Maybe Heidegger is more helpful frame as he posits the idea of thrownness. We are "thrown" into existence, born into a specific time, place, and cultural context, without any control over these matters. — Tom Storm

Thrownness is an interesting concept. You’re right that some interpret this as meaning the history of external circumstances which shapes us outside our control. But others argue that thrownness has more to do with how the future comes toward us than how the past constrains us. In other words, thrownness is our creative muse, whispering in our ear, opening up new worlds of possibility. Even what we consider to be autonomously willed choice is something we are thrown into.

This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it has an actuality beyond that? — Janus

Yes. Every aspect of the world interacts with every other such that no laws , rules or fixities constrain it. Instead, interactions produce new interactions which produce new interactions. The cosmos is in the business of reinventing its past constantly. The ideality of this continual self-creation does not depend on the mind of a human subject. We are simply a participant in it, but a participant who can rapidly reinvent worlds. The fact that there are no laws constraining future possibilities on the basis of a fixed in place history does not mean change and becoming means chaos and arbitrariness. On the contrary, we live in natural and social circumstances of relative stability and familiarity. One does not need a universe of already fixed properties in order to be able to anticipate new events.

The non-locality of selfhood is serial aboutness: the self, as such, is a continual roadmap to somewhere else.* In its act of thinking, the self displaces itself from what it thinks about such that whatever it thinks about is not-yet-but-will-be. In this regard, thought is both manipulatable and unapproachable. Herein we get a whiff of Satre’s human freedom in the form of the uncontainable self as consciousness. Existentialism must therefore be about authenticity, and its impossibility. The authentic self, therefore, is rooted in a series of forward-looking fictions about the illusive_elusive self as once-was-but-no-longer-is. — ucarr

This absent-self idea comes from Heidegger but Sartre insisted on bringing back the Cartesian subject and freely willing consciousness as the basis of the self.

We are outside the minds of other people. Do you think that we can learn about the workings of other people's minds by observation of their behavior? Doesn't your statement amount to saying psychology is impossible? — wonderer1

There are approaches within psychology which argue that
‘mind’ is not an inside set off against an outside, but an inseparable interaction, a system of coordinations with an environment in which what constitutes the perceiving (the inside) and the perceived environment ( the outside) are defined and changed by their reciprocal interaction. Because as individuals embodied and embedded in the world we are already outside ourselves in this way, there is no radical distinction between perceiving ourselves ( we come back to ourselves from the world) and perceiving others.
Mind is thus treated no differently than organism , which has no true ‘inside’ given they it is nothing but a system of interactions with an environment it defines on the basis of its normative way of functioning. But neither is there a true ‘outside’. So this modifies Wayfarer’s idealism somewhat into a play better the ideal and the real in which neither side has priority.

As long as the philosophy of mind does not make use of a sharp and categorically clear approach to the theory of science and instead loses itself in all kinds of irrationalities, it can be called dead.
In this form, it is of no use to science, nor does it provide an explanation for the nature of consciousness, but rather causes confusion. The instrumentalist approach of neuroscience and AI does not need such a philosophy. — Wolfgang

Perhaps the problem originates from the categorical nature of the distinctions you make between what you understand as the subjective and the empirically objective, the physical and the mental. Is instrumentalism in neuroscience a necessity or a choice? The research program of neurophenomenology would seem to be one example of a non-instrumental approach to neuroscience. Or is this irrational? I’m curious as to what other ‘irrationalities’ you have in mind with regard to philosophy of mind. Could you give some examples? This may help to determine whether the source of the difficulties you raise lies with the philosophical models or with the limits of your imagination.

It’s the Uber-pizza

The reliance on excessive vocabulary and technical jargon is the desperate cry for relevance and convincing others of its own importance. The more one relies on esoteric vocabulary, the more unnecessarily complex the idea becomes. This can give the illusion of complexity and intelligence where it does not exist — Philosophim

Do you have any famous philosophers in mind here, or just the hoi polloi?

I personally think that one can break the history of philosophy into two categories. These categories are the will to meaning and the will to power; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were known for putting a focus on these, but I think the roots themselves go back to antiquity — Dermot Griffin

.

