MidtDasein: First is not the same as most essential - interests (inter esse)

Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 16 October 2016 18:21.

First is not the same as most essential (inter esse), a take-away from prior thread.

Updated (significantly) the morning of October 18th CET

I agree that it is important to not set the bar too high and that is something which GW helps to articulate very well - i.e., the Heideggerian place of MidtDasein - by ensconcing the authentic consciousness of the subject in a world view that is not all that conscious - not feeling constantly compelled by the instrumental, for reasons too subjective, too objective, or too “the They” but resonating rather, with the emergent - he contributes thus significantly to the articulation of its authentic form, in this holding fast attention to resonance, from resonance of subjective emergence to resonance of the objective field, a position which does partake of the calculative (Cartesian) while not remaking stuck there, generally. On the other hand, also generally, Heidegger helps to not set the bar too high, by suggesting that authentic thinking generally occurs slowly, in a meandering, qualitative survey by poesis. While the subject is the inevitable entering point of caring interest, its viewpoint is calibrated authentically from there, taken away from inauthenticity and into engagement with its full organic process by re-attention to “there-being” (which occurs, I suppose, when resonance with a relative concern is particularly acute), from momentary concerns to a broad systemic view based in the relative interests (inter esse) of one’s folk (social group/midtdasein) within the emergent world - that is another description of midtdasein; and if the subject is centered not in objectivity, but within the purview of the folk, in praxis; and folk leaders share this view to their relative interests, the calibration of the group should feed back to serve the authentic interests of the subjective starting point which the subject will come back to inevitably in resonance - a resonance that should meld with the group’s interests, in the moment they seek to re-orient anew, to call back from estrangement their authentic position of caring. But if the subject is not getting sufficient feedback from the system, marginalized as such, their authentic concern would bring to bear their subjective perspective on the system’s inauthenticity, acting as a homeostatic corrective (I believe it was Heidegger’s student, Gadamer, who fostered this idea).

Thus, First - subject - isn’t the same as most Essential (inter-esse) - Midtdasein - subject ensconced in a world view of relation within the folk. In fact, the first subjective relation is not to this third person (Cartesian) point of view, but rather, the subject acting into relation of second person address - parental relation, as biological creatures with reflexive capacities unique among biological creatures. From that starting point, it moves into emergent and third person relation (us) to calibrate midtdasein - if the social system is correctly oriented - which it presently is not (because it is estranged, all too Cartesian: objective/subjective, all too moved into the third person “they”) - hence the need for centering not rigidly stuck in the Cartesianism of the psychological perspective, but in the communication perspective, in interaction, its affordance of a view confirmed and delimited by the relative interests of the human ecological system, beginning with the first to second person relation and then prompting engagement in non-universal maturity, to socialization in midtdasein - a worldview gauged against the relative interests of the social group. The interests of the subject as participant in the social group, its authentic being, are held fast as they naturally resonate in emergent delimitation against material reality, including its own affordances and constraints, matters of physics; and for the need to coordinate caring activity/existence in relation to the emergence of other authentic social groups, biological creatures, the necessities of their organic systems in emergent relation to our systemic organic necessities.

Heidegger does advise or describe as authentic then, a holding fast of this essence, the resonance of emergent qualities of the subject, the people, the MidtDasein and its world setting taken to heart.

The holding metaphor is interesting because it implies two separated appendages, or at any rate, the capacity to embrace and coddle that which is inbetween and captivate it to one’s subjective attention.

Adding

GW: Cartesian epistemology, then, is dangerously self-referential, and that applies to the Cartesian sum as well as its cogito ... to what the model can say about the subject.  Subjectivity truly is a chalk circle.

To break this, Heidegger proposed that every thing from a single particle to the universe has a being of its own and, therefore, a truth thereof which discloses itself to an action or state or site (depending on one’s interpretation) called Dasein.  Now, to overcome the difficulty of representation in the Mind, because thought, emotion and sensation are each, in their own way, representational, Hiedegger proposed essential thinking as the mind-activity which is active in Dasein’s way of seeing what is disclosed.

This is good in that it helps supply a much fuller understanding, encourages attention to where our subjective emergent qualities resonate with the emergent qualities beyond the subjective; but you are sweeping aside other aspects that Heidegger suggests for relieving Cartesian rigidity, viz., the idea of Caring, there-being (taking attention out of one’s head), the folk and their delimitation as such - these are not an affectation to Heidegger nor an arbitrary application.

You have reminded me of the aspect of Heidegger in which he calls attention to “spreading out what is interesting - inter esse - and taking to heart what is most essential - then holding fast” - that would be a Heideggerian means for subjective emergence resonating with emergent qualities of the objective…

The holding metaphor is interesting because it implies two separated appendages, or at any rate, the capacity to embrace and coddle that which is inbetween and captivate it to one’s subjective attention.

What you may not be respecting in what I am getting at is how Heidegger’s system would assign being to the folk - and how the subjective would have a different qualitative relation to it, within it, in midtdasein, than to the rest of the “site of disclosure”... it would be a relative quality and a Caring which goes beyond and then delimits the subjective perspective from The They and The The which would make a non-Cartesian difference. The holding metaphor which you remind me of in your attention to emergence is interesting.

Heidegger does advise or describe as authentic then, a holding fast of this essence of resonance of emergent qualities of the subject, the people, the MidtDasein and its world setting taken to heart.

GW: Only by fitting the two realms together may one reconcile false Dasein to “midtdasein” ... may one reconcile the formed personality, with all its error, to the “site” of disclosure of the thing which is the people.  That is what my Ontological Transit, in all its gauche simplicity, is designed to do.  Understand it before you criticise it.

Well, you can put it that way, its implied in what I’ve said, but rather than its being incumbent upon me to “understand” a reification like “the personality”, you might be open to understand before criticizing the reason why autobiography will provide a better means of fitting predilections of the corporeal self to the “site” of disclosure - which includes one’s folk.

I can appreciate that you want “personality” to fit a closer reading of the corporeal and its genetic expression, but the concept of autobiography is not mutually exclusive and will, rather, facilitate “the fitting together” of authentic expression of the personality and the “site of disclosure.”



Comments:


1

Posted by Holding fast on Mon, 17 Oct 2016 17:23 | #

Adding:

Heidegger does advise or describe as authentic then, a holding fast of this essence, the resonance of emergent qualities of the subject, the people, the MidtDasein and its world setting taken to heart..

The holding metaphor is interesting because it implies two separated appendages, or at any rate, the capacity to embrace and coddle that which is inbetween and captivate it to one’s subjective attention.

This is not an aspect of Heidegger that I have tended to focus on for the tumult and mix of my American circumstance, which called first for a liberation from the situation at hand - not something you wanted to hold fast to. ...even if you could hold fast to something, if you are a racialist, you would be reluctant to secure it in that situation.

Not that that step from Cartesian fixation in there-being is wrong for the European context either.. .the anti-racist project calls for this anti-Cartesian step here as well.


2

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 18 Oct 2016 02:32 | #

Adding

GW: Cartesian epistemology, then, is dangerously self-referential, and that applies to the Cartesian sum as well as its cogito ... to what the model can say about the subject.  Subjectivity truly is a chalk circle.

To break this, Heidegger proposed that every thing from a single particle to the universe has a being of its own and, therefore, a truth thereof which discloses itself to an action or state or site (depending on one’s interpretation) called Dasein.  Now, to overcome the difficulty of representation in the Mind, because thought, emotion and sensation are each, in their own way, representational, Hiedegger proposed essential thinking as the mind-activity which is active in Dasein’s way of seeing what is disclosed.

This is good in that it encourages attention to where our emergent qualities resonate with the emergent qualities beyond the subjective, but you are sweeping aside other aspects he suggests for relieving Cartesian rigidity, viz., the idea of Caring, there-being (taking attention out of one’s head), the folk and their delimitation as such - this is not an affectation to Heidegger.

You have reminded me of the aspect of Heidegger in which he calls attention to “spreading out what is interesting - inter esse - essential - and taking to heart what is most essential - then holding fast” - that would be a Heideggerian means for subjective emergence resonating with emergent qualities of the objective…

The holding metaphor is interesting because it implies two separated appendages, or at any rate, the capacity to embrace and coddle that which is inbetween and captivate it to one’s subjective attention.

What you may not be respecting in what I am getting at is how Heidegger’s system would assign being to the folk - and how the subjective would have a different qualitative relation to it, within it, in midtdasein, than to the rest of the “site of disclosure”... it would be a relative quality and a Caring which goes beyond and then delimits the subjective perspective from the they and The The which would make a non-Cartesian difference. The holding metaphor which you remind me of in your attention to emergence is interesting.

Heidegger does advise or describe as authentic then, a holding fast of this essence of resonance of emergent qualities of the subject, the people, the MidtDasein and its world setting taken to heart.

GW: Only by fitting the two realms together may one reconcile false Dasein to “midtdasein” ... may one reconcile the formed personality, with all its error, to the “site” of disclosure of the thing which is the people.  That is what my Ontological Transit, in all its gauche simplicity, is designed to do.  Understand it before you criticise it.

Well, you can put it that way, its implied in what I’ve said, but rather than its being incumbent upon me to “understand” a reification like “personality”, you might be open to understand before criticizing the reason why autobiography will provide a better means of fitting predilections of the corporeal self to the “site” of disclosure - which includes one’s folk.

I can appreciate that you want “personality” to fit a closer reading of the corporeal and its genetic expression, but the concept of autobiography is not mutually exclusive and will, rather, facilitate “the fitting together” of authentic expression of the personality and the “site of disclosure.”


3

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 11:09 | #

Heidegger does advise or describe as authentic then, a holding fast of this essence, the resonance of emergent qualities of the subject, the people, the MidtDasein and its world setting taken to heart.

This is close but, I think, not the whole thing, Daniel.  Existentially, the acts of “holding fast” and “taking to heart” are still exteriorities.  The strict Heideggerian would conclude that the holder and the taker is, at best, looking for something in the held and the taken (or being instructed to look for it, if it’s rules-based).  He would say that this stands at a critical remove ... that you will find nothing that is not merely an idea except from interiority; and he would say that the something in question would be revealed there in or through Dasein.


4

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 14:05 | #

I can appreciate that you want “personality” to fit a closer reading of the corporeal and its genetic expression, but the concept of autobiography is not mutually exclusive and will, rather, facilitate “the fitting together” of authentic expression of the personality and the “site of disclosure.”

I don’t see how there can be these different selves, except in the disconnected and shifting ground of the human personality.  Only within that habitual behavioural medium will such fracture occur, in no small part because the ascription of self is an extremely ancient, indeed primordial brain function tied to mentational focus; and it can and will land wherever the attention wanders.  Where attention is, there am “I”.

One can view attention as, if not Dasein, then certainly the way to the site which is Dasein (if you prefer that interpretation) or the energising of an act of or by Dasein (if you see it as an action producing revelation and witness).  In my (obviously not expert) view, Heidegger lost some detail by sticking to a strict philosophical and non-psychological reading.  Without attention, Dasein does not make perfect sense.  The automatic nature of attention in personality pre-conditions Dasein for falsehood.  But add psychological intent, force and direction, and attention pre-conditions for Dasein ... the site or act of revelation and witness ... as such.  This is how we experience the real in self and in the world, and make our choices.

How this then opens up midtdasein to the understanding is slightly tricky in so much as midtdasein does not mean simply being among one’s people, or knowing one’s people, or knowing one is among one’s people, or knowing one’s people’s distinctiveness, or feeling connection to one’s people - all very good, but still posterior to the event in question.  Dasien is where or how (depending on interpretation) the truth of a thing is revealed, at least in part.  Midtdasein, then, is where or how we experience the full or partial reality of kinship and its ordered place in the Nature of Man.  This is how we become of that order, and come into possession of all those good things I just listed as belonging to that order.

So here we are talking about a fundamental truth.  Heidegger is saying - as evolutionary theory, in its selective way, also says - that the human is a related being and his being - in this particular sense of the revealed - lies, therefore, in being in communion.  And not just socially, Daniel, but inherently and in the real.


5

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:00 | #

rather than its being incumbent upon me to “understand” a reification like “the personality”, you might be open to understand before criticizing the reason why autobiography will provide a better means of fitting predilections of the corporeal self to the “site” of disclosure - which includes one’s folk.

I can appreciate that you want “personality” to fit a closer reading of the corporeal and its genetic expression, but the concept of autobiography is not mutually exclusive and will, rather, facilitate “the fitting together” of authentic expression of the personality and the “site of disclosure.”

Personality, if I may repeat myself, is this:

the content of the social, as an a priori field into which we are thrown, is made of the inter-action of human personalities.  The personality takes its form from the negotiation of the constant rain of temporalising life influences, which impact upon us from birth to death, with what is of nature in us.  This negotiated “something” is then thrown into the world as a passive actor characterised by absence, mechanicity and suggestibility.

This is the human condition ...

Now, I am not talking about a point of view here, or a particular way of seeing.  I am talking about something universal to us but also infinitely particular, which does not belong to us but is of Time and Place.  If you were lifted up and deposited in another age you would be the same Daniel, but you would also be the Daniel of that time and place.  Then as now, if by an act of the attention, either voluntary or involuntary as sometimes happens, you experienced a moment of particularly vivid existence, that temporal product would withdraw.

It’s a real thing, not a bit of what some people these days like to call “word salad”, and not a “reification”.


6

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 09:28 | #

Thus, First - subject - isn’t the same as most Essential (inter-esse) - Midtdasein - subject ensconced in a world view of relation within the folk. In fact, the first subjective relation is not to this third person (Cartesian) point of view, but rather, the subject acting into relation of second person address - parental relation, as biological creatures with reflexive capacities unique among biological creatures.

Midtdasein also operates in relation to non-folk, and would, in operation, render it impossible for the usual stupifyingly narcissistic nonsense about race ... “Why does it matter what colour somebody’s skin is?” ... to be declaimed from the moral high ground.

Interestingly, in MacDonald’s paper on implicit racism of a few years ago he relied on (I think a couple of) studies of self-described conservative and liberal students and the correspondence, or lack thereof, of what they claimed their attitudes to other races were and what their adrenaline reactions said they were.  We should distinguish the instinctive, adrenal reaction from the revelation to the consciousness which Midtdasein implies, and understand that, as the Transit dictates, the latter refers to the turn away from absence to presence, from mechanicity to consciousness, from personality to identity.


7

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 11:35 | #

Of course, even as identitarians we should avoid becoming fixated on midtdasein and its revealed truths.  It is not the whole story.  This is very important, because ethnic nationalism cannot just be a people-based identitarianism, but, for the purposes of integrity, must reach back into the processes of identity, difference, and belonging.

In effect, the living organism, if it is not merely a creature of Time and Place, is always possessed of an authentic psychological schwerpunckt - that entity or identity which discriminates for Dasein’s revealed truths above everything else, because it appropriates them, and subsequently discriminates by them.  Ontologically, identity finds that which is itself with this process; and it accommodates all discriminative avenues: personal and social, sexual, ethnic and racial.


8

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 21:52 | #

  Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 11:09 | # 3

Daniel Says:  Heidegger does advise or describe as authentic then, a holding fast of this essence, the resonance of emergent qualities of the subject, the people, the MidtDasein and its world setting taken to heart.

GW Says: This is close but, I think, not the whole thing, Daniel.  Existentially, the acts of “holding fast” and “taking to heart” are still exteriorities.  The strict Heideggerian would conclude that the holder and the taker is, at best, looking for something in the held and the taken (or being instructed to look for it, if it’s rules-based).  He would say that this stands at a critical remove ... that you will find nothing that is not merely an idea except from interiority; and he would say that the something in question would be revealed there in or through Dasein.

Ok, sounds good.

My being ‘close’ and your refining the idea is one way it works when communication is functioning well - I put out a specificatory structure and then you correct, refine, shape, craft it.


9

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 22:25 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 09:05 | # 4

Daniel: I can appreciate that you want “personality” to fit a closer reading of the corporeal and its genetic expression, but the concept of autobiography is not mutually exclusive and will, rather, facilitate “the fitting together” of authentic expression of the personality and the “site of disclosure.”

GW: I don’t see how there can be these different selves,

...speaking of Self 1 (Corporeal) and Self 2 (Autobiographical)

It’s a matter of perspective, and while an inevitable back and forth, it can be done more or less authentically. The corporeal and its emergent expressions are immersed in historical and temporal systems, including language which provides means to negotiate it’s authentic scope - it can also propose highly inauthentic narratives, but without this capacity there would not be means to realize the full, historical, temporal systemic, authentic human dimension to the self.

At best, we might say, these aspects, or perspectives on and OF self as you might say, should be harmonized and match up well.

I am reluctant to say that self would be incoherent without the narrative feature, but it would be a less authentic coherence without a modicum at least of historical/temporal dimension.

Accountability as such would certainly suffer.

Agency and warrant would be diminished as well.


10

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 23:43 | #

autobiography will provide a better means of fitting predilections of the corporeal self to the “site” of disclosure - which includes one’s folk.

Sometime in 2008 or possibly 2009 I met one of our then regular contributors in London, an American living in Germany, and working in the university system there.  He was over here for a day or two and thought it would be a good idea to meet up.  We met, as I recall, for coffee in a rather busy hotel lounge - not overly suitable for conversation between nationalists.

Our friend had read Heidegger, but had the idea that everything is, at its root, material - even being itself - and saw in this some possibility of acquitting Heidegger’s central idea of Dasein to a nationalism of genetic interests.  I well remember taking a pen and a scrap of paper and scratching out a line of the stations of consciousness of self - not many of them because I had not long had the idea, and it was still very sketchy.  I tried to explain that materiality brought everything down to a single point and kept it there, whereas what we needed was to capture all the motion in the range of human consciousness, from darkness to light, so that the inevitable tragedy of our true condition and our one means of even fleeting freedom from it might be explicated.

A few years later I had this:

absence ◄ habituality (mechanicity) ◄ immersion ◄ negation ◄ reverie ◄ sloth ◄ passivity ◄► intent ► attention ► stillness ► detachment ► affirmation ► appropriation ► presence ► non-ascription of identity ► self-annihilation ► Being

... which, despite its obviously thin form, I still believe to be sequentially accurate.  Why don’t you see if you can develop your scheme of the corporeal ◄► the autobiographical as far as this?  My expectation is that, in doing so and providing you are seriously seeking to encapsulate the same ontology, you will end up with something very similar.


11

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:53 | #

Why don’t you see if you can develop your scheme of the corporeal ◄► the autobiographical as far as this?

Why don’t you?

It’s not like I am casting your thoughts aside - your articulation of the breadth and the perspective of emergence is excellent, among other things.

For my part, I can say that I might have a look at things along your terminological cluster, but I am not sure that that is all that is necessary (frankly, I doubt it).

This seems more like a rather personal psychological system for relating to the world..which may be blinding to the way one actually does things or to ways one needs to do things in order to do them better.

In your line, I don’t see much in the way of history and systemic, temporal breadth - those are certainly important matters to take into consideration, among many others.

But before you answer this question and remark, I need to look at and remark further on the rest of your comments just above.


12

Posted by Alex Candle on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:21 | #

So, I actually emailed my own treatise regarding a Heideggerean basis for nationalism and racial identification to the contact link (having originally been introduced to Heidegger at this very site several years ago). I should say more precisely that it lays the groundwork for how something “such as nationalism” becomes phenomenologically possible. I have not received a response yet, so I wanted to write that I would be willing to pay any sort of reading fee to have it reviewed. I’m sure it’s not gold, but I hope that I’ve at least stumbled upon a new approach to inform white activism.


13

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 06:04 | #

Alex, assuming your email is correct, I will contact you in a few - no reading charge )

Moving on to the next issue of GW’s comment number 4

GW: I don’t see how there can be these different selves,

That one is answered and I will put up a post before long to elaborate as to why it is important/useful.

except in the disconnected and shifting ground of the human personality.

That is not the full site, even if one chooses to go with that fairly arbitrary name - “the personality” - that is to place the issues too statically and monadically… and too narrowly within the head (for that lack of dimension, handicapping one before difficulties in dealing with paradoxes, contradictions, tangles, negotiation of social requirements and more).

Only within that habitual behavioural medium will such fracture occur, in no small part because the ascription of self is an extremely ancient, indeed primordial brain function tied to mentational focus; and it can and will land wherever the attention wanders.  Where attention is, there am “I”.

Not really, it’s system goes beyond that, quite necessarily.

One can view attention as, if not Dasein, then certainly the way to the site which is Dasein (if you prefer that interpretation) or the energising of an act of or by Dasein (if you see it as an action producing revelation and witness).  In my (obviously not expert) view, Heidegger lost some detail by sticking to a strict philosophical and non-psychological reading.

I don’t think he would have lost nearly as much for a non-psychological view as he would have lost for a non-biological, human ecological systemic view, and, to the extent that he is “guilty” of it, a non-sociological view - though I think he is less “guilty” of that than you are.

Without attention, Dasein does not make perfect sense.

Ok, you have a point there, but attention does not occur outside of interaction.

The automatic nature of attention in personality pre-conditions Dasein for falsehood.

Interesting point that attention pre-conditons for falsehood. I am not sure that I’d call it the personality, though.

This is a place where autobiography would most likely serve better, but for misdirecting to falsehood where narratives don’t match corporeal and systemic interest and to potentially bring them back to a good match (I will put up an article before long by an Oxford psychologist, that demonstrates that process).

But add psychological intent, force and direction, and attention pre-conditions for Dasein ... the site or act of revelation and witness ... as such.  This is how we experience the real in self and in the world, and make our choices.

I an agree that our corporeal self, brain and the rest of our system(ic involvement) would be an emergent experssion of adaptive choices, and attention would be one of those expressions.

You make a very interesting point that that attention can be misled…into falseness, as you say.

...moving onto your next points…


14

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 07:04 | #

I might have a look at things along your terminological cluster, but I am not sure that that is all that is necessary (frankly, I doubt it).

It isn’t a cluster.  It is an analytic tool: an attempt - good or bad I cannot say - to formulate the full working range of identity, will, and waking consciousness.  A hipster identitarian with a penchant for philosophy might describe it as where ontology meets teleology.  If it is sufficiently complete, any attempt to construct a political ideology of that necessary kind has its orientation here.  That is to say, the will-to-self as a process of synthesis from a general condition of nullity, which is the politics of identity and also the politically useful part of Heidegger’s ontology, is figured here in a functioning, sequential form like the combination of a lock. 

If I didn’t think it was important, thin as it is, I wouldn’t make such a big deal of it.

In your line, I don’t see much in the way of history and systemic, temporal breadth - those are certainly important matters to take into consideration, among many others.

Indeed you will not find the suggestion of difference in Time.  I am interested in what is always the same.


15

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 07:23 | #

That is not the full site, even if one chooses to go with that fairly arbitrary name - “the personality” - that is to place the issues too statically and monadically… and too narrowly within the head (for that lack of dimension, handicapping one before difficulties in dealing with paradoxes, contradictions, tangles, negotiation of social requirements and more).

It is you and me and all of us now.  It is all of us in our state of waking consciousness right this minute.  At the individual level, it is the condition in which our great systems of the perception operate quite automatically and without willed attention.  It is the condition of us in which the endless “paradoxes, contradictions, tangles, negotiation of social requirements and more” arise.  At the collective level, it is the condition in which external circumstance can have this terrible and totalistic grip upon us, with all its denying, obliterating force.  It is not the paradoxes, contradictions and so forth created by that which hold interest for us, but the lifting of us out from our absence, mechanicity and immersion, this being the politics of light called identitarianism.


16

Posted by Captainchaos on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 08:10 | #

This blog has become a train wreck.  How is it that an inarticulate, mentally and emotionally stunted dweeb can be empowered to delete the comments of his mental and moral betters?  I’m through here.  I hope the door hits Daniel Spergbotowitz in the face on my way out.


17

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 08:18 | #

CC, if you would only make more productive contributions, or if your criticisms were substantive rather than personal, you would find Daniel grateful for your time and attention.  It’s down to you.


18

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:09 | #

Not really, it’s system goes beyond that, quite necessarily.

I don’t know what you mean.  I am explaining the brain activity of ascribing a self to things that simply “happen” in a quite unmediated and mechanical way, simply because attention in its unwilled form is focussed there.  Think it through.  You know that there are moments in the life of the individual and that of the group when a particular focus takes hold, and clarity descends.  The life that is being lived at that moment becomes appropriated by a most familiar, singular self, and a very direct, wordless connection (Dasein) between, let us say, this knower and the known operates.  But what about the other times ... the vast stretches of time when none of this normally human activity is taking place?  The brain still ascribes self-hood, even though the operative self is a transitory, habituated thing and a veritable multitude.

A simply way of understanding what I want to say is that the sense of self is applied, and that doesn’t happen in the manner of, say, the sun, as a single great source of light, shining across a permanent psychological landscape so that everywhere is “I”.  Rather, it’s a searchlight following attention as it scans quite haphazardly, the ascribed sense of self obtaining only in the pool of light as it falls in any particular place, each pool being true only of itself.

What this tells us is that the power of attention, willed or not, determines the site of identity, authentic or not.  The name of the subject is given to that place regardless.  Thus a politics of identity absolutely must discriminate for the authentic, because everything else is partial at best and, therefore, error.

Now, an identitarian social analyst can have a highly significant role here.  But his analysis must discriminate along the ontological lines, or he will preference error.


19

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:30 | #

I don’t think he [Heidegger] would have lost nearly as much for a non-psychological view

He lost the attentive action of the brain.  He lost the mechanical act of ascribing “I” to everything.  He lost some of the (literally effort-less) immersive mental experience - our semi-permanent tendency to disappear into, and become absent in, objects.  He lost the open, suggestible nature of mind, which is extremely important to an understanding of autonomy.

I certainly agree that an evolutionary reading would have added a further dimension to his thought, if only in that his truths do need to be consistent or, at least, not in contradiction with “facts”.  I am not saying that he was necessarily so, but his treatment of technology, for example, might have benefitted.

to the extent that he is “guilty” of it, a non-sociological view - though I think he is less “guilty” of that than you are.

That is because you are mistaking sociology for creative philosophy.  It has its place in the chain, where it can be useful and where it operates strictly in accordance with everything else.


20

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:51 | #

Interesting point that attention pre-conditions for falsehood. I am not sure that I’d call it the personality, though.

Attention in this non-willed form is not the implicit intention in standard phenomenology, but the formative act of it.  Willed attention breaks through the silken bonds of the implicit and drives the object out into the open.

Here we are talking about brain function, not a function of the personality.


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Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:56 | #

This is a place where autobiography would most likely serve better, but for misdirecting to falsehood where narratives don’t match corporeal and systemic interest and to potentially bring them back to a good match (I will put up an article before long by an Oxford psychologist, that demonstrates that process).

I will read that with interest.  At this point I would say that the systems of mind and body are not, and cannot be massaged into being, any form of self.  I don’t see the distinctions which would make them so, but which plainly appeal to you.  Autobiography is certainly a deceptive term.  Its parameters are not known to me.


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Posted by DanielS on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 12:28 | #

Continuing with GW’s comment number 4:

But add psychological intent, force and direction, and attention pre-conditions for Dasein ... the site or act of revelation and witness ... as such.  This is how we experience the real in self and in the world, and make our choices.

That bit answered in my last comment (to be elaborated on later).

How this then opens up midtdasein to the understanding is slightly tricky in so much as midtdasein does not mean simply being among one’s people, or knowing one’s people, or knowing one is among one’s people, or knowing one’s people’s distinctiveness, or feeling connection to one’s people - all very good, but still posterior to the event in question.

I have always at least granted that there is an internal relation ..not only to these things but all, otherwise it would be Cartesian; but you have articulated midtdasein not only further than being amidst one’s group but beyond, and even more interestingly, beyond and even more fully the thin notion of fractal like internal relation (which is how Wittgenstein would treat it).

It is for this fullness that I give you very big credit for providing much better, fuller understanding.

Dasien is where or how (depending on interpretation) the truth of a thing is revealed, at least in part.  Midtdasein, then, is where or how we experience the full or partial reality of kinship and its ordered place in the Nature of Man.  This is how we become of that order, and come into possession of all those good things I just listed as belonging to that order.

Good. It’s probably missing a reconstructive element, i.e., a necessary social and agentive element, that is quite necessary to humans being born unfinished creatures that we are..but there is a profound feel to what you say and I want to let it settle in consideration.

So here we are talking about a fundamental truth.  Heidegger is saying - as evolutionary theory, in its selective way, also says - that the human is a related being and his being - in this particular sense of the revealed - lies, therefore, in being in communion.  And not just socially, Daniel, but inherently and in the real.

Ok, but you set yourself up a bit by using the word “communion” .. it is etymologically related to the word communication and community, and thus you (correctly) begin to allow for the legitimate connection of the social (“not just” therefore it is not absolutely separate from either). Nevertheless, I did not say that our relation to the world was merely social, there are these deep, resonating biological aspects and truths in and beyond our people that we experience in a way with our inherent, co-evolutionary means to experience them. And you articulate this much, much better than I have where I have even indicated that direction of consideration.

Next, for your comment number 5.


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Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 13:37 | #

Ethnic self-interest doesn’t need ‘permission’ from phenomenology to be real. It simply is as a function of genetics and inclusive-fitness theory which in turn simply reflect mathematical/statistical truths. I personally don’t give a damn if someone is an “authentic” ethno-communitarian - just that that perspective is normative, the mass accept it and the incentive structures around behaviour support that view over the long-term.


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Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 19:03 | #

It’s probably missing a reconstructive element

The “reconstructive element” has to be the recreation of the conditions necessary for the people to live in the truth of its own self.  Or, at least, that has to be the ambition.  It’s not enough to rely on the instinctual to assert itself, and not enough to impose rules or spread information.  Actual movement along the Transit, towards the turn, has to be achieved.

You set yourself up a bit by using the word “communion”

Yeah, I knew that when I finished typing.  Thing is, I’m trying to push into these quite recondite areas in a way which is instantly and very easily understood by any thinking person.  Sometimes I fall short.  Maybe this would have been a bit more like it.

So here we are talking about a fundamental truth.  Heidegger is saying - as evolutionary theory, in its selective way, also says - that the human is a related being and his being - in this particular sense of the revealed - lies, therefore, in being in a communion of truth.


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Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 19:31 | #

Graham, the instinctive needs no consent from the conscious.  But the non-conscious, or mechanistic, all too readily spreads its confusions far and wide, negating instinct, dehumanising its imperatives, denying the very existence of Nature in Man.  Better, then, to turn towards the conscious.


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Posted by DanielS on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 23:58 | #

Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 08:37 | # 23

Ethnic self-interest doesn’t need ‘permission’ from phenomenology to be real. It simply is as a function of genetics and inclusive-fitness theory which in turn simply reflect mathematical/statistical truths. I personally don’t give a damn if someone is an “authentic” ethno-communitarian - just that that perspective is normative, the mass accept it and the incentive structures around behaviour support that view over the long-term.

Graham, I’m actually glad that you have this pragmatic bias - quite important.

But it is not only practical to establish incentive structures, it would be necessary, of course, to have more concrete establishment of the content of the structures in order to provide argumentative/rules based/legal grounds.

For example, that it takes 14 - 21,000 of a particular kind to stave off mal-effects of inbreeding.

How much habitat and resource is required and what kind? I know that there are already answers to these questions, but I am talking about bringing them to the fore.

More, what are particularly significant traits that need protection, and again, in what quantity, that might not be known by common sense but require science to disclose?

Along with incentive structures, we ought to consider disincentive structures: Denying citizenship, birth certificates, marriage licenses, even Visas in extreme cases in order to protect populations and prevent invasive species from exploiting entitlement to the common resource of the social capital which is meant to serve the population from which it derived.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 21 Oct 2016 14:03 | # 24

  It’s probably missing a reconstructive element

The “reconstructive element” has to be the recreation of the conditions necessary for the people to live in the truth of its own self.

Not only. You played a card-trick, pulled a sleight of hand that is not so innocent a mistake - by inserting the word The, before “the reconstructive element” - The “reconstructive element” - where I had the preposition “a” before it. Big difference. “The” misrepresents what I’ve called attention to and displays Cartesian anxiety instead.

Moreover, it’s fine to some extent to try to model those pure conditions. However, we can be, indeed, must be more pragmatic than that. There is enough evidence in the way of facts and rules that go into returning EGI to its own before the time some pure ground is established.

Or, at least, that has to be the ambition.  It’s not enough to rely on the instinctual to assert itself, and not enough to impose rules or spread information.  Actual movement along the Transit, towards the turn, has to be achieved.

Well, it sounds like we’re close enough there.. except, again, I believe that we can be and need to be more pragmatic.

DanielS: You set yourself up a bit by using the word “communion”

Yeah, I knew that when I finished typing.  Thing is, I’m trying to push into these quite recondite areas in a way which is instantly and very easily understood by any thinking person.  Sometimes I fall short.  Maybe this would have been a bit more like it.

So here we are talking about a fundamental truth.  Heidegger is saying - as evolutionary theory, in its selective way, also says - that the human is a related being and his being - in this particular sense of the revealed - lies, therefore, in being in a communion of truth.

Nothing wrong with the word communion nor communication. It is very good that you look at matters with that perspective as well.


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Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 06:14 | #

You played a card-trick, pulled a sleight of hand that is not so innocent a mistake - by inserting the word The, before “the reconstructive element” - The “reconstructive element” - where I had the preposition “a” before it. Big difference. “The” misrepresents what I’ve called attention to and displays Cartesian anxiety instead.

Just when I think you are seeing, you prove that you are, in fact, only straining your eyes to see.  Yes, there is a “the” in an identitarian revolution.  No, it is not one of many developments labelled “a”, because without it the rest is just prescription, and will produce unintended and undesirable consequences leading to failure.

Moreover, it’s fine to some extent to try to model those pure conditions. However, we can be, indeed, must be more pragmatic than that. There is enough evidence in the way of facts and rules that go into returning EGI to its own before the time some pure ground is established.

Daniel, pure philosophy is chemistry.  Theoretical modelling is drug trials.  Politics is a course of treatment.  Each is necessary, of course.  But you can’t get to b without a, and you can’t get to c without b.  What is pragmatism but a wish to do away with tediously necessary order?

Nothing wrong with the word communion nor communication. It is very good that you look at matters with that perspective as well.

I have to at least try to be the martinet here, and insist that you still haven’t thought through the relationship of the personal and public moments of affirmation and appropriation.  The simple, basic fact is that ethnic identity is momentarily affirmed and appropriated in the public context, quite possibly without words at all because it belongs to the instinctive or autonomic system and to the emotion at least as much as it does to the intellect.  In terms of the action we have been discussing as Dasein, it is when two or more of the great systems of Mind - and there are arguably five or six, if one wishes to capture the whole Man - are focussed together that truth stirs and the world turns, and it most readily does that collectively.


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Posted by DanielS on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 07:47 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 01:14 | #

  You played a card-trick, pulled a sleight of hand that is not so innocent a mistake - by inserting the word The, before “the reconstructive element” - The “reconstructive element” - where I had the preposition “a” before it. Big difference. “The” misrepresents what I’ve called attention to and displays Cartesian anxiety instead.

Just when I think you are seeing, you prove that you are, in fact, only straining your eyes to see.  Yes, there is a “the” in an identitarian revolution.  No, it is not one of many developments labelled “a”, because without it the rest is just prescription, and will produce unintended and undesirable consequences leading to failure.

No, “a” will not necessarily provide unintended consequences and failure. “A” is an acknowledgement that we are not automatons, following brute, deterministic paths set for us by nature - and as Europeans, especially, we have flexibility and agency.

As humans we are born incomplete. Yes, there are inborn facets which keep us on the track of our biological system, which you would say keeps us on track of nationalism - but our biological system is not entirely naturally removed from other races; and for our advanced capacity, and for the fact that we are not so speciated from other races that we cannot interbreed with them, we can go off the mark (in the way that you are concerned about) against the better interests of our people’s necessary system; but, on the other hand, we can use our creativity - the “a” means as opposed to “the” means - to marshal our reconstruction, sometimes from more far ranging, sophisticated orbits of concern - in a great harvest to our social capital. ...or loss, if it is not garnered (say for rejection of “impure” prescriptive, relativist motives).

DanielS -  Moreover, it’s fine to some extent to try to model those pure conditions. However, we can be, indeed, must be more pragmatic than that. There is enough evidence in the way of facts and rules that go into returning EGI to its own before the time some pure ground is established.

Daniel, pure philosophy is chemistry.  Theoretical modelling is drug trials.

No it isn’t. It isn’t only description and testing. That’s science.

  Politics is a course of treatment.

Politics is more than that.

Each is necessary, of course.  But you can’t get to b without a, and you can’t get to c without b.  What is pragmatism but a wish to do away with tediously necessary order?

No. Again, you are reacting in to the word “pragmatism” and pragmatist philosophy in the same way I did at your impoverished stage of philosophical understanding.

We are not talking about “mere” pragmatism, but the ultimate practical necessity of our human situation. ...by contrast to your burdensome wish for an absolute focus singularly on foundationalism ...and far beyond what is practically necessary at that.

Nothing wrong with the word communion nor communication. It is very good that you look at matters with that perspective as well.

I have to at least try to be the martinet here, and insist that you still haven’t thought through the relationship of the personal and public moments of affirmation and appropriation.

Maybe, but I know enough to know more than generally what and who is in danger, in need of defense, who our antagonists are and what needs to be done.

Your calling that politics and acting as if it is not enough is more like a dangerous obstruction than being “careful.”

The simple, basic fact is that ethnic identity is momentarily affirmed and appropriated in the public context, quite possibly without words at all because it belongs to the instinctive or autonomic system and to the emotion at least as much as it does to the intellect.

Well, there are a lot of people who don’t get it instinctively - and not only because of Jewish crypsis.  They will valence the blackest of blacks. Maybe pheromones? - i.e., even the older parts of the brain, that you seem to covet so much as a natural guide to native nationalism, are at times leading us astray?

In terms of the action we have been discussing as Dasein, it is when two or more of the great systems of Mind - and there are arguably five or six, if one wishes to capture the whole Man - are focussed together that truth stirs and the world turns, and it most readily does that collectively.

Well, that’s one story to tell. But when you invoke the mammalian brain, you are at least connecting to concern for relationships and reflexive capacity, when you are connecting the newer brain, further still, you are into the realm of the “dread” prescription, planning and advanced agency, in the capacity to negotiate not only social obstacles and opposition but to articulate and enact a better philosophy of life for us.


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Posted by DanielS on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 08:22 | #

Resuming with GW Comment 5 now

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 10:00 | # 5

DanielS rather than its being incumbent upon me to “understand” a reification like “the personality”, you might be open to understand before criticizing the reason why autobiography will provide a better means of fitting predilections of the corporeal self to the “site” of disclosure - which includes one’s folk.

  I can appreciate that you want “personality” to fit a closer reading of the corporeal and its genetic expression, but the concept of autobiography is not mutually exclusive and will, rather, facilitate “the fitting together” of authentic expression of the personality and the “site of disclosure.”

Personality, if I may repeat myself, is this:

  the content of the social, as an a priori field into which we are thrown, is made of the inter-action of human personalities.  The personality takes its form from the negotiation of the constant rain of temporalising life influences, which impact upon us from birth to death, with what is of nature in us.  This negotiated “something” is then thrown into the world as a passive actor characterised by absence, mechanicity and suggestibility.

  This is the human condition ...

You have many good and useful things to say,  this elaboration on what you think “the personality” is, isn’t one of them.

If you want to say that it is a set of coordinates in the corporeal brain that creates a particular kind of temperament, predilections, aptitude and skills…ok.

There are dogs who are more aggressive, races that are more impulsive and so on.

It would be fine to identify a concept of a person’s most natural personality and help them match it with their practices.

I am not opposed to that.

As I have said before, I’d like to know the personalty type of females most disposed to miscegenation so that I can stay away from them.

However, the concept of autobiography is imperative to dealing with the complexities of interactive reality, social and otherwise. And it is very interesting.

GW: Now, I am not talking about a point of view here, or a particular way of seeing.  I am talking about something universal to us but also infinitely particular, which does not belong to us but is of Time and Place.  If you were lifted up and deposited in another age you would be the same Daniel, but you would also be the Daniel of that time and place.  Then as now, if by an act of the attention, either voluntary or involuntary as sometimes happens, you experienced a moment of particularly vivid existence, that temporal product would withdraw.

“If you were lifted up and deposited in another age”: Is that reality? Is it possible? It is a valid thought exercise and I suppose it is possible to assess what very similar DNA did in different historical circumstances..  so, I don’t need to disrupt your thought experiment, but..

It’s a real thing, not a bit of what some people these days like to call “word salad”, and not a “reification”.

Character types can be real to a personal system, but it is a “reification” when taken out of social interactive context and its complexities…and a disservice when that reification is rendered to the exclusion of the hermeneutic, in this application, autobiographical means to negotiate those complexities.


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Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:30 | #

You have many good and useful things to say,  this elaboration on what you think “the personality” is, isn’t one of them.  If you want to say that it is a set of coordinates in the corporeal brain that creates a particular kind of temperament, predilections, aptitude and skills…ok.

Don’t write it off so lightly.  I will, in the end, cause you to question the application to yourself and to me and to everyone of us of those qualities of identity, freedom, and agency you think we, in our ordinary conscious state, necessarily, indeed self-evidently possess.  For one thing, we have spoken of false Dasein, and I have pointed to the logical necessity of a flawed form of attention to explain it.  Now there awaits to be explained, also logically, how a flawed form of attention comes to pass, and what the implications of it are for the rest of the functioning of our consciousness.  I am bringing forward a complete model which succeeds in that, a model in which everything fits and functions together, in particular a model which combines and conjoins all the spheres of the everyday and what we might term the present-to-being, and makes them one human story.

However, the concept of autobiography is imperative to dealing with the complexities of interactive reality, social and otherwise. And it is very interesting.

You are welcome to champion it.  I will attend to it when I see something substantial enough to warrant that.  Meanwhile, you could ask yourself what you (and we) are, precisely, if there is this other state of presence which you (and we) are not.

Character types can be real to a personal system, but it is a “reification” when taken out of social interactive context and its complexities.

As I have already stated, the human personality et unum omnes IS the site of the social system, its existential limit ... its form of perpetual containment ... as well as its form of expression and transmission.  The social exists nowhere else, and functions through no other medium nor has any other voice.  There is no study of its form or its voice which is not, ultimately, a study of the content of the personality, and is not couched in personality’s defining characteristics whether those influence the social (ie, immersion, absence, mechanicity, etc) or are influenced by it (plasticity, suggestibility).  For it is these which define the ontology of the social, and by that means allow it to be appropriately scaled to Man.


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Posted by Uh on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:43 | #

Ethnic self-interest doesn’t need ‘permission’ from phenomenology to be real. It simply is as a function of genetics and inclusive-fitness theory which in turn simply reflect mathematical/statistical truths.

What you’re calling “ethnic self-interest” and “inclusive-fitness theory” cancel out. Wandrin and Bowery had this figured out years ago; Hamilton himself half a century before that. This is the rock on which you guys are always foundering. Wrangle as you might, there’s no extracting ethnocentric bias from exogenous peoples. Nor can it be imposed: it arises from the individual (as a relative unit) and eventuates in the tribe (as the sum of units). Very simple matter. But because it doesn’t contain some magic formula for “white” survival, there must be “something else”. Surely after years at this at least one of you has suspected that there is less to it than you’d like to think?


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Posted by DanielS on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 02:07 | #

Before resuming to address GW’s comments number 6 and 7 and any more comments pile-up, let me handle these two, one from GW and one from Uh:

First, GW
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:30 | # 30

DanielS: You have many good and useful things to say,  this elaboration on what you think “the personality” is, isn’t one of them.  If you want to say that it is a set of coordinates in the corporeal brain that creates a particular kind of temperament, predilections, aptitude and skills…ok.

GW: Don’t write it off so lightly.  I will, in the end, cause you to question the application to yourself and to me and to everyone of us of those qualities of identity, freedom, and agency you think we, in our ordinary conscious state, necessarily, indeed self-evidently possess.  For one thing, we have spoken of false Dasein, and I have pointed to the logical necessity of a flawed form of attention to explain it.  Now there awaits to be explained, also logically, how a flawed form of attention comes to pass, and what the implications of it are for the rest of the functioning of our consciousness.

Ok, that part sounds interesting.

I am bringing forward a complete model which succeeds in that, a model in which everything fits and functions together, in particular a model which combines and conjoins all the spheres of the everyday and what we might term the present-to-being, and makes them one human story.

That part sounds ridiculous. There is a such a thing, typical Jewish thing, of making life seem too complex in an existential sense so that they can slip in their deceptions, but this heads to another extreme, of being too unsophisticated, too simple to deal with reality in sufficient complexity. We’ll see, but don’t expect me to jump right in, of my own accord, to what is apparently a scientistic application to praxis. It’s worthwhile to look into how human systems maintain themselves, but I suspect that your bias for individual unit of analysis and scientism will not lend itself to a sufficient explanation.

DanielS: However, the concept of autobiography is imperative to dealing with the complexities of interactive reality, social and otherwise. And it is very interesting.

GW: You are welcome to champion it.  I will attend to it when I see something substantial enough to warrant that.  Meanwhile, you could ask yourself what you (and we) are, precisely, if there is this other state of presence which you (and we) are not.

