Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "The New Culture Forum"
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Being 60 years old, I'm probably too old to fight, unless I guess things get really desperate. Being something of an educated person anyway, I guess, even if I was younger, I would be deemed more useful, more efficiently and effectively disposed into some kind of desk job. For both these reasons then, it is somewhat difficult to construct a judgment with reasons here. That is an ambiguous statement of course: It is difficult to construct a reason in terms of facts because, at this point in time at least, it is probably still a very unlikely requirement for many people who would not normally want to enlist in the military anyway. For most people it is probably not even considered as possible career. For most people war is something to watch in a movie or in some horror on the news. In that sense war recollections for my generation and the previous one is an exchange of war movies or events in the News. You have to go back two generations before conscription is a thing a necessity not a possibility, and I imagine there are not many left now with a memory of War on the the kind of scale from World War 2.
I have talked at length to soldiers from World War Two particularly an officer on the Dunkerque beach evacuation, and an artillery soldier at Monte Cassio. There is another person with a much more extreme experience even than those but they never talked about it. War experience for the following generation though is not unknown. From the 1950's though to the 1980's I've talked to some of them at great length socially and worked with them on buildign sites and factories.
More recently I have spoken but do not know some soldiers from recent wars from the 1990's to now. They had very different recollections and attitudes towards it than the others. It maybe because more recent generations are not so taciturn about there memories or maybe its that they were worse or closer in age top me. One I met walking home and we began talking about the army and he ended up telling me all about Wittgenstein and the Bruschelov Offensive of the Eastern Front of World War One. It was the first lesson when he went to military collage in Germany. He was very bitter about the whole thing, as was a very disturbed man I met in a pub. They had returned to country that didn’t seem to hold much value and respect for their bravery. That it was all about the “Tony Blare Illegal War” discourse. They were unemployed and one was definitely psychologically unemployable. I did meet one though who was well disposed to depart back into battle.
So to get back to the question of judgement and reasons: firstly we are dependent on trusting higher authorities for “objective reasons” not just in terms of facts and intelligence, but in terms of present and past honesty in there stations and roles, disposing of their public duty properly and sincerely. You know what if it’s a rich man trick: the rich make money create massive inequality cause chaos around the world after the 1990’s and expect to get the poor in this country to fight the wars of consequence, where they are off to an island somewhere. It could be dismissed as a lefty and conspiracy world view I guess. In this kind of propagandising, all the heroic stories from past generations will be amassed as so much friendly fire to entice people to be Heroes (Hero come from Greek or medieval root as does Heroin listen to the Velvet Underground Song or David Bowie) One discourse predictably doing the rounds on GM News is the question of “Will the Snowflake Generation be upto fighting the Russian Army?”. This was dealt with very effectively on GB News, by a guy from the “other” You Tube channel “Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, a couple of nights ago. I can’t add anything more to what he said in his exchange. They have probably posted it by now. It made me proud to watch him take his opposing “man siren” out.
I had indeed began to think that the Woke thing was a middle class trigger for poor working class white men: you know “If you are unsure if you are a man or a women or a trans or a mangina, then prove it by going to fight a war in that traditional patriarchal role. You are either for the trans men or a soldier. Look non white men are fighting are you like them or a middleclass Culture studies snowflake? Get off of your computer war games and be real “The ladies are going to love it” (That’s a line from “The Mummy” remake, of a remake, of a remake, back to the Pelopenetian wars and beyond)
Secondly the judgment and reason for me is a bit of a Kantian Categorical Violation by contingency of non universality, I will probably never have to conform to my maxim of “yes everybody must be ready to fight”. Indeed the middleclass generally do not, and if they do are officers because of special rarer skills and education, those “above” them just leave the country, they were only here for the money anyway it contingent and defeasible, as a middleclass educated person might say. There’s so0emthign deeply disingenuous about the rich and middle class doing what Owen James called “Cosplay Soldiering”. Any way his targets head seems to have stopped spinni9ng now and is facing the right direction quietly.
That all said, and congenially in line with the far left’s hermeneutics of suspicion and counter to German Romantic Idealism of the Heroic Napoleonic enlightenment soldier, there is a realism the left seem unable to see grasp and assent judgment to: there are bad people out there, and they can be organised into a State with an modern technological military. War is real it cannot be deconstructed with collection of Post structuralist texts.
Obviously written in a rush this morning so charity for spelling grammar and even errors. I thank you and look forward to your discussion
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Upto about 23:00 mins. I'm afraid I've been working on the other problem of democracy from the one that appears to have been presented to us by the TV of the streets of London by the mass protests for Palestinians performance spectacle. Firstly here I mean viewers like me will see, and the performers will be seen and see each other, and that of course is the point: "Society of the Spectacle" (1967) Guy Debord, like Marx an image of the anonymous crowd as an "Awe" inspiring power which is signifying, through this visual reflective cognition as re orientation of self consciousness from the responsible individual to being a self consciousness member of a group with capacity and capability to change civil society. eg that is from Kant to Hegel and Marx on self consciousness: recognition by numbers, though the cognition of being anonymous "agents" of new possibilities and even potentialities for a revolution even a theocratic revolution. While it is expressed as for international law, human rights and justice, there is no clear boundary, no way to disentangle protesters and attitudes that are jsut for rights from those that seek a route to this greater and in many ways contradictory to rights potential for a new theocracy. Indeed someone can think they are just for rights but are being carried in their "anonymity" towards destination of which have no knowledge and so feel they are not agents and responsible for this potentiality or even actuality. In this way the street protest events, as described by them themselves, as for justice and rights, can contain quite other purposes, that would only manifest though great power and civic shaping.
Also in the cognition of spectacle of the street protests is not just a domestic internal issue but also a foreign issue. It is obviously a case and one of many in other countries too, of a geopolitical conflict in the middle east. That is we can see this is a foreign issue made domestic not domestic made foreign, which is the opposite movement of the events in Gaza which was a domestic issue for Israel leading into and drawing in foreign countries due to extra State alliances and attitudes and beliefs and dispositions. This international geopolitical covariance of attitudes has "shown" us that the model of multiculturalism has serious problems and failings.
Now, from what I have seen so far of the discussion here, you are raising the issue of multiculturalism, in terms of democracy in one State as under threat from foreign allegiances and foreign influence and foreign ideologies due to the liberalisation and globalisation of political economy that did not consider the substance of the moving human capital only their labour and consumer aspects, and did not consider or express such substantive differences, maybe, as you say Blair did not but i feel the left always think economic determinants are overriding of culture, the later only as a tool for the former in their view. The failure of the Labour governments to deal with Social Justice and inequality of the late 90's and 2000's, allowed the race gender issues to come to fore and so Post Colonialisms to get a grip over many ..at first anyway. Of course this was easily used by foreign power for quite other purposes. People concerned about democracy here than, have an internal concern about the power of self reflective anonymous numbers both to change policy here in radically new directions of possibility and with radically new alignments geopolitically. Perhaps the onset of a new phrase to replace "if America sneezes we catch cold."
