our generation (baby boomers) have been a complete disaster. Starting out as the philosophical idealists and ending up completely corrupt, obese, the worst parents ever, uber-materialists, with barely a morsel of dignity or a whiff of honor to be found among 75M FRAUDS. — synthesis

I’ve always found it interesting that the movers and shakers of the social revolution of the ‘60’s were not baby boomers( Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Tiom Hayden, Paul Krassner, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman) Even John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Jimmu Hendrix technically weren’t baby boomers.

the folks with the most direct experience are older and that is why older people are generally chosen for positions of the greatest responsibility. — synthesis

Otoh, it is a truism in mathematics and physics that if you havent produced anything groundbreaking by the time you’re 30 you never will. Pop music seems to be another arena where the most brilliant work generally seems to be done before the age of 35. I agree that politics is different, but maybe that’s a function of a mellower temperament in older age rather than more insight. Politics is precisely NOT about groundbreaking ideas but consensus building.

What "innovations"? Utopian socialism? Communism? Atheism? Class war? Revolution? Economic theories? All borrowed from others! — Apollodorus

Do you know of a philosopher who didn’t borrow from others?

You were just involved in thread where you justified linking psychological research with politics. Give me a short list of your favorite psychologists ( would Piaget, William James, Freud or Vygotsky be on that list?) and I’ll try and link them with Marx.

I'm also not sure why I'd reduce human agency to causal explanations alone. — Marty

What else is there except causal explanations? Of course, one can speak of different kinds of causation. Husserl grounded material causation in the motivational
principle of intentionality.

Youre missing the point. Marx is just one among a long list of philosophers and psychologists after Hegel who put Enlightenment liberalism under critique. There are two ways to critique Marx ( or Freud). One is to recognize his innovations and go beyond him. The other is to misread him and thus to dismiss what you’re not really understanding. The only way to deal with and counter aspects of wokeness that you find objectionable is to effectively understand the underlying philosophical basis so that you can move beyond it. You don’t stand a chance by throwing classical liberal ideas at it. Those values are on their way out one way or the other. Critical theory began 70 years ago as the work of a small group of continental philosophers. Now it has gained acceptance in practically every large university in the U.S.

it's good to know that they aren't the majority. — Apollodorus

I wasn't worrying. Just stating a fact — Apollodorus

Oh. Sounded like a worry.

It sounds like your view of what science does is based on the ideas of one of those philoaophers who have been dead for 200 years

I'm sure there are some who are Marxists even if they don't call themselves that. But it's good to know that they aren't the majority. — Apollodorus

I wouldn’t worry. In 50 years today’s left wing will be the moderate center.

Who wants to admit that everything they think has already been thought by a person that has been dead for ages? — ssu

A more important question is how many believe that everything cutting edge in science has already been produced by people that have been dead for ages.
I would say almost none. And yet they think there can be this disparity between scientific advancement and innovation in philosophy.

[reply="ssu;530659"

Well, being "post"-everything is so hip. — ssu

I don’t know anyone who is post-everything, but I do see intellectualideas in developmental terms , so any particular philosophy can be placedas pre something and post something else.

Sure, there are some who would call themselves Marxists, but they aren't the majority. — ssu

Don’t forget the post -Marxists. That would
include fans of William James, Sartre, Derrida, Heidegger, social constructionism , deconstruction , phenomenology, Freudianiam and neo-Freudianism, post-structuralism and post-modernism, just to name some figures and movements. If you want to escape the influence of Marx in rigorous philosophy, you generally have to find philosophers born before 1840.

Views are often inculcated through upbringing and education. Once they've become part of the system, of the psychological makeup, it may be difficult for somebody to consciously isolate, identify, and analyze them in any meaningful way. And what if subconscious memories from previous lives, or genetic factors, play a role? — Apollodorus

Norms are inculcated , but every one of us interprets those norms in slightly different ways in relation to our own outlook. We never simply , blindly internalize ideas
from the culture. We are not vacuum
cleaners , we are interpreters. We make use of the informational resources of our culture , and that limits us , but we can only select from those resources what is consonant with our own system of understanding, even when it seems at a distance like an entire community is in lockstep with each other.


It’s true we are not always very good at articulating in words what we believe and why we believe it , but there are ways of helping someone to express what they think by having them put it in contrastive terms with positions they oppose. What I can say is that if someone has a conviction that is important to them, then there are ways to allow them to articulate it and show what makes it different from alternatives. It’s also possible that their political alignments are not very important to them and they are happy to just follow others.

