Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad): An Elegy for England & English Morality" video.

  1. Part 1/3 An interesting discussion. In fact, I confess, I used to watch the Sargon of Akkad you tube posts, starting about ten years ago, and before he made the move into a particular political standpoint. I was intending here to add some discussion beginning with Logical Positivism(s) and its critics, a discussion that would place the logical positivists in their wider historical situation of emergence, and the relation of their work to the wider political, social and psychological program they were attached to and wanted to develop and engineer going forward. Thankfully, I found a new entry on Carnap (the main guy I think) on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (online) by Hannes Leitgeb (2020), which is great. Not drawing out all the context and purpose of Carnap that I would, but full of historical and project context. The Carnap stuff is extremely complex, and it turns out many of the famous criticisms of it are more a drawing out particular of aspects of one part of his program against other parts of the program than genuinely external critics. Even for those not professionally trained in analytical philosophy can get a sense of what it is about in this wider context, from just Section 2 of the Stanford entry. I want to pull one part of this in particular as it relates to what seems to be Carl Benjamin's political position. First off anyone who thinks Carnap is some dialectical liberal antidote to the scientism and social psychological engineering of the new left and the new right is going to be disappointed. Carnaps program is an extreme scientism evidenced by the general program of educating people out and away from tradition, ordinary language, place, in favour of the creation of international, rational, scientific, institutions managing over us all and mediating by science law and rules our relations with others. There is a sense here of an Hegelian universal institution of absolute reason mediating our lives, and the recognition that such a project must involve a removal or reduction or translation of ordinary language into a scientific language or captured and transformed by a pluralism of scientific languages. Where we think these projects are anti Hegelian they can be described as Hegelian sublimations. That is a kind of burning away a de legitimising of the immediate norms of speech for rational speech. a scientific bilder. This program of Carnap's run into problems because of the need to translate ordinary common experience reports into a scientific language. They need a genuine giveness of reports at once heterogeneous to scientific language but also homogeneous with its logico semantic syntactic structure. This lead to the famous main criticisms of Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin, Sellars "the myth of the given". (Criticisms that have a resemblance to Derrida's critics of structuralism (differance) and Austin's speech act theory (presence). Although the LP criticisms arrived the program continued and the criticisms from a scientist view point were more like modifications of the program. It can also accommodate reductions to both scientific economic liberalism and socialism with local modifications.
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  2. Part 2/3 One thing is clear to me though this nexus of science and institutional law sees all local nuance bias or preference as a place for scientific intervention and replacement. de Bouvier's discussion of the domestic realm here quickly becomes an arena for transformative congruence to efficiency (neo liberalism) and justice (social justice). no one wants to live in hovel of soil floors, but do we want the Taylor management under the corporation or social justice equality professionals doing efficiency and equality cheeks under the guise of risk prevention and "health" promotion. Wittgenstein was right to see this project as one problematic for privacy and what it means for the trajectory and progress metrics of the modern world. My view is the reduction and elimination programs are actually better understood as the effects of Kantian style regulative for science turned into projects of necessity for that those and all sciences to "become" those sciences. Not dissimilar to the Hegelian notion and the Hegelian version of Aristotelian naturalism of potentiality to actuality. A.J. Ayer was surly overstating the "revolt from Hegel" he characterised the logical positivist as tokening. The LP project then continues in its search for an international "perfect language" and the institutions to enforce and or nurture it. From this context then I would say that Carl Benjamin is part of a movement beginning one the one hand also in early 19th century German thought on language and culture that the Hegelians and then Marx ad then the marginalists recognised and reacted against. Its 20th century German exponent is probably the neo Aristotelian Heidegger. As much as Carl Benjamin then sees his own Aristotelian project as a reaction to logical positivism it might be worth looking at Heidegger's early lectures "The History of the Concept of Time", here he goes through his disagreements with positivism and neo-Kantian antecedents to logical positivism. There is of course the debate on metaphysics between Carnap and Heidegger, a debate that has returned today with "metametaphysics" and "speculative reason" respectively. However, Carl Benjamin wants to do metaphysics, he calls this project a Metaphysics of the English. It does remind me of the descriptive metaphysics program of Peter Strawson of Oxford. A program at once Kantian and libertarian providing for a non reductive non eliminative ontology of "individuals". Benjamin is right to see this as an attempt to draw a kind of limit on externa reductions to possible data, a limit that at once for him is originary constitutive of expression and so presupposed as the original condition for the possibility of language and science. it reflects that science its self presupposes these concrete individuals which i would say means a limit to scientific encroachment on the threat the science "cuts off the branch it is sitting on". Strawson is at once making an ontology of persons but this a constitutive a limit of privacy for example. I would imagine perhaps that Strawson inherits the work of Collingwood and Oakeshott although its all done within the logic and language of analytical philosophy. (nb: the problem of sentence proposition, assertion of negation, sense with reference and meaning)
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  3. Part 3/3. Carl Benjamin's project then, I would say has, to deal with two opposing critiques: on the one hand, there is the risk that his metaphysics of the English, becomes subsumed under the social justice program where in its is mediated by international human rights and institutions of law. the pluralism of Carnap places everything under the rights program. this results in the bizarre even paradoxical position that an international metropolitan grammatically scientifically legally educated elite will approach the poor that are near them in the same way with the same mechanism as those far away. Thus international projects for subaltern "others" becomes heuristic for those at home. the countryside around the city is a subaltern area in need of metropolitan intervention under the mediation of "international schema of justice. here we have, from an international standpoint, the Humeian "scratching my finger" problem, and the inverse care law problem by the criteria of planetary justice. something is wrong with middle class cities placing those outside its walls as all hegemonically equal across the planet. This is what it means to want to have men included into the hegemonic gender program and or the poor parts of town to be integrated into a foreign aid program. It ignores the irreducibility of individual countries makes everything the same except the metropolitan middle class who are at once Axiomatic members of humanity with real predicates, but also those observing and acting on everybody else. The middle terms of the syllogism. Here the rule of law and justice has become almost detached from its origin and genesis and become a formal axiomatic system, but with the middle class mediating the syllogism of policy ordinance. What is lost here is any genuine notion of consent and legitimacy, these are replaced by a sovereignty of science and management, and a Robespierre autonomy of the legal machine. We should not jump for joy when they are found culpurable under there own rules, because comic irony and pleasure of poetic justice aside, we rather then affirm and legitimise the program universally. Who was that ancient king who passed a law that adultery would be punishable by death. And then his own wife was caught and he agreed in her execution. The people didn't think "what a just king subject to his own law, they thought if he'll do that to his own wife for the sake of the law what else would he be capable of doing through the law. they got rid of him I believe. on the other hand, His project faces what is now called the problem of Criteria by the left. They have been working on using Wittgenstein's notion of a criteria for justification From his "On Certainty" to give an anti foundationalist legitimacy for their standpoint epistemology. This has brought them into the problem of, if you will, situated localised criteria and standards of normative assessment as in Carnap's terms only a matter of internal questions, there is no external standpoint of universal assessment. No view form nowhere. This results in the familiar relativism that characterises all the philosophy for and against of the later half of the twentieth century. that is the problem of the self and "the other" (where do we stand to have both these in our picture even )and postmodernism and the issues revolving around Carnap's pluralism made into a general methodology for the sciences and liberalism. On this later problem then considering you are aquatinted with Critical Theory I might suggest you take at look at the following new books: Allen, Amy "The End of Progress" (Columbia 2016) Jaeggi, Rahel "Critique of Forms of Life" (Harvard 2018) and the best book on the new left in action, for depth, breath, and clarity of exposition and architectonic: Harcourt, Bernard E. "Critique and Praxis" (Columbia 2020) Discusses the above two books and the context. The latter notion of praxis is drawn from the Ancient Greek divisions outlined originally by Heidegger and Arendt i think. Thanks for the discussion and have a great summer!
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