The tribe as a whole is the director, if you must embrace a noun to match the verb. Be wary, however, of being dragged by the surface of language into grand metaphysical-theological hypotheses. Reason is deeply and gloriously entangled with human autonomy. There's a special perversity in trying to wring some non-human Divinity from the fragile triumph of the Enlightenment. We are that 'divinity' (or its replacement, just as we were its model in the first place), and rational norms are precisely those which are not exterior to us. I am free to the degree that I myself endorse the constraints that bind me, because I understand the reasons for them. We impose laws on ourselves, both for practical reasons and to manifest the best in us. Humanism is already the 'religion' of Reason, for 'Reason' is just our Geist or spirit or authority. To take reason as an authority is just to take ourselves as authorities in a particular way, namely 'without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another. ' What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The law for me is the law for you.

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding [= reason] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)

It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another. (5:21) — Kant

To think for oneself Kant describes as the maxim of unprejudiced thought; its opposite is passivity or heteronomy in thought, leading to prejudice and superstition.[25] To think in the place of everyone else is the maxim of enlarged or broad-minded thought. And always to think in accord with oneself is the maxim of consistent thought (5:294). Although the last maxim sounds more straightforward, Kant is careful to emphasize its difficulty: it “can only be achieved through the combination of the first two and after frequent observance of them has made them automatic” (5:295). Consistency does not just involve getting rid of obvious contradictions in our explicit beliefs. It also requires consistency with regard to all the implications of our beliefs—and these are often not apparent to us. To achieve this sort of law-likeness in thought depends both on the genuine attempt to judge for oneself and the determination to expose one’s judgments to the scrutiny of others. In other words, it involves regarding oneself, first, as the genuine author of one’s judgments, and second, as accountable to others. As we might also say, it represents a determination to take responsibility for one’s judgments.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#ReaSelKno

How can a tribe issue a directive? Tribes are not persons.
And what if my tribe dies save me. Are you saying that now that no tribe exists I no longer have any reason to do anything or believe anything?
And can't an entire tribe of us, no matter its size, be mistaken about what it thinks it has reason to do?
It is Reason who issues the directives. That's why we call them directives of reason.
And Reason is not the name of a tribe, but a person.

How can a tribe issue a directive? Tribes are not persons. — Bartricks

They have not one mouth but many. Who decides what the words you used to ask that question mean ? Do you believe there is a single authority ? 'Language is received like the law.' You just assilimiated the norms for using English as a child. You never bothered to ask who made them up. It'd be silly to name just one person of course. Either of us might launch a meme if we get lucky.

Now we can discuss another example: democracy. Some tribes elect legislators to create the law, judges to interpret the law, and still others to enforce the law.

Sovereignty is the power of a state to do everything necessary to govern itself, such as making, executing, and applying laws; imposing and collecting taxes; making war and peace; and forming treaties or engaging in commerce with foreign nations.

The individual states of the United States do not possess the powers of external sovereignty, such as the right to deport undesirable persons, but each does have certain attributes of internal sovereignty, such as the power to regulate the acquisition and transfer of property within its borders. The sovereignty of a state is determined with reference to the U.S. Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sovereign+nation

Are you saying that now that no tribe exists I no longer have any reason to do anything or believe anything? — Bartricks

Oh you can still speak English and feel guilty on that island all by yourself. Once the top is set spinning, you can take away that hand that set it going. There were a guy who lived as a hermit for 30 years, stealing food from vacation cabins, basically living like a rat. He just walked off the 'set' one day, a young man...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/north-pond-hermit-maine-knight-stranger-woods-finkel

And can't an entire tribe of us, no matter its size, be mistaken about what it thinks it has reason to do? — Bartricks

Yes, we can be wrong. Speaking of which, you seem to be lost in the woods yourself.

If the tribe can be mistaken, then their directives do not constitutively determine what they have reason to do.

So now I am the director? How so, given I have reason to reject theories that contain contradictions even if I do not tell myself to?

A bunch of mouths is not a mouth.

How am I lost?

Brandom and you are the lost ones.

I have taken you by the hand and shown you what a reason is. It is a directive. And directives have a director. And that director is Reason. And Reason is a person, because directors are persons. And now you know what Reason is.

That's not lost. Show me where I have taken a wrong turning.

I have taken you by the hand and shown you what a reason is. It is a directive. And directives have a director. And that director is Reason. And Reason is a person, because directors are persons. And now you know what Reason is. — Bartricks

Why not choose a standard religion like most people ? It'd be less lonely. I see that you think you have a case or an argument, but you don't. It's textbook bewitchment by language. When they say it's raining, what is it exactly that rains ? Does the royal We trip you up too ?

Resist the temptation to focus on me. Focus on the argument I gave you.

Normative reasons are directives. You know that now. Wikipedia confirmed it for you.

Directives need a director.

And in the case of normative reasons, its not us, but Reason. That's why they're called 'reasons'. They're directives from Reason.

And so Reason is a director. And only a person can be one of those. So Reason is a person.

Where is the misstep? Or have I been altogether too clear?

You are either serious, which is concerning, or majestically committed to the bit.

I'm serious. But again: that's me. Don't you worry about me. And stop trying to give yourself an excuse not to focus on the argument. Worry about the argument. Can you refute it? Are you a philosopher or are you just playing games?

