I have in mind Deleuze’s reading of the transition from the death of god to the last man:

The reactive life strives for a long time to secrete its own values, the reactive man takes the place of God: adaptation, evolution, progress, happiness for all and the good of the community; the God-man, the moral man, the truthful man and the social man. These are the new values that are recommended in place of higher values, these are the new characters proposed in place of God. The last men still say: "We have invented happiness" (Z Prologue 5). Why would man have killed God, if not to take his still warm seat?

Heidegger remarks, commenting on Nietzsche, "if God . . . has disappeared from his authoritative position in the suprasensory world, then this authoritative place itself is still always preserved, even though as that which has become empty. The now-empty authoritative realm of the suprasensory and the ideal world can still be adhered to. What is more, the empty place demands to be occupied anew and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by something else".

Moreover it is always the same type of life which benefits from the depreciation of the whole of life in the first place, the type of life which took advantage of the will to nothingness in order to obtain its victory, the type of life which triumphed in the temples of God, in the shadow of higher values. Then, secondly, the type of life which puts itself in God's place, which turns against the principle of its own triumph and no longer recognises values other than its own. Finally, the exhausted life which prefers to not will, to fade away passively, rather than being animated by a will which goes beyond it.

This still is and always remains the same type of life; life depreciated, reduced to its reactive form. Values can change, be renewed or even disappear. What does not change and does not disappear is the nihilistic perspective which governs this history from beginning to end and from which all these values (as well as their absence) arise. This is why Nietzsche can think that nihilism is not an event in history but the motor of the history of man as universal history. Negative, reactive and passive nihilism: for Nietzsche one and the same history is marked out by Judaism, Christianity, the reformation, free thought, democratic and socialist ideology etc. Up until the last man.

Nietzsche became Zarathustra's Opposite to act as a saoshyant. This was part of his chosen purpose in life. To become the Anti-Saoshyant aka the "Anti-Christ."

And certainly not because he hated Christ, he modeled the Ubermensch based off his psychological evaluation of the account of the life of Christ based off the Gospels. (AC 33 & 39) — DifferentiatingEgg

Deleuze interprets Nietzsche as viewing Christ as offering a passive nihilism comparable to Buddhism.

He gave passive nihilism a certain nobility where men were still at the stage of negative nihilism, when reactive nihilism had hardly begun. Beyond bad conscience and ressentiment Jesus gave the reactive man a lesson: he taught him to die. He was the gentlest of the decadents, the most interesting (AC 31). Christ was neither Jew nor Christian but Buddhist; nearer the Dalai Lama than the Pope.

Nietzsche worked towards giving the purest form and psychology of Christ(ianity) back to the people, in a secularized format, in a world after the "death of God."

Fyi that's not a literal claim either. The death of God is a metaphor... — DifferentiatingEgg

The death of god was just the preview. The death of man was what Nietzsche was after, a post-humanist world beyond a morality of blame.

The one who actually treat that killer - assuming he's eligible for therapy rather than the needle - may have to identify (very likely at some risk to his own mental health). The ones who study the etiology of the illness - if indeed, it's considered an illness rather than evildoing or heroism in the particular society, who study, describe and classify the behaviour need no more emotional bridges with their subject than those who study, describe and classify the pathogens that cause epidemics. — Vera Mont

If one believes that the model of medical illness is adequate to understand the behavior of serial killers, sociopaths, etc, then one has already succumbed to the kind of thinking that splits off emotion from cognition they you seem to buy into. It’s not that you can’t come up with useful results by taking a reductionistic , objectively casual stance, but applying models derived from the hard sciences is woefully inadequate to make sense of how people think and feel. Having said that, it isn’t as though such researchers haven’t first done their damnest to emphatically figure out the people they slap these labels on. It’s that their objectivist stance covers over the valuable insights that could be gained by finding a way to integrate thought and feeling, cognition and emotion, fact and value, motive and cause. As a result, an ‘emotional bridge’ between psychologist and research subject is treated as a hinderance to scientific objectivity.

I suspect it comes from the brain, which like every other part of the person comes to be through the evolutionary process. By definition, if caring offered no survival advantage, we wouldn't care about others. — Hanover

The evolutionary goal of any particular organism is not simply survival, but the maintenance of a normatively stable way of interacting with the environment in the face of changing circumstances. Evolutionary constraints are not a one-way direction from environment to organism, but a reciprocal shaping in which the direction of functioning of an organism co-defines what constitutes an evolutionary pressure on it. In other words , what matters to the functioning of a creature, what it cares about , what is relevant to it, belongs to the very core of the the nature of evolutionary pressure , rather than caring being a potentially dispensable product of it.

All living things are sense-makers. Rocks merely survive, living systems maintain ongoing patterns of actions. For humans, this is not a static pattern of behavior but one which is continually evolving.

Conversely, I don't believe that it is necessary for a surgeon to experience the suffering of his patients or a psychotherapist to identify with the glee of a serial killer — Vera Mont

It depends on what the surgeon’s goals are, doesn’t it? If knowing too much about the patient would distract from performing the surgery, then it could be a liability. On the other hand, if remembering that you’re not a car mechanic fixing a broken machine can help you to talk to the anesthetized patient, play their favorite music, reassure them before and after the surgery and generally convey to them that you know how terrifying and dehumanizing it can be to be on their side of the doctor-patient relationship, it could be a plus.

The psychotherapist may not ‘identity’ with the glee of a serial killer in the sense of being tempted to become a serial killer themselves, but if the therapist cannot see not only how the glee is morally justified from the serial killer’s perspective, but build a bridge between that perspective and that of the therapist, then they will not be of much help to the client.

Sociopathy doesn't relate to someone's ability to calculate outcomes. It relates to whether they care how it impacts others — Hanover

Where do you think ‘caring’ comes from, a mysterious substance of ‘fellow feeling’? I like the enactivist definition of caring:

Sense-making is “the active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. [It is t]he basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring”…Whether we act or we perceive, whether we emote or we cognize, a structure of caring is at play in all forms of sense-making.

