Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Le Ghetto: Andy Ngo on France's Race Riots and the Violence Spawned by Segregation" video.

  1. Great discussion between Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs and Andy Ngo. I have a long response bellow. Its been written in its entirety without notes or cut and paste, but it will contain some arguments I have been reformulating in my head relation to the Prof. Nigel Biggar’s NCF interview and also draw on some work I did on the previous Harrison Pitt discussion that I was not happy with to posit yet. I hope this was posted in good judgment from possible reader in mind. If I can get it together I will add a few references but one I have found recently, but not had chance to go into yet is the pre Foucault use of the term Historical a priori by Simmel (1905/1977 87-93) ref. in R. Lanier Anderson “The Debate Over Geisteswissenschaften in German Philosophy” Chapter 15 of “The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870-1945 (ed. Thomas Baldwin 2012 (Pg. 225). And I thought it was Foucault’s Genesis. There was an approach to history coming out of Husserl, that was a phenomenological Critique of what the called the "natural attitude". Just to note this began as a project in the early 20 th Century to understand mathematics logic science and meaning language. The position was to avoid naturalism and naturalistic reductions. In Britain as similar project was taken up, from Frege, by Russell and Wittgenstein to avoid trying to understand meaning in mathematics logic and language in terms of psychological acts which hey called psychologism a kind of reduction to subjective associations in experience of empirical relations eg Mill. Now Husserl's project of the de-naturalisation of meaning, made him turn towards the structures of consciousness as the transcendental in relation to any empirical object or relation. So for example the meaning of the "number one" is not given by reference to a single object in the world or pointing to it and saying "this is what the number one means", but neither is it the product of some inner subjective repeated associations and habits. Rather consciousness contains structure the number one has meaning in virtue of being a position on a number line for example, and this is neither in the structure of the natural world or a product of associations in experience. Later Husserl started to apply this to history in the Crisis of European Sciences, in part to respond to Heidegger's Critique of him that we could briefly say disagreed with the notion of meaning being in the head rather it must be immediately related to the world not outside of it, and it must be related to history, in the sense that the history of philosophy and its perceived philosophical problems, were really the result of a certain abstraction of consciousness, from the world and history like Descartes "I think", as meaning existence in a mind independent of the world. Now this kind of philosophical movement became popular in France after the second world war. It was anti Cartesian and structuralist. I think the structuralism here might reflect the work of the early 19th century French mathematician Galois. I can think of Derrida and Foucault. In Derrida very early on we find an essay on Husserl's Origin of Geometry, in part that the origin is an event: Euclidean Geometry, in empirical history. i think it was a kind of "librarians" attempt in the ancient world to organise all the existent works on geometry into an order like a catalogue or encyclopaedia. He created the Axiomatic method then as a librarians attempt to organise the geometry section of a library. What i think was of interest was that once the axiomatic structure was created at a point in time it then forwardly and formally "closes" what is a possible future creative move in mathematics. The event of Axiomatic geometry as structure, then delimits what is possible as a move a theorem and domain of study and so representation of the world in mathematics. In the hands of this French tradition it is seen as limit to creativity in mathematics, a limit to freedom and thought as possibility. In Foucault this becomes the problem of the historical a priori. That is say in political history the event of the rise of state and private companies etc the application of social science, data science to manage and create projects. So in a similar way this data mathematical structural social science approach then constrains forwardly what possible projects are rational measurable etc the structure presents and apparent limit to what is policy possible.
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  2. Part 2: Now For Derrida and Foucault, they see, i think, that this problem is analogous to the idea of the State, laws and Right as projecting a limit to what is possible legally legitimately that rests on say "The Constitution" the axioms. In this they can Critique French Marxist attached to the Soviet Model, Maoists to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. So for them the project for the New Left is to open up freedom and policy project possibility from being tied and limited in legitimacy to say the axioms of the State. Derrida's deconstruction at once Critiques the historical origin of the constitution as an absolutely legitimate i.e. free, universal, contract, signed by all of humanity for ever. It thus lacks a certain modality or necessity of normative force going forwards since it was not signed by all of the people. Foucault more in line with thinking of micro political practice in a context sees liberal notions of freedom as an opening into the Critique of the State, a legitimate equilibrium discourse, that can be used to change the "Order" of the State. The agents of this change will be those left out of the Original Contract Event: the margins, the poor, the women, and the ethic other. That is the justification or legitimacy for this that the original event was not universal and just and this is carried over forwardly as a kind of necessity over time in data and norms. Carried forward as a structure of necessity as if its an ongoing but unconscious or not fully intentional (ie Structural) project of injustice. On the basis of justice and right, then a revolutionary move can be legitimate even if it does not conform to the axioms and rights of the "closed" structure of rights of the state. Foucault late on turned to liberal and neo liberal ideas of freedom and right as micro tools for this. I think this is the context for the intellectual legitimacy of praxis and interpretation of immigration. So immigration is argued for on neo liberal lines of freedom and right as individual self interest and economic rationality, where the homo econimious has no intrinsic value only in relation has no essential cultural aspects only loose and fluid values habits character and practices supervening on a fundamental self intertest labour and pleasure. So free movement of people as an effect of economic difference is just inherent or intrinsic to liberalism. Differential labour values and companies seeking to pay the lowest wages in the West will both drive mass population movements and make it legitimate. Indeed The state its self is only a contingent gathering of a manifold of changeable rules and law and habits and norms as it is for neo liberalism. What Derrida does is to more strongly frame this in terms of justice which, particularly in America, provides something of a event where in the many diverse and even conflicting claims to freedom and right for marginalised groups can be structured under one new pseudo object of Justice that "cannot be given". This has become the picture now of defining and measuring progress and justice. Its a new structure of axioms still continuous with the past but also different, it is the ground of the legitimacy of the Social Justice Project. Immigration though neo liberalism is a way of changing the axioms of the State and is legitimate because it is correcting now by data metric a past unjust set of axioms. It conforms to neo liberal dogma , and so in that axiomatic system only arguments of economic in efficiency are legitimate: eg we get "go woke go broke". or the economic cost of immigration in crime and policing verses benefits from low wages and increased markets. Alternativity people can respond in terms of some injustice to a particular group of the "host" population, like benefits going to immigrants not local people on the basis of need or equality. But this will always be difficult from the point of view of transcendent justice. Because the concepts, as they are viewed, of race ethnicity gender, are defined at least in terms of primarily both naturalistically (say by look or science), and so as an absolute base to collect all from everywhere and every when as members of one set. But they also recognise, that this method is post facto of its own axiomatic structure, which is Western. That was the problem that the problem of “the other” (from Hegel, Husserl and so on) to their own metric structures was meant to address. It has taken many routes: subjectivity, and shared “inter-subjectivity”, perceptivity and projection as a ground and tool of legitimacy they feel is also a kind of outside to the structure they seek to change. As an outside it has taken the form almost of an absolute given in terms of pain and injustice. As the subjective expression of experience in speech it is at once relational though, not absolute naturally given, but a voice, a speech, to be placed into a structure of difference under justice.
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  3. Part 3: So there becomes a lexographical ordering here. It begins with recognition of moral luck, that where you were born, or who you are subjectively, is not of your own doing not a choice not deserving and so I think not responsible for (or thrown-ness from Heidegger). its gift from outside of the individual person that the structure of relations gives without merit or legitimacy: unearned we might say, or undeserved. The structural model of justice relations, then is a compensation for this moral undeservedness, advantage. Moral luck is measured from absolute justice though concepts of race gender etc that are universal planetary and transcendent of the State to international law and right. International law and justice is the standpoint of this transcendent science of nature and difference. It is then at once about synchronic metric of difference by concept of persons, and draws on in subjectivity and shared narratives like stories and history. The lexographical order of moral correction though relations of difference in justice I would say creates a new moral luck of being born into one of the marginally defined and “lived groups”. Here the most extreme subjective stories become archetypes for all the members of the set. Asking a woman out for a drink is connected to or a member of a set that includes harassment assault even effects in far off wars. In this way, the concept of justice and extreme archytpes not only bind all its members as victims in an apparent shared life with civilian victims of war, but it also has the “desired” effect of breaking up the traditional cultural norms and relations of the host country. I say desired because the social disconnect “within” the host people is internally part of the project of constitutional change to be replaced by international law and rules beyond consent. This is just the post Marxist reworking of Hegel’s idea that freedom has to involve the radical rationalisation and transformation or destruction of tradition and convention (sublation). They have taken this now into post colonial studies. That is the question of justice and right, now, links the present to the past historical a priori event. Now the marginal and the left out from the constitutional signing are seen as victims of an “unintentional” but structural “leaving out” and silencing. As agents the signers were racist and sexist by todays structural metric. Buthis intention of lack of is beside the point, that is they are not transcendent Cartesians about a free and voluntary and omniscient agent, they are situated in a context, but under a hermeneutic of suspicion (Richour). There is though a claim to compensation or restorative justice for past wrongs. So now the conservative and liberal (Nozick) notion of inheritance and tradition s the inheritance of moral injustice. A an historical trace relation is made from data now to past contracts, and those not signing it but subject to its laws of private right.
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  4. Part 5: We think we have to argue a position in terms of economic efficiency, or, rather, not-inefficient, that seem the norm now, or justice and then make a case from an originally just pure a priori historical event that never was or could be. We don’t have to do either. We just have to realise there position and its tension or self contradiction is the result of a at least two transcendent errors concerning possible acts in context and the possibility of justice. The task of recognition of being a people is not a task like the task of the left of Derrida and Foucault. Their project has its own set of historical a priori: it’s a fact, its there, but not determining even not determining in terms of how to name those it leaves out. People are with each other in a way that is not atoms accidental connected or associated but also not members of a set of relations under a general concept. One task is to run this argument, from the impossibility of justice in the past, action as vector diagonal resolving two perpendicular axis both if which are as singular axis in abstraction impossible. This has a structural isomorphism with an audit or double entry book keeping. Getting this into view needs to be done, and then we can look at the statistics and data on population demographics without the tacit implicit myth of absolute acts and justice that is the structure of the Social Justice Lefts diagram. It is to me motivating a version of John McDowell’s intuition, where we intuit objects in and through relations, but the issue there of epistemic error error has to be seen as in terms of an illusion of a transcendent realism as a Criteria of Just action. The demographic data are not separable in the objects only in the abstraction and collection of the properties. That why we can get all the weird paradoxical cases like middle class women complaining about injustice walking past a homeless man. Or the problem of the lexographical order of victims and perpretators.
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