Sometimes I want to talk about, do philosophy about, etc. the world independent of human concepts, human knowledge, etc. I like ontology. — Terrapin Station

I relate. Indeed, philosophy thinks the human only to overcome the human. And is there anything more essentially human than this flight from the merely human? I am more human by being more bored by the merely human, one might say. Similarly I am a grander or more noble personality by thinking beyond my own petty perspective, etc. Metaphysics is language that wants to crawl out of its own skin.

I'm talking about the material thing, the thing that would still be present (at least for a short period of time) if everyone were to sudddenly drop dead. — Terrapin Station

You seem to assume that the stuff 'out there' independent of language is already broken up (quite conveniently!) into the objects of human discourse. Assuming for the sake of argument that this language independent stuff exists (which is admittedly intuitively appealing), how can we say anything determinate about it all without muddying its pristine independence from language/consciousness?

What kind of wall do you prefer to bang your head against? Brick or concrete? One with sharp extruding bits that draw blood, or more a smooth surface that just causes concussion? — Wayfarer

Ha. Well, it is a little frustrating to be misunderstood. As I understand it, I am basically trying to point out what is always already going on as we philosophize, a mutual recognition of the real through language. But meaning is misunderstood from the beginning as merely one of its own determinations ('mental' as opposed to 'physical.')

The very process proclaiming the real to be 'matter' or 'mind' or 'X' ignores its own role in the determination of the real. What 'mind' points to for any serious idealist is already bigger than the mental. Similarly the serious materialist has to include in his concept of matter whatever has been traditionally attributed to 'mind.' Call it 'mind or 'matter.' It's the real as determined by reason, so that we might even say that the real in its becoming or movement is its own determination via a self-transcendence that remembers. Statements like 'the One determines itself' sound spooky and ridiculous until one just watches philosophers at work and generalizes what they are doing, and until one understands that concepts only have determinate meaning in relation to one another.

But i wasn't talking about our concepts, perception, knowledge, etc.

It's very annoying to keep changing the topic to epistemology. (And/or philosophy of language, etc.) — Terrapin Station

We can drop it if you want, but it sure seems like the heart of idealism versus materialism to me. One way to understand idealism is 'language is the essence of the world.' From my perspective, it's exactly your framing of these issues as beside the point that misses the point. But I don't want to annoy you. If we are temporarily at a dead end, that's OK.

what it's supposed to be physically as something public. — Terrapin Station

The question seems to want to reduce meaning-as-public to the physical, missing that 'physical' itself a meaning we are publicly discussing. Note that 'mental' is also a meaning publicly debated. So reducing meaning to the mental is just as problematic as reducing it to the physical. The 'rational is the real and the real is the rational' to the degree that meaning is publicly aimed at the institution or revolution of the real. In some sense philosophy is a manifestation of the faith in the reality of the rational. It decides to take as real what stands the test of critical thought. To decide that matter is real is to institute matter as having proved itself a rational grasping or understanding of the real.

Will people in the future think that we are evil because they disagree with us? — TogetherTurtle

Yes. But some of them will have a similar kind of realization as you are presenting. It seems that it's just a part of acculturation to absorb a goods versus bads narrative, especially within a general framing of the situation in terms of infinite progress. A different framing might understand the past as good and the future as a deviation that ought to be corrected. I lean more toward the progress narrative, but with a sense that it's all too easy to demonize the past from the self-satisfied present. In some ways we might say that 'Columbus is evil' (or this interpretation) is already directed at the future. 'We ought to be (are learning to be) the kind of people who question our own complacency.' In some ways, you are just continuing that questioning of self-righteousness against that very questioning.

You're talking about concept-formation there, right? Again, I'd ask why you're talking about that. I wasn't talking about concepts per se. — Terrapin Station

You asked me about what I meant about 'grasping' a brain. To think that this is only concept formation is perhaps to miss an important point --which is that it is also object formation. To take the brain is some kind of simple object that is just 'given' misses the interpretation implicit in that givenness. To be sure, such 'interpretation' is largely automatic. I experience the world as objects and persons without having to try. On the other hand, we seem to have some conscious control of what we take for objects. We can question whether we are cutting nature at the joints. We can become aware or postulate (like Kant) how our own cognition shapes sensation into objects in a causal nexus. This is actually to create an object, some faculty that transforms sensation into this nexus of objects by applying concepts. (One doesn't haven't to embrace Kant. That's just an example.)

