There is pre-interpretive, pre-conceptual perception.
— Joshs
I agree entirely, apart from the last sentence. — Ludwig V

Damn it. I meant to write ‘ there is NO pre-interpretive, pre-conceptual perception’.

Let's take phenomenology, returning to the things themselves as they are given. The method is good, but it essentially records the world in new frames.. Phenomenology allows us to clear our judgments from previous experience. Cleared. And again took a picture. — Astorre

In phenomenology as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty conceived it, the ‘things themselves’ which are given to consciousness are not ‘recordings’ of real objects. They are not ‘pictures of the world’ but descriptions of constituting acts of intentionality. What a thing is in itself is the way it is constructed via mental processes which are directly in touch with the world.

Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Husserl, Phenomenology and Anthropology

Yep, that sounds about right.

I exist within my own reality, whatever that reality is. It is logically impossible to discover what exists outside my own reality using knowledge that is part of my own reality.

Perhaps this is "Dasein".

This means that I am limited to thinking about the ontology of my own reality, and the process of thinking about my own reality is epistemological. — RussellA

Heidegger understands the term ontology in a peculiar way.
He draws from Kant’s idealism the notion of condition of possibility. Kant’s categories are the synthetic condition of possibility of epistemology. For Heidegger the ontological is something like a condition of possibility, but it is not transcendental in Kant’s sense. Think of it as a stance or perspective, the Being of a being in terms of its way of being, not what a being ‘is’ but how it is. These stances do not precede the existence of the world, they are what it means to exist. To exist is to open up a stance. An epistemology is what is made possible ( intelligible) by a stance.

I recognize that "seeing as aspect" is inherent in perception. What's bothering me is that as aspect is always an aspect of something. Wittgenstein's presentation of this seems to me to obscure that point. The duck-rabbit can be seen in two ways. But there is a third way, which is neutral between those intepretations and allows us to say that those two interpretations are interpretations of the same picture. I mean the description of the picture as a collection of marks on paper — Ludwig V

We understand ‘same picture’ by seeing it as ‘same picture’. Or as you put it, by seeing something as ‘marks on paper’. The notion of marks on paper is no less in need of interpretation than seeing something as a duck or a rabbit. There is pre-interpretive, pre-conceptual perception.

How can you arrive at an ontological belief without first going through an epistemological process? — RussellA

Here’s how Heidegger would answer that question. Let’s see if Astorre agrees:

Heidegger would reject the framing of the question, because it presupposes a priority of epistemology over ontology. Instead, he would argue that epistemology depends on a more basic ontological structure of existence, one that we are already immersed in as Dasein. So, ontological understanding is not a conclusion we reach, but a condition we uncover. Epistemology is derivative. Traditional epistemology (as in Descartes, Kant, etc.) starts with the subject-object divide and questions how the subject can know the world. But we don’t arrive” at ontological belief via epistemology. We start in it. We are always already involved in a world where Being is disclosed. The proper philosophical task is to uncover this ontological structure, not to justify it through epistemology.

When you talked about shifting foundations, I thought you were talking about dialectics. Becoming analyses out to Being and Non-Being, and that brings us to Heidegger's What is Metaphysics, one of my favorites. :grin: — frank

It’s one of my favorites too. ‘The Nothing nothings’

From the Eastern perspective, continental philosophy looks quite analytical. If you cover the entire Eurasian continent and pave the way from India to Great Britain, you get a spectrum from hot and sensual to cold and analytical. — Astorre

It seems to me the distinction you are making can just as well be cast as that between philosophy and literature as between West and East. With regard to the Russian writers you mention, it is further narrowed down to literature of a particular era, the 19th and 20th centuries, which happens to coincide with the Romanticism and post-Romanticism which swept across Europe. Russian literature's spiritual intensity emerged during the same period that produced equally passionate and non-analytical Western works. In fact, Romanticism came to Russia a bit later than it emerged in Europe.

To make your analysis more complete, shouldn’t you bring into the discussion Western works of literature from that period so we can see if perhaps they as well are more ‘hot and sensual’ than ‘cold and analytical’? I notice, for instance, that you didn’t mention Georges Bataille. His work is simultaneously French and utterly opposed to cold analyticity; dealing with death, eroticism, sacred violence, and mystical experience in ways that are arguably more extreme than anything in Dostoevsky.

Here are some other examples:

French literature:

Charles Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du mal* explored decadence, eroticism, and spiritual corruption with intense sensuality.

Arthur Rimbaud.His visionary poetry and A Season in Hell were explosively passionate and mystical

Paul Verlaine. Symbolist poetry emphasizing music, sensation, and emotional immediacy

Joris-Karl Huysmans. À rebours was a decadent exploration of aesthetic excess and spiritual crisis

German Literature:

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zararhustra

Novalis. Romantic poet-philosopher whose *Hymns to the Night* merged erotic and mystical experience

Heinrich Heine. Poetry combining political passion with sensual romanticism

Stefan George. Aestheticist poet creating a cult of beauty and spiritual intensity

Thomas Mann. Works like *Death in Venice* explored psychological passion and moral decay

English Literature:

Oscar Wilde. Aestheticism prioritizing beauty and sensation over moral analysis

Algernon Charles Swinburne. Poetry notorious for its eroticism and pagan sensuality

D.H. Lawrence. Novels like *Women in Love* emphasized bodily experience and vital forces

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Religious poetry of intense spiritual and sensual experience

Scandinavian Literature:

August Strindberg. Psychological dramas of sexual and spiritual torment

Knut Hamsun. Hunger and other works emphasized irrational, instinctive experience

Hegel's roots were Neoplatonic, which is the philosophy Christianity is built on. Maybe he was instrumental in bringing it back to the academic scene, but it had been around for centuries. — frank

Neoplatonism may have been around for centuries, but my references to evolution and revolution were meant to capture how Hegel’s focus on historical change set the stage for Darwin, Marx, American Pragmatism, Nietzsche and Heidegger. I may be mistaken, but I dont think Christian neoplatonists were big on revolution. Hegel radically historicized the platonic absolute.

↪Joshs Brook Ziporyn. And it's not just nostalgia. Indra's Net is hardly a primitive ontology. — Wayfarer

Oops. Thanks. Concerning Indra’s net, it is not enough to transport the concept of the radical interdependence of all things as a one-size-fits-all cliche. One has to examine
what this means in practice in the way a culture conducts itself, treats expressions of otherness i. one’s family and community, avoids war and other violent acts which define the boundaries of ‘interconnectedness’.

If we stop fixating on essence and separate the concepts of sushchee (existent) and bytie (being), we can arrive at some interesting conclusions. The very notions of bytie and sushchee in Russian are something different. To exist (sushchestvovat’) simply means to be in a state where your attributes do not change by your own will (a stone lying on the ground, a tree growing according to its program, or an AI operating by an algorithm). To be (byt’) is something more than mere existence. It's roughly what happens when something can change its attributes at its own discretion (a prime example is a human, but not necessarily only them). — Astorre

I know of two cultures which have been claimed as thinking radically differently about being, presence and purpose in comparison with Western approaches. Heidegger singled out pre-Socratic thinkers like Heraclitus and Parmenides as understanding becoming in a fundamental way that was derailed when Socrates, Plato and Aristotle shifted the focus to beings, and truth as correctness, and Western thinking has followed suite ever since. It didnt matter to Heidegger whether a language like Russian was missing the present tense copula or not. What mattered was what kind of philosophical and religious literature was produced within Russian language without the copula. If the simple absence of the copula in a language predisposes their culture toward modes of thought which avoid the trap of fixing becoming into being, where is the evidence of this in the philosophical writings of Russia and other Slavic countries?

Robert Ziporyn, a translator of ancient Chinese texts, makes the claim that certain strains of Buddhism avoid fixing becoming. He associates this with their non-phonetic language and absence of copula, but derives his evidence from the content of the writings, not just their grammar.

I will call the claims of Heidegger about the pre-Socratics and Ziporyn about ancient Buddhism the nostalgic position. The nostalgic position asserts that some individual or culture in our distant past ‘got it right’ by arriving at a way of understanding the nature of things that we drifted away from for many centuries and are just now coming back to. So the latest and most advanced philosophical thinking of the West today is just a belated return to what was already discovered long ago.

I dont buy the nostalgic position. I think it is only when we interpret ancient thought in a superficial way that it appears their ideas were consonant with modern phenomenology and related approaches. Why are we so prone to misreading the ancients this way? I believe this comes from emphasizing only one aspect of their thought and ignoring the other, more significant dimension. Western philosophy after Hegel shifted its attention away from unchanging foundations and towards a discourse of evolution, revolution and becoming in which foundations become relative, contingent and impermanent. The primacy of the self-knowing ego and the purposefulness of the grasping will were put into question. Some of these philosophers took note of the fact that Buddhist scholars also talked about egolessness and non-willing.

But I want to argue that the most valuable consequence of the modern turn toward becoming was that it represented a further step in the evolution of Western thinking toward ways of understanding the world in terms of intricate relationships, harmonies, interconnections and correlations. This process necessarily had to start out with the belief in fixed objects and universal laws as a ground for seeing consistencies and stabilities in the world. My contention is that ancient buddhist thought is not post-Westen but pre-Western. Its view of change and becoming does not have room for the intricate interconnections that phenomenology and other contemporary philosophies describe within change.

The fact that I disagree with Heidegger concerning the significance and relevance of the pre-Socratics for his phenomenology doesn’t diminish my support for his ideas, and I am interested to see how your thinking relates to his, even if I don’t buy your nostalgia for older cultural-linguistic products.

I don't think it makes sense to talk about time in the first place unless something is already the same across the sequence. If there isn't already sameness, you just have wholly discrete being(s). The very ability to notice difference, for it to be conceptually present, requires that there also be sameness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sameness, similarity, consistency and inferential
compatibility are important. The self-preservation of living things, scientific knowledge and agreement in ethical norms depend on it. The question is whether belief in pure self-identity over time furthers scientific progress and ethical understanding or inhibits it. When one begins from pure self-identity-identity, differences appear as necessarily arbitrary, violent. polarizing, oppositional. In treating the temporally unfolding repetition of a phenomenon in terms of absolutely equal sameness one misses the subtle , intricate shifts in sense of meaning which take place in every every moment of the repetition. Then, when one finally notices a qualitative difference, one’s noticing arrives too late. Having missed the intricacy of qualitative change underlying the assumed qualitative stasis, one is only attentive to the gross, abstractive contours of contradiction and violation.

Your metaphor of the film reel as a depiction of time falls within the conception of time as related to motion, on which the empirical measurement of time is based. An object in motion differs from itself over time by displacing itself in space. But the qualitative sense of the object supposedly does not change through the quantitative changes in spatial location. The accounts of time that I endorse assert that the qualitative sense of an object that we observe in motion does change. This doesn’t mean that it does not continue to be the same object. What it means is that to continue to be the same object is to refresh its contextual sense, significance and relevance.

For anything to have meaning requires two things. It requires that it present a new aspect, a new way of being alike and different from other events. And it requires that this novel feature be relevant. What this implies is that identity is not necessary for the perception of similarity, for anticipating what is to come, for predicting events empirically. On the contrary, pure identity is the death of sense and meaning. To hold something as self-identical is to make its meaning disappear. The constant appearance of our world as self-same from one moment to the next that the perceptual system makes possible is only achieved by continuous changes it makes in itself. For instance, to see an insert as unmoving requires continuous subtle rapid oscillations of the eye. Hold the eye completely still and the object vanishes. A color only appears as it is against contrasting colors. If the entire visual field becomes monochrome, the perception of the color as color disappears.

Try to measure the motion of a ball, and see if you can notice how, even as you dutifully maintain your attention to the task, the sense of the task, what interests you about it, how it feels to you are all in continuous motion. The mistake we make is to consider such shifts in sense as merely ‘subjective’ and extraneous to the meaning of the object as self-identical.

Sure, and like I said, this all feels a little bit like a tangential topic. — Leontiskos

Would you agree there’s an easy way to test whether it’s tangential? Namely by jumping back into the topic of the OP and seeing how long we last until we start talking past one another. I like to think I succeeded in not talking past Number2018 in my back and forth with him over his OP. My aim there was threefold.

1) to clarify the concepts of affect and rationality that he was employing by tracing them back to the references he provided( Massumi, Luhemann, Deleuze, Foucault).
2) to establish that there are other ways of interpreting Deleuze and Foucault in line with contemporary philosophical and psychological perspectives on the relation between affect and reason which integrates them more closely than his approach does .
3) To show the implications of this alternative approach for his account of wokism.

More simply, a philosophy forum is about deliberation, and we deliberate about that which we are conscious of, not what we are unconscious of. The only way that unconscious entities can be brought to bear within a deliberative philosophy forum is by first bringing them into consciousness. — Leontiskos

I only intended my reference to Deleuze and his notions of the unconscious and the pre-consciousness for Number2018, because Deleuze is important to his thinking, and he brought him into the discussion.

I don’t want my position to be misread as a claim that when we deliberate we may be blind to the true motives and meanings of what we are trying to reason about. For any ideas which are important to us, it is a mistake to say they are unconscious or that we are unaware of them. The challenge we often deal with is in articulating why and how they are important to us. If we disagree about an issue and then check to make sure we are not talking past one another, it is not always easy to tease out the contrast poles of our concepts. I know what I mean by concepts like justice and dignity, but can I locate their opposites? The opposite of dignity may not be the same for me as for you.

I can find all the words I am using in the same dictionary you use, but finding these words will not tell how each of us is using them. I am not by any means crossing off the possibility that two or more parties can come to agree on the same meanings of what is being discussed. This happens all the time , and allows all to come to consensus on what has been validated or invalidated through deliberation. But I suggest that the more philosophically, spiritually and ethically consequential the topic, the more likely it is that the participants will begin talking past each other, which is where the intransigence of presuppositions I discussed earlier becomes a barrier to consensus, not due to hidden or unconscious dynamics, but the limits of any given framework of intelligibility to assimilate elements outside its range of convenience. That’s when the hardest thing in the world to say should be said. Not ‘you’re wrong, biased, irrational, not paying attention’, but ‘wen are talking past one another because I apparently can’t make your understanding of the concepts involved coherent to me and you can’t make my use of those concepts coherent to you, so we’ll either try to locate some more general level of analysis wheren we can see eye to eye, or leave each other to their world.

I get the oddest responses from Wittgenstenians when I tell them that their activity is not being done for no reason at all - when I tell them that everyone acts for ends, themselves included. They tend to see themselves as eternally above the fray — Leontiskos

Richard Rorty made some interesting observations along these lines.

Wittgenstein writes as if his readers will find it obvious that thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Hegel, and Heidegger were victims of “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI 109) rather than original thinkers who, by using words in new ways, broke new paths of inquiry. He has no interest in putting himself in the shoes of the great dead philosophers, nor in treating them as responsive to the intel­lectual and sociopolitical exigencies of particular times and places.

Exactly, which requires sameness and identity. Hence, the principles being equal (or even co-constituting, at least in the order of conception), or even three: actuality, potency, and privation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s talk about identity. What is the role of time for you in the determination of identity? In my way of thinking, identity requires temporal repetition. The first time, the emergence into unconcealment of something, is a difference. To emerge is to address a past within the moment of appearance. Think of a line or hinge. It subsists in a contrast, a before and after, an outside and inside, a then and a now. This is one moment of time. Wouldn’t there have to be a second moment in which that which emerges as a divide or hinge reproduces itself as itself? A=A implies temporal repetition, the turning back toward itself of what emerges, identity as pure self-affection and persistence, pure equality. Repeating identity is qualitative, categorical meaning. Calculation and measurement imply the persisting identity of the quality they iterate instance of. To deconstruct this concept of identity is to point out that each repetition of an emerging, appearing ‘something’ introduces alterity and new context ( this is what Derrida means by ‘there is nothing outside of the text’). Temporal repetition always alters what it reproduces in the apparent guise of ‘persisting identity’.

For Derrida, a would-be identity comes back to itself differently as the same . Derrida's notion of iterability is informed by a radical view of temporality he shares with Heidegger. The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...(Derrida 1978)". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.” (Derrida 1988). “Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.” (Derrida 1978)

Derrida's thinking here bears a remarkable resemblance to Heidegger's(1971a) insistence that identity is never simply present to itself, but differs from itself as the same.

“The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical...The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say "the same" if we think difference.”

I was literally not arguing; how can I “disagree”!? And 3/4 of this discussion is y’all and Joshs bashing on about theories on how we approach things!

I see; sorry I wasted your time with all this. — Antony Nickles

I had a pretty good sense this was how your well-intended project was going to end. I consider you to be one of the rare few on this site who grasps the idea that what is at stake and at issue for a matter of concern is not something which can be treated separately from questions of empirical validity , of what is reasonable, rational and logical. Rather, such considerations form the very basis of intelligibility for judgements of fact. Armed with this knowledge, you hoped to steer the discussion of wokeness away from what is true, rational , reasonable and logical to a preliminary exploration of the different ways participants construe what is at stake and at issue, and then see what kind of consensus might arise from this hermeneutic exercise. To your apparent surprise and chagrin, your attempt to begin at a point prior to formed ideology and theory was accused of being biased in the direction of an already formed ideology which you were trying to shove down people’s throats. In a certain sense they have a point.

Let me explain. You rightly take from Wittgenstein the anchoring of sense in systems of intelligibility that he talks about in terms of language games, forms of life and hinges.
What Wittgenstein does not discuss is how difficult one should expect it to be to persuade another to change their way of looking at things. There is a difference between seeing that considerations of what is at stake and at issue (forms of life) form the very basis of intelligibility for judgements of what is reasonable, and getting other to arrive at that insight. You seem to be treating this understanding as some kind of common sense, as though all you had to do was explain what you had in mind in a few paragraphs and it would be immediately comprehended by other members of the thread.

I think this lack of attention to historical genesis is an important weakness in Wittgenstein’s thinking. What we see in the work of writers like Focault, Deleuze , Heidegger and Derrida is a depiction of what Wittgenstein calls form of life as ‘sticky’, intractable and resistant to transformation and persuasion. And they explain why this is so. The very stability of systems of intelligibility which allows us to make
sense of the world imbues them with a certain conservatism and resistance to change. This is why Foucault can talk about cultural knowledge epistemes lasting for centuries, and Heidegger can talk about the first beginning of philosophy ( traditional metaphysics of presence) and the other beginning (inaugurated by Heidegger’s own thinking), with the first beginning extending 2000 years from the Greeks to the modern era.
That’s right, the first beginning lasted 2000 years, and you were hoping to cause a philosophical shift in thinking in a matter of minutes! What you have been considering as merely the commonsensical preliminary to a discussion of wokism is the whole kit and kaboodle. If other members were prepared to grasp the orientation toward what is at stake and at issue that you have been trying to convey, the whole conversation would be unnecessary in the first place.

But the very intractability of participants’ orientations on this matter made your assumption that mutual understanding here was assured fooled from the start.

My strategy in such discussions is to assume that it will not be possible to attain mutual agreement on such fundamental philosophical matters if the starting point for participants (their form of life) is too distant from that of Wittgenstein’s and writers who overlap his thinking. My goal is instead to zero in on their orientations as intricately as possible such as to glimpse the outer boundaries of their way of thinking, that zone of intractability beyond which any attempts at persuasion on my part meet with a glassy eyed stare and/or outright hostility.

You complain that my contributions to the thread restricted themselves to debates over ‘theory’, as though what you were asking of the group didn’t itself require a major shift in their presuppositions butting up against that very zone of intractability. You really don’t see that if Leontiskos and Fire Ologist embrace theories of emotion which split affective phenomena off from rationality as potential disrupters and inhibitors of reason they are going to be in a position to embrace a notion of what matters and what is at issue that completely overcomes this split? I think you should take your own admonition to heart. If you really want to understand others’ ways of thinking and valuing, what matters and how and why it matters to them, the. you need to appreciate the enormous difficulties they may have in coming over to your way of seeing things.

When Joshs and frank debated whether change is possible without rest, I saw a fascinating, yet ultimately still an attempt to reduce the dynamic of "becoming" to two fundamental, "substantial" categories—rest and change. This is the search for the basic elements that constitute being — Astorre

Heidegger spent much time critiquing the change-rest dichotomy going back to the Greeks. It would seem to be the case that in order for there to be change, difference, transit, there must first be something (object, narrative, scheme, the ‘now' ) to undergo such processes. Something must first be what it is by appearing ‘at rest' in the present tense, before it can undergo transformation.

