The understanding that our decisions are influenced by many things, and furthermore that the development of our character is influenced by many things, is already built into ordinary interpersonal relationships, as well as modern justice systems — SophistiCat

Martha Nussbaum has put a lot of work into spelling out specific implications for the dispensing of legal justice of her forward-looking approach to blame. What she advocates does not seem to be “already built into modern justice systems”. On the contrary, it has had a lot of influence in those circles.

Well, it seems to me that if we talk about something, then that something is not ineffable....

Hence if we talk about sensations - the aroma of coffee being the case in point - then the sensation is not ineffable — Banno

I’m trying to recall how Davidson thinks about this, since you relate to his work. I believe he posits perceptual experience , such as the aroma of coffee, as non-conceptually causal. Wouldn’t he argue that not only my attempt to communicate the smell of coffee to someone involves language, but my thinking about the experience in my own head requires a propositional articulation of the causal event? This of course, makes the causal sensation , or whatever it is, not only inaccessible to others but also to me in a certain sense. At the very least, there is a gap between the causal event and my thinking to myself, and to talking to others, about it.

I would just say at this point that this gap seems to be a product of Davidson’s insistence that perception is non-conceptual while language is conceptual This led Mcdowell to comment that Davidson makes language into a “frictionless spinning in a void”.

Which is why I find the Strawson et al stance patronising and undermining the remarkable powers of self reflection humans possess and autonomy — Andrew4Handel

‘Patronizing’ is a common accusation leveled against the postmodern and ‘woke’ left. But I’d hardly put Strawson in that category. We’re talking about a pretty mild version of social constructionism here, if we can call it that. If you’re that taken aback by his tame argument , I can’t imagine what you must think of the social justice crowd, influenced by folks like Foucault , Butler and Fanon.

There are degrees of mitigating circumstances from severe mental illness to having some adversity like everyone but not enough to act to causally determine ones criminal activity — Andrew4Handel

Are you familiar with Martha Nussbaum’s positions relating to issues of blame, anger and justice? They seem reasonable to me, striking a balance between mitigating circumstances and assigning responsibility.

I think the no free will brigade commit themselves to denying blame where it is due in an inappropriate way that has a negative effects on the victims of someone else. It is the culture of making bullies equal victims to their victims and further victimising victims. — Andrew4Handel

Sounds like you are an adherent of conservative social politics. No bleeding heart nonsense for you.

People who have believed in predestination have also supported punishment. People that don't believe in free will can believe in punishment as a deterrent to others — Andrew4Handel

as a consequence of man's fall, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin as a result of their fallen nature and, apart from the efficacious (irresistible) or prevenient (enabling) grace of God, is completely unable to choose by themselves to follow God, refrain from evil, or accept the gift of salvation as it is offered. — Andrew4Handel

Deterrents are a form of forward-looking , or consequentialist, blame, which Strawson and other blame skeptics endorse. Predestination and total depravity are linked to free will in the following way. In an earlier post I wrote:

“The very autonomy of the free willing subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus.

Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom, Strawson and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order. If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.”

This solipsist autonomy, cut off from a wider social ecology and cultural community, also characterizes the conditions of predestination and total depravity. Blame can reasonably be distributed within a community as well as within the isolated individual for free will skeptics, but this doesnt makes sense for perspectives which see individual motivation and values as walled off from the influence of the community, whether of their own choosing or because God made them this way.

I think Galen was not convince of this argument
, but was caused by his rebellion to his father, P.F Strawson, who defended free will. I think he would have to agree to stay consistent with his argument. — Richard B

Nothing about Strawson’s general philosophical outlook leads me to think he would share his father’s view on free will, especially his belief that the self is continually changing.

I find that every time I talk about something I don't really understand on this forum I get corrected. Maybe I should stop talking about things I don't understand — ToothyMaw

Just because a majority of philosophers believes a certain thing doesn’t mean they’re right. Just gives you an opportunity to investigate what they’re saying and decide for yourself. Afterwards, you may decide they’re full of crap.

I don't see how culture would get in the way of good science. Scientists, if they are good scientists, largely shouldn't pay attention to culture. That's not to say we shouldn't have ethicists directing how we use our science, but culture doesn't matter that much, I think. The same goes for mathematics. — ToothyMaw

I dont think you’ll find many contemporary philosophers of science who would agree with you here. Your view is more consistent with a 19th century perspective on the relation between science and culture. Today it is widely accepted that, far from ignoring culture, the science of an era is inseparably intertwined with all other areas of culture in terms of mural shaping and influence.

I think that philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, at least, would pay attention to what we might be able to learn from such advanced aliens. — ToothyMaw

It’s not a question of paying attention but of comprehending what one is paying attention to. We have philosophers , scientists and mathematicians today who represent widely differing levels of cultural understanding. The more traditional among them are living in the midst of ‘aliens’ they cannot comprehend.

An example: Derrida is a controversial figure. Some think he is a charlatan and others beleive he is one of the most important thinkers of the past 200 years. I happen to side with the latter camp. Let’s assume for the sake of argument I’m right. Did you know that in the 1990’s a group of scholars signed a petition protesting against Cambridge University awarding Derrida an honorary degree. Among them was one of the leading philosophers of our era, W.O. Quine. How is it that one of the most brilliant and well respected scholars can so utterly fail to see the brilliance of a contemporary thinker?
In the case of Quine and Derrida I suggest it was not just a matter of difference in style and approach, but the content of the work. Quine was not ready to grasp what Derrida was trying to tell us. For Quine , Derrida was a space alien.

Not to mention, the advances we might make would be largely self-discovered if the surprise box exists — ToothyMaw

You mean like the robot hand in Terminator 2?
I think our most talented philosophers, mathematicians and scientists will become Quines when presented with the ideas of an advanced civilization, just as the ideas of Freud, Darwin and Einstein would have been gibberish to the scientists of ancient Babylonia or Azteca. Science doesnt emerge in a vacuum, it is a product of larger cultural worldviews.

Some people are born bad. End of story — jgill

Yes, but if you agree with the following, then you are actually in Strawson’s camp:

“what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.” “In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.” (Caruso 2018)

“The more you believe in a person's free will, the more you will hold them morally responsible for their actions. ...and the amount that you hold a person responsible is related to how much they deserve to be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished, which, of course, affects the entire justice system.”

In sum, Strawson et al are not arguing against blame , punishment and justice but against revenge, retribution and backward-looking blame, which they see as the outcome of a traditional belief in free-will. They are advocating instead for a forward-looking constructive form of justice and blame no longer tied to revenge and anger. You dont have to go back too far in history to find
rampant examples of systems of justice based on retribution and an eye for a eye ( or a hand for a theft).

. In teaching someone to add, they become able to participate in a group of language games such as sharing, bookkeeping, calculating change. It's the action that counts, after all. — Banno

I would just add that ‘action’ should be specified even more finely in terms of sense of meaning rather than via general terms like bookkeeping and calculating. The action counts not as a token of a general conceptual category, and not in Quine’s understanding of behavior in objectively causal terms, but as belonging to a partially shared situational inter-action.

For instance, in PI Wittgenstein analyzes the word ‘calculating’’ in terms of actual use( rather than ‘in the head’’), showing that there is no such general meaning , only a family of context-specific senses. How do we know that someone is calculating? By way of actions within a contextual language game that determine always freshly what calculating performs , how it is used.

↪Janus, ↪Moliere, it would be wrong to treat teaching as moving something from one mind to another. It is better thought of as bringing about certain behaviours in one's students. Hence it is a public exercise.

Improving is a public enterprise. It can be seen, or it amounts to nothing. — Banno

What is it that is seen when we publicly observe a behavior? Is the public appearance of the behavior the moving of something from the behavior to each of the minds who are witnessing it, unmediated by individual interpretation?

I don't know what he means by "ultimate" responsibility. — ChrisH

I think I have an idea. As a blame skeptic, like Pereboom, Nussbaum and others, Strawson rejects the kind of radical free will that makes the subject responsible in an ultimate way. I take this to mean the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible Cartesian subject. Those who believe in such an ultimately responsible subject are necessarily harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.

The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus.

Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom, Strawson and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order. If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

This is my fun theory on what we might discover as we travel the galaxy in terms of new information given to us by advanced alien civilizations. — ToothyMaw

We already live amongst intelllectually advanced aliens, interacting with them in myriad ways. And yet this direct and unrestricted access does not make possible the transfer of one mode of thinking from one individual or group to another. Why not? Because we can only assimilate complex ideas that are consistent with our own worldview. As a result, we share a world in which ancient, traditional, modern and postmodern ways of thinking co-exist. If the immediacy of social media cannot bridge these gaps in outlook, our exposure to other-worldly cultures will fare no better.

t trying to come to terms with one's circumstances in life along with not wanting to become something one isn't, is a healthy and therapeutic practice. What's not to love about self-acceptance? — Shawn

That we have to make an effort to accept ourselves demonstrates the fact that the person we find ourselves to be is at odds with the person we had thought ourselves to be. How often does our behavior surprise or disappoint or puzzle us ? How many nights do we lay awake wracked with guilt, not recognizing who we have become? And how many relationships dissolve because because one or both of the parties are no longer who they used to be? It seems to me , then, that self-acceptance arrives after the fact. Of course we don’t want changes in ourselves that we dont choose, that other people and circumstance in general seem to force on us. That’s implied by will or desire. But how many times have we resisted tooth and nail changes in our thinking or ways of doing things that we later considered to be profound improvements in ourselves? Isn’t it the case that often changes in ourselves that we resist most strongly turn out in retrospect to be the most beneficial?

Therapists are familiar with the scenario where just as a client is getting close to achieving a breakthrough in insight about some aspect of their life, they are overwhelmed with a feeling of threat, even when they perceive the changes to be potentially positive. They feel threatened because they anticipate the insights will bring wrenching, confusing readjustments in their way of relating to themselves and others. Threat acts as a protective valve against the initial disruption that personal transformation brings. It prompts us to retreat back into the old and familiar habits of self, even when those habits have become confining.

The fact is the self is changing all the time. Self-acceptance is not about desiring a self frozen in place (which describes the mood of despair) , but striking a balance between who we are becoming and who we have been. We must not move too quickly into unexplored frontiers, so that we can preserve enough integrity and coherence in our identity to be able to accept our changing self.

To my (very limited) understanding phenomenology aspires to what the title suggests, an account of the "phenomenon of perception", of what it is like to perceive, in the abstract. Perhaps you can illustrate your point with a quote? I can't see how an abstract accounting like this can bridge the gap I described. — hypericin

In phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s hands, language is not the product of a meeting between private perceptions inside individual minds but of a primary intersubjectivity.

” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413)

Deleuze’s concept of intensive magnitude implies that only difference returns and is never the same. Anything identified as the same, as something that can be the same, can never return. The differentiating return transforms the return circuit into a departure from the self so that a sense of self only emerges in this gup — Number2018

Referring to singularity, to the event of becoming, is ultimately incompatible with the phenomenological approach — Number2018

There are many interpreters of Deleuze these days, so each of us have to choose our preferred interpreter. It might be helpful to my understanding of your interest in Deleuze if you could mention which current writers you think get him right. With regard to the relation between singualeites and ordinary points, between the quantitative and the qualitative , difference in degree and difference in kind, there is divergence between two prominent readers of Deleuze, James Williams and Dan Smith. Are you familiar with their disagreement? I agree with Williams over Smith.

Williams writes:

“Dan Smith gives no prominence to Deleuze's work on time for the determination of the new in Deleuze. This presents two difficulties through the critical question of whether Deleuze's work on calculus should be taken as a starting point for his work on time, as opposed to my focus on synthetic processes, and through the related question of whether the role of singularities in the philosophy of time should be understood through a mathematical understanding of the term:

‘The singularities of complex curves are far more complex. They constitute those points in the neighborhood of which the differential relation changes sign, and the curve bifurcates, and either increases or decreases' (Smith, 2007: 12).

My reservation about the mathematical model is its dependence on an opposition between ordinary and singular points. In terms of Deleuze's philosophy of time, there are no ordinary points in ordinary time, since the processes of time are all dependent on multiple singularities and their relations (in the living present, in the pure past, in eternal return and in the caesura that come with the new). In that sense, then, at least for the philosophy of time, my view is that the new is better defined in a more formal metaphysical manner. So I would rephrase the following sentence from Smith's work, avoiding the terms ‘ordinary', ‘constant' and ‘perpetual': ‘Every determinate thing is a combination of the singular and the ordinary, a multiplicity that is constantly changing, in perpetual flux' .The version closer to Deleuze's account of time would be: Every determinate thing is a combination of singularities, forming a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways according to the syntheses of time and led by the work of dark precursors and the eternal return of difference, the eternal return of the new.”(Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time)

Another noted reader of Deleuze is John Protevi. Are you familiar with his work? He says that in contrast to certain forms of phenomenology, “Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

This sounds like your claim that

Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage. — Number2018

But is Protevi’s reading doing justice to Deleuze? He argues that “a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it.
Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

When we look at the way that Protevi wants to rethink enactivist, embodied cognition, however , we find his brand of Deleuzianism to be merely a more reductionist form of embodied cognition. For instance , his understanding of Deleuzian affect incorporates cognitive and neuroscientific approaches like Lisa Barrett, Griffiths, Panksepp and LeDoux, and he associates the anthropological work of James Scott with Deleuzian thought. I see these approaches as not particularly compatible with Deleuze.

Peotevi and Massumi are the only Deleuzian writers I know of who engage with phenomenologically informed enactivist approaches to cognition, motivation, intersubjectivity and affect. In their hands, Deleuze is less useful than the models offered by Varela, Thompson, Gallagher and others. How, specifically, does your Deleuzian reading improve on an enactivist psychology?

Therefore, to say, "should I become what I am not" is to state that we want to become something, be it richer or poorer or happier or more joyful. My point here is that if we have wants, and they are realized by our conception of truth or lies, then why would anyone want to live (to be) in terms of what they are not? What would be the point of living with ourselves in contradiction of who or what we are? Yet, we do this every day. — Shawn

To quote psychologist George Kelly:

“…it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders what he really is – whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be. It may be helpful at this point to ask ourselves a question about children at Halloween. Is the little youngster who comes to your door on the night of October 30th, all dressed up in his costume and behind a mask, piping "trick or treat, trick or treat" – is that youngster disguising himself or is he revealing himself? Is he failing to be spontaneous? Is he not being himself?

Which is the real child – the child behind the mask or the barefaced child who must stand up in front of adults and say "please" and "thank you?" I suspect costumes and masks worn at Halloween time, as well as uniforms worn by officers on duty, doctoral degrees, and the other devices we employ to avoid being seen as we are, are all ways we have of extricating ourselves from predicaments into which we have been cast by the language of objectivity. They represent devices for coping with the world in the language of hypothesis.

But masks have a way of sticking to our faces when worn too long. Verbs cease to express the invitational mood after the invitation has been accepted and experience has left its mark. To suggest to a person that he be what he has already become is not much of an invitation.
Thus it is that the man who has worn a uniform long enough to explore all its possibilities begins to think that he really is an officer. Once this happens he may have to go through a lot of chaos before he can make anything more of himself. A student who is awarded a Ph.D. degree can find a lot of adventure in being called "doctor" and the academic mask may enable him to experiment with his life in ways that would have seemed much too preposterous before his dissertation was accepted.

But trouble sets in when he begins to think that he really is a doctor, or a professor, or a scholar. When that happens he will have to spend most of his time making noises like doctors, professors, or scholars, with the resultant failure from that time on to undertake anything interesting. He becomes trapped by verbs that have lapsed into the indicative mood when he wasn't looking.”

I mean something much more basic: there is nothing that is free of logic, simply because to have an idea at all, fact or fiction, is to have this within the framework of logic. For example, "Oh, my offense is rank" is, among other things, an affirmation, a logical category. — Constance

I’m wondering if you are familiar with the ways in which Husserl and Heidegger, respectively, burrowed within the grammar of formal logic to expose it as a derived abstraction of more fundamental constituting performances ? For instance, are you aware of how Husserl, in Formal and Transcendenral Logic, took Frege and Russell’s starting point in the propositional
copula and traced it back to a developmental sequence of constituting intentions?

“ “Since Aristotle, it has been held as certain that the basic schema of judgment is the copulative judgment, which is reducible to the basic form S is P. Every judgment having another composition, e.g., the form of a verbal proposition, can, according to this interpretation, be transformed without alteration of its logical sense into the form of the copulative bond; for example, “The man walks” is logically equivalent to “The man is walking”.

And Heidegger derives S is P from the hermeneutic ‘as’ structure, showing where we went astray in following Aristotle.

“If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the
“ hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation.""If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things.”

I suspect that your search for a primordial ground for caring and value is linked to the way you distinguish logic and value. Examining how Husserl and Heidegger deconstruct formal logic may clarify things.

In our social and cognitive environment, we instantaneously take part in various intensive apparatuses whose principles of organization and processes evade our control and recognition. Varela defines a machine as "the set of inter-relations of its components independent of the components themselves." 'A higher level of phenomena' is constituted by a relational machinic complex, effectuated before and alongside intentionality, discursive, and subject-object relations. — Number2018

John Protevi writes: “Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

Of course , it’s not just Deleuze who lets us go
above and below the subject. Embodied, enactive approaches in cognitive psychology have similar aims.
Shaun Gallagher says “…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”

The problem I have with these attempts to naturalize phenomenology is that they lose what I see as the most radical aspect of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty:

Deleuze provides a reciprocally causal account that has many features in common with those of the embodied community. But within his formal account any difference of degree, any quantitative repetition, any numeration qualitatively changes the sense of what counts at every quantitative repetition.

Deleuze's(1994) concept of intensive magnitude succeeds in deconstructing the quantity-quality binary by establishing a ‘ground' (as metamorphosis) in difference that is neither qualitative nor quantitative, and thus a basis of number that does not measure.

“Let us take seriously the famous question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” “In its own nature, difference is no more qualitative than extensive”

“The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units (unites) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement.”(Deleuze 1987, p.8)

“If there exists a primitive "geometry" (a proto-geometry), it is an operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affectations befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their segmentation: there is "roundness," but no circle, "alignments," but no straight line, etc.” (ibid, p.212)

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). ... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (Ibid, p.8)

an impression or memory of a phenomenal experience is still similar in kind to that experience. As opposed to when we attempt to translate that experience into words, where its phenomenal character is destroyed. — hypericin

Keep in mind that the original, immediate experience of a ‘now’ content , being itself an intentional synthesis of past , present and future, is not the exposure to an external objective datum , but a sense conditioned by my expectations. The moment we refer back to that original experience through reflection, we are intending a new sense, thus changing the phenomenal character of the original phenomenon. In this respect, reflection is like relating to another through language.

“... the immediate "I" performs an accomplishment through which it constitutes a variational mode of itself as existing (in the mode of having passed). Starting from this we can trace how the immediate "I," flowingly-statically present, constitutes itself in self-temporalization as enduring through “Its" pasts. In the same way, the immediate "I," already enduring in the enduring primordial sphere, constitutes in itself another as other...Thus, in me, "another I" achieves ontic validity as co-present [kompräsent] with his own ways of being self-evidently verified, which are obviously quite different from those of a "sense" perception.”(Crisis, p.185)

Also you misunderstand phenomenology, since it doesn't deal with the ineffable, but with what can be told about personal experience..The observations, analyses and syntheses of phenomenologists do not purport to be empirically testable (obviously) but offer you something only if they speak to your own experience — Janus

Phenomenology as it was begun by Husserl was about finding our way past preconceptions to the formal conditions of possibility of experience, to what is irreducible, indubitable and universal in experience and thus is communicable and intersubjective . For instance, time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically.

This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others, in the sense that it doesnt hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it. This does’t mean that we can’t communicate our experiences to ourselves , only that in doing so what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. So self-reflection is as imperfect as communication with others. The phenomenological method reveals to us the structural patterns that intentional synthesis consists in, such as the constitution of higher level phenomena like persisting spatial objects out of the changing flow of perceptual data.

In short, the content-in-itself of the contingent , relative, ineffable ‘now’ is not useful or meaningful via its role in the formal , communicable aspects of experience .

We can give a lot of definitions of fairness but are we ready to apply it? — javi2541997

I’m not talking about definitions. I’m talking about application. Are you, or Mishima, arguing that people who claim be using their faith or spirituality as a guide to navigating actual day to day situations are lying to themselves or fooling themselves? Is your argument that people are hypocrites and dont practice what they profess?

I didn't say it wasn't a praxis but not practical enough (at least in my own view) and that's why the metaphor of Mishima is excellent: it is a formidable building which lacks of a toliet. — javi2541997

I’m not sure you’re understanding the purpose of a metaphysical stance. Do you think that when someone develops a spiritual or religious faith, and proceeds to live their life guided this faith , that this ethical and social guidance isn't considered extremely practical and useful to them, perhaps the most practical of all modes of experiencing life? Do you have overarching principles that guide your life, and do you think they come
into play in practical situations of dealing with others? Do those principles inform your sense of how to approach concepts like honor, loyalty, friendship, fairness and justice?

↪180 Proof That's right, it is part of our nature and progress. We have two essential aspects: praxis and metaphysics — javi2541997

Why is metaphysics not also a praxis? What makes something a praxis and why do we value praxis? Is it that we associate praxis with use, with practicality? And what is useful is what is relevant, significant and meaningful to us? What motivates lemons to develop a. metaphysics? Do you think Kant’s ideas were considers useful , relevant and meaningful to him? Is the praxis-metaphysics binary really a spectrum from the more practical to the more abstract , from the particular to the general?

If this is the case, then how do we understand the contrast between how humans and other animals live?
Doesn’t our living language mean that compares to no -linguistic animals, we lack direct and immediate practical engagement with our world? After all, most of our engagements are less and less about using things in a simple perceptual way and more and more about virtual, conceptually-mediated living. Our objects are value objects like chairs and computers and cars, which are abstract concepts. Why do we prefer to live this more abstract , ‘metaphysical’ way than in a simpler, less-concept-mediated style? Is this because concepts being f the site into the present, and integrate and unify what would otherwise appear as dispute and disconnected elements? And isnt this precisely what metaphysics does for us? If we have the choice between knowing an aspect of our lives better, more integratively, rather than more ‘practically’ , do t we always prefer to know things better , more deeply, more richly?

So far I have only been talking about metaphysics as something certain philosophers write about. But there is also metaphysics as the implicit worldviews within which all of us organize our thinking. From this vantage, al even our most ‘practical actions are informed and guided by an implicit metaphysical worldview, and one could say the same for animals.

But science is useful. Phenomenology is philosophically unproductive and useless. — Heracloitus

As a phenomenological philosopher, I have a hard time finding this comment useful. Neither would contributors to journals like Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Based on Deleuze's text 'Desire and Pleasure,' it is not difficult to oppose Deleuze and Foucault's ontologies. Yet, in 'Foucault,' Deleuze entirely changed his position — Number2018

In ‘Deleuze, a Split with Foucault’, Mathias Schönher argues that in ‘Foucault’, Deleuze is trying to be generous to his old friend without really altering his critique from 1977:

“Whereas in "Desire and Pleasure" Deleuze ends his confrontation with Foucault's position in aporia, after Foucault's death he indicates an alternative, declaring that Foucault's books analyse a variety of historical situations and invent their own specific means to this end. However, this takes into account only half of Foucault's work, as Deleuze points out most clearly in "What is a dispositif?," a lecture from 1988: "Out of a sense of rigor, to avoid confusing things and trusting in his readers, he does not formulate the other half." Foucault formulated the other half "explicitly [only] in the interviews."

The alternative Deleuze exhibits here thus appears to consist of presuming an unwritten doctrine. In actuality, such a presumption would probably have been unthinkable for him, regardless of whether Foucault had really given such great importance to his interviews. As far as Deleuze is concerned, after all, the unwritten half of Foucault's work must be that which opens up access to the fundamental interplay of forces.

What Deleuze considers Foucault to have left out of his books is none other than philosophy, which, with its creative thinking, turns against the historical situation by setting out the starting points for the transformation of our society and our experience. To Deleuze, the alternative to the problems with which he is confronted by Foucault's thought can be none other than to presume that his own philosophy represents the outline of that plane that Foucault also viewed as having laid the foundations for the field on which the network of power was constituted, and to which Foucault attested in interviews.”

These gaps in mutual understanding sound like they are almost insurmountable. Are there ways you recommend we manage gaps such as these, or perhaps some essay about this you can direct me to? — Tom Storm

Funny you should mention it. In this essay I summarize the recent history of approaches to blame , anger and ethics in philosophy( free will blame, modernist blame skepticism, postmodern blame, Heideggerian blame) , and offer my alternative to blameful justice:

https://www.academia.edu/87763398/Beyond_Blame_and_Anger_New_Directions_for_Philosophy

https://youtu.be/1ycD55Zp634

My approach is consistent with my reading of psychologist George Kelly:

https://www.academia.edu/44497152/Personal_Construct_Theory_as_Radically_Temporal_Phenomenology_George_Kelly_s_Challenge_to_Embodied_Intersubjectivity

...it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose.
— Joshs

Are you so sure you know how I privately suppose it to be public? How could you? — Banno

I know that I will have to adjust my expectations of your responses to the dialogue with me in ways that will differ from others responses. My adjustments will eventually reveal a pattern to your differences from others. Through these progressive adjustments of my expectations, what I will eventually ‘know’ of how you suppose something like the public to be will not be a matter of my reading your mind but of my making sense of your unique pattern of responses to me relative to the pattens of others. My ‘knowing’ you is a situated, perspectival unfolding of anticipative engagement, an I-thou interplay of guesses and corrections evolving into a patterned rhythm.

You place a red object in front of it and on its screen it will report what color the object is. The machine goes on working fine but one day it reports that the object is red when no object was placed in front of it. Do we want to say the machine seems to experience red? Or would it better to say it is broken and needs to be fixed? What about human making such a claim of experiencing red when there is no red object? Does the human seem to have the experience or is just broken? — Richard B

Why not just specify the various ways in which objects are given to us in conscious experience, such as dreaming , imagining , perceiving , remembering? These are all modes of experiencing. My imagining or recalling a red color is not an ‘actual’ experience of red , but it is still a kind of experience. What all these modes have in common is an object emerging via a temporal structure, as a present ‘now’ linking a context of memory and expectation. A machine doesn’t have conscious temporally structured experience.

That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other.
— Joshs

Reasonable. How does this play out for us in terms of building 'community' or a shared moral framework? Surely there is some sense in which this must be almost impossible — Tom Storm

The feeling of mutual understanding varies quite widely depending of how superficial the shared activity is. Driving in traffic we normally co-ordinate our actions with respect to other drivers without any problem. We don’t have to know anything about their intentions outside of the general and generic indicators that act as cues for successfully driving on the road with other vehicles. The same is true for engaging in team sports or dancing with a partner. With these activities there seems to be a purely public exchange of signs and a melding of individuals into a group psychology. But in social interchange that involves a much more complex and specific set of ideas, such a politics , religion, philosophy or intimate personal engagement, we are constantly reminded that we are dealing with an other, that our expectations of their response to our communications frequently have to be adjusted , that there will be aspects of the relationship that will have to be less intimate than others, due to gaps in mutual understanding that will never be filled in.

...I've no clear idea what to do with this. While superficially addressing my criticism, it instead goes off in a new direction. Again, why not suppose that the first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative? — Banno

Give me an example of a public narrative and I’ll
try to show how it’s not public in quite the way you may suppose.

This should not be a surprise. They ask us to retreat into our inner private sanctum with the hope of emerging with all sorts of revelations to be shared. But the language they use is borrowed from the public realm, so if you to try to clarify, your are left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension depending on your natural inclinations. — Richard B

On the other hand, concepts like “inner private sanctum” and “public realm” leave me with more of a feeling of puzzlement than do phenomenological concepts , which question the coherence of the former distinctions.

Why not think instead that the supposed first person vantage is a construct of the public narrative...? A hang over from Descartes' misguided attempt to find an epistemic foundation. The supposed first person vantage depends on there being a public discourse. — Banno

You’re confusing Descartes’ self-enclosed subjectivity with a phenomenological self-world interaction. There is no Cartesian subject for Husserl. His ‘ego’ is merely a zero point of activity without any pre-assigned content. First personal vantage is not the vantage from a metaphysical soul, but the site of continual synthetic activity reinventing the nature , meaning and sense of the self in every intentional act. If we assume that the fist personal vantage is a construct of the public narrative, we completely miss the fact that this public narrative is a narrative construed and interpreted slightly differently from your vantage than from mine. That there is a public discourse from which each of us acquire our own vantages only means that each of us are constantly exposed to an outside, an alterity or otherness. But this publicness is not the identical public for each of us. That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other.

The epoché is not a falsifiable notion, so it could not be in conflict with any empirical evidence. The epoché is more like a prayer. — Banno

Or one could say the epoche is more like Quine’s fact/value complicity or Kuhn’s incommensurability idea, a non-falsifiable notion not in conflict with any empirical evidence.

What benefit is derived from endorsing societal anger and outrage? On the other hand, it seems reasonable to me that the negative consequences for an action should be proportional to the responsibility of a person for the results of their actions. You and I would probably agree that the drunk guy is more responsible for the accident than the other driver, so their punishment should be more severe. — T Clark

This quote from Jesse Prinz comes to mind. He is among those who defend the value of righteous anger against writers like Martha Nussbaum who has written that anger is an irrational , backward-looking emotion that encourages only revenge and retribution rather than productive action.

“…we have strictures against killing innocent people; and we have strictures prescribing equal opportunity. These principles are grounded in reason and subject to rational debate. . But justice also requires passion. We don’t coolly tabulate inequities—we feel outraged or indignant when they are discovered. Such angry feelings are essential; without anger, we would not be motivated to act....Rage can misdirect us when it comes unyoked from good reasoning, but together they are a potent pair. Reason is the rudder; rage propels us forward.”

Wittgenstein is an analytic philosopher. H — Banno

I would agree with Putnam, Cavell and Rorty, among others, that the later Wittgenstein is no longer an analytic philosopher.

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language... — Banno

Unless of course the public narrative is a derivative of the first personal vantage, the intersubjectively objective a constitutive accomplishment of subjectivities. I agree that setting out an experience exactly as experienced cannot be the goal of the epoche , if one expects to determine and preserve a specific content of meaning. If , however , one uses the epoche to uncover an irreducible structural invariant of experiencing, then this method is invaluable.
Isaac’s argument concerns the relation between conscious narratives of experience and the subpersonal processes which empirical research discovers. The epoche isnt in conflict with the results of neuroscience, since it doesn’t make any claims concerning specific contents of conscious experience or subpersonal mental events. Rather, its claims pertain to the formal condition of possibility underlying both conscious narratives of experience and empirical accounts of subpersonal neurological events.

In what way Deleuze was close to Derrida's approach? Could you relate Derrida's perspective on power to your quote from 'Desire and Pleasure'? By the way, Deleuze entirely changed his position and reformulated the disagreement with Foucault in 'Foucault'. — Number2018

Deleuze’s concept of desire avoids the problem of resistance that Foucault had to deal with. Rather than starting from symbolic structures of power that must be resisted, Deleuze begins from change, becoming and resistance.

