Even if universal foundations were possible and believed to be prerequisite of perfect ethno-national guidance, particularly given our crisis, which by definition calls for immediate practical responses, and particularly as that way of pursuing truth and comprehensive serviceability is unnecessary, we cannot abide delays for radical skepticism in service of that end in lieu of what is already clear and indubitable in ethnonational interest.
Pragmatic philosophy has conceptual tools that could serve and save us as ethnonationalists, but it is necessary to wrest their application from civic democracy, taken for granted as a virtue at its onset by its liberal American charter members, and taken over the top in universalizing that application against ethnonationalism by the YKW.
It is not far fetched to believe that they have taken good conceptual tools, exactly which we would need as ethnonationalists, only to apply them against our interests; moreover, taking them so far over-the-top in misapplication as to get a didactic reaction from ethnonationalists – who react by playing opposite day from the tools that we most need – and who, in reaction so overdrawn as to reject its humane virtues, repel and antagonize the would-be sufficient bases of ethnno-nationalists that they might otherwise coordinate with. That is not far-fetched, it is by now highly detectable as standard operating procedure of YKW academia with regard to conceptual tools which would best serve ethnonationalists.
Nevertheless, there are important differences between a philosophy necessary to uphold ethnonationalism as opposed to the philosophy of pragmatism as it has been taken into practice; but these differences are not to be found only after successfully overcoming our fallibility through establishment of universally unassailable foundations for ethnonationalism
The difference that makes a difference for ethno-nationalists is rather in emphasis and elevation of the concept of indubitabililty – working hypotheses of which there is no reason to doubt as being in ethnonational interests; whether a logic so plain that we may take it for granted, or more complex, but warrantably assertable through operational verifiability – we recognize no need for anything remotely like a relentless critique of these working hypotheses – especially not from those known to hold antagonistic ideologies to ethnonationalism. Thus, we de-emphasize critique and presumed correctability of working ethnonatonalist hypotheses, particularly by those with antagonistic motives and ideologies – markedly, those advocating civic democracy drawing upon genetically universal population; and those advocating imperialistic and supremacist ideologies which would not allow for ethno-nationalist sovereignty.
The principle working hypothesis of ethnonationalism, of course, would be the assertion that in our given genetics we are warranted to go on existing as a nation while our nation is warranted in turn to maintain our genetics inasmuch as we allow for others to maintain theirs; and vice versa.
We may proceed without the pseudo-prerequisite of universal foundations, recognizing radical skepticism as being misdirected for that aim and an expression of Caresian-anxiety caused by philosophical abuses such as those promulgated under the rubric of pragmatism; alleviating that Cartesian anxiety in fact, by attending in contrast and emphasizing instead pragmatism’s finer virtues, which are three:
1) Acknowledgement of fallibilism and affordance of its participatory correction not only provides ongoing availability of correctability of our knowledge, but it can do so for ethnonationalism as such, providing for a correction of mere pragmatism, and into an institutionalizing of ethnonational delimitation. As such, it allows us to build our ranks qualitatively but also quantitatively in the varied contributions necessary for our community to flourish and defend our people against infiltration, exploitation and genocide.
2) As such, it is not just any correction, but an ongoing correctability which, when coupled with pragmatic delimitation in the aims of correctability to the requirements of our community as ethno-nationalists, can relieve “the Cartesian anxiety” – an anxiety given our antagonists’ relentless attack on our ethno-nationalist community (and yes, they have made me hate that word too, for their didactic abuse of it – the disingenuously vague, merely cultural, non-genetic connotations they’ve associated with the word “community”), we feel a sense of anxiety, a longing for the grand Cartesian either/or. To explain that further..
“But lets turn to the ideas of these thinkers [Pierce, James and Dewey]. I’m going to present a composite picture with some dominant themes. The first theme is anti-foundatonalism and the critique of Cartesianism. Descartes, in his meditations, was searching for a solid foundation for the edifice of knowledge. Something that is indubitable and incorrigible; a truth that can be known with certainty, and that can serve as the real basis or foundation for knowledge. Descartes is haunted by what I have called in some of my writings, “the Cartesian anxiety” – the grand either/or. Either, there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelope us with madness and intellectual and moral chaos. Now, there is a way of reading a good deal of philosophy from its beginning, to its present, and especially from Descartes to the present, as a search for a firm foundation. Whether we take the foundation to be the intellectual grasp of eternal forms, or the direct grasp of immediate empirical intuitions, or the cogito itself.
The appeal to such a basic, rock bottom foundation, cannot be underestimated. In our time, the failure to discover, quote, such a foundation, is said to lead straight right to a defeating relativism, that denies the very foundation of truth, objectivity and moral fealty; and I think unfortunately to a great extent, that still infects a great deal of popular consciousness. ‘If I don’t have something basically to believe in, then anything goes.’
Now the pragmatists, all of them, challenge this way of thinking, challenge this kind of grandeur, they seek to exorcise this Cartesian anxiety; they reject the ideal that there is an absolute grounding or foundation of our being. I think one of the best statements of the pragmatic alternative was succinctly stated by Wolfred Sellers, when he writes, “for empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational not because it has a foundation, but because it is a self correcting enterprise that can put any claim into jeopardy, although not all at once.” The alternative to the foundation metaphor is to think of inquiry as a self correcting enterprise; that has no fixed absolute beginning points and no absolute end.” {1}
What is requisite is what is required, not a universal foundation.
In fact, participation in our fallibilistic correction can include contributions as deep, abiding and scientific as any – i.e., you can, in theory, question anything, even the most verified scientific law; though sane people, in vast percentage may consider you insane, dishonest, at best engaged in some speculative inquiry that will require you to compile verifiable information for you to bring to bear once you’ve completed your rather impractical inquiry; but the skeptic is not owed a privileged position of non-accountability for the initiation of inquiry over that which the community holds fast (the burden of proof is on the skeptic, so to speak, given) that which shows no practical need to change for the rather impractical inquiry; this holds true for many requirements of ethnonationalism –
3) The great contribution of the pragmatists is to show that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible:
This alternative paradigm, this alternative way of thinking, leads me to a second theme, that I think is characteristic of the pragmatic tradition, and that’s the theme of fallibilism. If inquiry is a self corrective activity, that can put any claim into jeopardy, then this means that all knowledge claims, indeed all validity claims are fallible, in the sense that we never can claim that we know anything with a type of certainty that cannot in principle be questioned. But there is a difference between indubitability and fallibility. Many of our beliefs are indubitable in the sense that we do not doubt them; and indeed may not even be aware that we have such beliefs. But what is indubitable today may turn out to be false tomorrow. Furthermore, fallibilism is not to be confused with epistemological skepticism. Hilary Putnam, who is one of the outstanding pragmatists of our time, and still alive, once wrote that the great contribution of the pragmatists is to show that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible. Pierce, for example, never doubted that we can know a reality that is independent of ourselves. But he also argued, that we’re never in a position to claim that we know this with absolute certainty …and I think we can illustrate what is meant by anti-foundationalism and fallibilism by an appeal to an understanding of scientific inquiry (or we could relate it to all kinds of inquiry). The validity of a given theory or explanatory hypothesis in any of the sciences is not dependent on showing that it rests on an absolute foundation, but rather that it is supported by the best empirical evidence and the best reasoning. Every serious scientist today knows, that our current theories and hypotheses will most likely be mollified or even abandoned in light of further inquiry and evidence. So strictly speaking what we take to be true today might turn out to be false. Nevertheless, it would be hyperbolic to say that consequently, we don’t really have any knowledge because any knowledge claim that we make may turn out to be false… rather the pragmatic point is that all knowledge is fallible and all knowledge is corrigible – in principle it can be corrected.
[…]
The question arises, if we cannot know anything with absolute certainty, how to warrant and secure our knowledge claims? And answering this will bring me to our third theme, the importance of the community of inquirers and the sociality of our practices that shape us. {1}
The principle working hypothesis of ethnonationalism, of course, would be the assertion that in our given genetics we are warranted to go on existing as a nation while our nation is warranted in turn to maintain our genetics inasmuch as we can allow for others to maintain theirs; and vice versa.
That our genetic genus and species exist as significantly discreet from others on the planet is indubitable. That sheer skepticism of the “reality” or “significance” or “sufficient grounds to defend” these classificatory differences will jeopardize these differences, particularly when discriminatory rules in their defense is prohibited though anti-racism and anti-discrimination laws is indubitable.
That there are good reasons to want to protect these differences is indubitable.
That game corresponds directly with an attack on any would-be gentile left, i.e., socially accountable, nationalism and unionization; particularly as Jewish interests have reached clear hegemony, they have sufficiently greased the palms of right-wing elitists to be complicit as they take control of right-wing reactionary platforms as much as possible; and have promulgated the vilification of “the left” (“speculative” social organization/unionization) as much as possible to try to counter any gentile social classification gathering as left, social nationalism to challenge their hegemony.
However, whereas the pragmatists stance against foundationalism and Cartesianism and its charge for us to accept fallibilism has been co-opted against us, it also offers us the best tool, weapon in fact, by which to warrant our defense – viz., that anti-racism itself is Cartesian. As such, we may come loaded for bear against the enemies of ethno-nationalism:
The attack on the ethnonational community comes principally from Jewish community’s extrapolation on the prejudice against social classificatory discrimination, with facilitation of their fellow Abrahamics (note that Abahamics are not nationalists, they are imperialists; and we do not have to respect them as nationalists) and the liberal community: The central component of anti-racism is a game of weaponized social classification against gentile ethnonationalism.
This Abrahamic attack is well cast in terms of Manichean as opposed to Augustinian devils. Judaism and Islamics were coming from a place in evolution to compete more against other tribes for resource – thus, how to trick (Manichaen devils) them became a central skill.
Whereas for Northern Europeans in particular, but all Europeans, the issue of survival was more a competition against nature – thus a skill set more evolved to handle Augustinian, viz. natural devils, where human agency to deploy and solve trickery is not so central a concern.
By all evidence, Christianity is a Jewish trick, prescribing universalism and self destructive altruism to us, taking advantage of our evolved European nature in predilection to attend to Augustinian devils – as I have said, our predilection to attend to Augustinian devils is not necessarily bad, as we will ultimately be up against Augustinian devils to solve; however, we must not be naive simply because we’d rather not be bothered with the pettiness and trivial mindedness of Manicheans.
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.
How is anti-racism Cartesian?
By artificially separating us from engagement in account of our broad, but very real, biological patterns and relative interests as such; as opposed to approximating our natural homeostatic delimitations, we are prohibited from observing these relative delimitation by means of classificatory delimitation – incited for the modicum of vaguery, ambiguity, arbitrariness and contingency at the edges of these classifications; for the history, where classifications were often used by one group to abuse another, we are obligated instead to put these patterns at risk to pure objectivism – on universal foundations – which is Cartesian.
Because our classifications are fallible in the sense that we can interbreed with other races, their communities charges that there are no important differences to warrant discrimination. This is Cartesianism on the empirical side, where the classificatory distinctions are held to be arbitrary and of dubious, if not fictional significance. Furthermore, as our antagonists and liberals confront us with the fact that all races can interbreed, they can and do argue that evolutionary competition and integration will produce good, if not the best results.
It is not practical for our community to try to foundationalize as an objective fact that this cannot possibly, in any way be true; and fortunately, it is not necessary.
The best we can do, and we can do very very well, is make the best arguments (practices, e.g., might of arms, count as “argument” here) in our defense, achieving warranted assertabilty – with operational verifiability of that warrant so much the better.
How do we argue in the face of this Cartesian incitement?
To begin, it is practical is to acknowledge that we can interbreed, but to argue and assert, in the event that their hypothesis just might just be wrong, that it is nevertheless indubitably valid to classify peoples according to genetic groupings for the sake of accountabilty; to keep “reserves” (i.e., the vast majority and their prerogative for a separatist homeland) and with that to build counter-arguments in warranted assertability that we and our qualities are worth saving despite their purported infallible claim that they aren’t. We establish warranted assertion in defense of our classification – as having distinct and long standing evolution, merited to remain in its trajectory, provided we allow for others to maintain theirs. The act of classification and its implementation affords agency thus, coherence, accountability, warrant in inherited social capital and human ecology.
And again there is a crucial difference for ethno-nationalists from academia’s (particularly Gadamer’s/Derrida’s ) crucially abused (as Cartesian) notion of “marginality” – where “marginals” are taken to be those who are from without, outside the classification and/or antagonistic to it, as opposed what would be the ethno-nationalist concept of marginality – i.e., those remaining just within the classification despite pressure, but well disposed to its reconstruction; having the additional existential benefit of “knowing where the shoe pinches.”
“Those who are marginalized” in this sense, does not necessarily mean those who are falling behind, but can also mean those who are outstanding, though they would be ostracized as they are not understood and appreciated as being out in front; and well intending.
We would be bringing to bear correctiveness from the “rich and diverse perspectives of our ethnonational community.”
As such, marginals would contribute to a homeostatic function of the ethnonational system, against incursions and crass exclusion of sufficient basic function and of outlier advance.
What is practical toward that end is the unionization of our relative interests as classifications so that we may not only have criteria to be accountable to our relative interests, but also to objective facts beyond our relative group interests; and to the relative interests of other genetic classifications.
But either way, pure racial distinctions or “one race, the human race”, it is an unnatural and impossible standard of purity which, when observing history and what happens with this void in means of bio-historical accountability, will show that it is prone to reaction and attack on other classificatory groups. It is a game that can be countered with pragmatism and hermeneutics applied, as I have said, with ethno-national delimitation – but we must ask, why has that not happened? To answer that question we have to know a bit more about where the prohibition of classification comes from, the context it operated\s in, and where these remedies came into play.
Where does this classificatory game, a game that is weaponized against us, particularly as Whites, come from? a little history is in order:
The YKW, in their ordeal of civility, as a self interested group classification, were confronted and threatened by the civic nationalism of America, viz., its civil individual rights which, as an instrument holding no proviso to recognize their group interests, observed that America’s civil rights were based on the Cartesian and following that the Enlightenment and modernity’s prejudice against prejudice – viz., given Locke’s prejudice against social classifications as they happened to operate against him; he took a position against social classifications that they are necessarily, universally pernicious fictions of the mind, only a machination of the dishonest; and against that deployed the Cartesian notion (on the empirical end) that only sense perceptions of the individual mind are real and that group classifications are non-empirical, nefarious fictions which should be prohibited in favor of civil individual rights.
To deal with this, the YKW made American Whites live up to their rules (Saul Alinsnky style), but weaponized them over the top as “civil rights acts” which denied White freedom from association, thus effectively put them into involuntary servitude where operative. Moreover, they made Whites live up to Locke’s prohibition against classification and took it over the top as well in the form of “anti-racism.” Anti-racism is essentially a prohibition against social classificatory discrimination.
Kant had anticipated the dangers of Locke’s purely empirical perspective, how destructive it could be perhaps especially to conscientious people, and his major work, “The Critique of Pure Reason” was an effort to solve this problem, to provide universal foundations in “the nouminal concept” against this empirical arbitrariness; a noble effort, thought it failed; as Heidegger said, it was still Cartesian.
The analytic school’s Whitehead and Russell, in taking it upon themselves to try to solve the liars paradox [classically, “all Cretans are liars, I am a Cretan”, or plainly, “I am a liar”] provide a later example of a philosophical method insufficiently equipped to deal with skepticism of social classification. The analytic school’s tools in fact would be susceptible to paradox and dealt with these issues clumsily – with Russel admitting that the “theory of logical types”, viz, “that a class cannot be a member of itself”, was “the most ad hoc thing he’d ever had to do.” Nevertheless, while it may have been ad hoc to his analytic sensibilities, logical types did have practical applications.
We are all pragmatists – because we have to be – and Whitehead, a renowned mathematician was acknowledging this when he said: “we cannot continually investigate everything, but must be able to take some things for granted and proceed from a given state of partial knowledge. Even a false or inadequate working hypothesis is better than no working hypothesis.”
And he was in the ballpark before WWII forced a shying away from more explicit, concrete applications, when he said “philosophy must now perform its final service and save a race of people sensitive to values beyond mere physical pleasure.” If his having used the word “race” was not made radioactive by the supremacist Nazi campaign of WWII, we might have been sooner to implement the idea of classificatory function, despite its fallibility.
The experience of Whitehead and Russel of trying to solve the liar’s paradox with the ad hoc theory logical types, that “a group cannot be a member of itself”, is an example of the clumsiness of a sheer analytic philosophy in dealing with classificatory paradox; while right-wing purity spirals to go beyond social problems are equally prone to paradoxing and hoodwinkng into runaway. By contrast, these are matters which a judicious implementation of pragmatic correctability could handle, well, practically, and matters which an additional hermeneutic component can handle gracefully – it will deftly put aside “paradoxes” with narrative sequentiality, furtive, hierarchical and other provisos.
The Vienna School of Logical Positivism (from which the Vienna School of Economics derives) was another effort in this vain. The tried to establish a pure positive language free of metaphor and failed for confrontation of the fact that words have more complex, ambiguous and contingent relations to their referents – they couldn’t avoid metaphor, in a world. The later Wittgentsein was forced to acknowledge this, calling the Tractataus upon which the Vienna School of Logical Positivism was based, “not a very good book.”
Heidegger’s invocation of hermeneutics was effort in the right direction as a way of dealing with Cartesian duality, the Cartesian anxiety, and our authenticity of dasein. As one might guess following the coherence of this article, I would add the dasein of social classification, some facimile thereof to round out his philosophy, falling a bit shy of a sufficient philosophy as it did for phenomenology’s first person overemphasis and lack of emphasis on group pattern connecteness, criteria and accountability – there was something like that in Heidegger but not emphasized enough; his philosophy strained in the reification of anxiety before individual death as the source of meaning, being, dasein. Like the pragmatists, the method for our interests was there, but underused for lack of proper basis (for what we’d fallen into) and emphasis, especially among later practitioners.
Like pragmatism’s “participatory correction” from an ever more enriching and diverse basis of civic democratic universalism, hermeneutics could serve the YKW in its academic big business of selling talk, to any mathematically challenged, verbal brained undergraduate with an axe to grind against White men in particular, in non-stop culture of critique; and any fallback they might take in science: as if hermenutics is anti-science simply because its capable of critiquing scientism, viz., bad science or bad scientific application.
Thus, what happened when I tried to talk to Professor MacDonald on the basis of hermeneutics – he insisted that “hermeneutics was anti-science” because all he’d seen in academia was YKW fostered abuse of the concept – they’d done what they always do; they’d taken concepts which would be most serviceable to ethno-nationalism, de-emphasized the aspects which would be most helpful to ethnonationalism and put over the top those features which when exaggerated would be most destructive; made them didactic; so instead of the coherent means to pursue our authenticity in organic form, and take hold (responsibility, the other interpretation of ownmost “guilt”) for our historical and systemic breadth, hermeneutics is associated with people who think that history and events can mean virtually anything they imagine, rather what cultural Marxists might think, divorced from empirical reality.
The pragmatists have shown that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible; that we can hold up to our opponents outlandish metaphors, speculations and narraties; while asserting and warranting our interests instead, more imperfectly at first and less so with ongoing correction by community interests. And together with that, hermeneutics has shown the means to overcome the Cartesian anxiety, a way to overcome paradox, arbitrariness and nefarious positivist chicanery against ethnonationalism. However, given (dasein’s thrownness into) the setting of its charter, America’s civic, democratic nation, the liberal democratic motives of its charter members and YKW co-opting, pragmatism has over-emphasized and rather exaggerated fallibilism’s correctability through social participation – viz., extolling a “diversity” of critique, alternative “narratives” in an ever broadening, and thus ever more arbitrary “democratic community”, giving us an “enrichment” which is, like classical liberalism, insufficiently committed by state administrators charged with accounting for the upholding of biological groupings, and citizens accountable to uphold their biological grouping, as would concern the ethno-nationalist; nor do they conceived to account for protection of these protracted historical bio-systems by delimitation of ethno-nationalism (that classification = “racism”); hence the predictable denouement into radical skepticism, as it becomes more and more the case for gentiles that one must look after one’s narrow interests completely (a problem not sufficiently helped by the pragmatists or Heidegger, and especially not as they’ve come into popular discourse), whether that position is most advanced by those who’ve managed to do well for themselves, despite and perhaps because of their complicity with group classificatory disintegration, or those, notably the YKW, who also do well for this disintegration, hypocritically promoting the prohibition of unionization of social group classifications where they cannot be exploited by their own institutionalized group classification.
This democratic correctibility, now called “social justice warriorism” for its didactic form as promoted by YKW pragmatism and neoliberal complicity, is already a skepticism of gentile classifications, its relentlessness and hyperbolic attack provoking a longing on the gentile part for otherworldy foundation by contrast; and offered (((“neo” reaction))) in kind to promote a new skepticism to social justice and unionized, participatory means of correction; the (((alternative right))) is offered to institutionalize their new position in defense of their supremacism, YKW and complicit supremacism, at the expense of institutionalizated accountability to ethno-nationalism.
Skepticism toward the unionization of group discriminatory classification is institutionally perpetuated, assimilating the “reality” that one must accept – this “inequality” not only has force of itself, but also the intellectual cache of the elites; both elitist gentiles and now also promoted more as a form of activism by Jews via the alternative right; promoted more now as a mere fact of nature, to which only the delusional and unrealistic would object and try to be so leftist as to unionize against, given their increasingly obvious hegemonies. Radical skepticism, especially toward the practicality of ethnonational classification and unionizations thereof, is almost part of our DNA and its inherent susceptibility to be exploited by now; it is the last things we need.
Nevertheless, gentile vulnerability to skepticism of group unionization and aversion to taking what we might refer to as the anti-Cartesian turn with the Pragmatists and the hermeneuticists, has also been exploitable not only because their anti-Cartesian remedies were taken over the top in didacticism; but because anti-Cartesianism came only after Cartesiansim and its means of exploitation had already been institutionalized, taken for granted and embedded in civil individual rights – divorced as they were, in fact prohibiting discrimination of group classification – while especially promoted through the rule structure of America – that is no small matter; as its rule structure spread in ostensibly warranted hegemony to further purity spiral given its victory over right wing reaction in WWII; a reaction which was similarly a purity spiral, though more explicitly seeking to throw-off, to purify itself of the guilt and burdens of the YKW and their priorly institutionalized means of infiltration and exploitation of group classificatory interests; viz. to throw off Jewry and their ensconced purity spiral of guilting the gentiles with ethno-sacrificing Christianity by means of “natural law”. American victory only increased the hegemony of liberalism’s liasz ez fair relation to the YKW purity spiral of Christianity, a liasz ez fair relation reinforced initially by its Cartesian constitution; and later, as intersectional (where Jewish hypocrisy is confronted) reaction increased to the point where it might notice Jewish ethnocentrism, paleoconservatism and its spawn, the alternative right, were unleashed to maintain that liasz ez fair – “our Judeo-Christian, ‘western’ culture.”
On a level of more common concerns, as Cartesianism was institutionalized in the American Constitution, leaving patterned concerns only implicit, and suspicious of groups, particularly those suspected of Aristocratic snobbery, Locke’s form of empirical individual rights increasingly ran roughshod over biological systems, doing its purity spiral, in prejudice against classificatory prejudice – mostly done naively by the gentiles, but often disingenously by elites beholden only to their narrow interests and a quid pro quo with an equally disingenuously YKW.
Note: we are not proposing doing away with the concept of individual liberties and rights, only that the Locketine technology was not the way, we have better ways now. But failing the implementation of those better ways, the ethnonationalist community remains largely in reaction to hermeneutics and pragmatism’s participatory correctability for the exaggerated misuse of those disciplines against our classification and truth; laregly in a reaction not only instigated with didactic exaggeration, but on pain of social ostracism. You gonna question muh rights? – nothing more sacrosanct than to an American (or to many UN charter activists for that matter) than their rights; you a Nazi? – need I say more? We remain stuck in the Cartesian realm of reaction, where analytic at all – and failing that, engaged with its faith cousin – you gonna question muh Abrahamic religion?
But another factor which had lent to the taken for grantedness of Cartesiansim and its increasing hegemony was the impetus of its yield to science and technology (and the lucrativeness of that); modernity’s progressiveness indeed, running roughshod over the human ecologies that left nationalism might otherwise serve and protect – commie leftist pinkos.
You gonna question muh capitalism, science and technology? muh manly pristine theory with that messy pinko lefty rag girly social pragmatism stuff? With this amateur understanding of the philosophical remedies that we are up against, the lack of understanding of the problems that we are up against and the means to correct them for the inability to see past and get past their abused forms; even though we would get past theme if we use of their correct forms. However, so long as we remain in reaction, we remain outside of our advanced philosophy and correctabilty for ethnonational ends. And in this mindset bereft of hermeneutics liberation from mere facticity, we remain stuck in the physics envy of clean lines and highly predictable cause and effect (to our enemies too), as opposed to the (only somewhat) messy but facile narrative coherence, agency, accountability and warrant to wrest our ethnonational sovereignty. And in this wish for pure analytic coherence, we remain unduly hindered by paradox and chimera that can be used by our enemies to hoodwink casual, implicit ethnonationalism.
Thus our plight begins with a form of skepticism, that such patterns exist that can and should be classified for their discriminatory protection, and that terrible things will not necessarily happen if such discriminatory classifications are rendered. The YKW version of universal civic democratic participatory correctabilty is a steady, grating skepticism writ large.
The assault by the YKW on our people, as if we are not importantly distinct – neither ideally nor practically, in classificatory assessment of genus and species, and not precious in such distinction, is centuries long.
As GW observes, it is an assault evidently prescribed by Jewish tribal interests to rupture differentiation and defensive exclusion among “the gentiles”, viz. the non-Jews, as gentile distinctions, complementary, coordination and the defense thereof may threaten Jewish power and influence.
This centuries long assault on our distinction began with neither Boas nor Descartes. It is narrative of classificatory disintegration, divorcing us from our complementary relations and coordination, from our land, nature and and earthy connection; it is a narrative that has been hegemonic over European peoples through and of a YKW mass media control that is not only decades long but, as Bowery observes, it is centuries long, with their Bible having functioned as the predominant “mass media” and medium of this narrative transmission for the better part of two centuries – promoting a narrative culminating with Jews as the chosen people, the light of the world, while the gentiles might only enter the hereafter by being purely altruistic, non-self interested. Dissent of that narrative, on the other hand, was on pain of otherworldly damnation, or literal, this worldly persecution – at times, even penalty of death.
And when in church, the priest did not say “let us think”, he said “let us pray” – viz. repeat by rote the priest’s call to submission to the Jewish god. It is a narrative trajectory increasing in hegemony and culminating in their story told as light of the world over the correspondingly undifferentiated gentile other.
European thinkers only began to shake this hegemony, throw it off as imposed superstition and return to the rationale of the Greeks and our own northern lights in The Enlightenment. Nevertheless, European peoples were not fully emancipated, as they would need to be in distinction of our peoples, by means of Luther’s proclamation that “here I am, I can do no other”, nor by Descartes, proclamation that “I think, therefore I am” …as he was, in pursuit of universal foundations.
These pursuits would have a loyalty nevertheless, but a loyalty not to the organization and relative interests of group patterns, but rather a loyalty to elitist objectivism, to mere facts and the upholding of the pretext of their objective pursuit – if one was to have the tacit approval of the scientific mavens and engineers who were becoming a new priestly caste, and that panderers (and pandered-to, frequently puerile females) against those who would operate against our classificatory interests.
…as with Nazism, warrant was not to be located in the differentiation and coordination with the other, but in the demonstration of purity of “natural law”, and supremacy that served the purging reaction of the meme virus.
Speaking of what is indubitable, taking advantage of the obvious disagreeableness of this concept, a reaction really, like a massive fit of coughing and diarrhea – a case of your struggle and stink is ok only if you are German supremacist – the YKW have with this indubitable didacticism amplified means to lay guilt trips and cause the gentile other to pursue warrant of innocence by a doubling down in Cartesianism; particularly through the victorious American enshrinement of enlightenment Cartesianism in the Lockeatine notion of civil individual rights – as they serve their aim to rupture the danger of opposing group classifications as “non-empirical”, a rupturing imposed on lines of “anti-racism”, “anti-Nazism” etc.
Marxist and neo-liberal YKW both would, in their elite mentorship, recognize the susceptibility of European peoples’ defense in their adherence to Cartesianism, and the YKW operate against it in mimicry of its own terms, in anti-racism, naturally – with particular emphaticness after WWII, they would be marching through our 7 institutions, and let us add another, even more so would they march through our very genome.
If the young White man is to have hope to be let past their gate-keepers – often the bitches who didn’t want to be fair, but want to incite genetic competition beyond their merit (their typical shit test in initial interaction episode, “isn’t racism terrible?”) – he must embrace the advancing meme structure, loyalty all the more fiercely to objectivism, to anti-racism, to the incursion of African and Arab hoards – if he hopes to extricate himself from the broader community of subjects as they are beholden to objectivist naivete, blind to individual and group Manicheanism (rule changing devils), who only mimicked adherence to Augustinian (natural) devils where it suits them in their “objectivism” as it is bound to be infiltrated by YKW: from Wittgensteins’ Austrian school positivism to its heirs Hayek and Austrian school libertarianism, to its neo forms, neocon, neo anything, as Irving Kristol admits, it is weaponization against Whites, still holding the undifferentiated gentile other as template of purity, innocence and warrant – the prejudice against prejudice was to make Whites live up to their own rules, as those rules worked against them.
Categorization, what I call classification, is not an artifice, is not Cartesian – it is a perfectly natural and necessary emergent function, to sort out, to discriminate healthy social patterns from unhealthy – “Women, Fire, and other Dangerous Things” (lets call that chocolate women, fire and other dangerous things).
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent and it is killing people.
Even if it is by means by a crass version of Darwinist competition:
As I have said many times in one of my original theories, Modernity’s Cartesianism has had a vast disordering effect on society. And the “anti-racist” extrapolation of anti-social classificaiton is a union busting function of the YKW writ large, playing manichean games with social classification/anti-classification as it suits their interests. Just because European peoples are prohibited from discriminating by social classification, doesn’t mean that other’s aren’t doing it, allowed to do it; and doesn’t mean that classification (categorization) doesn’t happen naturally – it happens anyway; with the categories too difficult to ignore, because they are basic, even in “universal” human terms: particularly male and female.
The result is that the patterns of our protracted maturity as K selectors are truncated, our female co-evolutionaries are pandered to from males from every direction, predated upon by R selectors, particularly as the YKW foist race mixing upon Whites to demoralize White men and to bust gentile unionization; they pander to the basest tendencies of females to incite genetic competition.
They take advantage of another category impossible to ignore – black men, particularly by contrast to White females, a category and contrast so stark that it is almost impossible to ignore as a tropism. They take advantage with their “anti-racism”, with the fact that blacks are not necessarily at a disadvantage as they say, in all cases and ways – not given their license to discriminate on their behalf and make coherent sense; not within the disorder, where black aggression, hyper-assertiveness and abilities on an episodic levels are a more salient criteria for partner selection; they are not disadvantage in these circumstances of anti-racism, if you take into account that opportunism is acting in concert with their ancient history, the bio-power of their long pre-evolution to Whites; which serves them in this mix, to privilege them over females, to provide them with females and children (frequently at the zero zum expense of Whites); along with the fact that their coherence, their classificatory identity is allowed, they are offered remedial programs by the liberals and YKW, to make up for a history of oppression that we had nothing to do with; furthermore, their daring is increased as expectations of them, as individuals, are low; group ethnocentrism backs them in their risk taking. They often have less to lose (some of their women are nice, but….). Whereas European men have a lot lose, and become skittish; furthermore, the merit of European men tends to show over protracted patterns, patterns that are ruptured by anti-racism; and truncated by the opportunism of males, R selectors and what-not, that they are not allowed to discriminate against.
Meanwhile the one up position in partner selection that females occupy (because eggs are precious, gestation vulnerable and sperm is cheap) emerges with increased significance, with puerile European females gaining in premature confidence and discretionary power as gate-keepers, as they are talked-to, solicited from every direction and pandered to – her opinions matter; as she has ready recourse in all directions to brute enforcing males, if anyone objects to her prerogatives. As she is pandered to, she is encouraged by the power of her position in this liberal mix. Her base tendency as female to incite genetic competition, which would be vastly and healthily sublimated in classificatory maintenance, is exacerbated, probably exponentially. This incitement further ensconces the Cartesian rupture of ethno-natinonalism, as liberalism affords puerile females incentive to maintain the easy advantages her increased one up position affords in the disorder – it is, as it appears, “only natural.” – Just as the gamers will tell you, as they promote R selectionism to move through European girls. And the disorder and disintegration absent the assertion of our classifications is perpetuated as such.
Thus, the Cartesianism of anti-racism is disastrous for our species.
The central component of anti-racism is a game of weaponized social classification against Whites. As exemplified in the racist’s paradox:
Again, the “racist’s paradox – if you say, “no, I don’t discriminate, I judge everyone by their individual merit”, then you can be charged by the anti-racist with disingenuously ignoring the history of (your alleged) classificatory discrimination and exploitation of blacks …on the other hand, if you say no, “I take affirmative action on behalf of their group to take into account the history discrimination and oppression against their group” then you are classifying, thus a racist by definition.
Thus, by means extant of Cartesian structures the proposition nation was brought to bear in exploitation by the YKW and complicit liberals against our fallible hypotheses, with predictable results..
It is a purity spiral ever more Cartesian and divorced of practicality in its reaction than that of the Cartesian anxiety which they had already exploited.
And their rhetorical flourish magnifies the anxiety that we must have a foundation somehow prior to words and discourse for our peoplehood, otherwise we cannot potentially challenge with their rhetoric, anywhere in the universe.
But toward our defense and in defense of human ecology broadly thus, it is necessary to overcome the Cartesian anti-social classification that underpins anti-racism ..its Cartesian detachment from land and resource relation as well.
With the pronouncement, denouncement really, of the Cartesian prejudice against prejudice – specifically its proposed innocence in prohibiting discriminatory social classification – that:
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.
Given the existential threat to our people for the devastating, decades long march through our institutions, of the YKW and their lackeys wielding the wholly unnatural, weaponized Cartesianism that is “anti-racism” ….the last thing that we need is mis-applied skepticism regarding the very antidotes to mis-applied skepticism – i.e., mirroring the anti-classification which is “anti-racism.
And we must avail ourselves of pragmatic correctabilty and the hermeneutic turn delimited to ethnonational aims – that is the way to resolve Cartesian anxiety. It is the way that allows for historical and conceptual breadth to capture the “non-empirical” classifications, that would provide for agency, coherence, thus accountability and warrant in maintenance, use and protection of our social capital and human ecologies.
It is not my purpose here to defend Pragmatist philosophy nor to proclaim myself a Pragmatist philosopher – Pragmatist philosophy is rather to be treated as a tool. It is not only to be taken to where the school of thought has been taken by academics, against the loftier aims of our people… it has made its way to the ordinary language of our “communities” that it might otherwise serve, to be taken as concerns ranging from laboriously dull to obnoxiously undeserving of participation. No, rather something like Sam Dickson’s suggestion that we subscribe to a kind of race idealism – that might be most pragmatic; and those who complain that Aristotle’s turning away forms was a turning away from the breadth of European imagination, they can find imagination resurrected in hermeneutics, along with rigor! Finally, though pragmatism tends to be associated with a lack of deeper concern in a particular respect – that is a lack of sufficient respect for prefigurative force – for matters of enduring importance – it is a bit unfair, particularly if we see pragmatism as a tool.
If GW wants to tighten the connection between what is, the ontology, and what ought, that could be part of correctibility – any organization of sense making in that case, in an instant anyway, would have to a part of inherent evolution.
Emergentism has kindred aims with pragmatism and hermenuticism, namely and aversion to the reductionism and anti mind body distinction, if not anti-Cartesianism on the whole; however, it has run into some problems that may receive aid from pragmatism and hermeneutics. Again, pragmatism and hermeneutics proper would not look at emergentism as necessarily adversarial, but rather a closer reading, at a more rigorous end of an ongoing survey.
It is confronted with difficulty in managing dichotomy that may perhaps be mollified by hermeneutics.
At least one problem for emergentism is:
Jaegwon Kim
Figure demonstration how M1 and M2 are not reduced to P1 and P2.
Addressing emergentism (under the guise of non-reductive physicalism) as a solution to the mind-body problem Jaegwon Kim has raised an objection based on causal closure and overdetermination.
Emergentism strives to be compatible with physicalism, and physicalism, according to Kim, has a principle of causal closure according to which every physical event is fully accountable in terms of physical causes. This seems to leave no “room” for mental causation to operate. If our bodily movements were caused by the preceding state of our bodies and our decisions and intentions, they would be overdetermined. Mental causation in this sense is not the same as free will, but is only the claim that mental states are causally relevant. If emergentists respond by abandoning the idea of mental causation, their position becomes a form of epiphenomenalism.
It is true that more (and more) information about more genetic and emergent levels will help guide us better; the process of ongoing correction does provide for that.
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.
With anti-Cartesianism, we’re precluding the “that’s just the way it is” according to nature argument …a void of accountability that the YJKW and Right Wing contingent can mess with to no end—- a nature argument so fundamental to liberalism and so destructive to us. …viz., how is anti-racism killing people? By holding them to a momentary and episodic basis of evaluation only, thus exposing them (particularly those on the margins of the lifespan or the systemic classification) to predation from outside group patterns – skeptically treating those patterns as “speculative”, even where those patterns are demonstrable as predatory and/or destructive patterns to the group that is not supposed to invoke classificatory discrimination.
Thus, it is a discrimination against those in marginal stages of a more protracted process, especially those who’s group evolution is of a more protracted yield to maturity, as K selectors in particular are going to manifest more often; exposing them to killing, consumption, subsumption by those that anti-racism is prejudice on behalf of – the victorious of “objective” standards – viz., those displaying winning moves by highly physical momentary and episodic evaluation, the “universal standard.” Actually, a better anti-Cartesian, anti-anti racist mantra would read:
“Anti-racism is anti-broad classification of peoples and against classification of peoples being used as criteria for discriminatory accountability. This prohibition of discriminatory classification is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.”
That’s a safer mantra because anti-anti-racism is less likely to be misunderstood as such, in a supremacist or other needlessly aggressive, exploitative, destructive senses.
European ethnonationalists will do well to avail themselves of hermeneutics; there are some good examples in WN – here’s an example from counter currents that expresses a good understanding:
Facts are important, but stories are more important. Facts are isolated data that can easily be forgotten, but stories coalesce to form the infrastructure of our worldview. The stories that we learn inform our worldview and our worldview filters the stories that we hear in an ongoing feedback loop. This is why it’s so important to control the narrative.
When Grenfell Tower went up in flames on the morning of 14th June, the narrative practically wrote itself. Here we had the poorest people in the country living next door to the wealthiest. The first victim to be named was a Syrian refugee, Mohammed Alhajali. Two miles away, the penthouse flat in the tower block at 3 Merchant Square was recently sold for £7.5 million, perhaps by one of those Russian oligarchs, semi-mythical creatures who buy up reams of expensive property in the desirable areas of London seemingly on a whim. A tale of two cities, a tale of two immigrants.
As the story continues, the residents of 3 Merchant Square are protected by smoke detectors and sprinklers in each flat whilst the poor residents in Grenfell Tower have no sprinklers and apparently a few faulty smoke detectors. Worse still, Grenfell Tower had only last year had a refurbishment which was designed to improve its appearance to outside observers (i.e. to the purchasers of those luxury flats). As we now know, having all become leading experts in the cladding of tall buildings in the last week, the insulating fascia built on the exterior of Grenfell Tower seems to have acted as a chimney, spreading the fire all around the building.
So the story is one of poor, immigrant favela dwellers whose safety doesn’t matter at all but whose ugly building must be dangerously disguised so as not to upset the delicate sensibilities of neighbouring millionaires. This narrative was immediately and effortlessly translated into one of murderous, racist Tory scum ethnically cleansing Kensington and Chelsea. The former narrative has some merit but the way that it so easily slips into the latter interpretation is due to the fact that the assumptions of the liberals have become hegemonic throughout the British political system. Chris Pankhurst, 22 June 2017
We will also do well to avail ourselves of pragmatism’s tools, obviously not only accepting fallibilism and participatory correctability on a sheer civic universal democratic basis, but in utilizing it to our ethnonational ends; following-up anti-founatonalism and anti-Cartesianism to purge from our midst the residual Caresianism in Pragmatist philosophy for its liberal, civic national democratatic premises, ad hoc introduction of the Cartesian prejudice against prejudice, put over the top by the YKW in the form of anti-racism and anti-semitism – “indubitable” Not innocent.
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.
That our genetic genus and species exist as significantly discreet from others on the planet is indubitable. That sheer skepticism of the “reality” or “significance” of these classificatory differences will jeopardize these differences is indubitable, particularly as the prohibition of their maintenance though anti-racism and anti-discrimination laws is enforced.
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Though it may seem like heresy to WN that I am quoting a Jewish philosopher, Bernstein is mostly just describing the distinguishing ideas of the American pragmatist philosophers Pierce, James and Dewey. I am precisely observant of those places where he begins to take pragmatism in directions that serves Jewish interests and antagonizes the interests of White/European peoples.
Pragmatism can be taken in other directions, in service of ethno-national interests. Bernstein acknowledges and approves of this facility as he quotes fellow tribesman Hilary Putnam:
In an article entitled “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity” this is what [Hilary Putnam] writes:
“What I find attractive in the pragmatism is not a systematic theory of the usual sense at all. It’s a certain group of theses, which can indeed be argued differently by different philosophers, with different concerns from what became the philosophy of Pierce and above all James and Dewey.”
Excerpts, Richard J. Bernstein discussing the pragmatist philosophers, their distinguishing ideas and implications:
{1} Richard J. Bernstein, the 2013 Selzer Visiting Philosopher, gave a lecture on “The Pragmatic Turn” (he has a book by the same name) 13 February 2013 at Beloit College, Wisconsin, U.S.A. He argues that many philosophical themes from the past 150 years are derived from classical American pragmatists.
[…]
Pierce, James and Dewey.
Despite Dewey’s role as a leading progressive pragmatic thinker (who was in sharp disagreement, attacking Trotsky for his ideas about means and ends, upon Dewey’s death, pragmatism as kind of philosophical movement began to rapidly fade for the American academic departments. During the 1930’s and 40s, there was a growing influence of the emigre philosophers who had fled from Nazism. And many were associated with the Vienna Circle and with logical empiricists; and later there was a strong influence in the United States with the Oxford style of ordinary language analysis of philosophers in America. From the late 1930’s to the 1960’s there was in effect a quiet radical revolution in academic philosophy departments in The United States. And this is the period, in which one can begin to date the dominant the dominant linguistic analytic philosophy and indeed it is a time when the infamous, and I think it is infamous Anglo-American split in philosophy was becoming entrenched.
So what happened to pragmatism? The classical pragmatists were marginalized. They were viewed as fuzzy-minded thinkers who may have had their hearts in the right place, but they lacked the clarity, precision and analytic finesse to do serious philosophical work. Pragmatism seemed to be relegated to the dust bin of history. It’s still a sad commentary, I think, on American academic philosophy departments that one can get a PhD in philosophy today without ever having read a word of the classical pragmatists. But beginning in the 1970’s there were signs of a change. The beginning of a resurgence of pragmatism. And one of the key figures in helping to make pragmatism respectable was Richard Rorty. During the 1960’s and 1970’s Rorty had written some excellent articles at the cutting edge of analytic philosophy; and edited a famous anthology called, “The Linguistic Turn.” He was sufficiently popular among hard core analytic philosophers, that he was elected President of the Eastern division of the American philosophic association at a relatively young age. But when he published his famous, some would say infamous book, “Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature”, it caused something of a sensation. He shocked many of his fellow philosophers when he wrote in his introduction, that “Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Dewey were the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Continental philosophers might agree about Heidegger; as Analytic philosophers might agree about Wittgenstein…. but virtually no one at that time would put Dewey in the same league, in the same category. From that time on, Dewey identified himself with the pragmatic tradition of Dewey and James; but his views of pragmatism was at that time and is to this day controversial.
Like James, Dewey wanted philosophers to stop dealing with the same worn out problems and he sought to foster a new spirit of creative experimentalism.
Another thinker of Rorty’s generation who contributed to an appreciation of pragmatism was Hilary Putnam. If ever there was someone who was originally identified as a hard core analytic philosopher, it was Hilary Putnam. He was a sophisticated philosopher, he is of physics and mathematics, and he was educated by the leading philosophers of logical empiricism, including Hans Reichenbach and Rudolph Kohlner. But gradually like Rorty, Putnam found that the confines of the analytic tradition were too narrow; and he too began to identify himself with the pragmatic tradition.. In an article entitled “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity” this is what he writes:
“What I find attractive in the pragmatism is not a systematic theory of the usual sense at all. It’s a certain group of theses, which can indeed be argued differently by different philosophers, with different concerns from what became the philosophy of Pierce and above all James and Dewey.
