Doesn't Merleau-Ponty's point only hold in cases where one intentionally seeks to "get behind" judgement—to attempt to enter something like Hegel's analysis of sense certainty? In everyday experience, we walk through forests full of trees and squirrels, rooms with tables and chairs, etc., nor streams of unmediated sense data. When we see an angry dog, we do not have to abstract from sense data and think: "ah, that sense data incoming from over there can conform to a large, angry dog, I better run away — Count Timothy von Icarus

For the phenomenologist, there is no ready-made world of objects. To perceive trees, squirrels and rooms with tables and chairs is to constitute them through the interplay between expectation and response.

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.

What we experience is indeed a real image of reality - albeit an extremely simple one, only just sufficing for our own practical purposes; we have developed 'organs' only for those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of survival, it was imperative for our species to take account, so that selection pressure produced this particular cognitive apparatus...what little our sense organs and nervous system have permitted us to learn has proved its value over endless years of experience, and we may trust it. as far as it goes — T Clark

What’s missing from Lorenz’a account is the more recent appreciation on the part of biologists of the reciprocal nature of the construction of the real. It is not simply a matter of the organism adapting itself to the facts of its environment, but of those very facts being a product of reciprocal alterations that go back and forth between organism and the world that it sets up for itself. What the reality of an organism’s environment is is just as much a product of the organism’s actions on it as it is the environment’s effects on the organism. Put differently, the perception of reality isnt a matter of representation or imaging of a static outside, but of patterns of activity which modify the outside in specific ways , producing feedback which in turn modifies the organism.

Stage 4: Being itself generates logic The conclusion: Logic isn't a set of rules we invented to think clearly. It's not even something minds discover about reality. Logic is the automatic byproduct of existence itself. The moment anything exists - anything that has potential for differentiation - logical structure emerges naturally. Where there's being, there's logic.

Thoughts? — tom111

I love your explication of logic by way of your 4 stages. My only problem with it is that the very first stage already relies on an unrealized supposition concerning what being and reality are. Where do we get the notion of a being as that which is identical with itself? From ‘reality’ , or as the result of a human construction, an abstraction which idealizes experience in such as way as to invent the notion of pure self-identity? As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

“...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores”(The Visible and the Invisible)

Rather I’m interested in the idea of a blended state, where a belief is seen as consisting of both cognition and feelings.
— Banno

This is a fact rather than an idea. Reason and emotion are not discrete entities. This is a hurdle it will probably take several more decades for people to get over in all academic fields and likely a century more before in bleeds into common public knowledge. — I like sushi

If one is to take this fact seriously, then one has to understand what we call affect (including mood, emotion and feeling) and what we consider Reason (including logic, cognition and representation) as inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon, and not as separable states, such as the cognitive and the non-cognitive.

I think post-modern skepticism re grand narratives, and a more general skepticism of logos's capacity for leading human life, has a larger impact on popular culture that is often acknowledged (through a variety of pathways, particularly its effect on the liberal arts). I'd argue that it is this skepticism that makes truth threating (rather than empowering) for democracy…

Not to mention that Rawls himself is undermined by the advance of skepticism since the 1970s. Even his instrumental, Kantian reasonableness starts looks shaky in the face of today's logos skepticism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you’re going to use the word ‘postmodern’ it might be useful to distinguish political and sociological adoptions of the term from philosophical usages. For a range of thinkers, from Wittgenstein and Husserl to Deleuze and Heidegger, the critique of grand narratives involves anything but skepticism concerning truth. That is to say, for them it is the belief in foundational truth that courts skepticism, and the way beyond such skepticism requires the invocation of a groundless ground, a non-foundational yet determinate notion of truth.

Just to highlight this: I agree, and too often, in authoritarian hands, it turns into "Make X Great Again!" with results we can all observe daily. We, meaning Western democracies, in fact have taken a whole new approach, in roughly the last century, and as a result things are vastly better off for women, poor countries we used to exploit, working people, people of color, and people with illnesses and disabilities — J

:100:

Right, that's a pretty common response, and in line with Fukuyama's argument. Liberalism is inevitable and human nature. I disagree on that obviously. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So do I. There is no political or economic system which is inevitable and optimally reflective of human nature. The nature of human nature is to transform itself via cultural development.

Monarchy and Marxism were no more or less natural than liberalism. When in the course of history one political-economic system replaces another it doesnt mean the previous structure was unnatural , false, unethical or not workable, only that the culture eventually outgrew it. The more successful a cultural order the more thoroughly it transforms the possibilities available to thought and the more effectively it sets itself up for its own surpassing.

Like Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, I foresee a post-liberal order, but this means building upon , while transforming, the insights that allowed liberalism to surpass previous systems of thought. You, by contrast, dont seem to want to build upon liberalism but instead reject it wholesale. This suggests two possibilities to me. The first is that the guiding inspiration for the new order you want to create involves ignoring the past three centuries of liberal thought in favor of religious and philosophical ideas propounded prior to the rise of liberalism and capitalism. The second possibility is that your definition of liberalism is so narrow that you don’t recognize how your own vision fits within the three-century-old spectrum of liberal thought. The first possibility places you somewhere in the vicinity of the Far Right, but I’m not prepared to slap that label on you.

I certainly give you points for imagination. You’ve broadly assessed the modern history of political and economic structures and, rather than aligning yourself with an already existing model, you want to start over with a sweeping new vision, albeit one which draws from ancient and medieval
sources. My first observation about such an approach is that it stems from what I would call an ‘apocalyptic’ interpretation of where we are now. In the apocalyptic view, something is terribly wrong and rotten at the very core of current practices. From your perspective, contemporary politics and economics are unmoored from a proper moral ground, so it is inevitable that the world will drift toward greater and greater moral collapse if it doesn’t change course. There will be more totalitarian and hegemonic repression, ecological disaster, a return to feudalism:

"Just offer a realistic alternative to a totalitarian and now globally hegemonic force." A tough ask! Unfortunately, I think humanity will have to weather the collapse of liberalism and it's attendant ecological disasters before any decisive break is possible. Maybe the God of progress will save us, but I doubt it… What likely comes after liberalism has been described variously as a sort of "techno-feudalism," a combination of technocratic rule and "consent-based" corporate (often patronage-centric) governance for those with the skills of connections to still be "economically viable" in the era of artificial intelligence… what happens when elites no longer want to exploit the people's labor but just see them as a problem/burden to be contained? — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I mentioned, it’s not as if you think there were periods in human history where large swaths of culture practiced approaches to politics and economics grounded in moral rectitude. For you, there was never such a pre-Capitalist, pre-liberal Eden from which humanity was expelled. For
you the only path is forward into a brave new world.

A polis based around a more robust conception of the common good would do many things differently. For instance, the purpose of education would be the development of virtue and happiness, not workforce preparation and enabling people to meet whatever desires they happen to develop. It would probably provide for civil defense through universal citizen military service instead of a standing professional (and increasingly mercenary) army/police force. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For my part, I have never bought into the apocalyptic narrative, the ‘things have gone terribly wrong and we need a whole new approach’ kind of thinking. I suspect such musings have more to do with projections from one’s personal experience of crisis than a neutral assessment of the cultural scene. When writers like Noam Chomsky, Giles Deleuze or David Graeber proclaim their wholesale rejection of modern political and economic culture I read this as their failure to understand important aspects of the relation between human nature and disrcursive practices.

I image how if they were given the power to magically wish into being their preferred social structure it would inevitably evolve into some variant of an already existing system, not due to immoral or coercive forces but because it happens to express what we need and what works for us at present, even if it is always far from perfect, and always in process of reform and modification. With regard to your preferred utopia, I think the political power of the states is more than enough to allow for retreat from secularism where there is enough of a consensus in favor of it, but as far as outright secession from the liberal capitalist state, I don’t think there is anywhere near the appetite for rejection of capitalism as you apparently do. To be honest ,give. your view that we have never had an adequately moral social system, I can’t help but suspect that no utopian plan for humanity that you can invent would relieve you of your sense that human beings are on the wrong track.

When you survive a volcanic eruption, you become something you haven't been before: You become an experienced volcanic eruption survivor. You'll be able to tell great stories about what it's like to experience the heat of hot lava. You may become a teacher, a film maker, an author, a painter ... — Quk

What you remember about the eruption is how you coped with it. The exhilaration comes not from static survival but from the discovery of new resources and skills. The person who now tells stories about their ‘surviving’ the event is not the same person who entered into the experience. They have been transformed by it. To say that any living thing simply ‘survives’ moment to moment is missing the nature of the moment to moment continuity of being alive. It is a continuity that is based on constant change, neither mere self-identical repetition nor random alteration but a being the same differently.

I think they are risks of survival. It's about great adventures. What might top that? — Quk

Survival is boring. Re-invention, becoming something you are not, is exciting and audacious. Nietzsche wrote:

“Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power –: self preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this. – In short, here as elsewhere, watch out for superfluous teleological principles! – such as the drive for preservation…(Beyond Good and Evil)

“Darwin absurdly overestimates the influence of 'external circumstances'; the essential thing about the life process is precisely the tremendous force which shapes, creates form from within, which utilizes and exploits 'external circumstances' ... -that the new forms created from within are not shaped with a purpose in view, but that in the struggle of the parts, it won't be long before a new form begins to relate to a partial usefulness, and then develops more and more completely according to how it is used.” “Everything that lives is exactly what shows most clearly that it does everything possible not to preserve itself but to become more ...” (Last Notebooks)

To wish to preserve oneself is a sign of distress, of a limitation of the truly basic life-instinct, which aims at the expansion of power and in so doing often enough risks and sacrifices self-preservation.

The thing is though, if you pair back all the Manosphere-speak in the book, the decrying of "manginas" and terse formulations of the imperatives of evolutionary psychology in catch-phrases like "beta need and alpha seed" (it is truly atrocious), what you'll find is a view of humanity that isn't that far off mainstream liberal welfare economics, or the more "enlightened liberalism" of guys like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris. It's basically those anthropologies boiled down to their essence and stripped of all social niceties or appeal to sentiment, and then presented in particularly low-brow form. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s easy to attack, but more difficult to lay yourself on the line by committing to a detailed alternative to liberal politics that others can then pick apart. I already know what you’re rejecting. I want to know exactly what it is you’re selling.

The most obviously illiberal thing I know Vought has said is that the US should prioritize Christian migrants. But why is this illiberal? It's not obvious why selecting immigrants who share a faith with the dominant faith of the polity that is accepting migrants is "illiberal" or how exactly it is supposed to constrain the freedom of citizens to have more (or less) co-religionist migrants living amongst them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My father is a Zionist, and when I was 14 he moved the family to Israel with the expectation of settling there permanently. It didn’t work out for various reasons and we returned to the States, but what I learned in the year we spent there was that a democracy based on Jewish nationalism is not a robust democracy. Even if the intent is equal treatment for Jews and non-Jews alike, in practice the biases in favor of Jewish religion and culture translate into the institutionalization of unequal treatment. I’m an atheist , but I would never dream of prioritizing atheist migrants over religious ones, any more than I would prioritize white migrants over people of color simply because whites happen to be the dominant population of the U.S. We tried that for 40 years when strict immigration limits were set in the 1920’s to keep out Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe, as well as Asians, under the pretext that they could not assimilate ‘American’ values.

It's worth considering why, in general, it is not considered damaging to "liberty" to select migrants based on their "economic qualifications " and ability to "grow the economy," but it is considered damaging to "liberty" to select them on the basis of their ability to assimilate to the dominant culture — Count Timothy von Icarus

Frankly, I think we tend to underestimate both the ability of migrants to assimilate to the dominant culture and their ability to contribute to its economy. We undervalue the tremendous motivation involved in choosing to leave one’s home country for a foreign land.

Religion here exists as a carve out, a sui generis space of "private" "spiritual" "faith-based" (as opposed to "evidence-based") belief. Such a view obviously excludes a conception of spiritual goods as precisely those goods that do not diminish when shared. It makes them inherently private and atomized.

It strikes me as one of the paradigmatic features of liberalism. The solution to the problems generated by liberalism is always "more liberalism!" (just more conservative or more progressive). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Everything you’ve said so far makes you sound like a kind of Socialist Christian Nationalist. Maybe I’ve been missing it in your posts, but I don’t get a clear sense of what kind of political system you are advocating for. Is this something you’ve concocted in your own head, inspired by your forays into Aristotle and Medieval theology, or does it exist somewhere else? What I mean is, is there an example of a political system that exists now or has existed in the past somewhere in the world that you think comes close to your alternative to liberalism, are are you spinning out your own utopia in the tradition of half-baked political thinkers like Chomsky and Fisher? Can you point me to contemporary political theorists who articulate a post-liberal political vision that resembles what you have in mind? Would you say that Bernie Sanders’ socialism comes closer to your model than conservative and progressive liberalism? If Sanders were to repackage his socialism with a religious emphasis would that come closer to what you have in mind?

The Claremont Institute is not against liberalism though. I think only left-leaning liberals would tend to see it thus. And that's only because they associate "real liberalism" with their particular brand of progressive liberalism. For instance, Claremont describes itself as a "champion of small government and free markets," the boilerplate pronouncement of right liberalism. Neocons aren't against liberalism; they have so much faith in liberalism that they have tended to embrace rather extreme economic coercion to spread it, or outright use of violence to "force others to be free."

They might be more skeptical about democracy, but then I think anti-democratic sentiment within liberalism is even stronger on the political left these days — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are those who would beg to differ with your assessment of the Claremont Institute as not anti-liberal. Casey Michel , reviewing Katherine Stewart’s book, ‘Money, Lies and God’ writes of the Claremont Institute:

"It is the final group, the “Thinkers,” that presents arguably Stewart’s most insightful sections. These are the figures like Eastman and his allies who posit themselves as the ideological, intellectual class crafting the contours of Trumpism—and identifying the kinds of legal cover Trump can use to dismantle American democracy. Much of this cohort can trace directly back to the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization where Eastman remains a senior fellow. As Stewart points out, it is the Claremont Institute where the “erstwhile reverence for America’s founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany’s fascist period, into material support” for Trumpism. 
The institute’s modus vivendi centers on the “Straussian man in action”—the man who bends history to his own ends, regardless of the consequence and regardless of democratic legitimacy. Stewart writes: 
His mission is to save the republic. He must tell a few lies, yet he is nonetheless a noble liar, at least in his own mind. He acts in the political world, where natural right reigns, and not merely in the legal world where lawyers are supposed to toil. Aware of the crooked timber from which humanity is made, he is prepared to break off whatever branches are needed for the bonfire of liberty.

