I find especially interesting that philosophers who had no substantive, grounded argument (Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and now Zizek) were so heavily promoted and broadly idolised, almost worshipped. This may have been done for some socio-political purpose, similar to the function of the mass media, or perhaps they were popular precisely because they had no meaningful answers and wrote beautifully and profoundly ‘about nothing of substance’, which made all the frustrated and confused but intellectually narcissistic children feel like their creative impotence and the sense of individual nothingness was somehow validated and excused, so they could now drink, party and have sex without feeling guilty for wasting their short lives on hedonic pursuits.
Hey Michael. I think this cluster of philosophical ideas you bring together ultimately arrives at emptiness, nothingness, and perhaps (although I'm less clear on this bit), some kind of hedonism, but existentialism and phenomenology need not be tossed out with the bathwater, in my opinion. I haven't any Sartre, Derrida, or Zizek, but I don't think there's any need to resort to ad hominems, and I'm doubtful they made no substantive arguments, though I strongly disagree with their philosophies. As for Heidegger, he really isn't idolized or worshiped, he's broadly unpopular in analytic, and even many continental, circles. Interestingly, some theists connect his ontology of Being to God. Although Heidegger, and those other philosophers, are fundamentally incorrect, and I agree many of their ideas are upstream of societal decay, there's no reason to resort to personal, emotional attacks. This betrays a lack of charitable, philosophical engagement with, as you say, at the very least profound texts.
I suppose my question to you is, do you think existentialism, phenomenology, and psychology need to be discarded entirely? Is your position Enlightenment-flavored rationalism? Medieval scholastic? Divine inspiration? Are these starting points mutually exclusive and, if so, in what way? Thanks for reading
Ad hominem is a term typically used to designate a logical fallacy which consists in alleging a fault with a person as the reason for judging their argument as invalid, provided that the argument does not logically depend on the specific property of the person. For example, alleging that a statement is an ‘emotional attack’ may be considered as this kind of fallacy. In any case, this is a misunderstanding: no emotions whatsoever were involved in the writing of my previous comment.
Similarly, it does not follow from Heidegger being wrong that phenomenology or existentialism ought to be rejected. These are seperate questions and require different arguments.
I painted the body of work of 4 philosophers with a broad brush (which is of course open to dispute) in order to make a concise point that relates to your point about general anxiety. I allege that neither of them provides any substantive guidance, does not answer any fundamental questions about the norms of thought, being or action, but leave the reader with the sense that such questions have no unambiguously true answers, that there are no universal norms: the kind of nothingness they produce is normative emptiness. I suggest, in reference to your claim about angst/anxiety, that this normative emptiness is idolised as it resonates with the natural, developmental anxiety of human beings in their early adulthood, when they seek answers to fundamental questions and to validate their individual existence in a society that does not make sense to them. Philosophies that leave them with nothingness, with normative emptiness, reinforce the idea that the lack of grounding they are anxious about is all there is, that it is all there is to their lives, which leaves them with the choice between pointless suffering (in adhering to societal expectations) vs hedonism.
I do not have any ideology. I try to make sense, which requires compliance with the laws of sense. I am interested in what follows from that, but I would not call it a system (although it inevitably implies Theory), but simply reality or truth.
I do not see overall sense in Existentialism. If I am right and it is logically inconsistent, then it must be rejected, since it is then just a cluster of claims that do not make up a meaningful whole.
Phenomenology, in the vein of Husserl, is not a logically complete system. Nagel added something crucial to it. The way I interpret phenomenology does make sense, it is essential to meaning, but my use of this term is very specific and quite different to how it was formalised in the past.
Hey Michael, thanks for engaging at such length! I genuinely appreciate the discussion. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I agree with your definition of an ad hominem. I read your first comment as a condemnation of their arguments based on the way they and their followers are "narcissistic children" or lived debauched lifestyles. You can see how I drew that conclusion, but your longer comment clears up what you meant. I'm trying to do my best to challenge name-calling on Substack. Your opinion is clearly substantive and well-thought through (I've subscribed to your blogs btw!)
I think your summary here is quite interesting, especially how these thinkers leave us with pointless suffering vs. hedonism. I tend to agree. Without a foundation for our identity, authenticity collapses into hedonism, nihilism, or, perhaps worse, worship of power, making people open to propaganda and authoritarian movements.
I also like your answer about ideology--I too try to avoid ideology (unless giving my full allegiance to Christ counts as an "ideology.")
We might disagree about existentialism, but we might also just have different definitions of it (impossible to say given the medium of short substack comments, haha).
I'd love to read essays of yours that touch on your understanding of phenomenology and your critique of existentialism if you want to link them! I'm also curious about what Nagel "added;" I love what I've read of Nagel (The View from Nowhere and a couple of his essays.) I wrote on his famous "what is it like to be a bat" https://agapesophia.substack.com/p/a-reflection-on-reductionism-art
I can see how my comment could be interpreted the way you did, and this is a good example to make a point about phenomenology. But first it would be useful to provide some background.
When Nagel discusses “what it is likeness” he can be understood in two ways, which are related in a special way but logically distinct. It is the connection between these two possible interpretations that, in my understanding, made a significant contribution to phenomenology, or at least an inspiration or a discernible possibility of taking it in a new direction (that late Husserl understood must be found but did not find: he called it “transcendental intersubjectivity”). It is unclear whether Nagel ‘meant it that way’ or is it only something that his argument unwittingly made conceivable.
Here is an explanation i recently made on this topic: There is a critical difference between “what it feels like to be X” and “what it is like to be X”. The former is a presupposition of subjective experience (which is not normative, therefore not truth-apt, therefore not knowledge-apt); the latter is plausibly a normative concept that tells us what X’s are like (as a type of things we ‘mean’ when we speak of X). Both of these logical forms are crucial to experience, but the latter is more fundamental, as it engages with the concept itself, or what it MEANS to be a particular something, or simply, WHAT anything is ‘to us’ (where ‘us’ is a language community or society that has evolved and reflexively sustains the said meaning). By making this distinction we can dispense with the notion of “subjective knowledge” (which is trivially true of everything we perceive, including delusions and illusions), and we are left with knowledge proper, in the normative sense of proven beliefs about objective reality. Nevertheless, the ‘what it is likeness’ (as a normative property of thought/meaning), which is systemically integrated according to the laws of sense, determines the identity, structure and relations of everything ‘we’ (our ontological type) perceive about the objective reality, and therefore it still does not constitute knowledge proper, but a narrative convention, a kind of social ritual that continuously evolves towards greater systemic consistency.
I understand (transcendental) phenomenology as a link between the subjective and the objective, via the subjectivity of others: the ‘what it is likeness’ in the ontological sense is a process whereby we generate common meaning, which comprises the world as we know it, and the foundation on which the conscious Self is objectified as an acting subject. We can conceive of ourselves, our own face, by identifying with the faces of others: we internalise some of what we see as what ‘I am like’, and thus develop the phenomenological sense for what humans (as a type) are like. On top of that we develop the phenomenological sense for different types of what we are not-like, which are all the other object-types that we do not recognise as our type but are like one another. A lot of this content is conveyed through language, and our sense of language is a higher-order phenomenology: we can thus understand not just what beings like us are really like, but what beings like us understand and mean, and how they relate to us, how they perceive us, how much they conceive of us as being ‘like them’, true to their sense for our likeness to their kind.
