Bukowski is one of my favorites. He did find love. Even a good marriage isn't perfect. People are people. People have issues. I'll agree that much of what gets called love is more like a drug than something sacred, but I assure you the real-enough thing is out there. I know first-hand and second-hand. I'd say that I was 30 before I learned how to negotiate the twists and turns. I like Jung's theory of the anima. I think men have to wrestle with that, perhaps especially men who want to live with women. We want them to be mystic doorways to adventure on the one hand and dependable quasi-mothers (safe as milk) on the other hand. You know, the "virgin/whore" complex and all of that.

Note that old Bukowski (in Women) didn't have an affair with a prostitute. He had troubled, sincere affairs at that time. But he wrote Women as a happily committed old man with a swimming pool and two Acuras in the driveway. If you read his last volume of letters, you'll see that he was good with the one he ended up with. He says therein that she was more responsible for keeping him alive than he was.

Thanks for responding to my OP, M.U. I appreciate it! I think you are capturing something valid about a different structure than the one I have in mind. I'm not looking so much at what X means as a word, but how event X is explained.
--Why is there a world?
--Because [for instance] God created it
--Why did God create the world?
--Because he had love to give [for instance]
--Why did God have love to give?
Or we can leave God out and just look at the hope for a scientific theory of everything, from which all of the other laws can be derived. We could use this theory of everything to answer lower-level why questions about particular contexts. But I can't see how the TOE or top-level necessity avoids a "just because" status. I'm aiming at what I perceive as the apparently necessary contingency of (top level, most general) necessity. I could say more, but I'd rather develop it in a conversation. For me it occurred as sudden insight, in the context of theological (apparent?) explanations. But Weinberg has wrote about this insight applied to physics.
"Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?"
https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept06/Weinberg/Weinberg.html

Here's a quote:
"Within the limited context of physics, I think one can give an answer of sorts to the problem of distinguishing explanation from mere description, which captures what physicists mean when they say that they have explained some regularity. The answer is that we explain a physical principle when we show that it can be deduced from a more fundamental physical principle....

We hope that in the future we will have achieved an understanding of all the regularities that we see in nature, based on a few simple principles, laws of nature, from which all other regularities can be deduced. These laws will be the explanation of whatever principles (such as, for instance, the rules of the Standard Model or of general relativity) can be deduced directly from them, and those directly deduced principles will be the explanations of whatever principles can be deduced from them, and so on...

Finally, it seems clear that we will never be able to explain our most fundamental scientific principles. (Maybe this is why some people say that science does not provide explanations, but by this reasoning nothing else does either). I think that in the end we will come to a set of simple universal laws of nature, laws that we cannot explain."

"By this reasoning nothing else does either" is exactly what I'm getting at.

I got Bukowski's Women off the shelf. It's still great.

I can't agree that happiness is an illusion. Happiness comes and goes, just like suffering. I've known moments where I understood all the "praise God" stuff in the Bible, and I don't believe in a god other than reality as a whole. Moments come along and one is a king with the non-conceptual "secret." I think painters and musicians sometimes aim at these high states. I suppose you can call them illusions because they pass, but then everything is an illusion and the contrast is lost. Why should suffering not be called an illusion in the same way for the same reason? For me, life is an alternation between high and low states, and wisdom is learning to attain the high and avoid the low states.

I'd say that lots of us (shrewdly) compare the amount of pain in a life to the amount of pleasure in a life. Suffering is a toll we pay on the way to pleasure, including higher or more abstract pleasures such pride in one's achievements. From this point of view, ceasing to exist is sometimes the only feasible victory. A man might realize he's losing his personality to brain disease and opt out before he becomes something he is ashamed to be. Or a paralyzed person may not adjust or want o adjust to being so dependent on others. But this same man in healthy days might weigh the chances of potential children and decide for them to throw them into this world, hoping they find the toll of suffering worth paying and are grateful (more often than not) that their father and mother assented to their tour or bought them a ticket for the roller coaster.

