This summary of Tegmark's mathematical universe is interesting — Lionino

The universe isn’t math unless the ‘same thing different time’ applies to natural phenomena rather than our pretending to hold it still so as to calculate it.

It takes a bit of mental contortion to construe the kind of object people are talking about in a direct vs indirect realism debate as transparently an intentional one…At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants. — fdrake

I have a confession to make. I deviated from the topic of the OP in responding to you and Jamal concerning the meaning of an object’s presenting itself in Husserlian phenomenology. I take Husserl to be neither a direct nor an indirect realist , and his use of the term ‘intentional’ is entirely different in its sense from the various ways it is used in analytic philosophy, or in debates between direct and indirect realists.

Nice summary. I was—or Banno was—hung up on the connoted attribution of agency to an object that “presents itself.” It wasn’t clear to me how we go from the object as “constituted by the subject through intentional acts” to the object as that which is doing the presenting. I’m not saying this doesn’t work, just that the locution is not clear to me — Jamal

The object of an intentional act is neither discovered nor invented, neither simply “forced to present more of itself than it wants to” nor accommodated by the subject as an arbitrary in-itself. The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl). So on the side of the subject there is an intentional effect of synthesis (what you call forcing it to present more of itself than it wants to) , and on the side of the object there is presentation or appearance, the aspect of objectification that always resists subsumption within pre-given laws or categories.

The work of the applied scientist is often popularly described as if it were a series of hostile acts: ‘So-and-so wrested from the soil a new source of food’, ‘Whosits forced the atom to give up its secret’. These are grossly misleading descriptions of scientific behavior.(George Kelly)

Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. This means they present themselves to the subject within some mode of givenness. For instance, an object can be given in the mode of recollection, imagination or perception. Within spatial perception, we never see the whole object in front of us; the object gives, or presents, itself to us in only one perspectival aspect at a time. So what we understand as the object as a unitary whole is never given to us in its entirety. This abstract unity is transcendent to what we actually experience.

The posit that they're the same question, or indeed have any kind of dyadic relation, is precisely the kind of structural presupposition which should be held in suspension IMO. I think if you come at that distinction from phenomenology you end up pissing reciprocal co-constitution everywhere and thus take the co-constitution as an unexaminable given. Rather than as an a contingent observation made of human bodies…Becoming-meatbag is something I appreciate in Ratcliffe ("Experiences of Depression") and Scarry ("The Body In Pain"), they really get into how the soul is a story told by idiot meat — fdrake

I wouldn’t say it s a structural presupposition for Piaget, auto-poietic systems theory or embodied, enactivist cognitive science. For them it is something that can be demonstrated empirically. Merleau-Ponty shows elegantly how we can conceive it either as a philosophical a priori or as an empirical result , depending on which hat we wear.
Ratcliffe address the question of

whether one form of inquiry ultimately has some kind of priority over the other. It could be maintained that the two address different but complementary questions. Alternatively, one might adopt a stance of agnoticism, a ‘wait-and-see' policy. Another position, currently very popular in the philosophy of mind and other areas, is the sort of ‘scientific naturalism' or ‘scientism' that gives empirical science metaphysical and epistemological priority over all other forms of human inquiry. But contrary to scientific naturalism is a position that appears, in slightly different guises, in the work of numerous phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. They maintain that phenomenology has priority over science. In brief, scientific conceptions of things are abstractions, which depend for their intelligibility on the everyday experiential reality studied by phenomenology, in much the same way that a road map depends upon a road system. Here is how Merleau-Ponty puts it:

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. . . . To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is. (1962, viii–ix)

This kind of position is not ‘anti-science'; it is an account of the nature and role of science. And it allows that science can still inform phenomenol-ogy, in various important ways. However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science. I suggest that this last conception of the phenomenology–science relationship applies to at least some uses of phenomenology in psychiatry: to adequately explore alternative ways of being in the world, one must first recognize the contingency of a way of being in the world that the intelligibility of empirical science depends on. Given this first step, it is incompatible with strong forms of naturalism. It follows that any attempt to characterize phenomenology solely in terms of how it can assist empirical scientific inquiry will fail to acknowledge an important and distinctive role that it has to play in psychiatry.

For the past while I've been interested in how schemes are generated rather than thinking about how changes shake already formed ones up — fdrake

I would think they were the same question. Cognitive schemes , as manifestations of living systems, only function by making changes in themselves. Genesis and structure are not separate features, although we can artificially separate them for convenience sake.

