Of course, Stoic love might seem like indifference to a drama-queen Romantic. Likewise, to be aware & concerned about Death & Disaster is necessary for the continuation of life. But, anxiety and dread and self-flagellation are counterproductive, and useless, and as Mr. Spock would say "illogical" . — Gnomon

Well I do like Mr. Spock! The 'drama queen' line is funny, but note the subtle casting of a female for that role. And it's something that a long married person might say. Anxiety is also thrill. Many of us like horror movies. So the idea that anxiety is simply bad seems all wrong to me.

Put jelly on your shoulder
Let's do what you fear most
That from which you recoil
But still makes your eyes moist
Put jelly, baby, on your shoulder
Lies down, now baby, on the carpet
...
Well some kinds of love
They're mistaken for vision
...
And for me to miss one
Would seem to be groundless
— Lou Reed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh-GNnCwHj4

What is man, in the end? — Wayfarer

The asker of precisely that question?

A creature, a phenomenon, a 'moist robot', a gene-carrier? What end are we trying to achieve? Interplanetary conquest? Fame and riches? Master of arts and sciences? — Wayfarer

At the very least, man is the creature who can dream that he is any or all of these things.

The human is (one might say) the question incarnate, a permanent identity crisis. This would be the gloomy/ecstatic existentialist answer, which virtuously (for it) faces our facelessness. Another answer is some kind of ideal society that justifies all the suffering it took to get there, towards which the world sneaks as it merely seems to be on fire and out of control.

So the secular~scientific attitude of mainstream culture does not preserve those ancient insights which are still even preserved (as you know) in the German idealists - Fichte, Schelling, et al (as you know). — Wayfarer

IMV the living 'religion' of a culture is manifest in what high-status people like to be seen doing. In this we see a collision of answers to the question: 'what is the human?' Philosopically our age seems 'late' and hyper-self-conscious.

The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift. — SEP

This next one reminds me of the word made flesh.

The Medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use -- the universal intersubjectivity of language -- undermines the message. — Zizek

We the people of reason must also be the people of rhetoric, since reason is a kind of ideal or point at infinity, a lusted-after purified rhetoric --cleansed of bias and small self and the stink of time. No wonder then that philosophers have ached to be mathematicians of the spirit and railed against 'systemless bullshit' that can't be verified by a dead machine. I think one can even read the opposition to later philosophers as a denial of the incarnation. Derrida is a good up-to-date Christian (?).

This fascinating quote sheds light on that one, and touches on the OP:

The implicit lesson of Plato is not that everything is appearance, that it is not possible to draw a clear line of separation between appearance and reality (that would have meant the victory of Sophism), but that essence is "appearance as appearance," that essence appears in contrast to appearance within appearance; that the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself. Insofar as the gap between essence and appearance is inherent to appearance, in other words, insofar as essence is nothing but appearance reflected into itself, appearance is appearance against the background of nothing - everything appears ultimately out of nothing. — Zizek (emph. added)

Since many posters on this forum admit to some degree of depression, anxiety, or existential dread, they seem to find things to "contend/despair over". — Gnomon

You tempt the gods, my friend. While a system of thought and habits clearly helps determine one's happiness or misery, as long as this gory machine is 'to us' we are vulnerable. If the sage's digestion goes to pieces, it takes his fragile wisdom along with it.

To live without anxiety or dread might be easier for a settled/retired person than someone in the middle of their lives largely worrying about what they can control --figuring out who they want to be, falling in and out of love, empathizing with friends and family exposed to the disasters that are just part of life.

To be passionately alive is to wrestle sometimes with anxiety and dread. I care therefore I think.

One of the "four cardinal virtues" of Stoicism is "andreia", which is translated as "courage" or "manly virtue". So I think "heroic" was not too far off-base. And "weakling" is just a way to illustrate the difference between those who sink and those who swim. I didn't label any person with those general terms, so I hope no one here was offended by the kinds of distinctions made by ancient macho Greeks. — Gnomon

Oh I'm not at all complaining that you used those words. Far from it. Courage and/or manly virtue is central to my own thinking. I've only been challenging a certain style of stoicism to look into its deeper motivations. It's not, in my opinion, some coldly rational minimization of suffering. It enacts a particular image or notion of masculine virtue for the mirror. It seems to not see its own narcissism. But this isn't to accuse it of narcissism but only of the not-seeing-it, and only from the perspective that understands itself to include but transcend a pre-ironic stoicism.

Sometimes I think things would be a lot easier if I just knew that I was saved by Jesus, but then other times I think that everyone who has gotten "the good news" really knows, deep down inside, that it's bollocks. The restlessness of the negative dialectic keeps calling me... — uncanni

Nice. Here's a passage that I think maybe you'll appreciate. To me it's about the glory of the negative what it tends toward.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.[1] — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm

This to me describes the 'infinity' of the godless/divine wanderer.

But moral wimps will give-in to gravity dragging them down, whereas those with a minimum of moral fiber will resist. And even the drowning weakling can reach-out in desperation for help from a stronger swimmer. — Gnomon

Ah, but look at how you can't resist words like 'weakling' and 'wimps.' We also get 'moral fiber.' That's fine, of course. My point is that this is the guts of the position, a morally complacent machismo. Now I accuse myself of the same thing, but he who accuses himself stills respects himself as one who surprises.

As far as I can tell, there's a tendency to read the skeptic/ironist as someone who is not waving but drowning. IMV that's the fantasy of the anti-Nietzschean --that all this thought that plays with fire does so out of weakness rather than strength.

I'm not trying to be rude. I enjoy our jousting, and I think this is fair response.

Ah, OK. And nice poem! I've wrestled with some funk, too. Some people have died, are sick. Doing this ol' philosophical thing is a bright spot.

You're a deconstructionist in the finest sense of the word. Knowing that madness can never be permanently banished is a step in the right direction. My madness is my old friend. — uncanni

Thanks! Hello darkness madness, my old friend. :starstruck: :grimace: :cool:

I know and love that quote. Nice!

That's the 'who made God?' objection. But the answer to that from the perspective of theistic philosophy, is that 'necessary being' is the terminus of the enquiry 'why does anything exist?' in the same way that '4' is the terminus of the enquiry 'what does 2 + 2 equal? — Wayfarer

For me it's not the the 'who made God?' objection. Let's grant that there is a God. If 'He' is intelligible at all, he has a structure or nature. Why does he have that nature and not some other? If we try to answer this question in terms of the nature of this God, that seems circular.

But transcending religious dogma is different to simply abandoning it. — Wayfarer

Personally I still love the good book.

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. — Romans 7:14

Or:

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? — Matthew 27:46

Feuerbach the 'atheist' still has this to say:

Every limitation of reason, or of human nature in general, rests on a delusion, an error. To be sure, the human individual can, even must, feel and know himself to be limited – and this is what distinguishes him from the animal – but he can become conscious of his limits, his finiteness, only because he can make the perfection and infinity of his species the object either of his feeling, conscience, or thought But if his limitations appear to him as emanating from the species, this can only be due to his delusion that he is identical with the species, a delusion intimately linked with the individual’s love of case, lethargy, vanity, and selfishness; for a limit which I know to be mine alone, humiliates, shames, and disquiets me. Hence, in order to free myself of this feeling of shame, this uneasiness, I make the limits of my individuality the limits of man’s being itself. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others; why should this worry me at all? It is not due to any fault of mine or of my understanding; the cause lies in the understanding of the species itself. But it is a folly, a ludicrous and frivolous folly to designate that which constitutes the nature of man and the absolute nature of the individual, the essence of the species, as finite and limited. — F

Humanism declares more or less explicitly that humanity is divine.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind--among them the entire fair sex--should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.

Thus it is very difficult for the individual to work himself out of the nonage which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown to like it, and is at first really incapable of using his own understanding because he has never been permitted to try it. Dogmas and formulas, these mechanical tools designed for reasonable use--or rather abuse--of his natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting nonage. The man who casts them off would make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch, because he is not used to such free movement. That is why there are only a few men who walk firmly, and who have emerged from nonage by cultivating their own minds. — Kant

Note that we are all here appealing to reason, our own human reason, in order to determine the divine more exactly. What isn't rational we as philosophers refuse to regard as real. And discourse that ignores or denies some aspect of the real we refuse to regard as complete. Hence philosophy is implicitly a humanism, though of course we can consider a continuum that runs between myth-metaphor-mysticism and careful arguments.

I think the key term in both ancient philosophy and religion was that we ourselves are related to that intelligence. And again that is existentially significant, don’t you think? — Wayfarer

From a Feuerbach-influenced perspective, I think it's unavoidable. Even if we reject Feuerbach's notion that such intelligence is merely a projection, it's hard to fathom a God worth having shorn of the 'divine' predicates already dear to us as humans, and even to atheists.

You believe in love as a divine attribute because you yourself love, and believe that God is a wise and benevolent being because you know nothing better in yourself than wisdom and benevolence.
...
The predicates have a reality of their own, have an independent significance; the force of what they contain compels man to recognise them. They prove their truth to man directly through themselves. They are their own proof and evidence. Goodness, justice, and wisdom do not become chimeras if the existence of God is a chimera, nor do they become truths simply because the existence of God is a truth. The concept of God depends on the concept of justice, kindness, and wisdom – a God who is not kind, not just, and not wise is no God. But these concepts do not depend on the concept of God. — Feuerbach

In any case, from a very high level, what theistic philosophies are seeking is congruence or relationship with the source of that order. — Wayfarer

I agree. To me it seems that even atheism and humanism can be interpreted as variants of theism that take the incarnation all the way, leaving nothing behind in the sky. The species becomes god and/or reason becomes god. The divine predicates never go out of fashion.

For that reason it is thought that one can come into contact with the nature of the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one’s ultimate inner being. — Wayf's quote

From the standpoint of a later religion, the earlier religion turns out to be idolatry: Man is seen to have worshiped his own essence. Man has objectified himself, but he has not yet recognised the object as his own essential being – a step taken by later religion. Every progress in religion means therefore, a deepening of man’s knowledge of himself.
...
And our task consists precisely in showing that the antithesis of the divine and human is illusory; that is, that it is nothing other than the antithesis between the essential being of man and his individual being... — Feuerbach

I lean toward interpreting theism as the projection of 'the essential being of man.' This leaves the ultimate source 'inhuman' and mysterious. I don't know why we're here. Even calling it a crapshoot doesn't satisfy me. We can postulate this or that probabilistic law, but I currently can't see how we don't finally discover a radical contingency --that the law is X and not Y. Nevermind the problem of induction.

Perhaps that's the issue. In my view the 'human form divine' (which is not the human body but more like language and feeling which Hollywood can install in squids who see that time is flat circle) is itself just something that happens to be here.

Appeals to the nature of the divine that attempt to escape this contingency are betrayed by that word 'nature.' If the divine has a nature, it is subject to some law or order which is itself unexplained. This doesn't close the possibility of feeling some kind of logic and necessity at the heart of things.

Thanks. I am very much a tea drinker (or just plain water - boring, I know). — Swan

I like green tea. It tastes like dirt in a good way.

Your posts are extremely refreshing (usually I have a tendency to overwhelm) with my long-winded rambles (it doesn't help I love to write - so I can get VERY long-winded), and just end up boring people off - I get like that usually all hours after midnight, to which I could use an ear to ramble into. My friends (or more so 'associates') either fall asleep or haven't much to add. — Swan

Thanks. I like your posts. They are raw and authentic.

Suffice it to say, people are like icebergs. You can assume that what is above the surface is all there is, but you’ll be missing 90% of the person that exists below the surface. — Mark Dennis

I'm with you on people as icebergs. No real philosopher is vulgar enough to know what he or she really believes.

"To the Self the world is but a colorful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over." -Nisargadatta — OmniscientNihilist

Good quote! Reminds me of the roller coaster metaphor. If only the self was always the Self...

I'd like to challenge you in a different way. Let's assume for the sake of argument that some kind of creative intelligence is responsible for big bang. What then? As long as this intelligence is something we all only vaguely assent to, how do we get more out of this than another philosopher's god? How is this better than deism? Unless we get afterlives and/or commandments that are manifest.?

As long as humans must speak and act for this God (promises and threats without miracles that leave the possibility of doubt), I don't see that much is solved. I'd expect 10,000 versions of what this God demands or promises from 10,000 self-anointed mouthpieces or bloody right hands.

Which is what Bakhtin's notion of dialogism does. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of monologists lurking about. — uncanni

Is it strictly unfortunate though? Doesn't the advocate of diologism need a foil? It's like the crystal palace of Dostoevsky's underground man. In the rational kingdom to come, we might slip into a coma from boredom and/or welcome the return of the king monological trolls. They'll serve as our 'golden pins.'

Now I genuinely like dialogism and other related insights. I still think that this principle itself runs the risk of becoming monological. It's as if every ideal or principle casts a shadow. It offers us a welcome refuge from the abyssal complexity within. Can any community exist without some foundational blindspot? I don't know. I guess I'm suspicious of any ideology, including my own anti-ideology, claiming a Final Triumph and mistakenly believing it has exiled its own madness.

Respectable does not equal well-known...

Does it? — creativesoul

Well that's a deep question. If I tell you about nobody from nowhere (some articulate prole without institutional backing or connections to fame), does this prole sound respectable to you? What is it to respected? 'admired and approved of by many people' https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/respected

To be sure, I can personally respect this articulate prole. I know that he's really a genius, and that he had his reasons not to bother courting the respect of strangers. That's part of the reason I respect him. I admire his scorn for such trifles. (To be clear, I'm playing. The articulate prole sprung into existence to help me make my point. Or made the point?)

Troll? — creativesoul

Wittgenstein was invited to a meeting of the Vienna circle: “When he finally came, instead of answering their questions about his book, he sat facing away from them reading Tagore, the Indian poet, for over an hour and then got up and silently left the room. Afterward Carnap remarked to Schlick, “I guess he is not one of us.”

That's the story I had in mind.

And then the form of the TLP is something a crank would dream up. Don't get me wrong. I love it. I got quasi-mystical kicks out of it and still think it's brilliant.It's just that I can imagine all the other Wittgensteins who didn't have the same luck in academia and left cursing it for its shallowness.

I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been anticipated by someone else. — W

I love it, but I doubt I could away with something like that. It's not 'respectable.'

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the
problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long
period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been
unable to say what constituted that sense?)


6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.


6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say
nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e.
something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever
someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him
that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have
the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the
only strictly correct one.
— W

Wittgenstein, the mystical troll! Hardly the final truth, but surely this wasn't the way things were usually done. He was an intellectual rock star, an eccentric who had the charisma ad connections (and exciting ideas, of course) to get away with it.

I do not share your enthusiasm about those excerpts. I'm much less enthusiastic about philosophers who employ rhetoric as argumentation in what is nothing other than their own anecdotal stories about others... reminds me of some of the dialogues that are more like monologues in Plato...

Meh. — creativesoul

Fair enough. Plenty of people are put off by freewheeling interpretative philosophy. I have a 'meh' reaction to philosophy that hides from this. To me it dies into dreary, 'normal' discourse. It presupposes a 'spirituality' and fidgets with dead things, worries itself over linguistic issues detached from great human passions. For me the metaphysical project decays or blossoms into cultural criticism. It's 'continuous' with literature and religion or cares about the same things.

Well, some of it's not interpersonal. — creativesoul

Well, sure, but I'm suggesting that the autonomous ego is something like a useful fiction, a piece of being-in-language and being 'one of us.' Language is social down to its bones. My most private monologue is potentially intelligible to those not yet born. The self is a function of language, one might say, though this is hardly the last word (not that I think there is a last word.)

All of us know quite a bit about what sorts of things we can affect/effect and what sorts of things we cannot. — creativesoul

Sure. We all have a loose sense of what's intended by Stoicism 101. But then it's as deep as 'no use crying over spilt milk.' And it's also (potentially) the 'religion' of a 'slave' (an imaginary freedom justifying conformity to a system ('master') that it's convenient for us to understand as beyond our control. I'm not pretending to be a revolutionary. I'm more of a 'skeptic' (as presented by writers like the one I quoted).

I wasn't saying that your position was one more role. — creativesoul

I know. I was just preemptively 'confessing.'

Rather, when I mentioned the role one plays, it had neither negative nor disingenuous connotations. I meant, quite matter of factly... we all play a role in our own lives... the primary one! — creativesoul

I know. I was squeezing the juice from your dead metaphor. I agree that in a certain sense we play the primary role in our own lives. But who is this 'we' or this 'I'? Peel the onion. What do we find but attachments to others and crystalline structures made from the language of the tribe?

As a mildly-educated individual (life's too short), what is my head filled with but the discoveries of others? The dried spit of those who came before? Surely it's not this particular bag of blood that denotes me truly. Personality is a quilt of ghosts.

That said, there's much to be gleaned by looking at all 'the different hats' one sometimes wears as a means to successfully interact with others, to act appropriately according to the situation one finds themselves in, attain some goal or another, and/or just follow the rules of conduct. We all must do this(to some degree or other) in order to navigate the world we find ourselves in.

The degree to which one does(or must) can be an interesting conversation... — creativesoul

I agree, and that IMO is precisely the realm of rhetoric. 'Ethics is first philosophy.' To me that means that the 'ego ideal' is central. And we can consider also the dominant ideals of a culture. If you want to understand someone, look to their notion of what kind of person they should be. If you want to understand a culture, look to what those with high status like to be seen doing.

Now someone might claim that some kind of universal reason can tell us this without rhetoric. Another person might say that 'universal reason' is tangled up in the first person's 'ego ideal.' How is authority established? What is to count as reason in the first place? IMV it's something like rhetoric or abnormal discourse that establishes a nice safe space for those 'seduced' by that (always false?) foundation. This position is, however, haunted by 'the irony.' The human is an abyss --who likes to pretend otherwise --or so certain humans like to pretend....

Just jesting with you... — creativesoul

I do not object to a jest, either finite or infinite.

Weren't they already respectable when doing it, or did they become respectable later? — creativesoul

I think of Russell and Wittgenstein. If you seduce the right somebody, you don't stay a nobody for long. Now I love me some Wittgenstein, but homeboy was a troll sometimes?

Here's some of Schlegel's take.

If a literary form like the fragment opens up the question of the relation between finite and infinite, so do the literary modes of allegory, wit and irony—allegory as a finite opening toward the infinite (“every allegory means God”), wit as the “fragmentary geniality” or “selective flashing” in which a unity can momentarily be seen, and irony as their synthesis (see Frank 2004, 216). Although impressed with the Socratic notion of irony (playful and serious, frank and deeply hidden, it is the freest of all licenses, since through it one rises above one's own self, Schlegel says in Lyceumfragment 108), Schlegel nonetheless employs it in a way perhaps more reminiscent of the oscillations of Fichtean selfhood. Irony is at once, as he says in Lyceumfragment 37, self-creation, self-limitation, and self-destruction.

“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).
— SEP

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

Self-satisfied system versus onanistic irony?

Thanks for jumping in.

Part of it is interpersonal. — creativesoul

To put it mildly.

Knowing oneself is the best start. You are the sole character that is on each and every page of your own life. Acknowledge the role you play, seek to understand it, and the realize the life you want. — creativesoul

Know thyself. Indeed. I love Kojeve's take on the philosopher as a type. Philosophy is the (anti-)religion of self-consciousness. Dissecting 'bland' stoicism is part of that. The dismissal of Nietzsche, for instance, looks to run in the opposite direction. I don't personally give a damn (obviously) whether any particular stranger out there enjoys Nietzsche. That's out of my control, see.

Acknowledge the role you play. Acknowledge that the cool stoic is one more role, one more project. That 'my' position is one more role shouldn't have to be mentioned.

To zoom in on a previously quoted passage:

The recluse does not believe that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." — Nietzsche

To become more and more self-conscious is to 'tarry with the negative' on the way of death and despair. Any plausible sage has to confess at least this and then justify it and tie it all up in a sleepy system...

Of course having attainable goals helps too... It is better to have no goals than to have unattainable ones... — creativesoul

Well I can't follow you here, though I get it. Isn't having no unobtainable goals itself an unobtainable goal? We simplify our own 'wicked' and complex nature and call it self-knowledge? Is wisdom just self-satisfaction? Complacency? Maybe it is. We can theoretically repress our angry itch for the impossible object. We can refuse to know about it. I am skeptical however about its eradication.

Self-satisfaction, genuine wisdom, completeness... this is like the end of history applied not to the world but to the knowledge-swollen ego.

How does the sage (Hegel, for ex.) handle the challenge of irony? Note how close the Hegel's ironist is to the stoic and the stoic's fantasy of controlling what he values (his desires.) 'Real' mastery is a mastery of ghosts, the control only of one's mediation of cancelled, ordinary reality. In sleep a king, but waking no matter. Yet life is a dream, a novel with the ego on every page.

But on this principle [that of the The Irony], I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free) as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
...
This irony was invented by Friedrich von Schlegel, and many others have babbled about it or are now babbling about it again. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

to be wretched and miserable about what is outside our control is unwise. — Ciceronianus the White

That may be so, but it also blends very well with deciding that more and more is out of our control.

How does one after all determine what is in and out of our control?

Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions. — Epictetus

I of course don't hold you to this particular quote, but let's consider it. Our desires are under our control? And all the other stuff isn't at all? It's a fantasy, a point at infinity.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself. — Epictetus

I think that's a great passage. Stoicism == 'be cool, bitch!' Don't be resentful, envious, etc. All of this is great, but the pursuit of a bland version of cool still seems less interesting than the cool surface of a soul that can at least inwardly laugh at the mad scenes in Dostoevsky or recognize its own complexity in Nietzsche's texts. I want my stoic to able to laugh at himself and his mad project.

I guess we've just missed one another so far in this too-wide world. I think I'd recognize a fellow monological walker. These days I'm walking the lonely-lovely streets at 4AM. I have the cityscape to myself, not counting the headlights on the interstate above my head and the coyote who lives in an ex-junkyard nearby. That coyote is my brother or sister.

Words going into the mind turn into illusions and misunderstandings — OmniscientNihilist

These words, going into my mind, turned into illusions and misunderstanding.

I too now know nothing about everything and everything about nothing. I have climbed the ladder of nonsense and let it drop behind me so that others may use it & join me in the clouds.

This is an interesting line. I'm not sure I've ever encountered someone whom I consider a troll who has any apparent fans or following. — Artemis

When troll really makes it, no one calls him or her a troll anymore. Calling all the philosophy that came before a bunch of confusion, for instance, seems trollish. Yet philosophers have done this sort of thing and become respectable.

Why do some people endlessly seek negative excitement and domination rather than collaboration? — uncanni

That's a deep question. IMV, the philosophical canon is itself full of 'negative excitement and domination.' I view it as a battle of 'final vocabularies' that depends as much on rhetoric as it does on logic.