Cursorily summarized, those are:
1) Anti-skepticism. Pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief.
2) Fallibilism. Pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had by such and such a belief, that will never need revision; and then he puts in parentheses, that “one can be both fallibilistic and anti-skeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism.
3) The thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between facts and values. and in a certain sense..
4) Practice is primary in philosophy.
[…]
Many of the divisions that were seen in philosophy for them [the pragmatists] did not exist. There were philosophers that inspired them, that were very different. Pierce claimed to know, and knowing Pierce’s capabilities I could believe it, although it sounds insane, that he knew Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by heart. James always felt a closer affinity with the British empiricists, and he even dedicated Pragmatism to J.S. Mill. And Dewey, as I mentioned, really started as a Hegelian. Consequently, there’s a richness and diversity of philosophical orientations woven into classical pragmatism.
But lets turn to the ideas of these thinkers. Now I’m going to present a composite picture with some dominant themes. And I want to single out six interrelated themes; that I think are characteristic of these pragmatic thinkers. The first theme is anti-foundatonalism and the critique of Cartesianism. Descartes in his meditations, was searching for a solid foundation, for the edifice of knowledge. Something that is indubitable and incorrigible; a truth that can be known with certainty, and that can serve as the real basis or foundation for knowledge. Descartes is haunted by what I have called in some of my writings, “the Cartesian anxiety” – the grand either/or. Either, there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelope us with madness and intellectual and moral chaos. Now, there is a way of reading a good deal of philosophy from its beginning, to its present, and especially from Descartes to the present, as a search for a firm foundation. Whether we take the foundation to be the intellectual grasp of eternal forms, or the direct grasp of immediate empirical intuitions, or the cogito itself.
The appeal to such a basic, rock bottom foundation, cannot be underestimated. In our time, the failure to discover, quote, such a foundation, is said to lead straight right to a defeating relativism, that denies the very foundation of truth, objectivity and moral fealty; and I think unfortunately to a great extent, that still infects a great deal of popular consciousness. “If I don’t have something basically to believe in, then anything goes.”
Now the pragmatists, all of them, challenge this way of thinking, challenge this kind of grandeur, they seek to exorcise this Cartesian anxiety. they reject the ideal that there is an absolute grounding or foundation of our being. I think one of the best statements of the pragmatic alternative was succinctly stated by Wolfred Sellers, when he writes, “for empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational not because it has a foundation, but because it is a self correcting enterprise that can put any claim into jeopardy, although not all at once.” The alternative to the foundation metaphor is to think of inquiry as a self correcting enterprise; that has no fixed absolute beginning points and no absolute end.
This alternative paradigm, this alternative way of thinking, leads me to the second theme, that I think is characteristic of the pragmatic tradition, and that’s the theme of fallibilism. If inquiry is a self corrective activity, that can put any claim into jeopardy, then this means that all knowledge claims, indeed all validity claims are fallible, in the sense that we never can claim that we know anything with a type of certainty that cannot in principle be questioned. But there is a difference between indubitability and fallibility. Many of our beliefs are indubitable in the sense that we do not doubt them; and indeed may not even be aware that we have such beliefs. But what is indubitable today may turn out to be false tomorrow. Furthermore, fallibilism is not to be confused with epistemological skepticism. Hilary Putnam, who is one of the outstanding pragmatists of our time, and still alive, once wrote that the great contribution of the pragmatists is to show that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible. Pierce, for example, never doubted that we can know a reality that is independent of ourselves. But he also argued, that we’re never in a position to claim that we know this with absolute certainty …and I think we can illustrate what is meant by anti-foundationalism and fallibilism by an appeal to an understanding of scientific inquiry (or we could relate it to all kinds of inquiry). The validity of a given theory or explanatory hypothesis in any of the sciences is not dependent on showing that it rests on an absolute foundation, but rather that it is supported by the best empirical evidence and the best reasoning. Every serious scientist today knows, that our current theories and hypotheses will most likely be mollified or even abandoned in light of further inquiry and evidence. So strictly speaking what we take to be true today might turn out to be false. It would be hyperbolic to say that consequently, we don’t really have any knowledge because any knowledge claim that we make may turn out to be false… rather the pragmatic point is that all knowledge is fallible and all knowledge is corrigible – in principle it can be corrected.
[…]
The question arises, if we cannot know anything with absolute certainty, how to warrant and secure our knowledge claims? And answering this will bring me to our third theme, the importance of the community of inquirers and the sociality of our practices that shape us.
[…]
The community of inquirers and the socialty of practices. Here again I think Pierce was one of the first to emphasize the importance of the concept of the community of inquirers. For the ways in which we can test the validity of our claims, is by opening them to public criticism; again, using scientific inquiry as an example, and I only mean this as an example, we can say that no hypothesis, no theory, will be accepted as correct, simply because it is affirmed with absolute conviction. New hypotheses must be subject to relentless criticism by the relevant community of inquirers. ..critical inquiry advances through the process of making bold conjectures and then subjecting them to rigorous testing and refutation. And the pragmatists go even farther, for they argue that we are quintessentially social beings in the sense that we are always being shaped, that does not mean completely determined, by the social practices in which we participate.
When I turn to the pragmatic conception of democracy, we will see that they reject the very common contrast between the individual and society. Individuality for them is not an ontological or epistemological given, it’s rather an achievement. And the quality of the individuality that we achieve is shaped and dependent upon the type of communities in which we live and thrive and the quality of the community, it’s life itself and quality is dependent upon our individual contributions. There’s a circular relation here, but not a vicious circularity; but rather a kind of creative circularity. And this leads me to the fourth theme that I want to emphasize.
Pluralism and Contingency. William James argues for a radical pluralism of perspectives. We human beings can never achieve a god’s eye perspective. In a pluralistic universe ….. but radical pluralism is not to be confused or identified with what might be called a self defeating relativism. It is an engaged, falliblilistic pluralism, such a pluralistic ethos as exhibited by James and others, places new responsibility on each of us, for it means taking our fallibility and our limited finitude seriously…
…and furthermore I think the pragmatists had a keen sense of urgency. There are and always will be surprises and conflicts in human life; and the pragmatists took contingency and change to be basic features not simply of human life but of the universe itself. We can never completely control or predict what will happen and consequently, their ideal, is to cultivate those habits virtues and dispositions that can prepare us for unexpected contingencies and conflicts.
Implicit in this view is a world that challenges a classical distinction between theory and practice.
__________
I provide a transcript of most all of this discussion between Robert Harrison and Thomas Sheehan about Heidegger’s Being and Time and Logic the Question of Truth. This is not meant as an endorsement of all of Harrison’s, Sheehan’s or even Heidegger’s positions. I have significant differences from them all. However, the discussion was clear and detailed enough to allow one (obviously myself included) to learn more clearly what Heidegger was saying, where one might agree, where one might differ; as well as where one might differ from these Heidegger scholars.
{2} Robert Harrison and guest Thomas Sheehan discuss Martin Heidegger and his famous work Being and Time. This is from an episode of Entitled Opinions, a podcast at Stanford University. Posted on Youtube, 14 January, 2017:
For more information, go to http://french-italian.stanford.edu/op…
Robert Harrison: The reason that I ask what it means to be at home in Ithaca is because Odyssyeus’s homecoming is not fully achieved once he returns; remember the visit to the underworld in book 11 of The Odyssey, there Odysseus had been told by the prophet Tyrresius, that once he make sit back to Ithaca that he must take off on yet another journey. With an oar on his shoulder he must travel to a saltless land where people know nothing of the sea; says Tyrresius, quote, “When another wayfarer on meeting you, shall say, that you have a winnowing fan on your stout shoulder then you must fix in the earth your shapely oar, and make goodly offers to Poseidon, and death will come to you far from the sea, a death so gentle that it will lay you low, when you are overcome with sleep, old age.” So just when you’d thought that you had returned, you have to take up your oar again, and leave. Only this time, your oar is no longer a means of locomotion, it no longer serves the practical purpose it was designed for; the oar now becomes a ritualistic object; that you place on your shoulder, carrying it into a place, where its instrumentality is misrecognized or misidetified. In that region of unlikeness, far from home, he must plant it in the earth, the ground of your mortality and thereby come to terms with your death. Only when Odysseus has undertaken this second journey into a foreign land, to make peace with his own dying, can he finally return to Ithaca and make himself at home there, for the first time.
…those who stay at home without undergoing this estrangement are not at home in their own homelands.” That Homer’s fable serves as the allegorical introduction to our show today deals with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time; this is a book that in the ponderous prose of German high philosophy, analyzes the kind of being that belongs to Odysseus, in so far as he is resourceful, insofar as he is mortal, insofar as he is human. It is a book that probes the underlying strangeness of the familiar, and penetrates the ground in which Odysseus plants his oar, which, by the time he reaches that destination, is neither an oar nor a winnowing fan, but a marker of our being unto death in the mode of anticipatory resolve. Being and time is a book that undertakes that second journey, dislodging the oar from its familiar context and following its hero, who goes by the name of Dasein, into that uncanny region where human existence is revealed in its fundamental determinations.
With my guest today we will probe and try to put into relief those fundamental determinations of Dasein’s mode of being as Heidegger understands them, and to share with you, our reasons for believing that Being and Time, is one of he most important events of western philosophy.
My guest today is Professor Thomas Sheehan, professor in the department of religious studies at Stanford, and the author several books as well as a host of articles on Martin Heidegger – most recently, he has translated into English, Martin Heidegger’s 1925-26 lectures on truth, entitled Logic the Question of Truth. This book is central to Heidegger’s overall project of reinterpreting western thought in terms of time and truth.
Tom, welcome to the program.
Thomas Sheehan (5:07): Logic the Theory of Truth is a first draft of parts of Being and Time. Its a difficult book, especially in its last third, where he deals with Kant, but a very rewarding one. I would say it’s divided into three sections. One is Heidegger’s very close reading of psychologism and his critique of that.
Robert Harrison: What is psychologism?
Thomas Sheehan: psychologism is the reduction of all the rules of logic to just the working of the mind, so that if we could anthropologically study what the mind is doing when it thinks we would have all the laws of logic so that they are no longer universal, they are no longer free of human reasoning, they are simply dependent upon reasoning itself.
And then in its second part, a very fruitful part, I think, you have an analysis of logos – that’s the word that underlies logic, the question of truth; an analysis of logos as the human being’s a-priori need to make sense of things. Logos is not language, it is not binding things together – it’s making sense, as Heidegger makes clear. And also in that second part, his best analysis of meaning, by reference that is say alethea itself, by reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book theta chapter 10. So, we’ve got psychologism, we’ve got logos and alethia; and then thirdly, and stunningly good, I think is his best statement of what he means by time.
And he defines time as the need to make things meaningfully present, so he focuses on the present moment of time. Anyway, he does this by a close and I must say difficult analysis of Kantian schematism, which turned out to be the first draft of his 1929 book on Kant.
And in the whole book, he anticipates what he would later say, namely that time is only a stand in for alethia, incorrectly translated as truth.
So its an important text, it underlies a certain shift that’s taking place in the profession these days, I would call it a paradigm shift that’s settling in among the younger scholars, among the best graduate students as well among some of us oldies, the paradigm shift consisting-in and its clear from part two of this book that Heidegger interprets Being as meaning bedoitzonkite – so meaning, significance etc, is what he means by being; which is no surprise because being is always the meaningful presence of something to one, in the practical or theoretical order. So, the emphasis on being as meaning is I think crucial to the text.
Robert Harrison (8:35): When he takes on psychologism, I presume he’s taking-up Husserl’s own polemic against psycholgism, and the critique of psychologism in Heidegger’s phenomenology was crucial …how do you understand Heidegger’s relation to Husserlian phenomenology in Being and Time now?
Thomas Sheehan: Yeah, that’s a big and very important topic. And I think that part of the shift of emphasis these days has been the rediscovery of phenomenology as the very basis of Heidegger’s work, Being and Time and all the rest. He said, in 1969 shortly before he died, that his work was phenomenological through and through – both phenomenological and hermeneutic; so perhaps we have to say something about both of those.
In the early 70’s, about five years before he died, I had the opportunity to meet with Heidegger in his home in Frieberg for a long conversation one afternoon in April of 1971. And, the topic that we mostly discussed, we discussed was phenomenology and Aristotle; phenomenology, comma, and Aristotle, two separate topics, but it was phenomenology that he put his emphasis on; and he made it utterly clear to me, I was just a young PhD at the time, that there is no understanding Heidegger without understanding phenomenology.
..and he walked me through some of the sections of (Husserl’s) The Logical Investigation and central and categorical intuition. ..Husserl’s main opus, the first volume of which was Husserl’s critique of psychologism as you mention, and he emphasized that phenomenology is not about things out there, stuff that is, phenomenology is about the meaning of things, in our world of use and practical orientation, the significance of things. It’s precisely meaning that changes things out there to phenomenon ..say things that meaningfully appear to us and that we can engage with. So, as he made clear to me, phenomenology is exclusively about meaning, sense, significance.. and “presence-to-you” in a meaningful way. So he was never about things out there now as they are real and so on, he was always about their interface, their correlation with human being. And human being’s correlation with meaning. So, phenomenology is the search for the last word on meaning.
But Heidegger, as you know, always uses the word “being”, except in his later years, he sort of came out and said, and I quote: “I no longer use the word being gladly, I no longer like to use the word being” would be the way to translate it; he said in his later writings that being was only a preliminary word. He said that basically, “being” was to be surpassed to the phenomenological correlation which he called [German word, phonetically: eraigniz] in his own interpretation …. so I would say that being is just another way of saying meaning.
Robert Harrison (12:04): Can I take issue with that? The heavy emphasis that you put on the word meaning ..by privileging that one word, you gave a number of other possible words, interface, correlation and you said the way things appear to you…the sense that they have. When we use the word meaning there are connotations to that, that there’s something humanly dependent on meaningfulness and that the meaningfulness can reach an order of having a larger meaning to life, for example. Why not just stick, for the moment, when we’re talking about phenomenology, with the fact that things appear to us, in ways that are accessible. That can be in the realm of visibility, it can be in the realm of intelligibility, it can be in the realm of practicality, practical use, any number of modes; and I think that the word meaning doesn’t encompass the full array of possibilities of how things are given over to us as phenomenon.
Thomas Sheehan: Well, except that Heidegger insisted in Being and Time on the word [Geman word, phonetically: bedoitzonkite] which means “meaningfulness.” The first name for being in Heidegger’s work is “world” – the meaning giving context, as he calls it. So, he did not shy-away from discussing being in terms of meaning, presence-to, accessibility as you say, but he does use the word bedoitzonkite, bedoitund all through his analysis of “world”, in Being and Time. …and he makes it clear that the central, how shall we say, determination of human being, dasein, is being in the world, being in meaning in bedoitzonkite.
Robert Harrison: Is “world” reduce-able to the word “meaning”?
Thomas Sheehan: Yes, I mean he actually defines world as, the structure of world as bedoitzonkite, what goes on inside of world is bedoitund.
As he says, when things are discovered along with human being, that is to say when they’ve been understood, we say they have meaning.
So, really what he’s saying is that the human being is a hermeneut – that’s not an add-on to some sort of plain old existence. Our existence is the obligation, the need the thrownness has given us into making sense of things …in fact, the first meaning of the word of Alethea is meaning, its not truth, as Heidegger points out; so if we’re embedded in hermeneutics and he is using the word bedoitzonkite, I think that we can actually retrieve from this plain old word being, we can retrieve the urgency that Heidegger feels are in your face – he says at on point in his first course after the war, the Great War, in February of 1919, he asks his students, what is it that you first encounter in your lived world? Is it things, is it objects, is it being? No, he says, its meaningful, that’s what’s in your face…all over the place, it’s coming at you. So, we don’t want to lose him to traditional ontology which just talks about the inner substance of things – no, we want to have him on this side of phenomenology as he himself insisted …and one way of constantly recognizing that is being in your face. Being is meaning.
Robert Harrison: Well, ok, we’re not going to resolve that only because of the connotations of the word meaning. It’s associated for me very much with Analytic philosophy, with its analysis of meaning making in propositions; and that the meaning-making activity is one that is very cerebral; it seems to be related back to subjectivity. The great excitement of Being and Time was that it was such a sort of existentialist, sort of treatise; and he didn’t call it “being and meaning”, he called it Being and Time.
And time is something which, would you agree to be the kind of ground of meaning, as you’re referring to it; and if so, there’s a way in which being temporal includes all sorts of things that don’t enter into the usual connotation of the word meaning – namely thrownness into the world and being ahead of one’s self and self transcendence; and being unto death and all these great existential categories that seem to take us away from this otherwise cerebral activity of making sense of everything.
Thomas Sheehan: Maybe we should start by asking why he even called his main work Being and Time. And that’s where the 1925-26 course, Logic the Theory of Truth comes in, because the whole last third of it is an analysis of the schematism, is an effort to give a statement on what he means by “time”.
And it’s clear, throughout Heidegger’s work, that the source of his meditations on temporality are not Aristotle, it’s not the time of the cosmos, its not the spread of moments across a certain arc; rather, his focus in understanding time is Augustin and Plotinus. In other words, time is a characteristic of human existence.
So, it takes it out of the cosmos and puts it into the realm of human existence. Time occurs only with the human being, Aristotle, Augustin and Plotinus would agree to that.
And time, he says, he says this in 1949, he says this in the Logic book that I translated, time is only a preliminary way of saying alethia – openness; unclosedness; disclosure; which is something that is the primary determinant of human being. It’s the existential which determines human being, which is that we are constantly embedded in the meaning making process; which is not a subject’s sort of casting of meaning over things; it’s rather an interplay, a correlation between meaning and hu/man/s. So, his motto in Being and Time is, “without Being, no Dasein”, but what he’s really talking about is the interface of human being and meaning. Without Dasein, there is no place for meaning to occur.
This is clear throughout the text; that what time, temporality means, is being present to things not passively, just receiving them, but actively making sense of them. That’s not simply painting in a certain color. Because we are always already involved-with, familiar-with, engaged with meaning as such.
Robert Harrison (19:54): Being and Time is in two parts. In the first part there’s a distinction between Dasein in its inauthentic modes of being and then in the second division, the authentic mode of being of dasein. And I presume that meaning-making pertains to both modes [Thomas Sheehan: “sure”]. But lets um, if I can ask you the fundamental meaning of some terms that he uses in pat one especially; because he says that dasein, and there are three particular modes of dasein – facticity, existentiality and fallenness. ..can you briefly go through what these three determinations of dasein amount to? Starting with facticity.
Thomas Sheehan: Right. He gives different names to the triads. One would be thrownness; projectedness; and being meaningfully present-to. So what if we take facticity in the sense of one’s thrownness? As you and your audience knows, his way of denominating the determinations of human being; the a-priori determinations, is to call them existential characteristics, or existentials, just like that. And the most basic existential of them all is dasein’s “thrownness.” All the others derive from it; even dasein’s alethic function of making sense of things. So the basic existential characteristic is called thrownness (eventually it would called facticity); but thrownness into what? He says thownness into the world, the world of the bedoitzankeik, the world of making sense ….and what he means from the very first page of being and time is that you have to be yourself; the question becomes what is this self? This self is hermeutical; this self is intrinsically sense making, so, I have to be a hermeneuse; I have to make sense of things; is the first characteristic of human being.
Being yourself in that thrownness entails as first requirement, making sense ….you must be a hermeneut.
Thomas Harrison: So thrownness is being thrown into a world, without my having chosen to be in the world; and I’m thrown as also projected beyond myself, as that the dimension of existentiality? you are thrown in so far as you are thrown with a past, but also, you are out ahead of yourself and reaching out into a future [Sheehan: into a future, sure], and then you are also present among other people as well as things and you are kind of fallen-in; and among things in a way that you might be making sense of them but in a fallen mode by just using them instrumentally, ah. How does this projection relate to thrownness?
Robert Sheehan: Right. The human being is divided against itself, or is disjunctive in its relation to itself; it’s not all self contained, it’s not closed-in upon itself, like the Aristotelian god who thinks of nothing but itself; the self thinking thought as we sometimes translate it; so, what we’re thrown into rather is our openness. I sometimes like to put the two terms together, throwness and projection, facticity and existentiality, put them together as “thrown-openness” – openness referring to one’s alethic function of making sense of things; but openness really means the opposite of the Greek, closure, so it’s a sign of finitude; fragility of, the need to strive, into the future ect. and the disjunction that we are thrown into is that we cannot take things immediately, and understand what their meaning is; their significance, their being, if you want to use that term. Rather we always have to take them in terms of something else; it’s a discursive, a step by step kind of knowledge, unlike the knowledge of god when god just opens his eyes (if you want to put it that way) and understands exactly what the thing is; no, we have to labor after the concept in Hegel’s sense; we have to work in order to put together this in terms of that; and the that is the dimension of meaning of a particular object.
So that disjunction at the core of human sense-making is what will eventually be called temporality, human openness as such.
But when we’re thrown into projectedness, we’re thrown into the need to reach ahead as it were and into the meaning of something in order to understand it for what it is.
Robert Harrison: Tom, can I ask about fallenness? Because we’ve been talking about dasein in its authentic mode, but Heidegger makes it clear time and again that for the most part dasein exists inauthentically. In a state of fallenness. What does he mean by that?
Thomas Sheehan: If I can take one step back because you refer to being with, other people, things, ourselves even. It’s always important to remember that the issue of being-with is not simply a physical coming up against, but rather a relationship of meaningfulness; in relation to things, to people, to myself, etc. Heidegger bifurcates being-with things meaningfully into two forms, into two modes, we might say – one is inauthentic and one is authentic; and the principle difference between that is whether or not one relates to things in terms of one’s full human nature; or if one instead treats other things and other people as just “out there”, to be kind of bumped-up against; that would be an inauthentic way, because one’s not reflecting upon or bringing to bear one’s whole human nature – finite, mortal, and all of that (actually, the Greek word authentikos means to be the one who commits the murder, believe it or not, the one who is responsible for the murder.).
So, to be responsible for one’s whole human nature, is to be authentic, that is to say to have accepted oneself; as thrown, as disjunctive, as finite, as going to die; so, inauthentic is all the opposite of that.
Robert Harrison: I used to be much more fascinated by the authenticity side of the two because I thought that’s where it all happened. Now I have to say that the analysis of inauthenticity interests me a lot more than his analysis of authenticity, because to begin with we are authentic only in privileged moments [Sheehan: right], we have these moments that break us out of the continuum, but for the most part, out home, where we live, where we are in Ithaca [the Odyssey] as it were, is in the inauthenic world. Now I said in my allegorical introduction, I said that if Odysseus is going to make himself at home in the world he’s going to have to estrange himself in the familiar; and he’s going to have to undertake this journey into the strange land and his oar will no longer be this instrument that he uses in an everyday functionality mode, but it becomes a marker for his own death and mortality, so its a thing of authenticity but after that he can go back to Ithaca. and actually make himself at home in a kind of world that is now not just the place that he’s from, but he’s taken full possession, he’s repossessed that world of his.
Thomas Sheehan (30:19): The experience of being estranged from oneself and the piercing through is called dread. He has a small section on it in Being and Time and a longer, more discursiveness treatment two years later in What is Metaphysics? Phenomenology, besides being bout meaning is always about first person experience.
So it puts the burden on oneself. So he walks us through this phenomenological experience of having your whole world fall apart. The whole world, filled with its meaning for us, that we are familiar with, suddenly collapses. Then you realize that you are so much a hermeneut, a maker of sense, but so finitely a maker of sense.
It’s an anticipation of death, dread is, because there is an anticipation of making sense – and that is to be dead. So, in the experience of dread you move right to that frontier between nothingness, absurdity, your own death and making sense. And Heidegger says, the experience is not one that pulls you into your death and encourages you to commit suicide, to fall into nothingness. He actually says that the experience of dread of that thin line that separates you from nothingness throws you back into the sense making world, now with the awareness that there is no ground under your feet, that you are doing this alone, that’s what he also means by the call of consciousness, that I am dreadfully alone, in the midst of all this, do I have the courage to accept that in an act of decision or resolve? To accept that that’s what meaning is all of meaning is about, that I am bound into a correlation that will finally just disappear when I die.
Robert Harrison (33:38): Well again one could say that the risk one takes by emphasizing so heavily on the world meaning is that it creates a difficulty to understand this moment of awakening, through the experience of angst or dread, where I realize that all my meaning-making activity is fundamentally meaningless, or absurd in that meaninglessness is the ground for the possibility of meaning; and therefore being has to be more than meaning; it has to mean my being at that edge of my finititude, where everything slips into a kind of nothingness and I realize that I am the nullity of all my projects and meaning making is a highly circumscribed activity and it does not exhaust the potentiality of my being.
Thomas Sheehan: Well, I would disagree and I’m only trying to explain, not convince why some of us see this a different way; Heidegger says, in the 1925-26 course, that human beings are embedded in meaning, there is no exit from that, making sense of one’s life, that’s what it means by being, having to be ..it doesn’t mean just having to tick tock tick tock your way through life, it means actually to, is there any meaning in my life…and its true what you say that the real source of all meaning making is absurdity, its death, we’re constantly pushing back that moment, or its pushing us back into sense, and that’s our experience but that moment of dread, like the moment of conscience, the call of conscience, the moment of dread is experiencing yourself right at the point of death. I don’t like the phrase being toward death as if we’re going down a road, and someday the road will end. No, it’s about right here and now at your death and that death is the realm of absurdity, because there will be no more sense to your life, there will be no more life.
But I don’t see as you do, this hermeneutical side as an add-on to existence. It is rather the definition of existing. It’s what makes human beings different. A human being is the animal that has logos – possessed by logos which is making sense.
Robert Harrison: Can I ask…you’re bringing up angst, and the role that angst plays in authenticity; angst he describes as an emotion or a mood, and one of the original contributions, as I see it, of Being and Time, in the history of philosophy, is that Heidegger actually proposes what we might call a philosophy of moods, or he redeems, retrieves things like state of mind and mood and the emotional life, as legitimate grounds for philosophical sense making. So, that, uh, now, I can go along with you that moods are always meaningful, but there is something in the fact of moods, which seems to escape the ordinary understanding of meaning as something we can reduce to conceptualization; so, what do you make of Heidegger’s redemption of mood as a philosophical opening.
Thomas Sheehan: Right, both earlier and just now, you seem to look upon meaning as what you say what analytic philosophers deal with or as you put it now, meaning reduce-able to conceptuality, well that’s not exactly what Heidegger means by meaning; by meaning he means, making your way, being on a way, a path, where things open up and give you a world that you can live in; be familiar with, rather than anything like a conceptuality; he doesn’t mean that at all by meaning, because he’s not talking about it as we might say, in an ontic sense, of the mind that is generated by your brain as it were. No, for him it is a way of being, its a way of being on your way, opening up a territory of meaning.
But back to mood, mood is for him a [German word] which means a resonance; it’s like two tuning forks; you hit one the other will start to resonate with it; so it’s a famiarity with meaning where both of them are resonating, both are on the same terms, as it were; I would call that correlation between these two resonating somethings; I would call that what Heidegger calls [German word], its the correlation whereby man needs meaning, and can’t exist without it, that would be the first part of Being and Time; and the unpublished part being meaning needs man. Meaning appears only with Dasein in various configurations. So that this resonance between the two, he even uses a German word that says that, the word means to go back and forth, resonate back and forth – that’s the core of thrownness into meaning; that we cannot separate ourselves from that buzz as it were, which gives us our meaning, our being and makes meaning able to appear. If you consider if I may, with the question of being: I once asked a friend of mine, who was holding a position similar to yours; I asked him, “when meteorite hits, and we’re all dead, will there still be being?” And he answered, “Of course there will be, there will be the moon, the sky, the earth itself, we won’t be there but there will be things in existence.”
Robert Harrison: I would say “no” though.
Thomas Sheehan: I would say “no”, of ours we would say no. Because being is only in correlation with human being, so now we’ve moved entirely away from the tradition of being as being out there. Rather its the importance of this thing to me, what being is. I use the phrase, in your face, I can’t escape that relationality. And mood is the primary way in which we feel the significance of this.
When I raise a cup of water to my lips to drink some water, I don’t even have to conceptualize anything. I simply know how to do it. And that would be the primary insantiation of [German word], namely that I am in resonance with that world of meaning. So that’s what I’m thrown into, I’m thrown into a mood which is a relationship to a whole world of meaning giving relationships that surround me. And that’s going to be gone, will be no being when there is no dasein. There will be no meaning when there is no dasein.
Robert Harrison: In fact, Heidegger says in Being and Time that the laws of Newton were not true prior to Newton’s discovery of them. They did not in a certain sense have their being. It’s only in their uncovering that they come into play.
Do you think that Dasein’s temporal constitution that makes it always ahead of itself and gives it a certain anticipatory access to its own death which means more than demise but means a certain kind of nullity that is always operative in being and time…that this is what discloses for the first time the intelligible world that gives us access to things.
Thomas Sheehan: Yes, I do, I think you said that very well. And in Being and Time as you now, there’s a step by step as it were reduction to the basis of everything – so you have being in the world in the first part of being and time, that gets defined as concern for meaning; from being in the world to Care as it is sometimes translated, to temporality, ultimately as the meaning of Care and of being in the world. So that temporality, that anticipation of death is the core of meaning,it is the ultimate source of meaning one might say.
[Perhaps interaction is a better place to look for source].
[…]
The call of conscience says to you in Germnan [word] – it’s usually translated as “guilty”, but another way of translating that word is “responsible for.” You’re responsible for your nothingness, you are in the driver’s seat when you confront this experience – what are you going to do with it? You can run from it, ignore it, you can say no, I’m not up for that, or you can embrace it, understand it and say, even if only momentary experiences as you point out, authentic experiences, when we lift our face out of the mud and realize what we are, even if only in renewable moments, that is the basis on which I am going to live my life. That would be the act of what he calls resolve. By anticipating one’s death, by understanding, one’s mortality, death is death, after which there is nada. But to anticipate it is to really feel, resonating with the mortality, the finitude of what you are. Now, Heidegger of course stops there. We won’t go into a discussion of how he learned to apply this or didn’t apply it in his own decisions ect.
But at least he sets up that model for being and human being on the basis of which everything else can be built. That’s why he calls it a fundamental ontology. It would be the basis for an ethics or an aesthetics, or anything, after that.
Robert Harrison: So we have a cluster of terms, angst, the call of conscience and guilt and they are all intimately interrelated; angst is something that has an awakening, it awakens me to the fact that there’s not a stable foundation, there’s not a positive foundation to existence; if I heed the call of conscience, its whence is also the wither, Heidegger says. It’s coming to me from where I will be going; mainly this finitude that I am; and it awakens me also to my guilt, in the German sense of debt, not just sinfulness. The sense that I owe something, I have an obligation; and do you believe that dasein can ever discharge that debt? or is the most we can do when we resolve authentically who we are that we can just acknowledge that this is a debt that is undischargable in full awareness?
Thomas Sheehan: Right, and I would say a responsibility that even when you choose not to notice, and not to live with, is nonetheless, your responsibility. To choose to not be responsible is to still be responsible, to still be in debt, as you put it.
Robert Harrison: and Tom, can I ask just a follow-up question, because the interesting thing there in Being and Time is after he’s talked about anticipatory resolve, he goes away from the individualistic emphasis of dasein and he starts speaking about how dasein is also an heir to a tradition; and that through the moment of authenticity you can authentically retrieve possibilities in your heritage and renew them or recast them, re-appropriate them in an authentic mode; and then you become not just a temporal being, but you become an authentically historical agent. And you belong not only to yourself, but now you belong also to your tribe, your community, your nation, your species and so forth.
That is a very important move, I think, toward the end of Being and Time. That perhaps could have been further developed but was not.
Thomas Sheehan: Right, some of course would accuse him of developing it in a nefarious direction; saying that the community is Germany and all of that; the way that that retrieval takes place that you’re describing, where one goes into one’s corporate past, one’s individual past, it all depends on what you’re retrieving, and brings it into something explosive, useful, uh, futural, is by, as he says, passing it under the eyes of death – a dramatic phrase; going into the teeth of death, another way that he says it. In other words, take all of those possibilities that are yours upon your shoulders and choose among them, which you want to live with in the light of your mortality; passing it under the eyes of death as it were.
[we can now see this reification of meaning coming singularly from the angst of one’s individual death can lead to a superficial existence]
…and there’s lots of things in our past that we would prefer to just let go, and rightly so. But, if we’re able to take possibilities and renew them in a finite, mortal way, that would give one a sense of one’s historicness, one’s connection with a past and one’s ability to renew that in a future that is a mortal, finite future.
Robert Harrison (48:37): But you would agree that there are no ethical prescriptions possible, even when one embraces resolutely your own mortality, it does not provide standards, for making choices that are right rather than wrong; which is troubling to a lot of moral philosophers, when they look to Heidegger and say, well, on the one hand he’s suggesting that there is a way of making authentic decisions, in an authentic mode, but he will not tell us what kinds of things would be right and wrong to choose. It’s up to you to choose.
Thomas Sheehan: Right. I think that, uh, that failure to provide any kind of standards, that would, as it were, channel the passionate authenticity that he calls one to; he, in section 74, where he says, “give up shirking your duty, give up being lazy”, you know, he has three or four categories there, but the fact that he couldn’t work out some sort of ethics, even at a meta-level, is probably the fault of the ..the weakness of his philosophy, insofar as it cannot take the next step, it cannot even begin to take the next step and it put up no bulwark for him, himself, in is choices in the future. So, I do think that really with Heidegger that you do need a complement, some people would say a Levinosian complement, but I would look to more ah, Enlightenment complements to that, a sense of equality of people and so on rather.
Robert Harrison (50:14): But do you believe like some people believe that if a philosopher can make the kinds of mistakes that Heidegger made after writing Being and Time that that goes a long way in neutralizing the validity of the philosophy itself? I mean its really quite astonishing that someone who could author Being and Time, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, one of the greatest philosophers in the western tradition, would have such a colossal failure of judgment; when it came to historical events as he was embroiled.
[I actually do not find this so singularly surprising; we have experience of people who compartmentalize their operations of thought and concern, neglecting some terribly at times.]
Thomas Sheehan (50:53): Right. I remember the first day I arrived in Friebourg, in an attempt to visit with Heidegger, I had to wait for another year, I had a letter of introduction but he was ill. I met a former professor of mine who lived in Friebourg and he said to me, I will have nothing to do with someone who has been a Nazi. I figured wow, that is the first time I’ve been confronted with that, because the American story put forth by Hannah Arendt was just a passing mistake, a kind of adventure on his part. It is utterly astonishing to me that he could write such a brilliant text, calling one to responsibility, and then find himself not only in the political order, but as we now know through the letters to his wife, in his own personal life to be a man who was entirely irresponsible vis a vis other people. Not to mention his sense of German nationalism and what that led to. On the other hand we do have this text that was written prior to his work, we have plenty of texts written after his sympathy for Nazism waned in the later 30’s. But we do, as Emmanuel Faye has pointed out in his very flawed book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” ..a very flawed text, we do have, he has discovered texts that show Heidegger to have basically been a minion, sort of the useful idiot of Hitler and Nazism and its just absolutely shocking. And he even later tried to locate it – in 1936 he says my whole notion of historicity is what led me in this direction. Well, Herbert Marcuse read Being and Time and said, “on the contrary, it leads in the direction of sociality, and a community of authentic human beings.”
So, the doctors are divided but we still have the paradox of a brilliant set of texts and a flawed man.
Robert Harrison: Do you think a lot of his subsequent thinking, his so-called later thinking, is a re-thinking of the role that responsibility plays and what philosophy’s role is in assuming responsibility – for example, The Letter on Humanism, which he writes right after the war, it’s all about the relationship between thought and action; and he’s making very clear there that he thinks that thought is responsible to itself only as a form of thinking, not as something that can translate into action as we understand it politically and socially; and there we get a very different sort of – not a contrite Heidegger per se, but a chastened one, who now has despaired of philosophy’s relevance to the larger world.
Thomas Sheehan (53:38): I find his repentance if we can even call it that, because he was very chary about putting forth any apologies at all, but in his private correspondence with Jaspers, for example, he points out that he was utterly devastated by his own guilt of this thing, he was so ashamed, as he puts it. But, I must say that in the later writings, I don’t find him coming to grips with his Nazi period at all; rather he comes to grips, and meaningfully so, with something like the spread of fallenness throughout civilization and culture in the form of technology and so on. But personally, I don’t feel that he ever stepped-up and took responsibility for the thirties.
Robert Harrison: Yeah, well, I agree with that and at the same time the twentieth century did tell us something about philosophy’s fecklessness, even when it becomes ethical philosophy or prescriptive philosophy, this fecklessness to really intervene in a decisive way into the course of history; and perhaps there is something there about Heidegger’s realization that thinking has to take care of itself and hope that in mysterious ways the relationship between thinking and action will work itself out, in ways that we cannot even suspect being operative, but its not going to be an immediate sort of connection.
Thomas Sheehan: Going back to phenomenology, there is the failure of phenomenology in Heidegger I would think – phenomenology is about first person experience, taking things concretely, and Heidegger got more and more abstract; as he moved back into the Greeks, etc. and favored writing about poetry – it was sort of like uh, retreat from not the abstract, but the concreteness that phenomenology wants to be about.
Robert Harrison: Yeah, that’s why I like to go back to the early stuff and the phenomenology.
Thomas Sheehan: Yeah, that’s really alive there, as Hannah Arendt says, that thought came alive again.
Robert Harrison: Passionate thinking indeed.
Experiments in integrating and advancing upon Heidegger with pragmatism and social hermeneutics:
As I said, the discussion was clear, thorough and honest enough to lay bare Sheehan’s errors, Harrison’s errors (which seem to be lesser) and even Heidegger’s.
Both Sheehan and Harrison agree with the “it doesn’t make a noise” doesn’t have being for us, anyway, regarding whether a falling tree in the woods makes a noise if there is nobody there to hear it. Presumably Heidegger thought similarly.
This may be sheer practicality, but I agree, but I believe it is a philosophical decision which is highly practical, as it places humans at the center of the relative, social perspective – our use and well being because if we’re not there, or who cares?
A inference that they do not make, however, is that this is is a social perspective; we care about some people more than others; and some we don’t like at all – who cares if they hear the tree falling.
All three seem to be locked into the phenomenologial perspective of Husserl, (he was a ((())), don’t know if that matters much, but…) in a failure of the phenomenological perspective, its first person experience and concreteness indeed – reification of the individual’s anxiety in confrontation of death, that finitude as the sole source of meaning, of being, dasein (whatever is supposed to make us distinctly human); as opposed to its source being, I might propose, in interaction in the ongoing social classification and its hermeneutic…
Now Harrison begins to invoke attention to Heidegger’s somewhat modest attention to responsibility to our people, history and future..
..while Sheehan is appalling in his putting aside of this concern. It goes to show just how superficial, not deep at all, a philosophy based on the idea that anxiety about one’s own individual death is the source of being. I can see superficiality and lack of empathy ranging through all manner of sociopaths in this philosophy, from cleptocrats, to those who destroy our environment, to those who destroy our genome, the assertions of many a self righteous mudshark in this philosophy; and, at the same time, a pandering to self righteous assertions on the part of this philosophy.
Nevertheless, he has something very right where he says that “hermeneutics is not a mere add-on” …. indeed it is our first obligation as beings, to begin, at least, to make sense. As he says…
…when things are discovered along with human being, that is to say when they’ve been understood, we say they have meaning.
So, really what he’s saying is that the human being is a hermeneut – that’s not an add-on to some sort of plain old existence. Our existence is the obligation, the need the thrownness into making sense of things …in fact, the first meaning of the word of Alethea is meaning, its not truth, as Heidegger points out; so if we’re embedded in hermeneutics and he is using the word [German word], I think that we can actually retrieve from this plain old word being, we can retrieve the urgency that Heidegger feels are in your face – he says at on point in his first course after the war, the Great War, in February of 1919, he asks his students, what is it that you first encounter in your lived world? Is it things, is it objects, is it being? No, he says, its meaningful, that’s what’s in your face…all over the place, it’s coming at you. So, we don’t want to lose him to traditional ontology which just talks about the inner substance of things – no, we want to have him on this side of phenomenology as he himself insisted …and one way of constantly recognizing that is being in your face.
I don’t care to exaggerate meaning if Sheehan is exaggerating Heidegger’s meaning (he claims that when he talked to Heidegger that Heidegger assured him that was correct- he was a “phenomenologist to the end.” … but I am definitely prepared to believe that a hermeneutic feature is one among other features that is integral to our human being, and that it feeds rather, not only, or even primarily off-of our ownmost death, but through interaction and the history of our peoples; more, its authenticity is confronted, I agree, immediately in the practical world – it is in our face – what is in our face is anti racism and that is what we need to make sense of:
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is predjudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.
I have begun to discuss how pragmatic participation of the ethnonationalist community and hermeneutics lived in their interests can begin to solve our problems…
Hermeneutics has wonderful possibilities to manage rigor and imagination, in ready connection to emergence and in confrontation with fallenness and facticity, to make sense of it, on the one hand; and on the other hand to liberate one from mere facticity, to neither get stuck in the absent mindedness of the arbitrary or to be stuck in reification, such as in the anxiety of our individual death; but to connect with the significance of our history and the systemic human ecology of our people; its dramatic journeys, ensconced in the general sense of security of our emergence already accomplished and its increasing bliss.
Comments:
Posted by Pragmatics of Coherence and Truth on Wed, 12 Jul 2017 05:02 | #
Hasok Chang gives a lecture on Coherence and Truth. This is his second talk in a series titled Pragmatist Realism: Philosophy, History and Science at The University of Tartu.
Posted by Ordinary Languge Philosophy on Wed, 12 Jul 2017 07:42 | #
Posted on Youtube 11 June 2017:
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought which emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II. With its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such ‘ordinary language’ were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear. Philosophers associated with the school include some of the most distinguished British thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin.
The guests are Stephen Mulhall (Professor of Philosophy at New College, Oxford), Ray Monk (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton), and Julia Tanney (Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Kent). The producer was Thomas Morris.
This is an episode of BBC Radio 4’s program In Our Time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl
Posted by Epicureanism on Wed, 12 Jul 2017 12:16 | #
20 Jan 2017
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Epicureanism in this BBC episode of In Our Time. Epicureanism is the system of philosophy based on the teachings of Epicurus and founded in Athens in the fourth century BC. Epicurus outlined a comprehensive philosophical system based on the idea that everything in the Universe is constructed from two phenomena: atoms and void. At the centre of his philosophy is the idea that the goal of human life is pleasure, by which he meant not luxury but the avoidance of pain. His followers cast off fear of death, and were suspicious of religious superstition, marriage and politics, but placed great emphasis on friendship. Epicureanism became influential in the Roman world, particularly through Lucretius’s great poem De Rerum Natura, which was rediscovered and widely admired in the Renaissance.
The guests include Angie Hobbs, David Sedley and James Warren.
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 13 Jul 2017 01:55 | #
Is it not an arbitrary and inappropriate decision by Jaegwin Kim to select the Mind-Body Problem as a test model for emergentism? It’s not remotely relevant. There’s no intellectual justification that I can see beyond ignorance or laziness why the mind should be understood in the amorphous Cartesian sense, rather than as a pluralised action of certain regions of the brain. Further, the will – such as it is (again, not Cartesian) – is likewise not at all an obstacle to the emergent explanation, as I hope I have already demonstrated via my multi-speed, tripartite model and my model of the transitory nature of consciousness. In the matter of human decision we really cannot rely on Descartes to assess, say, Darwin.
To be clear …
Evolutionarily speaking, the cognitive action of the brain (ie, Mind) is not somehow standing alongside the organism causally, available for Cartesian comparison. It is itself an emergent property, catalysed not from the organism as such but its relation to the world without, which is one of unknown and imminent but deadly threat as well as of life-sustaining opportunities. The resultant evolutionary process has a specific energy and direction of travel determined by the survivalist event of catalysis, which itself already implies component relation – actually a functional relation. So all this should be pretty obvious. Function really does follow form, as the dreaded architect of postmoderism liked to put it. But it also determines it!
If I missing something here I don’t know what it is.
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 13 Jul 2017 03:18 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 13 Jul 2017 02:55 | #
Is it not an arbitrary and inappropriate decision by Jaegwin Kim to select the Mind-Body Problem as a test model for emergentism? It’s not remotely relevant.
My understanding is that one of the central concerns of emergentism is the rejection of this distinction – inasmuch as that is true, it’s a good thing from both of our perspectives – and how those grappling with emergentism deal with it would be relevant indeed; even where their efforts are mistaken.
Saying it is not remotely relevant reminds me of Bowery trying to say that John Locke’s notion of civil rights and the American Constitution are not relevant to the matter of dealing with race.
There’s no intellectual justification that I can see beyond ignorance or laziness why the mind should be understood in the amorphous Cartesian sense, rather than as a pluralised action of certain regions of the brain.
Perhaps “THE” mind is not understood in an amorphous, Cartesian sense with that focus provisionally. But actually, Cartesianism can apply on the empirical side as well.
Nobody should say that you should not propose these close readings; though it is valid to say that they may not be looked upon as the only location of “mind”, nor most helpful in locating “mindfulness” and its vital use.
If you want to examine brain function then you’d probably be on steadier ground if you talked in terms of brain function and neural activity as opposed to “THE” mind.
Further, the will – such as it is (again, not Cartesian) – is likewise not at all an obstacle to the emergent explanation, as I hope I have already demonstrated via my multi-speed, tripartite model and my model of the transitory nature of consciousness. In the matter of human decision we really cannot rely on Descartes to assess, say, Darwin.
To be clear …
We can look at Descartes to assess where errors he made might be introduced and misapplied in Darwinian analysis – not only to humans, but of course centrally in our concern.
Evolutionarily speaking, the cognitive action of the brain (ie, Mind)
The brain is the “mind” ?
Evolutionarily speaking, the cognitive action of the brain (ie, Mind) is not somehow standing alongside the organism causally, available for Cartesian comparison.
With a historical, sequential perspective on what is called “mind” one can compare Cartesian models to newer efforts to map “the mind.”.
It is itself an emergent property, catalysed not from the organism as such but its relation to the world without, which is one of unknown and imminent but deadly threat as well as of life-sustaining opportunities.
It’s good that you are taking it into interaction and relationship.
The resultant evolutionary process has a specific energy and direction of travel determined by the survivalist event of catalysis, which itself already implies component relation – actually a functional relation.
Well ok, we can agree that in our basic, animal nature (which is) that there is a specific energy largely in the direction of survival… but then, when it comes to human being, we might ask whether it is in aversion to pain and misery? Injustice? A violation of our ancestors? “Nature rarely works within lethal variables.” – it’s a great critique of Heidegger. For humans, some anyway, there can be fates worse than death.
So all this should be pretty obvious.
It may seem obvious to you. But be implored to remain faithful to a first principle of emergentism – which is anti-reductionism.
Function really does follow form, as the dreaded architect of postmoderism liked to put it. But it also determines it!
I hope that you are going after post modern architecture, and that this is not another attempt to try to deny that the positive aspects of modernity are embraced; nor to diminish the negative significance of modernity and the need to move beyond it in a coherent, knowing way with post modernity proper.
If I missing something here I don’t know what it is.
You are missing a great deal where you might not move beyond efforts to try to show-up the academics, not let them have anything, criticizing and denying only (applying skepticism) and do not encourage, partake and cultivate what is of clear, important utility.
I put the Jaegwin Kim quote basically for your sake, to connect with concerns of emergentism, it is hardly a major point to the post.
I was reluctant to put that there, as I was to even talk about Heidegger. Lets move to a focus on what we can deploy in our interests rather than singularly in resentment toward them (academics and academically devised tools), their abuse and misapplications.
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 13 Jul 2017 08:46 | #
Adding to post:
And again there is academia’s (particularly Gadamer’s/Derrida’s ) crucially abused (as Cartesian) notion of “marginality” – where in “marginality” is taken to be those who are from without the classification and/or antagonistic to it, as opposed what would be the ethno-nationalist concept of marginality – i.e., those remaining just within the classification despite pressure, but well disposed to its reconstruction; and having the additional existential benefit of “knowing where the shoe pinches.”
“Those who are marginalized” in this sense, does not necessarily mean those who are falling behind, but can also mean those who are outstanding, though they would be ostracized as they are not understood and appreciated as being out in front; and well intending.
We would be bringing to bear correctiveness from the “rich and diverse perspectives of our ethnonational community.”
As such, marginals would contribute to a homeostatic function of the ethnonational system, against incursions and crass exclusion of sufficient basic function and of outlier advance.
…
Adding the (important bit about Augustinian/Manichean Devils):
This Abrahamic attack is well cast in terms of Manichean as opposed to Augustinian devils. Judaism and Islamics were coming from a place in evolution to compete more against other tribes for resource – thus, how to trick them (Manichaen devils) became a central skill.
Whereas for Northern Europeans in particular, but all Europeans, the issue of survival was more a competition against nature – thus a skill set more evolved to handle Augustinian, viz. natural devils, where human agency to avoid solution is not so central a concern.
By all evidence, Christianity is a Jewish trick, prescribing universalism and self destructive altruism to us, taking advantage of our evolved European nature in predilection to attend to Augustinian devils – as I have said, our predilection to attend to Augustinian devils is not necessarily bad, as we will ultimately be up against Augustinian devils to solve; however, we must not be naive simply because we’d rather not be bothered with the pettiness, the trivial mindednesss of Manicheans.
Anti-racism is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 13 Jul 2017 22:30 | #
Emergentism, as an attempt to explain the life-process, has mushroomed into a substantial and varied discipline in its own right, with people devoting their entire intellectual life to particular interpretations of it. I am not at all sure that it can all be falsified by saying it has to resolve Descartes’ dualism while, of course, using his own model. That is very obviously a rigged test which misses the elephant in the corner of the emergentist room, which is really order. Actually, I am amazed that this Korean guy can get away with formulating “the problem” in Cartesian terms and then telling the world that emergentism can’t solve it. It’s reminiscent of the Intelligent Design advocates’ dismissal of evolutionary theory, whereby the answer they are going to arrive at is already there in the terms in which they propose the question, but only because the question skips over falsifiability.
In short, the flaw with the Mind-Body Problem is that its dualistic model is not actually a model of anything, and certainly not of the human mind. It is just a presumption for a dichotomy which declares – surprise surprise – for dichotomy.
As regards what Mind actually is, well, it is the functioning of the human brain in its cognitive aspect (the brain also has a regulatory aspect as well as a reproductive aspect). It can be modelled basically but quite straightforwardly just using its functional machinery. The neurological detail is not required. It is only necessary that the emerging model does not offend against that at any point, or it, too, ceases to have verity. The model is, therefore, not neurological itself, nor is it psychological. It is interpretative of the human experience and propositional and, therefore, essentially philosophical in character and in application to various philosophical issues, of which the human will is probably the one on which it most directly bears.
More generally, emergentism proves its relevance not because it resolves a false dichotomy but because it establishes the historical form of the life-process in all its manifestations, which necessarily include processes of change. It acknowledges functional order, energy and direction where Descartes saw only stasis and division. His dichotomy dissolves, and we are left with a new general rule. The great questions for nationalists, as would-be change-agents, remain as they always were. But now it becomes possible to trust in the inherent direction of process, if it is not made subject to shocks and diversions from without of the kind we have come to expect only too well.
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 15 Jul 2017 14:01 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 13 Jul 2017 17:30 | #
Emergentism, as an attempt to explain the life-process,
If one is attempting to deal empathetically with emergentism, then the use of the article “the” here is problematic from the onset as one of emergentism’s central concerns is anti-reductionism.
has mushroomed into a substantial and varied discipline in its own right, with people devoting their entire intellectual life to particular interpretations of it.
Yeah.
I am not at all sure that it can all be falsified by saying it has to resolve Descartes’ dualism while, of course, using his own model.
Well, maybe Jaegwon Kim was trying to falsify all of emergentism by placing it within Descartes model, but obviously that’s not what I’m after.
That is very obviously a rigged test which misses the elephant in the corner of the room, which is really order.
Maybe Jaegwon Kim was trying to “rig the test”, but I was trying to present common grounds of concern for anti-Cartesianism and anti-reductionism as well as common concern for emergentism itself.
Speaking of traps, I was reluctant to go into tangential examples of emergentism and Heidegger, anticipating that despite my basic concern to connect to common ground, that given your autobiography in reacton to social academic concerns that you would rather take it as grounds to compete through particulars of those langauge games, and as such divert from the significance of the post.
Speaking of traps, I’m sorry that I fell into one by putting that example there, as you were liable to take it as pseudo occasion to try to trivialize the post and the central matter of Cartesianism and divert rather into a discussion of your mind stuff.
Actually, I am amazed that this Korean guy can get away with formulating “the problem” in Cartesian terms and then telling the world that emergentism can’t solve it. It’s reminiscent of the Intelligent Design advocates’ dismissal of evolutionary theory, whereby the answer they are going to arrive at is already there in the terms in which they propose the question, but only because the question skips over falsifiability.
Well, maybe human life can be reduced to falsifiable propositions.
In short, the flaw with the Mind-Body Problem is that its dualistic model is not actually a model of anything, and certainly not of the human mind. It is just a presumption for a dichotomy which declares – surprise surprise – for dichotomy.
“In short the”
You are oversimplifying the issue with Cartesianism by means of this example, I suspect because you want to minimize the post and its signficance as it threatens your mind project – a project stemming from your reacton and the opposite day game that you intransigently play as a restult, against (what you’ve known of) socially concerned academic input.
As regards what Mind actually is, well, it is the functioning of the human brain in its cognitive aspect (the brain also has a regulatory aspect as well as a reproductive aspect).
Well, that’s how you are defining “mind.”
It can be modelled basically but quite straightforwardly just using its functional machinery.
Really?
The neurological detail is not required. It is only necessary that the emerging model does not offend against that at any point, or it, too, ceases to have verity. The model is, therefore, not neurological itself, nor is it psychological. It is interpretative of the human experience and propositional and, therefore, essentially philosophical in character and in application to various philosophical issues, of which the human will is probably the one on which it most directly bears.
Well, at least we are moving away from a preoccupation with psychology and into human experience and its philosophical, existential circumstance instead.
More generally, emergentism proves its relevance not because it resolves a false dichotomy but because it establishes the historical form of the life-process in all its manifestations, which necessarily include processes of change. It acknowledges functional order, energy and direction where Descartes saw only stasis and division. His dichotomy dissolves, and we are left with a new general rule. The great questions for nationalists, as would-be change-agents, remain as they always were. But now it becomes possible to trust in the inherent direction of process, if it is not made subject to shocks and diversions from without of the kind we have come to expect only too well.
Though we might do well to tell a story of perfection as such to gird our direction against the vicissitudes of fortune and outward antagonism…
We cannot presume that it is an eternally emergent direction to maintain the form of the nation; and that it will not be subject to shocks as a part of its inherent course; for example, shocks that may be caused by base female inclination to incite genetic competition, especially if you are talking on such a “naturalistic” level; nevertheless, with respect as mature ethnonational agents, emergentism can be kept on ethnonational course with sound biological and historical basis, through means of accountability and correctability to our interests as such.
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Posted by DanielS on Sun, 16 Jul 2017 16:08 | #
With anti-Cartesianism, we’re precluding the “that’s just the way it is” according to nature argument … a void of accountability that the YJKW and Right Wing contingent can mess with to no end—- a nature argument so fundamental to liberalism and so destructive to us.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 17 Jul 2017 08:12 | #
Actually, a better ant-Cartesian, anti-anti racist mantra would read:
“Anti-racism is anti-broad classification of peoples and against classification as such being used as criteria for discriminatory accountability. This prohibition of discriminatory classification is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.”
That’s a safer mantra because anti-anti-racism is less likely to be misunderstood as such, in a supremacist or other needlessly aggressive, exploitative, destructive senses.
Posted by DanielS on Fri, 21 Jul 2017 07:12 | #
This paragraph wasn’t written as well as it should have been before. It is significantly improved now, as such:
In fact, participation in our fallibilistic correction can include contributions as deep, abiding and scientific as any – i.e., you can, in theory, question anything, even the most verified scientific law; though sane people, in vast percentage may consider you insane, dishonest, at best engaged in some speculative inquiry that will require you to compile verifiable information for you to bring to bear once you’ve completed your rather impractical inquiry; but the skeptic is not owed a privileged position of non-accountability for the initiation of inquiry over that which the community holds fast, that which shows no practical need to change for the rather impractical inquiry; this holds true for many requirements of ethnonationalism –
3) The great contribution of the pragmatists is to show that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible:
Posted by anti-anti-racist mantra on Sat, 29 Jul 2017 05:25 | #
This anti-Cartesian, anti-anti racist “mantra” should have been more clear. I’ve amended it here to read:
“Anti-racism is anti-broad classification of peoples and against classification as such being used as criteria for discriminatory accountability. This prohibition of discriminatory classification is Cartesian, it is prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people.”
That’s a safer mantra because anti-anti-racism is less likely to be misunderstood as such, in a supremacist or other needlessly aggressive, exploitative, destructive senses.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 29 Jul 2017 09:51 | #
… emergentism can be kept on ethnonational course with sound biological and historical basis, through means of accountability and correctability to our interests as such.
Obviously, your normalising imperative is also emergent. But that aside, please … just for once … try to understand that foundation and emergent process, in the terms I strive to address them, are really not “answers” to the standard WN analysis. I do not think about activism, as you do. I do not write about activism, as you do. Activism is, obviously, totally necessary, but I am little concerned with it today.
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 29 Jul 2017 14:41 | #
It is not a problem that you want to give closer readings. I have never objected to your focus on that; provided that you allow for the necessity of broader perspectives. The problem is that you have not, you’ve tried to trivialize, if not dismiss as utterly unimportant the projects that I am unfolding, which are, in fact, at least as important and usually more important.
I know that you are a very smart man. I have had patience for your philosophical retardation.
You try to trivialize what I say in this case by suggesting that it is mere “activism” whereas typically you try to say that it is mere “politics.” I don’t use these terms because that is not what I am doing, I am doing something more like philosophy..
You’ve wanted to act like you are up to something so much more important. You aren’t.
You have gone so far for the sake of your autobiography as to sweep aside crucial discussions and to virtually see our projects as mutually exclusive, even where I have been careful to call attention to the fact that they can and should be complementary.
Try for once to overcome your urge to contrarian polemic and to “one up” your “opponent” with straw men attributions like mere “politics” or in this case mere “activism”.
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 29 Jul 2017 15:21 | #
In this thoughtful talk between Greg Johnson and C.B. Robertson, they discuss psychological states of mind such as “hate” and “spite.”
They consider the capacity to hate as corollary to the capacity to love. They observe that spite is highly problematic to one’s own interests, of course, because one is willing to hurt oneself simply to hurt the resented; more interestingly, spitefulness does not provide a sound social basis because one cannot depend upon the spiteful party to be a rational actor, to act in accordance to their own interests.
Now, one can attribute some sort of “foundation” to that – “thou shalt never be spiteful”, but it would be a socially constructed rule of thumb attributed as “foundational” nevertheless. Sure, as a rule, you want to observe a golden mean, where indignation would be reined-in, and not tend to veer over the line of righteousness into excess, into spite. However, it is context bound and calls for judgment. There will be cases where “spite” would be interpreted better as altruistic punishment and may be noble – where you are sacrificing your personal interests, yes, but for the principle and the group pattern, so that the infringement not be gotten away with.
Posted by KM discusses group conceptualization on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 15:39 | #
Kevin MacDonald discusses his analysis of groups, conceptualization and behavior.
Posted by leave it to Millennial Woes to keep it kosher on Sat, 05 Aug 2017 07:45 | #
In this video, Millennial Woes presents himself as a noble adversary of “The skeptic community”, adding of course, for his Jewish friends that he White Knights for, that the skeptics are really “Leftists” underneath.
Leave it to Millennial Woes to fuck things up in order to maintain his 15 minutes of Jewish sanctioned fame.
First of all, skepticism is an abstract philosophical position, there is no “community” of skeptics other than a Jewish group calling themselves that, which Millennial Woes plays patty-cake with, within the Jewish controlled discourse that he willingly participates in against, “the left.”
Skepticism would function against a social conception of patterns, therefore it would be a right wing inclination, not a left wing inclination.
Millennial Woes isn’t going to tell you that because he maintains a sense of where his kosher bread is buttered – “oh, (((The Truth Will Live)))” sob, it simply is not in her to mislead us.” LOL.
DanielS
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 12 Aug 2017 12:37 | #
A question regarding the very fine rubric of “human bio-diversity” – how did a rubric which so finely lends itself to a framing of horizontally qualitative issues of ecological disbursement, qualitative differentiation and balance become associated instead with the quantifying and narcissistic criteria – i.e., non-differentiation other than that primarily based on vertical and supremacist notions – of i.q.?
One would think i.q., would be minor subset in concern of human biodiversity….
I would not be surprised to find our “friends” the YKW beneath that convoluted twisting of a fine term and framework, if not, then our other “friends” i.e, the YKW’s best friends, the right wing complicit.
Posted by Cybernetics re-tooled beyond mere pragmatism on Sat, 19 Aug 2017 06:52 | #
This is a comment by DanielS based on a chat with Per Nordin
Per Nordin: Hello friend
Per Nordin: How are you?
daniel sienkiewicz: Hello friend, I am ok and you?
Per Nordin: Good to hear. Yes im fine thank you.
Per Nordin: Whats going on?
daniel sienkiewicz: hmm, from my end, I’d say…
maintaining a course of matching our requirements as ethnonationalists under seige and pre ethno nationalists who are suffering and creating suffering for their lack of understanding that they need ethno nationalism—matching the requirements thereof with the most up-to-date and best possible theoretical/philosphical framework.
daniel sienkiewicz: Jewish interests have clouded those framworks, as I have been saying for a long time.
…taking the best ideas for social organization and defense and misrepresenting them so as to turn (White) people off and get them to react with counter productive ways and theories.
But I feel ok because I can see things pretty clearly at this point.
And I can see ways for us to go and to be successful.
As for Majorityrights, there will be more articles addressing significant matters coming up..
For the time being, I’m letting “pragmatism” set – – it needs to because its important.
Per Nordin: ah, very interesting
daniel sienkiewicz: it’s one of the things that’s been misrepresented.
daniel sienkiewicz: For example, all the stuff you hear about “enriching” and “enrichment”
…that is a direct perversion of pragmatist philosophy
Per Nordin: I’m interested in hearing your solutions and how we go forward for the struggle in a successful way.
daniel sienkiewicz: One of the things that needs to be done..
well, this, what I am about to say isn’t a full explanation
Per Nordin: please explain
ok I see
daniel sienkiewicz: but it is one project that will contribute significantly
Per Nordin: let me now, I want to read it …great.
daniel sienkiewicz: ok, well, cybernetics as you know is the study of self corrective (homeostatic) systems.
If we are treating race properly, as something to be maintained and defended, then we ought to look at it as a homeostatic system among systems
….maybe not all the time, but often enough look at it that way.
Per Nordin: Of course Always defend our race.
daniel sienkiewicz: systems have corrective components …correction is one part of defense – – if there is a weak point in defense an adequate system will correct it and as it improves as a system, it will do so more so, and almost automatically.
Now. There is a big tranisitin that has not been made between antiquated philosophy….
Many of the right wingers are stuck in scientism and have not adjusted to the hermeneutic turn.
They don’t understand that heremeneutics is not anti-science, it just complements science for the limitations of science in coping with things like intenationality, agency, imagination and overview, systemic and historical.
The bottom line for this “lesson” 
for today
It may be over-stating the case to say that “cybernetics” is the greatest bite out of the fruit from the tree of knowledge for the past few thousand years…but it is not very far off… if it is treated as and within frameworks of race and nation for example.
However, the task becomes …well, it was said with that, that “cybernetics ought not be sacrificed on the alter of pragmatism.”
But this is to misundersand pragmatism (as a philosphy) just as it is to misunderstand hermeneutics.
It is eminently practical to idealize and sacralize even, parts of our systems which are necessary to maintian homeostasis – cybernetic self correction.
…and to use heremeneuics so that we, our systems, are not paralized in scientist rigiidy and lack of inpiring vison, historical perspective, future aspiration.. or bound to headlong destruction because “that’s just the way nature is.”
In a word, cybernetics would not be sacrificed on the alter of pragmatism.. it needs to be integrated with it to be effective and in fact, descriptive of the human condition.
..a bit ironic, since those with a scientistic bent are all about description.
…they usually blow it because humans are not quite behaving like billiard balls enough to satisfy their scientific predilection and scientistic susceptibility.
So that’s one thing that has to be done: Cybernetic concern needs to be merged with pragmatism, heremeneutics and social constructionism.
End Chat with Per.
____________________________________________________________________
Sacrament and idealization of monogamy are a self corrective element
Anyone sympathetic to our position, i.e., appalled by the epistemic destruction of our people, the trauma, not simply a nauseating effect, of being thrown into the thrownness, the arbitrary, is disgusted by the word pragamtism, by being told to just move=on with your life, to merely ask “how to?” questions in that context, the context wherein everything valuable to us is destroyed, and we are tortured in the most matter of fact way, everyone is carrying on as if, “of course, what’s the problem?” …anyone who experiences the horror of this thrownness and an opposite sense of coherence derived from it understands and is sympathetic to Bateson in his conclusion to Steps to an Ecology of Mind when he says these idea of cybernetics is the greatest bite out of the tree of knowledge in 2000 years ought not be sacrificed on the alter of pragmatism…
From the final page of “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” – Gregory Bateson, 1972:
P. 468: A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part— if you will—of God.
[…]
P. 469: If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Indus-trial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don’t know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. “Myself” is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.”
The step to realizing – to making habitual – the other way of thinking – so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree – that step is not an easy one.
And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.
[…]
P. 487: “I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years. But most such bites out of the apple have proven to be rather indigestible – usually for cybernetic reasons.”
Cybernetics has integrity within itself, to help us to not be seduced by it into more lunacy, but we cannot trust it to keep us from sin.
[…]
P. 504-5:
The hardest saying in the Bible is that of St. Paul, addressing the Galatians: “God is not mocked,” and this saying applies to the relationship between man and his ecology. It is of no use to plead that a particular sin of pollution or exploitation was only a little one or that it was unintentional or that it was committed with the best intentions. Or that “If I didn’t, somebody else would have.” The processes of ecology are not mocked.
On the other hand, surely the mountain lion when he kills the deer is not acting to protect the grass from overgrazing.
In fact, the problem of how to transmit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically “good” direction is itself an ecological problem. We are not outside the ecology for which we plan—we are always and inevitably a part of it.
Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology—that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system.
We live then in a world different from that of the mountain lion—he is neither bothered nor blessed by having ideas about ecology. We are.
I believe that these ideas are not evil and that our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas as they develop—and as they are developed by the (ecological) process of their propagation.
If this estimate is correct, then the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans them-selves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pay to “sell” the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.
Of course Pragmatism, at its best, would say in regard to the general parameters of our human ecology, our system and those components necessary for its homeostasis, that it is practical to cast them as ideals, conforming to description of systemic homeostasis as best as possible, descriptions and ideals not to be subject to mere pragmatism, mere skepticism, but fitted with the advanced intelligence and agency of hermeneutics and social constuctionism in order to facilitate the praxis of that homeostasis.
Thus, cybernetics would not be “sacrificed” on the alter of pragmatism, but would become retooled into a philosophy advanced beyond mere pragmatism.
Posted by Hegel & Modern Philosophy on Tue, 29 Aug 2017 14:06 | #
Posted by Heidegger’s Existentialism – Self & Authenticity on Tue, 05 Sep 2017 08:57 | #
Inasmuch as this assessment is accurate of Heidegger’s philosophy, anyone should be able to see that it is an emphasis on self as opposed to group that we do not need: in fact, it is an emphasis that has left us susceptible to “anti-racism.”
A race is a group concept, and it is as a group that we are being attacked. The group is sociology’s unit of analysis – nothing wrong with that and only Jewish interests would try to discourage it, or those right wingers in reaction, perhaps stuck in an exaggerated reactionary fear of WWII and cold war era fear of collectivism.
But it is the egocentric selfishness, a kind of pop Heideggerism, of the boomers that has left us susceptible as a people.
Psychology takes the individual as the unit of analysis – and an individual is never apart from interaction and the social world. Never.
Posted by Paul Tillich on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 06:04 | #
Inasmuch as the above assessment is accurate of Heidegger’s philosophy (the discussion clip in comment 24), anyone should be able to see that it is an emphasis on self as opposed to group that we do not need: in fact, it is an emphasis that has left us susceptible to “anti-racism.”
A race is a group concept, and it is as a group that we are being attacked. The group is sociology’s unit of analysis – nothing wrong with that and only Jewish interests would try to discourage it, or those right wingers in reaction to the misuse of sociology against us, perhaps stuck in an exaggerated reactionary fear of WWII and cold war era collectivism.
But it is the egocentric selfishness, a kind of pop Heideggerism, of the boomers that has left us susceptible as a people.
Psychology takes the individual as the unit of analysis – and an individual is never apart from interaction and the social world. Never. The terrible irony of it with that fact ignored:
The Existentialist protest against dehumanization and objectivation, together with its courage to be as oneself, have turned into the most elaborate and oppressive forms of collectivism that have appeared in history.
– Tillich, The Courage to Be.
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 19:00 | #
Daniel, you make the assumption – a highly liberalistic, characteristically American assumption – that “the individual” and “the group” are even real entities, much less parts of my thinking. Turn that individual-group dynamic around a bit and you get the trope that the individual is reliant upon separation from the group for its existence. Hence the psychological violence and, inevitably also, the atomisation of the self-authored will. In turn and for the same existential purposes, “the group” – whatever confection that may be – must capture and constrain the individual to preserve its structure and coherence. Hence the stultifying, crushing nature of 20th century Soviet “collectivism”. As with your passionate desire to stick, in your political rhetoric, with liberalism’s model of left and right, so you remain locked into this thinking.
To be clear, “the individual” and “the group” are really just word-blanks on which one will inevitably project meanings. The manifold forms of nationalism do not project the meanings of liberalism on to them; and especially do not project this strange reciprocal conflict. The model of Man appropriate to ethnic nationalism is only individual in scale. It is not a model of an individual. Likewise, in nationalism “the group” is not a crusher and absorber of identity. It is the folk, and the source of identity, just as it is the source of life. The relation of each of us to our people is our relation to the source from which flows our nature, our truth or identity or essence, and our sense of belonging which attends that truth. That is Man, emergent from Time and Place.
For us products of the liberal thought-world, there is a whole landscape here of a self which is not at all the mechanical and egocentric product of Time and Place which went before. If one goes far enough with it (and the philosopher must), that product detaches and falls away. Its one-time familiarities become mere objects with no appropriative power. Here instead is an emerging and abiding personal verity. It affirms and appropriates. It is singular and complete. Because its essence is openness, it is not separated from or conflicted with the world. It stands in it nature to nature, epistemologically and ontologically, finding a freedom-in-being , and quite naturally, as if by osmosis, finding home or source.
This is the truth of each and every one of us, not some impossibly pretentious supposition or some wild Cartesian error. This what re-finds and re-founds. It is what, in their own unknowing way, everyone who approaches the existential and the folkish through Heiddeger travels towards. They may not have the whole understanding of the fact. They may think it is just about becoming “authentic”, as if the received personality of Time and Place can do that. But the model of conscious becoming is real enough. In as much as we may turn to it attentively, all of us – because all circumstance which is abroad in the new thought-word tends to it – will live the better as men and folk. For this is being in kind, where we do not author folkiness. We do not have it prescribed for us. We live and express freely in the way that we can.
That would be enough for us to take hold of our life and our circumstance. That would be everything.
The intellectual challenge, as men and women awakened to it, is to reconcile such experience in the consciousness with the practical and political … with the world of the everyday self.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:04 | #
GW, I am not a liberal and make no liberal assumptions. That is a convenient projection of your part to fit your autobiography and what you perceive as a necessary foil. I will address the matter later, am tired at the moment.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:14 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:00 | #
Daniel, you make the assumption – a highly liberalistic, characteristically American assumption – that “the individual” and “the group” are even real entities, much less parts of my thinking.
You pretend that you are thinking when you deny conceptualization, when in fact, you are doing just the opposite.
Locke could not have said it more sincerely that “group” is not real, and you prove every suspicion about you when you go this route.
Patterns are real.
To say that the group is not real is synonymous with saying that race is not real.
You rail against “sociology” out of reactionary (to Jewish abuse of sociology) right wing habit to abuse of the group unit of analysis.
Sociology takes the group as unit of analysis – that is neither good nor bad but it is the most necessary unit of analysis given what the Jews have done with anti racism.
Race is a group unit of analysis.
Sociology has almost always been done to our disfavor by Jews.
That does not mean that the unit of analysis is wrong.
Sociology potentially and well done, looks at systemic dynamics and positional roles as they would function in group systemic homeostasis.
Only an idiot would think that is not important consideration.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:18 | #
Turn that individual-group dynamic around a bit and you get the trope that the individual is reliant upon separation from the group for its existence. Hence the psychological violence and, inevitably also, the atomisation of the self-authored will. In turn and for the same existential purposes, “the group” – whatever confection that may be – must capture and constrain the individual to preserve its structure and coherence.
This is just you attributing to me stuff and motives that I do not have (typical of you).
Accountability to group interests is not confection, it is not an illusion, it is not coercion.
You’d have to be as stupid and pig headed as …. to think otherwise.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:25 | #
Hence the stultifying, crushing nature of 20th century Soviet “collectivism”. As with your passionate desire to stick, in your political rhetoric, with liberalism’s model of left and right, so you remain locked into this thinking.
I do not stick with liberalism’s model. I understand that you are not the brightest spark, but I could forgive that if you were not so competitive in a misplaced way.
It is not liberalism’s model, left and right – the left, through ordinary language (which is profound) is about looking after unionized group interests – accountability, viz., to social capital: that is the opposite of liberalism.
I don’t condemn you for not being very bright as to the matter, I condemn your obstruction to our well being.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:28 | #
To be clear, “the individual” and “the group” are really just word-blanks on which one will inevitably project meanings. The manifold forms of nationalism do not project the meanings of liberalism on to them; and especially do not project this strange reciprocal conflict.
The “conflict” between groups within left nationalism does not exist. You have ignored that assertion persistently, while maintaining your Jewish supplied cliches.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:30 | #
The model of Man appropriate to ethnic nationalism is only individual in scale.
Wrong. There are different scales and different criteria to be taken into account for any intelligent person.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:36 | #
This is the truth of each and every one of us, not some impossibly pretentious supposition or some wild Cartesian error.
It is your vain ego that wants to assert that Cartesianism as a problem is impossibly pretentious.
Stop listening so uncritically to Bowery – he is a scientist, he is a mechanic, he is not a very original thinker and not a philosopher.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:41 | #
That would be enough for us to take hold of our life and our circumstance. That would be everything.
The intellectual challenge, as men and women awakened to it, is to reconcile such experience in the consciousness with the practical and political … with the world of the everyday self.
This amounts to a plea that your having spent your youth tying to soup-up cars should qualify you to be a philosopher anyway – and to disqualify important ideas, many important ideas – It doesn’t. You aren’t qualified to do that, at all.
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 14 Sep 2017 05:44 | #
A group of people is a hypothesized circumscription of verifiable patterns of people. It is maintained (homeostasis) by accountability to rules (descriptive and prescriptive) (the less accounts necessarily requested, the better) with a measure of consensus and backing by force; the less force necessary to maintain adherents, the better.. It will require less force and have more consensus where it ensures the use, enjoyment for different kinds of people in actualization of themselves as they are necessary to complement one another in the pattern, while at once functioning to protect, maintain and advance the group’s social capital.
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:02 | #
Daniel,
1. I did not say you are a liberal. I said you are saddled with the liberal concepts of political axiality and the group-individual dynamic. These are anathema to nationalists. You are like some tragic Greek hero locked in an eternal struggle with a mythic serpent said to be guarding the ransom of an ancient king. The hero knows he could quit the fight and live. But he will not relinquish his lust for the serpent’s treasure. However, unbeknown to him, what is treasure to the serpent is poison to the rest of us …
2. The non-reality of liberalism’s self-authored individual and that of the socially-formed group stands in diametric opposition to ethnic nationalism’s uncomplicated, indeed naturalistic Man and folk. This thought is not likely to have occurred to Locke, or any of the Enlightenment thinkers.
3. “Accountability” is your own term. I have never encountered it in the mouth of another nationalist, presumably because it is thought to be no more than a methodology for zealous and Robespearesque revolutionary activists. Perhaps more work needs to be done. Perhaps a tie-in with conscience would communicate your meaning more effectively.
“Unionised interests” is likewise your own phrase – your very own. I know it’s only two words, and they are words easily used; and, then, perhaps you have not thought much about it. But they are significant. From the outset, the dynamic of a becoming “union” is distinct from that of a people rediscovering or turning to itself. It pre-supposes a definite state of separation – for example, by alienation in the classic Heideggerian sense. But such separation is a socially-relative concept, and as such it opens ineluctably to sociology and the “unit” of the social group. That unit can never be blood, for blood is too absolute in its associations and its calling to be intelligible to the coolly relative and dispassionate gaze of any external discipline. There is no measure from without of the imperatives within. We have to put away social thinking, and enquire from the appropriate perspective; and the appropriate perspective is the radically distinct one of ethnic nationalism – the only competent means of interpreting the ethnic imperative.
This is a clarifying step. We can move beyond the social phenomenon of alienation, and what we see is the psychological phenomenon of self-estrangement in which “the modern individual” does not fully abide in his or her own nature. “Unionising” gives way to re-finding.
Btw, this same phrase “unionised interests” also exhibits the state apparatchik’s love of adding layers of unnecessary meaning, whereby simple things are mangled into complex and demanding procedures which his tender ministrations alone can vouchsafe. Let us be clear that natural interests do not “unionise”. They do not create a union where none exists. They express. They inform. They suggest preference. That is the limit of their action and utility.
A “group unit of analysis” is another of these terms. I am English. I think I can speak for Kumiko in saying that she is Japanese. We are creatures of nature and kind … different kinds, actually. We do not have a “group unit of analysis”. We do not have a “group of people”. We have a people. We do not need or wish to analyse them. We do not wish to pass them off as a bloodless “unit” on humanity’s social ledger. For myself, I wish to make a politics of their free and sovereign life. This is not sociology for accountants. This is nationalism.
4. I wrote:
This is the truth of each and every one of us, not some impossibly pretentious supposition or some wild Cartesian error.
You wrote:
It is your vain ego that wants to assert that Cartesianism as a problem is impossibly pretentious.
There is an “or” which you obviously missed.
5. The conflict between the individual and the group, which is peculiar to liberalism, is not a “Jewish supplied cliche”. It is inherent to liberalism, with its salient and never quite reconcilable individualist and egalitarian, socially democratic wings. You know this. Everybody knows this. Why are you making such a basic error?
6. As I have said many times, I am plainly “not qualified” to be a professional scholar. Of course, you qualify fully.
But, actually, my last paragraph is a restatement of the fact that, as Rod Campbell revelled in pointing out, beyond ontology is teleology, or politics, anyway; and of the fact is, as I keep telling you, I have not ventured into that part of the general ethnic nationalist conception. Likewise, you have not done the ontology. You do, however, often point out that your superstructural work is not in competition with my ontological sub-structure. I suspect that your superstructure would only be without contradiction by a sub-structure of your own making. What would it look like?
Posted by DanielS on Fri, 15 Sep 2017 05:03 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:02 | #
Daniel,
1. I did not say you are a liberal. I said you are saddled with the liberal concepts of political axiality and the group-individual dynamic.
You keep saying ridiculous things like this, “that I am saddled with.” I am not saddled with anything: it is a working hypothesis and it makes consistent sense.
If you don’t try that bullshit, you will say that “I am lost in academic concepts” …also a lie.
Or, that “I am trying to impose rules on your people.” ..demonstrating that you completely misunderstand the analytic neutrality and eminent utility of the concept of “rules”.
Or that hermeneutics is “clunky”…“back and forth, back and forth” …which is totally ridiculous: it has the capacity to deftly deal with inquiry.
Or you’ll say that I am “communicationist” (?)
I can and will go on with the examples of your attempts to misrepresent what I am saying to the obstruction of collaborative inquiry if you don’t stop this.
These are anathema to nationalists.
No they are not.
You are like some tragic Greek hero locked in an eternal struggle with a mythic serpent said to be guarding the ransom of an ancient king.
No I am not. You have accused me of “not listening”…that is a projection. You don’t listen and you ignore what I say, which is clear as to the matter of why I talk the way I do – which is perfectly consonant with nationalism.
The hero knows he could quit the fight and live. But he will not relinquish his lust for the serpent’s treasure. However, unbeknown to him, what is treasure to the serpent is poison to the rest of us …
That is valuable in your projection – You are chasing after poison, GW.
In the first place it is not your fault, you are busy with your business life and don’t have time to understand the philosophical field and the lay of the struggle.* But your stubborn, misplaced contentiousness Is your fault. You are tying to make it seem like it is me, when there is almost never a good idea that you will not try to gas light and dismiss as trivia (by contrast to you in your armchair).
* It is not uncommon for you to get taken in by fairly obvious ruses, such as “Maiden” in Ukraine, which you took to be organic nationalism, or similarly, Pegida, England.
You haven’t had time to get beyond a shallow understanding, GW. That is not your fault, but your contentiousness and misrepsentation of Me as a stuffy academic foil putting forth irrelevancies for your shooting gallery Is your fault, because you are not exercising good judgment as to relevance: there are MANY things that should be elaborated in this post alone, also in many of the posts I have entered…but instead all you do is some sort of reverse Derrida deconstructionism ad nauseum. And it is beyond absurd. I am not going to simply put up with it, I will move beyond your obstruction.
2. The non-reality of liberalism’s self-authored individual
That right there is a typical straw man. Neither I nor social constructionism talks in terms of self authoriship in any pure way – that would be Cartesian. There is no self devoid of interactive input (including the emergent aspects). I have said this many times and it just goes to show that you are ignoring what I say in order to heap forth straw men and to try to misrepresent me as your foil.
and that of the socially-formed group stands in diametric opposition to ethnic nationalism’s uncomplicated, indeed naturalistic Man and folk.
Here we go again: you are trying to impose your cliche’s of what “the left does” upon me …“it imposes ‘unnatural concepts’ upon nature”
Let’s see if we can finally get this through your head (it won’t, you can’t bear that I could be the purveyor of any useful idea, let alone several).
A working hypothesis is a working hypothesis. It is not freed from reality testing to make sure that it holds up as a pattern;
It is a working hypothesis that our race and ethnonatonalisms are real and being challenged in their systemic well being.
That holds up as a group conception.
You claim to like simplicity (where you are not going into arcane. ontological nonsense), well that is simple enough explanation (again, for the millionth time – no reason to hope you won’t just ignore it again at your next convenience).
…and my working hypotheses, where I use them, are shaped to work with our nature at its most necessary, its best and most authentic.
This thought is not likely to have occurred to Locke, or any of the Enlightenment thinkers.
On the contrary, they were trying to get to a notion of “pure nature” .. an obsolete project in bad philosophy which you mirror exactly.
3. “Accountability” is your own term.
It is not “my” term. It has been in the English dictionary for long time, well before I was born.
I have never encountered it in the mouth of another nationalist,
That’s because you aren’t talking to any other intelligent/well educated nationalists.
presumably because it is thought to be no more than a methodology for zealous and Robespearesque revolutionary activists.
Well, again, as I have explained many times – you, along with reactionaries typically, will react by playing opposite day to Jewish misuse of terms; and Jews will typically misuse the best, most useful terms and concepts against us, make them didactic to turn us off from proper advocacy.
In the case of accountability, I have heard liberals using it, but by the nature of the term, its hard to abuse too badly of itself – so I have not seen examples of its especial abuse by liberals (The Soviet Union, yes, they abused it).
I came to focus on it through Shotter – who is English. He is (was, died not long ago) a liberal though espousing communitarianism.
However, his studies of accountability are neutral enough and I have shown how they apply to nationalism, very importantly.
Perhaps more work needs to be done. Perhaps a tie-in with conscience would communicate your meaning more effectively.
This represents a high point of absurdity if you are telling me to focus efforts on accountability in an abstract sense – Shotter was a scholar who spent his career doing that – he examined accountability through a hermeneutic pentad of who, what, where, when and how, circling it through chapter to chapter, paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence and sublimely, word to word! and YOU want me to guild that lily. You are always trying to guild the lily GW.
It probably stems from your STEM predilection to trace everything to singular efficient causes when in the social world it simply is more complicated than that – even genetic impact on behavior tends to have input from multiple markers.
It is not that there are not things to develop with accountability, but at this point what is needed a bit more application in the concrete realm. As I have said, and which nobody discussed with me, the Soviet Union was a case of much too much in the way of accounts requested. When we habituate ethnonationalists to the idea of accountability, we need to advocate a custom of accounts requested being kept to an absolute minimum. We don’t need to be arrested for being a week late in updating some paper work. But accountability from our leaders for border control and population management is of paramount importance.
“Unionised interests” is likewise your own phrase – your very own.
Not really. You are trying to gaslight me. Oswald Mosley, all syndicalism, anyone with sense and decency, in fact, is speaking in a consonant way.
Only a Thatcherite would believe that it is not real. If you want to give me credit for cultivating it further and updating the real concern with terminology refined to conform to our interests, I thank you for giving me some credit for a change.
I know it’s only two words, and they are words easily used; and, then, perhaps you have not thought much about it.
I have thought about a lot of things, and put that out there as a specificatory structure to be worked out directly with other people, preferably, but will do it indirectly with their remnant language if need be.
But they are significant. From the outset, the dynamic of a becoming “union” is distinct from that of a people rediscovering or turning to itself.
Typically, you’ve miscast the terms, rendering “becoming a union” something “unnatural, bad” and antagonistic to nationalism, which could not be more misguided/misguiding to our interests. “The dynamic” you talk about is a false opposition that YOU have created to serve your conceit as the sole purveyor of worthwhile information.
Again, you are lost in the line of ideology that traces from Locke, to early Wittgenstein, to Hayek, to Thatcher.
Your false dichotomy has you acting like what I am discussing would do anything but endorse an ethnonationalist people inasmuch as they “rediscover and turn to themselves.”
Worse, you act like your deconstruction of any analysis, hypothesis or applied words, even, will cause nationalism to emerge unproblematic. It is an absurdity.
The fault is yours GW. If you want to dwell on emergentism fine; emergentism is good stuff. If you want to try to be descriptive of how people function when they function as nationalists, fine.
The problem is that you propose a false either/ or that what I am saying is antagonistic to that, or somehow less important – it is not antagonistic and it is not less important and YOU continue to perform a disservice as you persist in that miscasting of me and what I say as such.
It pre-supposes a definite state of separation –
No.YOU pre-suppose that.
for example, by alienation in the classic Heideggerian sense. But such separation is a socially-relative concept, and as such it opens ineluctably to sociology and the “unit” of the social group. That unit can never be blood, for blood is too absolute in its associations
Not true at all.
I have never said that individual and group were in opposition, they are inextricably interactive, that is the non Cartesian position.. it is you who takes the retarded, Cartesian position that they are necessarily at odds and separate from one another.
Not only are you wrong to assert that I am saying THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG – that there is such perfect separation – BUT YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE INASMUCH AS YOU WOULD COMMIT THAT LIE AGAINST MY WORK.
And the reason you are making a liar of yourself is because you want to act like a unit of analysis is “bad.”
It’s like saying a microscope or a telescope is bad.
A haplogroup (lets advance a few centuries, please, beyond talk of “blood” – how quaint and folksy of you) …is a GROUP: HAPLOGROUP, SEE! IT’S NOT MY INVENTION!
Let’s see if we can get this through to you: a unit of analysis is a unit of analysis, it is not the only unit of analysis, but when it comes to racial/national defense the group is one of the better units of analysis – interaction is a very good one too.
The one that you prefer, the individual, is retarded and retarding to propose as a premier focus for the purposes of our defense.
and its calling to be intelligible to the coolly relative and dispassionate gaze of any external discipline.
Hermeneutics always welcomes vivifying and passionate narrative infusion – unlike your endless deconstruction.
There is no measure from without of the imperatives within. We have to put away social thinking,
No we don’t. Social thinking is exactly what we need to cultivate and your not thinking so is an expression of where you are not well suited to philosophical concerns.
Once group interests are protected at the parameters, then the individuality that it affords can be cultivated; it does not have to be interfered with to begin with at all, provided it is respectful of borders/bounds.
and enquire from the appropriate perspective; and the appropriate perspective is the radically distinct one of ethnic nationalism – the only competent means of interpreting the ethnic imperative.
I already am inquiring of the appropriate, competent perspective of ethnic nationalism. You may pretend that I do not survey the biological and close relationships, you may make that false claim in order to maintain your foil relationship, but you would not be honest. My perspective includes that which you focus on but adds greater competence, of necessity, of surveying systemic relations as well, and not losing sight of them.
This is a clarifying step. We can move beyond the social phenomenon of alienation,
Well, you have this misguided idea that stems from Cartesian rigidity. If I take a view of the group, that I am stuck there. I am not stuck there, you are the stuck one. Heremeneutics moves graceful in its surveys, taking the units of analysis most useful in a given moment or episode; and it remains interactive and correctable – even in the unit of analysis it adopts.
and what we see is the psychological phenomenon of self-estrangement in which “the modern individual” does not fully abide in his or her own nature. “Unionising” gives way to re-finding.
If you only knew how (rightfully) outdated that sounds (like pop psychology of the 50s and 60s) you would be embarrassed.
The truth is that “the psychological self estrangement” that you “diagnose” is that the social rules of modernity (and PC, etc) and other interactive tangles estrange us from our nature and nationalism.
Unionized rules could be shaped and conformed to encourage staying within our nature as ethnonationalists and to ward off misdirection. It is dumb and overly competitive to try to cast what I say as adversarial and “unnecessary.”
You do it all the time and it is an apparent expression of conceited contentiousness – because the concepts that I am setting out work with organicism, emergentism, serve all ethnonational interests – are correctable as such.
Again, like Bowery in a STEM thing, in a paranoid idea that I am interested to take your fucking individualism away or to saddle you with undue burden to others (if not turn you into an insect, when there is all manner of accountability to stave off loss of individual integrity), you are tying to pin point one “problem spot” in the electric circuit, viz., “unionizing”, and you are misrepresenting it so that you can render me and what I say redundant. It is a STEM conceit perhaps to wish to be so efficient as to render one and one’s device the only necessary cause.
But I am not just saying one useful and important thing, I am saying several.
Btw, this same phrase “unionised interests” also exhibits the state apparatchik’s
That’s what I mean: that is why I have taken off the kid gloves. An “apparatchik” is not only an insult and an expression of your determination to apply the cliche of “the leftist and his unnatural applications to nature and individual freedom”…but it is not remotely true of my character nor of what I am saying and endeavoring.
It is an idiotic misattribution.
love of adding layers of unnecessary meaning,
I don’t add unnecessary meaning. I never speak decorously. I use words to say what I mean. It is your STEM love of dehumanizing reductionism which is the nonsense.
whereby simple things are mangled into complex and demanding procedures
There is not mangling of simple things; if I elaborate on something in one place and it is not useful to somebody, they do not have to use it. At other times you have accused me of being too simple. So, elaborate as you might. But I make no demands. In fact, for you to suggests as much is utterly bizarre.
which his tender ministrations alone can vouchsafe.
No. People who want to come here to perfectly redeem Jesus, Hitler, Jews and scientism might try to say so, but it is not true, at all – I welcome many ministrations otherwise.
It has been cleverly said that for Jews free speech = pornography.
Well, for the Right, free speech = inclusion of Hitler idolatry.
Let us be clear that natural interests do not “unionise”.
Lets be clear and see that natural interests can and absolutely should, unionize.
Stop looking in the mirror and imagining a Hayek and Thatcherite image of the hero of the right and the individual and recognize the burden you are making to our people’s defense.
They do not create a union where none exists. They express. They inform. They suggest preference. That is the limit of their action and utility.
This is nothing more than Lockeatine perfidy: “classification of peoples are fictions of the mind.” …. tantamount to saying race is not real: GW, when you try this stuff, you are the best friend that the Jews could ever have.
A “group unit of analysis” is another of these terms. I am English. I think I can speak for Kumiko in saying that she is Japanese. We are creatures of nature and kind … different kinds, actually. We do not have a “group unit of analysis”.
It is perfectly valid and most appropriate to apply a group unit of analysis. It does not have to be, should not be the only unit of analysis, but your trying to deny its validity is yet another expression of your (jealous?) propensity to attack good and important ideas that have not come out of your armchair.
We do not have a “group of people”. We have a people.
That’s just Lockeatine semantic nonsense that you are trying to gaslight me with, GW – your error is that you are competing against me, when you should be looking to refine theory in our interests. If you were focused on that, you would not be in the absurd position that you are of continually denying important, solid and useful ideas, of having to lie, even, in order to maintain your rigid autobiographical position, as the hero of “nature” against me, “the left academic trying to impose affectation and unnatural burden” – a “tyrannical apparatchik.” How stupid and clear enough proof that you have not even let your eyes roam over what I say.
We do not need or wish to analyse them.
Then don’t. Others of us do wish to anyalyse patterns of interaction and we are right to do so.
We do not wish to pass them off as a bloodless “unit” on humanity’s social ledger.
Neither do I, that is why I consider the DNA Nation one of my most important essays.
For myself, I wish to make a politics of their free and sovereign life. This is not sociology for accountants. This is nationalism.
Stop you insults: “bean counter” that’s another insult that you tried on me. Now “accountability” is the same as the economic discipline of an “accountant”. GW, if you want me to talk nice to you, please end your insults and straw manning.
A people will be free when they have boundaries around their nations, a sovereign haven for their social capital and individual differences.
4. I wrote:
This is the truth of each and every one of us, not some impossibly pretentious supposition or some wild Cartesian error.
You wrote:
It is your vain ego that wants to assert that Cartesianism as a problem is impossibly pretentious.
Yes, I wrote that.
There is an “or” which you obviously missed.
No there isn’t. Anti-Cartesianism asserts that anything like mind, mentation, thinking, occurs in interaction: the Cartesian anxiety seeks to take mind out of interaction..
5. The conflict between the individual and the group, which is peculiar to liberalism, is not a “Jewish supplied cliche”.
I have NEVER looked upon individual and group as being in conflict, but always as necessary complements to one another.
It is inherent to liberalism, with its salient and never quite reconcilable individualist and egalitarian, socially democratic wings. You know this. Everybody knows this. Why are you making such a basic error?
Because I am not making that error! Read my last sentence.
I am not making that error, you are projecting that Cartesian error upon me in your endless effort to make me and what I say into redundant straw man and you as the only important thinker, “Mr. Natural and authentic” “debunker” of anybody who uses a word, term or concept right wing assholes are unfamiliar with.
6. As I have said many times, I am plainly “not qualified” to be a professional scholar. Of course, you qualify fully.
I do not qualify to be a professional scholar, I am an honest collaborator/participant in a team effort to work out what it takes for our people to defend, maintain and advance ourselves as systems among systems.
But, actually, my last paragraph is a restatement of the fact that, as Rod Campbell revelled in pointing out, beyond ontology is teleology, or politics, anyway;
That’s how he conceived it. The Heidegger scholars say phenomenology lies beyond ontology. They helped me to see conclusively the limitations of Heidegger.
But no, I can’t agree that teleology and politics are what come lineally after ontology.
That is a framing convenient to you in order to portray as trivial and superficial what I say, when in fact I do not ascribe to your linear model, but rather operate in terms of interactive, co-evolutionary process.
and of the fact is, as I keep telling you,
You keep ignoring what I am saying, is all you keep doing. You “tell me things”, I’ve heard them and found them wanting. I’ve verified my thinking before people who know far more and far better than you do of the philosophical bearings.
I have not ventured into that part of the general ethnic nationalist conception. Likewise, you have not done the ontology.
I attend to what is of essential importance.
You do, however, often point out that your superstructural work is not in competition with my ontological sub-structure.
It shouldn’t be, provided that you do not try to do with ontology what should not be done with it.
I suspect that your superstructure would only be without contradiction by a sub-structure of your own making. What would it look like?
Maybe I will answer that a little later, but your imposition of the word “supserstucture” is yet another a-hole attempt to present your concerns as more radical and important and mine as a trivial afterthought. That always has been a conceited lie of yours. If you are going to be so indignant as to completely ignore what I say, you could at least stop lying with misrepresentative straw men.
It would help you to avoid having to lie if you did not feel the need to pander to the Hitler idolaters. And if you knew anything about philosophy, you would understand that is not necessary.
I guess that you want to divert me into the realm of your inane pursuit of naturalistic fallacy, while you persist in ignoring my contributions as you have for five years…
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 15 Sep 2017 23:17 | #
You write: Anti-Cartesianism asserts that anything like mind, mentation, thinking, occurs in interaction
It is very obvious from that crude generalisation that you do not possess a model of Mind and consciousness. But without that how is it possible to declare that “all” is inter-action? How would you even know? At best, you would just be guessing from your own experience.
Of course, your object is to intrude communicationism and “social thinking” into the manifold, mostly unobserved mechanics and autonomic processes of Mind, without regard for the fact that the sum function of those processes is the perception of meanings by which the organism’s bias for its maintenance and survival and the maximal chance of transmission of its genes may be exercised. The selfishness of the organism (as distinct from the selfishness of “the individual”) in this regard is complete, and attests to a condition of profound isolation which I wrote about not long ago:
https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/being_in_kind_part_1
Now, from somewhere in the Mind’s very genotype there expresses the trait of speaking to self by means ancient and varied. As no self-respecting philosopher would deny, a primordial isolation does indeed belong to Being. It is its essential and tragic condition. Each thought, feeling, and sensation addresses that condition, reaches beyond it, consoles it, penetrates it to a degree, but never changes it. Speaking to the Other in the sense which communicationists intend is never an open and direct possibility … never free of speaking primarily to self, or elements thereof. In any case, the process works two ways – the isolation is equally of the Other, and is intrinsic to the Other’s private act of interpretation. Communication is a finite possibility and communication from intellect to intellect, with its reliance on an imperfectly and accidentally acquired communicative method, most profoundly so. The point of departure with Descartes – Heidegger’s, point of departure, really – lies in the mode by which meaning is disclosed, and certainly not in this original, existential isolation. In the same way that Heidegger has to accept this aspect of the Cartesian model, so have we.
You appear to understand nationalist thinking as a species of the standard Western canon, to be approached via the latter’s scholarly conventions and disciplines. I have the feeling that you never realised how categorically and systematically separate and distinct – and revolutionary – it is from conventional metaphysical, philosophical and political thinking. That should not surprise, given that in its ethnic form it is instinctual and timeless – so prior, actually. Only at certain points along the way from Aristotle to Heidegger and Schmitt have gestures in its direction been forthcoming from Western scholarship. Such gestures are as disquieting and challenging for conventional thinking as Darwin was for the faith-thinking of the Church. But by and large they are hastily and efficiently cut adrift; and, certainly today, the fine illusion of grey-haired wisdom proceeds quite undisturbed along its respected and well remunerated way. No one of European descent has any reason to be grateful to the humanities professoriate. By and large, Judas + a 130 IQ.
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:32 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 15 Sep 2017 18:17 | #
You write: Anti-Cartesianism asserts that anything like mind, mentation, thinking, occurs in interaction
It is very obvious from that crude generalisation that you do not possess a model of Mind and consciousness.
You are going to continue in your ad hominum attacks and that is unfortunate.
I don’t aspire to a static model of mind as a unit of analysis, as you do. I think in terms of the process of thinking, what needs to be done with it.
But without that how is it possible to declare that “all” is inter-action?
I never declared all is inter-action. I said all is in interaction.
How would you even know?
Because its obvious: part of the reason for making this post was to be done with your absurd skepticism. When you question something so obvious, the burden of proof is on you.
At best, you would just be guessing from your own experience.
Ridiculous.
Of course, your object is to intrude communicationism and “social thinking” into the manifold,
Here we go again, with your lying attributions. Who told you/encouraged you to call me a “communicationist” intruding social thinking (upon social matters) ? Bowery or Daniel Antionra?
Do you know what your problem is (and theirs as well) GW? As STEM inclined people people you are enamored of precision, efficient causes and air tight explanations. Because the social world is more messy than that, you conclude that it is “no good”, despite its pervasiveness, it somehow should not be “intruded upon you.”
Even though you are free to go on with your ontology musings, you try to insist that I should put my head in the sand just like you do, and be concerned with the same mechanics that you hobby-away at. And then you have the nerve to say that I am trying to force things upon you.
mostly unobserved mechanics and autonomic processes of Mind,
As I said!
without regard for the fact that the sum function of those processes is the perception of meanings by which the organism’s bias for its maintenance and survival and the maximal chance of transmission of its genes may be exercised.
Maximizing changes for survival is not necessarily going to protect it from miscegenation, especially if the prevailing focus is on individuality and group interests are stigmatized.
The selfishness of the organism (as distinct from the selfishness of “the individual”) in this regard is complete,
No it isn’t complete and it is no guarantor that it will treat others as too different, and maintain our more recent distinct evolution as Europeans absent …things like, lets go with Bowery’s term, “artificial selection.”
and attests to a condition of profound isolation which I wrote about not long ago:
https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/being_in_kind_part_1
Your profound isolation is an artifact of your framing of events.
Now, from somewhere in the Mind’s very genotype there expresses the trait of speaking to self by means ancient and varied.
There is individual systemic homeostais
As no self-respecting philosopher would deny, a primordial isolation does indeed belong to Being.
No self-respecting philosopher would make that a central focus. It was an error of Heidegger’s philosophy which took for granted his people a bit too much – there is more of a thrownness to peoplehood than even he accounted for, and it is a thrownness into interaction …with other people: not isolation. You may not like those people, they may not want to create the way of life you deem best, but that doesn’t mean that you are alone or that there is no overlap with your interests – there must be.
It is its essential and tragic condition.
No, that is the fiction that a whole generation of selfish, ego centric baby boomers bought into to squander all social capital. It is the stuff that sociopaths are made of, the stuff that the shallow are made of, the stuff that mudsharks are made of.
Each thought, feeling, and sensation addresses that condition, reaches beyond it, consoles it, penetrates it to a degree, but never changes it.
That’s a story you tell yourself.
Speaking to the Other in the sense which communicationists
STOP CALLING ME A COMMUNICATIONIST OR I WILL AGAIN CALL YOU AN ASSHOLE
intend is never an open and direct possibility
I am not aspiring to purity and perfect transmission, without requirement of correction, as you are.
… never free of speaking primarily to self, or elements thereof.
Maybe the “communicationsit” of your imagining doesn’t to that, but the communications perspective, which would read Aristotle, would observe his statement that internal conversation is the beginning of intelligence.
In any case, the process works two ways – the isolation is equally of the Other, and is intrinsic to the Other’s private act of interpretation.
You make these proclamations without really knowing what you are talking about.
Communication is a finite possibility and communication from intellect to intellect,
Only in your retarded understanding of “communication” ..as I have explained, you are stuck on the transmissions model; i.e., you don’t know what you are talking about.
with its reliance on an imperfectly and accidentally acquired communicative method, most profoundly so.
We are all subject to that thrownness, but then we take those specificatory structures and can shape, craft and refine our understandings. That’s all you are hoping to do with your wish to draw a “map of the mind.”
The point of departure with Descartes – Heidegger’s, point of departure, really – lies in the mode by which meaning is disclosed, and certainly not in this original, existential isolation. In the same way that Heidegger has to accept this aspect of the Cartesian model, so have we.
He says that we have to recognize it; he doesn’t recommend that we accept it. Heremeneutics is on crucial way to deal with its inauthenticity, to negotiate a process of inquiry and integration.
You appear to understand nationalist thinking as a species of the standard Western canon, to be approached via the latter’s scholarly conventions and disciplines. I have the feeling that you never realised how categorically and systematically separate and distinct – and revolutionary – it is from conventional metaphysical, philosophical and political thinking. That should not surprise, given that in its ethnic form it is instinctual and timeless – so prior, actually.
That’s a word salad that simply does not interest me. Suffice it to say, it is ad hominum. Apparently you have neither rigor nor imagination enough to do anything else.
Now, what ad hominum will you fan club have you try next?
Only at certain points along the way from Aristotle to Heidegger and Schmitt have gestures in its direction been forthcoming from Western scholarship.
If you want to wallow in Zen deconstructionism go ahead, but I’m not going to waste my time taking it seriously.
Such gestures are as disquieting and challenging for conventional thinking as Darwin was for the faith-thinking of the Church.
No, you pretend your endless skepticism and deconstructionism is profound. It isn’t. Its is the expression of a man who cannot think outside the box of modernity.
But by and large they are hastily and efficiently cut adrift; and, certainly today, the fine illusion of grey-haired wisdom proceeds quite undisturbed along its respected and well remunerated way. No one of European descent has any reason to be grateful to the humanities professoriate. By and large, Judas + a 130 IQ.
I, for one, am not telling people to be grateful to them. What I will do, however, is take what is needed. I will not stand for your absurdity that everything has to begin from the day one all the time and that no thinking and no good thoughts have ever come through academia (including the humanities) or through my applications to ethnonationalism.
Your final statement confirms my hypothesis about your problem. You can’t get over the fact that the social world does not conform to your STEM predilection for perfect precision, pure cause and effect, efficiency, cleanliness. It is messy and it intrudes upon you, and ever it will until you authentically dead.
Nevertheless, there are distinct patterns, and there is the capacity to treat them with great rigor, to operatonalize them, verify them and achieve warranted assertability.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 16 Sep 2017 23:13 | #
You write: I never declared all is inter-action. I said all is in interaction
But this opinion rests upon an intellectual sleight of hand, namely the redefinition of the object as existing in a state of action itself or in a theatre of action to which it is in some sense party (which theatre is really the subject’s personal drama; but, of course, we can’t say that, or you will start squawking about Descartes). This is hugely optimistic; really tantamount to wishful thinking, leaving out, as it does, large areas of concern as to Man and Nature, Being, Mind and knowledge.
Doubtless, such a sleight of hand is a pleasurable device, and convenient. After all, we are weak, and fidelity of conceptualisation is difficult, perhaps even impossible in ordinary waking consciousness – certainly south of 150 to 160 IQ, I would say. Perfectly intellectually competent people such as your good self simply do not grasp, from moment to moment, their state of profound absence and fragmentation rendered by their own habituated function, or the great rarity of their fleeting escapes from this condition. Neither have they the faintest idea of the vast over-estimation of powers they blithely ascribe to themselves (ie, singularity, will, consciousness). And, of course, they do not grasp the suggestibility which plagues them … the terrible ease with which they are become coloured and patterned by Time and Place; owned creatures forever susceptible to steering from without.
Heidegger got enough of this right – via his concepts of (a) thrownness into that which we never asked for and is not of the essence, and (b) falsehood or, say, false witness – to orient his students towards the properness of human authenticity. But he chose not to provide precise descriptors of inauthenticity, which I have always found puzzling. So they require to be supplied.
I would say to you, as I have said in the past, that you can’t just pick and mix this philosophy with other classes of ideas, including your social stuff. Some systems of thought have a relational structure, which in turn gives them an holistic quality. Parts cannot be successfully transplanted like living tissue to the body of another system. The process is too violent. Meanings will be lost (and, yes, you do have only a partial reading of thrownness). I wonder if you are a subtle enough thinker to see that.
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 17 Sep 2017 02:15 | #
GW, if this thrownness into inauthenticity is the unavoidable state of mind of most people, most of the time, how is prescription for adaptive behavior as enforced by a social hierarchy to be avoided?
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 17 Sep 2017 03:59 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 16 Sep 2017 18:13 | #
You write: I never declared all is inter-action. I said all is in interaction
But this opinion rests upon an intellectual sleight of hand,
No sleight of hand, it’s prima facie.
namely the redefinition of the object as existing in a state of action itself
Both observer and observed exist in interaction.
or in a theatre of action to which it is in some sense party (which theatre is really the subject’s personal drama; but, of course, we can’t say that, or you will start squawking about Descartes).
You can’t say that if you don’t want to be accused of the absurdity of solipsism either, of having created perceptions, the words and concepts to organize, describe and understand them all by yourself.
This is hugely optimistic; really tantamount to wishful thinking, leaving out, as it does, large areas of concern as to Man and Nature, Being, Mind and knowledge.
Not if it isn’t misdefined as you have (as solipsism) and not if sufficient rigor is exercised. On the extreme which tends to be of your interest, there are brute facts and some negotiation of how they count, but not even a whole lot of negotiation with other people as to how they come to count in some cases, even if you survive the brute fact.
Doubtless, such a sleight of hand is a pleasurable device, and convenient.
If it were a sleight of hand, other people would be apt to catch me eventually at least, but that is really just a straw man (the solipsism that you apply to me) and a yet another dishonest insult that you direct at me: “sleight of hand” …“intellectual dancer” … “not deep enough” …
Perhaps your penchant for ad hominum stems from your own solipsistic perspective.
After all, we are weak, and fidelity of conceptualisation is difficult, perhaps even impossible in ordinary waking consciousness – certainly south of 150 to 160 IQ, I would say.
No, GW, when you start acting like “accountability” and “union” are intellectual jargon words, it isn’t me that’s making the problem – it is your absurd skepticism.
Accountability: an expectation that one will attempt to provide an accepted explanation for one’s actions/or not and the consequences thereof.
Union: a socially circumscribed group of people, who constitute members as exclusionary to outsiders who are non members. Members have requirements and expectations for themselves – rules of accountability.
Perfectly intellectually competent people such as your good self simply do not grasp, from moment to moment, their state of profound absence and fragmentation rendered by their own habituated function, or the great rarity of their fleeting escapes from this condition.
Perhaps, but people like your good self are there to remind me, and call me back to your significant contributions, such as rigorous concerns and dwelling upon emergentism and interiority – internal interactions and reflections upon conceptual components of mentation.
Neither have they the faintest idea of the vast over-estimation of powers they blithely ascribe to themselves (ie, singularity, will, consciousness).
I don’t ascribe singularity of will to myself, never have. Not consciousness either. You are the one who is prone to that Cartesian debacle.
And, of course, they do not grasp the suggestibility which plagues them …
That’s the projection of one who can’t see out of the box.
When I talk about things and suggest them to others, it is because they have worked for me – experientially and experimentally as it were.
the terrible ease with which they are become coloured and patterned by Time and Place; owned creatures forever susceptible to steering from without.
Because I have wanted very much to do things with people, specifically to connect with a community of White racial advocates in good will, I have been subject to some bum steers in the past by sociopaths, who are liberal and realize that I am vulnerable as such. These were hard lessons and they were learned, while they were sociopaths relying on the good will of a community to back them, which will dissolve in its backing if their practices are not brought to sufficient account – as my lack of independence in those circumstances was brought to account.
Heidegger got enough of this right – via his concepts of (a) thrownness into that which we never asked for and is not of the essence, and (b) falsehood or, say, false witness – to orient his students towards the properness of human authenticity. But he chose not to provide precise descriptors of inauthenticity, which I have always found puzzling. So they require to be supplied.
I would say to you, as I have said in the past, that you can’t just pick and mix this philosophy with other classes of ideas,
I can spread out and pick ideas and take to heart what is essential, and hold it fast as Heidegger suggests.
Typically, you cast this process in insulting terms, but you are the one prescibing some rule that we have to be beholden to Heidegger verbatim, as you interpret him, not me.
including your social stuff.
Like I said, just insulting words, “stuff” … it is you, GW, who are not a aware …you are not aware of how much a disservice that you (and I suspect Bowery and your Hitler, Jesus and Jewish cheering section in the background) provide by treating the social realm as if it is trivial, a confection, matters that only Jews consider and should continue to consider.
The last thing that should be done is to allow them to be the sole arbiters of these matters. But their wish that it be so has much to do with why they have hoodwinked the entire Alt Right into arguing against “the left.”
Some systems of thought have a relational structure, which in turn gives them an holistic quality.
Parts cannot be successfully transplanted like living tissue to the body of another system. The process is too violent.
And it is for our people to hold those to account who are doing violence to our systems.
Meanings will be lost (and, yes, you do have only a partial reading of thrownness). I wonder if you are a subtle enough thinker to see that.
I did not venture a complete rendering of thrownness. But yes, you are right, in the moment of which you speak I was over emphasizing the arbitrarness of the condition in which we find ourselves – our emergent being as it came together from our forebears and as it is held together by our conspefics is not very arbitrary.
Posted by Mark Collett on poisonous mantra of individualism on Sun, 17 Sep 2017 04:42 | #
Mark Collett, The poisonous Mantra of Individualism
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 17 Sep 2017 16:13 | #
CC: GW, if this thrownness into inauthenticity is the unavoidable state of mind of most people, most of the time, how is prescription for adaptive behavior as enforced by a social hierarchy to be avoided?
This is a very large question indeed, and obviously, one that is not addressed ex cathedra, instructing the people to be authentic. A complete answer would have to take into account all the factors formative of a healthy general life, from sociobiological or instinctual characteristics and the custom and mores and myth they shape, the common wisdom, the faith system, and, if different, the systemic philosophical and political life of the people, and everything in between! The signifiers of authenticity in the person – groundedness, personal simplicity, natural character, the naturally honest profession of self, self-affirmation, self-possession, and so forth – belong to that healthy general life. Authenticity as such is a quality which the person (or individual, Daniel) expresses out of his own truth or nature. An entire people can be authentic if all its members are so. It is accretive.
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 17 Sep 2017 23:49 | #
What is needed is a blue ribbon panel of spergs to tell the people what to think at every moment of the day. It will be called the People’s Revolutionary Committee for the Imposition of Muh Non-Cartesian Hermeneutics. Lulz
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 18 Sep 2017 06:30 | #
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 17 Sep 2017 18:49 | #
What is needed is a blue ribbon panel of spergs to tell the people what to think at every moment of the day. It will be called the People’s Revolutionary Committee for the Imposition of Muh Non-Cartesian Hermeneutics. Lulz
CC, can I ask you what the fuck are you talking about?
Where have I told people what to think, ever, let alone every moment? I welcome, would like, participation in correcting and refining ideas here; and where people do not want to participate in the specificatory structures that I set out, then they can look at GW’s, or Kumiko’s or others, or propose their own, that’s what hermeneutics and social constructionism is all about – participation and recognizing participation as being of the essence.
You are apparently among the desperate cadre of those whose idolatry and right wing reaction has been sent elsewhere (you know what I’m talking about and that’s not telling people what to think, its protecting our capacity to think another way here, more cooperative and inclusive of our own people in our natural self interests), and thus try to apply a false charge of “anti-free” speech among a litany of “left wing” stereotypes …“anti-nature” “apparatchik” (totally ridiculous) “imposing collectivism upon the would-be free individual and nature” – a stereotype which was never the least bit true of me.
Something of the reverse is the case. I have been subject to constant false attributions, viz. accused of saying things and having intentions which I never have; and have been told that I should not talk about hermeneuticis, the interactive unit of analysis, the group unit of analysis (and that I am against the individual when I do), that I must talk about the “natural” individual, “euro-man” and things like “the personality” and a static, Tractatus-like schematization …whereupon Euro-man might rigidly plod along the axioms of his fixed path with sharp elbows and his clunky, mechanistic faculties – ironically for his supposed ideals, impervious to necessary adjustment, destruction to nature and people, their systemic interrelation, even his own.
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 19 Sep 2017 04:54 | #
Daniel, your entire worldview is the product of a lifetime spent feeling like a put upon, beta weakling. Any endeavor, and certainly one with very survival as the stakes, that does not place the will to power front and center will be an exercise in flaccid uselessness.
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 19 Sep 2017 05:18 | #
Nietzsche was perfectly correct about the difference between philosophers and scholars. Case in point, Descartes was a transcendent genius who elevated the intellectual estate of mankind. And all you do is gripe like a butthurt pussy, using Descartes’ great name as a tenth rate pejorative. Lulz. Clean up your fucking act.
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 19 Sep 2017 06:19 | #
Posted by Captainchaos on Mon, 18 Sep 2017 23:54 | #
Daniel, your entire worldview is the product of a lifetime spent feeling like a put upon, beta weakling.
Not true, because my complaint has been on a meta-level – against society as it has been organized and orchestrated (early on I did not fully understand the significance of Jewish influence, but we did not have the internet back then); beta weaklings don’t endeavor to be a part of societal transformations; beta weaklings aid and abet the arbitrary situation that serves the most self centered and short sighted females and those who pander to them – YKW and deracinating right-wingers: “the alpha gamers” who, like the meta-pussy whipped bitches that they are, forever try to adjust to what the little lady wants.
Any endeavor, and certainly one with very survival as the stakes, that does not place the will to power front and center will be an exercise in flaccid uselessness.
And so you see, it is a will-to-power, but one that does not accept modernity and its fall-out as merely the way it is – it is a will to power to how it really ought to be, and can be; and I am showing (helping to, anyway) where the “beta’s” and the “alpha’s” and the “shit testers” are going wrong and how they can organize in their/our natural systemic interests.
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:18 | #
Nietzsche was perfectly correct about the difference between philosophers and scholars. Case in point, Descartes was a transcendent genius who elevated the intellectual estate of mankind. And all you do is gripe like a butthurt pussy, using Descartes’ great name as a tenth rate pejorative. Lulz. Clean up your fucking act.
Nietzsche was a classic pussy whipped panderer to a bitch’s world view, so much so, so much and admirer of masculinity, that it is no wonder that grinder-g’s retreat would be enamored of him. It is a homo world view, pandering to females who want to hoodwink men into thinking that they should stand all alone as “over men” – the universal maturity of the Mulatto overman (with their admirable digestive tract) – so that they, the bitches can insight genetic competition as they arbitrarily might- and did, to our disaster in WWII. So that we can wind up with a choice of women oh so subtle, cooperative and sensitive – like black women, more men than any White man ever was.
I wouldn’t say that all I do is gripe like a butthurt; though I have (more so in the past) indulged in criticizing, lets say, the bullying of White men, because the whole “be a man” bit …“White male privilege” and “how could you possibly complain?” and “don’t use words” (to try to figure things out critically) had been overdone in my personal situation and society. The effort to use words and emotions as maps, to articulate problems and connect them with societal critique and means of improvement was a method that was at least somewhat necessary prior to the internet; as it was near impossible to talk about and coordinate these matters. This method, so to speak, was unbecoming at times, I admit. I would try not to do things that way and only fall into defending the bullied position (in the old, habitual pre-internet way of setting forth emotional maps, as much a defensive net as a map) in a pinch, when I feel I’m being gaslighted – and need the topographical map that my intelocutor is trying to obfuscate.
Now I have it/we have it (orientation) and I don’t have to worry about lame attempts at gaslighting such as yours – on behalf of the little innocent lady who thinks “the natural state of modernity that allows her to carry a black bat to hit you over the head with to knock you into the mudwrestling contest and stigmatize White man who’d take it away from her so that she cannot arbitrarily insight the most egregious genetic competition ad nauseum, causing vast, unaccounted for destruction to social/genetic capital and vastly over-pricing herself, as if that’s just the way it is, and only butt hurt, weak beta pussies would not man-up and adjust to that.”
Along with people with philosophical knowledge, I recognize Descartes’ philosophical program as a failure and the sine qua non of a wrong turn in Western philosophy. If one has concern that we should assimilate our natural patterns and interests, then Descartes is not a transcendent genius, he was trying to transcend sense and natural interactive process.
….but no, just be a good White slave, with your sights fixed in techno-servitude to keep things convenient, electronic items, the electricity and other tech and infrastructure working for the little lady and her Nietzchean Mulatto overman.
Posted by Heidegger & Classification on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:19 | #
Heidegger treats matters of classification as fundamentally important rather than superficial or dispensable; and those classifications are managed with the hermeneutic circle.
“Read Aristotle for ten years first”
Important influences on Heidegger
Husserl
Aristotle
Kant
Nietzsche
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 21:51 | #
Whole peoples cannot perform an academic’s dance. Do you understand, even at the risk of your own intellectual irrelevance? The mass of a people makes its own ethnic nationalism, which belongs uniquely to it and to no one else. It is a political replication of the relationship of genotype to phenotype. In its arising among the people, therefore, nationalism manifests as blood politics … instinct politics … brother politics. The mass of a people come into possession of it in the exact same way we, as confirmed nationalists, did. We all made the journey of the instinct, which is a journey of the consciousness, a journey of emergence from a perfectly automatic identification with all that is given by the world to an intense and natural and sublime accord with our ownmost truth and relation.
This is what we are primarily interested in today. This is the beginning of everything else. Every single one of us understands this in our own experience. We may not formulate it in that exact same way. At different times in the European past such awakenings have been associated with very different nationalisms to modern ethnic nationalism. But always this part of it is the same, and it is here that Heidegger holds lessons for us.
I don’t know what “classification” is. Perhaps it has some role to play further downstream, though I did not see much sign of complex academic adumbrations in the Brexit campaign or in Trump’s election campaign. So I doubt it. But one should try to be positive about these things so perhaps we might allow that hermeneuticising academics could conceivably come up with something relevant to the development of a rounder nationalist politics, as the need arises. But at the awakening, no.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 23:13 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:51 | #
Whole peoples cannot perform an academic’s dance.
There is no dance. That is a word you jealously apply.
You say that you cannot pick and choose among Heidegger, you seem to imply that we cannot use these ‘fancy words’ but then turn around and say that “Dasein” is ok to talk about, but not hermeneutics.
This is characteristic of your absurd position toward academia.
The fact is, that people’s way of talking frequently has made its way down from academia – just as “narrative”, a fundamental aspect of hermeneutics, has now become a common way of talking.
In fact, a whole people can share a narrative of their peoplehood; that’s the idea, one of the important features of hermeneutics is that it facilitates broad coherence where the the arbitrary facticity of the empirical world does not.
Do you understand, even at the risk of your own intellectual irrelevance?
Irrelevance? This is a projection of yours as you attempt to re-apply modernist philosophy over two hundred years obsolete.
Do you understand that you are the best friend that the Jews ever had?
Hey, you White people, you don’t want any of that “intellectual stuff’, leave the thinking to the YKW”
The mass of a people makes its own ethnic nationalism, which belongs uniquely to it and to no one else.
Here is where you are intransigently anachronistic and destructive in your default modernity.
In post modernity, i.e., in competence with regard to its requirements – as opposed to your insistence upon trying to maintain pure modernity – what happens is that it is expected that there will be and should be specific peoples who will need to maintain their traditions, their inheritance and balance it with modernity – in the case of the English, there is a kind of tradition of modernity: It is expected that there will be scientific investigations as to what it means to be English in a very empirical way, as close to foundational and empirical a reading as possible for some specialists; and that is appreciated.
That’s fine. That’s one end of the hermeneutic circle. *
However, the English are in interaction. They are in interaction period and they are in interaction with other peoples.
This is where post modernity becomes necessary if they are to maintain themselves and interact competently with other peoples.
Narcissistically approaching other peoples with universal theory, such as a “universal theory of mind” will not allow for other cultures to be understood properly and coordinated with, for them to be maintained, for the English to be maintained.
Nor will retreating back simply to “traditions”, particularly when “traditions” have been the likes of (((Christianity))).
It is a political replication of the relationship of genotype to phenotype.
No it isn’t. These are words that you misapply to things that I say because you approach everything I say as if it is coming from a hostile competitor trying to impose things, rather than as someone bringing tools of post modernity which are crafted exactly to facilitate our peoples defending, maintaining, fostering ourselves as discrete peoples among other peoples.
In its arising among the people, therefore, nationalism manifests as blood politics … instinct politics … brother politics.
Where that happens that’s fine, there is no interference from my part; and coinciding with your objectives, observing national boundaries and clearing the way of affectations will help to facilitate that kind of thing.
The mass of a people come into possession of it in the exact same way we, as confirmed nationalists, did.
Inasmuch as they do, there will be no interference from me. The interference is on your part.
We all made the journey of the instinct, which is a journey of the consciousness, a journey of emergence from a perfectly automatic identification with all that is given by the world to an intense and natural and sublime accord with our ownmost truth and relation.
That’s one story to tell, a wish to return to the innocence of mood signals. Very modernist indeed and you should speak for yourself rather than saying we all want something quite so primitive and debilitating in its prescription of how we are supposed to make our way in the world and deal with other people. The rest of us are more normal. We expect our orgasms and sublime moments, but don’t expect every day and every episode to be nothing but. You will bump up against people with logics of meaning and action that don’t always readily accord with yours; a narrative recontexting will be necessary. That’s reality.
This is what we are primarily interested in today.
Again, speak for yourself. That may be what you are solely interested in; and inquiry into instincts and natural behaviors of say, “the English” is expected, but such reductionism will not suffice.
This is the beginning of everything else.
Hermeneutics is not secondary, it is a necessary process for inquiring into cotemporaneous matters as we must, as we are not able to separate ourselves from ongoing interactive concerns.
Your wish that the world would stop, and interaction to cease in order for you to build your ontological foundation is as Cartesian as it gets, all for wont of the modicum of sophistication that would allow for a proper process of inquiry which recognizes the necessity to assimilate the co-evolutionary process of inquiry with close readings and broader orientation in reciprocal sequence as need be: it is no more unnatural or complex than allowing your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe – in fact, it will happen of its own accord if you won’t allow for it.
When you say “we” you are applying a classification.
You take a superficial modernist default handed down to you, i.e., that there are no categories, no need for them, only Lockeatine empiricism; you do that, as opposed to Heidegger’s suggestion that there are categories, as he observes in his post modern turn; you rather want to say there are no categories and no need to manage them, you will thus adopt categories superficially, by default.
Every single one of us understands this in our own experience.
We have unique entering points, but it is among people with common languages that strech well beyond mere instinct, rule structures that maintain broad legitimacies, narrowing obligations and prohibitions, narratives which open vistas from the vast and general trends to the particular and peculiar, etc.
We may not formulate it in that exact same way.
You are the one saying that “we” need a “theory of the mind” …
An individual might use one… some generic guidelines of “the English mind” might be identified, even general checkpoints of individual mindfulness, when an individual is being mindful, but to universalize a prerequisite for universal mind, as you do? You are the one who is absurd in you application of formula.
At different times in the European past such awakenings have been associated with very different nationalisms to modern ethnic nationalism. But always this part of it is the same, and it is here that Heidegger holds lessons for us.
Well, you think Nazi Germany was an awakening. I recognize it as something more like a collective allergic reaction.
This aspiration for a collective instinctual awakening will happen correctly instead, through a narrative that resonates with instincts and inspires imagination, pride and loyalty and awareness of the significance of our peoples among others.
I don’t know what “classification” is. Perhaps it has some role to play further downstream,
Not according to Heidegger, they are there from the start, we are thrown into them and where they resonate of being they are profound. Where they are merely accepted as applied against our being, against our classification, as you do with your superficial acceptance of Jewish definitions of left and right, they are estranging.
though I did not see much sign of complex academic adumbrations in the Brexit campaign or in Trump’s election campaign.
Did you get that from Lawrence’s article? It was so stupid that I didn’t even see the need to comment on it. Talk about going with Jewish categorization.
BTW: complex and adumbration is a bit of an oxymoron.
Furthermore, I neither said that things have to be complicated or uncomplicated. You are imputing unnecessary complexity to me as a means of your habitual contentiousness. That’s all.
So I doubt it. But one should try to be positive about these things so perhaps we might allow that hermeneuticising academics could conceivably come up with something relevant to the development of a rounder nationalist politics, as the need arises.
Brexit would have come about through a combination of reasons (which are obvious), ranging from the obvious injustice and overwhelmingness of immigration to England to compelling narrative circulating among ordinary people – not the least of which would be Farage’s skill as a rhetorician on the floor of European Parliament.
But at the awakening, no.
Well the awakening. Again, you misunderstand hermeneutics when you act as if it does not include at one end empirical reality – as in being confronted by a swarthy gang in East London or hearing the Muslim call to prayer – in one’s home town!
* Yet another hermeneutic end would be to draw upon say, the ancient narratives of the English, a people who came to the island, blending a few particular kinds of European, galvanizing a language of their own, winning wars at great odds, having some set backs as in the case of the Battle of Hastings and its creating of a divisive ruling class.. perhaps to be overcome…however the story might go…
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 10 Oct 2017 04:39 | #
Which philosophy is more relevant to a struggle against impending extinction; a philosophy of balls (Nietzsche), or a philosophy of meditative navel-gazing (beta pussy Heidegger)?
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 10 Oct 2017 06:00 | #
I wouldn’t say that Heidegger properly understood is meditative navel gazing. Furthermore, his philosophy in many places is an extrapolation on Nietzsche. Both are good, neither is enough. Heidegger is the better and more useful.
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 10 Oct 2017 06:16 | #
If Heidegger wasn’t beta then why he have to settle for Jewish pussy? Lulz
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 10 Oct 2017 06:51 | #
He didn’t settle for it, he took it on the side. I’ll bet that at a certain age and under certain circumstances (i.e., if your world view wasn’t crystal clear and she was still young), if Hannah Arendt wanted to pay you a little homage that you might let her.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 11 Oct 2017 01:56 | #
Adding the sentences in bold, for further clarification of the significance of hermeneutics.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:51 | #
Whole peoples cannot perform an academic’s dance.
There is no dance. That is a word you jealously apply.
You say that you cannot pick and choose among Heidegger, you seem to imply that we cannot use these ‘fancy words’ but then turn around and say that “Dasein” is ok to talk about, but not hermeneutics.
This is characteristic of your absurd position toward academia.
The fact is, that people’s way of talking frequently has made its way down from academia – just as “narrative”, a fundamental aspect of hermeneutics, has now become a common way of talking.
In fact, a whole people can share a narrative of their peoplehood; that’s the idea, one of the important features of hermeneutics is that it facilitates broad coherence where the the arbitrary facticity of the empirical world does not.
Do you understand, even at the risk of your own intellectual irrelevance?
Irrelevance? This is a projection of yours as you attempt to re-apply modernist philosophy over two hundred years obsolete.
Do you understand that you are the best friend that the Jews ever had?
Hey, you White people, you don’t want any of that “intellectual stuff’, leave the thinking to the YKW”
This is the beginning of everything else.
Hermeneutics is not secondary, it is a necessary process for inquiring into cotemporaneous matters as we must, as we are not able to separate ourselves from ongoing interactive concerns.
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 11 Oct 2017 22:22 | #
I said, Daniel, that you can’t raid Heidegger for your academic project. You can’t pick out, say, “false Dasein”, de-systematise it, do some definitional violence to it, but leave the rest of the epistemology. You can advance the epistemology, as a form of truth, but you are not doing that.
There are other misconceptions in your attempted critique of what I am, in general, saying. First, you want to label my proposed model of the tri-partite Mind (as emergent form) as “psychologism”. Now, I am not a scholar, but I assume that you are joining the long queue of scholars attacking poor old John Locke for his epistemological theory, and hoping to rope me in while you are at it. To cut to the chase, I assume you are accusing me of aguing that the process of cognition has something to say about the nature (or, in Heideggerian terms, structure) of meaning; and since (again, in the Heideggerian scheme) we are looking only at human being, we “mean” here the meaning of being – which is Heidegger’s project, and which plainly does not admit of any reductionism.
Well, I answered the charge of psychologism at comment 9 above, on emergentism and the Korean gentleman’s trick with Descartes. You are substituting Locke, but the gist is the same, and the same rebuttal applies, thus:
As regards what Mind actually is, well, it is the functioning of the human brain in its cognitive aspect (the brain also has a regulatory aspect as well as a reproductive aspect). It can be modelled basically but quite straightforwardly just using its functional machinery. The neurological detail is not required. It is only necessary that the emerging model does not offend against that at any point, or it, too, ceases to have verity. The model is, therefore, not neurological itself, nor is it psychological. It is interpretative of the human experience and propositional and, therefore, essentially philosophical in character and in application to various philosophical issues, of which the human will is probably the one on which it most directly bears.
More generally, emergentism proves its relevance not because it resolves a false dichotomy but because it establishes the historical form of the life-process in all its manifestations, which necessarily include processes of change. It acknowledges functional order, energy and direction where Descartes saw only stasis and division. His dichotomy dissolves, and we are left with a new general rule.
Can you be more disciplined, please; and not reward yourself the latitude to repeat rebutted charges? Your points about Cartesianism and now Lockean cognition are answered in the negative. Let that be enough of them. But …
If you still cannot agree to stand down, I will devote a little time now to the question of identity and being, because this is another area you are seeking to exploit for your own purposes in this exchange.
My (surely perfectly commonplace) contention is that being, as the being of Beings, is a process itself: the raw life-process of natural entities whose sole possibility is to subsist, fleetingly, under physical law in Time and Place – or, more prosaically, “the world without, which is one of unknown and imminent but deadly threat as well as of life-sustaining opportunities” (see my comment at 6). “Being as life-process” is critical to a non-abitrary distinction with a state of mere existence, while holding firmly to the utilitarian rule that everything roots back to materiality, and not immateriality, not some pre-existing, generative ground of “is-ness”, not “ineffable spirit”. Such are metaphysical notions which lead directly into religious thinking, which, throughout Being and Time Heidegger himself was at pains to eschew, and at its end stating this:
Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the contrary, starts with the “concretion” of factically thrown existence itself in order to unveil temporality as that which makes existence possible.
