Taught to hate the Yin within by repression and judgment.To hate the Yin around us by seeing it as lesser, while exploiting it.

For a common example, a young boy who is light-skinned (white) is told (implicitly, perhaps explicitly… dominator culture is hypocritical and likes to disguise its toxic nature) to hate the ‘lesser’ female, and to avoid being anything similar to that — 0 thru 9

Derrida’s deconstruction is an attempt to unravel the logic of dialectical opposition:

What_interested me then, that I am attempting to pursue along other lines now, was, at the same time as a "general economy," a kind of general strategy of deconstruction. The latter is to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it. Therefore we must proceed using a double gesture, according to a unity that is both systematic and in and of itself divided, a double writing, that is, a writing that is in and of itself multiple, what I called, in "La double seance," a double science. On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.

That being said-and on the other hand-to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new "concept," a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime… Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or…

they show the empirical sciences what is hidden to them in their own naive assumptions.
— Joshs

When and where would that be? — jgill

This is how Husserl put it in 1935:

The supposedly completely self-suffi­cient logic which modern mathematical logicians [Logistiker]
think they are able to develop, even calling it a truly scientific philosophy, namely, as the universal, a priori, fundamental sci­ence for all objective sciences, is nothing but naivete. Its self-evi­dence lacks scientific grounding in the universal life-world a priori, which it always presupposes in the form of things taken for granted, which are never scientifically, universally formu­lated, never put in the general form proper to a science of essence. Only when this radical, fundamental science exists can such a logic itself become a science. Before this it hangs in mid-air, without support, and is, as it has been up to now, so very naive that it is not even aware of the task which attaches to every objective logic, every a priori science in the usual sense, namely, that of discovering how this logic itself is to be grounded, hence no longer "logically" but by being traced back to the universal prelogical a priori through which everything logi­cal, the total edifice of objective theory in all its methodological forms, demonstrates its legitimate sense and from which, then, all logic itself must receive its norms.

Formal logic also depends on it.
— Joshs

Formal logic depends on duration?

How? — Banno

The objects of logic to be compared are presumed to maintain their identity (endure) throughout the comparisons.

Philosophy and physics come at the issue from separate perspectives. A key point of philosophy, I would assert, is that it is grounded in rational contemplation of the human condition. It ought not to overly rely on science, except perhaps insofar as scientific discoveries impact the human condition — Wayfarer

If you think about the concept of duration in terms of the notion of extension in time or space, that is, as changes in degree of a fixed quality, then you have the basis of both mathematics and objective science. There could be no mathematical or empirical object, no calculations nor measurement, without this idea of self-identical repetition. Formal logic also depends on it. Husserl’s philosophy was built on showing how we construct the ‘illusion’ of extensive duration out of qualitatively changing moments of sense. For Husserl, this subjective structure of time constitution underlying the concept of object extended in space and time represents an apodictic science underlying the relative and incomplete empirical sciences.
While Heidegger and Derrida has much to critique in Husserl’s work, they kept his discovery that the extended object at the heart of logic, mathematics and the empirical sciences is an illusion, or more accurately, a constructed idealization. So not only do their philosophies not rely on scientific results, they show the empirical sciences what is hidden to them in their own naive assumptions.

This is, to my mind, a great example of religious thought being progressive. Of course, religion is highly regressive in many contexts, in the sense used in the OP. My point would be that "the general principles by which theologies, philosophies, and ideologies become either progressive or regressive seems to transcend the secular/religious divide." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree completely. If at a certain point in history the use of the term religious fades away it will be the result of a progressive impetus within, but not unique to, the history of religion itself.

Yet is religious grounding always bad?
The thing we are grounded to in Platonism and the panentheistic vision of God displayed in Patristic theologians is transcendence, knowledge, freedom, and goodness itself… all human knowledge springs from the same source, man's desire for "what is truly good," not what merely "appears to be good and brings pleasure." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s try a deconstrucrive exercise:
By deconstructive I mean locating two hidden gestures operating together within the terms of a discourse. First, whenever a discourse makes claims for a boundary of opposition between two meanings, such as rational and irrational, love and hate, true and false, knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil, based on the assumption of a true quality intrinsic to each term, one can reveal that the sense of ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’ are themselves contingent, changeable and relative. The second deconstructive gesture is parasitic on the first. If supposedly reliably true, self-consistently grounded senses of terms like good and evil are themselves multiple and various, then the strict opposition between good and evil can no longer be justified. That is, dissolving the purity of categorical meanings ( or better yet, showing how they already dissolve themselves in practice) dissolves the violent sharpness of the oppositions they supposedly justify.

How does your notion of the good exclude those who you deem bad, how does your idea of the true banish those you deem false, how does your conception of the moral exclude those who appear to you as immoral? The religious gesture of grounding and binding always presents the danger of erasing the differences within its categorical terms, and as a result creating and hypostesizing oppositions that harmfully separate off groups of people from one another.

:100:

And indeed, that's what the research on the plunge in evangelical church attendance and its ties to radical right-wing beliefs and support for violence seems to suggest. People already in the "far-right" space don't tend to "get better" when they leave church. They tend to get more paranoid, more supportive of violence, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

Abandoning ties to institutions such as churches has been a symptom of the descent into dysfunction of many rural communities around the world due to economic decline , as books like Hillbilly Elegy have documented. This social dysfunction is especially true among men, reflected in higher rates of suicide, depression, addiction and violence.

Does this signal a loss of religious faith, or a loss of institutional connection? For conservative writers like David Brooks it doesnt matter. His argument is that severing the social ties that bind us together in mutual obligation and moral commitment is what leads to violence and despair. I disagree with him. I do agree that religiosity is about ties that bind us to something larger than ourselves, but this doesn’t have to correlate with church attendance. I suggest that dysfunctional right wing rural residents who are not connected to any institutions are very much driven by ties that bind them to something transcendent.

What I mean by this is faith in something that remains absolutely immutable and self-present, something pure that we can depend on to ground all of the relative, contingent changing phenomena of experience. Purity, persistent self-identity and self-presence are all tropes of what certain philosophers call a metaphysics of presence. We see a metaphysical of presence not only in fundamentalist religions with absolutist views about morality and truth, but also in modern science and humanism. When God was jettisoned in favor of the human subject, we exchanged a divine self-presence for the self-presence of subjective human consciousness and its ability to represent within itself empirically objective truth.

So why do I have problems with the idea of binding ourselves to a pure something outside ourselves (God, nirvana, antinatalist nothingness, objective truth) or within ourselves ( consciousness, self-actualization, authenticity)?

It’s just this: The more pure, the more fixedly absolute the ground, the more polarizing and violent is its relation to what it grounds. For instance, the religious or traditionalist belief in the free will of the autonomous, morally responsible subject implies a harsher and more ‘blameful' view of justice than deterministic-based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.

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. In other words, the more we are able to decenter the purity of our grounding of moral and empirical truth, the more we can see our relation to each other on dimensions of connection, similarity and belonging rather than opposition and blameful justice. To the extent that religiosity ( or a certain modernist view of science) is ‘regressive’ , it is in the extent to which it gives us over to notions of the pure, the true , the absolute which cannot help but alienate and blame in the same gesture in which it binds.

don’t do it on the basis of rationality vs emotion, because the science of emotion no longer justifies that dichotomy.
— Joshs

Can you say some more on this and the role of emotion in reason — Tom Storm

Think of emotion in terms of habits of thoughts, ways of being attuned to the world, of letting ourselves be affected, of how things matter to us, their salience and value for us.The rationality of correctness, of what is true and false, is ensconced within and oriented by the valuative salience contributed by affect. Rationality asks ‘What is the case’?, bit underneath it emotion asks a more fundamentalset of questions: ’what is the valuative significance and meaning of what is the case’? ‘Why do we care about it?’ ‘What the sense of it’? ‘What pattern of thinking makes the rationality of what is the case intelligible?

’Prefer' something seems a curious or 'cold' word to choose, given the subject matter; it makes theism versus atheism sound like selecting a pair of pants.

I've often held (perhaps wrongly) that (along with socialisation and enculturation) belief in deities is often arrived at aesthetically or emotionally, perhaps along the line of one's sexual preference. In my case, I never felt a jones for theism and no amount of argument is able to make it exciting or meaningful. — Tom Storm

Aren’t scientific theories of ‘what is the case’ also arrived at and overthrown based on aesthetic considerations? That is, by a shift of what matters to us rather than always sticking within the same affectively grounded frame of rationality that dictates the sense of what we deem true and false? Isnt the history of scientific progress akin to (and running parallel with) historical shifts in artistic movements? Isnt the historical progression of science, art and other cultural domains bound together via enculturation and socialization?

( Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made)
Josh, you seem to have some objection. Can you put it in your own words? — Art48

If you’re going to reject religion, don’t do it on the basis of rationality vs emotion, because the science of emotion no longer justifies that dichotomy. Emotion isn’t at odds with treason, it is its compass. Just say you prefer an atheistic value system.

The amygdala is the part of the brain which experiences emotions, in particular, fear and anger. It’s responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The cerebral cortex supports higher-level reasoning and intelligence. It has been speculated that the regressive has an overactive amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex, while the progressive has a better developed cerebral cortex. Relative to their overall size, humans have the largest cerebral cortex of all mammals. So, it might be argued that people with an overdeveloped amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex are people who are failing to realize their human potential. Thus, the label “regressive” is appropriate. — Art48

We humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior. Even the adjective we use to describe our­selves as insensitive or stupid in the heat of the moment —“thoughtless” —connotes a lack of cognitive control, of failing to channel our inner Mr. Spock. This origin myth is so strongly held that scientists even created a model of the brain based on it. The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system,” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so­called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most suc­cessful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his best­seller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows.

“Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly,” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Fin­lay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are
present in all vertebrates.” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.
( Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made)

...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. — The Mind-Created World

My first impression is that for Husserl the empirical is the product of an intersubjective constituting process, which itself is built out of the constituting processes of individual subjectivities. So to say that something is empirically true is to refer to a relative product, which could be otherwise, of the concordant experience in conscious subjectivity. The reality of the Universe as independent of minds must also be considered a conclusion that is relative and could be otherwise. Put differently, the mind-independence of the external world is itself a product of a mind-dependent constituting process. Mind-independent empirical nature for Husserl is this relative product of constitution, a mere hypothesis.

if we could eliminate all spirits from the world, then that is the end of nature. But if we eliminate nature, "true," Objective-intersubjective existence, there always still remains something: the spirit as individual spirit. It only loses the possibility of sociality, the possibility of comprehension, for that presupposes a certain Bodily intersubjectivity. We would then no longer have the individual spirit as a person in the stricter, social sense, a person related to a material and, consequently, to a personal world as well. Nevertheless we still have, notwithstanding the enormous impoverishment of "personal" life, precisely an Ego with its conscious life, and it even has therein its individuality, its way of judging, of valuing, of letting itself be motivated in its position takings.” (Ideas II)

“All that exists for the pure ego becomes constituted in him himself; furthermore, that every kind of being including every kind characterized as, in any sense, "transcendent” has its own particular constitution. Transcendence in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, constituted within the ego. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non- sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.

but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche.
— Joshs

I don't think he's trying to let each "epoche" speak for itself. He's myth making to explain why we have directly opposing conceptions of goodness. His answer is that it's our heritage, built into our language. One could easily swap that answer with something about the structure of the human psyche. — frank

Our heritage is defined by our practices, and a genealogy of history tracks changes in our practices, and how these changes alter the sense of meaning of our linguistic concepts. In its most general sense the genealogical is the method of analysis of the Will to Power, which is not a psychological concept.

The will to power must not be interpreted psychologically, as if the will to power wanted power because of a motive; just as genealogy must not be interpreted as a merely philosophical genesis. ( Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy)

What I have in mind by the untimely is captured by Deleuze here:

There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must vanish. . . . What deed would man be capable of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhistorical?" Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems.

As far as Nietzsche's historical sense, he's the only western philosopher who even utilized ANY Historical sense at all.
— Vaskane

That does not account for Hegel who was bold enough to claim what that history was destined to bring about.

It also excludes those philosophers who presented "natural' right as outcomes of our development as human beings, as seen in the differences between Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, etcetera.

Against that backdrop, the use of the word Genealogy by Nietzsche seems less explanatory than others. — Paine

Ah, but Nietzsche’s view of history is ‘untimely’, neither history as a chain of empirical events viewed from an external perspective nor history as dialectical progression, but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche.

I will say, the kind of anti-Judaism of Schopenhauer, was probably a bit too early for the modern style antisemitism. As far as I know, he didn't hate Jews more than any other ethnic group. He had something mean to say about everyone, including fellow Germans. Nietzsche's era was getting closer to actual antisemitism in the modern sense, but he seemed to disavow such views. — schopenhauer1

In Nietzsche’s early years, it seems as if the elements were in place for a Heidegger-style anti-semitism. Like Heidegger, the young Nietzsche was in the throes of German nationalism, and idolized the early Greeks. This combination in Heidegger led him to connect the German Volk with the proper path of thinking the Greeks laid out, turning the jews into outsiders who corrupted this early thinking and spread the corruption to Christianity. A return to the proper path meant embracing the way of the German Volk against that of the rootless outsiders. But Nietzsche turned against both the Greeks and German nationalism. If the jews were corrupters, they just happened to be among the first and most effective. Since the inclination to turn the will against itself was present in all of humanity, there was no need to fetishize the jews, and no reason to assume they were any less capable than any other group of overcoming nihilistic tendencies.

↪Joshs To consider them weak in will to power would be to consider them as decadents, which Nietzsche states that "the Jews are the very opposite of décadents." He goes on to explain their will to power -- to survive where so many other civilizations didn't -- was to become the head of movements of decadents to gain immense power and transfigure the values of the ancient world away from life affirmation, to keep man kind tame enough as to not remove the Jews from existence.
If you want to believe Jew are weak in will to power that's your interpretation, but certainly not Nietzsche's stance — Vaskane

What I’m centrally interested in is how you would
characterize ressentiment, particularly its manifestation as the ascetic ideal, from a critical philosophical stance. Put differently, what, according to Nietzsche, is the crucial philosophical self-understanding lacking in those (including the jews) who believe that a nirvana of pure will to nothingness is a solution to the pain and suffering of living, or that science progresses toward absolute objective truth, or that there are moral universals? How are these all examples of the ascetic ideal (which the jews bought into lock, stock and barrel), and what kind of ethics should replace them?

↪Joshs The whole of Aphorism 24 from the Anti-Christ shows Nietzsche believes the Jews aren't weak of will at all: — Vaskane

Nietzsche says:

“the Jews were a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence”. Ressentiment is structured around revenge and hatred , a revaluation of values.

“Whereas all noble morality grows out of a tri­umphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment…”

The ascetic ideal emerges from ressentiment, and is characterized as a coping mechanism to deal with a weak, degenerative, impoverished and sick physiology:

the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from appearance, transience, growth, death, wishing, longing itself – all that means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, but it is and remains a will.”

“And when we view it physiologically, too, science rests on the same base as the ascetic ideal: the precondition of both the one and the other is a certain impoverishment of life, – the emotions cooled, the tempo slackened, dialectics in place of instinct, solemnity stamped on faces and gestures (solemnity, that most unmistakable sign of a more sluggish metabolism and of a struggling, more toiling life.”