As we discussed before, I think the only way to avoid becoming a dominating evangelist is to prioritize an ideal, symmetric relationship. I don't claim to find this easy. The 'negative excitement' is always tempting.

Most posts like this are usually full of shit, imo, but admit not as bad as that one lady posting virtual signalling psychology articles about her superior pacifism in the middle of a debate. — Swan

I like your sense of humor.

I don't think that "get over it" is the right thing to say. I mean, that's pretty callous. Of course, you don't really want to talk about it with many people, do you? They won't understand. — uncanni

I think you read that line out of context. If you read more of my posts in this thread, I think you'll see that I am defending angst. I am criticizing the Brave-New-World-style response of offering pills and platitudes. Our 'great books' are about angst, about the big issues that don't help us sell widgets. Have you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_No_Alternative%3F
?

This is roughly where I'm coming from. The 'tough' response to capitalism is just embracing the jungle. The 'tender' response is 'nihilism' or angst. For me it's not about choosing one but rather about closing neither down and trying to understand both.

From that book:

In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché.
...
Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
...
To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.

most of our behaviors operate on cruise-control, so we don't have to pay attention to what's going on. — Gnomon

I agree very much with this.

When the "pilot" is weakened by stress (doubts, depression, drugs, etc), it's easier to "veg-out" and offload your responsibilities to a mindless machine ("let go, and let God"). — Gnomon

I think it depends on the drug. With the right dose of a CNS,...

But I agree with broken-down people tending to veg out. This is brilliantly described in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. The overwhelmed personality just flops down and becomes passive. Junkfood for the body, junkfood for the mind. Nothing long and difficult. Nothing that requires cooking. Everything bitesized and instant.

That's why suicide is often viewed as the easy-way-out. It also takes heroic (or Stoic) Character to take charge of a bad situation. — Gnomon

I'm not against your identification of the heroic and the stoic, but I don't take it for granted. My complaint is that such a position refuses to process limit experiences. Is it irrational to die in a duel? (These days it would be silly, but back then?) Is it irrational to fight, actually risk life and limb, against those who would dominate you? Is it 'irrational' to risk everything for the possibility of something great?

I'm influenced here by Kojeve's interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. Slaves rationalize their slavery. They can do this by projecting a master of their master (a God), before whom the master is one more slave of equal status. Or they can do this by settling for a virtual mastery, a self-mastery that nevertheless obeys the worldly master. Their slavery is an 'illusion' to their freed mind. All of these rationalizations are a substitute for the risk of life.

Now that's were at the (pseudo-) end of history with capitalism and do-it-yourself religion, it's just a jungle out there. Speech is free because it hardly matters. But pay your taxes and don't steal!

We enjoy virtual rebellions. Bread and circuses. I'm no revolutionary. I'm a slave with own do-it-yourself ideological opiate. And who exactly is the master? Where's the bad guy? The system itself is letting go and letting God. The invisible hand is God. No one is driving, though conspiracy theorists demand some extra-terrestrial lizards to target. But that's OK, as long as we navigate our little meat puppet safely and comfortably and rationally through the maze. I'm not even complaining (complicit of course), but only polishing the complexity so that it gleams. It's a poem for the jungle.

There's no way around crisis, death or despair for humans. The way I see it, we had best find the "healthiest" ways we can manage for dealing with them. — uncanni

I must see it that way too, because I try to be kind.

Now I do think 'healthy' pretty much has to be ambiguous here. If we avoid 'ideological' stasis, then (seems to me) we haven't settled exactly on what the good life is, on exactly how to be grown up and virtuous. Another uncomfortable issue in my mind is the connection of 'sin' or irrationality or immaturity with great art. Even moral progress seems to require that the 'sinner' (moral revolutionary) violate today's norms in order to install tomorrow's. In other words, domination these days is likely to be justified in terms of public health, public safety. There's also the problem of whether violence is ever justified. Is antifa dealing with things in a healthy way, even if it gets them or others killed? Or perhaps we'll take a 'do no harm' approach. Even this passivity can be accused.

I'm not trying to be buzzkill but only articulate the complexity of not-stasis as I see it. I guess I find an ecstasy in this complexity -- at the cost of having anything like a solution for existence.

That's a really thoughtful response, thanks for taking the time to write it out. I suppose I'm still filtering through things myself. — Swan

Thanks for pardoning what I feared would be excessive. I tend to err on the side of 'too much.'

Actually, I typed a long response, but I just removed it. I don't want to make this a sob fest. — Swan

Hey, I am happy to read it. Or send me a PM. I am addicted to the red pill. I like deep conversations. IRL, I am 'that friend.' My idea of a good time is sharing a pot of coffee (black, of course) and walking around for 3 hours talking about all the stuff that 'one' doesn't talk about in mixed company. .

.

Amor fati (despite it being our fate not know our futures until they happen - and maybe not even then, only in hindsight)! — 180 Proof

I like this. The genuine future is the one that's not conquered or denied with a system. Death lurks somewhere in that darkness.

I agree that Nietzsche as guru is questionable indeed. Nietzsche as a complex, brilliant personality wrestling with the death of God is something else entirely. To understand Nietzsche as a guru or guide for life is like understanding Hamlet or Stavrogin as a guide for life.

'Be patient with whatever comes.' Maybe, maybe not. What's the deep justification for this? In the name of what X do the old, wise men condescend to the angsty boys? In the name of what grand principle do we prefer the aging actuary to a Hendrix or Cobain who dies young ?

One reason to live long is to hang around for the great art about and by those who don't.

Our species can contemplate its own extinction. Yet the gurus will keep selling Jesus or rational moral progress or good digestion stoicism or even anti-natalism.

A PULSE. Amor fati, brutha! :cool: — 180 Proof

You too, brother. 'We know time.'

Perhaps. To my way of thinking, he recognizes that all he'll know is bounded by what he can know. — tim wood

Right. And this is one way to read that the real is rational and the rational real. What isn't intelligible to us (isn't mediated by human concept and feeling) might as well not be at all. It exists only as a negation (which is to say perhaps as mere confusion.)

Therefore, whatever God he has, is his own. That makes him God. Makes each his or her own God. Most of us divinities understand that our imperfect Godhood is just a short distance of approaching, and the goal unattainable, except in terms of the approaching - us modest gods, anyway. — tim wood

I agree, but I would emphasize how radically social we are. So for me it's more like: whatever Gods we have, are our own. To be alone with a new god is to be a madman or a prophet.

I also agree with your sense of being only on the way (still becoming and not being God.) The modern project of building a just and rational world looks like a modification of Hegel and Feuerbach to me. The very idea of 'moral progress' understands community as an evolving organism on the way to an even better community (or perhaps decaying, if one is conservative.) To establish right and wrong with human reason is implicitly godlike, as we acknowledge no bondage to anything extra-human. 'Reason' in all of its ambiguity is the Holy Ghost, and since it's open to criticism by its very nature, it's unstable. Is 'it' leading us somewhere good? I see a clashing plurality of humanisms.

And if we ever get there, which I think intrinsically impossible, if humanity ever gets there, then they will be God. — tim wood

I think it's impossible too. And images of the end of history seem to leave us without any grand mission. For Kojeve (an ironic and playful philosopher) we'd just become animals again, no longer driven to fight and work. Orgy porgy.

That leaves sci-fi questions such as, is humanity the best vehicle for getting to God? — tim wood

That is a fun question. Our experience of reason allows us to see 'ourselves' in those octopus creatures in Arrival. We're not strictly identified with anything but our language and our human feelings. IMO, those are limits on conceptions of the divine. 'It' has to think and feel like we do --or be a mere explanatory device if we're talking about a philosopher's god.