But even with such clarifying measures, if not religious thinking, then what CC calls “meditative navel-gazing” is always lurking near, ready to swallow up the unwary – not least because the isolated nature of thinking, and of cognition generally, leads us to frame that natural, subsistent entity, thrown into Time and Place, principally in singular terms and as a potentially solipsistic, suffering Jesus-identity nailed to the cosmic cross, or perhaps as the Tom Hanks character from Cast Away, separated from the constructed “Wilson” and nailed on his cross:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afiuJ2tsoVA
This is just the human condition, and it has nothing to do with Cartesianism. It does not, for example, militate that the entity cannot be plural. We could make a dual model of the plural in the form of a native people and an armed aggressor group at its door. Each has a being which is not the being of its individuals or even the sum of the being of its individuals, precisely because these individuals are fitted in their respective groups. That fitting is by relation, and by non-relation; and both hold urgent implications for epistemological enquiry of the one by the other, along the lines of threat ↔ obstacle. This shows that identity is in relation even in that Sibelian moment of a “beseeching of life’s fate in death”. In this respect the plural does imply some loss of focal power. But that is not to say that it is reductive in any way. The individual beings as group-being have other possibilities for being in their common endeavour. Further, just as identity is always in relation, being as such is always contextual, always “of” and tending to “in kind”. From the Sibelius article:
For it needs to be said to every nationalist approaching Heidegger with doubts about his value to our politics, that while we necessarily exist and perceive as individuals nevertheless we only do so nature to nature. Ours is a being disclosed not only in its being with other beings, but in its ownself’s relationship of kind … of a given, distinct pattern or line; and, further, a being which is most at one, most beautious and fitted when it is … in … kind.
I will go further and state that if that oneness is relation, that beauty is love – the much-remarked upon void in Heidegger’s work. It’s a shortcoming which seems to me to be inevitable and entirely appropriate to someone who focussed so singularly and relentlessly on pure thinking. It seems to have sounded a bell that rings on among Heidegger scholars. There are consequences, most visible as abstractions intensify. You quote Sheehan:
In other words, time is a characteristic of human existence.
So, it takes it out of the cosmos and puts it into the realm of human existence. Time occurs only with the human being, Aristotle, Augustin and Plotinus would agree to that.
But would any physicist or mathematician agree? Properly speaking, by its relativity Time dilates with movement. But relativity, whilst it certainly accords a unique subjectivity to the observer of it, does not imply that Time itself is dependent for its own existence upon the human observer. It is a mechanical process. Notwithstanding the enduring difficulties of finding a functioning definition for it, Time is a condition for human existence, not a condition of it. Time cannot be a literal characteristic of human existence, therefore. But the way we observe it is, and also the way we perceive it as a divided entity. The concept of eternity, for example, is uniquely human.
But Sheehan doubles down when he says:
And time, he says, he says this in 1949, he says this in the Logic book that I translated, time is only a preliminary way of saying alethia – openness; unclosedness; disclosure; which is something that is the primary determinant of human being.
Well, I do not go along with this. Yes, our capacity to order the Time process, in all its unknowableness, as temporality is inherent to our being as human beings. Yes, our Darwinian condition – a pre-condition – of existing for the transmission of ever more suitable information in the form of DNA renders us, and all sentient beings, perpetual harvesters of the nature of things and discriminators of their meanings. Yes, there is a sense in which it can be said that a characteristic of “being there”, compromised as it ordinarily is (ie, in ordinary waking consciousness), is openness … as is interest (which overlaps with and, in my view, precedes “care” as the simple will to survive) … as is discrimination. But, in any case, all these things are distinct from one another. I do not see them merging together, and I do not see any of them as “the primary determinant of human being”. Human nature is the primary determinant of human being. There is just no need to mystify it as Sheehan and, possibly Heidegger, does. Indeed, if all these fine and respected scholars looked to the nature of the world more and its meanings less, they might produce less convoluted statements.
What I also see, I think, is the practical limitation of the intellectual function as it strives to penetrate further and further towards what the vestigially Catholic Heidegger termed the onto-theological. It is a realm which Mind properly penetrates in the functional harmony of a presence which is not got by thought alone, but by the exercise of the attention. It is a realm I am content to give up to speculation, at least for the time being (so to speak). It is the realm situated to the right of presence in my ontological model:
PRESENCE → non-ascription of identity → self-annihilation → unalloyed Being
I will not yield any ground to you in this exchange, Daniel. You are welcome to your tool-kits and faux-circles and learned techniques. I have spent my intellectual life doing parkour – of necessity, I admit. But that’s how I like it.
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 11 Oct 2017 23:32 | #
Heidegger was also a literal cuckold. Heidegger’s wife cheated on him and gave birth to a son that was not his genetic progeny. Lulz. What a fucking loser!
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 12 Oct 2017 04:24 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 11 Oct 2017 17:22 | #
I said, Daniel, that you can’t raid Heidegger for your academic project.
And I said that I don’t do that. Furthermore, I observe that the charge is hypocritical, as you reject parts of Heidegger that do not suit your epistemological blunder.
The world and interaction, social interaction are supposed to stop to suit it as opposed to taking Heidegger’s very means to deal with it.
Your puerile autobiography calls for me to be your academic foil, applying mere academic concepts to reality, but that “assessment” is no assessment, it is a reflection of the fact that you do not so much as read, let alone bother to apply concepts the significance of which I make plain.
You can’t pick out, say, “false Dasein”, de-systematise it, do some definitional violence to it, but leave the rest of the epistemology.
I don’t do that.
You can advance the epistemology, as a form of truth, but you are not doing that.
Actually, I am advancing the epistemology, but not in an aspect that you can be bothered to understand.
There are other misconceptions in your attempted critique of what I am, in general, saying.
I am not usually addressing what you are saying. But I can say that all you ever do is misrepresent what I say with straw men.
You are absurdly contentious.
First, you want to label my proposed model of the tri-partite Mind (as emergent form) as “psychologism”.
It probably is a psychologism.
Now, I am not a scholar,
Modest, you are.
but I assume that you are joining the long queue of scholars attacking poor old John Locke for his epistemological theory, and hoping to rope me in while you are at it.
It is your conceit to think that my concern is to defeat you.
Vain competition is your thing, it’s your problem.
I am after the most useful and proper theory as tooled for our cause.
To cut to the chase, I assume you are accusing me of aguing that the process of cognition has something to say about the nature (or, in Heideggerian terms, structure) of meaning;
No I am not saying that.
and since (again, in the Heideggerian scheme) we are looking only at human being, we “mean” here the meaning of being – which is Heidegger’s project, and which plainly does not admit of any reductionism.
Well, I answered the charge of psychologism at comment 9 above, on emergentism and the Korean gentleman’s trick with Descartes.
You are substituting Locke, but the gist is the same, and the same rebuttal applies, thus:
I am not substituting Locke. This is yours and Bowery’s philosophical incompetence revealing itself by committee.
In your STEM predilection’s rigidity, you try to locate and reduce what I am saying to one singular problem in a tightly causal circuit.
I.e., as simply an attack on yours and Bowery’s wish to “reboot the enlightenment” and a Lockeatine project in particular.
I would have thought you would listen to Graham Lister where he said that “the best scientists are hermeneuticists” – it’s true.
As regards what Mind actually is, well, it is the functioning of the human brain in its cognitive aspect (the brain also has a regulatory aspect as well as a reproductive aspect). It can be modelled basically but quite straightforwardly just using its functional machinery. The neurological detail is not required.
You can have a theory of mind and it may even be useful to suggest this routine is what people do when their mind is functioning properly at a basic level – for just about all people (quite simply) and specifically, where it is playing its part maintaining individual and systemic function; on top of that, beyond mere utility, displaying the profundity of kind. A theory of “mind” could have some utility and standing, but yours is shallow and philosophically lame.
Rather, mind, group and nature is a necessary unity.
The part in maintaining our system would be the most important aspect for the defense of nationalism. Where you do not falsely impute antagonism on my part to that feature of homeostasis when it does emerge, you do not emphasize it, but rather assume that it is more assured (“there can be no other”) than it is.
It is only necessary that the emerging model does not offend against that at any point, or it, too, ceases to have verity. The model is, therefore, not neurological itself, nor is it psychological. It is interpretative of the human experience and propositional and, therefore, essentially philosophical in character and in application to various philosophical issues, of which the human will is probably the one on which it most directly bears.
Go for it.
More generally, emergentism proves its relevance not because it resolves a false dichotomy but because it establishes the historical form of the life-process in all its manifestations, which necessarily include processes of change. It acknowledges functional order, energy and direction where Descartes saw only stasis and division. His dichotomy dissolves, and we are left with a new general rule.
That’s fine, so along as it is not lineal and divorced from interaction as you seem to hope it should be – that is where you are Cartesian. Cartesianism uncorrected with hermeneutics would take us away from the relevance of application to the relative interests of our particular peoples.
Can you be more disciplined, please; and not reward yourself the latitude to repeat rebutted charges?
This is a projection, as usual. You are CONSTANTLY contending against rebutted charges.
Your contention that I am in danger of intellectual irrelevance is a projection – it is rather you (and your committee member Bowery) who endanger yourself with irrelevance as you try to resurrect the enlightenment, or the Tractatus.
Your points about Cartesianism and now Lockean cognition are answered in the negative. Let that be enough of them. But …
Absolutely not. Because I do not apply them where they should not be applied.
You and Bowery are simply so egotistical and misplaced in your competitiveness, that you cannot handle the fact that a critique of the epistemological blunder of Descates and Locke is absolutely relevant to the philosophy of our cause.
And the shame of it is that you would place your egos above theoretical requirements of our cause.
It is against those errors that I compete, whereas you and Bowery compete against those who threaten your ego; and you try to render them redundant – these others, in this case I (viz., your straw man misrepresentations of me), am what is “the error’ which needs to be isolated and replaced as the problem in the errant circuit of the system” – you do that, rather than attend to theoretical error of social systemic epistemology.
I told you that Bowery has desperately tried to order me to “stay far away from DesCartes” because I am “demoralizing our people”
I am not going to do that and the reasons why would be plain if you would bother to read anything that I’ve said, even in the above post and thread.
Graham Lister understood what I was saying and he (correctly) mocked Bowery as “John Locke in outer space.”
Because your gargantuan ego was hurt in its place as ‘the only important mind, whereas all else are redundant’, you are particularly prone to attack ideas more important than, well – that – is.
That is why you wound up opting for Bowery in his ultimatum, because he was more useful for your ego project – whereas Lister, though more correct, was not convenient to you, as he appreciated what I was saying.
As you should too (should have a long time ago: you’ve needlessly wasted much of our time and effort), recognizing that it can encompass what you want to do with your ontology and emergentism focus, if you ever, would finally be bothered to understand (to read) what I say.
And its a shame that you opted to push Lister away because philosophically, Lister was in some important ways, better and more relevant than Bowery.
If you still cannot agree to stand down,
Stand down? That’s what I mean. Fuck off. Everything is a personal competition with you guys, whereas I am after proper theory.
I will devote a little time now to the question of identity and being, because this is another area you are seeking to exploit for your own purposes in this exchange.
Again, a projection. I don’t seek to exploit for MY purposes. That is what YOU DO.
My (surely perfectly commonplace) contention is that being, as the being of Beings, is a process itself: the raw life-process of natural entities whose sole possibility is to subsist, fleetingly, under physical law in Time and Place – or, more prosaically, “the world without, which is one of unknown and imminent but deadly threat as well as of life-sustaining opportunities” (see my comment at 6). “Being as life-process” is critical to a non-abitrary distinction with a state of mere existence, while holding firmly to the utilitarian rule that everything roots back to materiality, and not immateriality, not some pre-existing, generative ground of “is-ness”, not “ineffable spirit”. Such are metaphysical notions which lead directly into religious thinking, which, throughout Being and Time Heidegger himself was at pains to eschew, and at its end stating this:
Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the contrary, starts with the “concretion” of factically thrown existence itself in order to unveil temporality as that which makes existence possible.
Ok, where I have not said as much, there’s nothing there that contradicts what I bring to bear.
But even with such clarifying measures, if not religious thinking, then what CC calls “meditative navel-gazing” is always lurking near, ready to swallow up the unwary – not least because the isolated nature of thinking, and of cognition generally, leads us to frame that natural, subsistent entity, thrown into Time and Place, principally in singular terms and as a potentially solipsistic, suffering Jesus-identity nailed to the cosmic cross
That is a danger that you are susceptible to indeed.
, or perhaps as the Tom Hanks character from Cast Away, separated from the constructed “Wilson” and nailed on his cross:
I’ll have a look at the video later. I find it hard to watch Tom Hanks – something about his face and his place in hymiewood puts me off.
This is just the human condition, and it has nothing to do with Cartesianism.
The human condition is not JUST that, this is just you trying to reduce things and render signficant contributions of others redundant because they threaten your gargantuan ego – you are that conceited that you would place the place of your ego as singularly important before the well being of the cause.
Grow the fuck up GW.
It does not, for example, militate that the entity cannot be plural. We could make a dual model of the plural in the form of a native people and an armed aggressor group at its door.
I didn’t say that we could not have a dual model or pluralistic model. You refuse to understand what is being done with the critique of Cartesianism and why it is important, because it threatens your puerile ego.
Each has a being which is not the being of its individuals or even the sum of the being of its individuals, precisely because these individuals are fitted in their respective groups.
Yeah, there is systemic being.
That fitting is by relation, and by non-relation; and both hold urgent implications for epistemological enquiry of the one by the other, along the lines of threat ↔ obstacle. This shows that identity is in relation even in that Sibelian moment of a “beseeching of life’s fate in death”. In this respect the plural does imply some loss of focal power.
One can use dichotomies provisionally and then bring ones self out of false dichotomy, destructive, mechanistic, unaccountable, anti social myopic focus to negotiate a more sophisticated notion of coherence yes. That’s what the hermeneutic process is conceived to encourage.
It is a process to overcome linear rigidity and the Cartesian anxiety which would have one give horrific bum steers against important ideas as if they are not important but that we must put all contemporaneous and coevolutionary matters, philosophically essential matters aside to somehow make the world stop in the retardation of your impervious ontology project.
But that is not to say that it is reductive in any way. The individual beings as group-being have other possibilities for being in their common endeavour. Further, just as identity is always in relation, being as such is always contextual, always “of” and tending to “in kind”. From the Sibelius article:
For it needs to be said to every nationalist approaching Heidegger with doubts about his value to our politics, that while we necessarily exist and perceive as individuals nevertheless we only do so nature to nature.
That depends upon what you mean by “nature.”
When you suggest that Jordan and Paglia are going to critique “post modernity” for us, one cannot simply trust in your capacity to define.
Ours is a being disclosed not only in its being with other beings, but in its ownself’s relationship of kind … of a given, distinct pattern or line; and, further, a being which is most at one, most beautious and fitted when it is … in … kind.
Well, lets hope so, but there are an awful lot of mudsharks around, plenty of English ones, who don’t agree with you.
And it is clear that your ontology project is neither enough nor a singular priority. Worse, your misrepresenting as trivial and antagonistic ideas and concepts which are conceived to facilitate the being of distinct peoples is a vast disservice that you have performed for more than five years now.
Stop it.
I will go further and state that if that oneness is relation, that beauty is love – the much-remarked upon void in Heidegger’s work.
And some mudsharks will claim affinity enough.
It’s a shortcoming which seems to me to be inevitable and entirely appropriate to someone who focussed so singularly and relentlessly on pure thinking. It seems to have sounded a bell that rings on among Heidegger scholars. There are consequences, most visible as abstractions intensify.
The shortcoming was apparently derivative of his phenomenological, therefore overly subjective perspective. That was expressed in the selfishness and myopia of ownmost being toward death. He was not relational, social, interactive enough in his project; though he was, in his own clunky way, trying to move theoria into praxis.
You quote Sheehan:
I quoted him, I did not say that I agreed with all of his assessments.
In other words, time is a characteristic of human existence.
So, it takes it out of the cosmos and puts it into the realm of human existence. Time occurs only with the human being, Aristotle, Augustin and Plotinus would agree to that.But would any physicist or mathematician agree? Properly speaking, by its relativity Time dilates with movement. But relativity, whilst it certainly accords a unique subjectivity to the observer of it, does not imply that Time itself is dependent for its own existence upon the human observer. It is a mechanical process. Notwithstanding the enduring difficulties of finding a functioning definition for it, Time is a condition for human existence, not a condition of it. Time cannot be a literal characteristic of human existence, therefore. But the way we observe it is, and also the way we perceive it as a divided entity. The concept of eternity, for example, is uniquely human.
But Sheehan doubles down when he says:
And time, he says, he says this in 1949, he says this in the Logic book that I translated, time is only a preliminary way of saying alethia – openness; unclosedness; disclosure; which is something that is the primary determinant of human being.
Well, I do not go along with this.
Neither do I.
Yes, our capacity to order the Time process, in all its unknowableness, as temporality is inherent to our being as human beings. Yes, our Darwinian condition – a pre-condition – of existing for the transmission of ever more suitable information in the form of DNA renders us, and all sentient beings, perpetual harvesters of the nature of things and discriminators of their meanings. Yes, there is a sense in which it can be said that a characteristic of “being there”, compromised as it ordinarily is (ie, in ordinary waking consciousness), is openness … as is interest (which overlaps with and, in my view, precedes “care” as the simple will to survive) … as is discrimination. But, in any case, all these things are distinct from one another. I do not see them merging together, and I do not see any of them as “the primary determinant of human being”. Human nature is the primary determinant of human being. There is just no need to mystify it as Sheehan and, possibly Heidegger, does. Indeed, if all these fine and respected scholars looked to the nature of the world more and its meanings less, they might produce less convoluted statements.
What I also see, I think, is the practical limitation of the intellectual function as it strives to penetrate further and further towards what the vestigially Catholic Heidegger termed the onto-theological. It is a realm which Mind properly penetrates in the functional harmony of a presence which is not got by thought alone, but by the exercise of the attention. It is a realm I am content to give up to speculation, at least for the time being (so to speak). It is the realm situated to the right of presence in my ontological model:
PRESENCE → non-ascription of identity → self-annihilation → unalloyed Being
I will not yield any ground to you in this exchange, Daniel. You are welcome to your tool-kits and faux-circles and learned techniques. I have spent my intellectual life doing parkour – of necessity, I admit. But that’s how I like it.
I will not yield ground to you either, GW. I know that you are such a baby that you will continue to try to belittle even very important ideas (“tool-kits and faux-circles”) that I bring forth, mattering not to you that they were and are conceived from the onset to facilitate the same concerns that you have, for your/our discreet peoples, are not obstructive or contentious of emergence, our significance beyond mere utility, only that they threaten your gargantuan, unmerited ego, the conentiousness of which evolved in and for the business world (where it makes good sense to besmirch and devalue your “competitor’s” product, while trying to portray your own product as solely important), not honest philosophical purpose; where you would recognize a collaborator if you weren’t blinded by the shadow of your own gargantuan ego from seeing what I say and its significance.
Don’t try to tell me not to place DesCartes and Locke as marking a crucial point in philosophical / epistemological blunder – with disastrous implications for our people to be overcome by the tool kit and hermeneutic circle of post modernity, lest you continue to not only render yourself philosophically irrelevant, but indeed the image of a fool so enamored of his own ego that he would place that before the well being and the being indeed of our peoples; and is thus rightfully to be moved aside as a vain obstruction.
You can shut up and re-read the post. If you were to ever read it (correctly) and stop interposing your straw men, you would see that it is not in competition or antagonism to ethnonationalism and its requirements, not in competition with being, emergentism nor the predilection to attend to the scientific and empirical requirements. Maybe it will finally sink through your skull.
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 12 Oct 2017 16:12 | #
CC asks: Which philosophy is more relevant to a struggle against impending extinction; a philosophy of balls (Nietzsche), or a philosophy of meditative navel-gazing (beta pussy Heidegger)?
Heidegger wrote a rather weight tome that re-assigned Nietzsche to the nihilist historical shift he – Nietzsche – thought he was agitating to end. Heidegger showed that Nietzsche’s implicit assumptions were drawn from the old lines of metaphysical thought, and so he was not actually definitively breaking with them at all. He was mediating and re-presenting them. Heidegger, meanwhile, serially demonstrated that his quest for a new foundation for meaning was historiographically novel, and its attitude towards that historiography revolutionary.
So that isn’t the best basis for making the argument that Nietzschean thought is a “philosophy of balls” and Heideggerian thought is all solipsistic navel-gazing. It may be that, as is so often the case in life, the swaggering Nietschzean bully is quickly bested by the authentic fighting man:
Posted by “Pestering” makes the example easy on Thu, 12 Oct 2017 16:58 | #
See here
Note: I’ve tidied that comment up a bit as need be – my power went off as I was nearing completion and correction of the comment.
It needed an example of a more concrete act in response to a clear violation of social norms, i.e., “Pestering girls at a bar” = bouncers are entitled to remove any man, even Africans in PC circumstance.
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 14 Oct 2017 15:10 | #
In other words, it may seem natural for a gold fish to mate with a gold fish in a gold fish bowl.
But thrown up against the stresses of various challengers by modernity’s rupture of classification, it may seem quite natural to try to adapt by merging with other kinds in preparation for contingencies.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 10:56 | #
More on the notion Daniel reports above that Time is another way of saying Alethea (the meaning of which Heidegger shifted from “truth” to meaning), and this is what being itself is … not what being means even, but what it actually is.
Sheehan is saying::
And he [ie, Heidegger] defines time as the need to make things meaningfully present, so he focuses on the present moment of time. Anyway, he does this by a close and I must say difficult analysis of Kantian schematism, which turned out to be the first draft of his 1929 book on Kant.
And in the whole book, he anticipates what he would later say, namely that time is only a stand in for alethia, incorrectly translated as truth.
So its an important text, it underlies a certain shift that’s taking place in the profession these days, I would call it a paradigm shift that’s settling in among the younger scholars, among the best graduate students as well among some of us oldies, the paradigm shift consisting-in and its clear from part two of this book that Heidegger interprets Being as meaning bedoitzonkite – so meaning, significance etc, is what he means by being; which is no surprise because being is always the meaningful presence of something to one, in the practical or theoretical order.
… he actually defines world as, the structure of world as bedoitzonkite, what goes on inside of world is bedoitund.
As he says, when things are discovered along with human being, that is to say when they’ve been understood, we say they have meaning.
So, really what he’s saying is that the human being is a hermeneut – that’s not an add-on to some sort of plain old existence. Our existence is the obligation, the need the thrownness into making sense of things …in fact, the first meaning of the word of Alethea is meaning, its not truth, as Heidegger points out; so if we’re embedded in hermeneutics and he is using the word bedoitzonkite, I think that we can actually retrieve from this plain old word being, we can retrieve the urgency that Heidegger feels are in your face – he says at on point in his first course after the war, the Great War, in February of 1919, he asks his students, what is it that you first encounter in your lived world? Is it things, is it objects, is it being? No, he says, its meaningful, that’s what’s in your face…all over the place, it’s coming at you. So, we don’t want to lose him to traditional ontology which just talks about the inner substance of things – no, we want to have him on this side of phenomenology as he himself insisted …and one way of constantly recognizing that is being in your face. Being is meaning.
First, I should point out that “the structure of the world” as bedoitzonkite”, according to Sheehan, is probably meant to be bedoitzonkiet, which translates as something very like bedrock. “What goes on in the world” as bedoitund is probably bedoitung, which translates as importance or significance. However, Sheehan states that it is bedoitzonkite which means meaning. So, that’s all rather odd for a famed translator of Heidegger from the original German.
Anyway, let’s quickly look at this claim that time is truth, truth is being, and being is meaning, which is the merry hermeneutic carousel which Sheehan wants us to clamber onboard. Will it bear the weight of a human being?
Well, let’s begin with the first clarification. “Being here/there” is not the whole of it. The cross we bear is that of Place as well as Time. Accordingly, the better formulation is “being here now”. But this is still incomplete. The whole sentence is: “I am here now”. Neither the actor “I” nor the action “am” is synonymous with the place and time. An action can be ascribed a cause or reason, or a function, a consequence, a state, and so forth. Its siting can be identified. Its duration can be measured. But it cannot be that site or that time.
No.2: For human beings to be hermeneuts in anything but a narrow and circular sense, as Sheehan is wont to claim, would require that (a) the very essence of the subject’s act of being here now is interpretative, and (b) that that is all there is, such that the whole human being is that or primarily that. Well, the why of cognition … the function of it … was resolved by Charles Darwin long ago on the chalk path at Downe House, such that it is subordinate to the subsistence of the organism, which itself is concordant with the transmission of its traits for fitness. Human beings are subsisters and transmitters. Simple hermeneuts do not and cannot exist, for cognition is part of the greater organic process.
No.3: To advance that last thought …
The question arises as to whether “I am here now” refers only to cognition, or whether it refers differently to other aspects of Mind and consciousness. There are senses in which there is “more” in Mind and consciousness than cognition. One, as referenced above, is that there is subsequent decision-making and action-taking. Decisions and actions are taken in the same totality of place and time (in which “I am”, because there is nothing else). However, the line of sight, so to speak, switches from its cognitive focus to the actor. This is the true “circle”, giving the phenomenon in the mind its sufficient truth for evolutionary purposes, and allowing the whole human enterprise to function.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 11:09 | #
Daniel, I do think it is very poor to respond to my comment that the image of the suffering Christ on the cross is an ontological figure for the human condition, to wit:
This is just the human condition, and it has nothing to do with Cartesianism.
with:
The human condition is not JUST that, this is just you trying to reduce things and render signficant contributions of others redundant because they threaten your gargantuan ego – you are that conceited that you would place the place of your ego as singularly important before the well being of the cause.
Grow the fuck up GW.
Grace under pressure is a virtue. Let us show it with style.
Speaking of pressure, besides the question of the utility of foundation, what is still standing of your critique?
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 12:56 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 12:09 | #
Daniel, I do think it is very poor to respond to my comment that the image of the suffering Christ on the cross is an ontological figure for the human condition, to wit:
This is just the human condition, and it has nothing to do with Cartesianism.
with:
The human condition is not JUST that, this is just you trying to reduce things and render significant contributions of others redundant because they threaten your gargantuan ego – you are that conceited that you would place the place of your ego as singularly important before the well being of the cause.
Grow the fuck up GW.
Grace under pressure is a virtue. Let us show it with style.
Speaking of pressure, besides the question of the utility of foundation, what is still standing of your critique?
Everything is standing of my critique. Everything.
And as far as my loss of temper goes, I’ve reflected on it and it has to do with your imperviousness and utter resistance to crucial theoretical ideas; this is going on years now.
You want to barge right through all I’ve said about the importance of getting the concept of post modernity right and proceed to say that we should interview Jordan Peterson because his discussion with Camille Paglia shows that his “critique of ‘post modernity” indicates that he is on our side.
It took all of two minutes to confirm what I already knew about Paglia, and to confirm what I suspected, that by means of this that the YKW would be pushing a distorted concept of ‘post modernity’ and an objectivist, rightist view against that straw man as it serves their interests.
You need to think out of the box, beyond the parameter of discourse that the Jews have set for you.
Think, GW.
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 13:00 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 11:56 | #
More on the notion Daniel reports above that Time is another way of saying Alethea (the meaning of which Heidegger shifted from “truth” to meaning), and this is what being itself is … not what being means even, but what it actually is.
Sheehan is saying:
I did not report this, that is a deliberate straw man misrepresentation of what I said.
I presented Sheehan’s position verbatim (and I was critical of it).
Please stop misrepresenting what I say – Ok? I was polite despite your persistent, dishonest misrepresentation of my words.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 11:56 | #
More on the notion Daniel reports above that Time is another way of saying Alethea (the meaning of which Heidegger shifted from “truth” to meaning), and this is what being itself is … not what being means even, but what it actually is.
Sheehan is saying::
Now, lets address the rest of your steaming pile that you will pretend represents what I say and “your victory over that” by contrast…
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 13:11 | #
All of it? Really? So what’s left of the eunochian shade, bereft of human context, which is this hermeneut? Do you actually believe in it?
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 13:55 | #
DanielS: Sheehan is saying:
Sheehan is saying, not me.
And he [ie, Heidegger] defines time as the need to make things meaningfully present, so he focuses on the present moment of time. Anyway, he does this by a close and I must say difficult analysis of Kantian schematism, which turned out to be the first draft of his 1929 book on Kant.
And in the whole book, he anticipates what he would later say, namely that time is only a stand in for alethia, incorrectly translated as truth.
So its an important text, it underlies a certain shift that’s taking place in the profession these days, I would call it a paradigm shift that’s settling in among the younger scholars, among the best graduate students as well among some of us oldies, the paradigm shift consisting-in and its clear from part two of this book that Heidegger interprets Being as meaning bedoitzonkite – so meaning, significance etc, is what he means by being; which is no surprise because being is always the meaningful presence of something to one, in the practical or theoretical order.
… he actually defines world as, the structure of world as bedoitzonkite, what goes on inside of world is bedoitund.
As he says, when things are discovered along with human being, that is to say when they’ve been understood, we say they have meaning.
DanielS: And I said before that I am more in agreement with Robert Harrison, that thrownness and respect for our inherited position is more integral to the hermeneutic circle than Sheehan is arguing; I have indicated many times, that hermeneutics does not divorce meaning and coherence from factual reality (if it did, it would be Cartesian).
Sheehan continues: So, really what he’s saying is that the human being is a hermeneut – that’s not an add-on to some sort of plain old existence. Our existence is the obligation, the need for the thrownness into making sense of things …in fact, the first meaning of the word of Alethea is meaning, its not truth, as Heidegger points out; so if we’re embedded in hermeneutics and he is using the word bedoitzonkite, I think that we can actually retrieve from this plain old word being, we can retrieve the urgency that Heidegger feels are in your face – he says at on point in his first course after the war, the Great War, in February of 1919, he asks his students, what is it that you first encounter in your lived world? Is it things, is it objects, is it being? No, he says, its meaningful, that’s what’s in your face…all over the place, it’s coming at you. So, we don’t want to lose him to traditional ontology which just talks about the inner substance of things – no, we want to have him on this side of phenomenology as he himself insisted …and one way of constantly recognizing that is being in your face. Being is meaning.
DanielS: Sheehan is overstating “the need to make sense of things that thrownness requires of us
“the need for the thrownness into making sense of things”
by his saying that “Being is meaning”
What he should be saying is that given our throwness, the first requirement of being, authentic being, is coherence.
Hermeneutics facilitates that in a way that fixation on mere empiricism or principles does not when confronted with social and all reality.
GW: First, I should point out that “the structure of the world” as bedoitzonkite”, according to Sheehan, is probably meant to be bedoitzonkiet, which translates as something very like bedrock. “What goes on in the world” as bedoitund is probably bedoitung, which translates as importance or significance. However, Sheehan states that it is bedoitzonkite which means meaning. So, that’s all rather odd for a famed translator of Heidegger from the original German.
DanielS: Well, you would want it to be bedrock with your foundational thing. But Heidegger rejected Kant’s quest for the foundational as it was still “Cartesian” (his words)
GW: Anyway, let’s quickly look at this claim that time is truth, truth is being, and being is meaning, which is the merry hermeneutic carousel which Sheehan wants us to clamber onboard.
No, lets not look at it because I’ve already stated that I am not on board, and especially not with your vain attempt to trivialize the profound concern of hermeneutics, simply because it threatens your vanity.
GW: Will it bear the weight of a human being?
Sheehan’s interpretation of Heidegger will not. But hermeneutics proper will because it is flexible yet resilient and requires honesty.
GW: Well, let’s begin with the first clarification. “Being here/there” is not the whole of it. The cross we bear is that of Place as well as Time. Accordingly, the better formulation is “being here now”. But this is still incomplete.
DanielS: Thank goodness, because I was done with pop psychology, this Gestalt Psychology type stuff – “awareness of the here and now” is supposed to be so all important – years ago.
Talk about superficial and worthless for our cause.
GW: The whole sentence is: “I am here now”. Neither the actor “I” nor the action “am” is synonymous with the place and time. An action can be ascribed a cause or reason, or a function, a consequence, a state, and so forth. Its siting can be identified. Its duration can be measured. But it cannot be that site or that time.
DanielS: Fine. BTW, GW, Being as emergence in significant guidance of one’s interests and to stave off inauthenticity can be recognized as extremely important.
GW: No.2: For human beings to be hermeneuts in anything but a narrow and circular sense, as Sheehan is wont to claim, would require that (a) the very essence of the subject’s act of being here now is interpretative,
Daniels Not at all. This is a reflection of your shallow understanding of hermeneutics, the refusal to understand that it is meant to incorporate respect for the pre-verbal, empirical end of “the circle.”
It is similar to just about all of your “critiques” – you depend upon a shallow and misrepresentive version of concepts.
As in the case of social constructionism – that if you have to put the word “mere” before social construct, then it is not true to the anti Cartesian mandate of social constructionism. That at one end we can propose constructs which, if they are that crazy, will be thwarted by reality if not others; while at the other end, we have some leeway to assign how brute facts count for us, provided we still have life, still have being with others.
GW: and (b) that that is all there is, such that the whole human being is that or primarily that. Well, the why of cognition … the function of it … was resolved by Charles Darwin long ago on the chalk path at Downe House, such that it is subordinate to the subsistence of the organism, which itself is concordant with the transmission of its traits for fitness. Human beings are subsisters and transmitters. Simple hermeneuts do not and cannot exist, for cognition is part of the greater organic process.
No.3: To advance that last thought …
The question arises as to whether “I am here now” refers only to cognition, or whether it refers differently to other aspects of Mind and consciousness. There are senses in which there is “more” in Mind and consciousness than cognition. One, as referenced above, is that there is subsequent decision-making and action-taking. Decisions and actions are taken in the same totality of place and time (in which “I am”, because there is nothing else). However, the line of sight, so to speak, switches from its cognitive focus to the actor. This is the true “circle”, giving the phenomenon in the mind its sufficient truth for evolutionary purposes, and allowing the whole human enterprise to function.
DanielS: Again, you are misrepresenting hermeneutics by means of Sheehan and at the same time you are doing a disservice to emergentism by being so reductionist.
In our peoplehood, in our system, the requirement to survive is essential of being, no doubt.
However, we as individuals and as a group, are not just that – we manifest, for example a need to make life more tolerable and comfortable if not enjoyable and inspirational – some people and some functions have evolved to serve that function which is not merely and directly about survival. Even EO Wilson acknowledges that you are going to have your childless Michelangelos.
This is manifestation of authentic, emergent being, i.e., with the full social expression of the system.
There is a place for elevating the significance of your insistence upon emergence and of being as a matter of survival; but until you can get past your fixation on the individual point of view, individual survival which you share somewhat with Heidegger (at times) and phenomenology, your analysis will be mostly counterproductive. The hermeneutic circle is meant to overcome that Cartesian error and to handle the full, non reductionist, breadth of our concerns and requirements of our peoplehood.
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 20:16 | #
GW, do you think beta pussy Heidegger would have been less inclined to take being cucked like a feckless punk if he had more will to power?
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 21:01 | #
If you don’t agree with very much that Sheehan says why on earth are you quoting him at such length? What does he say that you actually agree with?
Being as emergence in significant guidance of one’s interests and to stave off inauthenticity can be recognized as extremely important.
You really must think more methodologically before putting a toe in these waters. If I was minded to, I could make like a crocodile and bite it off. I’m not, but I think you should still avoid using words as labels, which isn’t that much more substantive than all the crass attempted put-downs and foul-mouthed insults – which, I repeat, are very poor and really need to end.
For the record, the organism as Nature precedes interest. But interest precedes subsistence, and only then do we arrive at being as we can practically formulate it. Were it ordered otherwise, there would only be the being of the most primitive and transient form of RNA. Or there would be a deity to wave a hand over it all and make it right, of course. You decide.
In the Salterian former case, interest itself does not “emerge” from being. To be pedantic, it is party to the natural constitution which informs what the Heidegger of 1927 designated Dasein, to which the nature of the being of other beings discloses itself, and is processed as a particular meaning which already expresses it (ie, interest).
Inauthenticity is too subtle and pervasive to be “staved off”. I won’t talk about how shallow that expectation is. But just making stuff up as you go does not massively advance your general case. If you are going to engage on a substantive basis you cannot rely on authorities who you don’t actually agree with. You can’t just make stuff up. You can’t make a valid contribution by using trigger-words like “Cartesian”. You can’t get away with content-free declarations of how “shallow” my contribution is. You won’t impress by having a melt-down.
All this needs to end, and you must engage substantively.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 21:33 | #
The hermeneutic circle is meant to overcome that Cartesian error and to handle the full, non reductionist, breadth of our concerns and requirements of our peoplehood.
But who is the recipient of this academic largesse?
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 21:37 | #
GW, do you think beta pussy Heidegger would have been less inclined to take being cucked like a feckless punk if he had more will to power?
Well, he had the moxie to provoke the NSDAP gangsters, and get himself expelled. Ever done anything that courageous yourself, CC?
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 23:03 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 22:33 | #
The hermeneutic circle is meant to overcome that Cartesian error and to handle the full, non reductionist, breadth of our concerns and requirements of our peoplehood.
But who is the recipient of this academic largesse?
“Largess” is just another jealous smear of a good concept. While I have discussed the fact that academia is often a means for the YKW’s academic big business of selling talk – and pseudo hermeneutics has been a means for that abuse – anybody can be the beneficiary of hermeneutic’s proper use, but especially Europeans can, because it can encompass our excellence in rigor and imagination.
Typically, you are reacting to the abuse of the concept.
Your attack on an idea is literally becoming a barometer of merit. There is something sociopathic about the way that you attack good and important ideas.
Its beyond stealing candy from a baby, it’s like sadistically depriving people of the very nutrients that they need.
It seems your goal is not to arrive at accuracy, but to compete and humiliate – to destroy the best and most important offerings being brought.
While you call for (what you portray as) my gratuitous insults to end, you have got to look at the way you have been treating me and what I say. You are very insulting and inconsiderate. It is rare that you suspend disbelief and consider that an idea is cooperatively intended and has been carefully considered. It is sadistic and demented. I recognized that you would not change with decency. The only way for me to signal to onlookers that you are continually burying important ideas with nonsensical contentiousness is to continually at the same time blast through it with marked signals.
Where I do indeed connect with a good point that you have – viz., in holding fast to the significance of emergence – you persist in treating it (in Bowery’s syle) as an occasion for competition.
Whereas he tried to order me to “stay far away from using the term Cartesian” which would have been a horrific bum steer if I had obeyed it …you try to coerce me to “avoid using words as labels and tell me that I need to be more methodical.”
I am deliberate in how I use words – in fact, I am impressed at how well my terminological system holds up – while your general disposition is insulting from the get go and a gratuitous obstruction; hence the mirror.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 15 Oct 2017 16:01 | #
If you don’t agree with very much that Sheehan says why on earth are you quoting him at such length? What does he say that you actually agree with?
As I have already said, because (while his emphasis goes off the mark) his discussion with Harrison nicely (clearly) outlines Heidegger’s basic concerns in Being and Time.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:14 | #
For the record, the organism as Nature precedes interest.
Obviously, and that’s why we take it for granted and, as people concerned with race, recognize that it is not necessarily going to maintain our more humanly natural concern for the homeostasis of race.
But interest precedes subsistence,
In some ways and at some times.
and only then do we arrive at being as we can practically formulate it.
Were it ordered otherwise, there would only be the being of the most primitive and transient form of RNA. Or there would be a deity to wave a hand over it all and make it right, of course. You decide.
If its formulated according to our relative (the relational, and relative, serving also to indicate family, cousins and those closely related but not exactly cousins, is a deliberate use – take note) interests as a precedent, then I agree and that is what I am already doing. I’ve already decided.
But it is not far removed from a cheap trick that Bowery used to deploy – to take something that I said, and then say that he is saying it and he’s going to tell me about it.
In the Salterian former case, interest itself does not “emerge” from being. To be pedantic, it is party to the natural constitution which informs what the Heidegger of 1927 designated Dasein, to which the nature of the being of other beings discloses itself, and is processed as a particular meaning which already expresses it (ie, interest).
Well put, you are indicating where Heidegger was showing how Dasein takes us back into (or keeps us in) interaction, involvement into relational concern and out of Cartesian forgottenness – whether the third person they or a point, in the first person I.
Inauthenticity is too subtle and pervasive to be “staved off”.
That’s nit picking. Maybe there can be another word, but it is hardly an egregious usage.
I won’t talk about how shallow that expectation is. But just making stuff up as you go does not massively advance your general case.
Nice try. Here we are back at your insults. Ridiculous. Rather than taking it as occasion to shape and craft the general idea, you take it as an opportunity for competition and insult. Typical of you.
If you are going to engage on a substantive basis you cannot rely on authorities who you don’t actually agree with.
I have already answered this. Sheehan’s and Harrison’s discussion lays out (outlines) the fundamentals of Heidegger’s terminology very well. That is why it is very useful. And because of that, it is easy to see where Sheehan goes wrong (in my estimation).
You can’t just make stuff up.
I don’t just make stuff up. You constantly apply straw men.
You can’t make a valid contribution by using trigger-words like “Cartesian”.
I already have, and if it troubles yours and Bowery’s scientistic egos that’s your problem. It is you who needs a philosophical update by 200 some odd years.
You can’t get away with content-free declarations of how “shallow” my contribution is.
It’s not content free. Articulating what is already basically known and accepted of science – evolution – and trying to replace philosophy with just that, particularly when dealing with the social matter of racial maintenance, with even an eloquent expression of scientific fact sheered of praxis, is scientism – that is philosophically shallow.
You won’t impress by having a melt-down.
I am not trying to impress, I move toward theoretical accuracy, and where I have indicated important matters, and you persistently try to bury it with denial and BS, then I must blast through so that you do not bury it, so that people are not put to sleep in thinking that this is a new angle by you, as if you are indeed just putting aside “unimportant matters”, as if you have paid attention to what I’ve said (because you haven’t) and the audience should not pay attention to what I have said recently or a while back.
All this needs to end, and you must engage substantively.
Your insults, ignoring what I say and insulting persistence in replacing what I say with straw men as if I have provided “nothing of substance” needs to end.
That is an egregious insult. You are trying to say that there is nothing important that I am saying. That is the opposite of the truth and it is an expression of some sort of sociopathy going on with your personality = the better, the more an important an idea, the more sure you are to try to attack and diminish it. It’s beyond selfish, beyond sadistic to me, it is sadistic to our people; that is why I will not stand for it.
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 07:30 | #
Daniel, did you happen to notice Bowery’s recent comments at Chateau Heartiste regarding the “pimping game”? According to Bowery there is apparently nothing essentially European about flirting with chicks to get them to spread. Game, you see, is all just about aping – pardon the pun – monkoid dominance posturing. This from a guy who thinks a wet pussy is a USB drive sprayed with WD-40. I guess when they were handing out common sense Bowery was off somewhere taking a shit. Lolzozlulzllolzulllzz
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 09:56 | #
I am more sympathetic to Bowery on this one than you are. We have that pattern (of flirting with women and going for the hole) among us, no doubt; but we also have a K selection pattern, which distinguishes us and is more distinctly characteristic of us – as opposed, markedly, to Africans and Arabs.
While it is argued that “game” can also be used to attract a woman who will commit to marriage and child rearing, as K selectors and ones trying to replicate our kind, we should be more concerned with how it is that we can find appropriate women and occasion the situation for that discovery rather than be especially focused on the pragmatics of trying to trick women into liking us who are not necessarily appropriate for us, and perhaps enamored of an R selection game. More, they are not necessarily going to remain linking us when we fall off our game and relax – I know I know zero f’s given – but that’s part of the r selection game, like a nig who doesn’t care about the mulatto bastards and gang members he leaves behind; and while there is some merit to showing that we have these alpha skills for the sake of politicking to perhaps bring some girls around – e.g., from a latent and complacent negrophelia – as a rule we want to think out of their box, we do not want to merely participate, reconstruct and reinforce tactics geared for an R selection climate – the modernist panmixia jungle – but rather focus on trying to assimilate the climate where we can identify our appropriate women; fundamentally creating the climate of ethnonationalism which is conducive to our K selection ways and the sorting out of appropriateness.
Having said that, I am not trying to discourage you or any other White guy from hitting on White women who are open to your overtures so long as you exercise some consideration of appropriateness – that you are not being such a trickster that you are going to jade a woman who could be an appropriate woman for another White guy and perhaps transforming her instead into a mudshark for her disillusionment (like “we’re all a bunch of nig dogs anyway”).
I think a cooler game is how to fuck up the game of mudsharks and the muds dogging them.
But yeah, you know, I’ve been a bit too fanatical and probably blew several chances for really fine woman because I could not pretend to be more liberal; and or did not relax my standards a bit. If not for their politics then perhaps for lack of marked beauty/beauty of my type – some were ok with my politics but I, perhaps wrongly, wanted a woman a bit more pretty – this thing about beauty was heavily about politics I realize more than ever (intelligence weighs more and more into the equation as the dust settles; I think back on a scientific lab worker who liked me; asked me to slow dance – she wasn’t ugly, but then again, context and the obnoxious self transcendence/lack of assertion of White men – beauty being semiotic); having seen too many White guys settle for less and allow the beauties to miscegenate. I even blew it with a few women who were both ok with my politics, intelligent and very beautiful as well. So, this is just advice coming from a guy who views context as content – any woman who would want to stay and have children in the US is to some extent repugnant to me.
