If the method of validation is grounded on a set of norms and beliefs, such norms and beliefs can not be refuted, since the refutation must presuppose them (like Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions). But if we do not share such norms and beliefs, and they do not ground our system of validation then of course we can refute such norms and beliefs — neomac

If another group’s norms and beliefs don’t ground our system of validation, then we can’t refute those norms and beliefs because we won’t be able to understand them. Refutation only makes sense when it is based on normative criteria provided by the same Wittgensteinian hinge proposition as that which is to be refuted.

↪Joshs I see. Yes, we can certainly just reject his premises and standpoint. I wonder, though, whether you're able to accept them for the sake of argument, and help us see whether the argument goes through? If that doesn't interest you, no worries. — J

Williams’s position is fallibilist. He rejects the view from nowhere. There may be an absolute reality but we don’t have to claim that our philosophical accounts of this absolute can themselves be known absolutely in order to make progress in our understanding of reality. We can do this through local, embodied and situated practical inquiries.

We would like some sort of absolute knowledge, a View from Nowhere that will transcend “local interpretative predispositions.” But what if we accept the idea that science aims to provide that knowledge, and may be qualified to do it? What does that leave for philosophy to do? Williams says we should then regard philosophy as one of the social sciences, which do not attempt or claim that kind of transcendence. — J

Neither science nor philosophy provide a view from nowhere, but what Williams has done is to take applied and derivative thinking (empiricism) and mistake it for a more fundamental and grounding perspective (philosophy).

We can be subjected to all manner of physical pain from non-human causes, and yet never develop the depression that results from abuse. Why not? Because at the core of the depression lie unanswered questions concerning why the abuser did what they did. Why did they choose you? Does the fact that they targeted you speak to something broken, unworthy or unlovable in you, that you are to blame for their actions? If they were a family member, how can you trust society in general if you can’t even trust the people closest to you? Because these questions seem so overwhelmingly difficult to answer, there is a risk that we give up trying, and run instead to sources of consolation.

But there are things we know about abuse, such as that they run in families and can be passed down through generations. This tells us that there are patterns of thinking resistant to insights that can break the chain of abuse. One of these patterns involves translating all of one’s unanswered questions into bitter resentment toward the world and the need to punish those closest to one. In its extreme form, this pattern of thinking rationalizes that even someone is my own child, they must be culpable and deserving of rejection.

The best chance of stopping the cycle of dysfunctional relationships and the accompanying self-loathing is, if not to forgive others, then at least to remain open to insights about the perpetrators of abuse that can reduce this self-loathing. Forgiving oneself here is more important than forgiving others. Whether one prefers to achieve these insights in the form of psychology, philosophy or literature, if they do no more than reinforce a sense of victimization, then they will leave you imprisoned in your own anger.

We already live in a country with laws against discrimination. If you feel you were discriminated against, then you have paths you can take - there is even financial legal aid available for those that qualify. — Harry Hindu

That doesn’t seem to be enough for ceo’s of many corporations. Even while Trump is actively dismantling dei , many ceo’s are maintaining or even strengthening their DEI commitments. Let’s see what their reasons may be.

While the United States has comprehensive anti-discrimination laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these legal frameworks have significant limitations that make them inadequate for creating truly inclusive workplaces:

Anti-discrimination laws primarily address overt discrimination after it occurs, rather than preventing systemic biases or creating equitable systems . The current enforcement system places the primary responsibility for enforcing anti-discrimination laws on individual workers, who must file complaints with their employer or a government agency. The complaint-driven system creates insurmountable hurdles for workers due to vast information and resource asymmetries between employers and employees .

Workers often fear retaliation or lack the resources to pursue legal action. Anti-discrimination laws also struggle to address subtle, often unintentional discriminatory behaviors that create hostile work environments but may not meet the legal threshold for discrimination. Many vulnerable workers are excluded from protections due to employer size exemptions in anti-discrimination laws . And the law focuses on proving discrete acts of discrimination rather than addressing systemic inequities in hiring, promotion, and compensation practices.

Many studies and corporate leaders cite DEI as a driver of business success. Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean .Costco's board emphasized that their DEI efforts "enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed" . Delta Air Lines maintains that DEI "is about talent, and that's been our focus... critical to our business" . Microsoft's chief diversity officer highlighted that "a workforce strengthened by many perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds is critical to our innovation" .

