I get the need to caricature me as the dry-as-dust reductionist scientist to legitimate the otherness that would be your heroic and liberated, yet still dreadfully suffering, poet of nature. It is the quickest way for you to win the argument here. But it doesn't accord with the facts of how I live and think. — apokrisis

I wasn't trying to offend you, just to be clear. I don't even identity with Romanticism. I don't care much for nature and I don't find suffering impressive or poetic. But yes liberty is part of my notion of the heroic. Anyway, I just thought you weren't painting a picture of Romanticism that squared with my fairly intense reading in the tradition almost 20 years ago now. I mentioned Beethoven under the assumption you enjoyed him, so I wasn't trying to paint you as a soulless person. You do dwell on philosophy of science or philosophy as science, but so what? Also, on some gut-level there's urge to "win" interactions, but isn't that in all of us? And, yeah, my position is easy to argue, since it's slippery and non-committal. But that's one of its features. Much of life is the clash of personalities, which I particularly contemplate. Still, I don't mean to be rude, just in case that's not clear.

Well I think those things might be fun but also bogus when it comes to insight about values.
If you want real insight like that, go help out at homeless shelter or do some eco-system restoration. Seriously. Actually being involved with the world is the way to discover its values. The other stuff you mention is largely self-indulgence. — apokrisis

Just for background and clarification, the best experiences I've had with drugs also involved great friendships. So there was a living community in place, and the drugs and music (listened to and created) just pushed feeling to heights that are otherwise hard to access. From this place of high feeling, certain metaphors and images in art and religion make sense in a new way. It's all "just" feelings, but the feelings are such that you don't give a damn about making objective claims. Everyone there already knows. The music becomes "obviously" something made in the same "spirit." Words seem like poor things. They are cups too small for the bliss.
But these days or rather these years (speaking of involvement in the world) I'm a PhD student in math. My worst vice now is probably typing foolosophy on this forum when I could be wrestling with ordinals and cardinals (or is it the nicotine gum?) As to the other stuff, I won't pretend to care much or pose as an altruist.

The observer side of the equation must also be generalised (so that it no longer seems so mysteriously and ineffably particular). We must be able to talk about observers as something themselves individuated, rather than starting with them as some brute fact individuation. — apokrisis

I like the idea of the subject and object being disentangled (starting with neither in its purity), but who is this "we" that must talk about observers being themselves individuated? It's as if we always already "believe" in the "we" and the "I."

People think they know the deep secrets of the universe when they are on drugs, in church, psychotic, crackpot, drunk in the gutter. Indeed, the psychotic and the crackpot are the most strongly convinced. — apokrisis

In a sense maybe some of them do know a temporary secret about the universe in such moments. From over here, it looks as if you're thinking about the universe in terms of the "scientific image (Sellars)." But this largely mathematical "image" is embedded in a far richer totality, including of course the "manifest image." Spiritual practices, drugs, music, fasting, etc., are usually aimed at value insights.
If you, for instance, are locked into an identification with scientificity or investment in objectivity as the measure of a man, then, sure, this won't have much appeal. But this investment is optional. Imagine Beethoven at his piano. Was that objectivity? But would we want him doing something else? There's something in Dead Poet's Society (yes, let's go pop culture for a moment) about science being about how we live and poetry being about why we live. This silly statement has a grain of truth. What gives the facts weight in the first place if not values? And whence the value in objectivity that doesn't cash out in utility? It's there. There's certainly a love of truth and objectivity for its own sake or at least the idea of that love as a mark of virtue. Some of the stuff above may help us (though obviously may harm us in the same way) by adjusting our values and therefore our trajectory and the gap between what we want and what we have.

I would argue that it is dialectic or dichotomistic metaphysics. That is what presents us with our "binary" choices. We can posit the axiom of continuity - having identified it as one of two choices. Reality could be fundamentally discrete or continuous. Well, let's pick continuous for the sake of argument and run with that, see where it leads. — apokrisis

I like dialectic. That's the process. The thesis swells (via anti-thesis then synthesis, repeat) and becomes more capable.
I like the instrumentalist approach. It's not about what's behind the manifest image. It's about what we can do within the manifest image using our theories. Think "prediction machines" or "manipulation machines." It's probably natural for the scientist to think in terms of representation, as with a mathematical sense of "X-ray vision" that pierces through the manifest image. It would also be hard to do math as a sincere formalist. One wants to prove something about objects that exist inter-subjectively. So there are atoms and real numbers, but this "are" doesn't seem absolute. It flickers in the context of purpose and focus. How would we cash out reality as continuous? How would it be established? Our most predictive/manipulative theory based on the real numbers? Or on geometric intuition of flow?

Well the relevant axiom is the axiom of choice. It starts by presuming individuated (crisp and not vague) things, events, properties, whatever. And given that is the case, forming collections becomes trivial in being trivially additive and subtractive. One can construct any unity (or deconstruct it to leave behind "nothing"). — apokrisis

The AC is often stated as the existence of a choice function. Are you sure you don't have another axiom in mind? I think the logical use of equality keeps things distinct in math generally, not just in set theory. We simply have x = y or not (x = y). All of x's properties are "naked" if we have the eyes to see it. Of course complicated deductions are not obvious, so some properties are invisible, although "already there" in some sense. (The relationship of time and classical logic is probably quite deep. )

Yep. Ghostly spirits. The essences that Newtonian mechanicalism so clearly leaves out.

Now of course Romanticism was also a retreat into vagueness about what exactly it might mean in this regard. — apokrisis

Oh, well those can indeed be called ghosts and spirits. But perhaps you'll grant that numbers are also figments of the imagination. So science is just a ghost or system of ghosts that gets things done.

How is the retreat into vagueness avoidable as we move away from numbers? Metaphors seem to me like a cutting edge of the creative imagination, and they are basically abuses or mutations of the language that sometimes succeed and become literalized (the exception becomes a rule if not the rule.) When someone asks us what we mean by our words, we can only offer more words. So "meaning" is a slippery ghost. On the other hand, an airplane or a stick of TNT speaks to the ancient, sensual animal. When I see a building from the sidewalk, I have no genuine doubt that others see this building. But as language becomes more complex and abstract, I very much lose this sense of "seeing the same building." I like pragmatism for trying to glue abstract statements to results in the concrete, manifest world. Instead of proving metaphysical "theorems" in a sort of "word math," we take them "modulo practice" and look at the result. (This isn't perfect or simply, but it's a promising path.)

So Romanticism I see as a refuge - a cloak of obscurity, an asking just to be left alone with a "mystery" that is more fun, more real, more whatever it takes to get serious questioning off its back. — apokrisis

Or one could define serious questioning as the questioning that one cannot get off one's back. This is inquiry powered by genuine doubt, cognitive dissonance, a fork in the road that matters. No doubt, poetry isn't science. But only a few of us are paid to do science, just as only a few of us are paid to be poets. Placing poetry and science and all the rest in the hierarchy is one of those issues that is under-determined (for individuals) by constraints on practice. Should the insurance salesman learn quantum physics or French? For the most part, it only matters to him.