It's good to keep in mind that despite their having differing opinions on almost everything, professional philosophers are overwhelmingly realist with regard to the existence of the world around us. — Banno

I’ll go along with that, but it gets a bit tricky when we try to parse terms like ‘real’ and ‘exist’. For instance, Is the existence of the world absolutely or only relatively real?

Now, however, we must not fail to clarify expressly the
fundamental and essential distinction between transcendental­ phenomenological idealism versus that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent. Above all: phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly. Its sole task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense in which everyone accepts it - and rightly so - as actually existing. That the world exists, that it is given as existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy.

In this regard, it is a fundamental of philosophy, according to the expositions in the text of the Ideas, that the continual prog­ression of experience in this form of universal concordance is a mere presumption, even if a legitimately valid one, and that consequently the non-existence of the world ever remains think­able, notwithstanding the fact that it was previously, and now still is, actually given in concordant experience. The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is "irrelative" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due,namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as an intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity. Natural life, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its "naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection.
(Husserl, Ideas II)

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places.
— Joshs

How is that different from the situation for poor people who have been barred from even more places? In other words, the Jews haven't been the only ones facing that kind of predicament. So it's misleading to single them out, as if everyone else was having a great time — baker

Let me get this straight. You don’t want to single the jews out as the only recipients of discrimination. But you do want to single the jews out in the follow way:

“When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.”

I think Nietzsche’s highly complex formulation of ressentiment, and its relation to historic judaism, is likely to be misconstrued on this forum as simply a blaming of the jews. I appreciate that Nietzsche’s larger concern in the Genealogy of Morals was not to single out some group for attack but to apply his notion of Will to power, as a
psychic battle among competing drives, not just to the history of morality but to the history of scientific truth.

I would suggest, though, that there are other ways of understanding the emergence of the morality of Good and Evil besides that of a weakness or sickness. This implies some sort of pathology or regression occurred in human history with respect to a prior period of a healthy Will to Power. Why not treat the rise of Judeo -Christian morality without the value judgement implied by ‘weakness of will’? It can be seen instead as a phase of a historical development or evolution, which made Nietzsche’s own philosophy possible.

magritte Here's the link to the very nicely formatted .pdf of the paper.

I was sceptical first up, but having started to read it, I'm coming around to it. — Wayfarer

I love how the the authors locate the ‘true’ meaning of human cultural products like art and literature in evolutionary adaptivity, a purpose only indirectly connected to the expressed or implicit motivation of the artist, but outside the bounds of their awareness. This true meaning grounds itself in an origin depicted as the universal lawfulness of empirical objectivity. The theological thinking of origin as the pure self-persistence of law is evident here, which is why Kierkegaard scholar Mark C Taylor embraced similar ideas in his 1999 book, The Moment of Complexity.

Stuart Kauffman’s extensive research and speculation are inspired by deeply held philosophical, metaphysical, and religious beliefs, which often stand in tension with his scientific investigations. His obvious rejection of the existence of a Judeo-Christian God cannot disguise the profound longing for unity and reconciliation that lies at the heart of his work. If Darwin and his followers are right when they claim that evolution is a matter of chance, human life would seem to be an accident. For Kauffman, such a vision renders life meaningless and makes it impossible to feel ‘at home in the universe.” If, however, there is an emergent order to things that lends evolution a discernible order and probable direction, life has a logic that makes human existence meaningful:

In this view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, brico­lage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing, ” in
Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which se­lection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on its head with his blind watchmaker.
This order, or course, is neither the product of a purposeful designer nor pro­grammed from the beginning; rather, evolution is an inner teleonomic process in which order emerges spontaneously but not accidentally. “If I am right,” Kauffman hopefully declares, the motto of life is not ‘We the improbable, but We the expected’.

Well since in Real Life here on planet Earth while physical systems are getting more and more complex, biological systems are rapidly becoming simpler and simpler. If current biological trends are extrapolated indefinitely, there will be a zoo, a corn field and an industrial feed lot.

It's erroneous on it's face. — LuckyR

I guess it depends in how you define complexity. For instance, how should we weigh decreasing bio-diversity against increases in human cultural and technological complexity?

↪mcdoodle
Do you think that there is an anti-Jewish bias in Europe stemming from pre-Holocaust ideas of Jewry that is not present in newer Western nation like the US? There are certainly hate groups everywhere but I am wondering if geography influences these trends — schopenhauer1

Europeans brought their prejudices with them when they emigrated to America. Not just anti-semitism ( there were many prominent anti-semites, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindburgh) but anti-catholicism, and conflict among catholic ethnicities. My grandmother remembered seeing signs posting ‘No jews, catholic or dogs’.
Major cities like New York, Chicago and Boston were divided up into fiefdoms bounded by major streets and centered around local parishes. You ventured beyond your group’s neighborhood at the risk of a beating. This faded by the 1960’s ( with the exception of prejudice against people of color) with the flight to suburbia and the integration of public and private institutions.

I think the key tends mitigating against separatism
are urbanization, secularization, inter-marriage
and population diversification.

Could facing up to functions being somehow (somehow) first-order fundamental (with implications for internalism-externalism, organic-inorganic, selectpsychism - panpsychism) help face up to the 'aboutness' problem, in a way that's consistent with known physics? (somehow) — Danno

Enactivists like Evan Thompson abandon functionalism in favor of an integrated approach that also does away with qualia, input-output directionality, representationalism and computationalism. Enactivism makes ‘aboutness’ the central organizing principle of living systems in that living things are defined by their normative, goal-oriented interaction with an environment.

In the traditional functionalist conception, cognition is treated as fundamentally distinct from emotion. Cognitivist explanations focus on the abstract problem-solving characterization of cognitive tasks, the structure and content of symbolic representations, and the nature of the algorithms for manipulating the representations in order to solve a given problem. Cognitivism goes hand in hand with functionalism in the philosophy of mind, which in its extreme computational form holds that the embodiment of the organism is essentially irrelevant to the nature of the mind. It is the software, not the hardware, that matters most for mentality.

Cognitivism made meaning, in the sense of representational semantics, scientifically acceptable, but at the price of banishing consciousness from the science of the mind. (In fact, cognitivism inherited its consciousness taboo directly from behaviorism.) Mental processes, understood to be computations made by the brain using an inner symbolic language, were taken to be entirely nonconscious. Thus the connection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world. Cognition or sense-making is the intentional and normative engagement of the system with its environment. One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.

↪Joshs
I know. Likewise, progressive American Christianity is fairly interfaith — frank

Would you agree that the varieties of contemporary anti-semitism expressed by the likes of Henry Ford, Heidegger, Hamas, Charles Lindburgh, Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan have less to do with the judaism of the middle ages than with their interpretation of the motives and practices of the modern world Jewish community?

The majority of Jews for the last 2000 years would say they adhered to their faith because the Torah explicitly condemns straying from the faith. For these Jews, other religions are not alternate paths to God. They're all paths to the Devil. The gods of other religions are false gods, and it's evil to worship them. There's nothing anti-Semitic about commenting on this. It's traditional Judaism. Look into it. — frank

Do you know anything about the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist denominations of Judaism? Within these theologies, there are no revealed truths, no miracles, only endless exegesis and interpretation. My father’s touchstone for his understanding of the application of jewish law was the Rationalism of Maimonides. Given that 90% of American jews adhere to one of these denominations rather than Orthodox Judaism ( what you call ‘traditional’ judaism’), your emphasis on strict adherence to law is foreign to the practice of the vast majority of American jews.

