One of the consequences was to that 'God became a ghost in his own machine', as some critic said. — Wayfarer

:up:

Ryle outlined what he regarded as the superiority of British (“Anglo-Saxon,” as he put it) analytic philosophers over their continental counterparts, and dismissed Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to “puff philosophy up into the Science of the sciences.” British philosophers were not tempted to such delusions of grandeur, he suggested, because of the Oxbridge rituals of High Table: “I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of philosophy as the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford colleges have kept them in personal contact with real scientists. Claims to Führership vanish when postprandial joking begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist—or a joke.” — link

Wow. Tribalism. Not pleasant.

His [Husserl's] mathematics teachers there included Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass, whose scientific ethos Husserl was particularly impressed with. However, he took his PhD in mathematics in Vienna (January 1883), with a thesis on the theory of variations (Variationstheorie). After that he returned to Berlin, to become Weierstrass’ assistant. — SEP

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/

Husserl was taught by mathematical greats, had a PhD in math.

This had the effect of 'naturalising' the transcendent ego, by making it continuous with the natural world - except for the embarrasing fact that how it 'interacted' with matter couldn't really be explained. — Wayfarer

Half-naturalized? I take something like a holist, 'continuous' view.

You know that Dennett was a student of Ryle's, right? — Wayfarer

Didn't know, but I know Dennett talks about Wittgenstein.

I think Husserl went on to point out the difficulties that this introduces — Wayfarer

I'm partial to his Crisis-era views, which aren't far from my interpretation of Wittgenstein.

What do you make of this?

It is an historical curiosity that it was not noticed that the entire argument was broken-backed. Theorists correctly assumed that any sane man could already recognise the differences between, say, rational and non-rational utterances or between purposive and automatic behaviour. Else there would have been nothing requiring to be salved from mechanism. Yet the explanation given presupposed that one person could in principle never recognise the difference between the rational and the irrational utterances issuing from other human bodies, since he could never get access to the postulated immaterial causes of some of their utterances. Save for the doubtful exception of himself, he could never tell the difference between a man and a Robot. It would have to be conceded, for example, that, for all that we can tell, the inner lives of persons who are classed as idiots or lunatics are as rational as those of anyone else. Perhaps only their overt behaviour is disappointing; that is to say, perhaps `idiots' are not really idiotic, or 'lunatics' lunatic. Perhaps, too, some of those who are classed as sane are really idiots. According to the theory, external observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to these other people were correct or incorrect. It would then be hazardous or impossible for a man to claim sanity or logical consistency even for himself, since he would be debarred from comparing his own performances with those of others. In short, our characterisations of 'persons and their performances as intelligent, prudent and virtuous or as stupid, hypocritical and cowardly could never have been made, so the problem of providing a special causal hypothesis to serve as the basis of such diagnoses would never have arisen. The question, 'How do persons differ from machines? arose just because everyone already knew how to apply mental-conduct concepts before the new causal hypothesis was introduced, This causal hypothesis could not therefore be the source of the criteria used in those applications. Nor, of course, has the causal hypothesis in any degree improved our handling of those criteria. We still distinguish good from bad arithmetic, politic from impolitic conduct and fertile from infertile imaginations in the ways in which Descartes himself distinguished them before and after he speculated how the applicability of these criteria was compatible with the principle of mechanical causation.
— Ryle

The ghost in the machine is an absurd or an insane posit, yet it looked plausible, because we ignored how much it depended on our unthematized social skills.

One of the hardest things to do is think and write simply. Strip away the jargon and name dropping and what is laid bare does not amount to much. Of course there are exceptions. — Fooloso4

I agree, but surely you are also aware of the anti-intellectualism that seizes on this kind of statement. It's too general. Who's unsimple in the bad way? Descartes, Derrida, Zizek, Plato, Chomsky, Marx , Freud, Popper,...etc. Everyone picks differently. What we don't like or don't understand is the tempting target. We then finds friends who agree, or our friends are friends because they agree (the usual tribalism.)

It has been my experience that those who rush do a poor job of reading. Their heads are full of ideas but they do not take the time to think through the problems. — Fooloso4

Consider though that you introduced the theme of rushing. Reading lots of thinkers is something one does over a lifetime. Personally I've tended to become fascinated by this or that particular thinker for awhile. I 'suspend disbelief' and try to feel my way into their perspective, and I think a kind of 'irrational' , preliminary affection is helpful. For instance, reading to refute is an uncharitable half-reading. Reading a synopsis to chatter about over cocktails is...not ideal.

We could probably agree on quite a bit at this level of generality. What seems to matter is what happens in actual conversations with others. We just smash into others in conversations and get some sense of their seriousness and skill.

Perhaps you'll agree that mind-identified people can be vain and on the lookout for the vanity of others.

Continuing as before to branch out from W to similar thinkers:

In Brandom’s view, it is Hegel who (in contrast to Kant) “brings things back to earth” by treating the transcendental structure of our “cognitive and practical doings” as being “functionally conferred on what, otherwise described, are the responses of merely natural creatures, by their role in inferentially articulated, implicitly normative social practices” .... Our practice of language-use is not merely the application of concepts but simultaneously the institution of the conceptual norms governing the correct use of our linguistic expressions; it is our actual use of language itself that settles the meanings of our expressions.
...
Heidegger himself saw pragmatism as one element of the technologically oriented, scientistic and naturalistic philosophical tradition that was destroying our original relation to Being. However, Brandom – together with some other pragmatist interpreters– describes Heidegger’s basic project in Sein und Zeit as a pragmatist one of grounding Vorhandensein in Zuhandensein: a necessary (transcendental?) background for understanding how it is possible for us to judge, state, or represent how things are from a disinterested perspective is found in “our practical nonconceptual dealings with things”; thus, “knowing that” is to be explained in terms of “knowing how”, and the possibility of conceptually explicit contents is to be explained in terms of what is implicit in nonconceptual practices. Brandom explicitly regards Heidegger’s strategy for explaining how the vorhanden “rests on” the zuhanden as “pragmatism about the relation between practices or processes and objective representation”. He explicates this as “pragmatism concerning authority”: matters of (particularly epistemic) authority are matters of social practice, not simply objective factual matters; the distinctions between ontological categories such as Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein (and indeed Dasein itself) are social.Heidegger is also explained as maintaining a normative pragmatism (cf. section 2 above), in which norms implicit in practice are taken as primitive and explicit rules or principles are defined in terms of them.63 Brandom in effect takes Heidegger’s normative pragmatism to be the combination of two theses: (1) the factual is to be understood in terms of the normative; and (2) propositionally statable rules, explicit norms, are to be understood in terms of implicit norms, viz., “skillful practical discriminations of appropriate and inappropriate performances”. Social normativity, then, is irreducibly present in the very project of ontology. What is zuhanden, “ready-to-hand”, that is, “equipment”, is (Brandom notes) characterized by Heidegger himself as pragmata, “that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings”.65 Pragmatism, for Brandom’s Heidegger, is not simply semantic, conceptual, or normative, but also ontological:

Heidegger sees social behaviour as generating both the category of equipment ready-to-hand within a world, and the category of objectively present-at-hand things responded to as independent of the practical concerns of any community. In virtue of the social genesis of criterial authority (the self-adjudication of the social, given pragmatism about authority), fundamental ontology (the study of the origin and nature of the fundamental categories of things) is the study of the nature of social Being – social practices and practitioners.
— link

https://lenguajeyconocimiento.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/sobre-brandom.pdf

These things which are "independent of the practical concerns of any community" seems to me like points at infinity. We care about them, we appeal to them, we use them. But we use them because of their apparent, relative independence from our concerns. I think of a knife that doesn't lose its edge. Or it's the (supposedly or in-the-limit) part of our culture that transcends that culture, a part treated as universal. 'Even aliens will recognize the primes. '

In this post I'll try to link Wittgenstein to other thinkers.

Herder argues that human perception, thought, and action depend on language. And language, in his view, is fundamentally social:

Go into the age, into the clime, the whole history, feel yourself into everything—only now are you on the way towards understanding the word. (Herder 1774; also see Herder 1769 & 1772)

Like his predecessors, Herder argues that cultures possess characters, affecting how the cultures act overall, but in Herder’s view, historical explanation requires treating societies as unified entities, and regarding individuals as products of society.
...
To be a self, according to Hegel, involves self-consciousness. And this is not something that an individual can possess independently of others. Instead, self-consciousness depends on our having a sense of ourselves as individuals as distinct from others, which in turn depends on our interacting with other people (i.e., recognizing other people and being recognized by them)
...
Hegel’s universal spirit is sometimes used as an example of “ontological holism”—i.e., the claim that social entities are fundamental, independent, or autonomous entities, as opposed to being derived from individuals or non-social entities (Taylor 1975, Rosen 1984).
...
As an alternative to ‘compact’ or ‘agreement,’ the legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf, in De Officio Hominis et Civis of 1673, uses the term ‘convention’ as the basis for law and language. He argues that conventions do not need be explicitly formed or agreed to. Instead, we can have tacit conventions—i.e., conventions that we may not even be aware we have.

Pufendorf also differs from his predecessors when it comes to what conventions accomplish. He does not merely speak of a convention as an agreement to cooperate or act in some way. Instead, by putting conventions in place, we create new features of the social world. For instance, Pufendorf holds that one kind of property ownership has its source in tacit convention. We have the tacit convention that the first person to occupy a piece of virgin soil becomes its owner. Without the convention, the first person to occupy a piece of virgin soil is no more than an occupant. The convention, however, generates new social institution: a form of ownership according to which being first occupant suffices to make a person an owner (De Officio, XII, 2). — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/history.html

I'm not sure, but perhaps that post is a parody? Since 'it' is so objectifying ('it rubs the lotion on its skin'), it's easy to think this is a joke. On the other hand, people are strange...

Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.[1][2][3] — wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Just found this:

While some genderqueer people use it as a gender-neutral pronoun,[12] it is generally considered a slur against transgender people[13] and should not be used unless requested by a specific person. — wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)#:~:text=In%20Modern%20English%2C%20it%20is,neuter%2C%20third%2Dperson%20pronoun.

So perhaps not a parody.

We're getting old, my friend.

Actually don't know much about that stuff, but it makes sense that his work would be useful.

But philosophical questions such as ethical relativism, theories of truth or the problem of induction make no practical difference to people's daily life. — Tom Storm

I agree that those questions make little or no difference.

I haven't read one and no one I know has ever disclosed reading one (that I can recall). But I understand they sell like the clappers. Any good examples - maybe I've heard of one or two and I have forgotten. — Tom Storm

Well I'm too much of a snob to read them (more seriously, I can't bear the style) but my wife enjoys them, so I see the titles and read the blurbs. At the same time, I think Epictetus and Marcus are self-help books for masculine types, and I think stoicism has been somewhat helpful to me.

When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal. Thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, "I will now go bathe, and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature." And in the same manner with regard to every other action. For thus, if any hindrance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say, "It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature; and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself. — Epictetus

http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

I don't count myself as a stoic (more of a pragmatic skeptic), but I'd call this a kind of wise cheer-leading. Speculation: self-help books help an individual articulate the goal (decide who they are striving to be.) They also contain folksy or half-scientific tips on how to get there, which may or may not be reliable. [I tried to read The Power of Now once and it was just terrible metaphysics. ]

:up:

Witt had moved on to seeing that one is to understand a language one needs to be a player to be a participant in that particular language game. — magritte

:up: :up: :up:

None of us are in position to call other philosophies 'nonsense' until we understand what is sense in that philosophy. (I'm pointing at myself) — magritte

:up: :up: :up:

I think even the later Witt (in PI) is still swatting down prejudices about language that get in the way of our everyday knowhow or skill. It's as if a certain kind of philosopher is blinded by an alluring theory so that he forget his ordinary chops in the game.

The mind-body problem was (seems to me) made possible by a theoretical invention with serious flaws that tends to be taken for granted, rather than as a (flawed) theoretical posit. As Ryle says, lots of such posits are useful at first but then ossify.

THERE is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory. Most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe, with minor reservations, to its main articles and, although they admit certain theoretical difficulties in it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory. It will be argued here that the central principles of the doctrine are unsound and conflict with the whole body of what we know about minds when we are not speculating about them.
One of the chief intellectual origins of what I have yet to prove to be the Cartesian category-mistake seems to be this. When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.

...

He and subsequent philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes, they must be construed as signifying the occurrence of non-mechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements in space as the effects of other movements in space, other laws must explain some of the non-spatial workings of minds as the effects of other non-spatial workings of minds. The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as intelligent and those which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their causation; so, while some movements of human tongues and limbs are the effects of mechanical causes, others must be the effects of non-mechanical causes, i.e. some issue from movements of particles of matter, others from workings of the mind.

The differences between the physical and the mental were thus represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of 'thing', 'stuff', 'attribute', 'state', 'process', 'change', 'cause' and 'effect'. Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies; mental processes are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements. And so on. Somewhat as the foreigner expected the University to be an extra edifice, rather like a college but also considerably different, so the repudiators of mechanism represented minds as extra centres of causal processes, rather like machines but also considerably different from them. Their theory was a para-mechanical hypothesis.

That this assumption was at the heart of the doctrine is shown by the fact that there was from the beginning felt to be a major theoretical difficulty in explaining how minds can influence and be influenced by bodies. How can a mental process, such as willing, cause spatial movements like the movements of the tongue? How can a physical change in the optic nerve have among its effects a mind's perception of a flash of light? This notorious crux by itself shows the logical mould into which Descartes pressed his theory of the mind. It was the self-same mould into which he and Galileo set their mechanics. Still unwittingly adhering to the grammar of mechanics, he tried to avert disaster by describing minds in what was merely an obverse vocabulary. The workings of minds had to be described by the mere negatives of the specific descriptions given to bodies; they are not in space, they are not motions, they are not modifications of matter, they are not accessible to public observation. Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. — Ryle

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/ryle/descartes_myth.html

I'm not saying that Ryle is 100% right, but his essay in worth checking out.

https://www.phil.uu.nl/~joel/3027/GilbertRyleDescartesMyth.pdf

Is it a game? But yes, I think he means serious philosophy. He is not talking about principles like social justice or the virtue of non-judgment. Do we have much evidence that people make many serious decisions in life based on any reading - even pop-psychology? — Tom Storm

It seems to me that it's (only a) game if no one uses it to make serious decisions. IMV, politics is deeply intertwined with philosophy (is applied philosophy, one might say.) To me it's bold indeed to suggest that reading general thoughts about life or how stuff all hangs together would have no effect on serious decisions.

If you expressing scepticism about the potency of some or even most self-help books, then I understand. But don't you think that some books sometimes make a big difference ?

Oh, the unenlightened florist who hasn't yet learned how to chop wood and carry water again. — baker

This is the guild thing again. Let's say there's a genuine or pure Buddhism but there's no way to check. You know it directly or not at all. The doctrines and rituals would mean nothing ultimately. There would be no sure way to attach words to these 'direct experiences.' (I invoke the 'private language argument' basically.)

Yesssss. I'm guilty of it too. But, in my defense, I'm aware of it, and taking credit for it. — baker

:up:

I like the direct answer.

Initiation (whether in religion/spirituality, or in the trades and other professional fields) serves some important purposes. It's not just about protecting the "secrets of the trade" or "keeping out the unwanted", it's also for the purpose of not confusing the uninitiated. — baker

:up:

Imagine what would happen to the economy if there would be no guilds (with all their functions of preserving and advancing knowledge of a particular field of expertise, making sure that their practitioners live up to the standards of the trade, and so on): it would collapse, or produce relatively low quality items.
It's what is happening to religion/spirituality. — baker

Note that you mention guilds. Those make perfect sense to me. That's peer review! That's not the isolated insight that doesn't communicated itself. That's skill recognizing skill. My criticism of Direct Experience is not that it fails to gesture at something vague but important but that any kind of sociality needs more.