You're not understanding me. The objective world is perspectival. — Terrapin Station

So is it something like a union of perspectives? Or is the real an intersection of perspectives? Does every perspective has some reality and then the intersection become the objectively real? Is this all matter aware of itself somehow?

Why would you be talking about "grasping" something? — Terrapin Station

We see the unity of the human body broken up in terms of organs that function together. The brain becomes a separate object of attention with a boundary. Do we include the spine or not? Where do we draw the line? Do we include the eyes? We make a decision about what is and is not to count as brain. We pluck it out of its context as an object for inquiry.

An abstraction? Why would you say it's an abstraction? — Terrapin Station

The single brain, grasped as a distinct object, is already an interpretation that plucks it out of the human body as a hole. And that human body is an abstraction, too. To really describe the nature of one thing is to be led to its relationships with every other thing. Concepts are inter-related. To explain one thing exhaustively is to explain everything. Since thinking is often about the skillful ignoring of purpose-irrelevant relationships, the systematicity of concept doesn't come up much.

The ideal (in my view) would be to get people to realize/acknowledge perspectivalism. — Terrapin Station

Is this not an attempt to impose your perspective (perspectivalism) as precisely a truth beyond mere perspective? The impossibility of objectivity as objectivity itself?

The more important thing here is that "'true' for everyone" overlooks perspectivalism, the fact that no two perspectives or reference frames/reference points are going to be the same, a fortiori because they necessarily have different spatial orientations. — Terrapin Station

Yes, I agree that no two perspectives are going to be the same. I'd say that true-for-everyone is a kind of ideal that we strive toward, an ideal that requires abstraction from individual perspectives to something like what they all have in common or usefully overlap.

No, I'm not saying that at all. Some matter is obviously mind on my view. I'm a physicalist, an identity theorist. — Terrapin Station

Well we probably can find more agreement than you think, then. I have the sense that you understand me to be saying some more outlandish than is the case. The German idealists were identity theorists (maybe in a different way than you), and I think they were on to something. The problem may largely be about jargon and background.

All concepts are the result of individual thought. — Terrapin Station

I see the truth of this statement, what it gets right. Let me make that clear. But I'd add that this individual only actually exists in a particular community, having been raised in a form of life and at least one language. So the individual is largely constituted by his community. To rip out an isolated subject is like ripping a wolf out of its environment, the things it eats, etc. A wolf only makes sense in its total context and a subject only makes sense as part of a community. Brains have evolved to interact with other brains through language. This is arguably what is most human about the human. The single brain can of course be contemplated, but this is an abstraction that risks throwing away the 'essence' of the human brain as a node in a network. Individual personality is itself in some sense a product of a thought of this network, even if from a physical point of view we can see that individual brain encased in its own skull.

I don't agree with any sentence there, — Terrapin Station

So you don't find it true for us but only for me? Or you don't find it true for you? If it's only not true for you and that's the issue, then we aren't really doing philosophy in some sense. We are just gossiping about preferences. The projection of our opinions of being worthy as being acted on as truths seems pretty fundamental to me.

You're going to keep asserting "shared" meaning and I'll keep pointing out that it's not actually shared, and then you'll respond where you talk about shared meaning again, and then I'll point out that it's not actually shared again, etc. — Terrapin Station

And I'll keep pointing out that I'm not attached to any terminology but interested in something that makes this conversation possible. I'm quite OK with the idea of the sounds and letters being 'physically' meaningless on their way from one skull to another.

It all hinges on this 'actually,' the specification of this actually. I take that you are saying that matter is not mind, that the signs are dead. And of course in some sense I agree. But the very concept of the 'subject alone with meaning' who uses 'dead signs' is itself a product of these publicly used signs in some sense. I'm saying let's loosen up some of our fundamental assumptions. Insights about language are going to reverberate all through our metaphysical positions. If, for instance, language was fundamentally ambiguous (never perfectly clear), then we could never have a perfectly clear or transmittable theory of the real.

That question particular strikes me as bizarre. Objectivity in no way hinges on us. The objective world would be there just the same if life had never started. — Terrapin Station

There is much to recommend this view, but it is a metaphysical position. It's one way to define the objective.

