Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up: — Tom Storm

Heh thanks. I didn't know and mostly was just worried that I went out into left field too much.

I’m not accusing you of sidestepping the problem, but you can see how people might call this avoidance. In other words, if I say the model is wrong, I don’t have to engage with it, I can just change the subject. — Tom Storm

Fair point.

I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts.

Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.

Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content. — Tom Storm

Cool. Sorry for starting out critically, then. It was my first instinct and reactive.

I wouldn't put naturalism in terms of mental states and brain states, though I can understand that rendition. I suppose part of me is thinking that it's easy enough to adapt naturalism in different ways such that there is no explanatory gap.

Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument.

I think we’re actually quite close on several points. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree.

But I’m not convinced that this makes explanatory scope, unification, etc. merely “aesthetic.” They look more like epistemic virtues that have proven themselves precisely because reality pushes back: ad hoc theories tend to break under novel testing, while unifying theories tend to be more counterfactually robust. So while we can’t directly compare a theory to “Being,” we can still distinguish better and worse ways of being answerable to constraint. — Esse Quam Videri

Not "merely" aesthetic -- but aesthetic.

Epistemic virtues work well enough for me. I wouldn't draw a hard distinction between ethics and aesthetics here -- especially with respect to intelligibility and naturalism.



What I don't know about is the "that have proven themselves because...."

But then your conclusion I agree with -- we can still distinguish better and worse ways of answering.

On voltage: I agree we invented the concept and the measurement practices, but it seems hard to deny that electrical potential differences existed long before we conceptualized them. That is, the conceptual scheme is constructed, but what it latches onto is not. — Esse Quam Videri

It does seem that way.

Yet we have the example of Ptolemy who surely felt the same. And it's possible that we're in a similar scenario. Perhaps electrical potential, in the future, will turn out to be another phlogiston.

And on your last point: I’m sympathetic to the modesty of “some statements are true,” but I’m not sure we can cash out even that minimal claim without implicitly presupposing that what makes a statement true is not constituted by our norms of justification. Otherwise “true” collapses into “warranted by our best lights,” which reintroduces the very distinction we’ve been debating. — Esse Quam Videri

To get back to how we agree in many ways: I agree that collapsing "true" into "warranted" isn't right.

And actually I find your rendition here much more agreeable: the minimal claim "some statements are true" implicitly presupposes that what makes statements true is not the norms of justification. In some ways this is almost analytic to what we mean by truth (except when we don't, of course ;) )

But I wonder if it justifies the criticisms against naturalism on the basis of intelligibility.

The problem with this formulation is that even for Hart the argument is independent of theism. Hart is quite comfortable to say that his argument does not lead to theism specifically; it merely identifies an inadequacy in physicalism's explanatory power, for reasons that wafarer has often pointed out (and he is not a theist either). Thomas Nagel holds a similar view and he is an atheist. — Tom Storm

Let me try a different formulation then.

The argument is going to sound plausible to those who reject naturalism as an adequate metaphysics and not plausible to naturalists.

The naturalist is content with it being a capacity of our species that was selected for through a chaotic process. When Thomas Nagel talks about consciousness as a metaphysical problem for naturalism the naturalist simply shrugs. I'm criticizing the persuasive power of the argument. Hart can make a conceptual division, and of course the argument can be rendered independent of theism, but the appeal of the argument will be heavily determined by the beliefs of a listener.

I think it's better to identify the specific reasoning and work out what is actually going on. But the first step is to understand the argument properly, and I’m not convinced that I do. Hence my OP. — Tom Storm

Fair. I'm not convinced I do either, especially as I haven't read Hart -- only the thread.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. They are only similar in that both issues seem to be unresolved, but they are not addressing the same type of question. — Tom Storm

I just mean to say that the way we'd answer either question won't be by abduction -- there's not an inference to the best explanatory route by which we can decide whether naturalism is adequate to explaining intentionality or not.

Even your formulation of the issue isn’t quite right: the question is not 'why the world is intelligible', but how naturalism explains intelligibility. Given that naturalism presents itself as the predominant explanatory framework for all things, the question seems apropos.

Fair.

What do you say to my updated reply I started with?

In my own life (I agree with you) I am content with not having explanations for things, like life or consciousness. My favourite three words are 'I don't know' and I wish more people would employ them. But that's a separate matter to trying to understand this argument. — Tom Storm

Sure.

For my part I'm not sure naturalism "explains" anything anymore than non-naturalism does with respect to intentionality. I feel like that's the wrong sort of way to think about metaphysical questions.

But I’m not sure that supports the stronger claim that there’s “no measure” of tracking what is the case better. Even if our access is historically conditioned, we still distinguish theories by explanatory scope, unification, counterfactual robustness, and coherence with independent lines of evidence. — Esse Quam Videri

I'd say there's no measure to reality itself. When we're distinguishing theories with these criteria -- scope, unification, etc. -- we're comparing and contrasting theories to one another on the basis of our aesthetic criteria for knowledge rather than on the basis of Being. Neither has a "more direct" accessibility relationship to reality itself -- in terms of their accessibility relation two theories are on par with one another.

