Update: Thinking I had philosophized my way to happiness turned out to be wrong. — Pfhorrest

I've been there. Up and down. I've scribbled joyous manifestos only to be dragged back down. In my experience, no abstract system holds things up. With the same 'metaphysical' system I've been both very high and very low. We're flesh and blood. The stuff we say and think are just the tip of the iceberg. I connect this with the 'anti-metaphysics' of the darkness as presented in Nietzsche and elsewhere. We're embedded in a terrible way, more vulnerable than we would usually like to know.

That's true: you're guessing. — ZzzoneiroCosm

He did a mountain of cocaine. It's better than coffee.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/payngv/a-brief-history-of-freuds-love-affair-with-cocaine

That doesn't mean the old man didn't ever get sad. I just find it implausible that he wasn't having a blast with all the coke he wanted while he worked. He was another wild soul who believed he solved the riddles of existence. To me that's 'the' 'spiritual' pleasure. It goes well with stimulants.

The saner part of me agrees with all of that. The wilder part of me remembers the connection of ecstasy with the terrible. Why do groups wage war when resources aren't scarce (when they don't really need to)? Then there's hard drugs and risky sex. Danger is part of the appeal. Intensity of experience is prioritized over the duration of experience.

I find meaningfulness inescapable. I suggested in a previous post that nihilism can be interpreted as an unconscious role-play where the nihilist faces the black dragon of meaninglessness. This apparent self-mutilation simultaneously makes the infinitely lonely ego a supreme hero. The truth in this case is the face of God. Most mortals cannot bear to look at it, since it's the death of all of their comforting illusions. In short, facing meaninglessness is, in my eyes, part of a 'religious' quest. The living sacrifice is the nihilist himself, as he wades into the acid or the devouring flames of God/Truth.

I suspect that this is the path for only one type of personality. Someone on this path who realizes that they are playing such a dark game unconsciously will perhaps become an ironist. 'Infinite jest' depends on the acid bath.

Quite evil, isn't it, to rationalize atrocities and needless suffering "in the name of" some other cunt's CAUSE or PLAN? (All is forgiven - "I was just following ends-justifies-means Commandments, sir".) Fuckin' theIDiocies ... :shade: — 180 Proof

Indeed. I do think the situation is complicated. Doesn't every community have its blind spot? Its plan and scapegoat? In practice I muddle through, try to choose the right team while also keeping a foot in the grave, making peace even with the extinction of species itself, the actual end of history that troubles all of our causes and plans. Reason reveals contingency, mortality, and even the absurdity of mortal things. That's why I object to reason as (only) happy self-preservation.

So you need to allow your rational "self" (ego) to regain control over the emotional reptilian brain (id). That won't be easy, and many people drown, sinking into despair. It will take motivation (your posts indicate that you have enough insight and ambition to seek text therapy), self-discipline, maybe some drugs, and perhaps the discipline of others. — Gnomon

You wrote this to @dazed, and it made me think of our conversation.

You pose the rational self against the old lizard. If only we are rational enough, then surely we'll be happy. Nothing is essentially wrong with reality itself. It's just that some individuals malfunction and need to be repaired. To me this presupposes that the goal is survival and comfort. It shrugs off mortality, lets go and lets God.

It's probably good advice. But it can look complacent and Panglossian, especially to 'nihilists' who have already absorbed that message, the standard message of sanitized buying and selling. It reminds me of Brave New World. We ourselves are pieces of the machine, to be treated by technicians for our glitches. The machine is good. The world is good. God is good. All else is unreasonable, sickly. But then the great books we like seen on our shelves are sickly. (Let us purge the canon of toxic masculinity !)

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory. — Debord

I quote Debord not as an authority but just to throw a wrench in the theodicy. I don't think the 'nihilist' is mad or sick, or not in a simple way. I'm suggesting that theodicies allow us to hide from ourselves as a species. We fantasize that we are rational, that the world is good, and that dissatisfaction is a malfunction rather than a virtue. Implicit in casting the dissatisfied as malfunctioning is the comformist as hero.

I don't mean to take sides in a simple way. I largely comform. But is that rational or something else?

one shouldn't speak too condescendingly about another's beliefs, considering we all hold beliefs — Tzeentch

I agree with you, basically. One things that occurs to me is that a community is more or less formed by unquestioned and even unquestionable beliefs and habits. So there's a limit to open-mindedness. We have no choice but to consider some people mad or be mad ourselves.

As philosophers, I think we are more dangerously open-minded than non-philosophers. We try to think and maybe even live on the frontier of the respectable and the sane. (This describes only one kind of philosopher, I guess. Others want to further make explicit and justify the culture's way of being, beliefs, etc.)

The only way I find any God at all is within my ideas, my thinking. — tim wood

This is where I'm at too. With philosophy comes a self-consciousness that makes traditional religious belief more difficult. God as he exists for me is tautologically an object of my thinking and feeling.

'He' is, however, the object, in my opinion. The atheistic philosopher, it seems to me, just wants to become God. The philosopher wants knowledge, power, tranquility, self-sufficingness, coherence --all the stuff we have associated with God.

In art we often have God as a bearded king. To me our images of God are human for a reason. That's the only God we can care about and imagine caring about us. Humanism /enlightenment is the moment when the son (our species) takes over for the father (its essence projected).

As we discussed earlier, however, humanism is entangled with a corrosive reason and has its own problems.

that institutionalized religion, in my sweepingly generalized view, does everything in its power to make people not question their existence. This is the boulder of ideology that oppresses so many minds so easily. This kind of ideology relieves the individual of any requirement to think and question; the goal is obedience.

