Then there's also the Marx card which goes like: Yeah, your card's alright, but like 5000000 people died so we could even play this game, and you're justifying that every time you play it. So, like: cool card, you asshole. I don't know how you can sleep at night

lol, yeah, my first thought too.



Derrida's whole thing is trumping everyone, on their own terms. I guess you could think of Derrida like a Ditto in pokemon. Whatever trump card you lay down, his move is to replicate a shadow image of that card and let them tear each other apart. That's a cool move. For instance, Plato will trump you with truth over your sophistry. Derrida will draw out the sophistry that allows Plato to distinguish between truth and sophistry in the first place, and voila: plato has just trumped himself. (I'm not a big Derrida fan, btw, but I think he works great in a Trump Card context.)

No one has committed a pessimistic crime by not using their ability for self-awareness regarding their paths of care or circular routines. I don't condemn it, but there is a recommendation to be aware of it.

This is, indeed, the right rhetorical move to make here. But frankly I don't believe you. Your other posts don't bear it out. Your opinion of people who don't use their ability for self-awareness bleeds through.

so : Why do you recommend it?

I will offer an olive branch to the anti-antinatalists/pessimists. Do you think that people should be at least thinking of life in the meta-awareness sense that some pessimists advocate? — schop

I think it can be very helpful, if used well. As an end-in-itself it's not only unhelpful, but crumbles into inconsistency.

But, is there a way for communities to directly address issues of existence head-on without mediating layers of allegory and metaphor?

I doubt it. Literality, brought to a limit, dissolves in the metaphorical. Both Existentialism & Pessimism are full to the brim with metaphors.Your namesake's a veritable metaphor-machine (the rainbow one is nice, and Baron Munchausen is a classic.) You've used plenty yourself, as well. I don't think this is a flaw, mind you. I think metaphors are great. So I would ask instead: Which metaphors work? Being condemned to fashion metaphors, which ones are worth cultivating?

I like just about everything you've written on this issue, but I think this line leave something out. What about the raging self-love that can lead to frustration? What about the monstrous inner child who always wants more? Or who is tired of being polite, punctual, and prudent? Or tired of being rational, respectable, scientific, etc.? I have in mind a kind of stupid animal rebellion against all constraint, except that it's particularly human in its relation to an unbounded imagination.

Goood point.

So I won't die on this hill, but I think the monstrous inner child and the overdemanding [something like a superego] are closely interrelated. They need each other.

Have you ever seen the movie The Master?

You have one character, Freddie, who is pure animality, unshapen earthly demand. & then there's 'the master' who is basically L Ron Hubbard. He has this grand faux-scientific system which he uses to exert absolute control over all his devotees. The movie is a perverse love story. The 'master' needs some utterly unreflective jumble of desire and impulse as the raw material for the imposition of his will (imposed under the false auspices of 'healing') & Freddie seems to need his absolute attention and concern.

I think this is about right. Infinite demand recognizes infinite demand. They reciprocally provide each other with limits they can't give themselves.

My hunch - and its just a hunch - is that children aren't really monstrously demanding the infinite. Rather they're overwhelmed by their emotions and don't know what to do with them. A skilled parent helps teach them what their emotions are and shows them how to ride the wave. An unskilled parent tells them (directly or otherwise) to ignore whats going on, to shut up and do this.

From the unskilled parent's perspective the child's inability to do this - its inevitable reversion back to [screaming, punching their sister etc] - does constitute an an unbounded monstrous. The parent doesn't know (probably weren't taught themselves) how emotions work, what their rhythm is - so all they can see is an eternally recalcitrant monstrousness that will always resist their limits. The child, on the other hand, is never taught how to meaningfully engage with their emotions. They just experience an irruption of overwhelming [ ineffable ] which irrupts in a household that has no place for it. Over time this turns into a feeling that certain needs are by nature unbound and unaddressable. If the child goes out on its own, it'll probably wind up in cycles of self-destruction. (One cycle, which I fell into, is one of Salvational Force (Girl, substance, philosophy etc.) disappointment, New Salvational Force etc.)


Hence the romance between the two: It's kind of sad, tragic one. They do both want to help the other, to be with them, but they don't know how to do it. The place in which they might connect has been replaced with a play of Boundaries & Transgressions which circles endlessly around what they need.

From the end of the Master:




I really like inner-child work. It's got an earnestness to it that turns some people off, but I think it's good. I had deeply flawed parents, like so many people, and reacted to it by overprotecting and bossing myself around, to the point where I was kind of imprisoned and quiet deep inside myself.Occasionally I'd burst through in a fit of [rage, lust, etc]. [also far from healed, very liable to fall back into old patterns]

What I kind of think is that you need a more complex and subtle relationship with yourself, where you allow the child wide berth when you can (like the parent who lets the kid run around screaming in the park, waving to the child when it looks back, until he finally wears himself out and wants to nap) and find a gentle way of communicating to it that you need to take control when life requires it. You don't yank its arm, or tell it to shut up. You figure out how to communicate the situation with a kind of affection.


I'm trying to relate this all back to the thread: umm. It'll be too forced right now. I think its relevant, but I'll have to post when it comes back to me.

What I want to say is that intimacy has to do somehow with letting your identity and metanarrative go. To keep it, hang it up on the coatrack - but to take it off for just a while. Pure authenticity is a myth, you still need the identity. But, still: to take it off for a second.

There can arise a temptation to cultivate a certain perception and then discard that identity when something uncomfortable comes to light, and muddles the perception you're seeking. ('if they know this about me, theyre not seeing what I want them to see') So then: Avoid the people who saw that identity. And then start afresh. & repeat:

To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another—generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia—and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim. — Conrad

So intimacy requires what lord jim is reluctant to do. But no one cares that much, except for jim. In fact they wish hed stay around and own it. They've been displaying their flaws all along, and can sympathize with someone who has flaws too. But the guy who has no flaws or history - he's harder to relate to. The tragedy is that on the one hand Jim thinks they'll be apalled, while on the other hand, just at the moment they're least-apalled, and most sympathetic - that's when Jim leaves.

I love the guy too, though I'm just really getting around to him. I recognize immediately, though, the kind of intellectual I like. This dude is present, relevant. So many thinkers are just snore-worthy, ignoring the forest for this or that tree.

yeah yeah, agreed. he's a real person, and he philosophizes from out of that. His whole person is always involved, and so the results are fascinating.

For instance, how many men who read the famous thinkers for pleasure can nevertheless find themselves entangled with women who don't really have a comparable appetite for abstraction? Or for cynicism or demystification? It may be that these women do our believing for us. And we do their doubting for them. — syntax

This feels true to life to me (at least true to life, sometimes). But I'm not making the connection between this and intimacy [qua dissolver (maybe) of metanarratives]

Whatever my metanarratively-woven identity is, it definitely includes joy at seeing Sloterdijk brought into the convo. Best (living) thinker out there, in my opinion [what am I signalling?]

What I want to say, cribbing Sloterdijk's terminology, is that there are a plurality of spheres in which we live. In the public sphere ( our job etc) - our particular identity and metanarrative is less important. Like you've said, we kinda all agree on this neutral background that lets us function. Our particular sense of self is present, but muted. On forums like this (or in real-world friendships) they become much more pronounced. In our private lives - if we write, or journal, or even just think - these things became super-present.

But there's another sphere, intimacy, where all this kind of breaks down. (Intimacy comes in all sorts of varieties, I'm not just talking relationships).

I say this, and I think its mostly right, but I think its also not quite right. I'm paving over something

I think you're spot on in your focus on community. 100%

Feeling cut off, deeply cut off - where does it come from?

I think it's not too far off the mark to simply say there's something wrong with antinatalists — inyenzi

From there.

"there's something wrong," said in the right tone, is the death knell. This is the beating heart of shame.

There is something wrong, but its something that happened (that can unhappen, over time), not something the antinatalist is. This is a crucial distinction, and a super important one.

Let me break down the paragraph:

Most people think there is some teleology to their existence. At any particular time, I should be doing X thing. But this isn't the case.

compare to this:

The ethics of phil. pess. is such that the aesthetics of existence is not simply hand waved and ignored, as that is the core of the issue. Hence darth's point about intra-worldly affairs. This is looking at the whole pie perspective, not trying to subsume, isolate, distract, and ignore it. — Schop1

The only coherent interpretation of this passage is that you think there is a kind of an ethical demand to face the horror of reality, one that most do not live up to.

Rather there is simply habits and routines we choose to pick up because we don't like the alternative of looking at the yawning void. Condemned to be free. Inside outside, do this that. Experiences are said to accumulate into something more and more developed and growth. Nope. It's the same circular pattern.

The suggestion here, read in light of what precedes it, is that the things we do because we feel that we're supposed to, and because we think they lead to something better, are really just a protective shell of habit and routine which allow us to avoid something else.

How does this square with the 'ethics of phil. pess.' and the refusal to 'subsume, isolate, distract' etc? Isn't it odd that on the one hand you have a very specific demand alongside plenty of posts repeating the same basic points, again and again. But then on the other, you're differentiating yourself from those who believe in the reality of meaningful demands, those who get caught up in circular routines?

What's your attitude toward those who fail to live up to your ethical demand?

It's best we soothe with words of self-help wisdom so that individuals don't look too deep.

It's an attitude of ironic contempt.

What you've done here is describe your own approach as someone else's, and then condemned it. Some people self-soothe, others can confront the 'deep'.

Most people think there is some teleology to their existence. At any particular time, I should be doing X thing. But this isn't the case. Rather there is simply habits and routines we choose to pick up because we don't like the alternative of looking at the yawning void. Condemned to be free. Inside outside, do this that. Experiences are said to accumulate into something more and more developed and growth. Nope. It's the same circular pattern. Did you ever think the ideas of self-actualization and moving towards something better were there as a way to cope with existential dread? Yes. It's best we soothe with words of self-help wisdom so that individuals don't look too deep.

No, I mean I get the darn concept- all of the above is boilerplate pessimism - but I think its wrong and I've been trying to explain why.

I mean just look at that paragraph: It's describing itself! It's closer to a recitation of a catechism than it is anything else.

Nothing in particular needs to be responsible for existence nor is there a need for guilt. There is no responsibility for that unless there is a god. This sounds like either your particular journey through this subject or a very direct experience of someone else's.

Yeah, I'm definitely drawing from my own experience, but not only that. I've mentioned Beckett and Conrad, for instance, where the same dynamic is very clearly at work. And it seems to hold true of nearly every full-blown pessimist I've run into.

I mean take this quote from a post just one page back:

The current way of looking at things has it that you can be irresponsible as a parent of a child by how you provide for them and treat them, but hardly ever is it considered that having children tout court is irresponsible. — Darth

Maybe I can clarify things a bit this way. There are many ways to react to a feeling that the world is largely horrible, filled with suffering. You have soteriologies of all variety. You have suicide. You can take a Buddhist approach and practice meditation. But there is another thing that consists of devoting the majority of one's intellectual energy to talking about how bad the world is. Saying the same thing often and with only slight variation (Cioran is probably the apotheosis of this.) That's philosophical pessimism. It's only partially about what's being said. What's more important to look at, again, is the patterns of saying it. So for instance: The OP is insistent that he's not drawing moral distinctions. Ok, but if that's not what he's interested in, why the particular appeal of this topic? The (ostensibly morally-neutral) selfishness of parents? Why does he return to this topic again and again?

'I must have got embroiled in a kind of inverted spiral, I mean one the coils of which, instead of widening more and more, grew narrower and narrower and finally, given the kind of space in which I was supposed to evolve, would come to an end for lack of room.' — Beckett

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run."

"But you’ve only got to run the other way," said the cat, and ate it. — Kafka

Addiction will always tell you that anyone suggesting a way out is a cat, or someone working on the cat's behalf. But there isn't any cat at all. The 'cat' is a necessary part of the pessimist mythology. In a way, it keeps you safe, but at a very steep price.

To take a more lowbrow example. Beginning of this clip: Frollo's the one who won't stop talking about the 'cat'. Why? And why does Quasimodo believe him? & it it meaningful that this particular exchange centers largely around disfigurement which is one of the pessimist's favorite talking points?

So here is a value-judgement upon what a person should be doing

Kind of, but not really. If you take a deep look at most pessimists, you find that they're very concerned with a specific sort of injustice. Without their consent, they've found themselves in a situation where something is being demanded of them in excess of their ability to deliver on it (the specifics of what the demand is can vary.) This is tormenting, a feeling of condemnation. The response is always the same: the world itself is then condemned. If the pessimist realizes that its not really all that meaningful to condemn something thats insentient (as in that Conrad quote), then they'll focus on the part that is sentient: parents. They're the ones who are responsible for all this.

I'm not saying the pessimist ought to confront anything because its the rules of being a good person. It's something different. The pessimist approach is (implicitly) obsessed with justifying its own failure to confront the demand (it generally slips out explicitly in one place or another though. Key examples would be: Beckett's discussion of his 'pensum' in The Unnameable, Conrad's Lord Jim, give me an hour and I'll find where it comes out in Cioran etc etc.)


So, it's not that the world's out here, folding its arms, and telling the pessimist what he should do. It's the pessimist himself who is constantly imposing this value-judgment on himself(if usually in a displaced way.) If what's ailing you is the condemnation that comes from not-confronting - it's up to you what you want to do with that - but you already have your answer.

Of course, it's hard to figure out what you're not confronting. Everyone has something different. But I think mostly its the condemning voice. You have to find a way to take away its power rather than trying to get it condemn something else, and leave you safe. It's a strategy that only works temporarily, and works less and less each time.

And I don't think its a psychological problem. I think its a spiritual one with psychological ramifications

I can’t do it! -> guilt -> but its not my fault! Its unfair to demand something of someone that that person cant give -> im not guilty, the universe is. Youve condemned me, well i condemn you back!

[antinatalism is subtler. Its a condemnation not of existence, but of the part of existence we can consider responsible for existence - however the focus on it is serving the same function - the feeling of guilt is placed elsewhere]

Go back to the beginning - why cant you do it? Frustration is always bound up with self-condemnation. The trick is to realize that youre the one making impossible demands on yourself, even if doesnt seem like it. Thats the first step of healing. addictions want you to think you cant get better, but you can

That we have to make decisions - yeah. But ‘burden’ and ‘condemned’ are very freighted terms. These hint at attitudes or dispositions. The same attitudes and dispositions, I’d speculate, that lead one back to keep restating same point, as if by compulsion.There are ways to say the same thing in wildly different terms, but those aren’t the ones you’ve chosen.

Note also: i can, with equal justification, flip this focus on condemnation and burden such that [obsessive focus on one thing] is an attempt to repress the complexity of life in order to focus on a single more managable concern.

[no, thats not the same!]

It really is though.

Its important to ask: what are you doing when you devote so much time to repeating the few tenets of a philosophy you already are comfortable with? Why are you choosing this?

About ‘burdens’ - when we avoid difficult choices in life, they become inflated. They grow bigger and bigger and bigger. The more we avoid them, the more burdensome they become, and the harder it is to ignore them, but also the more painful it is to confront them. So we’re more tempted to find some other easier form of relief, which leads us to ignore the choices we’re not confronting, which makes them grow bigger, which makes the crutch more appealing...this is the spiral of addiction, and part of addiction is misunderstanding or romanticizing the thing ones addicted to. Pessimism likes to pretend its the ultimate confrontation with the ultimate horror. Its not: its a justification for not confronting anything.

Then you have missed the point of philosophical pessimism.

I don't think so; it's very straightforward, isn't it? I just think its wrong.

& I think a preoccupation with it is a literal addiction.

What a feeling to read the great pessimists the first time and be like 'whoa yes exactly' right? But each time you return to those texts, they lose a bit of their power, until you find yourself almost mechanically repeating pessimistic passages, or slogans - not because it really helps anymore, but because its become painful not to.

There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold”. Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is – and it is indestructible!
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters.” — Conrad

Beautiful, right?

But spot the performative contradiction.

And, having spotted it --- what is the significance of the contradiction?

(hint: phil pess isn't doing what it needs to pretend its doing)

And what? I don't follow.

idk I didn't read the whole thread, just posted at the end

as an experiment:

like this:

I'll have kids

& then

see how much of their time they spend thinking about

[qualified antinatalist thing]

and then see if they realize that

[qualified antinatalist thing]

is just a conceptual [safe space]

and see if they can figure out how to leave the [conceptual [safe space] ]

and get to to the place where ...

[....fades and crackles because we're still in the conceptual safe space... ]

tldr: get over it, you were already born. don't have kids if you don't want to. Find something else to focus on, or you'll never feel better

(sermons get a bad rap. They're great. I think, if anything, we need more sermons. Maybe disguised ones, but) I think Adam Curtis, as heavy-handed as he can be, is at least on the right track. But then also: plenty of adam curtis movies, no one seems to ultimately translate that into doing anything - despair, despair.

At their best, they conjure relations and meanings that illuminate the real or that help us recognize the real, but this occurs in grammars and formulations other than those of the real." — sx

This is obviously a bit far afield, but I wish the left was able to do this in terms of storytelling i.e (mythologizing, sermonizing, poeticizing etc etc) I think the theory stuff is great, but I also sometimes picture like, 50 columbia grads at zucotti park talking to one another about hyper-nuanced stuff, and like 10 of these splitting off to try to talk to the group (Ranciere said !). I think the Left is reallllly lacking invigorating narrative power these days. And everything you've said about theory, imo, applies to (mythologizing, sermonizing, poeticizing) as well.

Ok so another way to put this. I don't think the realist need deny this semi-autonomous capacity of thought w/r/t this type-token stuff. It's not an argument against the realist, I don't think. They could describe all of this as a kind of cognitive excrescence, one that comes about when we need to talk about how we talk about things.

Or: the universals are the ground upon which all the rest builds. Like: type-token talk could, conceivably, be reliant on a kind of universal-transcendental ground. (Or could not. But I don't think any of what we've been talking about rules out the possibility that it is.)

In either case, 'doggie' already has determinate (that is to say particular) 'content' qua particular content, even if not recognized in a 'higher-order' game as particular.

So I guess the point is that while it's true that the game of tokens and types is 'a' game among others (de dicto), and that this game is indeed a 'higher-order game predicated on some lower-order one', it is nonetheless implicated in all other games (de re). And to play those other games - to sort pairs of like pairs together - is to play that game, even if one doesn't know, in the full-blown intentionally directed sense of the term, that one is playing that game (and not some other). At the very least any kind of recognition of 'something as something' paves the way for a retroactive lightbulb moment of 'ah, so that's what I was doing' (at a higher order).
. — sx

I think we're actually saying close to to the same thing here, so I'm trying to remember what point I was trying to make.

hmm

What we both agree on, I think:

(1)Type-tokening machinery has a semi-autonomous logic (semi-autonomous in the sense that it differentiates itself from the real, but the real doesn't differentiate itself from it. autonomous in that it has its own internally consistent machinic logic, but only semi- because the machinery arises from out of - and continues to rely upon - something that exceeds it)

(2) This gibes with a qualified nominalism, because it allows us to admit universals as tools, without necessitating that these tools reflect (instantiate, symbolize etc) real universals.

[let me know if that sounds off]

ok so now what I understand the monkey experiment to show

(This may sound like I'm just straight up repeating stuff you've already said. Just trying to put it in my own words to get this all organized in my head)

In order for the monkeys to identify pairs qua pairs, they can't simply relate one pair to another. Or even one pair to a bunch of other pairs. This type of relation would all take place on the same 'plane' so to speak. Just going from one thing to another: this and this and this and this.

Instead an additional layer of depth is required: this pair relates to this [thing]. And this other pair relates to this [thing] as well. And all the pairs relate to this [thing]. This introduces a kind of new 'level'. The lateral relations of all the things to one another are all condensed into a single relation - the relation to this one concrete thing. And this adds a kind of depth, it puts the single thing on a sort of higher plane Of course the that thing is as material as everything else. But the economy of relations has given it a particular significance.

(Hadn't thought of this before, but this is the same logic as the master signifier in Lacan, or how money relates to commodities in Marx, yeah?).

But the upshot of all this is that the very idea of type-tokens is a kind of multi-dimensional relationship. The relation of all these things to one another becomes intelligible in their shared relation to one thing. (and then this relation-structure can fractalize in and out, as much as you like.)

So, my lack of formal training might show here (there's trillions of gallons of ink spilled, I'm sure, on the problem of universals.) But I understand the visceral force of the realist argument to be something like: If these various things aren't all instances of a single universal, how are we able to 'pick them out' as particulars?

And I think this where is the pairs thing gets me. Because [pairs] is clearly up a level. It's base-level is already a relational, cognitive one.

I don't think it's clear that all universals operate like this, such that, ultimately, a particular relates to itself through relation to another thing.

So, the doggie route may have been a bad one. I think the Paul one is better. I recognize Paul. This definitely involves an as-structure: I see Paul as Paul. But I don't see Paul as Paul @tx related to Paul @ty related to [timeless] Paul. I just see Paul.

I think a similar process could happen for all sorts of things. I can pick out raspberries without relating them to [raspberry].

[placeholder: this goes back to the de dicto/de re thing (which I think I was trying to get at the same thing in terms of in-itself vs for-itself). But I think this is a place where the realist can actually get a good foothold.]

I guess tldr: I don't know that recognition requires the relational structure involved in the OP's experiment. I was going to say more, but I'm running out of steam. I'm hoping this is a good starting point tho, or at least a window onto how I'm thinking about this.

Another way to put it: I think the realist still has a way in here. At the level of recognition.

Does that make sense? I'm not championing a realist position by any means, just trying to figure out what isnt sitting right with me, which is still more a feeling than a well-articulated [something]

Yeah, but this is a different issue, no? At stake is not a question of tokens and types: by your own description, 'doggie' isn't a particular. I mean, this is one of the reasons Sellars draws a hard line between sensation and intelligibility, where a flood of affection would lie on the former side of the equation and tokens/types on the latter. I don't think the account of tokens and types given above needs to deny that such wellings of affections - where one might utter 'Paul!' or 'doggie!' as a consequence - can happen. It needs only to ask that we be careful to distinguish between the different 'logics' at work in each.

I'll dip back into Hegel here. What I want to say is that in my example 'doggie' is already functioning as a particular in-itself (the child will correctly say 'doggie!' in reaction to all sorts of different dogs) but it's not yet a particular for-itself (the child isn't able yet to see this particular dog as a particular dog. It sees it as a dog. But it doesn't see it as a particular dog. ) I may be totally wrong on an empirical level, about what's happening when kids of a particular age say 'doggie!' (I feel like its right, but I haven't done the legwork) but I think it's still a valid conceptual distinction regardless.

(A less annoyingly Hegelian way to put it would be: an external observer can see that the child is abstracting (it learned 'doggie' through interaction with Grandpa's black lab, and is now saying 'doggie' in relation to uncle mark's golden retriever) but the child itself doesn't see what it's doing.

The additional Hegelian point would be that the observer would miss something significant if it were to imagine that its observational perspective was ultimately the true one, while the child's was befuddled. That befuddlement, in fact, is both the condition for - and indisposable component of - the later non-befuddlement of the external observer.)

But, on a more basic level, what I was trying to get at is that

What does it mean to abstract? At base, it means to ignore things: the concept of an 'apple' involves ignoring things about individual apples: this apple may be bruised, and that apple may be green instead of red, but all these details are ignored when we simply designate both as 'apples'. — sx

This is what I was trying to get at with my example of Paul. Even if I've never seen Paul sunburned before, and he's sunburned now, I still see Paul*. The bigger point : the things you're describing as characterizing abstraction seem like necessary but not sufficient conditions for the token-type oscillations. Recognition of an individual also requires this kind of 'abstraction,' though it seems to be a way of abstracting in an operative, non-thematic way.

So what I'm objecting to is this:

Any identification, even of a singular, already implicates two levels: object-level (token) and meta-object level (type), with the caveat that with singular things, token and type coincide in the one object. And insofar as all identification involves both token and type, what you have is a strange case of identifying the relation between an object and itself — sx

Contextualizing all of that in terms of the broader conversation:

So I agree with you about the 'machinery' of thought being unable to latch onto any particular thing as a natural token or type. Tokening and typing are functions of the machinery. The machinery types and tokens. Absent the machinery: no types and tokens.

What I want to say, though, is that that this type-token stuff is a higher-order game predicated on some lower-order game. That's why I think it's worth noting that the study with the monkeys isn't about them recognizing shoes, its about them recognizing pairs (even more importantly: recognizing pairs as pairs, since a pair of shoes has its own significance that exceeds [pairs.] Would they need a (literal) token to recognize a shoe (or even a pair of shoes)? Could be, i don't know, but I do think its significant that this study is working a level of abstraction higher.

Which is to say: If Sellars is trying get us to change our perspective in order to look at predicates in terms of patterns of usage, then what we'd have to look at are the singular patterns of usage. The types/tokens thing would be a kind of autonomous secondary game that takes off from there. More precisely: Sellars, if I understand you and him, is rethinking our way of thinking about predicates in order to disrupt our way of understanding a certain pattern (predication) in order to clear the way to understand the more varied field of patterns underlying it. I don't want to say he's 'deconstructing' because he seems to have a pretty firm sense of what he's doing on a broader scale --- but, in this particular respect, it seems like what he's doing is some local brush-clearing. (that is, if I understand any of what Sellars is doing at all.)

I guess ultimately I'm trying to figure out how that indifferent machinery 'links onto' the stuff its thinking about (thinking with?). I'm trying to kind of sketch out a middle-place where universals are already in effect and ripe for the machinery.


(also bracketting @fdrake's excellent contributions here, just because I only have so much cognitive bandwidth today. I think the direction he's going with all this is fascinating and hope to respond to those posts soon)

------
*I'm ignoring anything along the lines of Paul at time x as token of [timeless] Paul, because I just think this is a bad way of looking at things. It might not be, I might be wrong, and I'd be open to that. I just figured I'd pass over it for now.

and so we have arrived at the utter vagueness that is also foundational to my anti-foundationalist position.

Yes, I think you're right that this is the endpoint of our conversation. I disagree with this characterization, but I cannot show you why, because the only ways to show you why are not considered by you to be legitimate or substantial. I believe they are legitimate and substantial. But how I could show you, using your criterion, that they are? We're at the heart of the thing I consider a trap, and you consider [valuable in some way]. There's nowhere left for us to go. And so I wander off into the vagueness and give you your laugh.

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.[/apo]

So I have challenged it and was pretty straightforward about what the challenge was:

Having developed your system, the only thing you seem to be able to do with it is find it in everything. Again, I can count on any of your posts to neatly ignore everything in the discussion except some minimal bit which can be used as kindling to fire up yet another recapitulation of the story you've already told - I don't know how many times now. As far as I can tell the only thing your system does is find itself. It seems to be a conceptual machine the purpose of which is to seek self-confirmation of itself. I base that on what I observe you do with it.
— apo

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.

Your reply again may be that it is unwarranted for me to expect you to frame your response in terms that might appear to legitimate my framing of the issues in that fashion. Your actual position here is the position against all positions.

No, I do have a position. It's the one above, and one that I've already outlined throughout my posts. It's not a position on everything, it's a position on your system. It strikes me as a kind of cognitive trap, something to be avoided, because look what the results are. And it's characteristic of the trap that someone who's fallen into it can only see people who walk around it in terms of the trap itself. So: my not having a theory of everything is, to you, its own theory of everything - a totalising pluralism as you put it. & you're absolutely right, from within your system. This is why: There is almost never a moment where you're not recapitulating your system. If you're talking to someone, you're talking to them about your system. Any suggestion that that approach seems flawed is immediately read as a position on everything, as, for you, your approach is everything. When that person leaves and does other stuff, not involving your system, they're not doing so in opposition to your system. But, for you, they have to be. (the city outside is read as non-stoop, for example, as though everything either was stoop or something related to the stoop) For example: my posts about romanticism etc weren't disagreed with, they were misread in a very specific way, without you seeming to be aware you were doing that. In fact they were misread in a very specific way, despite their being peppered with neon signs saying I was aware of how they could be misread in that way, and why I wasn't saying that. Now, that's not to say you couldn't have challenged me on whether I really avoided the pitfalls I signalled loudly that I was trying to avoid. But that's not what happened. You didn't even see the signs.

Finally, the engine quote. I was clearly, I thought, suggesting that the search for a foundation is flawed, substrate or engine. I wasn't avoiding responding. Again, I'm just confused. What did you think I meant by that quote? Your questions about it don't make sense to me. I was saying that the search for an engine is just a refined - but equally misguided- version of the search for a foundation. I thought the quote itself expressed that, I still do, so I didn't know how to respond to your questions about it

so let me be cheeky, then: I do believe I've touched a chord.

I'm sincerely confused, apo. I don't know what you mean about the supposed agreement between us in relation to the the quote about engines. I don't know how ironically talking about being a hedgehog after you yourself introduced the image is me histrionically playing the victim. It seems, if anything, a ironic undermining of your setting the scene as you versus a victim. I literally just lifted what you already said and said it again.

I have the uncanny sense of being accused of everything you are doing. I don't mean this rhetorically: I think a sober look at the exchange would bear out what I'm saying. I expressed my position very clearly in my post that began: "the boast of metaphyics." I don't know how to engage with you until you've engaged with that post. I feel that I've been identified as some sort of figure you already know and I'm being systematically rewritten, in your head, as that thing, to the extent that the things I've already said that undermine that idea are being passed over.

For instance: All the stuff I said about responding to poetry viz-a-viz softness, etc came from something you said about gagging and earnestness. You introduced this visceral emotional response, I responded in turn, and then you got very upset about being called out on an emotional level as though I introduced this line. I didn't. Again, I implore you to read back and look at the exchange soberly. I have addressed all your points, but they were covered-over, quickly, by making me a Figure. I anticipated this happening and tried to prevent it early on. I don't know what else to say, man

yeah you got me apo. I tried to say.... and I thought I said....but I was swimming against the current. Everything tends toward: Apo is strong and capital LOLing and the rest are scared curled-up hedgehogs. People who disagree are saying apo is cold and dessicated, and that they are fun and loving. What happens then is: apo shows how they are wrong and apo is strong and they are hedgehogs. I did engage in earnest, Apo, and I wish you could see what I was saying. Unfortunately things were quickly interepreted, after a certain point, as who is Good and who is Bad. It seems like, right now, there is no way around this way of looking at things.

So, I'll give it to you

I am a scared hedgehog and I recognize your strength. You won baby!

And that the move youre making is exactly the one I tried to show is flawed? Now i can accept that my characterization is wrong and my anticipation of this move is misguided. What i cant accept is being met with this move as tho i hadnt considered it. I did. What you need to do now is show why my consideration was wrong

Do you see that right now you’re asking me to characterize my position in terms of yours?

@apokrisis I ask you to think about all the ways you've characterized my position and then re-read my post, the one that began 'but the boast of metaphysics.' I quite sincerely believe I've addressed almost everything you've said. I'm not the thing you keep wanting me to be.

It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.

But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.

But I'm not fun-loving. I'm often moody and paranoid and mean - just look up my post history here. I'm well aware that I can be a total asshole. Again, what strikes me as strange here is you reflexively interpret me as giving myself these qualities in opposition to yourself, as though that were the underlying motivation for everything else. It isn't.

In other words, apo: You want me to be, for some reason, someone for whom life is a spray of roses. I'm not and never have been.

so:

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. — csal

Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.

Right, but the point of those quotes was, quite explicitly, to impute to me a particular stance and then show why it was wrong. What I was doing was to show how that imputation, to me, was incorrect. What i was saying was: You were trying to frame my approach as something already accounted for in your metaphysics, and I was rejecting being slotted into it. Then: sketching out why the approach you were imputing to me was not my own.

So:

I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account. — apo

I don't see it that way. I feel like I'm very aware of the 'totalising pluralism' you impute to me. I think I've done yeoman's work to show that I recognize what you mean by that and to show that what I'm saying is something else. I know, in my head, that I anticipated everything that I think you're saying now, and tried hard to show I understood that and to maneuver around it. But maybe I should just sit back and let you demonstrate what you mean and why I fit into that mould.

From my perspective, it feels like all these binary either/or things you're accusing me of are things I explicitly addressed, very consciously addressed, and tried to sketch a way around. You may very well be right, ultimately, but I feel like I haven't actually been heard. I feel like I quickly became to you yet another romantic who wants to make you feel lacking in order to make me feel good and artistic. So quickly, and so in spite of my anticipatory points to the contrary, that I feel like I'm being mistaken for something else.

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them.

Pragmatism, to me, brings with it falsifiability. So again: "What you have here is a prediction that can't fail, structurally. What would it mean for this prediction to fail?"

Of course not. You need the failure of foundationalism as your justification for a totalising pluralism!)

Lay it on me, brother. What do you mean?

I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)

I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. It's not that humiliating to do poetry and improv, though it will be if you assail yourself for being repulsive for even engaging in it. I struggle to understand how you engage with poems in the way I'm talking about, if the idea of an exchange of poems makes you gag.

Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?

Even though this comes chronologically late in your post, I think its a good place to begin. I'm trying to understand why you thought I thought this would be surprising to you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I've seen you make this kind of point before on the forums. What I was trying to do was demonstrate that I agree with you on this point, in order to show that what I was trying to say wasn't that kind of thing. Strangely, you took this as a starting point to remind me of the same structure I had just outlined. so:

So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.

Of course, I'm well aware. I said the same thing, or tried to, in order to orient us both toward a particular obstacle, to say 'hey we both see this, it's a very real thing, and I don't want to go toward that either.'

As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. Art doesn't work that way, for the same reason 'play' doesn't work that way. The pleasure of a poem, or of a work of art, or of a childhood game: all of those are saturated with concepts and myths and associations and memories and knowledge and everything else. The 'raw pleasure' of a picture of some typical scene (say the Annunication) will be a complex mix of tons of things, some of which involve my knowledge of other annunications. "Raw impression" suggests a dude being hit in the eyes with sense-particles. The aesthetic experience is more like: a Scene one must be present to in order to experience, but which is hyper-complex and draws from everywhere else.

The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic.

Not at all. What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. The 'lived level' from the beginning involves all sorts of Concepts. That's why kids playing tend to cast the play in terms of archetypes.

What I'm arguing against is extracting certain patterns or ways of thinking from out of this in order to say that these are the essential patterns which govern everything else.

So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.

Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post?

If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.

Sure, but, again, I addressed exactly this distinction between totalisation and pluralism. Maybe it fails, I dunno, but I addressed exactly this point. You seem to suggest that I'm symptomatically misreading you ("Again, you have this fixation for either/or" ) but, from my perspective, if seems like you're symptomatically glossing over my intentional engagement with this exact thing.

so:

So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").

Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations.

finally

So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?

I don't accept this distinction and find it strange that you ascribe either/or thinking to me while reflexively trying to make sense of what I'm saying int these terms. Thinking or mindless immersion in sensuality? The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think outside of a simplified thought/feeling model.

Look around

No, I mean, I understand the point you're making - and it makes plenty of sense to me that semantics and syntax have to emerge together.

What I mean is:

And that semiotic symmetry-breaking is still unfolding as we evolve from everyday language through to the most abstract mathematical and logical languages

+

So think of this as a story of mutual repulsion that drives two things towards their opposing limits. And it is the story of all metaphysical-strength dichotomies. That is why I say it is a prediction.

From the first quote, I infer that the symmetry-model is itself an unfolding of this semantic/syntactic co-reliant-in-their-brokenness break.

I don't see how you can 'predict' something that you hold to be necessary for the existence of the prediction itself. One way to put this is: the sine qua non of a prediction is that it can fail. What you have here is a prediction that can't fail, structurally. What would it mean for this prediction to fail?

Aren’t you confusing life and metaphysics? I don’t lose one by doing the other. They get to take turns.

But the boast of metaphysics is that its providing the ultimate. Everything can be explained and understood by reference to [metaphysical model]. The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. If such a claim is to be taken seriously, as the metaphysician intends it to be, then the things which he was doing un-metaphysically are things that can, in principle, be brought back into his metaphysical ambit. However he can only do so by reducing them. Yet its that very irreducibility that makes up the substance and texture of reality. The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety.

[yes, but you're doing the same thing, now, with variety and texture, that your 'metaphysician' was doing with 'otherness'.]

This is the finger pointing to the moon. I can engage in that texture and variety and experience. I can, sitting at my computer, conjure up a whole host of precise, singular, memories etc. I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. I find that what I'm doing, when I do this, is a single kind of activity among many. However, this particular activity has the strange distinction of wanting to say that all the other activities are somehow linked back to this one.

My triadic approach predicts this. — apo, regarding a new and improved neo-bloomian approach

Yes, but you've missed the point of the Bloom example entirely. You asked what your approach leaves out. I used the Bloom example to point out that, given a Bloomian lens, nothing will ever be left out. It will always find that the material it looks at fits into its system, in the same way an engine will always find the same use for gasoline. But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. Tweaking and improving it to make it even better at leaving nothing out is...well, an anticipated response, I guess.



tldr; I think there's something askew with 'the very idea' of metaphysics. 'metaphysics,' I think, represents a useful activity ( recursive cognitive modeling) that has metastasized (other things can do this too though: religion, myth, a photographer who can only see the world as composition etc etc. Group em all together under Midas-ism)

[so romanticism then?]

Nah, I think Blake railing against the demonic mills and all that is well-within a triadic model. The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. A poem about how poems are better than reason is very much prey to the sort of thing you're talking about. A poem that communicates is something else.

[so lets talk about that 'something else', then]

If I do so, on your terms, you'll always be right, because you've set down the rules. e.g. [show me, on this table, something that isn't on this table.] But now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc.