I don’t think the application of psychological models to politics is without merit , but it depends which ones. What you’re citing here, trait and birth order theories of personality , are the kind of reductive accounts that I think are not only unhelpful but dangerous.They give us a justification for dismissing the thinking processes that others use to generate their political beliefs and instead attributing their beliefs to simplistic unconscious causes. Personality traits are only background contributors. They don’t create political values.

the arguments put forward by either side are moves in the rhetorical game, — Isaac

What would it take for you to feel content that side A had 'understood' side B? — Isaac

side B's 'understanding' would only ever be a state of their network, it's not like it could ever be some kind of photograph of side A's True Position. — Isaac

I agree that side A can never have a ‘true picture’ of side B. But I begin from the belief that , at least in the U.S., side A and B inhabit different universes of thought. don’t think there is a single rhetorical game, but different games played in parallel universes.

Furthermore, these universes tie together and inform a multitude of specific political positions: gun control , climate change , views about covid danger and mask wearing , abortion, death penalty , immigration , terrorism, identity and gender politics, patriotism, economics, religion. A traditional worldview can justify the seeming paradox of protecting the newborn but favoring gun ownership and the death penalty, of not tolerating any ambiguity or complexity in one’s sciences.

So what can ‘understanding’ accomplish if not a fusion of outlook between A and B? It can allow side A to see
the logic of side B’s positron from their vantage even when side A continues to prefer their own viewpoint.
To succeed at this means to no longer have to delegitimize B’s thinking. What fuels today’s polarizing political scene is not simply that the opponents see the world differently , it’s that they cannot fathom how one could in good conscience hold the views of the opposing side. This leaves only delegitimizing explanations for the
other’s behavior. For instance, their reasoning can be faulted. The are all crazy, or looney, as the OP said. The other option is to impute their values. The dont really believe that what they are doing is is the best interest of everyone, this is just an excuse to cover up nefarious motives, like greed and lust for power.


To understand the other side in their terms is to recognize not only the legitimate moral righteousness that informs it l, but to be prepared for the possibility that they will be unable to recognize your own position in such morally neutral terms.
Thus, this kind of understanding of the other doesn’t have as its goal the aim of persuading them to adopt your position, knowing that they may see this as a betrayal of their values. Its advantage is to protect you from reacting violently, punitively, condemningly, toward the other.

I can buy that

Are there situations in which you think either side remain unaware of the arguments of the other, despite the mudslinging. It seems unlikely to me that if one were to ask a right wing political science graduate or economist what the arguments of their left wing counterparts are, they would be unable to answer. Most are quite conversant with the arguments of the other. — Isaac

Let me see if I understand this. Are you making a distinction between being aware of the other side’s argument,and understanding that argument in the way that they intend it? Or are you assuming that to parrot back to the other their talking posts is equivalent to sharing thr other’s interpretation of the meaning of the political stance? Are opposite sides in today’s polarized political scene misreading each other, or reading each other accurately and disagreeing about other issues (namely moral stance and motivation) ?

Politics is an ecological phenomenon first and foremost, and the idea that it is built up of units of psychologies - as it were - is to completely misunderstand both the mind and politics. — StreetlightX

I would think if anyone would realize this, you would. Postmodern psychologies study the ‘mind’, that is , the psychologically embodied , ecologically embedded mind, inseparably from environment. As you know, Protevi , borrowing from Deleuze , calls it the bio-political mind. But I think calling behavior ecological isn’t enough. One has to recognize a certain normative autonomy of organism-environment functioning that doesn’t just treat political action as arising out of an anonymous plural’we’.

What is time? I'll tell you later. — Banno

I think it’s time

Then the question would be where does intentionality not arise in our mental life for Husserl? — Manuel

He recognized issues like birth, death, unconsciousness and sleep as problems for the theory but I think he argues that since the transcendentally reduced ego is not a human it does not die or suffer complete loss of consciousness( don’t ask)

I'm assuming much of our mental ruminations may not be about anything. That is there is no "directedness" between speech fragments and any object. — Manuel

For Husserl, an intentional object, understood most primordial, is simply a ‘sense’. A mental rumination would certainly qualify as sense.

