wolf's howling at the moon...

in getting the dialectic logic of becoming right so that one could see history not as just any sort of random change but as a ‘good’ progress. — Joshs

Yes, this is how I understand Hegel (or one interpretation that I find plausible/fascinating.) We organize our own history triumphantly, as a progress, an ascent.

With Nietzsche and those whole follow him ( Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) one no longer critiques philosophies or sciences for ‘getting it wrong’. — Joshs

I understand this, but I'm not sure that philosophers can really mean this, or at least it's hard to maintain such claims with the proper irony. 'No one is right or wrong, logic is a fiction, and I'll now prove this to you.' The quote below articulates some of my concerns.

Bruno Latour is undoubtedly among the foremost proponents of this irreduc- tionist creed. His Irreductions pithily distils familiar Nietzschean homilies, minus the anxious bombast of Nietzsche’s intemperate Sturm und Drang. With his suave and unctuous prose, Latour presents the urbane face of post-modern irrationalism. How does he proceed? First, he reduces reason to discrimination: ‘‘Reason’ is applied to the work of allocating agreement and disagreement between words. It is a matter of taste and feeling, know-how and connoisseurship, class and status. We insult, frown, pout, clench our fists, enthuse, spit, sigh and dream. Who reasons?’ (2.1.8.4) Second, he reduces science to force: ‘Belief in the existence of science is the effect of exaggeration, injustice, asymmetry, ignorance, credulity, and denial. If ‘science’ is distinct from the rest, then it is the end result of a long line of coups de force’. (4.2.6.) Third, he reduces scientific knowledge (‘knowing-that’) to practical know-how: ‘There is no such thing as knowledge—what would it be? There is only know-how. In other words, there are crafts and trades. Despite all claims to the contrary, crafts hold the key to all knowledge. They make it possible to ‘return’ science to the networks from which it came’. (4.3.2.) Last but not least, he reduces truth to power: ‘The word ‘true’ is a supplement added to certain trials of strength to dazzle those who might still question them’. (4.5.8.)

It is instructive to note how many reductions must be carried out in order for irreductionism to get off the ground: reason, science, knowledge, truth—all must be eliminated. Of course, Latour has no qualms about reducing reason to arbitration, science to custom, knowledge to manipulation, or truth to force: the veritable object of his irreductionist afflatus is not reduction per se, in which he wantonly indulges, but explanation, and the cognitive privilege accorded to scientific explanation in particular. Once relieved of the constraints of cognitive rationality and the obligation to truth, metaphysics can forego the need for explanation and supplant the latter with a series of allusive metaphors whose cognitive import becomes a function of semantic resonance: ‘actor’, ‘ally’, ‘force’, ‘power’, ‘strength’, ‘resistance’, ‘network’: these are the master-metaphors of Latour’s irreductionist metaphysics, the ultimate ‘actants’ encapsulating the operations of every other actor.
...
The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. (2.4.5). In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between ‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to toothfairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, wheth- er those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblem- atically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor.

This is reductionism with a vengeance; but because it occludes rather than illuminates differences in the ways in which different parts of the world interact, its very lack of explanatory purchase can be brandished as a symptom of its irreductive prowess by those who are not interested in understanding the difference between wishing and engineering. Latour writes to reassure those who do not really want to know. If the concern with representation which lies at the heart of the unfolding epistemological problematic from Descartes to Sellars was inspired by the desire not just to understand but to assist science in its effort to explain the world, then the recent wave of attempts to liquidate epistemology by dissolving representation can be seen as symptomatic of that cognophobia which, from Nietzsche through Heidegger and up to Latour, has fuelled a concerted effort on the part of some philosophers to contain if not neutralize the disquieting implications of scientific understanding.

Rather, Latour’s texts consciously rehearse the metaphorical operations they describe: they are ‘networks’ trafficking in ‘word-things’ of varying ‘power’, nexuses of ‘translation’ between ‘actants’ of differing ‘force’, etc. In this regard, they are exercises in the practical know-how which Latour exalts, as opposed to demonstrative propositional structures governed by cognitive norms of epistemic veracity and logical validity. But this is just to say that the ultimate import of Latour’s work is prescriptive rather than descriptive—indeed, given that is- sues of epistemic veracity and validity are irrelevant to Latour, there is nothing to prevent the cynic from concluding that Latour’s politics (neo-liberal) and his religion (Ro- man Catholic) provide the most telling indices of those forces ultimately motivating his antipathy towards rationality, critique, and revolution.