You can't be right unless you are prepared to be wrong. So the question for Romanticism is in what sense is it putting itself in a position that it could be shown wrong? In claiming the transcendent authenticity of personal feelings and imaginings, it just puts itself in a place where that becomes a social impossibility. — apokrisis

Poets might be seen as (among other things) inventors of personalities. They give us new images/conceptions of what we might want to become. They are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world to the degree that they impose the values that shape the social and physical world. Perhaps you'll agree that we don't as thinkers merely construct and evaluate propositions. We invent new conceptions and therefore "disclose" things that thereby become visible. For instance, philosophy seems largely dominated by the image of a sort of armchair scientists. He's like a scientist in his intentions, but he can work like a mathematician with just a pencil and paper. If we shift to the engineer metaphor, however, we are going to look for results instead or at the "math." If we dwell on the philosopher as poet, we concentrate on how the world looks through the lens of a new personality. In fact, we probably operate on all of these levels simultaneously. But, consciously, the scientist metaphor seems to dominate.

But does it make great philosophy? I say no. It just isn't designed for that task. Although of course being a professional mystifyer in the form of a Continental academic is probably a quite gratifying kind of career if one is not really serious about cosmological issues. — apokrisis

I'm not crazy about mystification either. But "seriousness about cosmological issues" seems optional. For the consumer, a "black box prediction machine" and a "physical reality manipulation machine" are going to be enough. That's always going to convince more than "word math," no matter how respectable the reasoning. If this "word math" allows for better machines, it will be embraced for its indirect contribution. Some of us will give a damn about the details, but that seems like an esthetic choice. Why not pure math or King Lear or just Arrested Development? If someone feels especially talented at metaphysics, there's an extra motivation: honor, maybe even $. If the stuff leads to new machines, there will surely be $. But without the machines, how is it so different from Romanticism?

Set theory probably has the problem that it builds in the distinction SX hopes to derive. It's weakness is that its brackets that bound possibility are themselves so definite and unexplained as features of the world. — apokrisis

As I see it, math is machine-like. "Here are formal definitions. Here are rules of inference. See how these definitions are related in terms of those rules of inference." The formal definitions tend to have intuitive appeal of course, but we're aren't allowed to use intuition directly. The ghost of intuition must be incarnated in the symbolism.

As I see it, the formal definition of "set" tries to capture the intuition of "gathering up into a unity." All things as things are unities. The tail and the nose and the fur and so on have been gathered up as the dog, for instance. It's as there is always already a logical circle drawn around any particular thing, perhaps giving it its thing-hood, cutting it out from the background automatically. But then sets are also (intuitively) the extension of properties, which surely inspired the axiom of extensionality.

So set theory could be naturalised by recognising the opposed brackets as standing for complementary poles of being - the opposed limits you need to arrive at to have the third thing of the individuated something that can now stand between. — apokrisis

I think we get this from writing R as (-inf, inf).

I can't respond to much of your post, since I don't have a feel for it. But I have checked out a book on Peirce, so maybe I'll understand you better after I read it.

Why can't we apply rational argument in the way that I have done to arrive at some image of the unsayable and unthinkable? — apokrisis

It's hard to see how you're not talking about a conceptualization of that which, by definition, cannot be conceived. (Sensation, redness for instance, "overflows" the conceptual grasp we have on it, but we need the concept in order to speak of its "overflow.")

When talking about things, like the creation of existence or prime matter, normal folk only apply "intuitions" like something can't come from nothing, everything has a reason, causes precede effects, etc. — apokrisis

I do think it's great to question the PSR and cause and effect. Taking these for granted imposes tunnel vision.

In other words, normal folk are only going to continue to think about foundational issues using the same mechanistic habits of logic that have been drummed into them by Western enlightenment culture - a culture evolved to build machines. Or else they are going to default to the antithesis to that - Romanticism and its idealist causality, a world moved by ghostly spirits. — apokrisis

I'd stress feeling and imagination when it comes to Romanticism.

What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty. — Keats

Also sensation.

My senses discovered the infinite in everything. — Blake

Then there's irony and pluralism. Hegel griped about "The Irony" in his day, presumably in the name of the rigor of the concept.

“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos.” (Ideas 69). — SEP

The "world moved by ghostly spirits" doesn't fit with my image of Romanticism. I'm not an expert, but I sure did love those Romantic poets (and there theories of poetry) back in the day.

This is how you do it: Take a set, S. Then, you find the compliment of S, which just so happens to be the empty set, ∅ (S-S = ∅). Now that you’ve done this, you’re in a great position because the empty set plays a double role. Not only is it the compliment of S, it is also a subset of S, to the extent that every set contains the empty set. Note that the empty set is thus is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside of S, occupying exactly the paradoxical place which we said a rule for distinction would occupy. — StreetlightX

I don't know if you're using math metaphorically here, but the compliment of S is going to be relative to some set X. If X = S, then, yeah, the empty set is its complement. To say that the empty set is both inside and outside of S is a bit of cheat. It's a subset of S but not an element of S (in general). I don't doubt that your getting at something interesting about rules for distinction, though.

Having done this, you can generate the entirety of the number line by asking how many elements belong to the empty set (=1), and then recursively asking how many elements belong to that set and so on ad infinitum. Ta da. You’ve now digitised the continuum. — StreetlightX

Are you saying the empty set contains an element? (It definitely doesn't.) You then mention the continuum, but R is typically constructed with subsets or Q (cuts), etc. (Maybe you know all of this.) The measure of the computable reals is 0, so it's not such an intuitively satisfying "digitalization." But maybe this is all metaphorical. If so, perhaps that should be stressed.

The problem, of course, as with any digitisation, is whether or not 0 belongs to it. The answer is strictly undecidable. Wilden: "zero is not simply a number as such, but a rule for a relation between integers… zero is implicitly defined as a meta-integer, and indeed its definition is what provides the RULE for the series of integers which follow it.” Zero, like negation, is a higher-order, reflexive rule about the continuum on the basis of which we can divide it, provided we cannot situate either negation nor zero properly in that continuum itself. — StreetlightX

So this is from System and Structure. It looks like good reading, but it doesn't seem that we are in Kansas anymore (actual math), but instead in a realm where Freud is relevant and "presence and absence fill a continuum." That's cool. Just sayin'.

