What is Husserlian Phenomenology?

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by Kyklos, Jul 22, 2018.

  1. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    I added more symbolic logic notations through out this thread. The newly edited version of this thread is at Strange Phenomenon. And from there search the entire page for the quantifiers (∃x) and (∀x) .

    (∀x)(∃y)Lxy
    "Everyone loves someone or other."
     
  2. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    Okay, I figured out my angle of approach on Schleiermacher’s concept of the Academy, or public education. I want to add to what I call, “The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education.” “Axiological” is an old-fashioned word meaning the philosophical study of values in ethics and aesthetics.

    If you get a chance, please read Henry Giruox’s two new articles on public education. He has multiple styles of beautiful writing and is full of insight:

    Henry Giruox on May 10, 2019 and on May 13, 2019.
     
  3. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -50, Schleiermacher’s Ethical Social Theory/Christian Pattern
    -52, Thom Hartmann's "The Prophet's Way."
    -54, Schleiermacher: The State
    -55, The False Memories of a Reified World
    -57, Schleiermacher: Originalism and Judicial Nihilism
    -58, Interpreting Original Meaning
    -59, The Nihilist's Hermeneutic
    -60, Textualism is not in the Text
    -61, The Interpreter’s Purpose
    -62, Schleiermachian Sociology & Critique of Ideology
    -63, The Ideology of Individualism
    -64, The Social Construction of Reality
    -65, Primary and Secondary Socialization Paradigms
    -73, 74, Schleiermacher On the Christian Church
    -75, Four Conclusions
    -78, The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education




    The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education



    “Cognitive dehumanization has produced actual dehumanization.”—Paul Tillich

    “If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.”—Immanuel Kant



    Robert Munro does not go into detail about Schleiermacher’s educational policy. However, one could speculate on what educational content Schleiermachian theology would be consistent with based on his comments about epistemology, ethics, church, state, and society. “Axiological” is an old-fashioned word meaning the philosophical study of values in ethics and aesthetics. Of the academy Munro only writes:

    “The most perfect organic whole of knowledge is the Academy, or the unity composed of the teachers and masters in every branch of science. This organization occupies the place in the sphere of knowing that the State occupies in the sphere of doing; it is the highest development or unity of all that comes under the universal symbolizing activity of reason, even as the State is the highest development or unity of all that is included in the universally organizing activity”(Munro, p.244).

    Before discussing possible public school educational approaches for teaching, some historical review of free universal education in America is required which can be found in any modern American sociology textbook. The Greek word “σχολή” (skhole) means “leisure spent in the pursuit of knowledge.” School is not a place, but a time. Free universal education for early white American settlers was established partly because New England Puritans highly valued education as part of their religious beliefs. Also, the French and English ideas of equality and liberty added popular support for universal public education. Before the American Revolution public schools taught religion and ethics. After the Civil War schools taught business ethics as the curriculum. During the time between the Civil War and WWI educators taught social equality was an impossible goal; business property rights; and labor strikes were bad for American industry. In 1915 only 20% of American youth were attending high school, but in 1973 it was more than 80%.

    During the 1960s education equality, or inequality was a big issue just as it is still today. Sociologist James S. Coleman was commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1965 to survey equality of educational opportunity and published his report in “Equality of Educational Opportunity,1966.” Since the American Revolution equal educational opportunity was ideally universal free education to some level with equal resources for every local school. In practice the wealthy upper class students went to private schools while the poor, and minorities received sporadic education with minimum resources, or no education at all. Even common school students of different social classes were treated differently. Students groups bused into common school locations were physically present, but not integrated exemplifying a fundamental misunderstanding of society. But still, free mass education grew for the vast majority until it reached an unheard of span of 16 to 20 years of instruction. Yet, sociological empirical research shows that in general common schools benefited both lower and middle-upper class students.

    That education is necessary for success in life is a common assumption behind the concept of universal education and training. However, some argue that education has nothing to do with success and is even harmful to personal development, intellectual spontaneity, curiosity, and creativity. Who should be educated is the classic academic question the sociology of education has explored. Sociologist Lester Ward represented the dominant paradigm which held that education was for the very intelligent so that they could develop their intellect to benefit society as a whole. Sociologist Emile Durkheim understood education as the “cement” that held together Western cultural values for the health of society and transmission to future generations.

    During the 1930’s Great Depression sociologists Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis and August Hollingshead studied upward social mobility of poor students in American schools and found that schools failed to represent the ideals of liberty and equality, but rather represented the “dominant values of the upper-middle class.” Students of the lower working class that did not convincingly display commitment to the contradictory values of the status quo, hyper-competition, inherent uncritical conformity, and a careerist advantage-oriented life style did not meet academic achievement standards.

    This is the most important point to keep in mind: within the 1940s and 1960s educational training did little to actually change the class structure of American society.

    Herbert Hyman (Applications of Methods of Evaluation, 1962) theorized in his studies that the student’s identification and associations with a “reference group” whether social, ethnic, or religious did more to enable learning than from the methodology of instruction. Coleman agreed in “The Adolescent Society (1971)” that didactics was a minor factor in student achievement.

    Interpersonal relationships are an even more important factor in student learning and success than teaching method and content. As discussed before sociologists Berger and Luckmann noted that in addition to language, the second essential condition for socially training a child is “emotional attachment to a significant other” without which learning is impossible.

    Interpersonal relationships are essential for creating a positive attitude toward learning. Psychological studies by Mildred Gebhard found that a student just being hopeful of success in school increased both effort and interest. Irwin Katz discovered through empirical testing some minority students actually scored higher on tests when told their scores would be compared to students in the same peer reference group. Empirical experiments have repeatedly shown that student “educational aspiration” is affected by changing the group the student is being compared (Wish, Expectation, and Group Performance as Factors Influencing Level of Aspiration,1942, Leon Festinger).

    Students are not objects nor abstract categories, but rather evolving self-reflective conscious sentient human beings.

    Coleman concluded that the student’s “non-school” environment is the factor that best predicts school achievement, not teaching method and school quality. Sociologist Christopher Jencks (Inequality,1972) concluded that “socioeconomic factors” was the primary determinate of the student’s fate rather than personal abilities or quality of schools attended. Variables in education do not seem to explain the great differences of income inequality of students in later life. For Jencks, students do not need a social service, but a real increase in family income, and a standard of living to provide the material environment to educate a person. Piecemeal social services are not effective when simultaneously wage income is deliberately suppressed and even reduced.

    The question still remains today, “Who should we educate?” The cost of education for the elites is too high to be universal so the choice is either educate the elites only, or find another method for mass education. The decision has already been made by the elites: provide superior education to the upper middle class and privatized vocational education delivered by intentionally de-skilled temporarily contracted multi-discipline instructors for everyone else.

    However, the state of education in America is much, much worst than even this narrative suggests because in between reading, writing, and arithmetic mass murder occurs.

    Athletes of War

    “The art of war cannot be learned in a day, and there must be a natural aptitude for military duties. There will be some warlike natures who have this aptitude—dogs keen of scent, swift of foot to pursue, and strong of limb to fight…But these spirited natures are apt to bite and devour one another; the union of gentleness to friends and fierceness against enemies appears to be an impossibility, and the guardian of a State requires both qualities. Who then can be a guardian? The image of the dog suggests an answer. For dogs are gentle to friends and fierce to strangers…The human watchdogs must be philosophers or lovers of learning which will make them gentle. And how are they to be learned without education?”—Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Book II, Stephanus pagination 375 b.


    Plato is explaining to Glaucon how to build and educate an army in his ideal state. Plato’s “Republic” is translated from the ancient Greek word “politeia” (πολιτεία) meaning “the conditions and rights of the citizen in a city-state." As an expression of great honor to Socrates, Plato uses the Athenian teacher’s persona as a proxy speaker in Republic, and other dialogues, to present both Socratic and Platonic philosophical doctrines. There is no written work authored by Socrates himself in existence today.

    Plato believed the guardians must be trained in the gymnasium otherwise they may turn against the citizens and rulers themselves. So from the very beginning of Western Civilization education has been designed to create a certain kind of person that is gentle in civil society, but capable of killing in war. The modern American education system of today and the commercial sports industry essentially perform the same function as the ancient gymnasium for creating controllable soldiers who are not a threat to the State, or civil society.

    President Eisenhower first proposed a federal physical fitness program, but it failed until President Kennedy effectively reorganized it to be in the daily school curriculum. I did not like the fitness program because of its extreme regimentation. In our modern times the “gentle” side has been ideologically minimized with tragic consequences. One should note that the most murderous repressive dictatorships in world history were loosely based on the model of Plato’s vision of the Republic. The Nazi Third Reich and the American South slave plantation system were societies that attempted to emulate Plato’s ideal State that is essentially a Lacedaemonian, or Cretan commonwealth such as the military state of Sparta, which by the way, had a constitution. The History of Western Civilization has been the struggle of deciding what kind of government a society should have—Athens, or Sparta?

    Mad World

    All around me are familiar faces
    Worn out places, worn out faces
    Bright and early for their daily races
    Going nowhere, going nowhere

    Their tears are filling up their glasses
    No expression, no expression
    Hide my head, I wanna drown my sorrow
    No tomorrow, no tomorrow

    And I find it kinda funny
    I find it kinda sad
    The dreams in which I'm dying
    Are the best I've ever had
    I find it hard to tell you
    I find it hard to take
    When people run in circles
    It's a very, very mad world, mad world

    Children waiting for the day they feel good
    Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
    And I feel the way that every child should
    Sit and listen, sit and listen

    Went to school and I was very nervous
    No one knew me, no one knew me
    Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson
    Look right through me, look right through me

    Enlarging your world


    The Axiological Argument to continue as…

    The Machine Paradigm of Nature and Human Disenchantment
     
  4. Dissily Mordentroge

    Dissily Mordentroge Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Not sure Plato would swallow that given conformity of this kind has the power to negate anything like objective proof. (If I may use so unfashionable a term?) As to Satre’s theory of consciousness I suggest it provides no more than a pretentious method of describing iteration.
     
    Last edited: May 20, 2019
  5. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    Lol. Good. Adorno is here speaking of the conformity of paradigm, or switching a particular under a universal, thus, the particular always conforms to the per-established concept whether it is there or not. "Objective" is indeed old fashioned. Only our immediate consciousness is certain, everything else is inferred (Descartes). Oh, don't like Sartre? Try this....

    Ep. 10 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Consciousness

    What's happening in Canada I wonder?
     
  6. Dissily Mordentroge

    Dissily Mordentroge Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Don’t like Sartre” From my perspective his supposed contribution to western philosophy helped unleash a flood of subjective nonsense that’s culminated in deconstructionism. The later a topic I can’t be bothered even discussing. If that comes across as intellectual laziness, so be it.
    As to the tired old assertion ‘only immediate consciousness is certain’ how and why do you trust something as simple as driving across a bridge?
    How did the engineer responsible for it’s design and construction manage to get it right if only his immediate consciousness was certain?
    As to Adorno’s approach to the problem of a self defeating dialectic of modern reason and the blending of myth and enlightenment if he did sincerely believe (correct me if me memory is at fault here) it was negated by an internal repression of natural forces (inclinations?)
    I’m resisting the temptation to read him again as my reaction to his work had me thinking of Ayn Rand’s phrase “An over-tossed word salad”.
    And no, I’m not a Randian Objectivist even though I agree with the central points of her epistemology.
     
