I’d guess that humans are pattern seeking, meaning making machines. We see connections everywhere and this often helps us manage our environment.
— Tom Storm

How does it help if these connections are only in our head and have nothing to do with the environment in which we live? How could we even exist in and of a world that lacks any order? For that matter, how do you come to any conclusions about the world, even such skeptical conclusions as you — SophistiCat

The question for me is: are the patterns external, or are they the product of our cognitive apparatus?
— Tom Storm
I think this brings me back to my original question. If the patterns are not external, why would our cognitive apparatus produce them? — Patterner

These patterns are neither external to us, nor are they merely internal to us. The order emerges out of our discursive and material interactions with our environment. It is not discovered but produced , enacted as patterns of activity.

All fine, but what were you meaning to say about the slow changes that occur as a form of life "morphs along"? That the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable? — J

I guess I’m trying to emphasize that concepts like truth, certainty and impossibility, whether applied to stable forms of life or more rapidly changing language games, may be used in such a way that they are assumed to be fastening themselves onto an unchanging ground or fact of the matter, when instead the ‘how’ that they establish only maintains itself through use, and use redefines the sense of what it has established ( the how is modified in its maintenance) . It’s not just that the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable, but that to play it is to use the meanings established by it, and to use the meanings is to reawaken and reinterpret its sense.

Neither of you is debating some point of identity. The claim boils down to, "When I look at the duck-rabbit, it is not possible for me to see a lion." That, at any rate, would be the first-personal version. Should we expand it?: "It is not possible for anyone to see a lion." This all seems to depend on what sense of "possibility" you want to invoke. I guess we should ask Joshs, "Do you mean that we should acknowledge that someone, somewhere, could be taught to see a lion in the duck-rabbit?" If that's the idea, I agree; it is not strictly impossible. But I agree with Ludwig that this has little to do with metaphysics, unless the sort of "Continental-style" use of the word that Josh mentions is needed in order to imagine these uncanny lion-seers. That is, perhaps you need a whole different "inheritance from a community," not just an odd fact about what can be seen in the duck-rabbit — J

Don’t discount odd facts, because what makes them odd connects them to the functioning of a metaphysics. Let me explain. In another thread, Banno pointed out that the difference between a language game and a form of life is that the latter ties together a multitude of language on the basis of family resemblances. I would say the difference is a matter of breadth or scope. The form of life, like a metaphysical stance, has a relative stability about such that it functions as a dependable anchor or hinge. Moore’s certainty concerning his hand relies on his faith that he can repeat the same assertion multiple times, over multiple days or weeks or months, and it will still have the same sense.

But it is important to appreciate that it will never be the exact same sense, because the form of life or hinge making Moore’s assertion intelligible in the way that he means it is slowly morphing over time , but much more slowly than the empirical assertions and language games that it authorizes. Let’s say that a form of life or metaphysical system undergirds the duck-rabbit puzzle. Whatever it consists of, it anchors a much wider range of situations than just the one in which one identifies a figure in a drawing. In the very restrictive situation of the drawing , there is already a lot of background normative criteria that people have in common in order to play the duck-rabbit game. They are agreeing that it is a drawing, that their task is to identify what it resembles, that the figure within it can be interpreted in different ways, they see enough detail in the image to recognize a duck or a rabbit.

It belongs to that language game that a failure to correctly identity the figure as either duck or rabbit is a near impossibility. Why? Because it may be assumed that the image’s structure provides rules for its correct recognition as either duck or rabbit. But the lesson Wittgenstein wants to teach us about the duck-rabbit is that ‘seeing-as’ doesn’t ground itself in the consulting of a picture theory, that is, a set of rules to be followed. ‘Seeing as’ can never rely on a pre-existing rule, fact or criterion, which is why ‘odd facts’ belong to the very nature of ‘seeing something as something, For Witt the ‘near impossibility of seeing the image as a lion results of a confusion arising out of our use of language. ‘Seeing as’ shares with forms of life and metaphysical stances its normative impetus (showing up not what something. is but how it is), a certain stability over time of such normative certainty, and that the consulting of criteria, rules and grounds is. or enough to produce the ‘odd fact’ of actually seeing something as something.

I think you’ve captured well the phenomenological move, common to writers as varied as Henry, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, abandoning the need for an adequation between how things are perceived and the way things ‘really, really are’. The fecundity of time consciousness reveals the way things ‘really, really are’.

Poor old W - he must be spinning in his grave. I can see that, in some ways, metaphysical systems may play a part in our lives similar to the part he attributes to "forms of life". But insofar as they are theoretical, in the sense that physics is theoretical, they can't be forms of life. — Ludwig V

One can generate a theory in physics , such as the Newtonian or the Quantum model. It can then be revealed how one’s theory is guided by certain metaphysical presuppositions. The presuppositions can tie together a family of theories, just as a form of life can do. The metaphysics may be something one has not explicitly constructed as a formal position; it may instead have been ‘inherited’ from one’s community. I’m getting this concept of metaphysics from contemporary Continental authors, who apparently treat the term in a less technical and more encompassing way than the writers you are drawing from.