How do we differentiate between ourselves and others in the first place such that we are a position to decide whether or not to care about them ? The ‘self’ is already a society of interacting bits of interests, which is why it’s not that hard to find ourselves in relations with persons ( our parents, our children, a loved one), where our societies of self and that of the other become so intertwined that I can no longer tell the difference between acting selfishly and selflessly. A baby may not initially believe there is any differences. how they feel and how other feel, because they haven’t learned to decenter their own perspective. The whole concept that other have their perspective must be learned.

But research shows that from a very early age infants do distinguish their mother’s feelings from their own and respond to emotions like sadness with empathic responses. Animals that play know not to cause hurt to their playmates, else the play stop. Sociopaths care very much how others think and feel, and do their best to make sense of others. But the results of their assessments leads them to the conclusion that the thinking and feeling of others is unrelatable , without significant meaning. There are conditions where others appear to us as walking automations, alive but strangely inanimate. We want to empathize with them but we see nothing in their behavior which makes it possible to do so.

I also think it is not in our best interests to treat everyone with empathy. This is where, as a pretty clear lefty in terms of box-ticking, i get off the train. the "Be kind" crowd have fucked everything up in my view. — AmadeusD

How about “be insightful” or “be a good psychological investigator”? I think all of us always want to be kind, to the extent that others appear to be deserving of that kindness. So the problem is not in our ethical motive and intent, but in our ability to to keep going in our assessment of the thinking of others just at that point where it would appear that they are undeserving of our kindness.

I take empathy to mean that I don't burn down your house because I know what it would feel like to have my own house burned down. It's a cognitive function that places me in your shoes so that I don't treat the other as the other, but I treat him as my own. Whether a dog actually empathizes is doubtful. It is more likely she cares for her puppy out of an innate desire to protect, not out of thinking what pain her poor puppy must be in and that she wouldn't such pain on herself. But I could be wrong, not being a dog and all.

The ability to empathize is heightened and lessened in different people, and some actually lack the ability entirely (sociopaths — Hanover

We can’t function in society without an ability to anticipate to at least a minimal extent the behavior of others. We also must anticipate our own behavior, and when our ability to ‘know our own mind ’ crumbles we find ourselves in crisis. Our ability to empathize with others is entirely a function of a basic , clinical skill at glimpsing their perspective , how it differs from ours and how to assess the nature of the gap. ‘Sociopaths ‘ don’t have a deficit in something called empathy seen as a a mechanism separable from the skill of modeling the other’s outlook. It’s not some adjustable thermostat of caring, independent of the raw ability to make sense of others. The weakness of the sociopath is in the anticipatory modeling , not in a mysterious deficit of ‘fellow feeling’.

We don’t want to treat the other as other. It doesn’t occur to us to do so unless a barrier rises preventing us from being able to assimilate their actions in a way that is recognizable to us and that doesn’t seem threatening and chaotic. We arent born as fortress selves who have to be taught to care about others, or rely on some instinctual
module in the brain to do so. The basic fact is that relating to the perspectives of others is extremely hard work, and each of us is trying the best we can to accomplish this. When we fail at this task , we end up calling for empathy chips in others’ brains , or calling for more religious education, or blaming irrational bias, medicalized pathology in the form of sociopathy, or evolutionary predispositions.

:up:

That is, I'm not suggesting it's ok to murder because murdering is something humans are programmed to be able to do, but it is a legitimate question to ask why humans evolved to have this capacity. — Hanover

We didnt evolve to have this capacity, as though empathy were a physiological gimmick. Empathy is just a sophisticated example of anticipatory sense-making, which is present even in the simplest organisms. To be a living creature is to function on the basis of norm-directed purposes, which requires anticipating events relative to those goals. We care about others to the extent that they are implicated in and enhance our purposes and goals.

Pacifism doesn't work in a world where there are hawks. To the extent the OP suggests everyone will be a dove, I don't know the world would work with all doves. It seems like evolution didn't send us in that direction at least. So maybe that's the question: Should there be no hawks? What would they eat? — Hanover

There is a big difference between acting to retain someone else in order to protect oneself and doing so because one considers their actions to be morally evil or pathological. The term ‘hawk’ , at least in my mind, implies the latter rather than the former. Using evolution to explain empathy is one way to blame the other for what we see as inadequate empathy (biological pathology).

in order to reveal how we have surpassed old superstitious and doctrinaire ways of thinking.

It seems to me that it might be even more important to reveal current superstitious and doctrinaire ways of thinking. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that eventually any system of belief will come to be seen as superstitious and doctrinaire relative to what has replaced it. As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly, wrote

“I must still agree that it is important for the psychological researcher to see the efforts of man in the perspective of the centuries. To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.”

That said, I dont think we ever do away with the thinking of past eras. They continue to inform the present age, so we must continually reach back to them and engage them in hermeneutical conversation. Each must make their own decision concerning how relevant classical thinking continues to be in guiding their understanding of the current world. In order to adequately make this decision one needs equal exposure to the classics and contemporary ideas.

It is related to the sphere of expressivity of sense or meaning where the pure self of the transcendental reduction shows itself self-evident to consciousness. The sense of this pure I is self-evident. But as sense it has a linguistic value (see phenomenology of language in Husserl) , as "I am". "I am" is the sense of the self-evidence of the pure self. — JuanZu

The pure ego only shows itself to consciousness by reflection, that is, by treating the ego as an object. One has no direct, pre-reflective awareness of the pure I.

