I'm keeping a rough approximation of his genealogy, for instance, and the master/slave distinction. I keep the notion of the overman because it's the fulcrum around which my criticism rests; empirically speaking Nietzsche can be interpreted in many ways, and the overman which overcomes himself is the overman that never exists (rather than comes about as the future state of post-humanity; or at least, not yet).

But I still get a great deal of use out of his ideas. I'm skeptical of the metaphysical project in general, and so it goes with Nietzsche. (and so the Will to Power)

And I see nothing sick about slave morality, or healthy about master morality. So while I accept the distinction I'm uncertain about Nietzsche's positive evaluation of master morality — Moliere

You say you have criticisms, and point out that Nietzsche can be interpreted in many ways. I’m sure you would agree that in order to be fair (and accurate) in your critique, you ned to be acquainted with the way he is read by poststructuralists like Klossowski, Focault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who have produced some of the
most influential interpretations of him. In order to understand how they read such concepts as the overman, master/ slave morality and Will to Power, it is essential that you grasp their deconstruction of the concept of the subject, of identity, of dialectical opposition and of traditional metaphysics. How, for instance. can one critique identity politics from a Nietzschean point of view?
How can one put into question distinctions between the individual and the social, the self and the Other, as reflected in your Levinasian statement that ethics begins with others rather than the state of being or the choices of an individual?

Except that I don't think the genealogy of notions of the good justifies the good -- that this is still an "is", and not an "ought"; it only becomes an ought if we are passionate about following the normative structures of intelligibility. — Moliere

Who is this subjective ‘we’ that freely chooses in a Sartrean way to follow or not to follow the normative structures of intelligibility? Does a subject exist first and then choose to participate in normative epistemological or ethical systems? Or are subjects formed as an effect of social practices of subjectivation? Do we follow normative structures or do normative structures undergird, constrain and define the criteria of the ethical good and bad for us prior to our choosing as individual ‘subjects’? That is to say, do we choose the ethical norms that bind us or do we choose WITHIN the ethical norms that produce us?

Yes, Nietzsche can be read in many ways. The same is true of any great philosopher, and I would add that natural scientific paradigms are interpretable in as many different ways, but the abstractive nature of vocabularies in the physical sciences masks this diversity. But if you are arguing that there is no consistent substantive set of philosophical ideas that we can locate in his work, then I side with Deleuze, Foucault , Derrida, Heidegger and others who differ with you.
— Joshs

Why?

I see no reason to pick a side — Moliere

I would never claim there is a correct reading of Nietzsche or any other philosopher, so you should pick a side which reveals a philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche that is the most interesting to you, pushes Nietzsche to the limits of his thinking and offers the greatest potential for usefully guiding your understanding of the world. This is what I have done.

I'm not against a Deleuzian reading; but if asked how I understand the text then I'm going to point out the Nietzsche is purposefully kalaidescopic, and master morality remains neutral to any particular preference. — Moliere

Yes, that explains why you don’t seem to get much use from his ideas. I wouldn’t either with a reading like that.

If the world is absurd, incoherent, beyond knowledge then there's no point in arguing over what the world consists in and we can skip straight to the point: rather than making metaphysical theses which implicate a particular ethical frame we can just talk about the good, rather than being. — Moliere

If the world were incoherent and beyond knowledge, we wouldn’t be able to function in it, even on a perceptual level. The world we actually live in provides normative structures of intelligibility, recognizable patterns on the basis of which we can anticipate events, communicate and understand each other. All this without any way of grounding our pragmatic ways of knowing and getting along in a metaphysically certain basis of the ‘way things really are’.
Notions of the good emerge out of our ensconsement within actual contingent contexts of interaction within normatively patterned social practices. That is to say, ways of being. We could say with Heidegger that Being is the event of its myriad ways of being.

Nietzsche doesn't answer the titular question -- why ought one do that which is good?

Does master morality always lead to an eternal vigilance and preparation for self-transformation in the face of suffering?

I think, rather, that suffering is as valorized as the other forces which lead one out of nihilism. — Moliere

I think the question of why one ought to do that which is good is a tautology. The justification is embedded within the historically, contextually created system of practices which provide the particular intelligibility of a way of being, a form of life, a language game. Each discursive system of rationality already implies its own criteria of good and bad. Its ‘oughts’ are presupposed by the qualitative ‘is’ of its value system, which is what any system of rationality is.

I wouldn’t say that master morality leads to an eternal vigilance and preparation for self-transformation in the face of suffering, but that in some sense it is nothing but this vigilance.

Deleuze grapples with the issue of the relation between an implicit creative dimension of sense and an explicitly logical, extensive field of actuality by proposing to think the two aspects together in a transcendental-empirical synthesis.The transcendental dimension is represented by an anonymous, pre personal field of reciprocally interacting differences from which emerge singularities and intensities. These structures are actualized on the empirical dimension as wholes and parts, qualities and extensities. Deleuzian intensities are external to actualized extensity and quality as their generative cause and impetus of transformation. Intensities affirm the paradoxical, the heterogeneous, the singular, the incompossible, the Eternal Return of the different, the indeterminate, the non-sensical, the roll of the dice within sense, the object=x as difference in general, the virtual event of sense as intensity, the verb underlying the sleight of hand of the axiomatic , converging, referential functions of actualizing predication. Deleuze(1987) aligns his intensive-extensive duality with Bergson's distinction between duration and the empirical multiplicity of magnitude.

“Bergson presents duration as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is that which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division.'On the other hand, in a multiplicity such as homogeneous extension, the division can be carried as far as one likes without changing anything in the constant object; or the magnitudes can vary with no other result than an increase or a decrease in the amount of space they striate. Bergson thus brought to light "two very different kinds of multiplicity," one qualitative and fusional, continuous, the other numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It will be noted that matter goes back and forth between the two; sometimes it is already enveloped in qualitative multiplicity, sometimes already developed in a metric "schema" that draws it outside of itself.”

In Deleuze’s distinction between the unseparated implicit multiplicity of the transcendental field and explicit logical patterns, the latter are generated within the former but are heterogeneous to it and outside of it. Logic and extension by degree are developments and explications (secondary degradations) of the implicit (Virtual). The illusion is confusing the implicit and the explicit , the intrinsic and the extrinsic. For Deleuze, the implicit intensities (Eternal Return) generate the logical , conceptual, theoretical, lawful principles for empirical domains, and then are held steady in the background, beyond the reach of the conceptual and logical patterns, which cancel them by freezing and isolating them.