I mean how would you measure your "correctness" to reality? Isn't that just to say "My theory is true, and here are the reasons why"?

it’s just the minimal realist point that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate. I don't know if I'd call that "realist", though -- it's not like Voltage was waiting to be discovered. We have to invent new ways of thinking which in turn lead to productive research paths. Reality unfolds and even changes shape with knowledge-production.

I'd prefer to put it that the realist position is something like "There are true statements": rather than an explanation of Being as an independent category wherein we have potential structures to discover I'd pass over that in silence and prefer to say "Some statements are true", which is much more manageable a claim than claims on Being.

Relating back to @Tom Storm (sorry for going a bit off topic there)

I find this argument lacking because it depends entirely on one's beliefs. If one is a theist then the plausibility of naturalism is simply false, and if one is a naturalist then intelligibility couldn't have come from anything but a blind watchmaker.

It's really only appealing to someone who already believes the conclusion.

But some things aren't in need of an explanation. "Why is the world intelligible?" may not have an answer at all. It's something like asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if there be an answer it won't be of the sort which we abduce. Intelligibility is the mystery which philosophy reflects upon, and all the metaphysical stories we tell about it aren't strictly explanations or descriptions but rather frames for us to be able to say "this is intelligible" in the first place -- frames which I think comes from cooperating with others.

So when in Rome the world is intelligible due to Apollo. And when we're now the world is intelligible because it arose out of a chaotic process of natural selection. But in either case the world is intelligible and intelligibility somehow is "beyond" these stories, or grounds these stories in the first place.

But the reason we call the geocentric framing “oblivious” rather than merely “a different discourse” is precisely that it failed to track what was actually the case — Esse Quam Videri

This is where things are a bit tricky I think. It's not so much that it failed to track what was actually the case but that a different way of looking at the world was developed such that we could describe what was previously certain as oblivious. Here "affordance" helps, I think -- it's not so much that Ptolemy did not describe what-is-the-case. Like I said his predictions were actually better than Galileo's, in that time. Rather Being is such that it affords both a Ptolemaic and Copernican description.

We can say it as oblivious, now, because we've now journeyed outside of Earth and taken pictures. But Galileo and the rest had no such benefit. It's only now, in light of our techonlogical ability, that the picture seems quaint and so it's easy to think Copernicus, et al., were superior because they laid out what-is-the-case better and reality broke the Ptolemaic model.

But in fact science only changes with new generations -- the new model was interesting, lead to new avenues of research, conflicted with orthodox opinion and so was attractive.

It happens to be the case, now, that the Earth is not the center of the universe. But it's not like I have a time machine to go back to then where I can send a rocket into the sky to make sure the Earth was, then, not the center of the universe. We'd predict that it was not, but that's not because we're tracking what-is-the-case better -- at least, there is no measure of such a thing, even if we believe that we have more truth now than they had then regarding astronomy.

This what-is-the-case then becomes something like a thing-in-itself.

I think your last paragraph is exactly right: warrant concerns justification, whereas truth concerns what is the case. I’m completely on board with that distinction. — Esse Quam Videri

:up: Cheers.

I'm less sure about the suggestion that we’re only ever “talking about how we talk about” rather than referring to the thing itself. I agree that our interests determine which aspect of reality we’re talking about (we always carve out a facet, an affordance, a temporal slice, etc.). But that selectivity doesn’t seem to imply (on its own) that truth is merely an intra-discursive status rather than a genuine answerability to what is. — Esse Quam Videri

I want to note that I only meant that we're talking about how we talk about when we're talking about metaphysics, epistemology, science, and so forth -- we can certainly talk about more than our words.

Does that untangle some thoughts, or make things more confusing?

In fact, the possibility you mention — that a community can satisfy its own norms while being oblivious to something outside those norms — seems to presuppose precisely the asymmetry I’m pointing to: that what is warranted-for-us can fail to coincide with what is actually the case. If “truth” isn’t ultimately a constraint beyond our practices, in what sense is the community oblivious rather than simply operating within a different discourse? — Esse Quam Videri

"both/and" is my guess here, at least in the abstract.

They're both oblivious and operating within a different discourse -- suppose the many years of Ptolemaic astronomy.

They said true things, of course. Their predictions were better than Galileo's.

Yet to describe the universe as if the earth is the center of it is oblivious.

I think it’s magnificent either way divine intervention or completely naturalistic — kindred

Oh, yes. Definitely. I love science because of this magnificence.

