Joshs, do you know the difference between an evangelical conservative Christian and a scholastically trained theologian and philosopher?

It’s quite vast. — Joe Mello

What would be your critique of liberal theology of the 19th and 20th century( Kierkegaard, Buber, Niebuhr, Tillich)?

What I have identified, however, is that Donald Trump is obviously a self-loving greedy piece of shit, politicians obviously only want to stay politicians, the far-right tend to be racist bigots — Joe Mello

Now you’re talking my language.

Could you point me to where he discusses capitalism? I'd be very interested to take a look — Xtrix

I tried looking into it. The best I could find was his critique of technology and American ‘gigantism’. He was certainly no fan of Marx, though. One would assume he would critique Enlightenment and modernist philosophical groundings of capitalism.

My guess is post-marxist postmodernist political positions like those of Foucault, Derrida, Rorty and Deleuze may have some overlap with Heidegger.

Interesting that you consider yourself an antagonist. Is God cool with that? — praxis

Onward Christian soliders, marching as to war…
At the sign of triumph
Satan's host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers,
on to victory!

I’m curious how your political views dovetail with the spiritual position you lay out in the OP. Give. that so many liberals are atheists , do you feel more comfortable with the social values of conservatives?

But I couldn’t look at John for too long because he was so filled with drugs he was a hollow shell of a person. — Joe Mello

I was surprised he functioned so well considering.

Why does everybody call you names, Joe? Good thing you don’t respond in kind, or else this thread would turn into a brawl instead of a peaceful, loving discussion.

God is a concept for you also. No-one experiences God because God is necessarily beyond finite representation. You're in a box, just like the rest of us. — emancipate

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain
I'll say it again
God is a concept by which we measure our pain

I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles

I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that's reality”

John Lennon

What I'm struggling with is trying to understand why someone wouldn't intuitively reciprocate — Tex

People’s emotions and self- esteem are bound up with the meaning of money in powerful and very personal ways. It may be that your friend , after such a long time struggling financially, still feels financially vulnerable despite the windfall. Maybe they don’t trust their ability to hold onto the money, or fear some health or other sort of calamity will deplete their assets. You may simply be more confident about your relationship with money than they are.

Show me a scientific discovery where a scientist combines things and creates a totally different and greater thing. An ice cube is not it. — ""Joe

A better example than an ice cube is a poetic metaphor, which produces a new meaning from prior linguistic elements.

Using the example of life evolving from the elements, the metaphysical principle I provided can be thought upon like this:

Taking physical elements and adding to them a lesser thing, such as light, to create a living being would be an absurdity.

Taking physical elements and adding to them an equal thing, such as other elements, to create a living being would be an impossibility.

Taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing, such as a living being, to create a living being would be a redundancy. — Joe Mello

The idea that things combined cannot create something greater depends on a notion of the natural
world as material objects in motion , which is an outdated idea from the vantage of many scientists and philosophers. Of course you are right , given the assumption that reality is physical objects in causal interaction. But more recent views on the nature of the real grounds things in interactions. It is the interaction that is primary, not the object. Time is the key ingredient in all interactions, which means that something creative and novel emerges from every event. This is why you cannot unfry an egg. And novelty begets novelty. If this is a god at work, it is a god that is continually surprised by what they produce, because their product talks back to them. It would be a god constantly changed by what it creates, rather than an omniscient blueprint simply reproducing itself in the world.

A philosophy forum should be populated, at least, mostly with people who studied philosophy well enough to reason out basic logical problems. — Joe Mello

I suspect if you stick it out here long enough you may discover that 180’s background in modern philosophy is likely considerably more extensive than yours.

Garrett, your trust in your thinking is scary — Joe Mello

And you don’t see any of yourself in Garrett? For Garrett, rationality itself is the godhead, and for you, an omnipotent being is the godhead of rationality. These are two sides of the same rigid doctrinaire coin.

just as we cannot see two sides of a coin at the same time, we cannot see absolute truth and our opinions at the same time. — Joe Mello

Indeed.

And who gets to be the judge as to whether they correctly understand themselves or not? — baker

Garrett Travers.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task. — Jargon of Authenticity, p.9

“One gains the impression that Heidegger's temporary entanglement in Na­tional Socialism rather suited Adorno; in this way he could aggressively phi­losophize with Heidegger and yet keep a distance-which, in philosophical matters, was not all that marked.”
(MARTIN HEIDEGGER :Between Good and Evil
RUDIGER SAFRANSKI)

[

most of the time we spend making our way through the world is spent in an undifferentiated mode of being rather than in an inauthentic mode of being. And the only difference between inauthentic and authentic is choice. And the hammer has no choice. — Arne

Heidegger makes only a one-sentence reference in all his work , as far as I know, to an ‘ undifferentiated mode’ of being, and many many pages to authenticity and inauthenticity. What in the world is ‘undifferentiated mode’ supposed to mean? Can you tell me?

Heidegger uses expressions like ‘falling prey’ and ‘thrown’ to refer to inauthenticity, to indicate that it is not a choice. It is something we succumb to.The hammer for Heidegger isnt a thing in the world independent of dasein, because he is not a realist. It is a relation between us and world, given in a certain mode of interpretiveness.



“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein's being. To exist means, among other things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.”

Inauthentic, undifferentiated, and authentic are temporal modes of Dasein's being that have no application to entities other than Dasein. To say that something ready to hand (such as a hammer) is authentic or inauthentic makes no more sense than to say that something ready to hand (such as a hammer) is happy or sad. — Arne

Ready to hand is a mode of encountering entities, and present to hand is a further modification , a derivation of the ready to hand. Both of these , as modes
of falling prey to the world, are inauthentic modes.

“As factical being-in-the-world, Da-sein, falling prey, has already fallen away from itself; and it has not fallen prey to some being which it first runs into in the course of its being, or perhaps does not, but it has fallen prey to the world which itself belongs to its being.”
The hammer that we experience can be experienced as an objectively present object, this hammer, with such and such properties of size , color and weight. This is the mode of present-to-handness, which is a derivative mode. It is inauthentic because it is a closed off and flattened mode. The object only has meaning relative
to its pragmatic relevance to our ongoing pragmatic , goal-oriented engagement with the world. And this pragmatic ready-to-hand use of the object as a tool only has relevance in relation to the totality of relevance of Dasein’s self-understanding.Grasping dasein in terms of this holistic self-understanding is authentic , grasping dasein in terms of a particular object that is present at hand is inauthentic , and grasping dasein in terms of a particular pragmatic tool use is also inauthentic.

Heidegger is not a realist. He does not accept the ideas that there are objects in the world existing independent of dasein’s relation to them.

“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)

“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)

In the following , Heidegger critiques the notion of a world of objects existing independently(objectively present) of Dasein's pragmatic structure of the in order to'.

“… the understanding of the being of an entity which is and can be in itself, even without the Dasein existing, is possible only on the basis of the ontological rooting of functionality relations in the for-the-sake-of-which. Only on the basis of the clarified ontological interconnections of the possible ways of understanding being, and thus also of functionality relations, with the for-the-sake-of is it at all decidable whether the question of an ontical teleology of the universe of beings has a legitimate philosophical sense or whether it doesn't rather represent an invasion by common sense into the problems of philosophy.”

And in Heideggerian terms, isn't the real issue the degree to which a scientific mode of being can be an authentic mode of being? And if so, then the scientific mode of being is inauthentic insofar as it leads Dasein to mistakenly live as if Dasein were outside the world looking in. You cannot be more "in" the world than Dasein — Arne

But don’t forget, it isn’t just the objectively present objects of empirical study that Heidegger considers inauthentic. It is all intraworldly beings , including ready-to-hand being-with-tools. The ‘as’ structure of experiencing something as something is inauthentic.

“...in interpretatively addressing something as something, one addresses the thing encountered against the background of a more or less explicit acquaintance with it: as a tool as suitable for this or that, etc….The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.”

All pragmatically relevant engagement in activities in the world , all the things, activities and projects Dasein is being in the world with , are inauthentic because of the fact that they are interpretations within a larger frame of intelligibility. This indicates that, as Heidegger says, authentic Dasein depends on and is in fact a modification of inauthentic everyday being in the world.

“… authentic existence is nothing which hovers over entangled everydayness, but is existentially only a modified grasp of everydayness…. Falling prey reveals an essential, ontological structure of Da-sein itself. Far from determining its nocturnal side, it constitutes all of its days in their everydayness.”

This is also why we must spend most of our time in inauthentic existence and only momentarily and occasionally attain an authentic comportment. Once we attain authenticity the particulars of the world lose their significance for us.

You become aware of it, and you respond. ( you could have responded by ignoring it, that is often a good response) You express vague interest and puzzlement. Either way, in your response or ignoring, you become (somewhat) responsible for what follows, ie this response to you. Which means, as should have been obvious from the beginning, that in communication, we become responsible for each other's thoughts. — unenlightened

If the root of responsibility is the response, that is , our moment to moment interactions with others and the moment to moment changes in our thinking , willing and feeling, then to understand responsibility requires a model of the nature and organization of thinking, willing and feeling.
The moral question of personal responsibility thus rests on our understanding of the nature of agency and philosophies of the self, the ‘I’.

Beyond the question of free will vs determinism are all sorts of contemporary issues concerning what sort of causative model describes cognition and affect.

For instance, how are we responsible for other’s thoughts? It depends on whether you are a behaviorist, classical cognitivist , phenomenologist or postmodern social constructionist. Each of these approaches gives us a different answer. Within cognitive
science there are differing views of the self and our ability to recognize other minds.

My preference is the phenomenological perspective, which rejects the model
of objective causation and thus the idea that our thinking
is socially and affectively conditioned in a causative way , and that brainwashing is a thing.
Phenomenology instead argues that there is a thematic unity and intimate self-belonging i. our thinking and feeling from moment to moment. We never simply introject meanings and values from the culture , but instead interpret according to our interpretive schemes.

You seem to be assuming that conscious is inextricably linked to some brain actives of which no reliable correlates have been found — Andrew4Handel

We know what systems of the body and regions of the brain consciousness is not inextricably linked to by process of elimination. When we use metabolic neural activity to measure such things we find that if , for instance , only the cerebellum is highly active there is no report of consciousness by the subject. The same is true when we isolate many other brain regions. So what areas of the brain are correlated with waking experience?

“ One of the central questions in neuroscience is clarifying where in the brain consciousness, which is the ability to experience internal and external sensations, arises. In the journal Neuron, researchers report that a specific area in the brain, the central lateral thalamus, appears to play a key role. In monkeys under anesthesia, stimulating this area was enough to wake the animals and elicit normal waking behaviors.

Previous studies, including EEG and fMRI studies in humans, had suggested that certain areas of the brain, including the parietal cortex and the thalamus, appear to be involved in consciousness.“

Here is a plethora of sources on the brain, go check out what it is doing at all times, it is literally mind-boggling: — Garrett Travers

What you need to do is find out what the neuroscience sources you endorse are saying about the sources you reject as false and bogus. It’s easy to do, and maybe you and I should do it together. For instance, you refer to Barrett’s work as ‘quackery’ and praise Damasio. But what does Damasio say about Barrett? You treat sources your reject as though no self-respecting cognitive psychologist would treat them seriously , but that reflects a misunderstanding of how such theorists are viewed within the cognitive neuroscience community.

in short, no, I do not believe anyone is "born this way," beyond what is genetically established. Nobody is born anyway out side of consistently observable biomarkers and genotypical phenomena, except in cases of problems in gestation. I think something far more complex is at work in all things human brain related. But, we don't know enough yet, which just intensifies the ambiguity issue. — Garrett Travers

The article you linked to mentioned male and female
chromosomal differences as a potential source of the gender-based behavioral differences they discuss. But it has not been proven that genes are the only source of such brain differences. There has been as much attention directed toward the hormonal environment in the womb, and this has been suggested as an explanation of homosexuality. That is, that more feminizing hormones and less testosterone in utero can create a more feminine brain in a male body.

If this is true, then perhaps many transsexuals can be seen as gay men and women who want their bodies to ‘match’ their brain wiring.

Where do you people generate this anti-philosophy from? — Garrett Travers

A lot of it is generated from cognitive neuroscience. Check out anything by Panksepp or Antonio Damasio.
Or Lisa Barrett’s ‘How Emotions are Made: the Secret Life of the Brain’:

“ You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget.
Affect is in the driver’s seat and rationality is a passenger. It doesn’t mat­ter whether you’re choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two in­vestments, or two heart surgeons —your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-­colored glasses.

