Only time will tell.

I tried to make a similar point here.

↪fdrake Sure - ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. But what makes such cases 'extraordinary'? It's because, as I said, they go against the grain. I get that it's controversial, but his research is out there. — Wayfarer

So despite me going through all that effort to show you why the report is not particularly strong support for remembering past lives, you don't care, and supplant your own prejudice that I'm just having an auto-immune response to woo.

I am having an auto-immune response to woo, but this comes from a place of considered analysis rather than revulsion. Which I'm sure you'd realise if you were interested in actually being open minded on the issue.

If you take Google Scholar citations for math papers as a directed graph then use some measure of centrality (like an Erdos number), you'd get a measure of citation influence for papers. Whether this maps onto interest is a different question.

In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. — Wayfarer

Just to prove to you that my rejection of these reports 'suggesting' that remembrance from past lives is not based on blind prejudice, or scientific orthodoxy, or whatever irrelevant standard you're trying to portray me as holding, let's go through the above report.

In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to.

Great, already that the memory began with an elicitation from an external source. Moreover, it was part of a conversation which was recorded afterwards. This immediately means you can't distinguish conversational priming effects from those which arise from remembrance of past lives.

The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground.

Did the girl believe that her brother was 'mentally challenged' or that he was just 'stupid'? The '(mentally challenged)' bit is obviously some post processing of the report, we don't know if the girl actually remembered the brother as being an idiot or being mentally challenged or disabled in some non-specified way. This lack of specification allows the collator of the reports to substitute in 'mentally challenged' for 'dumb' in a just-so story. More formally, this is spending many 'researcher degrees of freedom' to tailor the post-processed (not original!) account to other things. On your standard, you would interpret low IQ, clumsiness, dyspraxia, any developmental disability effecting the mind, as equally being vindicated by the child saying she had a 'dumb' family member. But these details really matter. They matter because someone who had these specific memories with specified relationships in them would be having a typical event of memory; a young girl will probably know in what sense someone is 'dumb', but all we have here is that dumb was mapped to 'mentally challenged' during the post-processing of the report, with a vague status on precisely how much elicitation the mother treated the daughter too. You can only 'weasel out' of this with the stipulation that past life memories are qualitatively different from memories... IE they are not actually memories in the usual sense of the term.

This matters. A lot. You can give 'psychic readings' to people where you say Barnum statements and elicit specified responses, often people will remember you saying the elicited response rather than the Barnum statement. The report will say that 'The psychic predicted so many specific things about me!' and the person given the reading will have that memory, but the causal mechanism was one of elicitation rather than memory in a vacuum.

Herath is a unisex name, given that we do not know the degree of elicitation here, we cannot associate 'Herath' with 'bald father' accurately (also 'bald father', in a town with a Buddhist history, how specific!). We should have the same response to 'bald father called Herath' to 'mother with long brown hair called Herath', and it does not matter for the truthiness of the story which is which. But it absolutely does matter for the purposes of ascribing cause; the two are exchangeable for the purposes of the narrative validity, but are not exchangeable in terms of connection to a memory. You'd be saying the same thing for both, but they're different reports which would have been fit to the facts differently.

A marketplace near a stupa makes a lot of sense, they're going to be central features of a town.

For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were)

Yes, surely the memory averaged over the contents of male relatives, rather than being rather specific upon elicitation like usual memories. This is a retrojection of memory validity which just wasn't there, and has no causal mechanism associated with it. If you could tell me why it makes sense for 'ancestral memories' to sometimes average over male heritage lines and sometimes not I'd love to know.

The same goes for having dogs in the backyard being fed meat, this is common. The same goes for coconuts on the ground in marketplaces...

Anyway, the minimal criterion for one thing X being an indicator of another Y is that X is more probable (or less probable) given Y. One needs to assume that the relationship between the events in the town and the events the girl came up with are one of memory in order to assign that one is more probable given the hypothesis of memory. This goes in completely the wrong direction, what you should do when reviewing such reports is to ask the question "How likely is the scenario envisaged given how likely the scenario is to happen?'.

And when we ask 'how likely is the scenario to happen', the scenario needs to be highly specified, and not fit to the facts on an interpretive basis (which is what was done during the 'search' for the events of the memory).

Moreover, you also need to look over all possible remembrance events, if most are filtered out due to evidential standards, but some are left in without a pre-specified standard of validity (not which 'seem hardest to explain), you still have the problem of why are there so few reports which meet a higher evidential standard. Is the mechanism for generating the reports with a lower evidential standard substantially different for the mechanism generating the reports with a higher evidential standard? Or are they post selected for demonstrative purposes (which is what is being done here!)

If I took all the obese people in the world and looked at their chance of heart disease, I would vastly over-estimate the chance of heart disease in the general population if I did not take into account the fact that I have filtered the population. The same thing happens here, the reports of higher evidential standard say nothing about those which have a typical evidential standard; IE, most reports of such things are so easy to recognise as incredibly flawed that they are immediately removed from the study. To put it in plain words, the fact of the matter is that even if you grant that the memories considered in the higher evidential standard group are more likely to be remembrance of past lives than the ones in the lower evidential standard group, most reports of past lives are still too flawed to use as evidence.

And what is the standard for the ones in the higher evidential standard group? Not just the quality of elicitation, surely, one also wishes to check if they are true. Now, when they are true, we have a tiny subset of reports which purportedly describe real events. We now need to ask the question: does the probability of the real event increase when the event is described or elicited? But of course, since this pre-selection by coincidence of report with real events has happened, one can never ask this question of the data. The very criterion with which you would establish a mechanism of past life remembrance is excluded through the filtration of the study to the ones with a 'higher evidential standard'; which apparently is literally just the events elicited/described by the remember happened somewhere at some time under some interpretation (researcher degrees of freedom).

You might say that they happened in place X in way Y, but one needs to aggregate over the reports to get the real picture of what is going on. The relevance here is that things which happened in place X in way Y and were described as happening in some way related to X and some way related to Y is not the same criterion of validity as events X happening in way Y in the report (also note the priming/elicitation memory confusion here, it interacts!). The 'in some way' matters, as this is an inherent part of the filtration procedure; it has so many 'researcher degrees of freedom' that some fit is bound to happen for some reports. It is a mismatch inherent in the selection procedure for validity, you spend all the information you have on establishing the coincidence of real event with described event, not the conditional report validity (which is the minimal criterion for informativeness of X on Y... which is required for X to be memories of Y)

You might say I'm being too cautious, I would not hold up my beliefs in every-day life to this standard. And you're right, but the every-day is every-day, we need to have higher standards of evidential validity when considering questions as big as 'can we remember past lives?'.

I'm trying my best to not become the thing that I am criticizing, so please don't interpret anything I've written as a criticism of yourself. I too fancy myself a man of ideas, and really that's the inherent value I'm trying to promote. — VagabondSpectre

Can I take credit for this? Pretty please.

I think there's too much data presented in these cases to all be written off as coincidence or conspiracy. Also it should be noted that Stevenson never said that these cases amounted to proof of the veracity of past-life memories, only that it was suggestive of it. — Wayfarer

You could interpret it that way, being 'suggestive' of it. But notice that being suggestive does not mean that belief in what is suggested is warranted! The data may be consistent with remembering past lives, but it is also consistent with chance. Also notice no causal mechanism is ascribed to 'remembering past lives', one blurs their eyes and thinks that such a scientific hypothesis has been suggested, but there are plenty of ways that it could happen, and the data provides evidence for none of them because it is consistent with all of them.

A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train. On the back of the head of a little boy in Thailand was a small, round puckered birthmark, and at the front was a larger, irregular birthmark, resembling the entry and exit wounds of a bullet; Stevenson had already confirmed the details of the boy’s statements about the life of a man who’d been shot in the head from behind with a rifle, so that seemed to fit. And a child in India who said he remembered the life of boy who’d lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder-chopping machine mishap was born with boneless stubs for fingers on his right hand only. This type of “unilateral brachydactyly” is so rare, Stevenson pointed out, that he couldn’t find a single medical publication of another case. — Jesse Bering

It's very easy to fit this to a narrative, but the narrative does not need a specified causal mechanism to make sense. It only requires us to understand the flow of ideas in the narrative. Such an understanding is not a scientific hypothesis, it's not any scientific hypothesis, it's a gigantic disjunction which rules out nothing and thereby supports nothing.

In order for those details in the story to provide information about the past life, the coincidence of events is not sufficient. One event has to be more likely given the other, and that minimal criterion for informativeness has never been established. Even this does not establish any causal mechanism, only correlation (or more precisely a reduction in relative entropy/increased specificity).

One concludes, say, obesity is a risk factor for heart disease because having any heart disease is more likely given being obese. Such reasoning is completely absent here, in this apparently knock-down example (as you have presented it) demonstrating that past lives are indeed remembered.

But apparently, you seek to collapse the distance between possibility/consistency and justification/causality, all the while paying lip service to the virtue of epistemological humility.

If Stevenson spent most of his life studying these reports and could only conclude the strongest examples are merely suggestive of his thesis, I wonder how this counts as evidence for typical 'past-life remembrance' candidates not being due to more mundane causes. Obviously, it does not, and even for Stevenson the absence of effect dominates.

You're paying lipservice to scientific thought when it suits you, it's an old game of snake oil and equivocation. I hope you're not buying.

If it were as simple as you suggest, there would be no data. — Wayfarer

Seriously? The existence of data on a topic gives validity to conclusions made from the data? It doesn't.

Caveat: the matter is subject to strong cultural taboos in Western society, for obvious reasons - such beliefs having been declared anathema in the early Christian church and also challenging current scientific understanding of the nature of mind. — Wayfarer

There just aren't enough reports with enough accuracy to make past life memories plausible over unspecified random mechanisms associating categories with grammatical english strings. I've read a few of these reports, and I've never seen anything in them that can't be explained by either the Barnum effect or random chance. You also have huge priming effects in a lot of them; kids have their memories 'jogged' by context in the studies (as Stevenson notes), but the 'jogging' is a priming effect which can trigger other priming effects. The reports develop over conversations, usually, and are not sufficiently controlled to establish the presence of any causal mechanism. Nevermind, y'know, literally remembering things from before the formation of the subject's brain.

Kids' memories about things besides past lives, about mundane events, are a lot stronger. Of course, one can always say past lives have a mystical quality of being remembered from beyond the veil, which reduces their information specificity and scope, but really that reduction of specificity and scope is precisely what one expects when this is randomness in huge, filtered for effect size (in the sense of only 'strong' reports of past lives are present and attributed causal mechanism, such conditioning invalidates actual scientific papers all the time) observational studies having non-specified causal structures during inference for hypothesis support.

Edit: and before you rejoinder with 'mind!=brain', I'm not saying that. I'm saying 'mind => brain' and using the Moorean shift.

Under capitalism, education is a commodity, and is democratised by consumerism - the customer is always right. So professors have to win popularity contests just like the rest of us. And in particular, academics that deliberately put themselves in the public eye by publishing controversial political pieces in the mainstream media need to toughen up and stop whining about witch hunts when they meet some opposition and become somewhat unpopular. Folks that want unquestioned tenure should stay in their ivory towers and and only talk to other tenured academics. i never complain about the ones I never hear about. Government advisers deserve the blame for everything, don't they? — unenlightened

:up:

Twitter didn't create Scruton's views, or their social context. The method here is more like discovering a septic spot then squeezing it than giving yourself a midge bite. Scruton was already conservative wallpaper.

All that deep learning stuff on your posting habits is to map you onto a consumer identity (commodified personhood), this is why social media synergises so well with advertising. You first have that advertising allows the commodification of potential; your potential attention increases the expected revenue through exposure to goods you may purchase, making the codification of your personality valuable intellectual property (yes, you don't own your cyberspace image, that is terrifying).

You then have the site explicitly tailoring the goods it shows you to maximise the purchase chance. This has the effect of associating a revenue stream, literally, with your eye movements and left mouse button clicks.

But that's the rub isn't it? We're divided and conquered into these groups which are emotionally focused on the most trivial aspects of ourselves and the other, to the point that it crowds out any room for movements that don't match their attention-getting-power. — VagabondSpectre

Social media = social life and discourse = politics make sense in a political system where individuals cannot influence all, or at least the most important, institutional influences on their lives. Twitter is far less the downfall of civilisation than a concentrated expression of the alienation of people from politics and their governments from power. It reflects the state of the world more than it creates it.

The subjectivities which make good use of Twitter are those who already resemble brands, the Ben Shapiros, the Sargons, the Stephen Frys. Our use of it is a tragic imitation of its optimality condition, trying to ram the square peg of our souls through the round hole of commodified personhood. No wonder we come out bloody.

Do you think democracy will be able to overcome this trauma with some kind of coming-of-age trial and triumph? — VagabondSpectre

I don't think it's a threat to democracy, it rarely leads to disruptions in anything, or political movements. What is a continuing threat to democracy, a threat through omitted necessary action, is the reduction of politics to the perturbation or stabilisation of the norms of discourse (in social media). Our government institutions are now more than ever the HR department of international corporate power, and Twitter would need to be repurposed or 'reclaimed' by a real, global, social-democratic movement for it to in any way contribute to frustrating the desires of that power.

It's not even a 'distraction' or a 'waste of resources' if this becomes discourse, which is the way I think it's going. It's already political discourse, the powerful meet behind closed doors, they don't have to post on social media to have an impact. Even when that impact, the impact of all our thinking and desires, is only ever a caricature of the image of the world it wishes to create.

A caricature that makes lots of ad revenue, by the way.

Must we really join them? — VagabondSpectre

We all float down here, already.

For a second I would like to defend the impulse to castigate Scruton.

There are Scruton's ideas about sex being an interpersonal relationship between two people. For each, it is a relationship between self and other. He interprets masturbation during sex being a momentary cessation of that relationship, and sees (or saw) homosexuality as exploring someone who isn't other enough. That these are false I take as obvious, there are sexual contexts in which masturbation is still interpersonal. It is argued like a man who's never sucked a dick. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily sexist, insofar as it applies to men as well as women.

But really, what's at stake here is the social context of Scruton's ideas. Or the social context of Paglia's ideas. Or whatever martyred heretic we'd like to talk about. To the extent that shallow responses in our reactionary social media do not address themselves to the ideas in their philosophical context, we should be careful to interpret the responses not as off topic or as reductive (which they are, from the perspective of criticising the philosophy of the martyrs), but as focussed upon the norms of thought implicated and instigated by the expression of those ideas. It is in this regard that a government can be justified in revoking someone's position, or a newspaper justified in refusing someone a column. But it is also on this level, the level of the norms of discourse, that Twitter frenzies and other reactionary content act.

When people discuss Scruton's ideas, now for better or worse, they have been pulled into a social context away from the flowers in his country estate, his house with its stable, and the lairds gallavanting in the dale. Scruton's ideas become their echoes in discourse, a shallow projection onto a battleground of spittle and memes. One can distance oneself from this perspective, and wish for the days of yore when apparently discourse was not so reactionary, when simplifications did not propagate into received wisdom. But simplifications do propagate into received wisdom, internet debate is a market for attention, and the valued commodities are wit and pith.

Insofar as this medium is reactionary, it is grounded in its specular reflexivity; an alienated series of images signifying other images, simplifications upon simplifications, a world view condensed to 33 characters. Here in Dys among the other heretics, screams call for more screams. In the marketplace of ideas, attention buys more attention, magnifying outrage and outrage about outrage. In this medium, a call for sanity is still assigned a side, a call for sanity from both sides at best upends the table or leaves the game. At worst, the laments of the sane are a performative contradiction, pieces in a game they do not understand, or think in vain that their lamentation allows them to escape their place in Hell. They speak in others' voices in foreign words, like the simplified language of a migrant worker on another nation's soil. They cannot integrate without losing themselves in the throes of this unholy river, among the other corpulent bodies covered with the bloody detritus of the Styx.

In this medium, restraint casts only a shadow of madness, the bastard smile of a mutinous super ego conjured from the space between othering and the other. It plays the same part as the other it loathes, whether it likes it or not.

(1) How can Hegel claim that being and nothing are and are not the same? This is a contradiction. — philosophy

The SEP article on Hegel's dialectics has a long section describing the Being and Nothing relationship.

If you want 'elite' content, make it, and ignore anyone who doesn't live up to your standards.

Axiom of restricted comprehension sorts that out. You can't form sets out of arbitrary predicates, the only time you can form a set using a predicate is when you apply a predicate to a set which has been established to exist by other means.

↪fdrake Anecdotal evidence then. Or the weird assumption that porn is somehow representative of common sexual acts. — Benkei

Yeah, I didn't intend my statement to actually be supporting Scruton's moralism about sex. What I actually wanted to convey was...

Incredibly tiring and thorough research, I imagine. — fdrake

The image of Scruton's research being watching a fuckload of porn and proceeding to have a furious guilt wank. Which was supposed to convey something like you did explicitly with:

My psycho-analytical guess is that Scruton is disgusted with himself either for being excited about something he thinks is morally wrong or the insecurity it causes in him to make himself that vulnerable to the other. Since that uneasiness is caused by something the woman does, it obviously must be her fault. — Benkei

I've got a caveat though, but I'm sure you'll actually agree with what I say. When you say:

Here's my prescriptive take on sex: "Have fun and don't kill each other".

There are clearly times when a stranger can surprise you during the act and you can enjoy it, and vice versa. This clearly requires some trust, as that tantalising hinterland of ambiguity can rapidly turn unpleasant. One of the benefits of having a long term sexual partner is that you can visit amazingly good sex land from this position of radical safety, which allows deeper emotional responses than surface level pleasure to obtain or even motivate the act (say, anger and frustration, longing and extreme love). And also to ignore or challenge the usual (but necessary) rituals we establish consent through (as if feeling out a stranger's sexual boundaries).

I like to imagine Scruton first discovered erogenous ambiguity after a life time of 'thinking of England' when 'researching' sex through the medium of porn, and he jacked off so amazingly hard he had to spill a lot of ink to wipe up the stains.

Edit: but I don't think leftists should treat Scruton's ideas, despite how problematic they are, in exactly the same manner they'd treat someone much further right (IE instead of the usual habit of addressing the person's ideas, addressing the role their ideas play in discourse). Luckily how Scruton expresses himself is pretty easy to provide genuine critique of, and I think (at least I would like to imagine) that supporters of Scruton really could have their minds changed through reasonable discussion. Even if you (not you specifically, talking about fellow leftists) wish to treat his statements as a problematic symptoms of discourse (which they are, consistent with the reactionary heart of conservatism), you're just going to alienate people who would otherwise be receptive to your views. Though I doubt Scruton himself would be persuaded by such arguments.

Incredibly tiring and thorough research, I imagine.

Yes. Though, I'd love to see a conservative response longing for a return to the conditions soon after the sexual revolution, rather than what can seem as the sanitised discourse we can have about it now; I'm tempted to say the idea of being surprised by your desires and how you relate to someone is a bit at odds with the 'establish verbal consent before doing anything' memes you see about it.

No, the passage demonstrates a profound ignorance of female sexuality, given the importance of clitoral stimulation for most women during sex. Not sure how familiar people generally were with this in 1986, but it also substitutes communication between partners (e.g. "how do I make sex great for you") with unilateral disgust. — Maw

While I largely agree with you, I'm amused that critiquing someone's morality can now mean telling them how to fuck better.

Make a thread of it if you can be bothered. I fondly remember when North Star dropped it.

A: "He's right, we need to show solidarity regardless of petty disagreements, we care too much about dismantling the worldviews of allies and too little about defending and publicising our basic principles!"
B: "What a crypto-liberal this one is, you think that political results flow from reasoned disagreement? Can you just talk to the fascists and ask them not to kill you?"
A: "We're not talking about talking to fascists, we're talking about talking to leftists"
C: "Can't you see this is just another piece of divisive rhetoric from a bourgeoise ideologue? The old subordination of gender and race differences to 'the' class difference was debunked years ago'
D: "You vulgar intersectional fuckwads are the reason we're in this mess anyway"
E: "Well you're fucking racist for lumping post colonial critical theory in with the vulgarisation of standpoint epistemology and privilege theory that shows up on fucking Twitter"

Edit I forgot F, directed at people who had the same response as me: "You people who find all this funny with your apolitical ironic detachment are the fucking worst"

Of course. I meant to convey that it, predictably, lead to a schism among witch hunt leftists and another witch hunt.

Edit: though, you don't actually 'see' the effects on those who were successfully persuaded by it and do not go on the witch hunts.

The only comment I have on the article is that despite its great content it actually gets used as a device to bash 'witch hunt' leftists on the head with. Not really the author's fault most of what it did was fan the fire though.

Advise anyone interested in Heidegger to read it, it was very good and well written.

There's no gotcha here, no case for calling out. It's time to grow up and exit the vampire's castle. — jamalrob

In case anyone wasn't aware of the reference, it's an excellent article. Though it's definitely pitched at people who are already very leftist.

Merged duplicate threads.

Grice's maxims are useful.

Quantity
1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Quality: ‘Try to make your contribution one that is true’
1 Do not say what you believe to be false.
2 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Relevance: ‘Be relevant’
Manner: ‘Be perspicuous’
1 Avoid obscurity of expression.
2 Avoid ambiguity.
3 Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4 Be orderly.

For you, my ghost.

My sister haunts the servers among the early dead
Each photograph reposted, lost, it should remain unsaid
That a spectacle of grief where no tear graces a head
Is muted fury serving none except the one who owns the thread

I’ve forgotten her face, her name, now silence is her tongue
A bricolage of sorrow speaks for noisy revision
To vandalize and substitute, when all is said and done
Nothing remains except a trace of strangers having fun

If I could find my affectation in this rabble of the sad
I’d ask each and all for quiet and to stop feeding the fad
That subdivides and analyses every word they ever had
Each pattern advertises tombstones for epigraphs

And god forbid in weakness should I drown in sponsorship
You reduced her from a memory to another asset stripped
I wish you’d flayed her in the flesh than ripped and raped her for a tip
that comes in hollow climax whenever we submit

You hold her in a prism that casts remembrance as a ghost
To remind us all for one and all the community you host
Is a movie you created for a lonely symbiote
That works in words for nothing earned when all returns to dust

Fair. :up:

It's extremely dubious that previous the previous eras he was "nostalgic" for wouldn't have had just the same issues regarding the "art" and "techne" distinction he made. — Terrapin Station

Yeah he's definitely not trying to portray history in all its gory details and banalities, he's a lot more concerned with (his idiosyncratic notion of) philosophical history. Early Heidegger likes to put in in terms of a 'return' to fundamental questions about our lives that have become obscured through the history of philosophy. There are no battles or politics in Heidegger's history, only ideas.

Edit: and only ideas from great thinkers.

Thanks.

I don't know much about the distinction between art and techne in the later Heidegger, but at least the metaphysical side of your question in the OP is related to Heidegger's papers 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and 'The Question Concerning Technology'. He definitely contrasts artistic (or poetic) understanding and technical understanding, and displays suspicion and sorrow about the decline of poetic understanding and the growth of technical understanding.

For Heidegger, technical understanding is rooted in seeing the world as primarily transformable natural resources; as the substrate of a nature full of opportunities for humans to seize. This is contrasted to more 'primordial' senses of understanding associated with art, and a more primordial understanding associated with nature. Artistic understanding and a more primordial way of understanding nature are associated with the concept of 'dwelling', as in being engaged practically in a world we ultimately respect and care about. An analogy I like here is the love you have for your family (hopefully anyway) contrasted to seeing them as sources of income to exploit. The former is a cooperative and respectful experience for those involved, even if there are troubles, the latter can be so exploitative its practitioners might not even realise it's exploitative.

Throughout Heidegger's corpus, there's a heavy sense of nostalgia and forlornness for peasant life, associated with individual craftsmanship and pre-industrial agricultural communities. I've seen people try to make sense of his alliance with the Nazi party in terms like this. A central part of Nazi propaganda was the idea of the German people returning to an ancient (like Heidegger's 'primordial') heritage, mastering themselves, and valorising whatever communities they belonged to.

The Jews were characterised as technocratic usurers, greedy and exploitative of the people and resources they controlled. It is not so surprising that this characterisation of the Jews aligns itself with industrial mercantilism and the increasing societal importance of technical understanding; with the same notes of exploitation you can hear in Heidegger's concept of technical understanding. And the forlorn nostalgia longing for a return to more 'primordial' ways of being is definitely present in Heidegger's thought and is fully commensurate with the nationalist Nazi myth of the nation.

Ok. Can you please tell me how Colingwood uses the terms you referenced?

I'm not your enemy, I promise. Nor am I trying to troll.

Are there any quotes you can give from the text you are referencing that might help?

Yes, apparently. Now simmer down.

If you have issues with how you have been moderated in this discussion feel free to start a complaint thread about me in the 'Feedback' board.

There is moderation.

↪Terrapin Station I think Oscar Wilde defined art and creativity quite well; something completely useless. What he means by this is that it is useless to most people. Plotinus and Eckhart write of the difference between Being and Nothingness, no? And this is adopted by Heidegger and Sartre. We inhabited the middle realm between the two, but fell in to the abyss of nothingness, through the emergence of modernity. Our only hope, then, of returning in to the realm of Satya Yuga, as Evola puts it, is a complete and utter paradigm shift. — räthsel

So Collingwood is using Wilde's definition? And he's saying that there's a distinction to be had between "merely" functional living and "completely useless" living ("completely useless" to most people), while Heidegger and Spengler are saying that "completely useless" living (to most people) isn't possible at present for some reason, whereas it used to be? — Terrapin Station

The question Terrapin asked of you was fine. You have not characterised 'functional or 'creative'. Seeing as they are technical terms within another philosopher's account you are referencing, and it is not fair to assume common knowledge of what those terms mean in the account with all participants in this discussion, it would have been nice for you to actually say what they mean for the author you reference.

That said, Terrapin often comes off as adversarial even when he is not. Part of how he posts. But you can actually have decent discussions with him if you thoroughly answer the questions. or you can ignore the questions if you think they are irrelevant or uninteresting.

Stop the flamewar you're trying to have. Neither of you will gain anything from it besides a warning, and it wastes my time.

It seems to me that everything that is supposed to make philosophy relevant is at stake in not leaving things to the singular, if the singular fails to also teach us anything about form and pattern. — Joshs

Do you actually attribute this belief to me, based on what I've written, or are you speaking hypothetically?

My concern with it is primarily the claim that someone can have the normal meanings in mind by the terms. I don't think that really follows from anything. — Terrapin Station

You know, it's funny, a lot of the discussion here is precisely disagreeing on what the 'normal meaning' of the phrase is. Your suspicion's right, I think, that anyone fluent in English would immediately understand the phrase through some imaginative exercise. But the interesting thing here is why it is necessary to understand the phrase in this way, and where do the imaginative contexts come from?

I think there's a really interesting epistemological issue here. How can we ensure that we're being true to the thing we're interpreting when it provokes a suspension of the usual order of things?

This is what give us the tools, if we conclude that a revision in our understanding is required , to accomplish such revision. What do you think? — Joshs

Honestly? That we've done just fine supplying relevant contexts to the phrase to interpret it without all the theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular. It hasn't really told us about what senses of possibility or transformation are immanent with respect to the phrase and which aren't, just made us suspect that they exist.

Edit: though, I probably wouldn't've understood what you wrote if I hadn't travelled similar theoretical ground before.

Edit2: the major disagreement I have is quite pedantic, but I think it's important.

As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. — Joshs

Putting it very densely; looking at it, I don't think it's quite right to say that the interpretive contexts adjoined to the statement are necessarily presupposed, as if fitting together with a system of inferential rules and reasonable conduct. The act which adjoins the context to the phrase is creative and spontaneous as much as it is following cues from our previous conventions. And thus in this regard it's not so much a philosophical presupposition of a pre-existing interpretive framework or an undecidable schism between interpretive frameworks (which marks why our interpretive decisions are creative as well as inferential), but an act of concept creation tailored to the phrase to give it a philosophical grammar which makes sense of it. If a presupposition is something which can be refuted through sufficient analysis, the act of interpretation here contrasts to presupposition. This is because the application of a philosophical grammar to interpret the phrase generates a novel conceptual space (as @sime puts it) which is equivalent (sortally, if anyone else is tracking when they crop up) to our understanding of the phrase when interpreted as an interpretive act; in that regard we can't so much refute the interpretation as reject or fail to understand the framework which comes along with it.

Edit 3: but perhaps I have been smoking too much Laruelle recently.