. I deliberately used the term metabiology of mind to make it clear that metaphysics is not sufficient to explain the specificity of all living things and especially of consciousness. After all, it is not physics that describes life, but biology. And there is only one brain and it is organic and not spiritual — Wolfgang

Are you saying that metaphysics is to be understood exclusively in relation to physics rather than to biology and psychology as well?

Without a metabiology of mind, brain research, as well as the philosophy of mind, will continue to sleepwalk between utilitarianism (which should not be underestimated) and philosophical speculation. — Wolfgang

What do you think of this review of the field of metabiology by Arturo Carsetti?

https://researchoutreach.org/articles/metabiology-complexity-natural-evolution/?amp=1

Greek ethical notions such as phronesis and areti are in opposition to universalizing ethics, and manage quite well without embracing Heidegger's destining of Being.

The essence of a thing is not the meaning of Being. Our involvement with it can take many forms, including building extermination camps — Fooloso4

Yes, Greek culture was a paragon of ethical humanism. They didn’t have the technology for concentration camps, but they were able to manage the technology of slavery quite well.

What is the connection between Being and ethics? — Fooloso4

The essence of a thing, including an ethical value, is to be found in the contextual particularity of our involvement with it. This precludes universalizing ethics.

↪Joshs For the record, my personal view is that ethics is not Heidegger's primary focus. I concede its "relative absence" in the interest of ongoing discussion. Either way, I don't think it is central to the thesis of the OP. — Pantagruel

Without determining whether Heidegger offers an ethics, and, if he does, without defining the nature of this ethics, it seems to me we can’t counter the implication of the OP, which is based on Wolin’s book Heidegger in Ruins. That is, the question is, is Heidegger’s reputation really in ruins? Wolin wants us to conclude that the ethical implications of Heidegger’s work, its most important feature, are dangerous and deserve to be left in ruins. I agree with the many who have been influenced by his philosophy that the method of grounding ethics his work offers is relevant and important.

But how many times does this poor argument need to be unmasked? Here are some places where it has already been done — Leontiskos

Lovely. I highly recommend Jean Luc Nancy’s The Banality of Heidegger for an antidote to Wolin’s book. To summarize, Heidegger absorbs the anti-semitic tropes from his culture, but not without reinterpreting them. For instance, he rejects the biological, racialized concept of jewry. Jewry represents for him a mode of thinking, a technicized, logicized instrumentalism that he traces back to Plato and Aristotle and which Jews co-opted from the Greeks and spread to Christianity and which reaches its apex with Enlightenement science. He considered Nazism to be the ultimate expression of this technicized thinking. Nancy argues that the ethical tools Heidegger provides in
his thinking can be used to insulate against the very essentialism that Heidegger succumbs to.

It should be noted that Levinas, who was strongly influenced by Heidegger but who offered a philosophical critique of his work, essentializes the jews in a different direction. He argues that we can discern two currents or styles of thinking in Western philosophy since its origins, the Greek and the Jewish. The Greek current focuses on neutral truth and the Jewish deems the ethical as fundamental.

Again, I think it depends on whether Heidegger's philosophy implicates the moral sphere. For an ethicist to produce a work of great import and then choose actions which are deeply flawed is incongruous. — Leontiskos

I’m sure your actions, from the vantage of a century or so hence, will come to be construed as deeply ethically flawed.

The problem is evident in the Introduction to Being and Time. Heidegger claims that the question of the meaning of Being is the fundamental question, the human question. H. says that we must make the inquirer, Dasein, transparent in his own Being. To ignore the ethical dimension of human being is to make what he intends to make transparent opaque. — Fooloso4

Heidegger doesn’t ignore the ethical dimension of Being, any more than Focault, Deleuze and Guattari ignore ethics in their work. One cannot properly think responsibility and justice without an understanding of Being. The question of Being is in its essence an ethical question. This is a central idea in Derrida. I think you’re looking for a prescriptive ethics and, not finding it , infer the total
absence of an ethical dimension.

Many authors have taken such as stance. For instance, Todd May writes:

“Second, however, is the question of whether poststructuralism admits of an ethics at all. In a
discourse that emphasizes the local and the contingent, is there room for principles of evaluation that are, if they are not to be mere personal reactions to situations, universal in scope?”

