The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times

Hence the continuing allure of, for instance, fascism and communism, something bloody and radical, either nostalgic or utopian. The modern liberal state is neutral in the sense of taking the relatively free-autonomous-responsible atomized ego as its sacred object. For people like Kojeve, this is the end of history, its goal. If it didn't come with humanity's dangerous technical power, we'd probably celebrate it more.

Instead we see the Jenga towers of Moloch go up all around us, and our dear ol' gametheoretical Locomotive Breath has no way to slow down. If this or that agent reasonably stops to think, is cautious in this way or that, others will swoop in and take over. We won't (we can't) be careful with the environment or A. I. The incentive structure forbids it. Politicians will continue offering the comforting lie to those who don't want to see the ruthless way of the world --which is not the ruthlessness so much of guilty individuals but of the prisoner's-dilemma ('Molochian') structure of the game. Hegel came too early, dwelled on the good, didn't contemplate the threat of tech, but he saw the bloody grinding gears of a Machine that transcended the intentions of ephemeral individuals, and he mocked the impotent sentimental objections to this Process (the creepy side of humanism, but man is, among other things, an apex predator, though we mostly treat animals like meatplants, too lazy to hunt or bored with such easy prey).

In retrospect, we were always on the way to this situation, as a kind of breakaway piece of nature that had a big enough brain to become capable of bringing the whole system down. As far as I can tell, no evolutionary pressures were available during our forging to prepare us for our own therefore doomed triumph -- though we may sneak through the bottleneck and take over for nature, programming ourselves genetically and integrating our flesh with our best technology --posthuman cyborgs. This is the 'good' option, unless you not-so-unreasonably long for the end of our species. It's beautifully disgusting or disgustingly beautiful. I can't remember.

Which reflects back on that age-old dilemma….the body is certainly necessary, but it is not itself sufficient for such subjectivity. What is given to the cultural flesh is useless without that which has the capacity to do something with it, and even if cultural flesh is merely a euphemism for the brain, the knowledge how regarding subjectivity, is still as missing as it ever was. — Mww

Just to be clear, I don't deny the strangeness of subjectivity. We aren't just meat. The world 'depends' in an elusive way on our subjectivity.

At the moment, I like to think of consciousness as the being of the world for an individual subject. I am aware of the world and not of my image of the world. Others who doubt my claims may talk of my perspective. This metaphor is reasonable. We all look on the same world through or with eyes that are in different places. What I think we can't talk about is the world as it is apart from us. We know nothing of such an entity. It's a mere fantasy.

But this does not make the world-for-us a mere dream, for our subjectivity only makes sense if understood as localized in world-encompassed flesh. Hence the radical bone-deep entanglement of subject and object and something like Hegelian direct realism.

This what I meant by "laying claim to words" earlier, you have claimed the word "blueness" and "pain", and now I look stupid by having to deny that I experience color or pain. It is very important that you answer my question directly, no matter how stupid it sounds: why do you believe that you feel pain or that you experience blueness? — goremand

I think Husserl is correct in that we have a sort of categorial intuition. As humans, we live among concepts as much as colors. Certain traditional forms of empiricism simply assume a narrow concept of experience, along with (I claim) an ultimately absurd methodological solipsism.

The point is that claims like 'my tooth hurts' or 'your jacket is green' might be relatively irreducible. 'Experiencing blueness ' is not so absurd in my view. We can see a blue object and conceptually abstract its color. Our intentional focus in then on the blueness as a targeted aspect of the object.

I can’t say I understand, everything you’ve written. But I agree with everything I understand. — Patterner

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The key point is that all entities only make sense in terms of one another, that toothaches and thunderstorms are part of the same semantic 'blanket.' As Brandom stresses, we are creatures who demand and offer reasons, and anything that plays a role in that reason-giving exists, even if there are many modes or styles of existence.

The main argument for direct realism is that indirect realism (dualism) implicitly treats the sense organs and the brain as the creations of the sense organs and the brain. It's only because we are common sense direct realists that we could fret that maybe we are trapped behind some illusion thrown up by the brain that would absurdly be part of that same illusion.