Unconscious memories of course will influence belief, but only in the way that all aspects of our history do. But memory is always filtered though and reinterpreted in accordance with our current thinking. So we are never simply slaves to our past. The past that you recall is always a reconstruction. You never have direct access to what you experienced in an earlier time. Your past in some sense is always ahead of you.

how is this system built, supported and maintained, and what role do "traits" play in any of this? Do "traits" exist or not and if yes how do they relate to this system of anticipations? — Apollodorus

The system is built from experience. No event ever duplicates a previous event , so the system is always adapting and accommodating itself to the novelties it encounters by creating new categories and subcategories to make sense of events. if there must be some recognizable aspect or feature of an event , some similarity between it and a subordinate category of the system in order for it to be seen. Emotional crises are the result of the encounter with experience that the e system cannot assimilate on the basis of likeness and similarity on any level.

We see this clearly in today’s polarized political environment. Neither side can subsume the other’s thinking enough to see its validity for the other side.

What people think of as ‘ traits’ may correspond to variations from one person to the next in styles of organizing events, but in most cases , the concept of trait is used incorrectly to explain behavior that is the result of the content of one’s system. ‘ Emotionality’ of various sorts is a function of how comprehensively and assimilatively one’s system can cope with events. That’s a function of what one understands, the content of ones system , not some stylistic feature of engaging with the world.

Birth order, proneness to anger , shyness, extroversion can be studied in any culture, but have no direct bearing on the content of one’s outlook. and thus of one’s politics. If you want to know why someone believes a certain way, you’re better off asking them than assuming f secret traits. They will most likely be able to tell you why they think the way they do.

Being confronted with opposite views does tend to make you more aware of your own and reinforce them when you start defending them. And it seems that psychology, innate or acquired, does play a role in it. — Apollodorus

I hold to a different approach to psychology that one that sees behavior as innate or acquired. One could say that it is both at the same time, or neither. I hold with psychologist George Kelly that a person’s psychological
processes are channelized by the way that they anticipate events. And the way we anticipate
events is organized as a functionally integral system of anticipations that is our worldview. The relative stability of this system , rather than ‘traits’, makes us resistant to coercion and conditioning from outside forces, but it is not a frozen template. If events don’t validate our hypotheses, our system can crumble if we don’t reconstrue. What is validating to the left is not validating to the right , because the underlying worldviews are so different.

I can understand how a psychopath ended up that way if I see a lesion in the vm prefrontal cortex, that doesn't mean I can now diffuse his rage with talking. — Isaac

I understand that you don’t see political perspectives and moral systems this way, but just as a hypothetical , what if instead of connecting such complex ways of thinking with reductive causes like lesions in the brain, or reinforcement contingencies, we saw them as akin to scientific theories? That is, if we saw every social-political-ethics stance as the manifestation of an underlying ‘scientific’ theory that was constructed by the person on the basis of the evidence as they interpreted it? Would you then agree that coercion, condemnation, peer pressure and violence would not be particularly effective in changing their theoretical view? Can such methods change the theories of good scientists?

Again, I know the idea of an integrated gestalt-based personal foundation for social understandings conflicts with your conditioning-based approach, but I just want to suggest that it explains why countries under the weight of sanctions and international
condemnation can dig i. their heels rather than succumb to the ‘shaping’ effect of internetional pressure.

We're a social species, ostracisation is our main tool for setting group rules, so condemnation works. Look at how riled neo-liberals on this site are that we don't take their arguments seriously, they shouldn't care to debate with such obvious moral reprobates, but they do, because they want to be in the beard-stroking intellectuals gang. — Isaac

Group rules and ostracization only work when those being ostracized have enough overlap of their thinking with the dominant group. It has the opposite effect when the two parties have profoundly different worldviews.

Conservatives and liberals interact online all the time in the U.S. on comment sections and blogs, but studies have show that rather than causing them to come closer to the other’s point of view, it simply reinforces their differences.
It is impossible for someone to be successfully cajoled or threatened to some behavioral goal if that form
of behavior is based on a certain complex underlying understanding the the person has not arrived at. All you will end up with, at best, is a clever soul who learns how to ape the superficial aspects of your ways of acting in order to keep out of trouble. But in the meantime that person will strategize how to gain power in order to overthrow what they never bought into to begin with. And in terms of that person’s day to day intimate behavior with friends and family , they will implicitly continue to behave in the ways that intrinsically make sense to them. Even pigeons have been known to outfox reinforcement contingencies.

