You must have some examples in your own life… — Mikie

Yes. Protein branded food. It's fucking everywhere. Protein chocolate, protein sandwiches blah blah. Tescos here has "protein wraps", which are both less protein per gram and less protein per calorie than regular processed chicken sandwiches. "Protein bread" is literally just bread since gluten's in the macronutrient profile. Nuts get marketed as high protein when they're predominantly fat.

If someone's actually made a product that shifts the macronutrient profile of the product to be much protein heavier - like high protein cheeses or icecream, it's fine. But just regular food is getting called protein-food, when it's comparable to their non branded alternatives.

Also "skinny" food. Skinny lattes. It's the same number of calories as a skimmed milk latte - which is to say, a regular latte.

It's obviously the way to routinely sell people junk food, since you don't have to feel guilty binging on it if it counts as health food.

At the end of my block is one of those Clearchannel shifting wheel billboards, in December two ads would rotate on it - the first was for a long term savings account, the second was for the kind of junk food burger that would kill you if you ate it regularly.

At the nearest T-junction there's a series of ad plasters on a wall, one of them has "Dare to be different!" on it, and it's just plastered to this piece of shit dilapidated tenement. That slot on the wall gets kludged with signs of nonconformity, social justice, and respect. The drain outside stinks.

A sibling died years ago and the algorithm started sending me ads for crash diet plans, black suits, grief counselling, and tickets to Las Vegas. Ads using psychological profiles and sentiment analysis are incredibly invasive.

Why does this need explanation? It fits the theory rather well no? In a more feminine society, these are the roles ascribed to men. — Tobias

Yeah I think it fits your theory somewhat well. I don't think it fits the narrative you're criticising very well. It seems a vestige of a more gender-stratified economy and society. Whereas there's no reason women shouldn't be on the front lines, wearing hard hats, or heaving metal on a rig.

The point which I tried to make though and which you also picked up on (thanks for that) is that a lot of these values actually stay the same and that overt formal condemnation and demand for change is countered by informal 'subterranean' reinforcement. I feel stereotypical male values are formally opposed and informally reinforced. — Tobias

This is my impression. People's heads are relatively enlightened, peoples' guts are not.

While feminine values are becoming our mainstream values, masculine values remain revered in situations that are out of the ordinary, 'in love and war' so to speak, quite literarily in this case. When one reads young adult male forums one gets a sense that you have to be a bad boy to get girls. That can be quickly dismissed as the whining of losers, but there is some scientific support for this hypothesis. From a study on delinquency and dating behaviour: "Of particular importance, results suggest that delinquency does not appear to increase dating by increasing the delinquent's desire for dates. Instead, they suggest that delinquency increases dating outcomes by making the delinquent more attractive to prospective mates. This finding supports evolutionary psychology's implicit prediction that adolescents may, knowingly or unknowingly (see Berry & Broadbent, 1984; Claxton, 1999; Lewicki et al., 1992; Massey, 2002), perceive delinquency as one type of risk-taking behavior that reflects such qualities as nerve, daring, and bravado. 5 From an evolutionary perspective, such qualities may be highly beneficial to a prospective mate's social status, physical well-being, and/or genetic lineage"(Rebellon & Manasse 200 — Tobias

Internet Dating by Beasley and Holmes (2021) talks about the general theme you're touching on above from a more constructionist and sociological perspective. It talks about modern dating as {my words} a horrible cauldron of {their words} "heteronormative scripts", the expectations which make contemporary relationships safe and pleasurable at a baseline are to a large part still conservative and traditional. They define the expectations from which conduct is judged.

It talks about "nutter narratives", which are old examples from dating blogs, just dating horror stories. It looks at those as case studies of surprise and transgression in dating in order to get a vantage on the norms which are violated. Divining the sacred from its defilement.

The narratives people tell about their internet dating experiences can reveal how shifting yet stubborn heterosexual gender relations shape those experiences. We have argued that the nutter narrative is a commonly told story that exposes many of the gendered assumptions and ways of interacting that can reinforce inequalities between women and men. It is a narrative that helps us understand where the limits to gender heterodoxy sit and how they are guarded. The nutter narratives suggest that the gender innovations enabled by internet dating may travel out from the heteronormative centre, but not too far. What we offer in the rest of the book is an analysis of what kind of innovations are possible, but here we get to grips with the outer fences, the lines in the sand, beyond which it is dangerous to go. Technology has affordances, but the internet is not outside of regulatory power. The nutter narrative is one mechanism via which that power is exercised and gendered selves and interactions produced — Internet Dating, Beasley and Holmes (2021), p31

Yes and if I am write the pendulum will swing in women's favour. They will be seen as more capable of verbal jobs that require both rational and emotional intelligence, such as judge, university professor, upper management. It will take time, but if my theory is right it will happen. — Tobias

I suppose we shall see.

I think that masculine values as they are traditionally conceived march out of tune with the way society is developing. I think society will turn feminine as Hofstede defined it, more and more. It is not a moral claim, it is a factual claim. It may also turn out wrong. If it is not wrong though masculinity as a specific set of values runs into problems and if we have a class of people embracing values that are actually not very productive anymore, we face a problem of masculinity. It is not a moral claim at all, just a rather cold power based analysis. — Tobias

I think the point you made in the OP is rather important. There was a recent poll in the UK which showed that around 40% of high schoolers believed they had been taught "men were a problem for society", so this is something worth paying attention to even if it's false. I want to add the following points to it, which are also questions. This is also about the UK, which is what I'm familiar with.

1 ) If masculine values become more disincentivised on a societal level, how ought the relative stability of some aspects of gender norms to be explained over time? I have in mind that the boys at school are rewarded by peers for violence, bravado and competition, but punished by their teachers for it. They're taught to be as sensitive and emotionally aware as the girls, but the girls are not mocked in the playground for displays of emotion.

2 ) Some explanation is required for girls outperforming boys in school at every level and in every subject {up to some demographic factors}. Boys are much more likely to be suspended or permanently excluded too.

3 ) Some explanation is required for the rigidity of gender norms in high risk and physical workplaces - the overwhelming majority of construction workers, military personnel and offshore workers are still men. Compare the overwhelming split the other way for nurses and human resources professionals.

4 ) Women now write and publish more books than men.

5 ) 80%ish of rough sleepers {street sleepers} are men.

Given that there is a crisis, that crisis is eroding and emphasising aspects of gender identity and gendered privileges differentially. Some aspects are broadly maintained - women are caring, sacred, confined and ought value the other. Men are violent, profane, domineering and ought value the self.

My impression goes along with much of what you say @Tobias, that people's frame of interpretation for gender is still rooted in the aesthetics and moral values of what, now, polite society is seen to "reject". Though now the economic dimension of those norms has levelled considerably as of the last 5 years {though I don't know of a similar meta analysis study for the UK}, and people in general see women and men as equally capable of jobs women were traditionally excluded from.

Here we see the first step of the dialectic, masculinity has become a problem. Its values are losing significance its ways meet with more disapproval. Boys are taught by women and judged by women. They are judged impartially I must add, I do not wish to cast any doubt on the impartiality of female or male judges, but it is a sign of the times that women wield actual power, improve on the social ladder and boys remain a majority of the people who lose out in society. Masculinity is facing a crisis. Physical strength is not needed, but becomes a burden as using it to resolve conflicts is increasingly frouned upon. Their fondness of hierarchy is not producing results and their preference for competition is met by an emphasis on relationality and consensus. — Tobias

I also want to add that a bizarre collusion exists in the image of masculinity in polite society and that which is embodied by strongman leaders and misogynist grifters, man as a necessary aggressor. The only disagreement is whether this image is morally good or bad.

In threads such as these, the terms 'masculinity' and 'femininity' just become a fig leaf used to slap the most ridiculous generalizations onto people. — Tzeentch

:up:

And as Tzeentch highlights, you also get a hilarious agreement between some hyper postmodern contemporary feminists, and people who don't like generalising for other reasons.

The former highlighting that generalisations like "white man", "masculinity", "femininity" are insufficiently localised and contextualised {intersectional} to make an iota of sense... and the latter that people ought be considered on a more person by person basis without the use of stereotypes.

I think we just got used to talking out of our arses about relationships between men and women, and gender in general, and selectively forget how to think about it.

so to argue a Catholic theologian holds consistently with a Kantian concept of freedom being necessary for moral responsibility doesn't make it Christian. — Hanover

The ideas you expressed approval of, through Kant, are very Christian though. While his views on the matter had {at best} a mixed reception from theologians of his day, his stance on God is still firmly within the Christian tradition - closer to Catholic and Orthodox ones. I'm sure you're aware of his comment that he needed to "deny knowledge to make room for faith" regarding the limits of reason. The contradiction between the concept of will we're discussing and the causal structure of the universe was something he highlighted within his own philosophy, it's one of his antimonies. And he sided with that view of free will faithfully.

I dunno what to say, Kant's image of the human mind facing a decision is not particularly secular in origin. Even though his view on the relationship of reason and God, and maybe God's less literal existence, made him a bit of a heretic. Or not {seen as} particularly good at apology.

I'm open up learning Hinduism, but my running down the rabbit hole trying to understand this didn't lead me to the conclusion that Hindus universally argue we lack free will or that one's karmic rewards aren't tied to freely chosen decisions. From the Wiki article, it's apparent there are differing views within Hinduisn on this issue. — Hanover

I hardly know a thing about it.

If you can show that societies that developed outside that tradition (e.g. rain forest, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American societies) emerged with no sense of free will, then that would be supportive of your position, but I question if that's true. — Hanover

I think you're assuming that "free will" is a space of concepts, whereas it's a fairly demarcated one in public parlance. People think of a self causing mind able to manifest choices in a body.

This is consistent with doxatic volunteerism, the belief you can choose your beliefs. The reductio conclusion for one who disbelieves in free is that they don't believe in free will because they are determined not to. They'd be similarly forced to accept a believer believes because he must. If that's the case, we argue not to persuade or effectuate our opponents to choose our way of thinking, but because we simply must argue and bend as programmed. That is, the very concept of deliberation and consideration collapse in a determined world because the thought processes and conclusions were just another set of pool balls colliding. We don't choose option A bc it's most rational. We choose it because we're compelled. — Hanover

You may as well be quoting Aquinas.

Man has free-will: otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain. In order to make this evident, we must observe that some things act without judgment; as a stone moves downwards; and in like manner all things which lack knowledge. And some act from judgment, but not a free judgment; as brute animals. For the sheep, seeing the wolf, judges it a thing to be shunned, from a natural and not a free judgment, because it judges, not from reason, but from natural instinct. And the same thing is to be said of any judgment of brute animals. But man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. For reason in contingent matters may follow opposite courses, as we see in dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments. Now particular operations are contingent, and therefore in such matters the judgment of reason may follow opposite courses, and is not determinate to one. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will. — Summa Theologiae, Q83

the evil which consists in the defect of action is always caused by the defect of the agent. But in God there is no defect, but the highest perfection, as was shown above (I:4:1). Hence, the evil which consists in defect of action, or which is caused by defect of the agent, is not reduced to God as to its cause.

But the evil which consists in the corruption of some things is reduced to God as the cause. And this appears as regards both natural things and voluntary things. For it was said (Article 1) that some agent inasmuch as it produces by its power a form to which follows corruption and defect, causes by its power that corruption and defect. But it is manifest that the form which God chiefly intends in things created is the good of the order of the universe. Now, the order of the universe requires, as was said above (I:22:2 ad 2; I:48:2), that there should be some things that can, and do sometimes, fail. And thus God, by causing in things the good of the order of the universe, consequently and as it were by accident, causes the corruptions of things, according to 1 Samuel 2:6: "The Lord killeth and maketh alive." But when we read that "God hath not made death" (Wisdom 1:13), the sense is that God does not will death for its own sake. Nevertheless the order of justice belongs to the order of the universe; and this requires that penalty should be dealt out to sinners. And so God is the author of the evil which is penalty, but not of the evil which is fault, by reason of what is said above. — Summa Theologiae, Q49

This view of decision is inimicably Christian. The concept of will must be inherently unconstrained so that the horrible crap in the world can be our fault. That's what it's for. Free will gives humanity legislative authority over our own evils.

Compare:

All activities are carried out by the three modes of material nature. But in ignorance, the soul, deluded by false identification with the body, thinks of itself as the doer. — Bhagavad Gita 3.27

Totally opposite metaphysics. You have humans as unique willing agents vs human choice as relatively demarcated, somehow deluded, and part of the broader acts of nature.

We've then ended up thinking the broadly Christian concept of it applies everywhere and it's just "natural" and "innate" to see humans as legislative authorities on our own actions like existence is our own little fiefdom. It isn't even a cultural universal to see ourselves like this. People end up equating this Christian model of the agent with the concept of choice simpliciter, because we don't know any different.

We're saying we're divine. — frank

Yeah. At least you know what you're smoking.

I just have a take.

1) Free will as a concept arose as a response to the theodicy. AFAIK this is just true. As a concept it was never meant to make sense of the human on its own terms, it was meant to make sense of our relationship with god and the world's evil.
2) Educated minds started thinking of the will as what is essentially human, roughly equating it with the action of the human soul in the world. {This is me speculating}
3) Laws use intention {mens rea} as a metric for culpability, connecting the presence of an intent to the outcome of an action. Culpability is diminished when an agent is coerced, even if the intention is present.

The way people talk about the will pretheoretically is effectively some hodgepodge of the concept in ( 3 ) - uncoerced choice - and the concept in 2 - undetermined choice, even though the concept of determination behaves like it does in ( 1 ), total causal isolation from all that is thingly, a mental uncaused cause. There is no faculty corresponding to "the will", volitional signals couple with every signal in our nervous systems, and they can be messed with experimentally. It's a fairytale, honestly.

Which isn't to say we don't have freedom of choice, or determinism is true, or whatever, it's just that the way people describe free will is a fairytale masquerading as common sense, masquerading as a model of human conduct, then partially enshrined in law.

This would suggest the feeling of volition is simply a sensation that precedes certain activity, but not that it has special ontological status. — Hanover

Aye. I think it's quite clear at this point that "free will" as a concept is a theological atavism. The body's volitional processes are nothing like a soul making a decision in accordance with its essential nature.

What you've described is relevant to any two events that may or may not have a causal relationship. — T Clark

Yeah. The account of choice where a choice is an experiential component of an action is just an instance. The action in the OP is the body's evolving state during kick, and the choice to kick is part of experiencing that evolving state. The choice and the movement are "grounded" in the action, "supervene" on it, or are otherwise inseparable parts of it.

That would hold so long as what constitutes the choice to move that leg as it was moved, in the body, is causally implicated in the leg movement and vice versa. Whether it construes choice as a spectator on what's already happened, or whether some actions count as choices and some don't based on other bodily processes.

I think the paper @Hanover linked ultimately sides against seeing choice as purely post hoc, since the experiment elicited a greater degree of intention to actions when a subtle pain signal was given to the body prior to making a choice. A bit like someone almost imperceptibly shouting "GO!" at the beginning of a race, you'll find your body moving as if on its own, even though you choose to run. "GO!" makes you experience your legs moving of their own accord as an act of your will.

I quite like that idea for horror purposes, it brings to mind a machine you can put someone in to make them experience random crap as their own choice.

The other option (and my apologies if already mentioned) is that free will is just a post hoc justification for why we do things. Support for that theory:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521730062X — Hanover

Nice. That's the flavour of account I gestured toward with my response earlier.

4. Neither dream X nor event Y can be said to cause the other. The relation between X and Y is not a causal one, but one in which they supervene on or are grounded in some further Z. — fdrake

The further Z being a functional state of the body, the choice to kick is a flavour of quale that came along with the leg kicking, neither caused the other since they were parts of the same event.

Oh, "creates and sustains". Every time you see the phrase "in and through". "Posited and presupposed". All the same shit.

reciprocal causality — J

Feedback isn't reciprocal causality. On the level of a system feedback relationships occur sequentially from one variable at time t to another variable at the next time point t+x. People will use feedback more loosely though.

But you can find reciprocal causality, the term, used in social studies. People use it the same way as cocausality, the pairing "construct and enact" you might find in enactivism, and "coconstitute". "Reciprocal dependence" also.

I know originally all of these terms meant something different, eg coconstitution isn't causal and feedback doesn't care about whether it's read in a constructionist manner, but people never gave a fuck.

I forgot to ask: Why do you think it unlikely? There are many reasons. — Amity

People in general will make token gestures but likely won't organise, or otherwise do what is necessary, to change things.

Can you stop tagging me in these things please. I'll comment on them if they interest me at the time. Thanks.

As is now apparent, this is a little microcosm of the whole mental-causation problem. But I offer it because it’s curiously amenable to analysis, and makes me wonder whether any sleep researchers have actually used brain scans to look into this. — J

Nice post. I want to add 4. to that list:

4. Neither dream X nor event Y can be said to cause the other. The relation between X and Y is not a causal one, but one in which they supervene on or are grounded in some further Z.

As in the kick and the dream are two aspects of the same broader state, rather than a relation between mind and idea. They don't need to be reactions to each other. They can be part of the same action done by the body.

Glad somebody is. Ah well, at least the news is exciting.

Apparently the answer to the OP is "rearm". @Benkei you doing alright?

Does anyone have any idea whether this tidal wave of shit is malice done incompetently or incompetence done maliciously? The news has been a multiple clown car pile up since this fuckwit took office.

The only people that seem to be benefitting are EU weapons and plant manufacturers. And Russia.

I’m disconnected from these institutional structures. — Joshs

Ah right. I hear rage along the grapevine these days, no longer involved in research. My recent exposure to it {in person} has been in addiction studies, in which you can lose your academic prestige for saying heroin causes addiction. These are people receiving research funding from medicine grants.

I started reading a lot of masculinity studies last year - the feminist anthropology version of it rather than the reactionary bullshit on Youtube -. There's a fairly in depth review of how it becomes practically impossible to integrate anthropology and social studies about men with mainstream feminist analysis because the latter's methodologically hogtied to these philosophies of indefinite mediation - actor network theory, discourse analysis, deconstruction. And they don't tend to do fieldwork. The former research tends to be done in constructivist and experiment heavy terms.

Of course the rejoinder is that people who didn't adopt some flavour of postmodern methodology are behind the times. I also find it ironic that this is indeed the rejoinder from a group of academics who have rejected the idea of linear progress narratives.

I have found that there tends to be a substantial distance between the work of the ‘oracles’ of post-phenomenological thought and the interpretation and application of it by legions lesser lights, to the point where it is often almost unrecognizable — Joshs

Yeah I think we agree there. The original texts, and good secondary literature, was revolutionary. There's a lot of ossification over the years. I think the continued emphasis on contingency and mediation is a bit of a fetish at this point. There's a lot of disavowed generalisation despite using these methodologies to champion the singularity of everything. I have a particularly egregious paper in mind for the latter.

I've run out of steam for now. Thanks for the excellent discussion.

I don't understand how you can construe the post-phenomenological heritage a minor paradigm when it's quite hegemonic. It isn't hegemonic everywhere it touches, but it's a pernicious orthodoxy in social studies.

It's also a heritage that lets people do discourse analysis with no fieldwork while still getting papers published. People write 30 page papers whose principal argument is based on homophones {both meanings of site, cite...} and it gets through peer review because it apparently cleverly references the differential nature of the signifying chain.

You are incredibly well read, surely you've seen even worse excesses.

Can you say more explicitly what you mean by "the inference"? I tried to speak to the general issue with the paragraph beginning, "↪I don’t see how the parts are going to help..." — Leontiskos

The following inference:

I'm still not getting a lot of traction on this stuff. I would say that if someone ignores the spirit of an obligation and clings to the letter of the obligation, then they are failing in their obligations. I don't think the spirit of an obligation can be a supererogation. It still feels like you are conflating obligation and supererogation. — Leontiskos

If I construe the spirit of an obligation as "engendering the kind of world that obligation seeks to create" and the obligation's letter as "the acts constitutive of its duty", maybe that makes it clearer. Satisfying the spirit of an obligation has something like a success criterion for fulfilling a purpose or higher cause, and a duty doesn't need such a purpose or a higher cause but often {typically} has them.

Some duties are relatively transparent in their spirit and letter. The letter of my duty to take out the trashing is... taking out the trash. The spirit is a bunch of things like "letting rubbish pile up in your house is negligent" {a vice}, "letting rubbish pile up in your house degrades the quality of your and your neighbours lives" {disrespect to community}, just general ethical principles. If one took out the trash and left it in the street, you've satisfied the letter of your duty of taking out the trash, but contradicted some of the tenets that act is supposed to embody. You definitely took out the trash, you were nevertheless not considerate to your neighbours.

A small item may escape your trash bag, it counts as litter, do you run after it when it blows away in the wind? Well if you don't you've littered, which is inconsiderate by the same principle, but at that point no one particularly cares, so no one would see it as violating the spirit of your duties if you didn't chase after it. One may be perversely or minimally compliant, one may also do minor violations of the spirit of ones duties and count as satisfying them.

The room opened up by perverse compliance and minor violations of a duty's spirit is also room for the failure of the aims of duty while satisfying its letter.

Imagine a world, then, in which one could not fulfil the aim of being considerate to one's neighbours without running after an escaped piece of trash in a gale. That's a tyrannical and absurd standard, no one can live chasing after every piece of trash like that - metaphorically and literally. Nevertheless, the world demands you relate to yourself and others as such a tyrant in order to fulfil your duties about the things which matter in spirit and not just in letter.

Why?

If we were to take the food bank example then we would say that X = <produce food surplus or food waste> and Y = <people do not go hungry>. I won't hold you to that example, but we can use it if you want. I want to analyze a concrete example and see if the word "supererogatory" is being used accurately, and if not, what better words could be used. — Leontiskos

I understand something as supererogatory if it is laudable but not required for one's duties, like chasing after the trash in a gale. Laudability arises from embodying the spirit of one's duties to a high degree, heights of considerateness and self sacrifice.

The food bank example I think is a good one. I want to take it as given that no one is duty bound to work full time for free in a food bank, it isn't a moral requirement for anyone to do that, but some people take up the burden. What would happen if some people did not take up the burden? The poor would starve. Working as a volunteer full time in a food bank is laudable. Thus, working as a volunteer full time in a food bank is supererogatory, as it's laudable and goes above and beyond one's duties of care for humanity.

But let's have a look at what happens if no one takes up the burden - which is, no one does something which is always permissible not to do -, the poor then starve. Some people working at the foodbank in that manner is necessary for the poor not to starve - necessary as a logical requirement, the poor would starve without it. But it was also shown not to be a moral duty to work full time there as a volunteer.

The aporia arises because if some people did not compel themselves to go above and beyond their duties, the poor would starve. The state of things thus requires {logically} that people go above and beyond their duties to ensure that widely held requirements for a just society. That is a much greater imposition than occasionally chasing after trash in a strong wind. That's the monstrosity I'm speaking about.

It actually reminds me of debates in esoterica. Anyone who disagrees cannot possibly have truly fathomed it, and of course it will prove near impossible to show what "truly fathoming" the doctrines entails. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Even though the central "destructions" in the critique have been elaborated in secondary and tertiary literature for years. I want to say as the only people perpetuating the critiqued doctrine {ontologies of presence} at this point are its critics, but then you occasionally meet a scientist who tells you that tells you every state a human can occupy is an informational state in its brain... But humans have legs and arms. Which isn't to say that this scientist is an ontologist of presence as stereotyped in the critique, they just say some things which have some of that stereotyped perspective's framing.

There's definitely a lot of good that comes out of the critique, it's just articulated in terms that make it borderline impossible for its continued target audience to grasp. And it's also not that hard to grasp for the philosophically inclined given how much effort has been spent explaining it.

Forced translation exercises out of its technical vocabulary tend to show its worst excesses as the trivialities they are.

But my intuitive sense is that the difficulty for all of this is that the unconditioned is as a matter of principle beyond the scope of discursive thought (meaning, to all intents, out of bounds). — Wayfarer

Well no wonder the paper is hard to read.

Yes, I can see how it would seem like that. But again, we're no closer to the sense in which religious revelation purports to connote insight into the unconditioned. — Wayfarer

Unconditioned meaning foundational to perspective?

t would be as urgent as the requirement to breath. — Wayfarer

It seems to me you're describing a psychological difference, rather than a perceptual or epistemological one. Like it's a core belief. It is, and they're often revised. Just with more pain. The possibility of a crisis or faith, a greater understanding of it, a rediscovery, evinces the non-necessity of its content for its believer. It is not essential to them, they believe it is essential. Or if it is essential, it's the same flavour of essentiality as one's upbringing or deep seated beliefs. Treated as partially constitutive of the subject, but revisable.

Not all of this vitriol is aimed at you @Joshs, I've just been reading this for over a decade and I'm sick of having it explained to me like I've never read post-phenomenological work.

The basis of phenomenological and post-phenomenological thinking is that the starting and ending point of factual and and ethical analysis is the present , and the present of time is a complex structure which includes within the immediate ‘now’ a historical past and anticipatory future in which the past arrives already remade. The problem realists have with this thinking is that they place the identity of the ‘now’ before difference, Existence is self-identity to them, and change is also conceived in this basis. As a result, any utterance about there beyond nothing outside local contexts of meaning creation is read as a statement of identity, an in-itself fact about change that appears self-refuting on the face of it. It is inconceivable that a meaning can in itself expresss itself own transformation, an event of transit, being the same differently. The worst of it is that the implications of post-realism appear horrifyingly nihilistic because all that is glimpsed is contradiction, incommensurability, arbitrariness, skepticism and anything goes relativism. What is colossally missed is the fact that the positions which are being so completely misread do not attempt to deny the achievements of the sciences, don’t attempt to refute them , but leave them i n place and burrow beneath them to reveal their underpinnings. In so doing, they dont leave us with skepticism , relativism and arbitrariness , but with a profoundly intricate, intimate and enriching ‘ground’ for understanding how meaninful relations to our world — Joshs

You are aware of how many universal statements and definite statements about the essence of things are in this articulation of the radical contingency of everything, right?

"The basis" - as if there is one.
"starting and ending point" - as if there is a necessary duality between the two in any interpretive arc.
"is the present" - a single predication of an entire discourse which is impossible, even though you're ascribing it to an interlocutor's speech act {a reaction to their interpretation of discourse"
"is a complex structure" - this predication occurs over every discourse at every time and imbues it with
a complicated, transtemporal and transcontextual predicate. This is what you're denying your interlocutor the ability to do the sentence before.

I won't do the rest.

The problem fdrake has with this thinking is that it's utterly totalising despite pretending not to be, and can't be articulated without reducing every aspect of human comportment to a single existential-discursive structure. It's everything it claims not to be, all the time. The utter hypocrisy of the perspective is nauseating. Everything mediates everything else, "there is no ontological distinction between discourse and reality" {because the distinction is a discursive one}. It's The One with delusions of being The Many.

The proof is in the pudding, the stranglehold these soft realisms {really, discursive irrealisms} have on academic perspectives in social sciences makes it prohibitively difficult to do research requiring methodological innovation. It ends up totally isolating the disciplines that use this methodology and creating fiefdoms. People default back to broadly structuralist flavoured constructivism when they actually need to get shit done policy wise, because you can actually interpret operational variables and talk about causes {yes, unqualified causes, not mediated causes} with caveats in that framework.

It's utterly stultifying. The particularising nature of the methodology, in practice, just reminds you to do mediation analysis, then tells you you can't isolate causal variables in the wild. Everyone knows this.

Edit: and I like Ratcliffe because I get the impression he is not a stealthy reductionist of the material to its alleged existential genesis. He's a phenomenologist of disrupted bodies, and that's to his great credit.

no, that translates into a thing which was said within a giventime within a given context within a given normative sense of meaning. — Joshs

Every single thing which is said has those caveats! There's no extra information in the post-phenomenological gloss you provided. You've either got that you can generalise truths about all speech acts - which you're doing, and in terms of invariant deep contextual structures may I add - or you can't, and what you're saying is false.

That translates to "a thing which was said".

There is no meta-interpretation. — Joshs

Except for that claim.

Although whether one has, or is, an immortal soul, might be rather more significant than an optical illusion. — Wayfarer

Yes. Some beliefs are more significant to people than others. This remark says nothing about the phenomenology of revealed truth.

I think a better example is the duck-rabbit drawing. Is there a way to refute the correctness of the perception of one or the other figures? — Joshs

If someone sees a duck or a rabbit, and there are no lines on the page, they are wrong.

Doesn’t the basis for determining whether a particular interpretation of an image is an illusion itself rely on an interpretation? — Joshs

Yes. The same goes for any claim, do you mean to suggest no claim can have its correctness judged? How can you possibly be correct?

I'm still watching and judging.

But that is precisely what revealed truth means. It is the entire meaning of the Bible. It doesn’t mean you have to believe it. — Wayfarer

I've always been curious about revealed truth and faith. There's definitely a phenomenological angle you can take on it. You have a world transforming, singular, experience that reconfigures how you see everything. It's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't do much to establish a claim as it's not a move in a game of reasons, it's premising a new game. The best you can do with it is expect others to play along.

The justificatory consequences isn't the most interesting angle the above IMO. I think it makes more sense to grant that revelation is necessary for faith, and that it principally is a reconfiguration of one's world, and see what that means about the divine when taken at face value.

A world transforming, singular, experience aligns the nature of the divine with the perceptual. What you see is what you now believe. In effect, the reinterpretation is a way of seeing the same world another way, like whether a Necker Cube goes into or out of a page. Though it's odd to give faith in the divine a privileged, prior status with respect to reasons for that, as other such aspect shifts are declaratives and can in principle be refuted.

eg "The Necker cube goes into the page" is a statement of the form "The cube is on the page", you could refute the former by showing that the latter holds true. I thus don't think carving out a unique space for faith based on divine revelation is particularly coherent. It undermines its own phenomenology, as a reconfiguration of belief based upon perception.

I just want to blame all of you for my search algorithm thinking I'm having a crisis of faith. @Leontiskos @Count Timothy von Icarus

Also, how likely is it that, not only men, but people generally are willing to stand up against the powerful? — Amity

Unlikely.

How many of us are frustrated in our lack of power, our vulnerability to imposed, dramatic change?

Almost everyone I speak with.

How many will turn to the 'certainties' and 'strength' of a male, dictator?

Lots, but only in the name of change and a bright future.

It's doubtful that reading Mills will help in any way. So, who to turn to for guidance?

No one. No one can help.

Will people be seduced or coerced back to the comforts of the religion of the patriarchy?

Yes. Though requiring everyone to have an income, and the continued availability of washing machines, will stop the worst excesses of that backslide. Those In Power have no ability to stop women from working, I believe.

It's worth noting that every demographic swung harder for Trump than anticipated. And also that people tend to get more culturally conservative or fash-y in times of economic duress. Original article is quite ahistorical, it's a normal Guardian speculative gender thinkpiece.

I don't see how metaphysical optimism is relevant. I wasn't trying to say that we live in the best of all possible worlds with that offhand remark, I was trying to say that if we have a duty to adore all of creation, that extends to things we are horrified by. If we don't have that duty then it's a non-issue.

It would then seem that the Christ in your quote doesn't adore all of creation, and if how he acts becomes duty, there's no paradox.

But let’s suppose that unregenerate man fails to fulfill his means-obligations. What then? Will telling him that he must do the supererogatory fix the situation? I don’t see how it would. If he isn’t fulfilling his means-obligations it’s not clear why he would fulfill his means-supererogations. — Leontiskos

Yes. Telling people that they must do more to do enough, when we already can't do enough, doesn't work.

I would say that for the non-religious, or for those who believe that this state is our inevitable and perpetual condition, the only option is some form of resignation (to failure). To reuse the recycling analogy, this would be resigning oneself to fail to correct climate impact. You can still recycle, but only with the knowledge that you will not succeed—with the knowledge that you are only delaying the inevitable. And one can play Camus all they like, but that burns out fast enough. — Leontiskos

Answers to the problem aren't really about what to do, I think, they're about how to cope with our condition of being unable to do "enough". One way of dealing with that is to try to do enough. Or to try to bring about a state of things were people can do enough. Like @Count Timothy von Icarus engender.

That said, I think there are other options of how to feel than resignation, absurdity and faith - one could learn to love the taste of the brick wall. I think that goes against our natures more than what we've been talking about in this thread, though.

Existentialism looks like it provides an answer. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to rant about it. The number of people I see adopt an "existentialist" posture in person is quite high, but it does nothing to stop everyday petty grievances and tragedies from hurting them, and it doesn't allow them to enjoy the pain of it. I see an appeal to absurd as a metacognitive trap, it's how you think you think, but you only think that because you're not looking at how you think. It's also metaphysical stopgap, a refusal to inquire or do more. It's a refusal to be troubled by the troubling. Though doubtless there are more sincere engagements with it than the one I see often.

I will spare you my comments about faith in this context. But they resemble my comment below about extreme leftism, which I see as a secular form of faith.

I agree with you that a secular "answer" to the problem is quite difficult. The people I'm aware of who are troubled by these problems are generally socialists or communists, and treat The Revolution in eschatological terms. It will be Kingdom come, but of our own making. The faith they have in a future end-state with no means of imagining how to bring it about. They don't have the option of absolving themselves of all responsibility - all acts of going above and beyond - for bringing it about though. I think they're aware of how fucked things are {our fallenness} and stop thinking about it. It all dissolves into the question "What is to be done?". Though I think they real answer to that question is "What is to be done, that goes above and beyond, that I can actually do without an incredible amount of self sacrifice?". Which I have a lot of respect for. The amount of going above and beyond required from everyone for things to be markedly better may be pretty small indeed, and I can respect the gamble.

CS Lewis {for which I will retag @Count Timothy von Icarus due to his stanning for the man} has excellent commentary on this in The Screwtape Letters. For those of you which have not read it, this is a series of funny and disturbing essays, written from the perspective of the middle manager devil Screwtape mentoring his enthusiastic but hapless younger sibling Wormwood in the art of tempting mortals to sin. Throughout they fight "The Enemy" - God - principally through perversions of human faith and duty. The ideal state of the sinner in the book is someone who behaves without virtue who believes themselves either righteous or able to absolve themselves of their evil while continuing it.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future —haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living in the present” is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done good work; try the word “complacency” on him. But, of course, it is most likely that he is “living in the Present” for none of these reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And anyway, why should the creature be happy? — The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis

Lewis' antidote to this was to really give your all in the present and consign the outcomes to the will of God - for posterity and luck to judge, in secular terms. This is a form of living in the present. Notably Lewis sees our duties tomorrow as "acts of justice and charity", which are duties in the expanded sense @Count Timothy von Icarus was talking about. I think whether you read the above similarly to any self help book, or a means for bettering the world, depends upon the scope of duties and what you believe people following their duties successfully look like. From my relatively quotidian perspective on duty, in which people tend to satisfy them in our day to day lives, the above reads like any self help book extolling the virtues of living in the moment. If you instead read Wormwood's target of temptation heroically, that they will indeed plan tomorrows acts of justice and charity and simply pray for grace in their execution and outcome, the issue disappears. But the bar for good human conduct raises to a level that it becomes practically unattainable. At which point, in my view, it beggars belief that we could refer to any human as good accurately. And I do see us as referring to ourselves as good accurately, so what is good must be more quotidian than the world transforming eternal present of Lewis', or @Count Timothy von Icarus's, moral hero.

The latter moral hero functioning as someone to aspire to, or as the regulative ideal of our moral imagination? I can agree with that. But then we circle the inherency of failure again, and of the impossibility to fulfil that ideal, despite being required to do so by the state of things.