Objectivity is a philosophical concept of being true independently from individual subjectivity caused by perception, emotions, or imagination. A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by a sentient subject. Scientific objectivity refers to the ability to judge without partiality or external influence, sometimes used synonymously with neutrality. — Wiki

The essence of objectivity seems to be true-for-us-and-not-just-me. The notion of the physical seems to fit this ideal perfectly. But I don't think the physical exhausts the objective. As Husserl might add, we should consider in what way logic and math exist objectively. Arguably, reducing the objective to the physical simply ignores part of experience and offers therefore an only partial account of the situation.

There's a traditional sense (a la scholasticism for example) of "real" that's basically the same as "objective ," but that's a bad idea, because it discounts an d basically dismisses personal, psychological phenomena. — Terrapin Station

I relate to that. But one can embrace the reality of a fantasy. A community can believe that one of its members had a dream about giraffes. Roughly, anything in intelligible is a being or has being, or so one might say. Then further categorizations can establish visibility or access.

The mystery is why that would be the assumption. We could go through how communication works on my view step by step if you're interested, but that will probably take some time and it's a significant enough tangent that we should probably start another thread on it if you're interested. — Terrapin Station

I suspect that your theory of communication will eventually have to get around to addressing something like public meaning or inter-subjectivity, even if it eschews those terms. It's not so much that I pretend to have an explanation for what is going on. I would like to bring it to attention, make it more vivid.

The presence of culture and other human beings dominated our development and has a huge impact in developing our established norms - like there are human beings and I'm one of them. — Harry Hindu

I agree completely.

Yeah, but how did we get to the point of "understanding too much" in the first place if we didn't already start from a deconstructed state and then built it all up? — Harry Hindu

That's a good point. It's an interesting project, considering how 'matter' became 'conscious' (or however one wants to frame it.)

We seem to have two origins. We can use language to contemplate the origin of language. Then the origin of language would exist for or within language. A Mobius strip comes to mind.

Okay, but how would the fact that we can agree ("I think that nonconsensual killing is wrong"--"Hey! I think that nonconsensual killing is wrong, too!") or the fact that we can cooperate ("Let's make that illegal then") have any impact on the fact that morality, meaning, etc. are subjective? — Terrapin Station

If I make the string of words 'Let's make that illegal, then' by vibrating the air a certain way, surely it's not the physical energy of that vibrating air that helps get a law passed. Those vibrations are intelligible. Roughly speaking, an image of what we might and should do is somehow repeated in the mind of the listener. And such a thing only makes sense if we understand ourselves to be in the same world, talking about the same objects. These arbitrary signs, the spoken words, are charged with an imperfectly shared meaning. To learn a language is to enter in to a kind of network, where the vibrations of the air take on meaning that they would otherwise not have. (I don't think this is a perfect description of what is going on. I agree that we should keep trying to figure it out. It's not about mystifying but rather about clarifying the 'we of language' that makes this conversation possible. )

Because we want to know what the world is like, and we believe it's worthwhile to examine that with a methodological approach different than science in addition to doing it with science's methodological approach. — Terrapin Station

I agree with all this, and indeed it's crucial to my point. Note the 'we' that appears here.

That would be the case no matter the ontological reality of meaning. — Terrapin Station

I agree, and I'd even say that it's absurd in some sense to categorize meaning. The sign escapes the instituting question of philosophy ('what is it?')

The whole point is to figure out what meaning really is, how it really works, which just as when we're doing science, can easily turn out to be contrary to conventional wisdom, conventional ways of looking at it, etc. — Terrapin Station

Indeed. I agree here to. And I am personally challenging the conventional wisdom that meaning or language is only in the subject (the subject as a concept is itself a meaning, an abstraction.)

The real puzzler is why people are so averse to subjectivity. — Terrapin Station

I don't think it's an aversion to subjectivity. It's just we, who want to know what the world is like, can come to realize that we are engaged in a social project of working together to figure out what the world is like. It seems to be a fact that we bring signs to other human beings to have them recognized as representing or unveiling the real. The very notion of the real seems to involve what is true for us and not just me. The appeal of the 'physical' seems to lie in just this. It is one image of the true-for-us-and-not-just-me.

I think that the whole idea of "intersubjectivity" is nonsense outside of the fact that we can agree with and cooperate with each other. — Terrapin Station

The possibility of agreement and cooperation is exactly what is intended. I have the sense that 'intersubjectivty' is misunderstood in terms of some entity, some magical quasi-physical item.

Meaning and coherence are subjective. — Terrapin Station

I am taking this out of context, but I wanted to reply in a different way than before.

If meaning and coherence are subjective, then how or why would we do philosophy? Do you have something in mind like intersubjective coherence? I can imagine meaning and coherence being distributed and separated in different minds, and maybe there is no perfect overlap of two individual experiences of meaning and coherence. But there has to be significant overlap to make philosophy possible. How could you or any other thinker hope to offer anything valuable to another thinker without appealing to a similar meaning and coherence? And how could objects in the world be objective (for me and you both independent of our wishful thinking) without assuming an immense overlap in the interpretation of sensation? (I'd say we just grasp chairs as things we sit on and only come up with sense-data theories much later to patch up the theoretical construction of the subject opposed to the object.) Or if we just directly see the object, then how do we nevertheless assemble a shared coherent picture of the world, which we can't see all at once?

Forgive all these posts please if you find them boring. Respond to any part of them though, please, if they pique your interest.

Is metaphysics the desire to climb out of its own skin? Is humanism is the desire of the human to climb out of his own history as skin? And yet metaphysics can only climb away from itself with what it has of itself. The humanism that is climbed out of is climbed out of by a yet higher humanism.

How will metaphysics know that it has finally succeeded at climbing out of itself unless it can see that skin on the floor as a circle, a totality? And what is this completed no-longer-metaphysics but a vision of its skin on the floor? its own quieted corpse-as-chrysalis, its ladder dropped to the ground, the body that tied it to mortality and confusion?

Philosophy, then, is one aspect of the total manifestation of spirit – consciousness of spirit being its supreme flowering, since its effort is to know what spirit is. It is, in fact, the dignity of man to know what he is and to know this in the purest manner, i.e., to attain to the thinking of what he is. — Hegel

And what is his dignity then if not in being a philosopher? Man is metaphysics, and metaphysics is time that would climb out of itself into its future (an eternity-to-be) in terms of its past as mastered memory.

How does Nietzsche fit into this? For Derrida he was

... the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. — Derrida

Is active interpretation not directed nevertheless at a humanism that cancels itself in its next interpretation? Is the essence of metaphysics not presence but an ecstatically self-eating humanism? I read Derrida with the same kind of pleasure I get from Hegel. I feel a basic continuity.

Sounds great. I look forward to it. May your drive be pleasant.

You're too kind. Thanks!

You've given me some food for thought here, I'm going to have to come back to you on this on. — Happenstance

Fair enough! I'm happy to have at least not been boring.

I'm high on some new insights lately about just how idealistic 'all' philosophy really is some sense. Varieties of religious experience idealism-humanism.

Damn sign, you just made my brain hurt! Am I not being open-minded by declaring metaphysical ignorance as axiomatic?! :joke: — Happenstance

Ha. Well, I'd love to see what else you have to say about the issue. (And of course I trusted your open-mindedness as I raised the weird issue.) I just love these crazy (?) thoughts.

Look at it from my point of view; either I believe that matter is actual or deity is actual! This to me, is the crux of the matter (if you pardon the pun!) — Happenstance

I like the crux here, because what about deity-in-matter or deity-as-matter. For instance, Heidegger reminds of us pre-theoretical life where the 'subject' is dissolved in the 'object' (tool use) and the object in a meaningful world in a nexus of other tools.

No doubt we can imagine (in some problematic way) that 'matter' (whatever it is exactly supposed to be) was here first and be here after. If we identify the actual with durability, then matter becomes tempting as the actual. On the other hand, this whole line of thought exists as meaning. Perhaps the materialist forgets the ideal nature of matter (itself an abstraction in some views from a stream of sensation and therefore a part of universal spirit in others), and the idealist forgets the entanglement of meaning in its other. We can even postulate that the distinction between 'mind' and 'matter' is necessarily ambiguous, precisely because 'mind' is entangled in 'matter.' --or also note that the distinction is already a metaphysical axiom that obscures how we actually live in or even as meaning-matter. If language is the essence of the world (another way to frame idealism), then this language has a worldly flesh which makes separating itself from the world impossible.

*Derrida seems to be emphasizing the flesh of language that it can't peel off. Traditional metaphysics is like language that dreams of peeling its flesh off to peek at its skeleton.

Whatever metaphysical axioms are afoot, we all have metaphysical ignorance so saying what is or isn't seems to me something we can't be sure of. — Happenstance

Hi. I relate to that kind of openmindedness. I am interested though in precisely this metaphysical ignorance as a metaphysical axiom. I associate this with Hegel's critique of Kant. To start from the idea of a gap between us and the absolute is actually to start with the same absolute being placed beyond us. 'The absolute is closed to us' is itself embraced as an absolute principle. At the very least this is fascinating. Note that this is also language pointing outside itself to an 'essence' it can never touch. Such an essence must be nonconceptual it seems. But surely sensation or emotion aren't either, excepting for certain romantics. Does this mean the absolute is worshiped as a Nothing ? An impossible object in the distance, a horizon that outruns us? Or do we get closer?

In some ways this is like the idea that the history philosophy teaches us nothing. That nothing it teaches us is not only something but something sometimes embraced as the height of intellectual sophistication. The highest achievement of rationality is its self-recognition of its necessary failure. (The skeptic in me relates to this view, but I can't enjoy it as the whole story.)

There is no asking what meaning is.

Thought is proper to man alone – not, however, to man only as an isolated individual subject; we have to look at thought as essentially objective. — Hegel

Note the humanism. Perhaps materialism is appealing to some as a flight from anthropomorphism. Is this flight from anthropomorphism not also the institution of a new essence of the human? I am more human or a better human by being anti-anthropomorphic (fighting against today's humanism.) The truly human wants to see around the human. (And finds the human as this wanting to see around the human?)

Perhaps it's best to think of idealism in terms of meaning-ism. If meaning is understood as above as being objective rather than subjective, then thinking of meaning in terms of the isolated mind misses the point entirely. One starts with a narrow concept of meaning and begins by (impossibly) setting it up as trapped in a subject cut off from world, neglecting that language or meaning is already the essence of the world. This essence as language of the world can dissonantly dream of a world before language and a language before the world.

We said, with regard to thought, that there is no asking what its meaning is, since it is its own meaning; there is nothing hidden behind it – not, however, in the ordinary sense of that expression, for thought itself is the ultimate, the deepest, behind which there is nothing further; it is entirely itself. — Hegel

Meaning is being or reality is meaning.

Thought is proper to man alone – not, however, to man only as an isolated individual subject; we have to look at thought as essentially objective. — Hegel

Language is there, like the world. Language is the essence of the world. To live in the human world (in other words the world) is to live in meaning or significance. Heidegger seems to repeat Hegel in terms of being with others through language. The pre-interpretedness that veils certain modes of being is a sedimentation of 'spirit.' And Wittgenstein also seemed to be pointing at something the our immersion in a distributed ambiguous meaning-field. What I get from Wittgenstein and Derrida is an awareness of how tangled up meaning is in the 'non-mental.' And of course Heidegger dissolved the subject into tool-use and the object into a tool-being-used. (Among other things.) The focus on meaning as being doesn't seem to have went anyway. 'All philosophy is idealism.' Instead we seem to have an increased self-consciousness of the incarnation of 'essence' (meaning) in 'non-meaning.' The 'holy essence' is ground into its other.

===

The temple of reason in its consciousness of itself is loftier than Solomon’s temple and others built by man.

In everyday life, of course, we have to do with opinions, i.e., thoughts about external things; one has one opinion, another has another. But in the business of the world’s Spirit there is a completely different seriousness; it is there that universality is. There it is a question of the universal determination of the Spirit, nor do we speak of this or that one’s opinion. The universal Spirit develops in itself according to its own necessity; its opinion is simply the truth.

A third conclusion to be drawn from what has been said up to this point is that we are not dealing with what is past but rather with actual thinking, with our own spirit. Properly speaking, then, this is not a history, since the thoughts, the principles, the ideas with which we are concerned belong to the present; they are ‘determinations within our own spirit.

But the heart must be dead which finds satisfaction with dead bodies. The spirit of truth and life lives only in what is. The living spirit speaks: “Let the dead bury their dead;. follow me!” If I know thoughts, truths, cognitions, only, historically, they remain outside my spirit, i.e., for me they are dead; neither my thinking nor my spirit is present in them; what is most interior to me, my thought, is absent.
— Hegel

'Universal spirit' is the stuff we take for granted, that which is simply the truth, the (currently) unquestionable. The unquestionable universal spirit is unstable though. It can be unveiled and made questionable. It even unveils itself by questioning itself, wounding itself with the understanding's distinctions until it can gather them all up as the temple of its own-self-consciousness. Of course reason is the essence of man, the essentially human, so the highest temples build so far by man (still trapped in self-alienation to a greater or lesser degree) are nothing beside the temple that reason builds for itself, a tower of Babel, a ladder that can be thrown away.

