To harm stupidity.- Surely, the faith preached so stubbornly and with so much conviction, that egoism is reprehensible, has on the whole harmed egoism (while benefiting, as I shall repeat a hundred times, the herd instincts!) -above all, by depriving egoism of its good conscience and bidding us to find in it the true source of all unhappiness. "Your selfishness is the misfortune of your life''-that was preached for thousands of years and harmed, as I have said, selfishness and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much sensitivity, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it.

The ancient philosophers taught that the main source of misfortune was something very different. Beginning with Socrates, these thinkers never wearied of preaching: "Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor's opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the
happiest of all.''

Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons on its side than did the sermon against selfishness. What is certain, however, is that it deprived stupidity
of its good conscience; these philosophers harmed stupidity. — Nietzsche, Gay Science, 328

If Rodl is to subtly critique the various conceptions of thought on the basis of not properly capturing self-consciousness — Leontiskos

The science of judgment does not stake out a position, located in a space of positions structured by relations of exclusion or inclusion. It says only what anyone always already knows, knows insofar as she judges at all. — ibid. page 39

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 251, suggests that it is the defining mark of “grammatical sentences”, which are the province of philosophical reflection, to be without contrary. — ibid. Footnote 1

Therefore there is no such thing as a first-person proposition. There has been opposition to the idea that first-person thought is a propositional attitude. This is helpful, for it weakens the immunity to reflection enjoyed by the idea. Yet the opposition is limited; it limits itself by thinking of the first person as marking out a special class of thoughts. — ibid. page 34

I am doing something, I am active. It is not a point about the content. There is no notion that the I think is inside p, no notion that reflecting on the I think is reflecting on p. The self-consciousness of thought is not in view in the infatuation with agency — ibid. 35

But if what I say is true, then the demand for argument does not show intellectual acumen, but betrays a lack of understanding. An argument establishes that something is so by citing grounds for it. Embracing the argument involves affirming these grounds. An argument rests judgment on judgment. But if what I say is true, then the knowledge of it is contained in any judgment. There is no meaning in the idea that I might come to know it by turning to a further judgment. — ibid. page 39

Because if the critique of the force/content distinction is ultimately that it is dualistic, then I'm not sure where else there is to go. — Leontiskos

The force-content distinction enables us to describe and understand all these phenomena. Thus it has great explanatory power. Giving it up is costly. Unless we are being given assurance that we will be able to understand all this without that distinction, we do well to keep it.

This would make sense if the force-content distinction did. But it does not. What is confused in itself does not provide understanding. As the force-content distinction makes no sense, it has no explanatory power. There is no cost to abandoning it. On the contrary. It costs to retain it. Using the distinction, we will be certain not to understand what we seek to understand; we will be certain to distort it and impede its comprehension. — ibid. 2.7, page 37

Thus it may seem that c-propositions are the main topic; they are what the semantic theory is about. Yet, the concept of a c-proposition can claim to be a semantic concept only if c-propositions can be shown to inform the use of language. And they can inform this use only by figuring in the thoughts of those who use the language, as these think how to use it and how it is correct to use it. Thus the soundness of the concept of a c-proposition depends on there being this structure to the thought of someone who uses a sentence to make an assertion: thinking it correct to use the sentence in the way that she does, she thinks that a c-proposition is true at the context in which she uses it. — ibid. page 30

When Brooke Rollins was asked who would work on farms if the labor force was deported, she said she would address any ‘hypothetical issues that turn out to be real. — Investigate Midwest

Rödl says that the I think accompanies all my thoughts, or at the very least he wants to place a very strong emphasis on self-consciousness in thinking and judging. It seems overboard. What is the context that would account for this sort of emphasis? Thanks. — Leontiskos

There is no such thing as a “Public Weal” — NOS4A2

But it relates to his later point from Thomas Nagel about 'thoughts we can't get outside of'. Nagel emphasizes that there are perspectives—like the validity of reason or the unity of thought—that we cannot evaluate "from the outside" because they form the very framework within which all thinking and evaluation occur. — Wayfarer

What Rodl is claiming, using the synonymy of "thought" and "judgment," is that thinking that things are so is not different from being conscious or aware of so thinking. So the million-dollar question is, When I think about my judgment, which we know is a thought1 (a mental event), is my new thought about that judgment also a thought1? I think much of Rodl's thesis rests on denying this. Self-consciousness has got to be a thought2 item, something "accompanying" any thought1, not an additional simultaneous thought1 (mental event). — J

The Fregean account conceives the first-person pronoun as a variety of reference, which singles out an object in a special way, indicated by the phrase, as the one who is affirming the proposition.This alleged manner of singling out an object explodes the conception of thought that it brings to first-person thought: a thought that is of her who affirms it as affirming it contains the subject’s affirmation of it. It is not a proposition. The first-person pronoun is no variety of reference, but an expression of self-consciousness: it signifies the internality to what is thought of its being thought. The Fregean attempts to represent self-consciousness, which dissolves the force-content distinction, as a special content. If we are to understand the first-person pronoun, we must understand self-consciousness. The first step to this is abandoning the force-content distinction. — ibid. page 25

As I think this in the first person, I represent that substance as thinking that she is a human being. That she thinks this is one thing, that she is what she thinks herself to be, another. As we shall see, the semantic framework deriving from Kaplan and Lewis in effect imposes this articulation on first-person thought: she who thinks a first-person thought thinks something of a certain substance, which substance, in a separate thought, she thinks to be herself. — ibid. 27

In this sense, all propositions will be related to the one who thinks them, and thus in this sense, it may be said that all propositions are first-person propositions. This is a technical ploy; it has no philosophical significance. In the same way, all sentences may be treated as bearing a tense, even if they are tenseless. They will turn out to be true at all times if they are true at one. — ibid. page 28

Soc Excellent. And do you define thought as I do?

Theaet. How do you define it?

Soc: As the talk which the soul has with itself about any subjects which it considers. You must not suppose that I know this that I am declaring to you. But the soul, as the image presents itself to me, when it thinks, is merely conversing with itself, asking itself questions and answering, affirming and denying. When it has arrived at a decision, whether slowly or with a sudden bound, and is at last agreed, and is not in doubt, we call that its opinion; and so I define forming opinion as talking and opinion as talk which has been held, not with someone else, nor yet aloud, but in silence with oneself. How do you define it? — Plato, Theaetetus, 189e4, translated by Fowler

So is the idea that he follows Hegel in disagreeing with Kant about noumena but he does not disagree with respect to his interpretation that, "The I think accompanies all my thoughts"? — Leontiskos

Or perhaps you are claiming that Rodl mildly disagrees with the idea that he attributes to Kant? — Leontiskos

This bears repeating: there is no meaning in saying that, in an act of thinking, two things are thought, pu and I think p. Kant said: the I think accompanies all my thoughts.3 Hegel calls this way of putting it “inept”. However, in defense of Kant, we note that he hastened to add that the I think cannot in turn be accompanied by any representation. Thus he sought to make it plain that the I think is not something thought alongside the thought that it accompanies, but internal to what is thought as such. When I say, the I think is contained in what is thought, this may with equal justice be called inept. It suggests that there are two things, one containing the other. Perhaps we should say, what is thought is suffused with the I think. But here, too, if we undertake to think through the metaphor, we come to grief before long. — ibid. page 6

S]ince an object can appear to us only by means of … pure forms of sensibility, i.e., be an object of empirical intuition, space and time are thus pure intuitions that contain a priori the conditions of the possibility of appearances, and the synthesis in them has objective validity. The categories of the understanding, on the contrary, do not represent to us the conditions under which objects are given in intuition at all, hence objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding, and therefore without the understanding containing their a priori conditions. Thus a difficulty is revealed here that we did not encounter in the field of sensibility, namely how subjective conditions of thinking should have objective validity, i.e., yield conditions of the possibility of objects; for appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding. … [T]hat objects of sensible intuition must accord with the formal conditions of sensibility that lie in the mind a priori is clear from the fact that otherwise they would not be objects for us; but that they must also accord with the conditions that the understanding requires for the synthetic unity of thinking is a conclusion that is not so easily seen. For appearances could after all be so constituted that the understanding would not find them in accord with the conditions of its unity, and everything would then lie in such confusion that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing would offer itself that would furnish a rule of synthesis and thus correspond to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept would be entirely empty, nugatory, and without significance. Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking. — Kant, CPR A89-91/B122-123

The matter of duality is not dissolved but framed in way outside of contending dependencies — Paine

Could you explain that a little further? A passage that I highlighted, adjacent to the one you quoted, is:

The aim of this essay, as an introduction to absolute idealism, is to make plain that it is impossible to think judgment through this opposition: mind here, world there, two things in relation or not. To dismantle this opposition is not to propose that the world is mind dependent. Nor is it to propose that the mind is world-dependent. These ways of speaking solidify the opposition; they are an impediment to comprehension. — Wayfarer

They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — ibid. page 14

Perhaps the problem is I'm not sure what you mean "last exit from the highway of absolute idealism". — Janus

As the concept of knowledge is contained in the self-consciousness of judgment, there can be no account of knowledge that does not represent the subject who knows as understanding herself to do so. An account of knowledge seeks to bring to explicit consciousness the self-knowledge of her who knows; it articulates what is contained in her knowing herself to know. If we are to express in language the self-consciousness of judgment, we need to articulate the idea of a judgment in which and through which she who judges comprehends that judgment to be knowledge, comprehends it to be true to, agree with, reality. This task is rarely confronted in epistemology today. Thomas Nagel and Adrian Moore confront it. We will discuss their thoughts in Chapter 5. While both are oriented by the understanding we have of judgment in judging, they fail to appreciate the significance of this; they fail to appreciate the significance of the self-consciousness of judgment. They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — SC&O, page 14

According to absolute idealism the world just is the world as experienced by humans—"the rational is the real", so it doesn't seem clear that Rödl is moving beyond absolute idealism. — Janus

There is a major obstacle to the reception of absolute idealism, the history of it and, more importantly, the thought of it: this is the notion that absolute idealism is a species of—idealism. In an appropriately vague and vulgar way, idealism can be represented as the idea that the world, nature, the object of experience, depends on the mind. Reality is mind-dependent. Absolute idealism is the most radical, the most thorough, and the only sound rejection of that. — ibid. page 16

The recent reintroduction of the idea of the power of knowledge into epistemology is a huge step. Yet the idea is confounding. It is confounding on account of the objectivity of judgment. Since judgment is objective, the power of knowledge is not a power to this or that; it is the power, the power überhaupt. And this makes it hard to understand how it can provide for the recognition of the validity of a particular judgment. We make progress as we see that the power of knowledge is not a given power. It is not a power that is as it is anyway, independently of being understood in acts of this very power. (As Aristotle notes, this distinguishes the power of knowledge from powers of sensory consciousness.) As the power of knowledge is nothing given, it is what it is only in its own exercise: it determines itself. The power of knowledge is what is known; it is what we know, or the knowledge (Chapter 8). — ibid. page 17

Perhaps the problem is I'm not sure what you mean "last exit from the highway of absolute idealism". — Janus

I suppose that's understandable. — Arcane Sandwich