DocWatts

Very true! But the rub is that there are also multiple valid meta-perspectives for integrating the same territory. Pluralism might not necessarily go all the way down (agnostic on this point), but it does run quite deep.

Because it starts from where we actually are — rather than taking the end-product of a long chain of abstractions and treating that as our starting point. Think of it like this: color vision isn't a 1:1 representation of the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form. This would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, human perception evolved to use just a narrow slice of that spectrum — the part most relevant to our survival needs as living beings. Likewise, we don't reside within a raw, undifferentiated Reality - this too would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, our minds enact a curated version of Reality — one that’s intelligible, livable, and scaled to our cognitive and existential capacities. My term for this human-sized slice of our shared Reality is the Life-World: that shared, experiential world that serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. Because we can't completely step outside of our human perspective within Reality, any generalizations we have about capital 'R' Reality will contain the fingerprints of this situated starting point. Mind you, that doesn't invalidate the conclusions we draw - it just means that any inferences we draw about The Absolute will necessarily reflect our own relationship to it. Just like physics is still valid despite the fact that it's not exhaustive of Reality, when we talk about The Absolute what we're necessarily talking about is our relationship to the Absolute. The Absolute may be what-is, but our relationship to what-is is always partial. That's my working thesis, anyways. True to the spirit of Pluralism, there are usually multiple vantage points we can approach an issue from that are each valid without being exhaustive. Being-As-Absolute and Being-As-Understanding are no exceptions to that.

I've appreciated the constructive criticism. Half of the fun of doing philosophy are these types of dialogues, where a domain of shared interest is approached through a complimentary set of lenses, each attuned to a different focal point. Very much in keeping with the type of Perspectival Pluralism that I'm encouraging. Your point about bracketing metaphysical questions is a fair one. You don't have to look further than scientific realism to see how it can give rise to Performative Contradictions - where ontological commitments are smuggled in under the guise of neutrality, while denying any metaphysical framing. I'd also argue that just because bracketing can be done poorly, doesn't negate its role as a useful tool when wielded skillfully. The type of bracketing I'm doing is a form of phenomenological metaphysics - agnostic toward certain metaphysical claims that fall outside the scope of the inquiry, rather than dismissive of metaphysics as a whole. Traditional metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel to Whitehead, takes an 'outside-in' approach to ontology. Where you start from the Absolute (or some fixed metaphysical ground), and try to work your way backwards to our situated, everyday position within Reality. It treats ontology as a study of what fundamentally is. What I'm doing is taking an 'inside-out' approach to metaphysics, which starts from our situated, everyday experience - and tracing how that experience gives rise to categories, distinctions, and ontological inferences. From this vantage point, ontology becomes a kind of reverse engineering - not in order to deny capital 'R' Reality, but to understand how our access to it is structured. The divergence between these two approaches is rooted in a deeper disagreement over what ontology is for. On one view, ontology aims to describe Reality as it is in itself — timeless, essential, absolute. On the other, it aims to understand how Reality is experienced — how we carve meaning out of the undifferentiated.

Your use of 'Being' refers to the Absolute - the metaphysical ground of all that is (Being-As-Absolute) What I'm attempting to do is shift the question from what Reality is to how we experience Reality (Being-As-Understanding). Reality itself may be an undifferentiated whole, but it's always accessed from a situated position - a vantage-point rather than an everything-point. Being-As-Absolute might be what-is, but Being-As-Understanding is how what-is becomes intelligible. The former contains the latter, but the latter is more salient to our human condition within the Absolute. When we say that something is a type of thing, we’re already in the realm of Being-as-Understanding. Reality itself doesn’t consist of ‘things’ as such — ‘things’ emerge from the act of differentiation, of drawing distinctions within the undifferentiated.

Counter Claim: Ontology is always situated, because being (whether we're talking about the 'being' of entities or capital B 'Being') isn't metaphysical. It's instead a form of understanding for a particular someone, which we reify as a metaphysical substance or field due to a category error. In short, it's the most basic and primordial way that people, places, and things are first disclosed to us as people, places, and things.

As far as action steps, the first thing I would advise everyone to do is to find a local, in-person pro-democracy group to organize with. Indivisible is the one I joined - it's a nationwide broad-tent pro-democracy movement that has local chapters in every state and most major metropolitan areas (https://indivisible.org/). My local group has in person meetings every month where we share intel about what's happening in our state and the country, and coordinate actions like protests. The two founders of Indivisible have a nationwide 'What's The Plan Call' that anyone can join. (In addition to Indivisible, there's also no shortage of other pro-democracy groups to join that organize around specific issues, such as immigration, climate change, workers rights, etc). In addition to finding your local group, you can grab the 5calls app and make weekly calls to your Senators and Representatives about specific issues. The only way that our politicians are going to do what we want is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign telling them to vote NO on Trump's policies and cabinet appointments. Don't assume that just because your local Rep is a Democrat that they'll do the right thing without public pressure. And don't assume that just because your Rep is a Republican that they can't be pressured on specific issues, especially if they're in a competitive seat. We also need be willing to have difficult conversations with friends and family members who've tuned out of politics since the election. While the trying to reach the MAGA Cult is likely a lost cause, there are plenty of people who aren't hostile to the pro-democracy movement, but aren't aware of the danger we're in because they haven't been paying attention. They might not know that ICE is kidnapping people off the streets like the fucking gestapo, and that Americans are being illegally renditioned to a foreign concentration camp. They might not be aware of that Trump is in the process of collapsing our supply chains, and that he's doing this intentionally to consolidate power. Don't assume people know things that are blindingly obvious to you. In sum - we need to be spending less time on the internet and more time in-person building the pro-democracy movement within our own communities. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and powerless. Unless we have the platform of a Leo or a Destiny, there's not much we can do to fight this as individuals. We fight this by building a resilient network of communities that can come together to pursue a shared strategy.

Appreciate it! Your constructive criticism is very welcome. Mind and world are two aspects of a unified phenomena we call Reality, but that doesn't mean we have access to 'everything, everywhere, across all time' - our limitations matter. Good epistemology (in my view) uses our situated position within Reality as a starting point for making useful discernments from unavoidably incomplete information. I'm of course open to the possibility that there a levels beyond the epistemic territory I'm exploring - but if that's indeed the case, no sense moving on until the approach I'm articulating has been more fully mined for its partial insights.

Partial agreement. It might be worth clarifying my stance here, since it differs in emphasis from Leo's. I'm less interested in what's ultimately 'real', and more interested in a descriptive account of how we arrive at our conceptual distinctions. My contention is that knowledge need not have an absolute ground - regardless of whether that ground is an inferred 'mind independent Reality' (materialism) or whether it's purely mental (idealism / mysticism). Whether our shared Reality is physical or mental isn't what's important here - what's important is that mind and world blend into one another in a circular way. Our lived perspective is the canvas upon which we experience a shared Reality, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the shared Reality it presents. Trying to find an absolute ground in either of these two poles is like asking if a coin is 'really' heads or tails. The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm. Does all this mean that the Absolute doesn't exit? Not at all - just that it can't be cleanly separated from our lived perspective within Reality. Observer dependent, but not 'made up' or 'imaginary'.

Thank you. I've appreciated your thoughtful political posts over the years and, I hope you'll consider throwing your hat into the pro-democracy struggle if you haven't already. We could certainly use someone with your nuanced, pragmatic outlook. Finding my local Indivisible chapter and attending an in-person meeting was easily the best decision I've made since the election. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and disempowered. Our cynicism and despair is their ammunition. Spending less time on the internet and more time engaged in in-person civic participation with people in my community has made me feel much less anxiously cynical than I would otherwise be. We haven't had to fight for our democracy in America in a long-time. But we're not in this alone. Millions of people are standing up this cruel, idiotic regime.

Putin has maintained a relatively high approval in Russia despite being an autocrat, because his regime is credited with the country's economic recovery. Russia's transition to capitalism was disastrous for ordinary people, producing a decade of Great Depression-like conditions following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Economic shock doctrine was traumatically ruinous for ordinary people. Despite being a brutal dictator, Russia's economic situation stabilized under Putin's regime. Conditions for most ordinary Russian citizens improved. While Putin was gutting democracy he was replacing it with a mafia-like patronage system. Millions of pensioners in Russia literally depend on Putin's regime for their survival, since state subsidies are the only thing keeping them destitution. Trump's approval rating on the other hand is hovering around %40. The first 100 days is the honeymoon period where presidents are usually at their most popular, and Trump's approval ratings are already in the toilet in a historically unprecedented way. His economic 'policy' is little more than an idiotic extortion scheme that will make life much worse for most ordinary Americans -off exactly the opposite of how Putin was able to stay in power. Americans are about to go from disliking Trump to truly hating him once we're no longer shielded from the collapse of our supply chains from his idiotic tariffs. Economists are predicting empty store shelves by the summer, the domino effects of which will almost surely spark a major recession. When I say that Trump's regime is weak and unpopular, what I'm referring to is that Trump sucks at being an autocrat. The smart play would have been to move quietly and take credit for Biden's economy. Instead he started a trade war with the world while bragging about how he's taking away out due process rights. It's almost the perfect conditions for galvanizing a large, ideologically diverse resistance to his cruel, idiotic regime. The democracy that Putin dismantled was in its infancy, within a country that was autocratic for the vast majority of its history. Trump is trying to dismantle a 250 year old democracy with the oldest written constitution in the world. Putin has had 15 years to consolidate his power before launching the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, while Trump is much earlier on in that process in a country with a much more democratic civil society.

@Hardkill @integral To clarify, I'm not a pacifist. Simply put, nonviolent tactics are much more strategically effective at challenging authoritarian regimes than violent insurrection. The long term aim with the nonviolent pro-democracy campaign is to separate the regime from its pillars of support, by engaging a large and ideologically diverse cross section of the public. Nonviolent resistance has an enormous participation advantage here, owing to its lower physical, moral, and commitment barriers relative to violent resistance. Basically, the eventual aim is for the pro-democracy movement to snowball into something too big to suppress or contain. The threshold for this is smaller than you might think - when just %3.5 of a country's population is actively participating in the resistance is when this starts to happen. There's safety in numbers, but this only works if we maintain nonviolent discipline. Violent tactics on the other hand tend to produce a rally around the flag effect. This is to be avoided at all costs, since it makes a regime's supporters much more likely to perceive the conflict as a zero sum game, pushing them to fight on to the bitter end. In addition to all that, nonviolent campaigns produce much more democratic outcomes afterwards. Violent conflict is anathema to maintaining a stable democracy afterwards, which is why civil wars - whether in Russia or China or Yemen - produce autocracies, not stable democratic regimes. In the 20th and 21st century almost every successful transition from an autocracy to a democracy happened through nonviolent resistance rather than armed conflict.

Please DO NOT bring weapons to the protests. Don't give law enforcement or the feds an excuse to crack down. The primary thing that's protecting us is safety in numbers and goodwill with the public, and that vanishes if the protests are perceived as violent. Trump's gestapo isn't arresting people at large public protests. ICE prefers to catch people when they're unaware and isolated, who they think they can get away with disappearing. If you want to purchase a firearm, keep it in your home or personal vehicle. Don't bring it to a nonviolent protest - you'd be endangering everyone around you. (Note: I'm pro second amendment, just be strategic about when are where you bring a firearm. The problem isn't an ethical one, it's strategic. In theory, I have no ethical issues with someone using deadly force to protect themselves from being abducted by ICE - gestapo lives don't matter. In practice, the regime would like nothing more than for the resistance to turn violent. Don't give Trump his Riechstag Fire Decree.)

You know that the Vatican made a good choice when the American Nazis are already losing their collective shit over it. If Jesus came back tomorrow MAGA would have him extradited to the gulags for not being a christian nationalist - and for not being white.

If you happen to live in the United States and you're looking for something tangible you can do to push back against Trump's authoritarian regime, a huge nationwide protest in being planned for Sat, June 14th. On June 14th (which also happens to be Flag Day), Trump will be spending $90 million of our taxpayer dollars on a lavish North Korean-style military parade for his birthday, where tanks will be rolling down the streets of Washington DC. Indivisible and 50501, along with a broad network of grassroots pro-democracy groups, will be hosting nationwide protests throughout every part of the country - except for Washington DC. The aim is to draw the media and the public's attention away from Trump's gaudy dictatorial parade and towards the growing pro-democracy movement in the United States - and put the screws to the Big Lie that Trump has a mandate with the American people. The only way that our politicians and organizations like colleges are going to stand-up to Trump's destruction of our Constitution and the Rule of Law is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign for them to do so. In the April 5th and April 19th 'Hands Off Protests', 9 million people took to the streets in nonviolent protest against Trump's fascist agenda, with across thousands of demonstrations taking place in every state. These protests will be a great way to dip your toes into the pro-democracy movement - and they'll be happening literally everywhere in the country, from big cities like Las Vegas to small towns in ruby red districts. You can find more information on the No Kings protests here: https://www.nokings.org/ https://indivisible.org/ https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

The problems with Relativism, as I see it, are twofold. 1) It lacks a firm, emotionally compelling reason for why we should reject harmful/dysfunctional viewpoints. Relativism tells us that we should try to understand viewpoints and practices from within their own historical and cultural context - and that any judgement we pass necessarily reflects our own cultural conditioning and individual biases. This is true - but if this insight isn't paired with some other non-relativistic underlying principles, the best that relativism can do is tell us that accepting or rejecting a particular viewpoint comes down to the preferences that we've been conditioned into. When the Chinese government calls human rights 'Western rights', does our knee-jerk rejection of this just come down to cultural chauvinism? Or is it a reflection of cross-cultural principles that are worth striving for? Slavery 'made sense' from the POV's of the subcultures that enacted these practices - is there a more substantive reason for rejecting slavery, other than that it rubs us the wrong way because of the culture we grew up in? 2) It's self undermining. Basically, if relativism itself is just one viewpoint among many, why should we adopt it over the totalizing viewpoints it critiques? While this approach might look like humility, in actuality no one adheres to an epistemology without an implicit belief that it’s more valid than what it’s critiquing (otherwise, why embrace Relativism over some other viewpoint)? In short: relativism can't advocate for itself within its own framework. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Granted, there are 'strong' and 'weak' versions of Relativism, and these two critiques are much more salient for its 'strong' incarnations. You're right though - not all relativists cling to such extreme forms of equivocation. It can be applied with varying degrees of nuance. The larger point isn't that Relativism is wrong, per se - it's that it's partial. These critiques only jump to the forefront when Relativism is treated as complete viewpoint, rather than one heuristic among many that we should keep in mind when evaluating perspectives.