That's why I say he's stuck in the transcendent mode of thinking: criticism is understood as the way we save ourselves, rather than a way of developing an understanding of ourselves and the world. He doesn't envision truth as the living world or logic, which has no role in saving us. Truth is understood as our rescue, despite it being the living world and logical expression which has no role in saving anyone from meaninglessness. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Well, it's hard to imagine a non-dialectical leap from teen angst to world-affirming wisdom. I'd say that criticism, properly understood, is the way we "save ourselves." (We get better at life, some of us). But we don't save ourselves from meaninglessness (though we might pass through death of god angst). We save ourselves from inferior-in-retrospect meanings (worldviews, ego-ideals). Some might claim to have been saved by "meaninglessness."

Christianity took away from the things of this world only their irresistibleness, made us independent of them. In like manner I raise myself above truths and their power: as I am supersensual, so I am supertrue. Before me truths are as common and as indifferent as things; they do not carry me away, and do not inspire me with enthusiasm. There exists not even one truth, not right, not freedom, humanity, etc., that has stability before me, and to which I subject myself... — Stirner

We have here an image of the self-consciously free ego for whom "nothing is sacred" but the tool-using ego itself, or pure post-principle profanity. Let's give this poet his due.

Truth's power is not over those who believe fantasy, but those interested in truth-- if you accept the truth things are meaningful in themsleves, then fantasy has no role to serve.

The promises of rescue which make fantasy so profound to its adherents are revealed to be empty. Their claim-- their fantasy is a wonderful truth rescues us from meaninglessness-- is known to be false because no one was ever meaninglessness. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I can't know what you mean by the words, but I don't see a big difference between fantasy and meaning. "I'm here to be kind." "I'm here to experience lots of things." "I'm here to serve God." "I'm here to serve humanity." "I'm here to forge an original persona." And so on and so on. They are myths or projects. I don't see why either of us (or anyone on the forum) wouldn't be "performing" some version of the (philosophical) hero. Is that fantasy? It's a vision of the real we act on. I get the sense that you're envisioning a non-metaphysical life as the thing we don't need to be saved from, but I think "placing" ourselves via myth is a central part of the human experience.

The problem I see with what you are apparently proposing (that the difference between sophistry and philosophy is itself only apparent) is that you must thereby be denying that there could be any other motive for philosophical thought than engaging "in the war between the individual and other status-seeking personalities", which is merely a very questionable psychological thesis, and which as held, would be purporting to itself be universal; which would really be a performative contradiction. — John

I've probably been sloppy here or there. I just intended to focus on the fight for status in the realm of "the sacred" (an archetype of discourse-structuring "master words"). How does the will-to-truth differ from the will-to-utility or the will-to-status? Can we analyze the will-to-truth? Is there piety toward to truth, even when it's useless or even dangerous? If so, what's this piety about? I'm interested in "poses." Is the philosopher a scientist? a poet? an inventor? an arsonist? What's the fundamental metaphor? Obviously it varies from person to person, but the "armchair quasi-scientist" seems dominant.
Maybe I fell into the usual "representational" way of speaking, and I think there is an argument to be made that speech presupposes an imaginary community, but there's a big gap between "a few assholes not unlike myself" and "all of humanity for all of time." Of course I don't pretend that my "meta-tool" dominates my speech like a sentry. It's a maxim or paradigm that one calls to mind, good for abstract jobs. I'm generally a holist. I don't think individual sentences do the job. We form fuzzy images of personalities. My "sophist" or "radical instrumentalist" or what-have-you is something like my sculpture of the anti-priest. It's a poem in a genre.

I agree with the thrust of the OP. I think it's interesting, though, that the two hidden motives you've identified in the quest for absolute truths are purity (disgust for dad) and power (I'm an extra-cave initiate!). Both are rampant, I agree, but I feel like there's an even more fundamental need - security. That there are absolute truths and that one can discover them and be sure of them- how profoundly comforting!

Though all three 'hidden' motives would share, I think, themes of withdrawl and preservation. The apprehension of a truth has a finality; you can find it on your own and once you have it and no one can take it from you. — csalisbury

Thanks for the input. I really like "I'm an extra-cave initiate." It's the star on the belly of a Sneetch. We seem to abase ourselves to be exalted. For (Kojeve's) Hegel, we use (in a certain stage of consciousness) a projected supreme master, God, in order to rationalize our bondage to an earthly master, who is also (crucially) God's slave, and therefore partially negated as a master who must otherwise be fought. The absolute truth seems to play a similar "anti-worldly" role. We can become "secret kings of thought." If we are "slaves," that's an illusion on the cave wall.

As far as security goes, I agree completely. I like to contemplate the collisions of personalities.
A person's "sacred" identifications tend to be their weak spots, the "handles" by which they can be humiliated. One end of the spectrum there is identification with absolute truth. Then we stand or fall with this "god." The problem of course is rhetoric that threatens our claim on this truth. Absolute truth is a popular god! Once invested in the notion of single truth, everyone who disagrees with us simultaneously threatens our self-esteem. (Maybe all disagreement is ,well, disagreeable on a gut-level, but in this case the threat is "logical.")

The dictionary at the top of the search gives the (first) definition of radical as

(especially of change or action) relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.
"a radical overhaul of the existing regulatory framework"
synonyms: thoroughgoing, thorough, complete, total, comprehensive, exhaustive, sweeping, far-reaching, wide-ranging, extensive, across the board, profound, major, stringent, rigorous
"radical reform" — dictionary

Am I saying that my pragmatism is radical with respect to other strains of pragmatism or that pragmatism is radical with respect to non-pragmatism? Well, my pragmatism isn't apo's in that it abandons the "scientistic" paradigm altogether. It's "post-metaphysical" in terms of its reduced ambitions. So maybe it's a little radical with respect to other strains.

I do think ("radical") pragmatism is indeed radical with respect to non-pragmatism. To re-frame philosophy as creative adjustment via marks and noises is to abandon its pose as purveyor/seeker of universal truth. I'm not at all trying to demonize this traditional pose. I just personally enjoy becoming conscious of it. In retrospect, it's like escaping from tunnel vision.

I don't see it that way. I remember when I realized how dominated most discourse is by the assumption/projection of universality. It's like unconscious humanism/scientism. We assume that our ethical/epistemological claims should aim for universal validity and be claims in the first place. This is taken for granted and is almost invisible. There's a big shift from "X is the way things are for all of us" to "maybe you guys who are sufficiently similar to me should also try X as a rule for action."

We can also abandon (along these lines) the very notion of "one truth for all." Any belief-habit system that is working for an individual is "true enough"(correspondence is no longer our obsession). Granted, physical science is shrewdly treated as (more or less) true for all, but I think it's only scientism (Truth religion) that tries to project this special case of a normalized discourse to the abnormal discourse (philosophy) that places science among all of our other useful discourses. The non-instrumentalist philosopher (versus the instrumentalist sophist) tends to see himself as a sort of scientist rather than as an inventor or poet. They have a finding-metaphor (the truth is out there) that dominates a making-metaphor (what else might we try?). If this works for Mr. X, then that's fine. "Radical pragmatism" is itself just something someone might try (put in their toolbox).

That's what's beautiful to me about pragmatism. The "radically pragmatic" more or less is the good. Ideas that scratch the itch are prioritized. This idea about ideas is pretty clearly going to scratch some itches. This does not at all absolve us from wrestling with the devil in the details. It, pragmatism, doesn't have to assert its own universal purpose-independent truth, but only to suggest its not-necessarily-universal utility. It's one "monkey" offering a (meta-)tool to other "monkeys," as an experiment. Will they assimilate this tool? Find a use for it? Perhaps a new use? The radicalized tool-metaphor re-frames the entire tradition, it seems to me.

For me it's not bleak. I didn't expect it to be perceived that way. I love my radical pragmatism (sophistry). Of course there would be no duty to stop pursuing truth for its own sake. Instead the "for its own sake" looks a little more suspicious.

Consider that reasoning is something which you do, and it is also something which others do. Therefore it is something which goes on inside your mind, and also something which goes on in other places of the world, external to your mind. If we produce a conception of reason, we are describing all these external instances of reasoning, and making a concept of what it means to reason. Since we cannot see into the minds of all these thinking human beings, we look at their activities, compare the activities with how "I" would be thinking at the time of making that activity, and come up with a conception of reason. — Metaphysician Undercover

I see what you're saying, I think, but that image in my mind/reason of minds/reasons external to my reason is still an image within my own mind or reason. "Not-my-mind" is like an empty negation in a strict logical sense, it seems to me. There's my-reason-for-itself which I model in my mind among other reasons-for-others. But all of this is unified in my concept system. All of this modelling of modelling gets very tangled. I do like the idea of looking at activities.

So we can turn this world-for-us versus world-in-itself relationship upside down, invert it. The world-in-itself has intensive properties. Other than understanding those intensive properties as things which are described by laws, we can only have direct access to those intensive properties through our internal selves, and reason is necessarily there. Therefore the attempt to conceive of a world-in-itself as a world without reason is an exercise in futility. The world has intensive properties which must be accounted for in our conception. Our only means for producing a proper conception of the intensive properties of the world is through ourselves, because this is where we have direct access to intensive properties, and here we necessarily find reason. — Metaphysician Undercover

We generally agree here, I think. But it seems the world-in-itself remains an empty negation. We have an complex, conceptual image of mind-independent reality, but this "mind-independent reality" is constructed exactly from our own concepts. Another way to think of the "Real" (mind independent) is as that which resists mere thinking or redescription. It's in the way of our desire. It's otherness is derived from its opposition to our projected future. This is largely just us learning to parse the lingo of other perhaps. I believe there is a world out and that there are other minds out there. And yet this is a belief and therefore within my own "larger mind" in which I model my mind among minds, etc. And then we have an infinite nesting of this structure. Tangled.

It is an issue of dropping one seemingly small investment, which has become evidently a wrong judgement. That small wrong judgement though, may support other larger, more important investments. So the question becomes one of should I maintain this small wrong judgement, which I know is wrong, and seems very insignificant, but it supports other significant, and more important things, or should I drop it, and destabilize those important investments. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me the wrongness of a judgement is one and the same with its dissonance in the context of other judgements. Whether one should drop a "wrong" judgement supporting more important investments will itself be determined by all of the rest of the networked investments. To ask after a "general solution" is moving more in the direction of "reason" as I originally intended it as a normative image for thinking. Is it reasonable-for-our-community to maintain such an investment?

The point is all in the way that we relate significance to insignificance. The judgement which has come to the mind as being a mistake, or wrong judgement, is now judged as being small, slight, or insignificant, in order to justify maintaining it, in spite of now knowing that it was a wrong judgement. It is deemed "insignificant", so that dropping it is seen as unimportant. But the motivation not to drop it, and therefore maintain it, despite it being now understood as wrong, which produces that designation of "insignificant", is the fact that it will destabilize more important investments. This fact indicates that it really is significant, not insignificant, and the designation of "insignificant" is just another wrong judgement, carried out to support the original wrong judgement.. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I see it, there is only of the pressure of prejudices upon prejudices, so the mistaken judgement is already therefore in conflict with one set of prejudices even as it supports another set. Thinking synthesizing new prejudices, through inference and metaphorical leaps, and prunes them as well, if it doesn't abandon them altogether. There are also shifts in intensity. We strive toward flow. We don't want to lock up like one of Asimov's robots tangled in its own directives. Even here, as I see it, we are working on this system as an extremely self-conscious level, in this system's image of itself as system, etc. (And the yet the notion of this system is just a prejudice we project upon the Real that resists, it seems).

I would argue Stirner is still caught under the spell of the transcendent here. Criticism is veiwed in terms of seeking the "higher" rather than understanding a particular subject itself. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Actually Stirner was criticizing criticism for being still too pious, albeit something like the final station of (generalized) religion. He thought there was a stage beyond criticism, basically in thoughtlessness, which is maybe like overcoming the will to overcome metaphysics. But we all do that sometimes. For me, Stirner as intellectual persona just isolated pure iconoclasm. (To be sure, this is implicit in "all is vanity" with a much older text.)

If Nietzsche questioned the will to truth in 1886, Stirner wrote this is 1848:

The truth, or “truth in general,” people are bound not to give up, but to seek for. What else is it but the Être suprême, the highest essence? Even “true criticism” would have to despair if it lost faith in the truth. And yet the truth is only a — thought; but it is not merely “a” thought, but the thought that is above all thoughts, the irrefragable thought; it is the thought itself, which gives the first hallowing to all others; it is the consecration of thoughts, the “absolute,” the “sacred” thought. The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth’s service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. “The truth” outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods, it is Deity itself.

I will answer Pilate’s question, What is truth? Truth is the free thought, the free idea, the free spirit; truth is what is free from you, what is not your own, what is not in your power. But truth is also the completely unindependent, impersonal, unreal, and incorporeal; truth cannot step forward as you do, cannot move, change, develop; truth awaits and receives everything from you, and itself is only through you; for it exists only — in your head. You concede that the truth is a thought, but say that not every thought is a true one, or, as you are also likely to express it, not every thought is truly and really a thought. And by what do you measure and recognize the thought? By your impotence, to wit, by your being no longer able to make any successful assault on it! When it overpowers you, inspires you, and carries you away, then you hold it to be the true one. Its dominion over you certifies to you its truth; and, when it possesses you, and you are possessed by it, then you feel well with it, for then you have found your — lord and master. When you were seeking the truth, what did your heart then long for? For your master! — Stirner

Of course one is hallowed by proximity to (or possession of) this "master." In other words, we allow ourselves to be bound in order to bind in a sort of pyramid scheme.

I'm asking something far tougher of fantasy than making a call to obliterate it or offering an alternative fiction. My descriptive truth hits our fantasies right at their core: in their cliam of truth. I'm not talking about what we ought to do or offering a way to save us from meaninglessness. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But my question remains. In the name of what value or goal do you bother to hit fantasies at their core with this descriptive truth? If you don't want to save others from meaningless, do you want to save them from the illusion that they need saving? It's hard to see how a thinker isn't always offering something useful (beauty is something like pure use if pleasure is value).

In this respect, it's all together more powerful than any assertion of how someone ought to think. If I was just saying fantasy was bad for us, it would be easy to counter. I would be a dogmatist demanding we could save ourselves through (the fiction of) truth, a run of the mill cheerleader for one of the many ways of living in this world.

I not doing this though. Believing the truth isn't going to save us because no-one needs saving. My argument doesn't say we ought to give up fantasy, just that they're telling a whopping great lie about our meaning. In this context, fantasy becomes untenable. Not because it is not worthwhile or we ought not be involved with it, but rather because it says something about us which is untrue.

If I am meaningful in myself, fantasy no longer saves. Worthwhile or not, it becomes a mere practice I enjoy (or do not enjoy) rather than how I avoid being a meaningless wretch. — TheWillowOfDarkness

OK, but why is the "whopping great lie about our meaning" a problem? Why does fantasy become untenable? If the fantasizers aren't happy with their fantasies, then surely they need better fantasies, if you'll allow that fantasies (myths, prejudices, fictions) help people cope.

I really like meaningfulness in one's self. But I tend to view it as an introjection of the archetype of "the sacred," achieved in time dialectically. Because I see this "sacred" as archetype, we always have not only the usual bodily meanings but also 'sacred' meaning, especially through all of those alienating identifications such as God, man, truth, science, philosophy/criticism. A minimum of alienation is seemingly found in declaring one's own mind sacred. There is nothing sacred outside the mind to be sinful or wretched in relation to. Of course this only solves the "spiritual" problem, where "spiritual" is aimed at the urge to sacred. The needs for food, love, etc., are something else. I think constraints on behavior (laws, customs) under-determine most of our beliefs. This culture is largely about persona construction, the "happiness of being envied" or glamour (John Berger). So I connect "status anxiety" with the "spiritual." A person can be happy in a shared fantasy or identification with the sacred. Perhaps it's the anxiety of influence and the thrill of violation that drives the instability of identifications in some of us.

Modernist humanism is the same. The generalised "free everyman" takes the mantle of the transcendent, becomes the tradition which is destined to be practiced, such that we will be saved from our finite wretchedness-- technology will create utopia, everyone is a free man able to realise their dreams, etc., etc. It's all wistful fantasy which doesn't take human life seriously. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I like your iconoclastic edge. I like viewing humanism from the outside (I've read Stirner's book closely). But what is this "taking human life seriously"? Do you approve or disapprove of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain? Are you criticizing the assumption of the necessity of the transcendent as a source of needless pain? As an obstacle to pleasure? If so, I can relate. But I don't see how fantasy is bad in itself unless there is a transcendent Truth that we have some duty toward. Why not fantasies if they work? The only strong difference I see between fantasies-that-work and non-fantasy is that non-fantasy is made "the sacred" in Stirner's terms.

Alienness is a criterion of the “sacred.” In everything sacred there lies something “uncanny,” strange, such as we are not quite familiar and at home in. — Stirner

We seem to have fantasies-that-work versus truth-to-be-revered (which also happens to work, as a lucky by-product). What good is truth apart from utility if it's not the "hallowing" of its messenger?

Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism – that to live and work for an idea is man’s calling, and according to the faithfulness of its fulfilment his human worth is measured. — Stirner

That reminds me of what I think is your view. We think we need the "infinite" idea in order to measure up. But I personally think we serve "the sacred" (in a sophisticated form) even as we point it out as a dominating structure. We become (as intellectual personae wearing philosopher's hats part-time) something like pure ideological violence or nothingness.

Therefore I repeat that the religious world – and this is the world of thought – reaches its completion in criticism, where thinking extends its encroachments over every thought, no one of which may “egoistically” establish itself. Where would the “purity of criticism,” the purity of thinking, be left if even one thought escaped the process of thinking? This explains the fact that the critic has even begun already to gibe gently here and there at the thought of Man, of humanity and humaneness, because he suspects that here a thought is approaching dogmatic fixity. But yet he cannot decompose this thought until he has found a “higher” in which it dissolves; for he moves only in thoughts. This higher thought might be enunciated as that of the movement or process of thinking itself, as the thought of thinking or of criticism, for example. — Stirner

Well I did address why it's not taught at the end of my post. Not everyone believes that the world would be improved by a universal belief in determinism. It would seemingly have to be an abstract belief, for we would still bear the burden of decision. We would still "suffer" freedom. Determinism might ease a sense of failure (it was all that I was capable of), but it would also function as a universal excuse (I couldn't help myself).

What actually matters - the only thing that in the end you can cling onto - is the functional relationship you can build between your model of existence, and the control that appears to give you over that existence. — apokrisis

This is where we really overlap. Rescher likes "methodological pragmatism." The epistemological system is machine-like, a normalized discourse.The system as a whole and not its individual, inter-dependent parts is put to the test as we act on its output: "truths" or (implicitly) rules for action. For instance, this was probably the "living" justification of infinitesimals. They were part of a model of existence that allowed us to control that existence.

This is a great conversation. So, first, thanks for that! Again I'll reply freely to your entire post, since, well, I love this stuff.

However, that the concept of reasonable is prior to the concept of unreasonable, does not mean that reasonableness exists prior to unreasonableness in nature. So I do not think that you can proceed to your conclusion that "reason itself is on fire", because what you are referring to is the conception of reasonable, and unreasonable, not "reason itself". — Metaphysician Undercover

This is deep water, because I'm not sure how much of a gap there is between reason and the conception of reason. It's connected to the issue of the world-for-us versus the world-in-itself. But the world-in-itself or the world-not-for-us looks necessarily like an empty negation. It marks the expectation that we will update the world-for-us (which includes the model of the filtering mind enclosed in non-mind that it must manage indirectly, conceptually, fictionally.) Is there a place for reason in this "real" non-mind enclosure? Or is reason a foggy notion distributed through our practices, verbal and physical? As philosophy wrestles with the definition of reason, or reason-for-reason, it seems to be the very fire I was getting at. The problem with reason-in-itself is that we can't say anything about it. It seems to cash out to the expectation that we will keep reconceptualizing reconceptualization itself, you might say.

Can we assume that massive conceptual structures rest on fundamental principles? If so, then when we are examining these fundamental principles, should we judge them according to common sense, and good intuition, or should we judge them according to other fundamental principles, so as to maintain consistency with these other principles, and not to rock the boat? I think the former, if the fundamental principles are not consistent with common sense, and good intuition, then there is a problem with those principles, and that must be exposed, despite the fact that other principles might be destabilized in the process. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think we generally agree. I'd say that we only embrace the destabilization of an investment/prejudice in order to prevent the destabilization of a greater investment/prejudice. We amputate the hand to save the arm, or we trade the old arm for a new arm. It's a model of the modelling mind as a system that seeks minimum dissonance/tension/confusion and/or maximize preparedness, security, the sense of well-being. I think it's useful to think of the mind as a "readiness" machine. We have to act quickly sometimes, so the imagination cooks up detailed responses. If we are terrified by the thought of life in a world devoid of principle X, we will probably throw principle Y under the bus to save it.

I don't know if this can be called "prejudice". Prejudice implies a preconception. What I refer to is the potential for a method to go beyond conception, to observe, and describe, in an unbiased and objective way. If, the idea that this is possible is considered as a preconception, then I guess there is prejudice here as well. I don't see that it is possible to get beyond all prejudice, even common-sense, and intuition are inherently prejudiced, as there are prejudices inherent within our language. — Metaphysician Undercover

So we basically agree. Of course it's not one of my prejudices that all prejudices are equal. The paradigm notion of objectivity is the physical world, perhaps, but maybe that physical world seems to just a part of the fuzzy intersection of the fuzzy cores of the belief systems involved. You mention common sense and language. That's objective, too, and it seems to ground the objectivity of science. We need the "manifest image" as a background and ordinary language in order to practice science. Maybe "true-for-all" is a grandiose extension of "true-for-folks-like-us," encouraged by the apparent universality of mathematical natural science. We share candidates (prejudices) for inter-subjective adoption by a community. As humanists, almost unconsciously so, we tend to think about universal inter-subjective adoption: truth-for-all, not just for Americans or "the superior man." And yet the same prejudice or implicit-rule-for-action might not fit equally well into two differing sets of already-held ideas or rules-for-action. It's just our almost invisible prejudice that what is true for me at least should be true for all.

Yet when it comes to "fundamental ontologies" (including the presence or absence of the god-thing or the right-and-wrong thing or the truth-for-all thing), I don't think there's any reason to expect convergence. Fuzzy convergence in behavior, perhaps, since that is policed, but acceptable behavior under-determines the belief system, hence the "harmlessness" of freedom of thought. Different personal histories give us a different exposure to adoptable prejudices and really a different world to test them against (since we all live in the same world only by abstraction; our lives are all different streams of experience, etc.) Since science stays so close to the sensual and the mathematical, great consensus can be achieved. But our total, less-specialized belief systems don't seem similarly constrained. Lots of different belief systems "work" and are relatively stable. They're on fire, but it's a low heat, perhaps at the surface. For instance, I don't expect any worldview/ethical revolutions at this point, but I'll always be policing the "corona" of the fuzzy core of my investments.

And yet this vision/fiction itself is just a "candidate belief" for the relatively small inter-subjective community that is comfortable with such abstraction. I like it this prejudice, so I bring it benevolently (perhaps hoping for a reward somehow) to the tiny tribe like a better mousetrap.

We can insist that every change have a cause, but maybe this is just a hard-wired prejudice. We see change, assume some past event or rather the sum of past events is necessarily linked to that change. The change "couldn't have just happened." But can we establish this deductively? Joe was sitting on the couch. Then he got up and opened a bag of potato chips. Therefore all history preceding this opening necessitated this opening. It was logically impossible for him not to open the bag of chips, given all that preceded. But why should it be logically impossible? True, we see that environment has been used to predict behavior to some degree, but to get from this remembered utility to logical necessity seems to require hidden axiom(s) like the uniformity of nature and the principle of sufficient reason.

I remember finding something like this is Freud, long ago, and it caught my attention. Free association is a window into the subconscious because one assumes that this association isn't free at all, for every
event must have a cause. The psyche must be machine like, for machine-likeness is the way we make sense not only of physical reality but even of spiritual and metaphysical reality, or so it seems to me. But is this projected machine-likeness really there? Once we become conscious of the PSR and the uniformity axiom, does this not give us a little more distance from their projection onto the "Absolute"?

Formally, the Principle states (PSR): For every fact F, there must be an explanation why F is the case.
...
The PSR is closely related, if not fully identical, to the principle “ex nihilo, nihil fit” (“From nothing, nothing comes”). One of the most interesting questions regarding the PSR is why to accept it at all. Insofar as the PSR stipulates that all facts must be explainable, it seems that the PSR itself demands an explanation just as much. Several modern philosophers attempted to provide a proof for the PSR, though so far these attempts have been mostly unsuccessful. Another important problem related to the PSR is the possibility of self-explanatory facts and self-caused entities; particularly, one may wonder how these are distinguished from unexplainable, brute facts and uncaused entities. One may also wonder whether the PSR allows for primitive concepts that cannot be further explained. — http://plato.stanford.edu

Beyond these doubts about determinism, there's also the question of whether it is indeed good social software. If it eases guilt, it also threatens the pride in accomplishment and the notion personal responsibility (which might have to be invented if it didn't exist.)

In that case we need to be more precise about whether by 'universe' we mean 'this spacetime' or 'everything that exists'. — andrewk

Exactly. The "stream of experience" or the "totality" or "everything" simply includes the scientific image and is itself much richer. Talk about the image is often treated as talk about the larger reality in which the image is dependently embedded.

I trust science on its own turf, but I think they're right. Is there a clear line between science and non-science? What sorts of "proof" do we demand from someone who claims to be a scientist? We want to know what institutions he belongs to, who takes his work seriously, whether he is funded, etc. A scientist will judge the work, perhaps, but also in the context of who else (if anyone) has vouched for it. The very prestige of science seems to derive from its work in the "manifest image." I can see skyscrapers and watch space shuttles on TV. I can take an aspirin, log on to a philosophy forum. That seems to be the significant difference between science and some piece of currently useless pure mathematics. That's why we are tempted to say it "models" the Real. Yet it seemingly only predicts and manipulates the manifest image.

Secular philosophy transposes the physical universe into the role previously attributed to the divine, and science into the role previously attributed to religion. — Wayfarer

This is great, but you neglect to mention anti-scientistic strains of secular philosophy. A pragmatist can view both physics and theology as instruments. This "higher instrumentalism" is not a worship of the "scientific image" (which is just a tool, not the Truth). It's usually humanist if not individualistic, so I'd call it secular. The point is that not all secular philosophers embrace scientism. We have "truths" versus Truth, whether that Truth is a ghost or a secret or an electron.

This is a fascinating issue. Can we conceive of "pure randomness"? Even white noise has a structure.

Related, I like to think of the sensation/emotion that we can conceptualize without being able to actually exhaust in this conceptualization. The idea of red is not redness itself, though we need the idea to point at redness and maybe to give it unity as an object. And yet once we have this idea, we can see that redness exceeds its concept. I just don't believe that a man born blind knows everything about red, though this connects to one's conception of knowledge.

With God, though, it was partially because I had very little notion of any relgious beliefs or concepts prior to when I was maybe 14 or 15. My parents never brought it up--my mom's an atheist (and her father was an atheist, too), and my dad is just indifferent towards religion. We never went to church of course, it was never mentioned, and I didn't really have any religious friends when I was a kid. We were focused on other things. When I finally started learning about religious beliefs when I was around 14 or 15, I basically went, "Wait a minute--you believe what???" I literally thought people were putting me on--that it was a big practical joke (exacerbated by coming from a family with quite a few practical jokers in it). So I've never had the slightest inclination to believe anything religious, because the beliefs were so alien to my formation, and they still seem surreally bizarre to me. — Terrapin Station

Thanks for the background. That helps. You didn't have much to be liberated from, it sounds like, since you're parents were intellectually sophisticated. I was taught about God and Heaven and Hell and it was all intoxicating as well as frightening. Of course telling/implying an adolescent boy that sex is bad is a recipe for cognitive dissonance.

But I'm also interested in all of the ways that we tell ourselves stories that put us in a superior subset of humans. I like The Sneeches for generalizing this so economically. We make irrational investments in the truth apart from utility, for instance. Pragmatism has a stink with respect to a piety toward Truth for its own sake, as if the True and the Noble were associated.

I'll go ahead and reply to both your replies, since they are related.

That's what a difference of opinion amounts to, your series of assertions versus my series of assertions. The question is, who's series of assertions makes the most sense, and here we have only intuition to refer to. How does it make sense to choose a series of assertions, to believe in, which are counter-intuitive, but are chosen simply because they support an ontological position which is chosen for some reason other than that it makes sense intuitively? Isn't that choice of ontological position supported only by an unreasonable prejudice? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'd say that we have unstable systems of beliefs that we are constantly testing against experience, itself shaped and organized by these beliefs. "Intuition" has to pick up the slack when differing beliefs fail to lead to different actions, but distance from "what should we do now?" is associated (though not identical with) the irrelevance of an issue. This is why pragmatism is so annoying. It "dissolves" differences by taking them "modulo praxis." He believes A. She believes B. They both do C. So it doesn't matter which (if either) is right. If an ontology is a tool, then we just need it to work --to make us happy. If we continually tinker around with it, it's maybe "the princess and the pea under the mattress" situation. Musicians have an ear for tiny differences in sound, and philosophers in thought. Intuition ==taste, etc. As to "unreasonable," I think we need a notion of pure reason to ground any notion of pure unreasonableness (I think you'll agree). So I like to think of normalized discourse (Rorty/Kuhn), where philosophy, the normalizing discourse, is necessarily abnormal as it addresses itself. Reason itself is on fire.

To "double back and edit chunks of common sense" implies that there are principles, based in something other than common sense, which exist, and which we can refer to, for use in a judging of common sense, to edit common sense. Isn't any such principle demonstrably supported by nothing but prejudice, as described in my reply to StreetlightX? It is the very description of prejudice. What would provide you a principle whereby you could judge intuition or common-sense, a principle which could be excluded from the charge of "prejudice"? — Metaphysician Undercover

For me it's all prejudice. We can build principles on top of parts of common sense that make other parts look less "common-sensible." This is one of my favorite quotes:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. — Neurath

Most of "common sense" or our prejudices have to remain intact while we judge and edit a particular prejudice. Pleasure and pain are the hammers that re-shape this edifice. But the pain can be cognitive dissonance, and the pleasure can be a sense of status. It's not at all just bodily.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalisation is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. — James

The idea that there is something beyond prejudice can itself be described (though not finally, since description is apparently never final) as one more prejudice. This threatens the distinction itself of course which we need in order to get to this threatening...

You remind me of Feuerbach a little. He wrote that Christianity was dead in fact if not in theory in his times. It was the leg of an uneven table, dangling, bearing no weight. Life is drenched in meaning, buried in meaning, is meaning as investment itself. Life is care, concern, bias, asymmetry. Is that what you're getting at? If so, I agree. But what do you make of this?

2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself—THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!"—This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUM." For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner, perhaps from below—"frog perspectives," as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters. In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! — N

What I see here is a vision of higher meanings tangled with lower meanings in a continuum of life-enhancing fiction. Since life is meaningful in the sense that we always already care, these fictions are weighty and crucial. But one can learn to shift one's weight from one foot to the other, from the higher meanings or Truths to the "daily detail." I will defend the thesis, however, that self-esteem depends on a "Heroic" investment/identification. To speak "intellectually" on a forum for instance is an implicit assertion of one's own worth and dignity (and even uniqueness). Since we are nothing but abstract thoughts here, our appearance seems to indicate an affirmation of the the abstract thoughts we possess and largely are.

Anyway, I've never felt that I was "searching" for anything--truth, etc.--via philosophy.

Also re sophistry/the sophists, I never saw that as anything other than Plato badmouthing, and likely mischaracterizing, straw-manning etc. philosophers who disagreed with him, and there was good reason to disagree with him. I love Plato's writing, but he was wrong about far more than he was right in my opinion. — Terrapin Station

So would say that philosophy was just an amusement, then? I was an angsty little f*cker in my teens and twenties. I wrestled with whether there was a God and/or an objective right and wrong and of course with a consciousness of my own "sin." She's a pretty ridiculous philosopher, but I remember bumping into The Virtue of Selfishness (yes, by her) at about 17. It's not so much that the reasoning was bullet-proof. It was just an example of a thinker going after a primary assumption with daring and verve. Present altruism as a nefarious ideology or at least as one with a dark side contrary to its shining, sentimental face. That's exciting. Or be presented with a plausible argument that God is a fiction, a weapon, a con. That's exciting at first. Then one learns to generalize this. Not only theology, but philosophy too is a fiction, weapon, pose, con, instrument. I know that this last point doubles back on itself, but if someone defends against it philosophically, one might ask why? The notion that philosophy is more than a "weapon" is exactly its cutting edge.

It occurs to me that most of us are first attracted to philosophy out of genuine curiosity, for truth and beauty as ends in themselves, not means for power as preached by marxist or freudian ideologues. For them there is neither truth, nor beauty, only the power of sophistry or satisfaction of attitudes. — jkop

I do find beauty to be an end in itself, perhaps by definition. But why shouldn't there be ideologues of Truth? Scientism is like that, privileging the scientific image against that which makes it possible (the manifest image). Aren't thinkers generally ideologues who give themselves a pass? "They who disagree with me are just confused, misled, afraid. They have opinion. I have truth." The notion that we posses the truth boosts are sense of status, generally. It's the high ground. Now it's not God on our side but Truth on our side. So we tend to think the other guy's reasoning is flawed and not our own. We don't usually doubt the singleness of truth, either. Nor do we doubt (usually) that something like pure reason exists, which is a sort of "Christ" that gives us access to Truth in the first place. I'm not saying this is a whole "truth" about "truth," but I think the masters of suspicion you mentioned have a point (though I like Freud more than Marx.)