It’s coming right up, in the next day or two.

DanielS: Character types can be real to a personal system, but it is a “reification” when taken out of social interactive context and its complexities.

GW: As I have already stated, the human personality et unum omnes IS the site of the social system, its existential limit ...

I don’t think so. It can be one terminus, depending upon your unit of analysis - if you refine what I would rather call individual “character” such that in its authentic parameters, it would feed back in turn to correct the system authentically, that would be worthwhile but an individual certainly would not complete the social system, let alone in its historical breadth.

its form of perpetual containment as well as its form of expression and transmission….

It is a reliable unit to measure, granted, but that does not mean it is going to throw full light on the whole system: just look at the stuff you are trying to put across for all of us!

  The social exists nowhere else,

Total solipsistic horseshit.

and functions through no other medium nor has any other voice.

Did you invent the English language? Or did you inherit a medium that has come through the joint construction of millions of people, who shaped-it and crafted-it in social negotiation and in its fit to material reality?

There is no study of its form or its voice which is not, ultimately, a study of the content of the personality, and is not couched in personality’s defining characteristics whether those influence the social (ie, immersion, absence, mechanicity, etc) or are influenced by it (plasticity, suggestibility).

Don’t get me wrong. I do think you are on to something significant. The problem is that you are trying to do too much not only with the individual unit of analysis, but with as close as possible a reading of its corporeal systemic delimitation (I am being a bit generous at that in lending the word systemic to your motives), trying to comprehend everything with it and that simply will not do.

For it is these which define the ontology of the social, and by that means allow it to be appropriately scaled to Man.

I can agree that coming back to the invidividual unit of analysis can be significant in keeping social concerns human sized - very important -  sized and qualitatively attended to gauging the subjective perspective against inhuman and inhumane objectivism; but the emergent whole of the social is greater than the sum of its parts, and what you are missing is that praxis, as a perspective of relative social concern, performs a similar function on the next level (between subjective and objective)  - it provides a gauge on the social level to keep our concerns human sized as well - not allowing our endeavors to be whisked-off into inhuman and inhumane objecivism.

Posted by Uh on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:43 | # 31

GW: Ethnic self-interest doesn’t need ‘permission’ from phenomenology to be real. It simply is as a function of genetics and inclusive-fitness theory which in turn simply reflect mathematical/statistical truths.

Let me answer this specifically for myself first.

I wouldn’t say it needs “permission” either, and that objective fact is a part of the problem. Especially with your famous individual unit of analysis, it is not necessarily going to be self corrective in the form that you like. But neither will it necessarily be self corrective (in the distinct, English form that you like) as a system outside of human reflection and reflexive response - what Bowery might have called “culture”, viz. “artificial selection.”

Now, Uh goes on to make a snide remark:

What you’re calling “ethnic self-interest” and “inclusive-fitness theory” cancel out.

I imagine Uh is addressing GW here, because I have neither considered separating nor blending them.

But at first blush, these strike me as somewhat different terms and though overlapping and blending in good, non-Cartesian theory, I would not presume that they cancel eachother out: inclusive fitness seems to be more narrowly focused on genetics, while ethnic self interest appears to go into broader realms of concern, cultural historical.

Wandrin and Bowery had this figured out years ago; Hamilton himself half a century before that.

Both very smart people. While Bowery still makes an occasional cameo, Wandrin hasn’t been around in a while.

They both had a tendency to be reductionist, which would be the action that you are commending where they might have combined “ethnic self interest” and “inclusive fitness theory”... but again, I’m nor sure that in this case that they’d be performing a helpful service inasmuch as that’s what they’ve done.

I believe that Bowery was more disposed to over reductionism.

Wandrin was the only intelligent person here (besides Kumiko) who seemed to get what I’ve been saying about the test of good social constructionism as opposed to bad or disingenuoussocial constructionism - if you have to put the words “mere”, “just”, “only” or “all” in front of it, then its bad or disingenuous. For such a sharp analytical thinker as Wandrin to acknowledge that was unique here. I was looking forward to his asset here, but he took off…I know that he was offered the capacity to post, but declined because his situation was too sensitive.

This is the rock on which you guys are always foundering.

You are putting GW together with me on this. It is a reductionism that GW would be more inclined to than me.

Wrangle as you might, there’s no extracting ethnocentric bias from exogenous peoples.

Probably. But for one problem, one of the “ethnocentric biases” of Europeans is objectivism - which runs contrary to ethnocentrism. ..it is true that Abrahamic affectation compounds it and can take a prescription against ethnocentirsm on he part of Gentiles into over drive…

Nor can it be imposed: it arises from the individual (as a relative unit) and eventuates in the tribe (as the sum of units). Very simple matter.

It is not that simple at all. The subjective certainly contributes as a corrective to systemic, ethnocentric maintenance, but the system’s maintenance or not, as an ethnocentrism, is more complex and interactive, not simply arsing out of the “self” and becoming dispersed from there. Although Jews, such as Ilana Mercer, would love to re-emphasize our individualism as a sheer determined and determining fact of Europeans. The Truth Will Live would also like to “describe” and “diagnose” individualism as the European problem, but she would like to prescribe Abrahamism as “the cure.”

But because it doesn’t contain some magic formula for “white” survival, there must be “something else”.

It doesn’t contain some magic formula for White survival, though GW may think so. He has a point that uncontaminated by Jewish language games (notably Abrahamism, Frankfurt PC and Austrian School) and other misdirecting language games, it probably would be more homeostatic, but you are correct to say that it is not the magic formula for White survival as GW is given to treating it.

However, the “something else” that you want to include, Uh, is of course that Abrahamic god of the Jews.

And that is certainly NOT the magic formula for White survival either, just the opposite.

Surely after years at this at least one of you has suspected that there is less to it than you’d like to think?

So, I have suspected it - that causative nature alone is not sufficient, a magic formula, as you say, to White homeostasis - and also that your wish to bring Jews and the Abrahamic religion into the cause of White survival is not the magic formula.


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Posted by DanielS on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 03:31 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 04:28 | # 6

DanielS: Thus, First - subject - isn’t the same as most Essential (inter-esse) - Midtdasein - subject ensconced in a world view of relation within the folk. In fact, the first subjective relation is not to this third person (Cartesian) point of view, but rather, the subject acting into relation of second person address - parental relation, as biological creatures with reflexive capacities unique among biological creatures.

GW: Midtdasein also operates in relation to non-folk, and would, in operation, render it impossible for the usual stupifyingly narcissistic nonsense about race ... “Why does it matter what colour somebody’s skin is?” ... to be declaimed from the moral high ground.

Yes, you make a very good point here - that MidtDasein is not only in relation to folk and non-folk… and considering the myriad of objective relation we are thrown into would cast aside stupid subjective/relative arguments like “race is only skin color.”

Interestingly, in MacDonald’s paper on implicit racism of a few years ago he relied on (I think a couple of) studies of self-described conservative and liberal students and the correspondence, or lack thereof, of what they claimed their attitudes to other races were and what their adrenaline reactions said they were.  We should distinguish the instinctive, adrenal reaction from the revelation to the consciousness which Midtdasein implies, and understand that, as the Transit dictates, the latter refers to the turn away from absence to presence, from mechanicity to consciousness, from personality to identity.

It’s an excellent piece by MacDonald. And a good point that you make.

“Consciousness” is always in regard to something, however, and it is up to our language games to help guide it properly (as opposed to the manner in which the New York Times directs it, as observed in MacDonald’s study).

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 06:35 | # 7

Of course, even as identitarians we should avoid becoming fixated on midtdasein and its revealed truths.  It is not the whole story.

I agree with that, any hermeneuticist worth his salt would.

This is very important, because ethnic nationalism cannot just be a people-based identitarianism, but, for the purposes of integrity, must reach back into the processes of identity, difference, and belonging.

..and more.

In effect, the living organism, if it is not merely a creature of Time and Place, is always possessed of an authentic psychological schwerpunckt - that entity or identity which discriminates for Dasein’s revealed truths above everything else, because it appropriates them, and subsequently discriminates by them.  Ontologically, identity finds that which is itself with this process; and it accommodates all discriminative avenues: personal and social, sexual, ethnic and racial.

There is a large important truth to your focus. I commend it, and it seems you are beginning to see it as a part, albeit significant part of a constellation of hermeneutic concerns in our homeostasis.

All caught-up with the comments now.

 


34

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 06:14 | #

“Consciousness” is always in regard to something, however, and it is up to our language games to help guide it properly (as opposed to the manner in which the New York Times directs it, as observed in MacDonald’s study).

See my comment at 20.  Phenomenology’s intention is not more than a thin technical observation.  It is not a formative act in the ontological drama.  It doesn’t have what we might describe as relational effect.  The point here is that we, as identitarians, have moved beyond an interest in a phenomenological anatomy.  We are interested in vitality and movement.  Along with unity and system, those are the distinctive markings of a functioning identitarianism.

Further, you are implying consciousness is a unified field, which I do not.  There is the sleep state, there is ordinary waking consciousness, and there is what one might call normative consciousness (or just consciousness), which is a head-above-the-water struggle for reality.  Without this simple discriminative understanding the general human condition ... the self-estrangement, the submission to suggestion, the immersive character of the mental focus, etc ... doesn’t make much sense.


35

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 06:48 | #

I don’t think so. It can be one terminus, depending upon your unit of analysis - if you refine what I would rather call individual “character” such that in its authentic parameters ...

You have not yet worked through the meanings of the polarities at work in the mind, and what they imply for the human truth.  For some reason you are not willing to internalise, and so interrogate essentially, what I have tried, no doubt not very effectively, to explain.  You want to hold everything away from you ... to think calculatively about it ... to maintain thereby your intellectual detachment and equilibrium.  But we are seeking a redress for what is still there but is missing in the lived life.  That is what an identitarian nationalism must succeed at.  Success does not lie in examining the social, at one remove from self, on the intellectual pathologist’s slab, and issuing a carefully considered PM report on the correct way for the masses to conduct their racial lives.  Success lies in a mass racial awakening.

“Individual character” is a confused term.  There is nothing individual in the socially acquired aspects of the human personality.  None of it is essential, ie, from Nature.  All of it comes to its place in the perceptual systems quite accidentally; and at the turn - not, of course, the dead and detached, safely scholarly postmodern turn - all of it falls away.


36

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 09:32 | #

You are putting GW together with me on this. It is a reductionism that GW would be more inclined to than me.

Facts are sacred, as CP Scott observed in his Guardian manifesto of 1921.

By the way, there is a mix-up here because Uh was actually responding to a comment by Graham, not me.


37

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 09:53 | #

if you have to put the words “mere”, “just”, “only” or “all” in front of it, then its bad or disingenuous.

If you can’t explain minimal degree without somebody dragging up textual analysis and gesticulating to some supposed moral flaw, then you don’t have the right to use your own language.

Both Wandrin and Notuswind were exceptionally smart people, the latter especially.


38

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 10:29 | #

It’s worthwhile to look into how human systems maintain themselves, but I suspect that your bias for individual unit of analysis and scientism will not lend itself to a sufficient explanation.

Evolutionary theory explains how human systems, and all living systems, maintain themselves.  We must respect its truths, and even be guided in our thinking by them.  We can’t break the bounds of truth.  But our active intellectual focus is elsewhere, in philosophy’s central enquiry about the good in life.

On the charge of my “bias for individual unit of analysis”, thus far on this thread I posted at 15:

It is you and me and all of us now.  It is all of us in our state of waking consciousness right this minute.  At the individual level, it is the condition in which our great systems of the perception operate quite automatically and without willed attention.  It is the condition of us in which the endless “paradoxes, contradictions, tangles, negotiation of social requirements and more” arise.  At the collective level, it is the condition in which external circumstance can have this terrible and totalistic grip upon us, with all its denying, obliterating force.  It is not the paradoxes, contradictions and so forth created by that which hold interest for us, but the lifting of us out from our absence, mechanicity and immersion, this being the politics of light called identitarianism.

Hopping to a different but no less universal context, at 18 I posted:

I am explaining the brain activity of ascribing a self to things that simply “happen” in a quite unmediated and mechanical way, simply because attention in its unwilled form is focussed there.  Think it through.  You know that there are moments in the life of the individual and that of the group when a particular focus takes hold, and clarity descends.  The life that is being lived at that moment becomes appropriated by a most familiar, singular self, and a very direct, wordless connection (Dasein) between, let us say, this knower and the known operates.  But what about the other times ... the vast stretches of time when none of this normally human activity is taking place?  The brain still ascribes self-hood, even though the operative self is a transitory, habituated thing and a veritable multitude.

Directly addressing your charge of “bias for individual unit” in political language I noted the following at 3 on your previous thread:

In nationalist thinking, the individual is not the liberal model of individual Man.  The people are not the society or social body of liberalism.  In nationalism, the individual man and his people are not conflicted, but are united organically ... in ethnicity, love and belonging, instinctual self-preference and self-interest, and a conservative self-respect which surpasses mere tolerance.

We can agree with Salter that the interests of the individual are by no means contrary to, or exclusionary to, the interests of the people.  Individualism itself does not run counter to the people’s destining.  The two cohere, the profit from one being profit for the other; just as the individual himself could not physically come into being without the people, and the people could not exist without its individuals.

Then at 33, returning to the perspective on the universal:

Commentary on human nature and being or the human condition does not constitute a functioning model of Man unless it has a systemic form (as you critics of scientism never tire of telling us).  Even Heidegger’s ontology does not reduce to a clear model.  Schopenhauer likewise.  Whitehead, whom you mentioned.  But it is self-evident to me that a nationalism of an existential kind must endeavour to know Man as he is and make politics for him as he is, and must therefore resolve the modelling question.

And at 87, stating it plainly:

The unit, however, is Man and all men; and the unit is Mind and all minds; and the unit is the identity of the present subject which is the true identity of the individual and of the people

But it seems that none of this is enough.  You are still clinging to the view that “the social” is more than Man, and not a part of him, and you are not going to give up, are you?


39

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 07:09 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 01:14 | # 34

  “Consciousness” is always in regard to something, however, and it is up to our language games to help guide it properly (as opposed to the manner in which the New York Times directs it, as observed in MacDonald’s study).

See my comment at 20.  Phenomenology’s intention is not more than a thin technical observation.  It is not a formative act in the ontological drama.  It doesn’t have what we might describe as relational effect. The point here is that we, as identitarians, have moved beyond an interest in a phenomenological anatomy.  We are interested in vitality and movement.  Along with unity and system, those are the distinctive markings of a functioning identitarianism.

I didn’t say it was it was “only this or that”... I can probably agree with everything you say here except the part I’ve boldened.

Further, you are implying consciousness is a unified field, which I do not.  There is the sleep state, there is ordinary waking consciousness, and there is what one might call normative consciousness (or just consciousness), which is a head-above-the-water struggle for reality.  Without this simple discriminative understanding the general human condition ... the self-estrangement, the submission to suggestion, the immersive character of the mental focus, etc ... doesn’t make much sense.

Well it does help when you explain what you mean by “consciousness”...and when you clarify that it is not always so acute at its best - that is a more useful inquiry.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 01:48 | # 35

  I don’t think so. It can be one terminus, depending upon your unit of analysis - if you refine what I would rather call individual “character” such that in its authentic parameters ...

You have not yet worked through the meanings of the polarities at work in the mind and what they imply for the human truth.

I’ve worked through them enough, more thoroughly than you have in terms of the field of reality.

For some reason you are not willing to internalise, and so interrogate essentially, what I have tried, no doubt not very effectively, to explain.  You want to hold everything away from you ... to think calculatively about it ... to maintain thereby your intellectual detachment and equilibrium.

Not true.

  But we are seeking a redress for what is still there but is missing in the lived life.  That is what an identitarian nationalism must succeed at.  Success does not lie in examining the social, at one remove from self,

I don’t remove it from the self.

on the intellectual pathologist’s slab, and issuing a carefully considered PM report on the correct way for the masses to conduct their racial lives.  Success lies in a mass racial awakening.

You talk like it some exalted experience of the mind and I say it is more a matter of consensus, shared narratives - narratives which correspond with individual and group well being

“Individual character” is a confused term.

No it isn’t.

There is nothing individual in the socially acquired aspects of the human personality.

For your predilections rather, I was talking about inherited characteristics - like types of dog breeds

None of it is essential, ie, from Nature.  All of it comes to its place in the perceptual systems quite accidentally; and at the turn - not, of course, the dead and detached, safely scholarly postmodern turn - all of it falls away.

What a bunch of bullshit that was.

Taking non-Cartesian arguments, such as I would make and then attributing its opposite to “post modernity”

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 04:32 | # 36

  You are putting GW together with me on this. It is a reductionism that GW would be more inclined to than me.

Facts are sacred, as CP Scott observed in his Guardian manifesto of 1921.

By the way, there is a mix-up here because Uh was actually responding to a comment by Graham, not me.

“Facts are sacred” ...well, some might be.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 04:53 | # 37

  if you have to put the words “mere”, “just”, “only” or “all” in front of it, then its bad or disingenuous.

If you can’t explain minimal degree without somebody dragging up textual analysis and gesticulating to some supposed moral flaw, then you don’t have the right to use your own language.

Well that’s ridiculous. It’s very easy to eplain. If you have to say “mere” “just”, “only” or “all” a social construct then you are not understanding the non-Cartesian mandate - it is is an engaged process, therefore not all, not even mostly of your making.

For the umpteenth time: One the one hand, some things you have a good deal of agency in constructing (with others, somewhere along the line) and, on the other hand, some things are pretty much hard facts - nevertheless, you have some agency in determining how those facts count.

Both Wandrin and Notuswind were exceptionally smart people, the latter especially.

Well, I suppose that you say, “the latter, especially” because he was a mathematician scientist.

It is more than fine to value those things, but it is simply false to say that they are one and the same, even pre-requisite to all philosophy.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2016 05:29 | # 38

  It’s worthwhile to look into how human systems maintain themselves, but I suspect that your bias for individual unit of analysis and scientism will not lend itself to a sufficient explanation.

Evolutionary theory explains how human systems, and all living systems, maintain themselves.  We must respect its truths, and even be guided in our thinking by them.  We can’t break the bounds of truth.  But our active intellectual focus is elsewhere, in philosophy’s central enquiry about the good in life.

A good part of our good life, is the maintaining of our people and our better ways of life - our homeostasis.

On the charge of my “bias for individual unit of analysis”, thus far on this thread I posted at 15:

  It is you and me and all of us now.  It is all of us in our state of waking consciousness right this minute.  At the individual level, it is the condition in which our great systems of the perception operate quite automatically and without willed attention.  It is the condition of us in which the endless “paradoxes, contradictions, tangles, negotiation of social requirements and more” arise.  At the collective level, it is the condition in which external circumstance can have this terrible and totalistic grip upon us, with all its denying, obliterating force.  It is not the paradoxes, contradictions and so forth created by that which hold interest for us, but the lifting of us out from our absence, mechanicity and immersion, this being the politics of light called identitarianism.

Well, it’s your faith that some kind of collective consciousness, the likes of which Hitler marshaled is the ultimate thing.

Many others and I are already racially aware, active in defending our people and interested in solving the problems that are before us in much more practical terms.

Hopping to a different but no less universal context, at 18 I posted:

  I am explaining the brain activity of ascribing a self to things that simply “happen” in a quite unmediated and mechanical way, simply because attention in its unwilled form is focussed there.  Think it through.  You know that there are moments in the life of the individual and that of the group when a particular focus takes hold, and clarity descends.  The life that is being lived at that moment becomes appropriated by a most familiar, singular self, and a very direct, wordless connection (Dasein) between, let us say, this knower and the known operates.  But what about the other times ... the vast stretches of time when none of this normally human activity is taking place?  The brain still ascribes self-hood, even though the operative self is a transitory, habituated thing and a veritable multitude.

Fine, whatever.

Directly addressing your charge of “bias for individual unit” in political language I noted the following at 3 on your previous thread:

  In nationalist thinking, the individual is not the liberal model of individual Man.  The people are not the society or social body of liberalism.  In nationalism, the individual man and his people are not conflicted,

They don’t have to be conflicted, but sometimes they are.

but are united organically ... in ethnicity, love and belonging, instinctual self-preference and self-interest, and a conservative self-respect which surpasses mere tolerance.

That will be true in many cases and ideally. We certainly are happy where this is true and unfettered.

  We can agree with Salter that the interests of the individual are by no means contrary to, or exclusionary to, the interests of the people.  Individualism itself does not run counter to the people’s destining.  The two cohere, the profit from one being profit for the other; just as the individual himself could not physically come into being without the people, and the people could not exist without its individuals.

I can agree enough with that.

Then at 33, returning to the perspective on the universal:

  Commentary on human nature and being or the human condition does not constitute a functioning model of Man unless it has a systemic form (as you critics of scientism never tire of telling us).

I am more focused on a systemic model of racial systems’ homeostasis rather than a model of all mankind.

But yes, I am averse to scientism (i.e., bad science or misapplication of science).

I have functional model enough of individual and racial systems to work on refinement.

Even Heidegger’s ontology does not reduce to a clear model.  Schopenhauer likewise.  Whitehead, whom you mentioned.  But it is self-evident to me that a nationalism of an existential kind must endeavour to know Man as he is and make politics for him as he is, and must therefore resolve the modelling question.

If there ever was something which is non-objective, non-universal and a social construct, it is nationalism. That neither makes it bad or false. On the contrary, nationalism is rightfully posited against globalism and internationalism…

And at 87, stating it plainly:

  The unit, however, is Man and all men; and the unit is Mind and all minds; and the unit is the identity of the present subject which is the true identity of the individual and of the people

That is not nationalist thinking that is some kind of modernist, universaliszing homogenization which augurs to erase all racial and national differences.

But it seems that none of this is enough.  You are still clinging to the view that “the social” is more than Man, and not a part of him, and you are not going to give up, are you?

Why should I concede to a straw man? - “You are still clinging to the view that “the social” is more than Man.”

The social is a group of people delimited by specific rules of prohibition, obligation and legitimacy…in addition to affordances, constraints and obstructions


40

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 15:58 | #

The social is a group of people delimited by specific rules of prohibition, obligation and legitimacy…in addition to affordances, constraints and obstructions

A people has no “rules of prohibition, obligation and legitimacy”, no “affordances, constraints and obstructions” except what comes out of its nature, thereby giving life to it and effect over that life.  The whole of our struggle is to express that life-giving nature in our people, that they are such and not just a “group” for whom life itself is ruled illegitimate.

You have to get into your head somehow, Daniel, that this is a process of revelation of self, and of love, unity and will - none of them things which will ever be generated by intellectuals adumbrating about a new set of social rules.  You are mistaking the clear-up after the avalanche with the placing of explosives high up on the shoulders of the fall.  We use gravity.


41

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:10 | #

If you have to say “mere” “just”, “only” or “all” a social construct then you are not understanding the non-Cartesian mandate - it is is an engaged process, therefore not all, not even mostly of your making.

I claim all my people’s tongue, which I use consciously, btw ... every syllable, every punctuation mark.  Nothing is written unintentionally, even if the intent is sometimes not fulfilled.


42

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:26 | #

If there ever was something which is non-objective, non-universal and a social construct, it is nationalism.

Nationalism, in the broadest sense, is the politics of genetic interests.  Ethnic nationalism, or nativism, is the politics of the genetic interests of native peoples.  Identitarianism (crucially, not “identity politics”) is the politics of the revealed self.  None are social constructs, but all burst through the social web with a disdaining, corrective energy.


43

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:34 | #

The unit, however, is Man and all men; and the unit is Mind and all minds; and the unit is the identity of the present subject which is the true identity of the individual and of the people

That is not nationalist thinking that is some kind of modernist, universaliszing homogenization which augurs to erase all racial and national differences.

Why?  The method is universal.  The results are particular.  Obviously.

Do you accept yet that I don’t have a “bias for individual unit of analysis”?


44

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:36 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 10:58 | # 40

  The social is a group of people delimited by specific rules of prohibition, obligation and legitimacy…in addition to affordances, constraints and obstructions

A people has no “rules of prohibition, obligation and legitimacy”, no “affordances, constraints and obstructions” except what comes out of its nature, thereby giving life to it and effect over that life.  The whole of our struggle is to express that life-giving nature in our people, that they are such and not just a “group” for whom life itself is ruled illegitimate.

That’s a bunch of words ...you have just reshuffled your card trick deck with your whistling in the dark hope that homeostasis will be the deterministic result to native European human ecological systems after you tie their hands behind their backs in attempt to prohibit any deliberative thinking. ..

You have to get into your head somehow, Daniel, that this is a process of revelation of self, and of love, unity and will - none of them things which will ever be generated by intellectuals adumbrating about a new set of social rules.  You are mistaking the clear-up after the avalanche with the placing of explosives high up on the shoulders of the fall.  We use gravity.

You have to somehow get it through your head that I recognize the reality of the European race and what I am doing to defend it does not interfere with your attempts at describing the sublime ISness of its is.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 11:10 | # 41

  If you have to say “mere” “just”, “only” or “all” a social construct then you are not understanding the non-Cartesian mandate - it is is an engaged process, therefore not all, not even mostly of your making.

I claim all my people’s tongue, which I use consciously, btw ... every syllable, every punctuation mark.  Nothing is written unintentionally, even if the intent is sometimes not fulfilled.

umhum.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 11:26 | # 42

  If there ever was something which is non-objective, non-universal and a social construct, it is nationalism.

Nationalism, in the broadest sense, is the politics of genetic interests.  Ethnic nationalism, or nativism, is the politics of the genetic interests of native peoples.  Identitarianism (crucially, not “identity politics”) is the politics of the revealed self.  None are social constructs, but all burst through the social web with a disdaining energy.

Bullshit. You simply refuse to understand what is meant by “social constructionism” because you want to treat the red cape that you’ve been duped by as if it were a security blanket.

 


45

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 19:54 | #

You talk like its some exalted experience of the mind and I say it is more a matter of consensus, shared narratives - narratives which correspond with individual and group well being

That about sums up the difference.  Men fight and die for this.  It can’t be mundane.


46

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 24 Oct 2016 20:11 | #

That about sums up the difference.  Men fight and die for this.  It can’t be mundane.

It can be both normal, shared consensus and inspirational - something to fight for - intelligently, in a sustained rational manner - as opposed to some over the top, head-long psychological state triggered at a mass rally by some ranting lunatic.


47

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 05:28 | #

You simply refuse to understand what is meant by “social constructionism” because you want to treat the red cape that you’ve been duped by as if it were a security blanket.

Daniel, from whence does the “social” in “social constructionism” issue?  I suspect you will give the circular answer “human inter-action”.  In that event, from whom or what does all “inter-action” issue, and into what or where does it empty?  What holds it?  What is “ground” here?


48

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 05:58 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:28 | #

  You simply refuse to understand what is meant by “social constructionism” because you want to treat the red cape that you’ve been duped by as if it were a security blanket.

Daniel, from whence does the “social” in “social constructionism” issue?  I suspect you will give the circular answer “human inter-action”.

That’s a good answer.

In that event, from whom or what does all “inter-action” issue,

It issues from nature, and its affordances and constraints in combination with our socially afforded and constrained determinations as to how those facts come to count are of paramount significance to us.

and into what or where does it empty?  What holds it?  What is “ground” here?

Where it does not “empty” into a re-constituted (or further evolved) physical being, its genetic and behavioral patterns…..i.having followed rules (of nature, of the social) implicit or even explicit, then it has been passed on in verbal history, in language, in narratives, in advanced societies held in texts, in concepts, in formulas, in rules, in mathematical equations, in archives, in photos, in recordings audio and visual, in computers….in additional equipment, architecture, institutions, changed landscapes and resources ...n the other people and creatures (perhaps changed or now absent for extinction) that we relate to in presence or in absence for the structures they left behind. ....which also shape and guide practices of succeeding generations….

 

Social constructionism maintains that you can, in fact, construct and re-construct some things…other things are more a matter of brute fact, but up until the point that those facts would kill all of us, are nevertheless subject to some socially negotiated determination as to how those (even brute) facts come to count.

Social constructionism (proper) does not say that you can just make-up of your own accord just anything that you like - that would not be social and would be Cartesian inasmuch as it did not recognize facts necessary to acknowledge as generally applicable to people, including systemic groups of people, in co-evolutionary patterns of their survival.


49

Posted by Harré on locus on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 09:13 | #

GW, you might begin to find a bit more affinity resonating with this quote from an interview with Harré

From an interview with Harré

Then I found Rom Harré in the philosophy of science, a stalwart of realism: the idea (yes, it needs defending) that there is a material world out there that we can produce true knowledge about. But Rom’s scientific realism came with caveats, most importantly that the social world is not a world like this, that social objects are things that exist the way they do only because of the way we speak about them.

And then—irresistible to a political theorist like me—was his work in sociology, his denial of both mental events and social structures as causes. “Agency belongs to people”, he argues, “not their parts nor to those pseudo-entities of which they are parts, such as clubs, crews and societies.” A brain does not think. A neuron does not remember. A class does not hanker after some different state of affairs. It is persons that think, persons that remember, persons that hanker. Moreover, once such apparently pedantic quibbles have been “put right”, in Harré’s words, “genuine projects of human emancipation become possible… All we have to do is to show people that they are trapped in the silken but fragile shrouds of a pattern of discourse conventions. Yet how deeply they resist these demonstrations!”


P.S., I did request an interview of Harré for us at Majorityrights -

He responded thus:

Rom Harre <harre [ ] georgetown.edu>

10/29/14
 
to me

Sorry, but I have too much on my plate. Best wishes, Rom Harre


50

Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:53 | #

@Uh

Once you have mastered the Price co-variance model of evolutionary change get back to me. You seemingly know the square root of fuck all about genetics hence your idiotic, incoherent, comment on inclusive-fitness theory.

I am all fine for different perspectives and opinions but your can’t invent your ‘own’ facts, nor dismiss one of the greatest scientific achievements with some bullshit phrase.


51

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:56 | #

You simply refuse to understand what is meant by “social constructionism” because you want to treat the red cape that you’ve been duped by as if it were a security blanket.

I find “construction” suggestive of an agency which does not exist, and therefore an inappropriate and misleading term.  The better one is accretion, and the accretion occurs in those parts of the perceptual systems the non-attentive operation of which has the name “personality”.

There is not another space.  There is no permanent, operable betwixt and between space of inter-action.  It is an illusion attractive to many, especially those who write and think.  But even in the brain’s intellectual facility, with its coarse, heavy reliance on representative thought-modelling in words, construction is an over-ambitious descriptive.

In simple, everything comes direct from Mind to Mind ... from parent to child ... from peer to peer ... and either makes a dint on Mind’s convoluted, subtle receiving surface or not.  In this way alone, meaning moderates between being and truth, and provides the ground for contestation.


52

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:22 | #

I find “construction” suggestive of an agency which does not exist, and therefore an inappropriate and misleading term.  The better one is accretion, and the accretion occurs in those parts of the perceptual systems the non-attentive operation of which has the name “personality”.

There is not another space.  There is no permanent, operable betwixt and between space of inter-action.  It is an illusion attractive to many, especially those who write and think.  But even in the brain’s intellectual facility, with its coarse, heavy reliance on representative thought-modelling in words, construction is an over-ambitious descriptive.

In simple, everything comes direct from Mind to Mind ... from parent to child ... from peer to peer ... and either makes a dint on Mind’s convoluted, subtle receiving surface or not.  In this way alone, meaning moderates between being and truth, and provides the ground for contestation.

I don’t agree and it all sounds very Lockeatine (not a compliment) to me .. “impressions’ are stamped in the brain…associations formed” and so on..

Personality as “character”..as in a framework/role/script of personal type that delimits one’s central and perhaps alternative personas, “hats” as it were, has utility, scientific, philosophical, sociological and for political activism…

It (and they, inasmuch as it has multiple forms) can have an influential if not formative effect on others and surrounding…

But your focus on personality strikes me as a psychologism pursued to a highly impractical and even unrealistic degree - that is to say, not sufficiently capturing the way life and being work, at least not when they work effectively and grapple with the reality of interaction effectively.

It seems to be geared to an argument against those who want to deny the reality and validity of defending yours and your people’s existence and thus your wanting to prove to them that you do exist. I have never denied that and always welcome more scientific description - e.g., genetic information, but I believe that we have enough information already to defend ourselves.

Ironically enough, if you pursue that interview with Harré that I linked-to above, you’ll see possibilities of him being largely aligned with the aspirations of your project - i.e., his special valuation of the individual.

I’ll post it all now:

The Pantograph Punch

Society

25.08.2015

The Observance and the Breach: Rom Harré on Life and its Rules

By David Hall

Horace Romano Harré: a memorable name, the kind that sticks to the neurons. But it’s also that I saw it everywhere—nabbed for citations, wedged into bibliographies, calling out from book spines in obscure library corners. Reading philosophy is largely a lonely activity, yet simultaneously it’s also like being a ravenous gossip or diligent socialite, always alert to a significant surname, attentive to who’s around, who owes what to whom, who despises whom, what they believe, what they no longer believe, what their shortcomings are…

The first time I came across Rom Harré, as he’s more commonly known, was in philosophy of emotion, pegged to the pivotal book The Social Construction of Emotions. The gist of this edited collection is that emotions aren’t things we evolved biologically to have, like limbs or eyeballs. They are words and concepts we learn, tools we acquire to understand ourselves, to help us with living.

Next I saw the name in the adjacent literature of discursive psychology, a field that—to put it very crudely—treats mind not as a soft machine but as a text. Our way of talking about ourselves—in terms of faculties, beliefs, ideas, and wills—is really just that: a way of talking about ourselves that succeeds on those terms.

Then I found Rom Harré in the philosophy of science, a stalwart of realism: the idea (yes, it needs defending) that there is a material world out there that we can produce true knowledge about. But Rom’s scientific realism came with caveats, most importantly that the social world is not a world like this, that social objects are things that exist the way they do only because of the way we speak about them.

And then—irresistible to a political theorist like me—was his work in sociology, his denial of both mental events and social structures as causes. “Agency belongs to people”, he argues, “not their parts nor to those pseudo-entities of which they are parts, such as clubs, crews and societies.” A brain does not think. A neuron does not remember. A class does not hanker after some different state of affairs. It is persons that think, persons that remember, persons that hanker. Moreover, once such apparently pedantic quibbles have been “put right”, in Harré’s words, “genuine projects of human emancipation become possible… All we have to do is to show people that they are trapped in the silken but fragile shrouds of a pattern of discourse conventions. Yet how deeply they resist these demonstrations!”

This is hardly the start of it. A scan through recent publications—authored and co-authored—uncovers a polyphony of themes: “Mereologies as the Grammars of Chemical Discourses”, “The Siren Song of Substantivalism”, “Gender Positioning: A Sixteenth/Seventeenth Century Example”, “The Social Construction of Terrorism”, “Narratives from Call Shop Users: Emotional Performance of Velocity”, “Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance”, “What is Love?: Discourse About Emotions in Social Sciences”...

More intriguing still, Harré’s supervisor, as I came to discover, was J. L. Austin, the famously fussy Oxford philosopher whose idea of speech acts, of utterances as a kind of performance, was an important inspiration for the linguistic turn in European philosophy early last century. By taking this turn, philosophers came to see linguistic statements not simply as true-or-false representations of reality, but as a form of social action that can have diverse intentions and produce real-world effects. To make a promise, for example, or to consent to sex isn’t just to tell it how it is, but how it’s going to be. Likewise, a declaration of war can be—as PJ Harvey put it—the words that maketh murder.

Austin inspired post-structuralist philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler to extend and radicalise his ideas about language and identity. Harré, meanwhile, stayed closer to the linguistic turn’s Oxbridge foundations in Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, using their ideas to illuminate scientific understanding and, eventually, the methods of social sciences too. Thus, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Harré surreptitiously appears throughout the history of modern social understanding—the inventor of ethogenics, a pioneer of social constructionism, a navigator for positioning theory, a scolding godfather for critical realism—a humble yet ubiquitous figure who carried the torch for the linguistic revolution.

What’s more, when I finally googled him, my curiosity spilling online, I discovered that Horace Romano Harré, with that fabulous name, was from Apiti in the Manawatu. (It’s less of a surprise to discover, from there, that he’s uncle to Laila and Niki Harré.) Could this be the Manawatu’s own Michel Foucault, the post-structuralist philosopher with whom Harré shares unexpected affinities despite their obvious differences in style and temperament?

Born December 18th, 1927, Harré graduated from the University of New Zealand (now the University of Auckland) with a BSc in mathematics (1948) and an MA in Philosophy (1952). He taught mathematics at the University of Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan, from 1953–4, then read for a B.Phil at University College, Oxford, where he’s kept links ever since, although not without various stints elsewhere including the University of Leicester, London School of Economics, George Mason University in Virginia, Aoyama University in Tokyo, Universidad Santiago de Compostella in Spain,  Universidad Caetano in Peru, Free University in Brussels, and Aarhus University in Denmark. He still teaches and writes to this day, dividing his time between Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and Oxford.

And this is how it came to pass that, one late-summer’s day, in the midst of finishing up my own doctoral dissertation, I cycled down to Linacre College, the Oxford college he helped establish in 1962, for lunch and a chat.

***


53

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:26 | #

Ibid:

DH: I thought it would be helpful to start with the linguistic turn in philosophy. You came here—in the mid-1950s—at a pivotal point. Elizabeth Anscombe was publishing her translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. And J. L. Austin published How To Do Things with Words at roughly the same time as he supervised your B.Phil. So I’d like to hear you say something about what the linguistic turn was trying to achieve in relation to what came before.

RH: The first thing to say is that the linguistic turn came out of a long running discussion about what analytic philosophy ought to be doing.

One strand came from Bertrand Russell and ultimately from [German logician Gottlob] Frege: the idea that philosophical problems could be solved by translating the ordinary language in which they were expressed into logical symbolism. It was thought that this would give you a clear structure, that you would see where a mistake of translation led to. The famous example is the theory of descriptions, where Russell tries to show that statements which are about non-existent things can be true or false.

The other strand started with Wittgenstein who repudiated his own adoption of [logical positivism] in the Tractatus.[ii] He realised that really deep-seated, endlessly repeated philosophical problems came from misunderstandings about ordinary language. And this wasn’t just the ordinary language of everyday life; it was the ordinary language of physics and chemistry as well.

Misunderstanding the grammar of these languages would generate philosophical problems. So you had to reveal the grammar of the ordinary language, compare that [grammar] with the grammar of your philosophical analysis, and you would see that they didn’t mesh. Since the ordinary language was the one that you were using to construct life, or your cyclotron, that must be the correct working language— because it works.

The battle goes on until this day. A lot of American philosophers still love to do this logical analysis stuff. In philosophy of science, it’s still quite prominent. Then there are the people like myself who think this is a complete waste of time because it simply bypasses the really interesting and serious problems, and leaves everything as it is. That’s the core of the story.

DH: I’m also trying to get a sense of the culture of the time. Was there a sense, then, that the linguistic turn would have as far reaching implications as it has for social explanation?

RH: Oh, yes. When I came [to Oxford] in 1954 it was a hotbed of activity. It was amazing, really, what was going on.

It wasn’t just Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein became known in Oxford, but all this stuff started just after the Second World War. Gradually a lot of very smart people accumulated here. There were 110 philosophers at one time; each college had two or three.

[Oxford philosopher Gilbert] Ryle was influenced by Wittgenstein, but he was a bit disingenuous about this. So far as I know he used to go for walking trips with Wittgenstein, so a lot of the stuff in those famous writings of Ryle’s—the famous “concept of mind” and “systematic misleading expressions”—comes from Wittgenstein, I think. But [J. L.] Austin was entirely sui generis; he thought it all up by himself. And he was saying much the same sort of thing.

The optimism was that if we perceived this honestly and rigorously, then this was the end of academic philosophy in the old traditional sense. You could tackle problems and show that they had a finite solution. They weren’t going on endlessly, not for Russell’s reason, but for the reason that there was a language which was pragmatically successful. That’s what we had to focus on.

DH: You came from more of a science background, didn’t you?

RH: I started in chemical engineering [in New Zealand]. I was doing mathematics and chemical engineering in parallel—mad!—and I ran out of money. The chemical engineering course was an extra two years, so I had a mathematics degree and got a job as a mathematician.

My B.Phil [at Oxford] was on a mathematical topic. Only gradually did I become fascinated by the linguistic side of things. Because I was a trained mathematician, the logical analysis stuff held a certain initial attraction—I did a lot of work on modal logic, published papers, and so on—until gradually I began to see that this wasn’t getting me or anybody else anywhere. So I abandoned it and came to the other side.

DH: Similar to Wittgenstein’s personal transformation.

RH: Exactly. And he was a clarinetist as well.

DH: I heard somewhere that J. L. Austin used to run seminars with tea and crumpets?

RH: Well, he didn’t have tea and crumpets, but he had something rather spiritually similar. He would wander in carrying the three volumes of [the American pragmatist] C. S. Pierce’s collected works, he’d put them down on the table, he’d flip the page over and he’d look at it, and an expression of astonishment would come over his face. He’d read out a bit and then we’d all get to work on it. It was quite by random chance.

I also remember Austin coming in at the beginning of his Sense and Sensibilia lectures, and he had this book with him. He looked around, with his narrow smile, and held the book up like he would hold a dead rat, and said, “This is a work by Professor Ayer [another logical positivist]. I don’t propose to refute it, I shall shred it.”

DH: Ouch!

RH: That was style, it really was style…

DH: I’m curious as well about your New Zealand connection, because we entertain this self-image as a rather pragmatic people, and I wondered whether this helped you to see things in a particular way.

RH: That’s an interesting question I’ve never asked myself. Maybe the existence of the Māori culture. I did actually do Māori at university. I got an A for it but I’ve forgotten it now. It’s very hard to say, the complex lines of influence on one’s life…

DH: When I moved to this part of the world, I found myself having conversations about language more than ever before. If I’m in Germany, for instance, I find myself constantly talking about how the German language works. If I’m in France, the same. It becomes a constant source of conversation and it occurred to me, at one point, it’s no wonder that the philosophy here is so fixated on the contingencies of language. It’s a regional obsession, itself a contingent philosophical concern.

RH: Yes, the very moment you set foot in Europe, you’re confronted by it. I did French at school, because my family is, ultimately, French. I struggled through Latin, but I passed it. But, in the European context, I got more and more interested in all this language around us, this cultural difference.

I teach in Spanish in South America and I’ve written a book in Spanish, so Spanish became very much a part of my life. I began to realise that the Spanish conception of what is right and proper—the Spanish ideas about social relations—are quite distinct from the English ones, and even more so than the New Zealand ones. This is all, somehow or rather, incorporated into linguistic choices.

I don’t believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its very strong form: I don’t think language determines thought. But it certainly exerts a gentle pressure on it to go in a certain way. If you are brought up learning in Spanish celoso (jealous), it applies almost exclusively to sexual matters. If it’s about cars, though, you have a different word. So the Spanish language is making easy a distinction which you have to work on more exactly if you’re trying to enter into that culture from outside.


54

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:31 | #

Ibid:

On the Rules of Life

DH: So your work emphasises the role of rules in social explanation?

RH: Yes: if you want to understand how a social situation evolves or how a social institution operates, then it’s no good looking for causes. Because it isn’t entirely clear what you’d be looking for if you were looking for causes.

Nevertheless, you can see that people live in a world dominated by the norms that they and other people presume to operate a particular situation. The idea, then, is to look for something you can call “rules”—which, of course, is a metaphor because people are not actually following rules unless they are foreigners being told how to behave. Most of the time, Wittgenstein’s notion of a “hinge” is probably the best notion to have: a deeply buried presumption about how to act. When I wrote that book, Social Being, I hadn’t fully understood what Wittgenstein was getting at—but I do now.

So C. Gordon and I [the sociologist Chad Gordon], as well as others with our way of thinking, we would ask ourselves: What set of rules, if they were deliberately followed by people, would result in a social situation, or social institution, working a certain way? Then we would say that this is an overt expression of a tacit body of knowledge which everybody who is in that situation has acquired in a Vygotskian way—that is, by growing up in a family, in a school, in a certain milieu.[iii] So it is not so much that people are deliberately rule-following, but that “rule” is the best metaphor, because it contains the idea of a normative structure. Of course, rules have their boundaries. The rules of hockey are different from the rules of basketball, say, but each constitutes a game. Thus we are back to Wittgenstein, his “language games”, the same idea.

So, “rule” became a very powerful idea for organising what one has found out about the body of knowledge that a certain group of people are managing seamlessly without trouble.

DH:It’s interesting that you say that rule is the best “metaphor” because I guess one objection people might make is that rule is just another hypothetico-deductive symbol that’s being used to explain people’s behaviour, another attempt to locate causation. But you’ve already obviated that line of critique by insisting that rule is a metaphor, not pure description.

RH: I think you need an intermediate concept which C. Gordon and I tried to develop that is habit. So “rule” is the most formal way of expressing the idea of a taken-for-granted social norm. The best psychological version of that is habitual behaviour. This is exactly what Wittgenstein talked about as acting within a framework of “hinges”: these are habits.