This core Claremont belief leads to the yearning for a so-called “Red Caesar”—a masculine leader untrammeled by anything like democratic oversight or political pushback, grabbing a society by the throat and forcing it back into a world in which men, and especially white men, are once more restored to the top of America’s sociopolitical hierarchy. Indeed, there is an almost obsessive approach at Claremont to restoring supposed masculinity within American society. Stewart traces this belief system at Claremont—where, she says, all of the board members “appear to be male”—to Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., who wrote a 2006 book called Manliness and “counts as nobility among Claremont’s extended family.” As Mansfield argued, “gender stereotypes are all true”—including, bizarrely, that women would make bad soldiers because “they fear spiders.”
As Stewart details, Mansfield was “far too sophisticated to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries—but in the private sphere, “those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant.” This belief has seeped into Claremont’s bones and manifested itself at Claremont many times over. There is a Claremont Fellow named Jack Murphy who once said that “feminists need rape.” There was another Claremont official who gave a talk titled, “Does Feminism Undermine the Nation?” There is the promotion of work by an author named Coston Alamariu—better known by his nom de plume “Bronze Age Pervert”—who oozes undiluted misogyny and rails against “the gynocracy.” As Alamariu wrote, “It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization”—and the only way forward is to “use Trump as a model of success.”
These Claremont-based “Thinkers” also include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who has contributed to the Claremont publication American Mind and “appeared as an honored guest on Claremont podcasts.” Yarvin’s affections for despotism have been widely reported elsewhere, but it is his historical ignorance that highlights just how shallow the Claremont men’s pretensions at intellectualism truly are. Not only does Yarvin preposterously believe that “European civilization” wasn’t responsible for any genocides before the Holocaust—as if genocides in places like the Africa, North America, or even Ireland and Ukraine never existed—but he further maintains that America now needs to collapse into dictatorship in order to rebuild.  
The “men of Claremont frame their not-so-hidden longing for revenge as a series of ruminations about the rise of an American Caesar,” Stewart writes. “And when that ‘Red Caesar’ arrives, he can thank the oligarchs for funding his rise, and he can thank the rank and file of the movement for supporting him in the name of ‘authenticity.’ But he would owe at least as large a debt of gratitude to the unhappy men of Claremont, those spurned would-be members of the intellectual elite … for explaining just who he is, and why he should go ahead and blow the whole place up.” 

Taken together, Money, Lies, and God paints not only a devastating picture of the state of American democracy (as if one was needed) but one that also contributes texture and context to understanding the current American political moment. The book convincingly argues that, when it comes to figures like Eastman or Leo or any of the men affiliated with the Claremont Institute, calls for dialogue and civility are futile. “In earlier times this may have been sage advice,” Stewart writes. “Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” American democracy isn’t simply dying. It is, as Stewart observes, being murdered."

The axiom remains, but it doesn't ensure the road is without the 'odd bump' - the objective of life remains the same - more order, greater coherence, more expression. Every possible avenue is explored in this drive - even if ultimately unfruitful.

I'm happy to elaborate more on all or any part of this. It's actually a pleasure. — James Dean Conroy

In some respects, I am reminded of Piaget’s genetic epistemology. Consistent with complexity theory, he argues that the equilibration of cognitive structures (via assimilation of events into the system’s schemes and the simultaneous accommodation of those schemes to the novel aspects of what is assimilated) does not lead to a static homeostasis but a progressive equilibration, a spiral-shaped development leading from a weaker to a stronger structure.

You say that non-dogmatic interpretations of religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam can be seen as life-affirming adaptations, as opposed to a political system like Communism. My own view as an atheist is that God-centered faiths, even the more liberal-minded ones, remain attached to certain metaphysical presuppositions, such as the equating of the good with a substantive understanding of God. I wonder if your notion of the goodness of life doesn’t also rely on substantive pre-conceptions of what constitutes adaptive order. Saying that the criterion of what constitutes life-affirming order is simply what survives is one thing, but in a debate with atheists, anarchists, Christian nationalists, the far right and communists over which of these is life-affirming and which isn’t, I imagine you would rely not just on which of these worldviews appears to have died out, but also on the substantive details of your interpretation of the meaning of each of these perspectives.
Even where a range of ideas happen to co-exist, I suspect your model provides you with a method for determining which of them are likely to die out and which will thrive.

What I’m saying is that you seem to be looking for some special substantive content within a system of thought that qualifies it as life-affirming. I, on the other hand, don’t look for anything within a worldview other than its pragmatiic ability to guide a person’s anticipation of events, that is, to enhance their ability make sense of their world so as to make their way through it without too much confusion. Fundamentalist christianity , communism and fascism all provide ways of getting along in the world. I dont think there is some objective, external stance from which one can judge whether they are more-affirming or not, not even the fact that they may die out. If a system like communism vanishes at some point in history, it is only because its adherents latched onto an alternative that their communist practices helped to set the stage for.

Their communism was life-affirming and adaptive in its way, and the approach the adherents replaced it with was both differently adaptive and preferable. The point is it is not up to you or an external model to determine whether what people relying to guide them in understanding their world is life-affirming or not. If they are wedded to it, it is likely what is appropriate for them given their cultural circumstances, and they will embrace something new when they are ready for it. They know what they are ready for better than an abstract axiomatic model can tell them.

You list what is ‘good’ in Life as :
continuity, survival, endurance, resistance of entropy, adaptation, vitality, expansion, drive for order.
Ideas that are ‘true’ are those which survive.

You say that we are capable of recognizing the true political systems , philosophies, sciences. What if we blow ourselves up and the cockroaches , rats and micro-organisms take over the world.
Would you conclude that the biological adaptation we call rational thought was not viable and therefore not conducive to life? In that case, when we say that life is good, we must exclude everything associated with human rationality, since that faculty turned out to be non-adaptive.

You seem to see cultural adaptation as the movement toward a better and better fit between ideas and the way things really are. Hegelian and Marxist dialectic see the evolution of human culture as not simply wiping away earlier ways of thinking in the face of new ideas, but of subsuming those older ways within the newer ways.

Let’s say that a bacterium manages to survive for billions of years with little to no evolution in its structure. Now lets compare the survival of this bacterium over that time-span
to a simultaneously occurring branching of the evolutionary tree proceeding from single-celled creature to fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. If the life of this bacterium is said to be good on the basis of the criterion that it has survived , replicated and preserved its structure over billions of years, is the life of the mammal better because it has not only survived but evolved the complexity of its structure? Is the drive for order represented by complexity better than the drive for order represented by simplicity, even if that added complexity doesn’t lead to any selective advantage with respect to the long-term survival of the simple bacterium?

Let’s say that we reach the ‘end’ of history by coming up with religious, philosophical and scientific accounts that survive till the end of humanity. Are they good because they survive self-identically as living systems till the end of time, or would they be better if they continued to evolve? Does life always have to be getting better and better (more and more complexly organized and diverse) in order to be good, or does its goodness lie strictly in its self-preservation, regardless of whether this involves evolution of complexity? Put differently, is the goodness of the drive for order to be seen as a drive for becoming , or a drive for the homeostasis of prolonged static survival?