You tend to agree with me as if you were disagreeing. I suspect all thinking is relatively facile. We zoom out as much as we need to. Philosophy generally seems especially general/facile, and this might be its primary charm. We zoom out, sacrifice detail/complexity for the grand structure. I expect the complexities of an issue to be addressed largely in practice, but then I don't think I'm participating in science so much as conversation here. We won't convert one another. We might trade a maxim or a metaphor symbiotically.

I've read that D was a believer,too, but was Stavrogin or Kirillov? The Possessed is a favorite of mine. You see a variety of "concept religions" in that book.

The kind of grin I'm talking about is the one you find on a man when he hears the "laughter of the gods." " Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Beckett knew what was up. Thrown into this indignity of being a fragile ape, we do our best to sculpt a spirit like a statue in iron.

Those who say life is without meaning usually mean without absolute meaning. If you believed in God and the rest as a child, you probably have a notion of "absolute meaning." If you stopped believing in God and in a personal afterlife, then maybe it occurred to you that all pleasure and pain, horror and wonder, saintliness and sin, is scrubbed away by the hands of the clock.

There's something horrible about this, perhaps, but a person can also find the beauty and freedom in it. Time is "real" because (from this perspective) bodily death is death indeed. Life becomes a dream between two eternities of something blacker than night and quieter than silence. One puts on the costume of the hero with one foot in the grave and grins like a Dostoevsky character. If "nihilism" is "true", then it doesn't ultimately matter whether one whines or insists on a stiff neck. But "ultimately" is just something that haunts Now along with Tomorrow and Yesterday. I'd be slow to trade the "knowledge" that "all is vanity" for some other "concept religion" or heroic role-play. Grim, sure, but it's a view from a high place.

"The world always expesses its meaning, no matter how much we want it to be otherwise. "
I feel like you're aiming at saying something that I might relate to, but I'm not clear on exactly what you're getting at. Perhaps you could paraphrase it a different way. I'm curious.

"
Here is the understanding of the "uncaring universe." Our world will do what it does, even if that doesn't fit with our ideas of what is just. God (the infinite) cannot act to help or protect us. We are a "random" even of the world rather than one guaranteed through logic.

But this is a shallow account of God.
"

I have to disagree. I find the God in Job particularly profound, exactly because we have a God there unconstrained by human thought or human feeling. Job's "friends" are God-taming theologians, insisting on their comforting but less "profound" visions of God.

Just to be clear, the vision of apathetic/amoral God/Nature is, in my view, still just one more myth. While I act on this myth (manifest belief), I'm conscious of it as a sort of choice or adaptation. Does this half-fictional God mirror the human desire to be amoral and apathetic. Probably. But that's not all there is to it.

"Isn't that just plain relativism? Whatever suits you? You can dress it up with all manner of learned references but I think that is all you mean. "

I'm sure I'd be lumped with the relativists by some. I'm just certain enough that death is "real" (no afterlife). This is a huge "fact" (fact-for-me). All I can build are sandcastles between two tides.

I meet different people with different intellectual-emotional investments (generalized religion including ideology). These investments have weight. They don't move easily. A "correct" argument doesn't turn someone's personality upside-down instantaneously. For me it's a fact that folks see the world differently, and I have to interact with most of them without any hope of (or interest in) converting them. Unless an absolute truth is useful, I can't see what the fuss is about, except that the "absoluteness" can have a use for morale. But this use is diminished for the user "infected" by relativism. It's just a different investment, a different image of wisdom. What I call "pragmatism" adapts like water to the shape of the situation.

You wrote:
' Philosophies, such as pragmatism and positivism, "aim at mastering reality, not at criticizing it." Man comes to dominate nature, but in the process dominates other men by dehumanizing them.'

But I don't see much difference between criticizing and mastering. We are driven by pain and desire in either case. And when weren't we trying to squeeze food and safety out of nature, including human nature? I'll agree that modern life is cognitively dissonant (so much freedom and variety and so many disagreeing voices), but I don't see why there must be more dehumanization going on.

In short, instrumentalism is more descriptive than prescriptive. Even the argument against it serves a purpose and raises a status flag, or so it seems to me.

"So, my point was that stoicism should not be understood as a system of metaphysics at all, but as a system of therapeutics and transformation."

Sure, but that's what I was saying myself. I can't make use of Nature or Zeus's Will. I think the stoics were moved (probably without thinking of it this way) by a benevolent narcissism. They enacted a particular hero myth. In any case, what they did or did not think or feel is IMV secondary to the use we can make of their texts. I'm happy to throw it on the pile of "wisdom writing" with the jokes of Diogenes and God's spiel from the whirlwind in Job.

"So intelligibility is pragmatism."
I strongly agree with what I think you're getting at here. I "understand" insofar as I can make use of. Utility is vast, of course, or so I intend it. In short, understanding is a handle on things. Apart from motive and action, the handle doesn't exist in a way worth talking about. Note the mention of worth/value, which is a sort of ineffable ground.

"When do we know when we are actually studying nature, or the nature of nature, or if we're just telling ourselves a story? "
From Popper and Kojeve I got the idea that these are all one and the same. Some stories address the physical/social more the emotional/personal. Some stories address the relationships that hold between stories. In my view, creativity is central. We come up with a new story or fusion of stories and we are seduced by it. Then it gets banged against other stories. We always already believe lots of stories. We abandon them when we are seduced by a better incompatible story or when a story keeps getting us into trouble, physical or social. I suppose philosophy has been for me largely a collection of stories about stories. One starts to see (doesn't one?) certain structures that sum to a story about human nature (its story-telling aspect).

For me there's a "spiritual" version of nihilism. It's not that everything becomes valueless, but that all value becomes finite and temporary. It liberates the self-concept. There is no X to be absorbed in or absolved by. But there is no X that can accuse or terrorize absolutely. Life appears more dream-like. I find this in late Schopenhauer. Spiritual youth is a sequence of fever-dreams. Then one sees the structure of all such heroic dreams, but only because one is still propelled forward through life's difficult days by the dream of wisdom. My theory is that self-esteem is propped up by participation in various hero images. It's a dynamic system of faces that stabilizes (for me but not for everyone) around the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and Job. In Job, one gets a vision of God/Nature independent of human concepts of right and wrong. One trades a just kosmos for something more terrible and wonderful. A random string of bits forms the teeth in God's nowhere-differentiable smile.

You make some good points, but my recent reading suggests (along with my intuition) that the concept of Nature or Zeus's will is very important to the Stoic system. From my point of view, the modern use of Stoicism would be stripped of this metaphysics and indeed be viewed in terms of spiritual exercises. I just reread Epictetus (the notes by his disciple and the handbook). I didn't see self-conscious self-sculpture there, but maybe I did in Marcus years ago -- mixed with a piety toward Nature.

I suppose I don't want my will and my doctrine to get too far away from one another. Or let's say my practice and my theory. To be clear, suicide seems reasonable to me if life becomes sufficiently painful and/or hopeless. I see/feel no duty in either direction. As a matter of persona-sculpture, though, I'd rather blend what's great about influences into a new "writer-ly" voice.

I suggest not only that there is not one but also that there cannot be a "why the world is intelligible." This "why" (be it God or more nakedly synthetic concept) would always be part of the world-as-totality it supposed to "explain." The mind seems good at arranging entities in a push-pull system. If you want this, do that. If you see this, expect that. If you had done this, then event X "would" have happened (expectation projected backwards).

I think "explain" is a word to be sniffed. So-called explanations have weight to the degree that they help us manipulate/predict physical and social reality and/or make our emotional/intellectual peace with it, or so it seems to me. As I see it, reason is intrinsically instrumental. Veblen comes to mind when I think of the piety directed toward non-instrumental Reason. Roughly speaking, it takes on a status-boosting function in its distance from work. I do experience the "lyrical why," but this is almost like a glitch in human cognition. We can arrange entities within the totality into a system of causes and effects, so why not the totality? Because it cannot be related to anything.

The "problem" with pessimism (life is essentially bad) is, in my view, that it lives in a state of contradiction. If life is bad, then suicide looks like the only consistent and heroic move.

Stoicism is better in this regard, but it too is "guilty" here. While I love the stoics, I also get the sense that strict stoicism is aborted suicide.

What works in both movements is the implicit self-sculpture. One learns to stop expecting the impossible and to stop getting one's panties tangled up in petty drama. There's a view from the mountain top in both cases that's maybe their "inner truth and greatness." Both movements deserve respect for their intense relevance. Both movements give us "wisdom writing." Thought, as always, one has to pick and choose carefully and adapt the words of long dead men to a very different technological and social reality.

To me that's a central question. Why ought we follow this "reason" thing? We have to be "unreasonably" invested in Reason to get the game going. Reason does make sense however as a tool for pleasure, as filthy as that may sound. "Pleasure" admittedly remains elusive, but we stop asking questions as the bliss rises.

A life that is only focus on preventing suffering sounds hobbled indeed. Assuming a godless sky and no afterlife, we do choose to survive down here beneath the hole where some have or continue to seek for a God or a Reason less perishable than a peach.

I do find hyper-rationalized ethical thinking a bit questionable. It dresses like science, but I don't personally believe it's even a drop less irrational and myth-driven at the core. For instance, we have to be "irrationally" invested in a style or an approach or a method before we can attempt to use that method to ground itself, a questionable undertaking.

Is life Life without heroism? The hero wears a thousand masks. Give a man a mission and he will glory in his participation even as he suffers. Kierkegaard's "sinful" esthetic man comes to mind. For those no longer seeking the absolute, endless self-enrichment and self-sculpture seems to function more or less self-consciously as this Mission.

Facts about math are pretty weird really. As one moves away from applications, it's arguably not so different than changing mores. Are numbers sets? Does it matter when it's time to pay the rent?

I don't see how objectivity-in-itself can matter much. We have things like consensus and power. Slavery was legal once. Now racism is bad and will perhaps become illegal. It was bad to be gay. Now it is bad to think that it is bad to be gay.

I had this thought about history recently. Are we taught what really happened, more or less? Then it occurred to me that it was at least as important that we have (or have not) been taught what everyone else has been taught. In short, awareness of the consensus is arguably more important than awareness of what really happened, especially if one could not win over the consensus thereby (had no proof of the time-machine adventure or whatever).

Excepting something like a sacred feeling towards Truth, it's hard to see how objectivity isn't generally boiled down to relationship with others and the power to shape nature according to our desires.

It would be nice marketing if you could sum up your approach in the same way new rock bands are summed up. Of course it's bound to be a low-resolution approximation, but the mere willingness to do this would already, in my view, increase the curiosity factor. As I get older, I see my own linguistic adaptations as a slim volume in a massive library. From the outside, we are just one more book on the shelf. I can't help but think that avoiding sharing your ideas in dialog rather than with a link indicates a self-absorption that may mar your "product." I say "product" because I feel like I'm responding to an advertisement. And you will probably never read this, because you're too in love with your system to bother exposing it to criticism in a "hot" medium like this. (And yeah that's a general gripe, philosophy that's too precious and refined for the non-initiated dummies. It's like a movie that starts slow. You don't know yet if it's worth waiting for. But, if the director is unconscious of this dilemma of the consumer, it's a bad sign. End of sermon.)

I'm glad to see you quoting one of my favorite texts, Ecclesiastes. I interpret this book as suggesting the futility in seeking for fixed point or a Secret. It functions as an anti-Secret, the pseudo-Secret that either there is no secret or that it's not worth the candle. Life's too short, as Protagoras might say, to bother with gods that hide. To be fair, the text has been tinkered with, so it admits contrary readings. But I find a great comfort in "all is vanity." Kundera comes to mind. This is the (for-some-)unbearable lightness of being.

In another post on this thread you mention the thought police. I'll grant that there is indeed "irrational" or emotional resistance to absolutes, precisely because they threaten us with the unbearable heaviness of being. Sure, there's "scientism" out there, too, but I think attachment to the terrible and wonderful freedom in "all is vanity/emptiness" also motivates suspicion toward absolutes and trans-personal authorities.

I like philosophy that is grounded in practice, relationships, and the body.

I think science is so respected because it delivers the goods (technology). While life-philosophy is usefully viewed as Technology 101, it seems pretty clear to me that in a pluralistic society there is no reason to expect convergence. Why not many, differing always-in-progress "belief-habit systems"? The "post-philosophical" sense of humor about Truth is, from a certain perspective, just a "realism" about human disagreement and the limits of persuasion.

Of course not all philosophy is "life philosophy." While some of this is entertaining, it's often delivered as if were a science higher than science. But unless it connects to practice (is tested in our desire and danger drenched lives), it can (at its worst) look like weightless word-math, like word-smiths battling not over what is to be done but simply how to uniquely name the overlapping system of practices that make the name-debate intelligible in the first place.

I think one can love philosophy or rather wisdom without thinking that philosophers proper (paid for it or just identified with the role) are any closer to it than others. I love the last volume of Bukowski's letters, for instance. I would hate to have never been exposed to Ham On Rye and Women. So much can be done with the words closest at hand. Exceptions to every rule, etc., but I think it's wise to stay close to the language of the street, at least with "life philosophy." If we figure out something useful, we can "win friends and influence people" in terms of style and accessibility. We also run less risk of sounding like we are high on our own logorrhea. So, yeah, I'm voting that style matters. Hell, style is central. But I think the stoics and cynics were carving themselves into statues.

Anyway, exposure to pragmatism in particular encouraged me to embrace the daily detail, learn about nutrition, put more effort into relationships, career, style. To trot out an old horse, there's something to be said about being a man first and philosopher second. (And yeah the man can have a uterus. I'm talking about an image of human completeness and connection to the world.)

I'd say that nothing is explained in a "deep" or "ideal" sense of explanation. Maybe there is progress in recognizing the futility of absolute questions. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" By the considering the form of what I'm tempted to call any possible answer, the "why" involved begins to smell lyrical rather than functional.

Anyway, I think most of us just turn toward the technical/practical problems where a certain kind of progress is undeniable. And even the pure problems we leave behind, profound questions or confused pseudo-questions (according to mood or perspective), can themselves be described as status technology. "I'm the noble sort of mind that thinks beyond utility, so give me some food and a quiet room, please."

I like this. It's as if the adept learns from the apparent sage or apparent Book that there is no sage and that there is no Book. I also agree that there's a cheap form of spirituality. There's the idea of the prayer that it is like pushing a button on the God machine. Then the God-machine squirts out wealth, health, victory in battle. Of course we want these things, but it's a bit strange to worship the same being that treat like a vending machine. Affirming this world as a whole, stubbornly, seems higher and deeper. "Naked I came and naked I return. Blessed be the name of the Lord (Reality, Life, etc.)"

Should we measure the success of philosophy in terms of professional consensus? Or the attainment of these things called truths? Is Newton's physics a truth? It remains useful. When I reflect on the imperfection of our measuring instruments and the floating point numbers bouncing around in circuits, I'm tempted to say that "accurate enough" has just about always been good enough.

Also, let an individual reflect on what those books for sale under "philosophy" have or have not done for them. In my case, from my point of view, I have no doubt that philosophy has been good and valuable and right enough. If words empower and enrich, they are working.

Sincerely, that is a great question, and it's exactly the kind of question I began asking myself after exposure to philosophy. Roughly speaking, I lump religion, science, and philosophy into something like a generalized technology for living a better life. God-talk and electron-talk and talk-talk have all proven beneficial for various individuals (and harmful for others.) In short, I think that thinking about thinking can lead to more effective thinking. We can define "effective thinking" in terms of happiness or pleasure, but we move into the realm of feeling here. But feeling is the only thing I know of that makes whether a proposition is true or false "mean" a damn thing in the first place.

I also enjoy sharing my tentative "results" with others, especially when I don't see my own approach otherwise represented. While purveying the one-right-truth and offering possibly useful metaphors are related in spirit (proclaiming implicitly the possession of self-esteem-improving and status-boosting "spirit-lore"), I think the difference deserves some elaboration. And, sure, there's the "imp of the perverse" at work in any "unfashionable" position, but surely you can understand that. No hard feelings, I hope.

Good point. Aren't universals just concepts? How much can we really say about what it is to have a concept? It reminds me of describing the experience of redness (which may be the simultaneous experience of color and concept). We strangely invent something like a world without spatial extension of roughly shared concepts. I suppose any theory about this ability of ours is going to be justified practically or aesthetically. And any theory about the world that divides into non-concept and concept will itself seemingly have to live in the world of concept.

I agree. I find instrumentalism descriptive. It's not clear to me that we have any greater or different purposes than the non-human cast of Monkey Thieves. The "lyrical" and perhaps half-nonsensical "why is there something rather than nothing" itself seems to function aesthetically and symbolically as the sort of a thing a noble/superior primate might be overheard "worrying" about.

Also, any cure-monger needs the "disease" of the ignorance of or lack of belief in their "cure." For the most part, ideology tends to boil down to "if only they were more like me, what a world we'd have." (I'm not denying some crooked faith in this prejudice myself, but the better part of me knows better, maybe, perhaps....)

Hi, darthbarracuda. Your post reminds me of a theme which (as Hoo on PF) I've written on many times. I tend to speak of "status" and "ego-ideal" rather than self-esteem, but this simply my attempt to zero on on the self-esteem structure. Roughly speaking, I think we always already have at least a rough notion of the heroic or noble or worth human. The more we resemble that notion, the greater the narcissistic pleasure involved. What fascinates me is the mutability of the ego-ideal. If we associate any given (usually intellectual) ego-ideal with a normalization of discourse (identification with science or religion for instance), then a shift in the ego-ideal can also shift our truth criterion. A simple example is "I believe because it is absurd." Another is "foolishness to the Greeks."

Henry Flynt wrote that the only real metalanguage is ordinary language (a hint in the right direction.) I'd call this genuine meta-language "rhetoric." To fix a discourse's rules, we need to work from the outside. And that's how ego-ideals are edited. Rhetoric pries at the metaphorical or irrational core of an finally rhetoric or irrational "rationality."

This quote also won me over:
" We need the distinction between

(a) persevering through grief and discouragement, and

(b) having elan, feeling life to be sweet, walking on air.

(a) is like driving with the hand brake on. And (b) is an experience, not a proposition. It is the release of the powers you have, no longer having to drive with the hand brake on. Then you realize what you may not have noticed before, because you had become habituated to it: the drag. You carried a hindrance within, a discouragement, and you persevered because you can tolerate discouragement, because it is more advantageous to persevere than to lie down on the side of the road and die.

It is one thing to persevere in the face of discouragement; and it is another thing to be free of discouragement. The distinction is as palpable as being in a vat of molasses or not being in a vat or molasses. (b) means that the gratifying thing is attainable. Or a palpable hope is afforded us: that we can be innocently joyful, can see things as they are, can find like-minded people, can envision a better condition and attain it.

I do not know how likely it is that an act of will on your part can take you from (a) to (b). It is more credible to me that your relief has to come from without. Your only contribution is your openness to this gift of happenstance. "

I was gloomy and anguished in my 20s, but mostly find myself in state (b) these days, largely by having jettisoned futile and false fantasies of what the self could be, should be, was.

From the essay:
"Just as there is a natural orientation toward curiosity, activeness, relative self-reliance, relative power, there is a natural preference for the expansion of consciousness. We get a definition of cognition as the seeking of awareness of what the obscure totality shows of itself. Leaving aside our awareness of our awareness, we assume a gap between our awareness and "the" obscure totality; otherwise cognition would not be venturesome and we could not make mistakes."

I like this "obscure totality," which I think we do automatically posit. Cognition is "venturesome." That's why philosophy is (at its best)thrilling. It's not just survival: It's a joyride.

Yeah, csalisbury. I liked that part especially, too. He justifies self-honesty without sentimentality. I also liked your phrase "faux-stoic self-image of someone who has no real needs."

Hi, BC. For a long time now I've just assumed that consciousness "fades in" as nervous systems become more complex. Perhaps self-consciousness is especially human. We can be freaked out that there is a there there, whereas animals are probably just freaked out about what is there -- not that there is a there in the first place.