To my ears, then, construing the world as "presenting itself" is supposed to efficiently connote that the world's nature is autonomous, but what its nature is revealed as is dependent upon us. I think it's a means of saying that objects have a capacity to affect us regardless of our ability to apply concepts to them or those means of affecting — fdrake

You remind me of Lee Braver here, whose Transgressive Realism uses Kierkegaard as a means to reconcile Levinas and Heidegger.

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening. According to what I am calling Transgressive Realism these are the paradigmatic points of contact with a reality unformed by human concepts, when a true beyond touches us, sending shivers through our conceptual schemes, shaking us out of any complacent feeling-at-home

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties. — fdrake

Do you gravitate toward the alternative way of thinking according to which objects transcendentally condition interaction with an agent in a manner neither entirely separable from the nature of the schemes they condition, nor logically derivable from them?

It's quite possible for philosophy to address how people live and what they care about without having recourse to the kind of obscurity, and sometimes even esotericism, analytic philosophy and OLP were and are intended to expose and avoid. — Ciceronianus

God forbid philosophy should be ‘obscurantist’ or ‘esoteric’ (code words for ‘I have no idea what they’re talking about’). I’m not denying it is possible to locate writers here and there who choose to be deliberately obscurantist or esoteric, but mostly these accusations are leveled against philosophers whose work I am very familiar with and understand well, and I see the difficulty not in the choice of writing style of the philosopher but in the unpreparedness of the accuser to grasp the radically new and difficult concepts embedded in the text. I associate analytic philosophy less with a clear and accessible style of writing than with an attachment to a certain set of metaphysical presuppositions (for a long time, they were just bookends to Hume and Kant) that they have lately been in the process of abandoning , leading to the fading of the boundary between analytic and continental in terms of style of language and approach. Joseph Rouse and Lee Braver are examples of contemporary philosophers who have no trouble moving back and forth between the two cultures.

Is philosophy just idle talk? Philosophy in the general sense can be. Philosophy as a discussion of rigorous proofs, logic, and proposals is not — Philosophim

Otoh, positivist and analytic approaches to philosophy almost killed it by cutting off its revelance to how people live and what they care about. Fortunately, in recent years the wall between analytic and continental has been eroding.

It has more to do with the dynamics of conformity. Metaphysics is what One does. — Arne

ok, but I recommend adult supervision. You could poke an eye out.

Contemporary metaphysics represents the systematizing of philosophy. — Arne

That makes it sound like a deliberate effort is required. Is metaphysics for skilled specialists, something you should never try at home, or is it a way in which we are thrown into the world?

Heidegger’s thinking may be a bit weirder than you’re prepared to accept. I noticed you make traditional philosophical distinctions like that between mind and world, fiction and reality, subjective and objective. Heidegger eliminates those distinctions. Dasein is neither mind nor world , inside nor outside, subject nor object. Heidegger’s Being is not an entity, an object, a subject. Being is a happening, a transit, an in-between.

And if you do not want to talk ontology, then that is fine too. But only a metaphysician would attempt to persuade that metaphysics is some sort of umbrella term that includes ontology and epistemology. It is not. — Arne

To add my two-cents worth, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, what he calls also the ontic-ontological difference, is not at all the same thing as the traditional philosophical meaning of ontology as the meaning of extant beingness. Heidegger considers this classical understanding of being to belong to metaphysics, whereas his fundamental ontology overcomes metaphysics.

This is an intriguing position and I am sympathetic to embodied cognition. I'm not sure what it means to 'exceed' culture. Does he mean that bodily experince is primary and the others later and derivative? Or is there more of a reciprocal relationship? — Tom Storm

He means that each of us interprets the culture we live in in ways that are unique to us as individuals, and that these unique ways open themselves to creative transformation. It’s not just an inner process, since tapping into the body’s experiential intricacy is being in touch directly with the world of nature and culture.

It will incorporate the insights of postmodernism and move past the dead end where postmodernism seems to stop.

Do you agree with Gendlin's account here? Does postmodernism lead to a dead end? — Tom Storm

It’s not exactly a dead end, but I do agree with Gendlin that writers like Foucault who emphasize the socially constructed nature of experience leave us with a somewhat arbitrary account of meaning formation. Gendlin’s account
keeps pomo’s relativism while enriching it with an intricacy that they miss. I think Heidegger and Derrida also accomplish this.

Lots of noxious examples of woke authoritarianism here, but would you agree with me that Laurie Rubel’s comment about math and data being non-objective was likely not referring to the logic of calculating in itself but the contested subject matter it is attached to? That many facts in the social sphere are contestable doesn’t in itself seem to be an unreasonable assumption. What many do find unreasonable are the sweeping guilt by association tactics (white privilege, implicit bias, etc) used by some on the left.

Does Barad claim a scientific justification for the claim? — wonderer1

I would say yes. She cites studies of the neurobiology of the brittlestar as an example of the use of her approach in predicting the behavior of phenomena.

↪Art48

Agreed. Besides, when we are asleep we still dream. Not only do we dream — Lionino

Here’s an interesting paper by Evan Thompson on the subject:

https://anandvaidya.weebly.com/uploads/4/6/2/3/46231965/dreamless_sleep-_the_embodied_mind-_and_consciousness-2.pdf

One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether con-sciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya view, calls into question the standard neuroscientific way of operationally defining consciousness as “that which disappears in dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or dream.” The Indian debate also offers new resources for contem-porary philosophy of mind. At the same time, findings from cognitive neuroscience have important implications for Indian debates about cognition during sleep, as well as for Indian and Western philosophical discussions of the self and its rela-tionship to the body. Finally, considerations about sleep drawn from the Indian materials suggest that we need a more refined taxonomy of sleep states than that which sleep science currently employs, and that contemplative methods of mind training are relevant for advancing the neurophenomenology of sleep and consciousness.

Perhaps what is required is some kind of neutral, formal, metalanguage so that natural languages can be deconstructed more precisely. Instead of postmodernising mathematics, we should mathematise postmodernism. :smile: — GrahamJ

Don’t know about that. We don’t want a repeat of the Principia Mathematica fiasco. As for an Esperanto for postmodernists, that kind of flies in the face of the point they’re trying to make about the relation between language and the world.

I'm not saying that, the prevailing modern/postmodern state of wisdom, is the only wisdom there is. I am also not saying that postmodernism has no wisdom in it, because it does. But I think at the same time, there is a prevailing wisdom today, and it is stuck. It hasn't gotten past existentialism — Fire Ologist

In 1997, the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin held a conference at the University of Chicago titled ‘After Postmodernism’. His aim was not to deny the insights of pomo but to move beyond them. You might be interested in his work.

An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created between experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience—that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a new empiricism, one that is not naive. It will incorporate the insights of postmodernism and move past the dead end where postmodernism seems to stop. It will be an empiricism that does not assume an order that could be represented, and yet this will not lead to arbitrariness.
The rejection of representational truth must lead us to a more intricate understanding, rather than arbitrariness. We assume neither objectivism nor constructivism. The results of empirical testing are not representations of reality, nor are they arbitrary. Our empiricism is not a counterrevolution against Kuhn and Feyerabend, but it moves beyond them.

↪HardWorker To be fair, if the philosophy has been around for more than a few decades and isn't integrated into science in some way by now, its likely a failed or highly controversial philosophy — Philosophim

Wouldn’t a ‘successful’ philosophy also be integrated into art, literature, politics , education and business? Is science the supreme arbiter of the truth of philosophy?

Is it correct to characterize your statement thus: abstract rules of organization have conceptual influence (the conferring of sense and intelligibility) upon concrete things? — ucarr

I would prefer to say that concrete things are articulations and modifications of an internally interconnected web or Gestalt of referential meanings. This structure is not a logically causal whole, but a a reciprocally interaffecting totality in which changes to any subordinate aspect modifies the whole in some fashion.

Is it possible QM exemplifies a networked reality: wave functions and particle functions are interwoven within a universe that supports superposition regulated by probability measurements? — ucarr

Quantum physicist Karen Barad has produced a model
of interaffecting matter that was inspired by the double
slit experiments.

Phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without pre-existing relata. On the basis of the notion of intra-action, which represents a profound conceptual shift in our traditional understanding of causality, I argue that it is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘‘components'' of phenomena become determinate and that particular material articulations of the world become meaningful. A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘‘apparatus'') enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent
distinction—between subject and object), erecting a separation between ‘‘subject'' and ‘‘object.'' That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy. In
other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. (Meeting the Universe Halfway)

Physics isn`t mathematics, the theories within physics have additional assumptions and just make use of the theorems of mathematics. — Johnnie

Physics doesn’t just make use of mathematics. Even if all of the equations were removed from physics, its starting point in objective relations makes its goal calculative exactitude, the essence of the mathematical, even if it can only vaguely approximate this goal.

