Dont let a norm be a thing that exists first and then changes, like a moving object. Let the act BE the norm. — Joshs

I'm open to the limitation of any form/content framing, but I think you are pushing it too far. Unless all you are saying is that every move in the game has its little effect on the rules of the game.

If I say that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, then I'm committed to the claim that I saw an animal on the sidewalk last night. That's a fairly stable rule. If I say that the car was painted solid red, I can't go on to say that it was painted solid blue. (I can't in the sense that I ought not do so, unless in an exceptional situation where I'm talking philosophy perhaps or making a joke, etc.)

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique. — Joshs

One example of this is the critique of the privileging of phonetic script as ethnocentric, maybe a bit racist. The white man is closer to the breath of God, his own breath, and not lost in a maze of hieroglyphs, cut off from the (invisible) real thing.

Much of the discussion here on deconstruction and postmodernism centers around the fear that these approaches lead to a loss of access to truth, meaning and understanding. — Joshs

I agree. But it's 'tautologically' rational to fear a descent into irrationality. Of course Peterson, for instance, becomes the thing he fears.

What tends to be missed in these discussions is that effective insight into other peoples’ ways of thinking and behaving, our ability to empathize with them and avoid fearing and condemning them for their apparent alienating, irreconcilable and even dangerous and immoral differences from us, is directly tied to how solid and permanent we make the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the subjective and object aspects of the world. — Joshs

It's a reasonable claim. And I understand that to be related to the non-intellectual version of Derrida (watered down to the limitations or cruelty of binary thinking, etc.) I'm not denying that this simple ethical point has force. But your point only has force if it's true. Or accepted as true. Taken to extremes, your point would object to anything at all actually being the case. A determinate reality would itself, in that determinateness, be perceived as violent. And perhaps there is 'violence' in all institution, but it's a necessary violence (ameliorated, we hope, with Progress (John Gray barfs)). A community without norms does not make sense. Someone, in retrospect, after norms have changed, will be portrayable as the victim of those former less developed and less correct norms. And we will have Van Gogh and Nietzsche and other posthumous superstars.

There are no norms, no manifest image, no space of reasons that just sit there (even temporarily) protected from active, living, changing temporal context. — Joshs

But who would ever dream there was ? Anymore than they'd dream a river was the same water every morning ? As soon as human norms are seen to govern (and not frozen timeless gods), we have a mutating source of authority, our own evolving best idea so far.

The 'not even temporarily' point is hard to make sense of. If you are only saying that it's all just fiction or mirage, I guess that's fine, but so is fiction and mirage. I don't think one can plausibly deny though that we are animals in the world together using sounds and marks to arrange our affairs.

I could be wrong , but it seems you’re not comfortable in making the leap from neo-Kantianism to a phenomenologically-informed enactivism. — Joshs

It's not that, though I can see why you'd suspect such a thing.

My real concern is simply avoiding the stereotypical vices and absurdities of that demon postmodernism. I was strongly influenced by Rorty and James and Nietzsche, and I was happy on the epistemological left-wing. I'm not the person who was afraid to go all the way but the person who did and had to admit that I had gone a little too far, that my beliefs were not as consistent as they could be with a move toward the center.

The basic, familiar distinction is between poetic expressions of preference or mere suggestions on the one hand and claims which are understood to bind others in the name of a universal reason on the other. What charms me about Brandom is that he's whittled it down the essence.

Whether or not a substrate makes sense is obviously secondary to the norms that govern its discussion. In other words, that substrate cannot ground those norms. I have no right to believe in it unless I can justify it. The space of reasons is the only 'Given' (to blend some keywords from Sellars.) Those norms are themselves the groundless grounds of Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dreydegger. Of course norms drift. And we can talk about Heidegger and Gadamer here, the inherited 'interpretedness' that forces us to deal with a past that leaps ahead. 'Universal' rationality is binding without being perfectly or truly universal. Its universality is 'to come,' a point at infinity. (One might think of Peirce here and the consensus to come.)

I'm sympathetic to those points, and I'm not even terribly attached to indirect realism. But I don't currently see how the vague notion of a substrate is not more plausible, with all its problems, than some of its competitors.

Some of the points in the quote above are not unlike pointing out that the self is fiction. We can say that reference is a fiction too and so on. But the role of the illusion of reference and the talk about reference is still fascinating. There are patterns in what we do. I'm more than a little willing to embrace a zoo of social entities that only 'exist' 'in' or 'as' such patterns.

Ha, right out of Atlas Shrugged. — ZzzoneiroCosm

And from some of the more questionable passages in Herr Nietzsche (who is great nevertheless overall.)

My pleasure. Kind of nice to approach things sometimes through their demonizers.

How about quotes from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler - would that be acceptable? — karl stone

Therefore not only does the organization possess no right to prevent men of brains from rising above the multitude but, on the contrary, it must use its organizing powers to enable and promote that ascension as far as it possibly can. It must start out from the principle that the blessings of mankind never came from the masses but from the creative brains of individuals, who are therefore the real benefactors of humanity. It is in the interest of all to assure men of creative brains a decisive influence and facilitate their work. This common interest is surely not served by allowing the multitude to rule, for they are not capable of thinking nor are they efficient and in no case whatsoever can they be said to be gifted. Only those should rule who have the natural temperament and gifts of leadership.
Such men of brains are selected mainly, as I have already said, through the hard struggle for existence itself. In this struggle there are many who break down and collapse and thereby show that they are not called by Destiny to fill the highest positions; and only very few are left who can be classed among the elect. In the realm of thought and of artistic creation, and even in the economic field, this same process of selection takes place, although – especially in the economic field – its operation is heavily handicapped.

This same principle of selection rules in the administration of the State and in that department of power which personifies the organized military defence of the nation. The idea of personality rules everywhere, the authority of the individual over his subordinates and the responsibility of the individual towards the persons who are placed over him. It is only in political life that this very natural principle has been completely excluded. Though all human civilization has resulted exclusively from the creative activity of the individual, the principle that it is the mass which counts –through the decision of the majority – makes its appearance only in the administration of the national community especially in the higher grades; and from there downwards the poison gradually filters into all branches of national life, thus causing a veritable decomposition. The destructive workings of Judaism in different parts of the national body can be ascribed fundamentally to the persistent Jewish efforts at undermining the importance of personality among the nations that are their hosts and, in place of personality, substituting the domination of the masses.

Marxism represents the most striking phase of the Jewish endeavour to eliminate the dominant significance of personality in every sphere of human life and replace it by the numerical power of the masses. In politics the parliamentary form of government is the expression of this effort. We can observe the fatal effects of it everywhere, from the smallest parish council upwards to the highest governing circles of the nation. In the field of economics we see the trade union movement, which does not serve the real interests of the employees but the destructive aims of international Jewry.
— Shitler

https://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv2ch04.html

Hard not to see democracy itself demonized as a wicked piece of Jewish/Marxist insanity. Only geniuses are worth anything. The proles should know their place and lick shiny boots. Shiny shiny boots of leather.

And I smell a little 'but billionaires are job creators!" in there too. And what billionaire or macho real man from the Marlboro billboard, coughing up his last hoorah in Boomerville, could object to the denuded social Darwinism and ye old myth of the self-made Scrooge ?

Conceptual normativity nevertheless remains autonomous in their view, without need or expectation of further scientific explication. This opposition to a more thoroughgoing philosophical naturalism presumes familiar conceptions of scientific understanding, however, and also does not consider some new theoretical and empirical resources for a scientific account of our conceptual capacities. — Joshs

It's hard to see a way around the priority of conceptual normativity. Any "new theoretical and empirical resources" will have to be justified in terms of such norms if they are to be scientific.

Any reductions of conceptual norms to something deeper and "more real" will depend on those same norms for their authority.

One criticism might be that the priority of conceptual norms is tautological and uninteresting. One retort is that maybe its only obvious useful for pointing out the absurdity in various extreme metaphysical theses that forget their dependence on an interpersonal framework of giving and asking for reasons.

What I like about art is that it is consciously, almost self-evidently local and personal and reaches from that towards universal with usually never believing actually of achieving it. — hwyl

:up:

I guess it is the kind of the place where you would go after the utter miracle of Ulysses - and I would still say a cul-de-sac, but obviously bloody impressive for it. — hwyl

Yeah, perhaps a dead end. A glorious disaster. He could have done something less obscure. A sequel to Ulysses. But at least it had him laughing in the middle of the night while he wrote it.

But we are actually fresh ex-apes, randomly born on a speck of dust, we can never approach any actual universality: we, as we now are, will never be and think for all eternity, for all places, all situations, timelessly. That is not us. — hwyl

I agree, but I see that as a quasi-Kantian point. And Braver's book on antirealism, which I mentioned above, basically moves from Kant toward that view expressed above. While I do agree with you, it's still a form of 'negative' metaphysics, using the very organ whose flaws are being pointed out to delineate that organ's limits. The modern post-Kantian hubris is that philosophers can master the constraints on our knowledge rather than enjoy its possession.

And yet I mostly agree. I'd just say the maybe we also have to be humble about our knowledge of the limits of our knowledge. Which cuts back against itself in the same way I guess.

In terms of content (as opposed to tone), I'd lump Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault together as the same kind of thinker. Lee Braver does this in A Thing of This World. And then I'd lump them in with Hume and Hobbes. Basically I don't see the break in continuity, though philosophers often pose as being more revolutionary than they manage to be. Of course tone matters and is part of the message. If one reads Nietzsche as an American pragmatist misdelivered by the stork to Germany, and ignoring his own the ethical stuff, he fits in pretty well. And mostly no one would care. And it matters what Foucault and Sartre did politically, though personally I feel able and willing to pluck their insights out of context, just as I pluck myself out of topical issues, refusing to lose my cool. And I happily pluck deconstruction out of whatever US literary departments were doing with it. As discussed in a recent OP, Derrida can be read as adjacent to Wittgenstein, making similar points. Curious that Wittgenstein was never much politicized. I think he'd be hated more as a fraud if he was, given his indulgent aprofessional style in both major works.

Another little point. While it's useful to give an overall rating to thinkers, I think it's even better to think in terms of anthologizing passages. If you had 1000 pages of fill, how much space would this or that thinker get? I think Sartre is less interesting overall than Nietzsche or Derrida, but I love some of the stuff and Being and Nothingness and Nausea. I'd leave out some of the lesser passages of others to get some of these favorites in The Book.

And Heidegger's politics are boring and facile. Like Sartre though I'd give his better moments some space.

Elsewhere I have suggested that hatred is a secondary emotion, typically a response to a primary emotion of hurt or fear. — unenlightened

I find this quite plausible.

It seems, rather like global warming, that there are tipping points into a positive feedback loop where the lunatics take over the asylum, and the crazies drive us all crazy, to the extent that armed teachers in primary schools looks like a sensible policy. — unenlightened

Good example.

It's a bit insane that instead of guarding gold or cash against De Niro's crew in Heat that we have to think about how to stop maniacs from killing children at no benefit to themselves (excepting whatever strange benefit they calculate in the infamy.)

I connect this vaguely to our atomization. I get used to walking by the homeless lady who just settled on the sidewalk a block from where I live. I go on my own little way, minding my own business. This isn't all bad. It's connected with a vivid and differentiated society. But it's dangerous, for reasons you've emphasized.

probably almost twice Nietzche and three times Heidegger. — hwyl

Joyce was huge, so I mostly agree. But Nietzsche has golden moments that make him as big as anybody.

Well, I'm just glad that literature and poetry are my obsessions and not philosophy :) — hwyl

I'm obsessed with all of them, veering especially between philosophy and prose. Not long ago I read Joyce's bio, studied Ulysses, and continued plugging away at FW, largely reading books about it, which means enjoying fragments in the context of interpretation. I've composed various fragments in that style myself. As I see it, some of the more exciting philosophers just brought in a killer new metaphor. So it's nonfictional in its seriousness but literary in its method.

Good points on Nietzsche. Presumably many others had similar political thoughts, fantasies of the macho heroic Fight Club good ol' days. If Nietzsche wrote only this kind of thing, he wouldn't be remembered. It's because he was otherwise a genius that reactionary moments get attention. You may recall Ezra Pound's treasonous activity. There's an archetype even of the especially contentious intellectual who must take on their relatively enlightened peers (who can themselves be left to take on easier targets.) I recall that Nietzsche hated David Strauss, but it's hard to see why, or hard rather to approve his distaste, since Strauss was transforming crude unworldly Christianity into a secularized religion of progress (oh let them keep their little symbols, his Jesus was Satan.) And he was doing it successfully, patiently, from within the system, being read and reacted to (not without some risk).

Since Strauss is largely forgotten, I'll provide a substantial quote.

Though I may conceive that the divine spirit in a state of renunciation and abasement becomes the human, and that the human nature in its return into and above itself becomes the divine; this does not help me to conceive more easily, how the divine and human natures can have constituted the distinct and yet united portions of an historical person. Though I may see the human mind in its unity with the divine, in the course of the world’s history, more and more completely establish itself as the power which subdues nature; this is quite another thing, than to conceive a single man endowed with such power, for individual, voluntary acts. Lastly, from the truth, that the suppression of the natural existence is the resurrection of the spirit, can never be deduced the bodily resurrection of an individual.

...But do we then deprive the idea of all reality? By no means: we reject only that which does not follow from the premises. If reality is ascribed to the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures, is this equivalent to the admission that this unity must actually have been once manifested, as it never had been, and never more will be, in one individual? This is indeed not the mode in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to lavish all its fulness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all others—to express itself perfectly in that one individual, and imperfectly in all the rest: it rather loves to distribute its riches among a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other—in the alternate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals. And is this no true realization of the idea? is not the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures a real one in a far higher sense, when I regard the whole race of mankind as its realization, than when I single out one man as such a realization? is not an incarnation of God from eternity, a truer one than an incarnation limited to a particular point of time.

This is the key to the whole of Christology, that, as subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an individual, an idea; but an idea which has an existence in reality, not in the mind only, like that of Kant. In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures—God become man, the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child of the visible Mother and the invisible Father, Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power; it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one, pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does not touch the race or its history. It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the suppression of its mortality as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God; that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species. Now the main element of that idea is, that the negation of the merely natural and sensual life, which is itself the negation of the spirit (the negation of negation, therefore), is the sole way to true spiritual life.

This alone is the absolute sense of Christology: that it is annexed to the person and history of one individual, is a necessary result of the historical form which Christology has taken. Schleiermacher was quite right when he foreboded, that the speculative view would not leave much more of the historical person of the Saviour than was retained by the Ebionites. The phenomenal history of the individual, says Hegel, is only a starting point for the mind. Faith, in her early stages, is governed by the senses, and therefore contemplates a temporal history; what she holds to be true is the external, ordinary event, the evidence for which is of the historical, forensic kind—a fact to be proved by the testimony of the senses, and the moral confidence inspired by the witnesses. But mind having once taken occasion by this external fact, to bring under its consciousness the idea of humanity as one with God, sees in the history only the presentation of that idea; the object of faith is completely changed; instead of a sensible, empirical fact, it has become a spiritual and divine idea, which has its confirmation no longer in history but in philosophy.

When the mind has thus gone beyond the sensible history, and entered into the domain of the absolute, the former ceases to be essential; it takes a subordinate place, above which the spiritual truths suggested by the history stand self-supported; it becomes as the faint image of a dream which belongs only to the past, and does not, like the idea, share the permanence of the spirit which is absolutely present to itself.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64037/64037-h/64037-h.htm

If you know Feuerbach's work, this may sound familiar. His Essence was published in 1841, while Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil was out in 1886. Nietzsche is overall a more impressive thinker, but Feuerbach's character is unambiguously good (he's tonally more trustworthy, less of a creep and genius at the same time.) It's likely enough that Nietzsche famous as much for his faults as his virtues. That Fight Club shit is exciting. To some. For awhile.

philosophical approaches that disparage traditional, conventional ways of seeing things. — Clarky

Ah but that's what a biblethumper would say about Darwin or Hume. (I'm not accusing you of that, let me be clear, but riffing on your phrase.) The issue is what one takes for tradition. Many opponents of (their idea of ) deconstruction ( not all !) are likely gobbling up Jordan Peterson's strange brew -- hho is or was likely convincing lots of white boys with no interest in science that they were the knights of rationality against the black tide of a progressive hoard that could no longer tell pussy from asshole.

Anyhow, my attitude still remains: philosophy is rather frustrating and its sub specie aeternitatis hubris breathtaking. Maybe it's worthwhile to try the impossible, but literature and history are to me more profound and much more interesting, and more comprehensive fields. — hwyl

Maybe just imagine philosophers as protagonists in Greek tragedies, desperate to fend off the gods with the final hieroglyphic.

I have been fascinated about literary attempts at describing the reality (or as I put it, our experience of being in the world) - like the great modernists Joyce and Woolf, both tried (among many other things) to put our everyday experience, the texture of if, the internal and the external, into language. Quite magnificently but it is still clearly obvious fiction, obvious art. Reality is elusive, the moment is: we control the past and the future by internal stories and small fictions but never really are very consciously in the present, we rarely really just are. Maybe sometimes in serious pain or maybe at the moment of orgasm - but then those moments are pretty empty, not having much meaning in themselves. — hwyl

Well put. Perhaps we never just 'are,' because 'we' are ethical entities ('fictions') with serious work to do. To be an 'I' is to be responsible for a past and and future, smeared out over the present between memory and fear, sins and promises. 'I am the first mammal to make plans.'

I was on a Joyce kick recently, and Ulysses is great. The stuff that goes through our minds, flowing flowing flowing.

Communication breaks down because the prevalence of lies means that no word of anyone can be trusted. One is taught to buy stuff not because the stuff is worth it, but because "You are worth it", whatever that means. One cannot trust the pension fund, the health insurance, the job stability, that the bank will not repossess the house, that the writ of law will run; the people that run all these things are unreliable and have no honour. The loss of communication and the loss of trust is the collapse of society into chaos. And in that chaos, one looks for a saviour who seems to speak the truth. Maybe it is all those Mexicans after all, there's certainly more of them than there were in the good old days. Or maybe it's the Jews. Or the nazis, or the communists, or... There is no condition more vulnerable to manipulation than that of radical loss of trust and the resulting paranoia. He who believes nothing will believe anything. — unenlightened

Well put. Reminds me a bit of Hobbes. The worst thing that can happen is a breakdown of trust that makes all labor unsafe. Why sow what I may not reap ? Why save and plan when soldiers may steal and rape and kill tomorrow? One thinks also of the plague in Athens.

In the US there's a strange terrible background of hate and yet for the most part the usual scene at the grocery store. So I like to think that it's still just a morbid minority that's completely lost that basic trust and therefore trustworthiness, since the paranoid can 'justify' extreme measures in the light of the misperceived extreme threat.

The myth of the free independent individual, who does not need society because he has a bulging wallet; it's a joke really, because the bulging wallet is made of mutual trust in what without it would not even make good toilet paper. — unenlightened

:up:

Who can say. But it is fallacious to argue they must come from a lawmaker, because they are laws. — hypericin

:up:

Misled by metaphor!

The 'phonocentrism' in the philosophical privileging of phonetic over idiographic scripts (as in Hegel) might be explained in terms of hiding from the implications of the hieroglyphic roots of human cognition. As Derrida famously noted, it's easy to understand the voice to have a special relationship with meaning. Sound is as invisible as the spectral entities understood to ride 'inside' words (another metaphor, another picture.) It's hard to believe that a sequence of banal pictures can deliver the perfect presence of an non-pictorial 'content,' as Wittgenstein points out in the quote above. Philosophy understands himself to transcend myth. Metaphors may be acceptable in their proper, subordinate place. Once they escape, though, we have chaos and sophistry.
https://iep.utm.edu/met-phen/#SH1c

Derrida, from the outset, will call into question the assumption that the formation of concepts (logos) somehow escapes the primordiality of language and the fundamentally metaphorical-mythical nature of philosophical discourse. In a move which goes much further than Ricoeur, Derrida argues for what Guiseseppe Stellardi so aptly calls the “reverse metaphorization of concepts.” The reversal is such that there can be no final separation between the linguistic-metaphorical and the philosophical realms. These domains are co-constitutive of one another, in the sense that either one cannot be fully theorized or made to fully or transparently explain the meaning of the other. The result is that language acquires a certain obscurity, ascendancy, and autonomy.

Personally I don't want language to run away with us, and I don't want reason flood by ambiguity. But, just as knowing that passion distorts reason isn't the end of our responsibility for inferences, it's also the case that an awareness of the pictorial roots of our thought doesn't abolish our need to maintain discipline and avoid being misled by analogy. As Wittgenstein put, there's war to be fought against bewitchment, which may include avoiding being bewitched by talk of witches. Language on holiday and flies in bottles are of course metaphorical. So the cure is made from the poison. A series of metaphors, a series of crowbars, each used to jam in the crust of the others.

We can directly witness the coming and going of people and confirm that the world is largely unaffected by it, and therefor is independent. — NOS4A2

This is a good point, but it seems compatible with indirect realism. We understand that a blind man lacks an aspect of reality of the non-blind. We can then imagine (vaguely!) an extraterrestrial with more sense organs, experiencing an aspect of reality closed to humans. Or our scientists can make a case for objects too tiny or fast for us see. So it's hard to shake the vision of some imperfect mediator between us and 'stuff in itself' (though this dualism is not without problems.)

When and where academia becomes an inbred clique of self-serving poseurs, it is right to ridicule them. — Olivier5

Agreed. And I love Voltaire. But there's always the danger of deceiving ourselves with a little cartoon gang of bad guys. Tucker Carlson probably gives his loyal viewers that they are the shrewd, rational minority on this great stage of fools, and this anti-academic anti-fancy-talk vibe fits right in. Sokal's target was specifically political, aimed at feckless progressives rather than old-fashioned science-denying creationists. I grant that academia is so liberal that it's hard to take the reactionary threat seriously, and one feels that progressive sentimentality is the real threat, but that's ironically an ivory tower illusion itself.

No continuous and stable Cartesian fully autonomous and moral subject but more than an illusion of whatever origin. Something messy in between, something that at times is in some shifting unclear shape there, but then often isn't. Many dualities of Western thought, zeroes and ones, trues and falses are fundamentally quite strange, misleading. — hwyl

:up:

Yes, it's good to be a god. — Real Gone Cat

Indeed. It's almost tautological, as if god is the guy in the ad we're trying to be.

Trying hard to be rational vs. Effortlessly being rational. Wu wei! I'm getting mixed up...or not. Practice, practice, practice...makes perfect. We must develop good habits. — Agent Smith

Yes indeed! Good advice. I've only ever got good at things I liked doing. Yes, it required practice, but I only practiced enough because it was fun. So maybe the good advice is superfluous in some sense. Or could be replaced by "find something you like to do!"

It looks as though, apart from ethics, the self is as good as nonexistent - a stone falls, a book falls, we fall (for gravity there is no self, re anatta). — Agent Smith

That sounds right to me. The self is a virtual or conventional or ethical entity.

Thanks. :cool: It's been good getting to know you. Welcome to the forums! — ZzzoneiroCosm

Thanks for the welcome and the inspiring posts. You pick a nice variety of themes and authors.

Deus ex machina (automatons). — Agent Smith

OK, but I thought the gods just rode down on the machines, to save the day and help the author with a jammed up plot.

At times I miss the spring fairies - but the demons had to go. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Exactly. I was about 18 when Freud and other writers put the final nail in my sense of the otherworldly. I embraced the myth/theory of the world as an amoral or apathetic machine subject to law (manifesting a blind regularity, for reasons unknown and perhaps unknowable.)

The point then is to become an automaton - we need to stop trying to wrest control of our minds + bodies from the unconscious. — Agent Smith

Or a God who experiences everything brought to him by magic, as he desires, not realizing his body is hard at work making everything happen.

This de-mystiquefying of reality I take to imply a transformation of the unconscious. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well noted and well expressed. To become a rational secular blah blah blah is like emerging from a long process of the training of the unconscious, until it's hard to be afraid of the dark again or excited by ghost stories. Man becomes lord of this world, in his feeling if in no other way, by exterminating all the demons and fairies.

Keeping up appearances is an art form in its own right. It's a form of self-defense. — baker

:up:

It's maybe the primary art form or the mother of art. It's not necessary lying. Virtue is also involved (I may 'put on' the appropriate solemnity at a funeral that doesn't actually affect me much, because I know it's shitty to do otherwise.)

The unconscious, we have no control over it and it seems to be in the driver's seat - bah! mind! F*****k me! — Agent Smith

The relationship seems complicated. How is it that adults don't pee the bed (very often anyway, or unless they're trying to) ? How does the sleeper 'know' to resist the urge ? And many thinkers have noted that mastery involves skill becoming automatic, so that the conscious mind is only necessary at the most strategic aspect of the performance.

Shouldn't the Freudian revolution read: The mind is a very special and edifying substance in light of the wild and enriching depths of the unconscious? — ZzzoneiroCosm

:up:

The self then is an ethical entity. Nice! — Agent Smith

Well put !

I was reading Brandom on Kant and something 'obvious' moved to the foreground for me. The metaphysical status of the self is secondary. We could debate about it endlessly. But we who would be debating would be those ethical entities you mention, justifying our claims and demanding that others do so. And we of course remember which little boys have cried wolf, an we gauge the reliability of statements according to the evaluated credulousness or creditability of the claimant. Scorekeeping.

Unless of course the responsible and autonomous self is just an effect of discursive practices within a community. — Joshs

My response is...of course it is. But those discursive practices are equally their own product, as are the sense organs their own product, as Nietzsche joked once.

And what is discursive practice? Is it rational ? Is it a group activity? It's hard to see how one monkey body can make a nonviolently binding claim on other monkey body without discursive norms that hold each monkey accountable for assertions as to the way things are. If there are proper ways to use concepts, we have norms, which are hard to make sense of without individuals subject to them before witnesses. Once we are doing philosophy, it's 'too late' to question the framework, for such questioning is part of the game. "Let me prove to you that the responsible and autonomous self is ontologically secondary."