This post is just clarification.

If you’re only saying that some forms of agency are diffuse and collective, then I have no problem with that. The OP struck me as going farther than that, and claiming that there is monstrosity apart from the acts/creations/effects of agents. — Leontiskos

I am saying that. Though I imagine it can appear that I am saying something different since I see the flavour of agency that institutions and ideologies have as principally inhuman. And at a push I'd commit to human agency being kind of inhuman at its root. That's by the by though.

All you’re saying is that if 1c is not present then 2 does not follow, and my reasoning explicitly agrees with this. — Leontiskos

Yes. I assumed you were using the obligation of X into obligation of parts of X inference in a prior post. I then attacked the inference as if it were yours. I am making no use of the inference in my arguments. The failure of the inference is part of what leaves me the room to say that some obligations require supererogations, with the requirement being a logical one. The issue is part of the OP, but me writing about it like I have is because I believed you were using the inference against the OP, and I was attacking the inference without using the principle it embodies. I care that supererogatory acts aren't obligatory, I don't want to collapse any supererogations into obligations. That our obligations can require us going above and beyond our obligations in some sense is one of my central theses. That particular sense being {achieving the spirit of our duties or bringing about the kind of world living our obligations aims to bring about or the intended outcome of following our duties to begin with}}.

There is an equivocal term between (2) and (3), and once that is removed your (contradictory) supererogatory obligation dissolves. Namely, you added the word “meaningfully” in (3). Remove the equivocation by adding that adverb to (2) or removing it from (3) and the contradiction dissolves. — Leontiskos

Yes. "Meaningfully" was supposed to convey connection between our duties and why we follow them to begin with - that sense I spoke about in the final sentences of my prior paragraph in this post. If I was talking about fulfilling our duties and how that means we haven't fulfilled out duties, that would be a contradiction - and it's not the tension I care about in this thread. The @Count Timothy von Icarus leveraged this to form a counterargument of sorts, by inflating our obligations above and beyond my rather quotidian portrayal of them, our collective failures then become true "moral failings" of our duties, rather than some failure inherent in our moral conscience and the satisfaction of our duties to begin with. The latter is what I'm advocating. That we really do fulfil our duties, that they are quotidian in comparison to why we follow them, why we follow them casts a shadow on our conduct that renders our duties insufficient. Nevertheless we "do our bit", and it isn't enough.

That we "do our bit", and it isn't enough, I then interpret as a sense of monstrosity inherent in the "state of things", in our institutions and forms of life. The specific form of monstrosity is that what could be enough are acts of supererogation, the laudable but non-obligate. Even then they are no guarantee. The monstrosity that makes running food banks required to feed people despite massive food surpluses is one that those food banks volunteers' face, if they stop going above and beyond people go hungry. They're thus "expected" to in a manner that goes beyond their duties, and life presents them a threat in the form of a modus tollens impact, if you don't do this then that will not happen. Stop going to work for free and the poor starve.

That's the same threat we face whenever the letter of our duties does not also fulfil their spirit.

I hope this is clearer now.

Why'd you all have to keep pooping everywhere, gods.

Unless you're just saying that the many are lazy and therefore the few have to pick up the slack, but that seems like a different argument. — Leontiskos

My attitude toward us and our duties is that, by and large, we fulfil our duties. And I think to @Count Timothy von Icarus' point, our duties as we tend to circumscribe them are our duties. I think that most people are decent and have a good moral conscience, and follow most of their duties. Most people don't steal, cheat, harm others needlessly. Most people keep their promises and do their best to honour duties of care. I want to insist that by and large those duties are fulfilled. I just also want to insist that the broader purpose of those duties - their spirit, what they're done for, the kind of world following them is supposed to engender - is not fulfilled without going above and beyond them. That here is an inherent failure in the aggregate of just doing one's duties, that kind of conduct alone cannot bring about the world those duties are imagined to play a part in.

I think your response to this, and the Count's, is that this inherent failure coincides with an aspect of humanity's fall. That, in some sense, we're supposed to be better than this. I'd agree with that. But I think that supposed is holding ourselves to our better natures, principally in our imagination. We make ourselves aim for something better, even if we always fail in doing so. And that's good.

It's also a fundamentally optimistic gloss on he situation. It holds out a potential for humanity to be better based on better education toward virtue, or at least absolution for our perpetual failure to be better. I'm sufficiently cynical to believe that the optimistic gloss above is a less a means of aspiring to our higher natures, and more a means of telling ourselves that we are already acting in accordance with them and the world they imagine. That is perhaps by the by.

What I am certain of, however, is that the inherency of our failure to live up to the aspirations of our nature, and the necessity of absolving ourselves of that failure, are duties and norms working as normal. If you do your bit, you need not do more by definition - that's the connection between supererogation and duty, and what gives the prior argument you made @Leontiskos its refutational force. That to go above and beyond is, indeed, not expected on the basis of duty. And it cannot be, as to insist to go above duty is duty is a contradiction in terms

That failure, our perpetual inability to act in accordance with our better natures, and our ranging ability to absolve ourselves of responsibility for this, far from being an awfulness which can be excised from humanity is our essential condition. That our good conscience is inescapably not fit for the purposes it imagines itself to have.