The problem with many answers here is metaphysics ends up very inflated, encompasing physics and epistemology and not distinguishing metaphysics and ontology — Johnnie

You are right that we can pick and choose from mutually exclusive definitions of metaphysics. What I’m about is
your view toward a holistic model of scientific understanding. There are many examples of such holistic models, but I dont think you’ll find them in Aristotle. They emerge after Kant , and particularly in the wake of Hegel’s historical dialectics. Hegel paved the way for Heidegger’s ontic/ontological difference, which directs us to become attuned to the conditions of possibility (metaphysics) of the ontological manner of being of ontical beings. For Heidegger, a list of natural kinds pertains to ontical beings. But any category of existing entities derives its sense and intelligibility from a wider context of relevance. This wider context of relevance comes first, and the meaning of the list of beings is derived from it.

I'm tempted to say this supports my notion that science and philosophy are distinct.

But I'm uncertain. If I missed something I'd appreciate a clue. — Moliere

For Heidegger the way that science and philosophy are distinct is that science ‘doesn’t think’. What he means by that is that a given science works within the bounds of a regional ontology produced by philosophy, but can’t escape those bounds without the help of philosophy. Philosophy contributes

a productive logic, in the sense that it leaps ahead, so to speak, into a particular region of being, discloses it for the first time in the constitution of its being, and makes the
structures it arrives at available to the positive sciences as guidelines for their inquiry.

To put it in Kuhnian terms, normal science is the way the vast majority of scientists think, whereas revolutionary science requires philosophy. He believes today’s sciences (in the very way they define themselves as objective) are still stuck within the metaphysics laid out by Descartes and modified by Kant Hegel and Nietzsche.

We become the source of contradiction in this universe, as if enabling matter to reflect upon it's "self" instead of the matter - the first instance where what was becoming, simply is being. We provide a limit at which, by turning back, a reflection, a notion, a contradiction, is made. The word contradiction includes "diction" which places words in our essence, the self-contradictory animal who can speak about nonsense with clarity and poise. — Fire Ologist

Writers following Nietzsche into postmodern territory, like Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, reject the idea that reflection simply turns back to gaze at itself. Whenever we attempt to do this we are presented with an Other. Reflecting on ourselves IS reflecting on the matter. That is, the world , including our own consciousness, changes with respect to its prior state every moment. For instance, Delleuze argues that all matter in the universe interacts with other matter such that we can never point to any object that simply continues to be what it was the moment before. This is not the reality of human beings perceiving matter , but how matter ‘is’ in itself. Matter contradicts itself from moment to moment , whether there are people around to reflect on it or not. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche in forming his perspective, especially where Nietzsche suggests that all ‘matter’ in itself is differential relations among drives.

Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –). We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life?

My point was that no matter what the starting point is, and there are more than I mentioned, enough holes have been poked in things, that hole-poking deconstruction seems to be the last man standing… Now I should proceed to deconstruct every last word I just said, remake the very impulse that led me to say it in first place. Or maybe not, because then I might just be contradicting myself, demonstrating my point by refuting it. — Fire Ologist

You seem to be focusing on only one aspect of seeing the world in terms of a self-transformative, self-contradictory movement of becoming, and missing the other, more important one. Your focus is on incommensurability, loss, disconnection, arbitrariness. It is true that for all these writers difference is more primary than identity. And in deconstructing the traditional metaphysics, they lose the faith in the certainty a God creator provided, and the certainty absolute truth provided. But I would argue they gained something more important. In thinkers like Nietzsche, Derrida. Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Wittgenstein, the differential relations that swallow up matter are alway already organized as systems, networks, totalities of relational relevance and a certain internal consistency.

We are never without recourse to such backgrounds making our world intelligible and familiar to us at some level. If one compares the organization of these systems of internal differences with the objective realist models of idealists like Kant, or Enlightenment thinkers like Leibnitz, Hume, Spinoza and Descartes, one finds that they give us a way to understand our connection to the world, and to other human beings , that is more intimate and less arbitrary, allowing us to anticipate the behavior of others more effectively. We gave up the certainty of arbitrary truths in favor of the relativity and becoming of relevant , intricate and intimate relations of meaning. One can even find in postmodern models a certain notion of progress embedded within the becoming of these differential systems.

We haven't been able to really advance the discussion since existentialism (and it's bleed into post-modernism), and Nietzsche already burned most (not all), most of it down. — Fire Ologist

The discussion is always advancing , albeit slowly, although I admit this seems to be a somewhat stagnant period for great ideas. But if you grant that there has been a progress in the sciences and technology since the existentialists, then you would have to grant a progress in philosophy as well, since the former are outgrowths of the latter and parallel their development.

