I haven’t done a carful analysis of the economy of down under though. — Mikie

Nor me. But what we do have is free medical and hospital treatment and a guaranteed welfare payments and pensions. I work in the area of addiction and mental health so I’ve seen my fair share of disadvantage.

How about this: if you don't stand against the immoral, you are immoral. — Hanover

This interested me although we may have moved past it. Is Trump immoral, should we take a stand against him and his cronies? I ask because it seems to me people don’t share views about what makes immorality.

We can talk about rape or killing being immoral but when we seek specific examples. we often fail to agree. Any thoughts?

. We know what governance under Buckley conservatives is like, because it is played out history now. — BenMcLean

I understand that Buckley took a very principled position on antisemitism in the Right and was instrumental in reforming American conservatism.

Whatever the issues may be, it seems pretty clear that left and right don’t see the same world or understand each other’s views very well. The only conservative people I know in Australia would probably count as borderline socialists in the US, which always seems further right than we are. I like the idea of doing something about corporate power and monopolies. Even Friedrich Hayek, Thatcher’s hero, was opposed to them.

Vidal was just a Communist bemoaning the fact that neither American political party was explicitly Communist because both of them preferred living over dying. — BenMcLean

Interesting. I would place him as a right-centrist, certainly not a communist. It’s amazing how McCarthyism continues to define American politics!

As I see it, we need to protect private individual property from corporate overreach, not abolish private property! — BenMcLean

Who wants to abolish private property? No point answering this since it certainly isn’t me or Vidal.

That is, I think, my main point. The Right needs to go anti-corporate in a big way. Wall Street abandoned us in 2008, then actively persecuted us from 2014-2024. It is time they got what's coming to them: a massive regulayory backlash — BenMcLean

Some people would call this Communism too. But I would agree with you on this point.

Can you see seriously any elements of the US right going agaisnt the corporations?

Or are they just a showbiz distraction?
— Tom Storm
Like Gore Vidal was? He was clearly part of the show if anyone ever was, not above it. — BenMcLean

Yes, I think Vidal is a Kirk forerunner, just a difference in performance.

Interesting well written OP I'm Australian so forgive my somewhat tangential response, but your OP does suggest some questions to me.

Is there really a right wing and a left wing in the US, or was Gore Vidal right when he said, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”?

It certainly seems to an outsider that the current government has less competence and seems much cruder than previous administrations. But in the end it's mostly neo-liberalism, what varies is the capability.

I’m interested in how the Right is best understood. Is the word really that meaningful? There used to be reactionaries, libertarians, and conservatives, but do any of these distinctions really mean anything anymore? Trump doesn't seem to be a conservative, he's more of a radical.

Don’t attack the debate guys as if they’re the threat because, in reality, they’re your allies. — BenMcLean

Or are they just a showbiz distraction? Aren't some of the debate guys also canaries in the coalmine? Testing sometimes appalling positions to see if the public has an appetite for them?

1. Reject anti-white policies & rhetoric, but on the grounds of a moderate liberal civic nationalism, not white nationalism.
2. Stop seeing "socialism" as the boogeyman and instead work to get responsible people appointed and responsible policies made for real governance, not just opposition.
3. Actually get control of Big Tech, reigning it in so that tech works for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
4. Pursue pro-natalist, pro-family, pro-home-ownership policies across the board.
5. Stay home from foreign wars. — BenMcLean

You sound like an old fashioned conservative with an isolationist bent.

What is your potion on corporate power in general?

It may be a different situation with Husserl than Edith Stein or Max Scheler. For him a beyond of experience is not impossible but meaningless. There is no coherent sense to be attached to a reality that is not even in principle accessible to intentionality, because “accessibility in principle” is built into what it means for something to be something. The world always exceeds what is currently given, but it never exceeds the structure of givenness as such. Husserl isnt just declining to speculate; he is showing that certain speculative questions rest on a confused picture of meaning and existence. — Joshs

Interesting and an important point.

I’m not sure that’s my experience but maybe Australia is somewhat kinder. There are certainly neoliberal trends along those lines but also opportunities not to participate. But maybe I’m experiencing a wave of optimism.