There are masculine virtues? — Possibility

Yes. They are sealed in a vault somewhere in Texas.

To me, this is clearly at least partly true. — T Clark

cause you Da man

do you think that this version of masculinity has a place in the modern world? — BigThoughtDropper

This version of masculinity has a place among those who think such a thing as masculinity exists as a set of behavioral attributes grounded in biology. I suppose it also has a place among those who think that it is just an arbitrary set of features someone pieced together from traditional cultural assumptions, and that an almost infinite number of alternatives could work just as well.

So we use logic to arrive at an illogical sense of reality (metaphysics). Which in turn, is not so illogical at all (abstract mathematics, love, the will, intentionality, redness, ad nauseum). Or is it? — 3017amen

We use logic to work within normative rules that define a the conditions of ‘truth’. But the normative conventions that determine what is true for us and thus what is logically necessary are themselves the product of a value system. Idealist metaphysics , like the video offers, ossifies a particular value system as THE metaphysical
truth. Post-idealist approaches recognize
that value systems are constantly fading and new ones coming into being. The movement from
one value system to another can’t itself be described via a causative logic or rationality. So the role of ‘feeling’ is closely bound up with valuation.

All of which we feel as time. — MondoR

And all of which we feel in the same moment ‘as’ the present moment, retaining the just past within it and anticipating beyond itself.
As William James wrote :

“...earlier and later are present to each other in an experience that feels either only on condition of feeling both together.” In its most primordial form, consciousness is time consciousness.

The video introduces metaphysics this way:

‘Some say experience and feelings are the clearest way to truth, but I need rational analysis.’
He thus equates metaphysics with ‘rational analysis.’
He might instead have clarified that the notion of metaphysics as rational analysis is only one particular definition of metaphysics, one based on Enlightenment rationalism and German idealism.

you are making all these inferences based on your understanding of the meaning of terms which are not being used in the sense you apply to them. — James Riley

Before you get bent out of shape , you’re right. I initially didn’t read your first post carefully and assumed
you were making a moral judgement about those weak
and stupid, when you weren’t. Your moral focus was on the weak and stupid who refuse help.

it seems to me that it all springs from insecurity; a concern with how you want to be perceived by yourself or by others. — James Riley

What does insecurity spring from? Is it irreducible, or it it the manifestation of difficulties in making sense of social situations, in relating to the perspectives of others? There is no hostility, aggression, anger, condemnation without insecurity , but there is no insecurity without the experience of failure to relate to the thinking of others, and this includes our understanding of how they regard us and why. This failure to relate isn’t a personality trait or character issue , but an existential, situational issue.

That will not help you with those "others" because we are not all one (at least from a temporal, sense of interhuman relations). — James Riley

What Im getting at is that I believe there are
more satisfying philosophical approaches out there than the ones which support a ‘love your enemy’ narrative. They begin from a better grounding in how to understand human drives, motives, intentions and values and thus what causes individual human values to differ from each other.

To
the extent that we find it necessary to use a word like ‘ enemy’ to deceive another, we are still in the midst of a kind of crisis of empathy.
— Joshs

Again, you infer deceit. — James Riley

That was a typo. I meant describe.

How to love an enemy? — James Riley

How to think the meaning of the word ‘enemy’ that is not already fraught with affects of alienation and threat. What I’m trying to do is tie terms like hostility with a kind of crisis in sense-making. To the extent that we find it necessary to use a word like ‘ enemy’ to desceibe another, we are still in the midst of a kind of crisis of empathy. To then ‘love’ this enemy isn’t to resolve our personal crisis so much as to to put a bandaid on it, to tolerate the one we still don’t fully relate to. Only when we no longer have to label
the other as ‘ enemy’ do we truly find ourselves free of our puzzlement and failure to understand
the other, and therefore free of our hostility.