The whole point of the "9/11 didn't happen," meme popular on places like 4chan isn't that people actually think that the government falsified the construction of the Twin Towers in some objective sense, and then faked an attack on non-existent buildings. That would be too ridiculous even for those circles. The point is that history is whatever people in power say it is (and that Alt-Right activists possess this same power to change history). Objective history is inaccessible, a myth. The history we live with is malleable. It's a joke, but a joke aimed at an in-crowd who has come to see the past as socially constructed.. The subtext behind declaring every mass shooting a "hoax" is that "you can never be sure what is happening in current events." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can you give me some quotes that demonstrate the belief you’re attributing to the alt right that objective history is a myth? My understanding is that the far right is so astonished and incredulous in the face of what they see as completely unfounded liberal interpretations of the facts that they have completely lost faith in the accuracy of anything a liberal says. That's not being anti-realist, that’s abandoning the expectation that the other side will be faithful to what is real, true and objective. You seem to be randomly mixing pomo and conservative memes together while providing no evidence to justify this.

Another main route for anti-realism to enter the far-right has been through esoterica, particularly Julius Evola and Rene Guenon. On places like 4chan it is not rare to have people talking about tulpas, creating realities through concentrated thought — thinking something is true makes it so — although this generally partially ironic (like everything in the Alt-Right). Hence, their God who was created from memetic energy or whatever. Everything is ironic and unreal, a sort of trolling of the "real" to show its total groundlessness — Count Timothy von Icarus

Evola and Fuenon are considered traditionalists. This has nothing to do with anti-realism as I understand its meaning in philosophy. As Joseph Rouse describes them:

Anti-realists endorse the possibility of understanding what scientific claims purport to say about the world, while denying the kind of access to what the world is "really" like needed to determine whether those claims are "literally" true. We can supposedly only discern whether claims are empirically adequate, instrumentally reliable, paradigmatically fruitful, rationally warranted, theoretically coherent, or the like.

Again, your depiction of anti-realism inappropriately mixes mysticism, irrationalism, supernaturalism and other traditional metaphysics with pomo post-realism, which is not related to any of those perspectives.

Daniel Friberg doesn't urge "rebutting" or "debunking" leftist "lies" but "deconstructing their narratives" in "metapolitical warfare." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Friberg couldn’t accurate define what Derrida’s notion of deconstruction means if his life depended on it. Pomo memes like these have entered the public vocabulary and have now become ubiquitous, but it will be decades before the general public has a clue about their original philosophical meaning. As proof of this, he certainly seems to have you fooled.

Both exist and one is derived from the other. — Lionino

Indeed.

Critical race theory can be thought of as a paradigm that goes all the way back to the Frankfurt school of critical theory. What the theorists were arguing is that, in order to understand modern society, you have to pay attention to the power relationships among members and groups.

https://news.temple.edu/news/2021-08-05/untangling-controversy-around-critical-race-theory

At least if I'm right that science and philosophy are different, and math is science. — Moliere

Heidegger argued that modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche is grounded in a particular notion of the mathematical which founds the modern conception of science. With Descartes is born the contemporary philosophical metaphysics of the subject-object binary. The subject posits the object via an axiomatic method that defines in advance what it means to be an object, and in this way the modern notion of the mathematical becomes the basis of what subject and object are.

Mathematical method is not one piece of equipment of science among others but the primary component out of which is first de­termined what can become object and how it becomes an object…

Descartes does not doubt because he is a skeptic; rather, he must become a doubter because he posits the mathe­matical as the absolute ground and seeks for all knowledge a foundation that will be in accord with it. It is a question not only of finding a fundamental law for the realm of nature, but finding the very first and highest basic principle for the being of what is, in general. This absolutely mathematical principle cannot have anything in front of it and cannot allow what might be given to it beforehand.

This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing
each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of
that being. We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the
certainty of representation. What it is to be is for the first time defined as the objectiveness of representing, and
truth is first defined as the certainty of representing, in the metaphysics of Descartes. The whole of modern metaphysics taken together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what it is to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes.

Eugene Gendlin’s analysis helps to clarify Heidegger’s comments:

There is a serial procedure employed in counting. In this procedure we obtain various numbers because we always keep in mind the units al­ready counted. Our counting “synthesizes” (puts to­gether) fourteen and another, another, and another. We keep what we have with us as we add another same unit. Our own continuity as we count gets us to the higher number. As Kant phrased it, without the unity of the “I think,” there would be only the one unit counted now, and no composition of numbers. We get from fourteen to seventeen by taking fourteen with us as we go on to add another, another, and another.

Thus, our activity of thinking provides both the series of uniform steps and the uniting of them into quantities. These units and numbers are our own notches, our own “another,” our own unity, and our own steps. Why do two plus two equal four? The steps are always the same; hence, the second two involves steps of the same sort as the first two, and both are the same uniform steps as counting to four. Thus, the basic mathematical composing gives science its uniform unitlike “things” and derivable com­positions. Therefore, everything so viewed
becomes amenable to mathematics.

