I don't see how that diverges much from my interpretation. Again, he is pretty abstract here and up for interpretation. I take him as meaning that we should live a life where we would say "yes!" to life over and over.. Sometimes you have to wait at the post office (aka Satan's asshole) for hours, or visit someone you dearly love in a hospital, or deal with terrible tragedies, and these are not things one would want over and over again — schopenhauer1

That cartoon is funny. But there’s a reason it’s a cartoon. It collects all the misguided cliches about Nietzsche, i.e. that he’s just promulgating a self-aggrandizing form of existentialism, that he’s all about the supremacy of the autonomously willing subject, that he replaces God with Man. One of the many issues that needs to be addressed is Nietzsche’s split with Schopenhauer over the unity of the Will. For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative.

All values are ephemeral, transitory, changing. All are of equal value so why the "sacred yes' to these and not others when in time the sacred yes must become a sacred no? — Fooloso4

All are not of equal value during the period of time when one is working one’s way through a particular value system. One doesn’t live in all values, any more that one lives within all ecological systems, but in one particular way of life at any given time. Eventually, that way of life will come to seem intolerably repressive, and the value system that replaces it will at the same time reject it and be conditioned by it.

↪Joshs I'm curious and forgive the awkward wording - is it hard to get a useful reading of Nietzsche? How often do you think his work is taken into 'bad reading' territory? — Tom Storm

I think there are many useful readings of Nietzsche, but as is the case with any notable philosopher, these often conflict strongly with each other. The existentialist readers of Nietzsche seem to have nothing in common with his postmodernist interpreters. I say choose the reading you find the most daring and interesting.

I don't confer any Truth (capital letter T) to Freud, I only see that his general ideas are more on the mark than Nietzsche's notions — schopenhauer1

If on the mark means more objective, then that gets to the heart of the difference between Freud and Nietzsche.

As Daniel Berthold puts it:

In keeping with Freud’s idea of science, with its goals of objectivity and impartiality, he ‘fights for truth’ through rea­soned discourse. Again, for Freud, ‘reason is the only truly unifying influence’, so that reasoned discourse alone makes the achievement of a scientific community possible. But in keeping with Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘gay science’ that scorns ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ as myths and that is committed rather to radical perspectivism and the ideal of nobility as solitude, his style of authorship displaces the expectation of agreement, openness, cer­tainty and truth – Freud’s ideals – with a persistent deferral of direct communication. More strongly, Nietzsche deliberately invites misunderstanding: ‘Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood’

However strange and wicked Freud’s own project may be in the way it unsettles and shocks us – recall his warning to the audience of his lectures on psychoanalysis at Vienna, that he ‘will show … how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought’ will be challenged – he addresses an audience he seeks to convince through values he believes we all share: the value of the search for truth, the commonality of our
faculty of reason, and the shared space of our reality. Nietzsche, though, questions those very values and hence renounces the pretext that what he has to say can be grounded in a shared set of assumptions.

“Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face”.
Classic

What philosopher before Deleuze ever began a work this way:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times,
at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.

Deleuze destroys Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Deleuze is very well versed in Nietzsche. — Vaskane

My favorite section of Anti-Oedipus:

Melanie Klein herself writes: "The first time Dick came to me ... he manifested no sort of affect when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them 'Daddy-train' and 'Dick-train.' Thereupon he picked up the train I called 'Dick' and made it roll to the window and said 'Station.' I explained: 'The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.' He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shutting himself in, saying 'dark,' and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: 'It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.' Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: 'Nurse?' . . . As his analysis progressed . . . Dick had also discovered the wash-basin as symbolizing the mother's body, and he displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water." Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face. The
psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: "Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won't you?" Instead he screams: "Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein.

Do you expect the “real” reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation?

No. I'm actually quite a fan of speculative history.

What I am saying is that the method is easy to do poorly, and in some respects Nietzsche does it very poorly indeed. His Plato is almost a gnostic, and it is indeed hard to see why he would have become so influential — Count Timothy von Icarus

I confess to being an ignoramus when it comes to Classical history, as well as Greek philosophy. I always skip past Nietzsche’s writings on the Greeks, so I’ll take your word for it that his account doesnt donthat period justice.
What I’m interested in is not whether Nietzsche gets the content of historical events ‘right’, however one wants to define that, but, as you put it, the formal structure of historical change. Speculative history is grounded in one kind of formal account. Nietzsche’s formal approach constitutes a critique of speculative dialectics, leading to genealogical forms of analysis, like those of Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. I suppose my question would be why you prefer speculative dialectics over this alternative path.