I wouldn't be too sure about the "abandonment" in actual practice . . . . down deep scientists have ideas they hope will be substantiated by experiment or shown to be wrong. Preferably the former. They are, by and large, human and hope to get there first. On the other hand pure curiosity can be a driving force. — jgill

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I take the honor of subjecting oneself to peer review is not so unlike that of the brave soldier that shows up for battle. We don't like our pet theories busted to pieces, but we end up with better theories in the long run if we subject ourselves to criticism. We keep eachother a little less dishonest.

It is this that allows for, as Kant argued, faith, and I also think it allows for all kinds of wonderful metaphysical speculations, which seem to me just fine provided they are not taken too seriously. — Janus

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Sure. We are ludic primates, and I love us for it. Schlegel's notion of irony is beautiful. Fits more in my Dramaturgical Ontology thread, but oh well.

“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. (Some of the more striking examples of such moments of ironic interposition in the works of Schlegel’s literary contemporaries can be found in the comedies of Tieck—where, as Szondi (1986) argues, it is not merely the actor or playwright who “steps out” of his usual role, but in some sense the very role itself.)
...
For Schlegel “every proof is infinitely perfectible” (KA XVIII, 518, #9), and the task of philosophy is not one of searching to find an unconditioned first principle but rather one of engaging in an (essentially coherentist) process of infinite progression and approximation.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/#RomTur

For me the importance of the in-itself and the noumenal consists in its sustaining the realization that existence is, no matter how familiar it may seem, ultimately ineluctably mysterious. — Janus

We agree on the ineradicable mystery of the world. I love this quote:

The fact that the philosopher claims to speak in the very name of the naïve evidence of the world, that he refrains from adding any­ thing to it, that he limits himself to drawing out all its conse­quences, does not excuse him; on the contrary he dispossesses [humanity] only the more completely, inviting it to think of itself as an enigma.

This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it— first in the sense that we must match this vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn. But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with “word-meanings,” it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression. If the philosopher questions, and hence feigns ignorance of the world and of the vision of the world which are operative and take form contin­ually within him, he does so precisely in order to make them speak, because he believes in them and expects from them all his future science. The questioning here is not a beginning of nega­tion, a perhaps put in the place of being. It is for philosophy the only way to conform itself with the vision we have in fact, to correspond with what, in that vision, provides for thought, with the paradoxes of which that vision is made, the only way to adjust itself to those figured enigmas, the thing and the world, whose massive being and truth teem with incompossible details. — The Visible and the Invisible

I also agree that when we try to imagine the existence of the world prior to humans we project our (necessarily) anthropomorphic cognitions. — Janus

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On other hand I think it is implausible in the extreme to think that the prehuman world did not exist or that its existence was "human-shaped", even though we are unable to think its existence in prehuman terms (obviously). — Janus

I can relate. It's like a glitch. I still think that as 'serious' ontologists whose discourse refuses to cut corners for practical or political reasons (dazzled by the glory of technology perhaps) --- and not as physicists or geologists who accept the fictional independence of their models from their modelling --- the best thing to do is confess that we can't say anything sensible here, that we can't give a meaning to our signs.

I admit though that the Meillassoux's 'ancestral realm' is tricky, and I can understand someone taking another side on this issue.

For others who didn't see this link yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux

We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it. — Janus

I prefer to think about the finitude of our knowledge in terms of the 'depth' of the lifeworld. Everything is 'horizonal.' (Horizon, background, the sense of more around the corner or over the hill.) Even the moment has retension and protension. Time itself is smeared. Even the everyday spatial object 'transcends' our always-finite viewing of it. We are never finished seeing it. There is always another perspective. Then physics can endlessly clarify the details of how a chair exists, etc. But all along the objects of the lifeworld are real. They are just not 'finally' given. It's a 'flat' or singlelayer ontology but it's foggy with depth. So we have the proper sense in it of our fallibility -of a world that is 'infinite' in relation to us as individuals.

We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it. — Janus

We may differ a bit on this issue. To me the in-itself is something like the 'reflection' of a worldless-subject. It's a limiting concept like the worldless subject that, for my money, isn't worth the trouble.

But there is an encompassing world that is 'other' than us in an important if not absolute sense.

I'm ambivalent about science too, though, if it morphs into a scientism that claims that everything about animals and humans can be empirically determined. — Janus

Just for clarity, I love science and am trying to carefully aim only at scientism. I'd call problematic conceptions of empiricism an aspect of scientism. In an important sense, Husserl is an exemplar of genuine empiricism. To be sure, the nature or essence of experience is contested. Which means that the essence of science (really identical, in my view, with rationality) is contested.

Perhaps I'm just trying to point out a complacency that accepts dazzling tech as a substitute for a coherent ontology. And I don't even want to judge it from a place of resentful self-righteousness. I want to sketch it as an important part of the situation.

But then there is a basic observational aspect of science which is just an amplification of our ordinary observations of the world. For example, "It is raining", "water flows downhill" and countless other everyday observations which can be definitively corroborated or falsified. — Janus

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Right, and Husserl would include our basic categorial intuition, extending the given beyond mere sensation (or something like that.) As Popper saw, all scientific theories include universals. They permeate our experience.

We humans reify our own subjective perspective with the noun label "Self". Since the Self exists invisibly & implicitly inside a vehicle of mud matter, we have no cause to worry about its substance or provenance : the Self is simply Me, and always has been. — Gnomon

In my view, the self is primarily and not incidentally flesh. But (to be fair), the timebinding cultural aspect of the self, largely its linguistic aspect, is a graveleaping ghost. Metaphorically speaking, this or that individual body is its temporary host. As a philosopher, I, as mortal self, take up the grand conversation as I inherit it and hopefully push it along, leave a worthy footnote. We seem to operate both cooperatively and adversarially. We cooperate by challenging one another in rationality's second-order ontological tradition. We expect to be corrected. We expect to synthesize various partial truths into a less partial truth, etc.

Morally, the immaterial sensing Self is more important than the animated body, but since the essence is dependent upon the substance, we have no alternative to treating Body & Self as a unique composite entity : matter/life, brain/mind. — Gnomon

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I agree in the sense that Milton said that bookburning was worse than murder. I don't think the human spirit is truly immaterial anymore than our data on the cloud is. But it is so mobile, leaping from server to server, that it's as thin as the air that rattles the leaves on the trees. The philosopher learns how to die by learning how to live more and more in Popper's World 3 or its analogue. Disidentification with the petty self looks to be an honorable flight from death into the only plausible (and only relative) immortality.

I think the self is composite in the sense of having different aspects. As I see it, all reality is one in some important sense. But as practical sense-making beings we need our distinctions, our imaginary atomizations (useful fictions).

I agree. — Janus

Nice. Ever look into Meillassoux ? I disagree with him, but he's fascinating.

In this book, Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls "correlationism", the theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans. In Meillassoux's view, this theory allows philosophy to avoid the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge. He terms this reality independent of human knowledge as the "ancestral" realm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux

Perhaps Meillassoux is correct in France, where the influence of Heidegger is strong. But in my experience our (?) correlationism is not subjective enough for some and not objective enough for others. As I see it, I'm a true empiricist. I know nothing of experience independent of this mortal flesh --of experience without an experiencer. Though I naturally model the world in terms of objects that will survive me, remaining mostly as they are for humans that survive me.

Those "things" of the senses are of a collaborative nature; they exist as affects between what appears to us as the body and what appears to us as its environment, replete with other bodies, animate and inanimate, photons and other phenomena. — Janus

I like to think that the transcendent subject is basically just the human species. No humans means no world in any way that we can talk about without confusion. But any particular human is dispensable. Like data moving from server to serve, timebinding flame from candle to candle. But we can't say that the species-subject simply creates the world, for this would not be a subject and (in my view) we wouldn't know what we were talking about. Hence an irreducible entanglement. The environment that. 'appears to us' is indeed an environment. What the species [ clearly ] is just reality itself. Which is not to say that we ever conquer the depths of reality or obtain perfect clarity. It's just that we always already have at least blurry access to the real.

I also think things are just the way they appear (and can appear, with the augmentations of our senses afforded by equipment like telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes, colliders and so forth). — Janus

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It sounds like I can ride into town for the gunfight with another direct realist, which is great.

I think it follows that there cannot be the kind of strict intersubjective corroboration, which is possible in science, but there can be intersubjective assent to, or dissent from, its findings in the form of 'yes, that's how it seems to me" or 'no, that is not how it seems to me'. — Janus

Excellent point. If you look at Popper on basic statements, you'll find people just agreeing to take certain statements as given. The rubber meets the road where embodied subjects to whom the world is given simply assent that this or that claim needs (for now) no further justification. So it's not just phenomenology. I think in general a rational community always argues from currently uncontroversial statements toward or against others that are controversial.

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

Related point : my suspicion is that science largely shines (for most) by the reflected light of technology that just works. A crude power-worshipping pragmatism is the working attitude of, well, all of us maybe in our typical sub-scientific mode. I'm not trying to pose as above it. I'm ambivalent. But this makes the uselessly pretentiously rational-critical philosopher a fool in the eyes of the world. Bacon said knowledge is power (so [only] power is knowledge.)

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FWIW, I defer to current usage, so that my suggestion that Husserl is a scientist is a metaphor.

Phenomenology does not investigate the nature of the things themselves as they appear to us, but rather attempts to investigate the nature of the appearing itself. — Janus

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True, but as some kind of quasi-Hegelian direct realist, I claim that things just are the way they appear to us. To be sure, we can make mistakes, but this ability of ours to make mistakes need not lead to a dualism that puts the subject behind a veil of incorrigible sensation and conception. (I'm not saying that you are floating dualism, but just defending my direct pluralistic realism that features promises and puppies as equally real and meaningful in the semantic-inferential nexus of interdependent entities ---my warm holist ontological blanket, untorn and continuous. @180 Proof shared this link with me once, and it seems to get thing right : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence .)

The part that resonates for me is:
Mind may no longer be conceived as a self-contained field, substantially differentiated from body (dualism), nor as the primary condition of unilateral subjective mediation of external objects or events (idealism). Thus, all real distinctions (mind and body, God and matter, interiority and exteriority, etc.) are collapsed or flattened into an even consistency or plane, namely immanence itself, that is, immanence without opposition.

I take this in terms of the structuralist insights that entities (including concepts) are semantically interdependent. For instance, watch old cartoons and see how dogs, cats, and mice are all related. I tell you what a cat is in terms of dogs (from which it flees) and mice (which it chases.) We have all the famous dyads too of course. Nothing can be plucked out and keep its meaning.

There's a word for 'embodied subjects' that applies to all sentient organisms, and by which we ourselves are routinely described - that is, 'being'. — Quixodian

I'm not against that word, bu in English it is very close to entity, a dry term. I'd say we already have the word person or humanbeing. My view is anthropocentric, not because I'm cheerleading the species, but simply for quasi-Kantian reasons. I'm stuck in or really as a human being. [ Human being as cultural being is in its way self-transcending, which explains the intelligibility of talk about meat suits. As 'infinite' 'timebinding' 'Reason,' the body is a mere host for me. But bodiless reason is a dove that flap sit swings in vacuum. ]

That's why I will often say (usually to much derision) that the nature of being is the proper study of ontology, and that it should be distinguished from the objective analysis of whatever exists. — Quixodian

Objectivity as unbiasedness (perhaps you'll agree) is not a problem. The most radical ontologist/phenomenologist, who insists that the world is only given to subjects, still wants our truth and not just his or hers.

So I prefer to focus like Hegel on holism. Serious, grandiose, and (to the worldly) ridiculous philosophical ontology --the deepest most pretentious stuff, with which I side at great harm to my reputation <grin> -- is exactly the stuff that doesn't cut corners or leave out anything essential. Like, say, the way that the world is given, so far we have any genuine experience, only to flesh.

For instance, spatial objects are given only ever partially and perspectively in a purely visual sense, and yet they are grasped as objects that 'transcend' and unify these adumbrations. A crude ontology takes the frequent practically justified 'transparency' of the subject to an extreme that thinks it can keep familiar worldly objects without the subject that helps constitute them. The meaningrich lifeworld in which the project of natural science makes sense depends on the embodied social-cultural 'timebinding' subject (the entire species is the proper subject for the lifeworld as a whole, though it itself only exists through persons like you and me. The world [that humans can talk about sensibly, a redundant addition really ] is independent of you and me but not of all of us.)

Even Husserl recognized that the ego is nothing but an empty zero point of activity, harboring no intrinsic a priori content. This empty ego is not a person, or a human, or a subject. — Joshs

I think Husserl is great, and I'm open to insight from his work on this topic, but what really matters is what's rational and intelligible. To say that the 'empty ego' is not a 'subject' looks a little confused.

I'm saying for my own self, not quoting scripture, that the ego is and must be flesh. No doubt a mystic can claim otherwise, but as a philosopher I demand evidence and a sufficiently clear meaning for my terms. I haven't heard any good arguments against our notion of subjectivity getting its meaning from anywhere else than the everyday experience of being a human among others, responsible for what our bodies do (including what our mouths say.) Talk of insides without outsides, subjects without worlds, and left without right looks complacently irrationalist. Whether I agree with Husserl on every point, I respect him as a philosopher's philosopher who tried to never talk nonsense.

Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for. — Srap Tasmaner

That makes sense. I see all entities on a the semantic inferential plane. We see our spouse's eyes and not internal images of those eyes --- even though we see with the eyes and light in complicated ways.

As I see it, a phenomenological direct realist is more willing to grant the reality of the brain than most. For it is not an illusion paradoxically created by itself.

I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done. — Srap Tasmaner

The problem with the construction view (if taken too far anyway) is that we only believe we are trapped inside a construction because we take that same construction as a reality. Indirect realism, which seems admirably cautious, is incautious in what it takes for granted --- a meaningful concept of the subject doesn't depend on the same commonsense direct realism it sets itself against.

Are the sense organs their own product ? If we live in a construction, why should we believe there are really brains and eyes and ears that construct ? I prefer some kind of direct realism: There are eyes and ears and brains, and there is the being of the world (not the being of an image of the world) for a 'conscious' human. We have no experience apart from (by other means) than thru this living flesh.

There could be that moment of "Why am I doing any of this?" when stuck in traffic on your way to the laboratory. — schopenhauer1

Sure, and they'll be a variety of reactions that follow. Some will embrace 'gloomy' and serious thought, work it into their heroic myth. I very much embrace some version of this myth, and fortunately (and not really accidentally) it's a version that can endure and perhaps enjoys being unveiled. Indeed, a grand psychological theory about hero myths had better be able to withstand its own critique.

Yes I gathered what you were saying and hence why I was saying that human condition comes first, then investigation and post-facto explanation — schopenhauer1

Ah, but that's what I'm saying too. We are thrown into the existential situation. It's a fundamental aspect of reality. We know nothing of reality as it is apart from its being given to and through personality. Those who imagine otherwise are of course personalities using their imaginations, dreaming of serene landscapes without a trace of angsty primates.

That does seem to be true. We give reasons for why we do something. What is that, but a story or narrative? We are the creature that has reasons not just causes. — schopenhauer1

Exactly. Brandom specializes on this issue. I am responsible for my claims, and they should work together coherently. We live together in a normative inferential logical space. Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel both write about something similar. What does the game of philosophy always presuppose ? Self-consciously reasonable creatures.

This claim gets something right but it's a little reckless.
“The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects.

The objects are not independent of our conceptualization of them, but our conceptualization is not independent of the object. A meaningful and genuine subject is, in my view, an embodied subject in an actual world that is not just whatever the subject wants it to be. Also discursive practice melts uselessly into vague human coping if it's not basically or prototypically good old written and verbal discourse. The ameobic metaphor of such research reaching out to include a new object (a new species of cave fish) does not strike me as problematic.

I like what you wrote in that thread.
The observer and the observed are entangled in the observation, and this observation displays the same entanglement as every observation. The separation of the observer from the observed is never more than a convenient approximation that is never completely true.

Hegel wrote that any disconnected or finite entity was a mere fiction, had no genuine being. He then defined this view as the essence of idealism. So 'idealism' is the recognition that disconnected (finite) entities are ideal, imaginary, fictional. For Hegel, [good] philosophy is idealism as just holism, which is to say realism.

I am in general agreement, but would not characterize the statis as "disguised". — Fooloso4

Just to be clear, I imagine a world in which cities alternate between tyrants and democracies, almost randomly. So there's change/motion, but the timebinding philosopher can come to grasp the field or governing matrix of possibly as constantly present and static. Perhaps you already understood me to mean this. I got it from Kojeve discussing Aristotle.

I think this is a bit besides the point — schopenhauer1

I think the big picture is that you want to humanity deciding to go extinct to be more plausible. As others have mentioned, reproduction is the last thing evolution is going to fuck up. But I don't want this thread to become that one.

This thread is meant to be about the way the world is always given to or through an entire personality, so that the existential situation in general is a fundamental part of [human] reality. How you might connect this to Zapffe is to reflect on a 'scientism' personality whose existential strategy is the evasion of the embarrassing existential strategies as literature for sissies the tender-minded unworthy of contemplating steel-gray subject-independent Being in laboratories.

I like Zapffe, but I'd class him as one among many psychological philosophers. His points above are reminiscent of Ernest Becker. I like them both.

Keeping with the OP, I find the heroic performance of (flirting with) dying of the truth in all of the gloomy philosophers, including Nietzsche, and I speak as a practiced consumer of such gnostical turpentine. As Nietzsche saw, it's an ultimately ecstatic form of self-mutilating asceticism, a seductive roundabout status assertion. [Maybe it's not that simple, but we are fake dark thinkers if we are unable to suspect ourselves of the same deception that we accuse everyone of else of soaking in.]

Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individuals distance themselves and look at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g., writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his produced works were the product of sublimation. — Wiki

Becker and others make the same point. Life has a horrible aspect, and we meet it with narratives and symbols that mitigate that horror. The first heroic task as a child is ceasing to shit one's pants. A 'spiritual' being is a cultural or sublimated being.

Another related issue that occurs to me is the shift from the low-tech plausibility of an essentially cyclic world to a sense that the world was developing, gathering complexity, and in some sense moving toward an apotheosis or an apocalypse. A cyclic world is a disguised stasis. A sage at peace with its eternal nature makes sense. But the second world tempts the revolutionary to find a seat on the right side of the progress god History.

The modern philosophers gave themselves a task not entertained by the ancients, to master nature. Philosophy was no longer about the problem of how to live but to solve problems by changing the conditions of life. — Fooloso4

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Husserl justifies the noumena Kant prohibits, by assigning a different quality and domain to transcendental logic. — Mww

While Husserl himself may not be entirely consistent or definite in his meaning, in my experience those strongly committed to some kind of 'indirect realist' dualism (as perhaps you are) have trouble understanding what I'd call a phenomenological direct realism, which is not naive but sophisticated, as in the Hegelian reaction to the absurdity of a Reality that is essentially hidden from us. Kant makes the sense organs their own product. He's still a genius, but like all of us mortals (and like Husserl), there are blunders and rough edges.

I still very much stand with the critical spirit of Kant (as opposed to the metaphysical trying to save the essence of his religion somehow.) The gist worth polishing is, in my view, roughly an anthropocentric ontology that sees how easily humans spew out stuff that sounds good but is semantically challenged, museum of round squares and fuzzy liquids, magical gems like the cognition of objects as they 'really' are apart from human cognition, or their description as they are apart from all description. We know nothing of a world apart from the one given to our timebinding cultural flesh, though this same flesh can daydream about pure ur-matter or pure fleshless subjectivity, forgetting itself as a condition of possibility for that daydream -- often for 'good' reasons in a practical sense where the individual subject is usefully transparent.

You won't find it under a microscope. — schopenhauer1

I'm on a Husserl kick lately, and I think philosophy buries its gravediggers in the pile of their own performative contradictions. The 'true' science ('ontology') determines its own essence. I have to clarify who and what I am, who and what is noble or rational.

I had a thread on evolutionary psychology where it is debatable how much of human psychology is shaped by biological natural selection (rather than cultural learning): — schopenhauer1

I followed that thread. My own view is that we aren't very free, and I think we 'prove' that we all know that in the way we treat others. No one expects all the homeless drug addicts to suddenly go clean tomorrow morning. Freedom is what a marketing major calls responsibility (being punished or praised for what your body does.) Freedom as autonomy is also an aspiration. I want to be like God, says Sartre, and I think he's right.

But I say so on this great stage of fools, aware that it commits me in various ways, and that the meaning of such a speech act is largely a function of what I've already said. We actors are temporal beings, smeared across the dimension of time.

the professionalization of academia and the economic changes of specialized “jobs” has been internalized by nearly everyone, to the point where general inquiry and thoughtfulness is compartmentalized unnecessarily. — Mikie

:up:

The point being: the names are fine for ordinary life and convenience. But we shouldn’t take them too seriously. Nearly everyone has the potential to “do” philosophy. It’s just a particular kind of thinking — Mikie

:up:

You mention Chomsky, a great example. I've recently read some great John Berger essays as well as his Ways of Seeing. Deep stuff, 'philosophical.' His essay on Giacometti is a meditation on mortality. His understanding of art is sociological, existential, and ontological. Kundera and Hesse are two powerful novelists who give philosophy in its existential fullness, as a matter of the entire self, of feeling as much as concept. Then there's Harold Bloom writing about Shakespeare and Hegel, etc.

Perhaps the key concept here is holism. I don't care what the person's title is. Can they synthesize a coherent vision of things as a whole ? Do they at least strive toward a total harmonious grasp of the fact of existence ?

There is a way in which there is something it is like to be me that does not apply to our machine that distinguishes colors and reacts to them in different ways — Patterner

Yes, I believe in consciousness or subjectivity, but I'm a direct realist (which is maybe the source of the misunderstanding?) I think of consciousness as being, as awareness of the world. The world exists for me. If I daydream, then even that is part of the world with the firetruck and the cloud. It just exists differently--but still in the same and only causal-semantic nexus of interdependent entities.

The human condition is our self-awareness. We must deal with our Zapffean programming. Science is a pursuit. The human condition is our very being. The human condition is primary to scientific artifices. — schopenhauer1

I don't think you can sweep science in its wider sense aside, because I have to figure out if it's true that we have Zapffean programming.

I can also take honesty (if only self-honesty in a world that punishes truthtellers) to be a fundamental virtue, something like my inflexible point of honor. I may bravely face the Zapffean Void as someone who at least tried not to lie so much to himself.

So the project is to find a way to explore that aspect that science has neglected by design, that we are calling subjectivity for the moment, and that cannot be the scientific method, but might be, I don't know, poetic, confessional, artistic, moral, sentimental, meditative, spiritual? Perhaps the method of no method? — unenlightened

I think Husserl had the right general idea in his conception of phenomenology, which doesn't mean he was always right on the details. He understood very well that such 'science' is fallibly done with others.

I like the quote from Genesis. Timebinding sentient mud. As Feuerbach saw, the qualities of reason are not-so-coincidentally the qualities of God. [He also saw the importance of sensation and how the individual mattered even though thinking is essentially done trans-individually (by the inherited software or ghosts.)]

The rational or theoretical assimilation and dissolution of the God who is other-worldly to religion, and hence not given to it as an object, is the speculative philosophy.
...
The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing other than the rationalised, realised, actualised essence of God. The speculative philosophy is the true, consistent, rational theology.
...
The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason.

“God is the infinite being or the being without any limitations whatsoever.” But what cannot be a limit or boundary on God can also not be a limit or boundary on reason. If, for example, God is elevated above all limitations of sensuousness, so, too, is reason. He who cannot conceive of any entity except as sensuous, that is, he whose reason is limited by sensuousness, can only have a God who is limited by sensuousness. Reason, which conceives God as an infinite being, conceives, in point of fact, its own infinity in God.

Our flesh has evolved so that we are capable of hosting a kind of immortal time-binding 'species self' ('reason') that depends on no particular body but very much depends on bodies in general. Human culture runs on human flesh. Immortal ontology needs a series of mortal ontologists as hosts.

So when you say 'the truth, not just yours or mine', that's what I mean when I refer to THE mind, not your or my mind. You and I are examples or instantiations of the cultural- and species mind. Individuation is an attribute of only the very topmost level of that mind. But that is the mind which the world is not independent of or apart from - not your mind or mine, but THE mind. It's almost like 'mind at large' but it's important not to objectify or reify it. — Quixodian

I wrote a little essay on my biolinked website that casts the embodied species-essence as the [ entangled ] genuine transcendental subject. I say that we are forced by logical decency to 'reify' it in the sense of understanding it as flesh in an encompassing world. Möbius striptease.

Subjectivity is meaningless apart from embodiment in an environment. The whole tradition of methodological solipsism (Hume, Kant, ...) absurdly makes the sense organs their own product and misses that the intelligibly of a subject which is only given a mediated reality depends upon taking ordinary reality as unmediated and mostly trustworthy.

The task is to do justice to the genuine importance and even centrality of subjectivity without going too far and talking nonsense.