The living ego performs acts and experiences affections—acts and affections that themselves enter into time and occupy its stretches. But the living source-point of this entering into time and, hence, the living point of being, with which the ego itself enters into subjective relations to being and itself becomes temporal and enduring, is, as a matter of principle, not directly perceivable. The [living] ego is graspable only in reflection, which is after the fact, and is graspable only as the limit of what streams in the flow of time (Bernau Manuscripts, pp. 286-87).

. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident.
— JuanZu

Is this at all related to the immortality of the soul? — Wayfarer

This all gets very complicated, but the upshot is that what is immortal is not an individual ‘I am’ , but a pre-individual ego. This ‘absolute ego’ has more to do with the structure of the immortal flow of time than with the traditional notion of the soul.

James Mensch explains:

The “absolute”, which appears in the late manuscripts, can be considered as Husserl’s final expression of the process of temporalization—the “absolute consciousness,” the “living present” and the “absolute ego” being its other expressions. All these names point to an original process of non-constituted appearing, an appearing from which being, as persisting in time, comes to be constituted. In describing the absolute, Husserl stresses its unity, which is that “of the ‘streaming living,’ the primordial present … that temporalizes and has temporalized everything that is anything.” He also positions “the absolute as the absolute human totality of monads” as the first of its levels. As another manuscript from the same period makes clear, the absolute is not the same as this totality of human subjects. As individuals, monads are temporally limited. The same holds for “humanities.” They, too, are born and die. One cannot, however, assert this of the pre-individual absolute, which is not temporally determinate.

I buy bracketing as the main tool/method. Your emphasis appears to make of it an endeavor to look into becoming instead of a laying out and laying bare of being. While the bracketing itself seems scientific, its content must be subjective - that I'll call here "psychological." But then the goal appears to be through some alchemy to turn the psychological back into science - "universal certainty." — tim wood

It’s good you put psychological in scare quotes, because Husserl took pains to avoid the accusation of psychologism. The difference between treating subjective processes as psychological vs transcendental is that the former reduces those processes to contingent features of a physiological system, while the latter grounds those processes in principles that are ontologically prior to any empirical facts about human beings as biological or psychological organisms.

It would indeed be interesting to see a statement of something - anything - that is universally certain without some recourse to abstraction. Which leads me to suppose that the "universal certainty" is simply certainty for an individual and the criteria for such individual certainty. "Utterly contingent and relative," then, seems right, while in themselves universally certain. — tim wood

What sorts of concepts must be understood in order to make sense of ideas like contingency and relativity? Are concepts like past, present and future, or time in general, utterly contingent and relative, or they the irreducible ground for thinking about anything contingent and relative? This is what Husserl meant by apodictic certainty, that which must always be presumed in order to think anything.

I'm familiar with Evan Thompson's background, his father's book, which I also had in the dim distant past, and his recent Why I am Not a Buddhist. I've also listened to a couple of interviews with him. In the Why I am Not a Buddhist, he deprecated 'Buddhist modernism' and the claim that Buddhism is a 'science of mind', saying that it is and should be understood as a religious practice and culture. But in one interview about it, he said he's by no means hostile to Buddhism, in the way Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian was hostile to Christianity. — Wayfarer

Thompson seems to have struggled his whole life with how to unite Western philosophy, empirical science and Buddhist insights in a way that doesn’t lead to the domination of any one of these traditions over the others. It’s clear that what he has been steadfast about from the beginning of his career is that Buddhist insights concerning conscious awareness are an indispensable complement to philosophical and empirical approaches. But he wants to treat these insights as neither methodologically scientific nor as necessarily tied to specific ethical or religious commitments. This is why he can do science but not privilege scientific approaches to truth over non-scientific ones, and why he can depend on Buddhist knowledge but not consider himself a Buddhist.

Thomas Nail is an advocate of Karen Barad’s
agential realism brand of new materialism, which I think provides us with a way to unite inorganic matter and living consciousness on the shared basis of material agency.

These processes do not occur for a grain of sand (again, leaving aside strong arguments for panpsychism).
— J

They're my feelings, also. I'm learning a lot from the readings of the various postmodernist philosophers, but I don't share with them the distrust of the meta-narrative. I see life as being utterly embedded in one. (Note to self - dig out Huston Smith's essay in The Truth about the Truth, Walt Anderson. — Wayfarer

Where do you think Thompson stands on this issue? He came out in The Blind Spot as opposed to postmodernism:

“Science denial on the right and so-called postmodernism on the left represent a second response. These movements reject science.

And yet, I don’t see him as embracing meta-narratives. If he could find a way to extend the principles of living self-organizing systems backwards to encompass the inorganic I think he would. John Protevi, in his paper DELEUZE, JONAS, AND THOMPSON: TOWARD A NEW TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC AND A NEW QUESTION OF PANPSYCHISM suggested a way this could be done.

Both Deleuze and Thompson / Jonas can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That’s pretty much what Mind in Life means: mind and life are co-extensive: life = autopoiesis and cognition = sense-making. Thus Mind in Life = autopoietic sense-making = control of action of organism in environment. Sense-making here is three-fold: 1) sensibility as openness to environment; 2) signification as positive or negative valence of environmental features relative to the subjective norms of the organism; 3) direction or orientation the organism adopts in response to l and 2.

Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we'll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At the end of the talk we'll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson's “Mind in Life position with a Mind in Process" position and if so, what that supplement means for panpsychism.

https://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf

If asked what Husserl was about, I should say his goal to see things as they are, by separating out from them what they are not. E.g., being presented with a red apple, if his interest was the appleness of the apple, to endeavor to think the red away from it, attending to what was left — tim wood

For Husserl, things as they are is utterly contingent and relative, so there is nothing for phenomenology to state about ‘apples’ in themselves which is philosophical grounding. His goal is to strip away not only the redness of apples , but everything else about apples and all other objects which define them as entities, in order to reveal the PROCESS OF CONSTITUTING objects in universal certainty.

