Pluralism, Not Relativism

[zurew]

8 hours ago, integral said:

What part of Leos body of work actually fits in your models?

I dont have firm models or very strong positions on almost anything (Especially not on metaphysics - but I lean towards Idealism). I take most of the talks about metaphysics to be gibberish , I think most of the phrases like "grounding" and "fundamental"  , "real" and "exist" and such arent precise enough, because they seem to mean different things to different people.

I still have very much a lot of  reading and thinking and spiritual practicing to do.

But I think that I diverge from Leo on almost every position he has when it comes to philosophy - maybe except morals  - there I am an antirealist as well, but yeah, I cant even think of another example right now where we would align. 

 

I generally have most problem with Leo's epistemology and lack of rigor  - with comitting yourself to such a burden that you cant substantiate or defend (while still not letting go of the position or changing your credence about it) and Leo does that a lot, not just with philosophy but when it comes to other subjects and fields as well.

 

One last comment about your criticism on what-if scenarios: They are important in many cases, especially when it comes to testing claims where the claim is that something is logically necessary. My position is that we need to be sensitive to what and how much burden we take on ourselves, when we make a claim and I have no issue with trying to match my skepticism to the level of burden that a claim entails.

On 2025. 05. 22. at 9:06 PM, zurew said:

Or if you really want to stick with the mirror example , a more correct representation would be this:

 

You making a claim that "If you look in the mirror, you’ll see your reflection” and you also saying that "its impossible for you to be wrong about it".

Can you recognize what burden of proof you put on yourself between the claim where you dont add the "its impossible for you to be wrong about it" and between the claim where you add that part?

 

In the instance where its not impossible for me to be wrong about it - Im more than okay with just looking in the mirror to check your claim, in the instance where you add "its impossible for you to be wrong about it", me looking in the mirror is nowhere near sufficient to substantiate the claim.

Edited May 24 by zurew

[Nilsi]

Fair enough - you want to move beyond relativism and absolutism into some kind of pragmatic pluralism. I get it.

But then the question becomes: which purposes are worth having? How do you rank conflicting ones? You’re saying truth is contextual - fine - but then what makes one context or goal more “valid” than another? And here we’re already in Jordan Peterson territory. And while I disagree with his framework, I respect that he at least tries to answer that. 

It seems to me like you’re operating from a kind of spontaneous humanism - where things like slavery or authoritarianism are just self-evidently bad. But is that actually so self-evident? If you’re serious about situatedness, then even those judgments are contingent - not neutral, not universal.

So here’s where I bring in Nietzsche. Because if everything is already embedded - if we’re not choosing our axioms from outside but expressing deeper drives - then aren’t we already in a world of will to power? Of Heraclitian fire? Of forces asserting, affirming, transforming themselves? That’s not relativism. That’s not universalism. That’s beyond both.

And from there, maybe the only honest move is post-philosophy. Not more meta-theory. Not more frameworks. Just: this is me. These are my values, my instincts, my contradictions. What are yours?

And that’s where I find Derrida’s idea of hospitality so beautiful - not because it creates shared ground, but because it doesn’t. It’s a willingness to meet the other even when no shared grammar exists. No agreement. No synthesis. Just presence.

Which brings me to my critique. The kind of meta-language I see you - and others in this integral/meta space - using is too clean. Too non-violent. Too frictionless. You’re creating a universal code where everyone can speak, but no one is actually revealed. It sounds inclusive, but it ends up erasing real difference.

Personally, I don’t even want clarity. I don’t want us all speaking the same language. I want people speaking in their language - shaped by their body, history, contradictions. Even if I can’t understand it. Especially then.

Because only then is there risk. Only then is there life.

And honestly? I think that’s the real conclusion of Heidegger. If you take situatedness seriously, you don’t describe it - you live it. You’re immersed. There is no view-from-nowhere. No stepping outside the clearing. You’re in it. No more meta. No more escape.

That’s precisely where Heidegger arrived toward the end of his life.

And to me, that’s where philosophy ends - and where what I take from François Laruelle as non-philosophy begins.

And with it, something more human - and more dangerous - begins.

Edited Thursday at 02:38 PM by Nilsi

[DocWatts]

10 hours ago, Nilsi said:

And honestly? I think that’s the real conclusion of Heidegger. If you take situatedness seriously, you don’t describe it - you live it. You’re immersed. There is no view-from-nowhere. No stepping outside the clearing. You’re in it. No more meta. No more escape.

That’s precisely where Heidegger arrived toward the end of his life.

And to me, that’s where philosophy ends - and where what I take from François Laruelle as non-philosophy begins.

And with it, something more human - and more dangerous - begins.

I actually resonate with more of your thoughtful critique than you might realize, and I %100 agree with this point in particular.  Beautifully said. (And yes, the shadow of Heideggar looms large over my body of work).

I'd contend that purposes are primarily value driven. Values, then, are emotionally intuitive starting points that resonate with us because of our life experiences. Just as something about a color like 'red' remains stubbornly ineffable when trying to describe it to someone without eyesight, values have a requisite horizon of experience to be significant for us. Lived realities, rather than choices on a menu.

That said, even though values are driven by emotion and survial rather than intellect, they are open to reflection and refinement (human beings can and do develop, after all). While there's no universal cipher that can tell us which values to adopt in an a-perspectival and a-situational way, in practice human beings can and do arrive at shared forms of meaning and purpose.

The situations we navigate are bounded by shared biological, material, and existential constraints. We aren't just situated as individuals - we're situated together, as families, as communities, as a human species, as one link in the community of life. Not 'one big, happy family' - conflict is unavoidable, survival exacts a sharp price - but concentric circles of shared concern that radiate outwards from the individual, overlapping with the circles of others in more or less partial ways.

Edited Friday at 12:57 AM by DocWatts

[Nilsi]

9 hours ago, DocWatts said:

I actually resonate with more of your thoughtful critique than you might realize, and I %100 agree with this point in particular.  Beautifully said. (And yes, the shadow of Heideggar looms large over my body of work).

I'd contend that purposes are primarily value driven. Values, then, are emotionally intuitive starting points that resonate with us because of our life experiences. Just as something about a color like 'red' remains stubbornly ineffable when trying to describe it to someone without eyesight, values have a requisite horizon of experience to be significant for us. Lived realities, rather than choices on a menu.

That said, even though values are driven by emotion and survial rather than intellect, they are open to reflection and refinement (human beings can and do develop, after all). While there's no universal cipher that can tell us which values to adopt in an a-perspectival and a-situational way, in practice human beings can and do arrive at shared forms of meaning and purpose.

The situations we navigate are bounded by shared biological, material, and existential constraints. We aren't just situated as individuals - we're situated together, as families, as communities, as a human species, as one link in the community of life. Not 'one big, happy family' - conflict is unavoidable, survival exacts a sharp price - but concentric circles of shared concern that radiate outwards from the individual, overlapping with the circles of others in more or less partial ways.

I appreciate your generosity - and I can definitely see points of resonance, especially in how you frame values as grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. Still, I think there’s a fundamental difference in emphasis that’s worth drawing out.

You seem to orient yourself toward a horizon of shared intelligibility - where values emerge from lived experience but are still open to refinement in relation to others.  There’s a strong sense of situatedness-together here, which I read - perhaps speculatively - as extending to large-scale breakdowns like climate collapse, systemic injustice, or democratic fragility. This echoes what Heidegger or Badiou might call an evental structure: a rupture or crisis that forces a revaluation and opens the possibility for meaning to emerge in common.

In Lacanian terms, I would suggest that this still implies a relation to the Big Other - not necessarily as a figure of authority, but as the symbolic field that determines what counts as real, meaningful, or worth acting upon together. And this is where my critique comes in: despite the nuance and care with which you frame these concerns, it seems to me that you’re nonetheless caught in the desire of the Big Other - still oriented toward a horizon of intelligibility that promises meaning, coherence, or ethical response through shared recognition. Even the effort to refine or reflect upon values still presupposes a symbolic structure that can hold them.

My orientation moves elsewhere. I’m less interested in shared meaning or the refinement of values under existential constraint, and more in what escapes structuration altogether - the surplus, the unassimilable, the singular. I’m not concerned with coherence through the symbolic, but with what refuses the demand of the Other altogether. The body, for me, is not just situated - it’s an assemblage of intensities and forces, a site where meaning erupts from within rather than arriving through recognition or alignment with a shared field.

So instead of an outside-in movement - where values gain shape in response to shared constraints - I’m drawn to an inside-out force, where meaning is generated through the amplification of singularity, through difference that resists capture. This isn’t a search for reconciliation, but a commitment to radical immanence. Not fidelity to the event, but the unfolding of the will, even at the cost of intelligibility.

In that sense, your position clearly reflects a Heideggerian or Badiouan approach grounded in relation to the event and the symbolic; mine is more aligned with Nietzsche and Deleuze - an approach that finds meaning in what escapes commonality, resists symbolic consolidation, and refuses to appeal to any Big Other.

[DocWatts]

12 hours ago, Nilsi said:

I appreciate your generosity - and I can definitely see points of resonance, especially in how you frame values as grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. Still, I think there’s a fundamental difference in emphasis that’s worth drawing out.

You seem to orient yourself toward a horizon of shared intelligibility - where values emerge from lived experience but are still open to refinement in relation to others.  There’s a strong sense of situatedness-together here, which I read - perhaps speculatively - as extending to large-scale breakdowns like climate collapse, systemic injustice, or democratic fragility. This echoes what Heidegger or Badiou might call an evental structure: a rupture or crisis that forces a revaluation and opens the possibility for meaning to emerge in common.

In Lacanian terms, I would suggest that this still implies a relation to the Big Other - not necessarily as a figure of authority, but as the symbolic field that determines what counts as real, meaningful, or worth acting upon together. And this is where my critique comes in: despite the nuance and care with which you frame these concerns, it seems to me that you’re nonetheless caught in the desire of the Big Other - still oriented toward a horizon of intelligibility that promises meaning, coherence, or ethical response through shared recognition. Even the effort to refine or reflect upon values still presupposes a symbolic structure that can hold them.

My orientation moves elsewhere. I’m less interested in shared meaning or the refinement of values under existential constraint, and more in what escapes structuration altogether - the surplus, the unassimilable, the singular. I’m not concerned with coherence through the symbolic, but with what refuses the demand of the Other altogether. The body, for me, is not just situated - it’s an assemblage of intensities and forces, a site where meaning erupts from within rather than arriving through recognition or alignment with a shared field.

So instead of an outside-in movement - where values gain shape in response to shared constraints - I’m drawn to an inside-out force, where meaning is generated through the amplification of singularity, through difference that resists capture. This isn’t a search for reconciliation, but a commitment to radical immanence. Not fidelity to the event, but the unfolding of the will, even at the cost of intelligibility.

In that sense, your position clearly reflects a Heideggerian or Badiouan approach grounded in relation to the event and the symbolic; mine is more aligned with Nietzsche and Deleuze - an approach that finds meaning in what escapes commonality, resists symbolic consolidation, and refuses to appeal to any Big Other.

I'll confess I'm not well versed in Lacan, but your shift in emphasis from an outside-in to an inside-out framework for meaning-making makes a lot of intuitive sense. We might not even have a disagreement so much as we do adjacent perspectives - which is great, since I'd get less out of these interactions our viewpoints were too similar or divergent.

In other areas of my work, I've emphasized our connection to the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. I strongly resonate with your point that this primordial ground - our first contact with this shared, experiential world - resists symbolic consolidation. 'We know more than we can tell", as Michael Polanyi put it. Something is always lost when we try to capture our ineffable connection to this visceral ground through concepts. Abstractions about what's ultimately 'real' are our attempts to uncover intelligible patterns within this visceral Reality that are relevant to our needs and concerns.

Returning to my color example, we can try analogizing the color 'red' to other senses, give a mechanistic breakdown of how visible light interacts with rods and cones in our eyes and is converted into electrical signals that travel through our nervous system, but in the end color has to be experienced to be understood. Likewise, hermeneutic barriers can be bridged but not fully closed (No matter how much I try to put myself in the shoes of another, there's only so much I can do grok another subjective viewpoint. In practice though, intelligibility doesn't need to be perfect, just 'good enough' for our shared purposes).

I'd differ in emphasis slightly with your inside-out framing, in favor of a co-constitutive approach to meaning. 

The world itself (or your relationship to it at any rate) is constitutive of your 'in-here'. That's not to say 'you are the whole universe', just that the boundaries between the outer and inner realms are porous, and constant exchange is the norm.

The way I've analogized it is that mind and world are two sides of the same coin - just as hot and cold are two poles of a unified phenomena we call temperature. Meaning, then, isn't subjective or subjective, it's relational and emergent. Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, meaning emerges from the dynamic interplay of mind, body, and world.

Edited Friday at 11:08 PM by DocWatts

[Nilsi]

Forget about Lacan - I don’t have any ontological commitment there, and if that’s not your thing, I’m happy to bracket him.

I think we’re closely aligned in spirit, especially when you speak of the pre-conceptual grounding of meaning in lived experience. It resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh (la chair) - not the body as an object, but as a living hinge between subject and world, where perception and reality are entangled from the start. That’s a valuable reminder that experience isn’t built from the top down by concepts, but wells up from this in-between layer where thought, sensation, and world are still knotted together.

So yes - I’m with you up through that Heideggerian turn to the Life-World. But that’s also where I part ways. For me, Heidegger doesn’t really follow Nietzsche all the way. His reading of Nietzsche is compelling, but it still reins him in, domesticates the excess. I’m more interested in what happens after - in that lineage from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Klossowski, Deleuze, even Nick Land: a kind of dark vitalism that takes seriously not just the grounding of meaning in the body, but the body as a volatile site of intensity, transgression, creation.

Meaning here isn’t just emergent or co-constituted - it’s unstable, disruptive, even dangerous. It escapes containment. The body becomes not a vessel for resonance but a battlefield, an engine, a question: What can a body do? What kinds of becoming can it sustain, or destroy? How does desire move, twist, fracture meaning itself?

So if there’s a difference, I’d say it’s that: I’m less interested in harmonizing with the world than in following the cracks where form gives way. I don’t want to restore coherence; I want to feel what becomes possible when the body is freed from guilt, from form, from the demand to mean something.

That said, I really respect where you’re coming from. I think your approach is indispensable when it comes to things like collective sense-making, shared attention, and political or social action. I’m probably not a great ally there - I’m not against it, I just move differently. I’m drawn to feeling and desiring deeply, not in pursuit of some heroic ideal, but because I think the real ground of appreciating the Other lies in rupture and incoherence. The kind of collaboration I’m after isn’t organized around the Event or some shared hyperobject, but around something more fragile and fugitive - something artistic, erotic, and, in the broadest and best sense, useless. A friendship of openings, not objectives.

Edited 21 hours ago by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

15 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Forget about Lacan - I don’t have any ontological commitment there, and if that’s not your thing, I’m happy to bracket him.

I think we’re closely aligned in spirit, especially when you speak of the pre-conceptual grounding of meaning in lived experience. It resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh (la chair) - not the body as an object, but as a living hinge between subject and world, where perception and reality are entangled from the start. That’s a valuable reminder that experience isn’t built from the top down by concepts, but wells up from this in-between layer where thought, sensation, and world are still knotted together.

So yes - I’m with you up through that Heideggerian turn to the Life-World. But that’s also where I part ways. For me, Heidegger doesn’t really follow Nietzsche all the way. His reading of Nietzsche is compelling, but it still reins him in, domesticates the excess. I’m more interested in what happens after - in that lineage from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Klossowski, Deleuze, even Nick Land: a kind of dark vitalism that takes seriously not just the grounding of meaning in the body, but the body as a volatile site of intensity, transgression, creation.

Meaning here isn’t just emergent or co-constituted - it’s unstable, disruptive, even dangerous. It escapes containment. The body becomes not a vessel for resonance but a battlefield, an engine, a question: What can a body do? What kinds of becoming can it sustain, or destroy? How does desire move, twist, fracture meaning itself?

So if there’s a difference, I’d say it’s that: I’m less interested in harmonizing with the world than in following the cracks where form gives way. I don’t want to restore coherence; I want to feel what becomes possible when the body is freed from guilt, from form, from the demand to mean something.

That said, I really respect where you’re coming from. I think your approach is indispensable when it comes to things like collective sense-making, shared attention, and political or social action. I’m probably not a great ally there - I’m not against it, I just move differently. I’m drawn to feeling and desiring deeply, not in pursuit of some heroic ideal, but because I think the real ground of appreciating the Other lies in rupture and incoherence. The kind of collaboration I’m after isn’t organized around the Event or some shared hyperobject, but around something more fragile and fugitive - something artistic, erotic, and, in the broadest and best sense, useless. A friendship of openings, not objectives.

Take this for example: I have a Palestinian friend. When he tells me about his family in Gaza - shows me videos of bombed-out homes, the sound of grief still fresh - I don’t think there’s any shared Life-World to fall back on. I don’t “relate.” I don’t understand. And the truth is worse: I’ll probably forget five minutes later and go back to my routines, my inbox, my dinner plans. Not out of cruelty, just the sheer inertia of my life. And rather than beat myself up or try to extract some moral resolve from that, I think the only ethical move is to sit with the fact that nothing bridges this. To stay in the rupture, where nothing is redeemed, and no solidarity is promised.

Even your talk of the limits of empathy still seems to carry a kind of optimism - a subtle hope that something will hold, that we’ll find a “good enough” resonance. But what if that’s precisely the problem? What if presence doesn’t emerge from partial coherence, but from total breakdown? What if desire is not what allows us to connect, but what shatters any shared frame? What if the most honest encounter is the one that doesn’t lead to mutual understanding, but to disorientation - where the other remains truly other, and we remain fractured, without consolation?

[Nilsi]

40 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Take this for example: I have a Palestinian friend. When he tells me about his family in Gaza - shows me videos of bombed-out homes, the sound of grief still fresh - I don’t think there’s any shared Life-World to fall back on. I don’t “relate.” I don’t understand. And the truth is worse: I’ll probably forget five minutes later and go back to my routines, my inbox, my dinner plans. Not out of cruelty, just the sheer inertia of my life. And rather than beat myself up or try to extract some moral resolve from that, I think the only ethical move is to sit with the fact that nothing bridges this. To stay in the rupture, where nothing is redeemed, and no solidarity is promised.

Even your talk of the limits of empathy still seems to carry a kind of optimism - a subtle hope that something will hold, that we’ll find a “good enough” resonance. But what if that’s precisely the problem? What if presence doesn’t emerge from partial coherence, but from total breakdown? What if desire is not what allows us to connect, but what shatters any shared frame? What if the most honest encounter is the one that doesn’t lead to mutual understanding, but to disorientation - where the other remains truly other, and we remain fractured, without consolation?

I also have a Ukrainian friend. She’s a tattoo artist. Last time we met, we just sat for hours without talking. Another friend is Pakistani - his family got put on evacuation notice during the Kashmir escalation. Another traces his lineage back to Otto von Bismarck. Some of my friends are millionaires with properties scattered across continents; others live in two-room flats with extended family sleeping on the floor.

And sometimes we all end up in the same place. No reason. Just food, drinks, music, bodies. We don’t all laugh at the same stuff. Sometimes people argue. Sometimes someone cries in the corner. Sometimes someone makes out in the hallway. And yeah - sometimes it gets weird or intense or boring. But we stay. No one’s trying to make it all make sense.

I’m not trying to redeem this, to elevate it into a higher pattern of meaning or relational emergence. I think that would kill it. I think the moment you try to wrap it up in intelligibility, you lose the point. What touches me is precisely that it doesn’t fit. That I can’t process it. That it doesn’t add up.

That’s why I find myself turning not to a concept of shared reality, but to something more like the end of Zarathustra: a cracked, ridiculous ass-festival where no truth is found, no reconciliation reached - just laughter, wounds, noise, and the weird joy of being together anyway.

“Forget not this night and this ass-festival, ye higher men! That did ye devise when with me, that do I take as a good omen—such things only the convalescents devise!

And should ye celebrate it again, this ass-festival, do it from love to yourselves, do it also from love to me!”

That’s maybe all I’m trying to say. Not that we’ll ever see eye to eye, or understand what it’s like. But that we can still throw the ass-festival. Not out of coherence, but out of rupture. Out of love.