So, how do you inculcate a habit? Quite often it’s simply by Vygotskian means of copying each other, but sometimes you have to instruct someone. [For example] I meet an American and they say, “I’m going to go to England in the summer.” So I say, “One important thing to remember drive on the left.” I’ve given an instruction, a rule, and it’s going to become habitual. When I first started driving on the other side of the [English] Channel, the first two or three years I was always having to tell myself the rule. Now it’s completely habitual; I drive on the right-hand side of the road without a single thought. So this is transitionary. “Rule” has a part to play, but the operative notion is social or habit, teaching someone how to use a saw, how to play the piano.

DH: This is related to the distinction that Wittgenstein made between following a rule and acting in accordance to a rule.

RH: Yes, exactly. Following a rule is the initial business when someone tells you what to do. As for acting in accordance with the rule, a person may have acquired that habit entirely by imitation, but, if required to, they might nevertheless be able to formulate it as a rule.

We were a bit careless when [Paul] Secord and I first put this forward [in The Explanation of Social Behaviour, 1972]. We didn’t make these sorts of distinctions. In a way, we thought they were obvious—but they never are obvious. Of course, discovering [Lev] Vygotsky was a really big excitement as far as I was concerned. Here was someone who was doing all this with such elegance in the 1930s. All my students have to study Vygotsky.

DH: Another worry is that by turning to rules you turn to another form of determinism, a kind of social determinism. So I wonder how closely related you think rules and action are?

RH: “Rule” is a term of art. I think habits and actions are closely related. But rules are how someone looking in from the outside, either as a teacher or researcher, is going to express what they have realised about norms. It is certainly not the point that “rule” is the explanatory content, any more than F = Gm1m2/r² explains why something drops according to that. That’s a description of the pattern. The explanation is the gravitational force.

This is a very important point. Writing down a rule is not the same as writing down the cause for how this happened. So people who think that’s what we said, they’ve just got it wrong. Partly the excuse is we didn’t make it crystalline clear in Secord’s and my book that started all this off.

DH: Because sometimes an explanation for an action might be that the agent failed to act in accordance to a certain rule, so that would be how the rule and action relate to one another—in a paradoxical relation.

RH: Exactly! It might be anything from an earthquake to the flu: What you do in an earthquake is partly motivated by the hot rocks rolling down the hill, and partly by your conception of what bravery is.

DH: At the moment, in cultural theory especially, there is this “turn to affect”, an attempt to differentiate a domain of affective phenomena as pre-linguistic, pre-personal feeling. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about this, especially how it relates to your more constructionist notion of emotion as essentially social.

RH: Yes, I’ve come to a fairly settled conclusion on [emotion]. There is no doubt that ethologists have identified four or five fundamental reactions that the human being, as an organism, has in relation to the situations it finds itself in. Even babies exhibit this: if you put a baby on a glass floor, the baby gets upset by [what it perceives as a] cliff.

But when you see the way emotional lives are led by people—what upsets them, what pleases them, how they react with other people, and so on—then you begin to see that there is a very powerful set of cultural paradigms which are involved in it. And part of that, of course, is copying, but part of it is learning the language, learning the words.

So, if you are learning the word “anger”, you’re learning the criteria to pick out somebody who is angry, so you can then use the word to properly characterise it. Ira in Spanish and anger in English don’t mean quite the same thing. You have to learn different criteria, so if you’re a Spaniard learning ira or if you’re an English kid learning anger, then you are picking up on different things. Come to the Japanese, of course, and the difference is enormous.

Also, Catherine Lutz’s wonderful book on the Ifaluk [Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory, 1988]. There are things the Ifaluk vocabulary teaches you how to identify—such as song which is “justified anger”—that we don’t quite have exactly. Or the old story about schadenfreude among the Germans. Sometimes we have to borrow a word because we have that phenomenon.

DH: Yes, I learned another one in Singapore recently, kiasu, which translates roughly as “afraid of missing out”, this gnawing hunger to always be at the front of the line. It forced me to think about that line of yours: “Nothing exists in the mind that doesn’t already exist in the conversation”. Because even though Singaporeans seem to regard kiasu as distinctively Singaporean, it seemed at least familiar to me, having spent time living in a consumerist culture.

So let me put this another way…  It is possible to take social constructionism to imply a kind of rephrasing of Cartesian dualism, where it’s the word and the body that are somehow disconnected, rather than mind/body dualism. Yet isn’t it plausible for certain physical responses, such as primitive affective reactions or hungers or desires, to anchor language in some way, to restrain the conceptual possibilities?

RH: One thing that ought to be emphasised is that, when you become dissatisfied with a dichotomy, you usually become dissatisfied with one half of it. If you become dissatisfied with Cartesianism, you become dissatisfied with the idea of mind as a substance. If you chuck that out, then you’re left now with body as a substance. But Wittgenstein’s message is, “Look, you should abandon the whole dichotomy and study another dichotomy.” What about living and dead, what about conscious and unconscious, what about person and rock.

So person becomes the key concept. And persons are embodied centres of cultures, skilled in all kinds of things—in making soufflés and in speaking Vietnamese. So it’s just a mistake to start tearing a person up into little bits and try to assign one skill to one bit of the person, another to another bit of the person. [Gilbert] Ryle used to love talking about Stanley Matthews, a great English footballer, and his “clever feet”. How can that be? Because Stanley is a person we’re talking about.

DH: This is the mereological fallacy, the fallacy of confusing the part with the whole, especially by misattributing some competence to the part that only truly belongs to the whole

RH: Exactly. It all fits with this point of view: Don’t divide people up into minds and bodies. They’re persons.

DH: These days, of course, there’s ever greater scope for making the mereological fallacy because of developments in neuroscience, especially the invention of fMRI scans. Distinctions can be drawn at ever more sophisticated levels, so that different parts of the brain can be [fallaciously] assigned responsibility for the various activities of the mind.

RH: I think there is a way of dealing with that. If you’re thinking of persons as the ultimate metaphysical unit, then the bodies of persons and their brains are devices which the person uses for accomplishing the task set to them by the culture. So, the pre-frontal lobes do this, that, and the other thing.

I’ve been arguing with Peter Hacker [one of Wittgenstein’s best-known interpreters in the analytic vein] about this in a gentlemanly way. We had a couple of pieces in Journal of Philosophy. I think there is nothing wrong with the idea of the brain and hands as tools for tasks.

DH: Yes, I discussed this with Peter at one point [in his seminar at St John’s College, Oxford]. He was very much against the idea of using “brain talk” in a metaphorical sense because, as he put it, it didn’t recommend itself as a method. Yet there is a tradition that comes through people like Hans Vaihinger (fictionalism), Bas van Fraassen (constructive empiricism), or the pragmatists who accept that metaphors can or must be used in science, just that one should be conscious about it being a metaphor. [In other words, when we say “our brain thinks” or “our hippocampus remembers”, we make the mereological fallacy and therefore speak conceptual nonsense; however, such phrases might nevertheless succeed in communicating something useful that other phrases don’t.]

RH: Exactly. You have to work with this metaphor carefully, to see that it doesn’t run off into some unacceptable moves. But, by and large, it does work quite nicely. Persons are the unit and if we’re thinking about what persons do, what persons accomplish, what the characters of the person are, then we don’t need to be afraid of falling back into Cartesianism again. If we want to know how the hippocampus works, we can get on with it.

I’m not going to give into Peter by any means. But he’s such a nice guy, a really nice guy…

 


55

Posted by DanielS on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:33 | #

Ibid:

On Changing the Rules

DH: In regards to social transformation, it follows from the social constructionist point of view that reforming the language, reforming the rules, is where our attention should be focused. As you’ve written before, “All we have to do is show people that they are trapped in the silken shrouds of a pattern of discourse conventions, yet how deeply they resist these demonstrations.” Why do they resist these demonstrations, these emancipatory attempts to change language and discourse?

RH: Well, I think the answer is, at once, banal and deep.

Once people have acquired a certain way of going on, it’s very, very uncomfortable to start shifting. A simple example is metrication. I don’t know how long ago we officially adopted metrication [Ed’s note: the Confederation of British Industry formally endorsed the metric system in 1965], yet all over the place there are still inches, pounds, and so on. I remember in France after they adopted the “heavy franc” [in 1960], everybody would still talk about 10 francs as a meal, yet they meant 50 francs. So, there’s this resistance of people. So much of life is habitual, even though we know it’s conventional.

That’s the banal explanation, but underlying it is something quite deep. It’s this Wittgensteinian “hinges” idea, where most of the time we never explicitly formulate the tacit conventions by which we live. [Danièle] Moyal-Sharrock has a nice way of expressing it: for every hinge that underlies a tacit practice, there is a “propositional doppelgänger” and that is what you very rarely ever formulate. You can’t address the tacit underlying of the practice unless you can formulate its doppelgänger—then you’ve got your proposition.

To give an example: I watch people in the street. When I was in New Zealand recently [Harré was awarded an honorary doctorate from Massey University in 2012], I was astonished to see people walked on the left-hand side of the pavement. Come back here [to the UK] and people walk all over the place. Yet I bet if I were to say to someone in New Zealand, “What side of the pavement do you walk on?”, they would be completely baffled. Yet I could say, “As a matter of fact, you all walk on the left-hand side.” That’s a propositional doppelgänger of this practice.

Another example: We shake hands right-handed. It never occurs to us that there might be something strange about it, something artificial or conventional. Also, I remember when we began differentiating between a man meeting a woman and a man meeting a man. Now, in England, a man meeting a woman is always a French double kiss. Americans are picking it up too. They aren’t getting it quite right—every now and then an American gets it all wrong and gives you the full smack on the lips! But all this illustrates the fact that, in general, we don’t formulate in a propositional form—in a way that can be addressed linguistically—what it is we’re doing.

So that’s the deep reason why it’s very hard to bring about [social change]. Interestingly, when Ali [Moghaddam] and I wrote about what remains after a revolution [in “Psychological Limitations to Political Revolutions: An Application of Social Reducton Theory”, 1996], I didn’t see clearly the link with “hinges” and hinge propositions. I’d write it somewhat differently now, but it’s the same point.[iv]

At this point, of course, the political theorist often wants to turn to “class” or some thing by way of explanation…

I’m not adverse to that provided we say: “How is this worked out? What is this in the realities of conversational practices amongst a group of people?” It seems to me what happened in the nineteenth century in the Industrial Revolution was a whole new way of talking about life, quite different from the way the aristocrats and their peasants talked.

There is a very interesting article [see Tony Collins, Sport in Capitalist Society: A Short History, 2013] about why there was no revolution in England when the French Revolution was on. And the answer was cricket. You couldn’t have a village cricket team that consisted entirely of the landowners; you had to have some “oiks” as well. Traditionally, the blacksmith would be the fast bowler. If you’re going to have cricket, you couldn’t have revolution. I can’t remember who wrote it, but I thought it was very shrewd. No doubt there’s a million other reasons why there wasn’t [a revolution], but there was one little pointer to all these unformulated norms in a social practice.

On the Academy

DH: A lot of people orientate themselves in philosophy—or, more commonly, situate others—by reference to the continental/analytical divide. One of the things I find interesting about your work is that it resonates with ideas on either side of that divide. Your understanding of poverty, for instance, resonates far more with the performative, post-structuralist conceptions of Foucault or Butler than with the rationalist conceptions of agency that we might expect from the Oxford analytic tradition. It’s really an illustration of why the continental/analytical divide is so forced, so distracting. Bernard Williams had a pretty good line on this: “This classification always involved a quite bizarre conflation of the methodological and the topographical, as though one classified cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese.”

The other problem is that, by sweeping certain ideas over to the “continental” side of the divide, a whole range of important insights are dismissed as irrelevant to those who remain on the “analytic” side, even though some of those insights emerged from within analytic philosophy in response to its own shortcomings. It seems that blinkered attitude has migrated into psychology, especially North American psychology, which has this strongly positivist, rationalist, scientific self-image. It lets them off the hook; it allows them to push on as if none of this had really happened.

RH: Yes, it was very unfortunate that when social psychology began to develop—a little bit in the 1930s but mostly in the 1950s—that, even though the philosophical establishment had abandoned positivism, it was still the visible thing in philosophy of science. Yet they were ten years behind the times. People like Mary Hesse, Mario Bunge, and myself advocated models as the basic cognitive device by which scientists work, not logical inferences. Still, these psychologists thought that, in order to be scientific, they had to follow this resilient pattern. Consequently, of course, they got stuck in it. “How do you make all those words?” they would say. “Probability. Statistics.” It’s a total disaster.

So, they made a bad choice and it was very difficult to get out of. In America, everything became routinised very quickly. You had to do A, B, C, and D to get your PhD, to get your tenured post, and so on. The best way [to succeed] is to copy the work of the person who is one step ahead of you. The whole thing became completely institutionalised and still is to some extent.

The APA [the American Psychological Association] has began to change its mind a bit. Some of us have been selected for a “living legends” seminar in August [2014]. Here we are, an aging bunch, holding views far in advance of the mainstream. So let’s hope that it’s going to be populated by mainstream people who say, “Ah yes! Now I see!” Fat chance of that, I think.

DH: Do you think the departmentalisation of modern universities has anything to do with this? You’re often described as a polymath, as someone who’s competent in a range of disciplines: philosophy, psychology, social science. But it could also be said that you study just one topic—social explanation—and that it’s the academy that has splintered around you, drawing boundaries through what should be a unified subject area.

RH: American universities are particularly prone to departmentalisation. If you went to somewhere like Wisconsin, where I worked for a while, absolutely rigid. Nobody from A visited B, let alone listened to what someone from B had to say. Georgetown is very atypical in this. We have strong relations with the linguistics people. Deborah Tannen is a very close friend of mine, a very famous person in the linguistic world. She gives talks on our side and I give talks on her side—and so it goes. But it’s very unusual.

The problem is, once psychologists got stuck into their paradigm and they were getting PhDs, getting jobs, paying the mortgage, et cetera, it’s very difficult to tell them to look over the fence to see that other people in other departments are tackling problems that they’re also interested in—and tackling them in a much more effective fashion. In fact, it’s not that they don’t want to see this, they can’t see it, because the situation is so structured that they can’t move across disciplines. Even interdisciplinary projects involve a kind of summation, but not subsumption, of discipline.

*** end.


56

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 25 Oct 2016 23:19 | #

“impressions’ are stamped in the brain…associations formed” and so on..

The man who does not comprehend that he has within him a certain something which does not, in fact, belong to the native part of him, and which consists of networks of unconsciously acquired, associatively ordered data which effect quite programmatically as chains of behaviour, cannot know that there is also a certain something which does belong to him and is native to him.  In my part 3 Human essay I wrote of the former “something”:

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.

This “something” has the collective force of, in Heidegger’s terminology, “the they” - an experience of permanent otherness which, given the great man’s strictly observed prohibition against psychology, was never taken further.  But a focal switch from being to identity necessitates a more expansive approach.  We have to know and experience that which belongs to us, for which purpose we have to know that which does not.  We have to have some basis for discriminating for the authentic.  There is no other intellectually rigorous way to an identitarian system of thought.


57

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 03:31 | #

Well, that sounds like a complicated way of looking for a means to discriminate between behavior - I don’t dare say language or rules to you, because they are apparently completely fake in your aspired-for ontological model - hell, I shouldn’t even say system or behavior to you as that’d be fake too, everything but standing there in captivated, glowing rapture of authentic identity (before the fuhrer?) is apparently verboten and false - you want to find in the human organism’s neurology that discriminatory capacity which discriminates for that which is more natural and adaptive in a sense of survival, which you presume corresponds to loyalty and breeding with one’s specific racial kind.

I can grant that in its initial posing that you have gone into a philosophical realm to ask the question, but then you quickly plunged into a scientific inquiry - nothing wrong with scientific inquiries - but you probably go scientistic, as you have not only not included the entire body (let alone kind of body - say, English) and the broader systems with which it interacts, and have, instead, focused on the tri-part brain as the singular source of this discriminatory capacity…whereas I would think, rather, to the extent that this capacity exists to discriminate for what is natural, native to it and adapted for its survival that it is co-evolved as a part of fuller and complex feedback circuitry - but perhaps this “co-evolutionary” (hardware/software interface) with people and environment/habitat is exactly where you need to focus further, as it would be the place which would emphasize blood and soil.

As MacDonald has pointed out, there is mental hardware which is adapted to sheer survival and that it weighs toward racial discrimination (which we are taught not to respect, but which we, by contrast, believe we should respect) and software that is manipulable toward the fact that we are not so evolved away from other races as to not be able to interbreed with them…and can thus be persuaded that it is “adaptive” to interbreed with them, perhaps even to the complete blending away of our difference(s).

You are trying to locate that software which has been damaged or replaced as an interface that confirms the parts of our brain which not only selects on behalf of health and legacy, but of our own kind as such.


58

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 05:30 | #

you want to find in the human organism’s neurology that discriminatory capacity which discriminates for that which is more natural and adaptive in a sense of survival,

Identity is not logos (or telos, for that matter). So, for example, at 6 on this thread I noted:

Interestingly, in MacDonald’s paper on implicit racism of a few years ago he relied on (I think a couple of) studies of self-described conservative and liberal students and the correspondence, or lack thereof, of what they claimed their attitudes to other races were and what their adrenaline reactions said they were.  We should distinguish the instinctive, adrenal reaction from the revelation to the consciousness which Midtdasein implies, and understand that, as the Transit dictates, the latter refers to the turn away from absence to presence, from mechanicity to consciousness, from personality to identity.


59

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:38 | #

You are trying to locate that software which has been damaged or replaced as an interface that confirms the parts of our brain which not only selects on behalf of health and legacy, but of our own kind as such.

No, Daniel.  I am trying to find the means by which “the they” becomes “us”.


60

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 11:13 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 05:30 | #

  you want to find in the human organism’s neurology that discriminatory capacity which discriminates for that which is more natural and adaptive in a sense of survival,

Identity is not logos (or telos, for that matter). So, for example, at 6 on this thread I noted:

I didn’t really suggest that what you were doing was logos or teleology, but I was hoping to encourage you to go for the more straight forward science of your apparent predilection - as there is nothing wrong with that and it can, in fact, be useful.


I realize that you are going for something more metaphysical, arcane and sophisticated - and some of your observations about emergence and Heideggerian ontology are really excellent…

But I would not be so quick to ignore the word “co-evolution” and its implications as you have…

Moreover, my concern for your ontology project is limited where it belabors aspiration to universal application to all people on the one hand and tends to retreat into elusive realms available to sufficient understanding only by yourself, on the other - these extremes I find to be of limited utility if not an obstruction - quite frustrating, as “the alt right” and now the so called “the alt left” (coined by Robert Lindsay, a long time adversary of Majorityrights) attempt to co-opt and bury a solid and useful platform for White advocacy already here at Majoirtyrights and bring-in the YKW once again to commandeer popular understanding of terms and bury our true racial advocacy as genus and species of European peoples..

  Interestingly, in MacDonald’s paper on implicit racism of a few years ago he relied on (I think a couple of) studies of self-described conservative and liberal students and the correspondence, or lack thereof, of what they claimed their attitudes to other races were and what their adrenaline reactions said they were.

Ok, now you are referencing science by MacDonald..and that’s fine with me..

We should distinguish the instinctive, adrenal reaction from the revelation to the consciousness which Midtdasein implies, and understand that, as the Transit dictates, the latter refers to the turn away from absence to presence, from mechanicity to consciousness, from personality to identity.

Alright, that makes some sense.

  Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:38 | #59

You are trying to locate that software which has been damaged or replaced as an interface that confirms the parts of our brain which not only selects on behalf of health and legacy, but of our own kind as such.

No, Daniel.  I am trying to find the means by which “the they” becomes “us”.

Well, then you’d be getting out of the head (which is where you were a moment ago) and into rules and narrative, also fine with me.


61

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 16:01 | #

Daniel: So you are trying to get to London; but you know, don’t you, you can only go via York?
Me: No, I’m just going to drive up to London.  It’s only a few miles up the road.
Daniel: You get there from York station, where you can pick up the East Coast Express southbound.
Me: No, I am driving to London.
Daniel: You realise that to get to York you will have to change at Bedford?
Me: Er, no ... I am driving to London.
Daniel: You will find that Bedford is served direct from Brighton, so that’s your best starting point.
Me: But I am driving to London.
Daniel: I’ve got a train timetable somewhere.  I’ll fish it out and double-check the connection times for you.
Me: Thanks, but I really am driving to London.  I’ve pre-paid the congestion charge and everything.
Daniel: You are following rules then.  Don’t forget that you can’t light up in the train carriage anymore.


62

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 20:49 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 26 Oct 2016 16:01 | #

“Daniel”: So you are trying to get to London; but you know, don’t you, you can only go via York?

DanielS: Didn’t say that, GW is falsely attributing script to him.

GW: Ignores all that is said about Rom Harre, insists that the only thing that matters is his project, that all hinges on it’s “foundation”, as if we don’t know that English people exist.

GW: No, I’m just going to drive up to London.  It’s only a few miles up the road.

DanielS: so go there.

“Daniel”: You get there from York station, where you can pick up the East Coast Express southbound.

DanielS: puts words into my mouth that are not remotely analogous.

GW: No, I am driving to London.

So drive to London, concentrate on your ontology project as you might, but if you try to tell me what I am doing is backwards or unimportant I am going to carry on despite you..

“Daniel”: You realize that to get to York you will have to change at Bedford?

GW, takes sarcasm notes from Bowery, pretends that I am trying to talk about and approach things in quite same way that he is doing. Wants to pretend that what I am doing has no value and no place….that the only thing that matters is what he is doing.

GW: Er, no ... I am driving to London.

DanielS: So drive there

“Daniel”: You will find that Bedford is served direct from Brighton, so that’s your best starting point.

Bowery tells GW to pretend that not only do I not basically understand his project, but I am wrong because I do not believe that it is the most important let alone the only project necessary to our interests, as GW tries to assert ...(while ignoring everything else)

GW: But I am driving to London.

DanielS: So, for the millionth time, go ahead, drive to London.

GW takes my description of what I am doing, and my assertion that what I am doing as valid, as if I am giving him directions.

“Daniel”: I’ve got a train timetable somewhere.  I’ll fish it out and double-check the connection times for you.

DanielS: Drive to London, do your ontology.

GW: Thanks, but I really am driving to London.  I’ve pre-paid the congestion charge and everything.

DanielS: glad to hear it, bon voyage!

“Daniel”: You are following rules then.  Don’t forget that you can’t light up in the train carriage anymore.

GW projects his imperviousness onto me…no matter how much you show appreciation for his good work - e.g., on thoroughgoing emergence - if you can see that there are limitations and some aspects that are not so useful - e.g. “the personality” - he wants to give YOU directions to this place that you are not interested in going…

And when I tell him to go ahead if that’s where he wants to go, but I have things to do that are a least as important and truthfully, far more important to do, he tries to pretend that I am telling him he must do as I do… when, in fact, he has tried to tell me to adopt this “personality” project instead ..giving me directions and “means” to go to a place where I am not going ...

When I try to commend, show empathy, give him an indication as to how I might approach these matters, only to show that it can work with my project…if I were looking into these matters.. he takes exception…it is not enough that I recognize the good things he’s doing and commend what he is trying to do doing even where I think his approach is a little off (whereas he barely shows respect for anything that I am doing) ... apparently thinking “co-evolution” is an affront, a useless suggestion…..he then he puts words in my mouth.

 


63

Posted by "personal-ity" on Thu, 27 Oct 2016 10:31 | #

Reflecting upon the word “Personality” I can see that it can be studied and is not necessarily a reification.


Firstly, the “ity” suffix indicates to me a system - therefore a homeostatic system largely within the governance of the corporeal person. This can be studied as the systemic character, for example, of a particular English character ..and usefully, probably, if it is not treated as if wholly independent of interactive context - then it would be a reification.

Nevertheless, I still find it much more relevant and important to look after group systemic patterns since, again, we are under attack as a group concept and in fact, our individualism is encouraged to the detriment of our group defense.

Thus, too much focus on personality in isolation while ignoring concerns of social group homeostasis would play into this ruse to divert us from our group defense.

To characterize the error, it’s a bit like saying (((The Frankfurt School))) is bad so lets cure it with (((The Austrian School))).

Nevertheless, I have never said that the individual isn’t a valid and important concept. And I can see how the “ity” suffix on the world “personality” can mean that it is a hypothesis of systemic character which can be subject to operational verifiability - which is the gold standard of pragmatic philosophy.

Origin of -ity
Middle English
Old French
Latin
variant of -itie, Middle English -ite < Old French < Latin -itāt- (stem of -itās); in many words representing Latin -itās directly
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2016.
Cite This Source
British Dictionary definitions for -ity
-ity
suffix
1.indicating state or condition: technicality
Word Origin
from Old French -ite, from Latin -itās
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Cite This Source
Word Origin and History for -ity

suffix forming abstract nouns from adjectives, meaning “condition or quality of being ______,” from Middle English -ite, from Old French -ité and directly from Latin -itatem (nominative -itas), suffix denoting state or condition, composed of connective -i- + -tas (see -ty (2)).

  Roughly, the word in -ity usually means the quality of being what the adjective describes, or concretely an instance of the quality, or collectively all the instances; & the word in -ism means the disposition, or collectively all those who feel it. [Fowler]


64

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:37 | #

[The personality is] a homeostatic system largely within the governance of the corporeal person.

The question of personality and homeostasis is an interesting and abstruse one.  It bears on the degree to which, even in the historically novel condition of self-estrangement, nihilism, and anomie we have reached today, there is enough of Nature coming through from the instinctual in us to keep things going.  It needs to be understood that the guiding hand of instinct is not sufficient in itself, as I noted in Human Part 3:

There is, of course, the other part of us, the part that is beyond the power of mere politics or grand ideas, and even faith.  This is Nature in Man.  All the mind’s biologically-derived capacities, traits, instincts, drives, etc - the skeleton of the psyche, so to speak, that it is so necessary for bad philosophy to deny – are givens and are permanent.  But though they may never be made or re-made, yet the action of some may be deferred for a time, or suppressed, misappropriated, or distorted as a result of something, some wrinkle or glitch in personality.  Healthy sexual function is commonly forfeit in this respect.  But it is emotional function which usually bears the scars.  Even the deepest and most instinctively flowing emotions, such as ethnocentric feeling, can be damned up or drained off into some fetid swamp.

You use the word governance.  But will is a function of unity.  Unity is a function of realising self ... of affirmation and appropriation ... of, as I said at 6 above, “the turn away from absence to presence, from mechanicity to consciousness, from personality to identity.”

You also mention corporeality.  But the corporeal state is something I would connect to the instinctual aspect of Mind.  That aside, I don’t see it bearing directly on the existential paradigm.  For you, no doubt, it is part of a meaningful analytic system; but that system does not contain the same spacial relation and, therefore, possibilities as the psychologised but essentially Heideggerian model which is the Transit.

I still find it much more relevant and important to look after group systemic patterns since, again, we are under attack as a group concept and in fact, our individualism is encouraged to the detriment of our group defense.

I am not addressing the question “how” but, rather, “who”.

Thus, too much focus on personality in isolation while ignoring concerns of social group homeostasis would play into this ruse to divert us from our group defense.

If the question of “who” is not answered in the very first act of perception, then everything else is, to one degree or another, unfixed.

To characterize the error, it’s a bit like saying (((The Frankfurt School))) is bad so lets cure it with (((The Austrian School))).

There is no error.

Nevertheless, I have never said that the individual isn’t a valid and important concept.

Mind is Mind.  It has structure, it has verities.  It is a constant.  Explicating it does not individualise or collectivise it.

And I can see how the “ity” suffix on the world “personality” can mean that it is a hypothesis of systemic character which can be subject to operational verifiability - which is the gold standard of pragmatic philosophy.

Glad to see you say so.  This tendency of yours to switch out of the usual generalised perception of subject in existential thought and into some private mode critical of Cartesianism is difficult to break down - and doubly frustrating given the de-conflictualising, cohering aspiration which should always characterise serious nationalist thinking.


65

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 28 Oct 2016 06:19 | #

Mind is Mind.  It has structure, it has verities.  It is a constant.  Explicating it does not individualise or collectivise it.

No, that is Cartesian nonsense.

  [But] I can see how the “ity” suffix on the world “personality” can mean that it is a hypothesis of systemic character which can be subject to operational verifiability - which is the gold standard of pragmatic philosophy.

GW: Glad to see you say so.  This tendency of yours to switch out of the usual generalised perception of subject in existential thought and into some private mode critical of Cartesianism is difficult to break down - and doubly frustrating given the de-conflictualising, cohering aspiration which should always characterise serious nationalist thinking.

Oh my goodness gracious! You are going to try to project your contentiousness and your endless parsing of matters and Cartesian nonsense onto me. ..and act like you are the one who is trying to coordinate and integrate our efforts?

You also mention corporeality.  But the corporeal state is something I would connect to the instinctual aspect of Mind.  That aside, I don’t see it bearing directly on the existential paradigm.

Of course it does. Different kinds of bodies will not act into existential paradigms in different ways? Of course they will.

For you, no doubt, it is part of a meaningful analytic system; but that system does not contain the same spacial relation and, therefore, possibilities as the psychologised but essentially Heideggerian model which is the Transit.

This is maddeningly untrue. When I speak of hermeneutics capacity to look after the temporal and the systemic I have in mind matters of time and space precisely - precisely what your psychological perspective blinders you to.

  I still find it much more relevant and important to look after group systemic patterns since, again, we are under attack as a group concept and in fact, our individualism is encouraged to the detriment of our group defense.

  ..too much focus on personality in isolation while ignoring concerns of social group homeostasis would play into this ruse to divert us from our group defense.

Please do not misrepresent what I say.

I am not addressing the question “how” but, rather, “who”.

In addition to the how, I am always addressing the who of our identity.

If the question of “who” is not answered in the very first act of perception, then everything else is, to one degree or another, unfixed.

The question of who is answered. You want to specify it still further, go right ahead, we can always use more detail, genetic and so on…but where you say that you and Bowery are not coming from a perspective overly influenced by Austrian school type objectivism, that would not be true. Clearly you have not liberated yourself from that ruse ...and I doubt that you will outgrow your conentiousness… it may even well be an incorrigibly determined part of your fiber.

There is a group that you, The Austrian school, Ayn Rand, Thatcher, Bowery, John Locke, et al. are a part of, a group that doesn’t believe in groups, such as unions, class and society, believing that it is non-empirical…



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