I don’t agree then with John O'Sullivan analysis or his solutions. Generally because any ordinance will be applied to all it will not remain locked into a particular race or gender but be used far beyond that contingent framework as policy always does in its possibilities and often is aimed at such double effect. There are a hidden agendas and potentialities here too. I remember the 1980’s fights against Communism and the neglect of the North of England in the rapid de industrialisation of traditional industries, and everything off to London, a direction labour put on steroids and with foregone movements. Anti-immigration principles then applied generally through poverty even de facto slavery to the working class is not going to cut it I’m afraid. All done with AI and data, without responsivbilty.
But my problem with the foreign inspired protests is not just that the spectacle might be indicative for consequences mediatly, but rather is immediately problematic right here right now, a problematic central to democracy at risk of being over looked due to the highly visible and visceral events in Gaza. . There have been several days of the COVID Enquiry Part II interviewing members of the government MP’s, Special advisors and Cabinet Office Civil Servants. And a dark picture of the goings on there is slowly coming into view. There is a feeling and opinion I am forming that the Cabinet Office Staff had their own political agenda during COVID and even saw COVID as an opportunity to subvert the activities of the democratically elected government and later even to make moves to shift people’s perceptions and the possibilities of people’s perspectives, and even to push to potentially have the Conservative government massive majority collapse on the back of the Covid Emergency lockdown. All this serious internal stuff becomes subliminal compared to the awe caused by images from Gaza, which attract some and repel others. What seems to be being revealed in the COVID enquiry is very serious I think. And of course for any malfeasors in there who were upto there network group tricks and fun and games, instead of doing their f****n’ job, the recent Israel Palestine horror is all good. I look at men working hard on the roads, and women in shops, and then I watch these people in the enquiry and wonder, who do these unelected entitled conceited people think they are? But nothing will happen to ‘em, it never does, and they obviously know it. And Dominique Cummings seems to think AI and data technology is the answer replace them with machines, while the Cabinet Office seem to want to replace the government as anomalous actors to their symmetries and ideas, with their own sciences and technologies. Which of course means the scientist are in charge and democracy is over.
Its going to take me a long time to address this enquiry, and the views of John O'Sullivan.
Thank you John O'Sullivan, Harrison Pitt, and Evan Riggs.
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Part 2: My point is that most people see the problem here as about freedom of language use in description, and so they argue about language meaning seeking to exclude any competitor vocabulary. This is done in many ways of course, in conversation, on tv on the internet social media and by politicians I might go so far as to say Armatures talk and argue about language, professionals talk and argue about constructions of policy.
From this though a number of aporia and antinomies are solved. so for example the intuited inequality and injustice of say a middle class woman talking as if, and being described as subordinate, next to a homeless man talked of and described as privileged. The paradox is not due to langue and lack of empirical constraint, or mental acts needing a friction, but the product of active policy aimed at generality, at a series of users under the same description.
the problem of idealisms langue use in not to be found in cognition or knowledge and experience but in practicality that must function as a policy general over many cases and as needing an imaginative act of instituional construction. Concepts are tied to the opening the limits, the “quickening” of imaginative instituional possibility acts for action and not in trying to limit a purely cognitive imagination.
So politics operates at the gap of how the world is and imaginative instituional possibility for how it ought to be. This cannot be cashed out at the cognitive or data level alone which is how our current political narratives’ operate as if this act problem were a cognitive problem. When we try to think of it as a cognitive or data selection problem we think only political deception and bias when in fact the problem is of political action of the ought, that it is only possible though institutional mediation by construction.
This means the separation of cognition into is, and imagination as the cognitive “ought to” image, is wrong. Cognition is at once fecund for change the is implies an ought or several possible ought’s but the gap is not cognitive but cognitive/practical.
This is a rearrangement and reworking of a piece on natural law I am still writing for a previous discussion you had last week. It is inspired obviously by McDowell’s Kant but also a paper by Donald Davidson on empirical under determination and ad verbs. Which to me implies that when we make a policy under a rule the policy, through the rule can capture much unintended or double effects cases. In fact it can be the double effect “accidents” hat can be the “real” aim of the policy. Cases under descriptions and definitions can spread not because of vagueness of the concepts but because of the openness and freedom in their instituional application. Also then institution can be added to parts taken away reorganised all of which changes the meaning of the original conceptual descriptions since its use now draws in much not originally present and constructed with the original policy and instruction. So for example you send the immigrants to some island cos they are illegal immigrants, and some extras policy and institutional rearranging later all criminals are classed as illegals. Or in fact a definition a refugee can come to mean anybody over time as the additional institutional changes mean its meaning as use application changes with wide institutional contexts eg in context with other concepts and institutional rules.
We need t be very vigilant about the move to bring together different institutions and departments for say efficiency and cost cutting, even as they get people “in the studio” to come along and evidence problems of disconnected institutional actors like at the Manchester Area Bombing response. We already have enough police bias towards public and private institutions without formally tying them together.
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Good morning everyone.
Immigration through the context of the mini budget:
The mini Budget was always going to be a challenge to interpret in time to make any sort of timely and effective comment. Added to this i have had my bad back demon revisit me, and now its all change and unpredictability again. Most of the Criticisms came from the direction of "bad market reaction", a sense of disorder and unpredictability, and as if, the Response of the Bank of England in accordance with its antecedent duty to apply its policy, was not a priori but "unpredictable"?. So we got al the usual suspects criticising it from behind the accusative mask of "risk" and "instability", but the policy was also criticised in the same way by the unusual suspects of traditional friends. That is, both Tory MPs and Labour MP's attacked it on the basis of incompetence with respect tot he market: that they call a market realism. So many Tory MPs were able to say their constituents didn't like it, so its was rejected by the parliamentary party, and Labour MPs didn't like t because it displays a lack of competence and so loss of trust, for investors to take a risk. So tactically this allowed Labour to claim to be the party of economic competence a reverence for the markets and to claim the Tories as incompetent. And so following this two fronted political critique they can amass positive data on the pound, on costs of borrowing, on pensions etc. They all could claim to criticise the Tax cuts refereeing to the 45% to 40%, but few have stressed that the poor have had tax cuts and energy cost protections.
My question is, are the above politically hegemonic Critics' really the problem they all have with the budget? I believe the real explanation for the attack by all sides is that all sides reflect more the interests of the middle classes they both represent and are a member of. these interests primarily lie in this context, in the massive mortgage debts of the middle class London and south. Debts that on composition will prove to be unserviceable given the inevitable fall in production and wages. they were always massively over leveraged, but now in the new climate they are on a precipice, that under normal circumstances would mean a fall in the house prices and so negative equity. But we are not living in normal times and so, we must ask why haven't the house prices fallen in the economic decline since 2008, especially since there is a massive gap between supply and demand, why no new house building. Its a paradox! Well there must be some artificial or several feed back structures embedded in the system to protect themselves. They include immediately the openness of the London Housing market to the rest of the worlds rich as expanded top end consumer demand base, and the mass immigration also as expanding low end consumer demand. but also we can add planning regulation particularly on green filed sites prevent new house building. So to under stand immigration we might do better by seeing just in the context of maintenance of artificial high house prices though expanded demand base. Perhaps all the talk of necessary workers and diversity is really a mask the middle class use to keep their house prices high. they feel they can separate themselves form any negative double effects as well, and can be silent on it effect to erode natural communication due to language and cultural difference i.e. the break up of the glue of civil society that back in the day would have had the cultural linguistic shared back ground to critique this kind of thing.
