A feeling is an activity?
— frank

:up:

Or more generally, "A passion is an action?"

A feeling is generally seen as something that happens to us, whereas an activity is generally seen as something we do. To define feelings as activities is a bit like saying, "Internal things that happen to us without our doing anything are things that we do." — Leontiskos

I’m going to be lazy and let CharGPT summarize the postings that I’m drawing from:

Yes — you’re touching on a central idea in enactivist philosophy of mind, especially as developed by thinkers like Matthew Ratcliffe, Evan Thompson, and Shaun Gallagher. Enactivism challenges the traditional view that emotions and feelings are passive, internal states (like private inner “qualia”) and instead argues that they are ways of engaging with the world. Here’s a breakdown of the view, especially through Ratcliffe’s lens:

⸻

1. Emotions as Active, World-Involving Phenomena

Enactivism holds that cognition (including emotion) is not just something that happens inside the brain but emerges through dynamic interactions between an organism and its environment. Emotions, then, are:
• Not passive receptions of internal states
• Active orientations or engagements with the world

Ratcliffe’s Key Idea:

In works like “Feelings of Being” (2008), Ratcliffe argues that emotions are existential orientations — they shape how the world appears to us. For example:
• Fear doesn’t just happen in you — it discloses the world as threatening.
• Joy opens the world up as rich and inviting.
• Grief makes the world appear irretrievably altered.

These are ways of being in the world, not just internal reactions to stimuli.

⸻

2. Pre-reflective and Bodily

Enactivists argue that emotions are embodied and pre-reflective — you don’t always notice you’re feeling them in the same way you notice you’re thinking a thought.
• They are felt through posture, movement, action-readiness.
• For instance, anxiety might be an attunement where the world feels uncertain or unstable — not just a “tingling in your gut.”

⸻

3. Affect as World-Disclosure

Ratcliffe expands on Heideggerian phenomenology by suggesting that affective experience “discloses” or “opens up” a meaningful world. This view means:
• Emotions are not added on to an already-existing, neutral perception of the world.
• Rather, they are how the world first becomes meaningful at all.

So, when you love someone, the world is full of promise, vulnerability, and care. You’re not reacting to a neutral world with love — you’re experiencing the world through love.

⸻

4. Emotion as Situated and Contextual

Emotions are always situated in lived contexts and cultural practices — they are not the same everywhere, for everyone, in every moment. This supports the idea that emotions are interactive and historical, not static mental contents.

⸻

In Summary:

For enactivists like Ratcliffe, emotions are not inner states that “represent” the world; they are ways of being in the world — bodily, situated, affective orientations that actively shape and are shaped by our interactions with others and the environment.

This approach invites us to rethink psychology and philosophy by moving beyond a mind/world split — and seeing the self, body, and world as deeply intertwined in the experience of emotion.

However, language games are embedded and make use of stuff in the world - apples and blocks and so on. Hence they presume the world is a certain way - that it contains blocks and apples — Banno

I don’t know that Witt would want to separate the perception of things from the things themselves. He discusses this in relation to the duck-rabbit drawing in his analysis of what it means to ‘see something as’. Rather than our perception being an interpretation or perception of something external to it (a pre-existing something), the ‘seeing as’ is fundamental.

I am skeptical, both of the press and what we are calling the decline of the arts. I just look around and see thousands of high quality books, movies, television shows, and popular music produced every year. I can't speak for visual arts. Is there a lot of crap, of course. But you don't have to read, watch, listen to, or look at it. We also have easy access to everything ever produced throughout history. There is more high quality literature, history, philosophy, art, music... than any of us could go through in a life time.

Wringing one's hands and crying "hell in a handbasket" is not evidence — T Clark

No, but there is evidence in how one feels about the movies, songs, plays and novels that one gets one’s hands on. You’re an engineer. I’m sure you’re also a lover of good music, movies and other forms of artistic creativity. But I dont know how picky you are about your entertainment. What does it take to move you? When I partake of an artistic product, my standards are based on memories of experiences with a song or film that shook me to the core, that changed in some small fashion the way I felt or thought about things. I remember stepping out of a theater after watching a life-changing film and everything around me seemed a little different. My favorite music gave me ideas about new possibilities, and acted as a guide to the future I wanted to create or discover. I’m selfish about my artistic experiences that way. I will settle for superficial entertainment, but I crave the kind of art that unsettles me, surprises the hell out of me, disturbs me. And where do I find such art today? In small rarified circles closely aligned with academic environments, where the art is intertwined with philosophical notions which themselves are mostly isolated from the mainstream. I would say, then, that the innovative art and philosophy are out there, but they are produced and consumed by an increasing guy smaller segment of the general culture.