In a paper on hostility , I wrote this:

“If, rather than getting angry or condemning another who wrongs me, I respond with loving forgiveness, my absolution of the other presupposes my hostility toward them. I can only forgive the other's trespass to the extent that I recognize a sign of contrition or confession on their part. Ideals of so-called unconditional forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, loving one's oppressor, could also be understood as conditional in various ways. In the absence of the other's willingness to atone, I may forgive evil when I believe that there are special or extenuating circumstances which will allow me to view the perpetrator as less culpable (the sinner knows not what he does). I can say the other was blinded or deluded, led astray. My offer of grace is then subtly hostile, both an embrace and a slap. I hold forth the carrot of my love as a lure, hoping thereby to uncloud the other's conscience so as to enable them to discover their culpability. In opening my arms, I hope the prodigal son will return chastised, suddenly aware of a need to be forgiven. Even when there is held little chance that the sinner will openly acknowledge his sin, I may hope that my outrage connects with a seed of regret and contrition buried deep within the other, as if my `unconditional' forgiveness is an acknowledgment of God's or the subliminal conscience of the other's apologizing in the name of the sinner.”

I see our judgements of other people’s ‘character flaws’ as typically forms of hostility.
— Joshs

I don't. — James Riley

If you see character flaws as

understandable, relatable and human. — James Riley

, does this mean that this
represents the best that the person can do at the time , that their efforts and intentions are no less optimal than the effort and intention of someone without that particular flaw? In other words , does a character flaw impact one’s motives and intentions such that we could
call them moral flaws , or do they only describe limits of capability in a non-moral sense?

press on with what every one knows is intended, regardless of the incorrectness of the terms used. — James Riley

Its not the correctness or incorrectness of the terms Im
focusing on, it’s that they are terms of hostility masquerading as neutral descriptions. You’re describing what you believe are objective character flaws, but I see our judgements of other people’s ‘character flaws’ as typically forms of hostility. Once you label people in this way , it gives you or others license to gently or not so gently attempt to coerce them in your preferred direction. See my terms for anger in my previous post on this thread.

But that leaves one confronting the case of a weak person who refuses to be carried, or the stupid person who refuses to be questioned. — James Riley

‘weak’ and ‘stupid’. It sounds like hostility is embedded in your articulation of the issue. If we could just get people to stopacting so stupid, weak and condemnable we could solve the issue of aggression.

1) Assuming narratives that condemn, demean, mock or hold in contempt people for their actions, characteristics, skills, beliefs, preferences, views etc — Judaka

As you mentioned, there can be a variety of motivations for alienating other persons or groups, but I think the central motive for harm, violence and rejection of others is feeling the emotion of anger. I include in this emotion category a wide variety of feelings. These include: irritation, annoyance, disapproval, hostility, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, exasperation, impatience, hatred, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, lazy, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, disrespectful, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal.

I believe what these all have in common is a two step
structure. First, someone must have behaved in such a way as to disappoint our expectations of them, causing us emotional pain. If this disappointment were the only feature it would not be anger , only sadness. But in a second step, we generate the possibility of forcing them back to the way we believe they should have acted in the first place.

At the heart of anger is an unanswered question. Why does the perpetrator not feel guilty? According to the indignant person's original axes of construction, the very contemplation of the sort of nasty behavior he or she is presently witnessing should have produced a sufficiently intolerable amount of guilt in the perpetrator as to have prevented the translation of those plans into action. After all, thinks the angered party, "I've been tempted by that sort of thing too, but I've controlled myself." Unable to come up with any workable alternative explanation of the nonconformist's actions, the offended person attempts to validate his or her already failed construction by coercing the other into feeling the guilt that the original construction predicted he or she should feel. So the impulse of anger isn t to destroy. It’s a conformist impulse, to get the other to apologize, show contrition, men’s their ways. This can be achieved through violence or non-violence. In relationships , our anger doesn’t want to destroy the other , only to destroy the impulse in them that caused them to disappoint and reject us. We warm them back the way they used to be , the way they used to appreciate and respect us.

