The idea that 'niceness' must be maintained at all costs in the face of the hurt, abuse, and injustice is insane. It's an argument for coddled schoolchildren unexposed to the threats and reality of violence, poverty, and real pain that pervade all corners of the world. Or else it's the argument of those who are utterly blind to power relations and think that everyone speaks on an equal playing field as though the stakes of discussion are nothing more than parlour games in a gentlemen's club, and not, in some cases, lives. 'Niceness' is not some transcendental principle of discourse; it is a strategic tool to be employed in the right contexts - as is venom, abuse, and 'unpleasantness', each of which has its rightful and important place in all discussion. Trivial cordiality is a contributor, and not a panacea, to misery.

:grin: :up: :100:

I don't think there is any need to dilute the forum with dedicated space for psychological topics. Quite apart from the fact that most of the so-called 'psychological' topics here are just bar-room musings that barely refer to the clinical field of psychology - if at all - the two disciplines are wildly distinct, and with, I think, good reason. To accuse a philosophical position of psychologism was, for a good while, a serious perjorative, and a great deal of good philosophy has tried to divorce itself quite rightly from just such accusations (Frege, Husserl). It's all interesting as far as it goes, but given how hard it already is to cultivate and maintain substantial philosophical discussions here, I wouldn't support the proposal.

There's an argument by Adriana Cavarero - which I've been much influenced by - that philosophy's historical obsession with death has had a, well, mortally compromising effect on the discipline. Death, the great leveller - everything and everyone is equal in death - has had the distinction of erasing Western philosophy's ability to think about the singular: the irreplaceable, the historical, and the political. The insistence on death as something like 'the beginning of philosophy' - rather than the far more obvious point of natality, say - has been used simply to secure the autarky of thought within itself, never inclining it to actually respect the distinctions and plurality that comprises the world:

"'Throughout the whole history of philosophy,' writes Arendt, 'persists the truly singular idea of an affinity between philosophy and death. 'Philosophers from Plato to Heidegger (and beyond) proclaim this emphatically. The common people, for their part, figure this out rather quickly - and have fun ridiculingthem. The activity of thought consists in fact always and everywhere in a solitary experience, which temporarily abandons the world of appearances - or, rather, the world of life and plurality that we inhabit together with our peers. Since, for human beings, 'the most radical experience of disappearance is death, and the retreat from appearances which is equal to death, ' the analogy between death and thinking has an obvious foundation.

Making thought into his favorite activity - indeed, into his very profession - and qualifying this activity as 'a living for death,' the philosopher simply registers the way that things are. His ingenuity consists in the emphatic tone with which he announces this rather common experience to the profane. He pretends to smuggle as a discovery and a privilege something that is, instead, actually obvious" (Cavarero, Relating Narratives).

widens disagreement rather than resolves anything. — All sight

Widening disagreement with Nazis is an excellent goal to pursue. It is right, and good, and just, to hate them, and everything they stand for. What did wonders was bombing the third Reich into bloody, firey, submission and making sure that one couldn't put the word 'love' and 'Nazi' in the same sentence without spewing a little. A lesson that we now seem to be forgetting because some people are apparently are so coddled and privileged to think that a bit of discursive decorum is not worth the indignity of telling supporters of literal genocide to fuck off and die.

Abuse has a honourable and well-deserved place at the table of argument, in the right contexts.

Return the accidentally pilfered ring before it is no longer accidental.

In many ways, religion is everything philosophy could hope to be. It's stance on ethics commands that one ought to behave in a certain way and people oblige to this commandment and follow with the commands of any said religion. — Posty McPostface

It strikes me that the singular greatness of philosophy is that it resists this religious temptation at all costs; that nothing could be more detrimental and destructive of philosophy than the doxastic proffering of a set of commands. Philosophy is at its most powerful when it occupies the terrain of the negative and the critical, holding open the breach that religion - and its intellectual derivatives - aim to fill-in, and close once and for all. Religion is everything philosophy ought to avoid, least it surrender the one thing that makes philosophy worth engaging.

Paolo Virno - A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life
Giorgio Agamben - The Use of Bodies (The ninth and final book of the Homo Sacer series!)

You're the one asking questions of me.

No, but it looks super interesting. I'll take a gander and see if I can muster up anything.

To be able to address different contexts in philosophy. — Posty McPostface

Read: to be able to have a minimal grasp of philosophy. If this is quietism - and its very questionable that it is - then philosophy has never had any need for it.

Consider it a twist on quietism.

