Fortunately, some of the scholarship about the topics surrounding "free will" aren't beholden to the later view. They are rather committed to explaining how the alleged problems in accounting for agency and responsibility in a natural world tend to dissolve when our attempts at naturalizing those familiar phenomena appeal to rather more relaxed (embodied, situated and irreducible) Aristotelian conceptions of nature, agency and causation. — Pierre-Normand

Yeah, I'm aware of those moves, but I'm still of the mind that 'free will' has been so compromised by hundreds of years of theological poison that it needs to be dropped altogether. It's not 'freedom' I have a problem with, so much as 'the will'. It's that connection - unnecessary, overdetermined and intellectually disabling - that is what needs to be broken forever. A good dose of Spinoza - superior by far to Aristotle on this issue - would do everyone alot of good.

The OP's question has been answered, and there's an active thread about religion in the forum already, so this thread will be closed. I'll move some of the discussion here into that thread.

Why yes I am aware of the prevalence of third-rate scholarship on the issue, cited frequently by philosophical dilettantes happy to anarchonisticly and omnivorously assimilate all discussions of freedom into the two-bit reductivism of 'free will'.

“Augustine’s fateful turn reoriented Western Latin culture away from the Platonic intellectualist conception of human moral nature as either clear-sighted or confused and benighted (and in either case within the natural order) and toward the idea of a human person as fundamentally moral or immoral, responsible or irresponsible, obedient or sinful through choice of action rather than through understanding and character. In the Platonic tradition, by contrast, the body’s corruption was responsible for the mind being morally clouded; hence moral ignorance—not active sin but the Greek hamartia, “missing the mark”—was the result of the problems inherent in embodiment.

Aristotle’s view was a nuance on the Platonic: his was an account of moral action as stemming from moral character. In this theory, early socialization shaped desire, enabling a person to have the capacity for moral discernment and understanding, as well as deliberative reasoning. Augustine, in contrast, explicitly rejected the body as the source of ignorance or error, neither of which, in any case, could in his view ever account for sin. .... Augustine’s reduction of all internal mental operations—thoughts, emotions, feelings, judgments, learning—to acts of will is a new theory of moral psychology. This new theory amounted to nothing less than a shift in worldview—initiating a decisive break with the past by focusing on the freedom of the will and a concomitant demotion of nature. It is this worldview that we have inherited.” (Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself).

--

"The passage from the ancient world to modernity coincides with the passage from potential to will, from the predominance of the modal verb “I can” to that of the modal verb “I will” (and later, “I must”). Ancient human beings were people who “can,” who conceive their thought and their action in the dimension of potential; Christian human beings are beings that will. [For the ancients] ... it is not a matter of founding responsibility in the subject’s will, but of ascertaining it objectively, according to the various levels of possibility of the subject’s actions. To the preeminence accorded by modern people to the will, there corresponds in the ancient world a primacy of potential: human beings are not responsible for their actions because they have willed them; they answer for them because they were able to carry them out ...

We are so accustomed to refer the problem of action to the will that it is not easy for us to accept that the classical world thought it, by contrast, almost exclusively in terms of knowledge. ... The primacy of will over potential is brought about in Christian theology through a threefold strategy. It is a question, first of all, of separating potential from what it can do, of isolating it from the act; in the second place, of denaturalizing potential, of separating it from the necessity of its own nature and linking it to contingency and free choice; and finally, of limiting its unconditioned and totipotent nature in order to render it governable through an act of will... The Christian conception of the will, which modern ethics will inherit, frequently without benefit of an inventory, is a peremptory absolutization of the modal verb “I will,” which, separated from every possible content and all possible meaning, is used in vain: “I will to will"." (Giorgio Agamben, Karmen).

Religion falls under the remit of philosophy quite naturally, although efforts at proselytization are not welcome here. Short answer: no.

"According to the few details we had as of the weekend, the GOP has agreed to speak only to the man and woman concerned, thus confirming that there can only ever be a “he said” and a “she said”—a situation they claim to deplore even as they deliberately engineer it. (Despite repeated requests by Ford, they have so far refused to subpoena any potential witnesses, of which there are several—even though they might theoretically help Kavanaugh’s case, since they’ve said they have no memory of the party Ford describes.) But no: Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans insist that there’s no need for witnesses, or an FBI investigation.

...This is not a serious approach to Ford’s allegations, and senior Republicans have as much as admitted they have no intention of letting Ford’s account factor into their votes. “What am I supposed to do, go ahead and ruin this guy’s life based on an accusation?” Sen. Lindsey Graham hyperbolized on Fox News Sunday—an unintentionally clear invocation of the fact that for powerful white men, not getting a promotion is what counts as life-ruining. Still, he said, “she should come forward. She should have her say. She will be respectfully treated.” This is contradictory rot.

It’s worth watching, then, how the GOP implodes through the internal pressure of their own oxymoronic mixed messaging: loudly announcing their indifference to a nominee’s alleged attempted rape while just as loudly promising to investigate it. ... On the other side of all this is Ford, whose account has not changed, and who has—after suffering an inundation of threats—had to go into hiding while trying to negotiate with an intimidating and hostile body the conditions under which she will testify. On Friday, the day Grassley demanded she answer him in one of several ultimatums, she was meeting with the FBI over death threats she’d received."

It's hard not to be deeply saddened by the cynicism and misanthropy on display.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/brett-kavanuagh-christine-blasey-ford-mistaken-identity.html

Corroborating yourself with your own prior comments seems a bit flimsy doesn't it? — Hanover

I was adressing the question of motivation - why now? - as are most who (including Ford herself, I imagine) cite this fact. I.e. it makes this less likely to be some kind of midnight hour conspiracy.

She told her therapist, but nobody who could actually do anything to remove the alleged rapist as a threat to the public. This lack of action was a public statement that what maybe happened to her was not really that big of a deal. — Jake

To interpret a lack of action as a statement that 'it was not a big deal' is both naive and incredibly misinformed on at least two levels. Psychologically, it is well known that sexual assault is massively under-reported as a result of overwhelming feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment, and the fact that Ford has in fact spoken about this to friends and psychologists previously, indicate that she's been carrying around such feelings of shame for a quite literally decades. One doesn't go to a therapist and speak about something that happened years before because its 'not really that big of a deal'.

Socially, the intensity of the power dynamics that have to be negotiated in reporting a fellow student at an elite institution are massive. Reporting sexual assault is not going to the DMV and filling out a form. It is to be subjected to intense scrutiny (rightly so, to a degree) and it is to have to relive and retell a traumatic experience (not rightly so). It is being called to account, publicly and procedurally, for your own intensely personal victimization while having to face down the pressures of a judicial and socio-cultural system that is overwhelmingly not staked in your favour.

Finally, the focus of your post in her 'allowing' a predator to advance in his career and putting 'other women at risk' is just victim-blaming in all its puerile glory. The perpetrator puts victims at risk. Not other victims. It takes a certain kind of madness to hypothesize his guilt and, on the assumption that he really is guilty, still place the focus on a victim as the locus of agency. That's absurd.

Marx seeks to ask a deeper set of questions; what is it about an economy that allows everything to have a price? What is it about an economy that is facilitated by money? How does money obtain its value? — fdrake

I've only made it to the end of the 3rd page in the thread so far, but this is a really nice way of putting it. What immediately stood out for me is that this question is essentially a transcendental one: about the conditions of possibility of price(ing). There's a Kantianism here that's not often acknowledged.

I guess I'm still just circling around the same conceptual knot thats been troubling me for a while now. What I really want to talk about is the use and abuse of philosophy for life, but that's another subject, only tangentially related to this.

Something like: The philosophy of immanence seems doomed to chase its own tail, if its presented in a legible philosophical style. It seems like the ultimate end is to say being. To speak the truth of being. But to say the truth of being, in the philosophical sense, is to possess (my whole fixation on 'pronouncing.') — csalisbury

I think I have an idea of what you mean, if only because I think I've struggled with similar thoughts before as well (and still do, though their intensity is not as strong). The major thing that's helped me through it is in finding my own locus of interest (or 'project', if you will) that's somewhat independent of my previous immersion in 'the study of philosophy'. The problems I'm interested in seem now to belong more to me, and I'm no longer studying the problems of others (or, when I do, I'm studying them on my own terms, and not theirs). That's one side of it.

The other, and it's occasioned and prompted by the former, is in coming to understand the role of philosophy differently. You ask what is philosophy doing? Here I've I've found the notion of the relay useful: philosophy as relay, connecting - at the level of thought - heterogeneous domains, enabling and facilitating communication flows between discourses and practices that might otherwise be silent about each other. It's a conception of philosophy as a 'potentiator' or as 'potentiating': it doesn't 'act', it doesn't 'make a change in the world' (that much is obvious), but it can rearrange relations, draw attention to things where there weren't any before (this is its creative function).

One thing about relays is that they can't exhaust their sources: the very idea doesn't even make sense. You're simply a kind of differential gear, transmitting torque from one element to another: there's no effort of subsumption at work here, no 'belly turned mind' (to use Adorno's quip about Hegel).

I mentioned before that Anne Sauvagnargues' work has been influential to me on this question. One of the things she captures very nicely is what happens in the shift from Deleuze's early to his late work, and it's something that I'm finding resonates with me at a personal level as well: "In Deleuze’s thought, immanence [is] conceived as the auto-consistency of thought, then increasingly as an outright empiricism and heterogeneity. Thus, the very constructed, formal characteristic of the first studies bask in an annoying atemporality, whereas his encounter with Guattari transforms the theoretical regime, which falls into a whirlpool of theoretical sections and joyous, transversal constructions, even though the last works pick up a more constructed regime". (Deleuze and Art); there's something to this, and I don't think it is specific to just one particular philosopher.

I dunno, I'd be sorry to not class language as a member of the continuum in that it strikes the middle ground between expressiveness and pragmatics. Maybe, to use a Chomskian distinction, one might speak of 'language in the narrow sense' and 'language in the broad sense'? It's all a bit neither here nor there though!

As a meaningless expression?

Working backwards:

In that sense, it seems that the primacy of doubt is impossible even in language, precisely because it is taken for granted that at least our language is meaningful. I don't see how there can be any case of doubting without a background of certainty. — Πετροκότσυφας

Ah, let me be careful about distinctions here: the 'primacy of doubt' I referred to in the OP is not a primacy that I attributed to the the functioning of language. On the contrary, I agree that trust is primary: it's precisely because trust is at the basis of all language that doubt can be parasitic upon it. The point though, is that unlike 'individual deceptions' which do not put reality in doubt, lies can in fact put trust - and thus the foundation of language - in question at a global level. Deception is not to reality as lies are to language, if I can put it that way: lies can have global effects on the efficacy of langauge, while deception only ever puts into question this or that part of reality. The effects are asymmetric.

In game-theoretic terms, Dor speaks of liars as 'free-loading' on the system of trust that underpins language: "Language is based on trust, but once the trust is there, lying seems to be the most advantageous individual strategy. If everybody lied, however, the trust would collapse, dragging language down with it." What I said about the 'primacy of doubt' was that the experience of language - which, although founded on trust, is open, at least in principle, to global failure - is what enabled the very idea that reality itself could 'fail' - as with Cartesian philosophy. Part of my point is that this transposition (from language to reality) is an illegitimate one, even as we might be able to nonetheless trace where it might have come form.

In any case it's the asymmetry between the effect of the deception and the effect of the lie that I'm trying to say that is specific to, and emergent from, language as an institution. So to bring it back to your first point, it's true that we don't always judge the sincerity of what is being said solely on what is being said, but the phenomenon I'm interested in, lying, only ever takes place at the level of the 'what is said'. Sweating and avoiding eye contact are not themselves lying. The utterance must take place. and it is only once it has taken place that trust - and with it language - can be put into question at a global level.

While this is interesting, isn't it the case that language itself is experienced? — Πετροκότσυφας

Sure, but this experience-of-language is not what relies on (intersubjective) trust: we trust (or not) what is being said, not that something is being said (to ask a Wittgensteinian question: what would it mean to doubt that we are having this conversation?).

Sorry, I concocted that. — jorndoe

Hah, I like it nonetheless.

This is really cool, I didn't know this had a name! This accords to one of the most central insights - as I take it - of deconstructive thought (Derrida, etc). That ethics can only begin - can only be ethical[/i] - if one doesn’t just palm off responsibility to a high power or even justificatory framework which can wholly authorise one’s actions as ‘ethical’. This latter would just be bureaucracy, and has nothing to do with ethics. It’s in this sense that I’ve always thought that so-called 'is-ought’ gap, which is sometimes taken to be a problem for ethics, is in fact it’s very foundation: that if there wasn’t a gap between is and ought, then no ethics would be possible.

One other issue of possible interest here: the reflexivity of language, the fact that the lie can put into question the whole institution of language as such through its undermining of trust, means that language opens the way to another kind of very specific, very interesting kind of deception: a deception that appears to deceive (when in fact, it does not). This sounds strange, but consider a realistic painting of a pair of curtains, which makes one want to look behind them (a 'trompe l’oeil’: a painting that attempts to pass off as reality): the deception involved in this kind of painting is that it pretends to be other than it seems (and not, as customarily, other than it is). The realistic painting of the curtains conceals that fact that it conceals nothing: it really is just a pair of painted curtains. This is deception to the second-order: a deception that feigns to deceive.

This is something Zizek makes a big hash of and says - following Lacan - that this is the defining mark of the human: animals can deceive, but only humans can pretend to deceive. One of the reasons for this, I want to say, is that only humans are wielders of language: because language itself can be put into question, truth itself can be utilised to deceive: “there’s no way that’s it, there’s got to be more to it than that”. Hence a quip Zizek once made about Silvio Berlusconi (ex-Italian PM), which now seems applicable to a certain President of the Free World: “He looks like an idiot, he acts like an idiot, but don’t be fooled: he really is an idiot”.

I'm closing this thread. If the OP cannot be bothered to articulate its own arguments and instead demands that others simply refer to a series of videos, then that, coupled with the unwarranted combative tone, makes for a poor space for discussion. Provide arguments which can be debated over, not videos.

Daniel Dor - The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology

No.

Meaning is not univocal.

Meaning is interesting; kinds of meaning moreso.

I'm not convinced that poetry attempts to be gestural. There are many formal techniques in poetry -- and those formal techniques are even language-specific, in some cases; Especially as we go back to ancient poetry which were more formalized than a lot of modern poetry is. — Moliere

Yeah, I actually agree with this, but this touches on a point which I'm finding the hardest to express, which is that despite the imagery of a gradating continuum that I've used, that the formal and the gestural can't be ultimately separated. Part of this is what I was trying to suggest when I said above that mathematical manipulations are gestures in mathematical space: that gesture doesn't 'disappear' in math, but rather is transmuted, as it were, into something other than what it is in physical space. To stick with the math and to draw again on Rotman, he points out that the price to be paid by math for its treatment of its objects as pure types is that it totally expels any consideration of what motivates its proofs; math is treated as if it is pure step-by-step algorithm.

But, he argues - rightly in my opinion - that this is to render math unintelligible: every proof has a 'leading principle' which renders it a proof of this or that at all, and that this leading principle is not something that is ever is 'in' the proof itself, so much as it necessarily animates its unfolding from without: it can only be located in the act of the one or of the community who furnishes and interprets the proof through their actions (and all calculation is action): "It is perfectly possible to follow a proof, in the more restricted, purely formal sense of giving assent to each logical step, without such an idea [of a leading principle] ... Nonetheless a leading principle is always present - acknowledged or not - and attempts to read proofs in the absence of their underlying narratives are unlikely to result in the experience of felt necessity, persuasion, and conviction that proofs are intended to produce, and without which they fail to be proofs" (source).

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that the same kind of considerations - in a reversed vein - must also apply to poetry. My appeal to enjambment was to say that one can't actually treat poetry as pure gesture, and that there will always be a residue of form that makes itself felt in it, no matter how hard it might try to free itself of form. And of course you're right that there is a poetics of form as well, even, at the limit, a poetics of math too (all language has a poetics). In fact to be perfectly rigorous one would have to say there is no such thing as 'pure gesture' either, although the closest thing that might accord to it would be dance: gesture as pure(ish) expression (might be able to say - dance:gesture :: poetry:language). And of course every dancer knows that there's a grammar of dance too, and mastering that grammar heightens - rather than dampens - its expressive power.

Anyway, I'll stop with the free-association. Coming back to poetics, Roman Jakobson's definition I think might help me out here; of poetics, he says: "a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense". And perhaps once can say that this hesitation is either more pronounced or more condensed depending on where on the spectrum one lies. And it gets me thinking that, just as I made language both the genus and species of the rough visual I constructed previously, it might be useful to do the same with each 'species'. Something like:

Gesture: {Gesture --- Poetry --- Language --- Philosophy --- Math}
Poetry: {Gesture --- Poetry --- Language --- Philosophy --- Math}
Lge, etc..
Phil, etc..
Math, etc..

Where the genus defines the main expressive thrust of whatever it is: so poetry that leans heavily on form, for instance, simply minimizes its own gestural pole in favour of it's mathematical one (to the extent it can while still remaining poetry). Anyway, just playing a little with the form here, I hope it responds in some manner to the issues you're raised.

But - language as such is a matter of 'intra-utterance' relations. All of it.

No, but it does reflect the countability of the world, and possibly more. — Marchesk

It doesn't though. You have to beat alot of math in to place for it to adequately 'reflect the countability of the world' in the form of highly specific boundary constaints without which a great deal of mathematical modelling just falls into nonsense. Anyway, see my above post for why I don't think gestures are simply incidental to math.

Going back to the way we learn math, it strikes me that while the general way we are introduced to this type of cognition depends on gestures, as means of spatial designation and delimitation, as well as on language to slide us toward abstraction, neither of those domains recovers the essence of mathematical reasoning. The understanding of 1+1=2 depends on an initial suspension of actuality on the operational side, followed by a recovery of this actuality through a projection of this operation on an abstracted world which we pretend is a proper translation of ours.

I would suggest that if gesture is primordial here, in this context, its because it is a form of informational mapping. The educational gestures behind 1+1=2 serves the purpose of establishing boundaries and then lifting them, putting emphasis on the sequential aspect of the event so as to give the impression of operationality, while the language serves the purpose of obfuscating the fact that none of this is actually happening in reality. — Akanthinos

Hmm, but I'm not sure that the spatial aspect of mathematical reasoning is quite as suppressed as I think you're stating (I'm not sure if I'm reading you right on this so bear with me if I'm not). I mean, just to set the stage, one of the things that math does is to erase or rather compress time into space: relations between mathematical objects - mappings, translations, computations - can all ultimately be seen as spatial relations between entities distributed among imaginary space(s). I mean, the whole 'structure' of math - I'm not sure how else to put it - things like the number line, invariants which define groups and their corresponding abstract topologies, higher-dimensional numbers (imaginaries, quaternions, octonions, etc), the very idea of ordinals: all these things can be understood (and perhaps ought to be understood) in spatial terms.

It's not a coincidence that math in many ways can be understood as the study of various broken-symmetries (another spatial notion!). I would only add that the invariants which characterize the different mathematical asymmetries belong strictly to the level of form (that is, are invariants relating to types, and never tokens): math is the study of how pure types can be mapped and related to each other depending on the invariants in question (we just happen to call these pure types 'numbers').

This is obviously a super, super abstract definition of math (could it be otherwise?), but if one can accept this, then the major point is that the spatial characteristics that define math are not different in kind from the spatial characteristics that are found anywhere else in the 'real' world: the 'only' difference is that mathematical objects are not bound by so-called material constraints (or energetic constraints), whereas 'real things' are; in fact 'real things', are bound by both material/energetic constraints and formal ones. Mathematical objects simply have an extra 'degree of freedom'. Yet the point would be that in both cases, what constitutes 'space' for both mathematical and extra-mathematical objects is exactly the same.

And if this is the case, then we can understand why gesture (as a "disciplined distribution of mobility") is foundational to math qua math,and not merely a contingent tack-on that helps humans learn it: mathematical manipulations are gestures in mathematical space (where the idea of spatiality is irreducible and fundamental). Both these gestures and these spaces must in turn be seen as extrapolations from a more originary space without which these corresponding abstract spaces could not exist and could not be thought.

Here is Rotman: "Contemporary mathematics, though habitually understood in terms of static disembodied object-concepts, is constructed in/by a language whose basic conceptual vocabulary is rooted in gestural movement–schemata of the body. Chief among these are: the gestures of pairing two things together; combining two things to make a third; replacing one thing by another; pointing at a thing; showing, exhibiting or manifesting a thing; displacing or extending the body in its space; making/altering a mark; and the meta-gesture of repetition, of doing the gesture again. So that, for example, the object-concept ‘number’ can be seen as rooted in the gesture of making a stroke, an undifferentiated mark, and then repeating it; likewise the object-concepts ‘equation’, and ‘relation’, are different conceptualizations of the gesture of pairing... [etc]". (source).

I'm sure there is a better way for me to try and articulate these issues, but I'm very much groping here. Also, I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with your post here, but this is what its prompted outta me!

'Free will' wasn't even a thing until some boofhead Church father decided to make it the cornerstone of his theology. There's nothing 'perennial' about it - the very idea is just an overladen cultural meme that had a date of birth at a very late point in (Western) human history; it will have a date of death.

This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but what comes to my mind while reading this, is Wittgenstein. The act of writing "1+1=2" does not affect the fact that 1+1, in fact, equals 2, but the act of calculating it, does. 1+1 does not equal 2 unless someone invents a calculus in which in fact it does. Wouldn't it be fair to say that any calculation would be meaningless to us if it didn't involve the world in one way or another? Or, that types only makes sense through tokens? — Πετροκότσυφας

Yeah, I agree that tokens and types only make sense in relation to each other (again, I had a really fun conversation about this in the thread I mentioned earlier in my reply to ssu). But also, I think your larger point is very relevant and is where any exploration of the typology here would need to extend to: one of the consequences of treating math as, ultimately, a language, is that it blocks any realist account of math. Insofar as all language is normative, so too is math: it does not reflect some other-worldly eternal reality. Some of the reading I've been doing that somewhat inspired my thread has been precisely on the link between gesture and math, and the fact that math is unthinkable without gesture. Brian Rotman, who I cited in the OP, writes eloquently about this:

"On the contrary, mathematics’ links to physical movement, though mediated, are undeniable: each of the primary object-concepts of the mathematical universe – number, relation, set, function, operation, variable, line, point, space, equation – can be seen to emerge from a small set of pre-conceptual physical actions, disciplined bodily movements or gestures, that, with their subsequent transformations, make up the corporeal wherewithal of mathematical thought. In other words, contemporary mathematics, though habitually understood in terms of static disembodied object-concepts, is constructed in/by a language whose basic conceptual vocabulary is rooted in gestural movement–schemata of the body".

https://brianrotman.wordpress.com/articles/mathematical-movement-gesture/

The reason why I ask is that animals can count. And if it's not mathematics, a counting system of "none, one, two, three, many..." it still counting and counting is part of mathematics. Now the vast majority of species don't use these terms in their language (which typically limits to "Danger!" and "This is my territory!"). I wouldn't be surprised if some advanced hunters like Orcas would have terms for counting prey in their communication system (at least "many" and "few") or even something more advanced. Perhaps the other extreme from gesture could be some postmodern meta-analysis of language itself and not mathematics. Or basically philosophical study of language. That would feel very remote from the languages that animals use or even can comprehend. — ssu

In terms of the schema here, I would understand math to be (among other things), a formalization of counting (just like logic is a formalization of reasoning), which would mean that counting, in itself, is not really math. One way to see this is to note that while its true that some animals can count, their treatment of numbers - even among the smartest of them - is not in terms of tokens and types, as in a formalized mathematical system. I cited and discussed some of this research in another thread here, but the gist of it is that even monkeys can't process numbers as numbers (qua form). They can only really process numbers as coupled with material things: 1 of X, 2 of Y and so on, and not as sheer 'types', never as 'just' 1 or 'just 2'.

In fact, one can look at the formalization of counting (as math) as an attempt to get around this cognitive limit, which even we are subject to. By formalizing counting, we can treat entire sets of numbers (and even types of numbers) as single things to be manipulated, thus bypassing the need to deal with a whole range of sheer particulars.

Quick note on poetry: on the imaginary continuum set up here, poetry probably lies somewhere in between gesture and language proper. To the degree that poetics is less subject to the constraints of pragmatics (of getting a concrete message across in order to achieve an aim), poetics can be seen to be the exhibition of gesture in language, not unlike shifters. As pointed out by Giorgio Agamben though, the limits of poetry (and the reason why it can never be pure gesture) is that it is ultimately subject to enjambment.

(The continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line; as in:

the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow

The breaks between otherwise continuous lines are enjambment).

Enjambment marks the inescapable intrusion of the formal into poetry's attempts at gestural language. Agamben: "The possibility of enjambment constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing poetry from prose. For what is enjambment, if not the opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause? "Poetry" will then be the name given to the discourse in which this opposition is, at least virtually, possible; "Prose" will be the name for the discourse in which this opposition cannot take place" (Agamben The End of the Poem).

So visually, the continuum:

Language: {Gesture --- Poetry --- Language --- Philosophy --- Math}

(Language is both genus and species).

"But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think."

- Kierkegaard

Or, on economists' unblemished record of being utterly useless at predicting recessions (for which even the Queen even famously demanded why they were so completely shit):

"In the 2001 issue of the International Journal of Forecasting, an economist from the International onetary Fund, Prakash Loungani, published a survey of the accuracy of economic forecasts throughout the 1990s. He reached two conclusions. The first was that forecasts are all much the same. There was little to choose between those produced by the IMF and the World Bank, and those from private sector forecasters. The second conclusion was that the predictive record of economists was terrible. Loungani wrote: “The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished.” Now Loungani, with a colleague, Hites Ahir, has returned to the topic in the wake of the economic crisis. The record of failure remains impressive."

https://www.ft.com/content/70a2a978-adac-11e7-8076-0a4bdda92ca2 (possible paywall).

If I understand correctly, Chomsky does see language as an individual, biologically ingrained cognitive capacity, which is only 'accidentally' externalized for communication and social functions. — Snakes Alive

Yeah, for Dor - and I agree with him - this is exactly the wrong way around: language was first and foremost a specific communicative technology which, while initially piggy-backing off our cognitive capacities to communicate in other ways (gesture, vocalization, expression: ways that cannot indicate experiential displacement, or so-called analog communication), then 'retro-fitted' our cognitive abilities to work better with its specificity, as both language and our capacities for its use co-evolved together (a case of genetic accommodation).

So reading your post, is your position, and Dor's, that language had some core initial evolutionary function that involved this kind of transmission of experience, and then only later took on its other functions — Snakes Alive

I'm a bit fuzzy on the evolutionary part - I haven't got to that part of the book yet - but the idea as I understand it is that yes, language was engineered primarily as a 'experiential coordination' technology: a community normatively fixes a signifier in order to refer to a common set of experience(s), and you have a whole machinery - a grammar - that allows one to speak or communicate about subsequent experiences which are not present (at the time of communication) to at least one speaker. It's an engineering solution to the problem of communicating about things not-present in the current space and time of both speakers ('dialogic situation'). Or at least, it began (and remains) that, while also being now used for a range of other things as well.

Since economics has led to so much prosperity and as a field of science has been so successful — Posty McPostface

Lolololol economics as a discipline has probably been one of the biggest institutional failures of human endeavour in all of history; it consistently and famously fails as a predicative science and most of its models can't even be used to fit historical data let alone predict future events. The economy has led to a great deal of prosperity (along with concomitant and widespread misery), but economics as an academic discipline has for the most part been a dismal, useless, failure of a so-called 'science'. It's worth noting that perhaps the chief reason for its complete and utter incapacity as a discipline is precisely the assumption (non-empirical and thus metaphysical in the most pejorative sense of the term) that rationality accords to self-interest. Yanis Varoufakis once put the whole issue of the theology of economics masquerading as science nicely in an interview, which is worth quoting at length:

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"[Economics] is a priesthood that truly believes it is not a priesthood but, rather, a community of scientists. How do they manage to maintain this delusion? The simple answer is because their incantations involve rather advanced mathematics and their rituals are steeped in statistical tests and projections. Indeed, in aesthetic terms, the economists’ papers, models, presentations seem indistinguishable from those of physicists, bio-statisticians etc. The only difference is that, unlike the latter, economists generate nothing more than analytical propositions about economic variables which are, as Popper would have pointed out, profoundly non-falsifiable. And here is the rub. Once their non-falsifiable (and thus non-verifiable) propositions are expressed, the statistical tests that follow (usually referred to as econometrics) give economists a great excuse to imagine that their models have been tested. But tested they never are!

Let me explain this in more detail, as it goes to the heart of your question: The economist first builds a model – say: M – that seeks to explain one or more variables (e.g. wages and employment). Once that complex mathematical model is ‘solved’ (just like a system of two equations in two unknowns, y and x, can be solved by means of a function that links y to x; e.g. y = 3x+5), a so called ‘reduced form’ equation (or system of equations) is derived from that solution. Let’s call this R. What economists are good at doing is demonstrating that R corresponds to M (i.e. when the mathematical relationship R holds, this is consistent with the solution of model M). The virtue of R is that is can be checked statistically: data is collected and used to show that, indeed, there is no evidence that R does not hold in real life. At that point, the economist celebrates with yelps of joy: “My model M has been proven to be consistent with reality.” Alas, what the economist forgets to add is the crux of the matter. And what is that? Two crucial facts:

(a) There is a plethora of models, in addition to M, that are also consistent with R. Which means, naturally, that there has been no demonstration whatsoever that model M has been verified (since an infinity of alternatives could explain R just as competently). Now, of course this is also true in non-experimental sciences like astronomy. Yet, economics is unique. This is why:

(b) Model M, like all possible economic models, can only squeeze their ‘reduced form’ R out of their edifice if dodgy assumptions are made regarding time and/or complexity; i.e. only if they axiomatically dismiss what I call the economists’ ‘inherent error’. The practical importance of this is that the imposition of these assumptions may have succeeded in deriving R out of M but that success is bought at the price of having lost any capacity to predict what a complex economic phenomenon will generate (as outcomes) in the future (recall that if you account properly for both complexity and time in model M, no R is possible). It is in this sense that, as I claimed above, no test of M’s predictive capacity (regarding events unfolding in real time) is possible.

This is a most peculiar failure: The hapless economist uses the same tools as acclaimed physicists and astronomers. She has trained for years to speak precisely the same language as them, to understand the same advanced mathematics, to deploy most complex statistical methods which are an essential part of the scientific toolbox. It is, understandably, incredibly difficult to accept that her work is a form of higher order superstition; a religion couched in the language of mathematics and statistics. Tragically, this is precisely what it is. Come to think of it, what is it that separates science from mythology? The fact that scientific propositions are not self-referential. That, in science (unlike in mythology), when the facts clash with the theory it is too bad for the theory."

Yes and no; Dor's whole shtick is that to the degree language functions the way he reckons, then it is quite literally a social technology - not unlike a phone or a fax machine - and not an individual, cognitive capacity. This is largely at odds with the Chomskian tradition in linguistics, which, although having been under increasing attack in the last decade or so, has more or less set the agenda for the field since the 60s. Dor leans very heavily on the language-as-technology aspect, which I didn't really touch in the OP, although that's probably the most innovative part of his account. Its real cash-value lies more in the intra-disciplinary debates in linguistics over things like the origin of syntax and questions about linguistic relativity and such, but yeah, there's alot of stuff I left out to concentrate on the question of experience.

Anyone can juxtapose quotes. Explain youself on your own terms, or don't bother at all.

Maybe I can put the point phenomenologically: the objection I find myself reaching for most often on a forum like this is not 'you're wrong' but 'that's irrelavent, or 'that has nothing to do with whatever point I'm trying to make'. Even as a sheer observer of other conversations which I don't participate in at all, I'm often surprised (and slightly dismayed) that people - even and perhaps especially intelligent people - rarely reach for the vocabulary of 'thats not relevant', even when the point in question, whatever it might be, quite clearly isn't. It's like the only kind of 'mistakes' we are used to error, and we don't even have the vocabulary to speak of mistakes which are of the order of significance. I'd go so far as to say that the majority so-called 'disagreements' are over questions of relavence and not facts, even if they are often not recognized as such.

The point, among other things, is a generalization of this observation. To speak of transcendental stupidity in this context is simply when the problem that is being meant to be addressed is simply not addressed at all, or worse (and perhaps even more common), when it is entirely unclear what the stakes of a problem are to begin with (there's an anecdote that William James relates in his Pragmatism where he tells of two people arguing whether a man following a squirrel around a tree is going around the squirrel, or if the squirrel is going around the man; he dissolves the argument by showing that, obviously, there is nothing at stake in this question: that it is entirely irrelavant what the answer might be. This is another case of transcendental stupidity).

So - the question of 'substantive transcendence' is *ahem* irrelavant to any of this, and I do wish people would stop talking about it in this thread (which doesn't mean I can't put up vomit emojis when it's mentioned!).

@Csalisbury ^ This, btw, is the kind of 'Deleuze-speak' I absolutely hate. Just quoting long passages with no attempt to explain or engage with the quite obviously incomprehensible vocabulary. I think that if you can't speak about Deleuze (or any philosopher at all) without resorting to simply rehashing the vocabulary (especially vocabulary that quite obviously needs explaining in a public forum), then you've basically demonstrated that you have no idea what you are talking about. It's just regurgitation.

On the back of a commodity which is sold below its direct price, in order to generate a profit other commodities must be sold sufficiently above their direct price. This is just how to make a profit when using that strategy. That for a given owner of a profile of commodities, some of which are sold below their direct price, others must be sold more above their direct price to still create a surplus despite the loss. This still conforms to the analysis so far. Relabel commodity with commodity profile and you're done - the profit being the sum total of profits minus loss of those commodities which are being sold below their direct price. — fdrake

While I agree that Frank's interjection is more or less entirely irrelevant, I do wonder - and this is a stray thought that I haven't fully thought all the way through - if this holds for so-called debt capitalism: when the commodity being sold simply becomes a vehicle for debt, and where the goal is to keep the debtor in debt for as long as possible in order to squeeze interest out of them in the long-term (allowing a commodity to then be sold below cost price in the short term so as to recoup the losses in interest payments in the long term); one can imagine a model where the commodity then is always sold below cost and it is time which becomes the source of value, as it were. Would this kind of thing - even as an idealized model - affect the analysis here?

I agree with this. I worry that it leads to effective (not metaphysical) solipsism. Or at least a shared, niche, solipsism.

It's insular because it's really speaking to an absent third-party. It can neither fail nor succeed because the third party isn't present. That's the solipsism part. It's self-authorizing, because it authorizes itself through reference to a third party that is guaranteed not to arrive. But this makes it only authorized to itself, or to others who also have the absent third party in mind- which is not actual authority. — csalisbury

But wait, it's not about a third party: the authorization is taken from the problem(s) it sets out to address - it's internal to the philosophy, true, but there's still a dialectic of self-differentiation (and hence individuation) where implications are built upon and extended into fields beyond whatever jumping-off point served as the initial impetus (which in turn become self-consistent areas of investigations onto themselves - 'rhizomatic', not 'arboreal' logic); and yeah, in all cases form and content self-modify accordingly according to a logic of expression.

But a third party? No, that's not the reference point towards which it's all oriented. The third party's role is simply in providing further points of extension, further issues to be explored, additional problems to be addressed. But in all cases it's the problem(s) to which philosophy addresses itself, not the third party, who is just an occasion or source of encounter.

W/r/t authorization then, authorization is never complete or absolute: there's always more to explore, there are always more implications to be teased out, more fields which have not been addressed. And this is the case in principle and not merely 'in fact', not only because the world will always throw up new, unforeseen things which with to engage, but also because every new step in an argument will have retroactive effects on the whole: philosophy is kaleidoscopic.

Finally, there's also no reason why different approaches need to be in any way commensurate; different approaches might bring out or highlight different aspects of a problem, [cartography/maps discussion here, etc etc]. I'm happy to be pretty damn pluralist about this, which may or may not also effect the worry of solipsism, but that's for you to tell me.

Also, you're discerning alot more consistency in my threads than I am! I'm not saying there isn't, but most of them are a confluence of very dim, general intuitions about various things which were brought out by specific occasions (the pride thread was a response to fdrake's thread on political discourse; the expression thread because I just finished reading a particular book, etc, etc).

But isn't it the case that you set up the comparison between different meta-philosophies in this thread and the ones prior to this one? Could we not describe as car-cataloguey the distinction between philosophies that are cartographic and those that rely on tracing?

The potency of car-catalogue as epithet derives from the well-known image of a boorish consumer so stripped of the ability to create values (castrated?) that he has to choose between a pre-existent set of 'minor differences' laid out easily for him.

To differentiate oneself from this sad-sack consumer it would be necessary to show that one is the source of one's own valuation rather than someone choosing from among a series of options based on pre-existing values one has adopted. — csalisbury

No, this isn't it. The distinction isn't between 'being the source of one's own valuation' or 'choosing from a series of pre-set options'. All 'options' are 'sourced from one's own valuation' - the only question is whether that's recognized as such, or not. Or to put this otherwise, the so-called 'meta-philosophy' is internal to the philosophy itself, it does not stand over and above it; it's the philosophy itself that structures and generates even the meta-field, the array of seemingly 'opposed positions' form which it distinguishes itself. You wouldn't even be able to 'see' or recognize the 'other' 'meta-philosophy' from the 'outside'. There's no such thing as meta-philosophy. It's all very Hegel I know, but it's what's needed to short-circuit the endless proliferation of "meta-metas" that end up seeping their way out if you really think that 'meta-philosophy' constitutes its own self-enclosed field. The only justification is immanent. If you don't like it - create.