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#15259646
QatzelOk wrote:
Are you able to separate Practice and Theory when discussing politics?



Are you able to answer my question? Apparently not...

Btw, there are never many that study philosophy, I'm one of the few that has.
#15259655
late wrote:Are you able to answer my question? Apparently not...

I already have, as have millions of others.

You didn't notice because you write far more than you read.

Moderns have been rendered brain-dead by technologies that they don't understand. And an inability to read or understand complex arguments... is partially the result of the Modern's forced exposure to religious and commercial propaganda.
#15259669
QatzelOk wrote:
Moderns



I know the history of the Modern, it started in the 1800s. You have your own personal definition that is quite different from the usage I am familiar with.
#15259674
late wrote:I know the history of the Modern, it started in the 1800s. You have your own personal definition that is quite different from the usage I am familiar with.

For @QatzelOk, ‘Modernity’ began with the Neolithic Revolution. Which is a valid viewpoint, actually.
#15259686
Potemkin wrote:For @QatzelOk, ‘Modernity’ began with the Neolithic Revolution. Which is a valid viewpoint, actually.


I tend to draw the dividing line with Columbus and with Copernicus, before being Pre Modern and after being Modern.
#15259690
Potemkin wrote:
For @QatzelOk, ‘Modernity’ began with the Neolithic Revolution. Which is a valid viewpoint, actually.



Not really.

The birth of the Modern was the emergence of a secular world dominated by science and technology.





https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/420

This doesn't talk about the birth of the Modern era, regardless, it's by far my favorite of the books I've seen covering this era. It also makes the case nicely without needing to say it:
#15259693
Potemkin wrote:For @QatzelOk, ‘Modernity’ began with the Neolithic Revolution. Which is a valid viewpoint, actually.

Ah so he has no time for the Sioux then with their newfangled post neolithic horse husbandry then.
#15259704
Rich wrote:Ah so he has no time for the Sioux then with their newfangled post neolithic horse husbandry then.

I believe he has no time for anyone except the San. Or possibly some of the more remote tribes of Papua New Guinea. @QatzelOk is the most reactionary person I have ever encountered in my life.
#15259705
QatzelOk wrote:It might help to unpack the word "postmodern" if we break it down into its composite parts.

I don't think modernism refers to the post-tool making era of humanity, which is basically all of humanity since tools would be used by pre-human ancestors i'd imagine.
#15259706
Postmodernism is basically saying there are no universally correct narratives or morality, it is all relative, there are many different perspectives.

This is true. ie: with history you can never recreate a "true" account of history because you are always going to center some perspectives over others. So some things are subjective.

I reject the PM notion that all knowledge is relative. The laws of physics are universal for everyone on earth, for example. Some knowledge is objective, some are subjective.

Morals can be subjective too. But to derive meaning in life and to function and make decisions in day to day life individuals need to choose values of right and wrong, otherwise there is nihilism. So in that way we all are forced to reject moral relativism in the sense that all morals are equally valid. That doesn't necessarily mean you should always try to force your values on others though.
#15259708
late wrote:Not really.

The birth of the Modern was the emergence of a secular world dominated by science and technology.





https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/420

This doesn't talk about the birth of the Modern era, regardless, it's by far my favorite of the books I've seen covering this era. It also makes the case nicely without needing to say it:

It depends how one defines ‘Modernity’, @late. For example…

Behavioural modernity

Others place it with the European discovery of the New World. Others place it with the revolution in the Arts which began around the First World War. And for some, ‘Modernity’ began in the year they were born. Lol.
#15259709
QatzelOk wrote:Are you able to separate Practice and Theory when discussing politics?

Do you think that the statement : "If you don't like cars, walk in the middle of the street,'" is a good way of proving that cars are excellent and other means of travel are stupid?

***

And Moderns virtually NEVER think philosophically. They simply "react" to the narratives that their masters feed them under the dinner table.

By interacting with technology and doing the same repetitive tasks day in and day out, the Modern is among the stupidest humanoids to walk our planet. And this Modern Stupidity is driving him towards extinction. And he is so stupid that he doesn't care. All he cares about is the health of the fictional characters on the screens he shares his life with.

I doubt if your child were dying you would reject modern medicine to save them. Humans want to survive and nobody can stop the arms race. It isn't "a choice". There is no choice, only how to manage technology. Adapt or die. Pure Darwinism. Reject the medicine for your child, your DNA will die with you.

If humans kill every species on the planet that's mother nature's way, we are a product of nature like every other living species.

When humans invent self-improving AI a technological explosion with be unleashed at speeds the human mind won't be able to comprehend. Having created a new lifeform, we will have become Gods. This AI will create the technology to leave the solar system, to explore and colonize other planets, solar systems, galaxies. This is like a fish growing legs and leaving the ocean for the first time. This is our destiny. You're trying to keep the fish in the ocean because the land is dangerous, but it's inevitable. Animals will never stop exploring and pushing forward. Stop being afraid of something that at best we can only delay.
#15259713
I would emphasize that while morals seem to be something we can pick and choose from, there is a sense in which they really an objective part of the world even while constructed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Reality
Berger and Luckmann introduced the term social construction into the social sciences and were strongly influenced by the work of Alfred Schütz. Their central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conceptions (and beliefs) of what reality is become embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/emancipatory-science.htm
Hegel made mind/matter dichotomies and problems of epistemology objects of critique, and felt no need to have his own version of such systems. He saw that any society operated with a range of artifacts that were products of their own labor, and this same range of artifacts was represented in their knowledge, so there was not a lot to be gained by trying to draw some line between the ‘thought-objects’ created by labor and knowledge of these ‘thought-objects’ produced by activity with them. As the practical activity of a social formation changes, so the artifacts they produce, and people’s knowledge of those artifacts change. In this way, the idea of mediation dispensed with the problem of dichotomy.

What is emancipatory about this approach to science is that the content is grasped as a whole, consistent with an ethical approach to all human beings as subjects in their own right. Further, the science begins from one Urphänomen whose nature and origins can be easily grasped, and which implicitly contains everything. There is therefore no recourse to dogmatic claims about ‘laws of nature’ or ‘the origins of man’ and so on. “All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

He criticizes Hegel for believing that the development of a science was the “product of thought concentrating itself” whereas, he says, the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete “is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being” and “the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition” (1986a: 38). This meant that an idea arises as a form of activity before it “appears in the head ... as a product of a thinking head.” This takes the idea of immanent critique a step further, for it is the activity of human beings, even as it develops in the business of daily life, which is creating the real abstractions which are later to be reflected in the head of the theorist.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htm
In pedagogy, there is a troubling and (when you think about it) strange problem that is usually described as the problem of “the practical application of knowledge to life.” And it is in fact true that the graduate from school (whether high school or college) finds himself in the quandary of not knowing how to “apply” knowledge to any problem that arises outside the walls of school.

This seems to imply that human abilities should include the special ability of somehow “correlating” knowledge with its object, i.e. with reality as given in contemplation. This means that there should be a special kind of activity of correlating knowledge and its object, where “knowledge” and “object” are thought of as two different “things” distinct from the person himself. One of these things is knowledge as contained in general formulas, instructions, and propositions, and the other thing is the unstructured chaos of phenomena as given in perception. If this were so, then we could clearly try to formulate rules for making this correlation, and also to enumerate and classify typical errors so that we could warn ahead of time how to avoid them. In instructional theory, one often tries to solve the problem of knowing “how to apply knowledge to life” by creating just this kind of system of rules and warnings. But the result is that the system of rules and warnings becomes so cumbersome that it starts to impede rather than help things, becoming an additional source of errors and failures.