As Dan Smith writes:

“If resistance becomes a question in Foucault, it is because he begins with the question of knowledge (what is articu­lable and what is visible), finds the conditions of knowledge in power, but then has to ask about the ways one can resist power, even if resistance is primary in relation to power. It is Foucault’s starting point in constituted knowledges that leads him to pose the problem of resistance.

Deleuze’s ontology, by contrast, operates in an almost exactly inverse manner. Put crudely, if one begins with a status quo – knowledge or the symbolic – one must look for a break or rupture in the status quo to account for change. Deleuze instead begins with change, with becoming, with events. For Deleuze, what is primary in any social formation are its lines of flight, its movements of deterritorialization, which are already movements of resistance. “Far from lying outside the social field or emerging from it,” Deleuze writes, “lines of flight constitute its rhizome or cartog­raphy.” Resistance, in a sense, is built into Deleuze’s ontology, and for this reason, the conceptual problem he faces wound up being quite different from Foucault’s.”

This irreducible gesture of difference has proximities to Derridean differance, as Derrida noted:

“Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience – so unsettling – of a proximity or a near total affinity in the “theses” – if one may say this – through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, “gesture,” “strategy,” “manner”: of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the “theses” (but the word doesn’t fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference “more profound” than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this “generation.” I never felt the slightest “objection” arise in me, not even a virtual one, against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus…”

Foucault distinguished between the order of powers to affect and to be affected and the order of knowledge as heterogeneous but immanent to each other. "Between technics of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if they have their specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference" — Number2018

I think Deleuze was closer to Derrida’s approach to the relation between strategies of power than he was to Foucault’s. Deleuze was not happy with Foucault’s understanding of systems of power as motivating and constituting. Desiring assemblages can be differentiated from each other, but not in the way that Foucault presumes power systems to do.

“Which brings me to my primary difference from Michel at the moment. If I speak with Felix Guattari of desiring-assemblages, it's that I am not sure that micro-systems can be described in terms of power. For me, the desiring-assemblage marks the fact that desire is never a "natural" nor a "spontaneous" determination. Feudalism for example is an assemblage that puts into play new relations with animals (the horse), with the earth, with deterritorialisation (the battle of knights, the Crusade), with women (knightly love), etc. Completely mad assemblages, but always historically assignable. I would say for my part that desire circulates in this assemblage of heterogeneities, in this sort of "symbiosis": desire is but one with a given assemblage, a co-functioning. Of course a desiring-assemblage will include power systems (feudal powers for example), but they would have to be situated in relation to the different components of the assemblage. Following one axis, one can distinguish in the desiring-assemblage states of things and enunciations (which would be in agreement with the distinction between the two types of formation according to Michel). Following another axis, one can distinguish the territoritalities or re-territorialisations, and the movements of deterritorialisation which carry away an assemblage (for example all the movements which carry away the Church, knighthood, peasants). Systems of power would emerge everywhere that re-territorialisations are operating, even abstract ones. Systems of power would thus be a component of assemblages. But assemblages would also comprise points of deterritorialisation. In short, systems of power would neither motivate, nor constitute, but rather desiring-assemblages would swarm among the formations of power according to their dimensions.”( Desire & Pleasure,Gilles Deleuze.
trans. Melissa McMahon 1997)

it could be concluded that it is an objective truth that all conscious beings seek optimal freedom from conscious suffering - this despite complexities such as weighing short-term suffering against long-term suffering.

If objectively true that we all seek optimal freedom from suffering - what in western thought could be termed the search for optimal eudemonia - then that means which in fact best liberates us from suffering will be the objectively true goal relative to all conscious beings, irrespective of (or else, in manners independent of) one’s beliefs on the matter.

Since this objectively true goal would in principle satisfy that which all yearn for, it would then be an objective good - a good that so remains independently of individuals’ subjective fancies.

Since this good would be objectively real to one and all, a proposition regarding it could then be conformant to its reality and, thereby, true. — javra

This sounds like a version of the utilitarian claim that the pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain is the universal motivator of human behavior. John Dewey had a rebuttal to this notion, as explained by Putnam. Just substitute ‘avoidance of suffering’ for ‘pleasure’.

If “agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"

then

"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”

I think claims should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as some morals are definitely formed from emotional responses to experience, yet others are the result of careful thought. — ToothyMaw

Jonathan Haidt argues that our moral values are the product of inborn evolutionary adaptations. He lists the following 5 innate moral foundations:

Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation

These intuitions are the tail that wags the dog of the reasoned propositions that you are counting on to give us objectively true moral axioms. They are present in all of us but occur in proportions that vary from individual to individual. For instance , in Haidt’s model, conservatives may emphasize authority and loyalty over care and fairness.