Hence the relationship between perennialism and reactionary political movements. At least, it’s highly non-PC. — Wayfarer

:up:

Described as ‘non-conceptual wisdom’. Obviously a very difficult question as it can’t be conceptualised. Again it is related to that elusive idea of non-duality. — Wayfarer

The difficult point for me is that some of my favorite philosophers conceptually make a case against dualism. One is led dialectically from crude views to more sophicated views, even perhaps to aporia or quietism.

Again, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ - ‘religious awakening’ as akin to psychopathology or a best a edifying delusion. I guess that’s because from the outside there’s no way of telling whether ‘the florist’ is a visionary or a schizophrenic. — Wayfarer

That underlined part was what I was getting at. Part of me (the artist streak) relates to the florist, so it's not simply parody.

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness... — Cor 1:23

In this context, the secular philosophers are the 'Greeks.' The 'Jews' would be fundamentalist who take scripture (relatively) literally.

Interesting question. ‘Evangalizing’ is usually specific to the propagation of the Bible. Commitment to there being a higher truth is a philosophical perspective. But it’s not a popular idea. Why ‘bring it to the table’? Because it’s an important philosophical question. — Wayfarer

To be clear, I wouldn't want such a perspective censored. After all, it's a rich philosophical topic. What do we make of elitist, esoteric 'knowledge' ?

In work with people it is often the words that are used, the stories that people carry about themselves that prevent recovery. Change the wording, the belief changes, the life changes. People can have 'magical' transformations when the language about their lives and problems is re-written. But I don't want to suggest that this is simple and that it always works. — Tom Storm

:up:

Right, and you make a good point. Language is huge, but it doesn't substitute for everything.

think it is much more valuable to learn to read a few books, slowly and carefully. Too often philosophy is tread as if it were merely information, and books treated as trophies or notches in a belt. — Fooloso4

I sympathize with the value of slow, patient study. But imagine a fanboy of X who's just stuck in the charisma and perspective of a few thinkers. IMV, it's the clash of perspectives that sophisticates the mind.

I agree, but why/how? I speculate that it's part of the language we're trained into being able to use with others.

It would be great if our doctor's understood our pain and the best way to live with it. — Athena

Indeed. We might ask why we all think that pain-killers can be effective if no one can check in the secret box of the other where pain is supposed to live.

I'm trying to get a 'Blue Book' thread going. There are some great quotes there that might inspire you, and I'd enjoy hearing your reactions to them. 'Mind expanding' is what I had in mind.

Nice. I think similarly. — Tom Storm

I'm glad to hear it. Please say more if you feel like it, here or on the Blue Book thread. I don't like the image of linguistic philosophers as spoilsports, tho some of them can be. Wittgenstein is psychedelic even. I'd count Derrida and Rorty also in this camp. Rorty ended up reminding me of the Tao...liquefying the world, you might say.

My own intuition is some people can look at a 'million paintings' and be none the wiser. — Tom Storm

Fair enough. But if Vonnegut qualifies his statement too much it's just bad writing. Writers depend on their readers to sort it out.

In a similar vein, theorist and writer Stanley Fish has a polemic that in life philosophy doesn't matter. As you go about your business choosing a job or a partner or buying a house or selecting food off a menu, the questions of philosophy don't and can't enter into it. — Tom Storm

I think Fish is wrong here or only thinking of the academic philosophy game. Are you saying that Epictetus, for instance, can't help people with life? Or consider the industry of self-help books, which are ultimately philosophy books, if not well respected. If we go by quantity, it's the helps-with-life philosophy that's far more popular than the clever stuff.

My own intuition is some people can look at a 'million paintings' and be none the wiser. — Tom Storm

Sure. It's all about context. As a matter of interpretive skill (always a risk!), I can speculate that Vonnegut meant something like: if you care about art and developing your taste, the main thing is to look at lots of paintings. But that doesn't sound as good. What's the alternative? 'Prof. So-and-so is the art theorist who finally got it right. It suffices to grok Professor So-and-so and his selection of the 954 essential paintings.'

I'd say the same thing about philosophy. Any philosophy geek can give a list of their favorite books, but the main thing is to read lots of books, and those books talk about other books anyway, just as paintings 'talk' about other paintings.

:up:

The florist feels no such need to convince others. — baker

I agree that the ideal florist does not feel that need. But what of the imperfect florist? The aspirant florist? I can imagine ego-battles at the florist convention. I also had @Wayfarer in mind. Is it a performative contradiction to try to defend/explain the esoteric in a 'neutral' or boringly, typically 'rational' conversation?

Does 'nondiscursive knowledge' make sense ? I could live with 'religion as know-how' but that's not the claim, I don't think. 'The world is a purple rose' is a Higher Truth. No doubt it can function internally (all florist nod and repeat it) but if it's not for godless philosophers to understand, then why bring it to the table? Or how can one do this and avoid evangelizing?

Second point: I think people want recognition, sometimes (impossibly) for being beyond the need for recognition. I don't deny that some can temporarily truly be beyond that need. It's even an ego-ideal to transcend such a humiliating itch.

<2 tabs open, sorry for double posting>

I think really one of the worst forms of nothingness I would see is if there is no life after death. I do think that this life is worth focusing upon, but it just seems that for some people that there is so much pain and suffering. If that is all there is, that seems so sad. However, I also see the possibility of extinction of humanity as an even worse form of nothingness, far worse than the thought of my own death. — Jack Cummins

I love that you mention the second death of the species as a greater terror. I have thought about that too. My secular version of partial immorality is that each generation replaces the last. We all participate in a grand conversation. Our selves are mostly inherited fragments of this conversion in new bodies, but each generation adds a little something and something is perhaps forgotten.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due, not to the nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.

A biological species is both identical with and distinct from the individual organisms that make it up. The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed. Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself (i.e., constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and destruction of these individual persons. Viewed in this light, the death of the individual is necessitated by the life of infinite Spirit.
...
Arguing thus, Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is

a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137) — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

I agree with Feuerbach, so that the second death is more troubling than the typical first death. I really don't know why the second death doesn't bother me more. It should, but it doesn't. I think age is a big factor.

.

You ask me if I know Sartre. Strangely, I just began reading 'Being and Nothingness' this week. I am finding it hard work really. — Jack Cummins

Yeah, it's a slog. I've never read every page. But I have a paperback that includes the chapter Existential Psychoanalysis, and there are some great passages in that. Have you looked at Nausea? Probably a more pleasant intro. I'd recommend just jumping around in Being and Nothingness. Or personally I hate reading anything that bores me. I trust my guts.

Is it the nothingness of death without an afterlife that messes with you? Or the idea of the emptiness of all things ? (Vanity, all is vanity...)?

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions. — Nausea

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre

I can see your point of view, but I am not sure that the three big philosophy questions can just be neatly swept away, after all the centuries of discussion. — Jack Cummins

IMO, it's a personal issue whether they are swept away or not. Take the God issue. For some people, including me, this is settled. Doesn't mean I can convince others they have nothing to worry about on this score. I can give reasons, but that's all. Same with free will, which was only briefly but once sincerely an issue for me as I was losing my faith of God, to some degree because I couldn't make sense of free will in the context of eternal judgment and the problem of evil, etc., but also because I was exposed to the wider world and books from that world. Life after death fits in here too. I guess I let go of all of them at the same time. It happens slowly, but there's a point where one is conscious of it, one is emotionally beyond former worries.
I can vaguely imagine events that could change this view, but they'd have to be extreme. I would need to be visited by an angel & flown to Heaven or something.

FWIW, I think linguistic philosophy isn't purely negative. It allowed me, anyway, to see language in a new way, but that means seeing 'mind' in a new way, seeing our profound connection, that the idea of us as lonely ghosts in the machine is fundamentally flawed. In short, I am a 'we' first and an 'I' second. Or that's where I ended up. Might even sound mystical, and maybe some 'mystics' were misunderstood linguistic philosophers. That's only 50% joke.

It's not just the old science vs. woo, mind you. In many fields of human interest, but which are of vital importance to many people, science is quite useless or inapplicable. Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ... — baker

:up:

I agree, and this reminds me of know-how or skill. Explicit principles (from 'folk-psychology' perhaps) can be helpful, but to some degree there's just doing it, like riding a bike, riding a horse. Vonnegut says you don't know what a good painting is till you've seen a million paintings. I love that. No theory. Pure experience. The doormat/asshole issue comes to mind. I think we trust keep error-correcting in subtle ways that we cannot hope to (fully) articulate. I can imagine self-help books accelerating the learning process without replacing it.

the way he saw it was of how it is possible to assemble the parts we find helpful from various belief systems.
After that conversation, I was wondering whether we are in the position of doing that in our current time and to what extent does that work? Does it mean that we choose what we like and reject the rest? — Jack Cummins

That does seem to be the way of the times we live in. It's easy to take for granted, but it was a revolutionary idea.

The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subjects to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. — Tom Jefferson

That last line is the point. I imagine Jefferson making it easier to swallow as he leads up to it.
I think of this as our meta-religion, a kind of civic religion that governs private religion. All 'decent' and 'reasonable' people (roughly by definition) have to give other reasonable and decent people the space and freedom to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling or (hopefully) 'gradients of bliss.' The devil is in the political details, but we can ignore them for the moment.

I think that the whole way we approach the big questions must be so different from when people spent their lives embracing one shared worldview. — Jack Cummins

I think Athens and Rome probably had the same general feel at times (judging by history books) but yeah surely in general we are swamped with a new density of information, the largest menus of possible personalities ever. I can even understand people being nostalgic for some lost age where things were simple (probably an illusion.) Do you know Sartre?

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry – but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. — S

https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/sartre

I'm not saying Sartre is 100% right, but it's like Jefferson taken to the next level. It's not just or essentially a loss of God but also a loss of trust in the 'adults' who run the world. The child sees that the world is not run wisely. Like Lords of the Flies when a warship rescues the kids. The 'grownups' are playing the same mad game on a larger scale. The line about 'responsible for all men' indicates a healthy seriousness. We set examples for others. We want community, to live according to principles with others, however difficult it is to find and establish them.

Maybe it's like a town in the middle of a forest. We all are expected to go into the forest (our private lives) and experiment. But the town, where we all have to live with one another, is subject to rules.

The question of the existence of God is not solely about determining an answer, but about establishing rapport, creating dialogue, and ultimately creating shared meanings which can then have actual influences in the lives of individuals and thereby an impact on our collective and shared existence (culture). Likewise for all of the other mysteries you cite.

So, in effect, to pursue these questions is to answer them. — Pantagruel

:up:

Also (kinda what you already said) the very meanings of God, free will, and so on might be there in the actual influences on our shared existence, like ripples in a pond. (I mean look for meaning in use, in what goes on in the context of our muttering.)

That song just strikes me as one of the best little pieces of rock'n'roll.

Helps folks get to :starstruck: .

Yes, absolutely. I classify such utterances under "poetic ontology", "poetic epistemology", and other poetic suches. There's plenty of this in literature. It doesn't occur to me to think of the utterers of such utterances as having "mental health problems". — baker

We might even say explicitly poetic ontologies as opposed to the anti-poetic ontologies of a merely relatively depoetized reason. In other words, even 'rational' ontologies are poetic if cognition is essentially metaphorical.

I think we can say that if the florist is happy and kind, though perhaps vain and preening at times, then it's not madness, or not the kind we should worry about. I speculate that we all might even depend on a little self-flattering bias or some kind of energizing distortion.

See the beans in my hand in my avatar? I grow them. There is something absolutely transcendental to growing food and other plants. I'm just very careful about what I say about this to whom and when. There are other gardeners who understand very well what I'm talking about. And I know there are people (some of whom garden) who have no clue what I'm talking about. — baker

Nice example! I don't grow things, but my wife has a real passion for it. So I can vaguely imagine some kind of esoteric bond.

The 'harmless belief in fairies' is of the less common kind by quite a long way. — Isaac

Maybe you're right. I'm just commenting from my anecdotal experience. My wife has clued me in to a culture (largely feminine) of soft but unironic paganism, a mishmash of all kinds of stuff, morning Tarot card readins, a little green witchcraft blended with the wisdom of some wise alien race, and so on. My sense is that some people just like a little bit of magic sprinkled on grocery store reality. On the other hand, I've seen mentally troubled addicts lose their grip on reality, with a paranoid streak in their delusions. Not fun stuff at all.

Yes, this is much more like it. Certain beliefs are used as membership criteria for certain clubs, they're not really beliefs in the sense of tendencies to act as if... but merely part of a word game (or ritual enaction) that is played to create a sense of mutual belonging (and of course, exclusion of the other - the dark side). — Isaac

:up:
Well put!

The vast majority of religious practice is just social-bonding ritual and as harmless as a knitting club on a societal scale, but then so's the alternative. — Isaac

True. I'm not really trying to defend religious practice. I want to live in Denmark or somewhere like it. I'm tempted to think that some kind of psychopathology of everyday life will always be with us. It's a secretion, some kind of ooze to stick humans into groups, which, as you say, can go terribly wrong.

Seems to me that Witt is doing a kind of negative metaphysics. Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen. We can trust our blind skill enough to be as far out (actually more far out) as the typical skeptic.

A mistaken cartoon of Witt and OLP is that he/it is desperately normal. There's wicked fun in solipsism and skepticism. It's bad boy stuff. And no one wants boring dad to call it all nonsense. But I don't think (and don't think dad thinks) it's nonsense. We can follow certain metaphors way out with sufficient concentration. 'Bad' metaphysics is proof of this, and it's not meaningless. Wherever 2 or 3 are gathered in my game.... And it's a game (or family of games) that players can get more skillful at. So it's a matter of prioritizing. Who are we to be?

Is the stubborn sceptic a bricked-in narcissist ? Fending off the reality ? Is there a comfort in an atomic theory of the self as a little island that can doubt away reality? castrate the father? But the sceptic can also be a anarchist, a freedom fight, keeping us open. I think W is a benevolent mutation of the skeptic.

The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind—an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned.

The primary narcissism of children which we have assumed and which forms one of the postulates of our theories of the libido, is less easy to grasp by direct observation than to confirm by inference from elsewhere. If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognize that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer constituted by overvaluation, which we have already recognized as a narcissistic stigma in the case of objectchoice, dominates, as we all know, their emotional attitude. Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child—which sober observation would find no occasion to do—and to conceal and forget all his shortcomings. (Incidentally, the denial of sexuality in children is connected with this.) Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child's favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation—‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out—the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father's place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents' narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature. — Freud

Not presenting Freud as an authority here but rather I'm yanking him into philosophy, listening to an old man who spent his life talking to people about their secrets and problems. Personally I think something like the 'ego ideal' is central to philosophy, because it's central to life. How do we see ourselves in relation to the tribe? What role does the philosopher specifically play? A crust-cutting rhetorical stuntman? A knowledge referee?

We have learnt that libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicissitude of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the subject's cultural and ethical ideas. By this we never mean that the individual in question has a merely intellectual knowledge of the existence of such ideas; we always mean that he recognizes them as a standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on him. Repression, we have said, proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater precision that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. The difference between the two, which contains the conditioning factor of repression, can easily be expressed in terms which enable it to be explained by the libido theory. We can say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression. This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject's narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal. — Freud

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_SE_On_Narcissism_complete.pdf

This Freud digression isn't obviously justified, but I like the question: who did Wittgenstein want to be? What kind of man? Or, more practically important, how can or how does philosophy make us better people? What are the ego-ideals operating in philosophy?

I suggest that the gentleman's agreement (logic) is an overlapping of ego ideals, a shared ego ideal, that of rationality, sanity, decency.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
...
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
...
What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it. — W

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

Let's not forget:

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice.
(Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness. — W

beautiful bouquet of passages. I really like the archipelago-vibe - a series of loosely connected passages - loose enough (like the resemblance between games) to allow fortuitous connections, but tight enough to have a discernible throughline. — csalisbury

Thanks for this too ! They all fit together for me. I just yanked out my favorites. I like the idea that we fill up the spaces between these fragments.