I think mostly because suffering illuminates our existential condition while happiness clouds our knowledge of it. We cannot be happy while actually confronting the void. — darthbarracuda

If by "void" you mean our impending utter annihilation, then I think we can indeed reason much of the sting out of death, but only at the cost of modifying our image of what is worthwhile in ourselves. There's a "cheap" romanticism of the snowflake/fingerprint personality that shudders at this existential threat. The necessary adjustment is to shift one's weight to the other foot. That which dies is not that which is most important. Other humans carry on the same virtues, with slightly different faces, voices, etc. Of course the species itself will be extinguished, but this doesn't bother me as long as it's a distant event. This surely applies to personal death, too. It would be hard to be happy if I knew I were to die in 10 minutes. But dying in 20 years might even be good. The body suffers more and the mind is "bored" enough in a peculiar sense to welcome the adventure. I expect nothing from death, but I expect the preparation for death to be the adventure (knowing that it's Coming Soon). Ginsberg was exhilarated. I can already sort of imagine that at 40.

Hoo, do you think that "intuitive continuum" refers to anything real? Isn't it more than just intuition? Would you think that continued existence, what is expressed by terms like momentum and inertia, is simply an intuition, and not supported by anything factual. If you give the status of "factual" to such terms, how can you say that the continuum is simply intuitive. — Metaphysician Undercover

I guess that depends on what one means by "real." Is the real equated here with the scientific image (Sellars) ? For me that image is only a fraction of the foggy, inter-subjective real. I say "foggy" because I'm thinking of a continuum that runs from the unreal to the perfectly real. Maybe the real is well described as axioms in common. This would include the physical world but also the "common sense" that makes more abstract conversation possible. We can double back and edit chunks of common sense, so the real is unstable or "on fire."

How can there be a continuum which we know? If what we know is the digital, how could a continuum be known? — Metaphysician Undercover

You might want to look into (if you haven't already) the "arithmetization of analysis." I've really obsessed over this issue. I love analysis, but the real numbers are strange birds indeed.

Nietzsche was wrong. God is not dead, but rather was never alive in the first place. Throughout human history, our culture has been of the living and for the living, not the abstraction it purported to be. Ethical performance and identity are expressions of us, done for ourselves as living humans. For culture and identity to mean, they don't need to extend into infinity. They only need to matter for the living. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You sound very Nietzschean to me even as you try to contrast your views with his. I understand the death of God to be the death of belief in God. Of course Nietzsche was an atheist. He was one of the strongest poets of worldliness, too, even if he sometimes "fell" into poses that implied a god-like universal.

I actually very much agree that "ethical performance and identity are expressions of us, done for ourselves as living humans." But I think "shrinking" Nietzsche (anxiety of influence?) only obscures this important point.

No, the the digital is a subset of the analog, they are not in opposition or in a relation of exclusion. The relation is not a∨d (XOR), rather, d⊆a. Wilden: "The analog (continuum) is a set which includes the digital (discontinuum) as a subset." — StreetlightX

Is this really so clear? We can think of Q as a subset of R, but R is itself is usually constructed from Q and some quantifiers, and finally from the empty set, which is like pure digitality itself. We try to breath the "spirit" of the intuitive continuum into the "letter" of our relentlessly discrete symbols, because we want to have objective or inter-subjective discussions about this intuitive continuum. But we have to build it from digital sets, so it's arguably not the "real" continuum of intuition. As I'm sure you know, the power set of N is sometimes called the continuum, and this seems very digital. Plato's notion of the "One and the Indefinite Dyad" may be useful here. Perhaps we just come equipped both ultimately incompatible world-structuring faculties. The rational numbers were a brilliant fusion of digital counting (the One) and the Indefinite Dyadic intuition of continuous length, but troubled of course by the discovery of irrational magnitudes. So we build the "scientific" reals out of sets. And then there's also the argument that we can do science with a finite subset of the rational numbers (numerical analysis). The intuitive continuum is something like the wind that is only made visible by the discrete leaves it shakes as it informs our construction of discrete, symbolic systems.

I'll grant that. I obsess over "philosophy of life" mostly. I get my dose of objective science from mathematics (my career path).

This way no one can judge a person's opinion/belief on a particular issue by their opinions/beliefs on a different, irrelevant issue. — Ovaloid

I can see what is good in your suggestion, but I think at assumes an epistemology of pure reason. "Let the ideas fight it out fair and square. Remove bias." On the other hand, ideas (positions,beliefs) are like experimental software for the living of life. The "fantasy" (as I see it) is to get beyond trial and error and beyond the need to ever update our "software." If only our word-math is sufficiently depersonalized and cold, we must find the imperishable truth of any given matter. But maybe the adoption of an idea by a personality says as much about the idea as the personality. We can infer in both directions. And maybe we should, at least sometimes.

In Kojeve's vision of Hegel, the philosopher is in a state of deprivation and therefore keeps changing or falling forward into his un-thought complement. The wise man, on the other hand, is stable. He has chained together all theses in a satisfying circle. If he begins at any link of the chain, he follows it all the way around and finds no gap or contradiction. He has assimilated and harmonized all partial viewpoints. He is everyone and no one.

This too is a sort of existential myth, but it's what come to mind when I to think of an individuated being that is unitary. Otherness is overcome in time through dialectical assimilation.

Perhaps the craving for "meaning" is just the desire to be told what to do in so convincing a way that the burden of deciding what to do and who to be vanishes. This is also mixed with a desire for absolute community. Everyone is told to do and be the same thing. So there is no more "hell is other people" in the collision of incompatible notions of virtue. It's a noisy world. It's bad to eat meat, be white, be black, be male, be female, be X, Y, Z. Everyone's a critic, an accuser, a spiritual rival singing a song about their own investment's "co-incidental" superiority. I think we can learn to manage this noise and be sufficiently confident about our own choices, but it's not a short cut like Universal Absolute Meaning of Life.

The point I was getting at is that the human psyche's stability during episodes of trauma is primarily held together by hope. Hope for a better future, hope for a happy future. People will delude themselves their entire lives, believing that if they just run a mile a day, or go Paleo, or convert to such-and-such religion, or meditate three times a day, or get organized with their ergonomic crap, that then they will finally be happy. It's never quite accomplished, though. — darthbarracuda

Oh, well I agree that there is no final resting place. I like the metaphor of just learning to fall off of the horse less often. The "horse" is a general sense of well-being and flow. Falling off is trauma. Life-philosophy or wisdom writing helps keep us on the horse and get back on when we fall off. And even this statement (life philosophy's self-consciousness) can contribute. We can think of our worldview and/or our "ego ideal" as software to be judged by its effectiveness.