Antonio Damasio, in his bestseller Descartes’ Error, observes that a mind requires passion (what we would call affect) for wisdom. He documents that people with damage to their interoceptive network, particularly in one key body-budgeting region, have impaired decision-making. Robbed of the ca­pacity to generate interoceptive predictions, Damasio’s patients were rud­derless. Our new knowledge of brain anatomy now compels us to go one step further. Affect is not just necessary for wisdom; it’s also irrevocably wo­ven into the fabric of every decision.”

In some sense, "objectification" is the end of philosophy.

It serves no meaningful purpose. — Arne

has a point. Scientific thematization and objectification have their place for Heidegger, albeit distinctly circumscribed as regional ontologies. He claimed that science doesn’t think, by which he meant it doesn’t think philosophically , because it derives its sense and bases its inquiry on an already generated frame of intelligibility rather than constituting a fundamental questioning and ground laying.

Do Midwesterners learn to be tightly wrapped and screwed together, or is it just the way we are? Geographical Determinism? Extreme weather? A disease spread by wood ticks? — Bitter Crank

If you’re from Minnesota , there may be that Lake Wobegon Lutheran thing going on, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Why do some men use, or not use campy speech? One guess is that it depends on whether or not they have immersed themselves in campy gay bars from the get go. It takes practice to do well. Men who don't drink and smoke (and go to bars) are less likely to be campy [theoretical postulate... no evidence on hand]. Men from rural hick backwaters [me], however profoundly gay they might be, tend not to be campy — Bitter Crank

Is this all learned theater? Did you see La Cage aux Folles?

Remember the scene where the champagne was uncorked and everyone did a girlish scream? Do
you think that was pre-mediated theater or a deeply pre_conscious , reflexive perceptual reaction that gets to the heart of what I’m talking about?
Camp isn’t based on thin air, it’s the translation of a perceptual style many gay men are born with into something exaggerated and put on. Gay rural bumpkins may not know anything about camp but I will guarantee you they have those same perceptual tendencies that make many gays unable to hide what they are despite their best efforts.

A male is a male forever, as determined by the male's genetic composition. — Garrett Travers

Do you believe there is such a thing as psychological gender, apart from biological chromosomal sex?
Paychological gender would refer to a brain-wiring that produces what I call a perceptual-affective masculine or feminine style. This difference in behavior is what allows dog experts and breeders to tell male dogs from
female dogs based on their behavior. Do you think the same brain-wiring difference separates human males and females?

Legal tools such as arbitration or mediation focus on the relation itself or ongoing interaction as central, rather than the ‘needs and feelings’ of one or the other party. That isn’t to say that our needs and feelings have no value, but that they form only one aspect of a broader reality - one in which justice, laws, rules and blame could be considered arbitrary. — Possibility

Although our needs and feelings , far from being separable from a mitral, rational understanding of the situation , form the very basic of our rationality. Strongly polarized feelings between disputants are manifestations of different paradigms of rationality, different worldviews.

the distribution of attention and effort I’m referring to here is more in line with taking responsibility in future interactions, rather than being morally responsible for past behaviour. — Possibility

I realize that the term blame is loaded with all kinds of oppressive moralistic connotations, and that’s why blame skeptics and incompatiblists ,embodied cognitive scientists , legal scholars and postmodern social constructionists are racing to distance themselves from the word. I agree with their rejection of the idea of blame as based on belief in traditional free will. The notion of blame I think still remains is something that many may not consider blame at all. But my notion of blame has
to do with aspects within models of psychological and social functioning threat rely on the idea that values are conditioned and shaped. Jesse Prinz says babies are natural psychopaths that need to be conditioned into
moral concepts.

