Joshs Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive? — Tom Storm

I don’t know if you saw my edit. I wrote:


Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

In sum, Kantians and post-Kantians reject naive naturalism because it ignores the contribution of the subject. Hart rejects naive naturalism in favor of an even more naive divine naturalism.

↪Joshs Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism. — Tom Storm

I found more on this. The middle ages offers plenty of examples of a pre-Marxist socialism. Benedictine, Cistercian, and later mendicant monasteries practiced common ownership, collective labor, and distribution by need. Thinkers like Aquinas affirmed private property only instrumentally, arguing that goods are privately administered for the sake of order but remain morally common. In cases of necessity, the poor have a right to the goods of the rich—a claim that directly contradicts Enlightenment property absolutism.

Also, guilds regulated production, wages, training, and pricing not to maximize efficiency but to preserve social cohesion, moral standards, and mutual obligation. Competition was restrained, not celebrated. Labor was dignified as participation in a common good, not commodified as an abstract input.

So it seems that Hart really is drawing from pre-Enlightenment models to produce his notion of socialism.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose very component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostolgia). He can be quite a bitch — Tom Storm

Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fascinating how Hart’s and Milbank’s metaphysics are so close, yet Milbank is sympathetic to economic and social conservatism while Hart rejects both. I don’t know enough about non-Marxist versions of socialism to clearly understand his arguments, but perhaps he sees conservatism as relying on secular
Enlightenment notions removed from divine truths and moral directives.

There is a post-critical position that preserves what is valuable in the classical tradition—the claim that intelligibility belongs to reality itself—without lapsing into naïve realism or reducing intelligibility to historically contingent sense-making practices.

So from my perspective, the core issue can be stated simply:

What must reality be like for beings like us to be normatively bound by truth, necessity, and correctness at all?

Once that question is in view, the debate is no longer about science versus theology per se, or about evolutionary psychology, but about whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely a contingent feature of how certain organisms cope with their environments. — Esse Quam Videri

Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position?

If Schelling , then the gap between Schelling and Hart should be mentioned. From a post-Kantian perspective, Schelling shows how intelligibility emerges from being’s own inner dynamics, rather than presupposing a fully luminous order guaranteed by divine intellect. He accepts the Kantian critique of dogmatism but tries to move through it, not around it. Hart, by contrast, largely refuses the transcendental demand altogether, treating it as a historical detour rather than a philosophical necessity.
For Hart, intelligibility is grounded theologically and metaphysically in actus purus: being is intelligible because it proceeds from divine intellect and goodness. Participation explains how finite minds can know truth, but the structure of intelligibility itself is already complete and perfect in God. Mediation occurs, but it occurs within a fully determinate metaphysical order.

Hart and Schelling both reject Kant’s subjectivization of intelligibility, but Schelling does so by internalizing critique into ontology, whereas Hart largely bypasses it by appeal to classical metaphysics. Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding.

The post-liberal politics of Victor Orban, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio draw from the classical metaphysical thinking of John Millbank and David Bentley Hart, which completely rejects Kantianism and all of the subsequent developments of philosophy which have flowed from it, including the phenomenological work of Bitbol and the Hegelian-Piagetian ideas of Vervaeke. If Kant was a correction of the limitations of Enlightenment thinkers from Descartes and Spinoza to Hume, the post liberalism of Hart turns its back on this whole era and retreats to pre-Enlightenment theological sources. If phenomenology opens up to the postmodern, Hart’s approach is decidedly pre-modern.

I am confident your thinking does not ally in any substantive way with this radically conservative turn. But I wonder if you have sympathies with the pre-Kantian mathematical neo platonism of figures like Michael Levin, Kastrup or Tegmark. I say this because you write:

science does not explain logical or mathematical necessity; it presupposes it. In securing its proofs and models, science relies on principles that stand to reason: inference, consistency, implication, and mathematical structure. Although science introduces new mathematical formalisms, these are not confirmed or disconfirmed empirically in the same sense as empirical claims. Yet they are among the constituents of scientific discovery. — Wayfarer

For the mathematical plaronists, mathematics isnt merely a language science happens to use; it is the deep structure of reality itself. When science relies on logical implication or mathematical necessity, it is latching onto features that exist independently of human cognition, culture, or conceptual schemes. On this view, the fact that mathematical principles are not empirically confirmed is not a weakness but a clue to their status: they are discovered, not invented, and they constrain reality precisely because they are reality’s form. Science presupposes logic and mathematics because logic and mathematics are more fundamental than empirical facts. They are part of the furniture of reality, not merely the rules of our engagement with it.

By contrast, Kantian and post-Kantian thinkers read the same situation in almost the opposite direction. Kant fully agrees that science cannot explain logical or mathematical necessity empirically, but he denies that this licenses Platonism. The reason science presupposes these necessities is that they arise from the conditions under which objects can be experienced at all. Mathematics and logic are not discovered features of a mind-independent realm; they are expressions of the a priori forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding. Their necessity is transcendental, not ontological in the Platonist sense. They bind all possible experience because they are the rules by which experience is constituted.

On Kant’s view, mathematical formalisms are indeed constituents of scientific discovery, but not because nature is secretly mathematical in itself. Rather, nature as an object of possible science is necessarily mathematizable because our cognition imposes spatiotemporal and logical structure on whatever appears to us. Science presupposes mathematics because without those forms, there would be no objects, no laws, no empirical regularities to investigate in the first place.

Post-Kantian thinkers deepen and fracture this picture in different ways, but they retain the basic reversal of Platonism. Hegel internalizes necessity still further: logical and mathematical structures are not static abstract truths but moments in the self-unfolding of rationality itself. Scientific concepts presuppose logical necessity because they are expressions of reason coming to know itself in nature, not because they mirror an external mathematical realm. Neo-Kantians recast mathematics as a regulative framework internal to scientific practice.

For Bitbol, mathematics and logic are indispensable not because they are universally binding in all possible worlds, but because abandoning them would amount to abandoning the very project of sense-making we currently inhabit. Their necessity is pragmatic-transcendental rather than apodictic.

Husserl locates mathematical logic in acts of idealization, abstraction, and meaning-bestowal. Mathematical objects are neither empirical nor merely subjective; they are ideal objects, constituted through conscious acts but valid independently of any particular act once constituted.

Where Kant treats logic as a fixed formal framework and mathematics as grounded in space and time, Husserl insists that both emerge from pre-theoretical, intuitive practice such as counting, collecting, comparing and iterating, which are then progressively purified into exact, ideal structures. Logical and mathematical necessity is not imposed by an innate cognitive grid but arises from the eidetic invariants of these acts.

For Vervaeke, mathematics and formal logic emerge from ongoing processes of sense-making and relevance realization in embodied, situated agents. They are not grounded in pure intuition, transcendental structures, or ideal acts, but in adaptive cognitive dynamics that stabilize over time into normative constraints. Logic and mathematics are late achievements of a self-correcting ecology of practices aimed at reducing error, increasing coherence, and enhancing problem-solving power.

From this vantage, necessity is not metaphysical or transcendental but ecological and functional. Mathematical and logical norms bind us because they have proven indispensable for navigating complex problem spaces, not because they legislate the form of all possible experience. Vervaeke would say that Kant over-intellectualizes the origin of necessity: what really grounds it is the way certain patterns of inference and formalization reliably track affordances and constraints in the agent–world coupling. Mathematics is powerful because it sharpens relevance realization to an extreme degree, not because it reflects a priori forms of intuition.

Hart seems to argue that the problem with naturalism is that even if the universe produces conscious beings, it doesn’t explain why they can understand the world. Physical processes create neurons and behavior, but not meaning, truth, or reference. That our minds can grasp concepts and form true beliefs points, Hart argues, beyond mere material causes.

I was hoping someone could unpack this and elaborate. — Tom Storm

Hart is a metaphysical realist of a classical persuasion. That means that he thinks reality is objectively real, intrinsically intelligible, value-laden, purposive, and metaphysically grounded in God. Human reason isn’t a matter of trial and error representations we place over things, reason is formed by the world’s own intelligible structures acting directly on the mind. In other words, the mind is inclined naturally to grasp the truth of the world. This is a very different from Kant, who argued that categories of human reason are purely subjective in origin, not given to us directly by way by the truths of a divinely ordered purposeful world. Postmodernists
believe that reality originates neither in the world as already ordered in itself, nor from subjectively given categories of reason imposing themselves on the world, but from an inseparable interaction between us and the world.

Patterner’s approach is pre-Kantian but post-Hart. He allows for a direct apprehension of the real through empirical investigation, which ignores Kant’s argument that empirical causality is not a direct property of the world but is already built into our reasoning about the world as a subjective condition of possibility. But Patterner’s view also requires humans to figure out what is true about the world through total and error, which Hart believes is not necessary because we are naturally inclined to directly see such divine truths.

Plainly, Buddhism, like the Vedic tradition from which it broke away, is embedded in a very different conception of the nature of existence, than is the Judeo-Christian tradition. — Wayfarer

One can be ‘very different’ in a number of respects. One
can be so by arising independently of Western trajectories of thought, such that Westerners must access them by abandoning their own assumptions or evolving towards them. Or one can do so by being more ancient, such that it takes skilled investigation to recognize how forms of thought not unlike Buddhism and Hinduism hide deep within the foundations of judeo-christian traditions.

All of which is premised on the assumption that Buddhism cannot be what it describes itself to be, which is, a way to the total ending of suffering. Not amelioration or adjustment.
— Wayfarer
@Joshs What do you have to say to this?
Do you agree with Wayfarer's assessment of your stance? — baker

I am confident Buddhism is exactly what it takes itself to be, a way to end suffering. The issue for me is what framework of understanding it uses to define suffering and its alleviation. There are those who see suffering through a very different lens, such that ending it is not only not desirable but also an incoherent notion.

Yes and this is, as you probably know, one of Nietzsches main issues with a purely utilitarian view on morality. We need some adversity to be able to grow. The quest to reduce all suffering would ultimately also reduce what we can be as human beings — ChatteringMonkey

Not only that, it would eliminate pleasure itself.

“…the satisfaction of the will is not the cause of pleasure: I particularly want to combat this most superficial of theories. The absurd psychological counterfeiting of the nearest things . . . instead, that the will wants to move forwards, and again and again becomes master of what stands in its way: the feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the unsatisfaction of the will, in the way it is not yet satiated unless it has boundaries and resistances . . .

The normal unsatisfaction of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sexual drive, the drive to move, does not in itself imply something dispiriting; instead, it has a piquing effect on the feeling of life, just as every rhythm of small painful stimuli strengthens that feeling, whatever the pessimists would have us believe. This unsatisfaction, far from blighting life, is life's great stimulus. - Perhaps one could even describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of small unpleasurable stimuli . . .
(Nietzsche’s Last Notebooks)

So I'm skeptical it's even possible to "understand Buddhism better" without looking into the issue of (kamma and) rebirth, if this is something that one finds particularly stumbling. — baker

I’ve always thought that modern Western readers supplement ancient Eastern wisdom with ideas that are strictly modern, and in so doing are taking what I call a nostalgic position.

The nostalgic position asserts that some individual or culture in our distant past ‘got it right' by arriving at a way of understanding the nature of things that we drifted away from for many centuries and are just now coming back to. So the latest and most advanced philosophical thinking of the West today is just a belated return to what was already discovered long ago. I dont buy the nostalgic position. I think it is only when we interpret ancient thought in a superficial way that it appears their ideas were consonant with modern phenomenology and related approaches. Why are we so prone to misreading the ancients this way? I believe this comes from emphasizing only the aspect of their thought which appears familiar to we postmoderns (recursive becoming) and ignoring the crucial hidden dimension (a pre-Platonic , pre-Christian universalism).

Western philosophy after Hegel shifted its attention away from unchanging foundations and towards a discourse of evolution, revolution and becoming in which foundations become relative, contingent and impermanent. The primacy of the self-knowing ego and the purposefulness of the grasping will were put into question. Some of these philosophers took note of the fact that Buddhist scholars also talked about egolessness and non-willing.

But I want to argue that the most valuable consequence of the modern turn toward becoming was that it represented a further step in the evolution of Western thinking toward ways of understanding the world in terms of intricate relationships, harmonies, interconnections and correlations. This process necessarily had to start out with the belief in fixed objects and universal laws as a ground for seeing consistencies and stabilities in the world, before it could go on to deconstruct thes foundations. My contention is that ancient buddhist thought is not post-Western but pre-Western. The metaphysics behind Indra's web, the Tao Te Ching and related teachings as they were intended two thousand years ago are so profoundly alien to contemporary Western philosophical thinking that they run the risk of being mistaken as profoundly similar and compatible.

Whereas Postmodern views of change and becoming originate from a radically self-subverting groundless ground, Buddhist becoming rests on a cosmology of universalistic , sovereign normative grounds (what it is that unifies the infinite relational changes within Indra's web). Unlike Platonic and Christian metaphysics, this sovereign ground is not made explicit. The ancients were not able to articulate this ground in the universalistic language of a philosophy. But it authorizes and justifies conformist, repressive social ethics and political practices which have persisted for two millennia in Buddhist cultures. Postmodernism emerges from a self-undermining, groundless critique of Western metaphysics, whereas Buddhism often presupposes a cosmic order (e.g., karma, Dharma, Indra's net) that is anything but contingent. Many ancient philosophies, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedic thought, operate within a framework of normative cosmology: an ordered, purposeful universe with implicit or explicit ethical imperatives. This is starkly different from postmodernism's rejection of fixed foundations.

Buddhist metaphysics (e.g., dependent origination, Indra's net) was not a proto-deconstruction but a cosmological model of interdependence, often tied to hierarchical, tradition-bound societies. The ethical and political dimensions of Buddhism (e.g., monastic conformity, merit-based hierarchies) reflect this embedded universalism, which contrasts sharply with postmodernism's anti-foundationalism. The Taoist wu-wei or Buddhist anatta (no-self) are not mere parallels to postmodern fluidity but are situated within teleological or soteriological frameworks that postmodernism explicitly rejects. Buddhist societies, like all traditional cultures, have often enforced conformity, hierarchy, and static social orders, precisely because their metaphysics assumes a normative cosmic blueprint. This is a far cry from the emancipatory aims of much postmodern thought, even if both might critique the "ego" or "fixed identity.

If there are affinities with pragmatism or with later analytic work on normativity and practice, I’m happy to acknowledge them. But I’m not trying to force Wittgenstein into Hegelian inferentialism. I’m using later Wittgenstein to keep JTB anchored in how our practices actually operate, and to keep the discussion aimed at epistemic certainty, not Cartesian absolute certainty. — Sam26

Post-Sellarsianism is defined by where one locates normativity, which seems to be the same site you situate it, in public justificatory standing governed by mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. Like the post-Sellarsians, you treat JTB as a legitimate starting grammar, whereas Wittgenstein aims to dissolve this starting point. Wittgenstein uses hinges to stop explanation, not to underwrite it. Once hinges are recruited to keep JTB “anchored,” they have been absorbed into a normative architecture. That architecture is Sellarsian in spirit even if it is anti-foundational in tone.

In looking at the snippets of the paper you have been slowly unleashing, I’ve been trying to place its core method and approach with respect to the philosophical communities I am familiar with. What is its relation to poststructuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, Criitical theory, American pragmatism, and figures like Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Dilthey, Dewey and Peirce? It seems to me your perspective aligns most closely with the work of post-Sellarsians like Robert Brandom, John Mcdowell and Donald Davidson, who draw centrally from Kant and Hegel, and all but ignore the post-Hegelian approaches to reason, justification and ground offered by these other communities.

You make frequent mention of the later Wittgenstein, but you force him into the post-Sellarsian ‘space of reasons’ box occupied by Brandom, Pippin, MacDowell and other Pittsburgh school Hegelians, and strip away the hermeuneutic and phenomenological elements which make his work so different from the Hegelians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but If you haven’t read Brandon, you might find his approach to be a better fit for what you’re going after than the later Wittgenstein.

Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues. — Wayfarer

If there are convergences, they are not over Levin’s platonism. Deacon is doing almost the opposite. He is trying to show how what looks Platonic; mathematical or mental forms that are ontologically basic and existing prior to, or independently of, physical instantiation, arise only through specific kinds of physical–biological processes. They are not “there anyway,” waiting to be instantiated; they are generated historically.

murder is bad in itself — Fire Ologist

That’s right. Killing isnt bad in itself, murder is. The sentence ‘murder is wrong’ is a truism, since the word already means ‘wrongful killing’. The fact we have a litany of words expressing judgements of blame and immorality doesn’t guarantee we will all agree on what situations justify assessments of wrongfulness, even though we can all agree that the words connote things which are designated ‘bad in themselves’.

Shouldn’t the atheist answer be, they are thinking like a fantasy, fictional novel writer? They make up contexts, make up players in that context, make up actions, throw in biology and psychology to claim some semblance of “science” or actual knowledge, pretend rules and laws and human speech can direct physics and human choices (as if we are not mechanistic followers of biological necessity), and call this “morality” until the next time when all variables may be thrown back up in the air where they belong and never actually left.

To the atheist, like Nietzsche, isn’t having a morality itself maybe the only possible immoral act? Because it’s an utter lie? To the atheist, shouldn’t the one moral choice we make be the choice to resist all moral judgment, particularly of our own impulses and actions? I think so. That is coherent — Fire Ologist

Atheism is a spectrum of philosophical perspectives with a historical lineage in the modern West going back at least 400 years. These perspectives have nothing necessarily in common with each other beside the fact that they remove the name of theos. My particular version of atheism assumes the following:

1) What we call immorality are practices by others which we aren’t able to understand in terms that allow us to justify them according to our own values. As a result, we blame them for our own puzzlement.
2) Cultural history takes the form of a slow development of interpersonal understanding such that we progressively improve our ability to make sense of the motivations of others in ways that don’t require our condemning them, precisely because we see their limitations as having to do with social understanding rather than arbitrary malicious intent. Advances in the social sciences in tandem with philosophy and the arts contribute to this development.

The proof is in the pudding. Either our social bets pay off and our models of behavior are validated by the actions of others, or they are invalidated and we have to start over with a modified scheme. We all try our best to make sense of others without having to condemn them, but for most the task becomes too overwhelming and they find they have no choice but to fall back on something like god-given moral foundations (or the empirical version : socio and neuropathology).

The transpersonal subject is not solipsistic - it is not 'the individual consciousness creating reality'. Rather, it's the shared structures of rationality, perception, and measurement that together constitute the conditions for any subject. Accordingly, the 'veiled subject' is transcendental/transpersonal, not psychological — Wayfarer

In writers like Ken Wilber transpersonal psychology has specific connotations pointing to mystical experiences and expanded consciousness. Do you subscribe to this vein of thought, and are you imputing it to Bitbol’s work?

I because an atheist because post-theistic philosophical and psychological models appeared to me to offer more powerful insights into how to understand and get along with others. It wasn't a matter of whether God exists, but of whether that hypothesis was as useful in becoming an empathetic and caring person in comparison to the secular alternatives I discovered. I don’t see my atheism as a reaction of the noble ethical goals of theism, but as a better way of achieving those goals. The key challenge for theists and atheists is to answer the following question :
What are people thinking when they do things we consider wrong, and why are they doing them? I’ll go with whichever approach answers this question more effectively.

I think the more likely explanation is that we evolved something called biological altruism. — Questioner

You think altruism is a brain mechanism? You dont feel that it is in your best ‘selfish’ interest to help people you care about and need in your life? In that case altruism wouldn’t be a matter of choosing others over the self but being motivated to expand and enrich the boundaries of the self. We would also need to clarify that the self isn’t a static thing but a system of integration assimilating the world into itself while accommodating itself to the novel aspects of the world. Altruism can be seen in this light as belonging to this enrichment of the self’s capabilities.

It seems very odd to need a proof that god exists in order to do the right thing. — Banno

It would be a shame to waste a good sin.

This is because any degree of restriction whatsoever on abortion -- even a careful one on completely secular grounds -- carries with it the cultural implication that somebody, somewhere should be able to pass moral judgements on sexual activity, which is something they just will not countenance. It undoes the whole reason they wanted to get rid of God. It's a core dogma and it's not just immoral but blatantly anti-moral. (opposed to morality as a category) — BenMcLean

This reminds me of the kind of angry manifesto someone writes before they burn down an abortion clinic.

The division between a psyche and its world is the capacity to be mistaken, to read the world incorrectly. — frank

For Heidegger, it’s not just invalidation which comes from the world, it’s also the perspective being invalidated.

Europe fundamentally does not pay for its own military defense. It isn't completely devoid of military spending and is improving in this area but Europe is still heavily dependent on the United States for security its taxes do not pay for and ours do. — BenMcLean

You can thank the U.S. for coming up with the idea of that arrangement. After World War II, the United States did not reluctantly assume responsibility for European security because Europeans refused to pay for it. The arrangement emerged because Washington actively wanted to control the terms of European rearmament and, initially, to prevent it altogether. Demilitarization, especially of Germany, was a central American objective.

Furthermore, the claim that European welfare states would have been unaffordable or impossible without U.S. military spending is not supported by historical evidence and collapses once you look at cases like Britain, France, or Sweden. Europe built welfare because it prioritized social insurance, labor protection, and decommodification in ways the U.S. did not, not because it was freed from defense obligations.

The 'main reason' why I think that Kant's 'transcendental idealism' and those 'transcendental approaches' advanced by some phenomenologists are mistaken because they are positing that the 'framework' in which it makes sense to speak of an intelligible world is contingent.
Am I wrong about this?

Is the transcendental subject (or an analogous concept in those views that are similar to Kant's but not exactly the same) contingent? Do you think that asking if it is contingent doesn't make sense? If so, why? — boundless

Kant argued that the transcendental conditions for the possibility of the intelligiblity of time, space and empirical causality are not contingent but a priori. Hegel argued instead that these conditions are contingent, and the phenomenologists followed his lead. But according to Hegel and phenomenology , subjective consciousness is not contingent. This may sound confusing, but it’s a matter of of the difference between thinking about subjectivity in terms of a fixed set of conditions of possibility (Kant) vs as a site of interaction with the world in which schemes of intelligibility undergo historical change (Hegel) .

↪Joshs please look at the gemini link I posted in the original post, and tell me whether there is a confusion of meaning. — bizso09

I looked at the gemini link, copied the discussion to Chatgpt, and asked it to critique the discussion from the vantage of the later Wittgenstein.

It responded that there is an underlying philosophical mistake in your reasoning, and that the discussion exemplifies exactly the kind of philosophical confusion Wittgenstein sought to dissolve. It treats indexicality (“I am Alice”) as if it points to an object in the world.It treats subjectivity as a metaphysical entity with location and causal power, and it tries to solve problems of consciousness using logical constructions instead of examining the grammar of mental language.

From a later Wittgensteinian view, the “contradiction” you feel is grammatical, not metaphysical. There is no need for selectors, lights, or Windows, just a clarification that “I am Alice” is not a proposition about a metaphysical entity, but a rule-governed expression within human practices. The AI’s discussion builds an elaborate metaphysical edifice to solve a problem that, according to the later Wittgenstein, never existed once we examine the grammar of “I,” “world,” and “experience.

Because of 1, which shows the existence of You, and 2., which shows that this You is single, and 3., which shows that this You is absolute global, anyone else claiming to be You leads to a contradiction. If we apply this to our world at large, since I OP is already claiming to be You, and I have proof of this, the Reader cannot claim a You. In case the Reader has also proof of them being a You, it leads to a necessary contradiction of facts. — bizso09

Thank god we have proofs to tell us what our language means. On the other hand, the OP puzzle could be an example of what Wittgenstein called a confusion of grammar. As pointed out, a scenario like this only leads to apparent contradictions when we fail to recognize that the same works can have different senses of meaning in different contexts. Under everyday circumstances of use we have no trouble separating out these different senses. It is only when we try to force the words into the reductive abstractions of logical predicates that we conceal from ourselves the fact that the conceptual work they are doing has changed from one point in the account to another.

You have requested a distinction between a "transcendental" understanding, and a "causal" understanding. Can you explain this difference better, for me? "Nature herself" you say, is not the source of empirical things. So nature is not causal in this respect. And, you describe "the conditions" for empirical appearance, as the a priori intuitions. What could be the cause of those empirical appearances then? As empirical appearances they ought to be understandable, and this implies that we ought to be able to speak of causation. If the human mind itself is not taken to be the cause, then they end up as causeless eternal objects, like Platonic objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is Kant’s conditions of possibility that run the risk of looking like ‘causeless eternal Platonic objects”, but not empirical Nature. The forms of intuition are not empirical objects, events, or states; they are conditions of possibility for there being empirical objects and events at all. Appearances are neither caused by the mind nor independent entities floating free of all conditions. They are constituted through the joint operation of receptivity and spontaneity: sensibility provides intuition under the forms of space and time, and the understanding supplies the rules under which what is given can count as an object of experience.

Constitution here is not a causal relation. Appearances are not freely invented by us, there is something independent of our spontaneity involved in experience. But Kant denies us any right to describe that involvement in causal terms. Within experience, every appearance stands under causal laws. What Kant denies is that we can step outside that framework and demand a further causal story about why the framework itself exists.

Notice that I do agree with Kant that the 'empirical world' arises also from the cognitive faculties of the subject.
— boundless

Only if the empirical world is a general conception representing all possible real things does it arise from the cognitive faculties of the subject. For any particular thing in the collection of all possible things, given to the senses in perception and by which experience is possible, that thing does not arise from the cognitive faculties of the subject, but, insofar as it is given, arises from Nature herself — Mww

From a Kantian perspective, this rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Kant means by arising from the cognitive faculties of the subject. It treats Kant’s claim as if it were about where individual empirical items come from, rather than about the conditions under which anything can count as an empirical object at all.

Kant’s thesis is not that particular empirical objects are fabricated by the mind, nor that the empirical world exists only as a general conception. Rather, his claim is transcendental: the form of objectivity, being an object of possible experience, is contributed by the subject’s cognitive faculties. Space and time are forms of sensibility; the categories are rules of synthesis. Without these, there would be no “collection of possible things” and no “particular thing” that could be said to be given as a thing. Your distinction between a general conception that arises from the subject and particular things that “arise from Nature herself” reintroduces the naïve realism Kant is trying to overcome.

From Kant’s standpoint, the phrase “given to the senses” already presupposes the subject’s contribution. Sensibility is not a passive window onto a ready-made Nature; it is structured receptivity. What is given is given in space and time, and these are not features of Nature as it exists in itself but forms of intuition. Likewise, for something to count as a particular thing rather than a mere manifold of sensation, it must be synthesized under the categories. So even at the level of particular empirical objects, their objecthood does not “arise from Nature herself” in isolation from the subject.