My remark that the duck-rabbit can't be a lion was not, so far as I'm aware, a metaphysical claim. It's simply true. The idea that it could be a lion really passes my imagination What do you mean here by a metaphysical system? Kant versus Berkeley, vs Aquinas etc? Can you elaborate? — Ludwig V

I’m equating metaphysical system with paradigm , worldview or Wittgensteinian form of life. Is the duck-rabbit’s not being a lion is simply true, is it simply true in the same way as Moore’s declaration that ‘this is a hand’?

…in a case like this, you may find that people will infer that metaphysical speculations are always uncertain. But that's misleading. Better to say that metaphysical speculations are neither certain nor uncertain. But that doesn't mean that it's an open house. Interpretations do have to meet standards before they are acceptable. You can't interpret the duck-rabbit as a picture of a lion. That's why one talks of interpretations as valid or invalid, (or plausible or not, etc.) rather than true or false. — Ludwig V

These are standards of correctness, no? It is incorrect to interpret the duck-rabbit as a picture of a lion. Why? Because we are applying a pre-existing standard that says the image must be a duck-rabbit and nothing other than a duck-rabbit. This is the role of a metaphysics. It lays down criteria and standards of correctness. But since such standards apply only WITHIN that metaphysical system, it has nothing to say about an alternative metaphysical stance within which it makes sense to say that a duck-rabbit may also be a lion.

And Picasso was regressive; he was no more than a variation on Cézanne. — Banno

A more interesting comparison would be Cezanne and Warhol. Is Pop art a variation of impressionism or does it involve a more radical rethinking of the meaning and role of art?

I’ve read it. It may be stunning but it is widely rejected by scholars of the later Wittgenstein as a rigorous reading of his work.
— Joshs

Like who? — frank

Peter Hacker, Gordon Baker, David Stern, John McDowell, Crispin Wright, Norman Malcolm, James Conant, Cora Diamond, David Pears, Stanley Cavell, Peter Winch.

Why do you think that? Have you read Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language? It's stunning — frank

I’ve read it. It may be stunning but it is widely rejected by scholars of the later Wittgenstein as a rigorous reading of his work.

As others have pointed out in this discussion, you begin from a concept of the real as something that is presumed to have an absolute status in itself, such that our failures at grasping or modeling or holding onto it constitute illusions, falsehoods, mirages. One wouldn’t speak this way about a the real unless we believed it were the kind of thing that an unquestionable and absolute status. But if we can never directly attain the real through our representations and models, what allows us to think about it at all?

Our concept of the real in terms of what it is we are failing to attain must hold some kernel of the real within itself, no? For instance, what is it that allows the real to slip from our grasp? The enemy of the real would seem to be change, impermanence, transformation, unpredictability. The real
must be that which can reliably be returned to over and over again as the exact same. And where do we find the basis of this capacity in our concepts? We find it in the pure repetition of number. We might be then be inclined to say that mathematics is only possible because there are real things in the world.

But what if we instead say that the pure self-identical repetition that mathematics describes is not modeled after the real world, but invents the very notion of the real as pure self-identity. In that case, when we find ourselves lamenting the failure of human thought to attain the real, we are confusing our own invention (the real as pure, persisting self-identity) with the actual world. This, the reason the real is unattainable is because we can only achieve it by turning away from the actually experienced world in order to create the empty abstractions of mathematics. We have a choice. We can have the real in its purity if we abstract from experience all contextual meaning and relevance and calculate emptily. Or we can experience the world meaningfully in its rich contextually changing unfolding, and use the mathematical concept of the purely , self-identically real as a tool of convenience.

↪Joshs
Kripke is a branch off Wittgenstein. I don't think that kind of philosophical reticence existed in the early 19th Century.

Philosophy dives into and back out of mysticism. Wittgenstein was the latter — frank

Kripke failed miserably to grasp the later Wittgenstein, whose central ideas appear anything but mystical to me, being grounded in pragmatic interactions. I’m not sure what you mean by philosophical reticence. , but if we run Kripke through mid 19th century thinkers like Dilthey, Brentano and Kierkegaard, I think we can come up with solid critiques of his work.

↪Skalidris No, Kripke didn't use "textbook analytic philosophy".

Where traditional analytic philosophy (especially mid-20th century varieties influenced by logical positivism or the ordinary language movement) emphasized linguistic analysis aimed at dissolving philosophical problems, verificationist or deflationary attitudes toward metaphysicsand and an a priori, often conceptual, methodology, Kripke brought back robust modal metaphysics (possible worlds, necessity vs. contingency, essentialism), causal-historical accounts of reference instead of descriptivist theories, and a more realist attitude toward necessity—one that didn’t reduce it to analytic truth or linguistic convention.

In that sense, he was doing something strikingly new: not abandoning analytic philosophy, but expanding its scope and rehabilitating kinds of metaphysical argument many thought had been permanently discredited — Banno

If one defines regressiveness as the regurgitating of older systems of thought, then Kripke’a work is no more than a variation, a slight twist on philosophical thinking available already in the first half of the 19th century. But he’s not alone in that. Much of today’s intellectual culture has yet to catch up with the leading edge of 19th century thought. But as long as you find it challenging, the rest is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.

The problem for me -- in my language, that is -- is that none of this is about anything that could be qcalled "ontological priority." If we said "conceptual priority" instead, what would be lost? What would be gained is that we're now using a much more familiar idea, both within analytic phil and in educated non-specialist discourse. That doesn't automatically make it the best way to go, of course -- especially given the concerns raised earlier about "familiarity" -- and that's why I'm asking what "ontological priority" may be contributing that "conceptual priority" does not. — J

Let me address this by making a distinction between the content of a set of ideas and their mode of organization.
To illustrate this, I will place on one side of a divide those who offer theoretical explanations attached to a greater or lesser extent to empirical methodology (and of course, what constitutes proper scientific method undergoes shifts over time) and formal logic. This includes everyone from Freud to Einstein, Russell to Williamson. On the other side of the divide are philosophers who associate with Continental approaches, who view formal logic and empirical methodology as derived modes which fail to get to the bottom of things.

Bit since science’s understanding of what it is and does evolves over time (there is no such thing as THE scientific method) as do theories of logic and the status of Analytic philosophy, I think there’s a better way of describing the difference between the style of thinking of those on one side of the divide vs the other. I certainly do not believe that innovation and development is the exclusive preserve of Continental modes of thinking. On the contrary, within any era of culture continental and non-continental modes evolve in parallel, and it is not difficult to TRANSLATE between the two modes. Examples include the relation between Einstein and Kant, Bohr and Hegel, Freud , Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Enactivist cognitive science, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

In my view, the difference amounts to that between what is left implicit and what is made explicit in a set of ideas. When one stumbles upon what one believes is an original way of looking at the world, there are many styles of expression one can adopt to convey these fresh insights. One can choose poetry, the novel, the visual arts, music, science or philosophy. No one mode has priority over the others in terms of its ‘correctness’. They will all inevitably be superseded by a new set of insights (it’s up to you whether you want to call this movement a progress).

So where does ontological priority or primordiality come in here? Think of a theory in science or analytic philosophy which uses a conventionalized vocabulary. It recycles concepts that are familiar to its audience and defines its terms when introducing new ones. It may in fact be understanding the recycled terms in a new way, but doesn’t find it necessary, or perhaps isn’t up to the task of making explicit how it is using the old terms differently. In part this is because they may feel it is unwise to try and tie together every conceivable aspect of being within a unified perspective.

Continentals, by contrast, have a zest for beginning with every conceivable question that can be asked about every conceivable aspect of the world , and every domain of culture ( science, religion, art, politics, ethics) and then weaving them all together within a single unified approach, that which must be true for everyone everywhere at all times. (The thinking of authors such as Descartes, Spinoza , Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze have this i. common ). The result is that not a single word of the language can be simply taken for granted by way of a conventionalized meaning, and reading a work requires learning an entirely new vocabulary. Continentals do tend to evince an air of superiority with respect to the more conventionalized approaches, charging them with naïveté for believing that a piecemeal approach isn’t already relying on more global implicit assumptions. But I think that’s a bit unfair. Is poetry less rigorous than philosophy or science because it traffics in the felt, the intangible, the hidden and the implied?

I should mention, though, that I think the differences between writers like Heidegger and Deleuze on the one hand and writers like Williamson are more than just stylistic. They are also substantive. One doesnt need to look to Continental philosophers to make this argument. There are plenty of authors sticking to more conventionalized modes of explication we can draw from for a critique of Williamson’s way of treating mathematics, formal logic and empiricism.

In a bit (of information as in computer science), there is a difference between 0 and 1. It is a difference that does not make a difference. With a pair of bits there is a difference between pairs which contain a difference (01, 10) and pairs which don't (00,11). There's a difference between the presence and absence of difference. Now the 0s and 1s can be dispensed with entirely, never to be mentioned again, and everything can be built from difference. There was really no need to mention them in the first place.

This is how I (mis?)understand Deleuze — GrahamJ

If I place two identical letters side by side(aa) is this a difference which doesn’t make a difference? In formal logic the answer would be yes. For Deleuze the answer would be no. Formal logic assumes we can apply the notion of ‘same thing different time’ to any object without contextual effects transforming the sense of the object between repetitions. Deleuze argues instead that every time we repeat an object, we change the sense of meaning of that object Put differently, for Deleuze every difference in degree is at the same time a difference in kind. Every quantitative change is a change in quality. Qualities and extensities are mirages. As Nathan Widder(2008) explains:

“…the thesis from Deleuze's late 1960s writings holds identity to be a simulation or optical illusion…”identity and fixed markers, which may be considered natural and pregiven or contingently constructed but indispensable, are surface effects of difference. Identities and fixed markers, I want to say, are like patterns on the surface of water, which appear fixed when seen from a great distance, such as from the window of an airplane in flight: their stability and substantiality, in short, are a matter of perspective.”

“Nietzsche declares that ‘everything for which the word “knowledge” makes any sense refers to the domain of reckoning, weighing, measuring, to the domain of quantity' (Nietzsche 1968: §565); but he also maintains that ‘we need “unities” in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist' (§635). Mechanism begins with unities that can be quantified or counted, but the idea of unity applies to abstract things and objects, not to forces. On a more concrete level, where there are no unities or things pre-existing their relations but only incongruent relations of force, quantity cannot be a number but only a relation: as Deleuze argues, there is no ‘quantity in itself', but rather ‘difference in quantity', a relation of more and less, but one that cannot be placed on a fixed numerical scale.

Forces are determined quantitatively – ‘Nietzsche always believed that forces were quantitative and had to be defined quantitatively' (NP 43) – and this determination takes the form of relative strength and weakness.But this difference does not entail fixed numerical values being assigned to each force, as this can only be done in abstraction, when, for example, two forces are isolated in a closed system, as mechanism does when it examines the world. A quantitative difference between forces is therefore on the order of an intensive difference à la Leibniz, an intensive quantity in which forces vice-dict rather than contradict one another.”(Widder 2012)

. What we need is a revival where we build a Gothic cathedral on the proper scale, with a 3,000 foot spire — Count Timothy von Icarus

That was kind of the idea of the Chicago Sky Chapel.

https://images.app.goo.gl/PB9r5v6ycLD54yWx9

We're not just in agreement, then, we are brothers! — Srap Tasmaner

Phil-bro’s?

There's a bit of a sense in your post ― at least in what I quoted ― that ideals are a problem, and that their leaving stuff out is a problem, especially because they leave out what's most important. I may come to agree with you someday, but that's not really my sense of things. I guess I'm approaching them more neutrally ― idealization is a fact of human life and thought and behavior. Some clear upsides, some just as clear downsides, and something there's no reason to think we can get along without — Srap Tasmaner

It’s not idealizations that are the problem. I agree that they are very useful. The problem is when philosophy takes them as its starting point and adopts them as its method rather than delving beneath the facade to explicate the underlying processes. Many find fundamentalist religious beliefs to be very useful. We can recognize that usefulness while at the same time examine the genesis and justification for those beliefs from a philosophical vantage that doesn’t simply take them at face value.

My point that a philosophy which places natural language above formal language is more robust than a philosophy which does not
— Leontiskos

I've said similar things myself, even in this thread, even recently, but at the moment the question of priority is less pressing for me than the issue of how the two are related, so that's what I've been writing about.

@Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it.

I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

I would think the question for a rigorous philosophy is how to navigate between formal logic and natural language but to highlight features common to both that beguile us and turn us away from doing rigorous philosophy. Both formal logic and natural language involve idealization. For instance, the symbolized meanings of phonemic elements of words are abstracted away from the actual context in which they appear. So too are the categorical meanings of words like ‘lion’ , which are meant to transcend situational context. It is this idealizing feature of language that allows us to assign it a sense which can be repeated as identical regardless of time or place, and in the absence of any actual speaker. But natural language is at the same time
bound to the specific contexts of its use.

If I say ‘lion’ I can’t guarantee that the image which appears in your mind doesn’t change its sense from instantiation to instantiation. Formal and mathematical logic are purer forms of idealization. We start with our perception of narural features of the world we interact with. We create idealized shapes and colors out of this axrual world, concocting the abstractions we call self-persisting objects. We then take these idealized forms and further ‘perfect’ them into perfect lines and circles. We never see such pure idealities in nature. We do something similar in our invention of formal logic, taking our idealized natural objects and ‘fixing’ them abstractively as purely self-identical objects which maintain their precisely identical sense as we cobble them together into a predicative judgement.

We never allow the parts of a predicative assertion to change their sense as we go back and forth between subject and predicate. Like the pure geometric idealizations of line and circle, none of the components of a predicative judgement are seen in nature . They are a garb of ideas we drape over our experience. They are of course derived from our actual experiences with objects , but when we make use of formal and mathematical logic , we replace purposeful, relevant engagement with the regurgitation of a machine-like method. Our intent is to use these methods for our relevant purposes, but we run the danger of mistaking the method for the actual experiences they are abstracted away from.

So whether we make use of formal logic or natural
language in service of philosophy, if our focus is on reducing our experience of the world to fit the idealizations of logic or the categorical universalities of language we are failing to address the most fundamental philosophical question; what is the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world?

↪Joshs

Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why?

Well, first, it resolves the problem of seemingly presupposing giveness as a spontaneous, self-contained movement of potency to act, which would seem to make the world untinelligible. If something can just be given, "for no reason at all," or "no reason in particular," then there is no way to explain why the world is one way and not any other, no way to explain man's progress towards self-determining freedom, or the Good as such. The charge of solipsism against Kant always made some sense to me—not that he suggests it—but that it seems like he might actually be implying it against his will. But, and it's been a while, when I was reading Husserl's later stuff it sort of struck me as in some ways coming close to "Kant with extra steps." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Intention and intuition, potency to act and action are not separated in poststructuralist thinking, except artificially. Repetition and difference are prior to this distinction. But difference does have its reasons. For Husserl, the associative synthesis tying one moment of experience to the next links the two consciousness on the basis of some relevant dimension of commonality and similarity (this is quite different from Hume’s external principle of temporal association). For the poststructuralists as well, relevant relationality is the basis of reason. We are never without criteria of justification.

↪Joshs

How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserl’s content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning?

Well, consider my original question, in what way is this even a "ground?" Does it secure the authority of reason? Does it explain it in virtue of its causes or principles? Is the cause of giveness giveness-itself, man self-moving and spontaneously self-creating? The purely descriptive is not really a "ground" in the traditional sense. It is not a first principle either. And there is the issue I mentioned before where other "Great Names" attempt the same exercise and come to a radically different conclusion from Husserl, which seems to me to cast doubt on what we are to make about claims to have stepped behind all mediation. This same issue haunts the Greater Logic. Even advocates like Houlgate readily admit people following the same method are unlikely to come to the same "deductions." — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not just man that is self-moving, it is the world that is self-moving. And self-movement does not mean willing what one chooses to will. The movement is as much passive as it is active. One finds oneself in motion. One is throw into situations. The meaning and relevance of what we find ourselves thrown into, it’s ‘reason’ emerges out of the fact that we bring our history with us into new situations. The blending of this history with the situations it enters into makes the world always recognizable and familiar to us at some level. We can remain within a stable social structure for quite a long period of time, during which we can lay down the kinds of metaphysical grounds of reason and ethics that we can consult and depend on to be absolutely authoritative.

↪Joshs
Like I said in the other thread, the idea that immediate sensation is maximally unabstract is a presupposition that enters the door with Enlightenment materialism. I don't think it's an obvious conclusion; indeed Hegel's point is that this is the sort of least stable phenomena, devoid of content, and so the least itself and its own ground, the most abstract. The inability to transcend these sorts of presuppositions is partly why I think there is no truly post-modern philosophy, just the same trend of nominalism and individualism cranked continually upwards.

Consider the etiology of "reify' in "res," and it becomes clear that the idea that moving away from immediate sensation as "reifying" is itself a loaded metaphysical supposition, just one that is often being ignored and taken for granted by "bracketing" (arguably, simply dogmatically assumed if this is then used to supplant metaphysical inquiry). It's true that some thinkers do the opposite, and elevate the universal inappropriately. But I think the more subtle thinkers on this topic are often at pains to elevate neither of the "two streams"—particular or universal—over the other. Rather, they are like Ezekiel's two wheels, passing through one another, each reflecting the other and revealing it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And you didn’t read Husserl as uniting the universal and the particular in his concept of the living present, which is precisely a rejection of the myth of the given?

Of course, if one just assumes nominalism as a starting point by bracketing out realism a priori, one has already elevated the individual, but that's not the same thing as justifying that move, so I think that's one of the difficulties to be addressed. If we presuppose that phenomenology can be understood without reference to what lies outside the bracket we have already cleaved the part from the whole and declared the whole subsistent; or declared the part the whole (solipsism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

What we are bracketing, especially when done by Heidegger or Derrida, are idealizations which exclude from consideration the outside which is their condition of possibility.

Subsistent-Bing-Itself cannot be an "abstraction." It is rather most subsistent, most determined by itself, etc. Being truly infinite, it is not contained in any "abstraction,' hence the via negativa and analogia entis. Whereas the giveness of human phenomenology is always referred outside itself. Being radically contingent, it cannot be its own ground (unless it is self-moving potency), or so the concern goes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

↪Joshs
if we want to critique Husserl’s ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who don’t fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.

How can you imprison transcendence? If it is imprisoned, it has simply failed to be truly transcendent. The true infinite isn't a prison, because it is beyond all concepts; e.g. Dionysius, Plotinus, etc. That Nietzsche never studied this tradition and projected the popular 19th century German Protestant pietism he grew up with backwards onto the whole of Christian (and Jewish, Islamic, and Pagan) thought is not really a failing of those traditions, but of Nietzsche as a source of historical analysis. This is also why I wouldn't put him beyond modernity. The God of the German Reformers looms large in the Overman. So too for Heidegger, projecting Suarez back onto the whole of scholastic philosophy, although I will allow he has a vastly better grasp. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The true infinite can only be considered infinite to the extent that it is an endless repetition of the same finite quality. A transcendence which is transcendent to everything else but immanent to itself is no true transcendence. It only has ontological status when we think its iteration, imagining this same quality of Goodness again and again and again. But in doing so, its sense returns to us differently, in endlessly shifting valuative and affective textures of meaning. This is true transcendence, the eternal return of the different.

There is a tendency in this thread to use "continental philosophy" as a foil to rigorous philosophy, but that does seem odd to me. Do continental philosophers lack rigor? Not usually. But the key may be that the person who reads them casually lacks rigor, and this reflects back on them. It's almost like the phenomenon where the casual reader who tries to express Einstein's theory of general relativity lacks rigor and precision, and then the listener assumes that Einstein himself must also have lacked rigor and precision.

This also accounts for why analytic-type philosophy is popular on philosophy forums such as this one: because it is easier to understand and learn. It's not a coincidence that Russell gets discussed more than Heidegger. Russell is much more accessible. — Leontiskos

Absolutely. It’s hard to explain to someone , especially if their standards of clarity are shaped by the corporate world, how a set of ideas can be rigorous yet not instantly accessible.

You see where I'm coming from (hopefully with both our senses of humor intact :smile: ). I would very much like to see Heideggerians and others who followed his path stop treating all these matters as if they were do-or-die, right-or-wrong, essential-or-meaningless, succeed-or-fail, agree-or-you-haven't-understood, etc., etc., and aim for more modesty and, dare I say, humility. We're all in this conversation together. — J

Don’t get your knickers in a twist . I’m not in philosophy to insist on do-or-die, right or wrong ( Heidegger spent his career deconstructing the concept of truth as correctness). However, as to ‘ agree-or you haven’t understood’, what if we instead put it this way: ‘summarize the ideas of a philosophical school in a way that is reasonably consonant with the community of scholars who inhabit it or you haven’t understood’. Before we can get to the agree or disagree part, we have to get past this key first step. Then it’s fine to say,’there, I’ve shown that I’ve done my due diligence and I still disagree’.Modesty and humility are lovely qualities, but we can’t apply them until we know what it is we are trying to be modest about.

Again, I'm curious what this amounts to without the hyperbole. To understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way? Why? Couldn't the old way have been fundamental too? — J

So here’s an opportunity to familiarize yourself with an important set of ideas grounding Heidegger’s equating the concept of understanding with novelty. Once we have mastered these ideas we can together put on our modesty and humility hats and ask skeptical questions about how essential or primordial they are. Like Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, Heidegger makes use of Nietzsche’s principle of the Eternal Return of the Same. Rather than viewing it as a cosmological principle, or as imagining that we would have to live the same content of our lives over and over again eternally, they read it as eternal return of the different. Difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. Identity is a surface effect of difference. So for instance, in referring to ‘the old way’, they ask how we know what is old except through recollection. Does recollection retrieve a past like fishing out a stored file from a cabinet? Or does memory reinvent what it recalls? Deleuze writes:

When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). The eternal return is itself the Identical, the similar and the equal, but it presupposes nothing of itself in that of which it is said. It is said of that which has no identity, no resemblance and no equality. It is the identical which is said of the different, the resemblance which is said of the pure disparate, the equal which is said only of the unequal and the proximity which is said of all distances. Things must be dispersed within difference, and their identity must be dissolved before they become subject to eternal return and to identity in the eternal return…

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneous opposed to variation, and an eternity opposed to permanence… in univocity, univocal being is said immediately of individual differences or the universal is said of the most singular independent of any mediation…In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and cause only the yet-to-come to return.” (Difference and Repetition)

Heidegger et al are not interested in proving the assumptions of identity and a self-identical past incorrect, they want to offer an alternative view that leaves the old ideas alone and burrows beneath them. This way we can keep the naive assumptions but understand their basis more richly. There is no experience that is completely devoid of meaning, but some ways of thought can produce confusion and arbitrariness, as Wittgenstein pointed out. It’s not just Heidegger and his ilk who pound the table for a notion of understanding as transformation. It has made its way into the popular culture in many forms. For instance, John Vervaeke’s popular youtube series on the modern meaning crisis introduces his notion of relevance realization, while Buddhist-influenced approaches teach an idea of ethical coping as practical context-immersed involvement. What these have in common is a view of understanding as primordially enaction and active production rather than epistemological representation.

It seems that Husserl's theory takes consciousness for granted, just as physicalism does. He suggests that consciousness is unanalyzable - a brute fact. That's not explaining anything. Physicalism (in conjunction with neuroscience) attempts to analyze consciousness and explain it. You focus on the gap in that explanation, while implying Husserl's theory is a worthy competitor (or perhaps you think it superior) in spite of it explaining nothing. Rather, it raises even more questions that it can't answer — Relativist

Wayfarer is trying to give a taste of Husserl’s view of the relation between consciousness and the physical. Given that the OP topic isnt about Husserl, this isn’t the place to flesh out what Husserl meant by consciousness, but I can assure you he doesn’t simply take it for granted. He wrote thousands of pages explicating what it is, what it does and why it is fundamental to the understanding of concepts like the natural and the physical.

↪ssu There hasn’t been a progression in high art particularly, just an expansion into the depiction and expression of subjects and ideas that weren’t previously represented, for whatever reason, in the medium. — Punshhh

If you’re going to argue that, you may as well add that there hasn’t been a progression in science and technology either.

Why they call it "Renaissance" should be obvious to everybody. — ssu

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are categories encompassing many forms of art, including literature, poetry, architecture and music. Given the fact that Gothic architecture and polyphonic music were both born in the high Middle Ages, it is difficult to justify the claim that art as a whole ‘had fallen back’ during that period.

There’s also a strong Platonic or idealist undercurrent in Husserl’s later thought—his notion of eidetic reduction suggests that essences are real and perceptible to intuition, and not merely empirical generalizations. So while he doesn't affirm metaphysical or spiritual doctrines, his work provides a space for them.
— Wayfarer

Yes, this would seem to be the case... although maybe it's others who, rather eagerly, seek to fill this space.

I wounder what Joshs would observe here — Tom Storm

I’m not sure how much of a space Husserl provides for metaphysical and spiritual doctrines. He is very clear that what one uncovers at the end of a long chain of eidetic reductions is the irreducible essence of the living present. There is no room here to insert a spiritual content since the only content of the living present is its structure as pure self-affection. Not the presence to self of a feeling or knowing substance, not an ethical vector but idealization in its barest form, as the immediacy of the voice that hears itself in the exact same moment of its speaking. Any particular substantive sense we attempt to assign to what is within the living present will always be a higher order constituted product, merely subjectively relative and i. need of bracketing and reduction, with no metaphysical justification in itself. This runs counter to the aims of religious forms of phenomenology.

But I also think the Heidegger passage is more combative than that. He writes:

such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries.

"Prevented" is very strong, especially when coupled with "in its truth." If he'd said, "in its misunderstanding" or "in its misapplication," that might be different. But H seems to want it both ways: "What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology — J

I know it sounds like he’s celebrating obscurity for its own sake, as critics of postmodern writers have a field day accusing them of doing. But what he’s trying to say is that, as Wittgenstein would agree, to understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way, in a fresh context. To treat what is understood as already familiar as a derivative of a pre-existing scheme or picture is to render it meaningless, to fail to understand it in Heidegger’s primordial sense. We do of course comport ourselves toward things in this everyday way all the time, but in doing so we fail to recognize this mode of interpreting the world as derivative and secondary.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? Does he need to take that into account? If he tried to do that would not his accounts of our historical situatedness be themselves historically situated? Then we might need an account of the historical situatedness of the account of historical situatedness. Easy enough to see where this is headed. It seems we inevitably must begin from where we are and we cannot attain a "god's eye" view of our situatedness, and nor do we need to to begin to inquire into whatever it is we wish to inquire. — Janus

Exactly, we must begin from where we are. But if we take where we are in a traditional way that understands temporality in static terms as an endless series of punctual ‘nows’ , where the past and future are interpreted on the basis of an already fixed present, then taking historical situatedness into account would seem to involve an infinite regress. By contrast, if beginning from where we are is beginning from a more radical notion of temporality and history, where our past and present come to us already remade by where we are headed, then thinking historical situatedness is thinking past, present and future together as the ‘now’, and thinking from within the ‘now’ as the event of transit.

The historiographical, as the word itself is supposed to indicate, refers to the past insofar as it is explored and presented, either expressly or inexpressly, from the perspective of what happens to be the present. Every historiographical consideration turns the past as such into an object... It is now clear that happenings and history are not what is by- gone and what is considered as such, i.e., the historiographical. But just as little is this happening the present. The happening and the happenings of history are primordially and always the future, that which in a concealed way comes toward us, a revelatory process that puts us at risk, and thus is compelling in ad vance. The future is the beginning of all happening.

The historical does not denote a manner of grasping and exploring but the very happening itself. The historical is not the past, not even the present, but the future, that which is commended to the will, to expectation, to care. This does not allow itself to be "considered"; instead, we must "reflect" on it. We have to be concerned with the meaning, the possible standards, the necessary goals, the ineluctable powers, and that from which all human happenings begin. These goals and powers can be such that they have already come to pass -in a hidden way-long ago but are precisely therefore not the past but what still abides and is awaiting the liberation of its influence. The future is the origin of history. What is most futural, however, is the great beginning, that which-withdrawing itself constantly-reaches back the farthest and at the same time reaches forward the farthest. (Basic Questions of Philosophy)

↪J I think Heidegger is referring to his distinction between between vorhanden "present at hand" knowledge and zuhanden "ready to hand" wisdom. I see that distinction as being basically similar to the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". — Janus

Yes, good point. But the ready to hand can itself reify experience. My response to J focuses on Heidegger’s critique of technology, which turns everything into order-able standing reserve, including human beings.

…the standing-reserves do not possess constancy in the sense of a steady, unchanged presence. The kind of presencing of the standing-reserves is orderability… The transformation of the presence of what-is-present from objectiveness to orderability is, however, also the precondition for the fact that something like the cybernetic way of representation can emerge and lay claim to the role of the universal science at all.”

for me both Marxists and Randians are ideologues like the dogmatic religionists just because they posit some old "one way for all". It seems to me we all inhabit the same world in the empirical sense of "world"―but on the other hand beyond that we each inhabit our own worlds, which are microcosms, along with our family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues and so on. — Janus

Are you comfortable with an approach to philosophy which takes as its subject matter not claims for universally true content (a dogmatically correct way the substantive world is , whether ethically, epistemologically, or ontologically), but the sorts of content-free general descriptions that you have offered (“there is a sense in which everyone practices philosophy, even if they unconsciously adopt presuppositions about how they ought to live”, “we each inhabit our own worlds”). This is a way of using philosophy to speak generally of the utterly particular.

The bolded statements are kind of criticism-proof, aren't they? Reading them as a literary editor (which I am, partially, IRL) they also seem defensive and self-consoling in the face of lack of acceptance. Why couldn't he just say, "My stuff is hard. It'll take a while," instead of making it a hallmark of "essential thinking" or "genuine philosophy" or whatever — J

You have to appreciate these remarks in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technology. When he says that the “immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries”” , he equates the the familiar and immediately effective with the technologizing instrumentalism of empirical science as well as the Cartesian metaphysics that grounds it.Philosophy cannot be the mere putting into practice of a pre-conceived plan.

But is that admirable? It could also be seen as a mere dog-whistle to those who would think of themselves as part of an intellectual elite, pretending to understand words that were hollow.

Is he a radical voice ahead of his time, misunderstood because of the profundity of his insight? Or is he a clever ironist, whose appeal to future generations flatters the vanity of self-anointed "deep thinkers," regardless of the actual content? — Banno

The point isn’t whether Nietzsche is right about the status of his work, it’s the very idea that concepts aren’t bits of data and we arent data-processing computers. Interpretation of the sense of particulars is dependent on their role in a wider framework of understanding, which as Wittgenstein shows, is discursively produced. But different discursive communities can’t rely on good will to overcome incoherence in interpretation between groups, even of procedural issues as seemingly benign as the one Williamson discusses.

Except . . . do you really believe he didn't want to be understood by his contemporaries? that, indeed, if he had been, he would have felt he hadn't done worthwhile philosophy? That doesn't sound like him, except when he's in a very bad mood.

For that matter, Heidegger did not exactly shy away from praise, or conversation with peers. — J

Neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche said they did not want to be understood by their contemporaries. They wanted desperately to be understood, tried every way they could to be understood, but also knew that fundamentally new ways of thinking are not commodities whose communication is guaranteed by use of the right words. This is a mentality shared by analytic philosophers, technologists and the corporate world. If one spends one’s whole intellectual life surrounded by conventionalized and communized ideas, then one assumes that anything worth saying can be summarized in a good sound bite or logical formula.

Indeed, and this requiers agreement, convergence. This is Williamson’s minimalist prescription: no methodological revolution, just a re-commitment to being explicit. What logic are you using? What counts as evidence? What assumptions are you allowed to make? These are, in a sense, procedural constraints, shared norms that allow for adversarial argument without descending into chaos.
Williamson isn’t pushing a single method (e.g., scientific naturalism or conceptual analysis), but calling for transparency: if you’re doing verificationist semantics or paraconsistent logic or metaphysical grounding, say so. And make it intelligible. — Banno

All this assumes procedural constraints and shared
norms can be willed into existence on the basis of some imagined neutral playing ground. I can play your game according to your rules only if I can relate to that game and those rules. William doesn’t think he is pushing for a single method but he is doing exactly that.

immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking,

It's an . . . unusual claim. Does anyone know whether another philosopher besides Heidegger ever said something similar? Reminds me of Beethoven saying that his final music was "for a later age." — J

Nietzsche was known to say his philosophy was for the thinkers of the future.

From "On the Genealogy of Morals"
"The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness—he must come one day."

In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche frequently refers to "philosophers of the future”, positioning his philosophy as preparation for those who will come after. He writes about philosophical "free spirits" who are precursors to future philosophers who will create new values.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explicitly states that he writes for posterity, not his contemporaries, famously declaring himself "a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow."

Nietzsche consistently positioned his philosophy as being ahead of his time, written for future generations who would be capable of understanding and implementing his ideas about value creation, self-overcoming, and the rejection of traditional moral systems. He saw himself as preparing the ground for future philosophers and cultural creators who would build new foundations for human flourishing.
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If we're going to begin the task of figuring out what's important to think about, I think we would want to do a good job of it, so we would begin by thinking about how we could figure out something like that. Right from the start you have to face the challenge of thinking well, and reflecting on how that can be done.

Maybe too many philosophers never quite get past that. They become absorbed entirely in the matter of thinking itself. But philosophy is a communal project, so the fruits of their labor are available to others ready to get to issues of more "relevance," as kids in the sixties are supposed to have said. — Srap Tasmaner

How well is a philosophy thinking if its results are of immediate practical relevance to a wider community?
As a certain German philosopher wrote:

“…a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz… But why could I never have felt this process to be “painful”? Because I knew obscurely, what I now know more clearly, that indeed precisely this misinterpretation of all my work (e.g., as a “philosophy of existence”) is the best and most lasting protection against the premature using up of what is essential. And it must be so, since immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, and because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries. For that would mean what is to be disclosively questioned in thinking had been degraded to something Already commonplace. So then everything is in the best possible order—i.e., everything is well hidden and misinterpreted and withdrawn from rough fingers and from being rubbed away by the common understanding.

And besides, just cos it feels good, doesn't mean it is good — J

Not so fast. Seems it would first be necessary to determine the origin and structure of affect and its relation to values, knowledge, ethics and will. Some will argue that answering this question reveals affective valuation as primary and grounding.

So for instance, Stein recognizes the need for metaphysics to complete the description, Jean-Luc Marion recognizes that giveness exceeds the subject and must come from without, Ferdinand Ulrich probably extends this the furthest, countering the forgetfulness of being with an understanding of being as gift. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why? How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserl’s content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning? How does it not end up reifying both subjectivity and alterity? If we want to critique Husserl’s ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who don’t fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.

The worst part is, it's all true... Modern man is an inverse Oedipus. He is born free, master of his own fate, and then tears out his own spiritual eyes, fating himself to wander the wilderness, unable to answer the Sphinx's queries. Jacob saw a ladder stretching down from heaven, angels ascending and descending, but modern man is more like Balaam, stuck on his path, hoping blindly in the better judgement of his ass to avert technopocopypse — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it is true of Modern man (and I include among this group Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, despite their superficial aping of postmodern philosophical tropes), is it also true of Postmodern man?

↪perhaps Wasn't Alain Badiou largely motivated by a strong critique of postmodernism and a concern about the rise of relativism and the disappearance of any commitment to truth? He was certainly critical of thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault, whose work he saw as contributing to a loss of faith in universality and radical politics. In other words, Badiou had his own philosophical vision to sell, which as at odds with the above thinkers. Should we trust his assessment? — Tom Storm

What you say about Badiou’s disagreements with French postmodernist philosophers is true. The shared features of their thinking he highlights here are cherry-picked to be consonant with those he endorses. I wouldn’t say , though, that these features are at odds with the postmodernists, just that they are broad enough to encompass a very wide range of contemporary thinkers.