If we don't know what the hell it is all about, we usually do know that we don't want it all to fall apart in the next month. So we play along. We do what one does. We react. — ff0

I relate to this. I have my dreams, etc. But I find that I largely have to react to life. I try to lean on wise abstract words. I reason that death itself won't hurt. That a certain amount of risk in unavoidable if one wants to live a life worth living. Life bumps us into an anxious abstract mode at times. It forces us to reason about trauma. We make certain adjustments (if we can manage it), and then we settle back down. We get re-absorbed in the relatively smooth patterns of our lives.

But as you say, we largely avoid the disaster that threatens us next month. The closer the disaster is to us in the future, the more we prioritize it, as a general rule. The vague, unavoidable disaster of aging and death waits for the most part behind all the smaller disasters that threaten to fuck us up without ending us. It's a quiet evil laughter that accompanies our otherwise successful disaster-dodging. But it's also the one true cure for the hustle and hassle of this jumping and sliding.

This vision makes me feel large and small at the same time. I can participate and assent to this vast machine I've been thrown into. — ff0

I also relate to this large and small, which I hinted at in your Hegel thread. I am small because I see that I am 'naked' (theoryless, godless) in this world that eats me. But I am 'large' in my disbelief that anyone else is in on some secret. I know what it feels like to have the secret. But it passes as the pain sets in. I don't mean despair (though sometimes something like that.) I mean bodily pain. Maybe just annoying boils on the face. It only takes so much bodily malfunction to shut down the mood that knows the secret. In short, I can see that someone really believes in their secret and remain unseduced. For the most part, they seem wisest who just do the usual things with grace. Even talking about this stuff is a little stiff and earnest. I guess it scratches a certain itch. I thought I'd give online philosophy a try, having read not much but having talked quite a bit about life. ('Philosophy' has an academic smell.)

hy live free? Why die well? Because it feels right. Because it sounds right. For me that's the truth behind the epistemological 'posturing. ' Even this posturing feels right at the time for those invested in a certain notion of responsible, thorough 'rationality.' — ff0

Yeah. That's what my sciency peers don't get. Go truth. Go atheism. Go agnosticism. But it's pretty obvious that the guts are set one way or another. There's a limit to what we can sincerely question or doubt. There's something fixed about personality. Some arguments will never go anywhere. Things just 'sound right' and 'feel right' differently to different people. All the objectivity talk in the world doesn't cancel the objective fact (ding ding) of endless disagreement. This idea that we are tossed into a role doesn't gel well with the idea of us being perfectly free, perfectly rational beings. It seems to be that we have some decisions open to us and others closed. 'I can't turn off what turns me on.'

They're both just sloppy thinking to excuse a lifestyle they've already decided to adopt prior to the charade of pretending to arrive at their conclusions logically. — Inter Alia

I think you're right. But I often get the sense that describes most of us. And even if we identify with logic and critical thinking, this might involve some kind of 'prior' adoption of a standpoint. Don't get me wrong. I relate to critical thinking and logic. But I in some sense 'find' myself invested. Can I make explicit what is so great about logic and critical thinking? It seems vaguely (if at times intensely) noble.If I reduce it to a kind of prudence, the feeling of the situation is lost.

So, are facts only exclusive to the correspondence theory of truth?

I'm wondering. — Posty McPostface

Does someone know well enough what a fact is if they can use it in everyday life?

To me the difference between riding a bicycle and talking about a bicycle comes to mind. To use the word fact in a non-philosopical way is to ride the bike without falling off.

But then a philosopher gets off the bicycle and puts on his philosophizing hat and finds that no finite arrangement of words is the perfect explanation of what a fact is. A fact becomes mysterious and elusive. And maybe there is something mysterious and elusive in our being able to ride that bike. And yet it's a fact that we ride that bike all the time.

To talk about what a fact really --to get off the bike when it comes to the particular word 'fact' --seems to require that we keep on not-knowingly riding that bike when it comes to all the other words that we use to figure out what a 'fact' is.

It seems that a kind of ignorance makes explicit knowledge possible (or just pursuable?) in the first place. An active not-knowing (or an automatic or unconscious knowing) looks like the rule rather than the exception here. The we that looks is big and dark as we focus on the tiny point of light.

I think science doesn't necessarily have to be correct. it just has to work. — Pollywalls

This is a great issue. I'm studying physics. I'm at that point where I have to choose between engineering and pure science, and I'm leaning toward engineering. Why? Because that's seems to be the real reason we believe in science --because it works. It does stuff for us. It's the same with math. A few people in my calc classes are going for pure math. I can't relate to that. The numbers detached from reality have no appeal for me. I want to operate and maybe even create machines that get things done.

is it even logical to be logical? what is the proof of the proof of the proof of the proof of anything? how can we justify the regress argument? I can't seem to find a solution. maybe I should give up. there might be no solution. I feel so frustrated about it. — Pollywalls

The only philosophers to have held my attention so far have been pragmatists and Wittgenstein. How do we get out of the endless tangle of words? For the most part they go nowhere, it seems to me. X means Y means Z means...nothing. Or it's all finally justified in practice. Does anyone really know what they are talking about if they can't do anything with it? On the other hand, some of this talk motivates the millions. I guess that's doing something with it. Of course it's all got to be simplified into jingles and talking points in that case. Because others are impatient dummies like myself, waiting for the talk to become relevant to what they want and what they fear.

I don't see how we could know one another. But my views do strike me as pretty generic, so someone has surely run through these permutations before. With a name like Theo, you might think I'd be more theoretical.

‘No metaphysics’ is a kind of metaphysics; the worst kind, as it usually works out. — Wayfarer

Perhaps. I don't know. I find it hard to finish most philosophy books. I have a friend who reads the big shots and he gives me impressive paraphrases. But I also wonder how much of that is him and how much was already there in book. He gave me the run-down on Hegel that I saw elsewhere. It was the same story of God really being the dude that looks for God. It seemed like a thinking man's kind of religion to me at the time. Especially around that fire passing the bottle back and forth.

Derrida makes us rethink every opposition we articulate(past colliding with present) in order to uncover the way in which each term already is complicated or divided within itself, even before we can oppose it to something else. — Joshs

I can relate to this thought especially. I had a go with Wittgenstein once and that led me to see how messy and tortured meaning is in the claws of philosophers. They rip words out of context. They pin down the butterfly at the cost of its life.

Heidegger was the first philosopher to put 'is' into question, the way we use 'is' between a subject and predicate to build a description of the world without asking what is presupposed by doing this. — Joshs

I relate here, too. At the moment, I'm tempting to aim at the gap between theory and life. The world is 'really' X usually has little to do with how live is lived away from such statements. Someone around here used the word 'theology.' That gets the feel right. Lots of philosophy is a kind of theology of Truth, it seems to me. 'Theology' captures its artificiality.

They also assume that God or Truth is a frozen already-finished entity. All they have to do is snap the right word-numbers together. But for Hegel the meanings of the words evolve as we do philosophy. Even more radical, we create God (or self-conscious Reality) as we do philosophy. Or God creates himself through us as we try to figure out the truth about God/Reality. God has to misunderstand himself as a fixed object. God has to misunderstand language as a sort of math. Such creative errors are the stairway to reality becoming fully conscious of itself. — ff0

I've had this kind of thought myself. It occurred to me at some point that my mind was bigger than anything it could contemplate. All the things I wanted to be and/or God were 'inside' this mind-self that wanted to be or know the holy or the sacred or the infinite. So I was chasing something smaller than the chase. Therefore only the chase itself could be God. 'I' was 'God.'

I got very high on this thought, because it put me above everything. It put me above every mere idea. It was the answer. I had untied the knot. I was myself what I was chasing --the last place I'd think to check. Indeed, 'it' was in the last place I looked, just like dad said it would me, the smartass.

But the high wears off, more or less, and it becomes clear why 'I' was the last place I looked. Because I am just some guy who woke up here. And I won't be here long. And I can't control (or only somewhat) how comfortable my stay will be. I am left 'beyond' ideology in a certain sense, but at all beyond the drama and trauma of life. And this same big thought also closes off for me the beliefs that others enjoy. I don't know if I'd trade it, complain as I might. The 'negative' path (left hand path?) leads to a kind of self-posession, it seems. Yet it's also beautiful to passionately believe, to find something worth worshipping. Dangerous, sure. But I feel a little old in my 'self-possesion.' I may have stumbled into this position a little early, chronologically speaking.

New experience must carry forward the past in order to be recognized at all. This is the metaphysical gesture(repetition of the past as idealization). At the same time, repeating experience exposes it necessarily to contamination by new context. This is the empirical gesture. So Derrida calls this binary structuration of all experience as simultaneously formal and empirical, simultaneously an inside and an outside, the quasi-transcendental. — Joshs

That rings true. Out of curiosity, does he ever say it as well as you just did? (This reminds me of James' pragmatism, by the way. The past collides with the present.)

The pursuit of wisdom also involves guarding against rhetoric/hypnotism (hence the "therapeutic" aspect). — gurugeorge

Good point. For me the word 'shrewd' comes to mind. I feel shrewd for not being seduced by this or that formulation of formulaic wisdom. But I do sometimes envy the formulaic. They enjoy the sense of knowing it all. I only get what might be called the narcissistic pleasure of understanding myself as less seduced. I don't get to be the prophet. I am boring common sense, slightly purified.

Another way of saying this is that science doesn't try to answer questions that don't make sense, or aren't falsifiable. What makes any answer to any question that isn't falsifiable better than any other answer that isn't falsifiable? — Harry Hindu

I'm a student of science (engineering path), and I must say that I don't see how science can tell me who I should be. On the other hand, the philosophers don't necessarily convince me either. I chose science because I've never been able to shake the sense that philosophy was basically opinion-mongering.

Nevertheless, the way good friends talk about 'life' around a campfire as they share a bottle bourbon seems 'deeper' than science to me. They talk about the total situation of life. Love, career, death, religion, art, etc. And they do it in a shared language that as far as I know has never been formulated or processed by philosophy or science. I think the wise-man fantasy involves getting behind life and language with a formula that sums the total situation up once and for all. In my experience the most believable philosophers are those who point at the gap between systems and what they'd like to conquer --being alive as a particular human in all of its complexity. (Unfortunately, even some of these 'existential' philosophers tend to impose some lingo and get themselves talked about formulaically. )

The 'problem' is a focus on the public and objective that leaves our personal, mortal situation more or less unthought. — ff0

Right. Religion at least tackles the stuff we care about most, but it doesn't necessarily convince. So for me, I suppose, 'philosophy' is a kind of bourbon-around-the-fire conversation about life for those without religion --including the religion of being scientific with a kind of ideological purity. There's a spirit of not-knowing, I'd say. But I must confess that this skeptical position (the thought that religion and science aren't enough) is also a form of belief. It too has its stubbornness and commitment --to the 'obvious' perhaps.

You then think about the mistake: not saving your work. You ponder it. You never let it escape your mind. You feel guilt and shame (to some degree). Why? Because it interrupted the development of the identity of the hard-working student. — Abdul

This 'interruption of identity' approach sounds pretty convincing to me. If we ignore physical injuries and just look at emotional/intellectual trauma, I think threats to identity describes the field pretty well. It's as if we are pressing forward into the future with a story of ourselves. We're the good guy, the protagonist.

When something comes crashing in on this story, we are tempted to stop believing it (living-writing it) and start again. We seem to have to 'explain' the disaster to ourselves so that the story can go on --so that we don't have to start from the beginning. I think we end up enriching and complicating the story this way. I'm relatively young, and yet I'm already haunted by lots of disasters. It doesn't keep me from living, but these disasters will pop into my mind out of nowhere. I silently curse my cluelessness or lack of caution in retrospect.

What secret sources? Let me in on the secret. — Michael Ossipoff

I can't speak for ff0, but I think 'secret sources' is a pretty good phrase for what religious people imply that they have access to. It's not just theism. It's ghosts, horoscopes, new age energies, all kinds of things. It's the stuff that's invisible to ordinary experience and to science. Some of this stuff sounds so good that I'd like for it to be true. But so far my experience doesn't validate any of this stuff. At best, certain outlandish statements turn out to be (for me) metaphorically true.

It's possible that I close myself off to certain experiences, I guess. But this being-closed-off is the way I find myself. We don't choose our beliefs, it seems to me. Or we don't choose our big picture beliefs. I would have to have vivid conversations with the dead or with a godlike entity to really believe that the world is radically different than I think it is, for instance. I don't think a mere sequence of words could accomplish that.

Most people do not pick some "ism" to wear and defend. We are the strange ones. We are the word-mongering intellectually vain theological poets. — ff0

I can relate to this. I'm a science student. But studying science doesn't answer the big questions. It doesn't do what the religion I once tried to follow tried to do. So I've picked up various philosophy books. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that philosophers seem better at tearing things down than building them up, at least to me. Some of their positive beliefs are enviable. I sometimes wish I could believe them. But I can't. For me these positive beliefs seem (for lack of a better word) like rationalizations.

On the other hand, my science studies seem ultimately to boil down to moving stuff around, calculating where it must have been, where it will be, etc. I like it for being relatively trustworthy and definite, but I can't muster a religious feeling toward this kind of pragmatic knowledge.

Many people seem to be very concerned about the ontological status of things which we ordinarily think of as 'mental'. I sometimes wonder whether that is because it is (perhaps even unconsciously?) felt that their ontological status has some implications for religious belief, and most especially belief in an afterlife. — Janus

I think you've nailed it. If I had to pick one issue as an indicator of others, I'd go with afterlife.

If the mind needs the brain and the brain dies, then the mind dies. So the believers in afterlife seem to need something that can float away from the brain and remain intact.

It occurs to me that more rigid metaphysical beliefs might also need an independence of mind from the brain. After all, the brain is a fragile piece of gear. It's also spongey. It's counter-intuitive that this spongey, organic, fragile piece of gear is going to make for non-spongey surgically-exact symbols that somehow get reality right. And this whole intuitive notion of getting reality right may itself be problematic as we push it beyond the everyday sense of factuality.

The protagonist of that story is its essential, central, primary component. ...because a possibility-story is a life-experience possibility-story only because it has a protagonist. — Michael Ossipoff

Fascinating. It does occur to me that we exist largely as possibility. We are haunted, haunted, haunted by the things we could do, should have done, no longer can do, might become able to do. What is fully there seems to be only a small part of what is humanly there.

We can answer local why-questions in terms of these relationships. But the system as a whole must remain a brute fact. There is no object outside of the system to put the system into a necessary relation with. — ff0

I've had this thought, too, in my own words. But I've never been able to get my friends or even my girlfriend to understand what the hell I'm talking about.

Everyone seeing this thread will be dead in 90 years or less. Some of us much less than that. I'll be lucky to get 30 more years, and would not relish getting any more than that. All I have made, thought, and built; all those I love, or know will be swept away and turned to dust.
What possible 'grand meaning' can such an ephemeral thing have? — charleton

I think you've put your finger on the problem here. We build our sandcastles between the tides. We can understand goals that pay off in 5 years or even 20 years (depending on our age). This future-orientedness is 'mature' and 'civilized.' But extend it a little too much and it threatens us with a vision of terrible futility.

For many children are probably the 'meaning' of life. They carry the torch forward. Progress accumulates that way. There is also social progress. Our deeds reverberate for generations perhaps. Politics and art are what I have in mind. But if the species will eventually go extinct (which seems likely enough as we look as far as possible into the future), these secondary projects also begin to look futile. We don't seem to be able to escape the general death and futility of all things.

So then we shift toward the intensity of the moment and toward dying well, I think. Some of my favorite rock songs treat this theme of personal annihilation, and it comes off ecstatic, beautiful. War isn't pretty, but I think it too has offered men a way to charge at death in a maximum intensification of the moment. Then of course there's just our usual tendency to become engrossed in the situation at hand and forget mortality and futility. So futility or meaninglessness is something like an effect that comes and goes with a certain kind of thinking. We speak of 'meaninglessness' from a certain mood. Is it the truth about life? Yes and no. We speak of the eternity in the moment in other moods.

Derrida's works are very difficult to read. — Joshs

Ain't that the truth! Is it not a criticism of metaphysics? Something like an argument for the impossibility of ye old metaphysical dream? And yet one seemingly has to be steeped in the same culture that is being undermined to appreciate it?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this not justified in terms of metaphysics lurking everywhere? So we have to be steeped in metaphysics in order to avoid or transcend metaphysics?

Instead of looking for some system (or accepting some system) an existentialist sees the world afresh as a free being who has the first hand experience of finding himself in various situations. — anonymous66

I like this. He finds himself in hot water. He (really I) didn't ask for this adventure. No system seems to do this hot water justice. The systems seem to him like wishful thinking. Or to ignore the complexity of the situation. Or to ignore that the situation is his situation. The system is maybe great for humanity. It moves inexorably toward moral progress and increased scientific and maybe even metaphysical knowledge. To the degree that the individual can participate in this and enjoy it, hooray! To the degree that it neglects the specificity of his situation, boooooo.