Cool. I think what I needed from films was achieved in the 1980's and 1990's and now I just don't crave them of find them engaging. It's like a stage I went though. My idea of hell these days would be a trip to the cinema. Favourite films today include Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Angel Heart, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Citizen Kane, The Trial, Walkabout, Once Upon A Time In The West, Blade Runner, Sorcerer, The Long Goodbye. I tend not to care much for plots or stories and prefer mood, character and formalist excess.

Also, I’ll never fully understand why Blade Runner is so praised. I liked it to a degree, but not even in my top 100. I guess I had to have been there. — Mikie

Fair enough. It would be odd if we all agreed on art. If BR came out today it wouldn't really interest me. When it came out it was a revelation and I don't like science fiction. What are your top 3 or 4 movies?

Fair enough.

That said, if the academic life is attractive to you, then I would say 'go for it'. As for the practice, the more I attend to my experience without falling into trying to analyze the fuck out of it, the richer my life becomes. What more can we realistically hope for than an enriched life? — Janus

Sure. I am neither inclined to practice nor to theorise, but I am interested in understanding the range of perspectives out there. I find embodied cognition and its implications fairly compelling, and I tend toward a constructivist view of reality, with sympathies for anti‑foundationalist thought. I am also interested in any conceptual framing that seeks to potentially dissolve old problems and dichotomies.

The theory; trying to make sense of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty is very difficult, especially if, like me, you don’t particularly enjoy theory and have no background in philosophy. But I recognize in myself that the things I resist are often the things I would benefit from understanding better.

In that sense, phenomenology neither asserts nor rules out a “beyond”; it simply declines to turn what exceeds experience into a theoretical object. There’s something quite Buddhist about this also: a refusal to indulge metaphysical speculation, paired with an insistence on attending carefully to the nature of existence/experience moment-by-moment. — Wayfarer

This is one reason why it attracts me. If only it wasn't so fucking difficult. :wink:

Nice quote.

To get rid of the remnants of physicalism, we need to stop talking about the mind, body and world in terms of objects which interact , even objects that exist only very briefly. The bits I have been describing here aren’t tiny objects, they are actions, differences, events, creations, values, vectors. To make this our starting point rather than the concept of neutral , affectless ‘object’ allows us to avoid the hard problem’s dilemma of explaining the relation between value, quantity, affect, feeling, creation, meaning on the one hand and object, fact, identity, thing on the other. It also means that we have to start treating the concept of time seriously, radically, primordially. — Joshs

Thanks for your detailed response. It all alludes to a broader perspective and reading than my own on this, so in reading you, it’s a bit like listening to a cell phone call with reception which fades in and out. Bits are recognisable, bits are missing. I’ll sit with it.

Seems reasonable. Thanks.

It gets a bit tricky to sort out where anti-vacc-ers and other rejecters of scientific consensus are coming from. Much of the rejection of covid recommendations coming from the CDC and Fauci in the U.S. emanated from the same groups who reject climate change models. I wouldn’t characterize this group as anti-science. On the contrary, they are science idealists. They would tell you that they very much believe in science as a method. But they have a traditional, romanticized view of how science method works, and the actual ambiguities and complexities of scientific practice don’t fit their idealized view of it. Their worshipful, dogmatic view of science is about as non-relativized as can be. — Joshs

Interesting. This analysis surprises me. I hadn't thought about science-idealists who reject models when they are uncertain. It does make sense.

The anti-modernist, neo-Romantic thing seems apt to me up here in Nimbin — Janus

Fuckin' weed smoking hippie!

Pretty big in my city of five million as well. Of course, it’s mainly the middle classes and the literate blue-collar types who get on board, like any widespread movement. I recently had a plumber lecture me about how science is the cause of most problems and that we need more people like America’s visionary RFK. I think the culture war we often talk about also unfolds as a battle between the seen and the longed for. Or something like that.