But Heidegger terms the modern model of things
“mathematical” for a second reason. He argues that “mathematical” means “‘axiomatic”’: the basic nature
of things has been posited as identical to the steps of
our own proceeding, our own pure reasoning. The laws
of things are the logical necessity of reason’s own steps
posited as laws of nature. It is this that makes the model “mathematical” and explains why mathematics
acquired such an important role. The everywhere-equal
units of the space of uniform motion of basically uni­form bodies are really only posited axioms. They are the
uniform steps of pure, rational thought, put up as axioms
of nature. Descartes had said it at its “coldest” and most extreme: Only a method of reducing everything
to the clear and distinct steps of rational thinking grasps
nature.

Is not such an approach simply unfounded? Every­thing may follow from the starting assumptions, but what
are they based upon? How can that be a valid method?
Heidegger says that the axiomatic method lays its own
ground . He thus gives the term “axiomatic” a
meaning it does not always have: he makes it reflexive
(as Descartes’ method was ). “Axiomatic” means not only
to postulate axioms and then deduce from them; it does
not refer to just any unfounded assumptions one might
posit and deduce from. Rather, Heidegger emphasizes that the axioms that rational thought posits assert the nature of rational thought itself. Axiomatic thought posits itself as the world’s outline. It is based on itself. It creates the model of the world, not only by but as its own steps of thought. As we have seen, it is rational thought that has uniform unit steps and their composits, logical neces­sity and so forth. The axiomatic ground-plan of nature is
simply the plan of the nature of rational thought as­serted of nature. This, then, is the basic “mathematical”
character of modern science. It is founded on the “‘axio­matic” method of “pure reason,” which, as we shall see,
Kant retains but limits.

Perhaps we can't rightly call anti-realism vis-á-vis history, (or even contemporary events) post-modern, but it certainly gets lumped in with the term, and it's a cornerstone of Alt-Right thought — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you cite some examples of anti-realism as an explicit doctrine of the far right? I can’t help but think your own realist-based thinking is leading you to inappropriately lump together as ‘anti-realist’ everyone who doesn’t accept the scientific consensus of what has been objectively proven to be true, and ignoring their reasons for rejecting it. There are a wide variety of realisms, and I view the far right , to the extent that generalizations can be made here, as embracing a more traditionalist form of realism than the one you endorse. I think this is the source of your difference with the far right, and pomo’s alleged influence here is largely a popular scapegoating for cultural trends they have almost nothing to do with, based on an inability to read them effectively.

Formal logic and Symbolic logic are not able to deal with the real world phenomenon and states very well.
— Corvus

They are at the very heart of the development of digital computers, such as the one you're reading right now. — TonesInDeepFreeze

What Corvus should have said is that they are not very good at cognizing in the way living systems do, as Hubert Dreyfus famously showed 60 years ago with his ‘What Computers Can’t Do’ and his more recent update ‘What Computers still can’t do’. Of course they are a part of the real world. Specifically, as technological
implementations they function as appendages to human ecological systems , the way a nest belongs to the bird’s ecology and the web belongs to the spider’s built niche. While an animal species are stick within a single ecological niche, humans continually construct new ones. As we evolve culturally, so will our built niche, which may involve the replacement of symbolic logic with different technological languages.

↪Joshs

Right, but the question was: "did elements of the Nu/Alt-Right grow out of/use ideas from post-modernism?" not "does Nick Land understand Deleuze in particular?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

If we agree that there are in fact substantive ideas offered by particular authors labeled as postmodern , then in order to determine whether someone’s ideas ‘grow out of/ use ideas from pomo’, we first have to establish what exactly we’re talking about, and I think that requires picking a specific writer, whether it be Deleuze, Foucault or Lyotard. and determining a connection with Land’s work.

it seems unreasonable to assume that someone who had a successful career as an academic publishing on Deleuze and wasn't subject to particular criticism until after he adopted controversial political opinions completely misread his sources — Count Timothy von Icarus

A lot of scholar glom onto and base their careers on parsing each word of a major figure. They hew so close to the original texts that it is difficult to see where their thinking departs from the master until they write something controversial.

You’d be surprised by how wildly students of particular philosophers can misread them. For example , Graham Harman, who founded object oriented ontology, a branch of speculative realism, offers a reading of Heidegger about as far removed from pomo as I can imagine. I recently read a piece which claimed, somewhat convincingly in my opinion, that Land settled on a libertarian Kantianism, which it seems to me is impossible to characterize as ‘growing out of’ Deleuze or pomo. Your thinking doesn’t grow out of an approach that is built out of a direct critique of what you’re growing into.