Nietzsche didn’t speak of will to meaning but will to truth, a subset of will to power. His notion of power wasn’t some kind of concentrated energy possessed by certain individuals or institutions to be used for good or evil. He believed that all meaning is the effect of differential relations within a system of values. Each individual psyche is organized as such schemes, gestalts, matrices of inter-affecting vectors of drives competing with and altering each other. Social power works the same way, as differential forces flowing though and between persons in a culture, so that each of us in our practices reciprocally affect each other to form social systems and institutions shaped in certain ways, producing and changing the meanings that they have for us. Power exerts its effects bottom up rather than top down, through all kinds of complex feedback mechanisms.

↪L'éléphant :up: No problem. I would also add that I never know who a person really is. — Tom Storm

No wonder. Ever notice how who you think the other person in your relationship is changes over time, and who they and you are changes through being affected by the reciprocal interaction of the growing relationship itself?

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other — Janus

The Kuhn-Popper split is one of philosophy rather than science, and the two views definitely cannot be accommodated within each other, any more than postmodernism can be accommodated within realism. They both talk about the allegedly ‘same’ world outside of our schemes, but in terms sharply different from each other.

We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth — Janus

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science.

it deems logically impossible, but what appears from the vantage of that metaphysics as unintelligible, senseless and incoherent
— Joshs

Aren't those the same thing? — Lionino

Is logical impossibility the same thing as nonsense? Doesn't what is logically impossible conform to the criteria of meaning that allow a judgement of its meaningful incompatibility to be made? For something to be outside of this metaphysical criteria would be for it to appear as random, chaotic, not subject to logical judgement at all.

So, basically, when we say, it is metaphysically impossible for something to happen in a metaphysical system, we are saying, given a metaphysical system M and a proposition X, "In M, X is impossible", it seems that whether X is possible or not boils down to the semantics of M, that is, whether some of the properties or consequences of X are in contradiction to the axioms of M, making untrue analytic statements — Lionino

Wouldn’t the boundaries of a metaphysical system be defined not by what it deems logically impossible, but what appears from the vantage of that metaphysics as unintelligible, senseless and incoherent? What is logically possible and impossible would seem to be reciprocally implied, and both would define what is included WITHIN the system, not what is other than it.

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.
— Joshs

If the object is defined as 'the object as perceived' then of course it is trivially true that the subjective point of view would be a determinant. But if the object is defined as 'that which interacts with our senses resulting in perception' then the subjective point of view would be a result, not a determinant…

The argument that claims that because it is a mind which says that there are existents which are mind-independent, it follows that there can be no mind-independent existents, is a very weak argument which trades on conflating what we say with what actually might exist independently of our saying. As far as I can tell this impoverished argument (in the West at least) comes from Schopenhauer. — Janus

Have you heard of Object Oriented Ontology, or Speculative Realism? They compose a diverse group united by the claim that philosophy since Kant has been in the the thrall of correlationism, which makes what objects are in themselves beholden or secondary to their relation to a perceiving subject.They argue that this amounts to an anthropocentric smothering of the real. The OOO alternative assigns to objects intrinsic attributes hidden from perceiving subjects. Lee Braver compares this with other approaches to the real, and prefers what he calls Transgressive Realism.

If we are realists and hold that the world is “out
there,” independent of us, and that knowledge means
grasping it as it is in itself, then it seems that two
possibilities are open: either we can achieve this
knowledge or we can’t. The point of traditional
pre-Critical epistemology is to teach us how to push
our minds beyond their natural limitations so that
they can limn reality itself. As Leibniz promised,
if we can leave behind the restrictions of the body
and senses, we can come to think with God’s head,
at least to some degree. Skeptics, of course, take the
other option, arguing that we can never surpass our
all-too-human ways of knowing. We should give
up dreams of transcendence and make peace with
common life’s beer, billiards, and backgammon.
But Kant opened up a third path: the world of
phenomena is the one we live in, the only world we’ll
ever know in this life, so we should stop treating it
as second best. We can substitute intersubjective
agreement among ourselves for agreement with
reality in itself. This would be a new kind of truth,
one that is a lesser truth, perhaps, but a truth none­theless, the only kind fit for creatures like us.

The Speculative Realists believe that it is An­ti-Realism that represents the childish view, for it amounts to a kind of cosmic narcissism where being exists only in correlation with us or, in Heidegger’s terms, that being can only be in our clearing. This makes the world less our home than our nursery room where everything is organized around us. The Pre-Critical Realists mistakenly thought that we can only find genuine reality elsewhere, in a transcendent realm. But the Speculative Realists argue that we don't have to look to some beyond to find what exceeds our grasp; everything has an inner essence we are not privy to. For the Speculative Realists, studying this world is not setling for second best, but neither should we setle into a completely domesticated world.