Gen Z workers prioritize DEI - with one in two refusing to work at companies without diverse leadership - so maintaining these programs is crucial for talent pipelines. Ben & Jerry's warned that companies bowing to political pressure "will become increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace and will ultimately be judged as having been on the wrong side of history" .

Apple's board argued that abolishing DEI would "restrict Apple's ability to manage its own ordinary business operations, people and teams, and business strategies". Corporate Knights notes that "DEI isn't about optics - it's about survival," with resilient companies embedding inclusion deeply into their cultures.
.

I'd be interested in reading those writings of his, if you'd spare a reference for the best place to start. — Moliere

Here are some places to start:

Depression, Guilt and Emotional Depth
https://philosophyofdepression.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/guiltpaperjune2010.pdf

Experiences of Depression

The Phenomenology of Depression and the Nature of Empathy
https://www.academia.edu/3649407/The_Phenomenology_of_Depression_and_the_Nature_of_Empathy

Recommendations for how to do this? — Tom Storm

Kelly provides various techniques that help us
1) loosen our failing schemes without abruptly abandoning them and leaving us in emotional chaos.
2) experiment with alternative schemes, trying them on for size. One way to do this is to take on a role, like an actor would. The technique is minimally threatening because the person can remind themselves that it is ‘only’ a role, and if it turns out not to useful they can abandon it.
3) Once a new scheme has been formed in a loose and sketchy way, one can begin to tighten it, testing it out in different real-life situations for consistency.

On the other hand true depression is a serious and debilitating illness and probably requires treatment and the right support.
— Tom Storm

Can that treatment be found in philosophical writings or literature? Is there a possibility to understand depression at all? Because I feel that depression is very connected to existentialism and the suffering of why life is often incomprehensible — javi2541997

Others here have mentioned CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and its relation to stoicism). I want to point out the commonalities with phenomenology. For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe has written extensively about depression from a vantage that draws from Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger as well as embodied cognitive theory. Ratcliffe discusses the personal accounts of depression of such writers as Sylvia Plath and William Styron. What he concluded from these accounts is that depression is not just about feelings of despair but the loss of the ability ton discern salience and relevance in the world.

The metaphor of imprisonment is often used to describe depression, and it is easy to see why. The sufferer is irrevocably isolated from others, cut off from all sense of practical significance, and faces a future that takes the form of an all-enveloping threat before which she is powerless. World experience as a whole is akin to a form of incarceration. One of the most famous state-ments of this appears in Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar:

“wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (1966, p.178). Solomon (2001, p.66), recalling Plath, describes the experience as like being “encaged in Lucite, like one of those butterflies trapped forever in the thick transparency of a paperweight”, and Styron (2001, p.49) compares it to “the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely over-heated room”. The theme of being enclosed crops up in nearly every report; the sufferer is trapped behind a wall or a sheet of unbreakable glass, stuck in a hole, or wrapped up in some material (Rowe, 1978, p.30). This enclosure is always oppressive, like drowning, suffocation or inescapa-ble darkness (Karp, 1996, p.28). The recurrent themes of imprisonment, darkness and being trapped do not convey a loss of physical space but instead, I suggest, of possibility space.

Our experiences ordinarily include a sense that things could be otherwise in signi-ficant ways. Hence they also incorporate a sense of their own contingency, an appreciation that one's current view on the world does not encompass all that the world has to offer. In depression, there is a loss of the possibilities that would have allowed the sufferer to appreciate the contingency of her predica-ment. There is no sense that things could be otherwise in any consequential way. Hence the depression itself is no longer experienced as a transitory state, a way of feeling, but as something from with recovery is impossible, a way of being from which there is no escape. This also amounts to a change in the experience of time. Without any practical orientation towards salient future possibilities, the dynamic between past, present and future that people gener-ally take for granted is replaced by a predicament that seems eternal.

One of the pioneers of this approach was psychologist George Kelly, who characterized depression as the loss of a sense of coherent belonging with respect to others. In order to maintain a healthy core sense of self as competent and connected with others, one must rely on effective and reliable ways of constructing bonds of trust and understanding between oneself and others. When that compass ceases to be effective at insuring such belonging, events lose what gives them their overarching coherence , salience and significance, and we drift though a fog of meaninglessness until we can reconstruct a new compass on the basis of which we can relate intimately with others.

↪Joshs

Nature isn't equitable. The problem with these DEI initiatives is that they focus on limited intersectionalities in a world with countless intersectionalities. It creates resentment and prompts the excluded to ask, "Why aren't my intersectional identities being addressed?" And then there's the matter of weighing them up and comparing them - an impossible task.

