Text was also literal, a physical text. — Jackson

Yes, it included written text, spoken word , thinking to oneself , perception, and any and all forms of what would be called the ‘real’ or the objective. He would, however , question distinctions like literal vs figurative and physical vs mental.

I thought deconstruction was a technique of Critical Theory. The article acts as if deconstruction has been widely abandoned, but Critical Theory, as in Critical Race Theory, is clearly going strong. — Clarky

Critical theory is a neo-marxist approach in philosophy, a form of structuralism and dialectic. . Derridean deconstruction places into question the dialectical and structuralist basis of marxism and neo-marxism.

Deconstruction was not Critical Theory. It was a way to read and interpret texts — Jackson

This is true of the literary theorists who adopted practices of deconstruction, but the idea of deconstruction that Derrida produced was much
pre try a. a way of interpreting written texts. It was a way to understand the basis of all experience.
Text’ for Derrida referred to the way time structures experience.

Another evaluation of deconstruction. Thought others might find it worth discussing. I liked reading Derrida, but after a while, it just seemed like skepticism. — Jackson

I think the following sums it up.

“To this day, deconstruction remains a style of thought more complained about than understood.”

The author of the article would like to believe this ignorance is the fault of deconstructive writers like Derrida, but I would suggest it is the difficulty of his ideas that is the source of incomprehension rather than a matter of vacuity , inconsistency or vagueness in his thinking. I would also separate Derrida’s work from the host of authors who called themselves deconstructionists. I never found the work of these followers to have much in common with Derridean deconstruction.

I don't find Feyerabend and Haack significantly incompatible or necessarily inconsistent with either enactivism and autopoiesis (neither of which I find "anti-realist") — 180 Proof

From my reading , the following are the core figures in enactivism. Most contribute to the same journals, attend the same conferences, co-author books on enactive cognition and phenomenology, and comprise a tight -knit community of scholars. I believe that I can extract quotes from every one of these writers indicating that they are anti-realists.

I think that Varela speaks for this group when he writes:

“…despite other differences, the varieties of cognitive realism share the conviction that cognition is grounded in the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven subject.”( The Embodied Mind)

Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby, Matthew Ratcliffe , Thomas Fuchs, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Hanne De Jaegher, Kym MacClaren, Michel Bitbol, Rick Furtak, Joel Krueger, John Protevi, Joseph Rouse, Dan Zahavi.

Other contributors to enactivism , like Anthony Chemero, have waffles on the issue:

“ Situated, embodied cognitive science is all the rage these days. Some (including the present author) have argued that situated, embodied cognitive science is incompatible with realism (metaphysical and scientific). In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: there is no reason one cannot be both a proponent of situated, embodied cognitive science and a realist.” (Chemero)

My intellectual bias against "anti-realism" & "epistemic relativism" was no doubt reinforced by my undergrad studies in engineering and physics so I didn't take Rorty et al philosophically serious, and I still don't. At least an anti-foundationalist (IMO, "epistemic pluralist") like Feyerabend was philosophically as well as scientifically & culturally interesting and occasionally hilarious. Btw, Ms. Haack got it right (I'm a big fan!) — 180 Proof

Your stance against anti-realism forces you into a choice between two thriving movements within cognitive science. The first is inspired by Peirceian semiotics and Friston’s free energy neurological model. The second is anti-realist and embraces enactivist and autopoietic systems approaches inspired by phenomenology and pragmatists like James and Dewey. Haack is bound to the first group obviously ( I doubt very much she would be a fan of Feyerabend),and Rorty to the second. One of the founders of enactivism and among its most prolific and talented theorists is Shaun Gallagher, who has contributed to important work on autism, schizophrenia , empathy and perceptual body schemas. It is revealing that he has critiqued Rorty for not being relativist enough.

This shows that Haack and Peirce are a fair distance away from what I consider to be the most promising work in psychology today.

Did you ever read Susan Haack's takedown of Rorty? There's the essay Pining Away in the Midst of Plenty. The Irony of Rorty’s Either/Or Philosophy. It's pretty funny.
— Tom Storm
Oh yes! :clap: :smirk: — 180 Proof

Not much of a takedown. Haack wants to hold onto the ‘reality’ of the natural , so of course she will be opposed to Rorty’s anti-realism.

. Personally I would never use the word faith to describe reasonable actions taken in the world. When I catch a plane or go travelling I don't base the decision on faith but a 'reasonable confidence' that the plans will work out and the plane won't crash. This is a rational position based on the fact that travel and planes generally work safely. Faith, on the other hand, is an excuse for believing something when there is no good reason. — Tom Storm

Let’s take a closer look at how faith and reason are intertwined with each other. At one extreme you put the knowledge that the plane won’t fall out of the air, which you associate with reason and rationality. At the other end is faith on God, which is without good reason. But what is it that imparts reasonableness to the ordinary activities of our lives , our expectation that when we push a button, the computer will turn on , or when we turn our head the visual scene will change, but the objects in that scene will not change their location? We know that in perception we create expectations and those expectations are met , more or less, by what appears and the way it appears. But what we experience never precisely duplicates our expectations, so there is a kind of perceptual faith involved. We dont appreciate that this is a faith until we take lsd or suffer a stroke and suddenly our expectations become wildly mismatched with what appears.

But we still may want to argue that in normal circumstances, our understanding of our world and our expectation of how our technologies will work for us is ‘rational’, that is, there is a right match between what we anticipate or predict and what happens. Faith in god would seem not to provide us with such evidence to confirm our predictions. But what makes our sciences and technologies work the way they do and predict the world the way they do? The applied end is where we find the most dependability and predictability , but the higher we go in the abstract theoretical and meta theoretical direction , the more we find ourselves in the vicinity of faith, that is , of paradigms that do not yet have access to clearer evidence. At an even higher level
of abstraction lies the philosophical underpinnings of a science and its associated technology. At this level things are even more tentative and ‘unreasonable’.

So here’s a question , how can matters be so dependably rational at the lower applied level of our everyday dealings with machines, but have the ground be so unstable at the highest meta-theoretical level? After all, the former is just a subordinate component of the latter.

My answer is that this reasonableness is mostly a trick of language. We say the plane will stay up in the air and the train will arrive regardless of the shifting grounds of the sciences that makes these devices possible.
But what we fail to pay attention to is that we never expereince such facts as hermetically sealed entities. We experience ce the plane or train in the context of our attitudes and goals , of how these facts are relevant to us.
The subject-predicate language we use masks the facts that our ‘reasonable’ interactions with the world is shifting its ground in subtle ways all the time. The meaning of our everyday world isn’t just what happens but how it happens , how it is significant to us. Our moods don’t just color our experience, they provide us with our faith in the dependability of our world.
In severe depression everyday experience loses its salience and we lose faith i. ourselves and our competence to interact with the world. In anger we lose faith in others. In grief and mourning we lose faith in the coherence of the routines that were attached to meaningful persons in our lives who are now gone.

So a shifting faith in the world , in the sense of the relative significance, salience and coherence to us of the things and situations we are involved with, is a daily part of our lives. It defines how ‘reasonable’ our experiences really are for us, not just based on sterile logic, but in relation to the shifting coherence and relevance of our engagements with things and people. In this way, daily life and faith in god have much in common.

The irony in some of this discussion is that one of the upshots of Derrida's critique is that things cannot be reduced to context, and no fine-graining of 'context' would ever serve to explain or justify any phenomenon. This sets him irreducibly apart from any empirical discourse like anthropology, history, law, and so on. And this, insofar as he is committed to resisting the reduction to a skeptical empiricism that would not be able to hold fast to truth in the philosophical sense - or any notion of responsibility, for that matter. Différance disrupts all closure, including "context". — Streetlight

Things cannot be reduced to context for Derrida in the sense that context is not a centered structure. It is instead movement and differentiation. ‘There is nothing outside the text’ means that context IS this temporal movement. Skeptical empiricism cannot ‘hold fast to truth’ in that it alienates the formal conditions of possibility of truth from its object. Derrida’s project is not a skepticism because it does not see truth as something to hold fast to’.

"The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ('there is nothing outside the text') means nothing else: there is nothing outside context" “…one cannot refer to this 'real' except in an interpretive experience." (Derrida, 1972, p.148).

Relativism, as I understand the term, is a boogeyman of either a cultural or philosophical variety. Almost anything counts as relativism, broadly construed, because knowledge deals in relations. What people mean by "relativism" isn't very specific -- it's usually coupled with some anxiety with respect to objective truth, or scientific truth, or some such — Moliere

Fear of relativism is connected with anxiety over the lack of firm grounds for truth. As you say, there are many varieties and degrees of relativism. Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of scientific progress and coherence theories of truth offer a sort of moderate relativism, while still maintaining a ground for objectivity.
By contrast , the ‘radical’ relativisms of Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault , Lyotard and others are read as producing an infinite regress of relations with no ultimate foundation, nothing to justify science as progress or ethics as binding.

But in terms a philosophy, my assertion is there is no such thing. It's more of a boogeyman, politically, or a philosophical antagonist, philosophically -- but a cultural phenomena, rather than a particular philosophy. So I'd say that one could take any of his works and you wouldn't find the cultural or philosophical antagonist that people seem to have in mind.

Or would you disagree there? — Moliere

I think it depends on which intellectual community you are involved with. In psychology and continental philosophy, the postmodern means something other or more than a mere historical dividing line. There are distinctions made between modernist and postmodernist constructivism, hermeneutics, psychotherapy and cognitive science. The publications in these areas are filled with such references , because the readers of the journals understand what theoretical differences these distinctions are referring to.

I'd say there are a few beliefs that will not remain after gaining clarity, such as Derrida is a relativist, or Lyotard created a post-modern philosophy. Neither of those two things are true, at least as I understand these words. — Moliere

I’m aware of Derrida’s quote concerning relativism, but
give me an example of what you see in his work that defies relativism as you understand the term. I think Derrida is right to correct those who accuse him
of an ‘anything goes’ philosophy in which any claim to truth is as valid as any other. But I believe he also makes the following points: what is true is relative to contingent cultural formations, such that moral or empirical
correctness can only be determined within such structures, and such structures change over time in ways that do not form a progress. Derrida was no a realist. He did not assert a real world existing independently of our interaction with it. The absence of a concept of scientific progress in his work, his rejection of correspondence theories of truth and realism , and his placement of truth within local conventions would seem to be consistent with what realism means for many people.

As far as Lyotard is concerned. his philosophy has been treated as postmodern by many writers who embrace postmodern philosophy.
For example, Shaun Gallagher’s Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics discusses Lyotard’s work in the context of postmodern ideas:

“One can immediately think of objections to introducing the notion of universality into postmodern contexts. The emphasis in postmodern hermeneutics is on the local, the particular. Postmodernism challenges universality wherever it finds it -- from metanarratives to categorical imperatives, from performativity principles to Enlightenment politics.”

“The conversation of mankind fails as a model of postmodern hermeneutics not only because it is a metadiscourse and worthy of our incredulity, but because it hides exclusionary rules beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. The overarching conversation of mankind aspires to resolve all differends. But by requiring what is genuinely incommensurable (i.e., incommensurable with the conversation itself) to be voiced within the conversation, it denies it expression and helps to constitute it as a differend at the same time that it disguises it as a litigation. The very attempt to include something which cannot be included makes the conversation of mankind a terrorist conversation.

This is one of the issues between Lyotard and Rorty in their own conversation in 1984. For Lyotard, the conversation of mankind forms part of the modern Enlightenment tradition.”

“ The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new horizons.”

↪Joshs Philologists, anthropologists, jurists, historians and poets have demonstrated the contextuality of meanings long before Derrida obscurely belabored the point with florid jargon — 180 Proof

Before Derrida and other post-structuralists , the tendency was to take the contextual meanings they demonstrated and tie them back into some totalizing meta-narrative ( scientific or cultural progress , political emancipation, dialectical becoming, linguistic structuralism). Name me some of these contextualists writing long before Derrida and I’ll demonstrate my point

I'm saying that 'your own conscience' is not a good foundation as there is nothing one can't justify using such an approach. People justify slavery, sexual assault, murder, theft, anything horrendous, based on their own conscience (or lack of one). I also don't yet see how his answer relates to the OP. But I understand the broader point that perhaps all we have is personal preferences (conscience if you prefer). I do think however that even secular morality can rest on foundational imperatives, however contestable these might be. — Tom Storm

Personal conscience is not a trope you’ll generally find among postmodern philosophers. For writers like Foucault and Deleuze , the ‘subject’ or ‘personal’ is just a veneer placed over forces that originate as unconscious as well as social.

Knowing my `self' as a mere strategy or role in social
language interchange, I can know longer locate a `correct' value to embrace, or a righteous cause to throw my vehemence behind. The only ethics that is left for me to support is the play between contingent senses of coherence and incoherence as I am launched from one local linguistic-cultural hegemony to another. To the extent that I know what such a thing as guilt or
anger is beyond the bounds of local practices, these affectivities would have resonance as my experience of relative belonging or marginalization in relation to conventionalities that I engage with in discourse. I am always guilty, blameful in the extent to which I am a stranger in respect to one convention or another, including those that I recall belonging to in the past. I am always guilty in existing as a dislodgement from my history. Even in my ensconsement within a community of language, my moment to moment interchange pulls and twists me away from myself, making me guilty with respect to myself (my `remembered' self) and my interlocutor.

I think that an essential element that is normally ignored in discussions about postmodernism is history — Angelo Cannata

Postmodern philosophers reach the the importance of the difference between history and geneology. History tends to be thought of in terms of a historicism, a chronological model of change. That’s what your notion history sounds like. Genealogy , on the other hand , is not a causal concept of historical change.

As far as I can tell, p0m0 suggests "we should live" by transgressing – subverting – every "should" which, of course, is self-refuting (i.e. we could not live that way). — 180 Proof

Thats because they are not offering a “should” but an “is”. Transgression and subversion are not oughts, they refer to the way that experience comes to us already self-transgressing and self-differentiating. Pomo shows us the ethical advantages of becoming explicitly aware of what is already implicitly involved in sense-making.

Deconstructing Derrida's "text", whatever it means is deferred, no? (i.e. meaning-less, or as Humpty Dumpty says "means whatever I say it means – nothing more or nothing less") — 180 Proof

Derridean differance tell us that experienced meaning differs and defers at the same time. What does that mean? It means that contextual change assures that the repetition of any sense always alters what it refers to in some respect. We continue to mean the same thing differently. This not loss of meaning, but a sliding of meaning.

And if we are to judge from their characters, Deleuze really was not a very good man. — Moliere

I’ve been reading a lot of Deleuze lately. Why do you say he was not a very good man?

I think, maybe, people mistake description for prescription -- postmodernism is a condition, not a philosophy — Moliere

That’s a political analysis of the postmodern. There is a general consensus within continental philosophy concerning what postmodern philosophy stands for. That is , what thinkers like Heidegger, Lyotard, Nietzsche , Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida have in common that distinguishes them from modernist philosophers like Marx.

Keeping in mind that Aristotle called it "metaphysics" because it came after physics in his publications, not because it was beyond physics in subject matter or an addition to physics. I tend to see it as the framework for knowledge and understanding, which I guess is what you mean by "beyond" in this context. — Clarky

I don’t know if this is relevant, but the Aristotelian term ‘physis’ is better translated as nature than as physics. It is true that physics and the natural seem synonymous for the modern era of science , but Aristotle’s conception of nature was quite different in many respects from what we think of today as physics. I can also imagine a future notion of the natural that departs from the view of the natural that today’s physics implies. There are already an number of strands of thinking in philosophy and the cognitive sciences ( Peirceian semiotics, phenomenology, enactivism) that have redefined the natural in a way that that goes beyond the grounding of nature that physics offers.

So please don't take things too pedantically.. Like "Oooh what does "self-reflection" really mean?" — schopenhauer1

Whatever he means by it , he clearly means to separate off some specific intelllectual capacity of thinking from others, and I argue that he is mistaken here and is succumbing to a Romantic illusion about the bliss of ignorance or some such thing, and the demonizing of intelllectualism and self-awareness, as if one could be ‘excessive’ in these processes of thinking, as if the child is happier than the adult , the primitive happier than the modern, the animal happier than the human.

Do you really think he meant literally that the whole of human self-reflection is one mutation, or is being metaphorical to what the outcome is like? At least be charitable. — schopenhauer1

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. — schopenhauer1

Which ability is he claiming has been over-developed? Self-reflection? I don’t think that is its own special category of thinking. All human experience is in some sense already self-reflective simply in orienting itself toward the world. He is under the illusion that by somehow suppressing this ‘faculty’ one can be less unhappy. But to eliminate self-reflection is to eliminate thought.

. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground. — schopenhauer1

It all comes down to the fact that first principles are always of survival, and in humans that is economics (not the abstract study of, but the production and consumption aspect of everyday life). — schopenhauer1

Human intelligence isn’t just one peculiar (and questionable) mutation among others, like some antler. It is the quintessential expression of the directionality of function of living systems. The basis of life is not static survival , it is diversification. Intelligence is acceleration of the evolutionary process of diversification.

Depends what one means by nature. For science, it is only the movement of particles. — Jackson

Or whatever can be mathematizable, which may come down to something similar.

It's not clear to me what "two inseparable poles" means in this context. Metaphysics is the context of seeing, knowing, experiencing; not what is seen, known, or experienced. — Clarky

What makes a context a context? Isn’t it the intertwining of memory and what appears? Husserl articulated the subjective and objective contributions to perception and conception in terms of a noetic and noematic pole. The noetic side contributes memory and anticipation, the reaching out into the event with a framing expectation, the seeing, knowing aspect. But the noematic object that is seen , known , experienced, fills out the expectation but never completely fulfills it. Thus the metaphysical is a pole , a subjective contribution to the act of seeing and experiencing. But it can never subsist in itself as its own ‘context’. There is never a seeing or knowing without the seen or known contributing a new aspect to what is being anticipated. Experiencing is always contextual , and context is always a new use. Thus the breath of the metaphysical and that of the empirical go hand in hand in every moment of experience .

Humans are apes that do physics, metaphysics, abstract art, jazz, epic poetry, space exploration, mystical ecstasy...

No matter how morally indignant the philosimians get, facts are facts, there is no equivalency.

Humankind is superapekind. — ZzzoneiroCosm

In man's evolution he's created the city
And the motor traffic rumble
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes
And living in the jungle
'Cause the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in the coconut trees
Oh what a life of luxury to be like an apeman
(Apeman, Ray Davies and the Kinks)

Can you explain that? Isn't the very act of a starting point (even if self-reflexivity) a foundation? I've not read the writers you mention - except in small portions and I find them mostly incomprehensible, so generally I'm just looking for a high level overview if possible. :wink: — Tom Storm

They argue that we never leave the starting point or beginning, only repeat it different. i. this way, they are radically temporal, and radically historical. When I think this beginning, I am not capturing any discrete content but thinking from out of the midst of becoming. I am not pointing to anything that I stand outside of but enacting it, always differently, and I can speak from this ‘always different’ beginning in a self-reflexive way.

You say "value system," I say "metaphysical system." Facts don't necessarily change metaphysics, but metaphysics may have to change in order for us to see reality in new ways. I'm not sure how that works. It's at the top of my list of things to figure out. — Clarky

I’m reading Joseph Rouse’s Articulating the World right now, also discussing it in an online philosophy Toronto meetup. He talks about presuppositions in terms of the space of reasons, and makes use of Sellars’ distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image. He tries to show how the empirically observed world talks back to us to alter the space of reasons.
He models the genesis of scientific inquiry on recent biological notions niche construction, wherein the organism produces its own niche environment and that environment influences the organism , in a back and forth dynamic. The scientist’s instruments of measurement are part of the niche they construct.

The claim that "factual correctness in science asymptotically approximates ( through Popperian falsification) an ultimately true reality," is not a scientific fact, it is a metaphysical assertion. — Clarky

But in what way can we disentangle the metaphysical from the factual? A fact is what it is by virtue of its role within a value system. But the fact doesnt just reside within this system, it also alters this system. There is a reciprocal dependence between the metaphysical and the factual which allows each to define and change the other. A fact is never simply what is the case, it is at the same time how it is the case, how it is relevant and significant in the present context.

Metaphysics is how we look at things, not what we see. — Clarky

It seems to me that phenomenological and postmodern approaches recognize the metaphysical and the real, the formal and the empirical, the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real , the valuative and the factual as two inseparable poles of each moment of experiencing.

even those committed to perspectivism and the notion of there being no correct viewpoint - no totalizing metanarrative - seem to elevate this evaluative framework as somehow true, in itself a kind of totalizing metanarrative. — Tom Storm

This would not be the case for authors like Nietzsche , Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Foucault and Wittgenstein because their starting point a fact, frame or truth but self-reflexivity itself.

the question at hand is whether or not most people think "...there is one way of seeing reality rather than the plurality of possibilities." In my experience, most people think their metaphysic is factually correct, if they think about it at all. — Clarky

So would you extend this observation to the ‘facts’ of an empirical science as well? That is, is it a problem that people believe factual correctness in science asymptotically approximates ( through Popperian falsification) an ultimately true reality?

Funny how metaphysics never stays dead and buried — Jackson

I suppose we could argue the same about religion.

f the known represents our best understanding of what is going on, metaphysics represents our attempts to go beyond the limits of that knowledge in ways that analyticity doesn't compass. Expanding our understanding of the physical universe isn't metaphysical, because the new understanding doesn't change the fundamental nature of that understanding (except that quantum theory - e.g. the Cophenhagen interpretation - could be said to be metaphysical in that sense). — Pantagruel

Do you think that the history of scientific progress is at the same time a history of metaphysical
progress? In other words , that each era of scientific theory embodies a metaphysical worldview that usually remains unarticulated by the scientists themselves but is nevertheless implicit in their thinking. This view of metaphysics would reveal it not as something ‘beyond’ physics or empirical science in general but as implicit within its thinking.

Agreed. Philosophy is about expanding the limits of our understanding. Almost by definition, this coincides with metaphysics. The most interesting questions have always been metaphysical. — Pantagruel

Why is expanding the limits of thinking metaphysical?

Hume's and Kant's attacks on metaphysics have probably been the most important in the history of philosophy. To embrace these philosophers is not to embrace metaphysics (or, when it comes to Hume, "system building"). — Jamal

And yet , from the vantage of more recent generations of philosophers, Kant and Hume exemplify species
of metaphysical thinking. Husserl critiqued the metaphysics of Hume and Kant , and said that if his perspective is to be thought of as a metaphysics it is a very different sort of transcendental than that of Kant or Hume. Nietzsche claimed to be the first to transcend metaphysics, and that Schopenhauer was the last metaphysician (“…. At bottom, the last metaphysicians still seek in it true "reality," the "thing-in-itself" compared to which everything else is merely apparent.”). Heidegger called Nietzsche the last metaphysician. He advocated a thinking that overcomes metaphysics (“… in its decisive steps, which lead from truth as correctness to ek-sistent freedom, and from the latter to truth as concealing and as errancy, it accomplishes a change in the questioning that belongs to the overcoming of metaphysics.”) Derrida called his own approach quasi-transcendental, neither a metaphysics nor a rejection of metaphysics but a thinking on the margins of metaphysics. He said such a thinking, rather than the negation of metaphysics or it’s embrace , is the most rigorous stance we can take.

Tell me how to get rid of epistemology. You say "Z." I say "How do you know Z." Or I say "Prove Z." Those are epistemological statements. If you say "Here's how I know Z," you are speaking epistemology. You can't get away from it. — Clarky

Epistemology deals with general rules, structures and categories of meaning. You don’t ‘ get rid of’ or ‘get away from’ such concepts, you deconstruct them by showing how the general always manifests itself as a unique and particular contextual sense. Epistemology covers over how meaning is actually formed and used.

The strong for Nietzsche overcomes itself , displaces itself , transforms itself. Its strength is in reinvention, not holding onto some self-constant value system
— Joshs

Into what, exactly? With the abolition of the celestial hierarchy there's nothing to be transformed into, except maybe a more intelligent (or should we say 'craftier') ape. — Wayfarer

Difference precedes identity. This is the idea that has inspired so much of 20th and 21st century philosophy, from Bergson, James and Husserl to Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida.
Transformation isn’t a movement from
one static state to another, a special event that may or may not happen, but the precondition for any existent.

it is impossible to get rid of metaphysics. You might pretend that you have, even believe it yourself, but it can't be done. Metaphysics, especially including epistemology, is the foundation of reason. — Clarky

It certainly can’t be done if you hold onto concepts like epistemology and reason as the ground of philosophy. It is precisely such traditional notion a that have been put into question by contemporary philosophers.

we could be deceived that our conscious experience is more than just electrical signals bouncing around in our heads: "Whatever this sensation of consciousness is that I'm experiencing, it is something more!" — Bird-Up

This sounds like Dennett’s ‘explanation’ of consciousness. But while it can be said that consciousness is a graded phenomenon of organismic complexity, if we were to assume that it is nothing but an arrangement of physical
processes, we run the risk not simply of missing something more that is unique to consciousness , as if there is some inner , ineffable substance in the world called subjective experience to be laid alongside physical objects. What we risk missing is a dimension of what we call material or empirical reality that subjective experience
is trying to cue us into. Put differently, what we call subjective, phenomenal or inner isn’t another entity in the world to be added to physical things , it is the condition of possibility of notions like physicality, materiality , objectivity. The latter is what we end up with when we conventionally strip away what makes any concept of the object coherent.

What kind of 'empowerment' could he envisage, other than political power, the domination of the strong over the weak? The religious cultures that he abjurs depict fulfillment in terms of divine union or transcending the self, but there's nothing that can be mapped against that in Nietszche's philosophy as there's nothing beyond the ego. Is there? — Wayfarer

For Nietzsche power doesn’t control , it is both dominating and dominated , within the same psyche. The ‘ego’ or self does not rule , it is a community of drives in tension with each other. The strong for Nietzsche overcomes itself , displaces itself , transforms itself. Its strength is in reinvention, not holding onto some self-constant value system.This is the polar opposite of fascism, which desires the forcible institution of fixed values. For Nietzsche there is nothing beyond the relation of drives, and that means plenty beyond the ego.

“… our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives)…”