Well, this just gives philosophers a bad rap if you will. — Posty McPostface

'Raps' are for idiots.

I am taken aback by how many more problems appear if there are no real solutions. — Posty McPostface

Then forget the very idea of a 'real solution' - a chimaera that leads one to think 'quietism' has any content other than its own guilty conscience. The only question is what the real problems are.

Every other way? No, just one.

To show why a problem matters: the purchase it has on what it aims to come to grips with, the degree of fecundity with which one can see the world in it's light (an Aristotelian light, a Cartesian light, a Sellarsian light...). Problems are essentially distributions of categories of sense: what happens when such categories are distributed in this way rather than that? To succeed philosophically is to explore those implications to the nth degree.

It isn't. But then, to equate 'solutions to problems' with 'success' is, of course, an infantile image of philosophy.

If one goes about treating the very questions of philosophy as problems, per se, then how do you ever lift yourself out of that sorry predicament that philosophy imposes upon you? — Posty McPostface

It's not a sorry predicament at all. Particular 'philosophies' are nothing but problems taken to the very end: problems explored for all their implications, for all they say about the world. And the field of problems is open-ended and constantly evolving, calling each time for a creative endeavour equal to it. To study philosophy is to learn how to occupy these problems, and implicate ever vaster swathes of the world into them.

Interesting! I've always held that Wittgenstein was the epitome of what you are describing (a philosopher who treated the whole field of philosophy as one big problem), and hence the resolution of said problems was found in quietism. — Posty McPostface

I don't think there's anything particularly exclusive to Wittgenstein about this. As much as I love Witty - I count him as a formative influence - he doesn't differ in kind from a Plato, a Leibniz, or a Arendt: each inhabits a field of problems through which the world is viewed, and through which it is made sense of. A problem is not something to be solved as if once and for all: it it something to work-through, to occupy, to inhabit. Life as a problem to which individual lives are diverse solutions: philosophy is not unlike this.

As an aside, I don't think quietism qualifies as philosophy. It's intellectual failure hardened into pseudo-philosophical position. The failure of thought masquerading as the thought of failure. Wittgenstein which much more than his 'quietism', which was nothing more than a weakness of nerve.

Problems. Find yourself a problem or set of problems that you're interested in, and read around those problems. A caveat here is that one also needs to treat authors as problems. An author is a set of problems that needs to be worked through, and one is only ever interested in an author to the extent that one comes to know and occupy the same problems that motivate that author. If you only know what an author has said without knowing why they've said it, one hasn't understood the problem that it responds to, nor concequently the author.

There are always posts - and occasionally posters - beneath the dignity of a response. And many worse than even that.

Cool. Funnily enough now I'm worried about the lounge! Would it be too much to pin a notice - at least for those who miss this discussion - that the lounge will no longer show on the front page?

I'd support trialing categories at the least. I suspect, with JRob, that having individual active discussions not appear might affect traffic - there's alot more immediacy and 'jump-in' potential as it is now - but maybe the loungy/political discussions might be conterveiling forces for some potential new posters too. Hard to say.

They got Kant wrong.

Hmm, I've never really approached questions of time 'directly' - generally it's through other lenses (X's or Y's take on time) - and there's nothing I know that is quite so 'concrete/historical' as anything Thompson would have written. The closest thing I can think of is a great essay by Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille on time keeping devices and their social effects (look in your PMs!).

Otherwise, David Couzens Hoy's The Time of Our Lives is a great overview of different 'continental' approaches to time which I really like.

Elizabeth Grosz's two books, The Nick of Time and Time Travels, might be somewhat closer to what you've looking for, but they're more 'how to think about time and politics', and again, not anything like that Thompson essay (also, they're both essay collections themselves).

Henri Lefevbe's Rhythmanalysis might be even closer (Lefebvre being a Marxist sociologist), but it's a short book that deals more with rhythm than it does with 'time' as such.

Errr, otherwise, there's Poalo Virno's Déjà Vu and the End of History which I haven't read, but looks very much like something that matches what you're after.

Sciency-wise there's Lee Smolin's Time Reborn and Ilya Prigogine's The End of Certainty, which are superb (no politics at all!).

My last reccomendation might seem strange but is one of my favorite books I've ever read and has influenced me massively when thinking about time - Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, which strictly speaking is a (very clear!) reading of Derrida on time, but which I think is absolutely super as a stand-alone book on time in general.

But yeah, this is all a very random scattering of things off the top of my head. Time is always something I've approached 'sideways on', so these recc's may not be the best/most relevant, but yeah.

Any other institution - a Red Cross, a lawfirm - would be shut down and burnt to the metaphorical ground. But not the Chruch.

Gramsci once called for an optimism of the will and a pessimism of the intellect: this has always been, I think, a lovely formula to live by.

I don't thinks this quite works. — Marchesk

I'm not particularly concerned with what you think, I'm telling you how it was, and how the current distinction between subject and object is an outgrowth - a cancerous one, I'd say - of a more original distinction which was far more coherent and far more interesting than its current day incarnation.

In short, I doubt that for Nietzsche the "What is Truth?" question allows for a singular answer, pragmatic or postmodern. This paragraph is certainly indicative of Nietzsche's views about how particular truths, particular manifestations of the will to truth, etc. function under certain (sickly) conditions. But I don't think he's making a strong claim about truth beyond (like Wittgenstein) attempting to diagnose how truths function in particular circumstances... Nietzsche seems to be aiming for a complex understanding of the multivocality of truth (and the ethics of truth) that nevertheless does not equivocate or reject truth. — John Doe

I pretty much agree with all of this, so perhaps I shouldn't have poisoned the well by dragging in the word 'pragmatic', which, when it comes to N, is indeed too flippant a label. Perhaps it can be put this way: that Nietzsche doesn't have a theory of truth so much as a 'meta-theory' of truth (too formal, again?), one which understands truth - whatever it is in its specificity - as something which has a variable role or function in an ars vitae, which will always differ depending on what motivation underlies those roles (and I'd add here that one can substitute the word 'will-to-power' for the word 'motivation' in the formulation above, to emphasise the impersonal, non-ego-centered sense of 'motivation' I have in mind; the differing wills motivate 'in' us, as it were).

I think, moreover, that this means that there's nothing particularly all that 'special' about truth: lies, illusions, fictions, and fables can all play similar roles to truth, and that truth is just one historically privileged and thus contingent locus of 'life-bearing' powers, if you will.

I think you mean, Great Soon To Be Reality!

I'm not sure Nietzsche really holds to any unequivocal notion of truth -

(cf. the famous: "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.)

- and that he holds to a more or less pragmatic understanding of truth where truth simply is a variable plank in a larger assemblage of elements that allow one to live in some way or another (truth is as truth does, as it were). Raymond Geuss has a wonderful article (in his recent Changing the Subject) where he tries to disentangle some of the different ways in which Nietzsche talks about truth, depending on the context in which those discussions take place. If you can find it, it's a lovely read. A sampling:

"There are three issues here, different contexts in which ‘truth’ arises as a problem and in which it must be treated. First, there is the question about ‘truths’ (with a small ‘t’), that is, garden-variety statements about the world which are significantly strongly warranted and deserve to be affirmed. Do such statements exist, and are they distinct from non-truths, or is every thing simply a matter of opinion, with no opinion having any priority over any other? The answer to this is, for Nietzsche, patently yes, they do exist. ... The second is what some philosophers, following Plato, might call the ‘more strictly “philosophical” question of “Truth” ’: What is the definition of truth? Is it, for instance, the correspondence of proposition to reality?

... Even a cursory reading of any one of the works of Nietzsche’s ... should suffice to indicate to the reader that Nietzsche does not propose to answer this question but rather wishes to destroy the complex of assumptions which one must make in order for the question to be at all a sensible one to raise. ... This brings one immediately to the third complex of issues concerning truth, and the one that is of by far the greatest interest to Nietzsche. This is what we might call the ‘ethics of truth’." Any attempt to treat Nietzsche on truth would need, I think, to attend to the multiplicity of these differing approaches.

The only atheism worthy of the name:

"Many contemporaries are in one important sense neither theists nor atheists—it isn’t so much that they think that God does exist or that he does not, or even that they are ‘agnostic’ in the traditional sense. Rather, as Richard Rorty once said, he just wished people would shut up altogether about the whole topic because for him and those like him the categorical dimension within which something like ‘God’ could—or could not—be said to exist has just disappeared (or been abolished).

The question of the existence of some entity that might instantiate this category has simply lost all meaning or relevance. From the point of view of a religious believer this is the worst possible state of affairs: at least the militant atheist agrees that something very important is at issue in the discussion of ‘God’. For a committed theist, Rorty’s position would seem to be a particularly intractable form of what he or she would call atheism."