Come to think of it, even if we were all the same race and all from the same class, I don't believe we'd have made any progress towards genuine equity — BitconnectCarlos

What we want to keep , and will keep, from concepts like intersectionality and implicit bias, is that there is no such thing as a neutral playing field because we implicitly prefer what we are familiar with, and thus what is most intelligible to us. When one group dominates the other on the basis of numbers, wealth or political power, this preference will lead to stuctures which ingrain and perpetuate the biases. The best we can do is recognize that we are prone to such biases based on lack of contact and familiarity with other groups, and strive to increase opportunities for mutual contact and reciprocal interaction through policies that encourage inclusiveness. It looks like DEI in some form or other is here to stay, since even when the government attempts to ban it, companies re-establish it under different names because they find it strengthens competitiveness and innovation.

Identity politics focuses on the characteristics of individuals that the individual, nor society, had no hand in making - genetics. People that criticize identity politics focus more on defining people by the characteristic of their actions, not their biology. One might say that a racist nation, like the U.S. in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, was a society based on identity politics - treating people differently based on the color of their skin and their sex. The U.S. has evolved since then, but it appears that there are some that want to take us backwards by pushing the pendulum back to the opposite extreme - where another group receives special treatment at the expense of others to make up for the way things were while ignoring how things are now — Harry Hindu

I’m sure you’re aware of how the left might critique this view, but let me mention the main points. First, Identity politics isn’t just about biology but also about historical and systemic power imbalances based on culture-based differences in behavior.

You say people should be judged by actions, not biology (implying we live in a meritocracy, but if systemic biases exist (e.g., school funding disparities, hiring discrimination), then judging people purely on "actions" ignores **unequal starting points. For instance, a poor student who works hard may still have fewer opportunities than a wealthy legacy student at Harvard, and a blacknman with the same resume as a white man is 50% less likely* to get a callback (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023).

You argue that modern identity politics is a pendulum swing to the opposite extreme of historical racism/sexism, but most modern identity-based movements seek equity, not supremacy. Reparations or diversity initiatives aim to reduce disparities, not establish a new hierarchy.

Two things: first the diagnosis of depression is separate from the emotion of sadness and therefore the OP is akin to asking about the philosophical perspectives on diabetes. — LuckyR

Yes, but the diagnosis of depression gets its sense form a set of grounding psychological hyptheses, and one can then delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the psychological theory.

And note what I said about the way social analyses of the left become an accepted part of the conversation in the very resistance of the right. Something like lgbtq is now a fixity, or "rainbow coalition," even if it is prefaced with "so called" by the opposition. — Astrophel

This reminds me of Foucault’s research showing that the Victorian era, which many see as a time of the repression of sex , was also time of incessant talking about and interest in sex. The repression of sex and obsession with it went together. The sexual revolution, then, was not simply a liberation from an anti-sex position but a furthering of a sex-oriented culture established in Victorianism.

“Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not speak
of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence. Censorship. Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries with their continual transformations, things appear in a very different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion.”

Suppose we put two identical nothings side by side and assert a difference between them. We could write it like {|}. No jokers to the left, no clowns to the right, but here I am. Now we have something, we can put to the left of nothing {{|} | } or the right of nothing { | {|}}. And that's how you make 0, 1, and -1, as surreal numbers. Then you can reverberate to infinity and beyond. — GrahamJ

Notice that you start with the assumption that 2 entities are identical on some qualitative basis, even if that basis is merely imagined. Then you place them side by side, which allows you to count each of them as instances of the quality they share ( they comprise 2 nothings). Deleuze is saying that when we think we are generating a qualitative identity, or two instances of that identity, we are actually transforming the qualitative sense of the first as we arrive at the second. So there are in fact no two instances of a single qualitative meaning, whether we call it nothing or something. ‘Nothing’ is not a neutral placeholder, because there is no such thing. Mathematical was developed to apply to self-identical objects, and so presupposes the existence of these qualitatively self-identical objects. Deleuze argues that extensive calculations of self-identical quality is an illusory surface effect of what he calls intensive quantity, or just intensity.

“An intensity, for example, is not composed of addable and displaceable magnitudes: a temperature is not the sum of two smaller temperatures, a speed is not the sum of two smaller speeds. Since each intensity is itself a difference, it divides according to an order in which each term of the division differs in nature from the others. Distance is therefore a set of ordered differences, in other words, differences that are enveloped in one another in such a way that it is possible to judge which is larger or smaller, but not their exact magnitudes. For example, one can divide movement into the gallop, trot, and walk, but in such a way that what is divided changes in nature at each moment of the division, without any one of these moments entering
into the composition of any other. Therefore these multiplicities of "distance" are inseparable from a process of continuous variation, whereas multiplicities of "magnitude" distribute constants and variables.” (ATP)

OK. Mischievous questions. Does the totality of relevance include what Derrida calls bricolage (which I understand to mean, roughly, non-standard uses. Using a screwdriver to fish out a small object that has got into a space I cannot get my hand into. Does it include accidents, as when I trip over a screwdriver or drop one on the cat? — Ludwig V

This is where Heidegger’s idealism (and Derrida’s) becomes conspicuously notable, in spite of the fact that his work moves beyond a traditional idealism-realism binary. There simply is no aspect of experience that excludes itself from the encompassing web of intelligibility by which we are understandingly attuned to the world as a whole. For instance, Heidegger talks about breakdowns in the use of tools as events which bring to the fore and light up the chains of ready to hand interrelations which are normally not paid attention to when the work is going smoothly. In other words, breakdown only makes sense in the context of a ready to hand involvement with tools. The same thing is true of accidents. A. accident only has meaning as an accident in the context of that activity which it subverts and surprises. If we use a screwdriver for a purpose other than the usual one, there must be some context of sense that bridges the gap between this new use and the normal one.

He is critiquing our thinking of it in reifying terms.
— Joshs
I don't quite see what it is that is being reified. In fact, if it is a mistake to reify it, there is nothing to reify and "it" has no place in that sentence. I can't even ask my question. Do you mean thinking of the screwdriver as an object? — Ludwig V

What you’re talking about is the issue of how our comportment toward beings is modified such that the fundamental hermeneutic relation towards the world becomes disclosed in terms of reified present to hand objects. Heidegger explains:

The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.

Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like. Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question of Truth)

I get that. Science is not the primordial understanding of anything. The primordial understanding must be the understanding I have when I start the science. That's why I thought the present-at-hand was the primordial understanding. — Ludwig V

Present to hand objects are not primary. They are derivative of the structure of active purposeful involvement with the world.

“Equipment is “in order to.” This proposition has an ontological and not merely an ontical meaning; a being is not what and how it is, for example, a hammer, and then in addition something “with which to hammer.” Rather, what and how it is as this entity, its whatness and howness, is constituted by this in-order-to as such, by its functionality. A being of the nature of equipment is thus encountered as the being that it is in itself if and when we understand beforehand the following: functionality, functionality relations, functionality totality. In dealing with equipment we can use it as equipment only if we have already beforehand projected this entity upon functionality relation.”(Basic Problems of phenomenology 1927) “…all equipment is as equipment within an equipmental contexture. This contexture is not a supplementary product of some extant equipment; rather, an individual piece of equipment, as individual, is handy and extant only within an equipmental contexture. The understanding of equipmental contexture as contexture precedes every individual use of equipment.”

“The kind of being of these beings is "handiness" (Zuhandenheit). But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such "aspects" were discursively forced upon "beings" which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were "subjectively colored" in this way. Such an interpretation overlooks the fact that in that case beings would have to be understood beforehand and discovered as purely objectively present, and would thus have priority and take the lead in the order of discovering and appropriating association with the "world." But this already goes against the ontological meaning of the cognition which we showed to be a founded mode of being-in-the-world. To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are "in themselves. " “(Being and Time)

Seems to be straying into the mystical there. Requiring understanding and knowing not just through the lens of the mind. But from other parts of the being. — Punshhh

If the mystical implies contact with a faculty separate from the mental, then this is quite different from Heidegger’s intent. His project critiques the modern notion of subjectivity going back to Descartes. The subject, consciousness, the object and objectivity are all put into question by his approach.

Because the Dasein is constituted by being-in-the-world, it is a being which in its being is out beyond itself. The epekeina belongs to the Dasein's own most peculiar structure of being. This transcending does not only and not primarily mean a self-relating of a subject to an object; rather, transcendence means to understand oneself from a world. The Dasein is as such out beyond itself. Only a being to whose ontological constitution transcendence belongs has the possibility of being anything like a self. Transcendence is even the presupposition for the Dasein's having the character of a self. The selfhood of the Dasein is founded on its transcendence, and the Dasein is not first an ego-self which then oversteps something or other. The “toward-itself” and the “out-from-itself” are implicit in the concept of selfhood. What exists as a self can do so only as a transcendent being. This selfhood, founded on transcendence, the possible toward-itself and out-from-itself, is the presupposition for the way the Dasein factically has various possibilities of being its own and of losing itself. But it is also the presupposition for the Dasein's being-with others in the sense of the I-self with the thou-self. The Dasein does not exist at first in some mysterious way so as then to accomplish the step beyond itself to others or to extant things. Existence, instead, always already means to step beyond or, better, having stepped beyond."(Basic Problems of Phenomenology).

I must have misunderstood something. Heidegger understands our cognitive, theoretical, stance as "present-at-hand" and our real-life experience as "ready-to-hand". He analyses Descartes approach through presence-at-hand (which I'm equating to a theoretical stance and therefore methodical doubt) as implying a model seeing us as subjects, the world as object and knowledge as what links the two. These are what Heidegger calls ontological presuppositions and he therefore points out that this mode returns metaphysics to First Phiilosophy. Now, here's my confusion. Doesn't he also criticize this model because it does not begin to explain our everyday lives as active and engaged in the world - ready-to-hand? So, isn't the return of metaphysics part of his working through of a model which he does not deny, but which he wants to limit the role of to specialized occasions, positing "ready-to-hand" - as the model for our "real" lives. — Ludwig V

The ready to hand forms a totality of relevance, which is what Heidegger calls world. We use the hammer in order to hammer the nail, in order to build the house, in order to have shelter or pay our bills. This chain of in order to’s encompasses everything in my world relevant to my functioning in it. But the ready to hand doesn’t constitute the most primordial understanding of Being. If I understand a science in terms of a totality of relevant pragmatic relations between me and the world, this constitutes for Heidegger only a regional ontology. What makes it theoretical isn’t that it ignores relations of relevant use, but that it fixes this totality of pragmatically relevant relations. As a theory, a science acts as a paradigm, map, model of pragmatic relations. It explains the ‘how’ of the organization of the particulars of the science.

We can understand a microscope as a present to hand thing or a ready to hand tool, but for Heidegger, we are not understanding Being primordially until we see the totality of equipmental relevance that the tool belongs in its changeabilty. Heidegger’s ‘world as whole’ , including all of its relations of pragmatic relevance, is constantly transforming its sense. It changes along with our mood ( attunement). We can think of a metaphysics as a totality of relevance which is mistakenly reifed. We can’t avoid the metaphysical gesture, since we are always thrown into a world ( equipmental totality) . We always have a pre-understanding of the world ( what you are calling ontological presuppositions), which means that it is already familiar to us at some level. Heidegger isn’t critiquing the very existence of metaphysics and its ontological presuppositions. Without these presuppositions there is no world. He is critiquing our thinking of it in reifying terms.

Well, there's no stopping people using a term like metaphysics in a different way. But I can't set aside the difference between a theoretical stance, which seems baked into the concept and essentially different from a form of life which is the engagement of a living being with needs and desires (and hence values) in the world. Certainly, for Wittgenstein (though he doesn't put it this way) and for Heidegger, insistence on the latter is a fundamental part of their philosophies - IMO. — Ludwig V

You’re right that Wittgenstein equates philosophy with metaphysics and metaphysics with theory, but the situation is different with Heidegger:

Human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. This implies that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of man.” It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself. (What is Metaphysics)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like who? — frank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil-bro’s?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↪Joshs

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

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

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

↪Joshs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "what," ultimately, is axiomatic. There it is before you. No analysis can justify it being there before you. Logic might justify how it came to be there before you, but the fact of its presence before you lies beyond the reach of continuity. So, Heisenberg and Gödel alert us to the incompleteness of continuity.

The "how" is a narrative that distributes the "what." Herein lies meaningful continuity. When we seek answers, we seek a story that supplies those answers. The greatness of a story lies within the "how," not within the "what — ucarr

I think this distinction between the what and the how is very important. It is what allows us to see that meaning is finite. It is not just that, as Gödel asserted, each axiomatic system grounds itself within a more encompassing system ad infinitum, but that the changes over time in the stories and narratives we use to interpret experience aren’t logically derivable from each other. They dont fit one within the other in an infinite regress, but follow one another as a change of subject.