But you said you'd never even heard of the idea that Jews think they're superior to Gentiles. The fact that you haven't heard of it, and that it seems wrong to you, indicates that you are probably the end of the line for Jewishness in your family. — frank

I can’t speak to what the average jew in the biblical or medieval period said about gentiles, but I can speak from my own experience growing up in a Conservative jewish home, and living in Israel for a year with my family. I can tell you that no jew I’ve encountered, of any age, ever expressed such sentiments to me. Do religious jews believe their faith offers them a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics which is preferable to that of other religions? I would hope so. Otherwise, why bother to remain within the faith? But you seem to have a stronger notion of ‘superior’ in mind that you may have to spell out for me.

It was both. They weren't welcome in the court of the Czar, but they also abhorred the possibility of adulteration of their communities with foreign ways. So wherever they went, they had their own governments. They were more educated than the locals. They took roles as middle men.

Why exactly you find any of this to be insulting, I don't know — frank

Who said I found it insulting? This is what concerns me:

From Wikipedia:

1)aThe belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human. This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

2) A trope found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but dating to before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, this trope has taken the form of accusations that Jewish citizens of other countries are more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence.

↪TiredThinker
Because they accepted their deals of surrender up to the point they were given places to be in a separate place. Your comparison sucks — Paine

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places.

I have never heard this idea -- that Jews are superior to gentiles -- uttered by anyone. It doesn't make sense and I don't really care to entertain it.
— BitconnectCarlos

Nobody wants to entertain parts of their heritage that aren't attractive. — frank

How quaint. I had never heard this before either, and certainly not from jews. So I googled it and what I learned is that it is a long-standing prejudice, probably stemming from a misinterpretation of the phrase ‘chosen people’, or else a convenient application of that term to justify a sense that jews wield too much power in the world.

I've heard it many times. It's not polite to say it, though — baker

I’m betting you heard it from non-jews.

I do my best, but certain prejudices (cough, cough) can make that challenging.
— Joshs

Like what? — frank

Like the belief that jews “refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart.”

Many of the jews of Germany in the 1930’s considered themselves completely assimilated into German society. Boy did they get that wrong.

Is there anything particular about their lifestyles that is unappealing?
— TiredThinker
They refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart. — baker

I do my best, but certain prejudices (cough, cough) can make that challenging.

Science is enforced humility:

What is the core, immutable quality of science?

It's not formal publication, it's not peer review, it's not properly citing sources. It's not "the scientific method" (whatever that means). It's not replicability. It's not even Popperian falsificationism – the approach that admits we never exactly prove things, but only establish them as very likely by repeated failed attempts to disprove them.

Underlying all those things is something more fundamental. Humility. Everyone knows it's good to be able to admit when we've been wrong about something. We all like to see that quality in others. We all like to think that we possess it ourselves – although, needless to say, in our case it never comes up, because we don't make mistakes. And there's the rub. It goes very, very strongly against the grain for us to admit the possibility of error in our own work. That aversion is so strong that we need to take special measures to protect ourselves from it.

If science was merely a matter of increasing the sum of human knowledge, it would be enough for us all to note our thoughts on blogs and move on. But science that we can build on needs to be right. That means that when we're wrong – and we will be from time to time, unless we're doing terribly unambitious work – our wrong results need to be corrected. — wonderer1

I notice that only one form of humility was mentioned here, concerned with the epistemological issue of getting the facts right or wrong. But the notion of scientism has to do with lacking a different form of humility, closely linked with a spirit of audacity. This humility doesn’t concern science as truth or falsity but its continual becoming through revolutionary changes in paradigms, and the recognition that this is not a linear, inductive or deductive progress. it a kind of shift in faith and values. It require the appreciation of science’s close proximity to philosophy, the arts , and yes, even religion in this respect. Stridently scientistic arguments by the likes of Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sean Carroll suffer from a lack of humility in this department.

Here, what I am considering is cognitive meanings and scripts which are simply based on making life meaningful subjectively. — Jack Cummins

Do we ever actually think entities like cognitive scripts as neutral meanings abstracted away from affective valence and contextual significance? Or do we only perform such empirical objectivizations as an artificial act that conceals from itself its underlying structure?