When we read comments written by strangers, whose likeness to kind was cultivated in a different group, tuned to somewhat different narrative structures, turns of expression, humour, sarcasm, emotional reactions, conceptual prods and projections, we are likely to somewhat misinterpret their intended sense of expression. We are not as ‘like to them’ (in the way they communicate) as we are to those by means of which we cultivated out self-ideation. This can be a basis for radical divide between some people and groups, but there are always commonalities we can resort to close the gaps in meaning that interfere with constructive communication and understanding as beings of the same kind. Language is the most useful commonality insofar as it can be translated, clarified, but this requires the attitude of good faith and often substantial effort to be really understood, to accomplish likeness. On the other hand, we may have reasons not to be like someone else, not to fully relate as beings of the same kind, and these reasons can be communicated too, but if the reasons for favouring unlikeness are consistently articulated and both parties are willing to understand them, they are already mutually transformative on the fundamental-level of our rational agency, making us more alike as consciousness even if we have not yet resolved some object-level differences. This, i argue, is crucial to human becoming, to higher levels of integration as conscious selves.
This could be an essay all on its own, haha, great reply.
At first, I think I misunderstood your point by confusing normativity in a linguistic sense with an ethical sense. Now, what you seem to be gesturing towards is Wittgenstein's private language argument--namely, subjective experience of feelings are trivially true, experience is experience. The problem is this kind of relationship isn't normative by definition because it's of private feelings. Husserl reached towards normativity by talking about intersubjectivity (which I think he more or less stole from his Catholic student, Edith Stein), but Nagel adds something by talking about "what-its-likeness" rather than merely subjective experience, because what it's like connect with objective, linguistically accessible facts. What-its-likeness is making a claim about some graspable fact, whereas locating the normatively accessible truth in feeling AS SUCH is fundamentally flawed. Is this something like Whitehead's misplaced concreteness? I recently read someone who argued phenomenology (ironically enough) makes this fallacy in the same way reductionist materialists do.
It seems correct that experience has certain facts about it which can provide the basis of normative meaning. When we're in pockets of people that aren't like us, it can more easily lead to meaning breakdown and misunderstanding, but there are always ways of referring back to common grounds of experience. Again, this sounds quite Wittgensteinian to me, which I vibe with. Seems correct to me.
However, I think I'm still convinced by Heidegger that what's fundamental is dispositions towards reality. We are disposed to care about reality as real; the world mattering seems more fundamental than language--but only in one sense--that is, only for us. We simply find ourselves in a world of mattering, sense, and feeling; this finding of ourselves in such a world seems more fundamental than rationally, reflectively claiming that the world matters.
The intelligibility and normative receptiveness, let's say, of reality seems best explained by a metaphysically necessary, intelligent, conscious being. Nagel is correct that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere--but there is a view from God's “perspective” (whatever the hell that means). So it is correct that perspectiveless objectivity is ontologically impossible, but not that complete knowledge is impossible, just that it's impossible FOR US. In this way, I think Heidegger's Being seems to gesture towards God as a metaphysically necessary being, and, therein, the Being of all being.
That's just some spitballed thoughts. Not sure if we actually disagree that much. Maybe we disagree on whether Heidegger adds value or is saying nothing of substance. I tend to think he's cooking something. He's at least someone to (temporarily) wrestle with to understand why he's wrong. Understanding why someone's wrong in an interesting way is often as fascinating and helpful as trying to understand what's absolutely correct. I think Heidegger is wrong, but very, very interestingly wrong. I appreciate this back and forth. Interested to read more. If you have essays that explain your view more, link them and I'll take a look. Cheers, have a good weekend.
If the world is nothing to us unless it is meaningful, then it is an extension of language, and language is something we have in common. My core argument is that not only language but individuality/subjectivity is impossible without a multiplicity of subjects, that monadic conscious-individuality is impossible, and therefore a monadic conscious God is impossible. One could then postulate God as a multiplicity also, but this just kicks the can further down the road. If we have to explain God in terms of reflexive multiplicity, and we can explain humanity in the same way, then God is unnecessary.
Consequently, I conceive of God as the ideal of personhood, a perfect rationality, or simply Logos; a principle according to which all meaning is created, whereas human consciousness is a medium via which Logos is expressed, made alive, realised as the creation, both within (subjectively) and without (objectively).
The most detailed explanation of this creative ‘mechanism’ I could produce is in my book.
I find especially interesting that philosophers who had no substantive, grounded argument (Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and now Zizek) were so heavily promoted and broadly idolised, almost worshipped. This may have been done for some socio-political purpose, similar to the function of the mass media, or perhaps they were popular precisely because they had no meaningful answers and wrote beautifully and profoundly ‘about nothing of substance’, which made all the frustrated and confused but intellectually narcissistic children feel like their creative impotence and the sense of individual nothingness was somehow validated and excused, so they could now drink, party and have sex without feeling guilty for wasting their short lives on hedonic pursuits.
Hey Michael. I think this cluster of philosophical ideas you bring together ultimately arrives at emptiness, nothingness, and perhaps (although I'm less clear on this bit), some kind of hedonism, but existentialism and phenomenology need not be tossed out with the bathwater, in my opinion. I haven't any Sartre, Derrida, or Zizek, but I don't think there's any need to resort to ad hominems, and I'm doubtful they made no substantive arguments, though I strongly disagree with their philosophies. As for Heidegger, he really isn't idolized or worshiped, he's broadly unpopular in analytic, and even many continental, circles. Interestingly, some theists connect his ontology of Being to God. Although Heidegger, and those other philosophers, are fundamentally incorrect, and I agree many of their ideas are upstream of societal decay, there's no reason to resort to personal, emotional attacks. This betrays a lack of charitable, philosophical engagement with, as you say, at the very least profound texts.
I suppose my question to you is, do you think existentialism, phenomenology, and psychology need to be discarded entirely? Is your position Enlightenment-flavored rationalism? Medieval scholastic? Divine inspiration? Are these starting points mutually exclusive and, if so, in what way? Thanks for reading
Ad hominem is a term typically used to designate a logical fallacy which consists in alleging a fault with a person as the reason for judging their argument as invalid, provided that the argument does not logically depend on the specific property of the person. For example, alleging that a statement is an ‘emotional attack’ may be considered as this kind of fallacy. In any case, this is a misunderstanding: no emotions whatsoever were involved in the writing of my previous comment.
Similarly, it does not follow from Heidegger being wrong that phenomenology or existentialism ought to be rejected. These are seperate questions and require different arguments.
I painted the body of work of 4 philosophers with a broad brush (which is of course open to dispute) in order to make a concise point that relates to your point about general anxiety. I allege that neither of them provides any substantive guidance, does not answer any fundamental questions about the norms of thought, being or action, but leave the reader with the sense that such questions have no unambiguously true answers, that there are no universal norms: the kind of nothingness they produce is normative emptiness. I suggest, in reference to your claim about angst/anxiety, that this normative emptiness is idolised as it resonates with the natural, developmental anxiety of human beings in their early adulthood, when they seek answers to fundamental questions and to validate their individual existence in a society that does not make sense to them. Philosophies that leave them with nothingness, with normative emptiness, reinforce the idea that the lack of grounding they are anxious about is all there is, that it is all there is to their lives, which leaves them with the choice between pointless suffering (in adhering to societal expectations) vs hedonism.
I do not have any ideology. I try to make sense, which requires compliance with the laws of sense. I am interested in what follows from that, but I would not call it a system (although it inevitably implies Theory), but simply reality or truth.
I do not see overall sense in Existentialism. If I am right and it is logically inconsistent, then it must be rejected, since it is then just a cluster of claims that do not make up a meaningful whole.
Phenomenology, in the vein of Husserl, is not a logically complete system. Nagel added something crucial to it. The way I interpret phenomenology does make sense, it is essential to meaning, but my use of this term is very specific and quite different to how it was formalised in the past.
Hey Michael, thanks for engaging at such length! I genuinely appreciate the discussion. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I agree with your definition of an ad hominem. I read your first comment as a condemnation of their arguments based on the way they and their followers are "narcissistic children" or lived debauched lifestyles. You can see how I drew that conclusion, but your longer comment clears up what you meant. I'm trying to do my best to challenge name-calling on Substack. Your opinion is clearly substantive and well-thought through (I've subscribed to your blogs btw!)
I think your summary here is quite interesting, especially how these thinkers leave us with pointless suffering vs. hedonism. I tend to agree. Without a foundation for our identity, authenticity collapses into hedonism, nihilism, or, perhaps worse, worship of power, making people open to propaganda and authoritarian movements.
I also like your answer about ideology--I too try to avoid ideology (unless giving my full allegiance to Christ counts as an "ideology.")
We might disagree about existentialism, but we might also just have different definitions of it (impossible to say given the medium of short substack comments, haha).
I'd love to read essays of yours that touch on your understanding of phenomenology and your critique of existentialism if you want to link them! I'm also curious about what Nagel "added;" I love what I've read of Nagel (The View from Nowhere and a couple of his essays.) I wrote on his famous "what is it like to be a bat" https://agapesophia.substack.com/p/a-reflection-on-reductionism-art
Thanks again for engaging so thoroughly.
I can see how my comment could be interpreted the way you did, and this is a good example to make a point about phenomenology. But first it would be useful to provide some background.
When Nagel discusses “what it is likeness” he can be understood in two ways, which are related in a special way but logically distinct. It is the connection between these two possible interpretations that, in my understanding, made a significant contribution to phenomenology, or at least an inspiration or a discernible possibility of taking it in a new direction (that late Husserl understood must be found but did not find: he called it “transcendental intersubjectivity”). It is unclear whether Nagel ‘meant it that way’ or is it only something that his argument unwittingly made conceivable.
Here is an explanation i recently made on this topic: There is a critical difference between “what it feels like to be X” and “what it is like to be X”. The former is a presupposition of subjective experience (which is not normative, therefore not truth-apt, therefore not knowledge-apt); the latter is plausibly a normative concept that tells us what X’s are like (as a type of things we ‘mean’ when we speak of X). Both of these logical forms are crucial to experience, but the latter is more fundamental, as it engages with the concept itself, or what it MEANS to be a particular something, or simply, WHAT anything is ‘to us’ (where ‘us’ is a language community or society that has evolved and reflexively sustains the said meaning). By making this distinction we can dispense with the notion of “subjective knowledge” (which is trivially true of everything we perceive, including delusions and illusions), and we are left with knowledge proper, in the normative sense of proven beliefs about objective reality. Nevertheless, the ‘what it is likeness’ (as a normative property of thought/meaning), which is systemically integrated according to the laws of sense, determines the identity, structure and relations of everything ‘we’ (our ontological type) perceive about the objective reality, and therefore it still does not constitute knowledge proper, but a narrative convention, a kind of social ritual that continuously evolves towards greater systemic consistency.
I understand (transcendental) phenomenology as a link between the subjective and the objective, via the subjectivity of others: the ‘what it is likeness’ in the ontological sense is a process whereby we generate common meaning, which comprises the world as we know it, and the foundation on which the conscious Self is objectified as an acting subject. We can conceive of ourselves, our own face, by identifying with the faces of others: we internalise some of what we see as what ‘I am like’, and thus develop the phenomenological sense for what humans (as a type) are like. On top of that we develop the phenomenological sense for different types of what we are not-like, which are all the other object-types that we do not recognise as our type but are like one another. A lot of this content is conveyed through language, and our sense of language is a higher-order phenomenology: we can thus understand not just what beings like us are really like, but what beings like us understand and mean, and how they relate to us, how they perceive us, how much they conceive of us as being ‘like them’, true to their sense for our likeness to their kind.
When we read comments written by strangers, whose likeness to kind was cultivated in a different group, tuned to somewhat different narrative structures, turns of expression, humour, sarcasm, emotional reactions, conceptual prods and projections, we are likely to somewhat misinterpret their intended sense of expression. We are not as ‘like to them’ (in the way they communicate) as we are to those by means of which we cultivated out self-ideation. This can be a basis for radical divide between some people and groups, but there are always commonalities we can resort to close the gaps in meaning that interfere with constructive communication and understanding as beings of the same kind. Language is the most useful commonality insofar as it can be translated, clarified, but this requires the attitude of good faith and often substantial effort to be really understood, to accomplish likeness. On the other hand, we may have reasons not to be like someone else, not to fully relate as beings of the same kind, and these reasons can be communicated too, but if the reasons for favouring unlikeness are consistently articulated and both parties are willing to understand them, they are already mutually transformative on the fundamental-level of our rational agency, making us more alike as consciousness even if we have not yet resolved some object-level differences. This, i argue, is crucial to human becoming, to higher levels of integration as conscious selves.
This could be an essay all on its own, haha, great reply.
At first, I think I misunderstood your point by confusing normativity in a linguistic sense with an ethical sense. Now, what you seem to be gesturing towards is Wittgenstein's private language argument--namely, subjective experience of feelings are trivially true, experience is experience. The problem is this kind of relationship isn't normative by definition because it's of private feelings. Husserl reached towards normativity by talking about intersubjectivity (which I think he more or less stole from his Catholic student, Edith Stein), but Nagel adds something by talking about "what-its-likeness" rather than merely subjective experience, because what it's like connect with objective, linguistically accessible facts. What-its-likeness is making a claim about some graspable fact, whereas locating the normatively accessible truth in feeling AS SUCH is fundamentally flawed. Is this something like Whitehead's misplaced concreteness? I recently read someone who argued phenomenology (ironically enough) makes this fallacy in the same way reductionist materialists do.
It seems correct that experience has certain facts about it which can provide the basis of normative meaning. When we're in pockets of people that aren't like us, it can more easily lead to meaning breakdown and misunderstanding, but there are always ways of referring back to common grounds of experience. Again, this sounds quite Wittgensteinian to me, which I vibe with. Seems correct to me.
However, I think I'm still convinced by Heidegger that what's fundamental is dispositions towards reality. We are disposed to care about reality as real; the world mattering seems more fundamental than language--but only in one sense--that is, only for us. We simply find ourselves in a world of mattering, sense, and feeling; this finding of ourselves in such a world seems more fundamental than rationally, reflectively claiming that the world matters.
The intelligibility and normative receptiveness, let's say, of reality seems best explained by a metaphysically necessary, intelligent, conscious being. Nagel is correct that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere--but there is a view from God's “perspective” (whatever the hell that means). So it is correct that perspectiveless objectivity is ontologically impossible, but not that complete knowledge is impossible, just that it's impossible FOR US. In this way, I think Heidegger's Being seems to gesture towards God as a metaphysically necessary being, and, therein, the Being of all being.
That's just some spitballed thoughts. Not sure if we actually disagree that much. Maybe we disagree on whether Heidegger adds value or is saying nothing of substance. I tend to think he's cooking something. He's at least someone to (temporarily) wrestle with to understand why he's wrong. Understanding why someone's wrong in an interesting way is often as fascinating and helpful as trying to understand what's absolutely correct. I think Heidegger is wrong, but very, very interestingly wrong. I appreciate this back and forth. Interested to read more. If you have essays that explain your view more, link them and I'll take a look. Cheers, have a good weekend.
If the world is nothing to us unless it is meaningful, then it is an extension of language, and language is something we have in common. My core argument is that not only language but individuality/subjectivity is impossible without a multiplicity of subjects, that monadic conscious-individuality is impossible, and therefore a monadic conscious God is impossible. One could then postulate God as a multiplicity also, but this just kicks the can further down the road. If we have to explain God in terms of reflexive multiplicity, and we can explain humanity in the same way, then God is unnecessary.
Consequently, I conceive of God as the ideal of personhood, a perfect rationality, or simply Logos; a principle according to which all meaning is created, whereas human consciousness is a medium via which Logos is expressed, made alive, realised as the creation, both within (subjectively) and without (objectively).
The most detailed explanation of this creative ‘mechanism’ I could produce is in my book.