These days my self-overcoming amounts to disrupting my routine of sitting on the couch watching cartoons and eating Cheetos to moving to the recliner watching cartoons and eating potato chips — Fooloso4

Oy. Your cardiovascular system may not be too thrilled with that routine.

Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Hegel (plus plenty more) can't all be right about the "real" reasons for historical development of Judaism and Christianity…My point then, is that Nietzsche is, to some extent, right in his critique of prior thinkers. People know where they want to end up and work backwards from there…
My second point, re the Russell quote, is that you can very easily turn this same sort of analysis back on Nietzsche — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you expect the “real” reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation? And if not, how does one understand and separate the role of cultural bias from objective fact of history? What method do you prefer and which philosopher of history do you think best achieves this?

If one assumes, as I do, that the idea of empirically objective history is incoherent, this does not mean that there aren’t more and less rigorous ways to do a relativist history. Have you read Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’ This is a relativist, or as he calls it in the book, an archeological approach to history. He describes three periods of Western history, the Classical, Renaissance and Modern chapters, and analyses each of these in terms of overarching paradigms or worldviews ( he calls these epistemes). These systems of thought encompass all modalities of culture. He focuses on linguistics, economics, biology and the human sciences. The transition from one episteme to another is guided by no logic, except that each episteme is conditioned by what precedes it.

In later Foucault works we come to understand the mechanisms of organization of an episteme via the dissemination of forces of power through societies. His focus is less about overt coercion than a bottom-up reciprocal shaping of values through the way institutions comes to establish their material relations with persons. He was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche in his understanding of the relation between power and knowledge in creating value systems and the institution's that materially express and perpetuate them. It was Nietzsche who allowed Foucualt to get away from the dialectical idealism of Hegel and dialectical materialism of Marx in understanding historical motivations.

Or perhaps the West is engaged in neo-colonialism by trying to foist their "sexual revolution" on to other cultures, undermining gender identities people draw meaning from? :nerd: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Foisting and mandatory reshaping aren’t good, and not very Nietzschean. When I said that I take Deleuze to be moving further on Nietzsche’s path, I had in mind notions like this:

“…when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it.”

Deleuze understood well that one cannot coerce social change. One creates an opening and hopes that others connect with it.

Yet those very movements get cited as the tyranny of the weak over the strong. I don't see a way for Nietszcheans to adjudicate these sorts of disputes. E.g., is feminism Nietzschean because it affirms woman as woman, not as some sort of defective man, or is it the weak using slave morality as a cudgel, affirmative action the chains weighing down someone like Vonnegut's Harrison Bergaron?

This leads to the "no true Nietzschean" phenomena re moral norms — Count Timothy von Icarus

We each get to pick our favorite Nietzschean, the contemporary figure we believe best furthers the path of exploration laid out by Nietzsche. My choice is Deleuze. For Deleuze weakness is thinking that binds itself to a fascism of one sort or another, and the strong path is the path of revolutionary thinking, not bound to any telos, but to becoming for its own sake. liberating us from the intolerable and oppressive conventions we gravitate toward and get stuck in. For Deleuze, affirming woman as an entity in her own right is still to remain stuck in a binary that oppresses.

First part of the problem: we can never produce knowledge that perfectly matches reality. This problem isn't specific to consciousness — Skalidris

As long as you think reality is something that has to be ‘matched to knowledge’ you’re screwed from the get-go. Assuming consciousness as an ‘in-itself’ standing over against a world is the basis of the Hard Problem. You can blame it on our subject-predicate grammar.

As far as your (or Fukuyama’s) analysis of Nietzsche’s ideas, I don’t think any useful assessment of his thinking can get off the ground until one deals with the basis of the arguments made within such philosophical approaches as phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, neo-pragmatism, enactivism, new materialism , the later Wittgenstein, deconstruction and social constructionism countering traditional realism. I dont find Fukuyama’s thinking to be up to the task of effectively grasping what these philosophers are up to.