Good science can remain noncommittal about subjective experience while pursuing an understanding of the Hard Problem. Chalmers isn't saying that solving the Hard Problem will require an objective account of what it's like to be a subject. He only (!) asks that we discover what consciousness is, and why it necessarily arises in the way that it does, and no other. Must we insist that only an account of subjectivity itself will answer this? I'm willing to give science a lot more leeway here. — J

This is kind of a mess. The very presuppositions making the hard problem a problem at all are all on display in Chalmer’s split between ‘inner’ experience and ‘objective’ science. So his attempts at a solution take the form of freezing in place this split and then trying to glue the two halves together in some fashion or other ( such as panpsychism). What is needed is not a solution but a dissolution. The first step is to stop thinking of consciousness as something ‘inside’ a subject and the world as outside. Consciousness is the processes of interaction by which both world and subject are revealed, and a science of consciousness which avoids being stuck on one side or other of the ‘Hard Problem’ needs to
be neither subjective nor objective but beyond this split. This is where enactivist approaches excel.

Zahavi, one proponent of enactivism, argues:

Chalmers's discussion of the hard problem has identified and labeled an aspect of consciousness that cannot be ignored. However, his way of defining and distinguishing the hard problem from the easy problems seems in many ways indebted to the very reductionism that he is out to oppose. If one thinks that cognition and intentionality is basically a matter of information processing and causal co-variation that could in principle just as well go on in a mindless computer–or to use Chalmers' own favored example, in an experienceless zombie–then one is left with the impression that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. But this seems to suggest that with the exception of some evanescent qualia everything about consciousness including intentionality can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms; and in this case, epiphenomenalism threatens.

To put it differently, Chalmers's distinction between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness shares a common feature with many other recent analytical attempts to defend consciousness against the onslaught of reductionism: They all grant far too much to the other side. Reductionism has typically proceeded with a classical divide and rule strategy. There are basically two sides to consciousness: Intentionality and phenomenality. We don't currently know how to reduce the latter aspect, so let us separate the two sides, and concentrate on the first. If we then succeed in explaining intentionality reductively, the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant. Many non-reductive materialists have uncritically adopted the very same strategy.

They have marginalized subjectivity by identifying it with epiphenomenal qualia and have then claimed that it is this aspect which eludes reductionism. But is this partition really acceptable, are we really dealing with two separate problems, or is experience and intentionality on the contrary intimately connected? Is it really possible to investigate intentionality properly without taking experience, the first-person perspective, semantics, etc., into account? And vice versa, is it possible to understand the nature of subjectivity and experience if we ignore intentionality. Or do we not then run the risk of reinstating a Cartesian subject-world dualism that ignores everything captured by the phrase “being-in-the-world”?

What would 'immersing yourself' mean in practice? I interpret detachment more in line with what is taught in mindfulness-awareness training - that you are very much aware of the swirl of feelings, sensations and thoughts, without becoming carried into them or away by them. An analogy often given is the 'lotus effect' whereby water forms droplets on the leaf surface rather than the leaf becoming saturated by them. As quoted in the OP, ‘Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.’ — Wayfarer

Immersing involves a kind of openness or sensitivity toward the evolving felt senses of situations. We only run the danger of being ‘carried away’ or ‘owned’ by our feelings and thoughts when we reify them, isolate and unitize them into ‘this and only this’. We cut ourselves off from the meaningful whole context of feeling and thought when we do this. We should ‘detach’ ourselves from the detached concepts and feelings we get ourselves stuck in, in order to get the situation moving again. But there is no way to detach ourselves from the whole situation, since it is only from out of the actual context of situations that a notion like detachment gets its sense. The aim of a holistic grasp of our comportment toward the world that matters to us is to allow the whole to change , so as to allow new possibilities. Grasping the whole makes a change in it, just as all awareness changes what it surveys. We prevent the world from owning us so that we can allow ourselves to be transformed by it. There is no sovereign standpoint of peaceful serenity above the fray, any more than there can be a standpoint of knowledge that lies outside of our contingent involvements within the world.

. Therefore, by rights, the self-evident and essential sense of "I am" would be worth and have all its transcendental eidetic value even if the natural ego disappears or is bracketed out of existence — JuanZu

I agree with what you said in general, but I want to put into question the quote above. What exactly does ‘I am’ mean to you here? It isn’t a static substance for Husserl but a synthetic structure. The ego is but a pole of an indissociable interaction with an object pole , and this is as true of the transcendental ‘I’ as it is of the natural ‘I’. The ‘I’ has no existence in and of itself.

I am speaking "in fact". By bracketing the world I include my worldly self. That is why in the epoche it is said that the "I am" has full evidence. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. But in fact the epoche is made from a singularity that gives the specific sense to the "I am", with which the "I am" remains anchored to worldliness if it is not for the language that here saves ideality. — JuanZu

By ‘world’, Husserl means any notion of an entity ( world, reality, universe, etc) presupposed by the natural attitude. I. his 5th Cartesian mediation, where he imagines the destruction of the world without the elimination of the transcendental ego, he does not mean the elimination of exposure to an outside. There can be no subjectivity, no ego, without time consciousness , and time consciousness is always about something. What is left when we bracket out all concepts of world is phenomena.

“Let us imagine that we effect natural apperceptions, but that our apperceptions are always invalid since they allow for no harmonious concatenations in which experienced unities might become constituted. In other words, let us imagine that, in the manner described above, the whole of Nature, in the first place, physical nature, is "annihilated."”.. (Ideas I).

Husserl here isn’t eliminating all worlds, just the world of fulfilled adumbrations that the natural sciences call ‘real objects’. There is still a world of subjectively experienced sensate data after the bracketing of the natural world. But what is annihilated along with the world of physical objects and nature is the world of human beings and alter egos, my own psychological ego included.

You keep using the word ‘objective’ to describe Husserl’s goal of grounding the sciences, but objectivity has a specific, derivative meaning for him. Empirical objectivity is the outcome of intesubjective processes of relation among individual subjectivities. The fundamental ground that phenomenology strives for is in the associative processes of constitution, which can only be achieved by bracketing the higher levels of constitution. The apodictic certainty that is achieved through this method is not itself ‘objective’, since objectivity refers to the constituted product of associative processes of objectivation rather than the universality of those processes themselves. The ‘objective’ facts of the natural world are secondary, relative and contingent for Husserl. Objectivity is an ‘irreal’ product of constituting idealizations.

a scientific orientation often leads us to assume that objectivity is the sole criterion for what is real. This approach seeks to arrive at a view from which the subject is bracketed out or excluded, focusing exclusively on the primary and measurable attributes of objects and forces. In this framework, the subjective is relegated to derivative status. However, in so doing, scientific objectivity also excludes the qualitative dimension of existence — the reality of Being. — Wayfarer

I would prefer to say that scientific concepts are
themselves qualitative ( mass, motion, energy,’etc), and what characterizes them as leaving out what you call the subjective dimension is that these are peculiar kinds of qualities. They are flattened abstractions modeled as external to the subject. Bringing ourselves back into the picture returns scientific qualities back to the rich contexts of intersubjective relevance from which they were generated.

Stoic philosophy, which is enjoying a cultural resurgence, is built on the foundation of apatheia — not mere indifference or callousness, but a state of calm equanimity that comes from freedom from irrational or extreme emotions (mood swings, in today’s language). The Stoics believed that apatheia was the essential quality of the sage, unperturbed by events and indifferent to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. ‘Detachment,’ said one ancient worthy, ‘is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.’ — Wayfarer

A detached attitude is not the absence of affect; there is no such thing as affectless awareness. All forms of rationality get their sense and meaning from an underlying affective stance. By elevating detachment, one is simply substituting one mood for others and then proclaiming it the supreme ‘rational’ value. Rather than aiming for detachment, one should do the opposite and immerse oneself as intricately as possible in the contextually shifting meanings that affective attunement to the world discloses. We need to get in touch with the bodily felt affective sense of situations in order to cope with a constantly changing world, and to creatively move forward. Detachment can be a useful preliminary means of preparing to experience the affective feel, tonality and meaning of a situation as a whole rather than getting stuck within one fixed conceptual detail of it.

. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." The problem here would be that water is composed of entities, and the ways in which water is ordered and patterned give rise to features such as depth, velocity, waves, eddies, etc. (Arguably, these are not formal features, but then we need an account of what a formal feature would be.) We could say that the "entities" of which water is composed -- I'm thinking of molecules -- are themselves composed of smaller entities, right down to the subatomic level, at which it's unclear whether we can speak of entities at all. Might this level be closer to Husserlian "flow"? But do we really perceive that flow? If we could imagine -- and I'm not sure we can -- an epoché that bracketed everything, would we get the quantum world?

. The question discussed is whether quantity is simply a primitive property of the physical world, or whether it can be explained in non-mathematical terms. The relevance here would be that quantity might be an example -- like texture and consonance -- of something that appears ontologically primitive, part of the "flow" we encounter in the lifeworld. But maybe not, as the paper discusses. — J

In order to understand the basis of quantity, we have to see its relation to quantity. We can only count instances of something that remains qualitatively the same over the course of the counting. For instance, if we define change in terms of spatial displacement of a body, we are defining change in terms of motion. Motion is a formal notion of change, because it relies on the form of a quality, which remains self-identical as we measure its temporal movement in space. Contrast this to Husserl’s temporal flow, which contains within itself no self-identical qualities, and thus cannot be measured like motion can, and which is why it doesn’t make sense to talk about the flow moving faster or slower. Each new phase of the flow varies qualitatively with respect to the previous phase, but this doesn’t prevent there being dimensions of similarity and resonances within the differentiations of the flow.

Put differently, if every change in degree is at the same time a difference in kind, then both quality and quantity are in a sense illusions or abstractions we place over the flow.
Nathan Widder reveals a similar way of thinking in what Deleuze borrows from Nietzsche:

“…the thesis from Deleuze's late 1960s writings holds identity to be a simulation or optical illusion…identity and fixed markers, which may be considered natural and pregiven or contingently constructed but indispensable, are surface effects of difference. Identities and fixed markers, I want to say, are like patterns on the surface of water, which appear fixed when seen from a great distance, such as from the window of an airplane in flight: their stability and substantiality, in short, are a matter of perspective.”

“Nietzsche declares that ‘everything for which the word “knowledge” makes any sense refers to the domain of reckoning, weighing, measuring, to the domain of quantity' (Nietzsche 1968: §565); but he also maintains that ‘we need “unities” in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist' (§635). Mechanism begins with unities that can be quantified or counted, but the idea of unity applies to abstract things and objects, not to forces. On a more concrete level, where there are no unities or things pre-existing their relations but only incongruent relations of force, quantity cannot be a number but only a relation: as Deleuze argues, there is no ‘quantity in itself', but rather ‘difference in quantity', a relation of more and less, but one that cannot be placed on a fixed numerical scale. Forces are determined quantitatively – ‘Nietzsche always believed that forces were quantitative and had to be defined quantitatively' (NP 43) – and this determination takes the form of relative strength and weakness.But this difference does not entail fixed numerical values being assigned to each force, as this can only be done in abstraction, when, for example, two forces are isolated in a closed system, as mechanism does when it examines the world. A quantitative difference between forces is therefore on the order of an intensive difference à la Leibniz, an intensive quantity in which forces vice-dict rather than contradict one another.”

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy. — Wayfarer

Husserl certainly grants subjectivity ontological primacy, but the content of the ego changes with its acts.

“We can discern with evidence the sense in which the pure Ego changes in the changing of its acts. It is changeable in its practices, in its activities and passivities, in its being attracted and being repulsed, etc

What is unchanging about it is its structural role as center from which the retentional and protentional horizons extend backward to the past and forward to the future, respectively.

“As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.”(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. This suggests that the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity rather than a consciously sensed feeling of any kind.

An utterly formless, structureless flow of change.
— Joshs

That would be what is traditionally called chaos, would it not?

Traditionally, chaos is defined by its opposition to order. But
the constituting temporal flow is not without all order. Heidegger says:

“Chaos and the Greek meaning of it are not the same. Chaos mostly refers to the disorder which is a consequence of a loss of order; thus chaos, as the interpenetration and mishmash of all claims, measures, goals, and expedients, is completely dependent on the precedent “order” which still operates on it as its nonessence. In contrast, the Greek meaning of it, chaos in the original sense, is nothing nonessential and “negative”—instead, it is the gaping open of the abyss of the essential possibilities of grounding. An experience of this kind of “chaos” is reserved for the one who is decided and creative—this “chaos” cannot be brought into order, but “only” into an unfolding toward an extreme and ever freer opposition. The essentiality—the nearness to being—of a humanity can at times be gauged by what it takes, and can take, to be “chaos.”” (Ponderings 1938-39)

1) Why are the suggested terms exempt from the criticisms you make about any other supposedly external term? Why is OK to acknowledge the non-arbitrary existence of a “consonance” but not a tree or some other self-identical spatial object? — J

The nature of the flow that Husserl described is not without order, even though it lacks formal features. How can this be? Husserl is not the only philosopher who has depicted the primordial basis of reality in these terms. We find such thinking also in Nietzsche , Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger , Derrida and others. What is common to them is the idea that no entity in the world pre-exists its interactions with other entities. The patterns that arise obey no analogies or categorical placements. Things are not identities , they only continue to exist the same differently.

2) Why, and in what way, would an “affordance”, e.g., be constraining? Why couldn’t it be ignored? Does this have to do with the role that “our own activities” play in this process? — J

We cannot ignore events which thwart our purposes, even though what stands in the way of our goals emerges by way of those very goals.

3) Are these terms actually meaningful? Is it possible, e.g., to have “texture” without its being of anything? This seems like a predicate without a subject. Surely textures and consonances need to inhere somewhere, otherwise what organ of perception are we using to identify them? — J

The subject is itself produced as a continually shifting effect of organism-environment interactions. The person-world dynamic isnt a subject-predicate propositional structure, with a subject representing a world to itself. Instead, both the subject and the object ‘inhere’ as the result of their interaction.

Sure, but then I don't understand what the issue is. We have a whole range and breath of intellectual fields, sciences, arts, humanities that generate knowledge or culture in different ways. So I don't really understand what the central issue is here — Apustimelogist

The issue for me is that incorporation of the insights I mentioned can inform and transform the content of the hard sciences, just as it has already begun to have its effect on biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow nevertheless constraining, in some degree, of what we can constitute as an object or event? How is this flow not "whole cloth," as it were? — J

It is not as though this flow were devoid of textures, of consonances and dissonances. When we slap abstractions like self-identical spatial object and effluent causation over the flow, we are not producing such distinctions out of thin air, but forming idealizations out of the constants and affordances which emerge from our own activities.

Science attempts to explain how and why what we all observe is the way it is. It is unquestionable that we, and the other animals live in and experience the same world. Nonetheless how we experience the same things differs from individual to individual. — Janus

The world is not a static frame with objects in it, it is a process of reflexive self-change , and our sciences, arts and other forms of creative niche construction particulate in this process. Since this world continues to be what it is by changing with respect to itself, there is no ‘same’ world for any part of it to relate to. There are only partially shared patterns of action and interaction among its elements, including us humans. the aim of science is not to represent , but to change our interaction with it in ways that are intelligible and predicable.

If we do not invent objects out of whole cloth, what are the constraints put upon the way we constitute them? Will the lifeworld allow anything? Or, said another way: If we did invent objects out of whole cloth, how would we be able to tell the difference between doing that and merely constituting them through intentional acts? What would mark one or the other description of what we do as being the correct one? — J

We can’t invent out of whole cloth.Wr invent what we want to invent, but what we want is already conditioned and informed by ways of understanding the world that we share with others. The fiction writer expresses aspects of the norms of their culture even when they think they are being utterly original. What is true and false, what ought to be and what ought not to be get their intelligibility from such larger partially shared patterns of meaningful practices. The world that we co-construct talks back to our inventions, offering constraints and affordances that are specifically responsive to those constructions.

Sure, but there is no way to communicate about qualitative experiences in a way that is any different to what science, or any other intellectual field, does when it constructs knowledge and talks about things. You can't really go any deeper — Apustimelogist

Different sciences talk about things in different ways. Some rely on reductive causal abstractions, some begin from the contextually particular circumstances of persons in interaction. It’s not a question going into the ‘depths’ of an inner subjectivity but of staying close to the interactive surface of intersubjective practice and. it abstracting away from it with with claims to pure ‘objective’ description.

Science has little to say about your subjective experience as it is impossible to capture. Its not just science, but anyone. Even the closest person in your life doesn't know what your actual subjective experience is.
— Philosophim

Completely agree, and partly why I have never really understood what Wayferer is trying to push with his perspective and what precisely he is saying is lacking or what that has to do with science. — Apustimelogist

Everything science says is a statement of subjective experience. Your subjective experience sits smack dab in the very heart of scientific concepts, by way of the intersubjective interaction which transforms subjective experience into the flattened , mathematicized abstractions that pretend to supersede it, while in fact only concealing its richness within its generic vocabulary.

Is there more to the nature of things than this?
— Joshs

Whatever that might be may not be made subject to propositional knowledge, which already is a matter of implicit consensus, but it may be a subject of insight which is conveyed symbolically or by gesture or in art. Besides, this is where I feel that Husserl’s ‘wesen’ (essence) is significant. Granted they’re not self-existent platonic forms, but they’re still an underlying reality in some important sense, that are not grasped by objectivism. (I will come back to that.) — Wayfarer

You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. Husserl shows us the difference between how the world looks to us after we have constituted it through objectivizing intentional syntheses (what he calls constitutive time) and how the world is ‘in itself’ prior to such constituting acts (what he calls constituting time).

Each individual object (each unity, whether immanent or transcendent, constituted in the stream) endures, and necessarily endures -that is, it continuously exists in time and is something identical in this continuous existence, which at the same time can be regarded as a process. Conversely: what exists in time continuously exists in time and is the unity belonging to the process that carries with it inseparably the unity of what endures in the process as it unfolds. The unity of the tone that endures throughout the process lies in the tonal process; and conversely, the unity of the tone is unity in the filled duration, that is, in the process. Therefore, if anything at all is defined as existing in a time-point, it is conceivable only as the phase of a process, a phase in which the duration of an individual being also has its point. Individual or concrete being is necessarily changing or unchanging; the process is a process of change or of rest, the enduring object itself a changing object or one at rest. Moreover, every change has its rate or acceleration of change (to use an image) with respect to the same duration. As a matter of principle, any phase of a change can be expanded into a rest, and any phase of a rest can be carried over into change.

Now if we consider the constituting phenomena in comparison with the phenomena just discussed, we find a flow, and each phase of this flow is a continuity of adumbrations. But as a matter of principle, no phase of this flow can be expanded into a continuous succession, and therefore the flow cannot be conceived as so transformed that this phase would be extended in identity with itself. Quite to the contrary, we necessarily find a flow of continuous "change", and this change has the absurd character that it flows precisely as it flows and can flow neither "faster" nor "slower." If that is the case, then any object that changes is missing here; and since "something" runs its course in every process, no process is in question. There is nothing here that changes, and for that reason it also makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”

“Can one speak in the strict sense of change in a situation in which, after all, constancy, duration filled out without change, is inconceivable? No possible constancy can be attributed to the continuous flow of appearance-phases. There is no duration in the original flow. For duration is the form of something enduring, of an enduring being, of something identical in the temporal sequence that functions as its duration. In the case of processes such as a thunderstorm, the motion of a shooting star, and so on, we have to do with unitary complexes of changes in enduring objects. Objective time is a form of "persisting" objects, of their changes and of other processes involved in them. "Process" is therefore a concept presupposing persistence. But persistence is unity that becomes constituted in the flow, and it pertains to the essence of the flow that no persistence can exist in it. Phases of experience and continuous series of phases exist in the flow. But such a phase is nothing that persists, any more than a continuous series of such phases is. To be sure, in a way it is also an objectivity. I can direct my regard towards a phase that stands out in the flow or towards an extended section of the flow, and I can identify it in repeated re-presentation, return to the same section again and again, and say: this section of the flow. And so too for the entire flow, which in the proper way I can identify as this one flow. But this identity is not the unity of something that persists and it can never be such a unity. It belongs to the essence of persistence that what persists can persist as either changing or unchanging. Every change idealiter can pass over into a condition of constancy, every motion into rest and every test into motion, and every qualitative change into a condition of qualitative constancy. The duration is then filled with "the same" phases.

As a matter of principle, however, no concrete part of the flow can make its appearance as non-flow. The flow is not a contingent flow, as an objective flow is. The change of its phases can never cease and turn into a continuance of phases always remaining the same. But does not the flow also possess, in a certain manner, something abiding, even if no concrete part of the flow can be converted into a non-flow? What abides, above all, is the formal structure of the flow, the form of the flow. That is to say, the flowing is not only flowing throughout, but each phase has one and the same form. This constant form is always filled anew by "content," but the content is certainly not something introduced into the form from without. On the contrary, it is determined through the form of regularity only in such a way that this regularity does not alone determine the concretum. The form consists in this, that a now becomes constituted by means of an impression and that a trail of retentions and a horizon of protentions are attached to the impression. But this abiding form supports the consciousness of constant change, which is a primal fact: the consciousness of the change of impression into retention while a fresh impression continuously makes its appearance; or, with respect to the \"what\" of the impression, the consciousness of the change of this what as it is modified from being something still intended as "now" into something that has the character of "just having been." (The Phenomenology of the Constitution of Internal Time, Appendix 6)

Also wanted to add - yes, of course you're right about that. It was carelessly expressed on my part. But he does insist on the primacy of scientific paradigms, which are in some important sense, conceptual constructions. — Wayfarer

If I understand the aim of your OP correctly, you’re trying to get to the bottom of the relation between subject and world. Inn order to do so, we must grapple with the nature of subjectivity, and thisn requires an understanding of notions like conceptual construction and consciousness. I follow Thompson in tracing the origins of consciousness and cognition to the goal-directed normativity of the simplest living systems. Put simply, we don’t have to remain at the level of human conceptuality. By understanding what an object is for a bacterium, how their active interactions with their world constitutes what its reality is by reference to how it matters to them, we have already come a long way toward solving the mystery of what is real and how we come to know it.

To clarify this distinction, consider the act of looking out a window. Naturalism concerns itself with what you can see outside: the objects, events, and phenomena unfolding in the world. It aims to describe these with precision and detachment, focusing solely on their objective characteristics. Phenomenology, by contrast, is like studying the act of looking itself: the awareness of the scene, the structures of perception, and the way the world is disclosed to you as a subject. While naturalism investigates the external landscape, phenomenology turns the lens inward, asking how that landscape appears to and is interpreted by the observer. So it is characterised by a certain kind of detached self-awareness. This shift in focus introduces a self-awareness that naturalism, in its strict adherence to objective fact, often neglects. — Wayfarer

Something seems to be missing here. This description focuses solely on an ‘inner’ mental aspect of perception, as though there were the objects out there and the representing of them in here. This reminds me of Dreyfus’s cognitive science misreading of Husserl. The subjective pole of consciousness does not just process and interpret. Through intentional acts , it constitutes the objects as what they are and how they are. This does not mean that it invents them out of whole cloth, but neither does it mean that there is any aspect of the object that simply independent of the subject. The object gets itself sense from an inseparable synthetic co-construction effected between the noetic-egoic and the noematic-objective sides of an intentional act.

