Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "David Starkey: Britain Wasn't 'Built by Diversity'. Woke is Subverting British Society & Confidence" video.

  1. At 15:00 mins Dr David Starkey claims that conservativism is an empiricism, and then by contrast Social Justice is a religion. On Conservative Empiricism we have to be carful that there is an understanding of empiricism from the British tradition that roots this as within ordinary human experience, where claims on cases are tied to adverbial context of reference or acquaintance and conventions and norms and semantic rules in language use. This notion of a kind of first person rootedness of experience of objects who's reference is constrained from within linguistic social norms then has ancestral claim to be an empiricism. But what people tend to mean by Empiricism now is the reference to an object not primarily governed by linguistic conventions and norms, but a reference governed and mediated by categories posits structured by the various versions of logic and semantics of modern science. That is for example reference to objects are determined through general concepts or as members of a set extension (Quine), as opposed to being mediated by Platonic forms abstract ideas and so on. This later scientific notion of the structure of general terms and their formation, is not the same, or not isomorphic with the classical empiricist who like Hume have the object in experience governed by linguistic norms. Wilfred Sellars for example contrasts these two views as the Manifest Image and the Scientific image of man. For Sellars science begins within the Manifest image, but scientifically structured concepts and categories have privilege and are trumps over the manifest image. In this science gets to continually revise and transform our common sense norms of description into terms determined by axiomatic structure for sets and so on. Science gets to replace talk of Gods and Witches with terms who's legitimacy is logical structure and use like neuron electron alternative religion. Now the woke left draw on boundary shifting and movements between these different Spaces of Reasons. They will give a certain absolute warrant to first person's inner experience in the MI, but support it by drawing on those references as mediated though mass data formed Sets. Thus experience here means a certain equivocation or ambiguity of reference oscillating between the first person MI and the "objective" SI. This object of experience here has a foot in both MI and SI. Now the early mid century Woke left, were all taught Hegel (via Kojevie Koyre and Hypolite), but they claim to have sought to move against this, but one can say that, while they Critiqued Hegel's absolute idea and the universal as hegemonic and teleological, they took up Hegel's master slave as self and other, struggle, here individual other person though either and both via MI and SI. To keep the master slave but to temporarily deflate the Absolute Platonism in Hegel they seemed to turn to Heidegger. It is this, between Hegel and Heidegger, that the notion of the universal as necessary is Bracketed, and Critical notions of difference that is metaphysically prior to subject/property, essence/accident etc and this means there is no need non ironic non strategic role for the Universal. In the context of criticising then predominant French structuralism then the notions of a given nature or absolute transcendent norms (signifiers) are redundant the job they did is no longer required, and as foundations really functioned to try to make objects not susceptible to scientific translations and eliminations, that is, traditions and cultural norms not revisable by science. For post modern Hegelians then the foundational link between ordinary talk and its object is severed as the epistemic myth of the given, and are Platonic forms mythical abstract givens. The so called Woke attack on biology and nature is a correct depiction but because Normees attempt to use scientific notions of nature as both absolute givens and then absolute necessary norms follow as functions. So this is the Critical process but more recently the anti Hegelian anti Platonism has been embraced as social justice and the radical reconstructions and eliminations of much of our ordinary talk for legalistic meaning, science meaning and vocabulary and conventions in science and institutions. So the Critical stance to justice and law was "bracketed" until the anti foundational anti naturalism and anti structuralism strategy had been won. The left now have no problem crossing over the boards of different semantic spaces of reasons here the objects enjoy a Janus faced existence of being in both a first person ordinary vocabulary of experience and as under the institutional and definitional structure and semantics of law etc. Non philosophers would not notice this trick, but its easy to evidence and expose. Just get a few Woke down the pub and after a few beers ask who's round is it now. Now this woke anti-foundationalism then is like Hegelian and German Romanticism Critique of pure Empiricism. But analytic philosophers in the know by 1930's knew that the hope of a non Hegelian unmediated empiricism like Carnap could not work. Its seems he didn't even believe it in the end. So from Wittgenstein Austin Quine and Sellers the old empiricism of the given (logical positivism) was abandoned and by 1990's many people (Bob Brandon John McDowell) coming from Sellars were returning to Hegel or Kant/Hegel or Aristotle/Hegel. So really Roger Scruton was ahead of this neo-Hegelian analytical turn back to German Romanticism, following the collapse of the logical positivism version of empiricism. But the question remains about the relationship between the Manifest Image and the Scientific Image. In one area of debate is Aristotle here because as a model of human action towards ends it could afford a legitimate place for a religious intervention. For me the move would bring in St Augustine's Critique for the very idea of law and its relation to man. This can require much moving around between SI Mi and others. The obvious problem with say immigration then is not relations between different values and different MI vocabularies(though this can be of course), rather the project is driven by the Legal and scientific image of man. Thus we are expected to leave our ordinary language private at the door and discourse in public though the scientism and legal semantics vocabulary. That is in public the folk language must adapt to the latest science derived terms. What kind of community is this , one continually deferring to the latest contested science of utility and justice and equality. This is not enough to mediate over actual objects in our common space and is too much in flux and change in scientific logic to act a guide from within common sense human norms. This debate has parallels in history between materialism or Marxist economic materialism as science and the idea of the subjective value of things as within convention tradition and norms. For Marx the later is a super-structural ideological lie a semblance and appearance of value as fancy value, whereas the price difference in a whole economic science is a difference between price under illusion of free property owning conventional exchange is a deception of phenomenal immediacy of foundation (in individual rights and free exchange ideology), where as the whole system scientific law determined price is the true value the noumena. Thank you for the great discussion up to t, Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs and Dr. David Starkey.
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  2. 32:00 mins. The problem with absolutism is it begins with the abstract, the universal. This is what Sellars is attacking when he attacks Plato's forms. This can perhaps go proxy for Cicero too but not sure about St. Thomas Moore. Sellars contrasts this mythical idea with its role in modern science as Quine's Set extension that is a Sellers argues this as an implicit a kind of temporal Platonism (modality as necessity over time)(like St Augustine perhaps moving image of eternity) that reference for ever is the same as adverbial contextual reference here and now (McDowell's rules as rails in Mind and World). But Sellars in contrasting this set theory semantic structure, with ordinary occasional use (also called observation statements or eternal propositions/thoughts) has to explain the "Apparent" use of the myth of Platonism. If it is wrong how come its seems to work. His answer is these abstractions are used within ordinary language so they have a foot in both camps. Now before we abandon Platonism entirely, first it is regarded by many as Heidegger's philosophical error. Second that any Platonism of concepts as infinite functions has to see the abstraction error as one that abstracts the concepts form their place in an instituional architecture. This instituional context of multiple institutions in some kind of harmony in judgement and that brings in a whole new analysis. Category of public and private duty and organic unity to the rules and cases before the split into separate functions. Then the old onto-theological problem of an exceptional God origin of virtue and morality is now a very different kind of question, situated in the architecture of the State. Sellars i think missed this possibility, taken up by Russell and then peter Suber. The error results in paradoxes like Set theory paradox but the solution is to deny infinity and zero since in demythologising Platonic abstraction we have multiple institutions in play together and all at once. In this i push the Critique coming from Wittgenstein and between Dummett and Crispin Wright that the rules as rails and series is a version of realism. the realism is have is rather the reverse. that all the institutions are running in the one space at once, this is a realism that denies anti realism as the abstraction of one rule where in multiple rules we are in direct relation to objects. like Kant's refutation of idealism then i do not answer the single rule critique as a realism rather i deny it as a single institution abstraction on its own. eg say GDP measures are not metric jsut in terms of the rues of the GDP department but its sense requires all the others to be in paly as well. We see then a "zero" GDP is bellow the event horizon of possibility, that department workers left long before to chop down trees and hunt rabbits. We also see any possible infinity in one metric would have to annihilate all the other institutions or treat them as stable natural or instituional and passive ly given over time which is not possible. so no single or multiple infinities.
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  3. So at 40:00 mins my claim is there must always be a parliament a division and synthesis of instituional action. Now the transcendent soverignty has to be viewed in a new non abstract non external way as internal to parliament but not an object a referent or name. Schimitt and Agamben miss this semantic space that both presupposes it and denies it. it is intentionality the parliament is a kind of form but also is concrete with real people doing stuff somewhere. the problem of the myth of the exception then is like rule anti realism or single rule realism, it misses the architecture and so thinks its a problem like Plato or a Platonic paradox, the form of the good as the form of all forms, and so on. in set theory it is the set of all sets not members of themselves and so on. these are not problem then to solve but to diagnose as based in an error from the start and proper view the problem is not their. Wittgensteinian approach to philosophical problems and paradox of various representations of reason. Economic liberalism is quit profoundly a different picture to Platonism with dynamic equilibrium and so on. just as Platonism tries to go down and make the world in its false mythical image so liberalism tries to go up and make government redundant. For liberalisms the structure of all institutional form also. Behavioural theory of laws application and now from 1990 an AI theory of legal judgement and jurisprudence is on the way. maybe Schelling very different notion of nature to Hegel, as the equilibrium of forces can help. (it fits with strong and weak nuclear forces too as well as perhaps equilibrium economics see also Nelson Goodman.)
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  4. Interesting conclusion to a rooted transcendence at the end. That was a great discussion, and I'm privileged to have listened. Thank you Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs and Dr. David Starkey.
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  5. Normally when people talk of transcendence it is the idea that we can at once have an intention to an object of thought, but that such intentionality has no actual or sensory judgable content. An example might be a unicorn or me at the supermarket down the road later this afternoon. Here transcendence mean a stepping beyond immediate intentional objects of sense, to something beyond. In trying to fit these two capacities together philosophers have conceived at least two ways or accounts: the unicorn is drawing on conceptual capacities and using imagination to construct a kind of composite cryptid; the thought of being at the supermarket later also draws on the same faculties. Here the conceptual continuity and imagined object are connected in conceptual thought, the unicorn though we cannot see, or what to do to bring it to immediacy, no practical possibility can help us to fulfil the imaginative freedom. There is more Platonic sense too the thought or imagining of a Celestial City, like St Augustine or Thomas Moore entertained. Here is an imagined object constructed as an image in thought with apparent conceptual objective intentionality, along with the hope of a practical root to connect the hear and now to this possible future world. Indeed this is the context that, from McDowell, Sellars goes on to argue for intentionality at in a Kantian sense. Cleary there seems to be conceptual inferences in play in these imaginings, the object can only be as images and concepts, inference here can mean a connection of judgements and possible judgements between the "immediate" as source and the imagined as a gap bridging root to the "imagined" perhaps only by analogy with inference as a practical method to get their or maybe its the other way round too, our practical action is modelled on inference as mealy as cognitive imagined possibility. There is a question here about what might be involved Critically if we are to model the cognitive on the practical or the practical on the cognitive. Indeed a political difference emerges here constraining the cognitive to the practical can be a certain aspect of conservatism, while progressives would claim this as a lack of imagination too much repetition and that as the practical advances though its policy the scope of what is practically possible changes over time. we might say at one extreme is a deficiency of imagination and the later too much imagination. In the above the notion of transcendence is "from" the mundane here and now immediate sensory perception, to some imagined object of intention. There is a recent debate from McDowell on Sellars and Rorty, that questions this restricted use. So Rorty saw in immediate sense perception the objectivity has been justified "sideways on" that is by bridging a gap between inner states and the object using various sciences to causally (material efficient) link the two as if the inner were on one side and the object, the outer, on the other and they connect by a law of nature from science. This picture of two pace casual relation has the problem that: if either if it is thought of as in another third observer then it begs the question or lead to infinite regress, if not it is a kind of inflated version as Gods eye view or view from nowhere. McDowell originally took this as the place for a transcendence in the immediate which he then rejects in Mind and World. But more recently he argues that Rorty's capture of transcendence here mixes up Kant's distinction between transcendent and transcendental or transcendence. That is there is a sense that the immediacy of experience of an object here now is immediate in the sense of non inferential, but that there now open up the different distinction between the immediacy of what is perceived and what is the object in itself. This is the Kant Hegel context of German Idealism that begins with the idea that we are in in experience in a kind of hermetically sealed solipsism and idealism, we cannot get out of the conceptual and imaginative limits of thought to experience anything that is "not thought", ie other to thought. In this context then we can talk about transcendence as a relation perhaps that goes beyond experience and to reality the objective from the subjective. here transcended might mean a kind of gap between two things the sense data or image and the real, but this is wrong. Rather in experience we encounter multiply conceptually presented features of things. As if we have a kind of repatware of concepts sitting in the mind ready to engage with the world around us. it might be model here on the idea of concepts as stored and used by institutions ready for action. This analogy of mine seems to follow Sellar's view that ordinary thought and common sense especially in relation to others works like a theory like an institutional use of concepts. Its called the Theory Theory of mind and many people involved in politic seem to think the opponents think in terms of theories, we have a theory of the other and the transcendental object. this is an example of Sellars's scientism creeping in. Rather the transcendence of experience now, just means more manifold detail more possible conceptual application than passive non judging does. it can be seen as the reverse of the transcendence of the now to a future imagined state, in the sense that cognitive judgement of immediacy of transcendence is not jsut a matter of involving more concepts in the experience but of involving less in terms that we see it as transcendent as it in itself not "it" for some future towards a future imagined it. Transcendence ten can be seen as the suspension of the old model of transcendence to a future and be seen as just to look. The passivity is w.r.t. use and for acquaintance with details not the need to abandon judgement in experience, as here it is judgement of the now object "is" that pulls us away from use for some future state of affaires or imaginings. In this we have to contrast then the image of thought as a quasi instituional scientific policy setting of complexity with separate rules and sets and thought as it is in the intertwined roots of ordinary usage of Language. It may be correct to say following Quine that the instituional setting for concepts is actually a disquotationalism, it certainly is anonimious without a real author the institution apologies means little except money may be. In our experience we oscillate between ordinary usage in which we are raised within a language and images, and some of the same words understood instructionally as functions. Rationalism focuses on the latter and even thinks the former as version of it a theory theory. but i'm not sure how we could teach the instituional language without the ordinary language already in play with actual experience. The langue of representation generates an apparent problem of idealism say metric axiomatic formal modal whatever no anomaly. at the level of ordinary thought and intentionality the question of trasncendence in immediate experience is not open of stepping outside representation, representation is derivative and structured. At the level of ordinary language this kind of escape is not needed. instead of a image of transcendence as escape then we have transcendence as openness to the infinite richness of what is present and what is possible but not only in terms of instituional uptake and use. This view can also be founding the "field of representation" but at the level of intention to a person thought the whole architectural instituional structures. This lead on to aesthetic judgement for Kant. I can contrast here phenomena with noumena as comparing a row of dolls, or rows of dolls, to a set of Russian Dolls perhaps. On intuition then we see injustice as a feature of object relations, which must involve a mixture of the two views one of institutionalised concepts as rule and function in complex unities to be made the other of language intertwined with forms of life. McDowell take this up in long exchange with Robert Pippin on unity of the object unity of judgement unity of experience unity of the subject. In this I have drawn on John McDowell's 1997 Woodbridge Lectures (Columbia University) called "Having the World in View" They are published in the McDowell collection of essays as the first three, in "Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars." (2009)
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