@Streetlight, @Joshs, @igjugarjuk, @Moliere

A lifelong student of the likes of Freddy & Witty, Peirce & Chomsky, I still find 'p0m0 post/structuralism' as redundant as it is rhetorically obscurant. Life's too short for more than a cursory read of Derrida's (et al's) deliberately prolix muddle, and his apologists and expositors, on this thread and elsewhere, continue to persuade (remind) me that Derrida's "texts" are only academic flypaper.

Anyway, by all means, carry on ... :mask:

What about the idea that the same endures by continuing to be itself differently? I would say that this is the essence of deconstruction. — Joshs

Sure. I'm down with that. I'd just stress the interdependence of the concepts involved. And I'd look to local practical/context. The most recent context is the 'master madness' of the fear of death. Granted 100% that there is no 'truly' enduring self (and that one cannot step into the same river twice), I'd also make the opposite point and say that making unequal things equal is automatic and properly presupposed --- so one can step into the same river twice, because 'river' organizes or captures a flux, makes flux possible in the first place, one might say. Though the concepts are independent. There's no origin.

The unripe toe tag of the proper legal name also has an enduring referent. We can say that the referent changes if we want. But that depends on how we approach the institution of names and referrals. The thing referred to can change only if it's gathered as a stable unity that frames such a change. (I don't think either us is lacking comprehension of any of the relevant issues, so it feels like a matter of focus or preference.)

Yes, one can try and approach essences, or point at them for others to see, or connect them to other ones in metaphors, or simply employ them what they are good at, ie communication. I think it is still important to know that there can be no such thing as total clarity of thought and concepts. There's always some residual ambiguity, which is usually fine since a philosophical problem only requires a certain degree of precision to be communicated or treated to one's temporary satisfaction, not perfect precision.

Concepts evolve, they have a life, a vitality which you can kill if you try to trap them.

A lifelong student of the likes of Freddy, Witty & Peirce, I still find 'p0m0 post/structuralism' as redundant as it is rhetorically obscurant. — 180 Proof

OK, but I can't personally see the big gap between Derrida and Nietzsche or Derrida and Wittgenstein. Not now that the movement is a relic and basically just texts. Maybe Nietzsche 'already said that' in some sense, but Derrida would hardly deny the influence of a primary hero, and to me his best passages are like some of my favorites from Nietzsche. As good, as poetic, as penetrating.

I basically agree with all of that.

Concepts evolve, they have a life, a vitality which you can kill if you try to trap them. — Olivier5

I would maybe say here though that concepts evolve because we try to trap them. They have a life because we keep trying to put them death. Philosophy seeks for more clarity than the carpenter requires. The astronomer doesn't care about ICBMs. Philosophers are especially itchy fuckers, especially irritable (Schopenhauer's insight). Either those drapes inconsistencies/ambiguities go or I do !

Granted 100% that there is no 'truly' enduring self (and that one cannot step into the same river twice), I'd make the opposite point and say that making unequal things equal is automatic and properly presupposed. So one can step into the same river twice, because 'river' organizes or captures a flux — igjugarjuk

If you haven’t read him, you might enjoy Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of a real spatial object.
The real object is never completely fulfilled. It is a concatenation of memory , actual appearance and anticipation that changes slightly moment to moment. So the object is an idealization, a kind of faith in a total unity that is never fully achieved.

“The consciousness of its [the object’s] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process,
does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)

“ Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "Object in the mode of running-of" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.”(Husserl 1964)

If you haven’t read him, you might enjoy Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of a real spatial object.
The real object is never completely fulfilled. It is a concatenation of memory , actual appearance and anticipation. So the object is an idealization, a kind of faith in a total unity that is never fully achieved. — Joshs

I have (somewhat), and I like Husserl. And that theme of a unity to come also appears valuably in Gadamer's theory of interpretation. I think it also applies to the adjacent concepts of referral and representation. How can I talk about an object that I know little or nothing about? How can my label stick to the right place?

“The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973) — Joshs

To me this is like poetry that pretty much gets it right. It accords with introspection. But I'm more drawn to the view from the outside. Rationality is prior to any claim worth taking seriously, and that implies (it seems to be) that we are on the stage, so that the meaning of words is best looked for in proprieties of use. The object is the same (despite subjective sensory flux) because we treat it as the same. We are the 'same' person day after day, because in fact I wake up responsible to others for what I did and said the day before.

But Wittgenstein's Blue Book helps us imagine a different way of life. For example, what if there's a weekend me and the weekday me? With two names? The same with you and everyone. It's how we all roll. Maybe one of the selves sharing my body is thrown in prison for murder, probably the weekend self. But obviously the weekday self can not be punished for this crime, so the one body is only locked up on weekends.

One might speak of the fantasy of something 'deeper' than such norms that gives them necessity.

The Sokal Affair is relevant here, in case you haven't heard of it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair


"... an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.""

Thanks for the quotes. I'll have to give them a close reading when I have time.

I would maybe say here though that concepts evolve because we try to trap them. They have a life because we keep trying to put them death. — igjugarjuk

Yes, something like that. We struggle with them, try and harness them or even defeat them. Like Jacob struggled with a god all night and for this reason was called Israel. And that fight altered him and perhaps it altered the god too.

Heh, you say that -- but from my perspective it seems you keep coming back! :D

The Sokal Affair is relevant here, in case you haven't heard of it: — ZzzoneiroCosm

It was a great prank, and some French thinkers have been guilty of playing fast and loose with concepts from other fields, and some of them just suck, but what does it really prove that one journal was fooled ?Antipomo types on the other side seem just as liable to bias. It's some nerdy version of the culture war.

I remember Scruton calling Zizek an anti-Semite on a very thin pretext. So I didn't mind so much when it happened to Scruton. It's like the bitchiness in this thread (I'm as guilty as others.) We are tribal fuckers, only relinquishing our prejudices under pressure, if even then.

Thanks for the quotes. I'll have to give them a close reading when I have time. — ZzzoneiroCosm

:up:

Heh, you say that -- but from my perspective it seems you keep coming back! :D — Moliere

:up:

I agree: a great prank that proves, at the very least, that distinguished folks at the journal in question can't always distinguish sense from non-sense.

It makes you wonder how many other journals would have been fooled. So it has something to say about the pomo echo chamber. I'm far from anti-pomo but appreciate iconoclasm of any kind.

The supreme works of beautiful sculpture are sightless, and their inner being does not look out of them as self-knowing inwardness in this spiritual concentration which the eye discloses. This light of the soul falls outside them and belongs to the spectator alone; when he looks at these shapes, soul cannot meet soul nor eye eye. — Hegel

This bit is fascinating enough: suggesting the most concrete-seeming creations may hide a secret abstraction: the inhuman in human form.

Rich stuff.

.

I'm far from anti-pomo but appreciate iconoclasm of any kind. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Same here. I hate the idea of being trapped in a tribal bubble. I guess my fantasy of the philosopher is tied up to some kind of neutral Shakespearean consciousness that can be everyone and no one.

It makes you wonder how many other journals would have been fooled. So it has something to say about the pomo echo chamber. — ZzzoneiroCosm

... Or more broadly about the various echo chambers and sins of convergent thinking in Academia at large.

.

... Or more broadly about the various echo chambers and sins of convergent thinking in Academia. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes indeed, and outside too. But inside is sadder in a way, just as dirty cops are worse than other criminals.

Yep, well said :smile:

I'm basically progressive and liberal, I guess, but I don't like institutions betraying their principles in fits of topical self-righteousness. Areopagitica, motherfuckers !

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary…. They are not skillful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. — Milton

It has the optics of an abuse of power and that's always gross. It's unfortunate it can happen inadvertently.

Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? — Milton

For all his vision he hadn't the vision - can't blame him, of course - to forsee something like Facebook.

It was a great prank, and some French thinkers have been guilty of playing fast and loose with concepts from other fields — igjugarjuk

For precision's sake, Sokal pranked Social Text, an academic journal published by Duke University Press.

Alright, @Jackson -- if you're willing to spit it out I'm willing to hear it. How does Hume undermine all of this? I believe that's basically last we left off.

Right. But what I was referring to is this:

In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science; UK: Intellectual Impostures, 1998).[14] The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology.[15] It closed with a critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong programme of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge.[16] — wiki

I presume that Sokal's annoyance with these 'imposters' inspired the prank in the first place. It seems that Sokal depended on his own credentials as a physicist to overcome editorial concerns. While the editors surely look bad, it doesn't make Sokal look all that great. His parody of post-modernism, which admittedly scores some points, also echoes the conspiracy theory about 'postmodernists' that one might get from Tucker Carlson. Lots of that parody might apply to an early reception of Kant, except for the topical political progressivism bit (as if reactionary politics isn't just as threatening to science.)

My theory is that folks are at their worst intellectually (at their blindest) when they talk about their perceived enemies. 'Math is racist' is stupid. But go too far in the other direction and one is shrieking about the newspeak denial of biological sex --when all that's happening is a change in manners, predictably occasionally awkward or nasty.

For all his vision he hadn't the vision - can't blame him, of course - to forsee something like Facebook. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I agree with the implication that maybe he was wrong on that point. That's quite a can of worms in itself, the private ownership of the de facto town square (not that it is or has to stay Facebook.)

I remember it well. :up:

f you're willing to spit it out I'm willing to hear it. How does Hume undermine all of this? I believe that's basically last we left off. — Moliere

For Hume, there is no inside or outside, as metaphysical categories. Actual physical objects do not have continuity and neither do our perceptions. Hume's main criticism is at the concept of identity. Are physical objects real, yes. Are acts of mind real, yes. Is the mediation between object to mind real, yes. So it is a non-representational idea.