It has more to do with the dynamics of conformity. Metaphysics is what One does. — Arne

ok, but I recommend adult supervision. You could poke an eye out.

Contemporary metaphysics represents the systematizing of philosophy. — Arne

That makes it sound like a deliberate effort is required. Is metaphysics for skilled specialists, something you should never try at home, or is it a way in which we are thrown into the world?

Heidegger’s thinking may be a bit weirder than you’re prepared to accept. I noticed you make traditional philosophical distinctions like that between mind and world, fiction and reality, subjective and objective. Heidegger eliminates those distinctions. Dasein is neither mind nor world , inside nor outside, subject nor object. Heidegger’s Being is not an entity, an object, a subject. Being is a happening, a transit, an in-between.

And if you do not want to talk ontology, then that is fine too. But only a metaphysician would attempt to persuade that metaphysics is some sort of umbrella term that includes ontology and epistemology. It is not. — Arne

To add my two-cents worth, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, what he calls also the ontic-ontological difference, is not at all the same thing as the traditional philosophical meaning of ontology as the meaning of extant beingness. Heidegger considers this classical understanding of being to belong to metaphysics, whereas his fundamental ontology overcomes metaphysics.

This is an intriguing position and I am sympathetic to embodied cognition. I'm not sure what it means to 'exceed' culture. Does he mean that bodily experince is primary and the others later and derivative? Or is there more of a reciprocal relationship? — Tom Storm

He means that each of us interprets the culture we live in in ways that are unique to us as individuals, and that these unique ways open themselves to creative transformation. It’s not just an inner process, since tapping into the body’s experiential intricacy is being in touch directly with the world of nature and culture.

It will incorporate the insights of postmodernism and move past the dead end where postmodernism seems to stop.

Do you agree with Gendlin's account here? Does postmodernism lead to a dead end? — Tom Storm

It’s not exactly a dead end, but I do agree with Gendlin that writers like Foucault who emphasize the socially constructed nature of experience leave us with a somewhat arbitrary account of meaning formation. Gendlin’s account
keeps pomo’s relativism while enriching it with an intricacy that they miss. I think Heidegger and Derrida also accomplish this.

Lots of noxious examples of woke authoritarianism here, but would you agree with me that Laurie Rubel’s comment about math and data being non-objective was likely not referring to the logic of calculating in itself but the contested subject matter it is attached to? That many facts in the social sphere are contestable doesn’t in itself seem to be an unreasonable assumption. What many do find unreasonable are the sweeping guilt by association tactics (white privilege, implicit bias, etc) used by some on the left.

Does Barad claim a scientific justification for the claim? — wonderer1

I would say yes. She cites studies of the neurobiology of the brittlestar as an example of the use of her approach in predicting the behavior of phenomena.

↪Art48

Agreed. Besides, when we are asleep we still dream. Not only do we dream — Lionino

Here’s an interesting paper by Evan Thompson on the subject:

https://anandvaidya.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/2/3/46231965/dreamless_sleep-_the_embodied_mind-_and_consciousness-2.pdf

One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether con-sciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya view, calls into question the standard neuroscientific way of operationally defining consciousness as “that which disappears in dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or dream.” The Indian debate also offers new resources for contem-porary philosophy of mind. At the same time, findings from cognitive neuroscience have important implications for Indian debates about cognition during sleep, as well as for Indian and Western philosophical discussions of the self and its rela-tionship to the body. Finally, considerations about sleep drawn from the Indian materials suggest that we need a more refined taxonomy of sleep states than that which sleep science currently employs, and that contemplative methods of mind training are relevant for advancing the neurophenomenology of sleep and consciousness.

Perhaps what is required is some kind of neutral, formal, metalanguage so that natural languages can be deconstructed more precisely. Instead of postmodernising mathematics, we should mathematise postmodernism. :smile: — GrahamJ

Don’t know about that. We don’t want a repeat of the Principia Mathematica fiasco. As for an Esperanto for postmodernists, that kind of flies in the face of the point they’re trying to make about the relation between language and the world.

I'm not saying that, the prevailing modern/postmodern state of wisdom, is the only wisdom there is. I am also not saying that postmodernism has no wisdom in it, because it does. But I think at the same time, there is a prevailing wisdom today, and it is stuck. It hasn't gotten past existentialism — Fire Ologist

In 1997, the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin held a conference at the University of Chicago titled ‘After Postmodernism’. His aim was not to deny the insights of pomo but to move beyond them. You might be interested in his work.

An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created between experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience—that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a new empiricism, one that is not naive. It will incorporate the insights of postmodernism and move past the dead end where postmodernism seems to stop. It will be an empiricism that does not assume an order that could be represented, and yet this will not lead to arbitrariness.
The rejection of representational truth must lead us to a more intricate understanding, rather than arbitrariness. We assume neither objectivism nor constructivism. The results of empirical testing are not representations of reality, nor are they arbitrary. Our empiricism is not a counterrevolution against Kuhn and Feyerabend, but it moves beyond them.