Rather, we should resettle in more interesting places, away from the anthropocentric city, to study the interactions that take place among beings far away from our prying eyes. I find this line of thought intriguing and I take their warning about the danger of conceptual solipsism, but I'm still too much of an Anti-Realist to embrace Speculative Realism whole-heartedly. It seems right to me that we always bring our thoughts to any consideration of the world as it is independently of us, which automatically compromises any absolute independence. But the Speculative Realists are right to point out that the Anti-Realists may have exaggerated the comprehensiveness of our pre-forming of experience. If experience were so fully pre-digested by the ways our minds process information, we could never experience surprise. Specific, ontic surprises, sure, but not radical surprises that violate and transform our very notions of what is.

If the Pre-Critical Realists tell us not to settle for
the tawdry shabby world we find ourselves in, and
the Anti-Realists tell us to settle into this world as
our home, and the Speculative Realists urge us to
resetle elsewhere, Transgressive Realism emphasiz­es the way reality unsetles us. We can never settle down with a single way of understanding the world because it can always unexpectedly breach these. Such experiences do not get squeezed into our mental structures but instead violate them, crack­ing and reshaping our categories.

This violation is the sign of their externality since everything we conceive remains the offspring of our concepts and so retains a family resemblance with them. Rather than the wholly independent noumenal realm that Hegel rightly rejects, these are experiences that we have but which shatter our ways of understanding experience, exceeding our comprehension but not escaping our awareness. Transgressive Realism, I believe, gives us a reality that transcends our ways of thinking, but not all ac­cess to it, offering a middle path that lets us have our ineffable cake and partially ef it too. These aporetic experiences enter our awareness, not through the pathways prepared by our minds but in spite of them, transgressing our anticipatory processes.

If you follow Transgressivee realism rather than Kant, I think it commits you to a different view of the nature of reality beyond our schemes and theories You will hew closer to Kuhn’s notion of scientific progress through revolutions than to Popper’s appropriation through falsification.

A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth' for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than either of them is to Newton's. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong.(Kuhn’s Postscript to Scientific Revolutions)

Which text are you quoting? — Paine

The Age of the World Picture. You can find it in The Question of Technology.

The outcome is hopefully an account of mind in a physical world that does not rely on the nonsense of idealism. — Banno

As long as an organizing contribution of a subject can be detected in the description of physical phenomena, then a species of idealism is at work.

, if we leave aside Habermas’s insistence on the primacy of implicit rationality, solidarity, and consensus, we should admit that he could successfully advance our understanding of contemporary social realities — Number2018

If we leave aside his focus on rational communication and consensus, aren’t we ignoring the central features of his philosophical outlook? It seems to me that Habermas’s notion of communicative action is anathema to Deleuze.

“…philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say,
"Let's discuss this." Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as universal democratic conversation."

Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions… ( What is Philosophy)

Whether Heidegger was right or wrong to describe Nietzsche as producing the last metaphysic is a question here. Is the ground of personal being wrestled with here or are conditions not so easy to approach? — Paine

What Heidegger meant was that Nietzsche was the last to follow in Descartes’ s footsteps in treating the world as picture , as objects represented by and placed in front of a subject. Any philosophy which uses concepts like paradigm, worldview , point of view or perspective is, in Heidegger’s thinking, a metaphysics of world as picture.

This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing
each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of
that being…What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and truth is first, defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The title of Descartes’s principal work reads: Meditationes de prima philosophia [Meditations’ on First Philosophy]. Prote philosophia is the designation coined by’ Aristotle for what is later called metaphysics. The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of ‘what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.

What he is rejecting is the notion of a thinking substance. The soul is not something we have. In his refinement of the soul-hypothesis Nietzsche posits a “soul of subjective multiplicity”. This solves the problem of the seeming mystery of a thought that comes when it wishes rather than when I wish. It is not that the thought has some kind of independent existence and comes to me from elsewhere, but simply that there is not something within me, an “I” or “ego” or “little ‘one’” that is the agent of my thoughts. This is not a denial of agency, it is a denial of something within me, some substance or soul-atom that is the agent. — Fooloso4

Yes, the self is a community of competing drives, and
they are loosely united by one overarching drive or will to power, that dominates at any given time. A thinking substance must go the way of all substantive things. Agency organizes particulars according to relational patterns whose origins and purposes it does not have mastery over in the sense of the carrying through ofna prior self-knowing.