Thus, there is every reason to believe that the very problem we are trying to solve arises only because the “knowledge” has been given to the person in an inadequate form; or, to put it more crudely, it is not real knowledge, but only some substitute…
In fact, knowledge in the precise sense of the word is always knowledge of an object. Of a particular object, for it is impossible to know “in general,” without knowing a particular system of phenomena, whether these are chemical, psychological, or some other phenomena.

But, after all, in this case the very phrase about the difficulties of “applying” knowledge to an object sounds rather absurd. To know an object, and to “apply” this knowledge – knowledge of the object – to the object? At best, this must be only an imprecise, confusing way of expressing some other, hidden situation.
But this situation is rather typical.

And this situation is possible only under particular circumstances – when the person has mastered not knowledge of an object but knowledge of something else instead. And this “other thing” can only be a system of phrases about an object, learned either irrespective of the latter or in only an imaginary, tenuous, and easily broken connection to it. A system of words, terms, symbols, signs, and their stable combinations, as formed and legitimized in everyday life – “statements” and “systems of statements.” Language, in particular, the “language of science” with its supply of words and its syntactic organization and “structure.” In other words, the object, as represented in available language, as an already verbalized object.

Yes, if “knowledge” is always identified with verbally organized consciousness, then the problem will in fact be as described above – as the special problem of “correlating” knowledge and object. But when the question is posed like this, the very problem of the “application” of knowledge to the real world is easily replaced by the problem of the “correct” verbalization of unverbalized material. The verbal “object” then turns into a synonym for the chaos of totally unorganized “sense data” – into a synonym only for what I do not know about the object.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/concepts-now.htm
How can a thought-form be identical to (or ‘map on to’) a material object? The very question poses an impossible dichotomy, but how else can the idea of truthful reflection of the world be made sense of? In fact, concepts cannot be understood as mirror-images of Doppelgänger in the material world, but only as entities which span both worlds. Concepts must be both mental and material. Instead of looking for matching pairs, we should look for entities which by their very nature transcend the mind/matter dichotomy by participating in both thought and matter. For this, we must turn to the real forms of mediation by means of which human thinking is connected to our material environment. So, two interrelated kinds of entity hold the key: artefacts (including words) and activity (including speech).

Artefacts are all those products of human labour which are objectifications of human needs and aims, materialisations of thought – words (whether spoken or written), tools, machines, buildings, books, movies and even our own bodies: objective because they are material objects, subjective because they are what they are only thanks to their place in the social life of human beings. Activity is all the systems of purposive social action by means of which our thoughts are manifested and our needs satisfied: subjective because we mean them, but objective because they happen in the material world. Actions are always mediated by the use of artefacts, which are themselves products of social activity, given meaning by those same activities.


Human beings are born realists. We act as if the things we perceive exist independently of our consciousness and activity. Only later, thanks to critical reflection, do we come to realise that the concepts we form of things in the objective world are actively constructed from material belonging to our own culture and activity, whilst other people may think of things differently, through the lens of their culture and activity. In the same way, we are also born realists with respect to our self-consciousness. Even if we accept that our concepts are not copies of things in the material world, we tend to naively take concepts to be entities ‘existing’ in our mind. But as we have seen, this cannot be the case. We may learn to take a critical attitude to both the content and form of our own consciousness. Ruth Millikan (in Margolis & Laurence 1999: 537) tries to avoid reification by saying that a concept is a human ability or capacity rather than an entity. But as Anna Sfard (2008) convincingly shows, abilities and capacities are themselves products of reification, giving seeming permanence to what may be subject to unnoticed situational variation. Linguists avoid the problem altogether by treating concepts solely in the form in which they are objectified in language, whilst sociologists and behaviourists avoid the problem by concerning themselves only with behaviour and treating consciousness as a ‘black box’. But these routes are not available to psychology, which must perforce make consciousness the object of its investigation.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Virtue%20and%20Utopia.pdf
The traditional concept of ‘virtue’ is intrinsically individuated in that it references an aspect of an individual’s character. On the other hand, an aspect of an individual’s character is only a virtue if its exercise contributes to the internal goods of the practice of which it is a part, and what counts as the social good is determined by the social practice and the tradition of which it is a part. Further, character is itself shaped by participation in practices even though the character is itself a psychological formation. Virtue is thus essentially both social and individual in content.

This ambiguity is not unique to the concept of virtue. Knowledge, for example, is not simply an entity attached to an individual. Knowledge can only be realised in the context of social activity and what counts as knowledge depends on the practice in which it is realised, and individuals in general acquire and realise knowledge only through interaction within that practice. In a similar vein, customs are taken to be attributes of a community, conformity to which is acquired by individuals in the individual’s habits and conduct.

I believe it is justified to take virtue (like knowledge and custom) as in the first place a property of a social formation or project, evaluated within the tradition of which the project is a part, and only derivatively a property of the character of a participating individual. What is taken to be virtuous in a given practice is realised in actions which manifest that virtue. Like custom and knowledge, virtues should be understood primarily as attributes of a pr0ject, realised and manifested in the activities of the pr0ject and derivatively as something acquired by individual human beings in and through their participation in the practice, according to the quality of their participation and position in that practice. We are all familiar with the inclusive social movement, the competitive sports club, the supportive self-help club, the solid union or the egalitarian community.

Virtues are attributes of practices, not individuals.
#15259726
Unthinking Majority wrote:Postmodernism is basically saying there are no universally correct narratives or morality, it is all relative, there are many different perspectives.

The reason Cultural Marxists have been associated with moral relativism is because Anthropology was the first institution that they conquered. You can't do Anthropology from a place of objectivity. Anthropology require too much commitment, its only possible if you love the subjects of your study. When it comes to the American Founders for example you will notice it is conservatives that become the die hard moral relativists.
#15259730
Potemkin wrote:
It depends how one defines ‘Modernity’, @late. For example…

Behavioural modernity

Others place it with the European discovery of the New World. Others place it with the revolution in the Arts which began around the First World War. And for some, ‘Modernity’ began in the year they were born. Lol.



"The early modern period lasted from c. AD 1500 to 1800 ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_era

There is a difference of opinion. In the mid-1800s, in Germany, there was a number of profound changes, Nietzsche, national health care, universal education, and more; that mark for me the birth of the fully Modern.
#15259731
Rich wrote:
The reason Cultural Marxists have been associated with moral relativism is because..

you will notice it is conservatives that become the die hard moral relativists...




It's right in front of you, you even said it, and you still missed the obvious.

If the Left, and the Right, are both moral relativists...
#15259732
Wellsy wrote:
there is a sense in which they really an objective part of the world even while constructed.



We have a rough sense of morality built into our brains. You can kill that small part and instant sociopath...

What is thought of as moral changes a lot from time to time, and place to place. It's not an intrinsic part of the world independent of us and our way of looking at things.
#15259734
Modern industry begins in 1320 in Venice with the Arsenale Nuovo. Post modernism or anti-modernism begins with Dante who mentions the Arsenal in his Inferno.
#15259741
Rich wrote:

Post modernism or anti-modernism begins with Dante who mentions the Arsenal in his Inferno.



"The term postmodern was first used in 1870.[22] John Watkins Chapman suggested "a Postmodern style of painting" as a way to depart from French Impressionism.[23] J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

You've placed the intellectual reaction against the Modern before the intellectual idea of Modernity started.
#15259747
late wrote:We have a rough sense of morality built into our brains. You can kill that small part and instant sociopath...

What is thought of as moral changes a lot from time to time, and place to place. It's not an intrinsic part of the world independent of us and our way of looking at things.

If there is to be such a place it has to do with our social nature from which all ethics stems from our collaboration with other humans.
So fundamental to our existence and being that even some of the worst acts are still based in it as only a failure of socialization produces the worst individual who acts out by themselves.

Indeed things change as so do our social formations. One can emphasize the relative differences, but the point is to emphasize the basis on which all are derived from. They take on an objective quality because they are institutionalized and aren’t based on the whims of individual humans as much as many experience the loose ethos of liberal society than thick ethos of communities in which they participate if any beyond work. The objective part being they belong to the objects of humans as a property of human activity and not merely belief and thus take on a objective character even while they aren’t objective the way nature is. But even nature is shaped by human practice and is not to be look upon as independent of human activity. There is a reality underpinning all that can severely disrupt beliefs even and cause a crisis of belief. The appearance of total objectivity of course occurs only when dominant and undisturbed.

Such things do not exist independently of humans but their institutional basis gives them a reality in the world that can’t be easily ignored as a matter of mere belief. One can argue what it means to be a good feminist or Christian and come out with differences, but as with Marx’s aphorism, “All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”.
One finds the virtues and ideal norms of a practice/concept in ones history and often a critique of their limits. Even scientific communities operate in such a fashion. Those who fail to abide by such norms tend to be excommunicated in some fashion.

The good is always a good of something and becomes meaningless when one abstracts people from their social contexts, rendering humans purposeless, only arbitrary.

And from this there can be better forms of life in which to defend against others. Not only abstractly but in relation to material conditions such that one isn’t merely a middle class moralizer. Against the purely descriptive approach of differences, one can argue of some ways as superior even while one resists the imposition of a colonizing approach.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/malik/not-equal.htm
CLR James, like most anti-imperialists in the past, recognised that all progressive politics were rooted in the ‘Western tradition’, and in particular in the ideas of reason, progress, humanism and universalism that emerged out of the Enlightenment.

The scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values — these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously, or those that exist now in other political and cultural traditions. Not because Europeans are a superior people, but because out of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution flowed superior ideas.

The Western tradition is not Western in any essential sense, but only through an accident of geography and history. Indeed, Islamic learning provided an important resource for both the Renaissance and the development of science. The ideas we call ‘Western’ are in fact universal, laying the basis for greater human flourishing. That is why for much of the past century radicals, especially third world radicals, recognised that the problem of imperialism was not that it was a Western ideology, but that it was an obstacle to the pursuit of the progressive ideals that arose out of the Enlightenment.

As Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian nationalist, put it: ‘All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission that fell to them.’ [5] For thinkers like Fanon and James, the aim of anti-imperialism was not to reject Western ideas but to reclaim them for all of humanity.

Indeed, Western liberals were often shocked by the extent to which anti-colonial movements adopted what they considered to be tainted notions. The Enlightenment concepts of universalism and social progress, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, found ‘unexpected support from peoples who desire nothing more than to share in the benefits of industrialisation; peoples who prefer to look upon themselves as temporarily backward rather than permanently different’. Elsewhere he noted that the doctrine of cultural relativism ‘was challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists had established it in the first place’ [6].

How things have changed. ‘Permanently different’ is exactly how we tend to see different, groups, societies and cultures today. Why? Largely because contemporary society has lost faith in social transformation, in the possibility of progress, in the beliefs that animated anti-imperialists like James and Fanon.

To regard people as ‘temporarily backward’ rather than ‘permanently different’ is to accept that while people are potentially equal, cultures definitely are not; it is to accept the idea of social and moral progress; that it would be far better if everybody had the chance to live in the type of society or culture that best promoted human advancement.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdf
Critical voice is the capacity of a person living ‘inside’ a society to form views available from a position ‘outside’ that society:

... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society. (Sen, 2002a, p. 476-77.)

Critical agency refers “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.”

The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be ‘critical voice’. This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But ‘critical voice’ does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society.
Critical voice is both instrumental, in that it is needed in order to sustain the other elements of well-being, and constitutive, in that only the person with critical voice is truly free.

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