I noticed in your writing that you believe growth of complexity and order generally enhances survival, but you don’t seem to make becoming a fundamental principle of life as Nietzsche does. If growth of complexity usually but doesnt always enhance survival then it cannot be treated as a fundamental axiom. Isnt that correct?

A system that ceases to prefer life will self-destruct or fail to reproduce. Therefore, belief in life’s worth isn’t merely cultural or emotional, it’s biologically and structurally enforced. This is not idealism; it’s existential natural selection.
Implication: To endure, life must be biased toward itself. “Life is Good” is not a descriptive claim about all events; it’s an ontological posture life must adopt to remain. — James Dean Conroy

We could say that an organism ‘prefers’ to behave in one way vs another with respect to the environment within. which it is enmeshed. We could instead say that an organism is always already in the midst of interactions with its world. It doesnt need to be driven or motivated by any special internal or external pushes and pulls. A living thing simply is a system of interactions and exchanges with its world , a way of continually making changes to itself that maintains a normative pattern. In any interaction, the organism will always tend to reproduce its previous pattern of interactions. It finds itself acting in this consistent way before it makes a ‘choice’ to prefer this direction. If it encounters an alteration in its world
which interrupts its ability to respond in the usual
way, it will be forced to modify its functions or accommodate the changed world.

Again, it doesn’t ‘prefer’ to accommodate its functioning, it is forced into it. Rather than preferring such accommodation , it resists it, since any living system can accommodate only so much alteration of its normative patterns before disintegrating.
The same is true of human value systems and systems of thought. We always find ourselves ‘preferring’ to interpret the world in ways which can be assimilated into our pre-existing interpretive framework, and resist those aspects of the world which are inconsistent with them. This resistance to the unfamiliar isn’t anti-life, it is a necessary condition for preserving the integrity of our system of understanding, or, as you say, ‘being biased toward itself’ as a workable way to make sense of things.

↪Tom Storm Nietzsche was anti-foundational in the metaphysical sense. But what he longed for was a grounding that wasn’t illusion - something beneath the old truths, not above them.

That’s what I’m aiming at. "Life = Good" isn’t dogma - it’s an ontological necessity. All value, all perspective, all interpretation only exist because life persists to hold them. Even perspectivism needs a perspective - and that perspective is alive — James Dean Conroy

The ground for Nietzsche was the Will to Power, a way of thinking description and prescription, fact and value, the empirical and the ethical together. Life is not a fact preceding and grounding value, it is the essence of becoming and valuing. And rather than privileging the good over the bad, order over chaos, Nietzsche finds affirmation in both.

As Foucault pointed out - absolute moral prescriptions are inherently flawed - the context around people, places and differences - as well as shifting moral landscapes make this a fool's errand - this leads to things like nihilism and endless discussions about "good" and " — James Dean Conroy

If you’re going to be invoking Foucault here I should point out here that he rejects the Humean distinction between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Following Nietzsche, he asserts that there are no strictly non-prescriptive statements. One can find adherents of this thinking among such current philosophers as Joseph Rouse: “ I reject any sharp distinction between descriptive and prescriptive or factual and normative matters.”

“D.C. Schindler’s “The Politics of the Real” is a brilliant addition to the postliberal movement. By understanding liberalism as a distortion of the Christian order, we can recognize it as a sustained war upon reality. And we can understand a true postliberalism as nothing more or less than the New Evangelization, the effort of converting entire social orders to Christianity.”(William Bednarz)

“Liberalism is the political form of evil.”( D.C.Schindler)

The first thing to note is the title of the book itself—The Politics Of The Real—indicates that Schindler thinks Liberalism’s chief defect is it encourages an order of putative “peace” at the expense of the truth of things as they really are. The Liberal order seeks to keep the peace via a very minimal account of what constitutes “the good” precisely in order to avoid the often socially divisive arguments that inevitably accrue to any strong account of the good. Better to bracket concepts like “the good” in order to avoid such conflicts while opening a civil space for free individuals to “privately” hold whatever account of the good they deem appropriate. So long, that is, as they do not seek to impose their idiosyncratic notions on others.

Damon Linker, in a an essay for the NYT, examines a contemporary critique of liberalism going back to Carl Schmitt and taken up by Leo Strauss, the Claremont Institute and Adrian Vermeule:

Carl Schmitt (who died in 1985) developed his most influential ideas during the turbulence and ineffectual governance of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In his view, liberalism has a fatal weakness. Its aversion to violent conflict drives it to smother intense debate with ostensibly neutral procedures that conceal the truth about the nature of politics. That truth is revealed in emergency situations: Politics often requires making existential decisions about the good of the nation — and especially about who should be considered its friend and who its enemy. Liberalism’s supposed incapacity to make such primordial distinctions led Schmitt to the view that there exists “absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”

For Schmitt, someone must serve in the role of sovereign decider. Legislatures aren’t fit for it, because they easily devolve into squabbling factions. Neither are administrative bureaucracies, because they often defer to established rules and debate without resolution. Both contributed to making the later years of Weimar what Schmitt described, in a lecture from 1929, as an “age of neutralizations and depoliticizations.”

Few on the American right today explicitly credit Schmitt for shaping their views of presidential power. That isn’t true of Leo Strauss (who died in 1973), the German-Jewish émigré from Weimar who has influenced several generations of conservative academics and intellectuals in the United States. In his most influential book, “Natural Right and History,” Strauss subtly tames Schmitt’s views of politics, without mentioning him by name, and presents them as the pinnacle of political wisdom.

Strauss sets out a timeless moral standard of what is “intrinsically good or right” in normal situations as the just allocation of benefits and burdens in a society. But there are also “extreme situations” — those in which “the very existence or independence of a society is at stake.” In such situations, the normally valid rules of “natural right” are revealed to be changeable, permitting officeholders to do whatever is required to defend citizens against “possibly an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy.”

The Claremont Institute extended this intellectual line in America. Founded in 1979 in California by four students of Harry Jaffa, who studied with Strauss in the 1940s, the institute has cultivated a distinctive account of American history. It begins with veneration for the country’s founding, which institutionalized timeless moral verities. It continues with reverence for Abraham Lincoln’s displays of statesmanship, both before and during the Civil War, which deepened and perfected the American polity by fulfilling the promise of its founding.

For the next half-century, the United States became the living embodiment of the “best regime” described in the texts of ancient political philosophers.Then came the fall: First Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive movement, and then the New Deal during the Great Depression, introduced the notion of a “living Constitution” that evolves to permit the creation of an administrative state staffed by experts. This form of administrative bureaucratic rule, often aided and abetted by the judicial branch, stifles statesmanship. That’s why Claremont-affiliated scholars have been at the forefront of attempts simultaneously to roll back the administrative state and to consolidate executive power in the office of the president.

Finally, Adrian Vermeule, of Harvard Law School, combines explicit Schmittian influence with a desire to revive and apply elements of medieval political theology to the contemporary understanding of the presidency.

Are there any strands of this thinking you are sympathetic to, and if so, which ones?

Are you familiar with the works of John Hodge, John McMurty and Robert Brem? If not, look them up — James Dean Conroy

I looked up John McMurtry. I can see how your position has been influenced by his work. In attempting to understand the practical value of a broad abstract scheme , I alway look to see how it is applied to real world events. I noticed McMurtry attempting to do this in his article Explaining the Inexplicable: Anatomy of an Atrocity, published in The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America. Here he illustrates his concept of Life Consciousness by claiming that 9/11 was a conspiracy perpetrated by the Bush administration to provide an excuse to invade Iraq and Afghanistan and take their oil. Are you sympathetic to his view?