Despite the Uray abiogenesis experiment there are so many leaps going from amino acids to rna replication to dna etc that it would be like winning the lottery multiple times in a row and I don’t think this was pure chance alone but some helping hand to get things started then let evolution do its thing. — kindred

I'm of the opposite opinion. I'm sure you're surprised ;)

Yes, it is like winning the lottery multiple times in a row. That's improbable and possible. And such is life from my perspective -- though there is a physics theory I've run across that tries to demonstrate that life is inevitable (even if it's rare).

Given an infinite universe the unbelievably unlikely will happen at least one time, though. (and if it's truly infinite, it will happen an infinite number of times)

If we collapse the normative distinction between warrant and truth, mustn't we relinquish the possibility of an entire community being wrong, even while fully satisfying its own norms of justification? — Esse Quam Videri

I don't think so.

This is the co-constitution going on, I think. Yes, we're talking about something. That's what talking often is. And we can satisfy our own norms while being oblivious to something outside of those norms.

I didn't collapse the distinction between warrant and truth -- I don't think there's even a distinction to be had there except that they are different things**. With both we're definitely talking about how we talk about, though, rather than referring to thing itself.

But what it is we are talking about in the first place is decided by our interest -- so it's not so much Being that we're talking about but a facet, an affordance, a temporal part that may never be again.

**"warrant" I associate with justification. "truth" I associate with statements -- i.e. a statement of the proper form is either true or false.

So a statement is about what is, and a justification is about why I believe something is.

Thoughts? — Esse Quam Videri

My thought is we do both, and more.

There is sometimes an asymmetry -- but I'd put it that this is when we're approaching a collective practice. The asymmetry comes from how many people of importance would say what, and that asymmetry can be on either side of this (from the perspective of Being) merely conceptual divide.

I see this problem as related to the question of where did everything come from. Big bang would say the naturalist without speculating any further of what existed before time and space and though there are scientific theories they cannot be proven ( such as cyclical universe, multiverse etc) — kindred

A bit. Though I ought note that scientists have already ventured beyond "the big bang" in terms of physics and such.

Scientists don't stop.

The theist would say something along the lines of god was before time and space alpha and omega etc. and it was the cause of the universe, prime mover etc.

Not sure what the naturalist would make of the prime mover argument.

The naturalist, in terms of people who believe in a prime mover, more or less assigns "prime mover" status to nature itself: rather than an intentional, intelligent cause with a reason for existence we arose out of a chaotic, blind process which we just happen to get to be a part of, and whatever that is that's nature.

I'm curious: how would you cash out the distinction between "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" if the norms of correction are understood as entirely internal to practice? — Esse Quam Videri

My thought here is that I jumped in when you were on board with the general phenomenological thrust of things: to use an idea from @fdrake "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" are mutually determinative of one another -- you don't get one without the other, they mutually constitute one another as a contrast, that sort of thing.

So the norms of correction are either neither internal/external or both/and external/internal. Which in turn would mean that we can't sneak in an "well, ultimately it's being" or "well, ultimately it's us"

they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. — Esse Quam Videri

I'm not sure that they are. Though...

Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't think that follows, either.

Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements?

If there were no laws to dictate how atoms behave what would there be ? Nothing I assume, well at least no matter but I’m no physicist. — kindred

I think this gets an understanding of scientific laws backwards: it isn't that there are laws to which we are approximating but rather we crave certainty and so law-like structures are appealing to us so we set out to find the law-like patterns that have arisen out of the chaos.

But they do not necessarily have to be this way, and we could in fact have them wrong. They aren't laws of the universe which particles must obey, but regularities we've observed so far which could turn out to be wrong.

Why would there be a fundamental forces of nature such as these in the universe in the first place ? Again this to me seems to point towards divinity. — kindred

Does there need to be an explanation? Doesn't explantion eventually reach a terminus?

I'd put it that the theist is satisfied with the logical terminus of God, and the naturalist is satisfied with the logical terminus of nature.

But both are consistent with the science so science doesn't really rule one way or the other.

What is wrong with believing in god or god and science ? — kindred

Nothing.

At least insofar that we recognize that this isn't where the science leads one, but is rather something we bring to the science.

Just boom, voila life seems a bit … well unbelievable to happen. And without any divinity it would be a magnificent deed indeed for life to emerge unaided. With divinity as explanatory power then not so much. — kindred

Sure it's unbelievable, on its face. Why else would it take so much effort to demonstrate, and even after such demonstrations people's beliefs often persist?

It seems like it's designed. But I think this appearance is deceiving, and somewhat cherry-picked. If we look at the totality of all the universe we see that life does, in fact, seem rare. If abiogensis is unlikely we'd predict to see a universe devoid of life, and that's what most of the universe is: without life.

Perhaps I’m trying to prove God here and to me the emergence of life from non life seems to be an appealing argument.

It's definitely appealing. Kant ranked it as the most natural argument for the existence of God.

But just like incredulity is not a reason to draw an inference an argument can be appealing and yet lead one to believe something false.

