He who knows absolute truths is the authority all bow down to, right? — javra

I think there are two attitudes to those who possess absolute/objective truth. Those who's religious feelings are conceptualized in terms of knowledge will indeed view the scientist or perhaps the philosopher as a priest. If the highest human potential is the know truth, then the knower is the "Christ" we should imitate or at least admire.

But the scientist can also be viewed as a specialized organ like an eye. The eye is the tool of the "I" we might say. What I wants from the "eye" is knowledge as a means to secure its true object of desire, which is perhaps a life with a certain shape and rich with feeling of love or at-home-ness or dignity, etc.

Science has won its prestige via accuracy. If a black box made accurate predictions or spit out plans for technology that got us what we want reliably, we would learn to trust that black box without understanding it. But isn't this the same inductive principle that science uses to test what are fundamentally creative leaps into interpreting sense-experience differently. As Hume noted, this isn't even strictly logical. We just can't help ourselves. We return to what has worked. We expect what has come before. We can't say why and it doesn't even work us up that we can't say why.

Anyway, we probably couldn't worship the black box. Our images of the divine tend to be human. But it's interesting that religion is often framed in terms of knowledge or accurate beliefs. This makes it a sort of untestable or pseudo-science. On the other hand, it is testable as lifestyle, but (sociology and politics aside) only on a personal level ultimately. We might say that the notion of "one true religion" is a denial of substantial human variety. If there is one "cure" or "secret," then we must be all the same in some fundamental way. (I don't think it's this simple.)

The left gets busy with social causes, Use the right pronouns or we'll shame you and take away your livelihood. — fishfry

There's some truth in that. I lean left, but I "essentially" lean toward the individual being protected from the righteous mob. There's something unsettling about how easy a thoughtless comment in your private life can blow up your life.

It's as if there is no longer a public and private split. You are always on the clock and under the eye. I don't consider myself a racist or a sexist, but I'm sure my "cold"/critical approach to the issue would convict me in the eyes of some. It's expected that (on either side) one's thinking is drenched with virtue, outrage, bias, etc. But I'm hardly the first person to think that passion can muddy the mind.

So we focus on pronouns and statues and virtue signaling. — fishfry

I think the focus on virtue signalling is also connected to the fact (as I see it) that we aren't so virtuous as we tend to pretend. Most of our efforts (in my experience) go toward holding our own little lives together. Of course we feel some genuine empathy at times, but isn't there a fair amount of play acting? A person of "class" is civic-minded, moral, etc. So narcissism plays a role. Virtue-signaling is, in other words, also superiority signaling. It generally costs less, too. It's even free on FB.

For me it's a little more complicated. I was slow to use text messaging, suspicious of its authenticity. But really it's kind of a drag or stressor to deal with the intimacy of the voice. I read The Naked Ape ages ago (too young to have read it critically), and what stuck with me was the idea that we probably evolved from primates that lived in very small communities of say 30.

For economic reasons we humans drag ourselves into the city and live among hundreds of thousands if not millions of others. I think we are fighting our "programming" to do this, and that's why it's usually rude to start conversations with strangers. We try to ignore that the stranger exists unless it's an emergency.

I think the phone is part of this strategy. It's a sublimating form of communication. Less intimate in terms of the gut-level voice but quite powerful in terms of language and images. The dark side of FB, though, is the tendency of many if not all to use that medium for outrage/persuasion. Too bad, really, because social media are great for sharing "filtered" (positive) pictures of people, their adventures and links to the good stuff.

Words (Sartre's autobiography)
Dissemination (Derrida)
Interrogating the Real (Zizek)
Just finished the Sartre, actually. He's very open and likable. Finished first part of Derrida. Really liked the thoughts on Hegel's prefaces (which exiled themselves famously to a space outside philosophy proper). Derrida's prose is thick, of course, but I really like his tone. It's the same tone of his other texts I've look it. Cold but curious. He's also a thinker of form, or of the "content" in form. Zizek is great as usual (one of my favorite personalities), but the book (for me) lost steam after a very powerful beginning. Still, loved that beginning. He does tend to repeat himself, I've noticed. Oh well, maybe a personality is often permutations on a few key insights/revelations.

Whatever else religions may be, they are surely wisdom traditions, vehicles not simply for the accumulation of bland, discursive knowledge, but for personal transformation and for better states of knowledge. It doesn't seem possible to experience these things without being on the inside of a religion. But the desire for them can't be made the primary reason one converts to a religion. That reason ought to be because it is true. Unless one is reasonably confident of the latter, then attempting to experience the former will be impossible whether inside or out. On the inside, one would be forced to lie, and on the outside, one would be forced to coldly appropriate. Either way, the cognitive dissonance would be too great to give one any peace, which, in part, is precisely what one is seeking. This is why the search for whether any religion is true ought to come first and the search for similarities between religions second, which in fact will follow as a matter of course from the first. — Thorongil

I definitely agree to the first point. They aren't about "bland, discursive" knowledge but rather "personal transformation." What stands out for me above is your insistence we our reason for converting should be that the religion is true, as if your current living/actual but not entirely satisfactory religion is "Truth" nevertheless. I'm not saying this is wrong or bad, just pointing it out. Religion is still being framed in terms of knowledge, though not "bland, discursive" knowledge.

I think it's possible to question objectivity as a supreme value. In practical terms, we have no choice. But metaphysical truth is different. What if positing objectivity as a supreme value is a "mad" or "irrational" leap? I understand that if we are talking about personal resurrection, hell-fire, etc., then truth or falsity is paramount, but that takes us back to prudence, and religion is swallowed by an inclusion of the super-natural within nature. God would be a promising/threatening object invisible to certain instruments and methods, like an asteroid heading toward our planet that most of us don't see coming.

I think Feuerbach is right that we can only revere or worship human virtues. If God isn't love or wisdom and instead just a sort of important machine, then not worship but something else (fearful, prudent submission to the superior "alien") is appropriate. In short, the perfected or ideal human being is (for me) the only reasonable religious object.

"Go, tell them that the worship of God is honoring his gifts in other men, and loving the greatest men best, each according to his genius. " (Blake)

In terms of prudence, common sense, and smooth interpersonal relations, it's hard to disagree. But I do think there are some "speculative" tensions to be explored.

For instance, what is this territory apart from the map? It could also be thought of as part of the map that insists that this same map is subject to revision.

