Do you have a point of view? Or is it just the bewitchment of language that makes it seem so? — Tate

I have a point of view in the way that a bachelor is unmarried. This is how our ( public ) concepts work. I do not expect the arrival of a final word on this issue, but I'm currently unaware of a better approach than something like the following.

Hegel fully appreciated, as many of Kant’s readers have not, that one of the axial innovations orienting Kant’s thought is his reconceptualization of selves, consciousness, and self consciousness in normative terms. Selves are in the first instance normative subjects: subjects of normative statuses and attitudes. They are what can undertake responsibilities, in the form of duties and obligations, and exercise authority in committing themselves by endorsing epistemic claims and practical maxims. Being conscious in the sense of apperceiving—being sapient, a condition of our kind of sentience—is exercising those normative capacities. It is committing oneself, exercising one’s authority to make oneself responsible by judging. Judgment is the minimal form of apperceptive awareness because judgments are the smallest units one can commit oneself to, make oneself responsible for. What Kant calls the “objective form of judgment”, the “object=X” is the formal mark of what is represented in a judgment: what one makes oneself responsible to for the correctness of one’s judgmental act.1 What he calls the “subjective form of judgment”, the “‘I think’ that can accompany all judgments” and hence is “the emptiest of all representations” is the formal mark of the self who is responsible for the judging. What one is responsible for doing in judging is integrating one’s commitment into a whole exhibiting the rational unity distinctive of apperception. Synthesizing such an apperceptively unified constellation of commitments is extracting and endorsing inferential consequences of one’s commitments, offering some of them as justifications of others, and extruding incompatible commitments. Those unities are conscious selves as normative subjects, and the rational process of producing and maintaining them subject to the rules governing the rational relations articulating the conceptual contents of the various commitments is for Kant the the process of self-consciousness.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/PreHegelian_Stages_in_the_History_of_the.pdf
Bodies are trained into such norms, into regarding the body as (belonging to, manifesting a ) self.

A self is the type of thing that can be held responsible.

Hegel takes over and transforms this normative understanding of self-conscious selves by offering a novel social metaphysics of normativity. The process of synthesizing self-conscious normative subjects, which Kant had understood as an individual affair, Hegel reconstrues as a social practice of mutual recognition that essentially requires the participation of different interacting individuals. Normative statuses are understood as essentially social statuses, instituted by social recognitive practices and practical recognitive attitudes. Individual self-conscious selves and recognitive communities are jointly synthesized by practices of recognizing each other as normative subjects in the sense of having the authority to make themselves and hold others responsible, to acknowledge and attribute commitments and obligations.

Whether I claim to be a shit philosopher or not is up to me (I am held responsible for it), but what it means to be a shit philosopher is not up to me, because I don't govern the tribe's concepts. But we don't need to project them into eternity. Concepts are co-instituted and co-maintained, just as they are coperformed in the inferences we allow and disallow. That's what seems most reasonable to me currently.

I have a point of view in the way that a bachelor is unmarried. This is how our ( public ) concepts work. — Pie

The problem I see is that no one in particular is asserting this, so I have no context for interpretation.

How can there be such a thing as intention (not to mention intension) if there's no individual who thinks, feels, wants, questions, gets grumpy, etc.?

I'm dismayed. You seem to be responding to someone else. I do hold myself to the usual coherence norms, and I invite you to root out contradictions in my position. But let it be my position. Perhaps you can quote me. Show me where I deny the self, etc.

Show me where I deny the self, etc. — Pie

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. — Tate

:up:

Sorry if I came off rude.

if there's no individual who thinks, — Tate

The idea is that we, as individual claim-making monkeys, run cultural software that includes the concept of the responsible self, easily but problematically imagined as a kind a ghost in the skull.

I see. The subject, as Schopenhauer uses the term, is not a ghost in the skull. I've been assuming Witt's meaning is similar to Schopenhauer's.

I don't claim to speak for Witt, but I am indeed pointing away from the ghost theory toward a linguistic theory, to how selves actually function, looking for the meaning of 'I' in its use by the tribe.

don't claim to speak for Witt, but I am indeed pointing away from the ghost theory toward a linguistic theory, to how selves actually function, looking for the meaning of 'I' in its use by the tribe. — Pie

I see.

Don't know if you've been down Heidegger Road, but it seems that the ghost theory leads to a kind of shining void.

A tautology is.

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

... what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.

I am my world.

There is there.

Or, another angle:

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...

:up: