However, one also reads in the Edinburgh Research Archive that Nietzsche was probably an anti-realist, whereby any external reality is hypothetical and not assumed. — RussellA

I love Nietzsche, so I don't mind the detour, but keeping the function of the author in mind, along with our diligent avoidance of arguing from the fame of the mighty dead, especially one who told us he wore many masks, I present to you what I had in mind originally.

1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)

3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of good sense and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

https://www.austincc.edu/adechene/Nietzsche%20true%20world.pdf

Note that Nietzsche also mocked the idea of the sense organs being understood as their own product.

To be clear, I think all kinds of interpretations of Nietzsche can be supported, with none of them, including mine, resolving the issue.

We learn what “red” is by being expose to red objects and judging similarly. What goes on inside is irrelevant to the meaning of the concept “red”. — Richard B

I understand why someone would claim this, and I readily agree that the social aspect is necessary. But I don't think it's exhaustive. Ought we deny our experience of intending an object ? Or intending a state of affairs ? Something like the direct experience of meaning ? I think training is crucial for the linguistic version of this, but once trained we have a certain independence and ability to introspect.

Private meaning is not made possible by public meaning. — RussellA

I think it's more like two sides of the same coin. You talk of wavelengths a moment ago, and I presume you rely on the public inferential aspect of the concept. But it's hard to imagine how you could have a private sense of wavelengths without being immersed in a culture that uses this meaningful token in inferences (explanations.)

The private meaning is associated with the public meaning, but the private meaning is not included within the public meaning. — RussellA

:up:

What about pre-linguistic perceptual meanings? Do pre-verbal infants not construct meaning from their surroundings through the use of perceptual-motor schemes? — Joshs

:up:
I think we can also just look at our dogs and cats.

Realizing their personal Jesus is a mask of God, may prompt a believer to desire experience what is behind the mask. They may desire to experience God directly. They may want to become a mystic and experience God exactly as an intelligent rabbit or spider might experience God. — Art48

I suggest that we might think of God/Jesus as an object seen from different 'perspectives.' A personality is a position in 'interpretative/hermeneutical space.' This or that aspect of the God-object may more or less visible to this or that 'perceiver' (intuiting soulsearching theologian).

The problem with God-behind-all-masks is the classic problem with Kant's reality-behind-all-appearence. It understands the given as a blanket thrown over the real. All we could even mean by what's under the blanket is built from looking at that blanket. Otherwise it's an empty intention, a mystified thought of nothingness. Yet surely people only care about a God under the blanket because they heard stories, imagine a kind of father or intelligible principle.

I suggest that appearance should not be understood as a blanket thrown over reality but simply as that reality from a perspective. Consciousness is not illusion or screen but the being of the world itself. Along these lines, God is already something we are looking it from different perspectives. Some people see God as an idea or a projection of the species essence, created rather than creator. Others think pretty much the reverse, etc. Perceiving the same God directly does not mean without error. I can think a passing car is a blue Dodge Charger until it gets closer, and then I change my mind.

This is readily seen by asking the simple and obvious question: “why is one obliged to the moral facts?”. — Bob Ross

This questioning itself is an expression of the autonomy norm that makes philosophy intelligible. Why should I regard @Bob Ross as more than a monkey using instrumental reason to try to get a banana ? Because philosophy is founded on a deeper, ethical rationality. I'm not as cynical about you as you seem to be.

--Why the fuck should I live an examined life ?
--Who says I gotta ask questions about the world ?
--What if knowledge is not important ?

Do we not apriori seek knowledge...justified true belief ?

The philosopher only has leverage in the first place in terms of real norms: ego-transcending norms that apply to all philosophers as such --- not to be found like magic stones in some hidden amoral Reality behind the lifeworld.

But the critical-rational tradition is not the only existential possibility. People can just have gods whisper in their ear and refuse to debate. They can gather armed beneath mystic symbols that blaze above them on flags. Or an ironist can embrace a gentle radical childishness.

I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.
...
We have thrown out the cry-baby in us. Any infiltration of this kind is candied diarrhea.
...
I am speaking of a paper flower for the buttonholes of the gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, white cousins lithe or fat.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pd

.Are certain norms valid, or in force, because certain things such as linguistic expressions and intentional states have certain meanings/contents? Or do such things have meaning/content because some norms are in force? — sime

I'd say it's both. Husserl's categorial intuition is helpful. Once we are 'in' a form of life, including its inferential norms and more basic ostensive norms, we can directly perceive states of affairs (not sense data). I see that my wife is coming in with a bag of groceries, all at once. The world is always meaningful like this. So this puts a constraint on what's intelligible. The meaningstructured world isn't whatever we want it to be, and I don't think we can ignore the structure of typical worldly objects when we are thinking about the meaning of more abstract and complex terms.

Note that I largely agree with inferentialism, so this is a balancing acknowledgement of how meaning is not only structural but also founded on direct perception of worldly objects in relationship.

It seems to me that being rational can be utilized for good or evil; so it can't be fundamentally ethical. — Bob Ross

I don't mean simple instrumental rationality.

Secondly, "rationality" itself,I would argue, is normatively loaded; and is itself rooted, just like morals, in a taste (as its fundamentally obligation). — Bob Ross

Respectfully, you are appealing to rational norms as you attack them. The alternative is that your are a cynical manipulator beyond good and evil, just trolling us. I of course think you are sincerely seeking truth here.

You seem to assume that norms are Real unless they exist like stones. If semantics is even partially explained by inferentialism, you can't even think without real norms. You'd need the reality of those norms in order to intelligibly and paradoxically deny them.

For example, perhaps you think that what is rational is to be logically consistent, internally/externally coherent, to have intuitions which seem to correspond to reality, etc.: why should one be logically consistent, etc.? — Bob Ross

One should never be logically consistent, and yet one should always be logically consistent. I'd go farther and say that nonviolence is the most intense form of violence, and that only the honest lie. Any genuine philosophy contradicts itself continuously, confusing initiates until the chains of their superstitious attachment to an ancient misconception of rationality drop from them and they see Truth. Any statement that can be understood is apriori false. When I tell people I'm an atheist, they incorrectly assume that I don't walk with God a parsec at a time in the Filth Dimension.

****

More seriously, I allow for the existential possibility of mysticism, ironism, brutish pragmatism, ..., but these positions are only consistent if they drop all pretense to be justified rationally (according to a universal norm that binds all rational participants in the ICC). In my opinion, Holden from Blood Meridean is a beautiful (exuberance is beauty?) monster who 'understands' that the 'True Logic' is War. One does not argue for this warlogic. It's transconceptual. Its premise is a loaded gun, its conclusion a scalping.

As Nietzsche wrote “We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snows, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities.” — RussellA

Nietzsche in other passages gives Kant hell for making the real world (this one) an illusion.

I'd say that we should just look at the entire encompassing lifeworld and acknowledge its entanglement with our nervous system and our metaphors. In this lifeworld, marriages are as real an electrons. Science itself as a normative enterprise only makes sense on a stage of humans trying to be honest and less confused. So even value can't be wiped off like an illusion without paradox.

Yet both Bertrand and Russell can have a sensible conversation about "beetles", even if their intentional contents, their private mental images, are different.

Within the language game, private mental images drop out of consideration as irrelevant. — RussellA

I think the intentional concept has to include the public structuralist aspect of meaning, but that their can be a private founded aspect of meaning made possible by this public aspect.

There's a competition, where "It's true that this approach is likely to succeed at maximising the outcomes I care about" might decide which ideas are best. The "truth" part can be forcibly added, but it's trivial. — Judaka

I think we agree, at least on ambiguous cases. We want the best beliefs. We tend to want them to be true without having a way to know finally and certainly whether they are. In fact I've argued in other threads that we probably never know exactly what we mean. So philosophy to me is as much about clarification and intensification of semantic grip as anything else.


You might like this essay on the topic. I do think Brandom is great in general.
Why Truth Is Not Important In Philosophy

This is what I meant by "useful fictions create truth", now replacing that to be "created categories create truth". — Judaka

I probably make such a fuss because Brandom gets from Kant the big insight that statements / claims
/ complete thoughts are the minimal unit of responsibility. So I thought of a fiction as a complete thought and not just a category / concept by itself.

I will say that there are probably limits on our category choices as we get closer to the sensory world. We are almost bound to grasp the dog as a unity and not as 4 legs that live together in a little tribe under a brown cylinder umbrella. So it's the higher levels, etc., that look more flexible. Which, as you mention, things get ever trickier.

They're not representative of the types of claims made in philosophy, which deal with complex concepts and objectives, and require sophisticated interpretation and thinking. — Judaka

:up:
Yes, it gets trickier up in the clouds. We can talk about our talking about our talking. We build new metacognitive self-referential concepts on the fly. So it's an infinite game. I still think there's the same intentional structure, but the objects involved are lost in deep fog.

I agree with Wittgenstein and Brandom that much of meaning is ground in public norms, especially inferential norms as in what claims are justified by what assumptions. But I think as individuals we can have genuinely new insights that are hard to express. So we reach for metaphors, abuse language suggestively. I'm inclined to say that good conversation involves a kind of 'seeing' where the other person is 'coming from.' Gadamer writes about a fusion of horizons. Basically I have to learn your lingo and you mine. One of my favorite of his insights is that I come to know my own self as listener by seeing what my prejudicial misunderstandings were as the situation is clarified. For Gadamer, following Heidegger, our interpretative prejudices are otherwise invisible to us. We think they are the world, but they are glasses we can take off. To me that's beautiful. A big part of philosophy is converting false necessity into optional contingency ---a journey toward greater freedom and a wider view.

Truth isn't just about the world, it's a function of logic, and without pointing out a single new thing about the world, one can change their logic, concepts or created categories and reach a different conclusion. — Judaka

:up:

I think I understand and mostly agree. It's like you are imaging holding the world fixed and changing the concept system. That violates my holism a little bit, but I get your intention well enough not to quibble.

This is at minimum, very close to my view, and has the possibility of being the exact same. — Judaka

:up:

Here's a tricky part in bold.

If a proposition (or sentence, statement) for which we claim truth is indeed true, it is so because it accurately refers to existing objects, or accurately represents actual states of affairs — plaque flag

How does one hold up a meaning (the meaning of an assertion) against the world to compare that meaning with a state of affairs right ? To me this is a deep question. An answer for the more mundane and concrete cases is IMO given by Husserl.

There's an empty intention (a 'belief' that might be more like an image) that a-sliced-apple-is-on-the-counter that I can mean/have when I'm out in the back yard. This intention can be fulfilled or disappointed by my going in and looking at the counter. It can be fulfilled because the world (the lifeworld, the nonabstract familiar emcompassing world) is always already meaningfully structured for us. I think we agree that once a 'form of life' [a culture ] adopts the category of dog, we can 'just see' a dog walking on the sidewalk as a dog, 'immediately.' Heidegger is great on this stuff. We can actually see 'peripherally' or 'circumspectively' a world that's full of useful things, so we plop down on a couch 'without thinking about it.' For him, this is more fundamental than sharp theoretical positing.

I'm trained in math, and this kind of thing happens in the mathematical world too. It's a function of training and experience. But the symbols are very much a meaningful hieroglyphics, even tho much of mathematics can in principle be automated (formal proofs, which 'nobody' actually writes, are machine checkable.) But people like it because they get insight into a virtual world of forms (even if these forms only exist within/for human cognition.)

If it's correct to refer to a thing as beautiful, then it's true that thing is beautiful. To clarify, by "correct" I mean, one agrees it's beautiful, not just agrees it's a correct use of the word grammatically. — Judaka

We may be on the same page.

I think there are two issues entangled.
When I call an assertion true, I am basically endorsing or repeating that assertion.
Bob : It's raining.
Alice : That's true.

So Alice might as well in this context have repeated Bob.

Bob : It's raining.
Alice : It's raining.

Do we agree up to here ? The use of 'true' doesn't do anything in this simple case that repetition can't do.

The next issue is whether it is raining.
Now I claim that --- 'it either is or it isn't raining.' But that weirdly is a claim about the state of affairs. It has to be an explication of a logic we mostly use transparently. So it's not totally unlike checking for that apple on the table. It's just a different kind of looking at our own conceptuality. You and I can debate the details, but we can strangely intend the 'object' of our own default conceptuality.

It doesn't make sense to me to talk about "articulating the truth", I don't know what that means, especially in the way you're using it. — Judaka

<I get a little speculative below. So it's more exploratory than assertive. >

I think that phrase of mine was awkward. I meant describing the world [accurately.] I 'intend a state of affairs' as 'actual.' I tell you Joe is a solid guy. Even tho this is ambiguous, I intend to let you see through my eyes something essential and relevant about Joe, albeit ambiguous or spare. As Feuerbach puts it, thinking is essentially social. I imagine early human tribes having 100 eyes, because as long as they trusted one another, each member could use the claims of another member as a kind of extended nervous system.

So the tribe as a whole (if the cry goes out) perceives a wolf -- perhaps mistakenly. But the mistake is only corrected by further reports and investigation. We can't get behind interpretative assertions. So we can say that P is true, but that should be interpreted perhaps as seeing the state of affairs in a certain way. I intend the state of affairs (that which is the case), but I might be persuaded to see the state of affairs in another way. The world (not the planet but all of logical space) is a bit like an infinite object that we can't help talking about, can't help looking at, perhaps mistakenly. But the mistake can only be 'cleared up' by another corrective seeing which could also turn about to be mistaken. So changing our beliefs is like seeing that infinite object from a different angle, getting what we now hope is a better look at it. It's the point at infinity that links up all of our talk. I hope some of this makes sense. It's a weird and fascinating issue.

The Meaning Crisis episode on Heidegger is here. — Quixodian

:up:
Checking it out. Thanks !

***
So far, he uses the later Heidegger more. I am surprised the equipmental nexus from the earlier work wasn't touched on along with circumspection and 'understanding.' This part of the work helps the reader notice the structure of their mundane existence which is otherwise mostly transparent.

I think @Joshs mentioned the Harman interpretation.. As Vervaeke has it, speculative realism introduced or properly emphasized the horizon. Now the horizon is a beautiful idea, and it ultimately doesn't matter how one gets it, but it's incorrect to present Husserl as missing this. Indeed, his notion of the perspective-transcendent spatial object, which Sartre even uses to open Being in Time, is a perfect sample of the 'horizonal' elusiveness of the lifeworld, which Husserl emphasizes directly elsewhere. I gotta chime in, because I think Husserl and phenomenology in general is thought of very much in terms of subjectivity, which is not exactly wrong, but subjectivity turns to be...just the way the world is given, not some screen.

We have the freedom to pursue any ‘ecologies of practice’ we want to but absent the connective tissue provided by culture they can be very difficult to develop and enact. I was part of an informal Buddhist practice group for about ten years which was invaluable but it dispersed and it’s been impossible to replace. — Quixodian

:up:

This is why I mentioned earlier how we all compete now with the entire internet. I was very social in my 20s and 30s, but lots of things I took for granted fizzled out as people took different life paths. Some of it must be aging, but some of it is probably our hyperstimulated culture. So I feel a nostalgia sometimes for that lost sociality, but I find comfort in the realm of ghosts -- as I find myself more and more a ghost myself, in many ways happier than ever. I reflect on Plato from a psychoanalytic perspective, thinking about how the projection is drawn back in and the object in its recognized virtuality is possessed internally. I think of blindgoing Joyce at work on his musical monomythic sinwheel, watching from the balcony with the gods, trying to paint the view. Jung's essay on Ulysses is profound. Pdf not hard to find if you are interested.

Watch this trailer. The full movie has been released on YouTube but the trailer is a mini-documentary in its own right. Dreyfus is in it. — Quixodian

:up:

I've seen it. Good stuff.

As a great comedian once said, "I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less". — Janus

I like that.

I mentioned in this in passing once before, but I continue to find it resonant. All is vanity is a translation of all is hevel. This Hebrew word is already richly metaphorical. One of its more literal shades of meaning is vapor. But it's close to emptiness and fog and ambiguity too.

To me this is fucking hilarious and beautiful. Hevel itself, as a concept/metaphor, is foggy and undecidable and elusive, empty of substance in the sense of definite center. So we have an infinite horizonal metaphor here. Performing its metaphoricity on two levels.

To me a certain transcendence is hard to distinguish from nihilism. To say all is hevel is like grasping the entire world as a dream with nothing behind it. It's all of reality, but we are the animal that can compare all of reality with some kind of nothingness. A show moist entirelessly without substance. We don't just see entities there. We see the there itself as the there. Anyway, a less unfolded version of omnia vanitas was what I settled on at around age 30. It didn't mean that things in the world were worthless. I didn't know exactly what it meant, but it expressed a sense of transcendence. It occurred to me earlier that the philosopher is a lucid dreamer. But all of reality is that 'dream.' (So dream is no longer dream but substanceless hevel.) This transcendence is a thin film of nothingness between the philosopher and the world.

such a thing could never be demonstrated to be so either empirically or logically, so it would seem to be discursively useless. — Janus

:up:

I can't make sense of a simple binary state. And it can't be proven. And any kind of marketing or indiscriminate recruitment (for funding, say) speaks even more against such things. I don't believe in the free lunch. I might believe in some ladder in the internal abyss, but I'd only talk about it with some irony.

the presuppositions and basic insights to be found in philosophical works being more interesting than the vast edifices. — Janus

To me so much of the good stuff is just that, and then the next person tries to go even deeper or more zoomed out...

For me it's poetry, painting and music, all of which I see as being more sensorially and feeling oriented. — Janus

I do write some crazy stuff in a project with a friend inspired by Finnegans Wake. The main idea is to smash several layers of meaning together into an intentionally ambiguous-suggestive text object. It's like Dali's paranoiac-critical method in prose. The reader is encouraged to project their personal concerns/suspicions, be entangled with the text, etc.

.

I think we are speaking about different things. I have in mind the idea that there is hidden knowledge which can be transmitted from master to acolyte. — Janus

:up:

Yes, your version is more prototypical, and mine is a generalization. To me the main is idea is the closure and exclusiveness.

***

I do think statements like God is love intend a truth about the world. I wouldn't call such a statement esoteric so much as ambiguous. What metaphor is isn't easy to say.

My concern is that rationality itself is fundamentally ethical. In my view, there's a popular scientistic forgetting that science itself (in the broadest sense) is a 'holy war' against parochial ignorance and bias. It's the 'religion' of the horizon, of the truth to come which never arrives.

So we enact [ presuppose ] the reality of such norms in order to question them as philosophers.



Some quotes to give more info on what I'm getting at, which is the framework that too easily becomes transparent for us, disappearing like a screwdriver in our hand as we fix the faucet.

According to the core principle of his pragmatic theory of meaning, “we understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance—in short, when we know what makes it acceptable” (1998b, 232). With this principle, Habermas ties the meaning of speech acts to the practice of reason giving: speech acts inherently involve claims that are in need of reasons—claims that are open to both criticism and justification. In our everyday speech (and in much of our action), speakers tacitly commit themselves to explaining and justifying themselves, if necessary. To understand what one is doing in making a speech act, therefore, one must have some sense of the appropriate response that would justify one's speech act, were one challenged to do so. A speech act succeeds in reaching understanding when the hearer takes up “an affirmative position” toward the claim made by the speaker (TCA 1: 95–97; 282; 297). In doing so, the hearer presumes that the claims in the speech act could be supported by good reasons (even if she has not asked for them). When the offer made by the speaker fails to receive uptake, speaker and hearer may shift reflexive levels, from ordinary speech to “discourse”—processes of argumentation and dialogue in which the claims implicit in the speech act are tested for their rational justifiability as true, correct or authentic.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComAct

...a participant in a genuine argument is at the same time a member of a counterfactual, ideal communication community that is in principle equally open to all speakers and that excludes all force except the force of the better argument. Any claim to intersubjectively valid knowledge (scientific or moral-practical) implicitly acknowledges this ideal communication community as a metainstitution of rational argumentation, to be its ultimate source of justification

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

Any logical structure consists of variables - some kind of differentiation - otherwise you’re talking a singularity, the unintelligible absolute, which can only be relation itself.

For a rational conversation, you need rationality (logical structure), an assumption of embodied intra-action, AND qualitative variability (difference).

To posit rationality as god precludes the embodied intra-action from ‘determining’ themselves to be rational. — Possibility

I can't pretend to understand all of what you've written, but in case it clarifies my own case, your claims here would have to be justified in the 'dramaturgical' ideal communication community (rationally). Your claims. My claims. A place/ stage of civilized collision. Synthetic-critical tradition embraced at the door by both of us, for either of us, as persons, to have leverage.

At least I can't see how you and me as discursive subjects can be reduced by discursive subjects subject to norms which transcend them both.

I think the importance of major thinkers consists in just a very few insights central to the human condition, and the rest, all the arguments designed to justify those ideas are relatively tedious, obsessively driven filler. — Janus

To me the justifications are scaffolding that we can be rebuilt as needed. The main thing is to get it said.

I think you are right that there aren't that many necessary insights. 'Spiritually' I peaked (found all I really needed) at around 30. But I experience myself as a painter or composer in the world of concept, so I treasure the variety and the complexity. To me the web gets more and more vivid and fascinating with every new connection.

signifying nothing. — Janus

A little playfully but also seriously, I'd say the world itself is most entirelessly without substance.

For me the esoteric can be, has been, interesting, but I think it is mostly, to distort Shakespeare, full of secret unsoundness and innuendo, signifying nothing. — Janus

I think we have a somewhat different conception of the esoteric. I'd include heraldry. I'd include stars-and-stripes, hammers-and-sickles, swastikas, muted post horns, any kind of excluding symbol. Even sexism has an esoteric aspect, brilliantly emphasized in Lynch's version of Dune. Race is often (usually?) discussed/experienced esoterically. My genitals, my skin, is a 'magical' organ, giving me transrational access to Insight ---at least for some who tilt this lance against universal rationality. So to me the esoteric is as big as the shadow cast by the ideal communication community, which is to say that it's the rule rather than the exception.