“In accordance with metaphysics, all beings, changeable and moved, mobile and mobilized, are represented from the perspective of a "being that is at rest," and this even where, as in Hegel and Nietzsche, "being" (the actuality of the actual) is thought as pure becoming and absolute movement.” (Heidegger 1998c)

Heidegger’s notion of “rest” breaks with the traditional metaphysical opposition between rest and change or being and becoming.In metaphysics (from Parmenides to Plato to Aristotle), “rest” implies immutability, permanence, in contrast to movement or change. Heidegger deconstructs this whole framework. He believes this dichotomy is itself a product of metaphysical thinking, which has covered over the more primordial experience of Being (Beyng).

Being and nothingness, presence and absence are thought through a sequential temporality of beings that come into presence, linger for a while and then vanish away. As Heidegger(2013) describes the ordinary concept of time,

“In asking after what happens, we have in mind a being, even when we name it a “becoming” and attend only to its arising, approaching and decaying.” “This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the "now" out of the "not yet now" into the "no longer now."… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West...”(Heidegger 1968)

Could you explain to me how your perspective differs from Heidegger’s here?

And even when Joshs spoke about Heidegger, who, as he correctly noted, grounded "is" in the event of "unfolding," this was, in essence, an effort to find that very first principle, that "root" of our being. — Astorre

When Heidegger says that unconcealment is primary, he doesn’t mean that it is a principle, a substance, a category, a subject or object. That unconcealment is first doesn’t mean it is first in time, but that notions like subject and object, rest and change are derivative modes of unconcealment.

if we consider what is happening in modern ontology (Object-Oriented Ontology or correlationism) and science (the constant refinement of AI, which is increasingly used as a weapon rather than a friend and assistant, and which is developing at an incredible speed), a doubt arises: is this train heading in the right direction, or is it a direction where there will be no room for the subject? — Astorre

So you want to leave room for the subject? I’d love to see how you do this without falling into the sort of metaphysical assumptions that Heidegger critiqued as associated with the modern thinking of subjectivity.

First, I'll just point out that I think it's a mistake to conflate "emancipatory" with "critical theory" and "definitely not post-modern." Even in less explicitly activist texts, the "free rollicking of thought," the opening of "new lines of thought," or the deconstruction of systems so that new ways of thought and action can come into being are often presented as desirable in themselves.

The freedom of thought, an increase in potentialities available, of lines of action and thought, are themselves only good as a means of reaching choiceworthy ends, better means to those ends, etc. Greater potentiality is, of itself, not actually emancipatory nor is it desirable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right , one needs to find a criterion on the basis of which way of being is preferable to another, more desirable.

The fact that we are concatenations and flows of values and desire means that no one can stand outside of some stance or other to judge from on high, including the philosopher who writes about such flows. They are not a neutral observer but are writing always from within context , within history, within perspective. There is no perspective which doesn’t already have a stake in what matters and how it matters, but this doesn’t prevent one from talking about it from within one’s relation of care and relevance to the world.

Right, but then this is also taken as a reason for bracketing out or eschewing moral judgement. It's that line of reasoning I find faulty. Consider that Socrates does not need to "step outside his humanity" to judge, universally, that "all men are mortal." He can do this just fine while remaining a man. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s examine two ‘postmodern’ models. According to one, ethical and empirical progress are united, based on the same criterion, optimal anticipatory sense-making. According to another, there can be no such overarching vector of historical progress since the criterion changes along with the social structure. However, there is local progress. One initially finds oneself ensconced within a particular set of cultural norms ( ethical, empirical). These norms inform one about what ethically desirable and what is to be rejected. Eventually, cultural change shifts perspectives on the criteria of ethical norms, and one now disapproves of the previous conventions while embracing the new ones. This process of establishing, living within and overcoming criteria of ethical desirability repeats itself endlessly without any over progress. You may want to call each of these totalitarian, but such totalitarianism will never be used as weapon against your belief in moral and empirical foundations. In the first case cultural progress is subsuming. Each formation of knowledge and ethics is equally valid, and there is no justification for coercing a change in beliefs from an external vantage. In the second case as well , persuasion substitutes for coercion. In both case ma there would be no wokist breathing down your back and policing your language. Your concerns about these models’ totalitarianism would have to restrict itself to the complaint that they eschew punishment, condemnation and coercion against those believe are unjust.

They are relativist to a point.

Yes, it varies, but they do seem to tend towards various forms of anti-realism as well, including historical anti-realism. I think you are selling short the level of commitment here. One of the things right-wing media made the most hay over was straightforward pronouncements of the relativism and anti-realism coming out of activist circles.

My general impression is that, broadly speaking, the median Woke position is simply contradictory. It is morally and epistemically anti-realist and strongly relativistic, while at the same time being absolutist. This is, in many cases, an unresolved, and perhaps often unacknowledged contradiction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is their position contradictory, or are you failing to appreciate that there can be forms of realism? As you pointed out, anti-realism is not opposed to totalitarianism or absolutism. That was Rouse’s point about social constructionists being semantic realists. You can try and pathologize them if you want by claiming that at bottom they just desire power for power’s sake, but I think that would be utterly missing their motivation, which is not power but moral truth.

What I describe is not very clear, even to me, but I think it is more clear than what I see you describing of Deluze (who I’ve read a little) and Witt (read a bit more). I see carts and horses being moved around, but not much clarity regarding independent circuits being identified. — Fire Ologist

Maybe the views of two prominent researchers on affect will be a little clearer. Robert Solomon’s book Not Passion’s Slave argues against the traditional view (especially David Hume’s) that emotions are irrational impulses that control us, and that reason is merely a tool used to fulfill emotional desires. Instead, he claims that emotions are forms of judgment: They aren’t just feelings or reactions; they involve interpretation, appraisal, and meaning. Emotions are structured by reasoning: For example, fear usually involves a belief that something is dangerous. These beliefs can be questioned and corrected. Reason and emotion work together. Rather than being enemies, Solomon says emotions are intelligent and reflective; you can reason about your emotions and emotions can involve reasoning. Emotions are not irrational forces. They’re ways of seeing and making sense of the world, shaped by and open to rational reflection.

For Matthew Ratcliffe, emotions are not just about things in the world (like fear of a dog) but are about our whole way of experiencing the world. He calls these “existential feelings; they shape our sense of possibility, reality, and self. Rather than being just cognitive judgments, emotions structure our background sense of meaning, making some things feel possible, hopeful, threatening, or hopeless before we even articulate them. Emotions are not just ways of thinking or judging, they are pre-reflective ways of being in the world, shaping how things matter to us. This view is closer to that of Deleuze and Wittgenstein than it is to Solomon.

Affect cannot influence rationality from below
— Joshs

Is this a reframing of the source of error? Or are we moving away from error making? In which case we are drifting from our thesis it seems. — Fire Ologist

I am engaged in a dispute with Number2018 over what writers like Deleuze, Wittgenstein (where Antony’s perspective comes from) and Foucault mean by affect and how it relates to reason. These thinkers assert that error is not the result of any ‘distorting’ effect of affect on reason. A system of logical assertions gets its sense from a way of looking at the world, a perspective which is not itself either logical or illogical, correct or incorrect. Only the particulars organized within a perspective can be correct or incorrect error.

Your position, like that of Leontiskos, harks back to an older way of thinking about this relation, wherein emotion and reason run on partially independent circuits, and emotion can distort or inhibit rational processes of thinking.

It looks like you view affect primarily as a disruptive or distorting force — Number2018

Affect is simply the differences ( affecting and affected), the partial objects, the building materials, the working parts of machinic assemblages. It’s not the parts which by themselves disrupt or repress, it’s how they are organized. The parts can assemble themselves in ways that resist their own transformation, they can assemble themselves in ways that deterritorialize in a revolutionary manner, but I don’t know what it would mean to say that they can ‘distort’ themselves. Distortion implies a proper configuration, and there would be no fixed basis for the proper here.

Hannah Arendt offered a remarkable account of Eichmann. However, it is not quite accurate to describe him as irrational—he was, in fact, following the bureaucratic logic of the Nazi regime. Most likely, his most consequential decision was joining the Nazi party. From that point on, he became a thoughtless functionary. But that pivotal decision was made at a more subtle level, shaped by unconscious affective forces rather than deliberate reasoning. — Number2018

I’m going to offer my take on how Deleuze would analyze Eichmann’s situation, then present a Wittgensteinian perspective that I think is consonant with Antony’s. I will then contrast these with how you are relating the role of affectivity and rationality in Eichmann’s behavior. In AO Deleuze distinguishes between investment in pre-conscious interests and unconscious desires. Pre-conscious interests guide and organize what matters and how it matters. With regard to political movements, the former lead to reactionary and reformist actions, and the latter to revolutionary change. If one continues to draw one thinking from such pre-conscious interests, one will remain within a status quo even as one attempts to makes changes within itself. The unconscious however is transformative
change in thinking, opening up lines of flight which alter what is at issue, what matters and how it matters. Only such thinking can be truly revolutionary. No amount of deliberative reasoning can accomplish this, since all deliberative thinking is already enslaved to pre-assigned interests. Deliberative rationality is in service of the reigning norms.

For Deleuze, whether Eichmann was an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi ideology or andisinterested bureaucrat the diagnosis is the same. Eichmann was ensconced within a social collectivity in such a way as to validate the most extensive rational deliberation he might attempt to justify his actions.

A Wittgenstein account has many parallels with Deleuze’s. Eichmann’s work duties amounted to a network of language games authorized by a form of life which made his work life intelligible to him both practically and ethically. These languages games and this form of life are intrinsically affective in the sense that they are only formed and only sustain themselves through continuously inter-affecting between persons. Affect cannot influence rationality from below as some autonomous domain (contra Massumi). Instead it is the elements of the system of meaning (perspective) that is a way of life. We cannot change affect separately from perspective , since they are the same thing. Wittgenstein’s concern with regard to Eichmann would be how he might be persuaded to look at his situation and that of others living alongside him (the jews) differently. Not do a better job of rational deliberation, but find a way to turn those rational schemes on their head through a change in affective orientation

Your reading of affect seems to differ from these accounts by treating affect, as Massumi does, as not just primary but autonomous. It seems to want to sever the dependence of knowledge on affect and value, as though affect can distort or inhibit rhe process of reasoned deliberation, and as though there could be a progress in logical , rational deliberation that was not at every point made intelligible in its very sense and meaning in an affective manner. Your Eichmann and your wokists are victims of this strife between affect and reason.

Leontikos articulates this strife well:

Eichmann's reason became a slave to his passions, at least if we see Nazism as part of his passions. So Eichmann was involved in a lot of thought and reasoning about how to further his goal of Nazism, but in another sense he was being thoughtless and irrational. — Leontiskos

Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34

Are you familiar with the concept of the specious present? It was designed to address the problem of continuity that arises from the notion of time as an endless series of punctual nows. William James and Husserl were among the first to argue that past present and future must appear simultaneously as each ‘now’. Husserl depicted this fat ‘now’ in terms of a retentional, protentional and impressional phase. It is because the ‘now’ includes past and future that we can enjoy a temporally unfolding event like music without it disintegrating into disconnected notes.

Sheer change and difference wouldn't really be "change." If one thing is completely discrete from another, if there is no linkage or similarity and relation, then, rather than becoming, you just have sui generis, unrelated things (perhaps popping in and out of existence?). This isn't becoming, but rather a strobe light of unrelated beings. So, leaving aside the difficulty that the past seems to dictate the future, that things seem to have causes, or the difficulties with contingent being "just happening, for no reason at all," it seems hard for me to see how there could be any sort of "sheer becoming." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t know of any philosopher who advocates becoming as ‘sheer’ change devoid of relationality. For Deleuze it is in the nature of differences that they always produce themselves within and as assemblages, collectives. The relative stability of these multiplicities does not oppose itself to change but evinces continual change within itself that remakes the whole in such a way that the whole remains consistent without ever being self-identical.

↪Joshs How can you say there is difference if it is not identified? How is it possible to think difference without thinking (identifying) the things which differ? — Janus

Thinking isn’t in the business of thinking ‘things’ (identities) that differ, but of producing differences that relate to other differences.

How could there be difference unless some difference is identified? Identity and difference co-arise―you can't have one without the other. — Janus

Difference isn’t identified, as though there were some separate subject simply noticing what differs. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is all about this. He shows how it’s possible to think difference prior to identity.

↪Joshs
Einstein said all motion is relative to a chosen frame of reference. You declare a point to be unchanging at the same time you perceive change.

It's not that everything is changing before you declare a frame of reference. There simply is no change without stasis. — frank

That is a good summary of what we get from Einstein. Do you want to treat physics as the ground floor of your understanding of the world, or do you, like me, see Einstein’s thinking as the expression of an era of philosophy which has since been surpassed?

Can there be change without stasis? Aren't they two sides of the same coin? — frank

Derrida, Heidegger and Deleuze say there can be change without stasis. More precisely, there can be difference without a prior identity. So how does that work? One can imagine an assemblage of differences which continually make changes in each other. No aspect of the assemblage remains unchanged by the changes that occur in any part of it. There can be consistencies and patterns, but these are not static in the sense of being able to locate some static center around which the pattern is organized and which give it its sense.

The point is, as with Saint Augustine's "inner word," participation in Logos. Yet I'd hesitate to call this static. In a way it has to be most alive, lacking nothing. For Augustine and later thinkers in his tradition, it couldn't be a being, or even, univocally, "being," but was "beyond being" (or being/becoming). Dionysius says something on this to the effect of "It is false to say that God exists, but also false to say that God does not exist. But of the two, it is more false to say that God does not exist." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this inner word beyond being and becoming certain in itself , and as such the certain and absolute ground of all that is and all that becomes or merely ‘seems to be’? Can there be certainty without stasis?

The verb "to be" in Russian behaves differently than in Western European languages. In the future tense, we say: "Он будет лечить" (He will treat) or "Он будет доктором" (He will be a doctor)—the emphasis is on change, becoming. In the past: "Он лечил" (He treated, where "to be" is replaced by a suffix) or "Он был доктором" (He was a doctor, indicating something no longer current). Similar features are noticeable in Ukrainian and Belarusian. However, in West Slavic languages like Polish (Jan jest lekarzem) or Bulgarian (Той е лекар), the obligatory copula "jest" or "e" returns, approaching the Western European model. Why this occurs is a question for separate research, but it hints at cultural and linguistic differences that generally influence one's worldview. The verb "to be" in Russian is not a frozen snapshot of a state, but a process, movement, becoming. — Astorre

Heidegger’s main argument is that the definition of the truth of a being as adequation, or correctness, between appearance and reality, between how it seems and what it is, was bequeathed to the West by the Greeks and runs continuously through Medieval Christianity and Modern scientific thought. The fact that certain languages which belong to this tradition handed down from the Greeks lack the copula has. or prevented them from accepting the idea of truth as correctness, which assumes the persisting presence of the beings grounding this notion of truth.

Western philosophy, from Parmenides to Heidegger, sought the essence of being—eternity, phenomenon, givenness—relying on the formula "Being — is," rooted in a language where "is" fixes being. Even the understanding of God—from Kant's highest being to Heidegger's mystery of being—followed this logic — Astorre

How does Heidegger’s mystery of being follow the logic of presence? Heidegger did not seek to ground being in the ‘is’, he sought to ground the ‘is’ in the happening of unconcealment.

We will strive to move beyond focusing on "presence" and instead consider reality as a network of processes. Being, in our view, becomes through the establishment of boundaries, through the interaction of presence and change. The question "Being — is. How?" is replaced by another: "Being — becomes. How does it become?" — Astorre

Let’s say beings are always ensconced within networks of non-linear, reciprocally causal relations, incessantly self-organizing , self-creative, in always ongoing endogenous activity, evolving ever beyond themselves toward higher heights (like a chaotic, complex dynamical system.).

Evan Thompson defines such a nondecomposable system as

“one in which the connectivity and interrelatedness of the components give rise to global processes that subsume the components so that they are no longer clearly separable. In such a system, the distinction between preexisting parts and supervening whole becomes problematic. Not only does the whole emerge from the components, but also the components emerge from the whole.” “ Dynamic co-emergence means that part and whole co-emerge and mutually specify each other.”

Perhaps this type of model of creative emergence through relational process is close to the notion of becoming you have in mind.

My point is that the idea that hierarchical thinking is an evil bogeyman is a strawman. Anyone who admits that some values are higher than others is involved in hierarchical thinking. It's just not about power stratification. The power hermeneutic is something that the woke imposes on everyone and everything. — Leontiskos

You may be more conversant with Hegel than I am, but I suspect that thinking a hierarchy of values according to power originates with Hegel’s dialectical ‘stages’ of history. His idea of a totalizing emancipatory telos in the form of absolute Spirit becomes naturalized as dialectical materialism with Marx, and rethought as discursive power relations with CT writers. This is where I situate wokism, more or less. Only with Nietzsche and postmodern writers like Foucault is the logic of an emancipatory hierarchy and telos abandoned.
If to be woke is to be enlightened, then Foucault’s response to Kant’s 1774 essay ‘What is Enlightenment’ is instructive of where he might depart from wokists. He considers enlightenment not as emancipation through reason (as in Kant), but as the use of reason to challenge authority, norms, and institutions. This is true of wokists as well, but woke movements often aim to enforce moral clarity, while Foucault sees that impulse as itself a form of power-knowledge that should be questioned.

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life.”

“Events of decision that we experience as rational choices, seemingly without the motive force of affect to move them, envelop the complex of the pre-cognitive and micropolitical processes of the event-based situation. The ‘rational’ aspects of the event— judgment, hypothesis, comparative evaluation of alternatives, decision— were mutually included in the event along with all the other co- operating factors.” (Massumi, ‘The Power at the end of the Economy’, pg. 47). Overall, the production of subjectivity and affect underpin wokeness’s enactment of moral discourse — Number2018

This sounds fine, as far as it goes. I’m concerned with an interpretation of the above which sanctions something like Protevi’s concept of political affect. I see a fair amount of overlap between Protevi and Massumi on affect.

Operating from below conscious subjectivity, Protevi proposes evolutionarily adaptive neurological modules that program subjects for prosocial behavior as well as for narrowly construed self-preservation. Impinging on persons from above are socially originating forms of conditioning . Notice the Deleuzian language that Protevi incorporates.

"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged objectifying self-consciousness. But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we can treat basic emotions as modular “affect programs” (Griffiths 1997) that run the body's hardware in the absence of conscious control. As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person “wakes up” to see the results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that there is another sense of “agent” as non-subjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers' subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or equally non-subjective “affect program.”

“A little more detail on the notion of a “rage agent” might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases of rage produce a modular agent or “affect program” that replaces the subject. Affect programs are emotional responses that are “complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction” (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor's notion of modularity, which calls for a module to be “mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access that in other modules]”.

Perhaps second only to the question of adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested. I feel relatively safe proposing a very-widely distributed rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp 1998 is able to cite studies of direct electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage circuits in humans and other mammalian species (190)."

"In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an evolutionarily primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the body's hardware in its place.”"The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state, e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics."

I find this assertion strange because the annals of Woke protest letters/debates are full of assertions of an expansive moral and epistemic relativism/anti-realism.

“The idea that there is a single truth — ‘the Truth’ — is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain,” the students’ letter stated, according to The Claremont Independent. “This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.”

“The idea that truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples,” it continues.

— Count Timothy von Icarus

They are relativist to a point. For instance, social constructionism’s anti-realism is epistemically realistic. Joseph Rouse’s analysis may easily be applied to the Pomona students’ letter.

Realism is the view that science (often successfully) aims to provide theories that truthfully represent how the world is--independent of human categories, capacities, and interventions. Social constructivists typically reject realism on two counts: first, the world that science describes is itself socially constituted; and second, its aims in describing that world are socially specifiable (satisfying interests, sustaining institutions and practices, etc.). Both realists and antirealists propose to explain the content of scientific knowledge, either by its causal connections to real objects, or by the social interactions that fix its content; the shared presumption here is that there is a fixed "content" to be explained. Both scientific realists and antirealists presume semantic realism--that is, that there is an already determinate fact of the matter about what our theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life "say" about the world. Interpretation must come to an end somewhere, they insist, if not in a world of independently real objects, then in a language, conceptual scheme, social context, or culture.(Joseph Rouse)

But things get complicated here. Ken Gergen considers himself a social constructionist, and yet rejects the blameful self-righteousness of identity politics.

“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.

In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Ken Gergen, Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

I can’t imagine Gergen endorsing the accusatory language of the Pomona letter, and I think the reason is that his form of social constructionism is ‘postmodern’ and theirs is emancipatory. Emancipatory discourses like Marxism and the various versions of CT carries forward Hegel’s totalizing dialectics, asserting a ‘real’ ethical ground on the basis of which to accuse groups of succumbing to mere ‘myths’ and using these myths to oppress others.

↪Joshs

How is this not an argument against the very possibility of totalitarianism tout court, regardless of the ideology consumed by its practitioners? And yet, totalitarianism does exist, and it does not seem impossible that someone who has digested Deleuze or Nietzsche could practice it.

Likewise, your former objection would seem be an objection to the possibility of self-interested behavior tout court. Yet both self-interest as a motivation, and relative selflessness, also seem to exist; there is a meaningful distinction between them. It's the same with rejections of the possibility of weakness of will or the existence of norms.

Might I suggest that if an ideology demands the denial of the very possibility of many of the more obvious features of human life—if it demands that the ideology be affirmed over the obvious—this is itself a sign of potential totalitarianism? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not a question of denying features of life but of offering an alternative explanation for the motivations behind what appears as those features from a certain vantage. If your answer to the question of how well-intentioned people can produce totalitarian regimes and value systems is weakness of will , and my answer is limited ways of understanding alien forms of thinking, am I denying weak will as an obvious feature of life? Or am I acknowledging what you are seeing but enriching your view with a perspective which happens to be invisible to you? It all depends on the perspective.

You may argue that Ken Gergen’s quietism is a tacit endorsement of totalitarianisms, but he makes a distinction between respecting vs accepting ways of life that one disapproves of. Activism is still possible and necessary for him. He doesn’t pretend that totalitarianisms exist, but his analysis of their genesis differs from yours such that he would claim that you miss the forest for the trees. As a result you have no choice but to pathologize and moralize what he would submit to a hermetical negotiation based on mutual respect. This is how I have been reading approach to ethical debate.

“…to champion relational process is to treat with respect the intelligibility of all participants, even when other views are disagreeable. It is to carry the voices of all value orientations, to respect their validity within the circumstances in which those values were created. Every voice of value, no matter how heinous to others, carries the assumption of its own good. To be relationally responsible is to defend the rights of all to make themselves intelligible. One may surely resist what is seen as 'evil action,' but with a sense of humility -with respect to both one's own lack of fundamental grounds and the realization that under identical circumstances, a similar choice could have been made. What would this expanded form of conscience mean in action? It would favor, for example, supporting movements for social justice, for minority rights, or against tyranny of any kind, but without pathologizing those who might be targets of such movements

A view that advocates the reduction of the human being to a raft of social forces, flows, knots of language, etc., might very well be palliative in that it reduces inappropriate or overwrought anger. However, it can just as easily support callous indifference to suffering and vice. Such a reductionist account also destroys our notions of merit and goodness. It removes the beauty from history and ethical acts. One can certainly study a raft of social forces. One might even try to tinker with it to produce "choice-worthy outcomes." But does one resist serious temptation or suffer hardship for the sake of eddies of social force? Does one stand upon the ramparts in battle and risk maiming and death to save "flows," "sequences," and "concatenations? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Don’t confuse flows and concatenations with value-free causal bits. These flows are anything but value-neutral. And they are anything but motive and purpose-neutral. We strive to make sense of things. Put differently, cognitive-valuative systems organize themselves in order to anticipate events, which primarily means the actions of each other. This is an end in itself, not a means to a ‘selfish’ goal. The appearance of selfishness as an ‘obvious feature of the world’ is a kind of illusion in that it conceals the underlying dynamics behind a monolithic concept like ‘will’. The fact that we are concatenations and flows of values and desire means that no one can stand outside of some stance or other to judge from on high, including the philosopher who writes about such flows. They are not a neutral observer but are writing always from within context , within history, within perspective. There is no perspective which doesn’t already have a stake in what matters and how it matters, but this doesn’t prevent one from talking about it from within one’s relation of care and relevance to the world.

So, in any case, if what is 'good' for the life can change radically, why, say, some 'life-denying' morality could not, in some times, be a legitimate way of the expression of life? Same goes for resentiment? — boundless

When Nietzsche uses the word ‘life’ , he doesn’t mean it in a conventional biological sense. For instance, he rejected what he interpreted as the Darwinian principle of self-preservation. A life-denying morality is indeed a strategy of self-preservation for Nietzsche, but it is not what he means by will to life. Morality is a restriction of the will to life, and therefore is not ‘good’ for life. It is only good for survival.

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

The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life. (The Gay Science)

I think that one of his 'Untimely mediation' was actually against the idea of 'progress'. And also in later years he didn't think that the future will be 'better' than the present. Could you provide some references?
In fact, it seems the idea that we 'should' seek a 'better future' goes against many things he says. For him, the will to power doesn't have a 'purpose', it is like an innocent play (see the quote below). — boundless

I agree that the will to power doesn’t have a specific contentful purpose. But Nietzsche believed in a progress of strength, consciousness, and perspective; a will to power manifesting as creative overcoming. Growth, strength, and expansion of power lead to richer perspectives, the overcoming previous limitations and a dynamic reinterpretation of the world. Rather simply determining historical ideas and cultural types as ‘good or ‘bad’ he ranked them according to a hierarchy relative to his notion of progress.

“That every heightening of man brings with it an overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every increase in strength and expansion of power opens up new perspectives and demands a belief in new horizons—this runs through my writings.”

So, the mere ability to act in concordance with the will is what 'freedom'. Morality, according to Nietzsche, hinders that ability by constraining it with rules and this is why it is so bad. As I understand him, imposing on ourselves and others 'moral rules' suffocates disables the ability to act according to the will. Rather, Nietzsche would suggest, we should accept to live without putting constraints on the will and accept the suffering that such a way of life entails (due to, say, the conflict that inevitably happens). — boundless

We are always acting in accordance with the will, for Nietzsche. More specifically, we are always acting according to the will to power. All motivations and desires, including will to knowledge and traditional morality, are forms of will to power. The will to power can take ‘unhealthy’ forms which are antithetical to life. These don’t put constraints on the will; rather, they represent a ‘will to self-constraint’. Morality is an example of this will which turns its power against itself. Even so, in negating becoming, morality still represents a strategy for survival, albeit a ‘sick’ one.

Why I believe it is 'voluntaristic'? Because Nietzsche didn't distinguish between good ways in which life manifests itself and bad. Simply, whatever the will wills is good. The only bad thing is to hinder the manifestions of the — boundless

My reading of volunterisric doesn’t depend on removing the distinction between good and bad. It has to do with a metaphysical notion of the will wherein the will is a unitary substance that is in control of what it wills, and can reflective turn back to itself as this same identical will, the view that human action is ultimately self-determined by an inner power of choice or volition. For Nietzsche the will is not a single entity capable of pure self-reflection. One doesn’t choose (volunteer) to will what one wants to will. Instead, one finds oneself willing. One is as much the slave of one’s will as the controller of it.

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism‘.

There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition:

… a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.

Perhaps what you mean to argue is that for Nietzsche, like for Schopenhauer, the will is unconscious and irrational. It has no reason or purpose, and it does not choose in any moral or rational sense. What then makes Schopenhauer’s will volunteristic is that , unlike Nietzsche, he believes the will is universal and metaphysical; a singular, unified essence behind all phenomena.

The points I’m trying to make concerning Crrical theory are twofold. First, that regardless of how unconventional their realism was, they should not be in danger of being accused of an ‘anything goes’ relativism.
— Joshs

And Barron does not accuse them of that. What ↪AmadeusD says there is important. To talk about the philosophical antecedents of wokism is not to talk about wokism per se. You keep blurring the difference — Leontiskos

You need to remind what you think the difference is, in specific terms. Let’s start with this: If you agree with Barron that CT doesn’t adhere to an ‘anything goes’ relativism, are you claiming that some wokists do adhere to an ‘anything goes’ relativism? Can you give specific examples here, (besides Amadeus’s assertions)? If
you do think so, I think you are giving wokists too much credit. They are as a whole not philosophical scholars. Most activists are drawing on commoditized , pre-packaged , dumbed down dilutions of the antecedent philosophies. Given that the so-called ‘radical relativists’ (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida) offer ideas that are difficult even for other scholars to conceptualize, I suggest it is extremely unlikely the woke leadership, much less the rank and file, has assimilated any of this stuff. And as I argued earlier, if they have, it would pull the rug out from their moral self-justifications.

Here’s the likely effect of a wokist actually absorbing the ideas of the radical relativists:

“By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.

In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Ken Gergen, Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

Is it really necessary to emphasize the differences between wokism and CT? Is it your contention that wokist practices are so wildly deviant from the philosophical antecedents Barron mentions that ‘blurring the difference’ deprives us of a vital understanding of wokists? If Barron thought so, I dont think he would have bothered to spend so much time on those antecedents. I’ll give you three names: Adorno, Gramsci and Fanon. I defy you to show me any concrete evidence of a wokist pronouncement or action that isn’t fully compatible with one of these three thinkers. It’s true that, strictly speaking, only Adorno comes from the Frankfurt school, but the other two share the larger Marxist framework with Adorno, and are as much realists as he is.

A better life and society for everyone, wokists included. To disagree with someone is not to treat them as a means to an end. To disagree with someone implies that they have intrinsic worth. — Leontiskos

Are you suggesting that wokists, in treating others as a means to an end, don’t believe they have intrinsic worth? Should I be looking in the direction of Kant to locate the context of your critique of means-ends thinking?

Criticisms from Dark Enlightenment people aren't supposed to accomplish anything. The downside to wokism is viewed as self-correcting, so if anything, the admonition would be to accelerate wokism. Go faster. Accelerate capitalism. Stop dragging this out. — frank

Is that what Nick Land’s accelerationism is about?

If, according to Nietzsche, all manifestations of life are manifestations of the 'will to power', and there is no ultimate 'right' or 'wrong' way to manifest it (someone in the classical tradition would perhaps say that the 'right' way is what fulfills the nature of the will, but Nietzsche rejects that), it is somewhat inconsistent to write books glorifying some way of living and criticizing others.

Mind you, I think that Nietzsche had pretty interesting things to say (e.g. about how resentment works and can condition our thoughts, about creativity and so on). But his extreme 'voluntarism', expressed in his mature 'amoralism' and 'will to power' etc is IMO more consistent with an empty philosophy rather than a philosophy that can teach a 'way of life'. To put it differently, the 'pars destruens' was so pervasive than no 'pars construens' seems consistent with it, not his. — boundless

Human beings are pattern-seekers. That is how we are able to function in a world which never repeats itself identically from one moment to the next. We have to have a way of anticipating what is coming next in spite of the constant flux we are presented with. Older ways of thinking in philosophy and the sciences dealt with this challenge by carving up the world on the basis of categories. There were now law-governed objects and causal relations that it was our job to properly represent. Nietzsche was among those who attempted to show the dangers of taking the changing patterns we experience in our world and freezing them into such mathematical identities and absolutes. He tried to show that we do the same thing with moral values as we do with empirical objects, and the result has been endless wars and violence over what is right and what is wrong.

Nietzsche’s argument was that trying to locate a value system with the right CONTENT could lead to nothing but nihilism. This didn’t mean that he abandoned all possibilities of distinguishing what is a better way of life from what is worse. What he did was to separate this issue from the particular content of meaning of specific value systems. Instead of focusing on arriving at a final correct content of knowledge or values, our focus should be on accelerating the process of moving through value systems. Process , not content. And speed, not depth of foundation. The best way of living is that which can enjoy the delights of creative becoming and re-invention in the most optimal fashion, which means keeping itself free from repressive attachments to content-based absolutes and foundations of all kinds. He recognized this as an enormous challenge, because we are precisely NOT volunteristic in our decisions.

Contrary to Sartre, the will is not free to choose whatever it wants to choose. We find ourselves choosing, we are driven to choose. This lack of volunteristic freedom is the result of the fact that the psyche is a society of competing drives, and the self is an amalgam of such competing forces. It’s hard to be volunteristic when the ego is a mere byproduct of a play of drives. In addition. the psyche isn’t walled off from the social sphere, but is intertwined with it. As a result, we always find ourselves immersed in larger normative cultural structures, and thus we always run the risk of becoming entrenched within norms that eventually suffocate and repress. We thrive on recognizing patterns , regularities and norms from within the flux, but Nietzsche suggested how we could allow ourselves the intense pleasure of such creative ordering while steering clear of the tendencies to ossify such assimilating activity into life and meaning-destroying certainties. And we can get better and better over time at allowing the creative future to flow into the present. This seems to me to be a promising , growth-oriented way of life. If it is empty, it is only empty of content-based prescriptions, as I think it should be.

This gets complicated, but with NOS4A2 I would say that the act of activism precludes this response to one extent or another. The activist is treating everyone, friend and foe, as a means to an end. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that we should prefer compassion and understanding, the advice that we should treat everyone with an equal amount of compassion and understanding turns out to be false. It is false because it is fitting to treat those who are attempting to use us as a means to their end with less understanding and compassion — Leontiskos

Doesn’t this raise the issue of the difference between theory and practice? Dont we all walk around with interpretive frameworks in our heads allowing us to make sense of our world? Don’t our ethical principles and political instincts come from such ‘theoretical’ structures, and don’t we put such instincts and principles into practice every day in our interactions with others? Is the head of a family not an activist in putting into practice their understanding of moral standards in their child raising decisions? Are their parenting decisions not means to an end, that being the raising of good people? Aren’t all ‘activists’ simply actively putting into practice what they believe to be in the best interest of society as they understand it? How are the critical comments about wokism in this thread not a form of activism? What are the ends the criticisms are a means to?