↪Banno

My impression is that the majority of the people who really support the lobby are thinking with their gut, as everything about trans existence violates taboos, much like homosexuality used to.

The specific taboo with trans women is... they're men... and men are latent predators... so we've got men camouflaged as women... lying on forms to get access to women... who they'll certainly rape with their superior muscles. Which, broadly, is something bad feminists and conservatives can agree on, man bad dangerous woman weak protect. — fdrake

I want to throw out some ideas to complicate the discussion a bit. One could argue that the idea of men as latent predators has less to do with physiological expressions of male sex chromosomes, such as height and strength, than it does with psychological-behavioral characteristics that supposedly distinguish men from women. For instance, according to Google AI, men comprise about 93.2% of the U.S. prison population, while women make up around 6.8%. Some argue that sex-based differences in brain structure explain this wide gap. As the argument goes, males are biologically more prone to aggression, impulsivity and violence than females. We can add to those who put forth this argument some gender researchers who propose that many who identity as gay and lesbian are situated at intermediate points on the masculine-feminine biological spectrum, and many who identify as trans may have brain physiology opposite to their chromosomal sex.

Thus, many gay men may have less masculine and more feminine behavioral traits than typical straight men. And many lesbians may have more masculine traits than typical straight females. Do incarceration rates provide any evidence supporting this hypothesis? Not for gay men, but the statistics concerning incarcerated self-identifying lesbians are intriguing. Approximately one-third of incarcerated women in the US identify as lesbian or bisexual, whereas only 3.4% of the general female population identify as lesbian. Those who adhere to a biological explanation of gender-based behaviors will argue that lesbians as a statistical whole have more masculine traits than the straight female population, including aggressiveness, impulsivity and violence, and this explains their significant over-representation in prisons.

The same reasoning would suggest that as a whole, trans women may have been born with less of the anti-social male-correlated biological traits than straight men, and thus are less of a potential threat to women than the typical straight male.

I wanted to throw these ideas out there, knowing that they can easily be taken apart from many directions, biological as well as social.

Let’s see what Wittgenstein has to say about reason and religious faith.

239. I believe that every human being has two human parents; but Catholics believe that Jesus only had a human mother. And other people might believe that there are human beings with no parents, and give no credence to all the contrary evidence. Catholics believe as well that in certain circumstances a wafer completely changes its nature, and at the same time that all evidence proves
the contrary. And so if Moore said "I know that this is wine and not blood", Catholics would contradict him. (On Certainty)

 In a religious discourse we use such expressions as: “I believe that so and so will happen,” and use them differently to the way in which we use them in science. Although, there is a great temptation to think we do. Because we do talk of evidence, and do talk of evidence by experience.

Father O’Hara is one of those people who make it a question of science. Here we have people who treat this evidence in a different way. They base things on evidence which taken in one way would seem exceedingly flimsy. They base enormous things on this evidence. Am I to say they are unreasonable? I wouldn’t call them unreasonable. I would say, they are certainly not reasonable, that’s obvious. “Unreasonable’ implies, with everyone, rebuke. I want to say: they don’t treat this as a matter of reasonability. Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but it doesn’t pretend to be. What seems to me ludicrous about O’Hara is his making it appear to be reasonable.

We come to an island and we find beliefs there, and certain beliefs we are inclined to call religious. They have sentences, and there are also religious statements. These statements would not just differ in respect to what they
are about. Entirely different connections would make them into religious beliefs, and there can easily be imagined transitions where we wouldn’t know for our life whether to call them religious beliefs or scientific beliefs. You may say they reason wrongly. In certain cases you would say they reason wrongly, meaning they contradict us. In other cases you would say they don’t reason at all, or “It’s an entirely different kind of reasoning.” The first, you would say in the case in which they reason in a similar way to us, and make something corresponding to our blunders, Whether a thing is a blunder or not—it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another. You could also say that where we are reasonable, they are not reasonable—meaning they don’t use ‘reason’ here.

I would definitely call O’Hara unreasonable. I would say, if
this is religious belief, then it’s all superstition. But I would ridicule it, not by saying it is based on insufficient evidence. I would say: here is a man who is cheating himself. You can say: this man is ridiculous because he believes, and bases it on weak reasons. (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief)

…the level of bigotry which glibly states that billions of people are foundationally irrational is not polite, respectable, or reasonable. It is problematic; it is insulting to religious people… — Leontiskos

If it is not reasonable , would you then say that it is without evidence, and therefore irrational?

conservatives can model what liberals think, but liberals have no idea what conservatives think and they think that conservatives are just evil.
— Brendan Golledge

There are two moves made in this statement. First, liberals have no idea what a conservative thought process is or how conservative ideals can be rationally supported. And second, liberals conclude that conservatives are just evil. Both conservatives and liberals are too quick to make this second move, but I see it as more essential to way the left talks to conservatives (or won't talk to conservatives). — Fire Ologist

I think conservatives, liberals and MAGA are all thinking ‘morally’ according to different schemes of understanding. The key word here is understanding, not morality. They all want to do good, but their ways of figuring out how others think differs in its effectiveness at anticipating such behavioral processes. I think of such skills at ‘mindreading’ as products of philosophical worldviews thar develop over human history. In theory, then, we get better and better over the course of cultural evolution at making sense of of each other in ways that allow us to avoid the moral condemnation that comes from utterly failing to grasp how the other sees things. This development can be thought of as subsuming, with each new advance in understanding including within itself the essentials of the previous stage.

I am partial to liberal political approaches, taking on a ‘post-woke’ perspective ( as opposed to the pre-woke perspectives of conservatives and MAGA). Post-woke means I have assimilated the philosophical underpinnings that ground wokism, but move beyond its moralistic blame and finger-pointing. I view my perspective as subsuming the essentials of wokism, and see the progressivism out of which it emerged as subsuming the essentials of conservatism-libertarianism. And I see conservatism ( the socially moderate variety represented by National Review , now called RHINOS) as subsuming the essentials of MAGA. That means that of this whole developmental spectrum of political thought, MAGA is the least well-equipped to make sense of alternative ways of thinking and post-wokism is the best equipped to do so. But if this is the case, then why does it appear that conservatives can model what liberals think better than liberals can model what conservatives think? After all, if liberalism subsumes the essentials of conservatism and goes beyond it, then conservatism should be quite familiar to liberals.

Let me suggest that the issue is less that of understanding conservative positions than it is of not getting why conservatives would want to hold onto what liberals see as outdated, anachronistic, regressive thinking. It would be like visiting with a group of ultra-orthodox jews or an amish community and finding their ways quaintly familiar, a return to an older and simpler time and belief system. But at the same time, there might be puzzlement as to why these people would want to hold onto a worldview that appears from a modern vantage as unenlightened concerning important aspects of how to get along with others without the need to repress difference.

I get along well with my MAGA acquaintances. I understand well where they are coming from, and have no need to condemn them from a moral perspective. But they don’t strike me as very adaptive in their ability to connect with others unlike themselves, to skillfully see the world from the other’s point of view. I have to walk on tiptoe not to say or do the wrong thing. In this way there is a superficial resemblance to the hypersensitivity of wokism, but in the later, the finger-pointing moralism reflects a lack of empathy for those who aren’t able to live up to high standards of mutual understanding and acceptance of difference. In the former, the standards of human conduct are much lower; humans are seen as basically fortresses of selfishness. The healthy social sphere is expected to be dominated more by zero-sum competition and rivalry than by cooperation, which is to be approached with suspicion and cynicism.

The fact that fep can apply to anything also is perfectly consistent with embodied and extended cognition, especially when you consider that the enactive nature of fep as instantiated by Markov blankets with active states can be nested - i.e. Markov Blankets within Markov blankets - cells, neural populations, brains, social systems, eco-niches, etc, etc. — Apustimelogist

I am far from an expert on fep, but I was impressed by this summary, which sounds consistent with what you wrote.

In the contrasts between Predictive coding Predictive processing and Predictive engagement, there are not just vocabulary differences; there is a basic conceptual problem about how the different models understand brain function. These seem to be philosophical differences more than neuroscientific ones—differences that concern our understanding of concepts like representation, inference, embodiment, engagement, attunement, affordance, etc. We think that further progress on these issues will depend to some extent on sorting out the very basic issue of defining the unit of explanation (brain vs. brain-body-environment) and controversies about the vocabulary of the explanans. If, for example, for an enactivist PE account, inference and representation are not key parts of the explanans, it needs to provide further explanation of how precisely processes like adjustment, attunement, and accommodation work as part of predictive engagement.

Notwithstanding the strong contrasts, there is clearly some common ground on which the differences among predictive models can be clarified (Active inference, enactivism and the hermeneutics of social cognition, Shaun Gallagher and Micah Allen 2016).

What is "free active inference"? Neither would I say these views are having a debate; they are perfectly mutually consistent. One thing I like about active inference is that emphasis on formality helps clarify, imo, some of these philosophical positions on biology that are often stated by other authors in ways which can comes across as vague or imprecise or over-inflated. — Apustimelogist

Free energy. Active inference and enactivism used to be farther apart than they are now. There are still significant conceptual differences between them.

What I found quite compelling is how he frames the evolving relationship between philosophy and science. According to him, rapid advances in neuroscience and technology, such as human enhancement, AI, and the emergence of human-machine hybrids, are not just changing our world, they are also challenging the very foundations of how we understand human nature. As a result, philosophers should also — SunLoki

My background is in both cognitive science and philosophy. I view science as applied philosophy. As such, new approaches in a field like neuroscience harbor philosophical presuppositions that , proceeding as scientists, they are not in a position to bring out into the light and examine. Take the debate between free energy active inference and embodied enactivist approaches in neuroscience. While the neuroscience is new the philosophical thinking they rely on is 50-100 years old (phenomenology, pragmatism, hermeneutics).

Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. I’m more persuaded by arguments like this:

What is this supposed to be, some sort of guilt by association argument? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t know enough about yours politics to situate your critique of liberalism on a left-right spectrum. Maybe you can help. Did you think that Pope Francis was too liberal? What are your thoughts on the ideas coming out of the Claremont Institute? Are they generally to the right of your position on most issues, or do you find yourself in agreement with them on most things?

And in the many posts of yours I have read have never seen you actually try to argue for the claims that seem to lead to this position, e.g. that all intelligibility must be situated in/emerge from a specific language game/metaphysics — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here ya go:

I don't think we can distinguish between prescriptive and descriptive orientations, or between an anormative characterization of how things are and the normative significance of them. Elsewhere, I reject that distinction as a more encompassing Fourth Dogma of Empiricism, which encompasses the dogmas of analyticity, reductionism, and
conceptual scheming that Quine and Davidson identified. Recognizing that we always belong amid a conceptual field is not a separate determination from
understanding our situation within that field. It is an aspect OF the latter recognition, although one we are often not attentive to, and that aspect is common to different normative orientations within that more-or-less shared
conceptual field.

Remember that we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration. People always do have some at least implicit conception of what is at issue in their various performances and what is at stake in the resolution of those issues. They understand their situation in a particular way that takes the form of an ability to live a life within it, a practical grasp of what it makes sense to do, of how to do that, and of what would amount to success or failure in those terms. Such an understanding governs all efforts to work out that understanding by living our lives in particular ways. (Joseph Rouse)

Here’s a recent paper of mine on the subject.

https://www.academia.edu/124753599/Whos_to_Blame_for_Injustice_Joseph_Rouses_Poststructuralist_Critique_of_Enactivist_Ethics

The level of polarization today is not what it was 30-40 years ago. What changed? It seems to me that the rhetoric on the left and right has become more aggressive and tribalistic and that is what is driving the polarization.

Why do we even bother listening to what politicians say in the first place when they only speak in generalities and platitudes. We can predict what a Democrat or Republican will say on either side of the issue, or what they will say about each other. I no longer care what a politician says. I only care about what they do, which is often different from what they say. — Harry Hindu

We could rid of every politician in the country and it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on the polarized split between worldviews. This is not about what politicians or political parties say. It is about fundamental differences in philosophical outlook. One doesnt derive such an outlook from politicians. It is formed through interactions within one’s family and social milieu.

For instance, when I get into a debate with a Republican on the topic of freedom of religion and rejecting the idea of prayer in public schools, I'm accused of being a leftists. When I get into a debate with a Democrat on the topic of free speech and women's rights and transgenderism, I'm accused of being a right-winger. I'm an independent Libertarian. It's as if there is no middle ground for these people. Everything is black and white — Harry Hindu

I know that principled conservatives of the socially moderate William Buckley-National Review strand of republicanism (George Will, David Frum, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Lynn Cheney, Peter Wehner, etc) were pushed out of the ‘new’ populist republican party.
If that makes MAGA populism extreme, it also means that a significant minority of the country identifies with it to some extent.
Which places your moderate libertarianism in a big messy tent alongside the other groups who oppose MAGA, which includes RHINO republicans, moderate and progressive democrats and Sanders-style socialists. I imagine you share the most with RHINO republicans and perhaps some moderate democrats. Plenty of democrats were never fully onboard wokism, and simply tolerated it because they supported other elements the party stands for. The lesson is that when the extreme ends of the political spectrum are pushed as far apart as they are now, it shrinks the middle. And it wasn’t the politicians who did the pushing, it was the people.

I do think that there are people that are members of the parties that are not extremists. They may be life-long Republicans or Democrats, but the parties have changed with many claiming that they did not leave the party, the party left them. If you want to limit extremism then either stay and fight for the moderate mantra in your party, or just abolish political parties. — Harry Hindu

You focus on political parties, but I think they are just reflecting the polarization I just described in the general population. I have no reason to expect members of Congress to start singing kumbaya together until small town and big city America begin to see the world in ways that are more alike.

Correct. When the moderates leave your party all that is left are the extremists. — Harry Hindu

I don’t think the people in Massachusetts and Florida, California and Oklahoma ( London and rural England) are extremists if that implies that their views are irrational, objectively ‘wrong’ or unjustifiable. It’s a matter of traditionalists vs much newer ways of thinking. The rural
areas and lower population density cities have changed their traditional views more slowly than those of the large cities, particularly since the 1960’s social revolution, to the point that each speaks a different language and is unrecognizable to the other.