This also misconstrues Kant’s use of “empirical realism.” Kant is an empirical realist because he insists that objects of experience are not illusions or mere ideas; they are objectively valid for all subjects with the same cognitive faculties. But this realism is inseparable from transcendental idealism. To say that a particular empirical object is “given by Nature herself” as opposed to arising from cognitive faculties suggests a standpoint outside the conditions of possible experience, a standpoint Kant denies us. Nature, for Kant, is not a thing in itself that hands over ready-made objects; it is the lawful unity of appearances constituted through the categories.

To say that the empirical world “arises also from the cognitive faculties of the subject” is correct if it is understood transcendentally rather than causally. The subject does not produce empirical objects, but it provides the necessary conditions under which anything can appear as an object in a unified world.

Kant is not dividing labor between the subject (general concepts) and Nature (particular things). Instead, he is saying that Nature itself is Nature as appearance, which exists only in relation to the subject’s forms of intuition and categories. To invoke “Nature herself” as the source of particular empirical things is to speak as if we had access to Nature as it is in itself. From Kant’s point of view, that is precisely the illusion his critical philosophy is meant to dispel.

Like in dreams, we know there is a world beyond the immediate. Consciousness seems like a flashlight in a dark room. We move the flashlight around and come to know what was already there. — frank

This is a good example of the metaphysics of presence, where awareness is treated as our discovery of what was already there. A flashlight model assumes that the relation to the world is something added to a prior existing subject. But Heidegger rejects the idea that there is a self-contained subject who merely “lights up” pre-existing objects that are already there in themselves.

The world is not something present-at-hand which we merely observe; it is that within which Dasein already finds itself.(Being and Time)

Heidegger considers the encounter with objects in the world in an act of attention to be a creative process altering self and world in the same gesture.

"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all , and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "

Beings (essences) are produced by Dasein in the act of taking something as something because the ground ( the totality of relevance) of their being is created anew in our encounter with them.

“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground... It is not the subsequent adding of a ground for something already represented.“

Thanks. Just wanted to add this from conservative Peter Wehner, who Ben calls ‘despicable’:

Many of the same people who once fiercely supported Reagan and opposed moral relativism and nihilism have come to embody the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who insists that justice has no intrinsic meaning. All that matters is the interests of the strongest party. “Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” he argued.

The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become, in the words of Representative Ogles, a predator nation. This period of our history will eventually be judged, and the verdict will be unforgiving—because Thrasymachus was wrong. Justice matters more than injustice. And I have a strong intuition and a settled hope that the moral arc of the universe will eventually bend that way.

↪Joshs Fair enough. My instinct is that separation of powers only work by agreement. They are not magic spells and in the end where the military go will probably be the decisive factor. — Tom Storm

You’re right. Thus far, we have been successful in keeping them out of Chicago.

↪Joshs Do you think America has become an autocracy (with more to come) and that Trump and/or his cronies are here to stay? Either ignoring future elections or suspending them? Or do you think much of the US has a desire for autocracy and will happily vote for it? Or something else — Tom Storm

Tbh, I’ve been almost completely ignoring the political news the past 6 months to preserve my sanity. My guess, though, is that the separation between federal, state and local judicial and governmental institutions, not to mention robust civic institutions and a very diverse media landscape, will be enough to restrain Trump from seizing complete control. I think only a minority of the population truly supports autocracy. I don’t think our friend Ben does, but like many, he isn’t able to recognize those instincts in Trump. He thinks he’s just “a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.”

I’m not sure Trump has a direction — Mikie

It’s the autocrat’s direction. Everything points back to the king. Total one-man control of power.

Trump — for however different he is in many ways — hasn’t really strayed from the very policies that have been championed for decades: tax cuts, deregulation, small government, privatization. Same old, same old. — Mikie

Careful what you wish for. Be thankful we have a federalist system with many local checks and balances. Without those deep constraints, the direction Trump would take the country would be unrecognizable relative to the standards of a constitutional democracy.

But the American Left is very, very far from center on social issues -- and that's what I care about. It gets its leftism not direct from Marx, but from the Frankfurt School & critical theory. Which is, despite not being economic, still very far from anything any reasonable human on Earth could consider centrist. — BenMcLean

Yes, Frankfurt school Critical Theory has been trickling down from academia over the past few decades to shape the political views of politicians on the left. Is it centrist? Not if we take a poll of country as a whole. But if we poll residents of the 20 most populous American cities, as happened when the mayors of Chicago and New York were elected, it may be argued that some of its broadest concepts are being integrated into centrist perspectives in urban America. My advice to you is to stay away from the cities, especially the northern and west coast ones. You won’t like it there. Their centrism is not your centrism. I recommend suburban Dallas. Oklahoma City is good, too.

The act of cognition constitutes its content as objective. Once we recognize the distinctive givenness of essences in our experience, we can extend Kant's realism about empirical objects grounded in sensible intuition to a broader realism that encompasses objects grounded in categorial intuition, including mathematical objects. — Richard Tieszen, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics (Review)

I wouldnt say that for Husserl the objectivating constituting acts of intentionality amount to a realism about empirical objects. Rather, when Husserl says that the objects which are constituted are ‘real’, he means to treat the real as a subjective, relative idealization which must be bracketed and reduced in order to locate the non-relative grounds of objectivation. For Kant, empirical reality is not a merely relative idealization that can be reduced away in favor of a more primordial level of constitution. Rather, empirical objects are objectively real within the bounds of possible experience because they are constituted according to a priori forms and categories that are universally and necessarily binding for any finite discursive subject. The reality of the empirical object is secured not by ongoing intentional syntheses that could, in principle, be otherwise, but by the fixed transcendental framework of sensibility (space and time) and understanding (the categories).

