we cannot transcend these to reach some putative 'really real' or 'ultimate realm'. — Tom Storm

But even if we cannot reach such a realm (pure objectivity) can we "aim" at such a realm, attempt to achieve an "objective" perspective? Is "communicative action" founded on the presupposition of objectivity? Maybe transcendence is not the goal, but the process.

The Power Elite
by C. Wright Mills

Also by Habermas was daunting and incredibly dense. Best to be acquainted with Jaspers' theory of the axial age prior to tackling it. I'm going to wait a bit before tackling volume two (volume three won't be published until June anyway...).

My take on postmodernity is more of a generalized socio-historical observation, not so much the theme as the context of Habermas' new book. The idea of critiquing grand narratives I would say relates more to the manifestation of the pluralistic and decentralized postmodern perspective to (what I would call the self-conscious phenomenon of) post-metaphysical thinking. And post-metaphysical thinking is the primary theme of the book.

If I had to comment on the idea of the rejection of grand narratives, I'd align that more with an ongoing failure to successfully integrate the critical element of the mythical, so what I would consider a defect of post-metaphysical thought. A self-conscious movement that denies what it is perhaps?

Yes, I view postmodernity as symptomatic of a more general set of social themes rather the the explicitly literary-artistic focused usage of postmodernism, which sounds more like what you are describing. Certainly in either case it supports a range of interpretations. Rejection of grand narratives isn't the same as saying there are no big questions though.

I think that is a hallmark of every social movement, that it casts itself as an answer to all big the questions, no? And the nature of the movement is what it considers those to be....

I refer you to my previous observations:

I believe, however, that evolution is ongoing. We are evolving as a species to a kind of "species being". Not just in the practical-social sense described by Marx, but perhaps in a kind of evolutionary-cognitive sense. Our species has reached a tipping-point, as defined by the scope and scale of our mastery over our environment. Either we continue to evolve into a truly "human" species, a humane species, or we bring about our own extinction, as a mere consequence of having failed to achieve the ethical awareness necessary to adequately manage our own technology. — Pantagruel

The sense in which post-modernism is a reactionary response is really just its essential nature as part of a dialectical evolution. It can be seen as a variety of inversions of the rational and objective. The individual becomes decentered or pluralized.

Do you hold that post-modernism is a bad thing? Might it not also be a way we can use to think more interestingly outside of our habitual foundationalist posturing and dualistic thinking? Post-modernism is so ubiquitously detested, I can't help but think it must be onto something. — Tom Storm

I don't think it in itself good or bad - it is just a label that has been applied to a type of reactionary response to a recent phase of psycho-social evolution. That said, I think it highlights a schism in the modern (post-modern) mind and is a symptom of an associated socio-cultural condition, which is one of instability. The idea that mankind has reached some kind of tipping point.

We should remember that the good old days were not all that good. Slavery, exploitation, and oppression were ok with full support by traditional institutions, family, community and religion. There were at least as many wars then as there are now, although the ones we have now are more dangerous. People died of diseases that are easily treated. Life expectancy has increased dramatically. Were things better then than they are now? Good question. — T Clark

Aha.

People having a connection to an inner core of value is not the same thing as saying that those core values were themselves inherently correct. Obviously, as our experience of the universe deepens, our understanding and appreciation of the nature of core values will also evolve. This is exactly the challenge I think. We are not moving backwards to old values, but forward to new ones. It merely happens that certain institutions historically embodied certain kinds of values. They may again, even if the institutions and the values they align are not precisely the same.

My take is that, per the theme of my original post, the dominant social trend can be understood in terms of a relative alignment with or alienation from a "value-core". So everything you said is undoubtedly true, but it is a description of a problem that has been in a state of evolution since....way back when. Hopefully, the more we can understand the nature of that problem, the better we are able to put our energies into efforts that address it.

I agree that rule has historically been rule by a dominant minority. I believe, however, that evolution is ongoing. We are evolving as a species to a kind of "species being". Not just in the practical-social sense described by Marx, but perhaps in a kind of evolutionary-cognitive sense. Our species has reached a tipping-point, as defined by the scope and scale of our mastery over our environment. Either we continue to evolve into a truly "human" species, a humane species, or we bring about our own extinction, as a mere consequence of having failed to achieve the ethical awareness necessary to adequately manage our own technology.

So are you hoping for a synthesis after the thesis of modernity and anti-thesis of post-modernity? — ssu

I think that we are due for a new phase. The moral vacuity of pure technology is not only becoming evident, it is precipitating crises across many domains. The night before I wrote those reflections I dreamt I was searching for Hegel among bookshelves, amidst turmoil.

Look at the kind of anti-leadership that is being spawned. People think they live in a democracy because they hear the word used. Yet everywhere they look is evidence that their most cherished institutions are nothing but toys for plutocrats. Is this truly how people think democracy should work? Privileged selection of candidates and flawed electoral processes, all to subserve corporate interests. Hmmm.

“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”
~George Eliot

That's a silly question.

so, little kids that die of brain cancer deserve it because they would have grown up to end the world. Got it. Remarkable inefficiency for the so called all powerfull all knowing all wise creator of the universe, considering how many serial killers and terrorists make it through to adulthood just fine — an-salad

Not a very thoughtful response. Another perspective, everyone dies, and everyone is subject to unique conditions of life...and death. No one has any more "right" to live to a ripe old age than anyone else. It isn't reasonable. To extend your reasoning, god should simply prevent everyone from dying, and we would drown in a sea of overpopulation. Death is a natural part of life.

Also, If everyone only did work that they “loved and believed in” civilization would collapse in a week. — an-salad

This is a generalization and a fallacy. Lots of farmers love to farm. Lots of people happily pursue daytime jobs in order to indulge their passions.

Also, the biggest problem with a conspiracy theory that there is a secret group of rich people secretly running the world is that there is a non secret group of rich people not even trying to hide that they are non secretly running the world. — an-salad

This is true. I always reply to conspiracy theorists that the only real conspiracy going on is that there is a widespread conspiracy of greed.

Also also, does god actively give little kids inoperable brain cancer, or does he just let them get it and then sit back and watch while it slowly kills them? This isn’t rhetorical, I’m actually lookng for an answer. — an-salad

This is the problem of theodicy. And it isn't really a problem. Inasmuch as it consists of applying mundane-finite standards to the purportedly transcendental. Why should god eliminate what you or I or anyone else perceives to be a bad thing? Maybe the little kid with brain cancer grows up to cause the end of the world. Even when well-intentioned people try do to good it often goes awry. Don't worry about whether god can or should fix what's wrong with the world; try to fix whatever you can. Then maybe you'll see how hard it can be....and cut god some slack.

Myth and Meaning
by Claude Lévi-Strauss

there's a unique individual recipient, who will understand, digest, and internalize whatever has been conveyed — Ayush Jain

But how did that individual's version of whatever "meaning" arise? He didn't create it ex nihilo. It was constructed out of framing elements which evolved through social practices - words with already practically evolved meanings. Individuation and community are the poles of a spectrum, neither of which makes sense without the other, like materiality and ideality.

I assume that this is the entire project of culture, to symbolically memorialize individual experiences such that they can be re-ingested by subsequent generations, creating a kind of continuity of experience. The only way to actually parameterize individual experience is through intersubjectively evolved concepts. There is no truly singular meaning.

Amerika
by Franz Kafka

One-hundred Years of Solitude was absolutely spellbinding.

If people are in inner-conflict then small wonder that this manifests in outer conflicts, no? This might fall within the interesting tradition of "Psychomachia" or mind-war, classically conceived as the battle for good and evil in the soul of man.

My belief is that 1 and 2 only exist in the mind — RussellA

Does this itself establish that mental constructs cannot exert causal force? Isn't that the essence of deductive logic, where premises necessitate a conclusion? Isn't this arguably a form of "mental causation" ?

Embodied cognition is knowledge of interactions with the environment, not knowledge about what in the environment caused those interactions — RussellA

This is a misconstrual of embodied cognition, which is not about "knowing that" at all. It's about knowledge being enacted via its environmental embeddings, and extends outward, rather than inward, as in the associated concept of distributed cognition, where environmental features are construed as being actual elements of cognitive processes.

However this isn't the place to address that as we are veering OT for this thread.

That an organism is embodied in the world does not mean that the organism necessarily has knowledge about the world. — RussellA

Actually that is exactly what embodied-embedded cognition implies, represents a definition of knowledge as much as anything.

The idea that he is the metaphysical grandfather of embodied cognition is my own. Informed by having read five of his books as well as two extensive critical studies.

But there is no inside without outside. Collingwood's position falls directly within the parameters of a philosophy of embodiment. He is the metaphysical grandfather of the idea of the embodied mind.

This seems to suggest that for Collingwood, numbers, being part of mathematics, exist in thought rather than sensation. — RussellA

True. Except that he relentlessly fuses these:

The concept is not something outside the world of sensuous appearance it is the very structure or order of the world itself....The universal is only real as exemplified in the particular, the particular as informed by the universal.

Which really is the case. We never experience vacant materiality, or pure conceptuality. However we do have abilities that seem to operate on a spectrum of synthesis that lies between these poles.

Prototypical. Paradigmatic. Proto-digmatic. Just having fun with language.

I think the essence of the answer regarding the nature of abstraction and the mutual inherence of the universal and the particular already addresses your questions. (i.e. twoness is simultaneously abstract but qua concrete instantiation). It sounds as if you basically don't agree with the characterizations of the particular and the universal-abstract that I'm embracing. The long quote I made from Collingwood is its own best evidence and equates with my claims.

Indeed. Obviously there is not a unique set of two "proto-digmatic" entities. On the other hand, any pair of things can exist in a state of "two-ness" given the appropriate abstraction. Which is Collingwood's rationale, I think. His metaphysics consists of a state of mutual inter-expression, where the individual exists in and through the universal, and vice-versa.

Numbers are not just the culmination of abstractions. — Corvus

Here is an excerpt from R.G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis on the logical nature of mathematical concepts, which emerge through the power of abstraction from experience (kind of Kantian I guess):

...the only really a priori or pure concept is the concept of a class as such, the concept of classification or abstraction....each member being simply another instance of the universal. This indeterminate plurality of units is precisely the numerical series. Each unit is distinguished from the rest simply as being another that is, by its ordinal number, and the common nature of units in general is simply that they are that of which there is an indeterminate multiplicity. This indeterminate multiplicity is the mathematical infinite, which is therefore another name for the perfect abstractness of the mathematical universal...a mere plurality of abstract units...Mathematics implies the ideal reduction of what are really unique facts to mere units.

Ok. How about this. Numbers primitively seem to correlate with things. But are there in fact things? Or are there really only processes, whose synchronic slices appear intermittently as things? In which case, numbers would really correlate with processes. Or again, we can only count insofar as we abstractly identify the things being counted. So we count one-hundred peanuts. Be we don't count one-hundred "things" as one-peanut, two-jar, three-house, four-planet, five-universe....etc. Numeracy is itself just the culmination of abstraction. Short of objective correlation, what inherent reality do numbers have except the cumulative set of interrelations which are defined by all the possible mathematical constructs in which they appear?

But they don't exist like the physical objects do. — Corvus

You mean like quantum fields, that kind of "substantively real" thing? Or more like statistically defined entities like subatomic particles?

Exactly. Mathematical relationships inhere in material objects. The abundance of fractal features in the universe additionally is suggestive of this possibility. It's just an empirical observation for me. But I see no reason to discount the reality of numbers. Ipseity may be the foundation of all logic.

Math formulas, equations and functions are descriptions of the physical world. Description is not physical objects. — Corvus

The sun is yellow. Yellow is not a physical object. But the light being emitted at 510 Terahertz is.

We know, or are aware of the mental objects. They don't exist like the physical objects in the external world. — Corvus

Even if that were true, it wouldn't contradict the existence of an objective correlate of the mental object. i.e. Just because numbers have a mental appearance, doesn't mean that numeracy isn't a physical reality. My go-to example is the use of Fibonacci-sequence timed laser pulses to stimulate atoms into a new phase state of matter. Nature is "resonant" to numerical properties....

No. it doesn't. Number can start from any number you decided to choose to start. Because numbers are the mental concept. There is no physical laws or principles on numbers. — Corvus

Numbers can be mental concepts. However anything natural can also exist as a mental concept. And numbers appear to inhere in the natural world, as evidenced by the existence of mathematizable relationships. So what basis is there for claiming numbers are, or numeracy is, exclusively mental?

No, numbers do not have causal efficacy. They are not efficient causes, in any sense of the term. — Arcane Sandwich

What about considering binary fission as exemplifying a kind of organic ontology. One parent cell is the efficient cause of two daughter cells. One is the cause, two are the effects.

Oh. When I asked if the problem driving contemporary populism was systemic, I was asking if it's actually a problem with democracy. — frank

And I think that it is a problem with the mechanisms of democracy for sure.

Does that mean the only solution to any problem is revolution? — frank

I don't think that revolution is the only or most logical means to address systemic problems; you don't have to replace a system to address a systemic problem, merely address it at a systemic level. Which is the sense in which I understand legislation to operate, defining governing norms.

I would say that "kicking ass" is indeed a different priority. lol.

Is the problem systemic? — frank

If you place any credence in critical theory, then all problems are systemic. I do, inasmuch as we are more than just accidentally responsible for the state of affairs within which we exist. There's no limit to what can be solved as long as the legislative power enacting the solution is respected. Which is the entire purpose of having a government, in nuce.

Engels argues as much, when he talks about the ability to completely optimize economic realities, if only we can produce with consciousness as human beings "not as dispersed atoms without consciousness of your species." Whereby you transcend the problems of all "artificial and untenable antitheses." (from his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy)

Sure. So populism is essentially a symptom of the deficiencies of the existing system of governance.

So the underlying concrete problem is addressed by a coalition of billionaires who don't like to pay their workers. Does this make populism a corruption of reason? Or is Maga not a genuine form of populism?

Ok. What is the underlying "rationally and contextually situated request" of which MAGA has become the empty signifier? At least ostensibly, populism seems to be defined in terms of concrete problems, which is reasonable. But MAGA seems to never have been anything but an empty and meaningless abstraction.

Nicely constructed synopsis.