I think its the case that Land was always a traditionalist, but also a cultural hipster who joined the latest intellectual fad (which happened to be Deleuze) without absorbing more than superficial elements of him. As he became older and learned to read philosophy more carefully he discovered his true mentors were not pomo at all but transcendental idealism.

When it comes to tendencies, attitudes, dispositions and so on, I have only encountered human diversity, so for me any view which characterizes people as all having the same tendency, attitude or disposition I find egregious — Janus

.

It’s not necessary that a metaphysical outlook be identically shared among members of a community. Each of those diverse humans you have encountered has an interpretive system for construing events which is partially unique to themselves.

Land isn't responding to only Deleuze, although it seems likely given some of his lines that he would say he is doing to Deleuze what Deleuze claims to do to other thinkers: "buggering" them to produce demon offspring. That the demon offspring is recognizably related to the author but a sort of heretical corruption is sort of the point. I don't know how someone who conceives of their philosophy in such a way can be "misread," as it would seem that "misreading," shows proper application of the method that is recommended — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re not resolved of the responsibility to read Deleuze carefully. You don’t get off the hook that easily. Deleuze’s work is rigorous in what it is trying to say. It can be placed in just as precise a region as any of the other philosophers of our era. Deleuze lets us know the difference between ‘buggery’, where he uses authors like Leibnitz and Spinoza for his own purposes, and where he rejects what he doesnt like in their work. Readers of Anti-Oedipus have no doubt he was influenced by Freud and Lacan but leaves them decidedly behind at a certain point.Readers also know where he stands in relation to Derrida , Husserl and Hegel. Deleuze work tells us where to situate him with respect to the history of philosophy, praising Foucault and Heidegger but also letting us known where they fall short , venerating Nietzsche as his most important influence, resurrecting Bergson for his notion of lived duration but critiquing his subjectivism.

Despite his differences with Derrida, I believe Deleuze would endorse the latter’s thoughts about truth and relativism:

For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.

isn't saying "thou shalt not have hierarchies," itself an absolutist decree being made from on high? Why aren't we free to generate the neo-facist, neo-feudal aesthetic we find interesting? Isn't this more true to the goal of exploring "the infinite plurality of creative spaces?" How committed to this infinite creativity are you really if your response to some forms of it are "no, you cannot be creative like that!" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Deleuze is not commanding anybody to discard hierarchies, he’s showing how we can understand them as deconstructing themselves. Either you see this or you don’t. If you don’t, then Deleuze’s opinion is that your idea of freedom is a compromised freedom because it is unable to see beyond stratified categories that restrict as much as they liberate you. It’s your loss, not Deleuze’s. He’s just offering what he sees as options. It’s up to you whether you recognize them as useful alternatives or not.

↪Joshs
Sartre basically hovered around the starting line just like the rest. — Fire Ologist

Is there only one starting point? You dont find that certain philosophers provide you with more clarity than others?

But Nietzsche, like all of us, could only move in self-contradiction. Self-transformation, self-creation, lays out an ontology and metaphysic of self-material, action upon that material, and new self material - these all fall prey to the disconnect between appearance and reality. — Fire Ologist

There can only be a disconnect between appearance and reality we still take seriously the notion of reality as something independent of our experience. Throw away that notion and we also jettison the concept of mere appearance. And what’s wrong with self-contradiction if it moves us from one meaningful-in-itself value system to another?

We honest thinkers are deep in the cave. I find it an interesting place to be. — Fire Ologist

You seem to be at Sartre’s starting point, looking out a world where all the old verities and certainties have been put into question. Sartre’s response reflected the fact that there was one verity he was not prepared to question, that of the self-conscious subject. As a result, his attitude was one of mourning the loss of those old certainties. By contrast, Nietzsche was able to destabilize Sartre’s Cartesian subject, and as a result, he could take joy in immersing himself in self-transformative becoming rather than desperately search for ways to secure wisdom for the knowing subject from the rubble of the past through dialectical materialism.

". To be clearer, do you find that hypocrisy in what is maintained in praxis and what is professed via propositions cannot occur and, if so, due to what reason(s)? — javra

One can certainly lie to others about one’s views for various reasons, but I don’t think that apparent hypocrisy between opinion and action generally involves self-deception so much as failure to take into account the practical implications of one’s views. Theory is rarely able to account for the unpredictability and indeterminateness of real life situations.