So yes the Tory middle class and the Labour middle class share a common economic imperative to stop this sort of thing, they just have to do it using other metrics and terminologies. They don't say of course "Stop the budget because my and my friends my network friends risk loosing our unearned nest eggs" they say anything except this an all are on the same page media, international organisations etc. The Mini Budget protected the most vulnerable in many complex ways, but for once the middleclass were gong to have to take a risk hit for the first time its not a win win situation and they don't like it. we see these parties are controlled by the middle class who disguise their real interests for being "in the care of the minorities" or "being productive for employment.
i mean this already seems a stretch of context for immigration debate, but to go further, the middle class for the most part are shielded form war. they are represented very low in standard military populations. indeed the tradition of just war looks like a series of principles whereby the poor can legitimacy kill each other, but if the war reaches them "civilians" then it is classed as unjust? And why all the mass middle class movement against the atomic bomb. Because it would impact them. they banned the gas because they realised it could be used against them in cities.
To get really dark, maybe the European Immigration is not just because the source country has paid to educate and train them to adulthood , but also because they might be seen as the new fodder for new European Wars. Because the indigenous male population are beginning to see that its a ridged game by the middle classes. And perhaps they don't think the New Rights turn to Stoicism and Heroism is going to work as 21st Century" white feather any more.
Thanks for reading . Looking Forward tot he discussion.
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Answer to question by socratesrocks1513
I think its Beethoven. If so its kind of appropriate to part of the narrative, as in part it is rooted in early 19the century German Romanticism. That is the turn of a whole generation of philosophers and artists, who embraced Ancient Greek culture. They focused on Kant's Third Critique on Aesthetic Judgement, for example like Schelling and Hegel, as way back to the "heights" of Ancient Greek art as about "Form". Hegel thought the statues were pure form and shape turns out they were painted back then though.
This early Romantic German Tradition then became very interested in history, which the French British Enlightenment's focus on science had not paid that much attention to. Schelling wrote the first "History of Philosophy" books, a history of "Great thinkers". Others concentrated on literature like Schiller and Shlegal. They wanted to make German culture a player in European Culture, as "Germany" had been a late arrival to the Enlightenment, it didn't becomes unified till much later (1871) because of the ongoing effects of the Thirty Years War early1600's (Schelling or Schegel wrote a huge book on this too).
Now early on Fichtre had take Kant's notion of the Autonomous individual to an extreme of pure "I" a self isolated within there onw mind a subjective idealism. So many after him had reacted to this and then re-interpreted Kant as the same. This lead to them re-presenting the "induvial" as really only existing within a geographical cultural and historical context. that is the Fictre (and for them Kantian) idea of an induvial was an intellectual error of abstracting the human person from all context. So they wanted to bring culture back in though a story of the human in "the history of Western Civilisation". Since Germany (to come, to yet "Be" ) was kind of behind they set about exploring not just Western History but German folk tails and ordinary German language (drawing on Hamman and von Holbalt). They thought this was essential to "understanding" "one's" place in culture and meaning historically and in the context of a place and its folk traditions. Its is thus following Kant reflective. That is we must look to our past to know who we are. But it is not just nostalgic and static, culture and life is essential creative and dynamic too, looking back and using imagination to move forward. in this the Romantics wanted to escape what they conserved a problem with the Enlightenment that science and the science of man effectively eliminates history context and sees man as only subject to external laws of nature ie does not really exist. So they want "man" to be historical culturally situated and aesthetically creative as an expression of freedom.
After Hegel this tradition splits into those who want to bring about the German State as an Hegelian State (the Right Hegelians),and those who want a social political revolution like Marx (the Hegelian left). The left also take the idea of a cultural community in which the real concrete individual lives, as a task of creative construction "making a community" eg Communism. Many of those early German Romantics were young and were positive about the French Revolution, and Hegel thought of Napoleon as the Great Romantic Individual who can used his imagination and Genius (from Kant's discussion in Aesthetics) who can break out of tradition and create Reason in the world. That is Hegel' notion of "progress" and the Actuality of Potentiality. A tension then here still between the free creative individual Genius and the understanding of that individual as necessarily only existing and determined within a limiting cultural context.
Indeed, Hegel was writing his great work "The Phenomenology of Spirt" in Jena University Library, when Napoleon's Army entered the abandoned and deserted City. Just Hegel left writing and he does outside and sees Napoleon riding by. in his book he is well aware of all the violence involved in a revolution and the artistic creation of a Rational Romantic Empire of Freedom and imagination from Slavery. The slave is in a struggle with the master, but with victory and freedom comes the need to reimpose a necessary order through Terror.
Beethoven like all of them early on was a fan of Napoleon and the revolution but then saw him for the Brutal Dictator that he was. You can see the pro revolutionary
Romantic Spirt in much great German art of the era, and perhaps a Critique by Beethoven in his turn to nature.
This Hegelian Absolute Idealism and its reactionary Absolute Individualism and Absolute Communism had a profound influence all over the rest of Europe and particularly in the United States in the 19th century from Artists and Politicians like U.S. Grant. In fact this influence continued into the twentieth Century first Hegelian left in the Russian Revolution and Soviet Communism, then the Hegelian Right in Italy and Spain and finally Germany itself with Fascism. Some of the post World War Two Liberal West reactions to both as Totalitarianisms are based in the anti-Hegelian idea of an "individual" posited through economic determining sciences, in this they drew on 19th century liberal Critiques of Marx though "positive marginal economic science, which is really return to the Enlightenment idea of a science of man in abstraction form history and culture and place, but with a kind of Romantic creative imagination and even Genius for entrepreneurship non-State non-Communist progress. This liberal abstract individual decontextualized image of man moment in the multidimensional picture of Left and Right possibilities in the mid 20the century, is seen as "Too thin" and account both in terms of a Culturally robust ideal for combatting Fascisms and Communism in the Cold War, and as emptying the human of any real moral and ethical content e.g. an individual of only Self-Interest. So begging in America a number of previously Trotskyist intellectuals (in the 1930's), start to develop in the 1950s and 60's a 70's a thinker picture of this liberal person in history and in Culture. So they kind of do the Hegelian and German Romantic move of turning to Western History culture language and tradition, but now in praise of that as a tradition of the liberal induvial and civilisation as opposed to Totalitarian Dictatorship's. It is in part an embrace of Rock n Roll but also a fear that this is the barbarians destroying civilisation "Turn down that record player I'm trying to listen to Beethoven on the Radio". Better though the young become Rock n Rollers than Left or Right Revolutionaries.
In the last few decades another tradition has slowly developed partly out of the Religious Right wing Critiques of Libertarians, called Commutarianism, and Virtue Ethics and for some this is a return to Traditional even Romantic Conservatism of Burke and maybe Oakshot. Anyay the Bikers are doing the egg run out side so I'm off.
