willow: "and geuss is less than exactly clear in the passage, stressing the dichotomy too much. i didn't like the aytaç and rossi paper very much for this as well iirc. in any case, if you want geuss' actual view, just ctrl+f for "subordinate""

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willowJul 5, 2025

similar thing here, like this is a good point to make against new realists but its framed as an internal contradiction for rad realism in general, not like a reminder that geuss got it right the first time.

amadeus ulrich, ideology and suffering, 12

Such pre-epistemic premises might indeed drive the social analysis of radical realists without being made explicit. The criteria of selection and relevance that shape the lens through which they look at practices of self-justification and epistemic disruption in capitalist, racist and patriarchal contexts remain somewhat unclear. Take their endorsement of prefigurative politics, which is supposed to be ‘less likely to be subject to ideological distortions’ (Rossi, 2019: 647), since prefigurative agents withdraw from the belief structures of societies and create situations in which pervasive forms of distortion are no longer present. Even if this is true, and it might be, a problem with this affirmative stance towards prefigurative strategies is that it does not take sufficient heed of the moral commitments that inspire them. In 1994, when NAFTA was enacted, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico framed their fight to overcome capitalist oppression as an uprising of dignity, calling it a struggle against ‘la falta de respeto’ that Indigenous people had to endure for centuries and for a right to live as equals in a pluralistic world (see Dussel, 2007; Mignolo, 2002). Or take the Occupy movement, which sprang from widespread outrage over the anti-democratic effects of extreme economic inequality and was motivated by the desire, as John Hammond (2015) puts it, to ‘transform social values to favor human relations over financial transactions’ (289). Radical realists surely believe that such movements fight laudably for important causes. Why not acknowledge this? Otherwise, they contribute only partially to the self-clarification of the prefigurative struggles of our age, neglecting their real motivations and the very point of their practice of resistance. This omission matters since a central ambition of the realist countermovement is to take into account ‘what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances’ (Geuss, 2008…

willowJul 5, 2025

i'm just extra irked because people looooove saying this shit and it's so obviously already addressed

Left Nietzschean @DevinGoure
Sep 7, 2023
The Geuss-style realist critique of Rawls’ “ethics first” approach is convincing when applied to a certain style of liberal political theorizing. But when it extends to denying that moral norms have a very real force in human life and power relations, it’s just not plausible.
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Enzo Rossi @enzoreds
Sep 6, 2023
No. The materialist left should leave moralising to the liberals. And btw the impact of Rawlsianism and the wider radlib capture of the putative left has been huge: we now spend way too much time debating our moral intuitions & other wittle feelings instead of talking about power x.com/jacobin/status…
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Zoltán Gábor Szűcs @ZoltnGborSzcs1
Sep 7, 2023
I'm more of a Williamsian-style critic of Rawls's 'applied morality' which is directly related to metaethical debates and it would never try to reject the importance of ethical considerations but I think that your rendering of the Geussian critique is simply wrong.
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Left Nietzschean @DevinGoure
Sep 7, 2023
I completely agree on Williams, but could you say more re: Geuss? I have Philosophy and Real Politics in mind but I can’t claim to be deeply familiar with the rest of his work.
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Willow @PoliticsWillow
Sep 7, 2023
I mean even in the intro to Philosophy and Real Politics he acknowledges the causal significance of people’s normative conceptions. (Highlight is TL;DR)
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Left Nietzschean @DevinGoure
Sep 7, 2023
Thanks for the reference, and I think my blanket characterization of Geuss was probably unfair. This is roughly the view of morality Nietzsche articulates in Dawn. But to me this remains a profound philosophical question, and Geuss seems to evade the question of validity here.

https://x.com/DevinGoure/status/1699763743448592746
https://x.com/PoliticsWillow/status/1699835185964150818

willowJul 5, 2025

of course ulrich latches onto the "reprehensible" term in 'the idea of a critical theory', but notoriously you gotta be careful with that work and its interpretation

willowApr 7, 2024

contingency irony solidarity, richard rorty, pg 59

politics and the imagination, raymond geuss, pg 158

rorty and geuss are cute

willowJul 5, 2025

willowFeb 25, 2024

i wish i had access to manuscripts of The Idea of a Critical Theory. Geuss said somewhere that it was endlessly revised and lost a significant amount of length, and it certainly would have benefitted from a less dense presentation

willowJul 5, 2025

like he's constantly granting things geuss but then being a silly guy about rejecting him. why *this* "because"? of course you're right that the facts do not speak for themselves, and motivations are important, but we can arrive at that evaluation in plenty of ways

amadeus ulrich, ideology and suffering, 11

One might suppose, as Geuss (2001) writes, that the participation in bourgeois society causes us to adopt viewpoints from which it is difficult if not impossible to appreciate ‘the virtues of classless society’ (77). Perhaps. Yet all critical bite is lost without the further thought that the liberation from class society is a goal worth recognising and striving for because it would serve the interests of a vast majority of people.

willowAug 27, 2024

sources of normatively are abundant, diffuse, extraordinarily varied in scope and density and thickness, and generally not all that exciting (while simultaneously being the rather significant!). evaluative normativity can be very minimal, and conflating it with morality is a recipe for confusion.

willowJul 5, 2025

like this is a fine tension to bring up, but it's also more or less addressed head on by your citation. then again, i'm not too mad about this one because i think the frequency with which the catchphrase is thrown around to be a little off-putting and misleading,

amadeus ulrich, ideology and suffering, 12

I surmise that the best response for realists would be to stress that they do not deny that a division of labour between moral and epistemic criticisms of ideologies in political theory can be worthwhile and productive (see Aytaç and Rossi, 2023: 1225–1226). Yet this amounts to admitting crucial limits of their approach. This concession sits uneasily with their frequent assertion that the elision of moral ideas is a desirable feature of ideology critique, which is rooted in the sympathies radical realists have for the strong thesis that moral norms tend to be ‘dead politics’, as Geuss (2010) has phrased it: ‘the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future’ (111). Is the point, perhaps, that some prefigurative struggles can escape this grip? How exactly? These are fascinating questions, but reflections on them require the fuel of moral argument to get anywhere at all.

geuss, politics and the imagination, moralism and realpolitik, 42

Ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Our past is an essential part of what we are, which we ignore at our peril. We could not completely leave it behind even if we wished to do so; but recognition of this necessity gives us no reason to romanticize it. Nothing stops us from making our own moral judgments on our past, on our present way of life, or, proleptically, on future action or its probable outcome, although the further away from present contexts of action we get, the less of a grip our apparatus of moral reflection will give us on the situations we encounter. One should not, however, confuse trying to refine our moral categories with trying to understand what is going on in the world in which we live. There is nothing wrong with cultivating our own moral intuitions, but for them to have any value they must be minimally connected with the cognitive apparatus by which we track the world as it is. There is certainly no guarantee that the fi t between these intuitions, which we in any case have reason to believe are historically highly variable, and the way the world is, will always be smooth and comfortable,so it would behoove us to be on our guard against trusting them too blindly

willow @dreary.dev

and geuss is less than exactly clear in the passage, stressing the dichotomy too much. i didn't like the aytaç and rossi paper very much for this as well iirc. in any case, if you want geuss' actual view, just ctrl+f for "subordinate"

raymond geuss, morality, culture, and history, 6

Habermas is right to emphasize the importance of 'rank' and 'rank-ordering' in Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a conscious radical anti-egalitarian not just in politics but also in ethics. He explicitly rejects the view that there should be one morality for everyone (JGB §§ 198, 43, 30) . In fact he even holds that it is 'immoral' to apply the principle 'What is fair for one person, is fair for another' (JGB §221). Morality is to be subordinated to the principle of rank-ordering (JGB §§22 1, 219, 228, 257). Habermas is wrong, however, to connect this line of argument with a purported greater nobility of that which is older or more aboriginal.

raymond geuss, history and illusion in politics, 154

On the classic Marxist construction, it is not rational for those who are impoverished and oppressed to want universal tolerance and consensus-based reform rather than violent revolutionary change. Marx's economic analysis may have signal defects and he may have incorrectly identified the major class of oppressed people as 'the international proletariat', but his account of the specious logic of resistance to oppression retains its plausibility. Those who live in wealthy societies with a framework of robust institutions and strong liberal traditions can spend their time discussing the parish-pump politics that take place within that framework and the fine-tuning of the system of individual rights, but the framework is not in place everywhere in the world, and there is no reason to believe it will become universal in the foreseeable future. Even if one had no aspiration beyond that of extending the liberal system into new areas of the world, that would seem to require an ability to take a step back from it and see it in a slightly larger theoretical and empirical context. Such a wider context would be one in which the concept of a 'right' was to play a very derivative and subordinate role.

raymond geuss, outside ethics, 59

I have claimed that the main line of philosophic writing in nineteenth century Central Europe rejects the received modern consensus, and tries to orient thinking about human life and action around a very different set of questions from the ones that preoccupy contemporary ethics. Continental philosophers reject either one or the other (or both) of the two pillars of contemporary ethics. As far as the first pillar is concerned, they take one or another of a variety of weaker or stronger views. Thus, they cast doubt on the centrality of the ethical question, holding the weaker view that knowing “What ought I to do?” is of distinctly subordinate importance in practical life, or that it is not a philosophically significant question. Alternatively, they hold the stronger view that it is actually a deep mistake or a failing to ask that question (at any rate, as a philosophical question).

geuss, philosophy and real politics, 86

Nothing in this book should be taken to imply that no one should ever allow normative considerations of any kind to play any role whatever in deciding how to act politically. After all, even “efficiency” is a kind of normative concept. Equally I have given no reason to think that all moral considerations must be absolutely excluded from politics. Individuals or groups can cultivate their ethical intuitions and exercise their capacities for moral approval or disapproval ad libitum, as long as they do not confuse that with attaining any understanding whatever of the world in which they live, or think that their (clarified) moral intuitions have some special standing as completely adequate guides to political action. Finally, I have no objection to the view that “justice” (in whatever sense) or certain forms of “equality” are political desiderata (among others), as long as this is not construed as an abstract, blanket commitment that overrides all others, and provided particular reasons are given for thinking equality is desirable in some concrete situation. Considerations of fairness, equality, justice, and other virtues might well have a perfectly dignifed, if subordinate, place in various administrative decisions. What I do object to is the claim that they define politics. One result of taking seriously the reflections presented in this book would be that we would give up approaching politics in general by trying, necessarily unsuccessfully, to blank out history, and we would also give up focusing our thinking exclusively on the set of highly peculiar and historically contingent intuitions about “justice” that we happen to and in one contemporary society.

July 5, 2025 at 2:29 PM