. It could also be asked if there are aspects of pleasure and happiness which are overrides by goals of purpose and meaning. — Jack Cummins

Heidegger wrote that we always bring a pre-understanding to our engagement with the world. This allows things to show up for us within a certain interpetiveness. He added that this pre-understanding is attuned. That is to say, our understanding includes within itself our affective comportment toward the world, a way in which things matter to us. We are always in a particular disposition of mood, which makes us value things in a certain way. Pleasure, happiness and desire are not separate processes in relation to understanding, rationality, meaning , purpose and values. Mood is not a subjective coloration added to reason. It is its compass and gives it its sense and purpose.

↪Joshs comes at the issue from some imagined, internal, solipsistic position. "What are the minimum requirements for finding our way about?" Well, being able to find your way about! As ↪baker points out, you are already embedded in a community, so much so that your attempts to imagine yourself apart from the world carry the world with them. Basically, Joshs, you can't build the private language you need in order to formulate your solipsism. — Banno

There can also be a kind of solipsism, or rather, essentialism, built into assumptions about how a community embeds individuals. That’s why I asked about your minimum requirements. Perhaps I should ask what the minimum requirements are to be able to speak of a community. During the period when I am alone writing in my room, I suggest two things are the case. First, I bring to my writing my history as an embedded member of an interpersonal community. Second, over the course of my writing I am capable of thinking beyond the conventions of that history and that community. The language I use to accomplish this is not private because at first it draws from the resources of that remembered community. And as I continue writing I draw from my ‘self’, or more properly, community of selves, to transform the sense and vocabulary of my language relative to my starting point. So I draw from both an inter and intra-personal community to produce a language that exceeds cultural conventions, all the while avoiding the solipsism of a self-identical self and the essentialism of a strictly interpersonally defined notion of community.

↪Joshs Are you suggesting that self-awareness precedes awareness of the environment? — baker

I’m saying that self and environment reciprocally produce each other.

Your default notions of who you really are are not your own, but inherited from the society/culture you grew up in. So you cannot define your starting point, as that has been done by others already — baker

Society is an abstraction, an average derived from individual perspectives. It is true that each perspectival view is shaped and reshaped by its participation in its culture, but this just means that the way I change in response to that constant social exposure maintains its own integrity and uniqueness with respect to the way others within that same culture are changes by their interactions within it. In this way, each of us stand apart from our culture at the same time that we belong to it.

At some "personal defining juncture" however you choose to define yourself anew, possibly in contradistinction with your old, inherited idea of "who you really are", that new definition is still going to be in relation to your old one. So it seems that one cannot actually chose one's identity. — baker

Just because my new self is defined in reaction against my old self doesn’t mean that that new me doesn’t comprise its own identity.

More broadly, we understand - more or less - what being oneself is in the normal circumstances of growing old, forgetting, being injured and so on. But remove the body and the context in which all this makes sense drops out as well. In philosophical terms, the language game has been over-extended to the point where it needs to be radically rebuilt; we no longer have the capacity to find our way about.

So we make stuff up.

But there is nothing that makes the stuff we make up right or wrong. — Banno

What are the minimum requirements for finding our way about? What if I imagine myself as having memory, which includes my history as a body growing up in a conventional world, and the ability to learn. In addition, I have the ability to think but not to perceive an outside world. I am like a writer locked in a room with their private contemplations. Am I then just making stuff up? Is there anything generated within my thinking that can make that thinking right or wrong, that can validate or invalidate my expectations concerning the future directions of my contemplations?

Not at all, unless we wish to suggest that we come from some other place than the universe.
Answering where we came from we can answer what and who we are and where we're going. — baker

Where did the concept of ‘universe’ come from?What is the history of its etymology? When was the word first used and in what context? In what ways did our use of it change over time? These are questions that must precede the naive assumption of universe as a purely given reality.