I'm postignthis in the main section thanks for the question I hoope i'm right it was Beethoven
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What? They called the conference "National Conservativism"? Arranged by the "Edmund Burke Society"? And put it on in Brussels? I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Have they learnt nothing. We are in whole new paradigm. Need to rethink what it means to be in Critical Politics. Take inspiration from the intellectual left perhaps back in the 70's and 80's. For example, some 15 years ago, my far left mate went to a lecture and seminar titled "Benedetto Crose" but it actually turned out to be, a lecture and seminar on Marx although Marx was never mentioned. So maybe in future call the conference "A discussion of, or thinking with, 18th Century European thought", organised by "The society for the Origins of the Victorian Novel". You get to speak but unheard by a disappointed audience of three. A Kant Hegel dilemma then on what is now called the problem of free speech. The conference on free speech could be called "The Semantics of determined discourse in manifold molecular assertive contexts". No one will show up for that though.
The far left and left have had a troubled time recently in the International, Geopolitical, Foreign context. But mate, The Tories wanting to return the debate to domestic issues start off with the speech apparently attacking the disabled and the sick with the attempted resurrection of the means and health tested conditionals on Welfare payments. I've had the displeasure of being tested many times by those pseudo medical professionals with their their computer questionnaire test matrix's. e.g. Question 5: Can you carry and walk with a 1Kg BOX 20 meters? Yes or No? Question 7: "Can you set an alarm clock?" Yes or No?; Question 10: "Have you ever attempted suicide, or have suicidal thoughts?" Yes or No? You must answer the question else I can't enter you into the system.
The Tories seem hell bent on one last kicking of the poor and vulnerable and weakest in society. Maybe only the "nasty" ones are still there now? I worry that if that's where the Tory party is now, then where might those on the Right of the Tory party be on this. "Our workers in the north don't work half as hard as those did in The Soviet Union labour camps, back in the days of good old hard work or starve, KGB social policies". Conference on "Working Traditions in the Soviet Union: Were they really that bad or is it a myth?" by the Make Poverty Illegal Society Conference! I'll leave the reader to decide where to stage it.
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Part 1: Social Justice projects are presented as forward looking, not jsut a tautology, but forward towards justice as equality. This might be defensible in itself as a general if one dimensional notion of inclusive progress. But there cannot be a Universal Platonic idea driven project since projects as narrow in scope and can operate only over certain objects in certain ways. Projects of the production of wealth etc data now, would reveal differences between objects in terms of predicates/properties of race and gender. That would probably be true in most Western Countries and certainly true of the whole world. This data though despite the pre schema of chosen properties, could also reveal ( Truth as aletheia), other general differences that could be used to hypothesise other significantly differentiating properties and not jsut a tautology like all people with swimming pools are rich. There are poor white men for example.
So the left realised long ago that they needed a strategy to demarcate their chosen properties from all other possible significant properties, so as to justify the project and policy of chosen predicates projects from other possible projects. In this way the charge of pre selection bias against the whole can be met, and so support particular protected groups. In this this way they can protect the hard core equality project against charges of bias, and support alternative possible policy projects that would also generate more data in support of itself like cybernetics. This is the practical policy strategy to meet anomalous objects like and the revelation of poor white man.
One aspect of solution from German and French thought (Heidegger, Irigary, and perhaps Spivac) was to make race and gender difference not a matter of property differences between objects in some way identical before the accidental differences, but that gender and race difference in some way preceded was prior to any supposed "transparent" or neutral original identity. This is the foundation for such apparently auxiliary claims to defend the hard core of the project as "colour blindness is racist". But of course while this argument can be used as an auxiliary claim to the project, it is paradoxical since Gender and race difference as prior to say ontological difference can no longer remain within demarcated distinctions between hard core program and auxiliary modifications, and the very ground of transcendent Platonic equality would also be subject to a deprivileging of the Platonic centre of privileging justice over injustice, or seeking justice over something else, like the good.
Another root recently is to present the repetition of these synchronic data predicate differences as "natural kinds" (a paper from an Aristotelian Society Conference by someone i cant find the name for and it was in the last five years).
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Part 1: On eco-terrorism and the West (14:00 mins), the link to the West v Third world dialectical framing was made long before any of them had heard of any French Philosophers and modern Woke. Back in 1980s people interested in environmental issues could be conservatives or on the left, and these political orientations of eco protest go back at least to the 19the century Romantic reactions to rationalism. You have the background of Burke and re-enchantment of nature, and that of back to nature Communes like in Tolstoy. it was during the 1980s that these groups became more linked to political ideologies. they both found themselves at odds with the Thatcher Government and so, having a common enemy Thatcher, the Anarchist and the Communist leanings were brought together at festivals. it was the post punk era of many tribes effectively joining forces. As one i interviewed said "We are united by being against the government, that is it". pre 1982 these groups fought each other after 1982 they all fought the "establishment". She did bring a kind of harmony then.
I used to know one of the players and he framed the whole reasoning around Bishop Berkeley: So, man has power and hubris to control and master nature by the whip, to his will and ends, becomes: mans has the power and hubris to destroy nature its self. It drew on associations with the anti nuclear movements about absolute destruction, in a way they saw the environmental crisis as the same as Nuclear Holocaust just slower. One is an instant event, the other a gradual imperceptible process. Like compare the movies "The Guns of Navarone" and Force Ten From Naverone". With this distinction and connection any incremental change can be seen as indicative of absolute catastrophy and to be opposed at all and absolute cost. The eco movements is a network of associations and affiliations it can adapt its self and other view to bring them together. The feminist movements can approach it as male instrumental calculative reason, an attack on "Mother Nature", here the Critique incorporates aspects of Care and respect as opposed to use. the opposition becomes then one of Hegelian Progress verse care: utility and disposability verse custodian. A new Aristotelian Hegel is going around where reason and rationalism is not in opposition to nature as growth not mechanism. a running together of far left and conservative themes most don't even know they are doing. Easily, when it is joined on to more contemporary politics it can be attached to the save the planet, save the third world. But then the "Third World " becomes subject to two dimensions of progress: one is increased utility with use and infra structural build-up v finance sustainably projects for those most impacted by Climate change.
What is odd about it is that as political movements, it has been successful in bring into the fold many different groups with other wise opposed general outlooks. the "manifold" than has no real "essence" but adapts for the numbers and influence. I mean the policy of zero carbon as a definition and metric of progress has resulted in the double effect of legitimising Nuclear Power projects But these nodes of family resemblances as result of tactics and strategy is still expressed as a rationalism in rationalist deductive logic. Absolute nothing and how to prevent it. They don't even talk about the "mere" human condition now: from Kant and Later Heidegger nature has a value independently of man, a value of absolute otherness.
I think to discuss with eco environmentalist you must keep in mind adherence to these projects involves more than the agreement and use of moral propositions and scientific facts and projects. like all political movements it has its oppositions , its affiliation and its manifold projects on going. Belonging involves a series of rituals, festivals, organisations and friendships. not at all sure this can be turned off just by criticising a fact or moral premise. It's networks of forms of life. like the process of gradual material differential change, they hold for the catastrophic happening, to "sign" up to some branch of this involves process antecedent to the assent to a moral proposition and deducted inference. There was a group that moved form London to the US in the early sixties and then to France in late seventies and back to London in 1980s 90s to form an Animal Rights Group. In France they studied Deleuze when Deleuze was teaching and working on Kant, and no one had heard of him.
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Happy New Year everybody.
Part A1: I've been working on this problem for some time now, and focused since the original episode aired.
As i wrote in comments directed at Connor Tomlinson, I am approaching this via the problem of certain inconsistencies, contradictions and, some might say, performative hypocrisies that, seem to constantly manifest and re-manifest for the left when we look at more than only one or two of their polices at a time, or bearing on a place.
I began and interest in politics as a student in the early 1980's. One of our favourite moves was to point out such contradictions of policy and principle in the manifold of political projects and politicians. We drank deeply from the well of irony that never seemed to run dry. That the contradictions and hypocrisies were easily disclosed from the manifold of events projects suggested some kind of ironic intuition. But of course we were free to cherry pick any policy and event and place them against any other, to generate or disclose the contradictions. But that there is freedom to reveal this from the manifold of processes and events, does not mean the contradictions are constructed by the Critique, ie a subjective imposition on reality. The contradictions are there. Of course just as there is Critical freedom to select and compare, so their is justification or legitimacy freedom to select non contradictory cases and process from the manifold.
In practice, what happens in discourse is the Critical side is free to point out contradictions in the others policies and, that other is free to avoid discussing them. It quickly becomes a endless process of competitive auditing, we might say by two creative accountants, but the contradictions are there. They are contradictions of or between two or more policies and or principles, they are thus revealing not the contradictory nature of reality or its absurdity, but contradictions when we look at policies together i.e. projects and processes. In a way i might say from John McDowell that they are only raised when we view a reality from policy projections. (This is a practical version gestured by McDowell's non conceptual content point in "Mind and World").
Thinking back to our student rants in the 1980's we were more like lefty stand up comedians than political Critiques. More Ben Elton, than transcendental idealist. It never occurred to look seriously into this. Not that any of us had the knowledge or experience to even begin to approach the problem. I guess we had an implicit view that politics is basically pragmatic, and with a non homogeneity of the makeup of political parties, each with their own particular project, contradictions are, if not inevitable, at least highly likely. And the game is just to relentlessly point out such contradictions in the other side. it is thus more a method for those out of power than those in power doing polices.
I took the problem seriously first from working within Kant's categorical imperative which asks us to reflect on maxims in terms of their legislative possibility. You can get way with a simple reflection if dealing with only one maxim or action at a time. The problems emerges when we have to deploy more than one singular maxim at a time in a place over a case. Thus it might be an Hegelian Critique of Kant along the lines of "Kant's Universal Legislation test, only works, is only apparently practically possible and constant when we deal with one maxims or project at a time and in isolations or abstraction form other polices and projects". As Donald Davidson points out when it comes down to viewing event though the many policies in play the freedom we have to construct policy, also allows us to describe and re-describe events in many possible ways depending on all kinds of reasons of utility affordance convenience even to temporarily avoid a comparison that discloses contradictions.
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I think it is clear intuitively from my experience of watching mainstream media and on line media that it appears there is a bias in reporting in many different ways or of many flavours.
I'm also aware that there are many codes of conduct in play with mainstream media.
Now unlike some on line organisation or individuals, the BBC for example will have an army of lawyers making sure their reporting does not explicitly or evidentially violate their codes of conduct. I mean if its not simply factual errors or asymmetric inclusions and exclusions of stories, then proving bias has to involve making relation between two reporting events, and then showing that they are identical in some relevant aspect but also treated differently in some way. Now every aspect of those conditions for proving bias structurally is deeply difficult to establish. Who decides or on what basis which events are to be selected and set up as a relation of structural identity but substantial difference. I am bracketing at the moment a bias between fact in the world and its report as a easy identity relation as condition for bias or incongruence, and focusing on the problem of selection and relation between reports alone.
Now i might be wrong but it seems to me if indeed there is bias then either the BBC is out of control in some way, or they are operating within the bounds of the codes.
it seems unlikely that the BBC is out of control eg as if the reporters are possessed by Marxist spirits, if some are those spirts are kept well outside the magic circle that is at the centre of production. So it appears they are pushing the limits of the codes, but why? Well:
They might be doing this as a way to trigger their political and on line opponents to demand one of those "Calling to Account" enquiries. Then they would find the BBC probably compliant with the codes, in which case the knee jerk reaction would be we need stricter codes. Now i followed in great detail the last time they had these enquiries and debated about how to create standards and criteria for journalism, and what was proposed but rejected was a kind of Kant and R.M. Hare approach where by content is a choice but equal treatment of content was under conditions of equal treatment. The proposal as i recall was that the journalists would create their own standards and encode them formally as rules and laws, but a third party maybe in government would adjudicate over decisions. This though was generally rejected. and there was a turn towards individual duties and virtues of journalists and integrity trust and so on. so have they created a perception of not being able to do this on their own? I don't think so. They will be extremely competent at media analysis and Critique, and the law, so it seems to me that leaves only two possibilities: either they want to have more codes imposed on themselves and appearing to be a demand "from the public" as opposed to a demand put into the public's mouth or just having the phrase "the public has demanded" attached to it. the public enquiry would appear to legitimate this subreption. Then of course they can make the argument to constrain on line reporting appear legitimate by a transcendent consistency between different categories of media "equals". So by the same "public consented" code of conduct of equality internal to mainstream media applied between different type of media mediated by government. Another possibility would be that the apparent "leftist" BBC is full of "leftists" who want to destroy it, as part of their anti State project to split media into very local micro issues and very global wide macro issues nothing much in between. Of course they could do both projects at the same time.
A third possibility is its to trigger people into anger or passivity though continued indignity.
So there is a metaphysical relations problem and a political strategy and tactics problem to consider with wisdom and statistical data, good judgement and access to massive data and legal complexities. In this my intuition or perception will only be of interest if it lines up with their project whichever that maybe. You know i could be their best friend on the sofa banging on about bias in their media...you know be their useful idiot.
One thing i do know is they had an great interest in Deleuze and "differAnce" on these issues back in the day.
i think the first bit of the above might be in line with Connor's early points.
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Part 4: At 19:50 on "de-normalising migration" then. There is an irony here. since the post modern Deconstruction of the metaphysical seems to be a barrier to any internal legitimacy to absolute universal human rights. This is central to Derrida's attack on the "Violence of metaphysics", central as i have previously outlined to Deleuzse Transcendental empiricism, and central in Foucault's relativism or historicism of accounts of human nature from pre modern to enlightenment accounts of man that form a normative but temporary "rule of a historical a priori. "the ends of man".
Now i think shift was Derrida's responses to Simon Critchley's discussion of whether deconstruction was void of real normative claims. The turn was Derrida's move to justice particularly in his work on the law and justice. He claims Justice cannot be deconstructed.
Now we can view this, as a progressive development in justice and say it is natural law in development an odd conflation of old natural law as the unchanging but an accepted modern view of the progress of rights for example. but it cannot be natural law in any substantive sense since progress and development are here seen as rule based and institutionally achieved entirely. and so the notion of Aristotle's and Aquinas's actualisation/potential and essence and purpose are absent along with responsibility and so on. and the right hear closes off the filed of legitimacy. So it might look like a self contradiction and conflation of instituional normative law and Aristotle's Physics of change. it could be to have one cake and eat it too. maybe it is a case of pour political strategy and tactics like events and actual progress re-shape political commitments and ideologies. its a revolution not a pick nick but even pick nicks can have different food depending on the weather. it is thus the distinction between theory and praxis and the conflict of what metaphysical if any distinctions there is between the theories pre-suppositions and the praxis's pre-suppositions. (see Bernard Harcourt "Critique and Praxis")
Also i find Derrida and others shortly after claiming the link between Heidegger's philosophy (theory) and his politics (praxis?) is his move against Plato in a lecture he gave in the 1930s.
I want to add that the use of courts as a political tool was an old one. But proximately it in in Catherine MacKinnon's praxis as a lawyer that is the modern genesis of "the jurisprudential turn in politics" which to me implies "the political turn of jurisprudence. thus the fact precedes Derrida's theory or justification.
Perhaps i should add that Foucault did courses on Gary Becker's neo liberalism (part of the for runner for the 1980s monetary and free market project) from what i can gather since Foucault died before really expanding on this with Becker was that he saw in the anti metaphycality of the free market the anti state (anti Plato?), not an enemy that the left have traditionally seen it as but as a affordance of freedom. It was claimed some on the left wanted to mirror the free market in their socialism to come strategy. perhaps the link is that of pure a priori right international law then without the need of consent to regulate a international market was the model. in this as in neo liberalism, the free movement of people goes with the free movement of goods and services. the old left of Adorno would surly have felt as would Kant that people become mere commodity's mere objects of another's hypothetical imperatives, instrumentalised, and their being is outsourced, reified into an international institution, anomanyous and answerable to no one cos they have the standard of all of man.
for me this link of international free market liberalism and the international socialism project show the apparent dualism and conflict between two supposedly Janus faced groups of the middleclass suggests they are not really in conflict at all just two aspects of the same process masked as a political struggle. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. don't do totalitarianism by telling everybody should organise according to principle X, get two group to argue between X1 and X2. Arrange the argument with loads of facts and principles loads of history and make it a priori irresolvable metaphysically. then you keep people like me occupied in a meaningless futile dialectic of competing metaphysical claims that Kant et al shows are structurally irresolvable in the CPR. i guess like they seem to read Foucault now as a how to suppress and silence with psychological institutions manual. So they read Kant on pre-Critical metaphysics as a how to maintain conflict division and confusion in the population while they do what they want with apparent struggle. to draw on Kant's metaphor they are in the business of launching us onto that stormy sea with moving sand banks and no position to guide us back to land. The dialectics of international law as conflicting laws.
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Part 5 My diagnosis is that the genesis is the original political policy judgement, that involves many different functions and institutions thought together, but given time and telos this unity of policy comes apart. This of course can be a foreign strategy of breaking up the body politic, by sow divisions, but it can happen anyway due to the nature of the faculties and functions of policy and the apparent individual autonomy of these functions. I say apparent because although mathematically each function can aim at infinity, in reality this would mean one function operating without effecting and being effected by the others. Only people in one institution can imagine such a thing in their rituals, and they only have this one abstract duty. Anyone with an aesthetic world view on this realises this is not the case for the body politic, that the consciousness awareness and manifold orientation of the judgement all are in paly and in mutual dependence relations with each other. We know that power without understanding is blind and law without power is lame, and this is the case for all the categories of the body politics. It takes a judgement not determined by one functional rule alone then, to get it right and good, an original aesthetic unity, which must understand functions as in such original unity wherein they are at once limiting each other, and only when abstracted from each other do we get the myth of infinite metric of progress.
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Note to B
I wrote above that understanding 20th century analytical philosophy is about understanding a philosophical paper in its context, because the papers are mostly responses to other papers and so on. So I said interpretation is a similar act to how people construct conspiracy theories by making connections. the connections are not arbitrary, indeed already there are many books written by others that make there own connections, but hat is not closed, rather it is open for anyone to make new connections too if they are reasonable. The books that construct standard connections can teach us how to connect bits but then we might come to disagree with, or add to, the actual connections made in the book and so want to make our own.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and this kind of modern philosophy though is its substantive content is open to view. That is from Wittgenstein "nothing is hidden". The papers lead us back to our own language use, not to some hidden reality behind a veil. So rather than seeking some new scientific knowledge or discovery, it is reflection on how we use language and what we are meaning. For me this contrasts with what we might describe as the workings of language in burocracies. So there is much work contrasting how we ordinarily use language and reason with how buracraceis use language. One way to "show" the difference between these two is to compare the kinds of error both might make. So i might mistake the address on a xmas card and send the wrong xmas card to the wrong friend or family member. A burocracy with rules and machines computers can errors but not in the same way. The logic and content of a burocracy is different to ordinary language and further: seeks to replace the later with the former. This has been described as the attempt by them to construct a perfect language to replace our ordinary language.
Here is an example by Peter Geach from the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on "Negation":
Starting with a quote from Wittgenstein from his "Philosophical Investigations":
According to Wittgenstein (1953, §447), “the feeling is as if the negation of a proposition had to make it true in a certain sense in order to negate it”.
and further back with Aquinas in 13th century:
"The affirmative enunciation is prior to the negative for three reasons… With respect to vocal sound, affirmative enunciation is prior to negative because it is simpler, for the negative enunciation adds a negative particle to the affirmative. With respect to thought, the affirmative enunciation, which signifies composition by the intellect, is prior to the negative, which signifies division… With respect to the thing, the affirmative enunciation, which signifies to be, is prior to the negative, which signifies not to be, as the having of something is naturally prior to the privation of it." (St. Thomas, Book I, Lesson XIII, cited in Oesterle 1962, 64)
and even further back to Aristotle:
"The affirmative proposition is prior to and better known than the negative (since affirmation explains denial just as being is prior to not-being)" (Metaphysics 996b14–16)
"There is, as a kind of orthodox view, a thesis defended by Frege (1919) and Geach (1965), namely that denying A is the same as asserting A’s negation. This view implies what Ripley (2011b, 623) calls the denial equivalence: that to assert the negation of a content A is equivalent, in its conversational effects and commitments carried, to denying A.
Thus we can see that even an accusation eg "That p" by a burocracy or another person, that is proved false does not return us to zero, but only to "P not proven". "not p" is not nothing but the assertion of a sense or meaning with the denial of some reference. it is then interesting to compare burocracies doing this to people doing this. These philosophical investigations work with what it open to view in burocraceis and our ordinary use of language.
Incidentally Wittgenstein who is credited with starting this kind of philosophy off was big fan of American Pulp Fiction Crime novalas particularly Norbert Davis.
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Part B3: Now what interested Geach was what the above two parallel poles of the cosmology, make human reasoning and judgment look like, as a psychological reflex with reason as self-interested and obligation to follow the law as only due to the threat of force by other organised self-interested groups mediated by an institution. Here Geach wants to show that human reasoning is not well described as mealy reasons for following the law. He uses a mixture of logically and philosophy of language and mind. In this context then he wants to show that truth functional logic, Kant’s “General Logic” and Davidson truth functional “coherence theory of truth”, just fail to describe language structure and reasoning and so is wrong. In a way he making a distinction between how language and reason works in instituional legal settings, and how ordinary language of peoples and their reason work. So he is trying to demarcate a kind of instituional language and reason from real human ordinary language and reason, so the latter is not captured and manipulated by the former.
So Geach is if you like viewing the political cosmology as two poles: psychology of man and truth functional reason, and then like taking a bridge, you normally attack it from both sides at once. Bizarre as it may sound Geach then can be seen as a friend to whistle blowers in grounding there ability and content of reason beyond the sciences of psychology and laws and institutions. (note we can think of computers and instituional computer technology AI as truth functional or general logics.)
What I think can be gotten from this is that the political reduction of everybody else’s position and reasons as only self-interested and reflecting bias can be rejected (I have my own arguments here) and the idea that any kind of consistent reasons can be maintained if all the subjects and instituional actors are using is General logic and tactics and friend enemy distinctions. Indeed I began with this approach to answer the question: why does science and institutional political reasons for action result in having to either abandon the full scope of truth, or hold two contradictory views at the same time. This being difficult to do might explain completely why politics always tries to silence some people, or in the media just to ignore the troublesome events as if they don’t exist beyond their media representation.
I am using Geach as part of a diagnostic tool for what has gone wrong with contemporary politics. that jsut accuses opponents of self interest in all their reason giving, and uses tactical reason (instrumental reason) to justify policy which results in contradictions that need silencing and a media that ignores anomalous events to there contradictory political reasons and aims.
Like Hanna Arendt, but in a very different way then, I see this as a modernised version of Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?". I'm afraid I must confess, i am no where near the abilities of Arendt or Kant, not in the galaxy even, but going to have a go any way out of hubris and pride, with the free use of a self contradiction and hypocrisy. I mean everybody is doing it now, but i want to "better" than them.
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Part B1: Look all this philosophy stuff is my problem at the moment. I see you have interviewed Carl Benjamin at some point, he knows about this sort of stuff, and is more than capable of assessing and critiquing my arguments when hopefully I have finished, and can put them into some kind of a comprehensible form. Its very abstract and its meaning and the arguments are locked into complex philosophical debates in the 20th century. There is much "shadow boxing" going on, that is much of the debates are found straggled across many different papers by many different philosophers. Its shadow boxing because is not always clear why they make the moves they do when reading papers written some 70 years ago. That is any pawers must be read with several others that were in play at the time ie we must reconstruct the argument's context from within among many papers. This means interpreting a paper is much like the constructions of conspiracy theorists ie everything is connected, the question is how and why.
In a very broad sense then i am seeking the place of "the human being" in all this. That question today is very much about the place of the human within modern science technology and law i include instituional innovations, like the beurocracy of conscription, as a technology in this I follow Philip Bobbitt.
In my work in this some years ago i came across a book about the experience of war, that is written by a soldier who was also a philosopher. It is meant to be the best book on this written. A quote on the back cover reads "War reveals dimensions of human nature both above and bellow the acceptable standards of humanity". The book is: "The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle" by J. Glenn Gray (1959/1967/1970 and University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books 1998). It has an introduction by Hannah Arendt, who is one the the major political philosophers of the 20th century.
So to start with Peter Geach, it seems to me he wants to distance the humna from what he calls the "re-description" of man by scientific psychology. We might say the reduction of man to the idea of a complete causal nexus of scientific description and explanation, which makes man entirely subject to causal effects from outside. later by others this will be expressed in the tradition from Hobbes as the "representation" of man as a self interested being, and since these are external causes then man does not exist as "self determined" making a determination from himself, against external relations that can determine him. Thus in this scientific picture, man is wholly an object (in Kant's sense) subjected to causal psychological technology from elsewhere. Catch is of course the psychologists and scientists and technologists are themselves only ever subject to causal forces external to them. Eg they might complain that their patent is trying to manipulate them, by applying "mindfulness" and cognitive behavioural analysis and technologies the psychologist has taught them. Of course why a patent might do this they claim is due to self interest and does not involve any normative or just or legitimate reason like "the psychologist must be subject to their own laws and science and technology" by the patent. A kind of version of the social contract, where the sovereign is, must be, subject to their own rules. the line is drawn between agent and patent, sovereign and subject, station and duty and authority verses subjects consent (and for Onora O'Neil all this presupposes trust because the science is to complex for the patent to understand an use effectively so "informed consent is lacking in full legitimacy to the authority. So you see how this problem of man and science has a certain similar metaphysical shape to the idea of a political social contract between sovereign and subject in consenting and legitimising "to be ruled". The problem is if the science is causal psychological, then the very same science can be used to manipulate consent for anything, including paradoxically and self referentially the consent to the very science doing the manipulating. (this may be similar to Chomsky's meaning by "manufacturing consent" but I'm not sure)
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Here are some of my notes in case of interest.
(Its an interesting point: A person A has an opinion on an fact S, and another person B has an opinion on a fact S. A liberal might imagine A's opinion on S, is wholly independent of B's opinion on S. That though means: for A, B's opinion on S is just a fact along side S, and For B, A's opinion on S is just a fact along side S. This shows certain subjective solipsistic idealism is in play. The A world contains only facts S and B and B's opinion of S. The B world contains only facts like S A and A's opinion on S. Now the classic critique is that A's S cannot be shown or established to be the same S as B's S. ergo The Relation: "The same S" in that statement is problematic.
We might opt then for a realism that S is the real independent fact, and there is then A's opinion of S and B's opinion of S. This forces the opinions As and Bs to be absolutely independent of each other but that they absolutely agree there is the same S for both of them, they agree on the existence of S, its reference, but absolutely disagree on what kind of thing or properties S has.
The problem is then the real S would have to be either independent of all its kinds and properties, or have kinds and propertesi
I don't think i know that book. Many thanks. I'm having a go at approaching the liberalism/woke(Social Justice) debate from the view that both are idealist or at least both organise the world in opposite but similar ways. I'm going to draw on the early 20th century philosophy debate between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. Bradley took the view that these kinds of dialectic oppositions are best seen though the problem of Relations or liberal individualism has to establish absolute internal relations for a thing, and the social justice has to establish absolute external relations for things.
The liberalisms claim to individual facts has to be a kind of subjective idealism ie for any liberal all other liberals and their view are like facts like any other fact. The Social Justice on the other hand has to assume a view of the whole and that everything in that whole is wholly related to everything else.
The later can be classed as idealist just because objects are so only externally related, there is nothing left of the objects at all. Maybe we might claim a bare reference pointing or a unique number for the object and everything else is external relations eg kind and property are all relations. So for example any endowment or property are always seen in relations with others eg of the same kind or not of the same kind. and then how the kinds relate. In a way Social justice is a system of differences in kinds ie relations and about transfer of property from one to the other. The former liberal position as asserting the individual has the claim internal relations for that to be an individual. On the one hand this might be said to mean a pluralism as opposed to the social justice "monism" but really its a subjective idealism of one individual in which their view is the whole world. Social Justice then would be absolute idealism. Thus while they differ on the roles of relations, both are idealist.
If a person A has an opinion on a fact S "S is P", and another person B has an opinion on a fact S: "S is Q", we are quickly forced into the question whether as well as fact Person A and a fact Person B , is there is an additional fact "Person A "and" Person B. That is whether B is just and only a fact for A, and A is just and only a fact for B. Or there is A's opinion of S and B's opinion of S and just the fact S. Both views require some third thing of relation eg A and B are not mutually reducible to each other meaning there is a problematic transcendent fact or relation "A related to B" as a fact.
I don't think I know that book many thanks I'll check it out.
I've written several attempted responses to your "two of them makes three opinions". I'm trying to use the early 20th century debate between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell on the reality of relations. They took this as the key question separating realism from idealism, or here liberalism verses Social Justice. Non of my responses coming from this debate so far are adequate and so I wont post yet. I started using this kind of approach on a Novara Media discussion on the debate on the Kings speech. One example that came up from me was like you can't build houses where there are no utilities but you won't have utilities going to places with no houses. The philosophy of relations (internal and external ) shows up something interesting here a house cut off and on its own cannot exist and utility relations require houses to go too. We also have the power source and water source. We can ask then for a house and power source are the connecting relations also a thing...
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Part 1: Up to 11:00 mins. I've started a project to look at behavioural psychology and then to its shape in relation to conservatism. There is a way in to this though Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In the Paralogism's sections particularly the 3 rd Paralogism: "Critique of the Third Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology”. The explicit issue is the role and nature of: "The "I think" must accompany all my representations ("presentations" in Pluhar's translation)"#. This is both Critical of Descartes "I think" as an absolute ground of existence, but at the same time # he calls "the transcendental unity of apperception" is also a condition of the possibility of experience. Now on the other side of the argument to Descartes unconditioned, and so sue generic "I think" isolation and solipsism: a state Descartes categorises: first negatively as a "non material" "non-extended" it would also be "non relational", and then positively as a substance soul. The reason for the soul as independent of nature is to escape it from his mechanistic causal view of matter e.g. Hobbes.
Now Kant claims that their cannot be such a radical separation in this way e.g. definition by negation of matter, and then places the soul the "I think" into a quasi substance as the logical disjunctive complement to material substance.
His move is to first contrast the first person "inner view" of my states of consciousness with a third person "external view" of someone looking at me and acting toward me (CPR A362-3). He then says the identity i have of my self as persisting over time, is not the same identity that an observer can have of me over time. The objectivity of my determinations with the named "I think" as condition of those determinations, is a different objectivity to those determinations by another in observing me. That is these are different synthetic time determinations.
Now then my inner determining of my states then is not related to Descartes "I think" as a ground from which to be derived, the "i think" is merely a formal and derivative expression. rather what is in play here is a task of maintaining ones "personality" over time, a synthetic connecting in inner sense of my past and present (and later future possible) states. Its about ownership and responsibility and freedom). We can think of this as like: a contract; a promise; a duty; over and between times. Here i am drawing on Sellars in making these temporal relations in normative say in the human terms. This is an obligation we have not just to ourselves but, without it as an act, we are not a self a personality at all. We collapse into the contingent world of being less even than a subject in the face of ever changing causes. e.g. yesterday "I do a", for reason ra, but today "I will do b" for reason rb. But if my acts a and b are not connected by a coherent reason ra/rb but rather ra and rb might even be contradictory, then I cannot talk of any single act a or b as connected and so there really is no I doing anything, rather its being done to them (external manifold causes heteronomy without a subject an "I") and they have no identity to be found in just following time sensitive self interest and ever changing tactical shifts as a disconnected moments responses to ever changing manifold of events.
This contrast with the tasks for an observer of me, who must organise me and a stable object objectivity, in and over the time of their subjective inner states. That is Kant has already claimed that there is a task with them (and us ) and within their (and our) experience to organise their (ours) "external world" of objects under notions of permeance of substance and causal relational law as rule over time.
The contrast between the two view points then is a contrast of different types of tasks, self determination of personality over time, being person at all, is a normative connection, while determining an external object as objective is a task of architectural permeance of external objects.
Kant's point is that i can raise my arm in affirmation and consistent agreement with a vote i did yesterday. This kind of inner commitment and contract over time by me, is inaccessible to a third person, they can neither experience my commitment or my inner personality, only my body "arm reflexing twitching up twice in two days. For them the task is to architecturally organise a body in permanence and subject to causal law over time.
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Mr. Raja Miah gives and interesting account of how the left work in terms of how they use the shell like nexus of institutions to schematise voting numbers through power. I mean obviously i don't understand his much, and so am trusting his account. It's interesting philosophically in that the complex structures show that politics is not just brut force for the post raw materialist left, rather it is force though complex and externally incomprehensible institutional schemas and in the end about maintaining the foundation of numbers. Until they can dismantle democracy completely.
Mr. Raja Miah in presenting this manifold schematic against the old left's myth of brute force has too external a view still. In terms of reason it remains external and descriptive. I would want to add then, that in my experience with the left and radical left , which is long and extensive and from the inside, that they draw in heavily on internal reasons or first person reasons. this tactic takes many forms but the basic schema is the same.
So rather than diving into Donald Davidson and Bernard Williams, i can give a hypothetical example. So Mr. Raja Miah chooses not to wear a tie. It's his choice but there is or was a norm of wearing tie for those in his position, that would be a limit on his freedom. So a lefty could say to him "This norm limits your freedom. You have the founding basic human Right to choose whether to wear a tie or not. We can help you to avail your self of that right. We have the lawyers and money to do so from finance given by International human rights institutions." So he may consent to accepting their help in this. But then later, and following a considerable payment to their lawyers from the International fund, they will approach him for help and support in a project for some other schema of international right like the right to wear shoes without laces. They will say "Look you heled yourself to this international right over your tie, now it would be under the pain of inconsistency and hypocrisy for you not to support this other freedom and right. "You are not an inconsistent hypocrite are you?" "who has one rule for themselves and another for other equivalent cases of freedom. You are nota selfish individualist are you?
Indeed they will go so far as to create something against you themselves, so you have to then get their help in getting them to stop by appeal to their own rights schema. eg How to get Mr Raja Miah to agree to the right to wear shoes without laces? Make a rule that you can't not wear a tie. and apply shame and the threat of expulsion. i guess at the institutional external level, they will say "no one hypocritical and inconsistent can have a position in their shell like schema.
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