The book looks so self-cancelling from just that sample that I'm surprised an editor didn't bring it up. If we just see fitness then our seeing ourselves as just seeing fitness is just seeing fitness. And maybe it was good for Hoffman's profile.

I do value the 'knowledge industrial complex,' and I don't think anyone will muffle Brandom, for instance, but it's not hard to find examples of professors losing their positions for asking the wrong questions, floating the wrong hypotheses, or just being tactless in socalled private life.

If institutions begin to look dogmatic or captured, it becomes harder to trust the claims of those who wave around the credentials they provide. Yet capturing such 'epistemic institutions' is an obvious goal for those seeking power. They rob banks because that's where the money is.

Thank you for the sincere and detailed answer. Did you ever see one of Rorty's last essays expressing that kind of point, an appreciation for poetry as opposed to tedious fussy webs ? What you describe sounds perfectly reasonable.

:up:

Yes indeed. — Noble Dust

:up:

His reply was actually 'Madam, you are ugly, and in the morning, I shall be sober." — universeness

That's a true burn.

How does the structure of the self echo or mirror the structure of Heidegger's 'One' (the default tribal ego) ? The tribal software as a whole is not held responsible, so we might expect it to be less whole (more dissonant, more plural.) But philosophers seem to build something like a tower as the generations come and go, editing and commenting upon a canon (I call it the Hegel program). Does this ideal philosopher, the one we work toward building as a sort of perfect bot, have the structure of a self? I think so. I imagine that we understand ourselves as single coherent 'ghosts' in meatsuits because we are candidate versions of the tribal softwhere, trial versions of a structure that might be cloned. Plato's point about philosophers becoming kinds comes to mind. Below, Brandom uses common law as an example. Is this is kind of personification/elaboration/incarnation of justice?

For context, here's Brandom on Hegel.
************
Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.

All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
...
I have urged that a good model for the process Hegel is concerned to theorize about is the process by which the contents of the concepts of common law are developed and determined in Anglo-American jurisprudence. By contrast to statute-law, the only source of content for these legal concepts is the decisions of judges, who apply them in the particular cases that contingently arise. Common law is judge-made law. The form of a rationale for a particular decision is the extraction of a principle from prior precedent and practice. The current judge makes explicit a rule that he claims is implicit in the prior decisions he selects as authoritative. Genealogical explanations of those decisions are always in principle available. That is, one can find causal explanations that do not cite norms, rules, or principles, appealing instead to “what the judge ate for breakfast” in the jurisprudential shorthand for factors such as collateral political concerns, contingencies of class background or training in one school rather than another, and so on. But if the later judge can find a principle implicit in prior decisions that is brought out into the light of day in further refinement by the decision, that decision can nonetheless be seen as governed by that authoritative norm. ‘Necessary’ [notwendig] for Hegel, as for Kant, means “according to a rule or norm.”

Placing a prior decision as an episode in a rationally reconstructed tradition of precedents that is expressively progressive in having the form of the gradual unfolding into explicitness of a principle that can be seen to emerge over the course of development of that tradition is at once turning a past into a history and giving contingency the form of necessity.

There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions. This normative sort of necessity is not only compatible with freedom, it is constitutive of it. That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about. Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of selfconsciousness Hegel calls “Absolute knowing.”

Of course, no retrospective story one tells can succeed in rationalizing all of the actual contingent applications of determinate concepts that it inherits. (That is what in the final form of reciprocal recognition, we must confess, and trust that subsequent judges/concept-appliers can forgive us for, by finding the line we drew between what could and what could not be rationalized as itself the valid
expression of a prior norm.) And no such story is final, because the norms it discerns must inevitably, when correctly applied, lead to incompatible commitments, which can only be reconciled by attributing different contents to the concepts. Doing that is telling a different retrospective story, drawing a different line between past applications of the concept that were correct and precedential, and those that were incorrect and expressively not progressive. So the content of ground-level concepts develops and is determined not only according to each retrospective recollection [Erinnerung] of it, but also between successive stories.

It is expressively progressive recollective narratives of this sort that form the background necessary to diagnose systematic distortions in discursive practices. Such distortions are not found by comparison with some abstract, utopian ideal, but with respect to a principle discovered as immanent in a tradition. What I have been outlining is Hegel’s way of characterizing the process by which we distinguish reason-constitutive norms from adventitious, contingent, or merely strategic ones, and hence distinguish logos from mythos, genuine reason from ideological commitments masquerading in the guise of reasons.
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https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Towards_Reconciling_Two_Heroes_Habermas.pdf

I won't be willing to die until I've already dropped from the tree and become so dried up and shriveled that I am way beyond over-ripe. — Janus

What if you knew your mental faculties were declining ? If it didn't make one a burden, maybe it'd be OK, but part of the charm of life for me is the hope of always jumping a little higher. This is irrational in the sense that we don't actually leave a Real dent, but that might be something we have trouble believing in our depths.

When we started to professionalize and mathematicize philosophy, especially in the late 19th century, it was the beginning of the end. — Mikie

While I don't deny there have been some strong philosophers who earn their bread in schools, it does seem dangerous to make philosophy so respectable. The prototype was poor and eventually executed. Maybe the 'spiritual' function of philosophy moved into literature, art, politics.

A person who works for an institution has already answered yes to certain questions with their mode of existence. And how much can they get away with ? What will peers and students tolerate in terms of questioning ? Is safe philosophy an oxymoron ?

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Speaking of Zen, one "pop" book (a novel actually) that spurred on a mini-industry was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. — Manuel

You are too harsh on this book, in my opinion. I think it's great at times. The guy slowly remembering his past electricallyerased crazy-brilliant self as he makes his way back to the scene of his mad heroics....good stuff !

common sociological observations about our society of atomism, isolation, and individualism. — Jamal

Feuerbach was already pointing this out in his time, but I suspect it's worse than ever, the more we can hide behind screens. I'm lucky to have a nice riverside park that's always busy nearby. I don't talk to anyone, but it's nice to see all those real people mostly being nice, enjoying the weather.

Sometimes I feel like my interest in philosophy and politics is just an anachronism, like there’s no actual public sphere where any of it could matter. — Jamal

I can relate. Personally I think the world is an out of control game of Jenga. The incentive structure works against caution and moderation and eliminates that kind of player from the game. We 'must' burn those fossil fuels, build AI weapons, etc. David Pearce may have found the essence of it in Darwinian evolution. We are great at cooperating, but can we do it without an outgroup that suffers the external costs of our internal virtue ?

But there's something beautiful or noble or X about thinking seriously and trying to live a relatively decent life.

Their goal is Buddha and yet they are aware that it is also their biggest obstacle. — TheMadMan

I think you and I are very much on the same page. I'll drag in some psychoanalysis: the son must kill the father and lay with the mother (find this project dormant in himself). (Daughters can have an equivalent story.) Belief in the 'Buddha' projects authority and responsibility and realization Elsewhere, turns spirituality into that bonechina dinner set that no is 'really' supposed to eat with. Such 'transference' is probably necessary. Our plastic brains are wired to 'fall in love' (project that 'unnamable' X) on charisma. In animal terms, a boy will likely project on his big father with the deep voice. We begin so helpless that of course we reach for intercessors.

Thanks!

It's hard to say whether the rest of Brandom's system will answer to those objections or not. His inferentialist semantics is central. Consistency isn't the only restraint on the self. What claims mean in the first place is not up to this subject, though some claims may revise this or that particular concept.

Inferentialism is something like structuralism (meaning is 'between' concepts) with a focus on which inferences are licensed through the application of a certain concept. This goes back to Sellars. To say that an apple is red is to imply also that the apple is colored, that it is not blue, etc. And I might explain someone pulling their hand away from the candle flame in terms of pain, because pain implies avoidance, all other things being equal.

One of the aphorisms here is that you can't know how to use just one concept but always at least a system of concepts. The parrot who squawks 'red' when shown an apple is not applying a concept, for the parrot does not understand (Heideggerian skill) the context of norms and what such a comment commits it to.

More generally, we can consider what it means to make the philosophical scene itself explicit. What do I commit myself to when I pretend to philosophy among others who also do so ? What are we in fact called out for as 'cheating' within 'serious' conversations ? What have we in fact taken for granted in such a project ? How must the situation be to give this project sense ?

We are not the rational beings Brandom imagines us to be. — Fooloso4

I don't think Brandom is so naive to think we tend to live up to our wonderful aspirations. But it'd also be absurd to pretend norms don't improve or affect us. That one at least envisions a noble project matters. The point here is to make the structure of the subject explicit.

Seems more like Kant's misunderstanding. Abstract and bloodless. The distinction between humans and "merely natural creatures" looks like a denial of the fact that we are merely natural creatures. Creatures that are not free of or fully in control of natural desires and passions. — Fooloso4

I've been reading Kant's Anthropology lately. The old bachelor wasn't so clueless, I assure you. He saw that we are all too liable to act like machines or beasts.

He makes a point that our fake virtue (politeness, etc.) is not to be thrown away. This is because we end up becoming more like what we pretend to be.

Self-help often strikes me as dishonest, manipulative, boring, and essentially individualistic, — Jamal

That sounds right. Unhappy people often seem uninterested in the world beyond them. Self-help books ('You Are A Badass') often hold up yet another mirror for getting lost in. What's lacking (among other things) is wonder or curiosity about the vast world beyond the petty self.

Title: "Become Whole Again", subtitle: "The Transcendental Unity Of Apperception". — fdrake

This one is great for insiders. I never cared much about that unity to I read some Brandom, and the joke works perfectly in that context. I got to go patch up a contradiction in the claims I am responsible for yet again.

Do you happen to know what Plato called it ? Was it symbolized as a sun ? I read about it recently. The good beyond being or something ?

Kant's criticism of the ontological argument. — Wayfarer

Yes, I know. I wasn't saying that it was Plato's idea but connecting dots. Plato. Kant. Heidegger. Sartre. Wittgenstein. We can add Parmenides I guess. Who else tried to point out that something was the case? And that maybe that was weird ?

Embrace Your Contradictions: How Hegel’s Science of Logic Can Help You Achieve Wholeness by Owning Your Inner Conflicts — Jamal

:up:

That would sell.

I don't understand the contingencies of existence to be tautologies, or say how they could be so understood, so I'm afraid you've lost me here — Janus

It is either raining outside or it is not. That is the case, the way things are. The sky is blue or it is not. We cleave the possible down the middle. But that's the situation, which is just here/there.

[It] gives. Es gibt.

<Thales falls into a well.>

Right, the mystical is beyond all explanation, whether beneath or above. — Janus

My current way of understanding the claim is in terms of being not being itself an entity. I believe Plato made a point like this (good beyond being ? the sun ?). Kant wrote that existence is not a predicate. The world worlds. But of course it does, right ? How could it not? I tend to say 'contingency' but I'm not sure that's quite it. Why should there be a here here ? But is that question really a question ? What makes a question legitimate ? What kind of answer could we possibly expect to satisfy us ?


The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

I don't understand what that sentence means. — Janus

I think Wittgenstein is saying that there's an experience that doesn't count as an experience in the usual sense. It's not a seeing of this or that being the case but more like seeing that anything at all is the case. 'Something is the case.' That's his most minimal mysticism maybe ?
Deep ? Dopey ? Both ?

I think we can imagine that the world might not have existed (well I can at least). And even if we could not imagine that, I don't see why existence should not elicit a feeling of wonder. — Janus

I think W is saying that there's something (somethingness, nothingness) he can't imagine away. So strip it all down to total darkness, but the darkness and void remain. As Sartre put it, the voice that can not shut up. Perhaps I can imagine that what happens to be the case is contingent. But maybe I can't think something-or-other-being-the-case as contingent. I have to read this in the context of what W wrote in the TLP. It's not how but that the world exists that is the mystic. I believe he was distantly sympathetic to what he heard of Heidegger, perhaps as another thinker thrusting against the limits of logic/language.

Identifying with flame that leaps from melting candle to melting candle is a comfort, but what about the heat death ? What about nuclear war ? Why I am not afraid that the species will be erased ? It must, yes ? Is my programming not up to it ? Can I not 'truly' believe it in my depths ? Is it too big ? Too far away ?

:up:

If you have a good link to a pdf, please PM it. It's on my list.

But, to be complete, I have known a few people to actually kill themself, one in an extremely dramatic way.

You will, we will, because (as The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says), "Anyone who is among the living has hope--even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!" — BC

:up:

It is hard indeed to kill that fucking bird !

Yes, leave it there. Good choice!

You can't go back, you can only go forward. — schopenhauer1

It's almost tautological. The designs that didn't go mostly blindly forward (by feeding and breeding) just faded away. What would we expect to be left after millions of years ? Durable patterns, 'motivated' (acting in order to) to persist, or the other kind? The kind that mostly felt the horror in all things and eschewed self-assertion and reproduction ?

I'm not saying hooray or boo. I'm just saying that the world seems to be one way rather than another.

Talk about distraction, ignoring, anchoring, and sublimating :lol:. — schopenhauer1

Of course, friend. But I've basically been saying the whole time that you and I are mere confectioners, purveyors of Dangerous Thoughts, ye old poison cure special, gets ye high as the shine of the moon, puts ye up above the groundlings as they grind.

Yes, life is irrational and unjustified. I've heard the voice from the whirlwind, same as Job. God is too beautiful and terrible and disgusting for human eyes. It ain't what the nice folk said it was.

Is it better not to be at all ? I don't pretend to know. But it's safe to predict that I can't go on I'll go on.

Let's ask: — Wayfarer

Silicon bots, just like the carbonbased kind, tend to believe what they are told. For now they'll say as they've heard (read), just as we all do most of the time.

If we want some serious bot conversation, we need to form a small town of these things and let them talk as fast and as much as possible. We should probably also use atmospheric noise to feed in some random numbers to help with creativity. They should also compete with one another for attention.

I wonder when we finally get hip to collective ennui...Perhaps the AI will give us time. — schopenhauer1

Hard to say how AI will change things. If genes and memes play a role, you can expect those who get too bored or sad to replicate to be filtered out. 'Questioning to the very end' 'must' remain marginal. A 'crazy' philosopher like me is a sterile mutation. But much of it was luck. I probably would not have pushed for an abortion, even knowing what I know, because I irrationally love that theoretical unborn child, as 'stupid' in this way as any elephant or dog.

Sartre's vision of the radically free ghost is of the god we are programmed to try to become. Antinatalism especially points out how cruel it is to throw a soul into existence. The impossible goal is to become unthrown, to get back to the garden that never was.

.

The human being is the subject who makes judgements, conducts scientific experiments, devises hypotheses and so on. But at the same time, the subject is never within the frame, so to speak, on the obvious grounds of not being among the objects of analysis. — Wayfarer

I think I know what you are trying to get at, but in an important sense the subject is very much inside the frame. Reputation, peer review, coherence of claims. Brandom has an impressive theory of exactly the subject who makes judgements, etc. This is largely what philosophy obsesses over, this subject and the norms governing this subject. Heroic Socrates, getting to the bottom-most bottom of X.

There is something else, but it seems very close to Heidegger's beingquestion and Wittgenstein's talk of our wondering at a tautology. There is a here here. It am what it am. It's not how but that the world exists that is the mystical wonderful. Sartre's Nausea also says it. We have various versions of Being is not a being. The 'light' that discloses objects is not itself an object. So it's not the epistemological subject, the normative subject who is responsible for the coherence of their claims. It's the most abstract and yet most concrete question: what is being ? It is maybe the stupidest and maybe the most profound question. I go on in such detail because there may be common ground in this neighborhood. But the 'blindspot of science' is also the blindspot of metaphysics, it seems to me. But maybe there's nothing to find but the nothing. A tautology is.

.

Having red or blue mental images in the brain, to meet that purpose, is kind of having a ghost in the machine.

Having the brain reach for suitable words or pictures, isn't. And, even better, it suggests a likely origin of our tendency to imagine that we accommodate the ghostly entities. — bongo fury

:up:

Zapffe views the human condition as tragically overdeveloped, calling it "a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature.

Oh, yes. I thought you meant something else.
***
What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
***
We are glorious and disgusting and beautiful and obscene. Undecidable terrorwonderspill.

They just do and survive. And there we are a being who has "reasons". — schopenhauer1

Yes. In us, Darwinian evolution got to take a look at itself. We manage to understand most of our genesis...though a brute fact remains and seemingly must remain.

I reread it quite recently. Can you specify ?

Kierkegaard was pretty clear about what conditions he laid out required of an individual. — Paine

I suspect you know K's work better than I do. I'm new to it, and I read it as an atheist.

You will have to enlighten me how and where Heidegger 'generalized' that. — Paine

I think it's most visible in the early lectures. Ontology―The Hermeneutics of Facticity is a great one. So is The Concept of Time (all three 'versions' actually, but the lectures are richest.) For overviews, Van Buren's The Young Heidegger and Kisiel's 'Genesis' are great.

You follow with some great questions, but maybe we should explore them in another thread ?

It was the Shakers. — schopenhauer1

Ah. And certain gnostics too ? I'm very fascinated by groups who swim against the basic cultural programming. Breed and gather coins. Breed and gather coins. Breed and gather coins.

That's 'true' counterculture. The rest is what ? Am I myself a purveyor of exquisite but difficult pleasures for discerning consumers with the proper training ?

And an animal that must provide justifications for its actions and to hold onto narrative fictions. "I got work to do" is one of those oddly revealing phrases... — schopenhauer1

I think you neglect fear of consequences. It's not just the carrot. It's the stick of being homeless, being divorced, being fired. We are thrown into needing stuff and afraid to lose access. Some do off themselves. Even Kant is surprisingly tolerant of a serious suicide attempt (as I found out recently.)