that I prefer vanilla to chocolate ice-cream is a subjective fact - or if you prefer, it is a subjective truth. It's truth is dependent on my own taste.

That this text is written in English is not dependent on my own taste or feelings. Hence it is an objective truth.

That's an end to it; don't allow the notions of subjectivity and objectivity to take on any more significance.

in particular, don't pretend that there are either only subjective facts, or that there are only objective facts. — Banno

What does ‘my own’ mean? Empiricism and Idealism each have their own ideas about this, but in the end they are two side of the same coin. The social constructionism of Ken Gergen and Jon Shotter argues
that it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.

I agree with them as far as this goes. But I still don’t know what subjective and objective facts are , assuming we allow for both. And I don’t know what a joint or shared interaction is. I see everything you just said about subject and object , and intersubjectivity , to apply to a dynamic that comes into play before we assume the notion of participants in a language game. How do you describe a participant in such a game ? Why is the joint action, the language game ‘public’? It certainly isn’t private. It isn’t located in a container or self-reproducing continuity. But public implies
at least two. Two what? Subjects? No that’s not right.
Dimensions of a whole? And what do these two or more share in the joint action of a language game? In the moment of the sharing is there a dissolution of the plurality into a singularity of sharing , a single sense distributed among the plurality?

Music and visual arts can can of course still be profound. There is a strong sense in which setting out the meaning of a piece is detracting from it.
3h — Banno

In coming up with my first original ideas in philosophy, I didn’t know how to articulate them in words. Why?Because they were still too tentative , to much like a loose sketch , to internally inconsistent and unfocused. It took me a few years before i could write down the first word to describe these ideas. Over time my vocabulary became richer and more precise. Dinthis detract from
the peofundity of the original ideas? On the contrary , the verbalization made it possible to make much more rapid progress in transforming what I began with. Eventually I abandoned a lot of my original
vocabulary , but this was only made possible by creating it in the first place so I could see more clearly what it was I was so enthralled with. I think creativity is a cycle beginning with tentative , incipient music-like intuitive stabs at the new. One hears a new music in one’s
head. If one is a musician one doesn’t have to take this process any further, but if one is a scientist or philosopher one warns to enrich, tighten and define what is at first only a feeling so that it becomes a coherent , clarified concept rather than remaining only a loose sketch.
I’m not saying the verbal is more profound than the musical , but neither is the musical more profound than the verbal, or the painterly.

What is subjective is only understood in contrast to what is objective — Banno

Very true. Tell me more about how you transcend the subject-object binary. I don’t see it in any of your writings. Tell me how some of the cognitive scientists you are interested in do this.

The visual image of that painting doesn't tell you that there are symbols embedded in it, so how could they come to mind by simply looking at it? — frank

How does the visual image of the word ‘hello’ that you are looking at now tell you that there is a symbol embedded in it? What is a symbol? What is that that allows you to ‘decode’ a seemingly random pattern of dots into first a series of lines, curved and angles, and then further into letters, and after that into words? Isnt visual interpretation and thus symbolization involved every step of the way ? When we see a picture of a chair , aren’t we doing f something similar, beginning with the perception of a seemingly random spread of dots and from that we construct lines, angles and other shapes, and then finally recognize these features as all
belonging to a single object? Do we need a name for the object in order to recognize it as an object? How are lines symbolizing letters which in certain sequences symbolize words different from lines symbolizing pieces of a visual object which in certain combinations symbolizes the whole visual object? Isnt it symbolization the whole way down in both cases?

That painting is full of symbols that relate to events before and after the event. I think you need words to convey past and future. — frank

If only words convey past and future , how is it that visual images convey the present?

When looking at the painting, why couldn’t we deal with those symbols that come to mind relating to events before and after the event in either verbal form or via images of the past or future? We could
conjure in our heads extensions of the scene moving either backwards or forwards in time, just as we can verbalize such shifts in time

My position is that music, and visual arts, don't mean anything. Meaning comes with words. — T Clark

But don’t the components of a painting tell a
story? When we look at a written word, we begin with the geometries of lines and curves and angles , and then recognize letters , and then words, making use of context to anticipate the next word. Don’t we do the same
thing when we look at a painting, begin with geometries of line and shape and shadow and color and then piece
together larger meanings from these simpler perceptions, the story the painting tells?

I could describe in words da Vinci’s last supper, or show the painting. Could the words used to describe the scene ever convey more than the visual image?

What we do by naming, using words, is telling stories. — Mww

Is the sharing of a perceptual image or a sound recording also the telling of a story?

Banno
13.5k
↪Aidan buk Here's where this discussion generally leads, Aidan. To a division between those who think there is something more to be said and those who think it can only be shown. — Banno

the idea of an intersubjective locus of meaning makes no sense without subjectivities that interact.
— Joshs

This is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, relying on meaning rather than use, while giving primacy to the subjective. You would maintain some variation of a private language, disguised as "subjectivities". Go ahead, but then you can say nothing interesting about them. — Banno

Im not relying on meaning in Wittgenstein’s sense, and I knew using that word would cause trouble here. For me there is nothing but use, and I also dont mean ‘subjective’ in the way you think I do. Showing is using , which is changing. This takes place before we can talk about a community of language users , because primordially we dont yet know what a community of people or voices or bodies is. Before any of this is the way temporality, prior to any constituted notion of community , throws me outside of myself. The
‘me’, the ‘I’ , the ‘self’ always returns to itself differently. It is already its own social outside prior to the concept of a language community. You can only think
of this as a subjective inside , a box with a beetle , if you are misunderstanding what it is that is supposed to be changed by temporality every moment. You would have to begin with something present to itself first, which is mot what I am arguing for.

Derrida discusses this relation between temporality and language games.

Derrida says all speech is ‘writing’ , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social.

“That totally affects a structure, but it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other.”


“From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”

In response to a question about the connection between time and language , he says:

“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public': , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation' : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.

Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here.

. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn't call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .)

But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my
quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)

For Heidegger(1982), temporality as pure self-affection is not the essence of subjectivity but the essence of Dasein, which is not a subjectivity but what lies in between the subjective and the objective.

“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of
espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world itself, its own self is reflected to it from things. This is not mysticism and does not presuppose the assigning of souls to things. It is only a reference to an elementary phenomenological fact of existence, which must be seen prior to all talk, no matter how acute, about the subject-object relation.”
“To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in
the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So
far as the Dasein exists a world is cast-forth with the Dasein’s being. To exist means, among other
things, to cast-forth a world, and in fact in such a way that with the thrownness of this projection, with the factical existence of a Dasein, extant entities are always already uncovered.”

So here with Derrida and Heidegger we have the tow poles of self-world interaction; the anticipative protection outward from my past into experience, and the absolute novelty of what I anticipate into
Thus the self continues to be itself only by being absolutely other than itself to moment.

We open the armagnac and share it - we might talk about sharing the experience of drinking.

Then things get philosophical and someone says something like that we only know what the armagnac tastes like to each of us; we can't share what it tastes like in itself... and the little man appears, because the taste of armagnac-in-itself is as nonsensical as the little man who wasn't there. — Banno

I don’t think the Wittgensteinian approach completely resolved the problem because the idea of an intersubjective locus of meaning makes no sense without subjectivities that interact. We can say that we only know what the armagnac tastes like to each of us without assuming that there is such a thing as the armagnac-in-itself, just as there is no such thing as a self in itself or a self for itself or a ‘what it is like’ in itself.

Wittgenstein was right to argue that the sense of anything is only produced in interaction , but this interaction is not the same thing as a pure ‘sharing’ in which the sense of an experience is a outlet ‘we’ phenomenon. There can be no pure ‘we’ sharing of any sense because then this shared ‘we’ becomes a thing in itself.

The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes.
— Joshs

The crystallization you refer to is achieved by throwing away much of the information included in the original experience. — T Clark

Isnt this what we are told words are supposed to do, give us only this generic dictionary meaning? But is this really how each of us experience the meaning of a word? Do two people ever experience the meaning of a word in the same way? Does one person ever experience the meaning of the same word in the same way twice? If you read any of of the same words I just wrote twice do they connote the same exact sense each time? So what exactly is it that a word locks in? I know we say that this is supposed to be what words do, but what does a word, used this instant, in this context, lock in that a feeling, felt in this instant in this context, doesn’t?
I say that a ‘feeling’ is a particular change being made in the way we relate to a situation, just as a word is. What give a feeling the richness a word doesn’t have? Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? Or is it a discrete relational difference , a change made in my comportment toward the world?

Aside from the difference between a feeling and a word, what’s the difference between a feeling and an intention or a perception?

I was puzzled why such a brilliant genius like Nietszche who is so popular today would make such statements. I Know it's taken out of context but nevertheless if a philosopher today was to make such pronouncements I think he/she would be severly attacked for what seems discriminatory. — Ross Campbell

“A number of Nietzsche interpreters argue that Nietzsche was using irony and other devices to make points that were not on the whole intended as anti-female.

Susan Padilla writes:

Nietzsche probably utilized the tools of irony, parody, and hu- mor as a way of coping with his difficulties concerning the accu- racy and value of language. Finally, because his work is so an- fractuous, it is absolutely critical that any one comment of Nietzsche‘s be explicated only in context with the greater whole of his work. It is virtually impossible to make singular selections or anthologize Nietzsche without distorting his meaning.”

“Friedrich Nietzsche is widely regarded as a man who hated women. His work has been assaulted with accusa- tions of misogyny. It is true that his writing contains nu- merous references to women, few of which seem com- plimentary when taken at face value. From his earliest works, to those composed at the end of his life, one can identify dozens of excerpts to support the misogyny charge. One can read almost any work by Nietzsche, employ a narrow interpretation, and conclude that he was in fact a misogynist. His comments regard- ing women appear, at best, ambiguous. At their worst, they seem down right degrading. At least prima facie, Nietzsche seems per- haps the most sexist philosopher in history. A closer examination of his book Beyond Good and Evil will reveal a different picture. There is a different exegesis of Nietzsche which exonerates him from the charge of misogyny. Properly construed, Nietzsche is revealed as a man who appreciated the natural instincts and po- tential power of women, and who, through his use of irony and his criticisms of both ―woman as such‖ and women, wished to educate women on approaching the emancipation issue more effectively without losing their inherent femininity. He in fact implored women to cease in the cannibalization of other women and ―woman as such‖ in order that they could better achieve their goal of emancipation or even better, from Nietzsche‘s per- spective, to achieve a goal of self-overcoming, and in so doing become free spirits.”

The other is understood entirely by a body of knowledge possessed by a self, so no separation is possible. No mind independent other can exist, so a self cannot be separated from other.


This conception of self has a central density of information then extends outward, similar to a hurricane, to wherever and whatever it has information of.

How would you conceive a self, and thus a boundary of "subject"? — Pop

The subject-object boundary is none other than the finite, discreet nature of time. Time is nothing outside of the experience of time , and the experience of time is that of my immediate past ( and by implication all of my prior history linked to it ) being changed by implying into a new event which occurs into that implying. The now is always a differential. It is what occurs to me by changing me.

You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. This from the web:

Talk - speak in order to give information or express ideas or feelings; converse or communicate by spoken words. — T Clark

I can also talk to myself , as if I were speaking to someone else, neo sued in fact I am
speaking to someone else. I can also think ‘pre-verbally’, using the felt as a of a situation. But to me words are merely more richly articulated versions of a felt sense.
The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes. What the verbal and the pre-verbal , the merely ‘felt’ and the conceptualization have in common is that they are both ways of construing new events.

I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It feels different in a profound way. It uses different parts of me. I — T Clark

Is it anything like this?:


“Our usual way of thinking divides experience into discrete entities: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, body sensations, and so on....These experiences are cut apart from each other. If you were now to say to yourself, "How do I physically sense this situation as a whole?", even the question is confusing. It involves an unusual way of sensing. We are used to letting "physical" and "body" refer to just sensations. Can we physically feel a situation? We usually think of "situation" as outside, and we split that off from our inside.”
“ A characteristic of this felt sense is that it is experienced as an intricate whole. One can sense that it includes many intricacies and strands. It is not uniform like a piece of iron or butter. Rather it is a whole complexity, a multiplicity implicit in a single sense.”
“Thus intellectual meanings are in their very nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized. Everything we learn, think or read enriches the implicit meanings contained in subjective felt referent. For example, after reading a theoretical paper, my "feeling" about it will implicitly contain many intellectual perceptions and meanings which I have, because I have spent years of reading and thinking. When I write a commentary on the paper I symbolize explicitly the meanings which were implicit in my "feelings" after I read the paper.
Clearly, such "feelings" contain not only emotions, but attitudes, past experiences, and complex intellectual differentiations. Thus the "feeling" which guides the adjusted person implicitly contains all the intellectual meanings of all his experience. As his "feeling" functions, it is a modified interaction of these implicit meanings. When an individual is said to "act on his feelings," this complex total functions as the basis of action. It includes implicit intellectual meanings; it is not mere emotion.”(Gendlin, E.T. (1959).

I’m not suggesting this is your belief, but according to a long-standing Western tradition, which continues today in cognitive neuroscience, science, affective feeling is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily’, dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity,
calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

I believe in collapsing the distinction between feeling,intention, perception and action. Thus, to feel is to construe, which expresses.

↪Joshs You be the sort that talks about the music but don't feel it?
put into words... they become something different.
— T Clark — Banno

But feeling is already an expressing , and as such it IS a kind of talking.

Picture yourself in what nowadays is called a "flow" state; when you play so smoothly that there is no distinction between you and the guitar; when you cruise the corner perfectly, no distance between you and your chosen ride; when you look up to find that you've been coding for hours but it seems a few minutes. — Banno

In a flow experience , am I melding with the object or is the object melding with me, or is it not necessary to choose one or the other option? I think in order to have this experience of timeless immersion there must be a unity of similarity linking one moment of the flow to the next. This requires that each new event have a sense of belonging to the previous as variations of an unfolding theme. What occurs fulfills my anticipating into it. The flow isn’t interrupted by the unexpected and this is what makes it appear timeless. The anticipative aspect is what drives this experience and keeps it unified , and this is the subjective contribution.

Why decided to experience it as outside? Why put in place the subject-object?

That's what is here:
The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled ; they also constitute a new whole
— Joshs — Banno

Not sure I follow. The subject doesn’t decide to experience an object as outside. The outside imposes itself on the subject. The ‘subject’ here isn’t an entity but merely a pole of an interaction.

Didn't you say much the same thing as I did here? I understood what I said... — Banno

Maybe I said the same thing, but what phenomenologically informed cognitive science wants to emphasize, in contra distinction to computational, representational models of cognition, is that there is no generic outside. What I experience as my outside ( the keyboard , chair , room, etc) is what is pragmatically useful to me relative to my goals as a functionally integral cognitive system. I’m not just talking about how I use objects but their very sense. Similarly, each organism is shaped by an environment unique to its mode of functioning.

In other words, my outside is constrained, shaped and co-produced by the anticipative directionality of my cogntive system.

If this is what you meant then we are in agreement.

All is half truths except for this sentence? — frank

Including this sentence, because this sentence is also a product of subject-object interaction. Except rather than half truth I would say contingently constructed sense.

What's odd is that you seem to think that this helps. I don't see how. — Banno

My fault for trying to respond to a critique without an argument behind it.

It led me to think that in the process of becoming verbal there's a concomitant loss of experiential wisdom. Maybe that doesn't make sense to others - words again... — Tom Storm

I don’t know that words trap to any greater extent than thoughts do. It’s the construing that constrains ( as well as enables) , whether that is verbal or pre-verbal.

That’s being in itself in a nutshell. Irreducible subject-object reciprocal relationality.

Andy Clark on phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty:

“Merleau-Ponty stressed the importance of what I have called "continuous reciprocal causation "- viz., the idea that we must go beyond the passive image of the organism perceiving the world and recognize the way our actions may be continuously responsive to worldly events which are at the same time being continuously responsive to our actions. Consider a lovely example, which I think of as "the hamster and tongs" :

“When my hand follows each effort of a struggling animal while holding an instrument for capturing it, it is clear that each of my movements responds to an external stimulation ; but it is also clear that these stimulations could not be received without the movements by which I expose my receptors to their influence . . . . The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject are not only intermingled ; they also constitute a new whole .” (Merleau -Ponty)

"Being in itself" is the philosopher's "little man who wasn't there". — Banno

Could you give me an example of ‘being in itself’ for Heidegger or Husserl? What do you suppose they had in
in mind?

I guess I'm considering a view of idealism and realism at the same time. For example, I say that physical nature exists independantly of human cognition, which is a realist statement, but then I realise that such a statement, that nature exists independantly of human cognition, is borne of human cognition, and wouldn't be possible without it. Then I get stuck in a double bind. — Aidan buk

Welcome to phenomenology.

Husserl writes:

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking.
But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within what is for me real or possible.”?

Dan Zahavi:

“ For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity.”

Living in the moment, as I understand it, means not dwelling on the past or being preoccupied about what's next and/or what might happen and it is all about appreciating 'now' and being able to experience or enjoy what's happening as it's happening. It isn't literally trying to do the impossible with time. — Tom Storm

Notice that when you talk about experiencing the past or the future , you emphasize a certain style of approach , a certain mood or attitude. I am ‘pre-occupied’ rather than just being occupied with my future. I am ‘dwelling on’ rather than flowing though the past. I suggest what characterizes these experiences as negative dwelling on and pre-occupation isn’t their temporal position as past or future but the way we move through recollection or anticipation. Since I hold to the view that recollection is a constructive activity, I don’t give it lesser status in relation to the supposed freshness of the now. Recollection is essential to imagination and thus creative thought. As far as anticipating into the future , this also depends in part both on recollection and experience of the present. If we stare into a night sky and let our mind drift off into vast futures , it can give us a sense of profundity peace view of breadth of perspective. It can make the problems of the now fade into insignificance.
How can it do this if it is not keeping us within the now?

Because the ‘now’ is the flow of nows, and this flow is always characterized by a style, an attitude, a mood. It doesn’t matter whether this mood is generated from a reflection on a long ago event , an event far off in the future or one occurring right this moment. What matters is how we are understanding the flow of events to unfold one out of the previous. Are they harmoniously intercorrelated one with the next so as to make some kind of referential sense to us, or are they a puzzle to us , a chaos of unpredictability and alienation? This is what determines ether our experience of the ‘now’ is enjoyable or miserable and isolating.

There are times when we feel stuck in our thinking and our feeling, for instance when we are depressed, and typically this stuckneas is inescapable regardless of whether we dwell in memories , focus on the present or imagine into the future. What is often needed to snap us out of this depression is to create a fresh meaningful way forward. Being in the moment isn’t enough. It’s HOW we are being in the moment. This can be accomplished from out of any of the three temporal modes , but will ultimately involve all three. I rethink my past in relation to a changed present(sometimes just rethinking the past will
change one’s present) , which anticipates freshly into the future.

Or one could say keeping one’s present from becoming a stale, stuck recycling of habits of thought involves dipping into the future in order to reinvent one’s past.

That sounds like an attack on the secular Enlightenment and progressive philosophy which was trying to usher in a more Enlightened culture free from the Catholic misogynistic culture of the old older in Europe. — Ross Campbell

You’re confusing side issues with the main issue, which I see as the following: what are Nietzsche’s supporters claiming as his main thesis, and how is it original with respect to 19th (and much of 20th and 21at century) philosophy. If you decide that his central ideas are
not original and/or unproductive, then it will
appear to you that his comments on women are derivations of this unproductive philosophy. If however you embrace his ideas as ahead of their time and in some
ways still so , then you will be able to forgive his less than clear, quirky or irritating aspects , because we can dig up dirt on all great philosophers.
I think the focus here should be on those ideas that a consensus has developed around. These are concepts that one can find in the postmodern writings of French philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault , in social constructionism and even in phenomenology.
They deal with the relative bias of value systems, the shaping of individual views by participation in larger normative communities , and the impossibility of nailing down the meaning of goodness and badness outside of those normative communities.

If we remove Nietzsche from the discussion for a moment, what is your response to current day critiques of enlightenment liberalism and progressivism?
Everything you’ve written suggests strongly to me that you are wedded to enlightenment rationalism. If that’s the case, the. it’s not just Nietzsche that you likely object to but an entire era of of post-enlightenment thinking.
If you’re not a fan of current activism on campuses then you’re not going to be a fan of Nietzsche

The next line is “though frankly I would be the antipode of the Indian Buddha,” — praxis

That’s right, and much more like it.

“…anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –(Beyond Good and Evil)

“: think, too, of the whole metaphysics of the clergy, which is antagonistic towards the senses, making men lazy and refined, think, too, of their Fakir-like and
Brahmin-like self-hypnotizing – Brahminism as crystal ball and fixed idea – and the final, all-too-comprehensible general disenchantment with its radical cure, nothingness (or God: – the yearning for a union mystica with God is the Buddhist yearning for nothingness, Nirvâna – and no more…”

(Genealogy of Morality)

In Buddhism, one should not harm other sentient beings. ... Happily the peaceful live giving up victory and defeat." These elements are used to indicate Buddhism is PACIFISTIC. — Ross Campbell

This is insipid. Aside from physical harm ( tribal warfare, punishment killings) , there have been throughout the history of buddhist culture , myriad forms of oppression, prejudice, caste stratification, forced ritual that arise from the need to live in this world until one’s soul is taken to Nirvana. In this world there needs to be a guide for making sense out of those who don’t share your ethnic background , language and religion, and buddhist teaching has done no better job of relativizing cultural differences in value systems than Christianity has.

I wonder will Nietszche stand the same test of time. I know he's admired by 10s of millions of people today as one of the most popular thinkers , but Freud and Marx in the early to mid 20th century were also lionized , but who have gone out of vogue today. l wonder how fashionable Nietszche will be in 50 years time. — Ross Campbell

The only way any philosophy stands the test of time is if it is constantly transformed and reinterpreted anew in each era, which is what we see with everyone from Shakespeare to Aristotle and Plato. The Buddhism that has been embraced by Westeners over the past century has more to do with our own Western philosophical heritage than it does with Eastern thought of two thousand years ago. Freud and Marx have ‘gone out of vogue’ not in the sense that their ideas have simply been rejected , but in the sense that their thinking has been a absorbed into and transformed by current neo and post-Marxist and neo and post-Freudian models.

The wokism trends sweeping universities around the world would be impossible without the influence of Freud and Marx.

If we truly lives in the moment, we would experience absolutely nothing. A single experienced moment of time has three parts. It consists of the immediate past that forms a piece of the now, and the present event which occurs into that just past. A single ‘now’ also includes an anticipation into the next moment. If the immediate past were not a part of the now we wouldn’t be able to enjoy something like music, because the current note would have nothing to connect it to the just past note. We could t perceive anything in our world because most of what we see, hear, touch and smell in an instant comes from memory. We would have joys and hopes and pleasure because these are about how the present fulfills the past and points desiringly to the next present. I’m the story about the tiger and the area wberry we are supposed to learn a lesson that we will recall when we find ourselves in a similar situation.

Most people when hearing the story live in the future, they see one of two possible future outcomes, either the man falls or the tiger gets him. But the fact of the matter is, you don't know that. The mice could stop gnawing, the tiger could go away, so you don't know what will happen. — HardWorker

The person following the lesson of the story is also living in the future. He is anticipating that any outcome is possible. He is also making use of the past by recalling the lesson in the situation.

I don’t think inner peace is a matter of living in the moment , since th very idea of the moment is incoherent without its being part of a triadic structure of past-present-future which all occur simultaneously in what we call an instant of time. I think the key to satisfaction is in how harmoniously we anticipate beyond the moment.

The psychologist George Kelly made anticipation the very cornerstone of his psychology. In the following passage , he answers to the claim that the goal should be to live in the moment.

“For example, what about those rare and delectable hours when we can lie in the grass and look up at the fleecy summer clouds? Do we not then take life, savoring each moment as it comes without rudely trying to outguess it? Does one not feel very much alive on such occasions? Certainly! But this, too, is an anticipatory posture. To be sure, it is not the frantic apprehension of popping little events. It is rather a composed anticipation of a slowly drifting universe of great and benign proportions.”

Notice that when many talk about being in the moment , they equate this with being in the ‘flow’, but a flow isn’t about isolated, disconnected moments, it’s about experiencing them as linked to each other in a smooth, harmonious , meaningful way.

I have seen far more elegant and powerful writing of his in other passages. — Ross Campbell

Before you judge its power and elegance , I’d be interested to see if you have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about here. Of course , my reading could be wrong , but I’d like to see if you can make sense of such a reading.

how does Nietzsche know what people thought like in prehistoric times — Ross Campbell

I think his anthropological accuracy is beside the point. I think he would be the first to tell you that he is not attempting an empirical description but rather constructing examples to illustrate a more universal grounding of the basis of moral thinking. By the way, we do know that many of the oldest civilizations we have records of did indeed determine moral guilt on the basis of the action rather than the intent. Whether the act was done on purpose or by accident was irrelevant to the punishment.
Nietzsche’s point about Buddhism is that it upholds what he calls the ascetic ideal in its elevation of a nirvana beyond desire. Nietzsche said that a desire for nothingness is still desire, and there is no way around or beyond will and desire.

I agree with you. I think it’s possible to keep Nietzsche’s central ideas without having to articulate the movement of history in terms of weaker and sicker vs stronger and healthier will to power.
Foucault has done just this, keeping Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of history and his depiction of subjectivity as a differential play of forces, but avoiding creating the impression that any previous eras were pathological.

Ok Here's a Friedrich Nietzsche Quote:
“Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?”

Now explain what kind of validity is in the above statement. It sounds like something you could hear from some street corner guru. — Ross Campbell

I’d rather explain the validity in the statement below, which I, along with many philosophers, find to be brilliant.

“During the longest epoch of human history (which is called the prehistoric age) an action's value or lack of value was derived from its consequences; the action itself was taken as little into account as its origin. Instead, the situation was something like that of present-day China, where the honor or dishonor of a child reflects back on the parents. In the same way, it was the retroactive force of success or failure that showed people whether to think of an action as good or bad. We can call this period the pre-moral period of humanity. At that point, the imperative “know thyself !” was still unknown. By contrast, over the course of the last ten millennia, people across a large part of the earth have gradually come far enough to see the origin, not the consequence, as decisive for the value of an action. By and large, this was a great event, a considerable refinement of outlook and criterion, an unconscious after-effect of the dominance of aristocratic values and the belief in “origin,” and the sign of a period that we can signify as moral in a narrow sense. This marks the first attempt at self-knowledge.

Origin rather than consequence: what a reversal of perspective! And, certainly, this reversal was only accomplished after long struggles and fluctuations! Granted: this meant that a disastrous new superstition, a distinctive narrowness of interpretation gained dominance. The origin of the action was interpreted in the most determinate sense possible, as origin out of an intention. People were united in the belief that the value of an action was exhausted by the value of its intention. Intention as the entire origin and prehistory of an action: under this prejudice people have issued moral praise, censure, judgment, and philosophy almost to this day. – But today, thanks to a renewed self-contemplation and deepening of humanity, shouldn't we be facing a renewed necessity to effect a reversal and fundamental displacement of values? Shouldn't we be standing on the threshold of a period that would be designated, negatively at first, as extra-moral?

Today, when we immoralists, at least, suspect that the decisive value is conferred by what is specifically unintentional about an action, and that all its intentionality, everything about it that can be seen, known, or raised to “conscious awareness,” only belongs to its surface and skin – which, like every skin, reveals something but conceals even more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign and symptom that first needs to be interpreted, and that, moreover, it is a sign that means too many things and consequently means almost nothing by itself. We believe that morality in the sense it has had up to now (the morality of intentions) was a prejudice, a precipitousness, perhaps a preliminary, a thing on about the same level as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality – even the self-overcoming of morality, in a certain sense: let this be the name for that long and secret labor which is reserved for the most subtle, genuinely honest, and also the most malicious consciences of the day, who are living touchstones of the soul.”

My point was that I think you would find their work interesting and I’m betting you would relate to it. They reject just about all of the traditional trappings of religion: the trinity, a personal God, ritual, etc.

I think that there might be some moral facts, and that maybe good can exist, but I have no faith in the matter. That would be the most important difference between my view and a theologian's. — ToothyMaw

What you just wrote is quite similar to the postmodern perspective of ‘religion after religion’ philosophers like John Caputo and Simon Critchley.

I know what you are getting at - if I associate evil with a particular set of beliefs then I must think that evil is mostly perpetrated as a function of beliefs, and not just evil people doing evil things. — ToothyMaw

No, I was focusing on your claim that there are just evil
people doing evil things. That is a quintessentially theological notion. Even if you don’t think of yourself believing in God, you clearly believe in Good( which is what defines as evil as what it is) , and for many theologians and philosophers this amounts to the same thing as God.

philosophy should be ONLY based on REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE and in line with NATURE — Ross Campbell

The ‘real’ doesn’t come and slap us on the face. It must be interpreted. There are thousands of ways of interpreting any event depending on our aims and purposes.

“… How about grasping the perfect incontrovertible truth, the frozen ultimate, the knowledge of the way things really really are; would not that end the confusion of having something happen unexectedly, end it once and for all? With such knowledge in our possession nothing could possibly occur unexpectedly and our lives would be lived out perfectly in peaceful contemplation of what was coming next.

This, it seems to me, is like a man teetering on what he thinks is the edge of the universe and daring anyone to push him off. He feels perfectly safe because he thinks he knows what is what and there is obviously no such thing as ever going beyond the limits of reality. Still, occasionally he makes a pretence of looking over the edge, just for laughs, and he says, ‘See, there really isn't anything there - just a lot of nonsense'. Then, out of the corner of his eye he does catch a glimpse of something moving out there in the nothing; at first, perhaps, no more than the shadows of his own imagination. All night long he wonders what is the perfect truth about them, how much further out their limits lie. So he secretly tests these shadows, tries to see if he can make them move. Soon he is working with his hands.

In time, there arise out there in the nowhere whole new cities, built outside the walls against which he once leaned so confidently. Now his world is different. Now his once ‘perfect' truths tell him what he can see is not so, and, faithful as he may try to be, he can offer no more than lip service to them. Now, each time he looks up from his work and peers beyond his latest achievement, he wonders who he is to have imagined such things, and what he is doing, and he shudders to think how much of his life was spent behind the city barriers, or what unseen walls may imprison him now. And then he wonders more; to what destinies has he been false - and why has the evening grown so late?

This tail-spin of thinking starts as all tail-spins do, from the stall that occurs when one tries to stand still in mid-flight. From the moment we assume that truth is a stationary achievement, rather than a stage in a lively quest, it is only a matter of time until things start spinning round and round. Truth is neither reality nor phantasy. It needs to be understood, instead, as a continually emerging relationship between reality and ingenuity, and thus never something that can be skewered by a phrase, a moment, or a place.”

George Kelly

Do you identity your notion of evil with any particular religious or spiritual faith?

The point is not that he was full of shit, the point is he thought he had a plan for improving the world and millions of people agreed with this plan. — Tom Storm

One might even venture a developmental model of a cultural history of morality. connecting empathy with a gradual evolution from one-dimensional foundationalism to increasingly multi-dimensional , differentiated social understanding. What we judge in hindsight as genocidal evil becomes a necessary phase in that development. (I’m trying not to sound too Hegelian, or modernist).