↪HardWorker To be fair, if the philosophy has been around for more than a few decades and isn't integrated into science in some way by now, its likely a failed or highly controversial philosophy — Philosophim

Wouldn’t a ‘successful’ philosophy also be integrated into art, literature, politics , education and business? Is science the supreme arbiter of the truth of philosophy?

Is it correct to characterize your statement thus: abstract rules of organization have conceptual influence (the conferring of sense and intelligibility) upon concrete things? — ucarr

I would prefer to say that concrete things are articulations and modifications of an internally interconnected web or Gestalt of referential meanings. This structure is not a logically causal whole, but a a reciprocally interaffecting totality in which changes to any subordinate aspect modifies the whole in some fashion.

Is it possible QM exemplifies a networked reality: wave functions and particle functions are interwoven within a universe that supports superposition regulated by probability measurements? — ucarr

Quantum physicist Karen Barad has produced a model
of interaffecting matter that was inspired by the double
slit experiments.

Phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without pre-existing relata. On the basis of the notion of intra-action, which represents a profound conceptual shift in our traditional understanding of causality, I argue that it is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘‘components'' of phenomena become determinate and that particular material articulations of the world become meaningful. A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘‘apparatus'') enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent
distinction—between subject and object), erecting a separation between ‘‘subject'' and ‘‘object.'' That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy. In
other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. (Meeting the Universe Halfway)

Physics isn`t mathematics, the theories within physics have additional assumptions and just make use of the theorems of mathematics. — Johnnie

Physics doesn’t just make use of mathematics. Even if all of the equations were removed from physics, its starting point in objective relations makes its goal calculative exactitude, the essence of the mathematical, even if it can only vaguely approximate this goal.

The problem with many answers here is metaphysics ends up very inflated, encompasing physics and epistemology and not distinguishing metaphysics and ontology — Johnnie

You are right that we can pick and choose from mutually exclusive definitions of metaphysics. What I’m about is
your view toward a holistic model of scientific understanding. There are many examples of such holistic models, but I dont think you’ll find them in Aristotle. They emerge after Kant , and particularly in the wake of Hegel’s historical dialectics. Hegel paved the way for Heidegger’s ontic/ontological difference, which directs us to become attuned to the conditions of possibility (metaphysics) of the ontological manner of being of ontical beings. For Heidegger, a list of natural kinds pertains to ontical beings. But any category of existing entities derives its sense and intelligibility from a wider context of relevance. This wider context of relevance comes first, and the meaning of the list of beings is derived from it.

I'm tempted to say this supports my notion that science and philosophy are distinct.

But I'm uncertain. If I missed something I'd appreciate a clue. — Moliere

For Heidegger the way that science and philosophy are distinct is that science ‘doesn’t think’. What he means by that is that a given science works within the bounds of a regional ontology produced by philosophy, but can’t escape those bounds without the help of philosophy. Philosophy contributes

a productive logic, in the sense that it leaps ahead, so to speak, into a particular region of being, discloses it for the first time in the constitution of its being, and makes the
structures it arrives at available to the positive sciences as guidelines for their inquiry.

To put it in Kuhnian terms, normal science is the way the vast majority of scientists think, whereas revolutionary science requires philosophy. He believes today’s sciences (in the very way they define themselves as objective) are still stuck within the metaphysics laid out by Descartes and modified by Kant Hegel and Nietzsche.

We become the source of contradiction in this universe, as if enabling matter to reflect upon it's "self" instead of the matter - the first instance where what was becoming, simply is being. We provide a limit at which, by turning back, a reflection, a notion, a contradiction, is made. The word contradiction includes "diction" which places words in our essence, the self-contradictory animal who can speak about nonsense with clarity and poise. — Fire Ologist

Writers following Nietzsche into postmodern territory, like Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, reject the idea that reflection simply turns back to gaze at itself. Whenever we attempt to do this we are presented with an Other. Reflecting on ourselves IS reflecting on the matter. That is, the world , including our own consciousness, changes with respect to its prior state every moment. For instance, Delleuze argues that all matter in the universe interacts with other matter such that we can never point to any object that simply continues to be what it was the moment before. This is not the reality of human beings perceiving matter , but how matter ‘is’ in itself. Matter contradicts itself from moment to moment , whether there are people around to reflect on it or not. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche in forming his perspective, especially where Nietzsche suggests that all ‘matter’ in itself is differential relations among drives.

Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –). We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life?

My point was that no matter what the starting point is, and there are more than I mentioned, enough holes have been poked in things, that hole-poking deconstruction seems to be the last man standing… Now I should proceed to deconstruct every last word I just said, remake the very impulse that led me to say it in first place. Or maybe not, because then I might just be contradicting myself, demonstrating my point by refuting it. — Fire Ologist

You seem to be focusing on only one aspect of seeing the world in terms of a self-transformative, self-contradictory movement of becoming, and missing the other, more important one. Your focus is on incommensurability, loss, disconnection, arbitrariness. It is true that for all these writers difference is more primary than identity. And in deconstructing the traditional metaphysics, they lose the faith in the certainty a God creator provided, and the certainty absolute truth provided. But I would argue they gained something more important. In thinkers like Nietzsche, Derrida. Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Wittgenstein, the differential relations that swallow up matter are alway already organized as systems, networks, totalities of relational relevance and a certain internal consistency.

We are never without recourse to such backgrounds making our world intelligible and familiar to us at some level. If one compares the organization of these systems of internal differences with the objective realist models of idealists like Kant, or Enlightenment thinkers like Leibnitz, Hume, Spinoza and Descartes, one finds that they give us a way to understand our connection to the world, and to other human beings , that is more intimate and less arbitrary, allowing us to anticipate the behavior of others more effectively. We gave up the certainty of arbitrary truths in favor of the relativity and becoming of relevant , intricate and intimate relations of meaning. One can even find in postmodern models a certain notion of progress embedded within the becoming of these differential systems.

We haven't been able to really advance the discussion since existentialism (and it's bleed into post-modernism), and Nietzsche already burned most (not all), most of it down. — Fire Ologist

The discussion is always advancing , albeit slowly, although I admit this seems to be a somewhat stagnant period for great ideas. But if you grant that there has been a progress in the sciences and technology since the existentialists, then you would have to grant a progress in philosophy as well, since the former are outgrowths of the latter and parallel their development.

The whole point of the "9/11 didn't happen," meme popular on places like 4chan isn't that people actually think that the government falsified the construction of the Twin Towers in some objective sense, and then faked an attack on non-existent buildings. That would be too ridiculous even for those circles. The point is that history is whatever people in power say it is (and that Alt-Right activists possess this same power to change history). Objective history is inaccessible, a myth. The history we live with is malleable. It's a joke, but a joke aimed at an in-crowd who has come to see the past as socially constructed.. The subtext behind declaring every mass shooting a "hoax" is that "you can never be sure what is happening in current events." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can you give me some quotes that demonstrate the belief you’re attributing to the alt right that objective history is a myth? My understanding is that the far right is so astonished and incredulous in the face of what they see as completely unfounded liberal interpretations of the facts that they have completely lost faith in the accuracy of anything a liberal says. That's not being anti-realist, that’s abandoning the expectation that the other side will be faithful to what is real, true and objective. You seem to be randomly mixing pomo and conservative memes together while providing no evidence to justify this.

Another main route for anti-realism to enter the far-right has been through esoterica, particularly Julius Evola and Rene Guenon. On places like 4chan it is not rare to have people talking about tulpas, creating realities through concentrated thought — thinking something is true makes it so — although this generally partially ironic (like everything in the Alt-Right). Hence, their God who was created from memetic energy or whatever. Everything is ironic and unreal, a sort of trolling of the "real" to show its total groundlessness — Count Timothy von Icarus

Evola and Fuenon are considered traditionalists. This has nothing to do with anti-realism as I understand its meaning in philosophy. As Joseph Rouse describes them:

Anti-realists endorse the possibility of understanding what scientific claims purport to say about the world, while denying the kind of access to what the world is "really" like needed to determine whether those claims are "literally" true. We can supposedly only discern whether claims are empirically adequate, instrumentally reliable, paradigmatically fruitful, rationally warranted, theoretically coherent, or the like.

Again, your depiction of anti-realism inappropriately mixes mysticism, irrationalism, supernaturalism and other traditional metaphysics with pomo post-realism, which is not related to any of those perspectives.

Daniel Friberg doesn't urge "rebutting" or "debunking" leftist "lies" but "deconstructing their narratives" in "metapolitical warfare." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Friberg couldn’t accurate define what Derrida’s notion of deconstruction means if his life depended on it. Pomo memes like these have entered the public vocabulary and have now become ubiquitous, but it will be decades before the general public has a clue about their original philosophical meaning. As proof of this, he certainly seems to have you fooled.

Both exist and one is derived from the other. — Lionino

Indeed.

Critical race theory can be thought of as a paradigm that goes all the way back to the Frankfurt school of critical theory. What the theorists were arguing is that, in order to understand modern society, you have to pay attention to the power relationships among members and groups.

https://news.temple.edu/news/2021-08-05/untangling-controversy-around-critical-race-theory

At least if I'm right that science and philosophy are different, and math is science. — Moliere

Heidegger argued that modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche is grounded in a particular notion of the mathematical which founds the modern conception of science. With Descartes is born the contemporary philosophical metaphysics of the subject-object binary. The subject posits the object via an axiomatic method that defines in advance what it means to be an object, and in this way the modern notion of the mathematical becomes the basis of what subject and object are.

Mathematical method is not one piece of equipment of science among others but the primary component out of which is first de­termined what can become object and how it becomes an object…

Descartes does not doubt because he is a skeptic; rather, he must become a doubter because he posits the mathe­matical as the absolute ground and seeks for all knowledge a foundation that will be in accord with it. It is a question not only of finding a fundamental law for the realm of nature, but finding the very first and highest basic principle for the being of what is, in general. This absolutely mathematical principle cannot have anything in front of it and cannot allow what might be given to it beforehand.

This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing
each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of
that being. We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the
certainty of representation. What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and
truth is first defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.

Eugene Gendlin’s analysis helps to clarify Heidegger’s comments:

There is a serial procedure employed in counting. In this procedure we obtain various numbers because we always keep in mind the units al­ready counted. Our counting “synthesizes” (puts to­gether) fourteen and another, another, and another. We keep what we have with us as we add another same unit. Our own continuity as we count gets us to the higher number. As Kant phrased it, without the unity of the “I think,” there would be only the one unit counted now, and no composition of numbers. We get from fourteen to seventeen by taking fourteen with us as we go on to add another, another, and another.

Thus, our activity of thinking provides both the series of uniform steps and the uniting of them into quantities. These units and numbers are our own notches, our own “another,” our own unity, and our own steps. Why do two plus two equal four? The steps are always the same; hence, the second two involves steps of the same sort as the first two, and both are the same uniform steps as counting to four. Thus, the basic mathematical composing gives science its uniform unitlike “things” and derivable com­positions. Therefore, everything so viewed
becomes amenable to mathematics.

But Heidegger terms the modern model of things
“mathematical” for a second reason. He argues that “mathematical” means “‘axiomatic”’: the basic nature
of things has been posited as identical to the steps of
our own proceeding, our own pure reasoning. The laws
of things are the logical necessity of reason’s own steps
posited as laws of nature. It is this that makes the model “mathematical” and explains why mathematics
acquired such an important role. The everywhere-equal
units of the space of uniform motion of basically uni­form bodies are really only posited axioms. They are the
uniform steps of pure, rational thought, put up as axioms
of nature. Descartes had said it at its “coldest” and most extreme: Only a method of reducing everything
to the clear and distinct steps of rational thinking grasps
nature.

Is not such an approach simply unfounded? Every­thing may follow from the starting assumptions, but what
are they based upon? How can that be a valid method?
Heidegger says that the axiomatic method lays its own
ground . He thus gives the term “axiomatic” a
meaning it does not always have: he makes it reflexive
(as Descartes’ method was ). “Axiomatic” means not only
to postulate axioms and then deduce from them; it does
not refer to just any unfounded assumptions one might
posit and deduce from. Rather, Heidegger emphasizes that the axioms that rational thought posits assert the nature of rational thought itself. Axiomatic thought posits itself as the world’s outline. It is based on itself. It creates the model of the world, not only by but as its own steps of thought. As we have seen, it is rational thought that has uniform unit steps and their composits, logical neces­sity and so forth. The axiomatic ground-plan of nature is
simply the plan of the nature of rational thought as­serted of nature. This, then, is the basic “mathematical”
character of modern science. It is founded on the “‘axio­matic” method of “pure reason,” which, as we shall see,
Kant retains but limits.

Perhaps we can't rightly call anti-realism vis-á-vis history, (or even contemporary events) post-modern, but it certainly gets lumped in with the term, and it's a cornerstone of Alt-Right thought — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you cite some examples of anti-realism as an explicit doctrine of the far right? I can’t help but think your own realist-based thinking is leading you to inappropriately lump together as ‘anti-realist’ everyone who doesn’t accept the scientific consensus of what has been objectively proven to be true, and ignoring their reasons for rejecting it. There are a wide variety of realisms, and I view the far right , to the extent that generalizations can be made here, as embracing a more traditionalist form of realism than the one you endorse. I think this is the source of your difference with the far right, and pomo’s alleged influence here is largely a popular scapegoating for cultural trends they have almost nothing to do with, based on an inability to read them effectively.

Formal logic and Symbolic logic are not able to deal with the real world phenomenon and states very well.
— Corvus

They are at the very heart of the development of digital computers, such as the one you're reading right now. — TonesInDeepFreeze

What Corvus should have said is that they are not very good at cognizing in the way living systems do, as Hubert Dreyfus famously showed 60 years ago with his ‘What Computers Can’t Do’ and his more recent update ‘What Computers still can’t do’. Of course they are a part of the real world. Specifically, as technological
implementations they function as appendages to human ecological systems , the way a nest belongs to the bird’s ecology and the web belongs to the spider’s built niche. While an animal species are stick within a single ecological niche, humans continually construct new ones. As we evolve culturally, so will our built niche, which may involve the replacement of symbolic logic with different technological languages.

↪Joshs

Right, but the question was: "did elements of the Nu/Alt-Right grow out of/use ideas from post-modernism?" not "does Nick Land understand Deleuze in particular?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

If we agree that there are in fact substantive ideas offered by particular authors labeled as postmodern , then in order to determine whether someone’s ideas ‘grow out of/ use ideas from pomo’, we first have to establish what exactly we’re talking about, and I think that requires picking a specific writer, whether it be Deleuze, Foucault or Lyotard. and determining a connection with Land’s work.

it seems unreasonable to assume that someone who had a successful career as an academic publishing on Deleuze and wasn't subject to particular criticism until after he adopted controversial political opinions completely misread his sources — Count Timothy von Icarus

A lot of scholar glom onto and base their careers on parsing each word of a major figure. They hew so close to the original texts that it is difficult to see where their thinking departs from the master until they write something controversial.

You’d be surprised by how wildly students of particular philosophers can misread them. For example , Graham Harman, who founded object oriented ontology, a branch of speculative realism, offers a reading of Heidegger about as far removed from pomo as I can imagine. I recently read a piece which claimed, somewhat convincingly in my opinion, that Land settled on a libertarian Kantianism, which it seems to me is impossible to characterize as ‘growing out of’ Deleuze or pomo. Your thinking doesn’t grow out of an approach that is built out of a direct critique of what you’re growing into.

I think its the case that Land was always a traditionalist, but also a cultural hipster who joined the latest intellectual fad (which happened to be Deleuze) without absorbing more than superficial elements of him. As he became older and learned to read philosophy more carefully he discovered his true mentors were not pomo at all but transcendental idealism.

When it comes to tendencies, attitudes, dispositions and so on, I have only encountered human diversity, so for me any view which characterizes people as all having the same tendency, attitude or disposition I find egregious — Janus

.

It’s not necessary that a metaphysical outlook be identically shared among members of a community. Each of those diverse humans you have encountered has an interpretive system for construing events which is partially unique to themselves.

Land isn't responding to only Deleuze, although it seems likely given some of his lines that he would say he is doing to Deleuze what Deleuze claims to do to other thinkers: "buggering" them to produce demon offspring. That the demon offspring is recognizably related to the author but a sort of heretical corruption is sort of the point. I don't know how someone who conceives of their philosophy in such a way can be "misread," as it would seem that "misreading," shows proper application of the method that is recommended — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re not resolved of the responsibility to read Deleuze carefully. You don’t get off the hook that easily. Deleuze’s work is rigorous in what it is trying to say. It can be placed in just as precise a region as any of the other philosophers of our era. Deleuze lets us know the difference between ‘buggery’, where he uses authors like Leibnitz and Spinoza for his own purposes, and where he rejects what he doesnt like in their work. Readers of Anti-Oedipus have no doubt he was influenced by Freud and Lacan but leaves them decidedly behind at a certain point.Readers also know where he stands in relation to Derrida , Husserl and Hegel. Deleuze work tells us where to situate him with respect to the history of philosophy, praising Foucault and Heidegger but also letting us known where they fall short , venerating Nietzsche as his most important influence, resurrecting Bergson for his notion of lived duration but critiquing his subjectivism.

Despite his differences with Derrida, I believe Deleuze would endorse the latter’s thoughts about truth and relativism:

For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.

isn't saying "thou shalt not have hierarchies," itself an absolutist decree being made from on high? Why aren't we free to generate the neo-facist, neo-feudal aesthetic we find interesting? Isn't this more true to the goal of exploring "the infinite plurality of creative spaces?" How committed to this infinite creativity are you really if your response to some forms of it are "no, you cannot be creative like that!" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Deleuze is not commanding anybody to discard hierarchies, he’s showing how we can understand them as deconstructing themselves. Either you see this or you don’t. If you don’t, then Deleuze’s opinion is that your idea of freedom is a compromised freedom because it is unable to see beyond stratified categories that restrict as much as they liberate you. It’s your loss, not Deleuze’s. He’s just offering what he sees as options. It’s up to you whether you recognize them as useful alternatives or not.

↪Joshs
Sartre basically hovered around the starting line just like the rest. — Fire Ologist

Is there only one starting point? You dont find that certain philosophers provide you with more clarity than others?

But Nietzsche, like all of us, could only move in self-contradiction. Self-transformation, self-creation, lays out an ontology and metaphysic of self-material, action upon that material, and new self material - these all fall prey to the disconnect between appearance and reality. — Fire Ologist

There can only be a disconnect between appearance and reality we still take seriously the notion of reality as something independent of our experience. Throw away that notion and we also jettison the concept of mere appearance. And what’s wrong with self-contradiction if it moves us from one meaningful-in-itself value system to another?