You mentioned attention and effort. Attention and cognitive effort are central features of many contemporary cognitive theories. These concepts as
they are used in cognitive models assume that attention and effort are processes that are themselves
conditioned. They use experimental manipulations to attempt to demonstrate this. Phenomenolgosts like Eugene Gendlin and Husserl critique this idea
of attention as a kind of spotlight. They instead argue that attention is a creative process. We create what we are attending ro rather than noticing something that was assumedto be already there.
The difference here is between a causative
model and an intentional one. Causative
models are semi-arbitrary and based on conditioning. They imply the concepts of anger and blame , because these have to do with our experience of others behavior as semi-arbitrary and subject to shaping influences. We’re. it talking about moral condemnation here , just simple irritation and annoyance. Those are enough to lead us to try to ‘forcefully’ reshape attention and effort, rather than recognize that we always act to define and extend our understanding of
the world in the most appropriate fashion available to us at the time, given our pepe-existing knowledge.

You seem to be saying that ignorance of gender identity theory is part of the problem and Bitter Crank seems to be saying that “delusion” is problematic, or rather that sex/gender cannot be changed. It’s not clear if BC believes sex and gender can be more or less independent of each other. — praxis

My understanding was that BC thinks it’s delusional to believe you can change your sex, but he seems to agree with me that psychological gender, as a perceptual-affective style, is independent of biological sex, which is what I interpret him to mean by ‘gaydar’. For myself and my peers, gaydar doesn’t simply refer to the ability to detect if a man is sexually interested in another man, but rather the identification of a constellation of behavioral and appearance cues( dress, pronunciation, interests, posture, demeanor, walk) as pointing to what I have been calling a gay gender-associated perceptual-affective style. It’s interesting how it’s common for members of the gay community to refer to each other as ‘she’ or ‘queen’ or ‘girl’. I don’t think this is just social
conventions that we learn from each other. This use of language comes directly from the way we feel inside, this equal dose( and in those men who are strongly effeminate a much higher dose) of feminine style and masculine style.

interesting and perhaps revealing that your description of gender mentions only who one is sexually attracted to, and nothing about what I would consider to be a more central aspect of gender for many in the gay community, which has to do with a global perceptual-affective style
— Joshs

I will have to plead guilty to your charge.

When it comes to "being gay" which as you say involves a global perceptual-affective style, I find myself with a deficient vocabulary to adequately express what I experience. I meet men in ordinary social settings and we may immediately recognize each other as gay, but I find it difficult to pin down exactly what the signals are. This may be one reason I have always preferred to look for sexual partners in places where "pre-sorting" had taken place--bath houses, gay bars, night-time cruising areas in parks. Some people seem to be able to walk through a figurative Grand Central Station and reliably find prospective partners.

These is something abut deportment, grooming, details of dress, speech patterns, interests, and so forth that together add up to a strong signal. It's like art -- I know it when I see it. Some people are better at this than others, and some people with sharp gaydar are actually pretty straight. An some very gay guys (part of the 2.5%) don't signal their gayness very strongly. And some straight people see gay, but are not. But, gay signals and gaydar work well enough most of the time. — Bitter Crank

When it comes to "being gay" which as you say involves a global perceptual-affective style, I find myself with a deficient vocabulary to adequately express what I experience. I meet men in ordinary social settings and we may immediately recognize each other as gay, but I find it difficult to pin down exactly what the signals are….

There is something abut deportment, grooming, details of dress, speech patterns, interests, and so forth that together add up to a strong signal. It's like art -- I know it when I see it. Some people are better at this than others, and some people with sharp gaydar are actually pretty straight. An some very gay guys (part of the 2.5%) don't signal their gayness very strongly. And some straight people see gay, but are not. But, gay signals and gaydar work well enough most of the time. — Bitter Crank

Is sexual attraction more biological sex or more a part of psychological gender? The fact that some transsexuals are not gay seems to indicate that it’s more biological sex, and also that may gay people’s gender matches their biological sex. — praxis

I feel strongly that for myself and many other gay men I know, the gender-associated perceptual-affective style is directly responsible for sexual attraction. I believe that , as Freud said, in the most general sense we are all bisexual in that we all have the capability to learn to enjoy sexual relations with both biological males and females. But the strong preference most gay men feel for same sec partners is a result of the way the structure and feel of the male body implies behavioral traits ( strength, aggressiveness, etc) that gay men gravitate to. Think of sexual partnering as like a dance. To grossly over-generalize so you get the point, Heterosexual attraction is a dance of yin and yang: the yielding, more passive , emotive , soft characteristics of femininity ( and the feminine body) complement and complete the emotionally unaware, dominating or commanding aspects of masculine behavior and the masculine body.

They fit like pieces of a puzzle. For many gay men , who have bits of both masculine and feminine gender within themselves, the fit is more of a twinning than a yin and yang. Many gay men are repulsed by the signals they get from straight women who exude feminine passivity and softness while expecting the gay male to exude decisive, strong, commanding masculine traits. The gay man exudes a mixture of both sides and is attracted to that same mixture from their partner.

I dated a woman in college and that was pretty much the dynamic: her expectations of strength and decisiveness from me, for me to ‘take care of her’ even though she was my intellectual equal and headed for her own career.

it must be said that things in themselves are necessary for the appearance of phenomena, no? Which means that if they are not the material or efficient causes then at least they must be a necessary condition. — Janus

Maybe they are one of two necessary conditions:

"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”

It would seem to me your proposed terms suggest a dualism of some sort, which is perhaps the problem to begin with. I would argue that repurposing dualism under more modern terms would only confuse the issue further. — NOS4A2

Any concpet of will that associates it with control and cause is inherently dualistic in the sense of separating subject from world. To transcend this dualism you have to find a way to see subject and objective world as inextricably intangled , such that interaction is central , and subject and object are only the poles of each interaction. There is no constituted subject who wills autonomously , but only the subjective aspect of subject-world interaction.

One's thoughts come from nowhere else; they begin and end nowhere else; they are controlled by nothing else. Even the seemingly arbitrary activities, like the manifestation of thoughts, are wholly controlled by and under the direction of this same being. — NOS4A2

‘Control’, ‘under the direction’, ‘cause’. Not sure if any of these terms get at the new ways psychologists
are thinking about human agency. Perhaps if we substitute ‘reciprocal causality’ and brain body-environment loops for simple one way control and direction we can get closer to what thinking and willing consists in.

There seems to be a filter of sorts (between thoughts and actions) and the "mesh" that does the actual filtering is made up of, inter alia, our values. Some of us have good quality "meshes", others have broken ones, some don't have one at all. — Agent Smith

Hmm, that sounds like blame to me, attributing behavior that disappoints or puzzles you to the other’s disordered thinking rather than to your challenges in making sense of their motives.

was this thread talking about anger as a tool for interaction or for a tool for analysis? For instance, seeing an issue like the Israeli-Palestine conflict or the Russian-Ukrainian conflict through the lens of anger and blame? What is the better way? — Judaka

We wouldn’t have anger and blame as tools
for analysis if they weren’t already being used as tools of interaction. Would it be possible to effectively understand such conflicts without assuming a basis in anger and blame? Put differently, what would be left of these conflicts without such feelings?

Getting rid of blame is not logically sound. Why? How do we even start to define harm? Someone caused it, but he couldn't be blamed for it because there's no free will? How do we hold people accountable then? — L'éléphant

How do we hold children accountable for attacking another child out of fear because they didn’t understand the other child’s intent was innocent and peaceful? The whole point is we won’t need the concept
of moral accountability if we recognize that motivation and intent is never to ‘blame’ , but a limited understanding of other’s behavior and thinking is the root of what we mistakenly call immorality. There are all
sorts of ways we can protect ourselves from the potentially harmful actions of those whose limited insights make them a potential danger to us, as is the case with autistic children who can be uncontrollably violent with other family members. It’s important to note here that I am not considering the autistic child’s behavior irrational or parhological. On the contrary, it is a reflection of the child’s appropriate interpretation of their situation, given their inefficient processing of social and perceptual cues.

Ditching the concept of accountability allows us to know how to support others while protecting ourselves from their violence , rather than treating them
like demons.

How many times do you hold lovers, friends and
family members ‘accountable’ for actions you blame them for rather than blaming your own failure to effectively construe their thinking?

Let me ask you this: do you think you personally can get rid of the ALL of the following feelings in response to the actions of others?
— Joshs

No, should I want to? — Judaka

My claim is that all forms of blame I mentioned indicate a failure of insight on our part. I’m not saying they have no positive benefit. Our blame can cause another to apologize and tow the line. But it never achieves effective insight into why the other chose to act the way they did.
Feeling of blame are always an impetus toward conformity to what we thought should have been.