It can feel rewarding in many ways to feel that one has the "best" preferences, that what I enjoy, I enjoy because of my great taste. Others just don't "get" why what I like is so good, they're the ones missing out. This kind of validation produces feelings of superiority, confidence, pride and success. — Judaka

This reminds me of psychologist George Kelly’s description of punishment as a way to brand others as less than ourselves.

“People are threatened by ‘evildoers'. We have described threat; in this case it is the exemplification of a way of life from which we have only precariously escaped. The ‘evildoer' exemplifies what we might do if we dared, or what we might be if we behaved childishly, or what we would have been if we had not tried so hard to do better. We dare not interact with him on common ground lest we slip back into the unwanted ways. In order to take protective steps against the threat that his presence arouses within us we take symbolic measures called ‘punishment' against him. By such measures we either destroy or symbolize the destruction of the core role relationship of the ‘evildoer' with ourselves. That may make us feel a little safer from the looming shadow of ourselves as ‘evildoers'. We treat the ‘evildoer' as if he were experiencing guilt. That helps us convince ourselves that our own newly won position is secure. He really is not one of us. Even he now knows that he is not one of us. We are therefore not like him—we hope! We picture him as feeling guilty as a result of his being punished by us. From this point of view it is not the guilt which leads inexorably to the punishment, but rather the punishment which symbolically establishes the guilt. Punishment brands the threatening person. It banishes him into psychological exile. It thus protects a feeble society which is only half convinced of its system of morality.”

In the dance metaphor, we might consider how different bodies affect the 'same' (same enough) dance. — j0e

We could say that there are as many dances as there are dancers, but each dancer is attempting to mesh and intertwine their dance as harmoniously as possible or with each of the others, each from their own vantage. The result wouldn’t be one overarching harmonious dance but multiple achievements of harmonies. Peace could reign throughout the land, but only as proceeding from one to the next to the next dancer.

From a paper I wrote :

While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or
lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining
values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at
the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as
much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can
perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive
conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices
would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my
construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

The key question. for me is is how you understand the flow of experience moment moment to moment , both yours and your interpretation of the ongoing behavior of others. If you view meaning as socially languaged before it is that of any one experiencer , then it sounds to me like it is also fairly in the way that its sense changes from context to context. Why do the people around you get angry, feel guilty , get anxious i’m your everyday encounters with them.Is it merely their changing positing within discursive contexts, or is there a more intricate, intimate and effective way to anticipate the others attitudes and moods than via this linguistic ping pong game?

From a paper I wrote :

While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or
lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining
values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at
the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as
much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can
perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive
conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices
would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my
construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

The dancers come and go. There's no dance without the dancers, but the dance depends on no particular dancer. — j0e

Where does the perspective come from that identifies the dance which transcends the dancers? A view from nowhere, everywhere?

I'm not enthusiastic about continuing this discussion. Thanks for your responses. — frank

Let me see if I can help out here. Undoubtedly one could link phenomenal appearances, memories, dreams, fantasies, etc to neural pathways stimulating clusters of neurons. But this reminds me a little of Skinner attempting to pair every word in the dictionary with a specific reinforced response. I don’t think Isaac is incorrect to reduce perceptipn to activation of arbitrary groupings of neurons. This will provide useful information depending on what one wants to know and how deeply one wants to understand it. But I think the reductive route offers a kind of explanation and prediction that misses something vital about both sensory perception and language, and that is that meaning of all kinds involve intentional acts that arise out of nested contexts of significance for the person. Events occur for people into personal contexts that imply forward and thus co-define and shape
what occurs into them. Neurons or clusters of neurons never function in isolation from ones bodily system as a whole. They belong to larger webs of implicating relations linking sense modalities to other sense modalities , embedding these within superordinate affective-intentional aims and purposes.


So let’s talk a look at what it might be like for a little girl to learn the color ‘red’ from this non-reductive vantage. You’ll notice that it doesn’t t contradict Isaac’s
account but rather enriches it.

So the mother is trying to teach her daughter the color red. What is the background context foe this from the girl’s perspective? If she hasn’t learned any of the other colors, then she would first have to learn the category ‘color’. Otherwise when she acknowledges seeing the color red when her mother points to it , she may simply be recognizing color in general. Of course ,an even more fundamental context here is that the girl is a participant in a a language community, that she is making a decision to respond to a request from her mother , etc. It was suggested that her motivation for correctly picking out the right color is she wants to please Mummy. Perhaps , but any number of motivations may also be in play , and these motivations are not extraneous to the meaning of the task and even the meaning of the word ‘red’ for her.

For instance , children have a voracious curiosity , as evidenced by the obsessive asking of the ‘why’ question.
This is an intrinsic motivation, to be able to anticipate events beyond the immediate present, to be a sense-maker. Even before the mother’s attempts to teach color
words , the child likely has pursued numerous explorations on their own of color, how different colors form a rainbow , how some colors make her feel bad and some good , She may already have come up with her own words to describe her experiences with color.

But beyond or before all these subjective variations in meaning of color , is there a specific set of neurons that fire when exposed to a specific wavelength?
I had described in an earlier post how the perception of color can be produced on a spinning half black half white wheel, where ‘red’ is a black line coming out from a black background and ‘blue’ is a black line receding into a black background. I suggested that color may be fundamentally this ‘popping out at me’ of warm
colors and ‘receding away from me’ of cool colors.
In other words , rather than just an arbitrary bunch of neurons firing , color would be a contextual
movement being perceived, just as binocular vision is a comparative relation between two sources of input .

And color as a whole must itself be a corrected rod it of more basic intentional correlations. Color implies the seeing of a surfaceIf one does t yet know what a surface is , then color will not emerge as a coherent sense. To construct a surface perceptually, one mist construct lit of the every changing stream
of sense impressions stable objects that remain as what they are when we move our eyes or head or body. I doubt if someone someone blind at birth and only attaining vision later in life would see color at all , at least not initially.

Even if one were to claim that somehow the behavior of this apparatus produced a color wavelength out of black and white, it wouldn’t explain the more significant feature that red vs blue corresponds to , is produced by , opposing intentional contexts. The colors are what they are to us because they are DOING SOMETHING meaningful to us, in relation to our bodily comportment, not just resting in themselves as arbitrary sensations. And this meaningfulness of color implies into the motivational and goal-oriented contexts that I described above.

So what may the girl have learned of the parent succeeds in ‘teaching’ her to link the word ‘red’ to some feature of surfaces that both of them see similarly enough to differentiate from other colors? It wouldn’t just be a simple association between a word and a perceptual experience. It would be a whole situation that the girl learned, and the elements of this situation can only be artificially separated out into discrete items. The situational meaning would include the girl’s sense that something was important to her mother , what it was, and why it was. The situation would include the girl making a decision to comply , not comply , comply happily and with curiosity , or with indifference. It might involve excitement on the girl’s part that there might be a new achievement she could share with friends and maybe even teach them. When the mother begins pointing to objects and attempting to show that there is something common to all of them that forms a category, even before the girl connects her perception of red with this category , she may already know what it is like to learn a new category because she has played such games before. There is also the possibility that she never thought of red as a category. Perhaps for her each experience of red is so uniquely connected with that particular object that it never occurred to her to see it as something common to different objects.

So in sum, linking words and sensations is as complex and multivaried a social and psychological act as the perception of a senation itself.

In the following remarkable passage in response to a question from Thomas Baldwin concerning
the relation between the alterity produced by temporality and the alterity of linguistic sociality, Derrida appears to argue that the way in which time makes me other than myself from moment to moment is a more fundamental kind of sociality than that of linguistic intersubjectivity. I see this as a crucial point , and is certainly to my paprika concerning the unity over time of the self. It is a unity of transformations, but what unites it isn’t some dominating idealist center but the opposite, an utter lack of the arbitrary and polarizing force that is implicit in Witt’s and social constructionist models of socially.

Baldwin:

Anyone who reads Derrida having already familiarised themselves with the debates in English-language philosophy that we associate with Wittgenstein 's 'Private Language Argument' is bound to be struck by the similarities between, on the one hand, Wittgenstein' s critique of the possibility of private ostensive definition, and, on the other, by Derrida 's critique of the 'myth of
presence’. But then one difference must equally strike a reader; namely, that whereas Wittgenstein's argument focuses on a contrast between the private and the public, Derrida's focuses on a contrast between the present and the absent. So my second question is this: is
differance, this 'originally repetitive structure' of language, essentially public? Is some involvement with others essentially implicated in the use of language that counts as 'differance' ? There are suggestions in Derrida to this effect. For example he writes: Intersubjectivity is
inseparable from temporalization taken as the openness of the present upon an outside of itself, upon another absolute present' (Derrida 1973, p.a 84n). But, as this passage indicates, for him it is the 'temporalization' of meaning that carries the burden of his argument: it is the ecstatic potentially repetitive structure of differance that bursts the confines of anything merely present
through its essential reference to that which is not present. But is there here a distinction - between other times and other minds - without a difference?
...is the involvement of others in differance something essentially derivative - dependent upon the ecstatic structure of temporalization? Or is it absolutely fundamental in a way that might connect with that Hegelian conception of self-consciousness that is utterly dependent upon involvement with others?

Derrida’s response:

“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public’: , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation’ : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with
Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.

Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here. I quote you: “If one thinks back to the
Wittgensteinian debates again, it is clear that there are substantive issues concerning the alleged normativity of meaning and the role of a community in sustaining the practice of a language-game which involves other minds rather more than other times. “ I would immediately
agree on the level of the normativity of meaning. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn’t call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .) This is obvious. And, again, I would say that it is true even for animals, for animal societies. They form a community of interpretation. They need
that. And some normativity. There is here some 'symbolic culture‘.
But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other
now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely
other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the
living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it
knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I’ without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I’, that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I’ and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I’.”(Arguing with Derrida)

I like embodied mind and embedded organisms, but I don't find autonomy clear in this context. I tend to associate it with people who can be more or less autonomous. How does the world fit in except perhaps as a background or extended body? — j0e

If there is no dynamic aurnonomy , what makes an organism a dynamically functioning unity? Is it just a loose conglomeration of modules, or is there a functional unity to it , as Piaget argued?

Let’s say an organism is organized hierarchically, and even the most trivial aspects of its functioning are authorized or guided by more superordinate structures. Let’s then say that as the organism interacts with its world it assimilates a new aspect of the world to itself but at the same time accommodates and adapts its structures to the novel aspects of what it assimilates from the world. In sum, the structural organization of the creature as a whole is changed in every interaction with its world , but as a variation on a gradually changing theme. If this were not the case, then every interaction would produce an entirely new organism. it then would no longer be a living system but a rock.

One could look at mind the same way , in terms of a hierarchical organization that functioning as a unity , and that doesn’t ‘exist ‘apart from its being changed by the world that it is exposed to every moment. So it really has no internality to it. It is just a pole of self-world interaction. What I am pointing to here is not a solipsism but the exact opposite , a different and more radical notion of the social than that which believes in the coherence of the idea of the social as interpersonal. I’m my view interpsonal means something differ to every participant in it , and this isn t because a mind resists the social by being a box of inner stuff. On the contrary the so-called linguistic interpersonal notion of the social is a fiction. More precisely , it is a derived abstraxtion because it begins too late. One has to begin with radical temporality rather than language as Witt conceives it. Radical temporality reveals a more intimate and intricate beginning of the social, as both Heidegger and Derrida argued .

The dialectic opposing this approach is voiced by thinkers like Leo Strauss who charge Nietzsche with being an "historicist" rather than someone who recognizes the "discovery of nature." — Valentinus

Is Strauss championing empiricism ( the discovery of nature) over what he is reading as a subjectivism in Nietzsche?I think the causative dynamic of will to power would be a genealogical- psychoanalytic method of historical analysis, a differential of forces.

The idea of a brain transplant confuses us. Why couldn't the world always matter to a plurality of minds in a single body, matter to 'us in here'? — j0e

Galen Strawson argues that the self is always different from one moment to the next, and there is nothing outside of the larger social norms to unify this subjectivity as an identity over time. In this view he is not far from this those say that self is nothing but a social construct, and that intersubjectivity is more fundamental than subjectivity , which is only a temporary position within a socially constituted field.
This may be what you mean by plurality of minds in a body. Marvin Minsky talked about a society of mind , and Francisco Varela described a groundlessness of being with no solid self. But then there are the discourses on the embodiment of mind, taking their cue from Merleau-Ponty. Mind is embodied in organism, organism is embedded in world , and all three interact reciprocally such that a dynamic autonomy of self-organization is evinced. This autonomy provides the organism with holistically organized aims that give it a normative character. This argues for a notion of self as reflection of the ongoing normative consistency of organismic directedness.

To me it seems contingent. It's convenient that there's one 'soul' or 'self' per body, because bodies have to be trained to wipe their asses and stop at red lights. Which of the fourteen souls that share a skull gets prosecuted for date rape? Which one is a captain and which one is a private? — j0e

I agree it is contingent. But as a temporal flow its contingency unfolds as a synthetic unity from moment to moment. Not a soul or self as something unchanging throughout the contextual transformations of sense but a self remade each moment as new variation of itself. Self as a pragmatic ‘in order to ‘ , an always implying, anticipating beyond itself. The world always matters to me, is significant to me , is relevant to me in a new and particular way, but is always recognizable in its mattering. There is an experiential intricacy built on change but much more intimate than the arbitrariness of socially conditioned languaged sociality.

I was a counselor years ago, but since then I have been writing and publishing in psychology and philosophy, with a focus on the relationship. between affect and cognition.

https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer

I’ll try. You could say I practice it, in that it low behind all of my thinking. Where it really comes in handy is in psychotherapy. Two of my favorite clinical psychologists, George Kelly and Eugene Gendlin, used phenomenological ways of thinking in their approaches to clients.

I think the most profound aspect of their part poaches is i. thei integration of affect, feeling, emotion and mood on the one hand and cognition, rationality and intentionality on the other. This split is really at the heart of the ‘hard problem,

Josh, that sounds good but what does it actually mean? Can someone provide a basic example of phenomenology at work looking out a window or doing something interesting? Vague articulations of subject-object and the observing subject aren't really useful to me unless we can see what the contribution of this perspective might be. — Tom Storm

I know is you’d like something f you can wrap your hands around, but its a real bitch to provide a summary, at least for me. The best I can think of at the moment is a description of how Husserl comes up with the notion of a real spatial object. That may give us at least a starting point.

Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenological philosophy, attempted to chart a course between realism and idealism by grounding all experience in perception and grounding perception in structures of intentionality in which the subjective and objective aspects(what he called the noetic and noematic poles) are inextricably dependent on each other and inseparable. He was very much influenced in his project by the work of Franz Brentano, but went beyond Brentano's notion of inentionality by abandoning Brrentano's naturalism.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

What differentiates naturalism (and appeals to those who - perhaps excessively - idolise it), is that the corpus of information it yields about it's object of study is readily shared, without (by and large), the person holding that information having very much impact on it. If an engineer says a car works, it probably works no less for me than it does for you.


