With respect to the range of reason, surely one of the factors that underpinned traditional philosophy was the conviction that the Cosmos was itself rational in some foundational sense. — Wayfarer

Why do you think we should regard the cosmos as knowable, let alone rational in any sense?

And naturalism presumes no such cosmic reason or 'logos'. This is where the 'all-encompassing relativism' — Wayfarer

I don't know how anyone can determine whether the universe exhibits chaos or order. How does one do this except by using a human made criteria?

I'm intrigued that you are willing to accept the rather infamous 'blind spot in science' - the role of the observer as foundational in constructing reality - yet simultaneously regard the idea that order and reason (which we apprehend because we observe or infer them) transcend our observational constructivism. Which aspect of being an observer allows us to see the world and the order or reason in it objectively?

. The left has a consistent difficulty in distinguishing someone who doesn't oppose Trump from someone who endorses Trump. They assume that everyone who hasn't opposed Trump therefore endorses him. From what I have seen Peterson hasn't opposed Trump in this upcoming election, but neither has he endorsed him — Leontiskos

That would seem to place Peterson to the right of American conservatives like George Will, David Brooks, David Frum and Ross Douthat, and venerable Republican fixtures like National Review, all of who unequivocally oppose Trump. That doesn’t jibe with my assessment of Peterson’s political views. I’m assuming his non-opposition is a business move, to avoid alienating some of his fan base.

This is a scary vision, all right. I don’t think it has much to do with Rawls or political liberalism, though. It’s a huge subject, obviously, so let me just raise two points.

1) Yes, Rawls is offering a theory of political virtue, not individual morality. He’s not agnostic or skeptical about morality, as one person or another may conceive it; he himself was surely a hard-core Kantian. What he argues for is a hands-off approach by liberal governments when it comes to what is sometimes called “legislating morality.” He assumes both pluralism and tolerance. “Messing with the system that makes most other people happy,” to use your phrase, would presumably involve active restraints or disincentives on certain behaviors, as government policy. And Rawlsian liberals believe this is not the right approach, that tolerance of stupidity and wickedness is, in the end, the lesser of two evils. I emphasize again that this whole theory applies to social structures, not individuals. Personally I despise all forms of bigoted rhetoric, for instance, and do everything I can to oppose it; I’m not the least bit personally tolerant in this area. But I don’t want my government to censor or ban it. I’m also against a life of selfish pleasure, but liberalism asks me to tolerate in my role as citizen your choice of lifestyle even though I disapprove.

2) I think Rawls had much higher hopes for a society that implemented his theory of justice – higher, that is, than a sort of pleasure-based accommodation of desires. It isn’t only personal desires that thrive in a liberal democracy. So too do ideas, values, commitments, imagination, and deeply experienced “projects” of all kinds. And so does impassioned disagreement. Rawls believed we would become better people in a just society, not all at once, but as a result of participating in a fair political process. And his vision of “better” is surely not a matter of binges and entertainment. I guess another way of saying it is: Rawlsian liberal democracy is our best shot at creating a society that allows you or me the unfettered opportunity to argue for our personal morality, and perhaps see those arguments prevail.

That's a resounding note to end on, but I'm impelled to add: Rawls did not pay nearly enough attention to systemic economic inequality and its effect on fairness.

I don't know how anyone can determine whether the universe exhibits chaos or order. How does one do this except by using a human made criteria?

There are similar arguments against systems being complex versus simple. But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop. In virtue of what is it appropriate to say that "my car is blue," when nothing looks blue without eyes? Could we also say color is a "human made" criteria? Or in virtue of what is "my car has more mass than the this bag of flour," free from being a human-made distinction? Sans the observer, there is no one to cut "my car" and "the bag of flour," into discrete physical systems.

The ability to quantize features has been a deciding factor here. Mass is real because it can be quantized. Likewise, color is illusory, while light really does have a wavelength, because the wavelength can be quantized. Except we can now quantize all the discernable colors the human eye can see, so this no longer seems like a good delineation.

Two things seem to be going on here. The allure of mathematization, and then the pairing down of the world to its features that appear to us through multiple senses. The reduction of all things to "bodies in space," popular since the dawn of philosophy, would seem to come from the fact that sight, hearing, touch, and the vestibular sense all can cross-check each other in verifying objects' position in space and their shape. But there is no prima facie reason why, if we distrust our senses re color or pitch, that we should necessarily think they give us a more accurate picture of the world when they agree.

But of course, there have been attempts to mathematize complexity, order, etc. It's just that it isn't easy, and there are multiple models for varying use cases. If there was a canonical mathematization of "what physical order is," would that settle the issue? Entropy is another area where subjectivity seems to get involved (Jaynes), yet this also lies at the foundations of physics.

Humans themselves are not "human made." Given a naturalist explanation of how humans come to have their cognitive capabilities, it seems odd to me how often it is proposed that there are totally sui generis, uniquely human things we are said to "project" on to reality. From whence do these illusions come? I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy.

Humanism wants man as the measure of all things, and proclaims our freedom when it proclaims that ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and even the objects of sense perception are our own invention. And yet naturalism would say these all have a causal history, having come into being through the same step-wise progression of physical state evolution (the logic of the world) that moves planets and dust particles. The result is a sort of bipolar view where scientific naturalism is held up as the paradigm of knowledge, but then it's objects are taken to be mere appearance. So to this point:

Why do you think we should regard the cosmos as knowable, let alone rational in any sense?

If everything known or experienced is appearance, why even posit an appearance/reality distinction? If the reality can't be known, then it's just an unsupportable posit, the proposal of a brute fact that relates to nothing.

But if appearances have "real" causes, then it stands to reason that there is something that causes people to widely agree on the usefulness of the order/disorder, simple/complex distinction.



I certainly don't think Rawls wants or envisions anything like ABNW. Rather, I think pushing definitions of the good back to the unanalyzable preferences of the individual makes it impossible to state precisely why ABNW is abhorrent. The society there would seem to allow for greater freedom than liberal states today. Virtually all the "manipulation" comes in the form of positive feedback and the environment of one's upbringing. People aren't censored by the state for bucking norms, but rather end up estranged from their community due to their fellow citizens' own preferences for the current order.

The only time explicit government restraint enters the picture is when the characters violently seize soma from other individuals to "free them." But surely the government can step in to stop people from taking other's property. The result isn't even punishment, they are essentially rewarded instead, sent to an environment of like-minded individuals. John Savage wants to leave, and they say "go right ahead."

Point being that virtually all the coercion in born out of the preferences of the individual citizens. To be sure, these preferences are born of their enviornment, one we might call manipulative, but if preferences run the show, I don't see what the objection here is supposed to be.

If a society based on Rawls principles is set up, and over time it evolves into ABNW, where is the objection supposed to come from? That's pretty much the origin story in the book. The advanced economies set about trying to resolve problems, and over time ABNW emerges, not from tyranny, but from bureaucratic, scientific-minded problem solving, economies of scale, and consensus building.

There is another thing that often gets brought up here by right-wing students of post-modernism and identity movements: in virtue of what is the liberal focus on the individual and their freedom legitimate? Why shouldn't we focus on the freedom of communities or ethnic groups to determine how they want to live? To use Nick Land's term, there is no way to "exit" the liberal system, aside from force. A classmate of mine had a similar take, from the far left, claiming that representation should be apportioned on racial lines and there should be parallel justice systems and juries for people of different ethnicities.


Groups on not free to create their own neo-fascist city states and raise the collective above the individual. But what makes the individual the proper arbiter here?

I'd argue that the claims of liberals and collectivist identify movements can't be adjudicated because they each have the origin of the good lying not in reason, which can adjudicate, but in the individual or collective's desires.

There are similar arguments against systems being complex versus simple. But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop — Count Timothy von Icarus

We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature. This reinstates the Cartesian veil separating appearance from reality, and a correspondence approach to empiricism. We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy.

Humanism wants man as the measure of all things, and proclaims our freedom when it proclaims that ethics, aesthetics, meaning, and even the objects of sense perception are our own invention. And yet naturalism would say these all have a causal history, having come into being through the same step-wise progression of physical state evolution (the logic of the world) that moves planets and dust particles. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Humanism presupposes objective empiricism and vice versa. Both originate in the Christian( which is indebted to the Platonic) notion of an absolutely certain ground for truth. In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. According to then modern scientific , and humanist, notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself.

“Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…”( Heidegger)

Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject as the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the mathematical self-identity of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because , more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. Once you deconstruct the self-identical unity of the human subject , you simultaneously pull the rug out from under direct and interdict realism.

I'd argue that the claims of liberals and collectivist identify movements can't be adjudicated because they each have the origin of the good lying not in reason, which can adjudicate, but in the individual or collective's desires. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is the origin and nature of desire within the human being? It has been suggested, in different ways , that desire is a function of biological drives. Freud’s libidinal energy and Nietzsche’s Will to Power are two examples of biological adaptivist approaches to desire. Deleuze’s desiring machines is one of the most intriguing ways of navigating between the individual and the social, the reasonable and the affective, the human and the natural. To be more precise, his model of desire abandons the distinction between personal and social, reason and emotion, humanity and nature. Desiring machines are what we are made of, but they are pre-personal. Desiring elements are like nodes in a complex system; they never function alone , but always as an ensemble , out of which subjectivity , the self, the ego, is just a bi-product. Desiring machines are at work everywhere , as much in the world of physics as in the living world. Their functioning accounts for the paradoxical operation of reason, its temporary stabilities as well as its penchant for revolutionary transformation.

Desiring machines — Joshs

Spinoza's 'conatus' or Nietzsche's 'will to power' in different dress; the same old stew, reheated.

With respect to the range of reason, surely one of the factors that underpinned traditional philosophy was the conviction that the Cosmos was itself rational in some foundational sense.
— Wayfarer

Why do you think we should regard the cosmos as knowable, let alone rational in any sense? — Tom Storm

Cosmos means 'ordered whole'. That was the vision of the Universe before the scientific revolution. We discussed it before, I mentioned this:

This scientific and philosophical revolution - it is indeed impossible to separate the philosophical from the purely scientific aspects of this process: they are interdependent and closely linked together - can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the dissappearance from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, the conception of the world as a finite, closed and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being, rising from the dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres), and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound toether by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all those components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorisation of being, the divorce of the world of value from the world of facts. — Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe

That is the background to the predicament of modernity. How to deal with that, while still keeping fully apprised of the empirical facts, is the principle burden of philosophy today in my view.

Which aspect of being an observer allows us to see the world and the order or reason in it objectively? — Tom Storm

Isn't the whole concept of scientific or natural law built on the assumption of there being a natural order? I mean, the whole basis of our technologically-ordered culture is predicated on the reliability of scientific predictions. Look at these systems we're using in conducting this conversation, they work quite astonishingly well. How can that not be seen as 'an order'?

Where I see the problem for modern culture is that it is uncomfortable with fact that this order is not something that science explains or accounts for. The nature of the order is a different matter to the fact of there being an order. And 'laws' sound suspiciously anthropomorphic or theistic - 'no laws without a lawgiver', said Nancy Cartwright. It's similar to the argument over the nature of mathematical objects and Platonic realism - they're metaphysical questions, and we don't much like metaphysical questions.

I'm intrigued that you are willing to accept the rather infamous 'blind spot in science' - the role of the observer as foundational in constructing reality - yet simultaneously regard the idea that order and reason (which we apprehend because we observe or infer them) transcend our observational constructivism. — Tom Storm

I don't see any conflict between the 'blind spot' argument and the fact of order. The point of 'the blind spot of science' argument is that we mistake objective knowledge for a kind of transcendent 'God's eye view' of what is real, as if it were true in the absence of any observer whatever - scientism, in a nutshell. Speaking of which, this is from an interview with one of the three authors of the Blind Spot article:

That article came from a...project I’ve been working on with my longtime collaborator Marcelo Gleiser, who is a high-energy physicist, and Evan Thompson, who is a philosopher of cognitive science as well as a Buddhist scholar. We all love science, and Evan actually does science as well as being a philosopher. What we’re trying to point to is that there’s a whole set of philosophies, metaphysics literally, that people claim are science, when in fact they’re just philosophies, and they have nothing to do with science. It’s much like the interpretations of quantum mechanics we were talking about. Things like reductionism, things like materialism, those are metaphysical biases, which somehow people claim for science: “Science shows us that blankety blankety blank.” Actually, no, science doesn’t show that. And, in particular, the role of the Observer… well, it’s not even the Observer, it’s the role of experience.

The verb “to be” is something that science doesn’t really know how to deal with. What has happened is that scientists have often ignored it and tried to pretend that it doesn’t exist. They’ve sort of defined it away, and that’s actually fine for some problems—doing that has actually allowed science to make a whole lot of progress. For instance, if you’re just talking about balls on a pool table, fine: you can totally get the Observer out of it. But there is a whole class of problems that are at the very root of some of our deepest questions, like the nature of consciousness, the nature of time, and the nature of the universe as a whole, where doing that [taking the Observer out] limits you in terms of explanations, and it’s really bound us up in a lot of ways. And it has really important consequences, both for science, our ability to explain things, but also for the culture that emerges out of science.

In order to remove the Observer you have to treat the world as dead, you know? One of the things that for me is really important is to move away from like words like “the Observer” and focus on experience. Because part of the problem with experience is that it’s so close to us that we don’t even see it. And it’s only in contemplative practice that you really have to deal with it. — Adam Frank

But even that will rub a lot of people up the wrong way - 'oh, he's talking about Zen Buddhism, that's a religion, religion is dogmatic, he must be dogmatic.' Well, no. That's another cultural construct. Tangled web.

I think there is a deep, unsettled conflict between humanism and naturalism in modern philosophy, and it lies at the heart of the inability to move past the appearance/reality dichotomy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:100: Maybe because we mistake quantifiable regularities for reality itself.

I don't read Rawls as saying that definitions of the good have to be unanalyzable preferences. This seems to set up a false binary: Either the good for individuals can be known and agreed upon by some rational, objective process (and presumably form the basis for a civil society), or else all we're left with is "unanalyzable preferences." Rather, what we're left with is what we see in more-or-less democratic, more-or-less civil societies -- vigorous dispute over what is good! Dispute and lack of resolution do not necessarily indicate that a problem is "unanalyzable," only that it's difficult and perhaps evolves historically. In addition, we can allow that progress is possible, as indeed has happened in Western democracies, I believe.

If a society based on Rawls principles is set up, and over time it evolves into ABNW, where is the objection supposed to come from? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You! That's the whole idea -- a pluralism of viewpoint is encouraged. See something wrong? Speak up, make your argument. Unless the suggestion is that ABNW would somehow rob people of their ability to notice what's dangerous within their society? It's been years since I read the novel, and perhaps Huxley does suggest this, in order to make his world truly dystopian, but I think that's unrealistic. Remember, the ideal liberal democracy thrives on disagreement, not conformity.

Isn't the whole concept of scientific or natural law built on the assumption of there being a natural order? — Wayfarer

No, the concept of natural law is based on observed invariances.

But once you start deciding that key ways we cognize the world are illusory, it seems hard to know where to stop. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but I haven’t decided that.

We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature. — Joshs

Exactly.

Isn't the whole concept of scientific or natural law built on the assumption of there being a natural order — Wayfarer

Not sure about that. There are certainly regularities we are able to ride like surfers riding waves, but ‘natural order’ and laws’ seem grandiose and leads to anthropomorphic musings. Chaos and entropy seem even more readily apparent from my perspective. I don’t see how we can come to any firm conclusions about the nature of reality.

Chaos and entropy seem even more readily apparent from my perspective. — Tom Storm

We have order even in language:

entropy Chaos even from apparent readily and my more perspective seem.

Hence:

I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. — Nietszche

Isn't that how nihilism shows up in life? I asked my friendly AI helper about Heidegger's view of nihilism, and received the following response:

One of Heidegger's key contributions to the discussion of nihilism is found in his interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God" and the ensuing crisis of values in Western culture. Heidegger interprets Nietzsche's declaration not just as a theological statement but as a metaphysical one, indicating the culmination of Western metaphysics and its inability to provide a grounding for values or meaning. This crisis, according to Heidegger, leads to nihilism, understood as the devaluation of the highest values, and signals a fundamental emptiness or lack of meaning in the modern world.

In his lectures, such as those compiled in "Nietzsche, Volumes I and II," Heidegger explores Nietzsche's thought and its implications for the problem of nihilism. He critiques the Western metaphysical tradition for leading humanity into a state of forgetfulness regarding the question of Being, which he sees as the root cause of nihilism. For Heidegger, overcoming nihilism involves a re-engagement with the question of Being and a move away from the metaphysical conception of truth and values.

Furthermore, in "The Question Concerning Technology" and other essays, Heidegger discusses the role of technology in shaping modern human existence and its contribution to the nihilistic condition. He argues that the essence of technology as a mode of enframing reveals a world where everything is seen as a resource to be exploited, further distancing humanity from a meaningful engagement with Being.

I put it that this raises the question of what a 'meaningful engagement of Being' amounts to. I said we've become distanced from Being because of the illusion of otherness or separation, the sense that we are standing apart from or outside our experience-of-the-world, which in turn is based on the conceptual framework that we view it through:

Your reflection touches on a profound aspect of Martin Heidegger's philosophy, particularly his critique of the modern age and the technological mindset that, according to him, leads to a form of existential alienation. Heidegger's entire project, starting with "Being and Time" (1927), is an attempt to reawaken the question of Being, which he believed had been neglected since the time of the ancient Greeks. This neglect, in his view, leads to a form of nihilism because it results in a world where things are valued only for their utility, what he calls "the enframing" (Gestell). (e.g. valuing reason only for of its adaptive utility, what use it provides ~ wf.)

Heidegger's engagement with nihilism isn't always direct but can be inferred from his critique of the history of Western metaphysics, which he saw as progressively obscuring our relationship to Being. According to Heidegger, this alienation is not just a matter of mistaken thought but is deeply embedded in the way we interact with the world and each other, particularly through technology, which turns everything, including humans, into resources to be exploited. This condition exacerbates the sense of otherness or separation you mentioned, where we come to view ourselves, others, and the world around us as objects among objects, rather than being integrally connected to the world.

A "meaningful engagement with Being," for Heidegger, involves a fundamental shift in our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. It requires moving away from a conceptual framework that emphasizes separation, utility, and objectification, towards a more original experience of Being. This involves what he calls "thinking," a kind of contemplation that is different from the calculative thinking that dominates the modern world. It's a thinking that dwells on the mystery of Being, that appreciates things in their presence (what he terms "presencing") rather than just their utility.

This shift also entails a different way of relating to the world and others, characterized by what Heidegger calls "care" (Sorge) and "being-with" (Mitsein). Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated subjects confronting an external world, Heidegger encourages us to recognize our fundamental interconnectedness with the world and others (this is where aspects of Heidegger have been compared to the Buddhist principle of dependent origination ~ wf). This recognition can help overcome the alienation and nihilism of the modern condition by fostering a sense of belonging and responsibility for the world.

Your observation about the illusion of otherness ties directly into this Heideggerian critique. The challenge, as Heidegger sees it, is to overcome this illusion not by denying the reality of our individual experiences, but by recognizing that these experiences are always already situated within a world that we share with others. This involves a more profound engagement with the question of Being, one that acknowledges our fundamental interconnectedness and the ways in which our understanding of ourselves and the world is shaped by this interconnectedness. — ChatGPT

We have order even in language:
entropy Chaos even from apparent readily and my more perspective seem.

Hence:
I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
— Nietszche — Wayfarer

Not sure why we arrived at nihilism in this discussion and I never agued that humans don't find order useful - we are meaning making creatures, from our perspective finding order seems a ready and efficient way to make ideas work for us. But does this transcend our cognitive apparatus? I guess as a form of Platonist you would say, 'yes' (eg, maths as found rather rather than invented).

Grammar varies with languages and one culture's grammar looks like chaos to another's. So if grammar is a faith, it's sectarian and contingent, like that in gods. :wink:

Nothing here about Heidegger suggests he was a theist or a Platonist. Being can be radically contingent and still involve interconnection. Plenty of room for atheism in embodied cognition.

Doesn't Heidegger think that our tendency to conceive of gods and Platonic forms is foundational to nihilism? Being seems to be his way out of all of this.

ChatGPT on Heidegger and nihilsim

Metaphysics and Nihilism: Heidegger traced the roots of nihilism to the history of Western metaphysics, particularly to the tradition of ontotheology, which he critiqued for reducing Being to a concept or entity (e.g., God or the highest being). He argued that this metaphysical understanding of Being contributed to the forgetfulness of Being and the emergence of nihilism.

@joshs apologies for the above ChatGPT - this is obviously not my area. Any general thoughts on what Heidegger thought of theism or Platonism?

Not sure why we arrived at nihilism in this discussion — Tom Storm

I admit it was a bit of a flight of ideas on my part. But the gist was that the denial of order in the Universe tends towards nihilism, in the sense that it denies the possibility of causal connections and any intrinsic meaning. That is what made me think of Nietszche and Heidegger, as it was among their central themes.

But does this transcend our cognitive apparatus? I guess as a form of Platonist you would say, 'yes' (eg, maths as found rather rather than invented). — Tom Storm

Kant distinguishes 'transcendental' from the 'transcendent' where the former concerns the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself, such as space and time as forms of sensibility and the categories of the understanding. But they're still 'givens' inasmuch as they are already present as the constituents of the understanding, so in that sense, beyond or not accessible to conscious awareness. They're 'always already the case'. There are connections between Plato and Kant but it's a rather esoteric topic, but I think it's safe to say that Kant was certainly not nihilistic. I don't think he had encountered that chasm yet.

I don't know why you make the point whether Heidegger was 'theistic', as if I were suggesting that he was, or defending 'theism'. Heidegger's point, like Nietszche's, is not by any stretch to defend religion, but to point out that in its absence, and the collapse of the traditional source of value, we are faced with the prospect of a meaningless cosmos into which we are thrown by chance, and for no real reason, other than the reasons we ourselves can manufacture. All existentialists deal with that question one way or another, although some are theistic and others are not. I don't think Heidegger was theistic although I have read that his philosophical preoccupations were very much shaped by his early theological concerns (he originally studied divinity). Anyway, as I say, a bit of a flight of ideas on my part.

Grammar varies with languages and one culture's grammar looks like chaos to another's. — Tom Storm

Chomsky says not, that there's an underlying 'universal grammar'.

Anyway, as I say, a bit of a flight of ideas on my part. — Wayfarer

I enjoy such flights of ideas.

I don't know why you make the point whether Heidegger was 'theistic', as if I were suggesting that he was, or defending 'theism'. — Wayfarer

No, I guess my point is that people tend to tie nihilism to a lack of belief in gods or transcendental entities (antifoundationalism) and as far as I know Heidegger lacked belief in these. So his answer to nihilism seems not to be located in superphysical transcendence, but rather in a form of self-reflection on being, as you suggest. But this is not my subject.

…the denial of order in the Universe tends towards nihilism, in the sense that it denies the possibility of causal connections and any intrinsic meaning. That is what made me think of Nietszche and Heidegger, as it was among their central themes. — Wayfarer

Heidegger’s main target of critique was the subject-object binary that he traces back to Descartes and continues to exert its effect on philosophy through Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. This binary makes possible the metaphysical basis of modern science and technology. According to the modern scientific notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself. Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject to be the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the persistent presence of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because, more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself.

“Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…”

Heidegger traces the modern conception of will, value and causality to the presumed self-identity of the subject as that which posits and represents objects to itself (subject-object relation as propositional assertion S is P). For Heidegger the modern notion of subjectivity is nihilistic because the order (mathematical, objective) it attributes to the Universe is based on a presupposition concerning the certainty of the self as persisting presence. To perceive the self , or objects, in terms of Self-identity, self-persistence, present-at-handness is to distort and flatten meaning, to fail to understand , to fall into nihilism. His notion of Being (or Beyng) as fundamental ontology overcomes the idea of being as persisting presence in favor of Being as occurrence, happening. Being is more primordial than concepts like subject, object, consciousness, willing and valuing. We fall into nihilism whoever we take these as fundamental.

We dont have to assume our cognitions are illusory simply because we recognize the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature.

Exactly. And from the naturalist frame this community exists in nature, and it's evolution is not arbitrary or unrelated to nature to begin with, so there is no need to worry about it "floating free," of nature, having nothing to do with it.

This reinstates the Cartesian veil separating appearance from reality, and a correspondence approach to empiricism.

I'll admit, I don't really see how "recogn[ing]the inextricable role of the subject and intersubjective community in the construction of our understanding of nature..." implies the above, it seems consistent with denials of the veil as well.

We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I don't really know how this works either. Didn't we just reinstate the Cartesian veil?

Anyhow, how might this apply to common reality/appearance distinctions? Such as:

"Is economic inequality really increasing, or is it a mirage from statistical choices employed by economists?"

"Is there life on Mars, or are these weird patterns in rock samples caused by abiotic processes?"

"Hey, is that my friend's girlfriend over there making out with that guy?! Or is it just a woman with the same jacket and haircut?" (A classic Seinfeld problem for George when he loses his glasses!)

Such constructions might well be open ended, and inexhaustible, but they aren't unconstrained. Many — most really — ways of trying to do things run into immediate problems. If you want to patch a tire, there are myriad ways to do it right. Yet, just as certainly there are many more ways to do it wrong (e.g. pouring spaghetti on it, drinking potions, etc.) than ways that will make the tire hold air.

Likewise, there might be many ways to describe something plausibly and consistently (e.g. the nine or so big interpretations of quantum mechanics) but there will also many more ways to describe things in ways that are gibberish or which no one will find plausible. E.g., we might think there are very many ways we could design an airplane, but there are more ways to design airplanes that can't fly than ones that can.

These constraints I think, can usefully be thought of as reality, without losing the insights re intersubjectivity.

We could take Husserl's conception of the "zig-zag" in perception as the phenomenologically basic case of this. "Is this really the case?” we can ask, “is my interlocutor correct that Yosemite Park is in Wyoming?” When we perform this zig-zag we are moving between focusing on the judgment and focusing on things, and through this movement we can see whether the judgment and the state of affairs can be blended with one another. This oscillation is the origin of the kind of truth we call correspondence, but it is not "correspondence truth," in this naive form because it lies below the level of philosophical thought, in the realm of everyday communication.

Humanism presupposes objective empiricism and vice versa. Both originate in the Christian( which is indebted to the Platonic) notion of an absolutely certain ground for truth. In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. According to then modern scientific , and humanist, notion of the subject-object relation, the subject is seen as a self-reflective consciousness that posits and represents the object before itself.

I'm sort of with you here, but historically it seems like this has led to relativism as often as "absolute grounds for certainty." E.g., arguments along the line of "the individual is the origin point for moral judgement. Individuals disagree about moral judgements. Therefore, moral truth depends on who you are and where you stand." You see a similar move with aesthetic judgement too, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder."

Heidegger considers this self-presencing certainty of the subject as the basis of modern mathematical thinking. That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the mathematical self-identity of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because , more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. Once you deconstruct the self-identical unity of the human subject , you simultaneously pull the rug out from under direct and interdict realism.

Yes, but you also pull the rug out on the agent of truth who interacts in the "Human Conversation," writ large, the one who preforms Bernard William's virtues of Sincerity and Accuracy. The ego might be dissolvable, but it must come back on the scene for declarative sentences — "I feel that," "I think that," — and their central role in human conversation. But moreover, total removals of self ala Hume run into difficulties:

Funes, [of Borges' "Funes the Memorius"], remembers “not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.”32 For him, each iota of the space- time continuum is utterly singular. Or so he claims. Hume also claimed this. For Hume, we could never know if there was a world of information, of necessary laws behind our sensory impressions. For him, each impression, each leaf In a garden, was condemned to be isolated, sui generis, and never an example of a general rule.

But where this challenge led him to extreme skepticism, Kant drew another lesson. Kant realized that Hume’s world of pure, unique impressions couldn’t exist. This is because the minimal requirement for experiencing anything is not to be so absorbed in the present that one is lost in it. What Hume had claimed— that when exploring his feeling of selfhood, he always landed “on some particular perception or other” but could never catch himself “at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception”— was simply not true.33 Because for Hume to even report this feeling he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.

Hence what Kant wrote in his answer to Hamann, ten years in the making. To recollect perfectly eradicates the recollection, just as to perceive perfectly eradicates the perception. For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all ["displacement" in phenomenology]. If everything we learn about the world flows directly into us from utterly distinct bits of code, as the rationalists thought, or if everything we learn remains nothing but subjective, unconnected impressions, as Hume believed— it comes down to exactly the same thing. With no self to distinguish itself, no self to bridge two disparate moments in space- time, there is simply no one there to feel irritated at the inadequacy of “dog.” No experience whatsoever is possible.

William Eddington - The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2023)

and leads to anthropomorphic musings

But aren't this inevitable in anything we say?

I don't really see the danger in anthropomorphizing. Human beings are of the world, in the world. Obviously, we make mistakes when we anthropomorphize. Animism is ubiquitous in early cultures and children, "the sky is cloudy because it is sad." But the same faculties that lead to that judgement lead to its rejection.

We can bypass the whole reality vs illusion mentality by focusing on the inexhaustible variety of ways our constructions of the real can allow us to do things in the world, and find ways of making those constructions more inclusive and open-ended, rather than reifying one construction as more ‘truly real’ than others.

I don't really know how this works either. Didn't we just reinstate the Cartesian veil? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our constructions are real. They are of the world. More specifically , they are world-organism interaction, but not in the guise of an interior peering out at an exterior. Constructions are of movements , doings, performances, not passive contemplations of an epistemological nature. To know is to change the world in some fashion and to be affected by the feedback from that change. The cycle of interchanges between our bodies and an environment define what ‘objects’ are on the basis of what we do with them , and how they respond to our doings. There is no veil here since neither pole of the body-world interaction has a meaning or existence part from the interaction, which remakes each pole in every interchange.

Such constructions might well be open ended, and inexhaustible, but they aren't unconstrained. Many — most really — ways of trying to do things run into immediate problems. If you want to patch a tire, there are myriad ways to do it right. Yet, just as certainly there are many more ways to do it wrong (e.g. pouring spaghetti on it, drinking potions, etc.) than ways that will make the tire hold air. These constraints I think, can usefully be thought of as reality, without losing the insights re intersubjectivity. We could take Husserl's conception of the "zig-zag" in perception as the phenomenologically basic case of this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s look at a how Husserl’s zig-zag works. When Husserl talks about a real spatial object, what he means is an idealization. In the case of fixing the tire, we first have to constitute the real object we call the tire. We do this through a progress of objectivating acts that adumbrate perspectival appearances and synthetically correlate these with input from our other senses modalities as well as kinetic information. The object is an idealization founded on the synthesis of these correlated objectivating intentionalacts. Since the object is constituted on the basis of similarities and correlations with respect to prior intentional syntheses, which themselves are build upon earlier commonalities and likenesses, the ‘real ‘ world
that we constitute, both in terms of what we recognize within it and what goes wrong, what surprises us, what goes missing or breaks down, what turns out to be ‘illusory’, are already prefigured and organized by us around the possibilities of our own bodily performance as zero point of activity. In the zig-zag, when we go back to reflect on the ‘beginning’ of a process of constitution of the real, this beginning is already framed on the basis of the highest level of constitution we have achieved. As Derrida explains,

“…consciousness discovers its path in an indefinite reduction, always already begun, and wherein every adventure is a change of direction and every return to the origin an audacious move toward the horizon.

In sum, the constraints that are placed on the ways in which we are able to constitute the real via objectivating intentional acts arise out of an outside whose alterity is never completely foreign to the nature of the subject’s bodily functioning.

“Messing with the system that makes most other people happy,” to use your phrase, would presumably involve active restraints or disincentives on certain behaviors, as government policy. And Rawlsian liberals believe this is not the right approach, that tolerance of stupidity and wickedness is, in the end, the lesser of two evils. I emphasize again that this whole theory applies to social structures, not individuals. Personally I despise all forms of bigoted rhetoric, for instance, and do everything I can to oppose it; I’m not the least bit personally tolerant in this area. But I don’t want my government to censor or ban it. I’m also against a life of selfish pleasure, but liberalism asks me to tolerate in my role as citizen your choice of lifestyle even though I disapprove. — J

The problem is that liberalism presents a faux neutrality. To say, for example, that hate speech is permitted but assault is not, is to lapse into non-neutrality. What liberals do is highlight all the ways that liberalism is tolerant and paper over all the ways that it is not, and then announce that they are neutral and uniformly tolerant.

What is needed is a criterion by which the state acts, such that hate speech is permissible and assault is not. Liberalism is incoherent because it claims to be value-neutral, and yet there is no way to distinguish hate speech from assault given value neutrality. One could appeal to the proximate regime (modern liberal democracy) or the remote regime (democracy), but the mere appeal to a regime without a justification of the regime is a petitio principii, and this is precisely Rawls' error. It is a stretch for @Count Timothy von Icarus to call it an individual preference, because it is rather a cultural or societal preference, but both are in the same ballpark.

It isn’t only personal desires that thrive in a liberal democracy. So too do ideas, values, commitments, imagination, and deeply experienced “projects” of all kinds. — J

But only at the private level.

I guess another way of saying it is: Rawlsian liberal democracy is our best shot at creating a society that allows you or me the unfettered opportunity to argue for our personal morality, and perhaps see those arguments prevail. — J

But only at the private level.

Whenever someone's arguments oppose Rawls' vision, then they are by definition not allowed to prevail. Liberalism is a two-tiered scheme, where everyone is allowed freedom within the set boundaries, and no one quite knows why the boundaries are what they are.

Granted, "liberalism" in the older, non-Rawlsian sense derives from thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, and they were more willing to try to defend the regime than Rawls was. Rawls is like a politician who sums up and sets forth the values of a people. He does not attempt to justify those values.

I’m assuming his non-opposition is a business move, to avoid alienating some of his fan base. — Joshs

I'm sure that's part of it, but I think it's only one piece of the puzzle. For candidates on the right, he did extended interviews with DeSantis, Christie, and Ramaswamy, but they have all dropped and I know he is not a fan of Biden. It would be interesting to know whether he extended an invitation to Trump. In any case, I haven't been following politics very closely so I will leave it at that, especially for this thread.

That is, as the certainty of calculation. Only because being is understood via the persistent presence of subject and object can modern science and technology, as well as humanism, be thought. What is real is what is consistently present, and the object’s reality is made possible by its being represented by a self-present subject. A=A because, more fundamentally, the ‘I’ equals itself. — Joshs

Makes perfect sense to me. I do see a convergence between Heidegger and elements of non-dualism, although of course there are also many differences.

In the wake of Descartes, God was replaced by the human subject , the consciousness of the ego, as the source of absolute certainty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right - as I was saying up-thread, the advent of liberal individualism, the individual ego as arbiter of truth.

Consider Alistair MacIntyre's description of how proponents of Rawls and Nozick's ethical theories end up talking past one another:

It is in any case clear that for both Nozick and Rawls a society is composed of individuals, each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate common rules of life . In Nozick's case there is the additional negative constraint of a set of basic rights. In Rawls's case the only constraints are those that a prudent rationality would impose. Individuals are thus in both accounts primary and society secondary, and the identification of individual interests is prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between them. But we have already seen that the notion of desert is at home only in the context of a community whose primary bond is a shared understanding both of the good for man and of the good of that community and where individuals identify their primary interests with reference to those goods. Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. Only those goods
in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration. In Nozick's argument too, the concept of community required for the notion of desert to have application is simply absent.

MacIntyre goes on to describe how members of the laity who might sympathize variously with Nozick (conservative) or Rawls (liberal) would put things slightly differently. In general, these people will talk about deserts, what people "deserve," given good action. Thus the conservative will talk about how they worked hard for their income and deserve to reap the rewards of it, to use the fruits of their labor to buy their parents a house, etc. The liberal will talk about how the inherited wealth of economic elites is underserved, or how the hard working but impoverished laborers deserve a higher standard of living.

Desert is missing from the more sophisticated theories because it is assumed that "what is good for man," man's telos, and "what the virtues consist in," is unknowable. MacIntyre's point is a different one but it ties in to the problem we are discussing. It is because man's telos and the nature of virtue is unanalyzable that desert, a natural part of naive conceptions ethics, ends up missing from the picture.

The risk when just deserts leaves the picture is most acute when it comes to criminal justice. There, when we cease to focus on what is deserved, and instead only focus on the pragmatics of recidivism and incentives, we risk falling into a conception of the justice system as largely a tool for properly training people to behave in accordance with the law, the way we might "train" a horse.

The risk when just deserts leaves the picture is most acute when it comes to criminal justice. There, when we cease to focus on what is deserved, and instead only focus on the pragmatics of recidivism and incentives, we risk falling into a conception of the justice system as largely a tool for properly training people to behave in accordance with the law, the way we might "train" a horse. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The training of people, the 'civilizing' of them. although obviously more complex, is essentially no different than training horses. some people, like some horses, train better than others,

and leads to anthropomorphic musings

But aren't this inevitable in anything we say?

I don't really see the danger in anthropomorphizing. Human beings are of the world, in the world. Obviously, we make mistakes when we anthropomorphize. Animism is ubiquitous in early cultures and children, "the sky is cloudy because it is sad." But the same faculties that lead to that judgement lead to its rejection. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think anthropomorphising is lazy and onanistic. And worse, it is often wrong. But it's too minor a problem to debate. :wink:

the individual ego as arbiter of truth. — Wayfarer

I fail to see how it has ever been anything but this. We may dress up our individual egos in drag with Islam or liberalism or existentialism, but in the end we are emotionally driven creatures who make choices based on what (we think) pleases us and how we as individuals interpret ideas.

Liberalism is incoherent because it claims to be value-neutral, and yet there is no way to distinguish hate speech from assault given value neutrality. — Leontiskos

I've never known any liberals to say this. Can you provide an example?

But it's too minor a problem to debate

Au contraire, metaphysics being onanistic is a central point of contention re misology. That's where claims about the limits of reason started — the inability of speculation not to be led by mere passion and appetite in the end. The "Masters of Suspicion," Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, etc. get the ball rolling on that. It's just that it takes a long time for similar sorts of arguments to start getting made about "the things we know well," i.e., human relations: gender relations, race relations, inequality, justice, etc. But the skepticism re reason starts with "the external world," with the British empiricists (or arguably with medieval nominalism and Protestant fideism re God).

They are similar because how we learn is similar, and because the proximate goals of "reinforcing x behavior," are similar.

I'd argue that they can't be the same thing. When we train animals, a behavior, or lack of it, is the end itself. The Aristotlean distinction between continence and virtue makes no sense with animals. But with people, we want them to want what is good — Frankfurt's second order volitions — and we want to convince them that it is good to act in this way.

The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. We want people to be free, and in being free they must understand why they act and accept it "with the rational part of the soul." A merely continent person is always unstable, and in a way, unfree. They want to act in vice and are at war with themselves (Romans 7). But education aims at the enhancement of freedom and harmonization of the person, giving them the tools to harmonize themselves. Training only focuses on the ends of behavior.

But without a conception of the human good, virtue, and freedom, education and training for human beings degenerates into the sort of thing we do for animals.

They are similar because how we learn is similar, and because the proximate goals of "reinforcing x behavior," are similar.

I'd argue that they can't be the same thing. When we train animals, a behavior, or lack of it, is the end itself. The Aristotlean distinction between continence and virtue makes no sense with animals. But with people, we want them to want what is good — Frankfurt's second order volitions — and we want to convince them that it is good to act in this way.

The difference is that the person and their excellence, excellence in our eyes and theirs, is an end in itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m reminded of the reason that positivism, in the form of stimulus-response theory, came to dominate psychology. It was meant to counter the idealist atomisms of armchair psychologists. Only what was observable and measurable counted for the behaviorists. Eventually, after finally circling back to William James, it became clear that behaviorism’s understanding of objectivity relied on hidden metaphysical assumptions. Cognitivism sought to remedy behaviorism’s blind spot for the irreducibly interpretive elements of meaning, but came under fire themselves for being disembodied, and ignoring the body , the social, and the intrinsically normative, goal-oriented nature of human and animal behavior.

But without a conception of the human good, virtue, and freedom, education and training for human beings degenerates into the sort of thing we do for animals — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems to me the development of psychological theory from logical atomism to behaviorist understanding of human and animal behavior to psychoanalysis and cognitivism , and finally embodied enactivism, has taken the field farther and farther away from non-naturalistic, non-evolution and ecology-based models of the good, the virtuous and the autonomous.

I've never known any liberals to say this. Can you provide an example? — Tom Storm

For example, look at the post written a few hours before yours, where MacIntyre is being quoted:

Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life.

Liberalism as we now understand it is the idea that no conception of the good life is to be imposed, and everyone is to be allowed to pursue their own notion of the good life — Leontiskos

Might we say that, particularly for post-Marxist positions, there is a teleologically oriented notion of the good life that is process (dialectical materialism) rather than content-based?