Do we have rules that protect the rights of employees and employers, rental providers and renters, customers and businesses, rules that protect from harassment, the rules of civility or even the rules of a game, on the basis of blame? If I scream at a co-worker or at a cashier, it's only a problem because I can be blamed? We need to ask whether or not I had a bad day? Did my parents raise me right? Was I being influenced by some biological factor? Or is the problem that as a society we want to protect people from being screamed at regardless of the reason? — Judaka

‘Rights’, like ‘justice’, is a concept that would not exist without anger and blame. Concluding that someone acted unjustly or violated another’s rights is a blameful judgement. Harassment is also a form of blame and anger , as is the concept of incivility. All
of these terms imply that the other knew better, or should have known better, than to do what they did. Do you violate my rights not to be harassed if you trip and fall on me? No, deliberate intent must be involved.

I do not believe people care about the violator as they do the rules — Judaka

Shift away for a moment from societal rules and laws, and focus instead on the much more relevant and frequent examples of anger and blame on our daily lives. Many of these occur in our relations with people we know well , and it is these that determine our day to day happiness to a much greater extent than the legal situations you refer to.
The legal situations are derivations of the intimate interpersonal interactions we experience. Here we can see how blame and anger are remarkably sensitive manifestations of rifts in the subtle and vulnerable bonds of expectation and trust we develop with our families, friends and acquaintances. Why did my spouse cheat on me , why did my friend insult me, why hasn’t my child called me lately? These are deeply intimate , surprising disappointments in our sense of how others think about us. We thought they cared for us, and now they seem to callously reject us. The hinge of anger and blame is the proximity we feel the other has to our needs and feelings. This is what gives anger the fuel to try to influence the other back into the fold, because we believe at some level they are close to their previous caring self and can be coaxed or forced back to that intimacy with us.
Justice, laws and rules retain this structure of hopeful coaxing or forcing. If we look at the cultural history of blame, we see that as our views of the psychology of interpersonal blame evolves, our notion of legal blame evolves in tandem with it.

Blame is a way of directing our attention and effort towards a determined cause of pain, humility or loss after the event, which is unlikely to reduce future instances. It’s wasted, if you ask me. Better to direct it towards increasing our capacity for awareness, consideration or care in future situations — Possibility

Blame is a way of directing our attention and effort towards a determined cause of pain, humility or loss after the event, which is unlikely to reduce future instances. It’s wasted, if you ask me. Better to direct it towards increasing our capacity for awareness, consideration or care in future situations. — Possibility

Blame skeptics like Derk Pereboom make a distinction between forward looking and backward looking blame. Backward looking blame tends to be retributive, whereas forward looking blame aims to minimize future incidents.
I should note that focusing on increasing our care and consideration implies that we believe we were acting carelessly and inconsiderately, which I consider to be forms of anger-blame.

I don't think there's any shame in anger, one doesn't become less of a person if one loses one's temper. — Agent Smith

But what about blame, the thinking that underlies anger?
Even if one never loses one’s temper or shows anger, the central issue here is whether we can transcend blame. Anger takes many forms, like thinking of others as greedy, selfish, thoughtless, immoral. This is still anger, even with no expression of it.

Going back to Gendlin, what is the difference between anger as an emotion or felt meaning and does he provide an account of blame? I am assuming he would see anger as sometimes having a useful role. — Tom Storm

Gendlin says emotions are patterns of behavior in situations ( he recognizes a few which are inherited) that don’t take account of the larger context. They are like feeling with blinders on. That can be adaptive in fighting off predators , but not in dealing with your boss. Felt meaning, on the other hand , takes into account the whole situation , giving one many more options of responding to it appropriately and in a nuanced and intricate way.

a certain conception of blame is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations.
— Joshs

I'd also be interested in a few points on this. — Tom Storm

I can give you a taste of how postmodern social
constructionist Ken Gergen looks at blame.

“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement -incorporation or antagonism.”“ if moral deliberation is inherently cultural, then in what sense are we justified in holding individuals responsible for the humane society? Isn't individual blame thus a mystification of our condition of interdependence?”“Blame and responsibility are thus distributed within the community, and indeed the culture.”(Gergen)