Explanation - or justification - requires a contrast between what is explained and the explanation. For an explanation to function it must take what is being explained as granted - an explanation as to why the wasabi plants are thriving grants that the wasabi plants are thriving. The explanation explains and accepts something external to itself.

What our explanations - justifications - have in common is that there is something to justify. What our language games have in common is that they are embedded in the world, and together they make a form of life — Banno

Are language games explanations-justifications or are they structures of intelligibility providing the criteria for justification?

I'm pretty sure you could argue that anything is grounded in philosophical worldviews but that's besides the point. Art and philosophy don't depend on each other, one could stop evolving while the other could keep on evolving. Where did you get the idea that the innovations are dependent on each other? Sure some innovation in art could inspire something in philosophy and vice versa but it's far from always the case. — Skalidris

There are no hard and fast distinctions to be made between what passes as art and what is considered philosophy, or between philosophy and poetry, fiction, science or any other domain of creativity. This is why cultural movements (classical, renaissance, Enlightenment ,Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism) encompass all of these domains, not simply because they all belong to the same chronological period, but because they express different facets of a shared set of worldviews, via their own unique vocabulary of expression. So yes, each domain of creativity within an era depends inextricably on the others, since they are not separated to begin with except artificially.

I disagree, the ways to do art for example have completely exploded in the last century, basically anything is "allowed", and you can share anything you want online anyway. The internet has allowed so many odd things to be created, and there are entire communities of these odd things that could have never existed before.

I think the lack of creativity in philosophy comes from the fact that it now has an authority that only allows a specific type of content, and that academia is considered to be the only "serious" way of practicing philosophy, so independent thinkers wouldn't be taken seriously unless the authority recognizes the value in it. — Skalidris

Artistic movements are themselves grounded in philosophical worldviews. Any innovation in rhe former presupposes annd reflects innovation in the latter, and vice versa. All you have to do is examine a list of the most acclaimed new talents in philosophy and you will find all sorts of cross links between their work and the arts and literature. And for their part, many artists today draw heavily from critical theory, phenomenology and other recent strands of philosophy. Perhaps one could say that , rather than a deficit of innovation in philosophy or the arts, the trajectory of innovation in both domains is moving farther and farther away from the concerns of popular culture. Rather than popular culture embracing these new ideas, it is hellbent on suppressing and censuring it, as witnessed by the actions of many states and the current federal government of the U.S. to eliminate anything smacking of ‘wokism’.

The irony being that the popular press itself is among the most decadent and stagnated institutions. It makes it hard to take it seriously. — T Clark

Just because the press is a victim of the same phenomenon doesn’t mean they don’t have a point.

I just think when a person asks what it's like to live in a city, they're asking how it feels to live there. You'd want to help them connect it to feelings they already know about. Wouldn't you want to describe scenes, rhythms, tastes, colors, etc? Compare and contrast to other locations? Yes, you probably gathered that information by doing things, but that seems incidental. Consciousness is filled with feelings, right? — frank

Feelings aren’t inner senses sprinkling their subjective coloration over experiences , but activities, doings. They are our ways of being attuned in situations, the way things strike us.

And I would add, this death of innovative thought is apparently not restricted to philosophy, judging by the popular press. There have been so many books and articles in recent years complaining about stagnation in the arts, literature, cinema, music and the sciences they I have lost count. It is a phenomenon of our times thar is in need of explanation. Here’s some examples courtesy of A.I. For the record , I don’t believe the. current situation can be explained on the exclusive basis of the stifling effects of corporate capitalism.

### **Books & Articles on Creative Stagnation**

1. **"The Creative Drought"** (2024) – An essay by Ted Gioia and others discussing the decline of artistic innovation, citing corporate consolidation, nostalgia-driven content, and algorithmic homogenization in film, music, and literature .