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.
— Joshs

Yes, I agree, though obviously for different reasons. — Isaac

Where groups are oppressed and have been serially so for decades - the poor, minorities, modern day colonies of TNCs...what's needed is more violence and condemnation. — Isaac

I’m not sure I understand how one can authorize violence and condemnation against an other while at the same
time considering their perspective and actions to be legitimate. As Ken Gergen wrote “ those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”


I can understand how one group might accept an other group’s politics as not at all subject to moral condemnation , and yet find it necessary to protect one’s own community from them. One can defend oneself against a wild animal without condemning them , because we see their behavior as legitimate and natural.

I really don't see any reason to think that Side A or B have any kind of 'logic' to their respective worldviews at all, so there's nothing to see in that respect. There are collections of positions which are generally mutually exclusive sets (though some overlap) that are adopted out of habit, conformity, personal narrative building... — Isaac

I think this gets to the heart of it. For you the idea of a legitimate perspective , an internal logic to a worldview , is incoherent There are only fragmented and arbitrary bits of conditioned habits, so a ‘tough love’ is justified to change the reinforcement contingencies , habits, propositional narratives.

Considering psychology is largely a garbage science anyway, one has to admire the foresight of philosophers. — StreetlightX

I’m aware of your influences: Cavell, Zizek, Wittgenstein, Connolly, Deleuze. Every one of them has waxed enthusiastic about certain psychologists.
I think Deleuze was fond of Guattari, Witt admired James, Connolly quotes Freud up the wazoo, etc.

psychology is uniquely bad at understanding anything because it does not admit of a transcendental perspective. This is why philosophers as diverse as Kant, Husserl, and Frege went out of their way to erase any trace of psychologism from their work. Rightly so. — StreetlightX

The meaning of the transcendental , as well as the psychologistic, has undergone substantial
change since Kant. Psychologists who follow Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology embrace a form of transcendentalism that stands as a critique of Kantian transcendental subjectivity, by recognizing the irreducible reciprocal dependency of subjectivity and objectivity in the apprehension of the world.These authors jettison Kant’s solipsist idealist transcendental in favor of radical self-world interaction.

One finds this a priori in psychologists like Gendlin and Kelly, as well as Evan Thompson.

Of course , an entire generation of neo-Kantian psychologists implicitly based their models on Kantian idealism. So it wasn’t that they didntt admit of a transcendental perspective, but that they took it for granted.

Philosophy is an anti-psychology and that is its essence and greatness. Politics even more so. — StreetlightX

And art is an anti-philosophy and anti-psychology, as is music, literature , poetry and every other mode of human creativity. Each is the anti of the others and that is their greatness. Any attempt or privilege or denigrate
any of these modes with respect to the others leads to silly biases like Heidegger’s elevating of poetry to the ultimate expression of being, or Nietzsche doing the same with art , or Rorty telling us we should chuck our philosophy books in favor of novels, or claiming that politics is ‘even more’ anti psychology than philosophy.

When powerful new ways of understanding ourselves come upon the scene , they can be expressed in any of the above modes. All I know is the most exciting and insightful discourses of being in the world I have found are from a small group of philosophers and clinical psychologists. It seems to me that political theory is lagging behind. Deleuze, Foucault and Marx don’t do it for me.

when they do provide a more accurate non-psychological explanation for why conservatives are minimizing the virus threat, viz. that they are digesting a wide apparatus of conservative messaging, including propaganda from the President, that is downplaying the virus for political reasons, — Maw

This is also a psychological explanation, albeit one not rooted in personality traits but social conditioning , the idea that individuals unthinkingly introject and internalize ‘conservative messaging’.

This shouldnt be surprising. The divide between
paychological theory and philosophy is an arbitrary one(Freud vs Nietzsche, Sartre vs embodied cogntition , Gergen vs Foucault, Heidegger vs Gendlin). If psychology is just a conventionalized form of philosophy, then so is political theory. Between psychology and polic theory I would argue that most philosophers of the past 200 years have been more closely tied to psychology and politics. Nietzsche called himself a psychologist. Husserl heaped praise on intentional psychology.

Tell me a little about your political philosophy and I’ll match it up with a parallel psychological model. I promise it will be more to your liking than Haidt.

it it does not displace the central role of politics which is giving more power to some at the expense of others. People with privileges want to keep them. Those deprived of them want more equality. — Valentinus

Yea, but would you agree that the extreme political
polarization between right and left in the U.S. is not a function of power, but worldview? That is to say , explanations of who wields power, who the victims are and the reason for the inequality are entirely different depending on which side of the partisan divide you lie on.

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.