A further caveat, I haven’t seen Bowery’s comment yet, so…
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:01 | #
I’ll bet the reason the Nazis didn’t put Heidegger in a concentration camp for gainsaying them is the same reason Bowery has not been banned from twitter: why bother lifting a finger to silence an eccentric pissant no one listens to anyway. Lulz
I mean, what is the fucking point of having a gargantuan IQ if it renders you a goofball eccentric?!?!
Bowery commenting on the “pimping game”! Good god, I almost pissed myself I was laughing so hard! Lollulzolllzzlolz
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:20 | #
CC, I don’t think you are need of game’s advice anyway, any Nazi who can ingratiate himself here could open a charm school himself.
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 11:53 | #
Still not sure which comment you’re talking about – link?
This one? It’s very Bowery, i.e., it has its good points but is a bit off the mark if race is your concern:
jabowery https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/the-alpha-male-switch/#comment-897986
The simplest alpha-pill: Take the attitude that just as it is every woman’s prerogative to select which genes will make it into the next generation *via her body*, it is your prerogative to present yourself for evaluation, as a source of genetic material for her children, to women you find attractive — taking no rejection personally. It is, after all, her prerogative to accept or reject. You did her a favor by approaching her and she did you a favor by rejecting you so you don’t waste your time — or… alternatively…
Now, having said that, it is also your prerogative to select which genes will _not_ make it into the next generation by challenging other males to natural duel — but the government has arrogated that prerogative to itself on behalf of civilization. This confuses the Hell out of women (and less so, men who _get_ the fact that the government is a surrogate alpha). That’s where “game” comes in: To fill in the yawning chasm opened up by civilization between man and nature — especially civilization that has forgotten what it owes men, as has the present one.
Posted by Heidegger and Descartes on Fri, 20 Oct 2017 07:35 | #
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQjj0vDHDk
Heidegger & Modern Existentialism
Byran Magee: The most famous name associated with existentialism is that of Jean Paul Sarte. But the existentialism of this century (last century) really began not in France but in Germany, and in the period following the first world war. And in serious terms, the most significant figure of the movement is not Sartre, but Heidegger. That is to say, there is virtual unanimity among students of modern existentialism, that Heidegger as well as preceding Sartre in time, is the more profound and more original thinker. So, in this program, we’re going to approach modern existentialism chiefly through the work of Heidegger.
In 1927 Heidegger published his most important book, Being and Time. It’s not an easy book to read, but we have here the author of what I think is the best of all introductions to existentialism for the general reader –
William Barrett, Professor of Philosophy at New York University.
Professor Barrett, if you could imagine for a moment that I am somebody who knows absolutely nothing at all about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and you were to start setting about giving me some basic idea how would you begin?
Prof. William Barrett:
I think I would try to locate the man in his historical context to begin with. It would be a little bigger context than the one you indicate; namely, it wouldn’t be measured in terms of decades, but centuries. And I’m trying to locate him first in relation to the whole epoch of modern philosophy which begins with Descartes. It’s rather interesting to place him in that context because it relates him and differentiates him from other philosophers in the twentieth century. As you know, Descartes was one of the founders of the new science, that is of modern physics, and part of his scheme for launching this science depended upon a kind of split between consciousness and the external world. The mind schematized nature for quantitative measures, for calculation, for purposes of manipulating nature; and at the same time, the human subject, the consciousness that was doing that was set off against it.
So, what came out of it was a second kind of dualism between mind and the external world. Now, most philosophy, nearly all of philosophy in the subsequent two centuries accommodated itself to the Cartesian framework.
At the beginning of this (last) century, a number of philosophers began to feel that in some sense it was uncomfortable. And we find a kind of revolt or rebellion against Cartesianism takes place among different schools, both in England and (German word) and the American Pragmatists too. Now, Heidegger is one of those rebels against Descartes. And if you stop to think of it, in this rebellion against Descartes I think we would get the key idea of Heidegger’s philosophy with which I would want to start educating somebody in the philosophy.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 04 Nov 2017 12:22 | #
Daniel,
I have listened to the William Barrett video, as you asked yesterday. He is fine on Heidegger’s descriptive and non-conclusional modus, also on alienation and techne and also on Parmenidian one-ness (all of which I have attempted to address through my model of the transit, which you will not consider). Pleasantly surprised by the Bacon reference, which was good and relevant to a discriminating approach to Descartes. Barrett obviously didn’t have the chance here to venture very far onto the ground of how Heidegger resolved the Cartesian issue, which he did, actually, not only through his epistemological model but through a nexus of ideas (which include acceptance of our individual person).
I didn’t find in the video anything striking or new. But thank you for posting it.
Posted by DanielS on Sat, 04 Nov 2017 13:29 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 04 Nov 2017 07:22 | #
Daniel,
I have listened to the William Barrett video, as you asked yesterday. He is fine on Heidegger’s descriptive and non-conclusional modus, also on alienation and techne and also on Parmenidian one-ness (all of which I have attempted to address through my model of the transit, which you will not consider). Pleasantly surprised by the Bacon reference, which was good and relevant to a discriminating approach to Descartes. Barrett obviously didn’t have the chance here to venture very far onto the ground of how Heidegger resolved the Cartesian issue, which he did, actually, not only through his epistemological model but through a nexus of ideas (which include acceptance of our individual person).
I didn’t find in the video anything striking or new. But thank you for posting it.
GW, Barrett’s explanation places the problem of Descartes and modernity (thus rendering the matter of defining the post modern turn and its resources, differences that make a difference, correctly) squarely at the heart of the matter (as opposed to your ego) and it triumphs over your five year long misguided and misguiding attempt to render these issues unimportant.
Your “transit” is your psychologistic way of rendering a hermeneutic circle, one way of (perhaps) managing individual systemics but not the only way and not the best and most relevant for our problem of maintaining ourselves as peoples.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 05 Nov 2017 12:22 | #
You do appear to judge everything as a tool of some kind, when the prior necessity is a foundation and structure of truth. That, of course, you look upon as an intellectual folly. Which it perhaps is if one remains trapped in the religious cycle of thought (while, of course, excising the deity – obviously the religious question survives the excision of the religious answer). For us to approach foundation, and thus to sight the truth structure above it, requires, at the very least, a lifting out of essentially religious cosmological thinking.
So if one thinks of, say, the existent fact of rocks in space:
… or deep sea fish:
… and finds therein a kind of substrate of being … a universal positive in which these distant things <em>are<em> as opposed to an ultimately unimaginable void in which nothing is … that’s already to beg the question of genesis, and that relegates everything else to a relative and subsidiary place. Its intellectual product is a kind of collapse into fatalism. Non-religious thinkers know they must avoid it, and the usual way they do this is to impose an arbitrary restriction. Husserl focussed on consciousness and what appears in the consciousness. Heidegger focussed on human being in time (and, by implication, place). That was the term he set in Being and Time. The nearest he ventured to the cosmological question was his concept of thrown-ness, ie, he looked the other way, towards our being in the world.
The ontological transit is a commentary (and I would argue an advance) on Heideggerian thrown-ness and openness to meanings in the world. The former I would critique on the basis that it is reductive, leaving more or less unsaid the question of subsequent condition and consequence. The latter I would critique on the basis that it is limited to aspiration. Men and women cannot just sashay from the existential and psychological consequences of thrown-ness to the estate of the open, authentic being. The transit colours in everything that is missing, defining the thrown human condition and the normative will to openness as a structured whole subject to qualitative variation. It is not accessible from a crude dualistic interpretation (for example, the mind-body problem does not map on it, and neither does the problem of subject/object). It describes a qualitative dispensation in which the thrown being is weighted down chiefly but not exclusively by his non-ownership of what arises in him from Time and Place, by infirmity, and by habit. It provides for a structured freeing and realising process. It is not at all to do with textual or historical analysis or circles or academics setting rule structures for the masses to obey. It is philosophy, not psychology.
On the question of foundation with which I began, I presume for the totality of the material over the void, and the presence of the material as organic life over its absence; finding the human identity as both cause in the initiating sense and cause in the purposive sense … as principal and principle. Not, then, man becoming god, as we find in liberal thought, but just as men. The rest I most happily and gratefully leave to the mathematicians and the religious.
Posted by DanielS on Sun, 05 Nov 2017 13:12 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 05 Nov 2017 07:22 | #
You do appear to judge everything as a tool of some kind,
DanielS: It may appear that way to you, perhaps, for your convenience. But I absolutely do not view everything as a tool of some kind (tools are to be used, we are not to be used by them), and that is just another in a boundless litany of insults coming from you (always in attempt to diminish the significance of any contribution from another).
For example, one of my central concerns is the recognition or concept of intrinsic value in our peoples, a particularly important thing for White males, as it is more grudgingly granted, if at all. This concern for intrinsic value was an organic expression of the hippie movement – there being amidst their people – for example, as opposed to their being judged merely instrumentally, merely pragmatically… an instrument of the military draft for a war that had little do with and little regard for their being.
Thus, I do not judge everything as some kind of tool at all. You simply latch onto anything pejorative that you can possibly manage to say, no matter how inaccurate, and try to throw it up against me and what I say.
Especially if what I say is good and important.
Your projection of “shallowness” onto me is only one example.
What you ignore when you project your shallowness onto me is the fact that you put everything in terms of a competition …so that when I talk, for example, of hermeneutics, you conveniently ignore that I am already, in that, acknowledging and embracing emergentism, genetics, co-evolution, the concern for dasein…
Originally, I had expected you to see that I am observing necessary, complementary ways of understanding, ways of looking at our circumstance; and propositions for dealing with our problems, of managing our homeostasis, co-evolution and aspirations. I had expected you to be appreciative of that, to recognize that these are important ideas. I expected you to appreciate important ideas in service of our people (as deep as anything), not to place your ego above all, your concept of competition against academics above all, such that you would misrepresent and try to destroy (you can’t) anything that I can say.
Perhaps if you could realize that if you were known for nothing else than “the guy who held fast to the significance of emergentism” you will have been recognized for having performed a valuable service …you’ve made other worthwhile contributions too… if you could be satisfied with contributing and realize that ideas that I bring are not antagonistic, perhaps you would not have to misrepresent and bury in the noise of your hurt vanity (or whatever causes your contentious straw manning), important ideas that I, for one, am bringing to bear.
I already envelop the kinds of concerns you have; and another thing that you don’t get is that when you say:
“It provides for a structured freeing and realising process. It is not at all to do with textual or historical analysis or circles or academics setting rule structures for the masses to obey. It is philosophy, not psychology.”
What a stupid strawmanning that is. Your using words like “obeying” is just an idiotic straw man that you plucked out of no where – it seems, to show off to the girls. There is a kind of guy who will pander to females and get past their gate keeping by maintaining a low grade chaos with anti-intellectualism, and with that, a more advantageous one up position than they might otherwise have -they might otherwise have to be bit more fair and responsible (how terrible). This pandering is part of the charmed loop (vicious cycle) that keeps modernity and its destructive, implicative force, in place.
All societies have obligations, prohibitions and legitimacies. You are the one trying to order obedience – to prohibit these matters from being discussed.
You keep spewing this impervious shit as the four year old that wants all the candy or sometimes the teenage grease monkey who is going to show the girls he’s smarter than the academics (though sadly, he isn’t in many cases at all).
If one is to look into, for example, instinctive reactions revealing racial preferences, and examines specificatory structures of cognition facilitating that end, particularly as adaptive selection of one’s own kind, this is considered a hermeneutic logic.
Your misapplying words that would be appropriate in other contexts – textual analysis, historical analysis – does not change that fact.
Ultimately, “the consciousness” that will guide our maintenance and advance of our own kind is a hermeneutic of one kind or another, and critiquing social, historical and other narratives so that they are conducive to that end is imperative.
Your trying to present “circularity” as some sort of devil concept does not change what is meant by it either. “Acting-into”, “moving-into” and “emergence” and emergentism, for that matter, are part of the social constructionist and hermeneutic lexicon as well.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 05 Nov 2017 23:55 | #
I had expected you to be appreciative of that, to recognize that these are important ideas.
All that sort of thing is quite OK. It’s just not my project which, as you know, is to (a) give encouragement to able people to think from the Heideggerian standpoint, and (b) try to do myself. Somewhere downstream your project might have a role in the politics of mine, or it might not. I haven’t given very much thought to it. I am not in a hurry to do so. This is a long game.
when I talk, for example, of hermeneutics, you conveniently ignore that I am already, in that, acknowledging and embracing emergentism, genetics, co-evolution, the concern for dasein…
When one builds on a Heideggerian base – and does so with fidelity to him, of course, and not as some French philosophical thief – one is acting as an agent for a philosophical revolution. The objective cannot be to glue together a few references to European genetics, a bit of Heidegger, some Salterian causality, and the relational aspects of emergent processes, and what have you. The objective is not to make arguments. The objective is to arrive at a good in life greater than liberalism’s, and a system of thought which is closer to hand and more thrilling. After that, the politics take over.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:44 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:55 | #
I had expected you to be appreciative of that, to recognize that these are important ideas.
All that sort of thing is quite OK. It’s just not my project which, as you know, is to (a) give encouragement to able people to think from the Heideggerian standpoint, and (b) try to do myself. Somewhere downstream your project might have a role in the politics of mine, or it might not. I haven’t given very much thought to it. I am not in a hurry to do so. This is a long game.
when I talk, for example, of hermeneutics, you conveniently ignore that I am already, in that, acknowledging and embracing emergentism, genetics, co-evolution, the concern for dasein…
When one builds on a Heideggerian base – and does so with fidelity to him, of course, and not as some French philosophical thief – one is acting as an agent for a philosophical revolution. The objective cannot be to glue together a few references to European genetics, a bit of Heidegger, some Salterian causality, and the relational aspects of emergent processes, and what have you.
Philosophy is about the ways of life and central to that, human requirements. Science is more like a tool, an invaluable one, but more like a tool, this discipline to facilitate and help satisfy human requirements. To perform its service well, science requires thorough and rounded philosophical basis in a coherent way of life. It, ways of life and the world, cannot and should not wait for the singularity of scientific method – ways of life are more fundamental – while they can, nevertheless, provide a place for scientific fanatics, or the like, such as yourself and Bowery, to make your invaluable contributions.
You think your scientism is philosophy and that the philosophy that I bring to bear is “politics” … this is just a form of your TOP and TOOP business competition ways, in which you’ve got to trivialize your competitor and make you and your own product seem indispensable – it not the least bit accurate a description of what’s going on here.
“Glue together” [emphasis added] – this is only a part of your straw man. That I am, or should be concerned to be a thousand percent faithful to Heidegger is another.
I take from Heidegger (in the way he would recommend thinking is conducted, by the way) what is essential, what is needed, and take it to heart.
I also believe that he is too focused on the individual for our needs – an offshoot of his phenomenology background, that is what makes for ownmost being toward death and the superficial, irresponsible, destructive way of life that it would inspire.
The objective is not to make arguments.
Then you should stop doing it, particularly in its degenerate form – contentiousness.
The objective is to arrive at a good in life greater than liberalism’s, and a system of thought which is closer to hand and more thrilling. After that, the politics take over.
What you are doing is unreflective liberal politics. Skeptical of every human idea with the fallacious notion that if you somehow describe “nature” as it is, all will take care of itself. That is the underpinning of liberalism, not the liberation from it.
The liberation from liberalism requires the post modern turn, a.k.a. the hermeneutic turn, which largely began with Heidegger.
Kant had not quite solved the kind of arbitrary contentiousness of Lockeatine empiricism (to which you hold white knuckle) but took steps in the right direction with the idea of anchoring principles – wanted to place them on a universal foundation (with similar aspiration as yourself). “Still too Cartesian”, Heidegger proposed the hermeneutic circle as a liberation from mere facticity.
That is to say, not having to be beholden to every arbitrary fact that floats by to the detriment of coherence (and therefore accountability etc. as I like to observe), but to liberate one (and one’s people) from mere facticity so that they may observe the coherence of broader and deeper patterns – a liberation from what he would rightfully designate the inauthenticness of that mere facticity (to broader, more meaningful patterns).
This step beyond (the traceable logics of) modernity – willing suspension of disbelief – as opposed to the sheerer skepticism of modernity, allows for attendance to the coherence and homeostasis of our broader patterns – not only benign and helpful traditions, but the value of our inherited forms. It also allows us the basis thus, the specificatory structures to continue the modernist experiment and advance where beneficial.
And vis a versa: we can leave custom, habit and tradition behind where it is a handicap; we can curtail the modernist project where it is unhinged, running rough shod and changing things that should not be changed.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 09:34 | #
What you are doing is unreflective liberal politics. Skeptical of every human idea with the fallacious notion that if you somehow describe “nature” as it is, all will take care of itself. That is the underpinning of liberalism, not the liberation from it.
In your prior comment you said you have “concern for dasein”. What is “concern for dasein”? To what does concern belong? Actually, what is Dasein to you? Is it subject or object or something else? Do you have a sense of it at all, never mind a functioning definition? Have you simply accepted it as a probably necessary “something”, but lacked the intellectual curiosity to properly investigate the term, and determine its place and validity or otherwise? In your usage (which is garbled) have you not reduced it to the level of a symbol and a slogan for argumentation? Is that indicative of your whole claim to be liberating us from the liberalism of the Western world? Liberating us into what, if not human truth? And where is human truth if not in the natural purity of our being here now? Do you understand at all what Nature means in this context?
If I had the aim of unpinning everything you say, and discarding it like the things of a life on the floor of a burgled room, I would certainly do so. You would know the difference between that and the way I treat of you today. But I do not have that aim. You are not my enemy.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 10:40 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 10:34 | #
What you are doing is unreflective liberal politics. Skeptical of every human idea with the fallacious notion that if you somehow describe “nature” as it is, all will take care of itself. That is the underpinning of liberalism, not the liberation from it.
In your prior comment you said you have “concern for dasein”. What is “concern for dasein”? To what does concern belong? Actually, what is Dasein to you? Is it subject or object or something else? Do you have a sense of it at all, never mind a functioning definition?
It’s a ridiculous question because I have discussed this many time. Since you’ve asked me what it is for me – i.e., what I take from Heidegger, without total concern for other interpretations, even Heidegger’s for that matter ….
Dasein is “there being” … a prompt as such to come out of Cartesian detachment and forgetfulness and to return to where you are (the where of praxis along with whom, why, how, when – concreta), particularly your caring interaction, leading sooner or later to “midtdasein”, there being amidst your people (the of-being of emergentism would be a part of this hermeneutic recommendation as well).
Have you simply accepted it as a probably necessary “something”, but lacked the intellectual curiosity to properly investigate the term, and determine its place and validity or otherwise?
I am investigating it all the time, applying it, and I see that you are the one lacking in the curiosity of application.
In your usage (which is garbled)
No it is not.
have you not reduced it to the level of a symbol and a slogan for argumentation?
I have not. Look again at what I say above before your inner child screams, “only what I say matters, only what I say matters, your ideas are bad, not important!”
Is that indicative of your whole claim to be liberating us from the liberalism of the Western world?
This is where you share the same a-hole STEM penchant as Bowery, to try to “solve” an “opponent” by reducing them and their “argument” to one errant point in a lineal circuit (taken out of human praxis), a point which you would then try to do away with, and therefore do away with the opponent.
You are thinking like a mechanic trying to fix a car engine.
Liberating us into what, if not human truth?
Why are you such a hole? Asking me questions that time and time again I have answered?
Clue again, for one thing I’ve said: a liberation from arbitrary facticity (of the mere emprical flux) and into the truth of broader coherence.
And where is human truth if not in the natural purity of our being here now?
Put down your Gestalt Therapy book and recognize that truth is circulating through many discursive structures, not just within the “natural purity” of your skull, here and now.
Do you understand at all what Nature means in this context?
Do you understand what a jerk you are?
If I had the aim of unpinning everything you say, and discarding it like the things of a life on the floor of a burgled room, I would certainly do so.
No you wouldn’t because you can’t, although you will continue to try, endlessly. Because you are impervious. A four year old with unresolved issues.
You would know the difference between that and the way I treat of you today. But I do not have that aim. You are not my enemy.
You are not my enemy either, not in your wishes for the autonomy and sovereignty of yours and other ethnonationals, but theoretical error toward that end is my enemy.
You and Bowery are locked into a natural fallacy – provoked by paranoic reaction in seeing only the Jewish misrepresentation of ideas that I bring to bear and (one might infer of your behavior in accordance with natural fallacy) that “males duel for status and females (and their child bearing capacity)” so, you cannot see that I am not trying to compete with you, not bringing ideas to compete with either of you, they always have been brought to bear as they complement and enhance our efforts.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 12:33 | #
Dasein is “there being” … a prompt as such to come out of Cartesian detachment and forgetfulness and to return to where you are
No, that’s not it; and this isn’t a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of understanding, ie, that Dasein is a particular condition of human being in its ensconcement in, or at its point of contact with, the world of the extant now, here. It isn’t a prompt, therefore. It isn’t a return and it isn’t about forgetfulness (though it’s good in another context that you use these words). Dasein is the site at which or action by which meaning, as it is disclosing, is appropriated.
Dasein’s care for being is nothing to do with the rejection of the Cartesian subject and its representational modus. It knows nothing of this. Care for being is to do with identity and foundation, and with organic continuity. It extrapolates from these fundamentals, internalising them in the very process of meaning-reception. Otherwise, Dasein would be pure openness … acceptance. As it is, what happens to the appropriated meaning as it detaches and transits out of the moment, in a sense, and into the great faculties of the perception is a quite separate question (on which I have said much and have much to say).
truth is circulating through many discursive structures, not just within the “natural purity” of your skull, here and now.
The first is discourse, mostly political. The second is existentialism. Heidegger himself invests Dasein with a very narrow constitution in which there is no place for socially-informed thinking, or any thinking at all, or anything subsequently extrapolated from the disclosing meaning. This very narrow constitution is purely of Nature. It is, basically, genetic interest, sexual interest, survival of the organism. There is nothing else there. That what I was getting at it in my comment at 90, to which you replied that I am a jerk!
At least twice I have urged you not to cherry-pick Heidegger’s conception, pointing out that in its depths it is systemic, and you do violence to it when you yank something away and put it to service elsewhere. It’s good advice. You should heed it.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 13:50 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 13:33 | #
Dasein is “there being” … a prompt as such to come out of Cartesian detachment and forgetfulness and to return to where you are
No, that’s not it;
Yes it is.
and this isn’t a matter of interpretation
And all the more so because you asked me what it was to me.
It is a matter of understanding, ie, that Dasein is a particular condition of human being in its ensconcement in, or at its point of contact with, the world of the extant now, here.
There is not really a contradiction between what you are defining here and what I am saying. You are just being a contentious asshole.
That is why you will take arbitrary issue with any word, seeing the slight ambiguities of language and context as an opportunity for disagreement rather than agreement – case in point:
It isn’t a prompt, therefore. It isn’t a return and it isn’t about forgetfulness (though it’s good in another context that you use these words). Dasein is the site at which or action by which meaning, as it is disclosing, is appropriated.
Again, no necessary contradiction between your “definition” and what I am saying.
Dasein’s care for being is nothing to do with the rejection of the Cartesian subject and its representational modus.
Yes it does. It is by contrast to Caresian detachment.
It knows nothing of this.
You know nothing of it because you choose to remain ignorant.
Care for being is to do with identity and foundation, and with organic continuity.
You really sound stupid with your fixation on foundations, but basically what you want is enveloped in what I discuss (among what others say).
It extrapolates from these fundamentals, internalising them in the very process of meaning-reception. Otherwise, Dasein would be pure openness … acceptance.
Being cannot be about sheer openness, it is about organic reconstruction – or reconstitution, since you are too stupid to admit of an accurate understanding of constructionism.
As it is, what happens to the appropriated meaning as it detaches and transits out of the moment, in a sense, and into the great faculties of the perception is a quite separate question (on which I have said much and have much to say).
You make these proclamations as if you are Moses and everyone must obey …and I ignore the fact that I am allowing for the word appropriation here, because I am not the silly nit picker that you are…. you know good and well that if I used the word “appopriate” you would be all over its “mechanicity.”
It extrapolates from these fundamentals, internalising them in the very process of meaning-reception.
Is that what it does? Or does it form human-sized gestalts of those fundamentals?
Otherwise, Dasein would be pure openness … acceptance.
Being cannot be about sheer openness, it is about organic reconstruction – or reconstitution, since you are too stupid to admit of an accurate understanding of constructionism.
As it is, what happens to the appropriated meaning as it detaches and transits out of the moment, in a sense, and into the great faculties of the perception is a quite separate question (on which I have said much and have much to say).
Well, one thing that we can be sure of, the only thing you care about it is what wafts up from your armchair. I’m not going to let you misrepresent, push aside, try to trivialize and bury what I’ve said.
truth is circulating through many discursive structures, not just within the “natural purity” of your skull, here and now.
The first is discourse, mostly political.
Do me a favor, shut up and read a book before you try to tell me what its all about, that anything but your scientistic bullshit is political and trivial. You don’t know what you are talking about.
The second is existentialism. Heidegger himself invests Dasein with a very narrow constitution in which there is no place for socially-informed thinking, or any thinking at all, or anything subsequently extrapolated from the disclosing meaning.
This very narrow constitution is purely of Nature.
I really don’t care even if Heidegger doesn’t pass social information through a transit in Dasein. The value of paying attention to our sheer organic nature (as theoria) versus our human nature (in praxis) is limited. We need our scientists to pay attention to our organic nature, but it is not enough – – and taking philosophy into praxis is the post modern turn of which Heidegger was a part.
It is, basically, genetic interest, sexual interest, survival of the organism. There is nothing else there.
That’s the problem with your limited understanding of philosophy and the context of Heidegger, it lacks the hermeneutic breadth and capacity to take what is sufficient from his ideas and extend them to where he was or where he should be going, to encompass and reliably maintain broader genetic interests.
That what I was getting at it in my comment at 90, to which you replied that I am a jerk!
Yes, you are a jerk!
At least twice I have urged you not to cherry-pick Heidegger’s conception,
I have explained several times, carefully, that I do not arbitrarily take from Heidegger, arbitrariness is your disease.
pointing out that in its depths it is systemic, and you do violence
Fuck off. You do violence to what we need. It is not violence to Heidegger to say that Dasein is an anti Cartesian move into there being and the care thereof – (not much inference from there, especially as he was steeped in Aristotle, to infer that we care about relationships; he mentioned responsibility to the folk, but did not elaborate on that enough). You are speaking in the paranoid, melodramatic terms of Bowery – now we are going to turn into insects because I have a fuller understanding of what Heidegger’s assignment was about as opposed to your ego project and scientistic myopia.
to it when you yank something away and put it to service elsewhere. It’s good advice. You should heed it.
You should shut up or take it upon yourself to understand what you are talking about before throwing up straw man criticisms for the mere sake of competition.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 15:22 | #
And all the more so because you asked me what it was to me.
I am not looking for a personal representation from you. We are not interpreting. This is a living process, not a hermeneutical exercise. It is creative in that it always finds anew. Heidegger had it that we must think essentially in these matters, finding what is … going directly to the nature of the thing. That is how this work has to be done. We are very definitely not constructing conclusions about Dasein’s abstraction of meanings, which would be calculative in his scheme.
I strongly suspect that essential thinking is not possible outside of origination. Even if familiarity through time teaches the calculative thinker where everything stands, still the full force of the thing, free of pre-structured conceptions, will not be realised. For example:
It [Dasein] is by contrast to Cartesian detachment.
Cartesian detachment is error, not the essential, natural mode which is Dasein. The engaging Prof Barrett was clear that our commonsensical, experience-based understanding does not accord with Descartes’ model. That model is not true. As with all these general and formative factors of the personality (freedom as choice is one, human equality is another, the saved soul in heaven another, and so forth), they produce large, negative consequences in the lived life, driving us ever further into our estrangement.
That’s the problem with your limited understanding of philosophy and the context of Heidegger, it lacks the hermeneutic breadth and capacity to take what is sufficient from his ideas and extend them to where he was or where he should be going, to encompass and reliably maintain broader genetic interests.
But you think “the context of Heidegger” is the historical dissatisfaction with Descartes which Barrett referred to. Which is not what Heidegger said himself, and untrue even if we focus solely on his own dissatisfaction. He did not invent Dasein. He took it with all the implications of that. He did not take it for the purpose of replacing the Cartesian subject but because it is true in itself and, as such, its placement at the heart of an as yet unwritten life-philosophy would lead to people living more authentic lives.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 15:52 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 16:22 | #
And all the more so because you asked me what it was to me.
I am not looking for a personal representation from you.
That is exactly what you asked me for:
GW: In your prior comment you said you have “concern for dasein”. What is “concern for dasein”? To what does concern belong? Actually, what is Dasein to you?
OK? Now you can shut up.
Furthermore, I had concern which was realized above that the thread would degenerate into a discussion of how well you feel you understand Heidegger as compared to other people – which is NOT what the post is about. It is your means to derail it into your vain pursuit.
We are not interpreting.
Well you can carry on as if you are pure and as if an uncritical position with regard to Heidegger is of singular importance. It isn’t to me, especially when you make it clear that you don’t understand the overall frameowork of his project.
This is a living process, not a hermeneutical exercise.
Exercise is just another of your insult words and straw men that you whip out in your boundless conentiousness: shallow, communicationist, bean counter, apparatchik, clunky, confected, mere politics, mere “social stuff” ..about “equality” (which I never said)… doing an intellectual dance … hermeneutic “back and forth back and forth”
… it doesn’t end with you because you are too big a baby to grow up.
It is creative in that it always finds anew.
Hemeneutics does.
Heidegger had it that we must think essentially in these matters, finding what is … going directly to the nature of the thing. That is how this work has to be done.
The nature of the human being is inextricable with praxis.
We are very definitely not constructing conclusions
As I said, your are too stupid and impervious to absorb what is meant by construction as opposed to reacting to Jewish misrepresentation.
about Dasein’s abstraction of meanings, which would be calculative in his scheme.
It’s not calculative, and I don’t care that much about his scheme. It was too phenomenological ergo too individualistic.
I strongly suspect that essential thinking is not possible outside of origination. Even if familiarity through time teaches the calculative thinker where everything stands, still the full force of the thing, free of pre-structured conceptions, will not be realised. For example:
It [Dasein] is by contrast to Cartesian detachment.
Cartesian detachment is error, not the essential, natural mode which is Dasein. The engaging Prof Barrett was clear that our commonsensical, experience-based understanding does not accord with Descartes’ model. That model is not true.
Except for limited inquiries, it is not true, but as a custom and habit of thought, it has the capacity to mystify and misdirect thinking from engagement, away from dasein.
As with all these general and formative factors of the personality (freedom as choice is one, human equality is another, the saved soul in heaven another, and so forth), they produce large, negative consequences in the lived life, driving us ever further into our estrangement.
As I had just said, and these are all species of Cartesianism.
That’s the problem with your limited understanding of philosophy and the context of Heidegger, it lacks the hermeneutic breadth and capacity to take what is sufficient from his ideas and extend them to where he was or where he should be going, to encompass and reliably maintain broader genetic interests.
But you think “the context of Heidegger” is the historical dissatisfaction with Descartes which Barrett referred to.
I know that a great aspect in the commence of Heideger’s project is something like the rejection of Cartesianism at its onset, as Barrett discusses.
Which is not what Heidegger said himself, and untrue even if we focus solely on his own dissatisfaction. He did not invent Dasein. He took it with the implications of that. He did not take it for the purpose of replacing the Cartesian subject but because it is true in itself and, as such, its placement at the heart of an as yet unwritten life-philosophy would lead to people living more authentic lives.
He is simply asking the age old question of philosophy, centrally by Aristotle, what is the nature of man? (it is in praxis, etc). And, he asked that question, providing language that recognized that Cartesianism took us away from that nature (in praxis).
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:27 | #
I did not ask you for your interpretation of “concern for Dasein”. I asked you, if you read on, why you are not literate in these matters. You seem to have missed the question entirely, for which subtlety I have to apologise. I really thought that you might see that Dasein’s constitution is care for Being. There is no entity, not even you, which has care for Dasein. It’s a nonsense. Think it through.
I had concern which was realized above that the thread would degenerate into a discussion of how well you feel you understand Heidegger as compared to other people
What people, other than Jaegwin Kim on emergentism and the mind/body problem (whom you have not defended) and Sheehan on time as being (with whom you also do not agree – we are in agreement that we do not agree)? If you are going to appeal to authority at least make it an authority you agree with yourself and can defend; and quote something pertinent to your criticism. Barrett, for example – lovely, wise old guy – said nothing of substance with which I would disagree, excepting his initial over-emphasis on Descartes which he stated is made only as a good way of approaching Heidegger from the mainstream of the canon, and which I am sure he would have qualified in a flash had his interviewer quoted from the opening chapter of B&T.
You are attempting to prove that I do not know my own subject matter. You have been doing this for a very long time, starting with your proposition that, actually, the social realm is foundational. Then communicationism and inter-action hoved into vew. Then hermeneutics. In the main post here you alight upon American pragmatism, presumably to advance its instrumentality over the sort of long-run, foundationalist project which Heidegger’s ontology invites. All the while you have been mechanically maligning what I have been writing, using “Cartesian” as the ultimate intellectual sin and with far too much confidence in your own historiographical reading, and throwing-in syllogisms about science, psychology, and emergent structures without the slightest concern for what I actually say about any of them.
How many times do I have to explain that your own project is simply not my point of focus? My impression so far is that as a writing discipline hermeneutics is descriptive of a lot of things, and does not really exist as something specific. It looks nearer to wisdom in hindsight than a real theory. Perhaps it would help some writers to order their thoughts to better effect. But save our race?
But … prove me wrong. If it would help, I will make an entry on the sidebar under DNA Nations, and a separate Category so you can bring together your hermeneutic interpretations and any other related output.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 18:03 | #
In addition, I will just knock this poor, slathering beast on the head:
I really don’t care even if Heidegger doesn’t pass social information through a transit in Dasein. The value of paying attention to our sheer organic nature (as theoria) versus our human nature (in praxis) is limited. We need our scientists to pay attention to our organic nature, but it is not enough – – and taking philosophy into praxis is the post modern turn of which Heidegger was a part.
If you don’t care, you probably won’t be bothered to think, will you? And if you don’t think, you will say incorrect things when called upon to speak on the matter. Like differentiating between our immediate harvesting of near-raw data (never entirely raw because certain of our instinctual patterning extends into the very moment of harvest) and our non-conscious interpretive actions thereafter. By way of example I would remind you of those studies MacDonald cites in his Implicit Whiteness paper, whereby there is a marked dissonance in tested “liberal students” between the adrenalin-response (to images of blacks) which they actually experience and the easy-going race-blindness they perfectly sincerely report. The issue is not theory vs practise. The issue is nature vs personality.
By the way, if I asked you to describe to me in what, precisely, Heidegger’s famous and alleged turn consisted you would have to admit that you don’t know. Don’t just make something up in reply, for the sake of having something to say. Read the damned literature. It’s not at all as you would have it.
As for the alleged postmodern turn in intellectual history, where is it, outside of the French-Jewish intellectual tradition?
I have used the t-word myself, about the initial movement away from absence and estrangement and towards presence, and have characterised this by the term, “Intent”. It might be interesting to contest your scholastic definition with mine.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 18:52 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 18:27 | #
I did not ask you for your interpretation of “concern for Dasein”.
You certainly did.
I asked you, if you read on, why you are not literate in these matters.
You are not literate in the context of Heidegger’s project and therefore you cannot understand the philosophical place of dasein and midtdasein.
You seem to have missed the question entirely, for which subtlety I have to apologise. I really thought that you might see that Dasein’s constitution is care for Being. There is no entity, not even you, which has care for Dasein. It’s a nonsense. Think it through.
You have misinterpreted what I meant by “concern for dasein” … “my concern for dasein” was just casually speaking in answer to your question, how I see its relevance.
I had concern which was realized above that the thread would degenerate into a discussion of how well you feel you understand Heidegger as compared to other people
What people, other than Jaegwin Kim on emergentism and the mind/body problem (whom you have not defended) and Sheehan on time as being (with whom you also do not agree – we are in agreement that we do not agree)?
That’s enough. Here we go. It’s you dragging erstwhile relevant and productive discussion into your personal conceits.
If you are going to appeal to authority
I explained, even in the post, why I have transcribed the discussion of Being and Time by Harrison (whose take is different than Sheehan’s) and Sheehan. Because they lay out the basic outline of Being and Time very clearly. As such, it is a specificatory structure which can be corrected, refined and elaborated. Though I don’t agree with some of the ways that Sheehan has gone (while he had some things right).
at least make it an authority you agree with yourself and can defend;
I just defended it. Your objection is asinine and stems from your lack of the concept of specificatory structures – you cannot see the value of that because you are of a Cartesian mindset.
and quote something pertinent to your criticism.
There is much to be gained from Harrison and Sheehan’s discussion of Being and Time, far more insight into its overall framework than you would ever provide.
Barrett, for example – lovely, wise old guy – said nothing of substance with which I would disagree, excepting his initial over-emphasis on Descartes which he stated is made only as a good way of approaching Heidegger from the mainstream of the canon,
He defeated your recalcitrant objection that Descartes is irrelevant. He showed that it is crucial to an understanding of Heidegger to begin with – an understanding that Descartes marks the apex of the modernist quest and Heidegger is among a school of thought which was in rebellion against Cartesianism. (and what is Cartesianism, its various forms, why its a problem, I have talked about or quoted others talking about in many places).
and which I am sure he would have qualified in a flash had his interviewer quoted from the opening chapter of B&T.
You can try to nibble to death and bring people into endless qualifications over Heidegger, but I have already shown that we have more important things to do and better understanding in the post modern project.
You are attempting to prove that I do not know my own subject matter.
You don’t know the context. You admitted that you had not even read Aristotle.
You have been doing this for a very long time, starting with your proposition that, actually, the social realm is foundational.
I don’t talk in terms of foundations. That’s your quest, the answer to which Heidegger apparently gives in the negative – i.e., thrownness is not a profession of a profound belief in foundations.
Then communicationism and inter-action hoved into vew.
Oh my god, here we go again, the jealous kid. “communicationism” ..“communicationist” ….is that the same as “apparatchik”?
“interaction,” so bad of me to use that word! As if it is something that we can avoid.
Then hermeneutics.
Where does this artificial sequence that you propose come from? I have been talking in these terms for decades. Hermeneutics is a word that Heidegger and his students used.
In the main post here you alight upon American pragmatism, presumably to advance its instrumentality over the sort of long-run, foundationalist project which Heidegger’s ontology invites.
You misunderstand me. American pragmatism is another way, along with hermeneutics, to show that there is no need to put on hold indefinitely the attendance to our needs, both immediate and most profound, for this idiotic conceit of yours to finish building your model railroad
All the while you have been mechanically maligning what I have been writing, using “Cartesian”
I have not mechanically maligned you as Cartesian. I have called your project Cartesian where it deserves to be called Cartesian.
as the ultimate intellectual sin
It is a cardinal error indeed. You are repeating some of the classic mistakes that have set in motion the greatest catastrophies for our race and its dealings with others as well. And its imperviousness is a part of your imperviousness in setting those errors in motion.
and with far too much confidence in your own historiographical reading,
There is nobody who impresses me that agrees with you, that, combined with the fact that my understanding has held up through experience gives me a great deal of confidence. So, it is not far too much confidence, it is merited.
and throwing-in syllogisms about science, psychology, and emergent structures without the slightest concern for what I actually say about any of them.
That’s a projection. You have not the least concern to understand what I say and write. Just the opposite, you are at pains to misrepresent what I say.
How many times do I have to explain that your own project is simply not my point of focus?
That’s ok with me – if you are not going to read what I say, don’t comment, now that you admit that you are not bothering to “focus” on it.
My impression so far is that as a writing discipline hermeneutics is descriptive of a lot of things, and does not really exist as something specific. It looks nearer to wisdom in hindsight than a real theory. Perhaps it would help some writers to order their thoughts to better effect. But save our race?
The stories we tell – whether told well or poorly – are very important with regard to saving our race or not.
But … prove me wrong. If it would help, I will make an entry on the sidebar under DNA Nations, and a separate Category so you can bring together your hermeneutic interpretations and any other related output.
OK.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 19:30 | #
In addition, I will just knock this poor, slathering beast on the head:
I really don’t care even if Heidegger doesn’t pass social information through a transit in Dasein. The value of paying attention to our sheer organic nature (as theoria) versus our human nature (in praxis) is limited. We need our scientists to pay attention to our organic nature, but it is not enough – – and taking philosophy into praxis is the post modern turn of which Heidegger was a part.
If you don’t care, you probably won’t be bothered to think, will you?
It is rather you who is not bothered to think. Simply having a rote understanding of Heidegger is not thinking. I understand the overall structure of Heidegger’s project, its place and concern. I can see where he was going right, where he was going wrong, and therefore his jots and tittles are for you, if that’s your thing.
And if you don’t think,
Well, it’s you who is claiming people are not thinking if they are not repeating Heidegger verbatim, not me.
you will say incorrect things when called upon to speak on the matter.
Not if I’m honest, and I am.
Like differentiating between our immediate harvesting of near-raw data (never entirely raw because certain of our instinctual patterning extends into the very moment of harvest) and our non-conscious interpretive actions thereafter.
This psychological talk doesn’t do it for me. It reminds me of the kind of stuff I would come up with when I was trying to rely on erudition alone.
By way of example I would remind you of those studies MacDonald cites in his Implicit Whiteness paper, whereby there is a marked dissonance in tested “liberal students” between the adrenalin-response (to images of blacks) which they actually experience and the easy-going race-blindness they perfectly sincerely report.
I’ve quoted these MacDonald studies myself in response to you as to why we cannot simply approach our people as if they are entering a world where we can treat the discursive structures (that confront their older brain) as a trivial matter.
The issue is not theory vs practise. The issue is nature vs personality.
Personality, as Jordan Peterson and MacDonald speak of it, would be genetic tendencies, such as concern for orderliness and cleanliness corresponding with social conservatism.
I don’t object to people focusing on that, it is interesting, but not as interesting to me as the discursive structures that would legitimate, reward, obligate or block those structures.
By the way, if I asked you to describe to me in what, precisely, Heidegger’s famous and alleged turn consisted you would have to admit that you don’t know.
From doing to dwelling may have been his turn, but he is also known as being pivotal – perhaps in overview (ubersicht) of his place in philosophy – to what is called the hermeneutic and post modern turn.
Don’t just make something up in reply, for the sake of having something to say. Read the damned literature. It’s not at all as you would have it.
I don’t think that you understand what I have been saying here. Heidegger is not the bible to me as he is to you. There are certain ideas that are ready to hand. If he takes a turn toward “dwellng”, we know that he is concerned with rootedness and emergentism.
As for the alleged postmodern turn in intellectual history, where is it, outside of the French-Jewish intellectual tradition?
All over the place, read the damn literature if you don’t want to read mine.
I have used the t-word myself, about the initial movement away from absence and estrangement and towards presence, and have characterised this by the term, “Intent”. It might be interesting to contest your scholastic definition with mine.
Scholastic definition – lol. Poor guy, in the next life time I will give you a scholarship to Freiburg.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 22:03 | #
Daniel, “concern for dasien” is a nonsense. That’s the point. The more you insist on literalism in what I was really saying to you, the more you exhibit your native lack of suitability for dealing in these abstractions. Don’t protest further. You are not in control here. You don’t yet have a hold on the basics. But now you have been told this you could conceivably rectify it if you look at what else I have been saying in today’s exchange – which, although I say it myself, is a definite advance on anything else I, at least, have read on the subject of care!
Simply having a rote understanding of Heidegger is not thinking … jots and tittles …
For your own private reasons you need to run me down. I understand that. But, in my own defence, what man of existentialist letters has characterised the constitution of Dasein as I have right here on this thread. Likewise, who has addressed the space between thrown-ness and openness to the world’s meanings as I have? Who has defined “the turn” replete with an inherency to consciousness that renders utterly redundant all the over-blown and contested historicity about postmodernism (even if you don’t understand the fact)? Who has developed Being-with into Being-in-kind, and opened the way to everything? Who has developed a history of primordial identity and interest? Who has modelled Mind as a multi-functional organ, with particular evolutionary ages, languages, and speeds of operation? And so on. You think this originality is nothing beside your hermeneutics? Well, you will remain a faithful hermeneuticist, no doubt. But tomorrow and the next day I will author another new avenue. I will create what I say I am going to create, at the very least in terms of the bare bones of an holistic system. I would have preferred genuine scholars to do this work on our people’s behalf, and have tried over several years to organise something. But Otto aside, where are they? Obviously not among Sheehan’s “best students”? Greg Johnson? Well, he is undoubtedly a scholar and he writes beautifully. But IQ 138 … not yet enough originative capacity.