2. **"Is Old Music Killing New Music?"** (2022, *The Atlantic*) – Ted Gioia’s viral Substack post (later republished) argues that streaming platforms favor older songs, stifling new musical innovation .

3. **"Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?"** (2025, *The Atlantic*) – Examines the dominance of reboots, franchises, and algorithm-driven content, questioning whether we’re in a "cultural dark age" .

4. **"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (comparisons in modern critiques)** – Referenced by Gioia as a metaphor for cultural stagnation, where modern entertainment recycles past successes like the Arch of Constantine reused older monuments .

5. **"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin (2023)** – While not directly about stagnation, Rubin’s book critiques formulaic creativity and urges a return to raw, unfiltered artistic expression, implying industry-wide creative decline .

6. **"The New York Times Magazine" (2023)** – Declared the 21st century the "least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press" .

7. **The Guardian (2023)** – An art critic proclaimed that "the avant-garde is dead," lamenting the lack of groundbreaking movements in contemporary art .

8. **"The Honest Broker" (Ted Gioia’s Substack)** – Regularly critiques stagnation in music, literature, and film, highlighting how private equity and corporate control suppress originality .

9. **"Where Has Artistic Innovation and Creativity Gone?" (Inside Higher Ed, 2024)** – Discusses how economic pressures and nostalgia cycles (e.g., franchises, reboots) have replaced bold experimentation in arts and academia .

I’m not saying there aren’t any new ideas in philosophy, but philosophers generally seem very reluctant to drift away from the concepts they’ve read about. They seem hesitant to create new ideas altogether because such ideas likely wouldn’t meet the academic standards. — Skalidris

The situation is even worse than you depict it. It is not just that new ideas in a chronological sense are in short supply, but philosophical ideas which are already more than 100 years old have yet to be absorbed by a large percentage of the general population. Furthermore, most of what passes today for the leading edge of philosophical thought merely recycles and repackages the work of 19th century figures like William James, Charles Peirce, Wilhelm Dilthey and Kierkegaard. Meanwhile , the fresh ‘isms’ of 50 years ago (deconstructionism, postmodernism, poststructuralism) have been followed by regressive, reactionary movements like object-oriented ontology.

↪Hanover, ↪Joshs I picture language games as more or less discreet, seperate enterprises. The examples are things like the builders calling for a block, buying an apple, and so on. A form of life is an aggregation of these.

So, not synonymous.

And calling for a block or buying an apple would look more or less the same, in various different cultures. — Banno

Perhaps a form of life can be understood via Witt’s description of a family of resemblances, which ties together discrete games on the basis of commonalities that are intertwined but not reducible to a single shared thread:

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball­games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all 'amusing'?

Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family.

What I would like to do is develop an epistemology based on JTB, but with a Wittgensteinian twist - for example, demonstrating how our methods of justification apply across various language games within our form of life. — Sam26

What’s you think is the difference between a language game and a form of life?

If there are variable language games, are there also variable human forms of life that play those games, or is there but one? — Hanover

I’ve always thought that language games and forms of life were synonymous.

If there are many, then we cannot know who shares our form, and so we cannot know that we are playing a language game at all. My conversation with a parrot isn't public use. — Hanover

I beleive there are many. But if so, how did Wittgenstein come to know that there are language games? Perhaps from the experience of initially finding a set of discursive practices within a foreign community to be incoherent, and then later learning how to engage with that form of life. This may have led him to surmise that if the sense of meaning of word use is only contingently grounded within a particular language game, then even within that game, reference to pre-existing rules and criteria of meaning of words do not guarantee how they will be understood.

With regard to my conversation with a parrot (or with an A.I.), to the extent that I claim that I understand the parrot and the parrot understands me, I must be drawing from some already available normative discursive structure of meaning, which is likely to come from the language games I share with my human discursive community. Isnt this what we do when we interpret our pet’s behaviors in anthropomorphic terms? Which is not to say that we can’t enter into a language game directly with our pet dog.

