Perhaps he didn't think he had the character to be the "heroic" ascetic sage? — schopenhauer1

I still like Schop, but I can't unsee the performative contradiction. I'm guessing part of him knew well enough that he was a fame-thirsty poet looking for applause, looking for a personal survival of death in the usual literary way. I don't judge him for this. I only give him hell for incomplete analysis. But we all die too soon, and he was more honest than most.

As far as antinatalism and pessimism, I see it more in regards to "Do you see what I see?!". — schopenhauer1

In my opinion, framing the perception of the evils of life in terms of an impossible activism obscures the true goal, which is commiseration, communal gallowshumor. Personally I'd 'advertise' it (when looking for others to talk with) in terms of the dark side of life, or the ugly side that people largely ignore.

Freud comes to mind. From a letter:

“I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.”

I think Freud is trying to be funny and sincere at the same time, joking about the shit sandwich of life, while being personally 'saved' more than most by his powerful curiosity and sense of mission. As Nietzsche points out, Schopenhauer was probably happy in this way too.

It's fucking fun to tell the nasty truth.

To make this more concrete and personal, just think of a person trying to analyze their own motives. For instance, you might ask what role antinatalism plays in your life. Does it give you a heroic identity as an activist for the Good ? Or it more like playing the hero of consciousness ? More about seeing the world truly than changing it ?

In my own case, I'm comfortable with the seeing version of the heroic. The world is a big ugly beautiful god, and I don't pretend to be able to put a dent in it. To me it matters whether or not a movement has a chance of success. Evangelizing is also (for me) an embarrassing position, because it asks something of others. It needs others.

Shifting to Schopenhauer, his speech on the futility of suicide is also maybe a handy rationalization, a way to dodge a performative contradiction of his not escaping from the supposed evil of existence. Like the guy with the glass to his throat in that Black Mirror episode, Schopenhauer became a pop star, an influencer, truly famous for a little while, a sage for the mighty Wagner. He talked about the shittiness of life, but clung to his property and his prostitutes, kept a gun for those who might rob him, forgetting to see through the illusion of personality. He was a genius but also (like every genius?) an actor, a phony, a personality product.

I associate Nietzsche with the kind of personality who is well aware of this theatre of the self --who is never self-seduced for more than an ecstatic holiday.

I can totally relate to your 'layer' approach. I'm trained in math, and group theory (for instance) completely ignores everything about a group but its groupness, so that its results apply to every group. The real number system has various constructions, but they all satisfy a nice set of axioms, so it suffices for almost all purposes to leave the construction undefined.

I also have some training/experience in computer science, and abstraction dominates the field.

Perhaps what you are saying is roughly that metaphors are interfaces 'protecting' us from too much complexity. That sounds like part of the truth, a big part.

knowledge of things in themselves — wonderer1

I prefer the notion of horizon or background to that of things-in-themselves, but it's not that important in this context. The idea is that we can zoom in on reality, that we have a sense of greater detail waiting for us in every direction, if making the effort becomes worthwhile. The lifeworld (the encompassing world in which and for which we make models) has 'depth' but (for me) no ultimate Reality 'behind' it.

Yes. I meant politics in the broadest sense. The application of power. I'm simply making the point that the choice of theory as to how accessible 'the truth' is, immediately affects one's power in terms of access to it. I might benefit greatly from a theory which holds truths to be mostly psychological. A scientist gains power by holding truths to be accessible only through the instruments she has access to. A well-read philosopher likewise will profit by an epistemology which places emphasis on the history of ideas. — Isaac

I completely agree. My pet generalization is the triangle inequality. One person claims authority over another in terms of being closer to a sacred object (the laboratory, the guru, the celebrity, empirical science, taste, ...)

I'd associate this insight with various infamous masters of suspicion, but it goes back at least to the sophists. Thrasymachus comes to mind. I like Szasz well enough to get myself cancelled (without of course taking him as a final world.) Institutions, by their nature, can only pretend to assimilate critical thinking (it exists always within a golden cage, a conspicuous mascot.)

It's a conceptually simple realization, but it cost something emotionally. One wakes up to the world as largely a great stage of fools and pretenders. One is also endlessly suspicious of oneself, generating the Hamlet type ( I think Nietzsche is a pretty good example of a self-eating master of suspicion.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o428ScHkBFk

Seems to relate to the OP, and might be worth talking about.

mean, how is Nietzsche, when simplified to its actual ideas different from something like "positive psychology" or "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs", specifically "Self-Actualization"? — schopenhauer1

To me it seems you are living with a cartoonish reduction of Nietzsche. No offense intended. I grant that Nietzsche contains that cartoon among so much other stuff. But it's like collapsing Shakespeare to Polonius.

I understand if you don't want to read all this. But I dug up some Nietzsche I found illuminating. He's digging into the pose of the philosopher, into his own pose, which forces a change in that pose. Nietzsche (and critical minds in general) are clowns with their sleeves on fire, trying to put out the fire and only spreading it. Or they are haunted by sarcastic imps, calling them out for the phoniness, for not knowing what they really mean by their fine phrases, etc. This self-torture is also onanism.

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves—how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Our treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing—to bring something "home to the hive!"

As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear.
...
"What is the meaning of a philosopher paying homage to ascetic ideals?" We get now, at any rate, a first hint; he wishes to escape from a torture.

7.

Let us beware of making dismal faces at the word "torture"—there is certainly in this case enough to deduct, enough to discount—there is even something to laugh at. For we must certainly not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who in practice treated sexuality as a[Pg 134] personal enemy (including its tool, woman, that "instrumentum diaboli"), needed enemies to keep him in a good humour; that he loved grim, bitter, blackish-green words; that he raged for the sake of raging, out of passion; that he would have grown ill, would have become a pessimist (for he was not a pessimist, however much he wished to be), without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the whole "will for existence" "keeping on." Without them Schopenhauer would not have "kept on," that is a safe wager; he would have run away: but his enemies held him fast, his enemies always enticed him back again to existence, his wrath was just as theirs' was to the ancient Cynics, his balm, his recreation, his recompense, his remedium against disgust, his happiness. So much with regard to what is most personal in the case of Schopenhauer; on the other hand, there is still much which is typical in him—and only now we come back to our problem. It is an accepted and indisputable fact, so long as there are philosophers in the world and wherever philosophers have existed (from India to England, to take the opposite poles of philosophic ability), that there exists a real irritation and rancour on the part of philosophers towards sensuality. Schopenhauer is merely the most eloquent, and if one has the ear for it, also the most fascinating and enchanting outburst. There similarly exists a real philosophic bias and affection for the whole ascetic ideal; there should be no illusions on this score. Both these feelings, as has been said, belong to the type; if a philosopher[Pg 135] lacks both of them, then he is—you may be certain of it—never anything but a "pseudo." What does this mean? For this state of affairs must first be, interpreted: in itself it stands there stupid, to all eternity, like any "Thing-in-itself." Every animal, including la bête philosophe, strives instinctively after an optimum of favourable conditions, under which he can let his whole strength have play, and achieves his maximum consciousness of power; with equal instinctiveness, and with a fine perceptive flair which is superior to any reason, every animal shudders mortally at every kind of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his way to that optimum (it is not his way to happiness of which I am talking, but his way to power, to action, the most powerful action, and in point of fact in many cases his way to unhappiness). Similarly, the philosopher shudders mortally at marriage, together with all that could persuade him to it—marriage as a fatal hindrance on the way to the optimum. Up to the present what great philosophers have been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule; as for that exception of a Socrates—the malicious Socrates married himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very rule. Every philosopher would say, as Buddha said, when the birth of a son was announced to him: "Râhoula has been born to me, a fetter has been forged for me" (Râhoula means here[Pg 136] "a little demon"); there must come an hour of reflection to every "free spirit" (granted that he has had previously an hour of thoughtlessness), just as one came once to the same Buddha: "Narrowly cramped," he reflected, "is life in the house; it is a place of uncleanness; freedom is found in leaving the house." Because he thought like this, he left the house. So many bridges to independence are shown in the ascetic idea], that the philosopher cannot refrain from exultation and clapping of hands when he hears the history of all those resolute ones, who on one day uttered a nay to all servitude and went into some desert; even granting that they were only strong asses, and the absolute opposite of strong minds. What, then, does the ascetic ideal mean in a philosopher? This is my answer—it will have been guessed long ago: when he sees this ideal the philosopher smiles because he sees therein an optimum of the conditions of the highest and boldest intellectuality; he does not thereby deny "existence," he rather affirms thereby his existence and only his existence, and this perhaps to the point of not being far off the blasphemous wish, pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam!

8.

These philosophers, you see, are by no means uncorrupted witnesses and judges of the value of the ascetic ideal. They think of themselves —what is the "saint" to them? They think of that which to them personally is most indispensable; of[Pg 137] freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise: freedom from business, duties, cares; of clear head; of the dance, spring, and flight of thoughts; of good air—rare, clear, free, dry, as is the air on the heights, in which every animal creature becomes more intellectual and gains wings; they think of peace in every cellar; all the hounds neatly chained; no baying of enmity and uncouth rancour; no remorse of wounded ambition; quiet and submissive internal organs, busy as mills, but unnoticed; the heart alien, transcendent, future, posthumous—to summarise, they mean by the ascetic ideal the joyous asceticism of a deified and newly fledged animal, sweeping over life rather than resting. We know what are the three great catch-words of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity; and now just look closely at the life of all the great fruitful inventive spirits—you will always find again and again these three qualities up to a certain extent. Not for a minute, as is self-evident, as though, perchance, they were part of their virtues—what has this type of man to do with virtues?—but as the most essential and natural conditions of their best existence, their finest fruitfulness. In this connection it is quite possible that their predominant intellectualism had first to curb an unruly and irritable pride, or an insolent sensualism, or that it had all its work cut out to maintain its wish for the "desert" against perhaps an inclination to luxury and dilettantism, or similarly against an extravagant liberality of heart and hand. But their intellect did effect all this, simply because it was the dominant instinct, which carried through its orders in the case[Pg 138] of all the other instincts. It effects it still; if it ceased to do so, it would simply not be dominant. But there is not one iota of "virtue" in all this. Further, the desert, of which I just spoke, in which the strong, independent, and well-equipped spirits retreat into their hermitage—oh, how different is it from the cultured classes' dream of a desert! In certain cases, in fact, the cultured classes themselves are the desert. And it is certain that all the actors of the intellect would not endure this desert for a minute. It is nothing like romantic and Syrian enough for them, nothing like enough of a stage desert! Here as well there are plenty of asses, but at this point the resemblance ceases. But a desert nowadays is something like this—perhaps a deliberate obscurity; a getting-out-of the way of one's self; a fear of noise, admiration, papers, influence; a little office, a daily task, something that hides rather than brings to light; sometimes associating with harmless, cheerful beasts and fowls, the sight of which refreshes; a mountain for company, but not a dead one, one with eyes (that is, with lakes); in certain cases even a room in a crowded hotel where one can reckon on not being recognised, and on being able to talk with impunity to every one: here is the desert—oh, it is lonely enough, believe me! I grant that when Heracleitus retreated to the courts and cloisters of the colossal temple of Artemis, that "wilderness" was worthier; why do we lack such temples? (perchance we do not lack them: I just think of my splendid study in the Piazza di San Marco, in spring, of course, and in the morning, between ten and twelve). But that which Heracleitus[Pg 139] shunned is still just what we too avoid nowadays: the noise and democratic babble of the Ephesians, their politics, their news from the "empire" (I mean, of course, Persia), their market-trade in "the things of to-day "—for there is one thing from which we philosophers especially need a rest—from the things of "to-day." We honour the silent, the cold, the noble, the far, the past, everything, in fact, at the sight of which the soul is not bound to brace itself up and defend itself—something with which one can speak without speaking aloud. Just listen now to the tone a spirit has when it speaks; every spirit has its own tone and loves its own tone. That thing yonder, for instance, is bound to be an agitator, that is, a hollow head, a hollow mug: whatever may go into him, everything comes back from him dull and thick, heavy with the echo of the great void. That spirit yonder nearly always speaks hoarse: has he, perchance, thought himself hoarse? It may be so—ask the physiologists—but he who thinks in words, thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it shows that he does not think of objects or think objectively, but only of his relations with objects—that, in point of fact, he only thinks of himself and his audience). This third one speaks aggressively, he comes too near our body, his breath blows on us—we shut our mouth involuntarily, although he speaks to us through a book: the tone of his style supplies the reason—he has no time, he has small faith in himself, he finds expression now or never. But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited, A philosopher is recognised by the[Pg 140] fact that he shuns three brilliant and noisy things—fame, princes, and women: which is not to say that they do not come to him. He shuns every glaring light: therefore he shuns his time and its "daylight." Therein he is as a shadow; the deeper sinks the sun, the greater grows the shadow. As for his humility, he endures, as he endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity: further, he is afraid of the shock of lightning, he shudders at the insecurity of a tree which is too isolated and too exposed, on which every storm vents its temper, every temper its storm. His "maternal" instinct, his secret love for that which grows in him, guides him into states where he is relieved from the necessity of taking care of himself, in the same way in which the "mother" instinct in woman has thoroughly maintained up to the present woman's dependent position. After all, they demand little enough, do these philosophers, their favourite motto is, "He who possesses is possessed." All this is not, as I must say again and again, to be attributed to a virtue, to a meritorious wish for moderation and simplicity; but because their supreme lord so demands of them, demands wisely and inexorably; their lord who is eager only for one thing, for which alone he musters, and for which alone he hoards everything—time, strength, love, interest. This kind of man likes not to be disturbed by enmity, he likes not to be disturbed by friendship, it is a type which forgets or despises easily. It strikes him as bad form to play the martyr, "to suffer for truth"—he leaves all that to the ambitious and to the stage-heroes of the intellect, and to all those, in fact, who have time[Pg 141] enough for such luxuries (they themselves, the philosophers, have something to do for truth). They make a sparing use of big words; they are said to be adverse to the word "truth" itself: it has a "high falutin'" ring.

Finally, as far as the chastity of philosophers is concerned, the fruitfulness of this type of mind is manifestly in another sphere than that of children; perchance in some other sphere, too, they have the survival of their name, their little immortality (philosophers in ancient India would express themselves with still greater boldness: "Of what use is posterity to him whose soul is the world?"). In this attitude there is not a trace of chastity, by reason of any ascetic scruple or hatred of the flesh, any more than it is chastity for an athlete or a jockey to abstain from women; it is rather the will of the dominant instinct, at any rate, during the period of their advanced philosophic pregnancy. Every artist knows the harm done by sexual intercourse on occasions of great mental strain and preparation; as far as the strongest artists and those with the surest instincts are concerned, this is not necessarily a case of experience—hard experience—but it is simply their "maternal" instinct which, in order to benefit the growing work, disposes recklessly (beyond all its normal stocks and supplies) of the vigour of its animal life; the greater power then absorbs the lesser. Let us now apply this interpretation to gauge correctly the case of Schopenhauer, which we have already mentioned: in his case, the sight of the beautiful acted manifestly like a resolving irritant on the chief power of his nature (the power of contemplation and of intense[Pg 142] penetration); so that this strength exploded and became suddenly master of his consciousness. But this by no means excludes the possibility of that particular sweetness and fulness, which is peculiar to the æsthetic state, springing directly from the ingredient of sensuality (just as that "idealism" which is peculiar to girls at puberty originates in the same source)—it may be, consequently, that sensuality is not removed by the approach of the æsthetic state, as Schopenhauer believed, but merely becomes transfigured, and ceases to enter into the consciousness as sexual excitement. (I shall return once again to this point in connection with the more delicate problems of the physiology of the æsthetic, a subject which up to the present has been singularly untouched and unelucidated.)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52319/52319-h/52319-h.htm

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While I often find 'the map' to be a handy metaphor, that is all it is. Certainly language plays a huge role in how our 'maps' evolve. — wonderer1

:up:

There's also the issue of metaphor itself. What exactly is a metaphor ? If human cognition is fundamentally metaphorical, it's an important question. Roughly I relate it to analogy. I sometimes try to open my front door (where I live) by pushing a button on my car keys. The mind exploits skill in one domain in a new domain. Something like that.

I don't think there is any real possibility of cleanly disentangling our linguistic faculties from our 'more evolutionarily basic' non-linguistic faculties. — wonderer1

:up:

This sounds right. I like Lakoff's work on metaphor and embodied cognition. Our minds seem very 'incarnate.'

Grice only comments that our use of language may involve quite a bit of deeming. — Srap Tasmaner

That sounds right. I think another way to say this is: substance and subject are hopelessly entangled. Institution, historical semantic sediment. The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. For us, anyway, as timebinding and timebound animals, 'thrown' into an ethnocentrism that we wrestle with but never leave behind. We 'are' our history in the mode of no longer being it. The lust for naked reality, hiding under the panties of cultural inheritance and everything human, is maybe related to the fantasy of waking up from the nightmare of history and the achievement of divine selfcreation and the elimination of all passivity. Or, more cynically-reductively, a token that gives authority and access to mates.

even if our best theory says that language does not map onto the world, the idea that it does is part of our practice. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

That's related to what I try to gesture at with 'lifeworld.' The 'given' is our everyday cultureworld. Philosophers pretend they can peel back the symbolic layer, perhaps taking the scientific image as nude reality (paradoxical in my view.)

We live with promises and insinuations much as with puppies and asteroids and uncomputable numbers. We move through this world with a skill (linguistic) that surpasses in complexity any of our attempts to sketch its nature.

All of those attempts depend of course on the 'blind' or tacit skill they hope to explicate. I'm reminded more generally here of Socratic ignorance. Sincerely trying to make sense of our situation is valuable at least for the recognition of our ignorance and the difficult of the problem --a cure for humorless dogmatism. To me it's like ending up with a toolkit of theories that one knows are always imperfect but possibly helpful.

Rand strikes me as someone humorlessly identified with her persona. Her work is not going to teach the reader to see through her pose.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, remains elusive, even now. His books discuss masks, tease the reader like a Nabokov novel to look for secret codes. I think he could have been a cult leader like Rand (had the skill) but wasn't interested in such a sorry game and hanging out with people who were weak or undeveloped enough to take him for a prophet. Nietzsche as possibility rather than substance is a liberating thinker, making one more rather than less independent.

Even if perfection is elusive, we can always strive to do our best and leave the rest to the lap of the future. The voyage can be prepossessing without reaching a final destination. — Existential Hope

:up:

Without Plato, without the people condemning Heraclitean flux, we wouldn’t have any of the good stuff culture gives us now. — Albero

I thought Nietzsche was correct to see himself as descended from the ascetics that he criticized. His criticism is itself more of the same sublimated vivisection at a higher level of intensity and complexity.

Interesting that Marx liked to think of the communist utopia in terms of everyone being both a workman and an intellectual. Fish in the afternoon, literary criticism in the evening, etc. No one is left out of the 'priesthood.'

I can't say that I live in hope for that kind of thing though. I reluctantly accept that utopia will not and even cannot arrive. I wouldn't preach this, try to convince others.

So it's gallowshumor and muted post horns and deep conversations with those attuned to frequencies that I can't help preferring. I still believe in the good, but for me it's very local. I'm kind to strangers that I meet in my little world. I try to tolerate otherness. My way is not the only way, maybe not the best way. That kind of thing.

Life is a perpetual triumph over the grave. — Existential Hope

:up:

Another beautiful aphorism !

I take from Hegel the idea of philosophy as a graveleaping Conversation that accumulates the treasure of experience. You and I largely are that Conversation. It is our substance, that which is most human in us. Here and now we continue to it, trying to compress it, extend its mastery, highlight its relevance. Our work is stored in (potentially anyway) in tribal memory, within this Conversation as part of what gets passed on. In other words, 'theology itself is God' --- or philosophy is the process of divine self-recognition. Humans 'perform' the divine, progressively liberating and empowering themselves through a self-consciously critical and ever-unfinished discussion.

Good points and themes !

In the OP it says “why don’t animals seem to condemn the world of becoming”, well maybe in a Nietzschean fashion, those who were best suited for living didn’t think about their own death and impermanence. — Albero

My own take on this, which I got from others, is that humans tend to find (or rather lose?) their identity in the group. If I am a good Roman soldier, I am one with Rome. My body may die, but my essence, Rome, is immortal. In 1984, Orwell gives The Inner Party a self-conscious version of this. We all start 'immersed' in various imposed memberships, and we never completely escape out having been thrown into an identity we did not choose. But we can work toward some ideal autonomy and sense of having chosen our essence.

To me perhaps the key change in human spirituality is the moment when individuals had to start making their own religion (which we might call ideology or personality). Campbell's last volume of The Masks of God focuses on this chaotic era of individual solutions. Every man is his own king and pope in Vico's chaotic age. I can only truly conform by surprising everyone and (slightly) rewriting the rules, this includes revolutionary philosophers like Nietzsche, who becomes part of an institution that lives like a parasite on its rebels. To be fair, the traditional roles are still on the self, but it sometimes looks like nostalgia when people take them up. Polarized US politics are an especially common and boring way to lose/find identity too.

I've also put on the goggles of seeing language as a complex system of grunts and squeaks and barks. I found it illuminating. I think you are right to do justice though to the power of our system, which got us to the moon somehow.

Brandom's inferentialism offered me my most recent insight into language. He makes interpersonal responsibility absolutely central to meaning. There's something down-to-earth about this that gets the animal origin right but also an awareness of an unlimited potential for self-referential consciousness. We can talk about our talk about our talk, which is maybe all the divinity we can hope for, or all divinity ever was.

Perhaps we should think of a big wet continuous blanket of interdependent concepts. Or we can think of the concept system as a restless goo. Popper foregrounds/invents one aspect of science. Kuhn foregrounds\invents another. Brandom's version of Hegel could maybe include both, and more, because Popper and Kuhn are now both themselves part of our inherited conceptual toolkit.

Popper saw that universals were everywhere in our talk. He respected metaphysics. Theoretical frameworks make observations possible in the first place. @Srap Tasmaner talked about watching a chess game above. Good analogy ! A theory brings the state of being in check into 'existence' --into the game of norm-governed responsible symbol trading. Our Lifeworld (largely lived 'inside' culture) gathers complexity as we bind time/experience symbolically.

Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.
...
All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings. — Brandom

This may well be the case, which either amuses me or makes me sad, depending on my mood. — Tom Storm

:up:

It seems that it is inherent in the idea of a trinity that there are unifying characteristics. — Existential Hope

Just for clarity, the number three was accidental. Jesus and Socrates are Jerusalem and Athens (two deep sources of our current culture.) Shakespeare throws in London, and he represents a possibility truly other than Jesus and Socrates.

Slight digression, but I recently read What The Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. The key point in this context is that the wiseman or saint has to be part of the economy. Does he live on alms ? A holy bum ? Is Diogenes a kind of holy man ? But the issue for me is that this cannot be generalized. Not everyone can play this game. Most people have to marry, breed, work, and enjoy the holy man as an otherness, as a symbol or doll. 'The envelope is the letter.' This may work great in traditional societies, but even there a true renunciation of the world cannot be sincere. The monks are essentially subsidized performance artists.

I don't consider this a shameful thing, but I do want a spirituality to grasp its own role without illusion. That's my inheritance from Socrates and Hamlet -- I want to know myself truly. Someone like Joyce understood the artist to 'forge the conscience' of a people, from within the world, explicitly selling the strange form of scripture known as serious literature. Joyce (an updated Shakespeare figure) had a family, got his hands dirty, got his life dirty, but also articulated a transcendence rich enough to mock itself. Ulysses follows its protagonist to the toilet, because that's part of reality, taking a shit while reading a newspaper. What I'm getting at is the fearless embrace of every aspect of reality (nothing human is alien to me) which is also transcendent, wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove (Leopold Bloom, when pressed by abuse to evangelize for a moment, insists that hatred is no life for men and women ---that love is the point of being here --a stupidly simple message which is nevertheless the truth.)

I tend to keep coming back to similar notions of 'semantic finitude' too. — Tom Storm

FWIW, I connect this to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. We are nothingness trying to find a name for itself that will finally stick. To name truth or meaning or reality is also to name ourselves, define our project, who has authority, etc.

Whatever is between us and the truth is a power which can then be wielded politically. — Isaac

:up:
Truth, reality, God's will...

Anyway, I'm sure there's little stomach for political discussion in what's otherwise a nice bit of effete curiosity... — Isaac

Would you agree that the politics involved includes the interpersonal ? Not just forums like this, but friendships, marriages. Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things.

what is it that language does when we attempt to describe reality? — Tom Storm

Perhaps the answer to this question doesn't exist already, as if waiting for us to find it. I'm tempted to speak of a frontier calling for creativity. We can always find new ways to talk about our talking and argue that this or that way is the deepest and truest way ---and then someone else comes along with an equally impressive tale.

What is it to say ? This may get us in Heidegger territory. What is being ? What is meaning ? It's like trying to make darkness visible, but maybe it's just a ghost story. Are humans hilariously ignorant in all of their hubris about fundamental things ? Or are they high on the fumes of not-exactly-questions ? I don't know, but I lean toward some fundamental ignorance and vulnerability which it mostly pays to ignore (or doesn't pay to not ignore) (unless you were a existentialist who sold some books.)

I'm not looking for a defence of realism, I'm more interested in the implications of this matter - do we need a theory of language that explains how any realist claim is possible in order to accept those claims?

If we do not employ a realist account of language (as per postmodern thinkers), what is it we can meaningfully say about this notion of 'reality' we are so fond of describing and seems to be a substitute for god? — Tom Storm

I don't think we need such a theory to accept those claims. If we had such a theory, I could then raise the issue of meaning. Must we have a final and perfect theory of meaning before we accept any claim, for we must know what we mean first, right ? The whole mess is fuzzy together and always will be.

On the reality issue, I think you already said something valuable -- that it tends to function religiously in certain contexts. IMO, examining the meanings of 'real' is great part of the greater examination of meaning. How do these power words function ? We could also talk about the meaning of 'God' or 'truth' or 'reference' -- endlessly. I started a thread about 'semantic finitude' on this topic, as you may recall, because I don't think we can escape the fog, get a perfect grip, only a better one, or at least a new one, so that we don't get bored.

... Austin examines the word ‘real’ and contrasts the ordinary, firmly established meanings of that word as fixed by the everyday ways we use it to the ways it is used by sense-data theorists in their arguments. What Austin recommends is a careful consideration of the ordinary, multifarious meanings of that word in order not to posit, for example, a non-natural quality designed by that word, common to all the things to which that word is attributed (‘real ducks,’ ‘real cream,’ ‘real progress,’ ‘real color,’ ‘real shape,’ and so forth).

https://iep.utm.edu/john-austin/#SH2a

living things have to have grown into the shape they have. — Srap Tasmaner

I like that. I associate that insight with Hegel too, who seemed to think of the entire concept system as an organism. Vico too. Are you a fan of etymology ? I like thinking about how words are born, often as vivid metaphors that cool into a literality that has genuinely drifted from its source.

Just realized there's another way to put this: just as DNA is in some sense instructions for physical growth, I'm using "framework" to mean something like instructions for mental growth, what I was reaching for with the word "learning". — Srap Tasmaner

So as a general strategy for assimilation ? Ice-9, something that inspires a particular crystallization. That sounds good. I'd throw in a strong dose of metaphor myself. I find Lakoff's work persuasive I guess. To me metaphor is a profound concept beneath its familiarity.

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

It's beautiful, really. We can't help trying to find what philosophy is, because it's like finding our truest human nature or something. But fortunately we're inexhaustible in some sense.

Yeah, but it's not only other inmates of the zoo that matter, not by a long shot, especially if it's more like your

fundamental metaphor for reality
— plaque flag

that matters most. — Srap Tasmaner

What I didn't get into was the necessary construction of the self from pieces of other selves. A person who reads philosophy (and literature) (and watches good movies/TV) has more to work with, though too much plurality can be dangerous and maybe paralyzing. As Kojeve might put it, a person who is already into philosophy has already at least chosen the path of the hero of self-consciousness (of the species as much as the little self). This metaphor can be fleshed out in many ways. Am I a hazy slippery profound type or a sharp dry and clear type, contemptuous of anything that doesn't smell like math ? To me it seems like the struggle (anxiety of influence) is to somehow evade easy categorization, which means inventing new categories, enlarging the game for the players that follow. That's part of the charm of the history, seeing how this trick is managed again and again.

I'm also partial to Hegel-and-the-gang's idea that it's really just one thinker leaping from mortal body to mortal body, sometimes splitting into adversaries, but eventually recombining, only to split again. The software runs on the crowd, enough of us always alive to not lose our progress in the game's attempt to understand itself.

What I haven't heard yet from anybody is some sort of full-throated defense of, I don't know, 'decentering' philosophy in philosophical discussion, not taking its self-image seriously, and treating it instead as only a part of Something Bigger, something like the history of ideas, the Great Story of Culture, whatever. — Srap Tasmaner

FWIW, I think that's already implicit in the narrative, which includes Nietzsche and eventually Heidegger, Rorty, and Derrida, pretty much explicitly melting philosophy into poetry, cultural criticism, etc. Even Comte way back thought of philosophy as a merely prescientific stage of human thought. It's what I try to gesture at with Shakespeare as a symbol for 'infinite personality.'

I think of Harold Bloom and Tristram Tzara and James Joyce (to name a few) as part of the same general story as the 'official' philosophers. I'm reminded of Hegel trying to put down Schlegel's notion of Irony in his lectures on fine art -- as if Hegel was afraid of being merely an earnest character in some joker's novel.

You might find this amusing if you haven't already seen it.

“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Ideas 69). A literary work can do this, much as Schlegel’s Lucinde had, by presenting within its scope a range of possible alternate plots or by mimicking the parabasis in which the comic playwright interposed himself within the drama itself or the role of the Italian buffo or clown (Lyceumfragment 42) who disrupts the spectator’s narrative illusion.

In my view, it's better to think of Nietzsche as an experimental skeptic than as an earnest bringer of truth. He had his manic-prophetic moments, which adds to the whole, but I especially value his heroically honest self-vivisection

One of many ways to look at him is as a disciple of Schopenhauer who took that kind of depth and daring and turned it back on itself, digging beneath the pose of his hero, and of course each of his own poses as he tried them one after another. This is Schopenhauer as possibility rather than substance. The true disciple repeats the initial stormy intention in its radicality and not the performance itself. Nietzsche is something like a naked chaos, a playful poisonous and poisoned Hamlet, poisoned by the sword. His ghostly father Shakespeare was poisoned through the ears, as his eerie cousin Socrates was poisoned through the mouth.

I just see Ayn Rand with a mustache, or perhaps Ayn Rand is Nietzsche with lipstick. — schopenhauer1

I think you have a Nietzsche allergy that blinds you to his worth. No doubt he had some quirks. But I just a thinker by their best moments, and Nietzsche overall is a great example of a daring mind wrestling with the death of god and indeed with the uncertain legacy of Schopenhauer -- who lived to be an old man, relishing the attention he was finally getting. ( I have the Wallace bio of S on the way. It looks great.)

I had not thought about Shakespeare as a spiritual leader, and yet, it's bizarre that the interpretation did not come to my mind. — Existential Hope

I got the idea from Harold Bloom and James Joyce. I often think of the trinity of Jesus, Socrates, and Hamlet/Shakespeare. The third contains the first two perhaps.

When the flesh is nourished and sheltered, it becomes a fertile ground for the blossoming of tranquility and spiritual pursuit. But even without this good, the mystifying resilience of consciousness persists. — Existential Hope

Good point. It's impressive to what degree material challenges can be overcome if the mind/spirit is developed and trained to maintain morale and control.

He teleports between roles, inhabiting the souls of countless characters, and in that fluidity, he becomes both everyone and no one — Existential Hope

Along these lines, we can imagine a person who understands everyone, who can always look into a soul and find something familiar there, something he knows from the inside. Nothing human is alien to Shakespeare. Everywhere he goes, he finds pieces of his own harmonized internal chaos. Most of these pieces are dissonant, finite, and therefore engaged, attached, trying to prove something, sure that their enemy is truly other. Shakespeare's other is Shakespeare.

Their mind, wild yet serene, becomes a playground where the echoes of the city intertwine and ascend to sublime heights. — Existential Hope

:up:

Beautiful line ! Entwining echoes gets it just right, and the synthesis is indeed climbing, greater than the sum of its parts.

Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing – like the "redness" of red – and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".

So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings – aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.

Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them. — apokrisis

:up:

There's also the challenge of inventing a fascinating personality, becoming a success in a creative field : the personality as product. Strong poet, original philosopher, revolutionary scientist, etc. Revolutionize the means of production and seduction, to burn always brighter and hotter. To conform is to violate the norm in just the right way.

That is, that we don't naturally deal with 'naked' ideas, but with ideas as they occur within narrative -- that's what our thinking is organized around and pretending to discuss an idea 'in isolation' means you're probably just embedding it in some other narrative without acknowledging that transfer. — Srap Tasmaner

I lean toward us as the narrative (mythological) animal. We can also just look and see that humans mostly talk about ideas in practical contexts -- trying to persuade someone, prove one is educated, make a woman laugh, etc.

What is this house of personality ? I think of mirrors reflected in mirrors or Indra's net. We aspire perhaps to Shakespearean completeness or perhaps instead some thin dry purity or ? Someone may invent a new way to win tomorrow, though it'll probably be a blend of what came before, same old sawdust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net

Because of the clarity of the jewels, they are all reflected in and enter into each other, ad infinitum. Within each jewel, simultaneously, is reflected the whole net.

Language, world, self --- we never achieve full understanding of any of these, so we go on our entire lives in with this partial understanding, — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Thanks ! Yes I get it now. That's what I was also getting at with my talk of the symbolic realm.

Let me throw in a psychoanalytic theme too. Projection keeps the rat on the wheel. One way to see the wise man is as someone who embraces fantasy -- who realizes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and cuts out the middle man. There's the meme of the recluse who lives joyfully in the woods in a simple hut, untempted by the vanities of the city, finding enough entertainment in his own wild and yet serene mind, which has incorporated and sublimated the city already. I think of Shakespeare as a great spiritual figure -- as everyone and no one. Some kind of harmonic stasis is maybe achieved, if the body is healthy and safe enough anyway, because the flesh is always the foundation.

One way (hardly the only way) to look at philosophy historically is as a zoo of intense personalities who react to those who came before and influence those who come after.

Simple exposure to a many opposed personalities, all of them able to make a strong case for their own interpretation of reality, should not IMO be underrated. As others have put it, we are mytholgoical animals, and in philosophy we found a second-order tradition where our orienting myth, which we can't live without, is subject to constant modification -- like Neurath's boat.

The technical issues can be fascinating to me, but I suppose the existential issues remain primary. What is a person's fundamental metaphor for reality? What pose do they take in relation to it ? In other words, what kind of costume does the hero wear and what's the scenery like ? (Dramaturgical ontology?) This would include things like whether philosophy is understood more as mathematics than theatre in the first place.