One thing that the science does not do, however, is rule out a creator. It just has no need of one because we can synthesize the molecules of life in a lab so it doesn't seem to add anything to the explanation when chemistry will do to explain how the molecules of life formed.

Even if intelligibility “comes to light” only in the act of knowing, we still need an account of why that disclosure is normatively answerable to truth—i.e. why it can be correct or incorrect rather than merely an internally coherent projection. If the possibility of error is to be taken seriously, then disclosure must be constrained by what is the case. This seems to require that reality itself be intelligible in more than a merely relational sense. — Esse Quam Videri

I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.

Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world.

Abiogenesis is not an exact science and scientists have been unable to replicate the emergence of life from non life but that is not to say that it will not happen someday. This means that we’re left with naturalistic explanations that life did somehow emerge from non life through natural hit and miss chance or that there was a divine spark that set things in motion to begin with. For now the case remains wide open due to science having no answers yet in terms of replicating the jump of life from non life. — kindred

Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ?

I just find it improbable that life could emerge on its own without some sort of divine push to get things started…what is your take on this ? — kindred

Your implausibility is based upon:

As in the emergence or jump from inanimate matter to living things (abiogenesis) could not happen by chance alone. But then we’re inevitably drawn into the argument of probability to which I’d say that the complexity of life’s building blocks such as DNA and RNA is astronomically high. — kindred

Implying that complexity cannot be the result of physical processes without at least a divine spark or push to give what does not have life some sort of complexity-forming ability that it did not previously have.

This reminds me of the argument for intelligent design due to specified complexity. Here's a philosophy now article going over it., but it's different from what you're arguing though related (just a resource to think through your question).



What I think: Incredulity isn't a reason to accept a premise or reject a premise. At one point that there are irrational numbers was thought incredulous, yet it's been demonstrated that there are such numbers. Much of our discoveries were thought unbelievable -- until demonstrated that they had to be believed due to such and such evidence or argument.

Also, complexity isn't something unique to life. Computers are complicated, and inanimate. Cars are complicated and inanimate. M. C. Escher drawings are complicated and yet only drawings. The path a river follows is complicated, and the result of natural forces.

So it seems to me that complexity does not explain the "jump", or difference, between life and not-life.


Of course the creationist will point to the order of a river and human creation as ultimately deriving from the structure God imbues in creation.

The naturlaist will say: But it is, indeed, possible for order to arise out of meaningless chaos. Just look at evolution!

I'm finding your pre-Kant, Kant, post-Kant descriptions spot on and very clear and concise. Nice.

Nice.

Today I did a fast read from Disempowerment of the Subject to No-Man's Land. I feel like I understand his argument a bit better now and want to put it in my own terms to think through:

Heidegger makes Being into the thing-in-itself even more undefined than even Kant: being is being is being is being and not circumscribed by the categories. Adorno claims that Husserl stays just on the side of rationalism, but Heidegger brings phenomenology into a romantic (while protesting this description) relationship with ideas.

The general thrust I get from Adorno on Heidegger: He is one who became what phenomenology set out to be against. In transcending the categories, he turns the pursuit of being into a mystical quest which is so beyond definition, judgment, reason, and so forth, that its attempts at reaching "the things themselves" makes "being" even more obscure than the ding an sich.

EDIT: To continue the thought-- Husserl wanted to overcome epistemology by returning to the things themselves. Heidegger takes up that mantle and establishes a sort of priesthood of Being. One must list their begats to demonstrate they have the authentic understanding of Heidegger.

Adorno has an interesting claim about Heidegger that I don't understand going on here, that he claims to be beyond metaphysics while obviously doing metaphysics. I'm wondering if this is a jab at the ontic/ontological distinction? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding Adorno's description too. The relationship between Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger he describes is terse and basically assuming lots of knowledge on the part of the reader which, while I've read lots of these texts, still causes confusion on my part while reading.

A phenomenological space is all possible variations in a single experiential quality, not in a single experience.

That being said, the "overall experience" you refer to can be understood as a phenomenological space whose components are all of the experiential qualities making up that space.

So, in your video example: vision is one space, sound is another. The "overall experience" exists in a phenomenal space with vision and sound as axes. Those two spaces can, in turn, be analyzed into more basic axes. — Pneumenon

M'kay. I think I'm tracking well enough: "overall experience" is the synthesis of experiential qualities into a whole.

Would the experiential axes all relate to the senses, or are there others? (EDIT: or is that exactly all you're asking for? references? if so sorry I was just thinking out loud)

Ethics are taught in family and society. — Copernicus

If we agree that just because the majority says something doesn't make it right (in most cases, which can be mobocracy), why have we codified societal rulings on ethics and morals in our lives? — Copernicus

Because it was good enough for Moses and it was Good enough for Paw Paw so it's good enough for me.

Moral codes aren't really agreed upon as much as enforced. The insight of Freud is that we have a prohibition against incest because our id's desire is to have sex with our mother or father: extending this we should look at moral codes as signifiers of human desire. We prohibit these things because we are horrified by the desire people have. It's a sense of disgust which justifies punishing even your children harshly. (and most certainly the adults who know better)

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos. — Tao te Ching 38

:up:

8. Although Hegel claims to derive the non-identical from the identical he never gives an accounting such that the question is simply answered in his greater Logic. Rather the answers are implied through the manner of setting out the question.

I've tried retyping this one out and I'm still scratching my head to give it this closer rendition I'm attempting:
While he sharpened the critique of analytical judgement to the thesis of
its “falsehood”, everything is an analytical judgement for him, the
turning to and fro of the thought without the citation of anything
extraneous to it. That the new and the different would be the old and
familiar, is a moment of dialectics. So evident its context with the
identity-thesis, so little is it circumscribed by this

But the rest: As our philosophical thoughts yield more to experience the philosophical thought becomes closer to an analytic judgment. Becoming aware of a part of cognition is itself cognition: the subject prepetually producing judgments as the Idealist mind perpetually created existence. But by relying upon experience, these close-to-analytic judgments, we let go of the absolute that the new ontologists and positivists have given chase to in their rejection of (and eventual inevitable return to) Hegel.



Honestly still scratching my head on paragraph 8 now, but wanted to revisit this and give it a more proper attempt. — Moliere

Revisited this section today after reading Adorno: A Very Short Introduction. Thanks @Banno.

I think the paragraph is speaking about Hegel in particular, actually, and not the new philosophers that he addresses later(and earlier). Hegel comes close to the non-identical like Adorno wants to, but does so in a manner where the new is the old. But instead of this method of Idealistic proof of the union of subject with object Adorno wants to address the ontological need through the style of a pregnant question which contains its answer or begins the journey towards its answer in a non-scientific (i.e. the question isn't meant to be dissolved by the answer) manner. But this means that philosophy is giving up on proof and positive knowledge of the absolute.



That I feel good about, now. Onto Disempowerment of the Subject.

one begins to wonder what the point of it is. — Ludwig V

At this point? Justifying building stuff because our lords have said it's time to accept the inevitable.

There are cities wanting data centers since our lords have pointed: not just manufacturing, but energy firms and city councils.

Though, yes, the point is not what it actually does for us as much as it's what it makes for thems owning the architecture we are currently communicating with.

Feliz navidad!

If it is the case that he was just repeatedly pushing the same position over and over without engaging with the criticism laid at his feet, then fair enough. — I like sushi

Basically yes. On this particular topic, no less. I don't really like it, but Bob kept skirting around the guidelines with respect to racist and homophobic viewpoints. It was also explained to him in his more recent thread why : https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1031074

I know I've quoted this before, but it's worth reading the relevant part of the guidelines carefully:

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.
— Baden

This is not rhetoric. It reflects a substantive judgment about what does and does not count as a legitimate object of philosophical debate.

Every intellectual community draws boundaries around admissible positions. Refusing to treat certain views as worthy of debate is the baseline judgment that makes good philosophical debate possible.

TPF is not a platform for discredited intellectual frameworks, particularly those belonging to a long line of justifications for racial discrimination. Views which presuppose racial essentialism, whether framed biologically, metaphysically, or in thought experiments, fall well within the category of those positions we do not consider worthy of debate. — Jamal

And the most recent post, now deleted, was basically this but towards homosexuals, a topic previously discussed between he and I where we told him "This topic is not worthy of debate here".

So he has been warned multiple times on the similar theme of putting forward views that are not considered worthy of debate, being told directly that this is not how we do things here, and he went ahead and posted anyway.

I like Bob, and don't really relish losing him. But this was done as gradually as possible, as I tend to like to do, and here we are.

Question and Answer, Attempt 2 at a paragraph by paragraph because it's reading more easily now with the knot in Affirmative Character I tied myself in untied.

1. I think your post with Edit here is an excellent introduction to that opening paragraph and lays out a lot of the conceptual background going on very clearly. Nicely done. :

2. That the new ontology could not be critiqued by the individual subject's consciousness opens the door to the heterenomous social order through the threat of deeming the concerns of consciousness as merely ontic. In the early days of neo-ontology this was openly evident with Husserl's switch from the oblique intention to the direct intention. The critical philosophy delimited reason and phenomenology wishes to get past the category to the object as it is; i.e. to get past consciousness. And yet the general categories of Heidegger are meant to anticipate all the possible fullness of all of existence, a second refrain of absolute Idealism.

3. Even so the critical philosophy continued to have an effect on philosophy by receptively receiving and describing Absoluta from the positivistic sciences or in the manner of the positivistic sciences, in all of their contradictoriness. Absolute knowledge here is an intellectual intuition. The mediations of the subject are hoped to be cancelled out rather than acknowledged and contextualized. The desire to break from the Kantian critique becomes a new conformism. Without critique the categories stand as absolutes chosen capriciously which sit there like Aristotelian natural Kinds for the philosopher to see and describe, which that reduction to Naturalism is the sort of thing Husserl meant to push against. But rather than something radically new it doesn't take long to figure out just what social norms are meant.

4. In contrast, and in parallel, the idealistic strand of philosophy moved along through the positivistic philosophy which exempted what the untutored often think of as properly philosophical as proper philosophy: Kant's discipline on metaphysics rendered philosophers an academic niche which could not answer life's most basic questions which the phenomenologists were concerned with. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche signify this mark as a difference from the specialized niche of positivistic philosophy and the necessity to become "anti-academic" to pursue the deeper questions/not-niche-academic. The new ontologies of the phenomenologists then are making this non-academic break into an academic position: An audacious move befitting a youthful philosophy becomes a cadre of academics with specialized terms that are themselves abstractions rather than the things themselves.

5. This developments are to be expected given the ontological needs problematics. Yet here we are with what is meant to be a return to the things themselves, an overcoming of the subject which satisfies the ontological need, with a philosophy that has become what it sought to overcome and hence has a miasma about it. To keep the chase alive the question is emphasized, but this is just for the new ontology to console itself in its failures. Proper philosophy does not stop with the existence of the questioner without an answer. The authentic philosophical question includes its answer, and not in the if-then pattern of research. Rather the authentic question is modeled on what's been experienced so that it might catch up to that experience: there isn't a given, or a thing itself to which we return, in asking the authentic philosophical question but to the experience.

6. Idealism tries to drown out this subjective mediation of the question and answer by "deducing" itself from its own form and content, thereby "flattening" out the mediations. By contrast thinking which does not claim the origin should not shy away from saying, no, I am not the producer of the object but instead, as an experiencer I am giving back to the object what the object already has. In the moment of expressing the thought in the "I think" we cannot deal with consciousness thought in the more mathematical manner whereby we deduce answers that satisfy questions. Philosophy which attempts this ring false because they postulate that there's a difference between thinking itself and what thinking is about precisely where the two are one: the object is experienced by an experiencer and a judgment takes place which the object is meant to fulfill. (I want to say "But there is no need for this because...")Only what is true can truly be understood by philosophy. (We can't deduce the truth before the judgment as the idealist, nor do we separate the truth of the judgment from the object as if to be able to derive "ahead of time" or outside of experience that the judgment is true) If you don't participate in this process of judging the stringency of a theorem then you do not understand it -- that stringency has its own content that can and must be judged (rather than derived, idealism, or immediately answered with a quick and clear question with appropriate procedure, positivism)

7. There is no judgment without the understanding, and there can be no understanding without a judgment. We do not have a problem which is a mere question which judgment provides a simple solution to, a temporal if/then of a question which provokes an answer that satisfies the question. Philosophical proof is mediated -- rather than the scientific model of oblique intention -- but the fiber of this proof does not disappear in this mediation as it does in the Kierkegaardian dissolution of the answer into the questioner continually questioning. The "proof" is rather in the effort of judgment which attempts to answer with proper expression such that our expression can become commensurable to this desire to fulfill discursive thought through a question/answer. This critical reflection is not of philosophy but is philosophy.

8. Although Hegel claims to derive the non-identical from the identical he never gives an accounting such that the question is simply answered in his greater Logic. Rather the answers are implied through the manner of setting out the question.

I've tried retyping this one out and I'm still scratching my head to give it this closer rendition I'm attempting:

While he sharpened the critique of analytical judgement to the thesis of
its “falsehood”, everything is an analytical judgement for him, the
turning to and fro of the thought without the citation of anything
extraneous to it. That the new and the different would be the old and
familiar, is a moment of dialectics. So evident its context with the
identity-thesis, so little is it circumscribed by this

But the rest: As our philosophical thoughts yield more to experience the philosophical thought becomes closer to an analytic judgment. Becoming aware of a part of cognition is itself cognition: the subject prepetually producing judgments as the Idealist mind perpetually created existence. But by relying upon experience, these close-to-analytic judgments, we let go of the absolute that the new ontologists and positivists have given chase to in their rejection of (and eventual inevitable return to) Hegel.



Honestly still scratching my head on paragraph 8 now, but wanted to revisit this and give it a more proper attempt.

And why the reference to liberalism? What did liberalism once think it was? — Pussycat

I have a guess here.

Liberalism took itself to be a universal political philosophy which ought to rule, and the managed state with markets has fulfilled this vision -- capitalism is everywhere enforced by a giant web of rules around property, and everything is owned: including us.

So what is substantive about the subject becomes this ability to function rather than to be. It's one's relationship to the wider liberal order that gives people worth, and thereby shapes their subjectivity to the point that who we are doesn't matter as much as how much we own.

It is just a guess, though, trying to make sense of the phrasing. I'm not certain about the epistemology yet but it's something to think about as we keep reading.

Do you mean, "The intro to this TV show looks so goofy without the music"? Or something like that? — Pneumenon

Yes, that's what I mean: i.e. our senses are different yet they are still thought of as "bound together" in what I'll call the subject such that our overall experience changes with one sense. Our perceptions are altered by the total sensorial experience (both in the sense of ignoring some senses, like touch when watching a movie, and in paying attention to hearing and site which combine together into an experience)

I can try.

There are managers of the world. They live within a liberal state with politicians that are the managers of those managers, or lackeys of the banks -- managers again.

In the managerial liberal world there's a path provided whereby a person can excel if they do such-and-such, and if they don't then they'll be punished and encouraged to do such-and-such, or else eventually end up in the military or prison.

This idea of a managed world -- where everything we must do is dictated by what we know -- is what Heidegger pushes against, and Adorno agrees with.

But Heidegger does it in a romantic-poetic sense, which would be fine if he were not a fascist.

So "the subject" is lost in these managerial categories directed towards GDP, or other things, rather than being about what we're dealing with -- they aren't categories that even try to reveal what is, but only what makes number grow bigger.

There I can see a connection. The bit which is obvious is that Heidegger loses himself in fascism, which is bad, whereas Adorno did the opposite.

OK, this morning I was up to the task and tried reading it your way and it read a lot easier. I think you're correct to say that it's Heidegger's categories and not Kant's -- I was retro-reading the second paragraph into the first, but if I just read it straightforwardly then it flows a lot better and makes more sense.

Thanks for picking up on that.

So to try again:

Affirmative Character, attempt 2

I think you got this right:

The ontological need guarantees so little of what it wishes as the misery of the hungry does of food. However no doubt of such a guarantee plagued a philosophical movement, which could not have foreseen this. Therein was not the least reason it ended up in the untrue affirmative. “The dimming of the world never achieves the light of being.”1
— Adorno - Affirmative Character

He starts by saying that wanting something really bad, doesn't make it happen (against wishful thinking). And then he somehow excuses Heidegger for his short-sightedness. But I didn't much notice the quote of the dimming of the world, until later. When I googled it, I got an AI overview, saying "that humanity's self-inflicted obscurities (like pollution, evil, or spiritual apathy) prevent true understanding or fulfillment (the "light of being"), creating a state where darkness becomes normalized rather than overcome by genuine enlightenment", as well as a link to a gallery exhibition, but not its author. Then I noticed the superscript index 1, only to see:

1. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens [From the Experience of Thinking], Pfullingen 1954, p.7.

Wow, it's from Heidegger, the man himself! Why on earth is Adorno quoting him? Well, it's because the world's dimming got to him too, plaguing his philosophy. So Adorno used Heidegger's own saying against — Pussycat

carries out the sentiment of that paragraph, though I want to highlight the part that had an "ah-ha!" moment for me:

. The horror
of this, the dawning consciousness that the subject is losing its
substantiality,....

So he is critical of Heidegger's project but sees how the subject is becoming lost in a series of functional, rather than substantive categories -- into the liberal managed state.

But then Adorno goes on to critique Heidegger's philosophy -- and I agree with you in calling it pre-critical in the sense that it resists/evades critique (but doesn't perform critique as much as try to uncover these buried categories in a phenomenology of language)

The reference to Kant is meant to point out how Heidegger doesn't adequately address the critical philosophy, but ignores some of its insights such as its concepts or categories. Instead it waves it away with the imputation of ontological commitment:

rope in: persuade someone to take part in an activity despite their reluctance.

So Heidegger was reluctant to engage critically, but had to make it seem like he was doing critical philosophy, in order to turn Kant's noumenon into a positive ontology. Moreover, he made it foundational and pre-critical, thus barring it from critique, paving the way for acceptance and conformity to the status quo. Well, he didn't like critique very much! :razz: — Pussycat

[Kant's critique] . . . indeed tolerates the assumption of an in-itself
beyond the subject-object polarity, but leaves it quite intentionally so
indeterminate, that no sort of interpretation however cobbled together
could possibly spell an ontology out of it.

How does that look?

Less confusing than my first attempt, at least, thanks to help.

EDIT: Or so I hope so.

What, unconvinced of your own conclusion? :smile: — Pussycat

I'm uncertain of it now, yes.

The only error I see is this thing with the categories.

I said I'd do it this morning, but I'm afraid I'm going to do it when I have the energy to revisit. I didn't want to leave you hanging, though.

Exactly! This is Adorno's charge against Heidegger. — Pussycat

M'kay. That makes me hopeful in that I'm at least not entirely off track. :D

I'll have a reread tomorrow morning with your notes to see where I'm in error.

I'd never thought of that, that the aforementioned categories would refer to Kant's and not Heidegger's own. I think it would be really cryptic of Adorno to mix two different projects into one, without explicitly saying so, and therefore I do not agree. Besides, Heidegger's fundamental ontology has its own categories, what does it needs Kant's for? — Pussycat

Is it cryptic? I reach for it because he referenced the amphiboly and the paralogisms earlier. It seems on-point to me because Kant and Heidegger both address "the ontological need" in different ways, and Adorno is mentioning Kant in this text at least. What to do with that?

My take away from going over the amphiboly and paralogisms is that Kant's philosophy directly stops Heidegger's philosophy from lifting off the ground because it denies knowledge of the subject, whereas Heidegger's fundamental ontology is based upon that Being which I am, Dasein -- a sort of knowledge of the subject.

I don't know, though. This is just my first guess as I try to think through the text.

I think that you are over-thinking it, and over-complicating things, while it is simple. No matter what the problematic with Kant's categories is, they are not the focus here. Heidegger illegitimately moves past Kant, Kant is not even his stepping stone, just an obstacle that he bypasses out of whim, there is nothing of Kant in Heidegger, nothing at all, not even subsumption. — Pussycat

I could be. As I said these are just my first guesses in trying to make sense of the text at all.

I don't even have an argument. These are just my first impressions as I'm reading and attempting to make sense of what I'm reading.

How about norms that encourage people to share emotionally difficult subjects? In particular, men? Caught in the vice of 'toxic masculinity' that they embody if they talk about their feelings, but also if they don't? A vice that is tightened by the males and females both in their lives? — Jeremy Murray

For sure. I think such mores are very silly, but how to get others' to see that is sometimes hard to think through. I have no problem sharing my feelings on this subject, and tend to think that a genuinely mature man is one who is comfortable with their feelings whatever they happen to be -- the fear of emasculation is itself an extension of patriarchy, but if these social games are viewed as not just silly but counter-productive to forming good relationships then I'd rather say it's better to question these norms directly and expose them for what they are.

BTW, I hope it okay to use so much personal anecdote. I don't do so to find answers or express my own case as much as I find the anecdotal illustrative of broader trends. — Jeremy Murray

Not at all. They're real; that's not something you need to apologize for but something to be thankful for in a conversation partner.

Have you read "The Myth of Normal" by Gabor Mate?

Nope.

I didn't say that Heidegger is pre-critical, but that his philosophy of fundamental ontology is:

In those categories to which fundamental ontology owes its resonance and which they for that reason either deny or so sublimate, that they can no longer give rise to unwelcome confrontations, is to be read how much they are the imprints of something missing and not produced, however much they are its complementary ideology.
— Adorno

I read "unwelcome confrontations" as "conflict" or "critique". Then, the categories of fundamental ontology (Being, Dasein, Present-at-hand, Ready-at-hand, Care, Destiny etc), either do not (deny) confront the ontology, or integrate into (sublimate) it. In fact, these categories give the ontology its power. But, Adorno sees deprivation in them, as he treats them negatively, as well as complicity. — Pussycat

I meant Heidegger's philosophy isn't exactly pre-critical, according to Adorno, but mistaken in its response to the critical turn. Adorno seems to recognize that Heidegger is attempting to get beyond the Kantian denial of metaphysics, at least, so I'd hesitate to call Heidegger's philosophy of fundamental ontology as pre-critical.

I read your quote there as: "In those categories which fundamental ontology owes its resonance" is referring to Kant's categories. So fundamental ontology owes its resonance to Kant's categories. And because of that Heidegger's fundamental ontology either denies the category or sublimates the category into his wider project, thereby removing Kant's critique of the project of metaphysics (unwelcome confrontations).

So, simplifying, Kant's categories is to be read how much they are the imprints of something missing and not produced even though they complement Heidegger's project. I.e. there is something beyond those categories, namely Being. Or even moreso, the very ability to articulate the meaning of the question "What is the meaning of being?"

Roughly I'm reading this as Adorno reading Heidegger's reading/critique/subsumption of Kant.

Where is he saying this? What's been missing? You mean Being? — Pussycat

I mean Being. Does the above explanation of what's going on in my mind as I read this making sense of what I said, or making things worse?

I think your comment here makes sense of Adorno's allusions to Heidegger's fascism. Adorno understands the ontological need, but if you supersede the categories (standards of intersubjective judgment) then how is an initiate to criticize?

Were this to happen within a monastery then that'd be different from what happened: there is a place for when one needs a teacher or guide in life, spiritual or otherwise.


But Heidegger is an unapologetic fascist to the point that he turned against his mentor in favor of the Nazi party, in a way not even allowing Husserl to reply to Nazi "thought".

I'm not sure Heidegger is pre-critical, tho, at least according to Adorno. He seems to sometimes note that Heidegger is taking a particular path in light of critical philosophy, but subsuming it within his wider project of something that's been missed for all of philosophical history.