I'll take an example of NATO enlargement. One dominant narrative is that Russia was weak, Clinton wanted votes of those with East European ancestry and didn't think that Russia would ever be a problem. The points are true, how this nice US centric narrative forgets totally the other countries involved: the countries wanting to join NATO and the other NATO countries. For example with the Baltic States, the US (and actually the UK) approached behind closed doors Sweden and Finland first if our countries could give security guarantees for the newly independent again Baltic states. Our answer was "HELL NO!!!" and both countries were genuinely happy that the Baltic states did join NATO. — ssu

I admit, I'm probably missing something due to my own historical ignorance, but I don't understand the relevance of that to what we were talking about.

The hubris is in self-declaring one's self an intellectual, suggesting one belongs in the court of philosopher kings. It is at the heart of liberal elitism, and it forms the core of the left/right polarization. Who is the intellectual in Chomsky's view? I'd suggest it's Obama and not Trump, despite Trump hardly being an intellectual light weight. It's hard to read that without laughing isn't it, it being so ingrained in us that the right and its leadership is thought to either be composed of simpletons or those puppeteers manipulating simpletons.

So, per Chomsky, the duty then is shifted upon those who know better, not the simpletons, not the manipulators, but those even tempered, well educated, well informed academics whose wisdom should guide us. It would seem that it must be Chomsky himself who would be the top intellectual, which should come as no surprise. — Hanover

Chomsky's pretty smart though. He proved himself in linguistics, smart guy. Does that qualify him to speak on politics? Maybe, maybe not. But we know that this tradition isn't a specifically liberal thing. How do we know?

Buckley, for example, who was very much a part of this tradition. And then, going back: Burke, Chesteron. so on and so forth. There's a robust tradition of self-declared intellectual conservatives. The national review is still, more or less explicitly, running on the fumes of their previous existence.

My sense is Buckley would disagree with Chomsky, but agree with him on the importance of the intellectual's role.

But maybe you don't like Buckley either? Trump is smart, undoubtedly, I don't buy the bumbling idiot thing for a second. BUT - he's not an intellectual in the Buckley sense. Trump is smart, I sincerely believe that, but he doesn't seem to be interested in political ideas and their implications at all. Maybe for a second. But only insofar as that consideration carries him through this room and onto the next.

Maybe you think that's laudable. Fine. But I think - in fact I'm quite convinced - that trumps' mercurial self-identity, if displayed by Obama, or others - that this would be fodder for your criticism of them, were they to act similarly with Kim Jong, or others. My sense, too, is that if there were a Buckley for today, you'd make use of him.

I have a strong feeling ithat you'll adjust to whatever the circumstances are, so long as you can can maintain a no-nonsense persona. I have a strong feeling youll impose that willigness to shift on liberals, especially wheb youre dosing it yourself. Of course, liberals do do that. be better, then.

You have ideas, but you're content to bracket them, in order to get a rise. Racy joke --> the lesser sense of humor of others --> self-identity, and political ideas confirmed. There's something to that. But there are others as well-rounded as you, and they're not all dry, sardonic trumpians.

tldr: you're playing on an old 'smart 'experts'' vs 'honest, realistic americans' trope, even if you would balk at that trope put so baldly. And you're making that trope align with the liberals vs conservatives dichotomy, even though that isn't accurate, and would give most traditional conservatives minor seizures.

But why are you doing that? Who are you talking to?

[suspicions about old idealisms, compromise, and redirection of annoyance, using what's at hand.]

Nietzsche, free spirit, wouldnt have added a question mark

Well I've had a couple drinks tonight, and I say to you all - vice is moral. what about that

Well I've had a couple drinks tonight, and I say to you all - vice is moral. what about that

So, next time your roommate leaves his socks in the hallway and dirty dishes in the sink, which I suspect he does because that's what all roommates do, piss on the floor in his bedroom, leaving a yellowish bubbly puddle right before his bed. Nothing else need be said. He'll know clearly where things stand. — Hanover

It's not a bad tactic. As it stands, he's delegated the role of expelling bodily fluids in my room to his cat, who sometimes pukes. Maybe I'll just start peeing on the cat.

If you're trying to determine the contours of your own responsibility (as Chomsky is), wouldn't you have to focus on those things for which you bear some responsibility? It seems to me that a book about the responsibility of [western] intellectuals would, necessarily, focus on those things for which [western] intellectuals could be held responsible.

What would be hubristic would be to insist that the narrative relevant to this kind of project (the narrative of western intervention and moral cupability) is exhaustive, or at least is the narrative that most adequately integrates relevant historical detail.

But the existence of narratives of western responsibility (especially when put in the service of determining one's own responsibilties as westerners) does not entail that those who create or consume such narratives must necessarily discount other narratives.

An analogy : A niche academic historian might produce a study on e.g. the impact of technological changes of leatherworking on the economies of 1000-1600 Europe. Would one attack that historian along these lines : "And here lies the problem: the narrative is focused on Leatherworking, it excludes other narratives." Well, yes the focus is on leatherwokring, because Leatherworking is whats relevant to the study.

@Hanover

Mostly agree, but -

(f) pissed on your floor — Hanover

I'd definitely be annoyed if my roommate got blackout drunk and mistook my closet for the bathroom. But if he made a sober decision to piss in my closet....Seems much worse, in a way.

I guess the difference is the first is an accident, the second would have to be a (particularly disturbing) intentional act of aggression.

Or, put another way. The first is an offense to me because it displays an certain level of indifference to me as a roommate (my roommate feels comfortable coming home stinking drunk to our apartment, with all the risks that entails, but wouldn't do the same at his parent's or grandmothers' etc.). But the second is as a greater offense to me, because it expresses active hostility.

Yet still, my intuition is thinking there is more to this. I can't help but think that in some instances, framing the universalization in the way of the will as opposed to the action might change the way we think about it. — moralpanic

This seems like a legitimate worry. I htink the best way to draw out what you're feeling is to give an example where one of the two (action, will) would be engaged, but the other of the two wouldn't be.

I see the concern of the OP as there really not being a distinction between the real and the perceived at least to the extent that we talk about the two as if they are the same and there is no reason to declare one more real than the other. — Hanover

Even if that were what the OP was about...

- I'm having trouble gleaning that, at least from the OP alone...maybe there's some extra-thread context I'm missing? -

...but even if the OP were a symptom of a broader pomo attempt to collapse the distinction between lived experience and facts - something, something, safe spaces - would it really help to save a space for emphatic 'reallys' or 'absolutelys'? as indices of a refusal to accede to the pomo safespacers' demand for insular, reassuring pseudo-realities untethered to the world as it is?

This seems like a slippery slope, which will lead inevitably to 'really' or 'absolutely' inflation. If anyone can get their grubby hands on these words - and they will, if those words have power - they won't mean much of anything.

And that's already happened.

Yes, or that the mashed isn't the potato. — S

Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen.

It's kind of funny if you take out the definite article, so he's just talking resentfully about a guy named Will, who is Hegel.

which may make us attractive this way maybe? — Anaxagoras

Not sure if I'm interpreting this right - are you saying you identify as dark triad?

I'm sure you're right ( I haven't read Austin really), for me it was a pavlov association w/ 'slab'

The whole scenario (really, his whole life) couldn't possibly lend itself better to a screenwriter. I'm surprised W hasn't gotten the biopic treatment yet ala The Imitation Game or A Beautiful Mind.

For a different kind of treatment, if you haven't seen it yet -



h/t tgw

A quote from David Foster Wallace, which gets at this. (He seems to have been pretty dark triad himself, despite his compulsive need to present as a moralist.)

"The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”"

Most people, deep down, feel like there is something unique about them, something valuable, that the rest of the world doesn't quite see or understand. Even for those who don't feel that, they probably have a latent desire to feel valued in that way.

Being valued in this way feels more valuable if it comes from someone confident, who seems to be unconcerned with adhering to social convention. It feels somehow purer, and more authentic.

If someone strong appears to see through all the bullshit in the world, yet still values you - that's druglike.

Of course, when we're talking about dark triad, it's all smoke and mirrors. It's flattery and illusion. But it's easy to miss that - or be willingly blind to it - when the attention being directed your way taps so directly into your primal need for recognition and attention.

I think it works better if you don't try to glean a moral from it. It's just a really funny way to die.

This is genuinely hilarious, unlike most ancient jokes. It's like the opposite of Nietzsche going crazy with sorrow after seeing a horse getting beat. It's a much better story.

Thanks for the considered response. I would certainly agree that Kant's analysis is not without its flaws. I do think, however (echoing Janus) that while your criticisms of the noumenon are perhaps applicable to the A edition, Kant himself took into account these problems and so amended his work. I think this is admirable, and that there is no problem with taking his corrections into account when appraising his thought.The final version of the work does not fall prey to these errors.

That this aspect of noumenality cuts both ways (outward to the world, inward to the subject) is not a flaw, but a feature. The soul, for Kant, is unknowable - hence the paralogism .All we have access to is the form of transcendental subjectivity. (If this were not the case, we'd find ourselves caught in an infinite regress,)

Of course, the philosophers after all of that, around the time of the linguistic turn, also had relevant points to make: G. E. Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein. — S

Oh, for sure. esp. Wittgenstein.

I feel like I've been antagonistic in many of my recent posts on some of your threads, for reasons beyond me. I like your OP and feel like most days I'm trying to find that same place. I'll follow the lead of others here and throw in a verse I like, that gets me close to that feeling.

You have slept in the Sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn’t.

gotcha. I think it could be helpful to bring that experience into this thread as a kind of 'case-study' in order to pick apart exactly what went wrong.

By consulting with a know-it-all on reddit, I can officially say that Wittgenstein was talking about how the logical structure of language and the logical structure of the world are the same.

How do we know this, though? The statement implies a transcendental vantage point. Or maybe Wittgenstein was an anti-realist. — frank

The know-it-all you consulted appears to have had W's Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus in mind. (Cool story about that book - apparently W began writing it in the trenches in WW1. I just saw that Peter Jackson documentary about the war - hard to imagine someone in those circumstances doing that. Though... it might make sense in another way. There's something protective, bubble-like about the book. I say that because-->) you're right that TLP implies a transcendental vantage point. To the point where it might also imply solipsism. Which is troubling. And Wittgenstein was duly troubled. Enough to change his whole approach entirely.

He wrote Philosophical Investigations in large part as an ultra-self-conscious repudiation of the TLP. Which is why your post seems misplaced 36 pages into a reading group thread of PI. If you'd read up to this point, you'd have registered the multiple places he chastises his earlier self and ideas, quite explicitly.

He changed his mind, and owned that his brash, fuck-you-everyone treatise (the one the reddit know-it-all seems to have been referencing) was wrong. Pretty admirable, even if he repudiated it with another brash, fuck-you-everyone treatise.

But instead, what I've seen happen is that some people will just keep pushing their own ideas and going around in circles, and then all I end up doing is identifying the reoccurring problem while the other person just keeps pushing on. If you're either unwilling or unable to engage in a more productive way with an idea, because it clashes with an idea of your own that you won't let go off, then you should just come out and say so, and let that be the end of it. — S

I sympathize. But it's probably the case that the other side also experiences your pushing on as missing the already identified problem, while also seeing themselves as just pushing on. It gets more tricky than horses vs cats quickly.

So what's to be done?

Another way to put this is that the 'transparent' signs you've mentioned aren't just one of two options (transparent, opaque) and Kant & Locke blindly chose one of them. The cartesian attack is what brings this transparency into question. Locke comes after.

@Theorem Responding to you late, but here goes.

It's been almost a decade since I read Kant's Critiques, so I don't have the textual references handy, only a memory of the broadstrokes.

I understand the historical context to be something like [the below]. I imagine I won't get this quite right, because I haven't studied all these figures in depth. Let me know what you think.

Descartes, through radical doubt, severs the connection between our experience and the world 'out there' He reinstates that connection through God (via our awareness of infinity). A perfect God will ensure that our clear and distinct ideas correspond to reality. [tangential, but I think this is more interesting an idea than people make it out to be. There's a lot to chew on w/ the infinity stuff- it's not blind faith as some make it out me. ]

The rationalists - Spinoza & Leibniz - jump in, taking Descartes' lead, and make a lot of use of our innate ideas, the PSR etc.

The empiricists react to the rationalists and, in doing so, hearken back to the Cartesian wedge (between our minds and the world). They see the rationalists as dogmatically making claims about the world, without having any real means of showing that what they're doing applies to the world itself. So - we have Locke and and emphasis on what we actually know of the world through experience.

And then we have Hume - trying to show that Locke isn't really attending carefully to his experience. He's so caught up in inherited ways of thinking, that he has trouble differentiating between what's actually given to us in experience and received conceptual prejudices. He's smuggling in the old rationalist ideas, clouding his own vision.

So then Kant -
The point of the 'transcendental argument' is to show that these ways of thinking, these categories, are necessary if coherent experience is to be possible. Regardless of the relationship between experience and reality, experience must be structured the way it is, lest we have nothing but kaleidoscopic sensory chaos. If we don't have recourse to God, etc (like Augustine, and other of the medievals you hinted at) the only option is to make this coherence - through categories - a product of the transcendental subject.

All of which is to say - I think you need to go back even farther than Locke, if you want to attack Kant at this level. You have to go to Descartes. Either to attack radical doubt, or to resalvage the argument for God.

I didn't respond to the parts that seems unworthy of much of a response because they just seemed kind of empty, like an assertion or an opinion. Where was the substance? Where was the proper argument? — S

S, I did a breakdown of your OP, charitably steelmanning it, to show how it didn't work. I engaged with the form and substance of your argument, thoughtfully.

You did not respond in the same way. The biggest part of your response to my post was, bizarrely, to @ Banno, directing to him this steelmanned version in retaliation for what you perceived as a previous slight. There wasn't much to the rest of the post, but it ended with you more or less ignoring my criticism in order to say that, in any case, you disagree with the people who disagree with you.

You've since added the point that if you explained your post to other people, they'd probably agree with you.

You've accused me of point-scoring, but your approach through the majority of this thread has been to quote others who agree with you with a '100' or other variations on 'nailed it,' while fisking other posts in a patently point-scoring way. (this is a tu quoque, by the way.)

You've glowingly approved theorem's caricature of idealists as self-important, while saying things like 'It's time for a new breed of philosophers to throw off the chains, escape the scourge' etc. With a characteristic note of martyrdom, you compared your approach to that of a historical figure executed for spreading information to the masses.

You can understand my frustration. I remain suspicious that you don't quite understand the difference between OLP therapeutics (which I am a fan of ) and appeals to incredulity + pose-striking.

Oh god, not this again. Just because I can't imagine something, like an apple, without imagining it, that doesn't mean that it can't exist without my imagination. That's a really bad argument
— S

It's also an argument I didn't make. In fact I brought up this exact argument later on in the same post, in order to say that it doesn't work. — csalisbury

What part of that post are you referring to? — S

Read back through the post again and see if you can find something that sounds like this:

Just because I can't imagine something, like an apple, without imagining it, that doesn't mean that it can't exist without my imagination. — S

I'll give you a hint. It's the part that says the same thing almost verbatim.

Oh god, not this again. Just because I can't imagine something, like an apple, without imagining it, that doesn't mean that it can't exist without my imagination. That's a really bad argument. — S

It's also an argument I didn't make. In fact I brought up this exact argument later on in the same post, in order to say that it doesn't work.

Is it though? — Theorem

I think that's the best way to approach it, yeah, but It's true that in my last post I was only speaking for myself, rather than for others interested in Idealism. That said, it doesn't seem to me that most 'postmodern' philosophers are advocating something along the 'same, but mind not matter' lines - all that preoccupation with The Real & alterity etc.

Regarding Locke, he's a big gap in my knowledge of philosophy, but I was under the impression (no pun intended) that with him it was just the opposite - that our ideas receive their form from things outside us. But I may have that wrong.

I'm more familiar with Kant & I wouldn't agree that he doesn't argue for his position - transcendental arguments form the linchpin of his system. You could take issue with those arguments, but I think it would be a big stretch to say that what he's doing rests on mere assumptions.

My own take is that "idealism" shouldn't be the final stance one arrives at - its more like a bottleneck. If we try to imagine an apple, but leave out perspective and a subjective sense of time, we cannot do so. If there were no consciousness, the entire progress of the universe would happen in darkness and quiet- and even that isn't quite right, in the same way that darkness and quiet doesn't really capture death. It's difficult to differentiate between that happening, and nothing happening at all, except by describing the former as though someone were there.

But this isn't satisfying either, because everyday life shows us there is a kind of obstinacy of the material, something recalcitrant to our own perceptions and desires. What impresses us about discovering something undiscovered - a far planet, the grand canyon - is inseparable from the feeling that it was there all along - the sublimity of something far vaster than us that exceeds our concerns.

The only thing left is to accept that there is a mystery at the heart of it, something that we cannot understand through philosophy or thinking alone, maybe cannot understand at all. Stove's criticism of the'Gem' is right, in one sense. Just because we can't think/experience/imagine something without thinking/imagine/experiencing it, it doesn't follow that that thing is dependent on thought/experience/imagination. But the proper use of the gem, imo, is to show us that whatever there is, beyond our thought and experience, it is confused to think of it as something that's basically like how we experience the apple, only unexperienced. That in itself is a kind of idealism, only one that isn't self-aware.

Sure, but they wouldn't mean what they say, and what they really mean doesn't make sense. — S

I mean - they would mean what they say. I don't know how else to meet a 'nuh uh' but with a 'yes huh'.

In any case, whatever your feelings on idealism or rules (and I agree with you on rules!), the line of attack laid out in the OP doesn't work. We know you disagree with others on these topics, of course. The question is whether your OP helps develop that disagreement philosophically. As far as I can tell, it's a shaggy dog story that takes a long walk through analogical slippage to arrive back at the same incredulity about Idealism and beliefs about rules we already know you harbor.

Another way to say this would be that they only express themselves. It seems like these people talking about rules consider rules to be things of this sort. Idealists consider appearance to be something of this sort. (I was talking about pain in this way, as well). — csalisbury

And I disagree with all of you. — S

Alright, but if that's what it comes down to, why bother with the 'olp' stuff? The irony here is that this 'olp' routine- 'what would people at work say' etc - is being used in order to defend...well, I invite you to explain the OP to people at work:

'What are you talking about, man? Potatoes? Orange juice? Rules are just the things written down in, like, the employee handbook or, like, the rulebook in monopoly. There's no mystery. '

As a non-idealist, I'm happy to clarify that by eating an apple, you're eating a particular object. That doesn't seem absurd to me at all. It seems true. That's not the case with eating an appearance. — S

An idealist could also say that in eating an apple, they're eating a particular object. In fact, I think most would.

Let me put in this way, drawing on the conversation from earlier - A mereological nihilist might say 'you're not eating an apple - those don't exist - you're eating a bunch of physical simples (or whatever). ' Then there's your 'olp' corrective.

