Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Stop Demonizing Men! Defending Masculinity & Tackling The Male Crisis" video.

Nina Power's reference to Illich and his use of play (Greek) is new to me i read Illtch and Rymer in the mid eighties and it had massive effect on me. But it was before philosophy so i will go back and follow this up. maybe that is why i got into Wittgenstein at first in late eighties and i had forgotten. There is though the Gramsci Sraffa connection. (only Amyrta Sen has written on this as far as i know). maybe they have a common source and also with P. Bourdeau. I saw a great conference paper years ago where the "paper" consisted of giving the "audience" a pile of string and balloons and we all had to make up a game with rules and then change them in motion. I bribed my mate to lower the string when it was my go!
1
I remember Camilla Paglia was one of the people who got me thinking about this. It was her piece she did in a Star Trek TV weekend actually, which led me to her criticisms of post liberal feminism, or, in US post individualist liberal feminism. I thought she would have been ok for the feminists, that is until I "mentioned" her, and they put me straight on her before i moved on to "use" her ideas i guess. she charted the switch from feminism as freedom from authority to feminism as capacity as speech affordance and so a kind of positive freedom, but the individual has the speech power over the soul and so not appearing to fall under Berlin's worries. but of course in practice the institutions that apple law and rules make this a constructive and determining project to create maximum difference. Berlin's soul manufacturing by law, at the root of totalitarianism for him, is the liberal individual choice and of course the law is ontologically referring to or constructing persons as its condition of application. Certainly the left seem not to be telling us what a good and proper soul looks like for it to be free, but in a way, to choose away from tradition has the status of a performance of what it means to be free person. and so the left here are about funding the institutional and social conditions so that people can choose to free themselves from tradition. Of course two things follow, those who choose the most marginalised identities can claim compensation or capacity asymmetry for help, but pretty quickly this begins i guess to take on a kind of moral prescription and value distinction. in its cosmology as nature verse freedom , here freedom is seen as mature when against naturalisations and norms. c.f. the 60s become an individual matured away from parents, or mature in helping those who do. the outsider in Herbert Marcuse and Colin Wilson becomes the authority in the institutions, it intervenes well onto the libertarian values that Camila Paglia talks about but under the frame of justice equality and law it becomes a kind of radical existentialism with pay to compensate for the expressed radical gap between concepts of given nature as tradition and absolute transhuman freedom. Clever praxis to be sure. but the old medieval puritan or reformation protestant value and virtue hierarchy seem still to dominate just in a new form of authority and institutions. here a strange value system of the soul and institutions and authority is quickened. it looks because the soul is the choice of the individual that it is not a positive prescriptive notion of freedom, but when set in relations of equality justice and power asymmetry the ontological empty free space of the individual is in relations of power at once with others and so its empty freedom requires protection and quickening by reducing the effects of other on it. thus the power of the authority is not over the individuals soul but over those attendants to that individual that must compensation and make symmetrical all those constitutive relations. This is the key difference in that the old libertarianism was ontological even if a constructed legal right holder, the new person is always in relation of asymmetry with others, e.g. Foucault and Deleuze. it is interesting to note that the 20th century philosophical break with the darkness of Hegel was Moore, Russell, Whitehead and Wittgenstein all attacking at once the main Hegelian F.H. Bradly on relations. They saw there a key affording and intervening difference from Hegelianism was on ontology and relations. Now from the soul making anti-individualism of Hegel to libertarianism individualism in original freedom, to freedom from the person next to you, to a new relational post-ontology of the state to do metaphysical work on the soul of the person next to the free identity subject. in the end i think Camila Paglia connected this to the stories in Star Trek but it was long ago and i was supposed to have been organising a wedding at the time, bed ridden with a bad back and reading the oldy book i had with me Paul Richour's "The Rule of Metaphor".
1
It is an interesting point you make about the origin of the concept or notion perhaps of Gender at 4:00. another you tube channel i watch is Owen Jones and in a recent video they are discussing an event in 2014 something I was unaware off. it concerns a false flag or false letter that even after it was proven false the effect continues autonomously from its original "truth" or "falsity". So i posted them a comment and informed them that you too are here discussing and interesting paradox. Bellow is the comment i posted to them. part 5 an addition. I've just listened to a new you tube video, on one of my go too channels where i also do posts and comments, The New Culture Forum Channel. In this new video the host Peter Whittle interviews Nina Power author of "What Do Me Want". in the interview from 4:00, they look at the origin of the notions of Gender as distinct from Sex understood as biological (perhaps natural and even animal). So the term gender came form John Manny (spelling?) researching sex and developing the idea that Gender identity was a social construct and so people can choose their Gender. Here choice is seen i guess as a freedom against determining biological nature. Then second wave feminism took this and hooked it on in the liberal American context, to talk of freedom to choose, as freedom from tradition and traditional authority, (and for me perhaps later transhumanism). This then is for the "liberal agent" a task of acting or performing against expectations and attitudes context etc performing and creating identity over time. (I guess Judith Butler too the idea from Austin and Derrida of a performative that is immediate wherein the person creates then meaning in the speech act eg ("i name this ship Queen Elizabeth the Second) as opposed to a performance where the act is a time delay consequence of the speech "Shut the Door") so there s no "external" authority as to who can do this, so the subject can name themselves and have this authority legitimacy and right. Thing is John Manny's work had been discredited on several criteria, but even so it has performed well in its part in this political social project. one thing is Austin was i think wanting to add to Truth functional theories of meaning a use function which has success and failure as measure, not truth and falsity. Followers of his how ever took it to attack truth functional theories, and so for them fact and truth are seen as all under Austin's structure of success and failure criteria. Indecently Strawson took on both Austin and truth functional theorist with his descriptive metaphysics of the individual, object identity and personal identity. i guess for post Austin pragmatists if it works its truth is a secondary and derivative concept or indeed redundant traditional and to be translated and erased. I will post this comment to their site too and inform them of your interesting discussion here. Thank you Nina Power and Peter Whittle for the interesting and challenging discussion.
1
p.p.s. One wanders what kind of recognition is possible when it is under the force of the law and social shaming, aimed at guilt of the other. i guess for the materialist left there are only forces so their is no difference between being forced and being free to recognise. Similar to Kant's acting in accord with the law or acting out of law , or Wittgenstein acting out of a rule or in accord with a rule. Indeed in an eternal return on Derrida, the education the force of the law etc, in preventing harm and servicing equality by force, actually make recognition impossible or at least unknowable. We can just conform to law in public appearance with dispositions and attitudes at odds with this law. They used to say you cannot have a law against what you think only what you do. But now the left have all kinds of psychological linguistic sciences that can look into your "mind" (?) and causal sciences of our brains and even program us as spy's on the relata next to us. i guess that is where Star Trek come in.
1
Coda my experience with most people on the far left was in a street activist group. I said i was here to look at politics in practice or praxis. They were i have to say very accommodating to my reflections and critique. the only time i got the mob on me was in a discussion that became an argument over the use/mention distinction with a non philosopher. I still wander why? Now i do critique with comments on Owen jones channel i have mentioned (or used) and they are very accommodating. maybe there is hope. Great discussion many thanks.
1
p.s. So along with the neo-Hegelian structure of asymmetric relations without ground except actualising teleological reason, there is the Hegelian notion of the self as always in relations with other Selves. The relational asymmetry then means that self actualisation true to the possibilities of yourself are not ontological for that self but in a state of relations, of conflict, the self cannot actualise itself alone, it is in a master/slave (Lordship and Bondage in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.) state of conflict each necessarily requiring recognition from the other each seeking though the others annellation which will actually make the recognition impossible. This paradox in Hegel on recognition is in eternal return since if you have a project that seeks difference relations on the one hand and equality relations on the other, they are contradictory since any exchange in relation requires difference a priori e.g an exchange of good between people requires difference but justice requires the same. The paradox of contract and justice. or justice and justice or even justice and contract legitimacy. A paradox of competing notions of contract, consent, justice and natural law even. Derrida dis say something like "deconstruction and the impossibility of justice" and justice as its impossibility.
1
p.s. to my last comment: the Owen Jones you tube vid i refer to is called "Trojan Horse Affair".
1
p.p.p.s in a way the left deal with appearances/representations. That is I think, they took the neo-liberal self interested agent from political economy, that is how economists and lawyers model people as a condition of the possibility of these sciences. the problem begins when they start to think people are and only like this in the nouminal world. that is they try and conceive forms of life and their linguistic complexity as reducible to the grammar of the logic of appearances. they think like Strawson on Kant that the realm of the life world can be expressed in the same structure of logic law and their causal frameworks as the scientifically and institutionality of the real of appearances. Rather this logic its grammatical categories are a reification (Adorno?) of the life world. there is then no problem of how these worlds relate then, there is no duality, rather the world of appearance is the life word reduced to its order by frameworks of determination "in" that life world. see Beatrice Han Pile on Bachelard and Science. the frameworks are the removal of error and degrees of freedom to "make" the sciences possible and as such the reduction of the human being by frameworks into causal order. Wittgenstein "miracles are impossible in science". the necessity in science is in the frameworks and constructions "around" people. but my experience in Wedgwood's pottery factory taught me that the machines like people must have an intuitive a priori understanding of the object under manufacture is first an object in care. If Galileo had been from here we would not be in this mess. The existence of the object as integrity resistance character imperviousness and response to power is the limit condition of manufacturing. if it breaks up, its outside, or less than, limit. A human grasp of objects is gentle at first and must remain so even in use. Hegel is wrong but this i think is in Schelling's view of science and nature as equilibrium of attractive and repulsive forces. That is pure attraction is two objects into one, pure repulsion is objects infinitely apart. when we place them in an equilibrium we realise that pure attraction and pure4 repulsion are ontologically flawed metaphysics. both forces need each other originally and so the pure attraction and pure repulsion are totalised metaphysical errors. We are always in such equilibrium and infinity and two object unity are impossible limit condition but now we cannot make a metric of this limit in either one is it is a mutual limitation within itself not two un limited and zero metric that then set a demarcation line within its scope,. there is no outside to this limit of each with each other. just applied this to human and human sciences. The result is a radical shift in neo liberal economic objects and concepts. the key to doing this is symmetry conditions not as axioms but internal process. Are the scientists themselves under the same description as the objects they study and manipulate?
1