Phenomenology may well study 'you looking out of the window', but what consigns it to the lesser status it suffers is not that, it's the fact that the corpus of information is derives from that study is completely ephemeral, having no anchor of 'fit-to-world' to hold it. — Isaac

What differentiates naturalism is its presupposition that the person holding a meaning can define it as ‘information’, which presumes that the person holding it “ does. to have much impact on it “. That’s the classic realist trope, the supposed independence of the real world information from the subject that apprehends it.

What consigns it to lessor status is that it is more difficult to grasp. Nevertheless , as I have mentioned to you before , phenomenology is only one of a growing list of branches of philosophy which are being joined by psychological approaches which abandon representational realism.

As far as ‘ anchor of fit to world, surprisingly , a reciprocal anchor of fit extending from subject tot world and world to subject can actually be a more pragmatically useful sort of anchor of fit than the representational realist version.

If I send you a box of Oreos, will you read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception? If after reading it you still feel the same about phenomenology at least you’ll have a better sense of what’s being compared here

As mentioned in another thread, consider the concept of lifeworld, which is maybe where phenomenology wakes up from its lonely dream. — j0e

Maybe not , but then its ‘lonely dream’ may be misunderstood by those who are wont to attribute it to an idealist solipsism.

Husserl wrote this a few years before his death, in the midst of his so-called ‘life world’ period:

“The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you,
his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a
particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental
intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life
proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185

I have been arguing that this ‘solitude of the ‘I’ for Husserl is somewhat akin to the mineness of experience for Heidegger’s Dasein , not as a reified idealism but as a more intimate way to understand the perpsecrival
nature of experience than through the Witt’s language discourse

Naturalism is the study of 'what you see out the window'. Phenomenology is the study of 'you looking out the window'. — Wayfarer

No, this is a common misapprension of phenomenology as introspection into an inner subjective realm. It is an accurate depiction of the everyday use of the term phenomenological, but philosophical phenomenology after Husserl is about the replacement of naturalism’s assumption of a ‘subject looking’ vs ‘objects out the window’ binary with a different binary:subject and object are mutually created and recreated in each moment of experience.
Phenomenology redefines the nature of ‘what is out the window’ just as much as it redefines the subjective aspect of the relation to the world. Husserl spends as much time on the constitution of the real , the empirically objective and the socially constituted interpersonal realm he does on the subjective side.

For me the self-contradiction is best focused on language as a substitute for mind. For instance, why do we assume that there is one mind per skull? Why grasp the brain as a unity in the first place? — j0e

If we substitute the ‘I’ or ‘self’ for mind , then I think the issue of a unity comes down to whether perspective, interpretation and ‘ for-me-ness’ are fundamental features of any experiencing of a world. One would then have to examine how phenomenologists treat this idea of a primordial ‘self-awareness’ in such as way as to avoid the Wittgensteinian accusation of solipsism and internality (beetle in a box). I think they succeed at this, and in so doing enrich Witt’s account by integrating it with perception and temporality.

Depends on the theory but I guess so - I generally think of them as the best model we have for now based on the available evidence. — Tom Storm

But keep in mind that the evidence will itself be a product of the narrative. New evidence only becomes evidence when the narrative changes. So in a way the shift in paradigm precedes and makes possible the appearance of evidence. The narrative doesn’t just organize the evidence. It produces it.

these words by MacFarquhar are more ad hom than a robust analysis of his work. — Tom Storm

I see them as both as hominem and a reflection of his political work because I think his anarchism conveniently allows him to see cartoon villains around every corner. Is he right? Is he right that the complex motivations of individual actors and groups in society can be reduced to the villainous caricatures that he often turns them into?
My political preference is for postmodernists like Deleuze.