We honest thinkers are deep in the cave. I find it an interesting place to be. — Fire Ologist

You seem to be at Sartre’s starting point, looking out a world where all the old verities and certainties have been put into question. Sartre’s response reflected the fact that there was one verity he was not prepared to question, that of the self-conscious subject. As a result, his attitude was one of mourning the loss of those old certainties. By contrast, Nietzsche was able to destabilize Sartre’s Cartesian subject, and as a result, he could take joy in immersing himself in self-transformative becoming rather than desperately search for ways to secure wisdom for the knowing subject from the rubble of the past through dialectical materialism.

". To be clearer, do you find that hypocrisy in what is maintained in praxis and what is professed via propositions cannot occur and, if so, due to what reason(s)? — javra

One can certainly lie to others about one’s views for various reasons, but I don’t think that apparent hypocrisy between opinion and action generally involves self-deception so much as failure to take into account the practical implications of one’s views. Theory is rarely able to account for the unpredictability and indeterminateness of real life situations.

What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why? — Banno

Mathematical logic and its use in geometry produces pure, but empty idealities. They introduce the pure idea of precision, exactitude, accuracy that then becomes the basis for the aim of exactitude of correctness in the empirical
sciences.

“The only objectivity that belongs to exact natural science is based upon "geometrization," an idealization which is able to encompass theoretically, by idealizing them, all the possibilities of experience as experience of what is identical in infinitum; it does this by means of ideal concepts—con­cepts of what is in itself and of ideal truths as truths in themselves.” (Husserl)

The catch is that applying the pure idealizations of geometry to the natural world is describing a world that is no longer ‘empty’, no longer protected from contextual change in meaning. There are no pure forms , shapes in nature, and no self-identically persisting objects. For the purposes of convenience, scientists, beginning with figures like Galileo, fabricated a geometricized idea of the empirical object. As Husserl writes of this invented object:

“A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities, its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. But only ideals have a rigorous identity; the con­sequence would be that an individual is truly something identi­cal—i.e., an entity—if it is the ideally identical substrate for general absolute ideas.”

What Husserl means when he says only ideals have a rigorous identity is that in order to adopt the notion of a self-identical empirical object, or the concept of a logical subject and predicate , we have to conceal the subjectively changing processes of actual experience, to ‘freeze’ them into temporarily unchanging identities so we can compare and manipulate them. The world doesn’t come to us packaged as self-identical objects.

“ It is high time that people got over being dazzled, particularly in philosophy and logic, by the ideal and regulative ideas and methods of the "exact" sciences — as though the In-itself of such sciences were actually an absolute norm for objective being and for truth. Actually, they do not see the woods for the trees. Because of a splendid cognitive performance, though with only a very restricted teleological sense, they overlook the infinitudes of life and its cognition, the infinitudes of relative and, only in its relativity, rational being, with its relative truths. But to rush ahead and philosophize from on high about such matters is fundamentally wrong; it creates a wrong skeptical relativism and a no less wrong logical absolutism, mutual bugbears that knock each other down and come to life again like the figures in a Punch and Judy show.”

“The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it. One must finally achieve the insight that no objec­tive science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense.

Heidegger writes:

The ontological presuppositions of historiographical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor of the most exact sciences. Math­ematics is not more exact than historiographical, but only narrower with regard to the scope of the existential foundations relevant to it.

Because of examples such as these, I don’t then necessarily equate a being’s often unconsciously occurring Umwelt (for lack of a better word) to - in the case of humans - the self-professed worldview which is consciously upheld and maintained. — javra

The two don’t have to be in conflict. There are communities of scholars devoted to a particular metaphysics or philosopher, and yet no two people interpret that ‘same’ metaphysics or philosophy in exactly the same way. The publicly agreed-upon understanding is a shorthand, an abstractive generalization which conceals within itself the variety of ways it is implicitly used by different people. You may be surprised by the fact that “self-proclaimed Christians that adhere to all ritual aspects of their faith and uphold this metaphysical worldview at the same time in practice are in many a way atheistic”, but they may see no contradiction here.

It seems to me that the terms 'worldview' and metaphysics' are too often used interchangeably and this is confusing. I think, by reflective reasoning, the latter attempts to globally make sense of (i.e. translate into conceptual categories) the local 'presuppositions and implications' (i.e. parochial biases ~ e.g. mythological, theological and/or ideological blindspots) of the former; in other words, 'worldview' is to (native) grammar plus (naive) vocabulary/idioms as 'metaphysics' is to theoretical linguistics – or object-discursive & meta-discursive, respectively — 180 Proof

Wow, it sounds like a person would need a PhD in order to be qualified to form metaphysical presuppositions. I may be wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and connect your take on what metaphysics is with an Analytic approach. This makes sense give that, historically, the Analyric community has been much more interested in Hume, Leibnitz and Kant than Hegel. I am thinking that it is only in the philosophies that came after Hegel and were strongly influenced by him that we get an articulation of metaphysics as comparable to worldview. That is, as an overarching framework of intelligibility that orients us to the world and ties all its aspects together in a global unity, but that in most cases is held naively, unconsciously.

Maybe those people are not real post-modernists, but they do exist:

addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,”
— WSJ — Lionino

A lot of confusion around the word postmodernism. In the field of philosophy it tends to lumped in with trends that are quite tangential to it and in many cases opposed to it (Marxism). Pomo authors like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida often get blamed for the excesses of wokism and cancel culture, when in fact the repressive moralism coming from these movements is attributable to such doctrines as Critical Race Theory, and figures like Franz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci. These approaches are heavily influenced by Marx and psychoanalysis, which are put into question by pomo writers like Foucault and Derrida.

How one regards the significance of formal proof and formal theories may be philosophical, but the incompleteness proof itself about formal theories does not require any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t it require interpretation? It may seem as though it is in the nature of proof that it be absolutely transparent to anyone who understands mathematical proof, but hasn’t there been a lot written over the past 70 years or so (I believe Ian Hacking had some interesting things to say about proof) ‘relativizing’ its very nature?

If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here — Olento

I think you’ll find that the most interesting pomo analyses of mathematics are neither strictly about power or politics, although these are never absent . Rather, they reveal the historical and philosophical origins and significance of the concepts of objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness that is peculiar to mathematical logic. That is to say, they don’t deny that mathematics contributes these qualities, what they are interested in showing is that such qualities are secondaryto and derived from more primordial and fundamental ways of thinking that are precise in a different but more powerful way.

that a rhetorical question meant to convey that Descartes and Leibnitz knew little about mathematics? Or is it meant ironically to say that indeed they knew a lot about mathematics? In any case, of course it is famous that Descartes and Leibnitz are among the most important mathematicians in history. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Indeed they are. I was suggesting that even though pomo philosophers have not contributed specifically mathematical innovations, the best of them have as deep an understanding of the underpinnings of math as did Descartes and Leibnitz.

In any case, the proof of the incompleteness theorem does not depend on any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Doesn’t this depend on how one interprets the significance of performing a mathematical proof? Are you familiar with what Wittgenstein had to say about what it is we are doing when we construct a mathematical proof?

Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)

Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career — Count Timothy von Icarus

One problem here is the impossibility of coming up with a one-size-fits-all definition of what it means to be left or right wing. So much depends on the issue. I have my own peculiar way of thinking about the conservative-liberal binary, which is easy to poke holes in, but at least it gives some basis for discussion. It resembles in some respects the attempts by Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff to provide a profile of a personality type which gravitates to one pole or another of this binary. But whereas their analysis was based on psychological disposition, I view this binary as a developmental spectrum paralleling the history of philosophical eras. For me conservatism is equivalent to traditionalism, and philosophical traditionalism, from the vantage of writers like Deleuze, supports hard categorical distinctions that lead to the placement of particular genders , ethnicities, races, within rigid, opposed boxes, and organized hierarchically. This is of course a gross simplification , but hopefully you get the idea. Deleuze’s approach, by contrast, abandons hierarchical , categorical thinking for endless differences upon differences both within and between, that blur and entangle the boundaries between distinctions that place individuals and groups either exclusively inside or outside.

Nick Land is an unusual personality, to say the least, so it may be impossible to place his thinking within any familiar political category, but to the extent that he embraces any significant features of Deleuze’s thinking, I would have to say that he doesnt see the world the way that traditionalists do, based on the way I have characterized philosophical conservatism.

. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.

Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true if left and right stand for nothing besides mindless reactions against whatever the other side does.
But if you entertain my view of the binary as correlated with stages of a historical intellectual development, it matters what one is challenging the foundations of power and dogma in favor of. If Land subverts the establishment’s norms because he truly believes in rigid boundaries of gender, racial, class or whatever, and their strict hierarchization , then this places him by my reckoning on the philosophical right. If , on the other hand, his aim is to anarchically tear down all extant hierarchies and stratifications , with no desire to replace them with new ones,( I’m reminded of Zizek endorsing Trump in order to blow up the whole political order in preparation for his Marxist utopia), then I’d place him on the philosophical left regardless of how violent and disruptive the results.

The subject seems to bring out antipathies the way Communism used to. Notice how Jordan Peterson uses the term 'postmodern Marxists' to rally his troupes and disparage the current era of alleged meaninglessness. — Tom Storm

What’s amusing about this is Peterson doesn’t realize that thinkers he mentions as card-carrying postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault offer ideas directly counter to marxist dialectics. Postmodernism arose in opposition to, not as an elaboration of Marxism.

It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science (which is tentative and subject to revision) or philosophy (which might be seen as a swirling chaos of theories and positions — Tom Storm

You’re right to see maths as a central concern of pomo thinkers. They recognize that the essence of modern science is the marriage of the pure mathematical idealizations invented by Greek and pre-Greek cultures and observation of the empirical world. The peculiar notion of exactitude which is the goal of scientific description has its origin in this pairing.

But I was unable to review the critique, as I do not have a NYT subscription. And there is a paywall in front of the article. — Bret Bernhoft

A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World:

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Mr. Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labor and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorize the C.E.O.s of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. And the way we regard that wealth as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporized, how many other people contributed to their success or how much government money subsidized it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)

Would-be corporate monarchs, having consolidated power even beyond their vast riches, have already persuaded much of the rest of the population to more or less go along with it.


As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency. It rails against centralized systems of government (communism in particular, though it’s unclear where Mr. Andreessen may have ever encountered communism in his decades of living and working in Silicon Valley) while advocating that technologists do the central planning and govern the future of humanity. Its very first line is “We are being lied to,” followed by a litany of grievances, but further on it expresses disdain for “victim mentality.”

It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as just Mr. Andreessen’s predictable self-interest, but it’s more than that. He articulates (albeit in a refrigerator magnet poetry kind of way) a strain of nihilism that has gained traction among tech elites, and reveals much of how they think about their few remaining responsibilities to society.

Neoreactionary thought contends that the world would operate much better in the hands of a few tech-savvy elites in a quasi-feudal system. Mr. Andreessen, through this lens, believes that advancing technology is the most virtuous thing one can do. This strain of thinking is disdainful of democracy and opposes institutions (a free press, for example) that bolster it. It despises egalitarianism and views oppression of marginalized groups as a problem of their own making. It argues for an extreme acceleration of technological advancement regardless of consequences, in a way that makes “move fast and break things” seem modest.

If this all sounds creepy and far-right in nature, it is. Mr. Andreessen claims to be against authoritarianism, but really, it’s a matter of choosing the authoritarian — and the neoreactionary authoritarian of choice is a C.E.O. who operates as king. (One high-profile neoreactionary, Curtis Yarvin, nominated Steve Jobs to rule California.)

There’s probably a German word to describe the unique combination of horrifying and silly that this vision evokes, but it is taken seriously by people who imagine themselves potential Chief Executive Authoritarians, or at the very least proxies. This includes another Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has funded some of Mr. Yarvin’s work and once wrote that he believed democracy and freedom were incompatible.
It’s easy enough to see how this vision might appeal to people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Thiel. But how did they sell so many other people on it? By pretending that for all their wealth and influence, they are not the real elites.

When Mr. Andreessen says “we” are being lied to, he includes himself, and when he names the liars, they’re those in “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview,” who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

His depiction of academics of course sounds a lot like — well, like tech overlords, who are often insulated from the real-world consequences of their inventions, including but not limited to promoting disinformation, facilitating fraud and enabling genocidal regimes.

It’s an old trick and a good one. When Donald Trump, an Ivy-educated New York billionaire, positions himself against American elites, with their fancy educations and coastal palaces, his supporters overlook the fact that he embodies what he claims to oppose. “We are told that technology takes our jobs,” Mr. Andreessen writes, “reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.” Who is doing the telling here, and who is being told? It’s not technology (a term so broad it encompasses almost everything) that’s reducing wages and increasing inequality — it’s the ultrawealthy, people like Mr. Andrees.

It’s important not to be fooled by this deflection, or what Elon Musk does when he posts childish memes to X to demonstrate that he’s railing against the establishment he in fact belongs to. The argument for total acceleration of technological development is not about optimism, except in the sense that the Andreessens and Thiels and Musks are certain that they will succeed. It’s pessimism about democracy — and ultimately, humanity.
In a darker, perhaps sadder sense, the neoreactionary project suggests that the billionaire classes of Silicon Valley are frustrated that they cannot just accelerate their way into the future, one in which they can become human/technological hybrids and live forever in a colony on Mars. In pursuit of this accelerated post-Singularity future, any harm they’ve done to the planet or to other people is necessary collateral damage. It’s the delusion of people who’ve been able to buy their way out of everything uncomfortable, inconvenient or painful, and don’t accept the fact that they cannot buy their way out of death.

Which is another reason why I'm a techno-optimist — Bret Bernhoft

Are you supportive of Mark Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto?

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Or do you agree with this critique of Andreesen?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/marc-andreessen-manifesto-techno-optimism.html

I personally view fabricated truths as deception - be it self-deception or otherwise - if not outright lies. But that's just me. — javra

Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? You wrote earlier that we all “consciously or unconsciously cling to some form of what Mircea Eliade termed an axis mundi”. Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’?