This leads to a different sense of “non-relative.” For Kant, what is non-relative is not located in a deeper phenomenological stratum beneath empirical objectivity, but in the transcendental conditions that legislate objectivity as such. Once an appearance is subsumed under the categories and situated in space and time, its empirical reality is not something to be bracketed or reduced; it is fully legitimate and irreducible as appearance. Husserl radicalizes transcendental idealism by showing that even the sense of empirical reality is a constituted achievement that can be methodologically suspended.

On the object side of his analysis Husserl can still claim to be a kind of realist about mathematical objects, for mathematical objects are not our own ideas — Wayfarer

They are neither our own ideas nor simply in the world. They are products of the idealizations we construct out of our actions in relation to the world. The origin of number for Husserl is the again and again of ‘same thing different time’. Do we ever experience anything in our imagination or in the world which accords with this ideal of identical self-repetition? The answer for him is that no contentful event in imagination or world repeats itself identically. This is something we add to experience in order to have matematizable objects.

“The consideration of the conditions in principle of the possibility of something identical that gives itself (harmoniously) in flowing and subjectively changing manners of appearance leads to the mathematization of the appearances as a necessity which is immanent in them.

A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities [Weisheiten], its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. Purely mathematical thinking is related to possible objects which are thought determinately through ideal-"exact" mathematical (limit-) concepts, e.g., spatial shapes of natural objects which, as experienced, stand in a vague way under shape-concepts and [thus] have their shape-determinations; but it is of the nature of these experiential data that one can and by rights must posit, beneath the identical object which exhibits itself in harmonious experience as existing, an ideally identical object which is ideal in all its determinations; all [its] determinations are exact —that is, whatever [instances] fall under their generality are equal—and this equality excludes inequality; or, what is the same thing, an exact determination, in belonging to an object, excludes the possibility that this determination not belong to the same object.”

Understand that the conditions of mathematizing objects Husserl is describing above don’t come to us from the world, or ready made from our imagination, but from the idealizing abstractions we perform on actual events in order to make countable things appear. From Husserl’s point of view, Platonism is not attractive because of its advantages but because it answers the wrong question. The problem is not how we gain epistemic access to a realm of already constituted ideal beings, but how ideal objectivity, validity for anyone whatsoever, is possible at all. Husserl’s answer replaces the metaphysics of a Platonic realm with an analysis of the lawful structures of intentionality that make ideal unity, necessity, and exactness intelligible. Once that shift is made, it is no longer clear what work “mind-independence” is supposed to do.

Kant would have his own objections to what Tieszen is trying to do. Kant’s first objection would target the claim that mathematical objects are “given” in something like intuition in a way analogous to empirical objects. For Kant, mathematical cognition is intuitive only because it is grounded in pure sensible intuition:space and time. Geometry concerns the a priori form of outer intuition; arithmetic concerns the a priori form of inner intuition. Mathematical objects are not encountered as invariants in experience, nor are they disclosed through a special kind of categorial or eidetic intuition. They are constructed in pure intuition according to rules. This is why Kant insists that mathematics is synthetic a priori: its objects and truths arise from the active construction of concepts in intuition, not from the recognition of independently existing ideal entities.

Second, Kant would reject outright the idea that mathematical objects could be mind-independent, self-subsistent, and “in every sense real,” even with a transcendental qualification appended afterward. For Kant, this language collapses the critical distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Mathematical objects are objectively valid, necessary, and universally binding, but their objectivity is exhausted by their validity for any possible experience structured by our forms of intuition. To say that numbers or geometrical figures exist independently of those forms is, for Kant, to relapse into dogmatic metaphysics. We do not have access to objects as they are in themselves, and mathematical objects are no exception.

Third, Kant would object to the extension of “empirical realism” to mathematics. Empirical realism is Kant’s way of affirming the full objectivity of appearances while denying their transcendence beyond experience. It is not a general recipe for realism wherever cognition is successful. Mathematical objects are not empirically real at all; they are transcendentally ideal constructions whose application to experience is secured by the fact that space and time are forms of sensibility. Kant would therefore see Tieszen’s move as a category mistake: it treats mathematical objectivity as if it were just another species of objecthood, when for Kant it is a distinct mode of cognition grounded in construction rather than givenness.

Kant would see the phrase “transcendentally constituted but mind-independent” as incoherent. In Kant’s framework, transcendental constitution already exhausts what it means for an object to be. Once an object’s being is located in the conditions of possible experience, there is no further metaphysical question about whether it exists independently of those conditions. To insist on independence “in every sense real” is to overstep the limits of reason that the Critique is designed to enforce.

The Left finds them useful now not just because they hate Trump but because the Left has internalized the same libertarianism on economics — BenMcLean

Who is a good exemplar of non-libertarianism on the right? Do Trump’s tariffs count?

What they're really doing, in my view, is kind of despicable, because National Review today would rather flat out side with the rabid lunacy of the woke Left than work with a flawed but politically viable Right-leaning leadership. — BenMcLean

They’re despicable to you not because they aren’t taking an honest, principled stance but because they aren’t as conservative as you are. It shows how fringe Trump is that even you don’t like him.