Similarly, the sum of all our models of some phenomenon (a single systematic model then) is (arguably) the intelligible structure or essence of that phenomenon. All that's left out seems to be the "qualia" or the sensuality that concept cannot directly convey.

If this seems thin (and is quite thin from the perspective of practice), that's perhaps because words like "perception " and "description" for instance are typically used so that the perception is not the perceived, etc., so that there's something tautologous going on in those statements.

Finally, the "speculative" relevance of the tensions mentioned above tend to involve authority and interpretation. For instance, I can't know Hegel-in-himself. I can only know a model of Hegel in my own concept system. In that sense he and anyone else is forced in first-person terms to be "smaller" than me. The same argument can be applied to God, etc. I can only know Hegel/God to the degree that I am Hegel/God. The territory outside the map is just a hole in the map or the map's fragility.

...he also says 'atoms and molecules' are just as much icons as are any other kind of objects. In other words, he doesn't see atoms or molecules or any other kind of supposedly fundamental physical object as actually fundamental. What is actually fundamental, is conscious experience, and reality comprises entirely conscious agents. — Wayfarer

If I can jump in, I really like the idea above. As you say, "atoms" are just more icons. But (perhaps you'll agree) independent, differentiated conscious agents are also just more icons. If there are only icons, then the mind-matter or objective-subjective distinctions are secondary in theory if hardly in practice. We have an apparently self-organizing system of icons that comes to represent itself via this very theory of a self-organizing system of icons.

The process catches its own tail ("absolute knowledge") and finds that it is a Mobius strip. It thought of itself as two-sided, the collision of icon and non-icon, but discovers itself to be an "outsideless" or one-sided process. "There is nothing outside the text." But that also means there is no text in the first place. Text and the object described by the text are the same self-enriching subject-substance.

In retrospect, we can think the idea of the objective in terms of the fragility of the current icon system. Our "model" of unmediated objective (thing-in-itself) reality could be wrong, we would have said then. But this can also be described as an anticipation that our icon-system will simply develop a update that makes it more complex. We or "it" will create icons, perhaps, describing this process in terms of a desire for self-knowledge or stasis (homeostasis: it wants a fixed shape but responds to tensions in its vortext?)

"Absolute knowledge" would be the icon-system's existence for itself as an icon which it experienced as final in its general form. Obviously the icon-system remains unstable away from this presumably stable core of its awareness of itself as icon-system.

The icon or the sign can be neither mental or physical. It is the condition of possibility for this and all such distinctions. So it's not the conscious agent that "really" exists but the icon which is revealed to exist systematically. (Obviously Plato & Hegel & others come to mind and are influences.)

I see philosophy, when I talk of giants and lions, as pure, unforgiving, cruel logic applied. People are scared to think that there is a real world of ideals out there. They are scared to thing that there is no real world out there at all. They are scared to think that there is or there is not a categorical imperative of morality. They are scared to think that there is a real possiblity that there is a god out there or that there isn't. People are scared of their ordinary thoughts that they have taken for granted for years or for decades proven to be fallacies and/or self-contradictory statements. People are scared to ponder whether they are merely atuomatons, or that they actually don't have a free will at all. They are scared to realize that the world does not operate on a {good deed -- reward} basis at all times.

Those who are not scared of, and furthermore propagate and discover how logic applied to life can turn our entire weltaschauung upside-down, are the giants and the lions. — szardosszemagad

I think we are largely in agreement. Philosophers are brave. They face and analyze terrible possibilities.

As you say, they consider the possibility that the world isn't just (a system for rewarding good deeds and punishing bad deeds.) To me this is what's great in the book of Job.

As you say, they are afraid to discover that their decade's old "common sense" is maybe just confusion or fallacy. They are terrified of discovering that they have built their self (or self image) on the sand.

But where do philosopher's find this uncommon courage? Why do philosophizer's value the terrible truth more than the comfortable lie? What allows them to put their prejudices on the altar or give them to the flames of critical thinking?

I think they love the image of themselves as (potential) fearless heroes that they expose all of their other attachments to danger in order to live-up-to or become this image. Their bravery is measured by their sacrifice. That's why I think in terms of dis-identification. There is a self-loving nothingness at the heart of the white flame of critical thinking.

They are "unforgiving" and "cruel" to everything within them that is not this white flame. Crucially, that involves examining the holy words of "logic" and "truth" themselves.

Nonetheless, I can't help feel that while I am replaceable, the world will go on, my thinking is just enough left of centre to make a contribution somewhere, somehow. I think most people in this forum and maybe everywhere probably feel a bit that way too. — MikeL

I think you've put your finger on a great issue. Those whose ego-ideals involve creativity are perhaps the proudest of us. Of course I include myself. The fantasy is to have said something both significant and original, or to have produced a non-conceptual musical work, perhaps, with a potent, unique "flavor" of feeling. This fantasy is threatened by the millions of strangers, some of them maybe the true "Einsteins" instead of us. The horror is that one might be a second-rate imitation, a superfluous poor-man's version of the thinker, poet, composer, scientists. At least the mediocre scientist can be a useful foot-soldier, but the mediocre creative type is ( at worst) noise obscuring signal.

After families, friends, colleagues it closes out pretty fast. At the higher global levels of society we are really just numbers unless we do something to distinguish ourselves, but even then we are still very much just a commodity. — MikeL

Exactly. I think that's the heart of alienation. Having only commodity value for the vast majority of other human beings. We exist for them as skills/credentials with a fluctuating if not radically uncertain market value. So capitalism is stressful. But the flip side the privacy that comes with this alienation. In a small town, folks are in your business. In the city you are just a passing face, perhaps worth scanning on the subway between stops, if even that.

I have problems with calling beaver dams and birds nests 'technology'. Neither birds nor beavers wield their behavior deliberately or consciously. Beavers, for instance, bring branches and mud to locations where there is the sound of running water. That's how they keep their dams ingot repair. Put a speaker on a perfectly fine beaver dam, play the sound of running water, and the speaker will get patched.

A bird that uses grass to make it's nest can not switch to mud, and visa versa. Bees must make 6 sided cells in their honey combs -- it can't be 3 or 4.

I don't want to diminish in any way animal lives. Beavers, birds, bees, and beetles all perform wonderfully at their live-maintaining tasks. Neither do I want to diminish our animal lives. Most animals are part of natural systems. Wetland biology depends on beavers, and pollination depends on insects like bees. Humans don't seem to belong to natural systems. That's one of the problems we grapple with. (We can certainly fit harmoniously in natural systems, but it generally means living a much different kind of life than we normally aspire to.) — Bitter Crank

Of course you have a point. Humans are revolutionary compared to animals, as well as massively self-conscious. They think about their thinking, which includes thinking about this thinking about their thinking and so on. They can even grasp their absurdity and futility, in a certain sense, though this grasping is arguably just more adaptation. As apo might say, the perception of futility might nevertheless help us unclog the heat death.

But what if we are visited by aliens who stand to us as we stand to beavers? The sound they play by the water for us will entice our great thinkers and poets to rhapsodize. But they'll use the simplicity of this "sound" for them as an argument for a qualitative break between our technological status. (Just a playful thought experiment...)

Of course we are not replaceable. "You are all replaceable" is management talk for restless workers who might be thinking about organizing a union. We are all individually unique in not just one or two ways, but many ways.

Someone else can perform the boring tasks I do at work. That doesn't make me replaceable. Or you, either. — Bitter Crank

I agree, more or less. But I was proposing what feels "unnatural" about modern life. It's not the stuff we've built but all of the strangers out there. Imagine a post-apocalyptic tribe of 30 living in the ruins of downtown New York. Everyone knows everyone in their uniqueness. Would the ruins be so disturbing and unnatural?

Thanks for responding. I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I do think "man is great." But, yeah, he's on the end of a continuum. Still, I think there is a massive leap. We've been to the moon. I suppose I would emphasize the complexity of the animals themselves, since that arguably surpasses the complexity of our best tech. So Nature was full of technology before we even got here. We use more permanent materials and there are lots of us, so we change the face of our habitat. So we freak ourselves out emotionally among our massive concrete and glass boxes that are conceptually just "bird's nest." For me the alienation is really about population. We are all (or most of us) more or less replaceable. Billions of strangers go about their business as we suffer the grand agonies and ecstasies of life, with no time for or interest in these agonies or ecstasies. We are stamped with numbers, as if demanded by efficiency. So I think the nostalgia is really for some ideal community that perhaps never existed, except perhaps in our childhoods. Modern life is a lonely climb in many ways, but there is a beauty and freedom in this loneliness, too. And I sure don't want to dig in the dirt beneath the hot sun. Give me air conditioning and the internet, and I'll learn to deal with alienation tax.

It looks like you read the word "cynic" in the quote and based your entire argument from there. If you re-read the quote, "well-informed cynicism" was just one briefly mentioned aspect of the type of person Horkheimer was describing, not the basis of that type of person's views. — Noble Dust

You may have a point. Maybe he was just sneaking in a jab at the "well informed cynics" ('intellectuals" too selfish to be left-wing) and the rest of the passage was aimed at a fictional ideal dummy. But there are some problems with his argument nevertheless. His fictional dummy or bad guy is "never rationally reconciled to civilization," yet I'm guessing the spirit of this book is itself as odds with the civilization that the author found himself him. His "dummies" are guilty of being too comfortable, which is to say reconciled, though perhaps not articulately. On the other hand, I completely agree that people as a rule identity with race, fatherland, etc., but I'd include communism, critique, etc., as surrogates that also belong on the list. Hork is certainly more sophisticated than the average flag-waving Joe, but he still seems wrapped up in a secular version of religion. This talk of "suppressing and abusing nature" is the give-away. It's more or less anti-human. It's one thing to defend Spaceship Earth as our habitat and life-support system and another thing to personify Nature as a victim. The magical thinking is concentrated there. (I'm more or less neutral on this go-humanity issue. My motive for reacting is largely an aesthetic distaste for the form of his rhetoric, its moves.)

Does not life entail pursuits of one kind or another ? The man without any goals or dreams is a man already in the grave. Yet that does indeed seem to be the ultimate goal of Buddhism - those who achieve nirvana cease to reincarnate and cease to be. So the goal of Buddhism does seem to be well and truly non-existence. This leads to a very disturbing contradiction. The point of life, according to Buddhism, is to achieve permanent, eternal death (?) — John Gould

If you'll allow me to chime in with a slight generalization, I've often thought about what's in it for the sage. If we tame our more animal or childlike desires, then (as you ask) what the hell are we still hanging for? If the goal is nothingness, then suicide is the shortest path to that goal. The only goal that seems plausible to me (and which I can even relate to) is the attainment of a narcissistic serenity. In quasi-Hegelian terms, Spirit enjoys itself as Spirit in an orgy of self-loving self-consciousness. Of course this self of the sage or philosopher is white light, a harmonization of all human nature. He is no one and everyone. So harmonized humanity loves itself in and through him. That he is "no one" testifies that only an extremely sublimated or dis-identified narcissism is appropriate here. So the goal is something like an un-death enjoying itself with one foot in the grave and the other in the womb. In my view, there's a tendency to project innocence and purity of imagination on the sage, but I think this desire for innocence is one of the childish attachments that the sage/philosopher moves beyond. This desire for innocence manifests as a disgust for the world as it actually is and conceives of outrage as wisdom itself. On the other hand, a serene affirmation of the world more or less requires that we see how "good" and "evil" are entangled or interdependent. Progress, drama, development, the stuff of life itself all require inequality, variety, difference, confusion, noise, "sin," "evil." (I put these last words in quotes because yanking them out as absolutes is the exactly the view I'm criticizing.)

They don't necessarily need to believe in a literal Satan or a God for the results to be the same and they may not even be consciously aware that they're attempting to justify their greed as some kind of righteous standing-up for one's self. — John Days

As a "Satanist" (or close enough), I think I can clarify something I find not quite right in your analysis above. If we own ourselves and are our own kings and popes, we don't need a justification for our "greed." Satanists (if they aren't what I'd call confused pseudo-Satanists) consciously embrace selfishness as the "truth" of human nature. As we see it, we do consciously what others do unwittingly. Others do the will of their Father, be it God or some abstract idea that will finally fix the fallen and broken world. But this "Father" is just their own disavowed desire to lay down the law, their own "greed." As I see it, the more interesting of us humans are more attracted to status than sensual pleasure. So the religious-type (from my or "our" point of view) is getting his kicks from a sense of righteousness. In short, the non-Satanist justifies his disavowed greed (for status if not money) as some kind of standing up for his god or principles, which is to say for his alienated or disavowed self. The "righteousness" or pride of the Satanist is in dropping the pretense of speaking for the distant Father and instead claiming the position himself (I and the Father are one) without excuse or apology. So of course it tweaks my vanity to hear Satanists described as stooping to justify their own desire and therefore their lives in their essence. Hence this interruption, which is intended in a friendly spirit.

Everywhere else in the world we look, we don't find things like printers, buses, refrigerators or computers. We find the non-technological, the natural. When compared to what we see as nature, technology looks like an aberration, as if it doesn't belong. Technology seems like a mutation of the natural order of things, an artificial aggregate of dissimilar parts and pieces that have been forced into an unnatural symbiosis. — darthbarracuda

But aren't bird's nest and beaver's dams technology? The animals themselves are "machines" far more spectacular than those they build. Consider the wasp. Insects especially look like our own technology. Can humans yet build machines as intricate as insects? Perhaps. Our computers come to mind. In my view the "seems" in your "seems like...an unnatural symbiosis" is key. As I read it, you're translating a feeling into a abuse of the word nature. Beavers and birds don't use concrete and steel. They don't work with right angles as precisely as we do. But they shape the world for their advantage. It's hard not to read a disgust with life-transforming-environment-transforming-life as a desire for stasis, sleep, death. And your words could even be read as a technological manipulation of the symbolic environment for the comfort and success of your own mind. Life acts. Life transforms. Life is "guilty" of this. To the degree that "sentences are viruses," you even seek to colonize other minds. The denial of struggle/dominance is a manifestation of struggle/dominance, one might think.

Could it be that technology is actually one of the many ways the universe ends up organizing itself? Could what we see as artificial, technological, actually be simply a natural expression of the logic of the world?

In a way, the question comes down to: what differentiates the natural from the artificial? — darthbarracuda

I'd say yes to your first question. I'd read the second distinction in terms of a spectrum. Apo stressed how the way we change nature "feeds back" to change us. We might say that what tends to feed back is more artificial. But I think what was artificial yesterday is natural tomorrow.

K was never a live option for me either. Sartre I've studied pretty closely. At his best, he is the thing itself. I've never felt seduced by righteous political poses, though, so I just tolerate these in Sartre. Being and Nothingness can be bloated and tedious, perhaps because the amphetamines give him verbal diarrhea. Even so, it's full of killer passages. Hegel's Phenomenology is the same way though. I'm reading Sartre's The Words (autobiography) and it's pretty great. Similarly Hegel's Philosophy of History is more enjoyable than the Phen. In theory, the tech-jargon more difficult books are more "serious," but there's a passage of Hegel's famous preface in Dissemination (another tedious or too-patient book at times) that demolishes this illusion pretty well. The difficult/serious passages depend upon the more accessible as a foundation. This is sort of a digression, but it ties into your "role model" thing:

I think that's the essence of what we do when we read the most exciting philosophy. We are constructing ourselves , figuring out who we shall become. I like Sartre & Hegel and others for become aware of and describing this process. Man is a essencelessness sniffing out essence. Sartre at his best takes his coffee black. Man is a futile passion. Life is absurd. There's a divine laughter around these grim propositions. Man's passion is paradoxically satisfied in making peace with the impossibility of its satisfaction otherwise. That life is absurd only enhances the stature of the protagonist at first stumbling and eventually standing serene within its fog and noise. A nothingness that recognizes itself as such loses its hurried awkwardness. In my view, we search through various father figures. Absurdity and/or alienation is the hollowness or the emptiness of all of them. The wise-man-supposed-to-know is a carrot on a stick, a chased projection. Carrot chasers seduce and intimidate one another with hints that they are at least almost enlightened. But everything must remain impersonal and distant. It's impious to speak from the nothingness at one's own center. Even absurdity and freedom must (for some) be mediated by the famous sages, as if the nullity of the famous sages wasn't almost the essence of absurdity. Similarly, the "masters of suspicion" are treated with reverence as authorities, and the gods slap their knees. (A figure of speech, these gods.)

Respectfully, that doesn't answer my question.

Also found this quote:

“Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason — Noble Dust

I largely relate to well-informed cynicism, so jump in to point out some problems with this quote. To some degree cynicism is a mode of conformity. But adaptation is a mode of conformity. We conform to the nature of things so that we can eat well, flourish, etc. Non-conformity can be thought of a higher conformity to the nature of things supplanting an obsolete conformity. In the end, the cynic is selfish and personally oriented while the non-cynic or moral-political idealist is (apparently) trans-personally oriented. For the moral idealist, the cynic shirks his duty, the same duty at the heart of the moral idealist's vision of his place in the world.

As far as the "rule of the stronger" goes, there something tautologous going on here. If we view politics as central (as is common with moral idealists), then the stronger are almost by definition those who happen to rule. So we have of course an eternal norm, by definition. The cynic is guilty in the moral idealist's eyes for thinking that human's aren't going to stop being hierarchical anytime soon. The cynic accepts the life is fundamentally struggle. Give a man one thing and he immediately desires something else. The idealist hopes for a stasis over the horizon. Some day there will be a classless society, or a society in tune with nature. For the idealist the world just happens to be out joint. For the cynical, life itself is always out of joint, necessarily unstable and in motion.

The completely bogus line that gives the bias of the author away is:

Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed.

The first part about "debasing" nature is a description of life itself. Of course an organism shapes its environment so that it thrives. Life is obviously a motion against the chaos of its environment. Intellectuals beat a symbolic chaos into shape, just as Horkheimer is trying but largely failing to do here. That such a basic feature of life itself is demonized here seems to reveal the secret conformity at the heart of the quote, a desire to melt into nature. If it is "evil" to "debase" nature and the given, it most be virtuous to melt in to one's environment. Life itself is guilty.

The second part about race, fatherland, etc. is shockingly stupid. It describes the opposite of the cynic. Isn't the cynic exactly the person who scoffs at these sacred abstractions? What gets the moral idealist's goat is that his own cause is one more abstraction and duty on the chopping black. The "back to nature" or "back to a sense of community" song and dance is one more "fatherland" or "race." The cynic enjoys himself as one who does not honor these puffed-up concepts. He may indeed obey laws that he does not believe in. He may indeed play along. He may indeed selfishly adapt to the world as he finds it. In that he is truly guilty in the eyes of the world-fixing idealist. But the racist, the patriot, the ideological reactionary, etc., are not cynics. They are just idealists with a different notion of how to fix the world. The cynic is a thumb in their eyes, too.

The "eclipse of reason" is just the demystification of reason. "Instrumental" reason or pragmatism or the tool-use paradigm all offend in the same way. They make human desire central. Reason is not a replacement for God as it is with Horkheimer perhaps. Instead human desire or feeling is the replacement for God. In short, Horkheimer wants piety toward Reason and Nature. The cynic views both as resources subordinate to life, which is in some sense fundamentally anti-natural and irrational.

Many times I have heard it said that MRA's, including female MRA's, are misogynists. I have seen/heard words and actions that left me almost convinced that feminism--at least at this point in its evolution--has nothing to do with women or equality and is purely an ideology through which people are seeking power by any means, including lying, demonizing their opponents, deluding themselves, etc. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Your point about female MRA's is interesting. Presumably the female MRA is a gender-traitor. But the apparent fact that only women can be gender traitors suggests to me that men, more than ever, symbolize the universal. Man does not exist. To be a man is (to some degree) to have no fixed nature excepting perhaps the guilty autonomy that feminism needs from men. To be clear, I absolutely support individual freedom and equality before the law. I like proud, strong, capable women. So in some sense I'm a "feminist," though that word has been stretched too thin. I have to stress this because our polarized culture is drenched in a "with us or against us" attitude.

The main point I want to make is about the sexism in feminism. As soon as a sophisticated feminism makes room for those women who enjoy being objectified or taking a traditionally feminine role, it's already just individualism. Do your thing, sister. What solidarity is left except for the sharing of genitals? (So reproductive rights seem like a logical, non-paranoid goal for a non-sexist feminism. Individuals with the uteruses that value their have a well-defined goal here, namely access to body-specific healthcare.)
But the sexism in feminism is a vision of the abstract protagonist Woman and her ancient foe Man. She must be rescued from the dragon. Although she is secretly magical and superior, she is everywhere in chains. Of course every particular woman has a duty to advance our spectral protagonist, just as every man has a duty to repent and be baptized for his existence as a cell in the Great Satan, Man. This is all terribly oppressive and stereotyping. If a woman fails to achieve her goals, no doubt Man has a hand in it. If a man succeeds, he cheated. So failure and success are distanced from individual effort. Of course there has been systemic sexism and perhaps still is. But leaning in to it at this point may be counterproductive. Supposedly the goal is a gender-blind society, which would involve women also being viewed as universal, autonomous, guilty-worthy adults. But this would be the death of feminism, or at least of its justification. Does feminism really strive for its own obsolescence? Consciously, perhaps. But in some feminists (the "morbid" conspiracy-theory types who find a male hand in everything wrong with the world), there is perhaps the all-too-human terror in the face of freedom.

I suppose the difference is between asserting one's identity freely and having it imposed by society through subtle and not so subtle expectations and (moral) norms. Only when we're capable of letting go of harmful expectations can a person be free to have their own identity.

It does make me wonder if and to what extent many people would then feel lost? Do we need some level of gender stereotyping to socially function? — Benkei

A very deep issue. Here's part of the trickiness. Identity is largely about preference, and this largely involves a preference with respect to friends. If I'm a "macho" guy, then maybe I don't choose insufficiently "macho" friends. Maybe I crave traditionally female characteristics in a mate, perhaps to "live out" my own traditionally feminine characteristics that I consciously repress. The differentiation and specialization of organs comes to mind. A perfectly symmetrical relationship may involve both partners in certain blind-spots. Both also enjoy their own "gender" play via its recognition by the other: the roles depend on one another. Anyway, individual freedom involves the freedom of preference. It's reasonable to strive for equality before the law, but it's unreasonable to demand that everyone LIKE everyone else equally. These preferences are "harmful expectations." In a pluralistic society, we are battered by a thousand competing visions of the virtuous person. To me this is just the cost of freedom. The individual can sometimes tame this chaos, but think such an individual tends to do so most radically in terms of an individualism that abandons its identifications with groups. For instance, a female writer might resent her gender being mentioned in reviews. She might not want to have this role of representing her gender emphasized. Such a role is ultimately duty (be a role-model and don't just write whatever the hell you want to write.)

I know lots of sensitive people who wrestle with feelings of guilt or alienation. They want to be good people, but they receive endless conflicting messages about their guilt and their duties. I sometimes feel like the only sane person in a mad house. On the other hand, this is at the cost of me being "cynical" or "selfish" or "irresponsible" relative to the spirit of the times. My "sanity" is dark in a world that craves some universal source of light. I see ambivalence that refuses to recognize itself as such. To some degree we want to be objectified and dominated and cherished as objects. We want to be children again, guiltless and safe in a world where no one is allowed even to think that we are inferior to them. Wolves daydream about the lives of sheep, etc. There's violence and the desire to dominate hidden in the desire to end all domination.

Not much. A little Kierkegaard. I do the find the idea of a "leap of faith" believable. For instance, I think atheism involves a leap of faith. Sartre writes of a basic choice that structures personality. In my view, there's something like a basic choice on the God issue. Arguments can be made on both sides, so either side can find reasons after the fact of this basic choice. But I should point out that there are evangelical atheists who are in some sense quasi-theists merely replacing God with an authoritative abstraction. For instance, the evangelical atheist might want to "cure" the world of religious illusions. Spreading this cure or dispelling this illusion becomes a "holy" one-size-fits-all mission. I mention this to emphasize that the
"real" distinction might that between the personal ("pure" atheism) and the trans-personal (religion in both traditional and abstract terms.)

But the question of "Why?" remains. People want to know the truth and the complete truth. People want the whole story of reality. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

This is an old post, but it's a great issue. I think (for what it's worth) that (1) there can be no "true" answer to the why-why-why, for reasons of infinite regress, which you mentioned. But (2) I don't think we really care about the "truth and the complete truth." In my view, we are "how" creatures, and even the cosmic why is something of a "how" in disguise. If we had "ultimate metaphysical knowledge," what would we use it for? A prestige object, a badge of authority. To be fair, maybe there's a certain amount of pure curiosity. Similarly, there's a certain amount of pure empathy. But I look around and see knowledge used as a tool, again and again, usually for "selfish" purposes --including taking care of one's own beloved children, for instance, "part" of one's extended self. I'm tempted to say that the "truth" of science is technology and the "truth" of philosophy is moral authority. For years now I've considered the ultimately why to be unanswerable in principle, which is to say merely "lyrical." Reality is just here, at some point. It's hereness "surpasses" the patterns we can find in it. I feel a little more "special" for having been able to "unveil" this absurdity or radical contingency. In that sense it's like being proud of knowing the good music, the good novels, or being proud of one's social circle.

In short, inquiry strikes me as the hand of desire. This hand reaches for knowledge largely as a means rather than an end, though we must allow for curiosity and the aesthetic pleasure in patterns. I hypothesize that our stronger drive to map the world and our position in it in a way that not only does not humiliate us but gives us a sense of virtue, power, beauty, etc. Of course possessing the ultimate metaphysical truth would be a good way to scratch that itch. Indeed, my own position is a twist on that same old game, the offering of a truth about truth, the essence of inquiry, the more or less complete self-consciousness of the processes we are, etc.

REAL philosophy is for lions and giants. — szardosszemagad

I agree. Of course calling the philosophy I like "REAL" is to take a position. I might say that "real" philosophy is a lion's consciousness of himself (or herself) as such. "Philosophy" is the kind of thinking that transforms us into lions and giants. This desire to be a giant seems to be at the center. The guys who think philosophy is science^2 are giants of the supreme kind of knowledge, the scientists of science itself, cardinals or even popes among mere footman (priests) of objectivity. The guys like me who think of philosophy in terms of liberation (becoming conscious of terrible freedom and one's own priest and kind) don't even lean on "alienated essence." A knowledge of freedom re-contextualizes other forms of knowledge. Maybe I don't give a damn about the structure of black holes or even about parading as Mr. Scientifically-Up-To-Date. Of course there's also the more righteous type, those scientists of What We Ought To Do, All of Us, Because Philosophy (Goodness or Duty Science) Said So. Call me cynical, but I see the "power drive" contaminating if not dominating all of it. 'Course this "power drive" is only sinful or dirty or an actual contaminant if one's philosophy (one's "spiritual" self) decides that it is. We might just take it as one more feature of the world (specifically human nature) to reckon with the pursuit of our desires. If this sounds evil, then "real" philosophy might ask why the desire of the other is always assumed to be evil. Are we annoyed because our vanity isn't coddled ? Because our own "evil" desire isn't taken into account first?

I think Heidegger translates non-philosophical insights into a complicated language so that they seem like high-tech profundity. That's probably based on an ungenerous oversimplification, though I have put a certain amount of time into trying to see what all the hype was about. Readers of philosophy have a tendency to be seduced by the jargon. I view this jargon as sometimes justified and sometimes indulgent. Anything that can't be paraphrased is suspicious. We want someone out there to be profound, so we project profundity on ambiguity. It sounds high-tech, so maybe we fantasize that we are participating in something as difficult and objective as science and yet as exciting and ethically relevant as literature. Then there's the fame effect. Everybody talks about X, so X must be great. Maybe X will turn out be a fad in retrospect, hammer pants for precocious young men who dress themselves in difficult and prestigious words. The opposite danger is using these kind of doubts to avoid the cost of thinking in a new way (of feeling lost or conned at first.)

I try to avoid these dangers via the paraphrase test. If I can't offer a thought in my own words along with an argument for its value, having spent some time with an author, then that author is at least more or less worthless to me. I like the idea of stopping there and not proclaiming that author's uselessness to the general, even if I do hold everyone to the paraphrase test. ("Tell me what those words mean to you, so I know you're not unwittingly a fashion victim...")

But I'd say that our hardwired tendency to be "ethical" can manifest in very different ways. Most of us feel various "thou shalt nots." We don't attack strangers. But even here we can imagine sexual, racial, economic, and political otherness serving as justification (in some minds) for such an attack. So there's a sort of consciously directed (ideologically) direct energy that can dominate hardwired empathy. In the name of our principles we dehumanize. We dry our eyes and strike righteously. So I'd read the situation you react to above in terms of cognitive dissonance. Particle is navigating the tensions between his beliefs. He's just using "emotions" perhaps as a name for what are really traditional investments incompatible with his more Nietzschean thoughts. There's also a tendency to understand such thoughts in terms of Shakespearean villains (like Edmund), as if consciousness of terrible freedom automatically demands a dog-eat-eat morality. In other words, freedom is misunderstood as a duty to do "evil." I think this is solved by recognizing that social norms are largely the expression of the selfishness we all have in common. For instance, we all want to do different things with our freedom, but we mostly value freedom in general. So you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. I'll tolerate your distasteful differences as a price worth paying to enjoy my own in peace.

Or, as my old friend Paul Spenser put it, "nice guys don't even finish." — szardosszemagad

I heard that they finished in their hand.

We might say that knowledge is framed or sifted by ignorance. If we drown in information, we can't find the knowledge we need to improve our lives. So the information that is not there is "part" of the knowledge that's useful to us. We might think of the whiteness of a page in a book that makes the shape of letters possible.

I often reflect on how I'm forced to choose what I investigate further. I have no choice but to choose the directions in which I'm to be ignorant, since this is just another way of describing that which I choose to obtain knowledge about. To me this is a very philosophical question. What is worth knowing? Does knowledge even have any value in itself, for its own sake? We might say that wisdom is a meta-knowledge about what knowledge is worth seeking (or sharing). So we sift knowledge from information and wisdom from knowledge. But this sifted wisdom "feeds back" and affects the sifting.

That's a good point. Outcomes are unknown. But we can more or less choose our movements toward these outcomes, uncertain of the success of these movements. Beyond the attainment of our goals (always tricky), there is the fundamental way we view ourselves. Do we have a "right" to be here, even if we don't have a God-given reason? Do we experience ourselves as puppets? As sinners in the hands of some angry stand-in for God (a god-object that might be an abstract principle that has us wringing our hands like naughty children)?

What I like most is the idea that I can live whatever type of life I want, that I'm free to pursue (or not pursue) whatever system of philosophy I like. Of course, the flip-side is to acknowledge that I'm totally responsible for my choices. I can't blame anyone else for the choices I make or the consequences that follow. — anonymous66

To me this is the essence. This is true adulthood or spiritual maturity. That (to me) is why atheism is central. If I have a God, then my justification and dignity lies outside me. I am a child or a slave. I'm neither free nor responsible. To be fair, theologians try to squeeze adulthood back into the system with free will. But this is only the freedom to rebel against rightful authority. It is certainly not freedom to become one's own rightful authority. For what it's worth, this essence of existentialism is significantly older than existentialism proper. It's a subversive fragment in/of Hegel, for instance.

As far as responsibility goes, we are responsible to an (ideally) freely chosen (by us) vision of "duty." It's not exactly duty when we have a say in our notion of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. "My" ideal existentialist takes responsibility by not thinking very highly of excuses.

A last point is that I view existentialism as an ideal to strive toward. Are we truly and totally radically free? Or do we strive to live as if we are free? Do we move toward political and ideological systems that "stoke" this fragile sense of freedom? In short, this Freedom is (perhaps) something a or even THE noble lie through which we attain some dignity. "Treat me as if I'm free and adult and I'll do the same for you." The alternative is the endless attempt to embed the individual in forces beyond his or her control, to humiliate the nail that sticks out, arrogant enough to be a king without subjects and priest without a external god (or a priest of Freedom with only one real customer).

Interesting post. I'd define happiness differently. I'd say it's generally feeling good or at least OK. Let's say 1 is great pleasure, 0 is neutrality, and -1 is great pain. Then I'd say happiness is the needle spending about 80+% percent hopping between 0 and 1. Of course we want the needle far away from -1, except for brief traumatic moments that are more or less to be expected in the long run.

I strongly associate wisdom and happiness. If the wise man isn't happy, what's so great about wisdom? So the wise man (or woman) builds a life (which is largely the construction of a perspective on life) in which the needle behaves as described above on the pleasure-pain-o-meter.

In other words, condoning unfairness against men as natural is a sign of the oppression of women. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Good post. I found this quote to be food for though, though I think you mention it ironically. What hasn't been talked about much is self-oppression. Sartre comes to mind. If I'm oppressed, then my failure is not my fault. As you say, everyone is stereotyped. There is systemic oppression of women, of men, and even of the individual as such. Strong individuals of either gender manage to swim against the current. Weak individuals of either gender will stress systemic injustice in order to justify passivity. "The game is rigged." Of course the game is (partially) rigged and life isn't fair. I believe in voting to make the game less rigged and the individual freer. I'd be ashamed to deny the genius or character of someone because of some kind non-essential otherness. Most thoughtful people probably would be. Beyond the question of empathy, it would also indicate stupidity on my part. Sexism (classic or virtuous) is group-think. The individual melts into the group and its stereotypical personality (emphasis on the positive stereotypes.) The essence of my "gripe" (to the degree that I take such time-killing griping seriously) is the constant reduction of individual dignity and the distinct critical mind to guilt-innocence vice-virtue of groups. "You can only speak if you are purple or round. If you are green and rectangular, don't bother. We have found that green and rectangular types are colorist and shapist to the core. They are therefore excluded."

I wonder if you've considered a related issue. As I see it, people are largely attached to gender and racial identity. Many women (including my wife) take a certain pleasure in being non-male. It's part of their identity. I think it's the same with race. So on the one hand we have this fantasy of the individual without gender and color and on the other hand we have identities constructed in terms of positive stereotypes.

Here's an idea I found in some comment somewhere that's worth considering. Let's consider a male-to-female trans person. If there is no female essence, then what does it mean to "really" be a woman? What does it mean to desire the female pronoun? "I'm a she." What is this she? There was also the case of a "not really black" person identifying as black. So there seems to be a real ambivalence on the liberal side. Clearly it's considered bad form among many of my fellow liberals to conspicuously enjoy being male and/or white. It's treated as if one is flashing "wealth" (privilege). But if celebrating one's femininity or blackness, etc., isn't also the flashing of privilege, this suggests (among other things) a subtle devaluation of femaleness, blackness, and otherness in general, among the very people who would be most ashamed of such a thing. To protect otherness from legal inequality is only decent. But to protect otherness from cultural criticism seems condescending. Incidentally, this is why I won't want anti-male talk censored. First, it allows me to sort potential friends. Secondly, it's a confused form of flattery. Insult them (men). Wish pain on them. They are strong enough to take it. In short, it betrays...penis envy?

I understand. I don't disagree with anything you say. But there are some who do indeed simply "invert" the situation. I recently saw a cartoon on Facebook (a woman's post) of women splashing beneath a waterfall of male tears. How can such sadism be justified if men are not (in the context of this half-joke) the cause of all the suffering of the world? It was Eve. Now it's Adam's turn. Surely all things would run smoothly and innocently if there were only females, right? Of course that's a silly idea that few would seriously endorse, and yet the man-hating jokes seem to suggest the fantasy of an impossible guiltlessness. This fantasy is itself perhaps a colonizing phallus.

As to the beauty issue, I think it's worth noting that men are also harshly judged. Perhaps women (if I may risk a generalization) are less visual in their evaluation of the worth of men than men are not only in their evaluation of the worth of women but also (admittedly with important exceptions) of the worth of other men. People can have different feelings about that fact, if it is indeed a fact. Of course rudeness sucks. The focus on the runner's beauty is a bit laughable. On the other hand, that's sexuality for you. Is there any dispute that many women will choose for a mate a somewhat inferior mind in a sufficiently superior body? I think of Schopenhauer's notion that the brain and the genitals as opposite poles, the first for culture and the individual and the second for the species. As I see it, it is part of the cruel comedy of life. Ideally, we can get a certain amount of control and be less rude. But we can't eradicate this injustice entirely, not unless see become pure mind. Even then style and charisma would be accused of unjustly usurping the position of content.

First, I largely agree with your vision of the urge to truth. Truth is a god we want our side, and not always because we're just so wonderfully curious. If truth is not a tool or an idol, it's hard to see what it's good for if not to satisfy curiosity (which is to say as entertainment.) Is it the truth that truth is a tool? If "truth is a tool" is a truth, then what is it (as a tool) good for? It's a higher-level tool that allows us to use lower tools with more creativity and fluidity. If I "know" that knowledge for its own sake is not "really" (or no longer) my goal, then I can more efficiently seek knowledge as potential practice or prestige. I'm not stumbling around in the dark of a sentimental rhetoric of holy truth, a new god for the modern scientific man. Maybe I just want what I want, and the Mr. Truth pose is the long way around or a dead-end.

On the virtue issue, maybe being willing to live in this vision of truth is itself a virtue. I personally think so. I see the philosopher as a daring mind entertaining "threatening" ideas with a hard-won serenity. He or she lets go of one sacred "prejudice" after another. This exfoliation of prejudices is, in my view, made possible by doubling down a particular prejudice, which is that the "godless" or "fearless" critical mind is "axiomatically" noble and beautiful. That's the leap of madness that "founds" or makes possible the exfoliation of every secondary or non-essential prejudice, dogma. There's a traditional image of rationality that is, in my view, one more prejudice. The philosopher "transcends" (holds loosely) to various conceptions of rationality or frameworks for validating claims. He or she is constantly trying to get outside of every cage. Personality is a cage. The philosopher is perhaps an impersonality or anti-personality. That is one possible notion of virtue. (Our philosopher might be a productive citizen, loving family man, etc. A free mind doesn't necessitate a monstrous lifestyle. We can vote our interest.)

I really enjoyed your post. I definitely share your perception the repetitiousness. But I'll try to supplement your post with an answer to your rhetorical question, although I myself am not a parent. Of course kids just happen if you don't take precautions and becoming a parent (especially if you can support your own children) is anything but taboo. But those are easy reasons. How do parents justify their bringing of life into the world when they stop to reason about it? I think it's pretty simple. Life is viewed as a "net good." Despite the horror and futility and dogs it, it is nevertheless viewed as a silly dream worth having or passing through. Many of us (most of us?) do not regret being born. We can chalk this up to "blue pills" or something, but it's hard not to see the blue pill talk as itself a sort of rationalization. Thoughtful parents know that they bring suffering as well as pleasure into the world, perhaps even "more" suffering than pleasure in unlucky cases. It's a calculated risk. Maybe we circle around a hole. We amuse ourselves with partial objects and fragile, ultimately meaningless projects. We floss thousands of times. Behind the brilliant moments of life lurks an immense background of repetition. I definitely see that.

I personally take a neutral view. I don't know whether in some ideal general case the game is worth the candle. I even want to not know or take pleasure in the freedom from needing to know. I think of it as a transcended attachment, this extremely common itch to declare general existential truths. I can see the "blue bill" cheerleading from the outside and the "black pill" (red pill) cheerleading from the outside. Both are in some sense poses. What they share is an attachment to trans-personal truth.

Some people might endure an hour of the worst suffering for an hour of the best pleasure. I don't think the choice is so obvious. Examine your fantasy life. Does nothing you can dream up at least tempt you? Let's say you get to experience yourself as a world famous genius of some kind experiencing the perfect sexual situation with the perfect cocktail of drugs in the blood stream. Maybe you just completed the greatest work ever, the female(s) and/or males(s) and/or those more complicated arrive, and the doctor plugs the shot in your arm. You feel yourself to be as complete as God, etc. Maybe all of your sexual visitors are "geniuses" too -- who just happen to absolute fit your vision of the perfect sex partner physically and in terms of how they present themselves. If you act now, I'll throw in the sensation of killing all your enemies in a supremely elegant act of ultraviolence. Personally, I'd forget I had enemies with everything else going on. But I'm throwing that into the sales pitch.

I know by not killing myself this minute that I put myself at risk for great and unexpected suffering. Most of us know this and many of us do not feel constrained by platitudes or religious principles to live whether we want to or not. Some of us make peace with this possibility (to some degree) by remembering that it's probably the case that suicide will remain an option. Accidents could of course change us unexpectedly. That does scare me, an assault on my personality or self-ownership. But even this is "rationalized" or forgiven as a necessarily temporary situation. Certainly there's some probabilistic reasoning involved. Anyway, I suspect that lots of men especially at least fantasize about the possibility of ending their lives at some future time, when life can no longer be lived "nobly." And maybe lots of us aren't really disturbed by the suicide of those we don't love. Of course public, respectable voices (because they are public voices who must play a role) will offer your blue-pill platitudes. But I wouldn't take any of that at face value. There are plenty of mostly happy people who are well aware of two-faced life's terrible face. And they probably value suicide as a option that allows them to describe their life as an affirmed, calculated risk.

I like this theme. The "problem," however, is that it's difficult to make a moral point without implying a hierarchy. For instance, the best people are those who don't obsess over being the best. Let's not obsess over being the best, 'cuz we want to be the best kind of people.

As I see it, there's no obvious way around this structure. So the goal is priding yourself on the best kind of bestness. Many of us would probably agree that the right kind of humility is a virtue (which is to say with the spirit of your OP.) But I think we still enjoy ourselves even in that in terms of being more aware than those who think otherwise.

In short, I think it's futile to attack the desire for superiority. Instead the issue is which kind of superiority is truly superior. We may even decide that the truly superior attitude is to leave this question unanswered, if only because we can afford to (we are secure enough in our own choices to not be threatened by the value systems of others.)

Of course it's absurd. I'm on the liberal side, but we sure have our share of clowns on this side, too. To me this is just more of the darkness of human nature. "Bring in the next scapegoat."

But it's not all bad for the male (or the white male if we want to generalize). We're allowed to hear these biases. In many ways that's an advantage. On a personal level, I don't want this kind of thing censored. Morbid minds (small minds, group minds) reveal themselves this way. I'd rather know than not know. It helps me pick my friends. Fortunately there are many, many women out there who don't buy into all this conspiracy theory man-hate disguised as the endless war on misogyny. To be sure, women have been victims of sexism, but there's a tendency to overcorrect and merely invert sexism (or racism) into its "virtuous" or sickly-version liberal form. It's far more palatable than alt-right conspiracy theory, at least presently.

Really facing one's death as death obliterates "everydayness." All of it can be seen from the outside. Perhaps everydayness is immersion in all of the little tasks and goals that life for the most part is. Perhaps life can only be seen as a whole from the virtual outside of our imagined death. This virtual perspective-from-nothingness is perhaps a surfacing that grasps the world as a stage of busy maniacs.

I understand the possibility of impossibility like this. It's possible that (all of the sudden) all things will become impossible to me. So my possibilities are haunted by (or include) the possibility that all of these possibilities will vanish. Death steals even the possibility of death. You can only die once. As I experience it, this possibility of death is like a nothingness that haunts somethingness. Because it ends, life is a dream. I have to face this death in a solitude that is more or less unique to my dying. In my view, there's a deep form of heroism possible here. There's a new freedom in play for those who can endure the contemplation of the "nothingness" that haunts "somethingness." That somethingness looks more contingent, less binding with its center missing. Immersed in the dream, we wrestle with necessity. With one foot outside of the dream, this necessity reveals itself as optional (we choose to live once we attain the sense of our "right" to dispose of ourselves) and contingent (within the dream there is no final justification for the specific nature of the dream, but only a tracing of relations between its spinning gears).