“The transcendental principle does not govern any domain but gives the domain to be governed to a given empirical principle; it accounts for the subjection of a domain to a principle. The domain is created by difference of intensity, and given by this difference to an empirical principle according to which and in which the difference itself is cancelled. It is the transcendental principle which maintains itself in itself, beyond the reach of the empirical principle. Moreover, while the laws of nature govern the surface of the world, the eternal return ceaselessly rumbles in this other dimension of the transcendental or the volcanic spatium.” (Deleuze 1994)

The aphoristic approach makes it such that there is no true Nietzsche at all -- there are perspectives on Nietzsche, like Deleuze's, and there are other perspectives which read him more as a modernist. There isn't a true perspective so much as a perspectival truth. This applies to Nietzsche as well, such that there is no true reading of Nietzsche -- there was a Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche, and there was a fascist reading of Nietzsche, and there's the historical reading of Nietzsche, and there's the intentional reading of Nietzsche, and there's the leftist Nietzsche, the Christian Nietzsche, and the analytic Nietzsche, and the silly reading of Nietzsche which ought be included in the ever updating persona that is the new Nietzsche. — Moliere

Yes, Nietzsche can be read in many ways. The same is true of any great philosopher, and I would add that natural scientific paradigms are interpretable in as many different ways, but the abstractive nature of vocabularies in the physical sciences masks this diversity. But if you are arguing that there is no consistent substantive set of philosophical ideas that we can locate in his work, then I side with Deleuze, Foucault , Derrida, Heidegger and others who differ with you.

I have no qualms with defining slave morality by the ascetic ideal. I'm noting that people like the ascetic ideal. They want to be sick. They desire slavish morality — Moliere

What people like is freedom from domination by others, but also freedom from inner chaos. Seeing the world as incoherent is just as imprisoning as being repressed by external authority. So this freedom for intelligibility from the vantage of one’s own perspective requires a world that is made recognizable, and such recognizability is a product of discursive , languaged, conceptual interactions within a social milieu. This makes us free within the systems of discursive rationality that we participate in, until the not where we become the victim of someone else’s interpretation of ‘slavish morality’, sovereign law of nature or doctrine of ethics. We are not forced into a way of understanding the world in a top-down fashion by the ‘collective’. Rather, such systems of rationality flow from one person to the next in our practices, and each interaction changes the nature of the system is some small fashion.

Eventually, a segment of the community can begin to diverge from the larger group such that they see what was formerly acceptable as repressive and unethical. What Nietzsche taught writes like Foucault and Deleuze was that it is possible el to insert oneself within a system of rationality such that one can be open to catalyzing and accelerating the transition from identified repressive structures. It’s not a question of telling people they should be unhappy with their current system of rationality, but of showing them how they can better prepare themselves when it inevitably collapses. Master morality amounts to this eternal vigilance and preparation for self-transformation in the face of suffering.

Consciousness is a natural thing. Anything in the universe is natural. The problem is the belief that there cannot be any aspect of the universe that is not in the purview of our physical sciences. As Nagel says in Mind and Cosmos:
...intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
— Thomas Nagel
How have we concluded that we have so great a grasp of things that we can rule out any possibility that something exists outside of that understanding? — Patterner

I agree that consciousness is a natural process, but understanding this natural process can give us a new way to understand the concept of the natural that bypasses the limitations of traditional physicalism. For instance, recent scientific models of consciousness see it as a synthetic organizing process which is not strictly in the head , but consists of exchanges and reciprocal activities that move between the brain, the body and an environment , which is itself co-defined by the patterns of interaction between it and the organism. Understanding consciousness in this naturalistic way allows us to see how intersubjectively formed concepts developed in a social community on the basis of real discursive and material interactions in a human-built environment have led to theories about the nature of the world such as physicalism, the idea that there are such things as properties of the world independent of our conceptual interactions with that world, and we have direct, unmeditated access to such properties. Such a theory has been quite useful for technological progress, but it is a woefully inadequate theory when it comes to explaining the organization of living systems, consciousness and human cognition and affectivity.

There are competing approaches to naturalism, and the underlying assumptions guiding what we now call the physical sciences don’t remain static. I assume that within a generation or two physics, which has already in the past 125 years substantially altered its concepts of the physical, will come closer to where the biological and embodied cognitive sciences have arrived on this issue.

Whatever the true nature of what we call the physical is, my point is that there has never been any suggestion that consciousness has any of its characteristics. — Patterner

Sure there has. You just have to read phenomenology.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world. ( Evan Thompson)

Surely you agree that Nietzsche prefers the healthy and noble master morality, yes? — Moliere

Again, how are you understanding health and nobility for Nietzsche? It is not about a ‘constant striving’. Who is doing the striving? A self? Doesn’t striving imply a pre-existing purpose or aim on the basis of which to strive? The creative becoming Nietzsche valorizes isnt something we have to decide to put into effect, like some sort of plan, as if a self sits there in the background judging the success of their striving. The point is that the self which would see itself as putting into effect such a plan doesn’t exist in the next moment. It is already a different self. That is what self-overcoming means, not a substantive subject accumulating points, enjoying witnessing the progress in the direction of its increase in health, nobility and mastery. The very notion of health and nobility is the continual forgetting and displacing of the previous self. The ubermensch is beyond good and evil because it constantly erases and displaces its history, and with it previous standards and principles of morality.

It is not as if those who cling to traditional moralities are not also functioning as a continual becoming. The difference between them and the ubermensch is a question of awareness, not that “humanity stays about neutral ethically speaking -- they want similar things now as they did back then”. The will to nothingness, the ascetic ideal and slave morality which undergird staying neutral ethically and wanting similar things over time are themselves forms of the will to power. This means that we are displacing ourselves even as we desire to remain the same. We only succeed in remaining the same differently, in spite of our best efforts. But this doesnt keep us from trying to enforce repressive modes of conformity on others, based on our Platonic faith in constancy, eternity and fixity.

But Nietzsche's solution to this problem strikes me as pretty unrealistic. For one it only applies to ubermensch -- people who act out of a sense of nobility for what is higher in spite of suffering, or even seek out suffering to improve themselves. The slaves can't even strive to this morality; their lesser morality is written by the masters — Moliere

Again, we need to redefine the way you’re using terms like master and slave, good and bad, higher and lower, improvement and lack of improvement.

Slave morality has to be understood in relation to reactive values and the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche believed that the world, and the psyche, is composed of continually changing valuative differences. This is expressed by his notion of the eternal return of the same, which is the endless return of the same absolutely different . This means that concepts like purpose, goal, standard, identity and equality are fabrications which conceals the underlying changes in qualitative value. Reactive values assume an equal opposition that is ruled by an overarching concept or principle which remains the same. For instance, male vs female is ruled by the overarching concept of gender, good vs evil is ruled by the overarching concept of ethics. For Nietzsche slave morality, weakness, the ascetic ideal, and sickness in general have to do with believing in concepts, principles and truths which remain the same and rule over life. The notion of science as providing deeper truths that transcend mere appearance is an ascetic ideal, and as such
falsifies the actual creative becoming of life. The same is true of moral principles.

The ubermensch is not a higher man, it is a critique and overcoming of humanism. Not the elevation of man after the death of God , but the death of man. Not self-improvement but self-overcoming. As Foucault put it

“As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

The death of man implies the death of the subject and the ego. Nietzsche writes:

The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism’… The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable; the continual generation of cells, etc., produces a continual change in the number of these beings… “…mixing in the concept of number, the concept of subject, the concept of motion: we still have our eyes, our psychology in the world. If we eliminate these ingredients, what remains are not things but dynamic quanta in a relationship of tension with all other dynamic quanta, whose essence consists in their relation to all other quanta, in their 'effects' on these - the will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos-is the most elementary fact, and becoming, effecting, is only a result of this.

(Remember, the will to power does not mean "wanting to dominate" or "wanting power")

I can stumble upon something I've never seen before, that doesn't resemble anything I've seen before, and whose purpose or function I can't guess. But I can still measure its dimensions and weigh it — Patterner

You can only measure dimensions and weight of something which is presumed to remain qualitatively the same over the course of the quantitative measuring and weighing. Any calculation of differences in degree presupposes no difference in kind during the process. Otherwise one is dealing with a new thing and has to start over again. The world doesn’t consist of objects with attributes and properties which remain qualitatively the same from one moment to the next. We invented the concept of object as a qualitatively self-same thing so that we could then proceed to perform calculative measurements. Obviously, this works out well for us, but it doesn’t mean that ‘physical’ objects exist out there in the world rather than in the abstractions that we perform on the continually changing data we actually experience in our interactions with the world.

And lastly I think Nietzsche valorizes heightened states or excellent persons far too much. While master/slave morality is descriptive I definitely get a sense throughout his writing that he prefers master morality, whereas I'd say I prefer slave morality, and the wisdom of the herd. — Moliere

Deleuze would say you’re succumbing to a common misreading here.

We must again avoid misconceptions about the Nietzschean terms "strong" and "weak," "master" and "slave": it is clear that the slave doesn't stop being a slave when he gets power, nor do the weak cease to be weak. Even when they win, reactive forces are still reactive. In everything, according to Nietzsche, what is at stake is a qualitative typology: a question of baseness and nobility. Our masters are slaves that have triumphed in a universal becoming-slave: European man, domesticated man, the buffoon. Nietzsche describes modern states as ant colonies, where the leaders and the powerful win through their baseness, through the contagion of this baseness and this buffoonery.

Whatever the complexity of Nietzsche's work, the reader can easily guess in which category (that is, in which type ) he would have placed the race of “masters" conceived by the Nazis. When nihilism triumphs, then and only then does the will to power stop meaning "to create" and start to signify instead "to want power," "to want to dominate" (thus to attribute to oneself or have others attribute to one established values: money, honors, power, and so on). Yet that kind of will to power is precisely that of the slave; it is the way in which the slave or the impotent conceives of power, the idea he has of it and that he applies when he triumphs.

Bernardo Kastrup points out that materialism - that the basic constituents of reality are material in nature - and idealism - that reality is experiential in nature - are incommensurable types of explanations… Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. — Wayfarer

Kant correctly recognized that taking a strictly materialist stance depends on an idealism, since the very notion of a mind-independent object covertly smuggles in all the subjective apparatus needed to have an object appear before a subject. So realism and idealism are not opposites but versions of the same subject -based thinking. With regard to a Buddhist claim that there is something ‘else’ besides matter, I can’t see this as anything other than a reformulation of a dualist idealism.

Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value.

if you want to get beyond the realism-idealism, fact-value split, you have to be able to see value WITHIN matter , not separate from it and alongside it. Chalmers tries to pull the former trick by starting from spirit and matter as separate entities and then mixing them together like ingredients of a pie (panpsychism). To arrive at a thinking which transcends the traditional ideal-realism binary, you have to turn to phenomenological and poststructuralist perspectives.

Reading Peter Tse's Criterial Causation might provide a clue. Before reading Tse, I used an analogy of locks and keys, where in the scenario of reading written language, letters, words, phrases, etc. play the roles of keys, and neural nets trained in written language recognition play the role of locks — wonderer1

Does Tse discuss complex dynamical systems approaches
to free will and causation? I’m thinking of Alicia Juarrero’s Dynamics in Action:Intentional Behavior as a Complex System.

Much like the rest of life the environmental pressures select for the passions which lead to reproductive fitness. I think something similar happened with societies, except the selection mechanism was justified cruelty -- insofar that a society can justify expansion and cruelty it will outgrow other societies which prioritize kindness and peace because the cruel will outwit the kind, take their stuff, and kill them.

We are the descendants of the barbarians ruthless enough to live — Moliere

Your analysis is closer to Nietzsche’s than it is to mine. Nietzsche argued that the Will to knowledge is a derivative of the Will to Power. Knowledge wants to control and subdue differences for the sake of an assimilating dominant interpretation (“forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying”).

What is the origin of logic in man's head? Surely it arose out of the illogical, the realm of which must originally have been immense. But innumerable beings drew inferences in a way different from that in which we do now perished; nonetheless, they might have been closer to the truth! He, for instance, who did not know how to find ‘identity' often enough, both with regard to nourishment and to hostile animals – that is, he who subsumed too slowly and was too cautious in subsumption - had a slighter probability of survival than he who in all cases of similarity immediately guessed that they were identical. The predonminant disposition, however, to treat the similar as identical - an illogical disposition, for there is nothing identical as such - is what first supplied all the foundations for logic.

Similarly, in order for the concept of substance to originate, which is indispensable to logic though nothing real corresponds to it in the strictest sense, it was necessary that for a long time changes in things not be seen, not be perceived; the beings who did not see things exactly had a head start over those who saw everything ‘in a flux'. As such, every great degree of caution in inferring, every sceptical disposition, is a great danger to life. No living being would be preserved had not the opposite disposition - to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err and make things up rather than wait, to agree rather than deny, to pass judgement rather than be just – been bred to become extraordinarily strong. The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brains today corresponds to a process and battle of drives that taken separately are all very illogical and unjust; we usually experience only the outcome of the battle: that is how quickly and covertly this ancient mechanism runs its course in us. (The Gay Science)

But while you distinguish between the motives behind cruelty and those behind kindness and peace, Nietzsche argues they are the same. Peace and kindness are themselves interpretations forced on others. This isn’t the tyranny of egoism, since for Nietzsche the egoism itself just an invention, a product of the competition among myriad drives, from which struggle one emerges as temporarily dominant.

He who aspires to distinction has his eye ceaselessly on his neighbour and wants to know what his feelings are; but the sympathy and abandon which this penchant needs to satisfy itself are far from being inspired by innocence, compassion or benevolence. On the contrary, one wants to perceive or guess in what way the neighbour is suffering, internally or externally to our sight, how he is losing power over himself and giving way to the impression that our hand or sight make on him.” (Daybreak)

Physical properties combine in many ways, but the results are always physical. We can measure the size of physical objects in three physical dimensions. We can measure mass, weight, volume. We can measure hardness — Patterner

Are such properties inherent in objects or are they the products of historically formed ways of organizing our relation to the world? Heidegger has argued that we never just see a hammer with its properties and attributes. We understand what a hammer is primordially in what we use it for and how we use it, and in terms of the larger associated context of relevance. The hammer as a static thing with properties is derived from our prior association with it as something we use for a purpose.

Husserl showed how the empirical notion of object that you’re describing emerged in the era of modern sciences with Galileo. The Egyptians and Greeks first developed the concept of a pure ideal geometric form (perfect triangle, circle, square, etc) as the modification of actual interactions with real , imperfect shapes in nature. Armed with such pure mathematical idealizations as the straight line and perfect circle, it occurred to Galileo that the messy empirical world could be approach using these ideal geometries as a model. Now everything we observe in the actual world could be treated as an approximation of a geometrically describable body.

The notions of scientific accuracy and calculative measurement were made possible by thinking of actual things as imperfect versions of pure genetic bodies. The point Im making is that the physicalism you’re describing (self-identical things with mathematically describable properties and attributes) is not a product of the world as it supposedly is in itself. It is a human invention that depends on ignoring the contribution of subjective practical use and relevance to our perception of the world.

Once we recognize this it is no longer necessary to posit a distinction between an outer world of mathematically measurable things and an inner world of subjective consciousness. And the subject here is not to be understood according to traditional idealism and an internal realm The subject is just as much produced though pragmatic interaction in an environment as the objects of the world it interacts with.

Nothingness only takes meaning from the existence of its opposite: somethingness. They require one another for context and meaning. You can't have all nothingness and no somethingness or all somethingness and no absence/lack thereof. — Benj96

There is more to it than that for writers like Heidegger and Nietzsche. Nothing isn’t just the empty, generic opposite of a something. When we use the concept of nothing in actual contexts, it means something substantive in its own right. Nothing always points to a particular kind of nothing. It isnt just the taking away of a thing, but an affirmative move in its own right, a reaching out ahead. To reach out into the nothing is to connect with unheard of potentialities and possibilities.

Potential - not being anything specific but rather the ability to become a specific thing, need not be subject to the idea of presence or absence — Benj96

Think about how you use the concept of potential when you think it. It has meaning for you, and a use, and a history. First is the potential, and then the actual emerges out of it. So potential is the condition of possibility for the creation of something. If potential is the ability to be anything then it is just the generic name for thingness in general. We can think thingness as an empty category, with no specific content other than that we are thinking something rather than nothing. Adding that this empty category precedes the generic variety of actual things doesn’t change the fact that it is the thinking of a substantive object of thought, the meaning of that generic category that leads to actual things. Isn’t that exactly the role potential plays when you think it? And as a substantive meaning, doesn’t it co-imply its opposite, the absence of the ability to become a specific thing?

So, supposing human desire is "arbitrary," why then have I neverseen people slamming their hands in their car door for fun or having competitions to see how much paint they can drink? People tend to do a very narrow range of the things they could possibly do. Why do hot tubs sell so well when digging a hole so you can sit in a pool of muddy, fetid, cold water is so much easier and cheaper? Why is murder and rape illegal everywhere, but nowhere has decided to make pears or bronze illegal? What's with people going through such lengths to inject heroin but no one ever inject barbecue sauce, lemon juice, or motor oil? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Desire is for the sake of that which staves off arbitrariness, chaos and disorganization. Human bodies are organized in similar ways, so in general what is necessary and what is toxic for our physiological health does not vary dramatically from one person to the next. But while bodily organization, and its needs , changes very little from generation to generation and culture to culture, the same cannot be said of cognitive -affective needs and desires. From the most general perspective, our cognitive desires, like our bodily needs, are for the sake of that which staves off arbitrariness, chaos and disorganization, what I have called anticipative sense-making. But while our boldly needs remain relatively static over time, our cognitive desires evolve along with cultural development. Does this mean that within a given community, ethical norms can be agreed upon, but the changes in these norms from one era to the next are arbitrary? I would say the evolution of ethical norms is no more arbitrary than the evolution of scientific paradigms. Ther is no linear progression, but there is a strengthening of adaptivity.

By contrast, the idea that ethical norms are grounded in something transhistorical forces us to explain the failure to live up to those norms in arbitrary ways. The unethical person was behaving ‘irrationally’, ‘pathologically’ , ‘deviantly’, ‘capriciously’. The concept of evil is typically defined synonymously with arbitrariness.

Why is there something instead of nothing? — Benj96

Heidegger believed the very way the question is posed forces a certain way of looking for an answer. The question opposes being and nothing, privileging the former and treating the latter as lack. It assume we can’t think these two together. Doesn’t potential imply change, and doesn’t change include both presence and absence?