  7. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    I am not a fan of deconstructionism if you mean Derrida. It was a turn away from consciousness philosophy.
    I thought “I think, therefore, I am,” was a pretty good argument. However, even Descartes’ argument could be critiqued, “What is the ‘I’?” and “Is it the same ‘I’ that was here a second ago?” You are misreading my comment. Our immediate consciousness is “most” certain. You neglected the full context, “…everything else is inferred…” and mentioning Descartes. So my meaning is clear. I am not advocating Pyrrhonism, but methodological skepticism.
    Inferences based on synthetic propositions can be false, that is why buildings sometime fall down.
    I am not sure what that last part means: ”negated by internal repression of natural forces (inclinations?)”
    Hmmm, that is disappointing. I think Rand stole the over-tossed word-salad phrase from…Adorno.
     
    Last edited: May 22, 2019
  8. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    50, Schleiermacher’s Ethical Social Theory/Christian Pattern
    -52, Thom Hartmann's "The Prophet's Way."
    -54, Schleiermacher: The State
    -55, The False Memories of a Reified World
    -57, Schleiermacher: Originalism and Judicial Nihilism
    -58, Interpreting Original Meaning
    -59, The Nihilist's Hermeneutic
    -60, Textualism is not in the Text
    -61, The Interpreter’s Purpose
    -62, Schleiermachian Sociology & Critique of Ideology
    -63, The Ideology of Individualism
    -64, The Social Construction of Reality
    -65, Primary and Secondary Socialization Paradigms
    -73, 74, Schleiermacher On the Christian Church
    -75, Four Conclusions
    -78, The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education

    -83, The Machine Paradigm of Nature and Human Disenchantment


    The Machine Paradigm of Nature and Human Disenchantment


    “3.221 Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein

    (∀x)[Px ⊃ (Hx * ~Wx)]

    “All Propositions can only say how a thing is, not what it is.”


    At this seemingly odd place I what to bring Wittgenstein into the discussion since his views on the limits of symbolic logic is not unlike Newton’s view of the incoherent machine paradigm of nature and its inability to explain the absurd phenomena of interaction at a distance such as the non-physical interaction of gravity, or magnetic repulsion and attraction. Newton names these phenomena mysteries while Wittgenstein names them mysticism by putting them beyond human understanding. Both philosophers are dealing with what Adorno referred to as the Kantian Block—the very edge of intelligibility and un-intelligibility of experience. The question of whether nature is only a machine has grave consequences for human beings. How can there be values, free will, and moral agency in a wholly deterministic mechanical world? American sociologist Robert Merton made the very important distinction between “the intended, conscious functions of ideas, and the unintended, unconscious ones” (SCR., p. 11). Karl Mannheim warns us that “…in modern times much more depends on the correct thinking through of a situation than was the case in earlier societies”(Ideology and Utopia, 1936). The materialist’s tautology is “Everything is physical; therefore, everything is a machine since everything is physical,” Ad Infinitum. Ignoring fundamental philosophical questions of ethics and epistemology can lead to Pyrrhonism, nihilism, narcissistic solipsism, fascism, militarism, apathetic individualism, dehumanization, and disenchantment. When we define the world, we define ourselves.

    In his lecture, Professor Noam Chomsky recounts Descartes anchoring modern science on the understanding of the world, nature, or the cosmos as an intelligible physical machine. An animal squealing in pain and a squeaking rusty wheel are ontologically on the same plain—the physical. Isaac Newton comes to the absurd conclusion that there are no machines--nothing works by machine principles. Chomsky points out that we really do not know what “physical” really is—it’s like saying the physical is “really, really real.” The meaning of physical amounts to “Anything we understand.” We do not have a theory of the material or the physical. Atoms are units of measurement. There are no material bodies and cannot be accounted for by mechanical principles. Since Newton, modern science attempts to achieve the lesser goal of developing intelligible theories about the cosmos and not the thing-in-itself.

    The Machine Paradigm of Nature could be simply translated into the categorical propositional form “Everything is a Machine,” (∀x)Mx. Sometimes such translations are more radical and linguistically awkward. Let the following categorical proposition express a derived argument of the mechanical thesis of nature as “If all of Nature is a Machine, and all Humans are of nature, then humans are machines.” This proposition can be presented as a two premised argument and a conclusion. Here are the reasons I am presenting this argument in symbolic form: 1.) Show how the Machine Paradigm thesis symbolically appears in a logical argument. I must construct a thesis in order to present an antithesis. 2.) Show how translating an argument into logical notation is diagnostic in itself. 3.) Explain why logical contradictions are a bad thing in an argument. 4.) Follow the logical rule named, “Use it, or lose it,” or practice otherwise one’s reasoning ability will erode.

    This form of logical reasoning is called “categorical propositional logic,” or sometimes just “baby logic.”

    Definitions:
    (∀x) = for all x
    (∃x) = for some x
    v = either, or, inclusive
    ⊃ = Logical operator for implication: If, then.
    * = and, conjunction
    ~ = Not
    N = Nature
    M = Machine
    H = Human
    x = any item
    y = as an ‘unknown’ and not a constant
    ∴ = Therefore; conclusion.

    1.) (∀x)(Nx ⊃ Mx)
    “All Nature is a machine”

    2.) (∀x)(Hx ⊃ Nx) /∴ (∀x) (Hx ⊃ Mx)
    “All Humans are of Nature” /∴ “All Humans are machines”

    3.) Ny ⊃ My
    1, UI to strip away the quantifier to show sentence form.

    4.) Hy ⊃ Ny
    2, UI, sentence form

    5.) Hy ⊃ My

    3,4 Hypothetical Syllogism

    6.) (∀x) (Hx ⊃ Mx)
    5, UG to get the conclusion “All Humans are machines.”

    Newtonian physics posits, “Nothing works by machine principles:”
    7.) (∀x)~Mx
    Assumed premise that contradicts premise 1.

    8.)~My
    7,EI where “y” is an “unknown,” not a constant.

    If there is something that is a Human being, then we can derive this contradiction:
    9.) (∃x)Hx

    10.) Hy
    9, EI, where “y” is an “unknown,” not a constant.

    11.) ~Hy
    5, 8, Modus Tollens

    12.) Hy * ~Hy
    10, 11, Conjunction.

    /∴ (∃y)(Hy *~Hy)
    12, EG, Indirect proof reductio ad absurdum resulting from injecting premise 7.

    Contradictions are bad because they allow any conclusion whatsoever to be derived:

    Definitions:
    Ay = Any conclusion whatsoever

    1.)Hy * ~Hy
    Contradiction

    2.) Hy

    1, Simplification

    3.)Hy v Ay

    2, Addition

    4.) ~Hy
    1, Simplification

    5.) Ay
    3, 4, Hypothetical Syllogism “Any conclusion whatsoever.”


    The symbol (∃x)Hx is deceptively simple. What is human? And what does it mean to say humans are a part of Nature, which is different than saying someone is “natural,” or “unnatural.” These definitions are important for translation, but once the translation is made they are irrelevant to logical symbolism. Translating natural language into symbolic notation frequently reveal argument flaws just from pseudo-propositions that are not really propositions at all, but “nonsense,” or in some cases “senseless.” In fact, this is Wittgenstein’s method of language analysis.

    The great promise of Deductive Logic is that if the premises are true (using the sign “T”) in an argument, and the inferences are valid (“consistent”), then the conclusion must be true, or “T.” However, once a contradiction is allowed into an argument, that guarantee of certainty is lost. But what is truth? That is another department down the hall called “Philosophy of Language” and Wittgenstein is working on it…something about “picture” theory, and “language games” that theorizes language is like games—which is to say, “patterns of intention,” and meaning is determined in language by use. In fact, we could replace "T" for "1" and "F" for "0".

    Wittgenstein on the Limits of Symbolic Logic

    “4.441 It is clear that to the complex of the signs “F” and “T” no object (or complex of objects) corresponds; any more than to horizontal and vertical lines or to brackets. There are no “logical objects.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein

    ~(∀x)Lx
    “Nothing is a logical object.”


    Philosopher George Pitcher describes Wittgenstein’s conception as the world of meaningful discourse like a city set in the middle of a jungle: the jungle is defined in terms of that which is not the city. The city is well structured, exact and orderly; everything within the city is visible. Tautologies, contradictions, descriptive propositions—all these occupy the world of meaning, although, the first two say nothing. The jungle, on the other hand, is all that cannot be said, the mystical, the metaphysical, religion, ethics, and art have their place outside the city. But again, this is not the end of the matter. Wittgenstein writes—one could say he reveals his attraction for the mystical, “What can be shown cannot be said,”(Tractatus, 4.1212), and “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical”(Tractatus 6.522). What manifests itself? Ethical propositions, theological discourse, and surprising logic are all placed in the same transcendental realm. “Logic is transcendental”(Tractatus, 6.13).

    Logic only deals with abstract relationships. If I say “Everybody is related to somebody” (∀x)(∀y)Rxy, the relation is between (x) and (y) not “x” to “R.”

    Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus, “3.1432 We must not say, “The complex sign ‘aRb’ says ‘a stands in relation R to b’”; but we must say, “That ‘a’ stands in a certain relation to ‘b’ says that aRb”.

    There is no logical object that is “R.” Relationship is “psychic continuity” (Nature ≡ Machine) and not an object. He is warning against the reification of symbols that represent relationships.

    Like Newton, we can only say how a thing is, not what it is. When a paradigmatic system becomes more real than what it interprets, we then distort being through self deception and deny ourselves unfiltered experience.

    Philosopher David Pears wrote that Wittgenstein,

    “...was trying to demonstrate not that logic and mathematics do not rest on a realistic basis, but only that that basis cannot provide any independent support for them...the sources of the necessities of logic and mathematics lie within those areas of discourse in actual linguistic practices, and when those necessities seem to point to some independent backing out side the practices, the pointing is deceptive and the idea that the backing is independent is an illusion” (Ludwig Wittgenstein by David Pears, Penguin,1970, p.145).

    Early Wittgensteinian scholars failed to make some important distinctions of how Wittgenstein used the words, “senseless” and “nonsensical” (Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy, by K.T. Fann, 1969, p. 25). Wittgenstein claims we can only make sense by saying those things that are within the limits of language. Those things said about the limits of language are “senseless” (sinnlos). Those things said about that which is beyond the limits of language are “nonsense” (unsinning). Many of the English translations do not differentiate between “sinnlos” and “unsinning” so that both are translated as “senseless” (sinnlos). Such translations could be one reason Wittgenstein is thought of as anti-metaphysical. Philosophy attempts to say those things that are beyond the limits of language and is nonsense, “Most propositions and questions, are not false, but nonsense (unsinning)”(Tractatus, 4.003). For Wittgenstein contradictions and tautologies are without ”sense,” (sind sinnlos), but not “senseless.” (nicht unsinnig). The symbol for “0” has no “sense,” but is not “senseless” because it is a symbol of Arithmetic (4.4611).

    “5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.”--Wittgenstein




    "Riverside"

    Down by the river by the boats
    Where everybody goes to be alone
    Where you won't see any rising sun
    Down to the river we will run

    When by the water we drink to the dregs
    Look at the stones on the river bed
    I can tell from your eyes
    You've never been by the riverside

    Down by the water the river bed
    Somebody calls you somebody says
    "Swim with the current and float away."
    Down by the river everyday

    Oh my God I see how everything is torn in the river deep
    And I don't know why I go the way
    Down by the riverside

    When that old river runs past your eyes
    To wash off the dirt on the riverside
    Go to the water so very near
    The river will be your eyes and ears
    I walk to the borders on my own
    And fall in the water just like a stone
    Chilled to the marrow in them bones
    Why do I go here all alone

    Down by the riverside

     
    Last edited: May 24, 2019
  9. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    I have about one, or two last posts to go on Schleiermacher and Education. This thread is about 65,000 words so far.

    Here is another important article on public and higher education titled "We can fight the dictatorship of ignorance — and we can win," by Henry Giroux, May 19, 2019.

    I think professor Giroux’s questions about how to resist nihilism and anti-Democratic forces have some good answers. A universal and yet locally adaptable pedagogy (theory and practice of teaching) is available. A meta-teaching curriculum can be formulated that is political, but not partisan; spiritual, but not irrational or dogmatic; and epistemologically critical, but not cynically anti-intellectual.

    Last week a wonderful 18 episode free lecture course appeared in my YouTube video list. The lecture series is given by Professor John Vervaeke from the University of Toronto, Canada titled “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Episode 1. The lecture course is unbelievably good. I am almost finished with the 18 hours of lectures and have learned a lot. I will get back to this later.
     
  10. Dissily Mordentroge

    Dissily Mordentroge Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Of the academy Munro only writes:

    “The most perfect organic whole of knowledge is the Academy, or the unity composed of the teachers and masters in every branch of science. This organization occupies the place in the sphere of knowing that the State occupies in the sphere of doing; it is the highest development or unity of all that comes under the universal symbolizing activity of reason, even as the State is the highest development or unity of all that is included in the universally organizing activity”(Munro, p.244).
    Is ‘Academy’ in this context used as an abstract or as a generalisation about academies as such? What is being claimed with 'the universal symbolizing activity of reason’? From my observation many of today’s academies are the home of universal un-reason, especially in those inflicted with M BA’s as deans.
    In a later post we find 'Giroux’s questions about how to resist nihilism and anti-Democratic forces have some good answers. A universal and yet locally adaptable pedagogy (theory and practice of teaching) is available. A meta-teaching curriculum can be formulated that is political, but not partisan; spiritual, but not irrational or dogmatic; and epistemologically critical, but not cynically anti-intellectual.’
    Spiritual but not irrational? Some may want to claim those two mutually exclusive.
     
  11. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    The "universally symbolizing activity of reason" is the ideal Academy in his time 1799 A.D.. 'Reason' here is a Kantian notion of reason and epistemology.
    Mutually exclusiveness would depend on the meaning of spiritual and reason. See my posts -42, 43, "Adorno’s Critique of Heideggerian Fundamental Ontology."
     
  12. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -63, The Ideology of Individualism
    -64, The Social Construction of Reality
    -65, Primary and Secondary Socialization Paradigms
    -73, 74, Schleiermacher On the Christian Church
    -75, Four Conclusions
    -78, The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education

    -87, 88, The Worth of Critical Education


    The Worth of Critical Education

    “The unexamined life is not worth living.”-Socrates in Plato's Apology (38a5–6)

    “If we are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators and others to develop a language of critique and possibility.”—Henry Giroux in ‘Pedagogical Terrorism and Hope in the age of Fascist Politics’


    Axios,” (ἄξιος) means in ancient Greek, “worth,” as in “weighing as much.” And speaking of worth, I want to add two new premises to the Nature is a Machine argument. 1.) Some machines are superfluous. 2.) Superfluous things are expendable because they are worthless. I will not write the premises in symbolic form.

    In December 16, 1981 a janitor at the University of Portland shot and killed an engineering teacher. There were four more shootings that year at American Universities. In the last 5 months of this year of 2019 there were 15 shooting incidents resulting in four deaths, and 33 injuries. There were 44 gun incidents at schools so far this year alone. Human life does not seem to be worth much. And if humans are machines, they are ultimately expendable. The mechanical paradigm for nature is inherently a nihilistic universe having no intrinsic “worth” including the illusory ethical concepts of the Good, Justice, Democracy, and Human. The mechanical paradigm creates an axiological vacuum in which other ideological paradigms rush in to fill the void. In the case of American education that axiological void has been intentionally filled by fundamentalist market ideology that intensifies the dehumanization of persons and existential meaninglessness. The takeover of public education curriculum is not new in American history. Before the American Revolution public schools taught religion and ethics, but after the Civil War schools taught business ethics. Today’s fundamentalist market paradigm has, in the words of Dr. Henry Giroux, “…defined education in purely instrumental, privatized, and anti-intellectual terms.

    Professor Giroux’s view is becoming more common in American academia. Yale University Historian Dr. Matthew Frye Jacobson, and former president of the American Studies Association, said in a recent interview that students have morphed into consumers, “So instead of having liberal education develop citizens or humanists, it becomes a careerist, consumerist transaction.” Students are no longer citizens, but consumers with a careerist attitude--a strictly instrumentalist natural-scientific reductionist attitude in which the primary modes of being are domination, competitiveness, exploitation, and materialist accumulation. Education and even the students themselves are commodities—like everything else in the market place. In this social reality only “‘consumer sovereignty’ and shareholder value are the measures of what is good.” Dr. Giroux listed the new scale of virtues and values as “the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism; dehumanization; a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity;[15] the suppression of freedom and dissent; a culture of lies; a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language; a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms.

    Atomistic economic individualism replaces the values of communal democracy, empathy, freedom, equality, and knowledge. The school, “place,” is now the market place. The market place draw flies. Everywhere democracy, the community, and the commons are under attack so that every aspect of life is privatized and monetized thereby destroying the very social forms that make a free society possible. Giroux writes, “In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.” Language is a public tool to interpret our private life. A private language is a contradiction in terms. Noam Chomsky notes that we use language ninety percent of the time to subjectively talk to ourselves, and the rest for communication with others. When private legal tyrannies such as the corporate form spread sociological propaganda, they enter our private subjective inner world to influence our thinking and behavior.

    “If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth. Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.”—Herbert Marcuse in ‘One Dimensional Man,’pdf., p.129).

    A degree from the best American Universities can cost more than a million dollars. But I do not mean “best” as in a place to learn, but “the easiest to bribe.” Why not simply buy a degree since it is essentially only a financial investment transaction. The American University system has turned into a vast speculative market for obtaining fake identities—it is what professor Williams Deresiewicz called “credential laundering.”

    “Donald Trump was the dumbest ******n student I ever had.”- Professor Dr. William T. Kelley of marketing for 31 years at Wharton School of Business and Finance, University of Pennsylvania

    Professor Deresiewicz wrote “Excellent Sheep,” as a critique of elite universities and the inflated egos of the wealthy students with their strong sense of “entitlement.” He gives important insights into higher education “privilege laundering” in an interview with Michael Schulson of Salon:

    “But what’s happened in the last 50 years is that the meritocracy has in turn re-created the schools in their own image. They have created a system that took the meritocracy from what it was supposed to be, and made it what I refer to as a “hereditary meritocracy.” If your kid is going to get into one of these schools, with some exceptions, they have to be stuffed full of education resources almost from the moment they’re born, almost from the moment they start school.”

    “… the college admission process is the way that we launder privilege in this country. Instead of saying, “You get to go because you’re born,” which is obviously unfair, we say, “You get to go because you have really great scores and grades and you’ve done a million extracurricular activities.” But the only way to get to that point is if you have rich parents. I mean, again, there are exceptions, but there are not a lot of exceptions.”

    For the less fortunate education is has a predetermined course just like the student’s life is materially, and socially predetermined. Education becomes an endless series of instructions to be followed to avoid penalties without any holistic vision, or purpose except to complete a particular assignment. The teacher is merely a coercive emissary of a future employer who permanently records the student’s performance. Every activity is regimented including sports; swimming time is athletes of wartime when you attempt to drown your classmate. In short, sending your child to a public school in America is not unlike sending your child to a minimum-security prison. The end result is a well-behaved model prisoner with experience that might be useful in the future. The entire educational system is organized meaninglessness culminating in a disenchanted “withering of experience.” It is enough to make you want to put a bullet in one's head. Tillich wrote that when the possibility of self-realization is denied, “Creativity is replaced by subjection to law—a characteristic of man in estrangement”(ST. Vol. II, p. 65). This kind of alienating environment is one of constant danger, demoralization, and depression resulting in absolute total blind rage. With such humiliating loss of human agency, it is no wonder the nihilist picks up a firearm and murders the superfluous—including one’s self. Nihilists expend the expendable. In this way the nihilist has created an identity, an immoral identity, but nonetheless a self-identity with meaning. He has beaten the competition, gained agency, and most importantly he won playing by his own goal-directed narcissistic rules. And power cannot do a damn thing about it. Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood as a young man. The most dangerous people in the world are disillusioned idealist. This is the absurd logic of disenchantment derived from internalizing the Machine-Market paradigm as a life philosophy.
    Continued...
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2019
  13. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -63, The Ideology of Individualism
    -64, The Social Construction of Reality
    -65, Primary and Secondary Socialization Paradigms
    -73, 74, Schleiermacher On the Christian Church
    -75, Four Conclusions
    -78, The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education

    -87, 88, The Worth of Critical Education


    Brother Pence, Saint Ayn Rand, and Christian Fascist Ideology in the Schoolhouse

    “Donald Trump does not need to speak to the ‘Never Trumpers,’ some of my friends — or maybe former friends — who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country,”-- William J. Bennett, Reagan Secretary of Education 1985

    Mike Pence is the Judas of this generation of American Christians. Just as Bennett kicked down the school doors to inject Fascist Neoliberal ideology, the Reverend Billy Graham insinuated his way into the fundamentalists churches bringing with him the pus which he presented as New Testament Christianity. The Rev. Graham publicly advocated the corporatization of Christian Churches on April 29, 1985 telling Pat Robertson’s audience on the 700 Club show that “[T]he time has come when evangelicals are going to have to think about getting organized corporately….” The Prosperity Gospel appeared as corporate Mega Churches like running sores on the body of Christ. Their theology was the same “bait and switch” used in reforming national educational policies: parrot arguments that will appeal to progressives for changing school curriculum, but switch to business rights. Instead of teaching Aristotle, they taught psychopathic Ayn Randian anti-ethics with a strong dose of uncritical naive realism.

    I remember when as a member of a Pentecostal church the 700 Club program began airing on television. Little did I know this seemingly innocent religious program would become a force that Paul Tillich could described as “… demonry—if this word is to have any special content-occurs only in connection with a positive, sustaining, creative-destructive power...This is true also of the last great demonry of the present, nationalism.... National things receive sacral untouchability and ritual dignity. But just there demonization begins” (The Interpretation of History by Paul Tillich, The Demonic).

    The Reagan Administration’s grunting wheezing farting galoot, William Bennett, injected market fundamentalist sociological propaganda into an already nihilistic worldview taught in schools. The Christian fundamentalists whole-heartedly embraced the mechanical paradigm of nature as much as 17th century science. They engage in an particularly embarrassing and stupid apologetic to “prove” a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible—with religious trinkets made in China, a fragment of Noah’s Ark, a piece of ancient cloth, supernatural creationism, and other cheap money scams. Economic fetishism is transubstantiated into idolatrous religious object fetishism. Pence and Bennett advocate a heretical version of Christianity that the Nazis called “Muscular Christianity,” as opposed to “Feminized Christianity” which portrays Jesus as, in their words, “a lady with a beard.” Muscular Christianity is misogynistic making masculinity the paradigm of all virtues and women of all vices. This form of Christian fascism is a reaction against “perceived excesses in social equality and liberty.” No major fundamentalist church leader objected to the fusion of Ayn Randian anti-ethical system of “Wantism,”(“I want X; therefore, X is good) with the Fascist Neoliberal Prosperity Gospel. All the talk about ethics was designed to begin the privatization of public schools for profit that has lasted for 40 years, and we now know some results. Illiteracy is more profitable than costly education since the illiterate are more obedient employees, and uncritical consumers. The commodity paradigm is the true deity of this sickening historical form of Christian fascism: salvation is ultimately derived from high-level consumption. It’s a damn freak show.

    “Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”—Marcuse (ODM, p. 61).

    "My worthy friend, gray are all theories, and green alone Life's golden tree."-- Mephistopheles said in Goether's Faust,

    Critical theory has many names such as negative dialectics, Kantian transcendental philosophy, Marxian critique of political economy and ideology, critical reason, critical sociology, and “critical pedagogy.” The key term is “critique,” as in oppositional thinking, of unveiling, and debunking. Critical theory means “being puzzled by the obvious,” although, I can attest to the fact such an attitude will get you fired from most jobs. Christian theology is partly responsible for unleashing this vexing force upon the world. Before going into that theological history we should distinguish two objects which philosophical critique has been applied:

    A. Critique as Reconstruction (conditions of possible knowledge):
    1. -Understand anonymous systems of rules (Kant, Wittgenstein).
    2. -Explains rule operation on
    objective sentences, generative nature of linguistic rules, action, cognitive insight, and conscious operation of human actors.
    3. – Achieving correct knowledge is the goal (Truth).


    B. Critique as Criticism (system of constraints):
    1. -Liberation from particular, but not anonymous coercive illusions (Hegel, Freud).
    2. -
    Objectivity is questioned as having inbuilt deformity masquerading as reality.
    3. –Reveal false, or distorted consciousness (Emancipation).[1]

    Critique emerged out of the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Humanists and Reformers of all kinds used critique to study the ancient Classics and the Christian Bible. Both Catholics and Protestants applied critical reasoning to settle doctrinal disagreements, but over time this critical tool of reason became a force in itself independent of the churches and even biblical scripture. Truth gradually became defined as “rational thought,” and not what was true by biblical authority:

    “The warring churches now found themselves confronted by a common enemy. A new line of demarcation had opened up between reason and revelation, and the word ‘critique’ acquired polemical overtones, which it was never subsequently to lose. ‘Critique’ came to be seen no longer as simply a symptom of the sharpening opposition between reason and revelation. It was viewed as itself the activity which separate the two sphere. It was the essential activity of reason… neither religion nor the legislature was exempt from its test. The process of critique acquired public force” (Ibid, p.16).

    [1] This summary of critical reason is abstracted from “Introduction of Critical Sociology: Selected Readings,”edited by Paul Connerton, Penguin Books, 1976.

    I want to describe an excellent example of a critical pedagogy that can provide a language of critique and new possibilities that will appeal to both educators and students including the religious and non-religious. Professor John Veraeke of the University Toronto is currently giving a YouTube lecture course entitled “Ep. 1 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Introduction.” Dr. Veraeke is now at lecture episode 20 this Friday. I watched all 19 hours of lectures and learned a great deal so in my next post I want to briefly review his key philosophical concepts and language.


    Leonard Cohen Recites "Listen To The Hummingbird"



    Listen to the hummingbird
    Whose wings you cannot see
    Listen to the hummingbird
    Don’t listen to me.

    Listen to the butterfly
    Whose days but number three
    Listen to the butterfly
    Don’t listen to me.

    Listen to the mind of God
    Which doesn’t need to be
    Listen to the mind of God

    Don’t listen to me.

     
    Last edited: May 31, 2019
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  14. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -63, The Ideology of Individualism
    -64, The Social Construction of Reality
    -65, Primary and Secondary Socialization Paradigms
    -73, 74, Schleiermacher On the Christian Church
    -75, Four Conclusions
    -78, The Axiological Argument for Critical Public Education
    -87, 88, The Worth of Critical Education
    -89, Paradigm Shifting



    Paradigm Shifting


    Of course Dr. Vervaeke’s lectures can stand on their own and do not need my input as the lecture series continues. I do not want to sound pretentious even though it is probably already too late. Also, I do not want to spin the lecture topics either before being viewed by interested parties; although, some interpretation cannot be avoided in reviewing the philosophical language in his lectures. I want to briefly mention some, but not all paradigm shifting concepts that continually reappear through out the lectures.

    Whatever may be “paradigm shifting” is relative to each person in two ways. First, paradigm shifting means that new phenomenon appear that was not noticed beforehand in a dominant paradigm. Alfred Kuhn recounted how seventh and eighteenth French scientists studying electricity adopted the fluid paradigm to understand the flow of electricity through a circuit. The old model for electricity was based on its attractive and repulsive effects of differently charged bodies. This new model of electricity assumed that electricity flowed like water; therefore, it could be stored like water and from this metaphorical presupposition the capacitor (leyden jar) was developed.

    Secondly, paradigm shifting can also mean that old phenomenon previously not understood take on new meaning. The theory of thermodynamics during natural philosopher Joseph Priestley's time postulated a hypothetical substance (pholgiston: Ancient Greek φλογιστόν, phlŏgistón for "burning up") thought to be present in all things and released as flames during the process of combustion. This theory accounted for the phenomenon of mass loss when something such as wood was consumed by fire. However, this explanation could not account for the increase in weight by certain metals after exposure to heat. Only later did this phenomenon have significance for the scientist who rejected the pholgistic theory that Priestley could never abandon.

    Here is a more relevant example of paradigm shifting that result in a new understanding of old phenomenon. The term “psycho-technology” is defined in lecture Ep. 1 as a systemic use of cognitive tools to achieve insight into the self and the world. The use of ritual is a disruptive means to get outside the box, or everyday conceptual framing to alter one’s attention and perspective. Ritual, meditation, dancing, music, and community assisted altered states of consciousness can be used as psycho technologies to enhance cognition. At first glance one is tempted to categorize these customs or rituals as merely “anthropological” attributes or “mores” of ancient people. But that cultural categorization may miss a deeper understanding of consciousness and how meaning is created in human society. And notice that psycho- technology presupposes consciousness can change in order to align itself with being anew. This critical idea of consciousness is going to become even more prominent in later lectures.

    During the decade around 1913 Wittgenstein reviewed Bertrand Russell’s book co-authored with Alfred Whitehead on logic titled Principia Mathematica. With Russell’s approval Wittgenstein was to correct problems with Russellian set theory and work out the rules for categorical quantifying symbols such as the following:

    (∀x)Φx ≡ Everything is
    ~(∀x)Φx ≡ Nothing is
    (∃x)Φx ≡ Something is
    ~(∃x)Φx ≡ Something is not


    Wittgenstein was having great difficulties with Russellian mathematical logic and his critical review seemed to stall completely. Without informing Russell, Wittgenstein decided to be hypnotized to help him develop a system of logic that avoided uncertainties in Russell’s theoretical effort of base mathematics on logic. Can hypnotism be a psycho-technology? While Wittgenstein was hypnotized Dr. Rogers asked questions about logic that Wittgenstein was unable to resolve. Dr. Roger put Wittgenstein to sleep after two attempts, but it took half an hour to wake him. Wittgenstein reported that he felt anesthetized and paralyzed, but could hear Dr. Roger’s questions. Wittgenstein was later able to work out a “theory of symbolism” to avoid the problems of Bertrand Russell’s theory of types. Although some Wittgenstein biographers comment offhandedly that the hypnotism session was not useful without further elaboration. I view this as an example of phenomenon left un-interpreted simply because hypnosis and logic appear to be incompatible concepts. In fact, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) is viewed in the West as a work primarily on Logic and theory of language, but in Austria-Hungarian Viennese intellectual circles the Tractatus was interpreted as a philosophical work on ethics. Some Vienna Circle Logical Positivists actually told students to ignore section seven of the Tractatus all together because of its reference to mysticism. The Viennese would put the Tractatus somewhere in the same category as Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930.

    Is there a real division between Logic and Ethics, or are they different aspects of a deeper understanding of Reason? The youngest of Wittgenstein’s three sisters, Margarete, was brighter than her youngest brother Ludwig who was considered the dullest of the family. Margarete was attuned to Austrian intellectual culture and gave her brother some of Kierkegaard’s writings. For Kierkegaard the essence of Christianity is subjectivity, or as he wrote, “Truth is subjectivity.”

    “The objective accent falls on WHAT is said, the subjective accent on HOW it is said.”—Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1848, Princeton ed., p. 181.

    Truth in ethics, and religion is defined by subjective intention. In one New Testament parable the Widower only gives a mite to the temple, while the rich man gives a greater amount, but it is less of a sacrifice for him, and thus has less spiritual significance. However, in the arena of epistemology Wittgenstein strangely used the same language, “3.221 … A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.” For Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein only in subjectivity is there decisiveness. For objective reflection the truth is an object. For subjective reflection truth is “appropriation,” of “participation in,” and “inwardness”(ibid., 171). Wittgenstein thought Russell and Frege’s focus on logic completely misunderstood the Tractatus and considered withdrawing it from publication. For Wittgenstein he interpreted his own work as about the ethical:

    “My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by my book; … I’ve managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it …. For now I would recommend you to read the preface and the conclusion, because they contain the most direct expression of the point” (ProtoTractatus, p.16).

    Anagoge

    I do not remember ever studying the Greek word, Anagoge, which over time came to mean, " ‘reasoning upwards’ (sursum ductio), when, from the visible, the invisible action is disclosed or revealed.[3]” However, the literal meaning of anagoge (ἀναγωγή) is “lifting up of the soul” or “leading up,” but also “fullness of being.” Anagoga is the root word in “andragogy” referencing the methods for teaching adults, and “pedagogy” references teaching children or the young. “Hegemon” means “leader.” And “anarchy” means “no leader.” So Dr. Henry Giroux’s favorite term “critical pedagogy” is from “anagoge,” or to lift up the soul of the young. Wonderful!

    One thing about studying philosophy; every so often one experiences a paradigm shift and then you must go back and re-see everything all over again.

    This word study is fun and a good way to memorize them so let me find some more.