Similarly an 'olp' idealist could very easily say (and they do) that in eating an apple, you're eating a particular object - namely, an apple. There's no inconsistency there.

meological nihilism:physicalism::User 'emancipate:idealism

So, I'm thinking of linguistic meaning here as a kind of orientation. Meaning is meaning to ____ or meaning for ____ . As long as you can fill in the blank with a perspective holder capable, at least in theory, of making meaning from x mark or set of marks orientated to their perspective then that's enough for me to say that x is a meaningful set of marks. — Baden

@S @Janus

I think I'm more or less on the same page here. It seems weird to say that meaning is somehow injected, through intention, into an object and then remains there, dormant. That you can only awaken meaning if someone else had set it there to rest, so to speak.

But, I was thinking more about that view - and I think it may come from the intuition that a meaningful object is somehow trying to speak (or allow someone to speak through it.) Like, the french term for meaning is voulour-dire, wanting to say.

Always a mistake to make too much of language-specific etymology (I'm looking at you Heidegger) but I think it captures a certain intuition that I believe is playing out in the meaning-as-endowed-through-intention take. I think you can 'feel' it if you consider the feeling you'd get deciphering an ancient text versus the feeling you'd get reading a moving story you know was written by some insentient neural-net program.

In the first case, there's a deeply moving feeling of being spoken to across generations. In the latter, a weird uncanniness, possibly even horror.

It seems like the intuition behind these feelings has to do with meaning being part of a conversation - hearing and being heard - rather than a self-contained understanding.

I think the conclusions about meaningful objects drawn are wrong, but I feel like they're wrong for the right reasons, if that makes sense. Like there's an implicit understanding of meaning as communal, maybe?


(sidenote: a lot of these concerns are straight out of Derrida's voice and phenomenon. I thought it was a deeply flawed text, but it seems like a similar constellation if themes)

In my life poetry has been far from useless. In my life poetry has been the saving grace. It is the reason that I was admitted on a full scholarship to an elite private school in Virginia. It is the reason I have most of my friends. It is the reason I've been with women who were extremely attractive both physically and personally when I am neither. — Ilya B Shambat

That's a lot of pressure to put on your poems. If you see it that way - if someone were to criticize one of your poems, then they would be threatening your entire being. How is it possible to take any sort of criticism under such circumstances? But maybe you're mistaken about why people hang out with you- often people who know us value things in us we are ourselves are unaware of.

Yeah, I totally agree that such a thing almost certainly would never happen. But I think it's enough to drive a wedge, and hopefully draw something out?

so, intentional vs accidental meaning - Is the hallmark of an artifact that has intentional meaning that its creator intended that object to bear the meaning they've endowed it with, in order to convey it to others?

I'd say that whatever meaning might be mis-attributed by interpreters to such a phenomenon, the phenomenon would not retain meaning ever after, merely on account of mis-attribution; because it would not be meaning inherent in the phenomenon itself. — Janus

But what is the 'phenomenon' here? Say someone reads the meaningless text, is moved by it, and so transcribes it, creating an identical text. Then they're killed by the monkeys, dropping the text near the original. Someone else finds both. There's no way to tell which is which - they're phenomenologically identical

it's possible it could simply be intentionally produced undecipherable marks that are designed to mimic script, but have no meaning — Janus

@S

This may have already been mentioned, but what about unintentionally produced marks that seem to have meaning but don't. Borges' library of Babel, or a million monkeys.The likelihood of these things happening doesn't matter so much as the fact that they're possible in principle.

So wild sci-fi scenario - for some reason a civilization sends out some spaceship with a computer on it - as a kind of voyager golden disc thing. It's basically a giant word processor and printer. It crashes on a planet with some monkey-type species who mess around with it, eventually, against all odds, producing a totally novel short story in english. Not only does it have plot and characters - it has voice.

Let's say such marks don't have meaning. Still, whoever finds them, should they be a english speaker, is going to meaningfully interpret them. They'll be moved by the story. Does that mean these marks didn't have meaning until they were given meaning by the person who read them - and so, because of that, retain meaning forever after?

Or are they meaningful as soon as they're produced, even though unintentional?

It's a far-fetched scenario, granted, but still.

@Baden Curious what your take is as well.