Let me lay my cards on the table regarding these questions of "switching positions with someone else." Humans are enormously adaptable, and they all have the same nature. I think we can switch positions with others, whether linguistically, culturally, scientifically, etc. There are a few limitations and immutabilities, but when we are speaking about volitional realities I don't see much in the way of per se impossibility of switching positions — Leontiskos

The above caught my eye. Given that you believe humans have the same nature, and by this you apparently have in mind a powerful facility to understand the world from the other’s point of view ( linguistic, cultural, scientific), what sort of explanation is left in order to account for profound disagreements concerning ethical, epistemological and philosophical matters ( not to mention day to day conflicts with friends and family members)?

It seems that what is left falls under the categories of medical pathology, incorrect knowledge and irrationality, and moral failure. Is this characterization close to the mark?

Sorry. I don't get it. In the context of the question at hand, why does it matter whether human cognitive systems evolved in response to the environment or coevolved in concert with the environment? — T Clark

The issue is whether it is possible to make a distinction between the organism's perception of its environment and its evolution with respect to its environment. Put differently, is perception the organism’s representation of a reality, or is it the enacting of a reality? In the first case, what is represented is presumed to be external to the perceiver. In the second case, the real is produced through the organism-environment interaction.

So... living organisms, including humans, affect the environment and organisms and environments evolve together. Agreed. That's not "missing from Lorenz's account." It's just not particularly relevant to the specific point he, and I, are trying to make which is - human minds, including our intellectual capacities, evolved in the same manner that our physical bodies did. Logic is something we brought to the world. — T Clark

I get that that is your point, but the point of Lorenz’s comment is that we evolved sense organs for adaptive purposes , organs which allow us to see only those aspects of reality we need to see in order to achieve our evolutionarily shaped goals. Unlike recent biological thinking, he does not claim that the very reality of the organism’s environment is co-constructed by the organism’s patterns of functioning in it. Instead, he assumes the reality of that environment is external to, and independent of, the organism’s limited, adaptive perception of it.

My point was that the phenomenological perspective is not the default. I think the overwhelming number of readers would agree that Husserl or Marion provide far more abstract descriptions of experience than common narratives about what one sees in the woods. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting that you would use the word abstract to describe an approach whose aim is precisely to bracket and see beneath the abstractions that are commonly used to think about everyday objects. In doing so, one does not privilege the part over the whole. On the contrary, one arrives at an enriched understanding of the whole. I certainly agree that empirical reduction relies on abstraction, which is why Husserl warned against what Evan Thompson in his recent book called the blind spot of science, the tendency to forget that its idealizations are convenient simplifications derived from the actually experienced lifeworld (is temperature nothing but the kinetic motion of molecules? Is color simply wavelengths of light?).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts? — tom111

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't this rather a long-winded way of saying that there are indeed necessary truths? That necessary truths can't be, and don't need to be, justified in other terms - that's what makes them necessary. As Thomas Nagel remarks on an essay on the sovereignty of reason, 'the epistemic buck must stop somewhere'; there are thoughts we can't 'get outside of', or judge according to some other criterion, without thereby undermining their necessity ('contingent cultural and biological practices').

I think what's interesting about this whole line of thought is why it's interesting. Why is it we presume that foundational ('hinge') propositions can be or need to be justified by further analysis, and what are the implications of their not being so justified? — Wayfarer

The problem I have with the essay is that it fails to distinguish between a notion of necessary truth as a relative, contingently stable structure of meaning (Wittgenstein’s hinges, forms of life and language games) and a notion of necessary truth as a platonic transcendental, which is how Godel views the necessary ground of mathematical axioms.

Thank you for this well-presented OP. While I agree that Godel’s incompleteness theorems can lend themselves to the assumption of groundless grounds akin to Wittgenstein ‘hinges’, I don’t believe Godel would have been comfortable with such a relativistic, pragmatist conclusion. He considered himself a mathematical platonist. As Roger Penrose says about Godel:

Godel, himself, was a very strong Platonist…
The notion of mathematical truth goes beyond the whole concept of formalism. There is something absolute and "God-given' about mathematical truth. This is what mathematical Platonism, as discussed at the end of the last chapter, is about. Any particular formal system has a provisional and 'man-made' quality about it. Such systems indeed have very valuable roles to play in mathematical discussions, but they can supply only a partial (or approximate) guide to truth. Real mathematical truth goes beyond mere manmade constructions. (The Emperor’s New Mind)

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

:100:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↪Banno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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