I don't think philosophical materialism is the problem―I think it is consumerism, the obsession with material "goods" and personal comfort that is really the problem. I don't think loss of meaning, in the sense of loss of the ability to be convinced by overarching narratives is the problem either―I think it likely that most people only ever gave lip-service to such religious institutions in the interest of conforming with their social milieu. — Janus

Yes, I think we’ve agreed on this too. I wonder if the fear stirred by issues like climate change, AI, and technological change has helped spark a fresh retreat into comforting stories as a way of avoiding a perceived reality.

I find the implications of phenomenology for the question of dualism interesting but somewhat difficult to understand. I also note that there've been different ways of articulating phenomenology over time.

This is what I think I understand: the mind is not a detached observer, and the body is not merely a machine. They exist together, intertwined within a single field of lived experience. From this perspective, the traditional problem of interaction or dualism might be said to dissolve. Phenomenology does not assume that mind and body are two independent entities that must somehow be connected. Instead, it understands them as co-emerging, inseparable aspects of the way we inhabit and experience the world. Yet it seems to me we can ask whether this really addresses the heart of the mind–body problem, or simply reframes it in a more elegant way, substituting abstract categories like “lived experience” for concrete questions about causality, consciousness, and physical reality that first give rise to the apparent problem.

How do thoughts relate to brain in this model? What would it mean to say a thought is not reducible to a neural process? If phenomenology isn't monist what exactly does co-emergence mean?

Any mention, of divinity, God, faith, or belief derived from any of these religions is referring, perhaps not directly, or unknowingly to the principle of a transcendent ground of being. — Punshhh

But what is the transcendent ground of being; God, Brahman, the One, or all of the above? And how could we ever know that such a foundation exists? It is one thing to adopt a phenomenological perspective and seemingly dissolve the mind–body distinction; it is quite another to posit a principle that underlies everything. What if there is no ultimate ground? What if the very idea of a ground is merely a human desire to impose causes and explanations on the world, constructing answers where there may, in fact, be none? Perhaps it is a question without end, an endless recursion where each answer only leads to another question.

You remind me of Searle too.

(2) We’re in a period of technological nihilism, where we view human beings as essentially machines. The world itself is thought of as a machine, one reduced to substances — a collection of atoms. Our current variant of materialism, where humans are animals with language who go through life with needs to satisfy (inevitably leading to the human being as consumer), is particularly harmful. One consequence is capitalism in various forms. These ideas permeate politics, religion, and business. We did not get here by accident— the objectification of the world (in its modern form starting with Descartes) is an outgrowth of substance ontology. — Mikie

I'm interested in this paragraph. Forgive my meandering and uninitiated response.

We often hear this kind of criticism of the present era from religious people and popular intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke, both of whom are unlikely to be influences on your thinking. I understand some of their ideas are derivative of Heidegger.

I've often thought that we are living in an anti-modernist, neo-Romantic period where everything is centred around emotionalism and we are no longer generally convinced by reasoning or science, which seem to be widely understood as joy killers, the enemy of the human. Lived experience is seen as overriding institutional knowledge, with self-expression and personal freedom framed as moral imperatives.

I don’t see widespread objectification of the world as an emerging trend so much as a mystification of everything: a vanquishing of certainty, a privileging of subjective experience, an obsession with authenticity and a re-enchantment of nature, bordering on its worship. To me, this looks like a legacy of the 1960s counterculture that never really went away despite the best efforts of the 1980's.

I am assuming that the antidote to our situation (for you) is some kind of deeper connection to being and nature? What might that look like?

Got ya. Thanks.

I admit "ultimate goodness" is a vague term. But I'd say a universe without an eternal torture chamber is, at least, "not ultimately evil" — Art48

Or perhaps just evil (do we need ultimate?).

It sounds like you might be recovering from a harsh form of Protestant Christianity and, like many others, are trying to salvage part of the story by reframing some notion of the divine within an ethical system you can fully accept. If not, I apologise for this assumption. Not all Christians have believed that hell entails everlasting punishment. As David Bentley Hart reminds us (That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation), there were many strands of early Christian thought that held a universalist view: that ultimately all are saved, and that hell functions less as retribution than as a process of moral purification or the re-acquisition of virtue.