The question Leibnitz asks is: Why are there beings at all, and not rather Nothing? If we do not remain within metaphysics to ask metaphysically in the customary manner, then this might be asked as well: How does it come about that beings take precedence everywhere and lay claim to every "is," while that which is not a being - namely, the Nothing thus understood as Being itself- remains forgotten? How does it come about that with Being It is really nothing and that the Nothing does not properly prevail? Is it perhaps from this that the as yet unshaken presumption has entered all metaphysics that an understanding of "Being" may simply be taken for granted and that the Nothing can therefore be dealt with more easily than beings? That is indeed the situation regarding Being and Nothing. If it were different, then Leibniz could not have said in the same place by way of an explanation: "For the nothing is simpler and easier than any thing."

I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive'.
— "p.18
I was struck by how confident he is about this. He doesn't seem to take into account that a description can be an explanation and can give us a new view of what we are already looking. Nor does he seem to be thinking of the ideas about interpretation (seeing as) that occur in the Brown Book and the PI. Maybe he only came up with those ideas after writing this. — Ludwig V

I’m reminded of the role of explanation with respect to the language game. There can be a language which is organized in such a way that an explanation can be an intelligible move within it. But one can only describe the language game itself, because to explain it is to do no more than to reproduce it. And , like repeating a word over and over again, explaining a form of life devolves into meaningless. To understand what the diviner means when he says he feels the object behind his forehead is to have him describe the language game, not explain it. Perhaps Wittgenstein is taking the proper subject matter of philosophy to be language games rather than the moves within them.

↪Joshs

You often raise this strawman. I don't see anyone thinking that Hitler self-consciously believed himself to be evil. The example of Hitler is often raised for the opposite reason: the self-righteous are not always righteous. — Leontiskos

You mean they know not what they do?

See, apparently one must read his numerous texts again until one gets it "right", which exemplifies my point about postmodernists thinking that there is no such thing as being wrong (in this case only their critics are "wrong"). — jkop

Or perhaps you just ignored the part of the quote that denies your claim that postmodernists think there is no such thing as being wrong.

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

Do you think someone like the BTK killer or Jeffery Epstein's main problem was a crisis of intelligibility and sense-making? Or does this only cover part of ethics?

It seems to me that a lot of criminals, in interviews, understand why what they did is wrong at a deep level, and experience significant guilt and shame over it — Count Timothy von Icarus

The tendency to cite notorious media or historical figures as examples of evil (the Hitler effect) feeds into the Romantic conception of the autonomously willing ethical subject. Both the archetype of the lone killer and the solitary genius fit the bill here. But this thinking fails to do justice to the fact that the vast majority of individuals and groups who perform acts deemed as unethical by an aggrieved party believed themselves to be full justified. We have a strong need to believe that the ‘evildoer’ knows in their heart of hearts that they strayed from the path of goodness, but the reality is that in most cases they are as convinced of the righteousness of their actions as we are of our condemnation of them.

. When you speak about something being "built into our motivational aims," are you describing it from the point of view of psychology? That is, as a description of the human animal, of how we behave? Or do you mean "built in" as a sort of stand-in for a transcendental argument that would show it must be the case? I think it will make a big difference, which way we understand it, because if I want to go on to say that we do need a separate motivational mechanism, I need to know whether I'm arguing against an empirical or a conceptual claim. — J

This claim can be justified on more than a psychological basis. I would hesitate to call it transcendental in the sense of an idealist ground. Rather, it is transcendental in a way that cannot be understood on the basis of an idealist-realist
distinction. Both idealism and realism are anchored in a sovereign notion of ontology. Realists and idealists ground psychological phenomena, either directly or indirectly, in the way the world supposedly is in itself, whether that be the non-human or the human world. But the motivational grounding I have in mind is tied to a world that recursively re-invents its basis, sense and meaning by existing in time. There can be no static principles of ethics for this reason, no sovereign principle of motivation , no concept of the Good, of right and wrong, that makes any sense outside of actual, contingent contexts of interaction. Our motives are not drivers that propel us into motion. We always already find ourselves in motion, thanks to the reciprocally changing nature of our involvement with things in the world. Our motives emanate not from somewhere inside us but from matters at hand.

There cannot be a disconnect between our schemes of knowing or ethics and the way things are or should be , since those schemes are built from actual relations with a world that we are immersed within, a world that is on the way to being transformed by our interaction with it, and whose responses to our actions will continually require new assessments of the basis of right and wrong , correct or incorrect, true or false.

Can we use the word "hostile" without also meaning "aggressive toward others"?

Of more concern is where this stands vis a vis ethics. Are you wanting to say that, when we give a correct, or at least perspicacious, analysis of the person who has raped and killed someone, we are no longer in a position to describe the actions as wrong? — J

Aggression in its basic sense simply means active engagement with things. But this meaning becomes confused with the kind of activity that is motivated by anger and hostility. Such action is not directed toward simple destruction, but toward correcting a perceived violation. Anger always perceives itself to be justified.

To recognize a wrong is to have a perspective on it unavailable to the wrongdoer, to already inhabit a different world from them. If we succeed in bringing them over to our world, they will see themselves as guilty. If we cannot, they will see us as committing a wrong by condemning them.
I’m not denying that our ethical standards can progress, that the different worlds inhabited by diverse ethical communities dont belong to an overall developmental trajectory, but they evolve as a function of a complexification of sense-making that is built -in tendency of a complex dynamical system such as ours

Any thing is something. The contrary opposition is between being a particular sort of thing or not. Aristotle lays this out most clearly in Book IV of the Metaphysics when speaking on the principle of non-contradiction.

Husserl gets at something similar in his thought experiments on how much we can change the noema without making it cease to be what it is. Change a triangle's color or dimensions and it remains. Add a side and the "triangle" vanishes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re ignoring the rich normatively constituted relations that are unified through subjective (noetic) idealizations. The noematic content hides within itself these normative intentional shapings coming from the noetic side of the noetic-noematic synthesis. From the noematic perspective we see only a self-same object with its necessary attributes and properties, but from the noetic side we see the ‘plumbing’ undergirding such idealizations. Seen from the noetic perspective, there is no self-same object, but rather a constantly changing flow of synthetic senses , united moment to moment on the basis of similarities. Thus , the oppositional relation between an object and what it is not is subtended by an underlying normative sense making intelligible both object and its negation.

↪Joshs This is an interesting psychological picture of how people experience their connections with others, but isn't an awful lot of ethical talk being presupposed here, in order to give this analysis? As an example,

This is the hostile option.
— Joshs

You are clearly not trying to present "hostile option" in an ethically neutral way. It is not to be preferred, on your account. We ought not to choose the hostile option. So how is that judgment arrived at, and is it meant to carry ethical weight? — J

We can explain dogmatic or hostile construing not as the manifestation of arbitrary self-reinforcing drives or passions, but as representing the most promising avenues of constructive movement available to us given the circumstances. A prescriptive ethics ( we SHOULD avoid hostility ) only makes sense in a psychology which requires a separate motivational mechanism pushing or pulling us in ethical or unethical directions . But we don't need to be admonished to choose in favor of sense-making strategies that are optimally anticipatory, since this is already built into our motivational aims. When people stop actively questioning and evaluating their ethical constructs, and fall back on rigid verities, this should not be seen as a sign that the person has simply fallen in love with their doctrine, and thereby found themselves at the mercy of a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing rigidity. Instead, it is likely to signal a crisis in that person's ability to make their world intelligible. The question of why and to what extent a person embraces hostility should be seen as a matter of how much uncertainty that person's system is capable of tolerating without crumbling, rather than a self-reinforcing desire for hostile thinking.

Heh -- I would not say that the natural sciences make progress in any way which differentiates it from the other disciplines of human beings. Human beings continue to engage in various practices, and they change based upon what those human beings care about and do. Theatre has advanced from a previous period, and yet it has no ultimate teleology towards which it should strive. Likewise for science, and philosophy.

Progress is a measure of how impressed people are with a series of events, rather than a thing which happens — Moliere

I love this :100:

The conventional view might be that the violent perpetrator who assaults his partner, is doing so to exert his power and control of them by using fear and force — Tom Storm

Why does the violent perpetrator need to exert his power? Because he feels powerless. What does ‘power’ mean in
this context? Does it mean the ability to make happen whatever we desire? If so, what determines motive? If, as I am arguing, the power that we seek is fundamentally that of making sense of our world in ways that are harmoniously anticipative, it means the power to achieve the love and affection of others. But why this instead of the power to exploit them for our own selfish purposes? What makes our intent selfish in the first place? Do we start out selfish and have to be acculturated into empathy and altruism? Or is the ‘self’ that we are trying to remain faithful to a self which only exists as itself by assimilating the world? Don’t we settle for the power to exploit others as an inferior alternative to what we are really striving for, which is to connect with them? And isnt our callousness concerning their suffering the result of our assessment that they in some sense deserve this treatment , that we are punishing f them for what we perceive to be their own unjust callousness toward us?
Don’t you see in your own practice the handing down from one generation to the next patterns of abusiveness that result from the perpetuation through multiple generations of a failure to make sense of the others perspective?

If the basis of ethics is only about distinguishing what's preferred, how does that create any impetus to change preferences? I would have said that that -- the desire to prefer what, to the best of our knowing, is truly empathetic, or just, or compassionate -- is central to ethics, not so much the act of preferring itself. — J

Preference isn’t arbitrary. It is the measure of successful sense-making. All of our construals are interlocked and organized hierarchically with respect to our most superordinate concerns, how we understand ourselves with respect to others, and how we understand others to construe us. Our core sense of self crucially depends on how well we anticipate others’ behavior relating to us. Empathy and compassion don’t need to be taught, since our ability to empathize is only constrained by the limits of intelligibility. We only ‘desire’ against empathy to the extent that, as I said earlier, we are unable to recognize any basis of relatability between us and them. The experiences which are capable of producing the most profound anguish and suffering are directly tied to failure of social intelligibility. Our preferences are directed by the goals of sense-making; sense-making is directed toward optimal anticipation of events. The actions of others in relation to us are the most important events in our life.

We are motivated to change preferences when we experience a crisis in intelligibility. Our reliable ways of understanding others has broken down and we feel devastated, angry, hurt, betrayed and confused. We are left with only a few options. We can dig in our heels and try and extort validation evidence to justify our crumbling schemes of interpretation. This is the hostile option. Rather than exploring alternative ways of understanding the actions of others, we blame them for our failure to comprehend. Much of traditional ethics is hostile in this way, blaming the intent, character, or will of others when they fail to meet the standards we have set for them based on our criteria. The more effective , but far more difficult, approach is to experiment with fresh ways of interpreting the motives of others.

if the theories have anything in common, it's their diagnosing and revelatory character which makes them intellectually intriguing, yet they are written in a style which is obscure enough to remain dependent on the authority of expert interpreters — jkop

I have read Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida and don’t find any of them obscure. I find their ideas new and therefore difficult to grasp at first, which leads many to blame the messenger for the challenging nature of the message. If you need to rely on the authority of expert interpreters, then you aren’t actually understanding a philosophy. How can you use any set of ideas if you remain dependent on some other authority? And how would relying on what they say help matters if you are not able to understand what they are telling you?

when the theory attacks our intuitive and common sense views and rejects the existence of a shared basis for judgement (e.g. realism), it serves the interests of power… Enlightenment principles, nazis misused biology, communists misused psychiatry as political means. But they could at lest be accused for being wrong. Some postmodernists, however, don't even admit that there is such a thing as being wrong, which is arguably more pernicious. — jkop

No, journalists who spread cliches about Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze on Youtube claim that they say there is no such thing as being wrong. Now that’s what I call pernicious. Here’s what Derrida says about not being wrong:

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

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

Aristotle thought that being involved contradictory opposition. Something is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish. Contradictory opposition cannot serve to unify any thing and make it anything at all. But the "transcedental properties of being" in the medieval philosophy that grew out of Aristotle (the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and the One(Unity) all involve contrary opposition. For example, something can be more or less good, more or less unified (for Aristotle too). So the move from being to beings involves this sort of shift in opposition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Where does relevance fit in here? Contradictory opposition defines the being of a thing, but never simply in opposition to everything else in the world that it is not. The contrast pole to a meaning establishes the criterion of sense on the basis of which the thing differs from what it is
not, the particular way in which it is like some things and differs from others.

Anyhow, a key difficulty that seems to pop up for post-modern thought is the "slide into multiplicity" (as opposed to the slide into the silence of total unity). IMHO, this can be traced back to modern notions of freedom being grounded in potency as opposed to act—the "freedom to do otherwise," or, at the limit, "the freedom to choose anything." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But in poststructuralist thinking there is no freedom to do just anything. Freedom is always constrained by its history. It is always a relative freedom, a freedom that is at the same time a break with respect to a prior discursive system and a move which is dependent on that system. Multiplicities are organized diagrammatically, consistently, as perspectival points of view. Deleuze says:

Between two diagrams, between two states of diagrams,
there are mutations, reworkings of the relationships of forces. Not because anything can connect to anything else. It is more like successive drawings of cards, each one operating on chance but under external conditions determined by the previous draw. It is a combination of randomness and dependency like in a Markov chain. The component is not transformed, but the composing
forces transform when they enter into relation with new forces. The connection therefore does not take place by continuity or interiorization but by re-connection over the breaks and discontinuities. The formula of the outside is the one from Nietzsche quoted by Foucault: "the iron hand of necessity shaking the cup of chance”.

That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions.
— Joshs
You're so optimistic — baker

That’s what everybody tells me

Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making.
— Joshs

How do you explain that religions/spiritualities that focus heavily on love and compassion also "balance" this out with extreme violence, such as Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism (the Secondary Bodhisattva vows, where a person basically vows to kill, rape, and pillage in the name of compassion -- for the killed, raped, and pillaged person!!) — baker

The fact that love and compassion aren’t functions of successful sense-making for these religions, but must be attained by an act of will, demands that those who fail to desire correctly be dealt with in a punitive manner.

Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making.
— Joshs

Sorry, this is opaque to me. Could you expand? And, no offense, but in your own words if possible? I'm less interested in what other philosophers have said about this than I am in what you think. — J

The question of how to be compassionate toward others and to be alive to each being's suffering, assumes a need to resist the unjust desire or intention not to be alive to the suffering of others, that is, the unethical impetus to inter-affect with others by excluding their experience. But the suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our situated vantage of participation within multiple practices. We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from sense-making chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability.

Freedom from incoherence strengthens ties of relevant social relationality , freedom from the order of intelligibility fragments the integrity of social bonds. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. To choose to embrace the other is to discover and construct that aspect of the other which is knowable and relatable, which offers us the hope of avoidance of the abyss of senselessness and incoherence. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.

But where do such alternative forms of interchange actually work?
Certainly not at university, nor any level or form of formal education, not in most businesses.

I suppose a freelancer in some fancy abstract
mostly artistic type of work-livelihood could practice those alternative forms of interchange. But for everyone else, I can't see how they could be anything other than socioeconomic suicide. — baker

Groups of people form the kinds of social, economic and political structures that they understand. There are only a tiny handful of poststructuralists in academia or the workforce, so until which time that they emerge in larger numbers, these institutions will continue to operate the way they have. That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions.

I’m not trying to suggest that a single monolithic episteme underlies all forms of cultural creativity in a given era for a given community, but I am saying that these systems are interlocked, such that it makes sense to talk about Romantic painting, literature, music philosophy and science and mean more than just that these domains all belong to the same chronological period.
— Joshs

Yes, with a heavy emphasis on your warning about simplistic "single monolithic episteme" talk. The interlocking is complicated, and the parallels are stronger or weaker from era to era. Also, the role of science here is, to my mind, by far the most problematic. "Romantic" science? I'd need to hear more about what that might be. We all remember the Sokal hoax . . . — J

I’m thinking here of Foucault’s historical analysis of scientific epistemes. He grouped the period from around 1400 till today into three epistemes, the Renaissance, the Classical period (roughly 1600 to 1780) and the Modern episteme (1780 to today), and showed how theories of language , life and economics within each episteme shared many common features. Relevant to your question concerning Romantic science, he argued that the science of biology could not exist until the modern period because the classical episteme’s notion of natural history lacked a concept of holistic organization and history as self-reflexive change. These notions are central to Romanticism as a whole. He cites Romantic philosophers such as Kant , Schelling and Hegel as contributing to this new organicist
thinking in linguistics, economics ( Marx) and biology (Darwin).

I think this is indeed the conclusion we'd be forced to draw, and I think it's the wrong one. So I'd want to go back to look more closely at the fact/system/intelligibility relationship. How much of this is cultural? Do all matters of fact really depend on such radically contingent systems? Is there no value in the distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences?

I think that Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Habermas have a lot to teach us here. — J

Dilthey made a sharp distinction between the methods of the natural and human sciences, believing that hermeneutic method only applies to the latter. Gadamer, by contrast, and like Kuhn, applied hermeneutics to both the hard sciences and the human sciences. Gadamer, like Kuhn and Rorty thought that one could talk about a progress in the sciences, but this is not to be interpreted as a securing of matters of fact independent of schemes of intelligibility. Rather, the sciences, as part of the continuing conversation of man, can benefit humanity in increasingly useful ways in spite of the discontinuous nature of successive schemes of empirical factuality.

. The implication is that "the desire to be moral" can exist without some particular "conceptual content" -- that the desire can be present from era to era, but with a differing notion of the ethical good. Are you sure that's possible? What is this common denominator of desire? I'm not saying that there is no such common denominator, of course; I'm arguing, in the opposite direction, that in addition to such a common desire there is also ethical conceptual content that is translatable from era to era and individual to individual — J

I would say that the common denominator of desire is the normative aims of anticipatory sense-making. Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making. The ethical conceptual content you refer to , such as the Golden Rule, is what happens when sense-making breaks down and leads to blame and a concomitant collection of ‘oughts’ , which all come down to variations on the theme of ‘Thou shalt not act in ways that exceed my sense-making capabilities’.

The other falls short of our ethical standards due to a failing of ‘integrity’, a ‘character flaw’ , dishonesty, evil intent , selfishness, etc. In doing so, we erase the difference between their world and ours, and turn our failure to fathom into their moral failure.
— Joshs

To me, this describes the process of "othering," in which opponents or adversaries are assumed to be in disagreement with us due to certain traits they possess, rather than because there is genuine, potentially resolvable disagreement. Oddly, I see this as erasing the similarities between their world and ours, not the difference. But I think we may be getting at the same idea — J

The essence of the concept of Othering is not simply seeing
someone else's views, behaviors or traits as alien with respect to oneself and one’s own community, but judging these as unethical in their failure to conform to some universal. Levinas’s philosophical approach putting ethics before ontology captures the move made by a variety of approaches in contemporary philosophy. “According to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond… Levinas describes a direct embodied encounter
with the other.…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.”(Shaun Gallagher)

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

Is this not a "no true Scotsman" or "'real communism/capitalism' has never been tried," situation? No doubt someone could argue something similar about "real Christian nationalism," being grounded in love and "what is best for everyone," or "real Marxism" freeing the university system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do Christian nationalism and Marxism have in common? Both of them are grounded in forms of emancipatory humanism, which means that both posit a path of righteousness, on the basis of which it is possible to oppose and identify injustice and ethical depravity. The vast majority of the ‘woke’ community shares in this moralistic thinking, and justifies their repressive , language-policing tactics on its behalf. By contrast, the post-humanist work of writers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida rejects the idea of a righteous path of emancipation and the moralizing that goes along with it. They work not from grand narratives of emancipation, but within particular discursive systems to reveal openings for re-invention and alternative forms of interchange.

At some universities postmodernism has become as scary as The Spanish Inquisition. — jkop

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

I do want to affirm something you don't come right out and say, but that I think is implied in your questions. Creativity is socially constrained; it has a history and a context; and to ask "Would X have understood A?" is not the same as asking "Could X have created A?" In one of my fields, music, we often kick around stuff like "What would Bach make of Stravinsky?" Well, given enough time and examples to acclimate himself to Modernism, Bach might well have loved Igor. But there is absolutely zero chance he could have written Rite of Spring in 1725. So I read you here as pointing out, rightly, that we mustn't engage in some sort of "leveling of history" and imagine that Socrates, Aquinas, and Kant all spoke essentially the same creative language. They did not. — J

Yes, and I would go beyond that and argue that intelligibility is socially constrained. This point is fundamental for any theory of ethics, and for addressing the question the OP asks. You see, I believe that the musical sensibilities of era are inextricably linked to the way that the sciences are approached in that era , and the framework of understanding that undergirds the sciences is closely tied to that of philosophy , and the epistemic presuppositions grounding philosophy are related to that of poetry and literature. I’m not trying to suggest that a single monolithic episteme underlies all forms of cultural creativity in a given era for a given community, but I am saying that these systems are interlocked, such that it makes sense to talk about Romantic painting, literature, music philosophy and science and mean more than just that these domains all belong to the same chronological period.

More importantly, when we move from one era to the next
a certain discontinuity and incommensurability is involved. Not so much for those looking back to previous eras of thought and reinterpreting them from the present vantage, but for those who remain wedded to the old ways in the face of paradigm shifts and are not able to fathom what is in the process of replacing their system of thought. An entire metaphysics of ethics is dependent on flattening and ignoring these discontinuities in intelligibility. As a result, ethical values (the ought)) are spilt off from matters of fact (the ‘is’), as one assumes that it is a simple matter of introducing the new ways of thinking to any reasonably intelligent person and understanding is all but guaranteed. Why shouldn’t Socrates be able to understand Kant, the thinking goes, given a sufficiently thorough period of study? Why shouldn’t the Qanon -touting Trump voter sitting next to you be able to absorb the raw facts when conferences directly with them? According to this dualism of ethical value and matters of fact, the ethical disagreement between a neoliberal and a progressive socialist is based on considerations entirely different from those having to do with matters of fact. This flattening of discontinuities in intelligibility between eras, and between individuals, provides justification for the idea that there is such a thing a a universally shared notion of the ethical good that comprises not just the desire to be moral, but a shared conceptual content that is as transparent as matters of fact.

But if matters of fact depend for their understanding on systems of intelligibility which are contingently culture-bound, why should notions of the ethical good be any different? We live in a society carved up into myriad communities united by their own systems of intelligibility. The fact that we are all able to share the roads together and communicate in public spaces on the basis of general and superficially shared understandings masks the extent to which our worlds only partially link up. When we fail to see this we force the ethical into the position of subjective will. The other falls short of our ethical standards due to a failing of ‘integrity’, a ‘character flaw’ , dishonesty, evil intent , selfishness, etc. In doing so, we erase the difference between their world and ours, and turn our failure to fathom into their moral failure.

I was thinking of the parent trying to deal rationally with a child who has discovered the possibility of an infinite regress of "why". In the end, the authoritative. dogmatic, answer is the only possible one.

The language game makes intelligibility possible by taking for granted a founding system of interconnected meanings that it would make no sense to doubt as long as one continued to move within that language game. This built-in normativity of our languaged practices is not a failure to properly ground meaning, but the condition for keeping meaning alive.
— Joshs
I agree with that, of course. That's the explanation that makes the authoritative answer not merely dogmatic. — Ludwig V

Of course, the flip side of operating within a language game is that its authoritative rules and pronouncements are at the same time normative and non-binding concerning future practices within it. As Joseph Rouse explains:

Wittgenstein's well-known remark that requests for justification of a practice must eventually encounter a stopping point at which one can only say, “This is what we do" is often read as appealing to a social regularity, but his remark can instead be heard with the inflection with which a parent tells a child, "We don't hit other children, do we?"

Such statements or rhetorical questions do not describe regularities in children's actual behavior. On the contrary, parents make such comments precisely because children do hit one another. Parents do so, however, in response to or anticipation of such "deviant" behavior in order to hold it accountable to correction. Children's behavior in turn is only partially accommodating to such correction: sometimes obeying, sometimes challenging or circumventing corrective responses, some-times disobeying and facing further consequences, and so forth. Remember that we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

As for the continuity question, I see nothing in Kant's ethics -- apart from the Christian aspects -- that Socrates would not have both understood and been eager to debate — J

It sounds like you believe that the part of Kant’s ethics that exclude the Christian aspects comprises the core of his ethical thinking. If that’s the case, then am I right to assume you believe that Socrates would have understood the core of Kantian ethics? Am I right to further presume that, given that Socrates was capable of-comprehending Kant’s ethics, he could conceivably have though up something similar himself, in spite of the fact that he lived two thousand years before Kant?

Postmodern fear of knowledge. — jkop

Realist fear of postmodernism.