Of course that's true, but the experience itself cannot be definitively explained. — Janus

I completely agree. I'm tackling a related issue in Sensational Conceptuality. The idea is just that the inferential handles on concepts --- the kind that make a private language impossible from a structuralist point of view (beetles and boxes) --- aren't the entire referent. The inferential handles, which are indeed necessary for public sense, make a private referent 'exceeding' this handle possible. So 'my ecstatic vision' has a 'truly private' aspect, and that private aspect is likely to be by far what matters most to me. But this is also as mundane as the feel of hot water in the bathtub which is not itself just concept.

For context, I think humans are lucky to do as well they do in Denmark.

There were wars long before capitalism, long before the means of production was anything more than an old guy chipping arrowheads on a big rock. People have always fought over land, water, hunting rights, minerals, jealousy, anger, revenge and power. — Vera Mont

:up:

As a Cormac McCarthy character might put it, is it not weird that we dream of something more ? It's wrong for just one particular apex predator to compete (though we deserve our own new level, really).

We want to be safe, right ? That's the motive Hobbes gives for kings endlessly expanding their territory. Press any advantage and push that risk towards $0$. Kill the little baby snakes while it's easier and safer.

I don't mean to wallow in this. Part of us loves it though. Community through the shared enemy. Unmitigated cruelty spurts freely, in an orgasm of pentup hate. .

The true hallmark of lion sociality is their joint defense of a territory (Figure 1). Karen McComb measured the responses of females to recorded roars of unfamiliar females. A roar is a territorial display, and the females responded according to the odds: if a lone female heard the roar of a single female, she recruited distant pridemates, but a group of three females immediately approached the loudspeaker. When exposed to a roaring trio, real trios again recruited help, while quintets quickly approached. The real females moved to oust the invaders as long as they outnumbered the strangers by at least two individuals. Jon Grinnell found a similar sense of ‘numeracy’ in males, but they sometimes approached even when outnumbered three to one — probably because males have such a brief opportunity to father offspring and must protect their pride at all costs.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)00564-6

The game theory in The Selfish Gene stays with me. Dawkins wears the face of Nietzsche's Socratic optimism, but his 'ontology' is more like Schopenhauer's. Biological evolution is an amoral demiurge. David Pearce was great on this stuff. What I took from him is that lots of utopian ideologies don't strike at the root, which is to say the source code generated algorithmically by this 'demiurge.'

My question might be whether we can trust who we are now to program who we might become. It's not 100% crazy sci-fi to imagine a relatively immortal ruling class. Vampires will become real ? Or maybe a superstrain of humanity, not immortal but Better In Ovary Way.

Okay, thanks, that makes sense. I have had only limited exposure to Husserl, but maybe I will try to find an entry point when I have some extra time. — Leontiskos

:up:
In case it's helpful: Zahavi's little intro book is pretty great. Also there's a cheap highquality paperback copy of Ideas.

Note that a Husserl-influenced direct realism allows for every kind of falliblity, and I also include mental entities in my ontology with no need for dualism (the categories of mental and physical are not absolute or central, but just the usual fuzzy ordinary language distinction.)

I agree with the spirit of your OP, but then what do you make of the all too common opposition to correspondence theories of truth? Do you think the objections have merit? Do you hold to a correspondence theory? Thanks. — Leontiskos

Thanks for stopping in and asking a good question !

At the moment, I'm impressed by Husserl. There's an empty intention that the a-sliced-apple-is-on-the-counter that I can mean/have when I'm out in the yard. This intention can be fulfilled or disappointed by my going on and looking at the counter. In this sense I probably embrace the correspondence theory. A meaningful 'signitive'/empty intention can 'correspond' with the world in the sense of such fulfillment.

As a phenomenological direct realist, I think the world as a lifeworld is always already meaningfully and conceptually structured. So I don't have to deal with the mess of pure meaning prestuff somehow being glued on to pure nonmeaning urstuff.

The Adyar Bookshops had an unmistakable atmosphere, incense-scented, full of mystical tomes and tidings. — Quixodian

Lakoff talks about the prototypical center of concepts. I'd say you fundamentally think of the sage when you think of the philosopher. I think of the pure mathematician who has to extend his language to include the poetic but still seeks to articulate basic structure with 'cold' objectivity.

As Russell said, mathematics has an austere beauty. And I like that in philosophy too, or at least in part of it. I always loved the title Being and Nothingness. As Derrida puts it, this is the transparent/white mythology, worn timeless with its lack of concrete reference, its effaced metaphoricity.

I will say, Vervaeke’s lectures are bringing it all together for me - lashings of phenomenology, cognitive science, and sapiential wisdom teachings. — Quixodian

:up:

I love when lots of pieces come together. For me Brandom was the glue that helped me transcend dualism and clarify direct realism. Drama-fucking-turgical ontology. We need to simply listen to our own yapping mouths and realizing what we are doing--cease forgetting ourselves in the objects of the discussion and look at the ethical-inferential framework itself.

I feel like I'm finding a way to connect phenomenology's understanding of subjectivity as a 'private' perspective on the world (not a consciousness bubble closing us off) with 'Hegelian'/Wittgensteinian realizations that the linguistic self is more 'we' than 'me.'

For me wisdom teachings are important, but my 'pessimistic transcendent ' tendencies allow me to keep this personal existential decision separate. I need only address the larger framework of rationality for my own philosophical purposes. I need only sketch the necessity of an existential situation in general.

Reading about Vervaeke here : https://www.whatisemerging.com/profiles/john-vervaeke-edba633a-50b3-4dec-920b-967d8f0f2b01

“Situational awareness depends on what we call perspectival knowing. Perspectival knowing is what it's like to be here now: what's foregrounded, what's backgrounded, what's salient, what's relevant? Perspectival knowing is your salient landscaping in a particular context from a particular state of mind. That's your situational awareness. Now that, in turn, is ultimately dependent on how biology, culture, and your fluid intelligence are shaping you in the environment, so they fit each other so that it creates affordances. For example, a cup is graspable to me as a cup that I can use to solve the problem of drinking.”
No mention of Heidegger or Dreyfus in this. Are the fields that far apart ? 'We' have known/discussed this for awhile now.

“Can we find bottom-up emergence—new forms of practices, new ecologies of practices, new communities of practitioners—that are trying to train people in the transformation of perspectival and participatory knowing so as to reduce their self-deception and enhance their sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other in the world?”

Would this not be enabled rather than hindered by a free society ?

“With mindfulness,” he says, “I can break out of egocentric bias and that will actually afford me overcoming a lot of self-deception and it also enhances my connectedness to the world.”

I totally agree with that project. To me philosophy and science are already a big part of that. The branding of 'mindfulness' is fine, but some of us find it necessary. Because it can be sold as one product.
The wisdom traditions of the great religions play an outsider’s role in modern Western culture. They do not determine our culture. Science, psychology and even the multitude of modern and postmodern therapies and social practices, have not been able to fill the vacuum.

This 'vacuum' is the treasure of our long, bloody, and mostly stupid human history. It's the idea of trying all kinds of ways of being and letting our bad ideas die without taking us and our neighbors down with them.

This doesn't mean that we aren't fucked as a species. We might be. But this looks more game-theoretical than a mere matter of ideology. Moloch demands a tower. If I mindfully avoid developing the next super-weapon, my rival is even more motivated to do so, for that rival can achieve a greater advantage at the same cost. If my company thinks A.I. is unethical in this or that context and does the right thing at a loss of profit, rival companies sweep in, make more money, and eventually by my own or put it out of business by underselling it. We'd need a global spiritual/ideological movement to spread across all classes and nations at high speed. How about a single nation ? Would the issue then be endless class war ? The threat of a schism of that supernation's ruling class ?

What I like about God on the cross (as a symbol, and as a way of life, me being bloody Christ of course) is its insistence that good is only found entangled with and even imprisoned by evil. Satan Moloch is lord of this world. The proposed mindfulness movement is essentially optimistic and political rather than pessimistic and transcendent. Optimistic movements tend to reject the world as it is now, or forgive it only in terms of a implausible future. Pessimistic-transcendent ideologies (perhaps the skeptic in Kojeve) refuse to take mere worldly power as authoritative, finding an invisible 'kingdom of God' within. Stirner made much of the link between a unworldly Christianity (not today's Trumpthumping) and skepticism. Freedom is internal, a matter of ideas and feelings and ....

Reading about Vervaeke here : https://www.whatisemerging.com/profiles/john-vervaeke-edba633a-50b3-4dec-920b-967d8f0f2b01

A worldview is two things simultaneously: (1) a model of the world and (2) a model for acting in that world. It turns the individual into an agent who acts, and it turns the world into an arena in which those actions make sense.” The congruence between “agent” and “arena” leads to meaning in life. They “mutually make sense of one another, and ratify each other’s existence and intelligibility.”
:up:

A hero myth is a world view. A world view is a hero myth.

An ego-ideal implies a stage on which it makes senes, as well as a dragon/windmill/shadow.

Any expression of worldview is the expression of a total personality, of an 'unreliable' narrator who can be 'read off' of this worldview. Probably we mostly praise reveal ourselves by talking about the world (our stage), because our vanity is slightly less obnoxious in the vanity of others that way.

In modernity, politics is basically ideological competition. While it claims to be addressing the human pursuit of happiness, whatever that's supposed to mean, it has degenerated into ideological competition,

Freedom is idealogical competition, within the constraints of a 'meta-ideology' of this freedom itself. You/I pursue happiness as you/I see fit, within the limits of not denying that privilege to others. This is just Enlightenment autonomy. Did freedom save the world ? From what, the horror of -- the horror that's necessarily part of --- life itself ?

We tend to overemphasize propositional knowledge: We have sentences that give us certain beliefs, and then we classify them into theories, etc.” explains Vervaeke. “I am a scientist, so I think propositional knowledge is great. I am not trying to condemn that.” The problem is not with propositional knowledge per se. The problem is that we have lost other forms of knowledge that allow us to experience our connection with ourselves, each other, and the worlds we are embedded in.

Vervaeke sounds somewhat Heideggarian to me so far. His 'worldview' is something like the dramaturgical structure of a lifeworld. If I bring a woman a rose, it's not just a plant. If I slip a ring on her finger, when she's wearing a white dress, it's bigger than the metal and cloth involved. Heidegger famously criticized the idea that the subject 'painted' values and meaning on the world that was given in terms of meaningless objects. This fiction has been extremely useful for certain purposes, and the rhetorical triumph of the technology it enabled dazzled philosophers who should have known better. The subject itself, in its meaningful lifeworld found and enabling science in the first place, became transparent to itself, as it 'collapsed' into its model of an amoral machine.

As I see it, such insights are extremely liberating for the weird kind of person who could find a reductive description of the world plausible in the first place. A younger me was like that. I loved science in school, and I let myself believe I was studying a secret reality as opposed to the structure of this one. So tables were Really just atoms and love was Really just chemicals. Nevermind that scientific norms are vaporized along with the now-mystical-seeming meaning of scientific claims. To me this just goes to show how much we all long for the esoteric (for membership in a elite exclusive circle.) I couldn't just know progressively more about tables and love. I had to gaze at the Real table and the Dark Truth of what sentimental fools called 'love.' Eventually the game becomes gazing on what sentimental fools call 'Dark Truth.' And that too is swallowed and so on.

For what it's worth, I think your views are quite reasonable on an existential level. So I'm just being a stickler on a few technical issues that interest me.

Maybe this is what you've been trying to say:

Habermas now proposes instead a “pragmatic epistemological realism” (2003a, 7; 1998b, chap. 8). His theory of truth is realist in holding that the objective world, rather than ideal consensus, is the truth-maker. If a proposition (or sentence, statement) for which we claim truth is indeed true, it is so because it accurately refers to existing objects, or accurately represents actual states of affairs—albeit objects and states of affairs about which we can state facts only under descriptions that depend on our linguistic resources.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComAct

If so, I agree. We choose categorizations for their utility, but we intend the state of the world in our assertions in terms of those categories.

A nice, almost poetic explanation of Indirect Realism. — RussellA

<smile>
Ah but I think you know it's just an enriched-sophisticated direct realism. Bu if we get into that, it should be on another thread, I suppose ?

In Kant's terms, we conceptualize our intuitions. — RussellA

Yes. But I'd say that's a theoretical posit. Not incorrect, but a thesis. If we just look at the world we find meaningful objects. Heidegger talks about how the world is grasped largely in terms of a network of 'tools' that we use unthinkingly, gliding through our daily routines. I mostly pre-theoretically even sub-conceptually flip the lightswitch. The screwdriver is invisible in my hand as I focus on the task. This is the real world which we as thematizing primate enrich with powerful maps, largely through a mathematical syntax and a tradition of careful measurement that grasps space in a new way.

In my view, the scientific image is valued because it describes this world and not something hidden under or behind it. As philosophers we are discursive subjects on the scientific 'stage' of a public space of reasons, making a case for this or that articulation of the world we share. The biological complexities of perception are secondary, for we as discursive subjects are not in our skulls behind our eyes --- though a functioning brain is indeed understood to be a condition of possibility for our participation in the drama of science. It makes no sense to rationally doubt the conditions of possibility for rational discussion. So we might as well talk directly about the worldly objects we need to make our cases.