    “6.44 Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”




    Fiery Heart, Fiery Mind
    Alice Phoebe Lou


    And I've been running away from the wise man in my head
    And he said, go, go, go, go get lost in the wind
    And I've been hearing some whispers on the wind
    And they said, run, run, run, run away for your sins
    But don't leave that fiery mind behind
    Take it along for the ride
    And don't leave that fiery mind behind
    Take it along for the ride

    And there'll be an airplane flying across my soul
    And it will role right on
    I'll have to say fair well so long
    And there'll be a steam train rolling across my heart
    And I will have to depart
    I will have to depart

    But don't leave that fiery heart behind
    Take it along for the ride
    And don't leave that fiery mind behind
    Take it along for the ride
    And I've been running away from the wise man in my head
    And he said, go, go, go, go get lost in the wind


     
  15. Adorno

    Adorno Active Member

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    My apologies, I'm a bit late to this party. I'm not sure what you mean by power to negate objective proof here. As I'm sure you know, empirical observation (I'm assuming you are referring to empirical truth here and not philosophical logic) was not high up on Plato's epistemic confidence list. Now Kyklos is right, Adorno (the historical person) was highly critical of philosophical approaches that conceived of objective Truth (even logic) through pure conceptual grasping (as Plato argues). Concepts and the objects they represent are always historically situated (Adorno refers to this as historical sedimentation), which is to say mediated (even immediacy itself) through their relations with other things (which have their own history). Hence subjectivity is always involved; in other words, this constellation of concepts is itself the historical process of subjective understandings. Thus, knowledge of the object is always ensconced in a larger social totality - a phenomenological life-world. The concern of course includes: 1) that this schemata, by which conceptualized objects are given to us, is socially reproduced through various forms of cultural hegemony (this is much of the concern of Adorno's work on the Culture Industry) and 2) that such conceptualization is open to the charge of being blind to non-identity - that conceptual identity does injury to the object itself by not recognizing what is left out in the conceptualization process (see Negative Dialectics). This of course is not to be unexpected in a phenomenological life-world that is fundamentally damaged by its exceptional proclivities for reification.
     
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  16. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    You are always welcome to the party and just your one paragraph covers a huge amount of philosophy. We have touched on "the suffering of the concept" (historical struggle of a concept). I always liked "reification" better than the term "historical sedimentation" that Adorno uses about five times in Negative Dialectics. Critical Sociologists really, really like the term "historical sedimentation." Also, "non-identity" is another favorite word of Adorno that is very useful.

    Good point about Plato’s hierarchy of knowledge, Adorno.

    For Plato, empirical observation was the lowest of all states of mind of which are two: lowest level of knowledge is Opinion (δόξα) “belief” as in orthodoxy, and higher level of knowledge is (ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē, ) related etymologically to the letters of the “Epistles” for example.

    The lowest from of knowledge is Opinion based on empirical image (εἰκών, icon), and observing biological life ( ζωὴ, 'life' ).

    The higher levels of Knowledge includes mathematics ( μαθηματικά, method) and the highest level of knowledge is of the Forms (ἀρχή, archetype). Only νοητός has intelligibility of the invisible as opposed to the visible knowledge of opinion, and belief.

    Great to hear from you Adorno!
     
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  17. Adorno

    Adorno Active Member

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    Kyklos, I really enjoyed this. Really well done. The concept of critique that you describe here (and much of what animates Giroux's critical pedagogy) is systematically eviscerated in contemporary life. This is particularly true of how educational practices institutionalize authoritarian habits of consciousness. From John Dewey (Democracy and Education) to Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), the idea that education has become the facilitation of anti-democratic values is stunning. Today, at the student level, the emphasis on skill sets, quantification, and instrumental reason help to inculcate Weberian bureaucratic rationality. At the instructor level, the focus placed on mere formality: learning outcomes and quantification - in order to appease administrators whose pedagocial interests are fundamentally defined by business ideology (i.e. the acquisition of economically marketable characteristics). In this sense, education becomes its opposite: miseducation -rather than fostering the development of independent minds that can critically evaluate foundational issues that are essential to living well (existentially, socially, and politically): what does it mean to be human, how ought I to live, what is the nature of a just society, what is the nature of truth, beauty, the good, etc. we are relegated to understanding how to do things instrumentally. In Erich Fromm's terms, this is to confuse intelligence (concerned with means) with reason (concerned with ends). But it is the latter that is the human embodiment of reason. This educational approach infatuated as it is with the quantification - the static, unchanging, abstract becomes the ideal - that which lacks dialectical fluidity or a lived context. It is, to cite Freire (citing Fromm), to love everything that is dead in life; it is the necrophilia of education. But this is not isolated of course to education - rather education is a embodiment of the social totality of which it is part. Philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.

    By the way, I had to laugh at the William Bennett reference that kicks off your post - the never-trumpers "who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country" - This from the author of The Death of Outrage. You can't make this stuff up.

    One more thing: you may find Seyla Benhabib's book Critique, Norm and Utopia to be of some interest in regards to the nature of critique. Her argument holds that understanding the concept of Enlightenment critique entails understanding the shared etymological nature the term has with the ancient Greek term crisis (Κρισις).

    In ancient society crisis refers to dissent and controversy, but also to a decision that is reached – and a judgment that is passed. In this sense then, critique is the subjective evaluation or decision concerning a conflictual and controversial process – a crisis.

    During the Medieval age crisis gets used in terms of illness – the development of a disease in which one reaches a turning point and a decisive decision is reached concerning the healing or worsening of the patient, for example: a critical illness – or critical condition.

    Under the early Enlightenment period: loses it relations to ancient and medieval society This then moves between subjective assessment and objective process and takes on the meaning of the practice of judgment - it evaluates concepts of authenticity, truth, validity, beauty,etc. Hence, the critic becomes the good judge.

    Moving from pre-revolutionary French Enlightenment through the German (and Post German) Enlightenment: this idea is freed from political censure and loses it religious ties to the Church. It starts by distancing itself from the state (to be free) but then reasserts its ancient etymology and reflects on the nature of the state. Here the crisis of the state and political authority becomes visible: the exercise of rational evaluation which reveals the crisis of the state objectively. Hence one moves from Kant (freedom in consciousness, which is the separation of the subjective consciousness from the objective world) to Marx (the exposing of the contradictory and crisis ridden nature of the social totality.

    It's a phenomenal book. I highly recommend it.
     
  18. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    Thank you Adorno for your compliment and spending your valuable time to read it! Your writing is so polished! I was actually going to read a book today you suggested about a year ago titled, "After Virtue" by Alasdair MacIntyre. I am doing a word study on "Telos" and think it has gotten a bad name due to Hegel's philosophy of history being interpreted as deterministic. The criticism of telos carries over to Marx mostly as Cold War straw man arguments against so called Marxist "dialectical materialism"--a term Marx never used. Yet, Alasdair argues telos is essential for ethics and refers to Aristotle use of the concept.

    Now that is interesting, Seyla Benhabib's book Critique, Norm and Utopia, and the ancient Greek term crisis (Κρισις). I never looked up the etymology of critique. I am almost always surprised at what I find.

    William Bennett, what a blowhard! This is how Neoliberal Fascism crept into American schools. Bennett is not unlike Jordan Peterson, the crypto-fascist apologist that is being bankrolled by some unknown source to saturate Youtube with right-wing extremism, fascism, Klu Klux Klan bigotry, misogyny, and agitation propaganda. He is the Alex Jones of Canada, but Peterson is not a Nazi...just that Nazis really like him.

    A lot of planning goes into Peterson fake debates. This is a full Psy Ops operations against the Canadian people. I suspect his popularity is pure hyperbole hyped by bots. His tactics are 1. After his introduction, he argues a tautology, or truism so the target audience thinks they agree with him on something. 2. Stick or shadow the opposition by seemingly to agree on some, or all points. 3. Throw out "acid memes" to disrupt the channels of communication, "Your name is Bill, not Sue!" 4. Throw out an Enthymeme which is Greek for ἐνθύμημα, enthumēma meaning "a thought" and is a merely a rhetorical syllogism. This is an argument in which there are missing premises. Take for example this argument: Man asks doorman, "Can I enter the party?" The doorman says, "No!' The man asks why? And the doorman responds "We don't let idiots in." Now there is a missing premise here that is unstated. Or take another example, "Women are distributors, and men are producers. If you let women in power they only know how to distribute...." The missing premise that "women are only distributors and not good producers will cause scarcity " is unstated at the venue, but other third parties later provide the fuller interpretation. All of these tactics are a "light touch" to form a base audience for more extremist memes later. 5. He just throws out unknowable facts, false information, straw-man arguments, and many disguised truisms, "celebrate success," "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water," "It is better to live truthfully rather than in deceit," and psycho-babble. Peterson really needs to work on his existential angst routine and not sound like a bad soap opera actor.
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2019
  19. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -94, The Telos of Absolute Idealism, Pt. 1

    The Telos of Absolute Idealism

    “…in the Absolute, all is one,”—Friedrich Schelling

    “…in the Absolute, all cows are black…”—Hegel’s critique of Schelling

    The Greek concept of Telos (τέλος) is introduced in episode 2 of Dr. Vervaeke’s lecture series on cognition along with the concept of “patterns” in meaning, meaning making, and cognition. His lectures have greatly enhanced my understanding of the theologian Wilhelm Hegel’s absolute idealism and appreciation of this discipline known as cognitive science. In a way, this topic leads back to theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) a contemporary of Hegel (1770-1831) who was also a theologian. Telos means “fulfillment,” “end,” “result” or even can mean a charged “tax,” or “toll.” A person on a journey, or climbing to a mountaintop has a telos, goal, or purpose. Historical time can be viewed as cyclical, or linear. Time thought to be circular is a closed system. The Ancient Greeks viewed historical time as circular with persons having predetermined fates. A linear upward climb of time to a goal or completion is teleological and open ended to multiple possibilities. For the Ancient Greeks the ancient past is perfect and as time moves into the future the cosmos becomes imperfect. On the other hand, a progressive telos of history is thought to be moving upward and onward to reach a higher level of actualized being (Aristotle). But exactly what is history moving toward?

    “For Hegel, the inner movement of reality is the process of God thinking as manifested in the evolution of the universe of nature and thought; that is, Hegel argued that, when fully and properly understood, reality is being thought by God as manifested in man's comprehension of this process in and through philosophy”(Wiki: Hegel).

    You should not have skipped that philosophy course in college! The theological view of Hegelian absolute idealism is a little more intelligible only because we are familiar with Christian theism so this interpretation is actually very helpful in understanding what Hegel means by reality, mind, phenomenon, historical process, and knowledge. The German word for mind, “Geist” is also the same word as for “spirit.” Mind in this context has the meaning of “distinct from the body.” Spirit can mean “spirit of the times,” as in Zeitgeist, or spirit can mean “The Holy Spirit” as in “der Heilige Geist.” Absolute knowledge is a key concept for Hegel. Absolute knowledge does not mean knowing everything which is clearly humanly impossible, but rather knowledge of reality, as what is, and not as the world appears. Hegel shows in his work “Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807) (referred to as PS) how this knowledge is possible and it is not merely a matter of collecting more empirical data, which is the job of science. Hegel’s scientific philosophy is a history of cognition on the path of experience.

    Hegel viewed his task as documenting the historical journey of human thought--of mind, of consciousness in the highest abstract sense--educating itself as it struggles with material existence and itself. Consciousness changes into different shapes or forms, “as series of configurations,” as it reaches a higher understanding of itself on the torturous historical road of experience—to Calvary. Adorno referred to this historical process as the “suffering of the concept.” Hegel’s abstract idealism is integrated with world history for this is how mind becomes appearance, a phenomenon. Thought comes to know itself as self-consciousness and understands that reality is ultimately mind creating a purposive collective social community with coercive force that can build or destroy. Absolute knowledge is reached when thought realizes through this experience of consciousness that it seeks to know itself. Self-consciousness is consciousness reflecting on itself. History is the teleological manifestation of a pattern, the incarnation, and appearance (phenomenon) of mind in human historical experience.

    The force that moves history forward is the logical impulse of mind itself to resolve all division, disunity, and contradiction in thought and existence. In Hegelian philosophy the category of “Contradiction” is not just a rule of formal logic (p and ~p) rather “contradiction” mirrors a part of the ontological structure of Being—not merely a methodological tool to investigate the world. Contradictions can be forensically, or critically investigated to determine what ideas brought together opposing theses. We see this all the time in Marx’s critique of political economy.

    “But the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is unhalting….” (Phenomenology of Spirit, Intro., para. 80).

    Hegel is an absolute idealist, not a relative idealist that believes there are many interpretations of many different realities and like a solipsist thinks only their own experiences and thoughts are real with no objective reality by which to judge any one worldview over another. Absolute idealists believe in one reality because there is only one mind. The Absolute is an indefinite One: not a definite substance, or a cow--only immaterial mind.

    “Dealing with something from the perspective of the Absolute consist merely in declaring that …as something definite, yet in the Absolute, A=A, there is nothing of the kind, for all is one…[In this incorrect view of the Absolute]… all cows are black.” —Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s concept of the Absolute, “The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)” English trans. by J. Baillie, London,1909, Preface, paragraph 16.

    Reducing the Absolute (Reality) to a substance, or thing is a common tendency in Western thought. Ambiguously, Hegel has an Eastern concept of the Absolute. However, we find that for Hegel human “history is nothing but the progress of consciousness of freedom”(Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Singer, 1983, Oxford Univ. Press, p. 33). Once again, mind has stepped into the Agora, ἀγορά (or “marketplace,” related to the word “agriculture”) just as Socrates asked in the agora, “What is virtue?” The cynical and Cynic philosopher Diogenes searched for an honest man in the marketplace-it’s funny when you really think about it. And again the Christian monk Martin Luther “protested” (being a “protest-tant)” in the agora against the lifeless corpse of an authoritarian Christianity by declaring that human beings have their own spiritual nature and do not need permission to interpret the Scriptures from any external authority!

    In Hegel’s philosophical work Philosophy of History (1837) freedom does not mean to do as one wishes (Ethical Wantism), but having a free mind since we are not free if others coerce us by physical force or lies. We are not free when controlled by personal desire instead of Reason (Vernunft). Freedom only comes from free rational choice. Reason is universal and reality is the self-manifestation of the Logos. Hegel rejects the Kantian block and believes the noumenal world, or the thing-in-itself, is not beyond thought but can be known. Hegel said of this empirical manifestation “the rational is real, and the real is rational.” Logos is a characteristic of mind so that it is also universal. All human beings are linked by universal Reason. The greatest obstacle to a free society is that individual persons do not know they are a part of this universal mind. Consciousness through experience begins to slowly understand itself as both universal and rational. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel travels down the road to Absolute knowledge describing how consciousness finally comprehends the close connection between freedom and knowledge. “Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward” (PS, para. 11). Mind is necessarily communal in which persons can purposively participate in a rationally organized way:

    “…Hegel insists that knowledge is only knowledge if it can be communicated…The necessity of language rules out the idea of a entirely independent consciousness. Consciousness must interact with other consciousness if it is to develop self-consciousness. In the end, mind can only find freedom and self-understanding in a rationally organized community. So minds are not separate atoms, linked together by the accidents of associations. Individual minds exist together, or they do not exist at all” (Singer, p. 96).

    Next: Part II : The History of Consciousness
     
  20. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -94, 95, The Telos of Absolute Idealism, Pt. 1 - 2


    Part II : The History of Consciousness
    In “Phenomenology of Spirit” the Preface is titled, “On Scientific Cognition” so Hegel understood his historical review of Western philosophy as showing the different shapes of mind: “The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science” (PS, para. 78 ). Science during Hegel’s time meant “systematic inquiry.” Hegel examines each stage of mind in detail like a jeweler studying every facet of a finely cut diamond. It is this topic that Hegel mostly earns the reputation of an obscure writer; however, his train of thought can still be followed. Much of what Hegel’s critics call incomprehensible is Christian theology. This phenomenological history is structured to show the triadic stages of consciousness: Consciousness (Bewusstsein), Self-Consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein), and Reason (Vernunft).

    Sense-certainty

    The first undeveloped form of consciousness appears as the problem of knowledge and certainty. Hegel described this consciousness in the first part of Phenomenology of Spirit as Sense-certainty that only relies on sense perception of a particular object of knowledge. Sense certainty is the uncritical natural naïve attitude toward objects, but views itself as having genuine practical knowledge of the world. Sense-certainty only receives sense data at the here and now of this or that.” This type of knowledge really isn’t knowledge at all for it does not categorize the particular, but only records sense perception in the now. This is the most primitive empiricism that cannot coherently state any truth about experience since it lacks universal concepts to classify objects in some order. Knowledge cannot only be of the particular sense experience for they need concepts. However, the very general terms of language “here,” “now,” “that” themselves are universal concepts that point the way to the next higher stage of consciousness.


    Perception and Understanding

    Perception and Understanding (Verstand) are the next forms of consciousness to go beyond the particulars to the universals of language so that unity and coherence is given to the stream of raw sense data received in sense experience. A model of perceptual experience must be created to organize sense perception. And yet perception still lacks the power to understand reality so consciousness constructs its own laws of physics (Gravity, Electromagnetism, Force) to achieve order and unity of experience. Consciousness as understanding, or intelligibility mistakes these paradigmatic constructs as real objects (reification) so that consciousness is now really trying to understand itself. Consciousness in trying to understand itself is now latent self-consciousness.


    Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and Unhappy Consciousness

    In discussing how latent self-consciousness becomes self-consciousness, Hegel switches away from epistemology to Life as conflict. Living self-consciousness desires (Begierde) to establish its own identity as a person, so self-consciousness must have an opposing object to differentiate itself, or a non-self. Consciousness’ sense of selfhood needs another self to create its identity-in-difference. Self-consciousness needs an external object to define itself, yet it views all externality as a threat. To achieve recognition self-consciousness needs another object to possess, but when the object is made its own the object’s externality is negated so self-consciousness is alone once again. Self-consciousness must have another object without destroying its otherness so it seeks to possess another person--another self-consciousness, or we-consciousness. This struggle with another consciousness forms a Master/Slave relationship in which one seeks to destroy the other. However, in this power struggle the Master realizes he still needs the other self-consciousness and spares the other to spare his own self. This historical situation causes a variety of internal divisions in consciousness that reappears in other stages of cognition. The master only perceives himself as a true person. The slave (Servile Consciousness) projects his selfhood onto the master, but while in this dialectical relationship the slave transforms material existence by his labor opening the way to the next emerging stage of higher self-consciousness.

    “To be free is not to be either master or slave, not to discover oneself in this or that situation in the midst of life: it is to behave as a thinking being in all circumstances.”-Jean Hyppolite (“Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Northwestern University, 1974, p.180).

    Consciousness takes the form of Stoicism that teaches both master and slave to withdraw from the world into consciousness where “I = I” in an escape into a false liberty existing only in abstract thought. Hegel writes of Stoicism, “The essence of consciousness is to be free, on the throne or in chains….” Stoicism is not just a single isolated philosophy for the citizens of the Roman Empire, but a universal philosophy that every self-consciousness goes through in a teleological development of mind. Since the differences between life and the self remain unchanged, Stoic withdrawing into subjective interiority disconnects the person from the external world making it impossible to actualize itself into a stable human being.

    Skepticism is the next stage of consciousness as a self-contradictory philosophical attitude toward life; however, this is not the skepticism of Hume. Historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston said of this transition from Stoicism to Skepticism,“…this negative attitude towards the concrete and external passes easily into the Skeptical consciousness for which the self alone abides while all else is subject to doubt and negation” A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy, Fichte to Hegel, Vol. 7, Part I, Doubleday, 1965, p. 223).

    The unhappy consciousness is the “alienated soul” reflecting the division of existence into materiality and transcendent spirituality. This internal disunion is reflected in consciousness as physical desire (flesh) working against spiritual fidelity (faith). Hegel viewed this form of Christianity as consciousness projecting onto a transcendental deity all human qualities of personhood missing in the finite material world of suffering. The unhappy consciousness is aware this internal split that appears similar to the master/slave struggle, but now disunity is between man and G-d. “…the self is conscious of the gulf between a changing, inconsistent, fickle self and a changeless, ideal self…this ideal self can be projected into an other-worldly sphere and identified with absolute perfection, God considered as existing apart from the world and the finite self. 21 The human consciousness is divided, self-alienated, ‘unhappy’.” (Ibid., p. 223). Again, this cleft consciousness is not the living spirit of a unified life. For Hegel, Christianity is just one modality of the unhappy consciousness inherited from Judaism.

    From this point in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel continues on to the telos of Absolute knowledge, Reason, and Freedom.

    Of course Kierkegaard would disagree with all of this Hegelian systematization. As much as he railed against Hegel's dialectical system, Kierkegaard incorporates dialectical "contradiction" in his description of the stages of human existence, but going in the opposite direction! In contradiction to Hegel, Kierkegaard wrote “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”(1846) as an anti-Hegelian dialectic which moves not toward universal world-history, but the subjective individual existent; not to Absolute knowledge, but to uncertainty and faith; not theoretical integration, but fragmentary disintegration of truth. Human spirituality cannot just be another object of science. Human existence is "Unconcluding," or dynamically ongoing and fragmentary. Human existence can only be a "Postscript," or an unsystematic remainder of any comprehensive philosophical system.

    That was grueling. I need Space Lady...



    Synthesize Me

    Your eyes are set on stun
    You are hotter than the sun
    I love to see you shine
    Because you really blow my mind

    Your heart beats like a drum
    It hammers when you're gone
    The terms with you and me are up, set us free

    Synthesize Me
    Hypnotize Me
    Humanize Me
    Energize Me

    Your eyes are set on stun
    You are hotter than the sun
    I love to see you shine
    Because you really blow my mind

    Your heart beats like a drum
    It hammers when you're gone
    The terms with you and me are up, set us free

    Synthesize Me
    Hypnotize Me
    Humanize Me
    Energize Me

    I've seen the rings of Saturn
    And the craters on the Moon
    Oceans of Venus in the middle of June
    Mirrors of Mercury and Mars' electric skies
    Pearls of Neptune in Jupiter's eyes

    I heard the old man who plays the lake
    Amazing things will make you want to shake
    A strange planet a zillion light years away
    Through a black hole across the milky way

    Synthesize Me
    Hypnotize Me
    Humanize Me
    Energize Me

    Don't patronize me
    Don't glamorize me
    Don't paralyze me
    You can't surprise me

    Harmonize me
    Mesmerize me
    Solarize me
    Synchronise me
    Synthesize me




     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2019
  21. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -94, 95, The Telos of Absolute Idealism, Pt. 1 – 2
    -96, 97, Christian Socialism, Pt. 1 – 2



    Christian Socialism


    “Not he who rejects the gods of the crowd is impious, but he who embraces the crowd’s opinion of the gods.” (From Epicurcus’s letter (341–270 BC) to Menokeus on the tenth book of Diogenses Laertitus)


    “…the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”—Marx (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844)​


    Dr. Vervaeke presented a great summary of Hegelian Absolute Idealism within one hour (Ep. 24 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Hegel). A course on this topic in the United States would cost a fortune, but is given freely by the good professor Dr. Vervaeke. What first attracted me to his lectures was the constant focus on consciousness and an insightful review of its evolution in the history of philosophy. This theme seemed very familiar, but it was only when studying the word “Telos” that I consciously realized the similarity with Hegel’s famous work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, that essentially has the same angle of approach: review theories of cognition through history while searching for “patterns of intelligibility,” another fantastically useful term.

    In a second video, A Metaphysical Dialogue with John Vervaeke Jun 23, 2019, he goes into even greater detail by introducing two new important terms of which I must have been asleep in class when it was taught in college: emergence ontology, and emanationist ontology. Clearly, Marx viewed Hegelian Absolute Idealism as emanationist since it has a strong Neo-Platonic notion of the transcendent ideal forms that objectively exists and all of being is derived. And Marx would view a certain kind of materialist philosophy as emergent since material being interacts with itself to build complex emergent properties. A single cell cannot read, but billions of organized specialized cells can read, write, and speak. I would argue, however, that both Hegelian idealism and Marxian historical materialism (Marx never used the term “dialectical materialism”) synthesizes emergence and emanationism cosmologies.

    “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth [Hegel], here we ascend from earth to heaven.”Karl Marx in The German Ideology (1845)

    Absolute Idealism developed just as Hegel predicted; his idealist system presented a thesis, materialism is the antithesis, and Marx provided a synthesis. Hegel begins with mind in his ontology, and Marx begins with mind in existence so that initially Hegel descends, and Marx ascends. What is often overlooked and misrepresented by Cold War propaganda is both Marxian and Hegelian ontologies are dynamic feedback loops. The Hegelian road to experience is one in which consciousness evolves to self-consciousness and then to Reason. This process involves learning from experience, changing existence, and advancing from mere Perception (Empiricism), to Understanding (Kantian Transcendental Idealism). In Marx’s case, his starting-point is consciousness in existence, but material existence is dynamic, alive, and evolving—this is not the dead matter of crude materialism that is automatically used as a straw man argument against Marx (Not Copyrighted Material):

    “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology ,1845, Part I: Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook).

    Remember that Hegelianism was the dominant philosophy of the time so Marx emphasized material existence. Whenever Marx or Engels are asked if existence is the determining factor of life, they would argue on the side of consciousness; on the other hand, asked if consciousness in the determining factor of life, they would argue on the side of material existence. This historical context is never mentioned whenever Marxist historical materialism is discussed by persons that never studied Marx.

    Friedrich Schelling took over the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin after Hegel’s death in 1831. Schelling was a school roommate of Hegel and was deeply personally offended by his critical comment that “in the absolute all cows are black.” Schelling believed that Hegel’s system did not give actual existence it proper ontological place. Within one year of taking the Chair, Schelling began his lectures on “positive philosophy.” Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Engels along with anarchist Bakunin attended Schelling’s lecture! Interestingly, both Schelling and Hegel were friends with Goethe. Excepting Bukunin, all of the philosophers mentioned borrowed from Schelling’s philosophy including Fichte whom he accused of plagiarism. Also, Heidegger’s Dasein analytic in Being and Time was inspired by Schelling. Dasein is a Romantic!

    During times of political upheaval in history the sophists appear to share their “knowledge,” but they really want only to distract, mislead, and coerce. It was during a time of great political upheaval that Christianity arose as a world religion. During religious upheaval the Book of Revelations is used to frighten the population, “All the apocalypses attribute to themselves the right to deceive their readers”(On the History of Early Christianity, 1894 (HEC). Engels wrote,

    “We shall find that the type of ideologists at the time [Early Christian sectarianism] corresponded to this state of affairs. The philosophers were either mere money-earning schoolmasters or buffoons in the pay of wealthy revellers.”--Friedrich Engels in Bruno Bauer And Early Christianity, 1882.

    I will let you figure out who is who.

    Also, Engels noted, “It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of “free love” comes into the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman” (Engels in “The Book of Revelations,” 1883, referred as BOR).
     
  22. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    96, 97, Christian Socialism, Pt. 1 – 2


    “Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”-- Communist Manifesto (1848 )


    The same can be said of Christian Socialism that is often discussed out of its historical context. Engels helped draft the Communist Manifesto that was going to be entitled, “The Socialist Manifesto,” but another group already took the name “Socialist”—no Hegelian metaphysical debate decided the manifesto’s title. The Marxists did not care for the socialists anyway since all they wanted was a better dogcatcher and not really challenge the power of capital. Marx viewed religion as a fetish, but Engels had a deeper understanding of organized religion than the Manifesto would imply. Engels was raised in a very religious home and had surprisingly indebt knowledge of biblical criticism of his era. Toward the end of his life, Engels viewed Christianity as a proletarian movement against the Rome Empire.

    “And this is correct. Christianity got hold of the masses, exactly as modern socialism does, under the shape of a variety of sects, and still more of conflicting individual views clearer, some more confused, these latter the great majority — but all opposed to the ruling system, to “the powers that be.”—Engels in BOR.

    Christian theologians Martin Luther, Georg Hegel, and Soren Kierkegaard were much harsher critics of Christianity than Marx, or Engels. Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit “ inspired Ludwig Feuerbach to write The Essence of Christianity, 1841, in which Feuerbach agreed with Hegel that all theology is anthropology, “Thus God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man's inward nature.[1] “ Engels viewed Christianity as emerging out of a “Darwinistic struggle for ideological existence.”(Engels in “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” 1882, referred to as BEC). During this time a plethora of new religions sprang up within the Roman Empire causing a wave of religious debate and buffoonery just mentioned. Engels agreed with Biblical scholar Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) that Christianity was influenced by Ancient Greek thought more than Judaism arguing that the philosopher Philo actually formulated Christianity with aspects of Stoicism (Seneca) injected into its theology. Engels further wrote,

    “Christianity, like every great revolutionary movement, was made by the masses. It arose in Palestine, in a manner utterly unknown to us, at a time when new sects, new religions, new prophets arose by the hundred. It is, in fact, a mere average, formed spontaneously out of the mutual friction of the more progressive of such sects, and afterwards formed into a doctrine by the addition of theorems of the Alexiandrian Jew, Philo, and later on of strong stoic infiltrations. In fact, if we may call Philo the doctrinal father of Christianity, Seneca was her uncle”(BOR).

    Engels understood Christianity as essentially a subversive force against Roman tyranny:

    “It is now, almost to the year, sixteen centuries since a dangerous party of overthrow was likewise active in the Roman empire. It undermined religion and all the foundations of the state; it flatly denied that Caesar’s will was the supreme law; it was without a fatherland, was international; it spread over the whole empire, from Gaul to Asia, and beyond the frontiers of the empire. It had long carried on seditious activities underground in secret; for a considerable time, however, it had felt strong enough to come out into the open. This party of overthrow … was known by the name of Christians [10] (see “Engels, ‘Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France).(Not Copyrighted Material)

    Christianity was in opposition to the Roman Empire, but the Empire’s eventual response was to absorb Christianity as the official state religion and make Christians subject by law to Roman military inscription. This synthesis of religion and state is known as Constantinism and is when first century Christianity became the bureaucratic Christendom Kierkegaard protested against (Not Copyrighted Material):

    “A religion that brought the Roman world empire into subjection, and dominated by far the larger part of civilized humanity for 1,800 years, cannot be disposed of merely by declaring it to be nonsense gleaned together by frauds. One cannot dispose of it before one succeeds in explaining its origin and its development from the historical conditions under which it arose and reached its dominating position. This applies to Christianity. The question to be solved, then, is how it came about that the popular masses in the Roman Empire so far preferred this nonsense — which was preached, into the bargain, by slaves and oppressed — to all other religions, that the ambitious Constantine finally saw in the adoption of this religion of nonsense the best means of exalting himself to the position of autocrat of the Roman world”(BEC).

    Engels argues with Bauer that Christianity arose among the slaves, which included nearly everyone, “It was in the midst of this general economic, political, intellectual, and moral decadence that Christianity appeared. It entered into a resolute antithesis to all previous religions”(BEC). “Such was the material and moral situation. The present was unbearable, the future still more menacing, if possible. There was no way out. Only despair or refuge in the commonest sensuous pleasure, for those who could afford it at least, and they were a tiny minority. Otherwise, nothing but surrender to the inevitable”(BEC). In search of material and spiritual salvation Stoicism was an inadequate substitute for religion and parasitic Stoic disciple conduct “discredited its doctrines.”

    Christianity became a universal religion from the doctrines of fallen humankind and individual persons feeling responsibility for the corruption they witnessed and lived. The Christian doctrine of atonement offered salvation which many other religions understood and welcomed. The slave Christians pointed the accusing finger at themselves for the corruption and sought spiritual redemption (Not Copyrighted Material):

    “Christianity struck a chord that was bound to echo in countless hearts. To all complaints about the wickedness of the times and the general material and moral distress, Christian consciousness of sin answered: It is so and it cannot be otherwise; thou art in blame, ye are all to blame for the corruption of the world, thine and your own internal corruption! … The admission of each one's share in the responsibility for the general unhappiness was irrefutable and was made the precondition for the spiritual salvation which Christianity at the same time announced. And this spiritual salvation was so instituted that it could be easily understood by members of every old religious community. … Christianity, therefore, clearly expressed the universal feeling that men themselves are guilty of the general corruption as the consciousness of sin of each one; at the same time, it provided, in the death-sacrifice of his judge, a form of the universally longed-for internal salvation from the corrupt world, the consolation of consciousness; it thus again proved its capacity to become a world religion and, indeed, a religion which suited the world as it then was” (BEC).


    Berlin Blues


    It Ruffled up my feathers and it barked right up my tree
    When Suddenly it seemed all the fingers were pointing on up at me
    And the footsteps in the sand
    And we are were all getting
    Washed up by the sea
    To leave me in stitches

    Bursting at the seams
    Bursting at the seams

    When the sun came out to greet me
    I only saw the wolves from my dreams
    This is my Berlin blues song
    Sometimes life can get a little wrong
    But it won't be long
    Cuz it just makes me strong

    And there is a place where we one day
    Would delve where there no more walking on eggshells
    Where ideas are for free
    OH! It's the place to be
    A great mind's no longer the minority

    I'll see you there with your hands in the air
    Where the canvas is bare
    And there's no more despair
    And your third eye would stare
    Nothing can compare
    not want care
    and I'll see you there

    I'll see you there
    I'll see you there

    This is my Berlin blues song
    Sometimes life can get a little wrong
    But it won't be long
    Cuz it just makes me strong
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2019
  23. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    John Vervaeke has given another very interesting lecture on the meaning crisis. His last lecture on July 12, 2019 was on Cognitive Science Ep. 26. His thoughts on the difference on philosophy and science were particularly good.

    He sometimes follows up a Meaning Crisis lecture with side discussions that applies cognitive science to a critique of culture or some other meme. Dr. Vervaeke just posted a YouTube discussion on the symbol in popular culture of the Zombie in “First Discussion: Symbols and Zombies” with a very interesting author Christopher Mastropietro that has a detailed analysis of this phenomenon of the Zombie meme in science fiction.

    Do not underestimate the power and importance of this type of critique of popular cultural symbols such as Zombies, Replicants, or other science fiction themes. In 1912 at Freiburg the journal “ Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research” was founded by Edmond Husserl with his student disciples Moritz Geiger, Alexander Pfänder, and Adolf Reinach. They wrote phenomenological critiques of music, books, plays, and popular media and became to be known as the Munich Circle of phenomenologists out of which the phenomenological movement emerged as a school of thought proper.

    Both Chris and John review theologian Paul Tillich’s understanding of the functions of signs and symbols which I found to be difficult to understand when first studying Tillich’s Systematic Theology because I didn’t have a good grasp on participatory knowing, and had partial understanding of other complex symbiotic theories. The professors’ lecture wiped the slate clean and present a clear start on the meaning of signs and symbols.
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2019
  24. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    "Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory." --Herbert Marcuse, "One Dimensional Man," pdf., p. 101.

    If you have the time and interest there is a new essay written by Dr. Giroux titled, "History Holds the Antidote to Trump’s Fascist Politics." Giroux's essay is Hegelian in length, but unlike Hegel clearly written and touches on almost every challenge in facing the rise of Neoliberal fascism today. Adorno referred to the historical research as the "suffering of the concept" since struggle is a necessary condition for political change.

    Dr. Giroux wrote in the essay, “Political education also encourages students to think and act critically in order to struggle for those political and economic conditions that make a democracy possible.”

    The struggle for a normal working day was not unlike the struggle for labor rights today. Capital and their “flesh agents” used all the parliamentary tricks of English law in the 1830s that are used today. For example, the workers were able to pass laws to reduce the workday, but they were in the beginning hollow victories. Labor struggle sixty years to get English Factory Laws passed for the health and safety of workers.

    Marx writes of the struggle for a 12 hour workday in “Capital Vol. 1” noting as late as 1860 so much law was written to sabotage workday length regulations that a judge had to define what “day” and “night” meant in the courtroom saying “Parliament passed 5 labour Laws between 1802 and 1833, but was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their carrying out, for the requisite officials, &c….They remained a dead letter. ―The fact is, that prior to the Act of 1833, young persons and children were worked all night, all day, or both ad libitum.[“at one’s pleasure” ]…A normal working day for modern industry only dates from the Factory Act of 1833”(Capital Vol. I, pdf., p. 182).

    Because the factory owners were constantly creating loopholes in labor laws, and redefining what a workday is, or if a 8 year old is an adult, or create split shifts to cause children to work more than 12 hours, “they created a special system in order to prevent the Factory Acts from having a consequence so outrageous”. Remember, if a man was hired by a factory, the entire family including children were expected to work without a wage:
    Not Copyrighted Material

    However, the factory owners created a “system of relays” to move children around to different locations making it impossible for factory inspectors to enforce child labor laws. Children were routinely worked to death.
    Not Copyrighted Material

    So the English factory workers were in a constant struggle to win legal limits on the workday in the face of corrupt judges, and powerful manufacturers. Factory owners countered the factory laws by passing their own weak laws and even got to workers to vote against there own interests in bait-and-switch schemes just like today’s political struggle for economic justice. The Factory Act of 1844 put under protection a new category of workers--women over 18. They were placed on the same footing as the young persons, work time limited to twelve hours, and night-labor forbidden. The manufacturers struck back “At their instigation the House of Commons reduced the minimum age for exploitable children from 9 to 8, in order to assure that additional supply of factory children which is due to capitalists, according to divine and human law”(Ibid., p. 184).

    The manufacturers would force workers who were pushed into debt by arbitrary wage reductions to petition against the very factory laws that protected them:
    Not Copyrighted Material
    Marx goes on documenting the long struggle for a limited work day for some seventy pages (Chapter 10), but concludes with this summary that no gains for the working-class will not be achieved without protracted historical struggle. This is analogous to Hegel’s thesis in The Phenomenology of Spirit in which consciousness must travel the road of historical experience to absolute knowledge (to know reality opposed to mere appearance):
    Not Copyrighted Material [My bold for emphasis]
     
    Last edited: Jul 18, 2019
  25. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    -89, Paradigm Shifting
    -94, 95, The Telos of Absolute Idealism, Pt. 1 – 2
    96, 97, Christian Socialism, Pt. 1 – 2
    100, Tillich on Being, Theos, Idolatry, Pt. 1



    Paul Tillich on Being (ὄντα), Theos (θεός), and Idolatry (εἶδος)


    “It is a dreadful saying that the gods blind those whom they want to ruin…But who are these gods? They are the evil instincts that are in every nation with whose help the Nazis came to power…God opens the eyes of those whom he wants to save, however terrible this awakening may be.”-- “Against The Third Reich,” Paul Tillich’s Wartime Addresses to Nazi Germany 1942 to D-Day 1944 (pdf.) p.149, passim.

    About old Symbols…

    There was once a Japanese woman that gave thankful prayer everyday to the tiny wooden Shinto shrine above her entrance door. Knowing little about the Shinto religion, she ritually claps her hands together and bows her head in acknowledgement of the infinite, to the power of being, and then offers a finite grain of rice as a symbolic gesture of this mediated recognition of the infinite, of the infinite in the finite.

    In the process of moving to a bigger house she packed away the shrine that was absentmindedly never unpacked until many decades later when it was accidentally discovered. Symbols die. We must search for and retrieve those dormant Christian symbols in its vast reservoir of multi-dimensional mythic meanings collected over the centuries within its orthodoxy. But the task cannot be one of simply re-presenting symbols that have lost the depth of reason, that has lost the power of logos, and are now impotent signs. For Tillich a symbol points to something beyond itself. The historical experience of Christian theology encoded within its orthodoxy must be re-interpreted using the conceptual tools of today to retrieve their authentic Christian Pattern so as to make them relevant to life in modern advanced industrial society.

    I forgot to mention another philosopher, Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who also borrowed heavily from Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). Just like Wittgenstein, Schelling is a good philosopher to “borrow” from because his thought is both systematic in structure yet open-ended. It seemed that everybody took inspiration from Schelling, but each time the system changed hands it was improved until it was a finely tuned machine—maybe too finely tuned. Christian Socialist Paul Tillich was the first non-Jewish professor to be forced out of the University of Frankfurt in 1933.[1] Tillich had been Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg (1924-1929), Dresden University of Technology, of Leipzig (1925-1929), and University of Frankfurt (1929- 1933) where in addition to professor he was the Dean. Tillich expelled some disruptive Nazi students, which was the last straw for Nazi officials. And the troublesome Professor had published “Ten Theses: The Church and the Third Reich (1933). In Thesis Seven he wrote, “Protestantism set the cross against the paganism of the swastika…the cross was against the “’holiness’ of nation, race, blood and power” (Ibid., p. 6). That statement nearly got him arrested, but an alert Reinhold Niebuhr quickly urged Tillich to join the faculty at the New York City’s Union Theological Seminary where he was accepted. America was greatly enriched by receiving many highly educated German refugees including physicist Albert Einstein, but the Social Sciences also benefited by a rich collection of world-class philosophers many of whom were Jewish. Paul Tillich was one of these philosophers, but it took time for him to learn English and construct a new paradigm shifting Christian Systematic Theology. He was best known by his work, “The Courage to Be,” (1952) which is a synthesis of Kierkegaardian Christian Existentialist Philosophy and Heideggerian Phenomenological Existentialism.

    Tillich’s written works in whole can be categorized as theology (systematic theology, and sermons); theology of culture (philosophy, ontology, politics); inter-religious dialogue on Buddhism, natural science, psychology, feminism, and postmodernism. Tillich said, “First, Read my sermons!” His sermons appeared in America as The Shaking of the Foundations, The New Being, and The Eternal Now. Tillich said that all of his writings could be burned expect those on the demonic, The Courage to Be, and his theory of Christian apologetics in, “Justification and Doubt (1924).”

    Being

    The Greek term for “being” is (ὄντα) meaning the being of things, of reality and what actually exists. Tillich’s theology can best be understood as a relevant theology giving close critical attention to the human creations of science, economics, politics, and art. Tillich begins with spirituality shaped by material existence, a theological stance influenced by Hegel (teleo-phenomenological historical road to experience), Marx (historical materialism), Schleiermacher (“ ...no world without a God, no God without a world.”), and Schelling. Schelling is known for his “positive philosophy” to provide some systemic balance to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Schelling draws the distinction between “negative philosophy” which is the symbolic world of concepts and essences (What something is) whereas “positive philosophy” is about existence, or nature (That something is). Existence cannot be deduced from thought. Ideas can be deduced from other ideas, but we cannot deduce a That from a What which only says how a thing is.

    Tillich’s theology is a synthesis of negative philosophy and positive philosophy by concentrating on the concrete socio-historical world referred to as the “Theology of Culture” which “includes also a normative vision of what an authentic religion or a fair society should be”(“Tillich’s Analysis of the Spiritual Situation of His Time(s)” by Jean Richard in “The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, Ed. by Russell Re Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pdf., p. 123, referred to here on as “CCPT”). Tillich distinguishes between Chronological time, or Chronos, (the Ancient Greek word, Χρόνος,) is linear time, or clock time of science contrasted with the other Greek word for time, Kairos, meaning lived time. Chronos is quantitative time, but Kairos is qualitative time. It is lived historical time. Personal psychological lived time is just as valid as scientifically measured time. Kairos also means for Tillich a time of revolutionary change in which he hoped to synthesize Christianity and socialism to create a new kind of personal life and civil society. After serving as a Chaplin in WWI, Tillich came to a decision in favor of socialism so as to “…experience the divine in everything human, the eternal in everything temporal.” (The Socialist Decision, 1933). The Christian socialist has a “prophetic attitude,” and is watchful for Kairos in anticipation of revolutionary transformation of life and society in which human beings no longer suffer existential estrangement.

    Some have criticized Tillich for having a worldly theology and this is true in the sense that he recognized that theology is in the world, in culture, in science, and in art. This is a paradigm shift from a Neo-Platonist Christian theology that is oriented to transcendent super-naturalism. Students (and some professors like Edmond Husserl and Bertrand Russell) often fall in love with the Platonic Socrates of invisible Eternal Forms because Platonic ontology solved so many epistemological issues. This transcendent realm of the Forms, however, only exists in language as symbols, and meaning. Heidegger investigated a completely de-mythologized Christian Theology by reducing it to a philosophic essentialist-reductionist form in his work, “Being and Time,”(1927) that is entirely Schleiermachian. Schleiermacher sought to re-mythologize Christian theological universal principles with a new language to enhance intelligibility for persons of a particular historical era. Paul Tillich is continuing the same hermeneutical project as Schleiermacher with language adopted from existential Phenomenologist Heidegger and pre-Socratic philosophy. De-mythologization and Re-mythologization is a massive project since religious language is laden with spiritual and nonspiritual meanings collected over the centuries. And yet, Tillich is able to recapture, or re-energize multidimensional Christian symbols that complexly relate to issues in systematic theology, apologetics, culture, education, phenomenology, academia and ecclesial concerns with a new theological language (see, “Tillich on God,” by Martin Leiner in CCTP).

    The ontologies of emergence and emanation either have θεός (God) in the world, or above the world— both the immanent (particular), and the transcendental (universal) are merely spatial metaphoric symbols. Tillich points out that medieval philosophers defined “transcendental” as “beyond the universal and the particular” and should be understood as “the power of being in everything that has being”(Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology Vol. II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957 & 1963. p.11). Tillich means “the power of being” in a second Heideggerian sense as (ὄν) often written as “Being,” as opposed to (ὄντα) “beings” that mean "things that are." This distinction is difficult to see in the English language. Tillich instead of using imminence and transcendent, he prefers the spatial metaphor “depth of being.”

    “God is immanent in the world as its permanent creative ground and is transcendent to the world through freedom. Both infinite divinity and finite human freedom make the world transcendent to God and God Transcendent to the world…The infinite is present in everything finite, in the stone as well as in the genius” (ST, Vol. I, p. 162).

    ...continuing to part 2.
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2019

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