When FDR massively expanded the powers of the executive branch and when Obama said, "I have a pen and a phone" you clapped like a circus seal and never gave the implications of that expansion a second thought. This is just pure partisanship, not rooted in a genuine suspicion of executive power. The same thing is good when your guys do it but bad when the other guys do it. — BenMcLean

I gave you a chance to get beyond the ‘you guys vs us guys’ rhetoric when I gave you a long list of the kind of people you said in your OP that you endorsed as thoughtful role models of Buckley-National Review political thought. I explained that none of them had any problem making a distinction between executive overreach and straight-out autocracy. They all placed Trump in the latter category. Most of the figures on that list have explicitly singled Trump out as exceptional among U.S. presidents in the degree, explicitness, and persistence of his autocratic instincts, not merely as “another flawed president” or an intensification of familiar abuses of power. What distinguishes their criticism is precisely that they do not treat Trump as continuous with Nixon, Bush, Obama, or even earlier illiberal moments in American history, but as representing a qualitative break in norms.

For writers like George Will, David Frum, Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson, Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer, the claim is not simply that Trump governed aggressively or expansively, but that he rejected the legitimacy of constitutional restraint itself. They repeatedly emphasize features they regard as unprecedented in the modern presidency: the open denial of electoral legitimacy, the personalization of state institutions, the systematic attack on independent courts and the press as enemies of the people, the use of office for personal loyalty rather than institutional fidelity, and the willingness to praise or emulate foreign strongmen as political models. Will, in particular, has framed Trump as the first president to govern as though the Constitution were an inconvenience rather than a binding structure.

So you and I belong to two different communities. I side with that thoughtful community of National Review pundits in their assessment of Trump. You side with the community which dismisses these views as ridiculous and overblown. I suspect you and I have different criteria for what constitutes autocracy, which is why on such an issue having a deep impact on the quality of our lives we should separate and focus on building up our respective communities in the direction we need it to go. I want to hang out with the people on that list , even though they are to the right of me politically. You go hang out with whoever considers them ridiculous.

I had the idea that his ‘eidetic vision’ was concerned with essences ‘the pure perception of the essential, invariant structures (eidos) of phenomena, moving beyond mere empirical facts to grasp universal essences, achieved through the method of eidetic reduction, where one uses eidetic variation (imaginatively altering features of an object to find what must remain constant) to discover necessary laws of consciousness’. However it’s centered on conscious structures not on some supposed ‘third realm’. He referred to it as a kind of qualified Platonism — Wayfarer

I was taking liberties in referring to a world apart from consciousness. One finds this in Deleuze and Foucault, not in Husserl. They want to deconstruct subjectivity so as to make it an effect of processes which are pre-subjective and pre-personal. But this isn’t as big a departure from Husserl as one might think. For instance, what exactly is left for Husserl once we perform the most radical and complete phenomenological epoche? What invariant structures remain as essential? Only the present itself (as retention-impression-protention) as an empty form. What’s important here is that for Husserl, as for Deleuze and Foucault, no substantive content is left once we have reduced the naively seen world to its irreducible basis. No objects, substances, material forms. Only a synthetic repetition of change of sense. For Husserl the site of this repetition is time consciousness (transcendental subjectivity). For Deleuze it is a multiplicity of differences producing not a single flow of time constituted by a single source or zero point ( the subject) but multiple times arising out of multiple differences ( the pre-subjective collectivity).

I wanted to show that we can end up with a similar deconstruction of empirical objectivity even if we don’t use Husserl’s starting point in subjective consciousness (which sets people off because of its strong connection in their minds with older metaphysical notions of consciousness) and instead talk about the relational structure of the world ‘in itself’.

. But even still, the real cause of these people's alarm isn't that Trump really is so extreme (that's ridiculously overblown) but that the massive success of Trump does stand as a public indictment of the older ideology of National Review (and what remnants of it are still represented by its current editors) as dying, on a civilizational level — BenMcLean

I have no problem in accepting that a broad swath of the American public always harbored autocratic instincts, but that until the past 50 years this segment was hidden within a mixed electorate characterizing both parties. As intellectual republicans of the George Will-David Brooks mold left their party, and that broad traditionalist swath inclined toward autocracy left the Democratic party, it exposed a long-hidden truth, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Traditionalists gravitate to leaders like Orban, Putin, Erdogan and Trump, and when they all concentrate within one party, their numbers allow them to dominate at the national level. That’s not an indictment of anything, it just says that your way of life was never as popular as you thought it was and now that the electorate has split along geographic lines coalition may no longer be possible.

It is becoming less and less likely that some political middle ground can be reconstructed any time soon, because the left has been moving farther and farther away from the traditionalists, which is why the latter fled liberal parties. Just as important, the two factions have segregated themselves geographically. If you live in a large city, it is likely your view of the world socially, scientifically, politically and ethically is so far removed from that of a rural resident that for all intents and purposes you live in a different country from them. Is Trump extreme? No more than MAGA. Is MAGA extreme? Yes, of course they are. They are extremely far removed from any political, ethical, social or scientific values that I and the majority of those
living alongside me in my urban community relate to and thrive within. I am not judging their values and positions as right or wrong in a moral sense. I am simply saying that when implemented by a community as a whole they are incompatible with the kind of life I need to live. Under such circumstances, the best strategy for a federalist country like the U.S. is separation and soft secession.

I am not worried that the Right is at risk of imploding.
On the contrary, it is quite possible that the MAGA numbers will increase over the next decade as more socially conservative minorities flee the democratic party. It’s only your vision of the right which has imploded because you are outnumbered. This may go on for a long time, and that isn’t a tolerable scenario for urbanites since it means their needs will go unrepresented. It will require aggressive , creative thinking about how to re-align the relationship between municipalities, states and the national government in the direction of forming local and state alliances and coalitions which fill in for what will be lacking from the national level.