What does that laundry list have to do Fukuyama or anything I've wrote and why is a big list of terms developed decades after Nietzsche was writing the only way to properly engage with his writing? Surely he can be engaged with on his own terms. And since a good deal of Nietzsche corpus focuses on representations and critiques of prior thinkers, surely the accuracy of these claims can be analyzed without appealing to say, Wittgenstein.

I mean, does someone really need to be steeped in New Materialism and 21st century thought to decide if Nietzsche accurately represents or responds to Plato? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do you suppose are Nietzsche’s ‘own terms’? Isnt that the central question? We never read a philosophy by descending into the pristine purity of their thinking. As Nietzsche understood better than most, our readings of philosophers are perspectival, filtered through our own cultural template. This is why objective history is always history as written by the victors, and Nietzsche was not interested i. doing objective history. What he wanted to do was lift out structures of power relations that are presupposed by any history. In spewing forth my laundry list, I didn’t say one has to know these approaches, I said one needs to understand their basis, what ties them together with Nietzsche. Otherwise , one may end up reading Nietzsche through the lens of more traditional philosophy and only trivialize his ideas.

Here’s a fair synopsis of Nietzsche’s "The Use And Abuse Of History"

https://www.thoughtco.com/nietzsches-the-use-and-abuse-of-history-2670323

“Out of life's school of war—what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols)
— Joshs
This is obviously not true on the face of it, as evidenced by many broken people who have survived a serious physical injury or disease, or a socio-economical fall — baker

Nietzsche was among the first philosophers to critique the long-standing bias within philosophy giving preference to presence over absence, the general over the singular, and most importantly, positive unification over negation. Negation has traditionally been thought of as a lack, an accident, something standing in the way of and opposing itself to the good and the true. But postmodern writers
like Nietzsche see negation as a positive, affirmative power. The influence of this thinking can be seen today in the change of language from the disabled to the differently abled, from normal and abnormal neurology to neurotypical and neuro-atypical, from pathologizing schizophrenia to the affirmative message of the Hearning Voices movement. Oliver Sacks’s positive accounts of people with Tourette’s, autism and other alterations in behavior was influenced by Nietzsche.

He wrote:

I am compelled to ask, with Nietzsche: ‘As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?’—and to see the questions it raises as fundamental in nature.

All this has led to an ideology that is on the one hand
openly hostile to "post modernism," (the constant refrain of folks like Jordan Peterson) while being itself highly post-modernist — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are at least two disparate uses of the world ‘post-modernist’ floating around in our era. The first is a socio-political term referring to practices of consumerism and other aspects of mass culture. The other use has almost nothing to do with this kind of analysis, referring instead to a loosely connected community of philosophical approaches that critique such notions as foundational truth , realism and objectivity, grand narratives of history, etc. It sounds like you’re talking about the first use here. As far as your (or Fukuyama’s) analysis of Nietzsche’s ideas, I don’t think any useful assessment of his thinking can get off the ground until one deals with the basis of the arguments made within such philosophical approaches as phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, neo-pragmatism, enactivism, new materialism , the later Wittgenstein, deconstruction and social constructionism countering traditional realism. I dont find Fukuyama’s thinking to be up to the task of effectively grasping what these philosophers are up to.

How can someone still rightfully be called "strong" if they can be overcome by germs, entrapments, etc.? — baker

“Out of life's school of war—what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols)

How so? In what way is Nietzsche's "historical analysis" more actual historical analysis than Hegel or Vico's? I would say Marx actually has a leg up in this department, despite the same charge being easy to level at him — Count Timothy von Icarus

In order to treat Nietzsche’s approach to history fully, I think one needs to be familiar with the following:

1)The difference between history and historicism.

2)The difference between objective empirical history and genealogical history.

3)What Nietzsche meant by the “untimely”

If Russell had any inkling of what Nietzsche was up to , his own philosophy wouldnt have been so backward. At the very least, a grasp of the later Wittgenstein’s thinking would be a prerequisite for understanding Nietzsche, and Russell was woefully inadequate at this.

I've felt bored since I was a small child. The feeling has never left me... — Tom Storm

If it never left you, you wouldn’t know you had it. What I mean is boredom is a comparison, just as sadness or happiness. It requires a letdown from a state which was non-boring or at least less boring. We live our lives as a series of creativity cycles, and boredom is one element of these cycles, the phase of the curve where what had held our interest become constraining and redundant. This indicates that in boredom a part of ourselves has already moved onto the next cycle, but we perceive the incipient phase of the new as a landscape without recognizable landmarks, as dull and empty.

Maybe my problem is that I've always felt everything was contingent upon culture and history and that there is no foundation or point of reference for humans. Perhaps I need to become a Christian fundamentalist to self-overcome. — Tom Storm

Existentialists like Sartre were caught in transition between two worlds, the old one of foundational certainty and the new one of ungrounded values. As a result their philosophies were an act of mourning the loss of the old. They hadn’t yet reached the point of affirmatively celebrating ungroundedness , because they still considered negation as a bad thing, inferior to ultimate truths. So they believed they were stuck with an inferior way of life but couldn’t go back to the old one.

Nietzsche has the whole spiel about how others decide where they want to end up re morality, and then invent reasons for getting there. It's a good critique, but it seems like it could easily be turned back on his own work and his fairly rigour free retelling of Jewish history that just happens to paint a picture where the "real story," lines up with his beliefs.

I always felt these had a lot in common with the old: "you only reject the obvious truth of Christ because you're blinded by your own pride and shame at your sin." I'm not against arguments from psychoanalysis as a whole, but they seem to easily fall into this problem of being "too neat." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps. Then again, your reading of Nietzsche may be too neat.

I've never understood the point of 'continual self-overcoming'. What does this mean (or look like) in practice when you are going about your daily business? It sounds kind of tedious — Tom Storm

We all do it anyway, whether we want to or not. Another way to put it is that life takes you where it wants you to go, not where you think you should. The feeling of tedium, boredom, meaninglessness arises out of being stuck in a situation, set of practices, way of life, a value system or worldview that one no longer fully relates to. But if we are taught that the way of moral, spiritual and empirical truth involves chaining ourselves to fixed, foundations, we will consider overcoming to be a mark of immorality, irrationality, madness, nihilism, infidelity. As a result we will bear the tedium of our chains as a sign of righteousness. Your emotions tell you how continuous your self-overcoming should be.

Do you mean propositional logic? — Tom Storm

yep

If the "weak" can constrain the "strong", then the "weak" aren't actually weak, and the "strong" aren't actually strong. What gives — baker

It’s more a matter of constraining the impulses of strength within oneself. By ‘strength’ Nietzsche meant a will to continual self-overcoming ( not personal ‘growth’ as in progress toward self-actualization, but continually becoming something different). The weak path is toward belief in foundational morality, a god who favors the meek, universal truth and the supremacy of proportional logic.

It's very odd to talk about the "practical implication" of truth — Leontiskos

Unless, of course, one is a pragmatist.

When a human being makes a decision of any kind—moral or otherwise—they always do so for a reason. For example, "The Earth is X distance from the moon because of the parallax measurements I collected."

Now when one says they ought to do something, they have made a decision, and there is a reason for their decision. The reasoning process involves apprehended truth (i.e. that which is apprehended to be true — Leontiskos

Your notion of truth is just one theory of what truth means. Not everyone who does things for a reason would explain their reasoning on the basis of your theory of truth. For instance, some would say a decision is placing a bet that the consequences of one’s decision will be more or less compatible with one’s anticipations.

Plenty of rational "immoral" choices to make in life. Why not just say good and evil? It's the same pathetic equation. — Vaskane

I agree here. There are an infinity of competing rationalities out there. But we do tend to find some value systems more pragmatically useful than others, given our purposes within our local communities. Do you suppose there is anything like a progress of pragmatic rationality?

In one possible world babies suffer if they're murdered and it's immoral to murder babies.

In another possible world babies suffer if they're murdered but it's not immoral to murder babies.

In both worlds we believe that it is immoral to murder babies.

What is the observable difference between each world — Michael

Absolutely none. So why don’t we dump moral realism and moral subjectivism and all other moldy conformist dictums stuck in the 18th century, which blithely ignore all the exciting ideas coming from current research in evolutionary biology, anthropology , psychology and language studies?

I'm invited to a dinner party.

"Hey, bert1, nice of you to come. Have you had a good day?"
"Yeah, fab. I killed 21 babies. Great day!"

Has bert1 understood the concept of moral obligation? — bert1

.

Perhaps. But I might question bert1’s understanding of proper dinner party etiquette.

Interesting. I see where you are coming from. Do you think it is possible to formulate any general principles that can be used to assess actions? Or is this a pointless exercise? — Tom Storm

I would throw out the notion of immorality as bad intent, and along with it justice as blame and culpability. In place of principles to assess moral blame, I would focus on techniques and strategies of exploring, refining and clarifying workable ways of making sense of and relating to others. How do we know when our social sense making is failing us? Affectivities such as guilt, anger, anxiety and threat define the contours of the disintegration of permeable ways of anticipating the actions of others and oneself.

In a paper on George Kelly’s ethical model, I wrote:

If it is the case that Kelly has no use for constructs like blame and forgiveness, what is left of the notion of ethics for Kelly? Whether it is the person striving to realign their role with respect to a social milieu that they have become estranged from (Kelly’s unorthodox definition of ‘sin’), or members of a community concerned about the effects of a particular person's behavior on those around them, Kelly's view of ethics provides a pathway around hostility and blameful finger-pointing. We can strive for an ethics of responsibility without succumbing to a moralism of culpability. To the extent that we can talk about an ethical progress in the understanding of good and ‘evil’ from the vantage of Kelly's system, this is not a matter of the arrival at a set of principles assigning culpability, but , from the point of view of the ‘sinner', of the gradual creation of a robust and permeable structure of social anticipations that increasingly effectively resists the invalidation of guilt. Kelly's ‘ethical strategy' to deal with one's own sin, then, is social experimentation in order to achieve a validated social role, which is not at all about conformity to social norms, but making others’ actions more intelligible.

For the classical realist the extramental world can be known in itself precisely through the rational, perspective-grounded mind.
— Leontiskos — Leontiskos

And for the New Materialist knowing the world is interacting with it and interacting with it is changing it.

↪Wayfarer ↪Joshs I'm well aware that we cannot speak about the nature of what lies outside the scope of our experience and judgement. So neither of you seem to have carefully read and considered what I've been saying, which was in no way contesting this obvious truism. — Janus

Would you agree with the following?

“Questions, what things ‘in-themselves’ may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? ‘Thingness’ was
first created by us” (Nietzsche, WTP 569). Just talking about an uncate­gorized reality is already applying categories like “thingness” to it, and hence is precisely not talking about something uncategorized. If we were to remove all categories, then ex­istence, substance, and causality would have to go, and they are the mate­rials from which Kant built his concept of noumena as the source of our sensory data. Indeed, they are the conceptual resources that any discussion must draw upon; withdraw them all and we are left with, as Hegel said, just “a pure direction or a blank space” (Hegel, PS 47, §73).

Good­man puts it succinctly: “We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described” (Goodman 1978, 3), or “talk of unstructured content or an un­conceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating;
for the talk imposes structure, ascribes properties.”

In loose terms it brings a previously non-existent obligation into existence. There is now something in the world that was not there previously: the obligation
— Banno

What bizarre, magical thinking. As if, *poof!*, a newly minted promise, shiny and golden, floats down from The Land of Ought.

The promise exists in the mind of the promiser, and their audience. That's it. — hypericin

Among the alternatives to physicalism is the idea that thoughts are real objects in the world.

Chicago, Illinois ( from a native American word for smelly onion)

Some languages certainly seem more suited to rhyme. The Inferno sounds far better in the original for example. English is not a particularly great language for poetry — Count Timothy von Icarus

On the other hand, it has been said that English is better suited to rock and roll than other languages , maybe due to the syllabic compactness of its vocabulary.

If I can’t make sense of this then perhaps I ought abandon my dogma and either accept that all moral sentences are false or that no moral sentence is truth apt. — Michael

You seem to be burning some of your Analytic philosophy bridges. Keep this up and you’ll have to join us Continental relativists. Wouldn’t that be a revolting development.