- Raymond Geuss

Family dinners are weird :groan:

Haha, I've been intrigued by that book ever since I read this:

https://griffithreview.com/articles/andrew-bolts-disappointment/

- a reflection on people's reaction to the book which aims to show the extent of Aboriginal innovation in Australia before white settlement. Also, I've been sniping with my family over just this question recently so I decided I need to get educated! Something a little outside my normal reading habits, but its very good so far and I'm learning lots.

Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu
Alexander Galloway - The Interface Effect

This seems an indirect attack on ideas like Will in Schop's philosophy. — schopenhauer1

I read it that way too (among other things), and agree with it.

However, what is more disheartening are philosophies (pessimistic or not) that have only isolated/closed off events. Nothing is really related in any necessary way. All is contingent. That is another possibility. — schopenhauer1

In both much worse and much better than this in Nietzsche: "Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning"; this again is the noon-day Sun, the indifference to which one can simply be indifferent to in turn. The quote here follows on the tails of: "But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. ... The total character of the world ... is in all eternity chaos." (The Gay Science)

But I find it really interesting that Nietzsche is willing to concede the "truth" of pessimism while still attacking it. — John Doe

As I understand it, the connection between the two here in Nietzsche is not just incidental or rhetorical but essential: it is because Nietzsche is willing to concede to the truth of pessimism that he can attack it. This might sound paradoxical, but one of Nietzsche's recurring motifs is that nihilism, taken to the limit, effectively undermines itself ("We have abolished the real world.... With the real world we have also abolished the apparent world! Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; Incipit Zarathustra"), and that the real problem with nihilism is that it draws the wrong conclusions about its own procedures: not pessimsim, but unburdened affirmation is what you get once you leap through the fire of nihilism to get to the other side (hence also Nietzsche's self-declaration in the WTP of himself as a 'perfect nihilist').

The metaphorics of the 'shortest shadow' at midday (which is everywhere in Nietzsche's work), attests to this too, I think: noon is when the shadow coincides with the thing, the point of indifference between reality and appearance, and the abolishment of all transcendent values against which this life could be measured ("Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated, which comes to the same thing) ... Becoming is of equivalent value at every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to which the word ‘value’ would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated").

And this jibes with some of Nietzsche's other comments on truth, in which - far from simply devaluing it, he treats it as a measure of spirit: ""Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much “truth” he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted"; Elsewhere: "How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value. ...My philosophy will triumph one day, for what one has forbidden so far as matter of principle has always been — truth alone".

So I see Nietzsche as understanding pessimism to be 'self-immolating', as it were, where the test of it's truth is how lightly it can be borne, how easily it can be engaged with (a test condensed in the idea of the eternal return: " Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”). So yeah, I think there's a definite consistency that runs through N's thought which is quite nicely exhibited in his relation to pessimism.

The wedding vow was already one of Austin's paradigmatic examples of a performative speech act, which Massumi is simply recapitulating in his own way:

"One of our examples was, for instance, the utterance 'I do' (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something - namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying." (Austin, How To Do Things With Words).

Do you have a point to make in this discussion about performatives?

I most definitely do not mean the scientific model. My outlook is informed more by a Deleuzian approach than anything, where things like 'unity' and 'separation' - these terms are very vague and hard to talk about on their own - are results of processes in and of time, and not 'given' as first principles. I'm not even sure one can talk about this in the abstract without abusing grammar outright (metaphysics is largely an abuse of grammar anyway...). But as a start consider an assemblage approach as one that I'm partial to.

What about a more dynamic conception in which things that are 'metaphysically separate' become 'unified', and things that are unified become separate? What about thinking of separation and unity as results or snapshots of a more fluid field: an empiricism in which one would have to attend to things in time, as historical, in order to draw any conclusions about unity or disparateness, in a way that belies any attempt to stake it out from an armchair?

Just to be clear, I didn't call anyone here a monster. I don't for a second believe that most people, including those here, would, when confronted with a situation in which ethics is at play, treat that situation as a purely intellectual problem - even if they might say or even think otherwise. There is ethics in action, and there is what people think they are doing, the morning after.

One thing Frankfurt is right about is that ethical 'answers' are co-eval with ethical 'questions': and they are coeval because all ethics are the result of encounters which define the very questions which constitute the field of ethics. Ethics is not some kind of thought-game, some intellectual past-time for the bored and lonely, requiring some inane deliniation of pre-set 'criteria'. But this is not a 'fault' of ethics, a 'systematic incoherency', this is its pure consistency, through and through, compromised by all idiotic attempts to treat it categorically.