The Christianity I grew up with described hell not as a place of torment, but as a state or condition defined by the absence of God. We were taught that the Bible is largely a collection of pre-scientific myths and narratives, best understood allegorically rather than literally.

I was never able to accept or comprehend the idea of a god. From the moment I first encountered it, I completely lacked any sensus divinitatis, as Calvin might have it. The idea doesn’t help me with sense-making or everyday living, but I still find it very interesting.

Midnight in Paris was ok. No Country for Old Men and The Killer were diverting but not exciting. I want the big electrical experince I got when I saw Blade Runner (the sequel was bland). I suspect the problem rests with me. I have had my thrills and can't recapture the experience. Actually there's one film I quite liked, Nightcrawler (2014) reminded me of when Scorsese wasn't making Ron Howard films. :wink:

When I say I believe the universe is fundamentally good I am merely the superiority of a FAITH in truth and the ultimate goodness of the universe with the inferior FAITH in some book that has a talking serpent and a talking donkey. They are both types of faith.
— Art48
Sorry, I didn't understand this part. — ssu

I'm not sure I have faith in truth or ultimate goodness. A talking serpent and donkey wound almost as plausible.

I wonder what ultimate goodness means other than a god surrogate. Maybe the word ultimate is the problem. Maybe it is easier to believe in goodness when it's contrasted with badness?

Otherwise I can skip going to the theater. — Mikie

Can't say I've seen a film I've enjoyed in around 25 years. My own theory is that for some of us only have a limited number of films we can watch before the entire enterprise becomes dull.

Though in my mind, the opinion that is the most important is that of the originators of the religion, thus my original conclusion. — LuckyR

But who are these originators? Can you actually sketch the process because it seems a bit vague? The founders are not generally in this vein: the Buddha, or Jesus (if he was a historical person), were not empire-builders. If we take Christianity, who exactly are the originators to whom this claim is meant to apply; Paul, Constantine, the Roman Empire, the First Vatican Council? Does this apply to Judaism and Sikhism as well, or only to one or two religions?

One cannot determine the success or failure of an entity without a concensus on what that entity's goal is. In my opinion, organized religion's goal is to consolidate power and wealth. From this perspective they have been spectacularly successful. From other perspectives, success (and failure) will vary. — LuckyR

I’m sympathetic to this line of thinking, but I don’t think we have good reason to assume that any religion has a single, unified goal. One of my close friends is a priest who regards the Vatican as corrupt and “not the real Church,” and I have met many Catholics who hold similar views, which makes it hard to see how the Vatican and its shifting political perspectives could simply be identified with Catholicism itself. For the same reason, I’m not convinced we can say that the aim of organised religion is the consolidation of power, because it isn’t even clear what “organised religion” consists of: it is mothers and fathers, radicals and reactionaries, good people and bad people, institutions and dissenters, shared traditions and internal conflicts, all pulling in different directions for different reasons, making any claim about a single purpose or intention seems like an oversimplification.

Seeing is part of what's real. No need to split the world in one that we see and another that we supposedly never see. — jkop

But isn’t that the question which matters? How do we cocreate our reality as opposed to see reality?

Whether the question matters is a separate one. As Simon Blackburn put it: An idealist is a realist whenever he walks out the front door.

I can see that.

Kant doesn't explicitly reject direct realism. His empirical realism his transcendental idealism — jkop

I’m no Kant expert but I was referring to that argument specifically. Mind you, if we what we see is phenomena not noumena then what meaning does realism have?

Thanks. :up: :up:

Objections to direct realism are typically based on arguments from illusion or hallucination. — jkop

Kant’s concern was more structural and general: he focused on how the mind contributes to experience. Our sensibility provides raw intuitions, structured by space and time, while our understanding organizes these intuitions into coherent experience through concepts, or categories. As a result, everything we experience: the phenomenal world, is filtered through these mental faculties. This framework implies that our perceptions can misrepresent the “thing-in-itself,” whether through error, illusion, a range of factors. However, Kant didn't need to discuss specific perceptual errors to make this point, his argument is systematic: we never access things directly, only through the mind’s structuring. This argument (in a simple form) occurred to me when I was very young and always seemed more convincing to me than arguments from illusions or hallucinations.

A question out of curiosity: do you have any views on the idea that certain spiritual states or "higher consciousness", might allow direct (whether partial or complete) access to noumena?

Be that as it may, of course; the thread title doesn’t implicate Kant anyway. — Mww

I don't mind who gets implicated, as long as it's interesting. :wink:

I have sympathy for the position you are expounding. It's tricky stuff because to discuss it we are already deeply immersed in human framing, possibly smuggling in assumptions.

I'm not overly convinced by the idea that a dog sees a fish just as we do. The phrase "just as we do" seems unproven. Does a dog see a fish? Obviously not: it has no language. It perceives "prey" in some form, perhaps. But does it interact with a conceptual world or an instinctive one? I'd suggest the latter. When we see a fish, do we perceive food, prey, another animal, an allergy threat, or even potential mercury poisoning? I think a dog engages with a fundamentally different world, one that shares the same raw material to some extent, though ours is elaborated and structured by conceptual frameworks and language which transform it entirely. Reducing this to "well, we both see a fish" overlooks critical distinctions and makes assumptions about just what is shared.

Could those same standards be applied to non-scientific thinking? Of course. Science isn’t the only way to know things or the only good way to know things, but when it’s done right, it is a good way to know things. Isn’t that good enough? — T Clark

I think you’re making the point that Haack argues: there is nothing intrinsic to the scientific method that other disciplines cannot also employ. We sometimes fetishize science, which can lead to scientistic worldviews: the belief that only science can deliver truth to human beings. This is a foundational presupposition of old-school physicalists. I thought it worth tabling given the discussion.

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability. — frank

Wasn't the Holocaust also a product of scientisitc thinking and misapplied rationalism with a technocratic final solution? Zygmunt Bauman ( a philosopher and death camp surviver) argues that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, made possible by bureaucratic rationality, which allowed ordinary people to participate in genocide without personal hatred or direct violence. I have always thought of the Holocaust as what happens when rational calculation overrides people’s emotions and moral instincts.

Not a moral content but an ethical process. Authenticity guards against reifying experience into totalizing moral categories, and that is an ethical achievement. — Joshs

We need a thread on this alone. :wink:

So, one “presupposition” underlying all science – still today - is that it is a way to accumulate knowledge – that science is a process, conducted according to the rigor of the scientific method – — Questioner

Sure but interestingly there are different views on the scientific method.

Susan Haack (a philsophy of science and epistemology stalwart) takes the position that there is no single, special “Scientific Method” that sharply distinguishes science from other forms of inquiry. In her paper Six Signs of Scientism Haack writes there is "no mode of inference or procedure of inquiry used by all and only scientists, and explaining the successes of the sciences." Essentially science shares its approaches to reasoning with everyday inquiry. What distinguishes science is not a unique method but the more rigorous, systematic, and socially organized application of ordinary evidential standards such as responsiveness to evidence, logical consistency, and openness to criticism.

Science provides a particularly clear illustration. Scientific inquiry presupposes a mind-independent, law-governed reality and the reliability of our cognitive and instrumental access to it,
— Tom Storm

I'm trying to think of one human endeavor that does not ... you can be describing fishing. — Questioner

That’s a fun line, and I can see why you might lean that way, though it feels a bit slippery. Does science not rely on the assumptions mentioned above? If not, explain how it avoids them.

It's true most human activities, including fishing, implicitly rely on assumptions about the stability of objects, causal patterns, and the reliability of perception. Science goes further by explicitly acknowledging such assumptions and systematically testing them through observation, experimentation, and modeling, thereby building a cumulative knowledge base grounded in these methods. By continually probing the regularities of nature and refining our understanding of the laws that seem to govern reality, science not only relies on metaphysical foundations but also clarifies and extends them, making it a particularly clear illustration of the assumptions underlying all belief. All true in the case of pre-1900 science, I would have thought.