People should read Heidegger all they like. I don't seek to ban his books. I myself am inclined to avoid whenever possible those who, inter alia, think and are determined to tell everyone that certain groups of people (including themselves) are distinctive in spirit, or have a special place in the world, are especially a part of or have a unique understanding of "Being" or who knows what else is said to qualify as the kind of mystical-religious-philosophical locus of ultimate reality some of us need to manufacture, which in any case cannot be defined or understood through the use of reason; who think reason itself is detrimental to attaining what's true or real, and believe that it should be replaced by something or other like dancing, or marching, exercising, working (because it makes us "free") or running about the mountains in lederhosen pretending to be a peasant. Particularly when they are, also, unrepentant Nazis. — Ciceronianus

Wolin gets Heidegger half right in this respect. Heidegger did indeed reserve a special place for his own parochial culture over others. In his mind rural culture was better suited to grasping Being urban culture, the German volk grounded in blood and soil were better suited to this thinking than ‘rootless’ jews or other foreigners. What Wolin doesnt get is that the thinking of Being itself is a thinking of pragmatic engagement that in its particularities clashes with the structures of totalitarian political institutions. Wolin believes that at the heart of Heidegger’s concept of being is nothing but right wing fascist philosophy dressed up in mystic poetic terminology. But his philosophy is profoundly different from the sorts of conservative philosophies that were fashionable at the time, and still appear today. So Heidegger’s thinking appears as something new and radical but tied to the vestiges of parochial nationalism.

I don't see how the problem goes away unless one argues that Heidegger's academic work is inherently contrary to the unappealing aspects, and that he simply failed to recognize the way in which his philosophy precludes antisemitism, or Nazism, etc. A tall task. — Leontiskos

I hope this helps:

Eugene Gendlin was a Viennese Jew who , at age 13 , just barely made it out of Austria alive in 1939. As a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, he avoided reading Heidegger for years because of his political activities.After finally reading and embracing aspects of his philosophy, Gendlin wrote a remarkable analysis of the historical context of Heidegger’s actions. He didn’t excuse Heidegger or explain away what he did , but , like another famous Jewish philosopher who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Emmanuel Levinas, he showed Heidegger’s faults to be symptomatic of a weakness endemic to European thinking. Rather than conveniently indulging in a pose of moral superiority, patting himself on the back for his righteousness, he looked beyond the individual to a climate of thinking common not just to the Nazis but to those who opposed them.

Here’s the first part of Gendlin’s article , plus the last paragraph:

“Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.

Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World War.

What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.

With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.

So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.

So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side.

Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And Heidegger did write of his "mistakes" in his application to be allowed to teach again at Freiburg (1946). He also distanced himself from the Nazi party already in 1934, long before most Germans. I have no difficulty understanding any person's mistake, and less difficulty if someone is highly developed in other ways. No human can have every kind of strength and judgement. On a personal level there is really no problem.

Why he was so silent about the mistake is also more than personal. It is the silence of a whole generation. I will return to this silence.

The problem is not about him, personally, at all. I pose a problem for us. The problem is, why his kind of philosophy---our kind of philosophy---fails to protect against this "mistake." That is the philosophical question.

His philosophy allowed for this mistake. It is therefore not just the personal accident. There is an inherent, systematic connection. These deep insights permit inhuman, racist views. To find the systematic connection, we must look exactly where these views---our views---are deepest, most precious, and not false but true. What was lacking at that most true point?

Something very important was lacking at the deepest point. We don't notice the lack, because when we read these writings today, we assume and add what is lacking.

I became an American when I was 13. As a child I had not belonged in, or identified with, Austria. I had been alienated in some confused and inarticulate way. I found I could really be an American, and I am one.

But, some European peculiarities remain from before. At the Heidegger Circle I laugh silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?

My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.

Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.

Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human.

To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.

In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.

**************************
Last paragraph:

It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?

To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought
horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.“

But your presupposition is that the two bodies of work are in conflict, and that we therefore must choose either one or the other. Why think that? On my (admittedly limited) view, the two are not in conflict. — Leontiskos

No, my presupposition is that the two bodies of work are two aspects of the same thinking, and that we must use each side to better understand the other. But one side is profoundly richer, deeper , more fully elaborated than the other. Without a thoroughgoing scholarly immersion in that side, one ends misreading Heidegger’s philosophical use of the word ‘destruction’ for the conventional meaning, as Richard Wolin does. This is one of innumerable misreadings he makes in his diatribe against H.

When ↪Pantagruel attempts to excuse Heidegger on the basis that he was an intellectual and not a moralist, he seems to implicitly commit himself to the view that Heidegger's academic work is largely non-moral, and is therefore not contrary (nor promotional) to the moral evils of Nazism. This approach also does not see the two bodies of work as conflicting — Leontiskos

I would disagree that Heidegger’s work doesnt imply an ethics. It does. Both Derrida and Levinas have connected the limits of the ethicial implications of his thought with his political mistakes.

Margolis, a self-professed relativist who stressed the importance of cultural and historical situatedness, would not accept the kind of Heidegger apologetic we see here — Fooloso4

Margolis’s relativism seems to go only so far. He appears to embrace Foucault but his critiques of Husserl, Ricouer, Heidegger, Rorty and various postmodern writers seems to indicate his inability to make the phenomenological (and beyond that, deconstructive) move into a thoroughly relational model of being. Instead, he insists on maintaining a split between the methods of human and natural science, based on his belief in a certain notion of an ‘objective' physical reality. He says cultural time is reversible but physical time is irreversible:.

”Their [cultural meanings] narrative structure—their past, for instance—is, as we have said again and again, always subject to further change by way of further interpretation. Nothing like this obtains in the physical world...The human world is significantly different from the physical—in possessing Intentional structures; it is conceptually richer and more complex in virtue of incorporating the other—and more. The physical world must be older, we say, than human life, and independent of human inquiry; otherwise, all our conjectures make no sense.”

Disentangling the two is not as easy as Heidegger's students would wish. — Leontiskos

.

Let’s be clear about what are entangled here. On one side are the public record of Heidegger’s political actions, and his collected comments concerning his views about National Socialism and the Jews. On the other side are dozens of philosophical works spanning 6 decades and comprising tens of thousands of pages.

If as responsible readers we are charged with the task of using the public record and scattered diary fragments to illuminate the meaning of his published work, and vice versa, which of these two sides of Heidegger’s life do you think deserves the most attention in clarifying the ‘true’ intentions of as careful and complex a thinker as Heidegger?
I think it’s no coincidence that those, like Wolin, who are most inclined to treat Heidegger’s political activities and non-published comments as a proxy for actually mastering his published work are the ones who want to dismiss his philosophy entirely.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure?
— Pantagruel

There were plenty of Germans in Heidegger's time who did not fall for the Nazi foolishness, and if Heidegger is to be held up as a paragon of human brilliance I don't think this argument holds water. — Leontiskos

It had better hold water, or else the concept of human brilliance needs to be done away with.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure? Anyone today who espoused slavery would be rightly seen as a monster. Social contexts create themselves as norms. Sometimes extremely dubious things get realized as social contexts, it's the nature of the beast. Man can be a very ugly animal. As unpleasant a fact as social reality is, it is a reality. You downplay your awareness of the exigency of the social context at your own risk. Your outrage is far more of a social than an intellectual response, anyone can see that. If it were intellectual, then it would only be a matter of letting Heidegger's writings speak for themselves, wouldn't it? — Pantagruel

Good points. If Heidegger’s mistake was cultural essentialism, the eclipsing of individual difference in favor of the social whole, Ciceronianus’s mistake is subjective individualism, which downplays the social shaping of individual subjectivity. Both tendencies are formed within discursive traditions, and both can lead to potentially dangerous ethical myopia.

As for his philosophy, such as it is, it seems to me that Dewey's alleged observation that Heidegger "reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" describes whatever is of worth in it, by my understanding, if we subtract H's mysticism and Romanticism — Ciceronianus

Coming from you , that’s a compliment, given the brilliance of Dewey.

Yes, we are all too quick to criticize those who supported Hitler and the Nazi regime and referred to the Holocaust as the "self-annihilation of the Jews." The "wrong side of a socio-historic movement," forsooth. — Ciceronianus

I don’t know if it is any more improper to refer to supporters of Hitler as being on the wrong side of a sociologist-historic movement than it is to characterize Trump supporters that way.

“On Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating “liberal Jews” who had “voted to destroy America”.(Atlantic Magazine)

I would say language-games never reflect the facts. Rather, facts only get their sense within language-games.
— Joshs

From Wittgenstein's Zettel:

Do I want to say, then, that certain facts are favorable to the formation of certain concepts; or again unfavorable? And does experience teach us this? It is a fact of experience that human beings alter their concepts, exchange them for others when they learn new facts; when in this way what was formerly important to them becomes unimportant, and vice versa. (It is discovered e.g. that what formerly counted as a difference in kind, is really only a difference in degree”.

I like Jasmin Trachtler’s reading of the above quote:

“…even if grammar or concept formation corresponds to
general facts of nature, this does not mean that grammar
can be explained causally, nor that it can be justified by
“nature”—it merely means that grammar does not seem to
be completely random in a trivial sense. Grammar is, as
Wittgenstein says, autonomous (cf. BT 236r)—autonomy,
however, is not absolute independence as it is not a
“complete detachment.” We might have as well other terms
and make other conceptual distinctions. As Wittgenstein
emphasises, both in the 1930s and in his later
investigations, our concepts cannot be justified as the
“right” ones or as corresponding to “nature”: they are
neither “reasonable” nor “unreasonable,” neither “right”
nor “wrong.” As he puts it, the belief that “our concepts are
the only reasonable ones consists in […] [t]hat it doesn’t
occur to us that others are concerned with completely
di!erent things, and that our concepts are connected with
what interests us, with what matters to us” (LW II, 46).
With this, however, Wittgenstein does not want to set up a
hypothesis:

I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature
were different, people would have different
concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). Rather: if
anyone believes that certain concepts are
absolutely the right ones, and that having
di!erent ones would mean not realizing
something that we realize—then let him imagine
certain very general facts of nature to be
di!erent from what we are used to, and the
formation of concepts di!erent from the usual
ones will become intelligible to him. (PPF, xii,
366)

There are plenty of language-games that reflect facts or states-of-affairs. Many of the language-games of science reflect facts, as do other areas of study. — Sam26

Apparently you’re not a fan of Kuhn and Feyerabend.

We know that there are many different language-games, and some of these language-games, (e.g. religious and political language-games) don't always reflect the facts. — Sam26

I would say language-games never reflect the facts. Rather, facts only get their sense within language-games.

So Moore's language-game doesn't do what Moore thinks it does, viz., provide a proof of the external world. So Wittgenstein rejects Moore's language-game, and all such language-games that amount to a subjective knowing, i.e., the mistaken idea, common in many quarters today, that "I know..." is purely subjective (one's conviction). This idea has wrecked havoc on many belief systems. It's very destructive. — Sam26

Is it that Wittgenstein rejects Moore’s language-game or that he is showing Moore what a language game is? Does the idea of rejecting a language-game make sense?

That's beautifully expressed. Probably belongs in the Certainty thread too — Tom Storm

I Certainly hope so

So an alien species was capable of travelling a million light years but they weren’t clever enough to leave us with anything but a corpse?

But yet we want to maintain our inherent uniqueness, that you can’t know “This!” (#253), that my experience is still paramount to communication and the failure is intellectually explainable. That our intelligibility to each other is just “constructing, through joint action, shared systems of intelligibility” and not an ongoing responsibility to be responsive to each other and our moral claims on each other, or, all to often, to fail or refuse to make ourselves intelligible. — Antony Nickles

I thought you might be amused by the similarity between your last sentence and this by Karen Barad:

What if we were to recognize that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental mode" of objectivity as well as subjectivity? Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”

…and this by Shaun Gallagher:

“ As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with another person is called to respond if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding positively or negatively with action to her action.…according to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.”

Barad and Gallagher both utilize Wittgenstein in their work, and are being more faithful to him than I am when I question their (and his) notions of relational responsibility. But just to be clear, the radically social constructionist position Im arguing from doesn’t see shared systems of intelligibility as grounded in autonomous selves. On the contrary, the self is derived concept , a social construction. Since responsivity is a given of relational being, the challenge isn’t how to become responsive to each other, morally or otherwise. The issue is how to enrich and enlarge the system of relational intelligibility that defines us as ‘selves’ within a tradition, so that we can make sense of and embrace alien traditions.

As Ken Gergen writes:

“... groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates.

I would characterize Wittgenstein’s insight of our desire for certainty as a temptation based on the human condition (that we are separate and we want knowledge to bridge that gap).
The desire for certainty is as ancient as Socrates’ desire for knowledge, spawned from the desire for control, the fear of chaos (and death), and the mistrust of others, so again, I find it unlikely those responses will go away (though they may wax and wain/be overcome and succumbed to) — Antony Nickles

I am just pointing out that concepts like certainty and knowledge, as products of discursively formed social practices, differ in their meaning from era to era and culture to culture. Foucault performed an archeological analysis of such notions over the past millennium in the West to demonstrate that the very sense , value and use of terms like certainty and knowledge changed significantly from the Classical to the Modern period, across all modes of culture. So claiming that the desire for certainty is ancient is like saying that the desire for Romantic love is ancient, which is to confuse what is universal and transparent with what is culturally and historically contingent.

If there is any motive which transcends the locality of cultural eras, I suggest it is the need for intelligibility. We have always striven to make sense of each other and our world, and we do this by constructing through joint action shared systems of intelligibility. At a number of points in the course of cultural history, certain senses of the concept ( or family of concepts) of certainty were co-constructed. It was a means to an end; the means was the use of the term certainty and the end was the aim of making the world intelligible.

I think Wittgenstein’s focus on the desire for certainty resonates best in the context of the still-dominant influence of Enlightenment tropes of Truth. In poststructuralist and other postmodern forms of discourse, the idea of certainty is no longer considered useful. This is not due to a repression of the desire for it, but because the concept has lost its intelligibility.

Wittgenstein says that the rules of language are like the rules of chess, in that the rules of chess don't describe the physical properties of the chess pieces, but rather describe what the pieces do. Similarly, in language, the rules don't describe the words but do describe how the words are used — RussellA

As you may be aware, there are numerous competing interpretations of the later Wittgenstein. You embrace a more conservative, realist-oriented reading, whereas Antony hews to the interpretations of writers like Cavell. I also favor these more ‘postmodern’ approaches. For instance, Hutchinson and Read critique a key representative of this more conservative approach:

The mistake here then is Baker & Hacker thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-object relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

Interestingly, Gordon Baker, Hacker's co-author in these papers, had, from 1991 onwards, not only explicitly distanced himself from the Baker & Hacker reading of Philosophical Investigations but also frequently used ‘Baker & Hacker' readings as a stalking horse for his own new reading.

Joseph Rouse reiterates Hutchinson and Read’s contention that for Wittgenstein words do not refer to a pre-existing type or rule of use.

“… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances. Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”

I agree completely with your interpretation of Wittgenstein as you are using it in this thread to counter RussellA’s realist reading of him. I do have some reservations concerning Wittgenstein’s take on desire and motivation, specifically as it relates to such matters as our ‘desire for certainty’.

the interlocutor has the impulsive desire for certainty and “crystalline purity” that Wittgenstein is trying to understand and unravel… humans have (traditional philosophy has) a reason for wanting to hang onto the uniqueness of our sensations, our selves. Wittgenstein is getting at the motivation for those reasons. Maybe to avoid the responsibility to make ourselves intelligible, to block off the other from our imagined “knowledge of ourself”—so we imagine that it is the nature of humans that comes between us, rather than our choice, our “conviction” p 223. And it is possible (and terrifying) for you to be empty, just a puppet, fake, and, in the face of that fear, we want to stay unique, unknowable, so we look around for a reason, and pick the thing most certain—“our” experience. But all the focus on us is easier to face than the real problem to be accounted for: our lack of knowledge of the other. The desire to enforce a connection between outward and inward in me is actually about our limitation to have knowledge of the other, which shows how we do respond to them (acknowledging them, or not). — Antony Nickles

My uneasiness about these comments, which I think represents Wittgenstein’s view fairly faithfully, has to do with a distinction which he seems to want to maintain between the relationally discursive and that which would transcend the particularities of historical practices. Put differently, who is it that is motivated by the desire for uniqueness and certainty? If the self is a relational achievement, then aren’t desire and motive also relational, discursive constructions that emerge from traditions of intelligibility within particular communities? Rorty makes a similar point, arguing that what Wittgenstein reifies as a primal desire of humankind is in fact the product of historically changing social-discursive forms of life.

“It is certainly true that the desire to get in touch with something that stays the same despite being described in many different ways keeps turning up in philosophy. But it is not obvious that this desire, the one that sometimes manifests itself as the need to “emit an inarticulate sound” has deep roots. A desire may be shared by Parmenides, Meister Eckhart, Russell, Heidegger, and Kripke without being intrinsic to the human condition. Are we really in a position to say that this desire is a manifestation of what Conant calls “our most profound confusions of soul”?Wittgenstein was certainly convinced that it was. But this conviction may tell us more about Wittgenstein than about philosophy. The more one reflects on the relation between Wittgenstein's technical use of “philosophy” and its everyday use, the more he appears to have redefined “philosophy” to mean “all those bad things I feel tempted to do” Such persuasive redefinitions of “philosophy” are characteristic of the attempt to step back from philosophy as a continuing conversation and to see that conversation against a stable, ahistorical background. Knowledge of that background, it is thought, will permit one to criticize the conversation itself, rather than joining in it.

The transcendental turn and the linguistic turn were both taken by people who thought that disputes among philosophers might fruitfully be viewed from an Archimedean point outside the controversies these phi-losophers conduct. The idea, in both cases, was that we should step back from the controversy and show that the clash of theories is possible only because both sets of theorists missed something that was already there, waiting to be noticed.

Once we give up on the project of “stepping back”, we will think of the strange ways in which philosophers talk not as needing to be elucidated out of existence, but as suggestions for talking differently, on all fours with suggestions made by scientists and poets. A few philosophers, we may admit, are “like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it”. (PI 194) But most of them are not. They are, rather, contributors to the progress of civilization. Knowledgeable about the dead ends down which we have gone in the past, they are anxious that future generations should fare better. If we see philosophy in this historicist way, we shall have to give up on the idea that there is a special relation between something called “language” and something else called “philosophy.”

. Yes, objectification of other species and other people has certainly been widespread in human civilizations. It's an entirely self-serving and artificial position: even while vivisection was generally accepted, people had relationships with their pets and working animals, much as we do now. Nor would a bullfight or dog-fight be any fun to watch if the combatants were automata - it is precisely the awareness of the pain, rage and fear that makes these sadistic entertainments pleasurable to some humans. — Vera Mont

Hypocrisy is also a very human trait that can be fostered or discouraged in early childhood — Vera Mont

It's a rejection, suppression or outright persecution of any minority (their suffering doesn't signify) that threatens a carefully built and maintained structure of power. — Vera Mont

From a social constructionist perspective, you and I are coming from different traditions of intelligibility. The tradition of thought that you participate in is a form of realism in which real biological and social phenomena can be distinguished from , and act as constraints on, discursively constructed meanings. This allows you to believe
that you “have no doubt what they're feeling”, “The mirror neurons in the cerebrum of more developed brains don't require an interpreter”. If the real, non-discursively constructed basis of understanding feeling allows everyone across cultures access to the ‘ true facts’ of feeling and suffering, then according to this tradition of intelligibility the failure of some to care for and empathize with others the way your tradition assumes they should is a function of bad intentions and motives ( hypocrisy , manipulation, power, sadism, self-serving).

By contrast, according to the tradition of radical social constructionism, what you assume as universal, objective or common knowledge belongs to a multiplicity of competing traditions. So it is not a question of bad intent , but a different system of intelligible within which the other believes themselves to be as justified from a moral perspective as you feel.

I can as well understand the suffering of a fly in a spider's web or the distress of a swallow whose nest is threatened as the fear of an unknown human prisoner in a Turkish prison. Sop, in fact, can humans generally - or there would be no art or literature, and certainly no animated motion pictures featuring mice in trousers. As living entities, having descended through all of evolution from the first plankton, we are capable of experiencing the feelings and of all sensate creatures. This is evident in the mythology of pre-civilized peoples the world over: they did consider themselves kin to all species. — Vera Mont

The capability of experiencing others’ feelings is no
more straightforward than experiencing their thinking, since it relies on culturally embedded interpretation. If one examines carefully, in a genealogical manner , the epistemic basis of cultural treatment of other animals throughout human history, one finds much variation. For instance, in the modern era , the notion that other species have feelings , emotions and cognitions was not accepted widely until recently. The brutal treatment of animals on farms , by pet owners and in laboratories attests to the fact that we didn’t really believe our anthropomorphizing cartoons. Mickey the emoting mouse was no more real than the talking moon and sun behind him.

Do fish feel pain? Many today would say yes, unlike a century ago. But what about insects? Do they have feelings? Or plants? Our schemes of intelligibility are constantly changing. Future cultures may have very different views about such matters.

In human affairs, disagreement generally takes place not over whether the other can be seen as suffering , but what the significance of that suffering is. When Southern slave owners claimed their slaves were happy, was this merely a rationalization to protect their way of life, or the manifestation of a tradition of intelligibility common in the West that viewed certain cultures as simple-minded and incapable of the deeper human feeling that their own cultures supposedly possessed?

When certain gendered categories are labeled pathological or immoral, is this a failure to see the other’s suffering, or a failure to interpret the significance of the suffering as constituting an injustice?

Some concepts of good and bad may be subjective; most concepts of good and bad may be cultural, but the most basic test of good and bad is whether something causes harm, suffering and destruction or benefit, wellness and improvement — Vera Mont

I like Gergen’s social constructionist take on good and bad. Focusing on the origin of good and bad as specifically moral concepts justifying praise or blame, he connects these affective determinations to the ability of one group to understand another intelligibility within the scope of their traditions. The suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be identified and made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix.

“…centripetal forces within groups will always operate toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning, and thus the exclusion of alterior realities. Groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates.”

We commonly suppose that suffering is caused by people whose conscience is flawed or who pursue their aims without regard for the consequences to others. From a relational standpoint, we may entertain the opposite hypothesis: in important respects we suffer from a plenitude of good. How so? If relationships-linguistic coordination--are the source of meaning, then they are the source as well of our presumptions about good and evil. Rudimentary understandings of right versus wrong are essential to sustaining patterns of coordination. Deviations from accepted patterns constitute a threat. When we have developed harmonious ways of relating-of speaking and acting--we place a value on this way of life. Whatever encroaches upon, undermines, or destroys this way of life becomes an evil. It is not surprising, then, that the term ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, the customs of the people; or that the term morality draws on the Latin root mos or mores, thus affiliating morality with custom. Is and ought walk hand in hand.”

That doesn't sound like close observation of a "bad seed"; it sounds like a child in the wrong environment. — Vera Mont

I don’t believe there is such a thing a ‘bad seed’, just bad psychological models.

She has been doing this from infancy, in spite of all attempts by her caregivers and teachers to modify the behaviour? — Vera Mont

That’s probably why she has been doing it so long. Because the people around her are more interested in ‘modifying her behavior’ than understanding her point of view. Her ‘dark side’, her ‘evil’ and manipulations are how her behaviors appear to us when we fail to see the world through her eyes , and instead try to force our perspective on her.

I will define duty as: a feeling of obligation brought about by expectation that is irreducible; it exists only as a meta-construction - as recursive and a sum of its parts - and yet it is a very basic concept understood by pretty much everybody…The best leaders know that duty begets duty — ToothyMaw

Why do I hear marching music in my head when I read this?

Not sure if it "fails to account" for intelligibility. I feel that is nurture no? One is nurtured based on the paradigm (culture and form of education) of the surrounding people — Benj96

It’s nurture but not blind conditioning, not a one-way shaping from culture to individual. Cultural meanings are formed and reformed in a reciprocally participatory manner in specific contexts of interaction.

How many of you would propose it is down to one thing: that people are really born bad or good eggs, or that really there is only conditioning and interpersonal influence at work — Benj96

These two options fail to take into account the issue of intelligibility, that interpersonal influence isn’t blind or arbitrary conditioning, but is instead oriented around a reciprocally created pragmatic way of making sense of the world.

Ken Gergen explains:

“We commonly suppose that suffering is caused by people whose conscience is flawed or who pursue their aims without regard for the consequences to others. From a relational standpoint, we may entertain the opposite hypothesis: in important respects we suffer from a plenitude of good. How so? If relationships-linguistic coordination--are the source of meaning, then they are the source as well of our presumptions about good and evil. Rudimentary understandings of right versus wrong are essential to sustaining patterns of coordination. Deviations from accepted patterns constitute a threat. When we have developed harmonious ways of relating-of speaking and acting--we place a value on this way of life. Whatever encroaches upon, undermines, or destroys this way of life becomes an evil. It is not surprising, then, that the term ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, the customs of the people; or that the term morality draws on the Latin root mos or mores, thus affiliating morality with custom.

Groups whose actions are coordinated around given constructions of reality risk their traditions by exposing them to the ravages of the outliers. That is, from their perspective, efforts must be made to protect the boundaries of understanding, to prevent the signifiers from escaping into the free-standing environment where meaning is decried or dissipated. In this sense, unfair or exclusionary practices are not frequently so from the standpoint of the actors. Rather, they may seem altogether fair, just and essential to sustain valued ideals against the infidels at the gates. . Centripetal forces within groups will always operate toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning, and thus the exclusion of alterior realities.

“…to declare that injustice is an unalloyed fact is also an invitation to conflict. Such declarations suggest that there is someone or some group that is acting unjustly. It is to make claim to a moral high ground, from which the unjust may be held accountable—possibly shamed and punished. It is to invite resistance, antagonism, and retaliation against an “evil other.“… In contrast to the consequences of this realist orientation, to understand that one's sense of injustice is one way of constructing a given condition—fully justified within a given enclave or tradition—is also to realize the possibility of other perspectives that may contain their own inherent justifications… Rather than creating a relationship of us versus them, it is to open the possibility of dialogue. It is to invite curiosity, mutual understanding, and possible collaboration in building a more mutually viable world.

”

if skillful navigation of the world represents the "most basic" form of understanding, then I think wisdom involves more than this. The foundation must be properly laid, but the wise person will have a deep understanding of the fact of skillful navigation, along with how it works and comes about. That is, they will be able to write about it and provide insight into it. This is why Heidegger is considered wise, because he is able to do these things, and his exposition is a theoretical form of knowledge — Leontiskos

Writing about something and providing insight isn’t necessarily the same thing as understanding a fact theoretically. Heidegger defines the theoretical as a derivative, ‘present-at-hand’ mode of thinking which forgets its basis in practical engagement.

In Being and Time Heidegger argues:

“Theoretical looking at the world has always already flattened it down to the uniformity of what is purely objectively present…

Derrida says of Heideggerian Being:

“The Being of the existent is not a theory or a science. There are few themes which have demanded Heidegger's insistence to this extent. Being is not a concept or theory or existent.”

Heidegger adds:

“No matter how keenly we just look at the "outward appearance" of things constituted in one way or another, we cannot discover handiness. When we just look at things "theoretically," we lack an understanding of handiness. But association which makes use of things is not blind, it has its own way of seeing which guides our operations and gives them their specific thingly quality. Our associa­tion with useful things is subordinate to the manifold of references of the "in-order-to." The kind of seeing of this accommodation to things is called circumspection.

"Practical" behavior is not "atheoretical" in the sense of a lack of seeing, and the difference between it and theoretical behavior lies not only in the fact that on the one hand we observe and on the other we act, and that action must apply theoretical cognition if it is not to remain blind. Rather, observation is a kind of taking care just as primordially as action has its own kind of seeing. Theoretical behavior is just looking, noncircumspectly. Because it is noncircumspect, looking is not without rules; its canon takes shape in method.

Handiness is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself initially a theme for circumspection. What is peculiar to what is initially at hand is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of handiness in order to be really handy. What everyday association is initially busy with is not tools themselves, but the work. What is to be produced in each case is what is primarily taken care of and is thus also what is at hand.”

I think the Heideggerian and the Aristotelian concepts of ethical wisdom are very similar — Leontiskos

For Heidegger the important difference comes down to this:

"Aristotle had a more radical view [than Plato]; every logos is synthesis and diairesis at the same time, not either the one-say, as a "positive judgment"-or the other-as a "negative judgment." Rather, every statement, whether affirmative or negative, whether false or true, is equiprimordially synthesis and diairesis. Pointing out is putting together and taking apart. However, Aristotle did not pursue this analytical question further to a problem: what phenomenon is it then within the structure of the logos that allows and requires us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diairesis? What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something."

In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together. If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation.""If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things.”

As you know, there are many strands and styles of philosophy taught within academia. Some of them find a more comfortable home in academic departments outside of philosophy. Are you dissatisfied with all of these approaches or just a certain one that you feel has been allowed to dominate?
— Joshs

I see the same approach being taken right across the academic world. It entails not studying the nondual philosophy of the mystics and then not being able to solve any philosophical problems or construct a fundamental theory — FrancisRay

One of the most productive current offshoots of the linguistic turn in philosophy is enactivism, whose founding authors ( Francisco Varela and Even Thompson) advanced a non-dual philosophy melding cognitive science, phenomenology and the mindfulness traditions of the buddhists.

It seems the Perennial philosophy is not considered relevant to academic philosophy, so nobody tries to falsify it and it is simply ignored…This would be how folks like Dennett and Chalmers can get away with publishing books on consciousness that fail to mention the views of those who study it experimentally without being laughed out of their profession. — FrancisRay

So you’re saying academic philosophers need to deploy, or at least cite the results of, scientific experimental methods of study in order to validate or falsify the claims of Perrenial philosophy? What are your own views on the validity of Perrenialism?

As a general rule academic philosophers examine all philosophies except non-dualism and a neutral metaphysical position. This is an academic scandal it seems to me. It means most philosophers are unable to explain why metaphysical questions are undecidable and so for them philosophy is an ineffective and interminable area of study that never makes any progress. — FrancisRay

Are you familiar with philosophical movements like phenomenology, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodern hermeneutics, enactivism, New Materialism, Science studies, Cultural studies or neo-Pragmatism? Do you think what you wrote above is true of the many academics who study and teach within these approaches?

I am not convinced that even the postmodern vision of wisdom is based in practicality. Do you have any quotes or sources that would support this thesis? — Leontiskos

If the begin­ning point of wisdom for Socrates is the realization that you don’t know what you think you know, for Plato it is that you do know what you think you don’t—you just don’t know that you know it. We are ignorant not of the relevant facts, but of the fact that we are not ignorant of them. Thus is the Socratic acknowledgment of ignorance replaced by the recollection and recognition of one’s concealed knowledge. In order to avoid traditional biases, Heidegger examines Dasein in its “average everydayness,” that is, amidst the mundane activities that fill our days. In spite of philosophy’s overwhelming emphasis on abstract theoret­ical thinking, the briefest glance at our daily conduct shows that “the kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’”

Heidegger calls this noncognitive, nontheoretical, inconspicuous understanding “cir­cumspection,” and defines it as a tacit know-how that “‘comes alive’ in any of [Dasein’s] dealings with entities.” We understand the three kinds of beings—tools, objects, and people—because we’re constantly dealing with them in very different ways; Oliver Sacks’ patients excepted, we rarely mistake people for tools or vice versa. These three regional ontologies col­lectively constitute our understanding of being, which does not consist in learning an esoteric doctrine but in being proficient at living a human life.

In order to behave as humans do, we must know how to use some form of equipment, how to communicate with others, and how to examine objects—which means that every Dasein has mastered these three ways of being. This skillful engagement with the world represents our most basic kind of understanding, grounding all abstract thematic thought. Hei­degger pursues ontology by studying Dasein for the same kind of reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that’s where the understanding of being is.”

( Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, by Lee Braver)

“ Ethics is closer to wisdom than to reason, closer to understanding what is good than to correctly adjudicating particular situations. I am not alone in thinking this, for it seems that nowadays the focus has moved away from meta- ethical issues to a much sharper debate between those who demand a detached, critical morality based on prescriptive principles and those who pursue an active and engaged ethics based on a tradition that identifies the good.”

“We always operate in some kind of immediacy of a given situation. Our lived world is so ready-at-hand that we have no deliberateness about what it is and how we inhabit it. When we sit at the table to eat with a relative or friend, the entire complex know-how of how to handle our utensils, how to sit, how to converse, is present without deliberation. We could say that our having lunch-self is transparent. You finish lunch, return to the office, and enter into a readiness that has its own mode of speaking, moving, and making assessments. We have a readiness-for-action proper to every specific lived situation. Moreover, we are constantly moving from one readiness-for-action to another.“

“My presentation is, more than anything, a plea for a re-enchantment of wisdom, understood as non-intentional action. This skillful approach to living is based on a pragmatics of transformation that demands nothing less than a moment-to-moment awareness of the virtual nature of our selves. In its full unfolding it opens up openness as authentic caring.”

( Ethical Know-how, by Francisco Varela)