I object to the left/right paradigm in general because left and right are so nearly identical in their underlying philosophies.
— NOS4A2
Exactly. Their shared underlying philosophy is authoritarianism.


No, it wasn't always this way.
— BC
Would you say that it started getting worse when their numbers started declining and the number of independents and moderates started growing? It's as if they are seeing the demise of the political left and right and are now engaging in underhanded and manipulative tactics in a vain attempt to hold on to their dwindling flock of followers. — Harry Hindu

I would think that by definition a polarized social and political environment implies that there is such a wide gap between the ways differing communities look at the world that it becomes impossible for the warring groups to meet each other at a moderate center.

I am far from alone in only recently discovering that childhood friends, relatives, acquaintances from the neighborhoods adhere to political views that are profoundly alien to my ways of thinking. My niece was born and raised in Orlando, Florida , went to college and graduate school out of state, and a few years ago moved back to Orlando with her husband. They decide they had to leave Orlando because the political atmosphere had become so oppressively right wing. They are far from political activists. On the contrary, in any large northern city they would be considered middle of the road. Meanwhile a friend of mine is considering leaving the Chicago area because he is so alienated by the generally left-leaning perspectives of those he deals with. Are you telling me you don’t have experiences on your own like this to share?

t leftists have a lower level of moral development than conservatives — Brendan Golledge

Hey Brendan, just curious. Would you extend this moral
superiority to Trump or just to his MAGA followers?

There is more in this post than most commenters are going to give it. But I can already see from the one response, people are not going to be even partially fair to an view-from-above post like this. A shame. — AmadeusD

…the left has no genuine moral beliefs; all their beliefs are only verbally espoused in order to try to win the approval of other leftists. I think MAGA is in the conventional stage of morality, which is concerned with law and order…

This study would seem to be consistent with the idea I just described that leftists have a lower level of moral development than conservatives. — Brendan Golledge

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the image of Brendan sitting in the middle of a group of MAGA supporters and saying to himself “Gee, these people are so much more morally developed than leftists!”.

State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.

Such a sentiment could be used to justify practically anything though, right? For instance, the people picked Trump, and they picked him despite his obviously extreme authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for the rule of law. They picked pill mill doctors and opiates. They picked mass incarceration as a solution to opiates — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why shouldn’t it justify anything? What other authority have you got to invoke to justify or condemn a society? Is there some sovereign, sideways-on or god’s-eye perspective that hovers above the fray of messy, practical political
engagement? We can’t climb outside of our contingent societal norms to sit in judgement of them. The judgements belong to the contingent normative field itself.

The dictator Nayib Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin American history. Is this the result of a successful propaganda campaign, or do his many supporters recognize and endorse what he is? Should we condemn that society for not being prepared for the task of embracing a democratic political system of robust checks and balances, or might we instead recognize that they must discover for themselves , through trial and error, its advantages?

Yet if it was true that state action reflects community preferences, how exactly do you explain simultaneous rioting in most urban centers over the infamies of American police in 2020? Has the "market and people" spoken here? And is it obvious that if "the market (people) want it," it's a good thing? Have the American people also spoken in favor of the private health insurance system? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I consider BLM in many respects a ‘boutique’ movement, whose principles reflect the latest in academic theory. This in part may explain why it was embraced so rapidly by highly educated , wealthy liberals in places like Chicago’s north side and posh north shore suburbs, but may have resonated less well within the inner city black neighborhoods that were the alleged focus of the protests. For instance, most residents of the most crime-ridden communities wanted greater police presence (albeit less trigger-happy) rather than a defunding of the police.
Large urban centers like New York and Chicago are split politically in ways not dissimilar to the red-blue nationwide divide, although this is covered over to an extent by the fact that the vast majority of blacks still vote democratic.
Poorer communities and those with large concentrations of immigrants from places like Africa, Mexico and China skew socially conservative, which may explain how a Trump-supporting major like Eric Adams was elected in New York.

the liberal individual isn't actually some atomized super human shedding their need for community, they just force the state to force others to provide them what they need to be atomized individuals in a market context.

And if some people in their nation want to choose a more communitarian system? "Too bad, they still must pay for us to have the liberal system first and can use what they have left over," has been the general liberal solution.

This is why the left/right tension within liberalism tends to be about the state doing more or less to help people be atomized individuals by taking some people's property to enable others to be more atomized. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your notion of the communitarian is just the flip side of the individualist atomism you oppose. Rather than analyzing the nature of community as an additive composite of sovereign individuals, you invest the community with sovereign moral attributes derived not from actual interactions among socially shapes selves but from an already assumed set of ethical absolutes. You apply these context-independent norms to your notion of the communitarian and then force it onto the individual.
Timothy, I am not an atom, and neither is my community. Neither how I ought to act as an individual nor how the community ought to act can be ascertained in advance , but only emerges as a function of the actual ongoing reciprocal interactions of each of us with each other. The role of the State and the market reflect the needs that emerge out of these interactions, such as the need to nurture community based on intertwined interests rather rely on blood ties and the oppressive formal obligations that tend to go along with it. This historically recent changes in attitude concerning the centrality of the family is not the triumph of the ideology of the atomized individual, but the transition from absolutizing concepts of community to discursive, practice-based accounts.

As to the ‘proselytizing’ nature of liberalism, it’s not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism

Whenever you complain about "Platonic" metaphysics and routinely suggest postmodern ones, is this not proselytizing? What makes it different? It seems the only difference here is that we are in disagreement about how great liberalism is. If offering a critique at all "proselytizing?"

Of course I think there is something wrong at the core of liberalism. I said it's vision on human liberty is extremely myopic. Can one not disagree with liberalism's voluntarist vision of freedom? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The difference between my defense of postmodernism and your critique of liberalism is that I would never dream of passing judgement on any political system put into practice by a society from a vantage outside of the normative
dynamics at play within that society. Attacks on liberalism in the U.S. amounts to a clash between rival communities. If I choose sides and defend liberalism, I am not telling
the community critical of liberalism that they should not be constructing their political system in the way that makes sense to them, and justifying this on some objective truth that I think they are ignoring or can’t see. Rather, I can offer them my alternative and let them determine if and how they can incorporate it into their thinking.

This also ignores that sectoral shift is far less damaging when it happens slowly or that neo-liberal policy also allowed a massive influx of immigration to further drive down wages paired with the shock of off-shoring. New immigration was unpopular and couldn't be passed as a law, so they just stopped enforcing the rule of law on this issue, leading to a substantial share of the population lacking legal status so that they could also serve as a more easily exploitable underclass. The results of globalization and migration absolutely hammered unions, which is why unionization collapsed instead of spreading into the service sector — Count Timothy von Icarus

Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. I’m more persuaded by arguments like this:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/immigrants-didnt-kill-your-union/

I do find your opinions interesting though, because you're statements, particularly on a permanent underclass, have often reminded me a lot of Charles Murray, but obviously the underlying philosophical assumptions are quite different. The judgements on the fate of the underclass seem very much in the vein that celebrates to "exceptional individual" one finds in liberal theorist like Mill (On the topic of Mill, he, like Locke, is another liberal who justified enslaving people who were not economically productive enough to liberate them from low consumption). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not exceptional individuals, like Musk’s technocratic elite, that drives prosperity. It’s collective, coordinated, large -scale production drawing on strengths and weakness of diverse working communities. Inequities that result need to be addressed by slowing down the pace of change to minimize the disruptive consequences of layoffs, investing in job training and education, using tariffs selectively in combination with reinvestment in plants, strengthening the safety net for those struggling to adapt to these changes (healthcare, child care, addiction and suicide counseling , possibly a universal guaranteed income). Are these not approaches that the progressive end of liberalism has supported? Is there some alternative outside of progressivism that has better ideas? Bernie Sanders-style
socialism?