What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why? — Banno

Mathematical logic and its use in geometry produces pure, but empty idealities. They introduce the pure idea of precision, exactitude, accuracy that then becomes the basis for the aim of exactitude of correctness in the empirical
sciences.

“The only objectivity that belongs to exact natural science is based upon "geometrization," an idealization which is able to encompass theoretically, by idealizing them, all the possibilities of experience as experience of what is identical in infinitum; it does this by means of ideal concepts—con­cepts of what is in itself and of ideal truths as truths in themselves.” (Husserl)

The catch is that applying the pure idealizations of geometry to the natural world is describing a world that is no longer ‘empty’, no longer protected from contextual change in meaning. There are no pure forms , shapes in nature, and no self-identically persisting objects. For the purposes of convenience, scientists, beginning with figures like Galileo, fabricated a geometricized idea of the empirical object. As Husserl writes of this invented object:

“A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities, its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. But only ideals have a rigorous identity; the con­sequence would be that an individual is truly something identi­cal—i.e., an entity—if it is the ideally identical substrate for general absolute ideas.”

What Husserl means when he says only ideals have a rigorous identity is that in order to adopt the notion of a self-identical empirical object, or the concept of a logical subject and predicate , we have to conceal the subjectively changing processes of actual experience, to ‘freeze’ them into temporarily unchanging identities so we can compare and manipulate them. The world doesn’t come to us packaged as self-identical objects.

“ It is high time that people got over being dazzled, particularly in philosophy and logic, by the ideal and regulative ideas and methods of the "exact" sciences — as though the In-itself of such sciences were actually an absolute norm for objective being and for truth. Actually, they do not see the woods for the trees. Because of a splendid cognitive performance, though with only a very restricted teleological sense, they overlook the infinitudes of life and its cognition, the infinitudes of relative and, only in its relativity, rational being, with its relative truths. But to rush ahead and philosophize from on high about such matters is fundamentally wrong; it creates a wrong skeptical relativism and a no less wrong logical absolutism, mutual bugbears that knock each other down and come to life again like the figures in a Punch and Judy show.”

“The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it. One must finally achieve the insight that no objec­tive science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense.

Heidegger writes:

The ontological presuppositions of historiographical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor of the most exact sciences. Math­ematics is not more exact than historiographical, but only narrower with regard to the scope of the existential foundations relevant to it.

Because of examples such as these, I don’t then necessarily equate a being’s often unconsciously occurring Umwelt (for lack of a better word) to - in the case of humans - the self-professed worldview which is consciously upheld and maintained. — javra

The two don’t have to be in conflict. There are communities of scholars devoted to a particular metaphysics or philosopher, and yet no two people interpret that ‘same’ metaphysics or philosophy in exactly the same way. The publicly agreed-upon understanding is a shorthand, an abstractive generalization which conceals within itself the variety of ways it is implicitly used by different people. You may be surprised by the fact that “self-proclaimed Christians that adhere to all ritual aspects of their faith and uphold this metaphysical worldview at the same time in practice are in many a way atheistic”, but they may see no contradiction here.

It seems to me that the terms 'worldview' and metaphysics' are too often used interchangeably and this is confusing. I think, by reflective reasoning, the latter attempts to globally make sense of (i.e. translate into conceptual categories) the local 'presuppositions and implications' (i.e. parochial biases ~ e.g. mythological, theological and/or ideological blindspots) of the former; in other words, 'worldview' is to (native) grammar plus (naive) vocabulary/idioms as 'metaphysics' is to theoretical linguistics – or object-discursive & meta-discursive, respectively — 180 Proof

Wow, it sounds like a person would need a PhD in order to be qualified to form metaphysical presuppositions. I may be wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and connect your take on what metaphysics is with an Analytic approach. This makes sense give that, historically, the Analyric community has been much more interested in Hume, Leibnitz and Kant than Hegel. I am thinking that it is only in the philosophies that came after Hegel and were strongly influenced by him that we get an articulation of metaphysics as comparable to worldview. That is, as an overarching framework of intelligibility that orients us to the world and ties all its aspects together in a global unity, but that in most cases is held naively, unconsciously.

Maybe those people are not real post-modernists, but they do exist:

addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,”
— WSJ — Lionino

A lot of confusion around the word postmodernism. In the field of philosophy it tends to lumped in with trends that are quite tangential to it and in many cases opposed to it (Marxism). Pomo authors like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida often get blamed for the excesses of wokism and cancel culture, when in fact the repressive moralism coming from these movements is attributable to such doctrines as Critical Race Theory, and figures like Franz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci. These approaches are heavily influenced by Marx and psychoanalysis, which are put into question by pomo writers like Foucault and Derrida.