What if someone is able to learn, calculative, intelligent, wilful, determined, of sound mind and they still do not learn and grow? Still don't try to excise their errors and expand their strengths across many domains they are in fact able to?

That looks like stupidity to me. A pervasive refusal to try to learn — fdrake

I agree. Stupidity is typically a blameful judgement of moral culpability we level against others (or ourselves) which supposes bad intent. Related terms of blame include laziness, stubbornness, self-indulgence, negligence, thoughtlessness, selfishness, inconsiderateness, greed. The question is, when others fall short of our expectations of them in this way, is the failure in their intent or in our failure to separate their perspective from our own norms?

There are more interesting ways of defining stupidity that take into account the irrationality grounding rationality. Deleuze, for instance, defines stupidity in terms of what produces the paradoxical gap between perspectives, both between and within persons.

I personally don't like most conceptions of libertarian free will I have come across. If our decisions aren't "determined by" the way we are, and the way the world is, then it seems like they are arbitrary, random, and thus not free. Plato and Hegel seem to have the best popular definition of freedom I am aware of: freedom as (relative) self-determination. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his essay, The Question of Technology, Heidegger distinguishes between two modes of revealing: the related Greek notions of techne and poesis vs instrumentality, which is common to mathematical physics and technology. The form of revealing of poesis is bringing-forth, which, unlike instrumentality, explicitly sees itself as making use of all four causes:

For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and mat- ter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.

It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossomn into bloom, in itself (en heautõi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open blonging to bringing- forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.

By contrast, mathematical physics and technology reveal by taking into account only one of the four causes:

“What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality… For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects. The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causality.

This does not however change my point regarding playing games and living real life or respecting the difference between talking about life in Gaza right now, simulating it to educate others or actually living through it. So Derrida and Wittgenstein may have had important messages they wanted to get across to others, and I respect that, but so do most of us. It's finding the common ground between the majority of us that I think the OP in this thread was suggesting overall, should remain our common goal. — universeness

A notable current in thinking about the origins and nature of justice and friendship draws from research on animal play For instance , Shaun Gallagher links justice with play. In his latest book, Action and Interaction, Gallagher(2020) writes

“… if Bekoff and Peirce are right that a sense of justice “seems to be an innate and universal tendency in humans” , and continuous with certain tendencies in some non-human animals, a more basic sense than the sense of fairness may be at stake—a sense, perhaps, of just being able to respond, or being able to join in the back-and-forth arrangement of responses.”

Gallagher distinguishes play from games:

I think that play (or what we might call free play) should be distinguished from games, where rules are pre-determined or already instituted. In free play there may be implicit taboos, but they do not emerge or get defined as rules until something goes wrong; and this gets signaled by pausing the play, or stopping it full stop, or transitioning into something that is no longer play. Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale:

“Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

Science says humans are mechanisms and what we think and feel are products of that mechanism, most people do not believe this and vocabulary isn't the problem. I don't think the rest of what you said answered the question i posed.
— Restitutor

I think your question relies on confused assumptions.
Your split between ‘ineffable’ subjectivity and physical
mechanism harks back to older traditions in philosophy. There are newer ways of thinking about the relation between physical science and subjectivity which don’t get caught in this dualist trap of assuming subjectivity is something added onto or apart from the physical.

Evan Thompson writes:

We can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity of the human life-world.”

It seems to me that the deeper idea here is not that ethical homogeneity produces harmony, but rather that injustice is a consequence of unhappiness, and that if people were happy then the problem of injustice would solve itself. — Leontiskos

I always thought that injustice was just the way we talk about competing values from within our own partisan bubble.

Physic is mechanistic to the point we can shoot rockets across the solar system and know with extreme accuracy where they will end up. Even clockwork isn't' so precise. — Restitutor

Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it. We could have chosen a different way of modeling it , but so far this way is quite useful for us. It may not always be so. Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary.

What is the implication of this for the idea that computers are just too mechanical to be, conscious, to love, to generate or understand meaning, to have a self or to have free will? How would changing notions of consciousness, meaning, morality, free will and self to make them fit with bodies as mechanical as any robot change these psychologically important notions? — Restitutor

In order to create our mechanistic framework for modeling physics or building machines, we have to pretend as though subjectivity does not play a part in how our machines work or our descriptions the physical world. In other words, our computers are already interactions between human subjects and what we create, so the workings of computers reflect this subjective aspect within themselves even when we call them purely mechanical.

We have to find better ways to communicate with each other and find where we have majority common cause. We all need food, water, shelter, medical support, education, security, and purpose, for example, and these are far far more important and common to all of us, compared to personal beliefs, race, nationality, gender, age, colour, where you were born or who your parents are — universeness

What prevents us from finding common cause is assuming that rationality means finding a correct standard around which to base that communication rather respecting differing value and ethical systems and attempting to negotiate common cause based on that respect.

Sounds like you are shopping, entertaining or playing games, instead of talking about communicating with real people. — universeness

Playing games is the way a number of prominent philosophers describe the art of social communication (Derrida’s play, Wittgenstein’s language games).

The universe demonsrates no independent intent. — universeness

Every aspect of the non-living world expresses agency and intent in the sense that all events that take place among material entities occur within changing configurations of relations that define what these events, and entities are. Entities in the world don’t pre-exist these configurations. Rather, contingently changing configurations condition the nature of materiality just as configurations of ideas condition and define how we interpret the world.

. Any affect we have as a species, on anything, is currently very local indeed, and hardly goes beyond this tiny pale blue dot. Imo, this thread tries to focus thoughts, on the premise that we can improve the human experience, if we perhaps focus a little more on such as:

We have so many insights about human nature but yet we keep on using concepts that give us a completely unrealistic view of humans, and cause Weltschmerz whenever we try to learn more.
— universeness

You’re missing the point. The aim of knowledge is not to take an accurate picture of the universe (and the minds of other people) but to effect more and more harmonious changes within whatever small part of it we are interested in interacting with. Knowledge isnt about passively representing what things are in themselves, but about what we are trying to do with things in a pragmatic sense. The richer and more complex our uses of our surroundings, the more we come to know what our world is ‘in itself’. Since other human beings are the aspect of our surroundings we care the most about, it is this aspect of that world that we focus most of our energies on. Improving our understanding of others isnt about becoming more realistic, more rational, as if earlier ways of understanding each other were less real or weren’t already useful. It’s about trying on for size more and more open-ended and flexible ways of interacting with each other, aiming for a ‘dance’ in which each of us can optimally anticipate the others’ moves.

↪Joshs
I will join you on any rational road, numbered or otherwise. But let's stay within the universe/cosmos as there is no evidence of an 'outside' of the universe/cosmos. — universeness

We dont need any other cosmos, given that this one is constantly changing with respect to itself, and the questions we pose to it in the form of our scientific hypotheses, as well as our technologies, participate in and accelerate the pace of the changes in the universe. Our rationality is not a function of mirroring a static cosmos, but of anticipating the effects of the changes we make in the world. The universe is always reinventing itself, with our help, so the task of rationality is to steer it and ourselves into patterns that are more and more harmoniously anticipatable. Most forms of rationality believe it is only our accounts of the universe which are incomplete, but the world itself is also incomplete , and this includes the nature of its laws and forms.

↪Skalidris
A good thread with many good contributions imo. For me, the fact that discussions such as this one are alive and kicking and are developing and spreading, and are rational and based on the premise that we can do better, is the 'fresher air,' I think is so welcome. I am sooooooo sick of nihilists, pessimists and doomsters, when they offer almost nothing else. — universeness

.
Perhaps there is a third road that can be taken, one which is neither mired in pessimism, nihilism and doomsaying, nor tied to a notion of the ‘rational’ that grounds itself in the conformity of our representations to the furniture of the universe.
I’m a strong believer in both scientific and moral progress, but I don’t think that this should be understood as a rational progress if rationality is defined in the way that it most often is. This leads less to progress than to conformity to ready-made presuppositions. The evidence for this can be found by asking what constitutes the opposite of the rational. What are examples of persons holding viewpoints deemed to be irrational? Inevitably the answer leads us to nonconformists, not those failing to think ‘rationally’.

What I mean is that what we currently know, in more scientific fields, not personal opinions or cultural believes, is in contradiction with a lot of intuitive everyday concepts. I just don't understand why no one fixes it. — Skalidris

They do fix it, and then they have to unfix it. This is because a scientific theory is a sophisticated form of cultural belief. There is no binding consensus among the various social sciences and branches of psychology on any issue important to human flourishing. Science does not just contradict intuitive everyday concepts, it also
contradicts itself.

Thanks very much! :up:
Oh wait… you mean that quote was already dumbed down? :sweat: — 0 thru 9

Believe it or not.

Why don’t people change their expectations instead of being mad about human nature? Why isn’t there a discipline that aims to build concepts that are closer to reality? — Skalidris

Now there’s a depressing thought.

Ahh! I see. Excellent, thanks. :up:
By the way, where (what book) was that Derrida quote from? — 0 thru 9

It was from ‘Positions’, where Derrida responds to interviewers’ questions, the easiest way to read him.

Thanks for your reply. :smile:
I think I understand most of Derrida’s quote, and see a relationship to my quote.

But if you could expand on that a little (dumb it down a shade? :blush: ), it might sink into my mind even better. — 0 thru 9

So Derrida is saying that binary oppositions (male/female, white/black, hetero/homosexual) inevitably privilege one term over the other. Deconstruction overturns the hierarchy but doesn’t stop there. It then shows how each term of the binary depends on and overlaps with the other, so that they no longer can be said to simply oppose each other but to belong to each other.

Husserl and I share an ancestral connection: Karl Weierstrass. Husserl was temporally close the great mathematician, while I am one of about 35,000 descendants. Husserl may have been at a point in mathematics with little to no precedents while triggering the ideas of manifolds and categories in math. — jgill

Husserl’s early belief that the concept of cardinal number forms the foundation of general arithmetic was strongly influenced by Weieratrass. In a note from Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl wrote:

Weierstrass usually opened his epoch-making lectures on the theory of analytical functions with the sentences: "Pure arithmetic (or pure analysis) is a science based solely and only upon the concept of number [Zahl]. It requires no other presupposition whatsoever, no postulates or premises."

Taught to hate the Yin within by repression and judgment.To hate the Yin around us by seeing it as lesser, while exploiting it.

For a common example, a young boy who is light-skinned (white) is told (implicitly, perhaps explicitly… dominator culture is hypocritical and likes to disguise its toxic nature) to hate the ‘lesser’ female, and to avoid being anything similar to that — 0 thru 9

Derrida’s deconstruction is an attempt to unravel the logic of dialectical opposition:

What_interested me then, that I am attempting to pursue along other lines now, was, at the same time as a "general economy," a kind of general strategy of deconstruction. The latter is to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it. Therefore we must proceed using a double gesture, according to a unity that is both systematic and in and of itself divided, a double writing, that is, a writing that is in and of itself multiple, what I called, in "La double seance," a double science. On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.

That being said-and on the other hand-to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new "concept," a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime… Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or…

they show the empirical sciences what is hidden to them in their own naive assumptions.
— Joshs

When and where would that be? — jgill

This is how Husserl put it in 1935:

The supposedly completely self-suffi­cient logic which modern mathematical logicians [Logistiker]
think they are able to develop, even calling it a truly scientific philosophy, namely, as the universal, a priori, fundamental sci­ence for all objective sciences, is nothing but naivete. Its self-evi­dence lacks scientific grounding in the universal life-world a priori, which it always presupposes in the form of things taken for granted, which are never scientifically, universally formu­lated, never put in the general form proper to a science of essence. Only when this radical, fundamental science exists can such a logic itself become a science. Before this it hangs in mid-air, without support, and is, as it has been up to now, so very naive that it is not even aware of the task which attaches to every objective logic, every a priori science in the usual sense, namely, that of discovering how this logic itself is to be grounded, hence no longer "logically" but by being traced back to the universal prelogical a priori through which everything logi­cal, the total edifice of objective theory in all its methodological forms, demonstrates its legitimate sense and from which, then, all logic itself must receive its norms.

Formal logic also depends on it.
— Joshs

Formal logic depends on duration?

How? — Banno

The objects of logic to be compared are presumed to maintain their identity (endure) throughout the comparisons.

Philosophy and physics come at the issue from separate perspectives. A key point of philosophy, I would assert, is that it is grounded in rational contemplation of the human condition. It ought not to overly rely on science, except perhaps insofar as scientific discoveries impact the human condition — Wayfarer

If you think about the concept of duration in terms of the notion of extension in time or space, that is, as changes in degree of a fixed quality, then you have the basis of both mathematics and objective science. There could be no mathematical or empirical object, no calculations nor measurement, without this idea of self-identical repetition. Formal logic also depends on it. Husserl’s philosophy was built on showing how we construct the ‘illusion’ of extensive duration out of qualitatively changing moments of sense. For Husserl, this subjective structure of time constitution underlying the concept of object extended in space and time represents an apodictic science underlying the relative and incomplete empirical sciences.
While Heidegger and Derrida has much to critique in Husserl’s work, they kept his discovery that the extended object at the heart of logic, mathematics and the empirical sciences is an illusion, or more accurately, a constructed idealization. So not only do their philosophies not rely on scientific results, they show the empirical sciences what is hidden to them in their own naive assumptions.

This is, to my mind, a great example of religious thought being progressive. Of course, religion is highly regressive in many contexts, in the sense used in the OP. My point would be that "the general principles by which theologies, philosophies, and ideologies become either progressive or regressive seems to transcend the secular/religious divide." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree completely. If at a certain point in history the use of the term religious fades away it will be the result of a progressive impetus within, but not unique to, the history of religion itself.

Yet is religious grounding always bad?
The thing we are grounded to in Platonism and the panentheistic vision of God displayed in Patristic theologians is transcendence, knowledge, freedom, and goodness itself… all human knowledge springs from the same source, man's desire for "what is truly good," not what merely "appears to be good and brings pleasure." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let’s try a deconstrucrive exercise:
By deconstructive I mean locating two hidden gestures operating together within the terms of a discourse. First, whenever a discourse makes claims for a boundary of opposition between two meanings, such as rational and irrational, love and hate, true and false, knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil, based on the assumption of a true quality intrinsic to each term, one can reveal that the sense of ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’ are themselves contingent, changeable and relative. The second deconstructive gesture is parasitic on the first. If supposedly reliably true, self-consistently grounded senses of terms like good and evil are themselves multiple and various, then the strict opposition between good and evil can no longer be justified. That is, dissolving the purity of categorical meanings ( or better yet, showing how they already dissolve themselves in practice) dissolves the violent sharpness of the oppositions they supposedly justify.

How does your notion of the good exclude those who you deem bad, how does your idea of the true banish those you deem false, how does your conception of the moral exclude those who appear to you as immoral? The religious gesture of grounding and binding always presents the danger of erasing the differences within its categorical terms, and as a result creating and hypostesizing oppositions that harmfully separate off groups of people from one another.

:100:

And indeed, that's what the research on the plunge in evangelical church attendance and its ties to radical right-wing beliefs and support for violence seems to suggest. People already in the "far-right" space don't tend to "get better" when they leave church. They tend to get more paranoid, more supportive of violence, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

Abandoning ties to institutions such as churches has been a symptom of the descent into dysfunction of many rural communities around the world due to economic decline , as books like Hillbilly Elegy have documented. This social dysfunction is especially true among men, reflected in higher rates of suicide, depression, addiction and violence.

Does this signal a loss of religious faith, or a loss of institutional connection? For conservative writers like David Brooks it doesnt matter. His argument is that severing the social ties that bind us together in mutual obligation and moral commitment is what leads to violence and despair. I disagree with him. I do agree that religiosity is about ties that bind us to something larger than ourselves, but this doesn’t have to correlate with church attendance. I suggest that dysfunctional right wing rural residents who are not connected to any institutions are very much driven by ties that bind them to something transcendent.

What I mean by this is faith in something that remains absolutely immutable and self-present, something pure that we can depend on to ground all of the relative, contingent changing phenomena of experience. Purity, persistent self-identity and self-presence are all tropes of what certain philosophers call a metaphysics of presence. We see a metaphysical of presence not only in fundamentalist religions with absolutist views about morality and truth, but also in modern science and humanism. When God was jettisoned in favor of the human subject, we exchanged a divine self-presence for the self-presence of subjective human consciousness and its ability to represent within itself empirically objective truth.

So why do I have problems with the idea of binding ourselves to a pure something outside ourselves (God, nirvana, antinatalist nothingness, objective truth) or within ourselves ( consciousness, self-actualization, authenticity)?

It’s just this: The more pure, the more fixedly absolute the ground, the more polarizing and violent is its relation to what it grounds. For instance, the religious or traditionalist belief in the free will of the autonomous, morally responsible subject implies a harsher and more ‘blameful' view of justice than deterministic-based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.

If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior. In other words, the more we are able to decenter the purity of our grounding of moral and empirical truth, the more we can see our relation to each other on dimensions of connection, similarity and belonging rather than opposition and blameful justice. To the extent that religiosity ( or a certain modernist view of science) is ‘regressive’ , it is in the extent to which it gives us over to notions of the pure, the true , the absolute which cannot help but alienate and blame in the same gesture in which it binds.

don’t do it on the basis of rationality vs emotion, because the science of emotion no longer justifies that dichotomy.
— Joshs

Can you say some more on this and the role of emotion in reason — Tom Storm

Think of emotion in terms of habits of thoughts, ways of being attuned to the world, of letting ourselves be affected, of how things matter to us, their salience and value for us.The rationality of correctness, of what is true and false, is ensconced within and oriented by the valuative salience contributed by affect. Rationality asks ‘What is the case’?, bit underneath it emotion asks a more fundamentalset of questions: ’what is the valuative significance and meaning of what is the case’? ‘Why do we care about it?’ ‘What the sense of it’? ‘What pattern of thinking makes the rationality of what is the case intelligible?

’Prefer' something seems a curious or 'cold' word to choose, given the subject matter; it makes theism versus atheism sound like selecting a pair of pants.

I've often held (perhaps wrongly) that (along with socialisation and enculturation) belief in deities is often arrived at aesthetically or emotionally, perhaps along the line of one's sexual preference. In my case, I never felt a jones for theism and no amount of argument is able to make it exciting or meaningful. — Tom Storm

Aren’t scientific theories of ‘what is the case’ also arrived at and overthrown based on aesthetic considerations? That is, by a shift of what matters to us rather than always sticking within the same affectively grounded frame of rationality that dictates the sense of what we deem true and false? Isnt the history of scientific progress akin to (and running parallel with) historical shifts in artistic movements? Isnt the historical progression of science, art and other cultural domains bound together via enculturation and socialization?

( Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made)
Josh, you seem to have some objection. Can you put it in your own words? — Art48

If you’re going to reject religion, don’t do it on the basis of rationality vs emotion, because the science of emotion no longer justifies that dichotomy. Emotion isn’t at odds with treason, it is its compass. Just say you prefer an atheistic value system.

The amygdala is the part of the brain which experiences emotions, in particular, fear and anger. It’s responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The cerebral cortex supports higher-level reasoning and intelligence. It has been speculated that the regressive has an overactive amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex, while the progressive has a better developed cerebral cortex. Relative to their overall size, humans have the largest cerebral cortex of all mammals. So, it might be argued that people with an overdeveloped amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex are people who are failing to realize their human potential. Thus, the label “regressive” is appropriate. — Art48

We humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior. Even the adjective we use to describe our­selves as insensitive or stupid in the heat of the moment —“thoughtless” —connotes a lack of cognitive control, of failing to channel our inner Mr. Spock. This origin myth is so strongly held that scientists even created a model of the brain based on it. The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system,” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so­called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most suc­cessful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his best­seller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows.

“Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly,” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Fin­lay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are
present in all vertebrates.” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.
( Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made)

...there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. — The Mind-Created World

My first impression is that for Husserl the empirical is the product of an intersubjective constituting process, which itself is built out of the constituting processes of individual subjectivities. So to say that something is empirically true is to refer to a relative product, which could be otherwise, of the concordant experience in conscious subjectivity. The reality of the Universe as independent of minds must also be considered a conclusion that is relative and could be otherwise. Put differently, the mind-independence of the external world is itself a product of a mind-dependent constituting process. Mind-independent empirical nature for Husserl is this relative product of constitution, a mere hypothesis.

if we could eliminate all spirits from the world, then that is the end of nature. But if we eliminate nature, "true," Objective-intersubjective existence, there always still remains something: the spirit as individual spirit. It only loses the possibility of sociality, the possibility of comprehension, for that presupposes a certain Bodily intersubjectivity. We would then no longer have the individual spirit as a person in the stricter, social sense, a person related to a material and, consequently, to a personal world as well. Nevertheless we still have, notwithstanding the enormous impoverishment of "personal" life, precisely an Ego with its conscious life, and it even has therein its individuality, its way of judging, of valuing, of letting itself be motivated in its position takings.” (Ideas II)

“All that exists for the pure ego becomes constituted in him himself; furthermore, that every kind of being including every kind characterized as, in any sense, "transcendent” has its own particular constitution. Transcendence in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, constituted within the ego. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non- sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.

but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche.
— Joshs

I don't think he's trying to let each "epoche" speak for itself. He's myth making to explain why we have directly opposing conceptions of goodness. His answer is that it's our heritage, built into our language. One could easily swap that answer with something about the structure of the human psyche. — frank

Our heritage is defined by our practices, and a genealogy of history tracks changes in our practices, and how these changes alter the sense of meaning of our linguistic concepts. In its most general sense the genealogical is the method of analysis of the Will to Power, which is not a psychological concept.

The will to power must not be interpreted psychologically, as if the will to power wanted power because of a motive; just as genealogy must not be interpreted as a merely philosophical genesis. ( Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy)

What I have in mind by the untimely is captured by Deleuze here:

There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity, becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must vanish. . . . What deed would man be capable of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhistorical?" Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems.

As far as Nietzsche's historical sense, he's the only western philosopher who even utilized ANY Historical sense at all.
— Vaskane

That does not account for Hegel who was bold enough to claim what that history was destined to bring about.

It also excludes those philosophers who presented "natural' right as outcomes of our development as human beings, as seen in the differences between Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, etcetera.

Against that backdrop, the use of the word Genealogy by Nietzsche seems less explanatory than others. — Paine

Ah, but Nietzsche’s view of history is ‘untimely’, neither history as a chain of empirical events viewed from an external perspective nor history as dialectical progression, but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche.

I will say, the kind of anti-Judaism of Schopenhauer, was probably a bit too early for the modern style antisemitism. As far as I know, he didn't hate Jews more than any other ethnic group. He had something mean to say about everyone, including fellow Germans. Nietzsche's era was getting closer to actual antisemitism in the modern sense, but he seemed to disavow such views. — schopenhauer1

In Nietzsche’s early years, it seems as if the elements were in place for a Heidegger-style anti-semitism. Like Heidegger, the young Nietzsche was in the throes of German nationalism, and idolized the early Greeks. This combination in Heidegger led him to connect the German Volk with the proper path of thinking the Greeks laid out, turning the jews into outsiders who corrupted this early thinking and spread the corruption to Christianity. A return to the proper path meant embracing the way of the German Volk against that of the rootless outsiders. But Nietzsche turned against both the Greeks and German nationalism. If the jews were corrupters, they just happened to be among the first and most effective. Since the inclination to turn the will against itself was present in all of humanity, there was no need to fetishize the jews, and no reason to assume they were any less capable than any other group of overcoming nihilistic tendencies.

↪Joshs To consider them weak in will to power would be to consider them as decadents, which Nietzsche states that "the Jews are the very opposite of décadents." He goes on to explain their will to power -- to survive where so many other civilizations didn't -- was to become the head of movements of decadents to gain immense power and transfigure the values of the ancient world away from life affirmation, to keep man kind tame enough as to not remove the Jews from existence.
If you want to believe Jew are weak in will to power that's your interpretation, but certainly not Nietzsche's stance — Vaskane

What I’m centrally interested in is how you would
characterize ressentiment, particularly its manifestation as the ascetic ideal, from a critical philosophical stance. Put differently, what, according to Nietzsche, is the crucial philosophical self-understanding lacking in those (including the jews) who believe that a nirvana of pure will to nothingness is a solution to the pain and suffering of living, or that science progresses toward absolute objective truth, or that there are moral universals? How are these all examples of the ascetic ideal (which the jews bought into lock, stock and barrel), and what kind of ethics should replace them?

↪Joshs The whole of Aphorism 24 from the Anti-Christ shows Nietzsche believes the Jews aren't weak of will at all: — Vaskane

Nietzsche says:

“the Jews were a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence”. Ressentiment is structured around revenge and hatred , a revaluation of values.

“Whereas all noble morality grows out of a tri­umphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment…”

The ascetic ideal emerges from ressentiment, and is characterized as a coping mechanism to deal with a weak, degenerative, impoverished and sick physiology:

the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from appearance, transience, growth, death, wishing, longing itself – all that means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, but it is and remains a will.”

“And when we view it physiologically, too, science rests on the same base as the ascetic ideal: the precondition of both the one and the other is a certain impoverishment of life, – the emotions cooled, the tempo slackened, dialectics in place of instinct, solemnity stamped on faces and gestures (solemnity, that most unmistakable sign of a more sluggish metabolism and of a struggling, more toiling life.”

It's good to keep in mind that despite their having differing opinions on almost everything, professional philosophers are overwhelmingly realist with regard to the existence of the world around us. — Banno

I’ll go along with that, but it gets a bit tricky when we try to parse terms like ‘real’ and ‘exist’. For instance, Is the existence of the world absolutely or only relatively real?

Now, however, we must not fail to clarify expressly the
fundamental and essential distinction between transcendental­ phenomenological idealism versus that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent. Above all: phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly. Its sole task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense in which everyone accepts it - and rightly so - as actually existing. That the world exists, that it is given as existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy.

In this regard, it is a fundamental of philosophy, according to the expositions in the text of the Ideas, that the continual prog­ression of experience in this form of universal concordance is a mere presumption, even if a legitimately valid one, and that consequently the non-existence of the world ever remains think­able, notwithstanding the fact that it was previously, and now still is, actually given in concordant experience. The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is "irrelative" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due,namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as an intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity. Natural life, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its "naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection.
(Husserl, Ideas II)

Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places.
— Joshs

How is that different from the situation for poor people who have been barred from even more places? In other words, the Jews haven't been the only ones facing that kind of predicament. So it's misleading to single them out, as if everyone else was having a great time — baker

Let me get this straight. You don’t want to single the jews out as the only recipients of discrimination. But you do want to single the jews out in the follow way:

“When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.”

I think Nietzsche’s highly complex formulation of ressentiment, and its relation to historic judaism, is likely to be misconstrued on this forum as simply a blaming of the jews. I appreciate that Nietzsche’s larger concern in the Genealogy of Morals was not to single out some group for attack but to apply his notion of Will to power, as a
psychic battle among competing drives, not just to the history of morality but to the history of scientific truth.

I would suggest, though, that there are other ways of understanding the emergence of the morality of Good and Evil besides that of a weakness or sickness. This implies some sort of pathology or regression occurred in human history with respect to a prior period of a healthy Will to Power. Why not treat the rise of Judeo -Christian morality without the value judgement implied by ‘weakness of will’? It can be seen instead as a phase of a historical development or evolution, which made Nietzsche’s own philosophy possible.

magritte Here's the link to the very nicely formatted .pdf of the paper.

I was sceptical first up, but having started to read it, I'm coming around to it. — Wayfarer

I love how the the authors locate the ‘true’ meaning of human cultural products like art and literature in evolutionary adaptivity, a purpose only indirectly connected to the expressed or implicit motivation of the artist, but outside the bounds of their awareness. This true meaning grounds itself in an origin depicted as the universal lawfulness of empirical objectivity. The theological thinking of origin as the pure self-persistence of law is evident here, which is why Kierkegaard scholar Mark C Taylor embraced similar ideas in his 1999 book, The Moment of Complexity.

Stuart Kauffman’s extensive research and speculation are inspired by deeply held philosophical, metaphysical, and religious beliefs, which often stand in tension with his scientific investigations. His obvious rejection of the existence of a Judeo-Christian God cannot disguise the profound longing for unity and reconciliation that lies at the heart of his work. If Darwin and his followers are right when they claim that evolution is a matter of chance, human life would seem to be an accident. For Kauffman, such a vision renders life meaningless and makes it impossible to feel ‘at home in the universe.” If, however, there is an emergent order to things that lends evolution a discernible order and probable direction, life has a logic that makes human existence meaningful:

In this view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, brico­lage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing, ” in
Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which se­lection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on its head with his blind watchmaker.
This order, or course, is neither the product of a purposeful designer nor pro­grammed from the beginning; rather, evolution is an inner teleonomic process in which order emerges spontaneously but not accidentally. “If I am right,” Kauffman hopefully declares, the motto of life is not ‘We the improbable, but We the expected’.

Well since in Real Life here on planet Earth while physical systems are getting more and more complex, biological systems are rapidly becoming simpler and simpler. If current biological trends are extrapolated indefinitely, there will be a zoo, a corn field and an industrial feed lot.

It's erroneous on it's face. — LuckyR

I guess it depends in how you define complexity. For instance, how should we weigh decreasing bio-diversity against increases in human cultural and technological complexity?

↪mcdoodle
Do you think that there is an anti-Jewish bias in Europe stemming from pre-Holocaust ideas of Jewry that is not present in newer Western nation like the US? There are certainly hate groups everywhere but I am wondering if geography influences these trends — schopenhauer1

Europeans brought their prejudices with them when they emigrated to America. Not just anti-semitism ( there were many prominent anti-semites, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindburgh) but anti-catholicism, and conflict among catholic ethnicities. My grandmother remembered seeing signs posting ‘No jews, catholic or dogs’.
Major cities like New York, Chicago and Boston were divided up into fiefdoms bounded by major streets and centered around local parishes. You ventured beyond your group’s neighborhood at the risk of a beating. This faded by the 1960’s ( with the exception of prejudice against people of color) with the flight to suburbia and the integration of public and private institutions.

I think the key tends mitigating against separatism
are urbanization, secularization, inter-marriage
and population diversification.

Could facing up to functions being somehow (somehow) first-order fundamental (with implications for internalism-externalism, organic-inorganic, selectpsychism - panpsychism) help face up to the 'aboutness' problem, in a way that's consistent with known physics? (somehow) — Danno

Enactivists like Evan Thompson abandon functionalism in favor of an integrated approach that also does away with qualia, input-output directionality, representationalism and computationalism. Enactivism makes ‘aboutness’ the central organizing principle of living systems in that living things are defined by their normative, goal-oriented interaction with an environment.

In the traditional functionalist conception, cognition is treated as fundamentally distinct from emotion. Cognitivist explanations focus on the abstract problem-solving characterization of cognitive tasks, the structure and content of symbolic representations, and the nature of the algorithms for manipulating the representations in order to solve a given problem. Cognitivism goes hand in hand with functionalism in the philosophy of mind, which in its extreme computational form holds that the embodiment of the organism is essentially irrelevant to the nature of the mind. It is the software, not the hardware, that matters most for mentality.

Cognitivism made meaning, in the sense of representational semantics, scientifically acceptable, but at the price of banishing consciousness from the science of the mind. (In fact, cognitivism inherited its consciousness taboo directly from behaviorism.) Mental processes, understood to be computations made by the brain using an inner symbolic language, were taken to be entirely nonconscious. Thus the connection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world. Cognition or sense-making is the intentional and normative engagement of the system with its environment. One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.