A circle is infinite and finite in different respects just like a Mandelbrot set has finite area but infinite perimeter. There is no respect in which humans are or can be infinite. — Lionino

Interesting. That makes me wonder. In what respect is a circle or the Mandelbrot set infinite? In the case of a fractal, it is a non-linear series where we take the product and feed it back in as input, making it recursive. We can think of pi as an infinite series also. The further we take the computation of the series , the more accurate is the calculation of the circle’s shape. Does this mean that the infinity of pi is a kind of infinitesimal? If we take the human body as a series of shapes and contours, don’t we get into the territory of infinitesimals in mapping its topography? Aren’t coastlines fractals, and if so, isn’t the human body composed of such fractals? Another thought: since there are no perfect circles in nature, the infinite series of pi exists only as a calculative activity of the human mind. If the mind is finite, then where does the infinity of pi exist except as a hypthesis?

Yes, but the judgement that that they may have an existence outside of any perspective is neither demonstrably false nor unintelligible. You seem to be trading on the obvious truism that all our judgements are mind-dependent to draw the unwarranted conclusion that all existence must be mind-dependent. Existence and judgement are thus unjustifiably conflated — Janus

I would assume that Wayfarer wouldn’t deny existence outside of perspective. But as an exercise, try to imagine constructing a sentence describing such existence. To begin with, the subject-object grammar of language must be bracketed off, including any properties or attributes (location in space and time, size, weight, color, shape, etc) ascribed to said existence. Perhaps rather than unintelligible, one could say such existence would be profoundly devoid of meaning, given that the meaning of describable objects is tied to their use for us as prescribed by some sort of grammar.

A world with no existence is metaphysically impossible because metaphysics deals with existence.
A world with no existence is logically possible because logically there are possible worlds where nothing exists. — Corvus

Metaphysics can also be taken to mean a perspective, paradigm or worldview within which we make use of and interpret the meaning of such concepts as existence and logic. Without a metaphysics, we wouldn’t be able to makes sense of notions like existence and logic.

Basically, there is nothing controversial about this, things that are logically possible are not always physically possible. For example: "I am flying faster than light". The laws of physics state that is impossible, however, it is not logically impossible, as there is nothing logically necessary about the speed of light.

However, what would something metaphysically impossible but logically possible be? — Lionino

We can see from the varied responses to the OP that the concept of metaphysics is understood in distinctly different ways within philosophy. My understanding of metaphysics comes from the way the term is employed by postmodern , post structuralist and phenomenological philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Whereas your Venn diagram seems to derive from Analytic approaches, if I were to draw up a diagram, metaphysics would be the circle encompassing the physical and the logical. Formal systems of logic, from Aristotle to Frege, presuppose a particular overarching metaphysical framework as their condition of possibility. Metaphysics taken in this sense refers to a gestalt framework constituting a web of interconnected elements of meaning. It is a perspectival worldview or system of values. Logic, as a historically situated cultural construction, doesn’t sit outside value systems but is instead a product of a particular system . What is possible or impossible is defined on the basis of the way a metaphysical system is organized. When we move from one metaphysics to another, the criteria of possibility change along with it, including how we understand the workings of logic.

If I was a criminal I would still consider it "harmful" to me if you locked me up, If I was a murderer I would consider it harmful/hateful if you killed me in retaliation.
— mentos987
So what? Most criminals 'believe' they are not guilty of their crimes. — 180 Proof

And by using the normative label criminal, we can smugly justify our ‘belief’ that the locked up other is deserving of the harm we cause them. Bully for Hillel for being a non-relativist, but this doesn’t magically turn labels like crime , murder, harm and hate into universally transparent meanings.

↪Joshs Can you distinguish between politics (or jurisprudence) and ethics, Joshs? Hillel's principle, as I call it, concerns moral encounters with others (M. Buber, H. Arendt, P. Foot), not some instrumental, or ideological, calculus. — 180 Proof

I don’t understand how the distinction between politics and ethics impacts on my comment. Whether we are talking about thought or action, the political scenario I described gets its sense and justification from its underlying ethical premises. Thinking or acting ethically, apart from the specific political context, requires an interpretation of the meaning of hate/harm. Otherwise these words are without sense. Are we to simply presume that what these terms stand for is transparently obvious to everyone? Isnt the problem of interpretation the central issue of ethics? And doesn’t this problem make all ethical questions inherently political?

↪Joshs I can't follow you — 180 Proof

The worst atrocities in history were committed by those who believed they were morally righteous. Technically, they were following Hillel’s admonition, because ‘doing no harm’ offers no way to distinguish who is really acting justly from those who just believe they are acting justly.