The ego pole projects an anticipatory sense forward , a form of belief, and the object assimilates itself into this anticipated meaning while simultaneously completing the intentional act by obliging the ego to accommodate its anticipated sense to what is novel in the object. Thus, spatial objects are ‘real’ for Husserl as idealizations constituted via synthetic acts of consciousness on the basis of the adumbration of similarities of sense. We don’t ever actually see spatial objects as persisting identities, and have no basis for assuming the ‘reality’ of such unities besides our sciences, whose notions of objects as self-identities in externally causal interaction are themselves abstractions and idealizations derived from phenomenological acts.

Thus, scientific naturalism, what Husserl calls the natural attitude, doesn’t differ from a phenomenological analysis by being oriented toward the ‘outside world’ while phenomenology is interested in inner experience, as though the external landscape would still be what it is without the participation of intentional acts. Phenomenology shows us that the ‘outside’ is already an idealization constituted within transcendental consciousness. In other words, the very distinction between outside and inside is an artifact of the naive thinking of the natural attitude.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

“Indeed, perhaps it will turn out later that all externality, even that of the entire inductive nature, physical and even psychophysical, is only an externality constituted in the unity of communicative personal experience, is thus only something secondary, and that it requires a reduction to a truly essential internality.” (Husserl 1977)

Consider an allegory. Three men are viewing a parcel of land. One is a real-estate developer, one an agriculturalist, and one a geological surveyor. They all have different uses for that land, and would all develop it in different ways, with very different consequences. If what that land is, is entirely determined by the use it is eventually put to, does that mean the land itself has no reality independently of those uses?

Of course, this is only an allegory, but it raises the question: do these different perspectives fully exhaust the nature of what the land is? Or is there something more to it? — Wayfarer

It’s not just that the different uses of the land bring with them their own real dimensions of meaning. The concept of parcel of land is itself already a discursively produced normative meaning. But just because our materially real meanings already move within some set of discursive practices or other doesn’t mean that the practices themselves are static. They are, in Joseph Rouse’s words, temporally extended. This means that practices only exist by being repeated, and the repetition itself, in partially shared circumstances, is always anticipatory, oriented toward new directions of understanding. As Rouse explains:

Norms are not already determinate standards to
which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

Is there more to the nature of things than this? Let me put it this way, if there is, it can never be anything that we articulate, since any way we formulate this idea already presupposes some prior practical stance toward and engagement with what is claimed to be independent of us.

The current subject of many animated philosophical debates is whether we humans are able to see ‘things as they truly are’. At issue are the perennial philosophical questions: What is real? and How can we come to know it? These are questions fundamental to philosophy and science alike. — Wayfarer

Certainly we are able to see things as they truly are. There is no way the world is ‘in itself’ The world shows itself to us in our practical engagements with it. This world that we are already deeply and directly in touch with is the only world that will ever matter to us.

philosophers of science, such as Thomas Kuhn¹ and Michael Polanyi², have demonstrated that tacit knowledge and personal perspectives shape even the most rigorous of scientific practices. — Wayfarer

Kuhn’s paradigmatic model does not rely on personal perspective in the sense of a subjective representation of reality. Rather. it is based on practices of DOING THINGS with the world.

Obedience to proper authority is part of "right behavior." If children refuse to listen to their parents or teachers, employees refuse to listen to their bosses, citizens refuse to listen to the police or tax collectors, nurses assisting a surgeon refuse to obey the surgeon, cops refuse to obey elected officials, etc. there will be obvious problems.

This is fairly obvious is contemporary American society, where we see police forces (paramilitary organizations) openly heckling what are essentially their commanders-in-chief (i.e., mayors, sheriff's, commissioners) and responding to orders with: "nope, don't feel like doing that," or "maybe if you pay us a large donative we will consider following that order." For instance, when elected officials try to respond to citizens concerns and anger over law enforcement, impunity, etc., a not uncommon response has been for forces to simply to stop doing their jobs in protest.

Simply ignoring the rule of law is another example. Yet such behavior by those in positions of relative authority only makes sense in a frame where the "common good" is merely a means of maximizing the fulfillment of the individuals' desires, and where there is no such thing as "right desire," but merely acts that maximize utility—the fulfillment of existing desire—or fail to. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Law and other structures of authority hold society together only to the extent that they refer back to societal consensus, and the glue holding societal consensus together is shared understandings that only preserve their validity through repeated testing effected by each individual. Doing rightly must be based on right understanding, and obedience only has ethical import to the extent that it leads to such understanding, or presupposes such understanding, such as in obeying rules of the road. We need not know the basis of every rule, but we have faith in the wisdom of those who did create the rules.

I figured people might find this interesting. There has been a boom in interest in classical education across the US over the past few years, with growth rapidly outpacing other K-12 enrollment in the US. The advance is occuring on several fronts, being a major trend in homeschool settings, private schools, and (to a lesser extent) public charters. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I believe that both empirical knowledge and ethical understanding undergo a historical evolution. Therefore, I think a classical education is important as a way to understand where we’ve been, in order to reveal how we have surpassed old superstitious and doctrinaire ways of thinking. We cannot orient ourselves toward the future without putting under critique the traditional presuppositions. Any classical education which simply venerates the past in the name of sovereign moral verities is doing its students a moral injustice.