But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts, – sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection.

If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace moral or empirical notions of truth? It seems like we have some capacity for truth and self-determination or we don't, and if we don't, then books about self-overcoming are useless. And why the focus on being controlled by bad ideas? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We already know we colloquially use and understand notions like ‘decision’, ‘choice’ and ‘will’ in different ways according for different philosophies. Cartesian desert-based approaches , which are assumed to arise from the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible subject, are harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control. The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus. Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order .If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

Whereas Pereboom and Nussbaum argue that moral blame is ‘irrational', postmodern approaches, defined in very broad terms, don't view blame in terms of a rational/irrational binary but rather in terms of pragmatic usefulness determined in relation to contextually changing inter-subjective practices.

Gergen’s postmodernist constructionism argues:

“In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right.” “ Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”

Enactivist writers such as Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela emphasize the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”

It should be noted that In postmodernist accounts like that of Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze, a ‘personal’ point of view or perspective isnt eliminated from the participation in a social community. But in effect, this point of view is pre-personal, not the possession of a substance we call the self or the ego or the soul.

Nietzsche writes;

When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,' I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,' and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is.

I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore –.” Following the same basic scheme, the older atomism looked behind every “force” that produces effects for that little lump of matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects are produced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned how to make do without that bit of “residual earth,” and perhaps one day even logicians will get used to making do without this little “it” (into which the honest old I has disappeared).

We can say that someone chooses or wills, and mean that what they do is not simply a carbon copy of a pre-established social norm. But it also does not mean that choice and decision draw from an innner mental space that just sits there to be ultized. When we intend to mean something , to choose, we always mean something slightly other than what we intended. What we call volition is this unpredictability within the structure of choice. We are always slightly surprised by what we find ourselves willing.
So there is a loose internal coherence to volition, but it is not the rationality of propositional logic. Rather, it is a certain inferential compatibility between one moment of experience to the next that provides the glue of personal unity.

One powerful argument in favor of Nietzsche's strong sense of responsibility, quite apart from any thesis regarding free will, is his heavy use of what I call the blaming perspective, according to which people are held accountable as the authors or agents of their actions

Robert Solomon was an existentialist philosopher, and read Nietzsche through that lens. That’s fine , but his perspective has little to do with the Nietzsche I am discussing. I’m not saying Solomon is wrong, only that his work won’t provide any tools for dealing with the Nietzsche of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, which is the one I am representing. Solomon wants Nietzsche to be a philosopher of personal responsibility, like Sartre, Kierkegaard and other existentialists Solomon champions. But postmodern interpreters of Nietzsche argue this is precisely what Nietzsche’s notion of personhood critiques. More important than which interpretation is right is which reading is more promising from a psychological and ethical point of view.

Just checking is this Thompson? I always thought this quote was credited to Dan Zahavi, (2008) Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism. Synthese 160:355-374 — Tom Storm

You’re right, the first two paragraphs are Thompson and the last two are from Zahavi. Good catch ( didnt think anyone was paying attention).

Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. (Habermas, ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,’ p 93). How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion? — Number2018

Well, I don’t think following Habermas’s Kantian modernist path is the answer.

Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism...
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see much distinction between physicalism and naturalism, other than in usage. My impression is that "physicalism" is just the word more commonly used in the context of discussing philosophy of mind. For example, the question on the 2020 Philpapers survey is, "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?". If "physicalism" was replaced with "naturalism" would it make a difference? — wonderer1

A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.

Evan Thompson writes:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.

Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes. Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices”.

We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about. This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either. Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.

I think Joseph Rouse’s distinctions are helpful. He distinguishes between orthodox, liberal and radical naturalisms.

Orthodox naturalists divide over the unity of science: physicalists insist that what there is can ultimately be reduced to or supervenes upon physical entities, or that the methods of the “special sciences” are dependent upon or legitimated by an understanding of their physical basis; pluralists recognize the ontological or methodological autonomy of astronomy, chemistry, biology, the neurosciences, and perhaps geology or the environmental sciences.

Rouse’s radical naturalism shares with liberal naturalism “a more pluralistic conception of scientific understanding than is characteristic of orthodox naturalisms, and reject conceptions of nature that would require error-theoretic, reductionist, or non-truth-conducive treatments of conceptual, epistemic, moral/political, or aesthetic normativity. I endorse liberal naturalists’ emphasis upon “anti-supernaturalism” as the most definitive naturalist commitment, and my view has some overlap with the primacy some liberal naturalists (e.g., Price 2004, 2011) accord to understanding human conceptual and epistemic capacities as natural phenomena (“subject naturalism”) over seeking scientific imprimatur for a physicalist or other scientistic metaphysics.”

I don't see how that diverges much from my interpretation. Again, he is pretty abstract here and up for interpretation. I take him as meaning that we should live a life where we would say "yes!" to life over and over.. Sometimes you have to wait at the post office (aka Satan's asshole) for hours, or visit someone you dearly love in a hospital, or deal with terrible tragedies, and these are not things one would want over and over again — schopenhauer1

That cartoon is funny. But there’s a reason it’s a cartoon. It collects all the misguided cliches about Nietzsche, i.e. that he’s just promulgating a self-aggrandizing form of existentialism, that he’s all about the supremacy of the autonomously willing subject, that he replaces God with Man. One of the many issues that needs to be addressed is Nietzsche’s split with Schopenhauer over the unity of the Will. For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative.

All values are ephemeral, transitory, changing. All are of equal value so why the "sacred yes' to these and not others when in time the sacred yes must become a sacred no? — Fooloso4

All are not of equal value during the period of time when one is working one’s way through a particular value system. One doesn’t live in all values, any more that one lives within all ecological systems, but in one particular way of life at any given time. Eventually, that way of life will come to seem intolerably repressive, and the value system that replaces it will at the same time reject it and be conditioned by it.

↪Joshs I'm curious and forgive the awkward wording - is it hard to get a useful reading of Nietzsche? How often do you think his work is taken into 'bad reading' territory? — Tom Storm

I think there are many useful readings of Nietzsche, but as is the case with any notable philosopher, these often conflict strongly with each other. The existentialist readers of Nietzsche seem to have nothing in common with his postmodernist interpreters. I say choose the reading you find the most daring and interesting.

I don't confer any Truth (capital letter T) to Freud, I only see that his general ideas are more on the mark than Nietzsche's notions — schopenhauer1

If on the mark means more objective, then that gets to the heart of the difference between Freud and Nietzsche.

As Daniel Berthold puts it:

In keeping with Freud’s idea of science, with its goals of objectivity and impartiality, he ‘fights for truth’ through rea­soned discourse. Again, for Freud, ‘reason is the only truly unifying influence’, so that reasoned discourse alone makes the achievement of a scientific community possible. But in keeping with Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘gay science’ that scorns ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ as myths and that is committed rather to radical perspectivism and the ideal of nobility as solitude, his style of authorship displaces the expectation of agreement, openness, cer­tainty and truth – Freud’s ideals – with a persistent deferral of direct communication. More strongly, Nietzsche deliberately invites misunderstanding: ‘Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood’

However strange and wicked Freud’s own project may be in the way it unsettles and shocks us – recall his warning to the audience of his lectures on psychoanalysis at Vienna, that he ‘will show … how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought’ will be challenged – he addresses an audience he seeks to convince through values he believes we all share: the value of the search for truth, the commonality of our
faculty of reason, and the shared space of our reality. Nietzsche, though, questions those very values and hence renounces the pretext that what he has to say can be grounded in a shared set of assumptions.

“Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face”.
Classic

What philosopher before Deleuze ever began a work this way:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times,
at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.

Deleuze destroys Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Deleuze is very well versed in Nietzsche. — Vaskane

My favorite section of Anti-Oedipus:

Melanie Klein herself writes: "The first time Dick came to me ... he manifested no sort of affect when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them 'Daddy-train' and 'Dick-train.' Thereupon he picked up the train I called 'Dick' and made it roll to the window and said 'Station.' I explained: 'The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.' He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shutting himself in, saying 'dark,' and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: 'It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.' Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: 'Nurse?' . . . As his analysis progressed . . . Dick had also discovered the wash-basin as symbolizing the mother's body, and he displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water." Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face. The
psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: "Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won't you?" Instead he screams: "Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein.

Do you expect the “real” reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation?

No. I'm actually quite a fan of speculative history.

What I am saying is that the method is easy to do poorly, and in some respects Nietzsche does it very poorly indeed. His Plato is almost a gnostic, and it is indeed hard to see why he would have become so influential — Count Timothy von Icarus

I confess to being an ignoramus when it comes to Classical history, as well as Greek philosophy. I always skip past Nietzsche’s writings on the Greeks, so I’ll take your word for it that his account doesnt donthat period justice.
What I’m interested in is not whether Nietzsche gets the content of historical events ‘right’, however one wants to define that, but, as you put it, the formal structure of historical change. Speculative history is grounded in one kind of formal account. Nietzsche’s formal approach constitutes a critique of speculative dialectics, leading to genealogical forms of analysis, like those of Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. I suppose my question would be why you prefer speculative dialectics over this alternative path.

These days my self-overcoming amounts to disrupting my routine of sitting on the couch watching cartoons and eating Cheetos to moving to the recliner watching cartoons and eating potato chips — Fooloso4

Oy. Your cardiovascular system may not be too thrilled with that routine.

Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Hegel (plus plenty more) can't all be right about the "real" reasons for historical development of Judaism and Christianity…My point then, is that Nietzsche is, to some extent, right in his critique of prior thinkers. People know where they want to end up and work backwards from there…
My second point, re the Russell quote, is that you can very easily turn this same sort of analysis back on Nietzsche — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you expect the “real” reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation? And if not, how does one understand and separate the role of cultural bias from objective fact of history? What method do you prefer and which philosopher of history do you think best achieves this?

If one assumes, as I do, that the idea of empirically objective history is incoherent, this does not mean that there aren’t more and less rigorous ways to do a relativist history. Have you read Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’ This is a relativist, or as he calls it in the book, an archeological approach to history. He describes three periods of Western history, the Classical, Renaissance and Modern chapters, and analyses each of these in terms of overarching paradigms or worldviews ( he calls these epistemes). These systems of thought encompass all modalities of culture. He focuses on linguistics, economics, biology and the human sciences. The transition from one episteme to another is guided by no logic, except that each episteme is conditioned by what precedes it.

In later Foucault works we come to understand the mechanisms of organization of an episteme via the dissemination of forces of power through societies. His focus is less about overt coercion than a bottom-up reciprocal shaping of values through the way institutions comes to establish their material relations with persons. He was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche in his understanding of the relation between power and knowledge in creating value systems and the institution's that materially express and perpetuate them. It was Nietzsche who allowed Foucualt to get away from the dialectical idealism of Hegel and dialectical materialism of Marx in understanding historical motivations.

Or perhaps the West is engaged in neo-colonialism by trying to foist their "sexual revolution" on to other cultures, undermining gender identities people draw meaning from? :nerd: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Foisting and mandatory reshaping aren’t good, and not very Nietzschean. When I said that I take Deleuze to be moving further on Nietzsche’s path, I had in mind notions like this:

“…when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it.”

Deleuze understood well that one cannot coerce social change. One creates an opening and hopes that others connect with it.

Yet those very movements get cited as the tyranny of the weak over the strong. I don't see a way for Nietszcheans to adjudicate these sorts of disputes. E.g., is feminism Nietzschean because it affirms woman as woman, not as some sort of defective man, or is it the weak using slave morality as a cudgel, affirmative action the chains weighing down someone like Vonnegut's Harrison Bergaron?

This leads to the "no true Nietzschean" phenomena re moral norms — Count Timothy von Icarus

We each get to pick our favorite Nietzschean, the contemporary figure we believe best furthers the path of exploration laid out by Nietzsche. My choice is Deleuze. For Deleuze weakness is thinking that binds itself to a fascism of one sort or another, and the strong path is the path of revolutionary thinking, not bound to any telos, but to becoming for its own sake. liberating us from the intolerable and oppressive conventions we gravitate toward and get stuck in. For Deleuze, affirming woman as an entity in her own right is still to remain stuck in a binary that oppresses.

First part of the problem: we can never produce knowledge that perfectly matches reality. This problem isn't specific to consciousness — Skalidris

As long as you think reality is something that has to be ‘matched to knowledge’ you’re screwed from the get-go. Assuming consciousness as an ‘in-itself’ standing over against a world is the basis of the Hard Problem. You can blame it on our subject-predicate grammar.

As far as your (or Fukuyama’s) analysis of Nietzsche’s ideas, I don’t think any useful assessment of his thinking can get off the ground until one deals with the basis of the arguments made within such philosophical approaches as phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, neo-pragmatism, enactivism, new materialism , the later Wittgenstein, deconstruction and social constructionism countering traditional realism. I dont find Fukuyama’s thinking to be up to the task of effectively grasping what these philosophers are up to.

What does that laundry list have to do Fukuyama or anything I've wrote and why is a big list of terms developed decades after Nietzsche was writing the only way to properly engage with his writing? Surely he can be engaged with on his own terms. And since a good deal of Nietzsche corpus focuses on representations and critiques of prior thinkers, surely the accuracy of these claims can be analyzed without appealing to say, Wittgenstein.

I mean, does someone really need to be steeped in New Materialism and 21st century thought to decide if Nietzsche accurately represents or responds to Plato? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do you suppose are Nietzsche’s ‘own terms’? Isnt that the central question? We never read a philosophy by descending into the pristine purity of their thinking. As Nietzsche understood better than most, our readings of philosophers are perspectival, filtered through our own cultural template. This is why objective history is always history as written by the victors, and Nietzsche was not interested i. doing objective history. What he wanted to do was lift out structures of power relations that are presupposed by any history. In spewing forth my laundry list, I didn’t say one has to know these approaches, I said one needs to understand their basis, what ties them together with Nietzsche. Otherwise , one may end up reading Nietzsche through the lens of more traditional philosophy and only trivialize his ideas.

Here’s a fair synopsis of Nietzsche’s "The Use And Abuse Of History"

https://www.thoughtco.com/nietzsches-the-use-and-abuse-of-history-2670323

“Out of life's school of war—what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols)
— Joshs
This is obviously not true on the face of it, as evidenced by many broken people who have survived a serious physical injury or disease, or a socio-economical fall — baker

Nietzsche was among the first philosophers to critique the long-standing bias within philosophy giving preference to presence over absence, the general over the singular, and most importantly, positive unification over negation. Negation has traditionally been thought of as a lack, an accident, something standing in the way of and opposing itself to the good and the true. But postmodern writers
like Nietzsche see negation as a positive, affirmative power. The influence of this thinking can be seen today in the change of language from the disabled to the differently abled, from normal and abnormal neurology to neurotypical and neuro-atypical, from pathologizing schizophrenia to the affirmative message of the Hearning Voices movement. Oliver Sacks’s positive accounts of people with Tourette’s, autism and other alterations in behavior was influenced by Nietzsche.

He wrote:

I am compelled to ask, with Nietzsche: ‘As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?’—and to see the questions it raises as fundamental in nature.

All this has led to an ideology that is on the one hand
openly hostile to "post modernism," (the constant refrain of folks like Jordan Peterson) while being itself highly post-modernist — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are at least two disparate uses of the world ‘post-modernist’ floating around in our era. The first is a socio-political term referring to practices of consumerism and other aspects of mass culture. The other use has almost nothing to do with this kind of analysis, referring instead to a loosely connected community of philosophical approaches that critique such notions as foundational truth , realism and objectivity, grand narratives of history, etc. It sounds like you’re talking about the first use here. As far as your (or Fukuyama’s) analysis of Nietzsche’s ideas, I don’t think any useful assessment of his thinking can get off the ground until one deals with the basis of the arguments made within such philosophical approaches as phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, neo-pragmatism, enactivism, new materialism , the later Wittgenstein, deconstruction and social constructionism countering traditional realism. I dont find Fukuyama’s thinking to be up to the task of effectively grasping what these philosophers are up to.

How can someone still rightfully be called "strong" if they can be overcome by germs, entrapments, etc.? — baker

“Out of life's school of war—what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols)

How so? In what way is Nietzsche's "historical analysis" more actual historical analysis than Hegel or Vico's? I would say Marx actually has a leg up in this department, despite the same charge being easy to level at him — Count Timothy von Icarus

In order to treat Nietzsche’s approach to history fully, I think one needs to be familiar with the following:

1)The difference between history and historicism.

2)The difference between objective empirical history and genealogical history.

3)What Nietzsche meant by the “untimely”

If Russell had any inkling of what Nietzsche was up to , his own philosophy wouldnt have been so backward. At the very least, a grasp of the later Wittgenstein’s thinking would be a prerequisite for understanding Nietzsche, and Russell was woefully inadequate at this.