Is a resentment toward the self-love in humanism just the attempt to make the human more lovable for the human? 'I don't love all this self-love in humanism. I'd prefer (love more) [alternative.]' Is there a clear gap between humanism and religion imagined as a non-humanism? Has 'God' not always been a word for what is highest for and therefore in man? Is the issue really about lifestyle? Imagery? Is this holy man apart from commerce and entanglement? Or can the holy man be the world spirit on horseback, surveying his realm? Does the holy man work in a pin factory? Can we find the essence of a humanism in an image like this?

So, originally, I think the search was for a kind of intellectual illumination, a seeing-into-the-first-principles as a noetic act. — Wayfarer

Have you ever checked out Husserl? I just did recently, and I only wish I had looked into him sooner. It makes sense to me that first-principles have to be intuitively grasped or given.

Incel, I know about. As for idealism - have a browse through some of the pages about Timothy Sprigge. Only learned of him when his obituary was published, but a full on — Wayfarer

I like what I just briefly read. But then I embrace ambitious philosophy, 'useless' philosophy that tries to make sense of existence in a way that helps us live well. (I think we agree on this. My 'useless' was ironic, of course.)

That's where maths comes in so handy! Nobody has to say 'whaddya mean, "7" '? — Wayfarer

Exactly. And this even helps explain scientism as a kind of pythogoreanism in love with the heiroglyphs. It's not unlike some extremely reduced kind of Platonism without a dialectic to make sense of itself. It's a strange worship of power and heiroglyphs that hasn't clarified itself , mixed with the religious idea of a universal reason in which we participate (or so it seems to me.) Of course I like this universal in which we participate. It's what makes philosophy possible (even as certain philosophers deny what makes its denial possible: meeting in a language that aims at transpersonal or objective truth.)

I saw it on reddit by chance and looked it up. It really amused me. I don't really spend much time in places where the kids make up this lingo, but I sometimes get curious. I also looked up 'Chad' and 'incel.' It's a weird world out there. I'm getting old.

But idealism, Hegelian and anything like it, pretty well fell right out of favour in the English-speaking world (except for amongst 'neck-beards' ;-) ) That's the problem! — Wayfarer

I appreciate the neckbeards allusion, but neckbeards are Dawkins fan-boys, haters of Hegel if they've ever heard of him. Neckbeards aren't sexy like Hegelians, damn it! :cool: More seriously, the stereotype is aimed at antisocial atheists who are Conspicuously Rational on social media. The steretype also suggests bad hygeine and complaints about women only liking bad boys who don't mylady them as a neckbeard might.

Indeed. And I believe there are other approaches. I vaguely remember interleaving the bits in another way. The black and seamless sea of the unit interval expressed with ones and zeroes... Very beautiful math. Cantor was a poet.

All the applications are nice, etc., but there is just a real joy in trying to capture the infinite with an exact thinking (in terms of rules that make the results not-just-subjective.)

I'm not the type to dismiss ecstatic states, but I have been trying to figure out how to integrate them into my life. — csalisbury

Yeah, this is tricky. I'm not good at living in the middle. I'm not at all claiming that I live in a state of ecstasy. I mean I usually really approve of myself or I am really disgusted with myself. While there is a healthy or unhealthy-but-enjoyable narcissism involved, there is also a genuine lust/curiosity that directs me beyond myself when I am happy. (I assume this is pretty common: happiness as being on the hopeful chase.)

So the really good state wants to dance and exult and see the bad state as 'blindness' or 'confusion' that is over now that the truth is revealed. And the really bad state wants to see the good state as deluded and sugarcoating. — csalisbury

I generally agree, though the last time I was stricken I didn't stop believing in the good states. I knew that I was irrationally afflicted. I was self-consciously trying to reactivate my lust for life. It's all about the darkness of the future, perhaps. Is that darkness made of pure threat? Or is there enough promise in that darkness to embrace the threat? One falls out of love with life. Or that's how it is for me.