I’ve quoted these MacDonald studies myself in response to you as to why we cannot simply approach our people as if they are entering a world where we can treat the discursive structures (that confront their older brain) as a trivial matter
As ever, your mind turns effortlessly to questions of utility. But the point I was making was deeper and more formative: not history, not the “group analysis” but the division of nature/authenticity and personality/inauthenticity is the coalface of our work. By political and legal, educational, cultural, and social means (which may or may not include your suggestion) we have to produce a movement towards the former such that the debilitations of the age are shrugged off. To your distaste, I have often mentioned the change (detachment ►) in self-awareness (affirmation ►) and self-confidence (appropriation ►) which came over the German people in the early- to mid-1930s; and the Nazis didn’t even know what they were doing! We have to understand better than that. But – and here is our greatest problem – ethnic nationalism has vanishingly little serious philosophy (I don’t count Walker Connor, who was the guy I mentioned to you and Kumiko the other day, and who stated the obvious back in the 1970s – which of course seemed terribly radical to the liberals of that era). We are trying to do this on the back of our people’s instincts alone, in the teeth of all the forces which confront us. It isn’t necessary to go unarmed into that arena, and we should not.
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 02:50 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:03 | #
Daniel, “concern for dasien” is a nonsense. That’s the point.
For fuck sake! in context I was saying “with regard to dasein”…
The more you insist on literalism
I don’t insist on liberalism and stop lying.
It is you that is doing liberalism when you insist upon individualism “unfettered” by any discussion of consensus, paranoically depicting the slightest discussion, even, as “coercion.”
in what I was really saying to you, the more you exhibit your native lack of suitability for dealing in these abstractions.
You remain unsuitable for dealing with philosophical matters.
Don’t protest further.
I will defend myself against misrepresentation every time.
You are not in control here.
I am in control of what I mean.
You don’t yet have a hold on the basics.
I have a hold on the basics that I need. You, on the other hand, are full of it.
But now you have been told this you could conceivably rectify it
No, you can correct your straw men by going back and looking at what I actually say.
if you look at what else I have been saying in today’s exchange – which, although I say it myself, is a definite advance on anything else I, at least, have read on the subject of care!
If you do say so yourself. But in truth, you can be evasive, and are quick to deliver strawmen
Simply having a rote understanding of Heidegger is not thinking … jots and tittles …
For your own private reasons you need to run me down. I understand that.
Again, a projection.
But, in my own defence, what man of existentialist letters has characterised the constitution of Dasein as I have right here on this thread.
Even if what you say about dasein is wholly faithful, it is not very different from what I, and others say; it is only more limited and backward in its relevant implications – it lacks the context of Heidegger’s project with regard to our needs as peoples – “against” various “pincers”, as it were – and the implications thereof. Context bears readily on content.
I am usually moving toward holding fast to midtdasein in that regard.
Likewise, who has addressed the space between thrown-ness and openness to the world’s meanings as I have?
Mirror, mirror on the wall….
“The world’s meanings?” while you flout hermeneutics, are you kidding me?
Who has defined “the turn” replete with an inherency to consciousness that renders utterly redundant all the over-blown and contested historicity about postmodernism
Well now I know that you are off the mark and must be taken with a massive grain of salt.
For one thing, my discussion of (what I call White) post modernity (to distinguish it) cannot be lumped with other renditions and what ever blowing up accords. There is no reason a person of normal concern for his people should try resist it and denigrade it as you have.
Though it is your fantasy and habit as a STEM person to render “utterly” redundant matters that trouble your “simple and elegant” design, you have neither done that, nor have you performed as service as such, but rather a vast disservice.
Holding fast to emergence and consciousness thereof (which still requires interactive streams of logic which accord or not) can be a faithful reading of a basic feature of Heidegger, and it can be useful as I’ve said to you, if that “consciousness” is directed (at least at critical moments) by the social to look at where it bears upon social, not just invdividual homeostasis.
If it does not, then it is either a limitation of your definition or Heidegger’s – I suspect a limitation in Heidegger, for the phenomenological emphasis on subjectivity; and then in turn, a limitation in yourself, for relying too much on Heidegger in isolation.
(even if you don’t understand the fact)? Who has developed Being-with into Being-in-kind, and opened the way to everything?
Mirror mirror on the wall…GW, you are a smart guy, but …“everything?” Get a grip.
You’ve made some good contributions: insistence upon attention to emergentism, an outstanding and incisive critique of some of the major flaws of Nazism…
And if you have to be myopic about a philosopher, Heidegger is a pretty good one, as he tends to have a curative effect for a more European way of thinking than much of what is going on out there, including in your dread academia.
But I remember chiding Wittgenstein for proclaiming the “end of philosophy” and being Jewish as such…[because I think, am sure, philosophy remains important] and Bowery corrected me by observing that Heidegger said the same thing…
I was startled. Responding, “he did?” …you know Bowery as you, has that STEM thing against any perceived excesses, ‘redundancies’ of philosophy that could/to him should be subsumed in science.
In truth, I remembered afterward reading Heidegger having said that, though I don’t recall in which book.
I would treat it as a limitation or Heidegger being provocative if not arrogant.
He is is not the end of philosophy (and you should probably “heed” that).
Who has developed a history of primordial identity and interest?
Mirror mirror on the wall…..who is the fairest hermeneuticist of all?
Who has modelled Mind as a multi-functional organ, with particular evolutionary ages, languages, and speeds of operation? And so on.
Rom Harre put the word “mind” on the chalk board and crossed it out – said it’s a four letter word and it shouldn’t be used. He is a cognitive psychologist and philosopher of science.. it would be fun to hear what he has to say about your mind scheme….
“Thinking” is a proposed alternative…being less static and monadic.
But I’ll say this, if you or others find it useful, go for it….
One of my first ideas when embarking further education was exactly to model the mind. I was reading and trying to decipher a cognitive psychology book, equipped with mental structures, amygdala, hippocampus, the works.
I came with the same revulsion over the word pragmatism (ergo utility) that you have. I was cured by the first professor that I inquired of, with the observation that “you object to mere pragmatism” ..he was right (and we are pragmatists because we have to be).
I came to believe that philosophically speaking, and in terms of our needs as people, what we needed from that discipline was not most urgent – important, no doubt, but we knew most of what we needed and the rest could be added as we go along …letting the scientific nerds beaver away at their detail…
One of my more influential professors did confide to me, even though he is a master at a wholly different discipline, that if he were to start his PhD over again, he would pursue neuro science.
Even so, I’m sure that he would not try to excise its functioning from context, social and otherwise, as you do in an effort to render the social a superfluous matter.
But I cannot trust you to respectfully render a definition of the social and interactive as I mean it, because you have adopted too much of an aversion to any such talk.
Even where Heidegger might do that too, try to sort out what you call “the personality”, I would view that as one end of a hermeneutic circle, a feed back loop, or some facimile thereof, and an epistemological error on the part of anyone who tried to isolate it from praxis and thus do violence to the overall purpose of his project, his assignment, as it were.
Heidegger’s is in many ways, his rendition of the same assignment as other philosophers, i.e., a continuation of the turn, shall we say, that Aristotle took in Nicomachean Ethics.
You think this originality is nothing beside your hermeneutics?
I didn’t say it was nothing. I didn’t come here to do what you do in your STEM predilection in this very moment, of trying to reduce the myriad of ideas I’ve brought to bear and reduce them to just one – in this case, hermeneutics – to then try to render it redundant. That is yours and Bowery’s thing.
Well, you will remain a faithful hermeneuticist, no doubt.
Indeed I will, among many other things.
But tomorrow and the next day I will author another new avenue.
You are a reactionary, it is evident in this utterance.
I will create what I say I am going to create, at the very least in terms of the bare bones of an holistic system.
And it will be here and anywhere else you post it for people to elaborate on, debate, cherish what should be cherished.
I would have preferred genuine scholars to do this work on our people’s behalf, and have tried over several years to organise something. But Otto aside, where are they? Obviously not among Sheehan’s “best students”?
I only know of one student of Sheehan, that is Harrison. You know others?
Besides, your project is not my project.
Furthermore, I suspect that most scholars would shy away from you, because they all have experience of your type, the non-academic who is going to “debunk them and show them that they are not smart.”
Whether you are smarter than some, most of them or not, one valid criticism that some of them might make if they look upon your scheme is that it is technical and of limited utility.
Greg Johnson? Well, he is undoubtedly a scholar and he writes beautifully. But IQ 138 … not yet enough originative capacity.
Well, Greg provides way more context than you do. I am not satisfied with his philosophy either, but at least he does that.
I’ve quoted these MacDonald studies myself in response to you as to why we cannot simply approach our people as if they are entering a world where we can treat the discursive structures (that confront their older brain) as a trivial matter
As ever, your mind turns effortlessly to questions of utility.
That’s good. If I am pointing the way to utility that is one feather in my cap.
But the point I was making was deeper and more formative: not history, not the “group analysis” but the division of nature/authenticity and personality/inauthenticity is the coalface of our work.
That, what might be one end of a hermeneutic circle, is the coalface of your work.
By political and legal, educational, cultural, and social means (which may or may not include your suggestion) we have to produce a movement towards the former such that the debilitations of the age are shrugged off.
True, I see as sheer cognitive project as insufficient to our needs by itself, but I am always endeavoring, in one way or another, to provide either direction toward personal and group systemic health or to critique infirmities and antagonisms to what you might call authentic personality.
To your distaste, I have often mentioned the change (detachment ►) in self-awareness (affirmation ►) and self-confidence (appropriation ►)
This is not to my distaste. I simply do not find the psychological unit of analysis to be the most important one for our needs. Perhaps Heidegger’s folk ensconcement was secure enough so that he took it for granted and could focus on elaboration of the phenomenological perspective.
which came over the German people in the early- to mid-1930s; and the Nazis didn’t even know what they were doing! We have to understand better than that.
I can agree with that!
But – and here is our greatest problem – ethnic nationalism has vanishingly little serious philosophy (I don’t count Walker Connor, who was the guy I mentioned to you and Kumiko the other day, and who stated the obvious back in the 1970s – which of course seemed terribly radical to the liberals of that era).
Well, there is a lack of philosophical consideration of ethno nationalism generally, but I, for one, am bringing resources to bear that you should not be dismissive of (though I have every reason to believe by now, that you will continue to try to do that).
We are trying to do this on the back of our people’s instincts alone, in the teeth of all the forces which confront us.
It isn’t necessary to go unarmed into that arena, and we should not.
Maybe you feel you are operating on instincts alone, but I take the best of what the giants and common people have to offer and integrate it to our needs; and if I bring it to bear, it is because it proved itself necessary (for myself as an ethno nationalist and for ethnonationalism) through experience.
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 09:23 | #
The problem with the social question is not the question as such – we have a socially-acquired component – but the conceptual lightness of those who work with it professionally, and their determined blindness to natural identity and cause. Actually, it’s worse than that in the case of those social thinkers who have argued that authenticism, as an experiential quality, is tainted by narcissism. This is a very modern left-centred way of operating, effectively triangulating what is particular to us, and consigning us, in our new totality, to the shallow, supine, scarcely-real life of the safely individualised social product, sans essential principal. This isn’t Man. This is no different to Jewish thinking about the gentile.
Harre’s ethogenics appears to be a clear case in point, whereby identity is assumed to be socially-formed and even fashioned by the subject. To me, the incipience of this “identity” is a mechanical process, the product of the mating of Time and Place and the passivity and suggestibility which pervade our absence. For such a being to be a nationalist is scarcely different, qualitatively, to it being a revolutionary internationalist, or come to that a bird-watcher or a fan of hot curry. Everything is condemned by its functional ordinariness to the same depressed level. Nowhere is there the vertical relief of the consciousness which raises and authenticises, taking us out of the received, out of the dark, and returning us into our true relation in the world.
I have written here:
https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/what_it_means_to_be_human_part_3
… of “Human personality as the contested historical space”, and that sums up my estimation of the socially-acquired element in us.
Definitionally, personality is the expression of neurological data generated by influences external to the organism, and laid down associatively in the three perceptual systems (intellectual, emotional, motor). This data constitutes every acquired principle, ideal, belief, value, taste, attitude, ambition, prejudice, vanity, presumption, impression, impulse, accent and inflexion, action and reaction, fad and fashion … everything behavioural that is nurtured, everything that is habituated, everything that is prescribed, everything that is not native.
The human consequence is that plastic, suggestible, unruly totality into the workings of which, regardless, the most ancient facility in the brain, some kind of identity spark-plug, mechanically, stubbornly ascribes the small, mighty estate of the self … “I” … “the same as itself with itself”, as Heidegger concluded in his lecture-essay Identity & Difference. It is not a requirement that there is any truth to the event. And, indeed, on observation, the workings turn out to be a programmatic and wholly unexamined flow of body positions, movements and impulses, emotional states, and associated sequences of thoughts, the vast majority simply reactive and running without pre-selection or management. The claimant “I” … the directing, conscious agent thinking calculatively, experiencing the flow of life-events, making choices, setting and striving for goals, etc … that only arrives on the scene later as a rationalisation.
You made a wrong turn back in your college days. Nationalism effects socially because it is a politics. But it does not arise in us from a social origin. The origin is the thing that differentiates it from the mere belief structures that Harre studies.
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 11:11 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 04:23 | #
The problem with the social question is not the question as such – we have a socially-acquired component – but the conceptual lightness of those who work with it professionally, and their determined blindness to natural identity and cause.
That’s not only their problem, it’s their error and misdirection which means it is not to be left in their hands.
Actually, it’s worse than that in the case of those social thinkers who have argued that authenticism, as an experiential quality, is tainted by narcissism.
Well, I have never argued anything of the sort.
This is a very modern left-centred way of operating, effectively triangulating what is particular to us, and consigning us, in our new totality, to the shallow, supine, scarcely-real life of the safely individualised social product, sans essential principal.
Quite. That’s what their left, and international left of the abstract beleaguered or an anti-White coalition would do.
This isn’t Man. This is no different to Jewish thinking about the gentile.
Your way of looking at it is Jewish. A White person, Whit3e people wouldn’t dare think of their group interests.
Harre’s ethogenics appears to be a clear case in point, whereby identity is assumed to be socially-formed and even fashioned by the subject.
Not really, and he’s written fat books about cognitive science and the social aspect of being (i.e., not at all merely subjective) but I’m not going to defend him because he is a liberal; at best perhaps, not an extreme case; but he’s not an ethno nationalist.
To me, the incipience of this “identity” is a mechanical process, the product of the mating of Time and Place and the passivity and suggestibility which pervade our absence. For such a being to be a nationalist is scarcely different, qualitatively, to it being a revolutionary internationalist, or come to that a bird-watcher or a fan of hot curry. Everything is condemned by its functional ordinariness to the same depressed level. Nowhere is there the vertical relief of the consciousness which raises and authenticises, taking us out of the received, out of the dark, and returning us into our true relation in the world.
If you say so, it must be true, right?
I have written here:
https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/what_it_means_to_be_human_part_3
… of “Human personality as the contested historical space”, and that sums up my estimation of the socially-acquired element in us.
Yes, I remember.
Definitionally, personality is the expression of neurological data generated by influences external to the organism, and laid down associatively in the three perceptual systems (intellectual, emotional, motor). This data constitutes every acquired principle, ideal, belief, value, taste, attitude, ambition, prejudice, vanity, presumption, impression, impulse, accent and inflexion, action and reaction, fad and fashion … everything behavioural that is nurtured, everything that is habituated, everything that is prescribed, everything that is not native.
Appears rather limited, but if you want to subject it to operational verification, by all means…
The human consequence is that plastic, suggestible, unruly totality into the workings of which, regardless, the most ancient facility in the brain, some kind of identity spark-plug,
….vrooooom! we’re off…
mechanically, stubbornly ascribes the small, mighty estate of the self … “I” … “the same as itself with itself”, as Heidegger concluded in his lecture-essay Identity & Difference.
Quite a lot of discussion of the “I” in Harre’s work, actually, but we’ve been through this already, you accepted only the corporeal self (which he has quite a lot to say about, despite your ignoring that fact), and not the autobiographical self, as I recall (a conclusion as boring as it is wrong).
That’s a big problem with you – if someone has a good idea, your ego can’t handle it; and as a result you wind up attacking the better ideas, to everyone’s detriment.
It is not a requirement that there is any truth to the event. And, indeed, on observation, the workings turn out to be a programmatic and wholly unexamined flow of body positions, movements and impulses, emotional states, and associated sequences of thoughts, the vast majority simply reactive and running without pre-selection or management.
Yes, Zen master.
The claimant “I” … the directing, conscious agent thinking calculatively, experiencing the flow of life-events, making choices, setting and striving for goals, etc … that only arrives on the scene later as a rationalisation.
K.
You made a wrong turn back in your college days.
Fuck off. I choose what I attend (mostly) to in accordance to our needs. You are the one on the wrong turn, in reaction, etc (I’ll refrain from repeating the other, apparent reasons).
Nationalism effects socially because it is a politics. But it does not arise in us from a social origin.
This conclusion stems from your retarded definition of social, communication, social construction etc.
The origin is the thing that differentiates it from the mere belief structures that Harre studies.
You don’t know what Harre studies. But again, I am not here to defend him.
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 13:26 | #
Quite a lot of discussion of the “I” in Harre’s work, actually, but we’ve been through this already, you accepted only the corporeal self (which he has quite a lot to say about, despite your ignoring that fact), and not the autobiographical self, as I recall (a conclusion as boring as it is wrong).
Because Man is not an autobiographical self + a corporeal self. It is a lumpy, simplistic, inadequate and factually false prescription, albeit “obvious” to a person who is seeking, primarily, to underscore his own social model. His autobiographical self – one should be sparing in one’s use of the word “self” – misses the screamingly obvious fact that, cognitively and behaviourally, it requires an authentically grounded being to live the life of authenticity which you and I would envision. You cannot get authenticity, as fidelity to nature in Man, out of a social-derived being from whom nature is near as can be excluded.
Of course, I only have your word that this is a fair representation of Harre’s model. It is certainly true that I do not read Harre’s output in order to determine all his positions for myself. That might be poor form, but one cannot read everything. I know you are not above using Wikipedia or Stanford or whatever for a thumbnail sketch of this or that. Well, Wiki very helpfully provides this 1983 quote from the man:
All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed. The structure of our thinking and our feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of that conversation. The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models.
So …
Sentence 1 allows for nothing originating in us that is not from our environment. The only ray of hope is that “something” idiosyncratic in us might … might provide for a little difference from all that is happening in everyone around us. So, conveniently, we might not be identical social cyphers, but are we social cyphers nonetheless!
Sentence 2 says the same thing as Sentence 1, and does not need to be said at all.
Sentence 3 reinforces the singularity of the social genesis, and compounds the error that emotion, as a third of our perceptual architecture, couldn’t possibly be an evolved mechanism; while the gamut of feelings could not conceivably be its native language. No, no, it’s all just some vague thing do with socially-acquired beliefs expressed in the English or Russian or Chinese or Bantu or whatever language. Notwithstanding the fact that the mechanism of emotion does not understand, much less speak, English or Russian or Chinese or Bantu. Or whatever. It operates with quicksilver speed. The languages of Man, of course, are the lumbering helpmeet of the mechanism of intellect.
Harre completely misses our sensate “life” as the third (and fastest and oldest) cognitive system. Why’s that? Because, if this quote is anything to go by, he has the wrong damned model. Yet this is the quality of thinking you apparently esteem.
I expect you will now re-state your disagreement with the liberal Harre, and your preference for Shotter. What’s his model of Man, though?
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 15:33 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 14:26 | #
Quite a lot of discussion of the “I” in Harre’s work, actually, but we’ve been through this already, you accepted only the corporeal self (which he has quite a lot to say about, despite your ignoring that fact), and not the autobiographical self, as I recall (a conclusion as boring as it is wrong).
Because Man is not an autobiographical self + a corporeal self.
He is not necessarily as you formulate it, i.e., this plus this, but any man beyond the most primitive (probably prehistoric) monocultural man will have these two features.
Your jackass denial doesn’t make that untrue.
It is a lumpy, simplistic, inadequate and factually false prescription
No. Your apprehension and wishful thinking according to your threatened ego is lumpy, simplistic, inadequate and factually false prescription.
, albeit “obvious” to a person who is seeking, primarily, to underscore his own social model.
You should stop listening to retarded people like Uh.
It is almost funny (if this was not going on years now) that I have to keep repeating, that the group unit of analysis is not a fixed unit of analysis and I am not a sociologist (neither is Harre, but as I said..), but it is an important unit of analysis given that “anti-racism” is our chief affliction, and that is an attack on our ethnocentrisms (our group organizations and defense).
His autobiographical self – one should be sparing in one’s use of the word “self” – misses the screamingly obvious fact that, cognitively and behaviourally, it requires an authentically grounded being to live the life of authenticity which you and I would envision.
He is not absurd, and he would clearly recognize the screamingly obvious fact that the autobiographical self cannot go too far afield of the corporeal self.
You cannot get authenticity, as fidelity to nature in Man, out of a social-derived being from whom nature is near as can be excluded.
There is a difference from “deriving” and interacting; Shotter is a bit critical of Harre for using the word appropriation, the same word that you use, by the way, but it is still meant interactively.
Furthermore, with regard to authentic expression expanding into the narrative and social realm, emergentism would at least hold for its possibility (being non reductionist) and extended phenotype theory probably would as well.
But at any rate, its being a two way, circular process, it is supposed to be gauged and brought to accord, at least according to me, with our (what you call authentic) corporeal self.
Of course, I only have your word that this is a fair representation of Harre’s model.
To repeat, I am not here to defend Harre.
It is certainly true that I do not read Harre’s output in order to determine all his positions for myself. That might be poor form, but one cannot read everything.
The problem is that as ever, you don’t ever consider how something like this could be good and true. In aspects, I am sure that it is good, and necessary even. You might also know that he is a STEM type, having begun as motor engineer (for boats, I believe).
I know you are not above using Wikipedia or Stanford or whatever for a thumbnail sketch of this or that. Well, Wiki very helpfully provides this 1983 quote from the man:
All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed. The structure of our thinking and our feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of that conversation. The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models.
So …
Sentence 1 allows for nothing originating in us that is not from our environment.
“perhaps idosyncratically informed”
The only ray of hope is that “something” idiosyncratic in us might …
As I said, it looks that way ostensibly, but the thing is you are not thinking radically enough in terms of what he means by conversation. He would consider your model of the transit a conversation.
might provide for a little difference from all that is happening in everyone around us. So, conveniently, we might not be identical social cyphers, but are we social cyphers nonetheless!
As with Heidegger, I take from Harre what I need; and find the utility where I might. You’d have to talk to him or read into books where he is discussing the corporeal self to see how he might rebut your charge which seems apparent on the basis of that passage that he is treating us more or less like cyphers. And if that were the case I would disagree (I never claimed to be a proponent across the board of him either). But putting this into the light of a higher criteria, I would say that he is concerned to emphasize the social as a rigor of it s own, to emphasize the fact denied by the Cartesian model that we can neither deny our social indebtedness, and therefore ought think of our maps of the mind as matters of grammar and conversation; and at once avail ourselves of agency in de-thingifying mind, taking it out of the static, monadic habit.
Sentence 2 says the same thing as Sentence 1, and does not need to be said at all.
Again, your problem is the a limited understanding of what he means and what he is doing with the word “conversation” ….even with regard to harder-wired cognitive processes like emotional reaction, he is extending conversation, perhaps by hundreds of thousands of years, to facilitate observance of that moment when words were applied to that emotion – say fear (of another race) and then the conversation that perverted it (New York Times saying, nothing to be afraid of, racism is backward superstition of the uneducated), in order to bring people into the agency of conversation against “experts” who would deny us our agency (and self defense as ethnonationalists).
Sentence 3 reinforces the singularity of the social genesis, and compounds the error that emotion, as a third of our perceptual architecture, couldn’t possibly be an evolved mechanism; while the gamut of feelings could not conceivably be its native language.
When he says: The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models.
I would refer you back to my last comment. Even according to emergentism, anything but the most primitive organic reconstruction, i.e., any human sort of “mind” would not be a thing (an entity) but would move beyond the kind of reducionism that you espouse, into a logics of meaning and action which he calls grammar, again, to emphasize social indebtedness in correction of Cartesian detachment and denial of participatory agency.
No, no, it’s all just some vague thing do with socially-acquired beliefs expressed in the English or Russian or Chinese or Bantu or whatever language.
I can’t speak for Harre, but what I am talking about, anyway, is not just that. There are genetic differences that are at the heart of my concern to protect. You fail to realize that hermeneutics can not only help, but are necessary to do that.
Notwithstanding the fact that the mechanism of emotion does not understand, much less speak, English or Russian or Chinese or Bantu. Or whatever. It operates with quicksilver speed. The languages of Man, of course, are the lumbering helpmeet of the mechanism of intellect.
At that point it boils down to the old philosophical question, if a tree falls in the woods and there is nobody there to hear it…does it make a noise? Yes, but it won’t matter much if there is nobody there to hear it.
What I am saying is, a child in the woods is probably gong to instinctively recognize its own kind versus another kind (even if they are unable to see it, in order to prompt kindred reaction). We are in agreement that at that point of emotion, we are not talking about a great deal of social negotiation; however, there remains the modicum of agency in determining how these facts comes to count.
And there is much reason to not give up that primordial agency, as if the first person who made the choice to reproduce one’s kind.
Harre completely misses our sensate “life” as the third (and fastest and oldest) cognitive system. Why’s that? Because, if this quote is anything to go by, he has the wrong damned model. Yet this is the quality of thinking you apparently esteem.
Your doing your STEM asshole thing again. You constantly try to pin one thing on me and try to do away with me and everything I say on the basis of that.
This is why I have come to despise having to respond to your smearing comments.
Having said that, let me repeat, I am not here to defend Harre, his full array of thoughts. I take what is worth consideration. I am sure that Harre has studied babies, I know that Jerome Bruner has, and that Harre refers to Bruner. I only mention that to say that you are looking at him discussing adult, Personal Being (I think that’s the book that’s quoted from, not Social Being). This book does not deal much with the corporeal self, I suppose because he is talking about being. He has a whole other book devoted to corporeality and cognitive science.
But the really egregious thing is that you are doing this STEM asshole thing, where you try to pin everything I say, try to make it all hinge on one thing, that you are going to knock over and render me and all I say, rendering it all redundant.
I am not here to defend Harre, i.e., it is not my purpose to defend his honor and esteem. Nor Heideggers. I take from them what I can use.
Rather than seeing what is useful, you are constantly looking for ways to defeat me or academics on the basis of any possible thing you can latch onto as a criticism – invariably a straw man, nothing that I am defending and honoring.
I expect you will now re-state your disagreement with the liberal Harre, and your preference for Shotter. What’s his model of Man, though?
I explained in a bit more depth my position with regard to Harre – how you might misunderstand what he means by and why he uses terms like conversation and grammar. I don’t “prefer” Shotter (I believe he even had a colored wife in the few years before he died; I’m definitely not on his team), I am taking from them what I need.
But I will say this, I have witnessed Shotter speaking before the cognitive science department and he was asked by one of the graduate students, “what’s in the head?”
He answered “porridge.” …I laughed. And I guess that was meant to tweak anti-social people like yourself, so averse to social accountability.
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 21:38 | #
any man beyond the most primitive (probably prehistoric) monocultural man will have these two features.
It has not occurred to you, then, that the autobiographical self is illusory … a species of mechanical expression … a scientifically proven fallacy? It has not occurred to you that the corporeal self is not a self at all? It has not occurred to you that Descartes would have had no disagreement with either? It has not occurred to you that simply accepting “the obvious” is inherently unambitious for truth? It has not occurred to you that the mind is not any kind of entity for Harre, but these two illusions are? It has not occurred to you that by eschewing fidelity to nature in Man, Harre demonstrates that he has no interest in him as he is. He is only interested in seeing him in a certain, pre-selected way.
The appropriate intellectual procedure is not to affirm (in my terminology) the everyday self, and its world, but to explore and understand the ontology; and on that understanding build a solid foundation in truth and in nature. An ethnic identitarian nationalism cannot grow from any other root.
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 22:51 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 07 Nov 2017 16:38 | #
any man beyond the most primitive (probably prehistoric) monocultural man will have these two features.
Zeus, er GW says: It has not occurred to you, then, that the autobiographical self is illusory …
That’s right, it is not illusory, any more than a history of England or a recounting of an event is illusory or a telling of a news story going on in real time is an illusion.. or setting an itinerary is an illusion
Autobiography can be quite conducive to the sequential facts of one’s existence.
a species of mechanical expression … a scientifically proven fallacy?
This is some kind of Zen-like foolishness you’re speaking, the all words are illusion bit.
It has not occurred to you that the corporeal self is not a self at all?
It has occurred to me, that in the west, we normally claim that our body houses our self, or represents our self – our person. But that clean division can be questioned, or its being a self can be questioned.
Some cultures have lacked the concept of the possessive self. …“arm hurts” …. not “my” arm hurts
Again, you ignore the point that he is talking about personal being, a human thing, not the mechanical, animal process you covet.
It has not occurred to you that Descartes would have had no disagreement with either?
“It has not occurred to you” that “this series of “this has not occurred to you” proclamations is an expression of your puerile contentiousnesss, now gone pointedly grandiose?
It has occurred to me *******, that the quest and pure mechanical detachment of observer from observed and interaction, for which Descartes is the exemplar, is more or less problematic, particularly for us as western peoples.
Thus, the pure separation of the two necessary kinds of self, as you would apparently attempt.
It has not occurred to you that simply accepting “the obvious” is inherently unambitious for truth?
Has it not occurred to you that your trying to come up with whatever negative angle that you can possibly come up with is not what you should be doing?
It’s called radical skepticism and it is an expression of Cartesian anxiety.
With the post modern turn, we recognize that certain things are absurd to question and we take advantage of willing suspension of disbelief to just any arbitrary facts; thus we liberate ourselves from mere facticity into coherence and the capacity to elaborate ways of analyzing problems, test stories, hypotheses and provide solutions.
You have simply ignored many contributions to human ambition that I commend, where I do not underscore, unfold and elaborate.
Contributions that in your jealousy (or whatever your problem is) that you try to thwart, rather than trying to connect with, though time and again, I show you how it is possible for our preferred perspectives to work together.
It has not occurred to that the mind is not any kind of entity for Harre, but these two illusions are?
I told you that I am not here to defend Harre, any more than I am here to defend every jot and title of Heidedgger.
His notion of autobiographical self is important for coherence, accountability, agency and warrant.
It has not occurred to you that by eschewing fidelity to nature in Man,
This is not eschewing fidelity to the nature of Man, it is essential to human nature.
Harre demonstrates that he has no interest in him as he is.
I doubt that, given that he’s written books on cognitive science, that he has “no interest” in man as he is.
He is only interested in seeing him in a certain, pre-selected way.
This is a projection, you want to conceive of me and others in a pre selected negative way and never to consider how what we might be saying is true and valuable.
The appropriate intellectual procedure is not to affirm (in my terminology) the everyday self, and its world, but to explore and understand the ontology; and on that understanding build a solid foundation in truth and in nature.
Go build your foundation then instead of ordering me to put aside crucial and essential philosophical necessities, matters more essential than your ontology project.
According to you, I was supposed to focus on the personality. Why don’t you?
I gave you a positive altercast already – if European people have a tight understanding of the personality characteristics that make up a healthy person and one that will reproduce European peoples, ways and places, that can be nifty, like the Euro DNA nation,something that you can take with you wherever you go.. with the “consciousness” of yours and your peoples significance.
There’s a place for that in hermeneutics. Do you remember what Graham said, about the best scientists being hermeneuticists?
And do you remember what Jon said – “I don’t need a blue print when my house is on fire?”
Heck, one doesn’t have priority need for a blueprint when the house is already built, in tact, its problems, capacities and affordances understood.
That is to say narratives, stories, rules, logics of meaning and action that would keep that personal “consciousness” on track, keep the house together, foster it and not obstruct its maintainance, not destroy it (for some hair brained insistence that it all has to be brought down in favor of blueprint), must be attended to as well.
So let other people be the fire brigade, or whatever needs attending to while you examine the sort of personality that is most inclined to reproduce European ways, Euro Man, in all its splendor it has the kosher seal of approval, so what are you worried about?
An ethnic identitarian nationalism cannot grow from any other root.
We need maps for authentic negotiation of the social realm and its hazards as well ….those maps interact more or less with our authentic being as we make our way….
I didn’t say that our identity doesn’t grow from what is instantiated – I said many times that it would be Cartesian to say that we are detached from nature and interaction, but by the same token, we are a part of complex feedback systems. And I said that we know enough of what is to proceed; indeed we must; while the more scientific predilection is invaluable, it is not all that we need, the world is not going to wait for your ontology project.
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 03:18 | #
When Heidegger experienced Dasein he began to shake uncontrollably, his eyes rolled back in his head, his tongue lolled to the side and drool began streaming down his chin as he mumbled to himself, “I am…an authentic pussy…cuckolded…a genuine cypher…I am!”
Lolllullzzolzolllzulzz
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 03:31 | #
Btw, I don’t see why GW busts Daniel’s balls so hard when he basically gave all the fruitcakes (Bowery, Richards, Von Hoffmeister, etc.) that have come and gone here over the years a free pass.
I mean shit, Bowery may be a top shelf computer sperg, but is he good for anything else? Single deadly combat, anyone? How about an explanation for the Jews’ rise to power in America? Does saying they did it with black magic cut any mustard for you?
Lulz
Posted by Captainchaos on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 07:30 | #
Just what kind of solution does Heideggerian philosophy offer for staving off racial extinction anyway? What, if you spend a lot of time meditating, you may, just maybe, experience a few fleeting seconds of instinctual clarity in which your biological imperatives are perceived as of overriding importance? But what about the rest of the time, which just happens to be most of your life? Back to la la land!
And what about the vast majority of people who won’t even bother to meditate, and who will dismiss all this as just new age horseshit?
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 07:43 | #
Well, as with any good, social organizing principle (or socially disorganizing ideas, such as objectivism can instigate, where they want to block organization) the Jews have latched onto hermeneutics and associated it with their antagonism – associating it (wrongly) with strict antagonism to scientific facts, to the reality of race, etc. – that’s how they turned off – not only no-nonsensical normal folks – but even very intelligent and scientific minded people like MacDonald, GW and Bowery, turned them off to its, not only utility, but necessity, even. They’ve turned them off to it even though its not a Jewish idea!
In shorter answer, the majority of people will treat hermeneutics, when its done well, as shared stories which allow them to transcend set backs and contradictions, despite obstacles, to project their motivation, their authenticity (which liberation from facticity requires) with sustained coherence (thus also accountability, agency and warrant), being part of a people, into the future.
On the other hand, if our people tell confused, arbitrary and endlessly self critical stories* (or simply allow for negative stories to be told about us) we are in big trouble.
* GW plucked out an excellent scholar, who critiqued the golden rule in depth.
And, in further defense of GW, his holding fast to emergentism does reflect a deep lesson as to how European peoples think, a kind of organic slowness and poesis of thought*, a healing sense of how we are, as opposed to the facile, speedy, stealthily imposed affectations and lies of Jewish and liberal narratives, stories, concepts…. or of arbitrary thrownness and mere facticity as upshot from the rupturing effects of modernity and Cartesianism. Emergentism thus, is a part of our hermeneutics circle nevertheless; and that’s good.
* As you know, the nature of our thinking has evolved not just to think in facile terms of defeating the manichean devils of neighboring middle eastern tribes and implementing manichean trickery of our own, in low trust, tightly group organized competition right back at them; we have not had the luxury of being so superficial, we rather need to solve grand problems of nature – augustinian devils.
It will take some adjustment, perhaps evolution on our part to overcome the naivete of our species born in isolation from manichean competition: we must be better at handling both details, not only augustinian but manichean as well.
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 08:29 | #
CC, why are you … you in particular … racially conscious? How did you come into this truthful, natural, normal estate?
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 09:43 | #
That’s right, it is not illusory, any more than a history of England or a recounting of an event is illusory or a telling of a news story going on in real time is an illusion.. or setting an itinerary is an illusion
Autobiography can be quite conducive to the sequential facts of one’s existence.
You are entering the realm of the ridiculous, holding hands with bad thinkers like Harre. Ordinary waking consciousness is an on-going state of absence … there is nothing of a “self”. You are mistaking the illusion … a rationalisation … over which the brain pronounces “I”, for a reality. Various studies have demonstrated the time-delay between a simple action of the organism and the firing up of neurons in the thinking faculty, which is the focal point of consciousness where the sense of self is. There is no doubt about this. If you need confirmation, look at the vastly differing operating speeds of the great cognitive faculties.
There is a reason why ontologists are cautious in their employment of the term “self”. It is fine for general chit-chat, but not for the establishment of truth.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 10:14 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 10:43 | #
That’s right, it is not illusory, any more than a history of England or a recounting of an event is illusory or a telling of a news story going on in real time is an illusion.. or setting an itinerary is an illusion
Autobiography can be quite conducive to the sequential facts of one’s existence.
You are entering the realm of the ridiculous,
No I am not.
holding hands with bad thinkers like Harre.
And I am not holding hands with “bad thinkers” like Harre.
This again, is your puerile STEM-assed tendency to place everything I can say into one “errant” slot and “render” me and what I say redundant.
Ordinary waking consciousness is an on-going state of absence … there is nothing of a “self”.
It tends to be that way on one end, on the non reflective end of the hermeneutic circle, attending to articular matters (otherwise we are searching for extant patterns, including of our own lives). If you want to tell a story that it reflects nothing of a self, you can do that. Westerners, being individualists and wanting certain prerogatives for themselves as individuals, tend to want concepts of the self.
You are mistaking the illusion … a rationalisation … over which the brain pronounces “I”, for a reality.
If you read what I just said, and before, you’d see that I am making no such mistake.
Various studies have demonstrated the time-delay between a simple action of the organism and the firing up of neurons in the thinking faculty, which is the focal point of consciousness where the sense of self is. There is no doubt about this. If you need confirmation, look at the vastly differing operating speeds of the great cognitive faculties.
Then it would be an expression of “the corporeal self” – no problem to explain in this framework.
There is a reason why ontologists are cautious in their employment of the term “self”. It is fine for general chit-chat, but not for the establishment of truth.
As I said above, you don’t have to talk in terms of the self. We westerners, aside from a rare scientistic lunk-head, perhaps, tend to like, require even, the concept of self for reasons I mentioned above.
Even though both corporeal and authobiographical self could be operationally verified, I guess there would be some scientistic ontologists who would be averse to a concept of self because they can’t “see it.”
However, that is where modernity’s scientism runs rough shod even over our own traditional, ethnocentric/ego centric ways, to become more and more moncoulturalists – – ripe to be blended with the brown masses.
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:11 | #
The sensate and emotional cognitive systems of the brain are no more under the control of a “corporeal will” than an autobiographical one. There is no corporeal self. It is a fictional device, not a real entity. “Self”, as a sense of a subjective personhood termed I or me, is a specific thing, and functions as a point of evolutionary reference, obviously, but also as a place-holder for that sense of I which “Rarely, rarely, comest”. You can’t just move it around and attach it to what you want, not if you are a serious thinker.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 12:30 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 06:11 | #
The sensate and emotional cognitive systems of the brain are no more under the control of a “corporeal will” than an autobiographical one. There is no corporeal self. It is a fictional device, not a real entity.
“the corporeal will” has quotes around something that I didn’t say.
If you want to say that that there is no corporeal self that is a story that you can tell. I have already explained why it is that we westerners find it necessary to have our stories of self.
“Self”, as a sense of a subjective personhood termed I or me, is a specific thing, and functions as a point of evolutionary reference, obviously, but also as a place-holder for that sense of I which “Rarely, rarely, comest”.
This would be a part of the corporeal self, but not authentic to full human being, not even according to the anti reducionism of emergentism…
At this point, you are merely making me repeat myself as usual.
You can’t just move it around and attach it to what you want, not if you are a serious thinker.
I don’t just move it around, that’s what you do, in order to “win” against the “academic” …
If the “self’ is not accountable to biology and sufficient evolutionary fitness and then reproduction, then it will be held to account by that reality and die.
I want to remind you of something, that you are making work for me by dumping the bullshit that you make me shovel off after you dump it on top of concepts that are crucial for our people to have at their disposal.
The shame of your contentiousness is that it has the hallmarks of your being stuck at something like a four year old level with unresolved issues in some critical aspect.
You have shown me that you can be contentious to no end. It is not surprising that someone can do that, but that someone would.
When I come across to you and point to the things you’ve done well, as I have in comment 111, it does not result in reciprocal acknowledgement of good points; your level of contentiousness with me is misplaced.
I do not deny the reality of race, your specific kind, the importance of ethnonationalism, the significance of the English and that they should have their homeland for themselves, that we are under attack, that we need to understand ourselves, that you are sincere in your concerns and have some very intelligent and important contributions to make.
That should satisfy you and cause you to consider more carefully how what others might be saying can be good and connect non-conflictually with your preferred focus in the project of ethnonationalism.
Sadly, that doesn’t seem enough for you. You have got to try to annihilate others – viz., me and what I bring to bear; especially if what is being brought to bear is good and important. But because you cannot destroy it, because its good, you’ve got to replace it with straw men, so it fits in with how you apparently want MR to be, your own private Blackpool wooden duck shooting gallery. The ideas of others are supposed to be wooden ducks for you to shoot down. In the end there is only supposed to be your musings as the only worthy matter. That’s apparently how you want it to be, but that’s not the reality, so you resort to endless straw manning in order to set up more wooden ducks til then.
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 13:40 | #
I have already explained why it is that we westerners find it necessary to have our stories of self.
Not fictions. And certainly not fictions composed by intellectuals for the people. In no small measure, the value of ontology lies in clearing away the errors and commonplaces which accrete over large spans of time, so that a reliable basis for a narrative of what it means to be human … what it means to be a son or daughter of European humanity, and so forth … is disclosed. Without this attention, there will be something prescriptive which, at the very least, is non-optimal for stability of outcome. The historical evidence is that prescription is always a precursor to eventual disaster.
This is what you don’t fully get:
Your project is the upper part of a structure of truth. It is not free-floating. Ideally, it will have fundamentals which are ontological in philosophical kind, not merely operational self-referents. I have been attempting for these last several years, by way of encouragement of others as well as working in my own right, to generate at least some sound indications of what such fundamentals would look like. One of their aspects, in my view, has profound creative implications for your project, and here I am talking about emergent features. Now, I haven’t done much to explicate emergence, either as an event in itself or by cases. So the hand-over, so to speak, is not available for your assessment. Regardless and being a man in a hurry, you consistently mistake my intentions. No explanations to the contrary – and they are many – have any effect. You insist both on misinterpreting the extent and range of the ontology project and, when the mood takes you, of over-estimating the fundamentality of your own ideas (for example, by defending and, I presume, seeking to incorporate Harre’s scarcely considered “selves”).
In this way the opportunity to work together is lost. For me, being a slow and careful worker, it is frustrating to find you continually pushing on in ways which simply cannot connect to what I am doing. It’s like watching a bad changeover in a sprint relay. For the changeover to happen at all, you do need to make room for my work. If you think it is wrong in some respect as to its conclusions, or in all respects, you are, of course, welcome to make constructive criticism. That cannot, however, mean thrashing around with charges of “Cartesian!” or “STEM!” or whatever, and it cannot mean advocating against ontology per se.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 14:54 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 08:40 | #
I have already explained why it is that we westerners find it necessary to have our stories of self.
Not fictions. And certainly not fictions composed by intellectuals for the people.
Again, just as you do not understand what is done by the word “conversation” you do not understand what is being done by the word “story” in this context. “Story” or “narrative” is not necessarily a fictional story, it refers rather to the form of information. I will answer the rest of your comment later.
For now, I have a suggestion, provided you don’t attack me on your main posts and force me to defend myself, I will not comment on your posts, so that people who like your stuff can enjoy it without interference from me, and vis a versa – please don’t comment on mine – the theoretical, non-news stories that is – so that people who are interested in my posts will not have them clouded by your boundless contentiousness. Let’s try that for a while.
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:18 | #
Absolutely not. This is a free speech blog. Where you find your worldview pinched by mine, and vice versa, is going to remain up for discussion.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:20 | #
Ok, well then I will address the rest of your contentiousness later…
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:59 | #
In no small measure, the value of ontology lies in clearing away the errors and commonplaces which accrete over large spans of time.
Hermeneutics does the same thing, only more effectively.
so that a reliable basis for a narrative of what it means to be human … what it means to be a son or daughter of European humanity, and so forth … is disclosed.
Hermeneutics does the same thing, only more effectively.
Without this attention, there will be something prescriptive which, at the very least, is non-optimal for stability of outcome.
The “goal” of “prescription” as some permanent, pejorative enforcement is your paranoid hallucination.
You reveal to me that you have not paid attention to the first word of what I say. That is why I have not valued your comments for some time [they are contentious, not based on understanding what you are arguing against but on straw men], and apparently that’s the way it will be for the forseeable future based on your persistent contentiousness.
The historical evidence is that prescription is always a precursor to eventual disaster.
You are the one prescribing things, trying to insist that I should not deal with praxis, even though that was the heart of Heidegger’s project too, without realizing that your prescription of sheer “naturalism” without the human element of praxis is the epistemological blunder at he root of Hitler’s world view.
This is what you don’t fully get:
Your project is the upper part of a structure of truth. It is not free-floating.
This is what you don’t get, my project is the essential one, the philosophical one – I explained this above. Philosophy is about ways of life, preferably human ways of life; because we are born of nature, we all have some sense of ontology already, enough to begin and to find a place for scientists to improve our ontologial basis as we go along.
Ideally, it will have fundamentals which are ontological in philosophical kind, not merely operational self-referents.
You can work toward that ideal, it is not mutually exclusive and our more essential (and most often more important) requirements cannot wait.
I have been attempting for these last several years, by way of encouragement of others as well as working in my own right, to generate at least some sound indications of what such fundamentals would look like.
Go for it.
One of their aspects, in my view, has profound creative implications for your project, and here I am talking about emergent features.
Emergentism is important, I concur.
Now, I haven’t done much to explicate emergence, either as an event in itself or by cases. So the hand-over, so to speak, is not available for your assessment. Regardless and being a man in a hurry, you consistently mistake my intentions.
I am not in a hurry, there are certain things that are ready to be said and need to be said. Furthermore, they should not interfere with your ontology project and they are correctable – that’s the idea, of specificatory structures, though judgment should not have them, as hypotheses, being too far off the mark to begin with. Science is an invaluable partner.
No explanations to the contrary – and they are many – have any effect. You insist both on misinterpreting the extent and range of the ontology project
You are the one who insists upon misinterpretations.
and, when the mood takes you, of over-estimating the fundamentality of your own ideas (for example, by defending and, I presume, seeking to incorporate Harre’s scarcely considered “selves”).
Listen, you are doing your STEM asshole thing again – trying to pin down “THE” thing that I am trying to do so that you can trivialize it and make it and me redundant by comparison to your conceits.
There isn’t a whole lot that I am using from Harre and what I have taken I take because it is very well considered.
Aside from that, yes, I will take a people centric viewpoint (which is not “unnatural” with respect for our nature and nature more broadly).
n this way the opportunity to work together is lost.
I have said time and again how our ideas can work together. The problem is that you think the world is supposed stop for your ontology project, which most people recognize as absurd, particularly given our circumstance – furthermore it is unnecessary that the world should stop as I say at the top of this post. A proper philosophical basis is in service of (our) people, respects what is indubitable, is correctable in an ongoing hermeneutic process of inquiry. Because it is non-Cartesian, it does not deny reality or what is.
For me, being a slow and careful worker, it is frustrating to find you continually pushing on in ways which simply cannot connect to what I am doing.
The connections may not always be apparent, but they are there (sometimes those are the interesting theoretical questions).
It’s like watching a bad changeover in a sprint relay.
What I am doing doesn’t come after. We are not building and tuning up a car engine, changing oil and tires after the car engineer has modeled his effort.
For the changeover to happen at all, you do need to make room for my work.
Do your work, I am not stopping you; but if you want me to be honest, the way you talk indicates to me that you’ve got the philosophical enterprise fundamentally wrong.
Nevertheless, if you wanted to, you could see that you could propose the careful readings that you like and it could be complementary – at times invaluable (as contributions on the rigorous and scientific end are, when they are right).
But if you are going to proceed on an epistemological blunder and expect me to sit on my thumbs forget about it.
If you think it is wrong in some respect as to its conclusions, or in all respects, you are, of course, welcome to make constructive criticism. That cannot, however, mean thrashing around with charges of “Cartesian!” or “STEM!” or whatever, and it cannot mean advocating against ontology per se.
Well, I sense that I am arguing against a committee here, because it was Bowery’s stupid idea that “Cartesian” and “STEM” are just insults, shut up words, instead of accurate critique of the fundamental error and the predilection that would be disposed to that error.
Posted by (((Julia Ioffe))) on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:11 | #
What is important to be taken under consideration, particularly with regard to Bowery’s perspective – though it is shared significantly by GW and to a lesser extent MacDonald (because he was studying groups and therefore the topic is not verboten of itself) – is that:
In his treating pure nature and the individual as sacrosanct, he is not only committing an epistemological blunder (which would be characterized as Cartesian, yes) of separating nature and individual from the relativizing criteria of group interests [the requirement to integrate theoria with praxis, the social realm – which has been the western philosophical assignment beginning with Aristotle, and proceeding through Heidegger and others] which would provide the means to hold individuals and “our nature”, even our group interests to account, but moreover he sates explicitly that when it comes down to it, what he cares about is individuality – and he cares about that above our race: I.e. if not “Euroman” then if he perceives another race doing a better job of fostering individualism, he would join their side.
This kind of maintenance of that strict reverence for “nature”, for the “courage to be one’s natural self” has had the ironic upshot in precipitating, as Tillich observed, the “most elaborate and oppressive of totalitarian regimes” – he was talking about the Nazis. Whether they were the worst, one can argue, but they were bad enough, certainly did their part in instigating the world wars – They were not ethno-nationalists and it is no coincidence that with their epistemological blunder, their over emphasis on pure theoretical nature – that they thought not in human, moderating and relativizing terms, but headlong in naturalistic fallacy of imperial conquest, dominate or be dominated, war is natural, master and slave….“you can do no other, its just a fact of nature”, etc. – no accountability.
That is to say, this naturalism and hyper “naturalized” individualism is going to precipitate catastrophic collectivism as it is bereft the human criteria of praxis.
Believing that one is on the side of such objective power, unhesitatingly of pure nature in all its power, might be compelling and intoxicating, but it is prone to vast hubris.
Now, hermeneutics has a way of handling this error and managing its correction. We can begin with the hypothesis that you and Bowery were influenced by the prevailing narratives of the 50’s – the Cold War and The Soviet Red scare of collectivism,* the need to protect the individual from totalitarian collectivism. That was seen as the greatest threat at the time. You would be influenced by literature like Orwell and then all the pop psychology of the 60’s talking about personality, you would have been “validated” by the misrepresentations of “leftism” (cultural, anti-White Marxism) in the 70’s the Reagan Thatcher/(((Vienna Schools))) boom of the 80’s, “language and social/society is bad” …..and as things started to get really bad with cultural Marxism kicking into full gear in the 90’s, Austrian school individualism be damned, Bowery, in particular, would be repulsed by the word “social”, socialism and social things as they are associated singularly with Jewish leftist, anti White internationalism; and the enslaving requirement that individual White Americans must pay and sacrifice themselves for this “social” realm, in which they have no interest (neither did I, that’s why I left).
It is very interesting to note that even with MacDonald’s excellent study of old brain reaction to different races, the Jews present a challenge to this in crypsis. Talk about the need to transcend perception, intuition even, with language and history. In some cases in particular you need language, talk and historical understanding to realize, “this person may have seemed ‘intuitively’ to be on my side, but now I realize that they are not.”
It is perhaps telling that in his call for a formal declaration of war that Bowery does not especially specify who his side is – vaguely Euro man, but not very specifically; and neither are friends and enemies specified. That’s how much priority he is giving to the individual “Euroman” over our group(s) interests …he would declare war now, and yet I am being called headlong, I am being told that I am the one jumping the gun.
– DanielS
* Which was a legitimate scare, but there’s another problem, as we can see, of protecting the group (or group DNA before you wrongly accuse me of saying that the individual comes sheerly out of the social a le Descartes) that would in turn protect our individualism, and out of which our individualism emerges.
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:58 | #
Hermeneutics does the same thing, only more effectively.
No. Ontology is an enquiry of being which is not limited to meanings but seeks to report the experienced nature of it as directly as is possible for the human mind. Hermeneutics is an academic interpretational device which you are trying to big-up as part of your communicationist focus. Hermeneutics interrogates meanings as a second- or third-order enquiry. So, for example, it might be employed in the interpretation of an interpretation of some aspect of Being and Time. But it cannot be used in the enquiry of being per se, which requires creative thought.
Actually, you do acknowledge that ontology, not hermeneutics, is the appropriate means of philosophical address for foundation. But you deny that foundation is attainable or necessary or both. You do it right here in the main article, which you begin, “Even if universal foundations were possible and believed to be prerequisite of perfect ethno-national guidance …” You are now extending that denial to cover everything, basically, that isn’t within the functional purview of your hermeneutic methodology. It’s just a figure for your over-estimation of the social and of inter-action. Why you need these to be “the all” is a personal matter, and I do not propose to intrude upon it.
Instead, let us look at the proposition that foundation is beyond reach. This, it seems to me, is a problem chiefly of the definitional structure. If that structure is sufficiently defined we can very easily find foundation that is universal to it. If we look at mathematics, for example, the universal must be number. One might try to argue that it is problem, but problem is outside the definition in that there are multiple means of addressing it. Only when we do so with number are we mathematicians.
Likewise, in art the universal is image. In religion the universal is faith. In education the universal is knowledge. What’s the problem, then? We’re only talking about human being. We all have first-hand experience of it. Well, it’s arriving at a working definition, of course. If the mathematician is such because he is working with number, with what defining property, exactly, is the human being working? If we answer “being”, we set foot on the slide into religious cosmological thinking described in comment 86, with its attendant collapse into fatalism because, after all, everything in the universe “is”. What we have done is to allow human being as property – Bowery’s fateful “as” – to escape from its mooring, so to speak, and drift onto the definition of ground. Heidegger’s complaint here was precisely that being had to be saved from such metaphysics. Bring it back to the station of the being of a being with a full life-experience, a nature, and mortality, and we have a structure to work with. A definitional structure facilitates a defining answer.
And now we can look at the second part of your opening sentence. It is: “we cannot abide delays for radical skepticism in service of that end in lieu of what is already clear and indubitable in ethnonational interest.”
Putting aside the question of time, which is plainly pressing, you are really demanding that we escape the universalising, estranging anti-nature of Christianity, liberalism, modernity and nihilism, economism, and Jewish philosophy and politics without actually having a statement of philosophical truth of our own by which to live and make the world. In other words, there is an increased difficulty in what you demand. You hope to make up in time for what you lose in formative structure. You consider it perfectly possible to get away from that present nexus of woes without actually replacing them with something else. I don’t even know how that would work. Our life as individuals and in common, indeed the age, is a formed thing. We do not have the power as men to exist without formative influences. Our passivity before the grand ones cannot be expected to just go away. We will carry our formative influences with us into the new life, which will, therefore, turn out not to be a new life at all. You know it of the proto-typical German-American Hitler fan who is actually a libertarian. You know he will never be Nazi. No matter how hard he tries he will only ever be a libertarian, as will the world he makes. We cannot lightly escape what forms us. It is our foundation. It makes a human product which is not actually true of us. But, in our condition of absence, it stands for what we are.
That’s what I don’t think you have understood.
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 17:03 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 17:58 | #
Hermeneutics does the same thing, only more effectively.
No.
Are you seriously going to try to bury the comments that have gone before with more of your ego-propelled bullshit?
Let me put the world on notice, please pay careful attention to what I say in comment 122, don’t let his piles of commentary distract – he is not well.
I will attend to the rest of the vomit that is GW’s latest contention, er comment, later.
Posted by DanielS on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 17:11 | #
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 17:58 | #
Hermeneutics does the same thing, only more effectively.
No. Ontology is an enquiry of being which is not limited to meanings but seeks to report the experienced nature of it as directly as is possible for the human mind. Hermeneutics is an academic interpretational device which you are trying to big-up as part of your communicationist focus. Hermeneutics interrogates meanings as a second- or third-order enquiry. So, for example, it might be employed in the interpretation of an interpretation of some aspect of Being and Time. But it cannot be used in the enquiry of being per se, which requires creative thought.
How stupid. I am not trying to big up hermeneutics, everything that you say is here requires hermeneutics without your having the “consciousness” to name it as such, because you do not wish to.
World – pay attention to comment 122. Don’t let him distract you.
Posted by Captainchaos on Thu, 09 Nov 2017 18:40 | #
These debates are the reason it’s worth tuning in. Not only is the drama produced by the competition fun to watch, but the competition itself forces all involved to better clarify and refine their outlook.
As to my own racial awakening, first I needed the information that the White race was indeed under threat of extinction. This I got from Pat Buchanan. After that, the instinctual reaction of valuing and wishing to defend something I perceived myself to be a part of was pretty immediate. I experience WN as giving meaning and purpose to my life.
Posted by DanielS on Fri, 10 Nov 2017 05:18 | #
Actually, you do acknowledge that ontology, not hermeneutics, is the appropriate means of philosophical address for foundation.
I acknowledge no such thing, and hermeneutics is the only means to arrive at a sufficient basis, “foundation” as you like to say in your archaic philosophical language.
You are claiming that only you can tell us what’s real, how and when to proceed.
But you deny that foundation is attainable or necessary or both.
I don’t deny that it is attainable or necessary as sufficient working hypotheses, I deny that we do not already have such suffiient basis and if you could ever bother to read what I say, you would have gathered that already.
There is no reason to delay the project of theoretical and practical defense of European peoples – certainly not for your amateur model building.
You do it right here in the main article, which you begin, “Even if universal foundations were possible and believed to be prerequisite of perfect ethno-national guidance …” You are now extending that denial to cover everything, basically, that isn’t within the functional purview of your hermeneutic methodology. It’s just a figure for your over-estimation of the social and of inter-action. Why you need these to be “the all” is a personal matter, and I do not propose to intrude upon it.
No, this is a projection of yours, as usual. You are the one, in your quest for universal foundation, who is attempting to derive a nationalist foundation from nature.
Which patently ridiculous as anyone can see (except for yourself).
Instead, let us look at the proposition that foundation is beyond reach.
That’s a proposition, not one that I propose – I maintain that there can be a sufficient basis; but that the wish to stop the world and our requirements within it while you tinker away at your pet project, misguided as it is, is an unnecessary mistake.
This, it seems to me, is a problem chiefly of the definitional structure.
We are about to revisit the Tractatus and is error.
If that structure is sufficiently defined we can very easily find foundation that is universal to it.
Like I said: “The world is everything that is the case.” lol.
If we look at mathematics, for example, the universal must be number. One might try to argue that it is problem, but problem is outside the definition in that there are multiple means of addressing it. Only when we do so with number are we mathematicians.
A definition by consensus.
Likewise, in art the universal is image.
Less consensus on that one.
In religion the universal is faith.
I don’t agree.
In education the universal is knowledge.
A bit limited a definition.
What’s the problem, then?
For one thing, you even your “common sense” definitions are not universal, not in the sense of covering all the bases.
We’re only talking about human being. We all have first-hand experience of it. Well, it’s arriving at a working definition, of course.
So you admit that you are talking about “common sense” – your “common sense.”
If the mathematician is such because he is working with number, with what defining property, exactly, is the human being working? If we answer “being”, we set foot on the slide into religious cosmological thinking described in comment 86, with its attendant collapse into fatalism because, after all, everything in the universe “is”.
Again, “The World is everything that is the case.”
You of all people, as an emergentist, should not be quite so reductionist, but should learn from interactionists, that the human being is not only about being, he is interaction as Aristotle observed, within praxis, as he put it and among the thrownness, according to Heidegger’s framework. Here, Harrison made a good argument against Sheehan, that that arbitrariness, that thrownness is an integral part of the human condition and Sheehan was wrong to try to parcel it out so absolutely.
But, comment 86, the pictures are nice, make science exciting for kids.
If they want to look into the periodic chart of the elements, pursuit of foundations per se has a pit more epistemological bearing. As for humans, they are a little more complicated.
What we have done is to allow human being as property – Bowery’s fateful “as” – to escape from its mooring, so to speak, and drift onto the definition of ground. Heidegger’s complaint here was precisely that being had to be saved from such metaphysics. Bring it back to the station of the being of a being with a full life-experience, a nature, and mortality, and we have a structure to work with. A definitional structure facilitates a defining answer.
I’ve welcomed you to go ahead with your definitions, but Wittgenstein’s experience with and after the Tractatus has him back off, like he’d seen a ghost, didn’t even want to cop to authorship afterward he was so embarrassed.
Here’s the thing, you go ahead and lay out your definitional structure, but if you will not be warned, others might be, that it is likely to be more self serving and not as innocent as you purport; and next, the enemies of our being can do to it, what you are always doing to matters that I bring to bear – engaging in boundless contention, it only takes the power to do that. …or disingenuousness:
For example, your saying that I haven’t provided a model of man when I explain Aristotle’s model of man.
And now we can look at the second part of your opening sentence. It is: “we cannot abide delays for radical skepticism in service of that end in lieu of what is already clear and indubitable in ethnonational interest.”
Putting aside the question of time, which is plainly pressing, you are really demanding that we escape the universalising, estranging anti-nature of Christianity, liberalism, modernity and nihilism, economism, and Jewish philosophy and politics without actually having a statement of philosophical truth of our own by which to live and make the world
That is a lie.
As I have said before, your ignoring things I say and misrepresenting them hardly makes what you say is true.
And you are claiming that only you can tell us what’s real, how and when to proceed.
In other words, there is an increased difficulty in what you demand.
I don’t demand. That is a lie to begin with. And what I offer is more, shall we say, is user friendly.
You hope to make up in time for what you lose in formative structure.
Not true. The truth is, you want to hide the destructiveness of your gargantuan ego project behind the pretense that we don’t know enough to proceed in tandem with science.
You consider it perfectly possible to get away from that present nexus of woes without actually replacing them with something else.
This is a fucking lie. And it is a lie based on one of a few things: an ignorance stemming from not having read what I say or, not bothering to understand it, for the convenience of your ego project, even though I’ve explained it clearly.
I don’t even know how that would work.
Because you don’t listen and you haven’t read what I said – yet you want to interject your ego project.
Our life as individuals and in common, indeed the age, is a formed thing.
That’s a bit grandiose, but I understand your motive.
We do not have the power as men to exist without formative influences.
I have said as much many times; in many ways; it is a part of all you ignore in what I say.
Our passivity before the grand ones cannot be expected to just go away.
Your contentiousness before them cannot be expected to go away.
We will carry our formative influences with us into the new life, which will, therefore, turn out not to be a new life at all. You know it of the proto-typical German-American Hitler fan who is actually a libertarian. You know he will never be Nazi.
Now we’re getting to the brass tacks of your subjectivism. Somehow your Germanophilia (perhaps because your father had more than a usual amount for an Englishman): As if your endless attempts to bring the “renegade” Nazophiles home is unproblematic – they’re just looking to be good old libertarians, would never make any problems for anyone (as if libertarians haven’t made enough problems for us in their rational blindness to group pattern connectedness), no, the Nazophiles, in their scientism, will to power, in their supremacism, their inhumaneness, goal of exploitation, in their imperialism, in their denial of their part in the cataclysmic damage that they’ve done to European peoples, would never do any harm to European peoples. Their mentality is harmless, safely innocuous to us now.
The Jews would never try to play them off of other White people:
(((Julia Ioffe))): This time I have to say, like, if there’s a third world war, it’s like the Chicago Cubs, maybe its their turn, maybe its not so bad; they (Germany) kind of deserve it now.
No matter how hard he tries he will only ever be a libertarian, as will the world he makes.
In certain contexts he may make a libertarian, as if libertarianism is not destructive enough in America, and to our group systemic maintenance broadly. But in Europe he is likely to stir up terrible conflict if not inter European war.
We cannot lightly escape what forms us. It is our foundation.
I am not looking to likely escape our corporeal and empirical side, that’s why I advocate the DNA Nations. But as for what forms us being our foundation, your definition is limited, its a bit more interactive than that.
It makes a human product which is not actually true of us. But, in our condition of absence, it stands for what we are.
That’s what I don’t think you have understood.
It’s poetic of you but..
That our corporeality, our emergence, that our full systemic interactive requirements are out of complete purview, i.e. mostly unconscious, and therefore the endless pursuit of “consciousness” is foolishness, is what you don’t understand. We must be able to take certain things for granted and work from a given state of partial knowledge. Even an incomplete working hypothesis is better than no working hypothesis – or delay for the hair brained, endlessly contentious one of your ego project.
A note to the world: read comment 122. Don’t let GW distract you.
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 12 Nov 2017 02:34 | #
Hey GW, do you think the Pacific Northwest could be realistically pulled away from ZOG under an IRA insurgency during the right circumstances? Give your honest opinion, MI-5 will not lock you up for it.
Posted by DanielS on Mon, 13 Nov 2017 16:41 | #
Lets rather go back to the issue of epistemological blunder.
Perhaps an analogy will help to explain more clearly the epistemological blunder that people with understanding of our philosophical requirements as European People recognize as being in need of theoretical distinction and integration.
Again, Aristotle distinguished Theoria, the realm of pure science and pure math (in his time thought to be understood through epistemology – thinking about thinking, though now we might ascribe a form of techne as its means) from Praxis, the social world of interaction and human behavior (to be understood by Phronesis, practical judgement) and Poesis, the realm of the Arts (at his time understood by techne, though now we might ascribe epistemology as its means).
Aristotle differed with the theoretical distinction drawn by Plato between perfect forms and people as they arę accurately to be inquired about … being the biological creatures that we are, with distinctive human capacity particularly in our social interactive circumstance, that we arę invariably enmeshed-in to some extent… as requiring some different means of inquiry rather than the forces and impacts of theoria, when considering our capabilities beyond certain physical rudiments. Aristotle called the human interactive realm Praxis and he maintained that for its complexity and some changeableness that it requires somewhat more of a feel and practical judgment (Phronesis) in order to discern patterns; as opposed to the hard sciences which examine more strictly law like cause and effect through and through.
Now, where I cottoned onto the idea of its being an epistemological blunder to apply theoria to praxis began with Bateson, not with Jews, GW. In fact, most communicologists started with Bateson, who spoke at length about this epistemological blunder. He drew upon Carl Jung’s (another non-Jew) distinction between pleroma, the hard sciences of forces and impacts verses creatura, the biological world of plants and animals, and the various hazards of mixing the two.
Here is where I hope to draw a helpful analogy. Western philosophers have, since the time of Aristotle, mostly been concerned with this project of integrating or hamonizing theoria with the social realm of praxis. It is like they are inquirers tasked with rendering the same concern and coming up with solutions. Descartes is seen as the arch adversary, mucking up the assignment with his aversion of integration and proposal of mind body separation.
However, all serious philosophers, beginning with Descartes contemporary, Vico, have been after a resolution of the Aristotelian epistemological concern. Vico was something of a proto hermeneuticist in his solution. Locke posited individual perceptual integration through mental associations. Kant saw this as arbitrary and a detriment (to coherence); thus tried (and failed) for synthesis in universal foundational principles (Heidegger considered his noumina to be still Cartesian).The very titles of Bateson’s books signaled his taking on the “assignment”, with “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” and “Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity.” To go at this integration, Bateson favored biology, pervasive ecology, communication and cybernetics and principia mathemetica, his groundbreaking article, Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia taking psychology out of the head and into interaction. He observed that humans are second order cybernetic systems – that being among the reasons why the epistemological blunder of applying theoria, or pleroma, as he called it, should not be misapplied to people and other creatura. Heidegger was attending to the same problem and rendered at least two solutions, one being dwelling in emergent being and amidst folk, the other being the hermeneutic circle. His student Gadamer, who wrote a book called Philosophical Hermeneutics, coined the very important phrase, ‘the prejudice against prejudice’ when criticizing Descartes and the enlightenment’s scientistic blunders. Harre sęeks to integrate theoria and praxis by looking at person positions in relation to one another and their appropriation of narrative fom the social realm and its moral orders to make sense for themselves and others, more of a hermeneutic take. While Shotter’s take is more consonant with emergence, as he thinks in terms of ‘depth grammars’ to be acted into by means of internal relation.
None of this precludes the capacity for rigorous and sophisticated analytic models to be applied to the social realm …I have barely scratched the surface of using the ones at my disposal. I only mention these examples and this analogy in hopes that it will be better understood that this (integrating theoria and praxis) is the key problem before us as most competent philosophers of western requirement see it.
Bowery’s wish to ‘reboot’ the enlightenment along with his new church has the look of aversion. GW’s apparent wish to parcel out social interaction and have a language pure of its influence and multifarious interfacing has that look of Cartesian anxiety as well.
An additional obstacle to the overcoming this epistemological error and blocking correction might stem from misapplication of a business model – rather sheer competition and skepticism of potential cooperation and collaboration as opposed to collaborative effort – The TOP and TOOP game of corporate ladder climbing, wherein the winning strategy is to minimize the value of a competitor and his product while presenting one’s products and ideas and one’s self as indispensable. And when plans and models are presented for one’s approval by others, the winning move is to say ‘NO!’ Say no, no matter what, because statistics show that most proposals fail and you will come out the winner by not having invested in failed projects (and then one might lift some of the better rejected projects under the rubric of one’s own).
This is an inappropriate model to apply here.
My statement that ‘anti-racism is Cartesian, it is a prejudice against prejudice, it is not innocent, it is hurting and it is killing people’ should be treated as a watershed, as ‘foundational’ as any of our requirements… along with several other ideas that I have brought to bear.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Nov 2017 20:47 | #
Daniel, is your racialism an epistemological blunder? If not, why not; since you apply it to your life.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Nov 2017 23:00 | #
He drew upon Carl Jung’s (another non-Jew) distinction between pleroma, the hard sciences of forces and impacts verses creatura, the biological world of plants and animals, and the various hazards of mixing the two.
There is no hazard in synthesising scientific truth and philosophical enquiry. There is a clear hazard in philosophical enquiry which is heedless of scientific truth, and builds on falsehood (like, for example, human equality or the unfettered will).
Posted by DanielS on Tue, 14 Nov 2017 03:09 | #
First of all, I should note that I’ve tidied up my previous comment, not changing content, but just making it more clear and correcting a few oversights.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:47 | #
Daniel, is your racialism an epistemological blunder? If not, why not; since you apply it to your life.
It is not an epistemological blunder because I do not aspire to transcend praxis and deny agency, reflexive effects and accountability in a futile attempt to apply pure theoria to praxis.
It is not an epistemological blunder because I do not try to place myself above my relative and subjective interests in praxis, nor do I expect other peoples to be, therefore I engage the means accountability for the agentive influence of my relative motives and subjective effects in praxis. In fact, I am facilitated in acknowledging the agency and reflexive effects of myself and others, whereas the epistemological blunder of trying to apply pure objectivity to praxis is blindered.
It is not an epistemological blunder because I am not looking to think purely, for myself and others to be above the prejudice of their relative perspective, needs and effects; to transcend the delimitations of interpersonal and social interactive systems. I accept the pragmatic necessity to work within these relative requirements at least to some extent, and to acknowledge some relative and subjective engagement with the objects of inquiry and some effect on my part; as well as their agency, the reflexivity of creatura, their reflexive effects, the mammalian concern for relationships, the characteristic need for optimal (viz. relative amounts to govern motivations for change for balance as opposed to maximal amounts to force change) and the correctability of their/our systemic interaction [while principles of co-evolution are stable, even for primitive biology their remains the mutability of mutability and adaptation] particularly for humans who are more complicated still in their/our nature of praxis – who are “second order cybernetic systems” as it were, which can learn to learn, inextricably interactive to some extent with the social world – all of which requires one to accept the necessity of a bit more feel, acceptance of fallibility, some agency, correctability and social concern in delineating and applying hypotheses of our nature and our/one’s needs – “communication, the social matrix of psychiatry.” Accepting limitations of rigor (substantial though the rigor can be, by my resources as well you’ll see) has reward, however, in agency and stimulating imagination.
How has my racialism worked out for me? It depends. Some people are lucky enough or desperate enough to be served by liberalism and they can therefore be served opportunistically by anti-racism (anti-group classification). Bald faced racialism has not usually been an effective way to meet women; perhaps they think its a man not strong and independent enough to be liberal, too reliant on groups; or they are guilty about the baser part of their nature and license already taken; but others perceive the “alpha” in racialism, even pretty bald racialism, and even that works at times – perhaps I have lost a few good opportunities for not being willing to moderate my rhetoric in some circumstances, and I was being a bit too scientistic in not taking human measure of the circumstance and relationship(s), but I suspect that these relationships were limited anyway, either because they weren’t right or because I was still not satisfied with my own resource, including my project to legitimize my “racialism”, rather to render “racism” into a legitimate functional understanding of the need for some classificatory discrimination among humans and have that be understood by enough people, a sufficiently large amount of people to have systemic traction in the world, or at least a part of it that I could coordinate with in and among recognized groups.
At times perhaps I should have been more tactful, but I am particularly sensitive to context; and don’t have a great deal of patience for “shit tests” if that’s merely what they are in this context, a context where human (and other ecology) is so precarious for the popularly instilled denial of any means (rule structure) by which it might be brought under deliberate control and managed.
I don’t like any shit tests with regard to miscegenation. I remember a gorgeous Italian woman walking with a black in Sorento (probably just a friend and just one such paring in a large crowd, but I still didn’t like it; and walked up beside them and started giving them all this shit).
The next evening the woman sat down by herself and stared at me as I leaned against the fountain. She was obviously ready and wanting me to approach her and talk to her. But I was just too disgusted by my experience in America to be comfortable with the context of liberalism that it had significant part in spreading. I am averse to women who get off a bit too much on inciting genetic competition.
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 13 Nov 2017 18:00 | #
He drew upon Carl Jung’s (another non-Jew) distinction between pleroma, the hard sciences of forces and impacts verses creatura, the biological world of plants and animals, and the various hazards of mixing the two.
There is no hazard in synthesising scientific truth and philosophical enquiry.
Carl Jung’s (another non-Jew) – in fact, none of the people I’ve cited in that passage are Jews.
If one treats and models biology (creatura) and people the same as physics, for example, there can be very great harm.
The example often used is of using a lever to move a rock or using a person as a lever. The person will probably learn that they’ve been used as a lever and that will probably have ongoing systemic consequences; and people in turn, have reflexive responsibility to understand that because they are not like bears (not second order cybernetic) unable to contemplate systemic effects and alternatives and consequences to themselves for having killed.
There is a clear hazard in philosophical enquiry which is heedless of scientific truth, and builds on falsehood (like, for example, human equality or the unfettered will).
I can agree with that, and I can say, perhaps to your chagrin, that it would be Cartesian to go heedless of scientific truth and build on falsehood, human equality* or unfettered will* – furthermore, none of the academics that I’ve taken general orientation from would do anything like that.
…“there are some people who are never going to solve a high math problem” …. “there are some patients who are going to come to a psychiatric clinic with organic brain syndromes”… not problems of communication (not in the traditional understanding of communication as a transmission model, anyway)
* I maintain that to argue against equality or even within the terms of equality/inequality is an epsitemological blunder, ignoring the incommensurability of various human qualities, and as such, a hubris prone to false comparison, disrespecting niche requirements and requirements of optimality and differentiation; likely as such to produce very negative reflexive effects.
** and to treat people at the other Cartesian extreme, as mere no-account matters of biological determinism is a mistake as well, which will cause reflexive effects, correctly negative.
Posted by World Wars: theoria over praxis on Sat, 25 Nov 2017 02:47 | #
Further evidence that theoria is the danger that has perpetrated the catastrophes:
The War That Ended Peace takes a long view of the origins of the war. The crisis came in 1914, but the groundwork had been laid over the previous two decades, and there were other moments when war could have broken out. One theme in the book is that social Darwinism helped to create an acceptance of the utility of war. “These ideas and assumptions permeated European society,” she says. “You get people quite casually saying things like, ‘Struggle is the law of life.’” The backdrop to war was complex, the contributory factors many. Which is why she shies away from questions about who was to blame.
Indeed, it was not just Hitler who held this world view. Roman Dmowski was a social Darwinist as well.
Inasmuch a Marx, being a typical Jew, saw “praxis” as a part of a deterministic historical process, he too was committing an eptistemological blunder of applying theoria to the realm of creatura (esp. regarding the human social realm). Hence, the necessary, “beneficial” aspects of war, (revolution) in his theory as well.
Posted by DanielS on Wed, 28 Feb 2018 03:24 | #
Greg Johnson’s characterization, and objection in fact, of Heidegger as an “epistemological anarchist” masquerading in ontological terms would be rather accurate.
But I would add that it would be accurate for Heidegger’s over-emphasis on the significance of the sheer individual being in being toward death as the manifestation of all important authenticity.
It would be literal “eptistemological anarchy” to deny the ordering feature of praxis.
I could be said to be going “deeper” than Heidegger (with him, GW,) in this sense, where I suggest that individual authenticity of being is to be found (midtdasein) within social systemic authenticity, i.e, in practical, i.e. moral, i.e., social systemic structuring – notified by an honest concept of social marginalization (whether for unfair expectations on ordinariness or for unfair limitations on excellence) – as they would invoke a natural concept of social boundaries.
Now, I don’t want to go too far with this critique of Heidegger, because he does have a concept of “the folk” and he cared for their social plight “between the pincers of The US and The Soviet” and he did talk a little bit about historical responsibility to one’s people, but I agree with Robert Harrison that he did not develop this idea of social responsibility enough; and I don’t agree with Thomas Sheehan’s satisfaction to leave a quest for meaning through individual authenticity in moments and episodes” to be anything like the satisfactory quest that he believes society should ensure – it sounds rather like the essence of the historical/social irresponsibility that the boomer generation has left us with – a philosophical question which the WWII generation America did not provide an answer for either, as it upheld Lockeatine disorder; nor did Hitler resolve it, himself an epistemological anarchist.
William Barret’s conjecture that Heidegger had meant to add a second half to Being in Time in which human nature would anchored in perfect sync with the non-human natural realm is no resolution of this criticism; while a scientific inquiry to tell us how sheer natural systems might order events is valid and can be helpful, it would still be an epistemological violation into the anarchism of naturalistic fallacy; and reductionary violation even of human emergentism. That is to say, Heidegger was still possessed of the Cartesian anxiety regarding praxis. Again, I am always sympathetic to this anxiety and when you have a brilliant thinker like Heidegger there is much to be learned, especially as philosophy has assigned him its premier epistemoloical question – how to integrate theoria and praxis.
….
Here is what Johnson said in conclusion of his article:
“Heidegger’s Question Beyond Being” Published: October 29, 2014:
Heidegger does not truly go beyond Husserl, for two reasons, one methodological, the other substantive.
First, the meaning of Being is that which makes Being present. Present to whom? Meaningful to whom? Presence and meaning require a “to whom,” a dative, a receiver of presence. In Husserl’s terms, the dative is transcendental subjectivity. In the early Heidegger’s terms, the dative is Dasein. Heidegger, then, is doing transcendental phenomenology from the beginning of his career to the end—although in his later writings he systematically obscures the “to whom” of manifestation.
Second, Heidegger is simply wrong to say that Husserl does not raise the question of the meaning of Being, for in his writings on internal time-consciousness, Husserl speaks of something called the “absolute time-constituting flow” of consciousness. The absolute flow is a level of consciousness more primordial than the transcendental ego and its bundle of intentional acts. It provides the “clearing” in which both transcendental subjectivity and the objects made present through transcendental subjectivity come to presence. Finally, the absolute flow accounts for the conditions for the possibility of transcendental reflection itself.[43]
Heidegger remained a phenomenologist to the end. Where Heidegger writes “Being” substitute “meaning.” The “Being of beings” means the “meaning of beings to a knower.” The “meaning of Being” means the “meaning of meaning to a knower.” For Heidegger, ontology is really what is usually called epistemology, i.e., the theory of knowledge. And Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is reflection on the history of knowledge. And Heidegger’s final word on the transformations of meaning, and of the meaning of meaning, over the history of Western philosophy is that it is ruled by inscrutable contingency.
If the trajectory of traditional metaphysics—e.g., Platonism and Aristotelianism—is toward intelligible, necessary being that exists independent of human consciousness, Heidegger’s trajectory is in the exact opposite direction: toward mind-dependent meanings ruled by inscrutable contingency. Heidegger’s insistence on cloaking what is essentially a kind of epistemological anarchism in the language of ontology strikes me as perverse at best, fraudulent at worst. Of course it does not alter the substance of his achievements as a phenomenologist. But those achievements will be better understood and appreciated once Heidegger the ontologist is unmasked.
It’s pretty clear to me that Greg Johnson was already influenced by the clarity (on Heidegger), or the kind of clarity that Sheehan had provided (e.g., “where he says that Heidegger remained a phenomenologist to the end” – which is non trivial to me in that it implies and over emphasis on individuality); in an article not long after, Greg Johnson acknowledges his indebtedess to Sheehan for helping him to make sense of Heidegger and he concludes critically:
“Making Sense of Heidegger”, December 12, 2014:
Although I am nonplussed by Sheehan’s criticisms of Heidegger, I have some of my own. I am skeptical of his post-Kantian transcendental quarantine of metaphysics. I am skeptical of his biological race-denial and would like to explore his rationale. I am not so sure that the clearing is intrinsically hidden at all, or hidden in a non-trivial way.
But my main objection to Heidegger is his terrible writing. I long ago lost count of the Heideggerian words that actually don’t mean what they seem to mean. Heidegger translator David Farrell Krell recounts, “Occasionally, I would bring [Heidegger] a text of his that simply would not reveal his meaning; he would read it over several times, grimace, shake his head slightly, and say, ‘Das ist aber schlecht!’ (That is really bad!).”[5] I wish I could get back every hour I wasted reading Derrida and Foucault. I don’t feel the same way about Heidegger. But especially with certain works, I feel like those South African miners who have to sift through mountains of rubble for a pocketful of gems. When it comes to making sense of Heidegger, the philosopher was his own worst enemy, which makes Thomas Sheehan’s scholarly career a work of friendship. Making Sense of Heidegger is an indispensable book on an unavoidable thinker.[6]
Now, having added my critical angle on both Heidegger and Sheehan above (abnegation of responsibility to praxis and with that dereliction, a epistemological anarchism that has left us in the kind of straights we now experience), Majority Rights own Graham Lister added one of only four comments to the article.
He emphasized emergentism, as he and GW would bring to bear, and where others would be remiss.
Graham’s comment correctly invokes the emergent aspects lurking in Heidegger’s philosophical concern):
Graham_Lister
Posted April 11, 2015 at 6:13 pm | PermalinkI am not professional philosopher, nor have any formal philosophical education, but it always seemed fairly obvious to me that Heidegger owes a great debt to Aristotle.
Three question for Greg (when you get the chance).
1) What do you think of the work of Merleau-Ponty with his project to (I guess) ‘naturalize phenomenology’ via his focus upon the science of perception etc.? To bring the body into the account so to speak.
2) What, if anything, to you think of Graham Harman’s work on ontology and Heidegger? Here I am thinking of Harman’s interpretation of the ‘tool-analysis’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time, (see Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects and Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing) from which Harman sets out to develop what he calls object-oriented ontology. Recently Harman has gone on to give a new and expanded account of Heidegger’s notoriously difficult/obscure idea of the fourfold structure of reality (see his The Quadruple Object) in which Harman argues against ‘flat ontologies’ and reductionism for an emergentist account of reality. Harman’s philosophy is, therefore, a radically anti-reductionist philosophy.
3) I agree that phenomenology is anti-reductionist. Due to time pressures and the stresses of life I have yet to give my thoughts on why philosophical reductionism ultimately gives a false account of both science and the world. Additionally that any account of both science and the world is one in which hierarchy, differentiation and emergence are central thus necessarily embraces a form of ontological stratification. Which neatly brings us back to Aristotle and the old ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ thing. Furthermore why such an ontology of emergence and stratification – when employed in the field of social ontology – is of cardinal political importance. Liberalism really is a form of reductionism in social ontology (the individual as the fundamental, indeed only, building block of social reality etc., pragmatic and ideological ‘methodological individualism’ – and associated notions of radical fungibility etc).
In essence an account of how one can, and indeed must, be an non-reductionist realist and the importance of such ideas for meta-political thinking.
Anyway enough of that rambling! My question being that before I submit any such essay (and it may be quite some time before any such essay exists) over at say Majority Rights (or elsewhere) perhaps Greg you might do me the kindness of giving my amateur efforts a quick look in order to point out any egregious philosophical errors on my part?
Posted by Nina Jablonski on Mon, 28 May 2018 11:55 | #
Reddit, Nina Jablonski, three eagles r/HBD,
The attempt to ‘retire’ (aka censor) the concept of race is based on that transitions between the races is not crisp but fuzzy/gradual. It’s essentially like trying to ‘retire’ the concept of ‘colour’ because one colour transitions into another. So the idea that there is such a thing as red, blue or yellow would need to be ‘retired’. Talk about making people ‘colour-blind’.
And so polite scientific society will be forced to pretend not to recognise that, for example, Northern European Swedes and Central African Botswanans do indeed and unquestionably differ racially/morphologically.
More generally, this is an attempt to deny one’s ability to, from observation, reach general conclusions which can then be categorised … almost as if someone seeks to make people colour generally-blind … to deny them conceptual tools … to make them even stupider than so many already are.
Posted by Narcissus on Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:19 | #
THE ONE QUALITY A NARCISSIST CAN’T ACCEPT, Dr. Les Carter.
Eight indicators of narcissism, Dr. Les Carter
Feeling defensive with a narcissist, Dr. Les Carter
Narcissism and 2 way dishonesty, Dr. Les Carter
Narcissist, Psychopath, or Sociopath: How To Spot The Differences, Dr. Ramani Durvasula.
Posted by William James on Sun, 12 May 2019 12:45 | #
William James on the value of doctorates and diplomas
Andrew Batson’s blog, 16 April 2019:
Greg Ip at the WSJ has a nice piece responding to the ruckus over the nominations of Stephen Moore and Herman Cain to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. It’s obvious from the Fed’s own history that the mockery of Moore for not having published peer-reviewed journal articles, or not having a Ph.D. in economics, quite misses the point. As Greg nicely puts it, the real question to ask about someone who is may need to make economic policy decisions is whether they are a disciplined thinker, not whether they have a certain credential.
By coincidence, I also recently read an essay by William James entitled “The Ph.D. Octopus,” originally published in the Harvard Monthly in March 1903 (it was reprinted in his essay collection Memories and Studies which is out of copyright and freely available). Some of James’ sentiments still ring quite true:
“America is thus as a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency.”
James worried that the institutionalization of graduate degrees, and in particular their use by employers to screen potential hires, would cause all kinds of negative consequences:
To interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations…
James was deeply aware of the tension between universities’ avowed mission of free intellectual inquiry and their economic function as producers of credentials, and hoped that the former would discipline the latter:
Our universities at least should never cease to regard themselves as the jealous custodians of personal and spiritual spontaneity. They are indeed its only organized and recognized custodians in America today. They ought to guard against contributing to the increase of officialism and snobbery and insincerity as against a pestilence; they ought to keep truth and disinterested labor always in the foreground, treat degrees as secondary incidents, and in season and out of season make it plain that what they live for is to help men’s souls, and not to decorate their persons with diplomas.
Posted by Heidegger and the dasein of whiskey on Thu, 07 Nov 2019 15:26 | #
Watch “On Heidegger & The Metaphysics Of Whisky” on YouTube
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 08 Nov 2019 11:52 | #
Interesting quotes from William James, wholly appropriate given the present state of meek suggestibility among humanities students on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
Friedrich Nietzsche, writing aged 20 in a letter to his sister.
Posted by DanielS on Fri, 08 Nov 2019 16:25 | #
…and, of course, those who fall in to line with the (convenient to Jewry) characterology of “the left”, are the suggestible idiots.
Posted by Will Durant—The Philosophy of Plato on Sat, 01 Aug 2020 09:48 | #
Posted by Will Durant: The Philosophy of Aristotle on Mon, 03 Aug 2020 21:18 | #
Charles Robertson grapples with the issue of ideology and technology’s divorce from organic systemic correctivity, i.e. species praxis homeostasis by means of social accountability…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmVtqc1NXg8
He argues (and I agree) that arguments which place ideology above one’s people, to their detriment, are immoral. And I would agree. I would argue further that just as a “magic hand” proffered in capitalist co-modification beyond accountability to social capital is immoral, this (ideology beyond the delimitation of social group praxis – pragmatically, ethnonationalist) is what makes Christianity immoral.