Are you a philosopher, or are you just playing games? — Bartricks

Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either.
...
Her every effort would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even if—what then? Would it make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl’s honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess.
...
And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft! — Joys

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap13

I'll take that to mean 'I'm playing'. I recommend buddhism.

The space of reasons. How much space do they need? 10ft sq? What about their colour? I like beige ones.

I'll take that to mean 'I'm playing'. I recommend buddhism. — Bartricks

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That’s why she’s left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate. Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such a bad headache today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All kinds of crazy longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent that nun told me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I suppose. Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something in the air. That’s the moon. But then why don’t all women menstruate at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the time they were born I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of step. Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that. Damned glad I didn’t do it in the bath this morning over her silly I will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That gouger M’Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife engagement in the country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small mercies. Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices. Reserve better. Don’t want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O. Pity they can’t see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom. Willy’s hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those girls or is it all a fake? Lingerie does it. Felt for the curves inside her déshabillé. Excites them also when they’re. I’m all clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap13

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
...
—The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it King Hamlet’s ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.
...
He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.
...
—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
...
—Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

you do realize I don't read quotes. Own words. Use your own words
Frey Bentos. Have you ever had a frey bentos pie? They have a very poor quality filling.

The "space of reasons" can be a philosophical prison, a cave. The notion of norms requires desedimentation. The Greek term 'nomos' means law and custom or convention, as well as song. In the absence of truth and knowledge there is nomos, likely songs or stories.

In the Timaeus Plato introduces a different notion of space, the Chora, with its own likely story. It is the work of the imagination, philosophical poesis. Something often disparaged by reason, but to the detriment of philosophy. It fails to recognize its own imaginative assumptions regarding what reason can do.


For a more detailed discussion of the Chora: Shaken to the Chora.

From that account:

Timaeus begins with a likely account of the beginning, which is to say, not at the beginning, but with where he is able to begin. The inability to identify the true father, the origin, the beginning, leads to bastard reasoning. Our reasoning is on the basis of likeness in the double sense of sensible things being a likeness without ever having what belongs to that which it is a likeness of (52c) and, a likeness in the sense of being likely or like what it is without being what it is that it is like. And, of course, without access to the original we cannot say just how likely the story is to be true.

Forms and Chora are an indeterminate dyad. Together they order all that comes to be through intellect and necessity, that is, according to paradigm and chance, order and disorder, determinacy and indeterminacy.

We do have to be careful, though, because observation is theory-laden. — Pie

If everything is theory-laden, then our judgements are fucked because we would find ourselves in an infinite regress of theory-ladenness. I accept that when it comes to observations and the judgements that issue therefrom, there is a terminus in experience as it is given, which means that even children understand very early (they only need to understand the requisite language) how to discern truth and falsity in statements concerning simple observations.

It might be like figuring out if you are driving on the correct side of the road. Norms are enforced more or less gently. A young man might think he's a great violinist and continue to fail to impress those who recognize such talent professionally. A humble young woman might think she's only mediocre at math and continually amaze her teachers with her genius. Probably both will move toward correction. No man is an island. We've evolved to work together, respond to censure and praise. — Pie

With "self-knowledge" I was thinking more along the lines of understanding one's motives, not of assessing one's skills in disciplines where a simple reality check could disabuse one of any deluded notions of one's abilities. The kind of thing I am thinking of in that context would be "why do I feel compelled to inflate my assessment of my abilities"?

If everything is theory-laden, then our judgements are fucked because we would find ourselves in an infinite regress of theory-ladenness. — Janus

Do you have good reasons to think this is not the case?

I think so, when it comes to ordinary judgements about what is directly observed. I mean, would you seriously question whether the judgement "snow is white" is correct or believe that it is rendered incorrect, impotent or irrelevant by "theory-ladenness"?

I agree with you about modest empirical matters. But isn't the problem for us the other stuff - values, justification and truth? Seems to me philosophy is often about living two sets of books - quotidian life where we take realism for granted. And 'theory' where little, perhaps nothing, is certain. The question is how much do you allow the latter to impact upon your life and choices? The moment one stops to investigate being and what we know, we can readily arrive in a world of infinite regress or a hall of mirrors of phenomenological perspectivism.

I tend to think that ethical values are "no-brainers" given that we are dependent on the collective, and there is no rational justification for treating anyone differently than anyone else, when it comes to matters concerning fairness and justice. The problem is not that we don't know what social values should be, but that we fail to live up to them.

Justification seems easy enough when it comes to "modest empirical matters", which make up a good percentage of our practical concerns. The same goes for truth in this connection; it is only when it comes to metaphysics and aesthetics where there is any rationale for much disagreement. "Each to their own" should take care of that; if only good will predominated. But good will does not predominate, and that's down to human recalcitrance in my view.

So, basically what I'm saying is that metaphysical issues: idealism vs physicalism. immaterialism vs materialism, realism vs ant-realism and so on are not of much significance, or at least ought not to be, when it comes to the critical issues facing us. On the contrary social harmony in a complex pluralistic society requires tolerance of difference and diversity.

Can't disagree with any of this. :up:

:cool: