I appreciate this translation. I cut my teeth with the Norman Kemp Smith translation fifty years ago. It was like being sent to a different planet.

Are you referring to principles, that in which resides always and only absolute certainty? — Mww

I will have to think about it in those terms. I don't want to get too far over my skis.

In the passages I quoted, the view of Descartes and Berkeley as being childish both involve the personal being taken as a fundamental ground that is not only unproven but misses elements of experience. Kant claims his more mature approach looks for a set of conditions for the experience of the 'I think' that it is not self-evident but requires more understanding. How we visualize the boundaries seems connected to this kind of unknown. I will try to express this better in other posts.

Your point about Kant having the last word in many places if left unchallenged is well taken.

Your observation regarding the structure of CPR is interesting. I best not put my trowel away.

What still surprises me about the later sections is where he dismisses the either/or quality that has often been ascribed to him by later thinkers. The attempt to form the last words on an issue is yet not to have the last word. Otherwise, there would only be the silence Cratylus was said to have fallen into.

I submit that it is the differences between how philosophers use terms that undermines making a lexicon that underlies all the possible usages.

So, for instance, I appreciate and admire efforts like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to establish a standard of description where different thinking can be compared to each other. Such an approach is not going to illuminate what defies comparison. The latter is the motivation for many a disagreement between thinkers. Maybe there is a limit to description.

I will try to approach the passage by comparing Kant's objections to Hume with Kant's arguments against Descartes and Berkeley:

Refutation of Idealism

Idealism (I mean material idealism) is the theory that declares the exis
tence of objects in space outside us to be either merely doubtful and in
-demonstrable, or else false and impossible; the former is the
problematic idealism of Descartes, who declares only one empirical as-
sertion (assertio), namely I am, to be indubitable; the latter is the dog-
matic idealism of Berkeley, who declares space, together with all the
things to which it is attached as an inseparable condition, to be some-
thing that is impossible in itself, and who therefore also declares things
in space to be merely imaginary. Dogmatic idealism is unavoidable if
one regards space as a property that is to pertain to the things in them-
selves; for then it, along with everything for which it serves as a condi-
tion, is a non-entity. The ground for this idealism, however, has been
undercut by us in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Problematic idealism,
which does not assert anything about this, but rather professes only our
incapacity for proving an existence outside us from our own by means of
immediate experience, is rational and appropriate for a thorough philo-
sophical manner of thought, allowing, namely, no decisive judgment
until a sufficient proof has been found. The proof that is demanded must
therefore establish that we have experience and not merely imagina-
tion of outer things, which cannot be accomplished unless one can prove
that even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible
only under the presupposition of outer experience. — CPR, B274

Immediately following the above text is the Theorem to support it. It is a set of paragraphs that are not included in the first (or A) edition. I read this addition as an attempt to clarify language used throughout the work. One can see how the terms are carefully developed through their use.

Kant's beef with Hume is not the skepticism the latter employed regarding the narratives produced by "reason". Kant agrees that much cannot be proved. But the limits are part of a larger understanding of experience. As quoted before:

Thus skepticism is a resting
place for human reason, which can reflect upon its dogmatic peregri-
nation and make a survey of the region in which it finds itself in order
to be able to choose its path in the future with greater certainty, but it
is not a dwelling-place for permanent residence; for the latter can only
be found in a complete certainty, whether it be one of the cognition of
the objects themselves or of the boundaries within which all of our cog-
nition of objects is enclosed. — CPR, A758 B786

A double whammy, not only can’t we say anything about noumena, but we are confined within a world of appearances, so can’t say anything about anything else (apart from appearances), either. — Punshhh

Kant disagrees about there being nothing to say about either. He distinguishes our ignorance from a skepticism that would presume more than it can display. Here is Kant's argument with Hume on the matter:

On the impossibility of a skeptical satisfaction of pure reason that is divided against itself.

The consciousness of my ignorance (if this is not at the same time
known to be necessary) should not end my inquiries, but is rather the
proper cause to arouse them. All ignorance is either that of things or of
the determination and boundaries of my cognition. Now if the ignor
ance is contingent, then in the first case it must drive me to investigate
the things (objects) dogmatically, in the second case to investigate
the boundaries of my possible cognition critically. But that my ignorance
is absolutely necessary and hence absolves me from all further investi
gation can never be made out empirically, from observation, but only
critically, by getting to the bottom of the primary sources of our cog
nition. Thus the determination of the boundaries of our reason can
only take place in accordance with a priori grounds; its limitation, how
ever, which is a merely indeterminate cognition of an ignorance that is
never completely to be lifted, can also be cognized a posteriori, through
that which always remains to be known even with all of our knowledge.
The former cognition of ignorance, which is possible only by means of
the critique of reason itself, is thus science, the latter is nothing but
perception, about which one cannot say how far the inference from it
might reach. If I represent the surface of the earth (in accordance with
sensible appearance as a plate, I cannot know how far it extends. But
experience teaches me this: that wherever I go, I always see a space
around me in which I could proceed farther; thus I cognize the limits of
my actual knowledge of the earth at any time, but not the boundaries
of all possible description of the earth. But if I have gotten as far as
knowing that the earth is a sphere and its surface the surface of a sphere,
then from a small part of the latter, e.g., from the magnitude of one de-
gree, I can cognize its diameter and, by means of this, the complete
boundary, i.e., surface of the earth, determinately and in accordance
with a priori principles;' and although I am ignorant in regard to the ob-
jects that this surface might contain, I am not ignorant in regard to the
magnitude and limits of the domain that contains them.

The sum total of all possible objects for our cognition seems to us to
be a flat surface, which has its apparent horizon, namely that which
comprehends its entire domain and which is called by us the rational
concept of unconditioned totality. It is impossible to attain this empir
ically, and all attempts to determine it a priori in accordance with a cer-
tain principle have been in vain. Yet all questions of our pure reason
pertain to that which might lie outside this horizon or in any case at
least on its borderline.

The famous David Hume was one of these geographers of human
reason, who took himself to have satisfactorily disposed of these ques
tions by having expelled them outside the horizon of human reason,
which however he could not determine. He dwelt primarily on the prin
ciple of causality, and quite rightly remarked about that that one could
not base its truth (indeed not even the objective validity of the concept
of an efficient cause in general) on any insight at all, i.e., a priori cogni
tion, and thus that the authority of this law is not constituted in the least
by its necessity, but only by its merely general usefulness in the course
of experience and a subjective necessity arising therefrom, which he
called custom. Now from the incapacity of our reason to make a use
of this principle that goes beyond all experience, he inferred the nullity
of all pretensions of reason in general to go beyond the empirical.

One can call a procedure of this sort, subjecting the facta of reason to
examination and when necessary to blame, the censorship of reason. It
is beyond doubt that this censorship inevitably leads to doubt about all
transcendent use of principles. But this is only the second step, which is
far from completing the work. The first step in matters of pure reason,
which characterizes its childhood, is dogmatic. The just mentioned
second step is skeptical, and gives evidence of the caution of the power
of judgment sharpened by experience. Now, however, a third step is still
necessary, which pertains only to the mature and adult power of judg
ment, which has at its basis firm maxims of proven universality, that,
namely, which subjects to evaluation not the facta of reason but reason
itself, as concerns its entire capacity and suitability for pure a priori
cognitions; this is not the censorship but the critique of pure reason,
whereby not merely limits but rather the determinate boundaries of
it - not merely ignorance in one part or another but ignorance in
regard to all possible questions of a certain sort - are not merely sus
pected but are proved from principles. Thus skepticism is a resting
place for human reason, which can reflect upon its dogmatic peregri
nation and make a survey of the region in which it finds itself in order
to be able to choose its path in the future with greater certainty, but it
is not a dwelling-place for permanent residence; for the latter can only
be found in a complete certainty, whether it be one of the cognition of
the objects themselves or of the boundaries within which all of our cog-
nition of objects is enclosed.

Our reason is not like an indeterminably extended plane, the limits of
which one can cognize only in general, but must rather be compared
with a sphere, the radius of which can be found out from the curvature
of an arc on its surface (from the nature of synthetic a priori proposi
tions), from which its content and its boundary can also be ascertained
with certainty. Outside this sphere (field of experience) nothing is an
object" for it; indeed even questions about such supposed objects con
cern only subjective principles of a thoroughgoing determination of
the relations that can obtain among the concepts of understanding in
side of this sphere. — CPR, A758 B786

The above quote also supports 's observations concerning the role of boundaries in rational activities.

It is true that many different beliefs agreed to the First Amendment establishment of religion clause. The toleration of differences was a rejection of the wars of religion that had consumed the English Civil War and its resolution. That spirit of Liberal rights was broader than just what was expressed by the self-declared Deists of that time.

As a Constitutional matter, the adjudication of States who required their citizens to comply with the taxation and practices of a particular religion were overturned through the use of the 14nth Amendment that restricted the scope of what States could do in view of the individual rights given in the First:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. — Constitution, 14nth Amendment, Section 1

A good summary of this process is given in the Supreme Court decision, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947), where the State was permitted to reimburse some costs separate from any advocacy for a particular church.

The idea of the person.

The Deists did not agree with your assessment. The idea was central to the separation of church and state in America.

Does your approach amount to:

Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind.

I propose that there is/was a strong countervailing movement against this idea;

So, the Gerson argument? There is only the possibility of a made world against whatever one might propose?

If I can address this topic, I will try it in the Rödl thread. It is a difficult conversation when you make certain claims and then disqualify yourself from opining upon them.

The “unity of thinking” grounds the possibility of objects as given in experience, but is not itself an object of intuition. — Wayfarer

Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument.

But that is not Kant's complaint against Descartes. The limits of intuition do not inform us as to what is possible or not. There is no phrase in Kant that says:

There being an observer (a subject of experience) is the condition of existence of objects of cognition. — Wayfarer

Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be. That follows a way of thinking about reason itself such as performed by Anselm, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, etcetera.

Or if you prefer, Wittgenstein speaks of solipsism as manifest but not expressible. But then he stopped doing that later, realizing what he was not saying.

The instances make me wary of comparing one set of ideas against another.

Well, Kant was a committed Lutheran who puzzled in the Critique of Judgement how Spinoza could carry on without the belief in the continuance of his personal soul.

Descartes reformulated the reasoning of Augustine in his pitch of the experience of himself. I agree that the "self" is a sticky wicket in Kant's model. But I think his concern was decidedly not Buddhist in it's character.

What you describe seems to express the view of Deism, a collection of views from the Enlightenment that welcomed a certain view of creation but questioned the idea of God as a direct agent in human affairs.

Do you see your effort in the context of that history?

In support of your observation, Kant went as far as rejecting Descartes' grounds for confirming his own "thinking" as an experience.

From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of itself (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place. *

* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), but rather it is identical with it. It expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception through the category in regard to time; and here existence is not yet a category, which is not related to an indeterminately given object, but rather to an object of which one has a concept, and about which one wants to know whether or not it is posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition "I think." For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition "I think" an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general. Only without any empirical representation, which provides the material for thinking, the act I think would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application, or use, of the pure intellectual faculty. — CPR, Kant, B421

Okay. I will try to show up there with something.

Your question about choices is a fair response to my challenge. I will think about it.

I get that an old thread may not be the best place to respond. Maybe J's thread on Rödl would be better.

I will try to answer your question in the next few days. I have work to do.

On the other hand, we have exchanged words for many years now regarding how to understand what has been written about such things. Shall I write as if none of that ever happened?

By presenting the readings concerning different ways to understand idealism in Kant and Hegel, I was not trying to challenge your views regarding the role of materialism in present and past cultures. I am suggesting that what concerns Rödl does not support either side of what you have framed as the choices available to us.

Yes, that is what I meant.

As for what can be taken as verification, this passage from Žižek helps me see different ways to read Hegel that bears on what may be referred to as "mind-independence:

The root of this trouble lies with the deadlock at the heart of the Kantian edifice, as noted by Henrich: Kant starts with our cognitive capacity—the Self with its three features (unity, synthetic activity, emptiness) is affected by noumenal things and, through its active synthesis, organizes impressions into phenomenal reality; however, once he arrives at the ontological result of his critique of knowledge (the distinction between phenomenal reality and the noumenal world of Things-in-themselves), “there can be no return to the self. There is no plausible interpretation of the self as a member of one of the two worlds.”[381] This is where practical reason comes in: the only way to return from ontology to the Self is via freedom: freedom unites the two worlds, and provides for the unity or coherence of the Self—this is why Kant repeated again and again the motto: “subordinate everything to freedom.”[382] Here, however, a gap between Kant and his followers occurs: for Kant, freedom is an “irrational” fact of reason, it is simply and inexplicably given, something like an umbilical cord inexplicably rooting our experience in the unknown noumenal reality, not the First Principle out of which one can develop a systematic notion of reality, while the Idealists from Fichte onwards cross this limit and endeavor to provide a systematic account of freedom itself. The status of this limit changes with the Idealists: what was for Kant an a priori limitation, so that the very notion of “going over” is stricto sensu meaningless, becomes for the Idealists just an indication that Kant was not yet ready to pursue his project to the end, to draw all the consequences from his breakthrough. For the Idealists, Kant got stuck half-way, while for Kant, his Idealist followers totally misunderstood his critique and fell back into pre-critical metaphysics or, worse, mystical Schwarmerei.

There are thus two main versions of this passage:[383] (1) Kant asserts the gap of finitude, transcendental schematism, the negative access to the Noumenal (via the Sublime) as the only one possible, and so forth, while Hegel’s absolute idealism closes the Kantian gap and returns to pre-critical metaphysics. (2) It is Kant who goes only half-way in his destruction of metaphysics, still maintaining the reference to the Thing-in-itself as an external inaccessible entity, and Hegel is merely a radicalized Kant, who moves from our negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself as negativity. Or, to put it in terms of the Hegelian shift from epistemological obstacle to positive ontological condition (our incomplete knowledge of the thing becomes a positive feature of the thing which is in itself incomplete, inconsistent): it is not that Hegel “ontologizes” Kant; on the contrary, it is Kant who, insofar as he conceives the gap as merely epistemological, continues to presuppose a fully constituted noumenal realm existing out there, and it is Hegel who “deontologizes” Kant, introducing a gap into the very texture of reality. In other words, Hegel’s move is not to “overcome” the Kantian division, but, rather, to assert it “as such,” to remove the need for its “overcoming,” for the additional “reconciliation” of the opposites, that is, to gain the insight—through a purely formal parallax shift—into how positing the distinction “as such” already is the looked-for “reconciliation.” Kant’s limitation lies not in his remaining within the confines of finite oppositions, in his inability to reach the Infinite, but, on the contrary, in his very search for a transcendent domain beyond the realm of finite oppositions: Kant is not unable to reach the Infinite—what he is unable to see is how he already has what he is looking for. Gérard Lebrun has clarified this crucial point in his analysis of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s antinomies.[384]

The commonplace among defenders of Kant is that Hegel’s critique, although apparently more audacious (Hegel sees contradictions everywhere), only domesticates or blunts the Kantian antinomies. Kant is, so the story goes (as retold from Heidegger to postmodernists), the first philosopher who really confronted the subject’s finitude not only as an empirical fact, but as the very ontological horizon of our being. This led him to conceive antinomies as genuine unresolvable deadlocks, inescapable scandals of reason, in which human reason becomes involved by its very nature—the scandal of what he even calls “euthanasia of Reason.” The impasse is here irreducible, there is no mediation between the opposites, no higher synthesis. We thus get the very contemporary image of a human subject caught in a constitutive deadlock, marked by an a priori ontological split or gap. As for Hegel, although he may appear to radicalize antinomies by conceiving them as “contradictions” and universalizing them, seeing them everywhere, in every concept we use, and, going even further, ontologizing them (while Kant locates antinomies in our cognitive approach to reality, Hegel locates them in reality itself), Hegel’s radicalization is a ruse: once reformulated as “contradictions,” antinomies are caught in the machinery of the dialectical progress, reduced to an in-between stage, a moment on the road towards the final reconciliation. Hegel thus effectively blunts the scandalous edge of the Kantian antinomies which threatened to bring Reason to the edge of madness, renormalizing them as part of a global ontological process.

Lebrun demonstrates that this commonly shared conception is thoroughly wrong: it is Kant himself who actually defuses the antinomies. One should always bear in mind Kant’s result: there are no antinomies as such, they emerge simply out of the subject’s epistemological confusion between phenomena and noumena. After the critique of Reason has done its work, we end up with a clear and unambiguous, non-antagonistic, ontological picture, with phenomena on one side and noumena on the other. The whole threat of the “euthanasia of Reason,” the spectacle of Reason as forever caught in a fatal deadlock, is ultimately revealed as a mere theatrical trick, a staged performance designed to confer credibility on Kant’s transcendental solution. This is the feature that Kant shares with pre-critical metaphysics: both positions remain in the domain of Understanding and its fixed determinations, and Kant’s critique of metaphysics spells out the final result of metaphysics: as long as we move in the domain of Understanding, Things-in-themselves are out of reach, our knowledge is ultimately in vain.

In what, then, does the difference between Kant and Hegel with regard to antinomies effectively reside? Hegel changes the entire terrain: his basic reproach concerns not what Kant says, but Kant’s unsaid, Kant’s “unknown knowns” (to use Donald Rumsfeld’s newspeak)—Kant cheats, his analysis of antinomies is not too poor, but rather too rich, for he smuggles into it a whole series of additional presuppositions and implications. Instead of really analyzing the immanent nature of the categories involved in antinomies (finitude versus infinity, continuity versus discontinuity, etc.), he shifts the entire analysis onto the way we, as thinking subjects, use or apply these categories. Which is why Hegel’s basic reproach to Kant concerns not the immanent nature of the categories, but, in an almost Wittgensteinian way, their illegitimate use, their application to a domain which is not properly theirs. Antinomies are not inscribed into categories themselves, they only arise when we go beyond the proper domain of their use (the temporal-phenomenal reality of our experience) and apply them to noumenal reality, to objects which cannot ever become objects of our experience. In short, antinomies emerge the moment we confuse phenomena and noumena, objects of experience with Things-in-themselves.

Kant can only perceive finitude as the finitude of the transcendental subject who is constrained by schematism, by the temporal limitations of transcendental synthesis: for him, the only finitude is the finitude of the subject; he does not consider the possibility that the very categories he is dealing with may be “finite,” i.e., that they may remain categories of abstract Understanding, not yet the truly infinite categories of speculative Reason. And Hegel’s point is that this move from categories of Understanding to Reason proper is not an illegitimate step beyond the limits of our reason; it is rather Kant himself who oversteps the proper limits of the analysis of categories, of pure notional determinations, illegitimately projecting onto this space the topic of temporal subjectivity, and so forth. At its most elementary, Hegel’s move is a reduction, not an enrichment, of Kant: a subtractive move, a gesture of taking away the metaphysical ballast and of analyzing notional determinations in their immanent nature. — Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Zero, chapter 5

I understand Rödl to be standing with Gérard Lebrun's reading of Hegel here. The question of the "real" is not a place in a schema. The limit of the "natural" is not pointing to its supersession.

That flaw would be an assumed demarcation between what we can know as real/unreal, and mind-dependent/independent. A "judgment of experience," here, has nothing to do with logical principles; I think you're suggesting we interpret such principles as the mind-independent reality that we want to connect with experience. — J

I read Rödl to not saying we could know the limits of "logical" principles. If we cannot know their limits as the basis of "experience", we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact.

The work is difficult. At the same time, it is painfully simple. It relies upon very few arguments. repeated ad infinitum.

I don't read it as a replacement for other advocates.

Hegel is well known for being an advocate for this or that. Rödl is doing something different.

Is he pointing to the problem of grounding causal necessity in logical necessity? — Wayfarer

No. That would be taking for granted that we are given the means to compare "our" necessity with what is not "ours"; Which was the original complaint of Kant against Hume. Rödl is arguing that Hegel's argument nips that stuff off out at the root. The 'idealism" is not an explanation.

There are many other responses to Hegel. I am just trying to focus upon what is called out in Rödl's language.

There are broad differences between interpreters of text in the language of "idealists".

In your description of how the term, "real" can be compared to the term, "mind-independence", I am reminded of your attention given to Rödl awhile back. He argues for abandoning the ground being sought by either lexicon:

However, on closer inspection, it seems not to address our difficulty. We sought to comprehend how a judgment of experience can be complete in the thought of its necessity. But knowledge of the logical principle is not a judgment of experience; it is absolute knowledge. Even as there is absolute knowledge, which comprehends itself to be what it is to be, simply as judgment, this does not mend the insufficiency, which entails the incomprehensibility, of the judgment of experience. For, the logical principle supplies no justification of any judgment of experience; no scientific principle can be derived from the principle of logic. This is so precisely because the logical principle is without contrary. A judgment without contrary does not justify any judgment of experience. A judgment that justifies, as much as a judgment that is justified, has a contrary. Therefore, knowledge of the logical principle does not supply the lack from which the judgment of experience suffers; it does not complete the progression of the judgment of experience from assertoric to apodictic modality. We already saw that if the logical principle did justify principles of science, it would complete science. Completing it, the logical principle would transform science into a judgment without contrary, and in this completed science, the structure of power, power / act, act, would have vanished.

This may enjoin us to hold the logical principle separate from science and think of absolute knowledge as distinct from empirical knowledge. But then absolute knowledge not only does not address our difficulty of comprehending the judgment of experience; it repels all concepts through which we think the judgment of experience. First, absolute knowledge—the consciousness of the logical principle—then is not necessary and does not understand itself to be necessary. For, the thought of a judgment’s validity is the thought of its necessity only because and insofar as it is a judgment that excludes its contrary. Second, absolute knowledge then cannot be an act, specifically not the original act, of the power of knowledge. For it contains no thought of a distinction of power and act and therefore cannot be an understanding of itself as the power whose acts are judgments of experience. Absolute knowledge remains enclosed within itself, repelling any connection to empirical knowledge. If we consider what we now pretend to think in the idea of absolute knowledge, we realize that, instead of the fullness of being, we think nothing at all. — Rödl, Sebastian. Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism (pp. 152-153). Harvard University Press.

Less than Nothing by Slavoj Žižek.

Sort of a last word from him. He has played a kind of jester in the past. Not here. A scene upon the agora.

It gets difficult when the 'deep state' is your group in power. Claimed but not owned. Needing the old narratives but the victim of them at the same time.

Pretty weak beer.

Fool me once:

On Sunday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said her office would send a memo, which was released on Friday with a statement, and its supporting documents to the U.S. Justice Department for use in potential criminal prosecutions of unnamed Obama-era intelligence officials.

“We are referring all of the documents that we have uncovered to the Department of Justice and the FBI for a criminal referral,” Gabbard told a Fox interviewer. She did not say explicitly who she hoped might be prosecuted.

The memo accuses the former officials of a “conspiracy” to “politicize” intelligence about Russia’s 2016 election interference, in order to “subvert” Donald Trump’s election win. But neither the memo nor the report refute the volumes of public evidence of the interference, including a GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. And the documents advance a misleading description of what the intelligence community said about those efforts and their extent.

The report offers a timeline of when intelligence officials discussed Russia’s actions internally. Tellingly, it does not refute or contradict the findings of the 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, nor any of the public evidence supporting those findings:

In September 2015, the FBI contacted the DNC after detecting a breach on its servers, which the FBI attributed to a Russian actor. That’s a matter of sworn public testimony from Yared Tamene Wolde-Yohannes, a DNC IT contractor.

In April 2016, the DNC contacted CrowdStrike to investigate another detected intrusion. CrowdStrike, which was also under contract with the RNC, attributed the breach to known Russian actors. These attackers were already familiar to the broader cybersecurity community, having also targeted the State Department, White House and Pentagon.

In July, a Russian-linked news site called DCLeaks and WikiLeaks published a series of exfiltrated communications from the DNC—some 20,000 emails—the same data taken by Russian actors from DNC networks.

In October 2016, DHS and ODNI issued a joint statement attributing the DNC hack to Russia, confirming what many analysts had been reporting for months. The Senate Intelligence Committee report also documents a concerted effort by the Russian government to sway U.S. public opinion via social media networks, including through targeted ads.

To what extent did these efforts change voters’ minds? Personal voter motivation is notoriously difficult to quantify, though some have tried.

The new ODNI report, in short, misrepresents a documented Russian influence campaign aimed at voter perception as a cyber campaign to manipulate vote totals. It also omits a subject of more current relevance: the evidence that Russia is continuing its efforts to reshape perceptions of truth to America’s disadvantage. — Patrick Tucker

I count the ὄστρακον by each citizen and will leave of my own accord.

May fortune be yours.

If you are satisfied by your own efforts, what is the purpose of seeking validation from others?

I am glad that you focused upon exploitation and inequality because it points back to the centrality of lordship and bondage in Hegel's Phenomenology. That another existence can cancel a sense of that for oneself by simply being there is Hegel's 'state of nature' in contrast to Rousseau and Hobbes.

I would be happy to be proven wrong. — Truth Seeker

If you are the only one who could do that for yourself, what does it mean to appeal to others?

If you are satisfied that all is determined, why ask about it?

Would it change something?

I guess that one example of negativity being 'reified' points to Adorno objecting to the "material" as a reliable pole star in Marx and Lenin (and Lukács).

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno observes:

The corporeal moment registers the cognition, that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. “Woe speaks: go.” That is why what is specifically materialistic converges with what is critical, with socially transforming praxis. The abolition of suffering, or its mitigation to a degree which is not to be theoretically assumed in advance, to which no limit can be set, is not up to the individual who endures suffering, but solely to the species that it belongs to, even where it has subjectively renounced the latter and is objectively forced into the absolute loneliness of the helpless object. All activities of the species make reference to its physical continued existence, even if they fail to recognize this, becoming organizationally autonomous and seeing to their business only as an afterthought. Even the institutions which society creates in order to exterminate itself are, as unleashed, absurd self-preservation, simultaneously their own unconscious actions against suffering. Narrowly restricted indeed by what is their own, their total particularity also turns against this. Confronted with them, the purpose which alone makes society into a society demands that it be so arranged, as what the relations of production here and there relentlessly prevent, and as what would be immediately possible to the productive forces right here and now. Such an arrangement would have its telos in the negation of physical suffering of even the least of its members, and of the innervated reflection-forms of that suffering. It is in the interest of all, at this point to be realized solely through a solidarity transparent to itself and to every living being.

MATERIALISM IMAGELESS
To those who wish that it not be realized, materialism has in the meantime done the favor of its self-degradation. The immaturity which caused this is not, as Kant thought, the fault of humanity itself. In the meantime at least it is reproduced according to plan by the powers that be. The objective Spirit, which they direct, because they require its chaining, adjusts itself to that consciousness, which was enchained for millennia. The materialism which achieved political power has devoted itself to such praxis no less than the world, which it once wanted to change; it continues to chain the consciousness, instead of comprehending it and for its part changing it. Terroristic state-machineries entrench themselves under the threadbare pretext of a soon to be fifty-year-old dictatorship of the long since administrated proletariat as permanent institutions, the mockery of the theory which they pay lip service to. They chain their underlings to their immediate interests and keep them narrow-minded. The depravation of theory meanwhile would not have been possible without the dregs of the apocryphal in it. By leaping summarily outside of culture, the functionaries who monopolize it would like to crudely feign that they would be beyond culture, and thus give sustenance to universal regression. What philosophy wished to liquidate, in the expectation of the immediately impending revolution, was, impatient with its claim, already at that moment lagging behind it. What is apocryphal in materialism reveals that of high philosophy, that which is untrue in the sovereignty of the Spirit, which the prevailing materialism disdains as cynically as bourgeois society had done in secret before. The idealistic sublime is the cognate of the apocryphal; the texts of Kafka and Beckett harshly illuminate this relationship.

Solely indefatigably reified consciousness imagines, or tries to persuade others into imagining, that it would possess photographs of objectivity. Its illusion crosses over into dogmatic immediacy. When Lenin, instead of entering into epistemology, compulsively and repeatedly asserted against this the being-in-itself of cognitive objects, he wanted to demonstrate the complicity of subjective positivism with the “powers that be” [in English]. His political need turned thereby against the theoretical cognitive goal. Transcendent argumentation finishes things off by means of the power-claim, and for ill: by being left unpenetrated, what is criticized remains undisturbed as it is, and is capable, as what has not been properly examined, of being resurrected in transformed power-constellations any which way.

Materialistic theory became not merely aesthetically defective in contrast to the hollowed-out sublime of bourgeois consciousness, but untrue. This is theoretically determinable. The dialectic is in the things, but it would not be without the consciousness which reflects it; no more than it could be dissolved into the latter. In the One pure and simple, undifferentiated, total matter, there would be no dialectic. The official materialistic one skipped over epistemology by decree. The latter’s revenge is epistemological: in the reflection-doctrine [Abbildlehre]. The thought is no reflection of the thing – it is made into this solely by
materialistic mythology in Epicurean style, which discovered that matter sends out little images – but aims at the thing itself. The enlightening intention of thought, demythologization, nullifies the image-character of consciousness. What clings to the image remains mythically ensnared, idolatry. The summation of images forms a wall before reality. Reflection-theory denies the spontaneity of the subject, a movens [Latin: what moves] of the objective dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. If the subject is bound to the stubborn mirror-image of the object, which necessarily lacks the object,
which discloses itself only to the subjective surplus in thought, then the result is the restless intellectual silence of integral administration. — Adorno, Negative Dialectics, page 224 ff, translated by Dennis Redmond

The way Adorno bounces what is imagined or not in particular schemes is interesting.

But most of all they are taking a moral stance. They refuse to rely on an instrument of exploitation and coercion to achieve cooperation with others. To do so, to me, is a sign of moral poverty. At any rate, it’s a sign that one doesn’t have much else to offer but his fealty to some class of politicians. — NOS4A2

How does that statement square with your years of defending a particular politician?

That reminds me of Thomas Paine saying:

The present time, likewise, is that peculiar time, which never happens to a nation but once, viz. the time of forming itself into a government. Most nations have let slip the opportunity, and by that means have been compelled to receive laws from their conquerors, instead of making laws for themselves. First, they had a king, and then a form of government; whereas, the articles or charter of government, should be formed first, and men delegated to execute them afterward: but from the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom, and lay hold of the present opportunity— To begin government at the right end.

When William the Conqueror subdued England, he gave them law at the point of the sword; and until we consent, that the seat of government, in America, be legally and authoritatively occupied, we shall be in danger of having it filled by some fortunate ruffian, who may treat us in the same manner, and then, where will be our freedom? where our property? — Thomas Paine, Common Sense, just before the Appendix

4. If FDI does decline it will result in lower growth, weaker dollar, austerity or inflation and loss of global influence. It's not strategic at all. — Benkei

It does seem to be an element of the market that protectionist policies keep colliding with. None of the "balance of trade" talk performed so far by the Administration incorporates that as a factor.

Stanly and friends