In other words, Latour’s texts are designed to do things: they have been engineered in order to produce an effect rather than establish a demonstration. Far from trying to prove anything, Latour is explicitly engaged in persuading the susceptible into embracing his irreductionist worldview through a particularly adroit deployment of rhetoric. This is the traditional modus operandi of the sophist. But only the most brazen of sophists denies the rhetorical character of his own assertions: ‘Rhetoric cannot account for the force of a sequence of sentences because if it is called ‘rhetoric’ then it is weak and has already lost’. (2.4.1) This resort to an already metaphorized concept of ‘force’ to mark the extra-rhetorical and thereby allegedly ‘real’ force of Latour’s own ‘sequence of sentences’ marks the nec plus ultra of sophistry. — Brassier

I once 'defended'/asserted/advertised a view close to Letour's, so I 'get' it. I just think it's somewhat self-defeating, while containing various insights.

This is what deconstruction does, for instance. It is significant that , unlike earlier eras in philosophy, in critiquing each other, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche , Foucault and others who follow after Nietzsche don’t use a language of correctness or incorrectness , truth and falsity , validity and invalidity, proof and falsification. Each doesn’t insist their philosophy is more ‘correct’ than their predecessors. Rather, they seek to explore becoming in richer and more intricate ways. — Joshs

Ideally and oversimplifying perhaps, yes, but the drift and the targets are anything but random. I don't need an explicit valorization of unhip Truth to project myself as an enviably shrewd man, as one who deserves assimilation. 'Correctness' can be seen as a kind of mask for something deeper like priority or status, and another mask (like 'richness') can take its place. Who gets to name things? Whose names end up sticking? Whose innovations become the new convention? The dominant taking-as?

If we are embodied in a world, correctness is not so easily dispensed with. This is why it's important to remember that we are animals depending on one another to stay fed and make babies. Correctness is not just a verbal game, it's 'interesting' for practical reasons.

'Correctness' can be seen as a kind of mask for something deeper like priority or status, and another mask (like 'richness') can take its place. Who gets to name things? Whose names end up sticking? Whose innovations become the new convention? The dominant taking-as?

If we are embodied in a world, correctness is not so easily dispensed with. This is why it's important to remember that we are animals depending on one another to stay fed and make babies. Correctness is not just a verbal game, it's 'interesting' for practical reasons. — jas0n

Priority, status and don t forget power. In fact, let’s focus on the concept of power that has become so fashionable and makes its way into all sorts of political discussions. Most of the left who are wielding that term as a weapon are understanding it moralistically, within a totalizing empirical discourse. Do you see the dynamics of power, status, priority and privilege as amenable to empirical analysis( we are animals who….)?

This seems to be the level at which you want to deal with notions like power and status, from some meta-empirical level that wants to be faithful to the real as the way to protect all of us from the effects of power. But ini doing so , is one escaping the problem of ‘ bias’ or is one instead institutionalizing it scientistically? Derrida once said the ethic of deconstruction wasn’t in the blurring of differences but in the multiplication of difference. Not the dream of a fusing of horizons but the intricate movement though differences.

Do you see the dynamics of power, status, priority and privilege as amenable to empirical analysis( we are animals who….)? — Joshs

Not in any simple way, no.

This seems to be the level at which you want to deal with notions like power and status, from some meta-empirical level that wants to be faithful to the real as the way to protect all of us from the effects of power. But ini doing so , is one escaping the problem of ‘ bias’ or is one instead institutionalizing it scientistically? Derrida once said the ethic of deconstruction wasn’t in the blurring of differences but in the multiplication of difference. Not the dream of a fusing of horizons but the intricate movement though differences. — Joshs

I understand your concerns, and note that I'm not pontificating on a political thread about the threat of Cultural Marxism or Jesus Freaks or ...

Probably best to understand me as a skeptical moderate...or a practical skeptic. I believe there's some kind of 'real world' out there in some never quite finally specifiable way. What is a body really and finally? Can't say. I confess more readily than others perhaps that I don't control my own meanings, don't 'grasp' them in some luminous fullness, never know exactly what I mean. I relate to Socrates understood as someone trying to make darkness visible. I have no settled system but only various principles that seem to get something right or at least less obviously wrong, without knowing exactly what it means to be right or wrong. (And without abandoning the pursuit for further clarification.)

You are 'rationally' concerned about institutionalized scientism and I am 'rationally' concerned about a solipsistic free-for-all that would forget the body in and through talk about that body. For me 'body' points to the world of biology and physics and the difference between the idea of bread and bread that keeps the brain functioning and makes the idea of bread possible.

These are matters which don't yield to thought. Addressing them are tasks for the artist or mystic or the religious. What is sought is an evocation, a showing, a revealing rather than argument or demonstration.