Anyhow, I don't see how one could possibly separate equality from reflexive freedom, or freedom as self-governance. For instance, you cannot have a equal society with a recalcitrant, morally bankrupt leadership class. They will tend to destroy what they rule over, in part because they are unhappy. Donald Trump, for instance, strikes me as a man ruled over by his passions and appetites, a vice addled man who cannot even follow through on the (very few) good intuitions he has because of a lack of self-discipline. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his later years, Foucault wrote a lot about self-governance, going back to Romans like Seneca and his practices of the self. Of course, what Foucault was after was the idea of self as a work of art, and practices of the self directed toward the aim of continual self’s
re-invention.
Trump’s idea of freedom is the freedom of the self from accommodating the needs of others, from having to encounter dissent of any kind. This manifests itself as an impulse of destruction, the limiting of any outside impediment to the exercise of the will. But the power of the will emanates not from some inner reserve but from its connection to the social milieu which feeds it and replenishes it. Cutting the will off from its wellspring reduces it to idiocy, which is what we’re witnessing now.

But . . . flawed as it is, the Rawlsian viewpoint is about fairness, understood as neutrality or impartiality. It would be ludicrously wrong to say that Rawls "wasn't trying to be neutral" or "didn't care about fairness." If we could somehow, per impossibile, generate a re-deal of human affairs based on his original position, it would almost certainly be fairer than what we have now -- and more neutral, too — J

Yep, the quote is from Gallagher’s recent book, Action and Interaction. His notion of justice departs from Rawls in not being grounded in neutrality or fairness. For him, the sense of justice is prior to that of fairness. Given that Gallagher’s perspective is a cognitive enactivism informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, he sees justice more in terms of openness to the autonomy of the other than elimination of bias. He traces the sense of justice back to playful interactions among other animals.

If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution…

Justice, like autonomy, is relational. I cannot be just or unjust on my own. So an action is just or unjust only in the way it fits into the arrangements of intersubjective and social interactions.” “Justice consists in those arrangements that maximize compound, relational autonomy in our practices.” The autonomy of the interaction itself depends on maintaining the autonomy of both individuals. Justice (like friendship) involves fostering this plurality of autonomies (this compound autonomy); it is a positive arrangement that instantiates or maintains some degree of compound relational autonomy.”“Accordingly, although one can still talk of individuals who engage in the interaction, a full account of such interaction is not reducible to mechanisms at work in the individuals qua individuals.”

The ‘neutral’ is never divorced from some stance or other arising from the messy business of assessing competing claims to validity within a diverse community.
— Joshs

Yes, so all the more reason not to saddle Rawlsians with a version of "neutrality" they never claimed to exemplify. Their neutrality is associated with a stance, as is yours, as is Rorty's, as is mine. — J

What do you make of the version of neutrality that Axel Honneth and Shaun Gallagher are saddling Rawls with?

Justice is, accordingly, equated with just distribution. As Honneth indicates, however, what counts as just distribution is, according to such theories, to be determined by some procedural schema. One can easily think of Rawls’ notion of the original position as such a procedure through which a group of seemingly autonomous individuals come to determine the principles of distribution through a voting procedure. Here we start to see that, from the perspective of someone like Rawls, the idea of embodied, enactive interactions that characterize our everyday primary and secondary intersubjective encounters with others are seemingly part of the problem rather than a source of a solution. In the original position, precisely the details of embodied engagement and situated social contexts are to be bracketed by dropping a veil of ignorance around the participants. To arrive at a completely neutral judgment about distribution we need to hide all details, not only about who our neighbors are, but also about who we are—what our embodiment is like.

Are we tall or short? Strong or weak? Are we white or black or some other color? Are we male or female? Are we fully abled? Can we stand up and gesture? Do we believe X or Y or Z? Do we have any special social status? Do we engage in religious practice? Do we belong to specific institutions? All of these details that may shape our real intersubjective interactions are set aside, neutralized, in order to guarantee fairness. The principles of justice that emerge from this arrangement would seemingly be perfectly appropriate for disembodied, non-social beings.
Honneth points to another issue. The idea that we are looking for a distribution schema at all presupposes that we have a conception of which aims and goods are
worth pursuing, and such goods are likely to include not just material things, but other kinds of arrangements about which we will have learned only through intersubjective, social interactions. To suggest that distribution some­how captures all aspects of value is similar to the reduction of a good life to economic utility. More basically, Honneth suggests, the idea that we are able to pursue worthy ends already presupposes the idea of autonomy. But autonomy is not something that can be bestowed by a distribution of goods or opportunities.

In this way, all understanding is normative, defining its own limits of the acceptable and intelligible.
— Joshs

That's true, but this normativity isn't ethical in nature. As you say, it's a matter of expectations. — frank

That depends on how broadly one defines the ethical. Most of us think of ethics in relation to the expectations we have of each other’s conduct. Specifically, ethical situations are defined in proximity to social engagements where blame and anger can be triggered. We find the other morally culpable when they violate our expectations and fail to live up to our standards of engagement. We believe they knew better than to do what they did, that they fell under the sway of nefarious motives. But is also possible or to conceive of ethical ideals which don’t rest on notions of injustice and blame.

↪Joshs
He's expressing Schopenhauer's pessimism. He's saying consciousness itself is dependent on dissatisfaction. The only place where wholeness and perfection exist is in oblivion. — frank

Except that Nietzsche is no pessimist. I was being lazy in throwing that quote out there. I should have explained metaphysical oughts myself. A metaphysical, theoretical or
perceptual interpretation about an aspect of the world commits itself to certain expectations about the way things should be. What lies outside of the range of convenience of that interpretive understanding may not be seen all, it may be seen as confused or non-sensical, or it may be construed in social terms as an ethical violation of accepted standards. In this way, all understanding is normative, defining its own limits of the acceptable and intelligible. The ‘neutral’ is never divorced from some stance or other arising from the messy business of assessing competing claims to validity within a diverse community. It is my notion of the neutral or your notion of the neutral or their notion of the neutral, but there is no sideways on viewpoint to retreat to.

I recognize very well the juxtaposition you point out, and so does the tradition -- I simply don't find it scandalous in the way that you do… It's you, not Rawls, who claims that this carries with it the idea that "such notions of the objective, the equal, the neutral, are secular offshoots of religious thought." If that is indeed true, then perhaps the liberal project was always incoherent. — J

It’s not scandalous, it’s not incorrect and it’s not incoherent. But it is amenable to a deconstructive analysis laying bare hidden presuppositions. Whether you think the Rawlian approach is a secular offshoot of religious thinking depends on how narrowly you want to define religion. If you take Heidegger’s broader vantage, the platonism of Rawlian liberalism qualifies it as Ontotheology. But then of course he thinks the entire Western philosophical tradition up through Hegel and Nietzsche is ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence.