In the Leviathan, Hobbes argues for monarchy being the best system because it forces the different agencies of government to be answerable to a single source of power. The primary differences between the agencies relate to the work that they do. The alternative to their existence would be the absence of institutions dedicated to the benefit of the public good. Such an absence is described by Hobbes as the natural condition where man is at war with all other men.

This scenario does not provide much of a context for the struggle between 'bodies of government' you describe. Hobbes recognizes that such institutions are liable to corruption in both aristocratic and democratic regimes. But that is quite different from suggesting that the work of government is itself conditioned by the war its acceptance by a society is supposed to avert.

That from improving ones life, life itself becomes a more enjoyable experience, or that you should at least hope for that "in the long run". — Cobra

That makes life sound like some kind of trust fund; Some balance between resources explains outcomes.

But actual optimism is not confidence in a return but persistence in a method; Not knowing if it is all for not.

So, it is like not proving the existence of love. If one assumes it exists, events unfold a certain way. If one does not, other stuff happens.

We always try to gauge what we deserve and what others deserve, but how is any such thing measured objectively? — TiredThinker

I am not sure what the 'we', presented by you amounts to. If you are referring to the laws set up to arbitrate disputes between various claims of right and injury, the possibility that arbitrary decisions will be made without regard to more refined senses of justice is exactly why those institutions came into being.

'We' came to a limit to what could be understood in the dealings between persons and came up with a system to carry on despite that insight not being available to an 'us.'

Your mention of Ancient Greek struck me how lucky we are to have a number of different genres to compare with others over measures of similar and different time. The plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The mathematics of Euclid and Apollonius. The poems in different generations going back to oral traditions. The different histories and commentary regarding the 'pre- Socratics.' The style of Thucydides is especially helpful as he wrote for a completely different purpose than other writings that have survived from the precise years of his authorship.

Many other languages permit a contrast of that kind. Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese, Farsi, Latin, etc. I am sure I am leaving out many others due to my ignorance. The point is only that such examples are different from inscriptions and examples of writing where there is little to no means of cross reference to other uses of speech.

One difference between N and those Stoics is that N dd not appeal to a cosmic Good as a point of departure.

One of the elements to be observed is that one can prepare for the test(s) by help from people who have studied the exams. I have taken SATs, ACTs, and a GRE without prep and recognize many years later the advantage I would have had if I had cooked the algorithm.

Another element to consider is that many intellectuals are talented in ways that make a standardized format difficult to perceive. They start assigning possible values to answers meant to be discarded out of hand. They know they are supposed to reject certain answers immediately but are not happy with the choice as a choice. People who are not afflicted with that propensity blow right past the others and finish the test on time.

I realize my remarks are not any help in regards to current debate. But my emphasis on testing is a different matter from standardizing curriculums. The different arguments I have seen have not done a great job of separating the issues.

Edit to Add:
As for proponents against universal curriculums, Ivan Illich put that forward as his criticism of modern society.

Vulnerable means, in my book, to be deprived of all means of escape/relief - there's nothing you can do (amor fati) and so :grin: and bear it! — TheMadFool

That expression is at odds with Nietzsche saying life keeps happening despite the entropy. The cups keep getting filled over. We have no idea why.

And what do you make of all the language surrounding freedom from bad science and sick thoughts? He does not replace all that with sunshine. That absence is part of his proposition, if you could make it a sentence, the sentence would have been written.

If evil is the creative element you describe, it doesn't need anything from anybody. it is either observed with acuity or misunderstood.

Celebration and worship are directed toward what won't survive without attention and love.

The interest in 'identity theory' (google it, I didn't know about it until it was pointed out to me) is that the duality that anchors our epistemology is not necessary any longer if states of the brain are whatever the 'real' as a one-to-one correspondence could possibly entail.

The element about the idea that most interests me is how the proposal could be tested. If what is said to be Two is actually One, won't I need a Third to arbitrate?

There is no doubt I am viewing the matter through my own peculiar view of the world.

I meant no offense. The comment was put forward as an alternative reading of Nietzsche and Pascal to your interpretation.

Nietzsche spoke specifically against the 'punishment of self' Pascal applied to himself. I am not aware of any remarks by N regarding Pascal's wager. Leaving aside my reading of Pascal in the context of Christian expression, what text of Nietzsche exemplifies the grin and bear it quality you hear?

Would you have preferred he write in a different style? — Joshs

That is an interesting question. He was clear that if someone wanted to do better, then do better. That is as honest a response I can imagine.

Point taken. He was a writer of his time taking on the challengers as they appeared.

But I think there is a geometric element in his rhetoric that endeavored to show what the reverse of conventions produced. I don't read N as someone so simple to think he could just reverse what was commonly held and be accepted as someone trying to do serious work.

A lot of the language demonstrates elements beyond specifc propositions. Something like, 'you say reverence has to be couched in such and such a language. Well, this is what it sounds like if I use the exact opposite means of expression.' Nietzsche was a pretty astute student of the use of 'egotism' in European literature. It seems strange to me to read his use of the form without a grain or two of salt.

So, sincere? Yes, to a fault. Unaware of that quality as a matter of rhetoric? Very unlikely.

I think some of the style comes from growing up in a dour religious household.

As you can see, the moment you think of the this and now as not ideal, you open the doors to Pascal's wager. You can't have one without the other. Hence, my statement, "perfectly good real opportunity". — TheMadFool

When you put it that way, the 'now' sounds like a description of a Bed and Breakfast one reports visiting without enthusiasm. It was okay for the night but not anything to celebrate.

Nietzsche is asking for one to put oneself in a vulnerable position by choice. The bird he held in his hand is free to fly away. He seeks a verification that may not happen. That is why he keeps talking about being courageous.

On Pascal's side, the risk being taken on by his interlocutors has already been accepted. These people have deferred the sufferings for their sins upon some kind of existence they have already abandoned. They are numb and suspicious. Pascal proposes a period of accommodation rather than call for people to fall on their knees in fright. Those cards have already been played.

Yep. Throw away a perfectly good real opportunity for an infinitely better but imaginary one. Reminds me of Pascal's wager. — TheMadFool

I would not describe it as a 'perfectly good real opportunity.' Perhaps you are aware of this, but Nietzsche specifically called out Pascal as the poster child of how a great talent can be misled by morbid ideas (more in N's notebooks than actual books).

On Nietzsche's side, one is risking a lot. The desire for certainty is not any kind of promise it will be met. Honesty is the wager.

On Pascal's side, the wager is not even a gamble. There is nothing to lose if you shove your chips across the board. The casino is an illusion. You are not here.

What Nietzsche rejects in the expectation of an afterlife is that it avoids our responsibility to decide for ourselves what to value or discard in this one. Note how having an intellectual conscience is demanded without qualification:

2
The intellectual conscience. - I keep having the same experi-
ence and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe
it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an
intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if
anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in
the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.
Everybody looks. at you with strange eyes and goes right on
handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody
even blushes when you intimate that their weights are under-
weight: nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your
doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider
it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly,
without first having given themselves an account of the final
and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even· trou-
bling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted
men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority."
But what is good heartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when
the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his
faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire
for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress-as that
which separates the higher human beings from the lower.
Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and
was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed
their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of
this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous
uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning,
without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such
questioning, without at least hating the person who questions,
perhaps even finding him faintly amusing-that is what l feel
to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first
in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human
being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my
type of injustice. — The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Book One, paragraph 2

I was misled by fate which I read as passively, stoically, resignedly accepting whatever it is that comes your way without resisting (rebelling). — TheMadFool

Are you familiar with the doctrtine of eternal recurrence that N proposed as the antithesis to depicting life 'here' as some kind of test for another life? The idea is not presented as a desiderata. It is presented as an unavoidable medicine if one is to reject the other pharmaceuticals on offer.

The element of what Nietzsche refers to as 'Socratic' (that Nietzsche objects to) is the separation of the realm of becoming from the realm of the eternal in a way where it is said that the former is built upon the structure of the latter.
Nietzsche depicts the delight in the 'given' objectivity of our experiences as secretly relying upon the reliance upon a 'given' eternal condition underlying the chaos we try to make sense of. An article of faith is being treated as a living god. So, it is a really good mask because it has a mask for its mask-i-ness. The world stands before me like a bowl of breakfast cereal.

Regarding the inheritances of cultural legacies, Nietzsche describes 'Christians' stealing the idea of the eternal from the 'Socratic' vision for their own uses. Whatever was going on with Jesus was accepted by N as the last expression of a message barely heard. N described Jesus as the last Christian. But that interesting element is only a side note to how little worth 'cultural legacies' were regarded by N. The way people used/use those legends to develop 'identity' for themselves receive the greatest scorn.

The above is presented for the purpose of noting that N wrote the Genealogy of Morals, not the Science of Morality. Exploration versus Explanation.

I appreciate your focus on attention. As a young person, I liked what I liked as an immediate response to music but learned a lot from people drawing my attention to how time, anticipation, and sounds coming together worked in very different performances. Coming to recognize when musicians were really playing together helped me open up to what had not been in my experience before.

So, do you think that the continuity of memories, often formulated as 'identity', is illusory? — Jack Cummins

I don't know if is an illusion or not. Our condition is especially good at fusing experiences with accounts given about them. A thoroughly skeptical point of view does not start from a more objective point of view, free from this problem of singular perception. The view requires accepting our experience is outside of what is really going on.

And that seems unlikely. Why would such a condition be more possible than others?

Humanity scares the crap out of me.
I do think our shared experiences of being human is more evident than many other things. Is 'faith', in this context, an acceptance of a certain kind of report or an anticipation of some result?

Are you saying that Gosar fantasizing about the death of a colleague is part of a protest against a tyranny of civic conventions imposed by a group who reject some other set of civic conventions?

That is an excellent brief, counselor.

Some of the problem involves how attempts to clarify relationships get taken for other things.
Hume and Kant swatted the same flies (or at least very similar flies) but disagreed about how little could be known about why they hung around. Kant wanted to say we could talk more about that than Hume did. It is an ironic development that an attempt to say we can know more about what happens is a step away from the subject (or object). Descartes presents some of the same odd disproportion between intent and consequences. Reading the Discourse upon Method beyond the money shot reveals a thinker deeply involved with experience, thankful that he had some.

That is an interesting perspective about the limits of what can happen in a corporate environment.
But the vulgarity being embraced in this case is done with the assumption that that environment could never be breached by such incitements as performed by Gosar, etcetera. You can have your cake and sell it on Ebay at the same time.

The distinction you make between 'genuine beliefs' and the merely 'hypothetical' suggests a kind of disassociation that I have not observed between different psychological models. They all seem hell bent on 'saving the phenomenon' they capture.
So, from that point of view, Aristotle is not modelling a methodology but the way we make claims for them.

Is the mind in what is understood, or in the way in which it understands? — Pantagruel

I figure the answer points to the importance of a dialogue that develops different models and assumptions over time. Framing answers to problems create new ones. The importance of Aristotle is that he marked out the limits of his horizon. He accepted the depths of our ignorance as described by Socrates but did not say the quality was acceptable as any kind of last word.

When Aristotle limits what can be a science to what can be identified as what changes, it can be read as an attempt at a complete explanation. But all of those accounts keep running into the limits of what has been explained. He is modelling how to use language during the work of inquiry.

What is politically expedient is to satisfy the insatiable demand for transgressive performance. There is a market demand for that and suppliers are working to meet it. The carnival of mutual disgust consumes all surrounding resources. The credit line of opportunity costs accrued indulging in the catharsis keeps getting bigger but there is no income coming in to balance it against. It is the condition of people who have nothing to do with what keeps them alive. And if they cannot survive they will have at least taken down their enemies with them.

What makes Roark so attractive to some young males is that the theme of rugged individualism and the virtues of a pure meritocracy provide cover for the desire to be accepted by a particular group on the basis of what Veblen referred to as the display of conspicuous consumption. The dominance of Roark over women reflects how participation in the group translates the role of beauty. For example:

She is useless and expensive, and she is consequentially valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons , so as to conform more nearly the requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under the guidance of of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificiality induced pathological features attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture, and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. — Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorsten Veblen

The futility of the 'kept' woman finding purpose through work is not a bug but a feature for Roark, it makes the forced sex hotter as a kind of degradation of worth. Rand makes the fantasy even hotter by suggesting that such a result is secretly what is wanted.

Time for me to hit the shower....

I see the distinction you are making but balk at the true versus false designation. It is not a field to win or lose honor except in the eyes of the living. All of the dead are equal through their death.

My concept is that, where there is no purpose, there can be no will, but rather exists only the aimless longing indicated (and misnamed??) by Schopenhauer. In this conception, will is closely associated with Viktor Frankl's "search for meaning" which he hypothesized as being universal in man. — Michael Zwingli

Nietzsche throws down several stumbling blocks to Mill's kind of utilitarianism and Frankl's 'search for meaning' Book One of The Gay Science puts the differences between instincts and reasoning in a different context than how an individual operates. Section 11 questions the agency of the actors themselves, at least as something treated as self explanatory causes for outcomes:

Consciousness.- Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished
and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that
lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, "exceeding destiny." as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of
the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it
did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would
have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open
eyes, of its Jack of thoroughness and its credulity-in short, of
its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would
long have disappeared.
Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if during the
interval it is subjected to some tyranny. Thus consciousness is
tyrannized-not least by our pride in it. One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate,
and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies its growth arid its intermittences.
One takes it for the "unity of the organism.''
This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an
all too fast- development of consciousness. Believing that they
possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very
much to acquire it; and things haven't changed much in this
respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and
making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human
eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task -that is seen
only by those who have comprehended that so far we have
incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness
relates to errors. — Fredrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufman

The ontological argument is a sham unless seen as mysticism — Gregory

One of the appeals to reason in the argument is that we could not have had a notion of the divine unless we were infected by the notion at some point. That strikes me as a very unmysitcal thing to say. We try to take inventory of our ideas and this very strange one shows up.

Rightly or wrongly, the idea is presented as an interloper, something that is not self evident.

Anselm brought in the idea of what can be imagined and what were the conditions of such an activity. It was not a work of mysticism like others of that sort.

What do you make of St. Anselm? He was not interested in replacing faith with reason. Nor vice versa.

I don't understand the human side of these speculations. If there is a god who is interested in what I do and think, then that is an important part of my experience. And if that is the case, I do not care about what could be said or not by this and that criteria outside of my relationship.

The entire notion is based upon whether something is going on or not for some people. It is meaningless outside of that context.

Why didn't Aristotle, the father of metaphysics, not make a Kantian-like distinction between noumena and phenomena? After all it seems to be baked into metaphysics. — TheMadFool

Perhaps it has something to do with the division Descartes made between the I and the world it perceives. The singularity presumed is not concordant with Aristotle seeing humans as inhabiting a place between gods and animals.

Yes.

Do you take this dialogue as a warning against complete, self-contained systems of thought? — frank

That is unlikely given this writing is one of the first of its kind. I was referring to the willingness to have every proposition be challenged as such. The permission to hear new ideas. Why would one extend such an invitation?

I don't think you can support that mental constructs of pure philosophy are useful in any way to a person. — magritte

As far as I know, 'persons' are the only ones who might be possibly interested in these 'constructs.'

My response was directed to what might be wanted beyond acceptance to any particular account of our limitations, however those things may be described. To notice that quality is not a claim upon what should be counted as possible or not. It is not leverage to object to your idea that the universe is a product of perception.

Nonetheless, I am pretty sure the universe is something with me and without me.

Forms are only used to build Plato's abstract metaphysical models, and have no psychologically useful correlates. — magritte

Doesn't our experience with recognizing kinds, types, and universals in the realm of particulars count as 'psychologically useful' correlates?

Your description seems to suggest that the problems of Parmenides have all been surpassed by means of some complete explanation. Some of the effort in the dialogue is troubled by the consequences of complete explanations. Are 'we' beyond that now?