To confront the impasse, as I meant it, is to acknowledge the aporia: the problem of existence does not have an answer = the disproportion between explanation and action. — uncanni

I'm with you on confronting the aporia. But I also think this is a terrifying path ('condemned to be free') and that religion is also an opiate in demand: people want a master, a system. You nailed it with 'relieves the individual.' Of what? Of the permanent identity crisis that might otherwise drive them to despair and self-destruction.

As in Brave New World, the people are protected from their own depth and potential for madness. Heretics can be cast as enemies of the people, who would thrust them into a permanent revolution in the means of seduction (of self and others via flattering-comforting grand narratives.)

Apparently, I have given you the wrong impression of Enformationism. It is not an attempt "to bring God down to this world". And it is not a Christology in any sense. It is instead an attempt to understand the traditional disputed dichotomies of Science, Philosophy, and Religion. As expressed in the heading of my BothAnd Blog : "Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc." — Gnomon

Thanks. I am now seeing it as a metaphysical system that wants to resolve traditional confusions and overcome apparent dichotomies. This too is in Hegel, along with a religion element that you aren't concerned with.

I'm more with philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger on this theme. To me the situation is far more organic and subconscious and ultimately 'uncurable' by an explicit system. We can't dominate the metalanguage, which is ordinary language. All explicit systems are little boats on the dark ocean of being-in-the-world, being-with-others, being-in-language. Explicit systems can be good for organizing explicit knowledge, but I think most of our knowledge is tacit.

Yes. I was impressed, although at times mystified, by Hofstadter's books. I have quoted him in some of my essays on The Self. But I wouldn't mention that abstruse Strange Loop argument to non-scientists or non-philosophers, because it's so technical and abstract — Gnomon

His books are indeed complex. I do think I am a Strange Loop is beautifully unpretentious given its depth and complexity. It's hard to imagine how he could have written it better.

I agree that it's hard to discuss with those not into that kind of complexity. Philosophy can be a lonely path, especially in this junk-food social-media age, where everything is bite-sized click-bait. Even the people I'm close to don't have the same appetite for the conceptual journey. And it's only that appetite that leads to enough reading to make Hofstadter digestible rather than mystifying.

It's painful and liberating, as you suggest. I am quite isolated where I live--there are absolutely no old leftie hippie intellectuals around these parts; I'm surrounded by devout, hypocritical christians. So I have indeed found in this forum a respite, a breather. — uncanni

Me too. And I know what you mean by hypocritical Christians. The leftist hippies are the true Christians, as I see it, as they continued with the implicit humanistic core of the Christian tradition.

I really like your phrase, "permanent identity crisis": but this doesn't have to be a painful or uncomfortable constant: it can be seen simply as the evolution of oneself, one's philosophy. — uncanni

I totally agree. I have found my ecstasy in this crisis. I live largely for this crisis. I suppose I chose those words to emphasize that it's the way of death and despair, too. Philosophy has opened up for me both new highs and new lows.

Would you say all 'beliefs' have a potentiality to be dangerous in some degree then..? If humans are highly susceptible to crave authority. — Swan

Yeah I'd say so. Even if our ideas are well-adapted to the world (maximize survival and comfort), there world can and does change. Any successful system of habits/thoughts can become obsolete (maybe by simply beginning to bore our wicked hearts.)

And then there's the issue of us not simply wanting to maximize survival and comfort. What I have in mind is the glamour of war, hard drugs, risky sex. Dionysus, in other words. We can get bored, stultified, world-weary and so crave danger, intense experiences, etc.

That is a very interesting take. I was thinking something similar, that the red pill is nothing but a red capsule with blue gel inside. — Swan

I like the way you put it. I see this idea as one of the fundamental things I realized as I studied philosophy. Nietzsche liked to talk about an organism venting its power. So even if we are seduced by an ideology that doesn't privilege survival or respectability, it's giving us something. It makes us feel noble, grand, like we're really living. It's all self-help books, even if someone of them are dark, ironic, and dangerous.

Perhaps the blue pill (really does) just kill us all in the end. Human(s) attempting to escape all things human - the blue goo and desire to consume it may be inescapable - for some (red pill poppers) just turn into addicts - addicted to the blue goo - the bold red seductively attracts, void of answers, but it is the blue substance inside that ends us all. — Swan

Nice. Yeah, I think the human as human wants to transcend the human. I like this theme in Kojeve. We don't just desire like other animals. We desire what others desire. We desire recognition, the submission of others, to be envied. Our restlessness or itch for the impossible object is our glory and our curse.

I edit to add what is easy to leave out: we desire to be in love, to be dominated, to be lost in a Cause. In my lonely and glorious wickedness I sometimes envy those who think they solidly are somebody. I find my own name alien and strange. It's pasted on. It's a dead thing slapped on me by the machine. Sartre felt this way, I think. I don't care about his positive results. I do love his darker lines. The gods laugh with and at the grim existentialists.


To me the typical blue pills are connected to the relaxed warmth of group membership. Red pill types are blessed/cursed with the creative genius as their ideal --and are maybe just antagonist personalities who enjoy disagreeing, finding faults and holes in the systems of others. Corrosive reason, the demon in the machine, the god who only exists as the negation of others gods.

So I agree with what you suggest, that we'll always need some kind of pill --that we're the metaphysical-mythical animal. Does this kill us directly? As I see it, nature does that for us, no matter what we believe.

I am not much of a country gal, but wish sometimes my family owned a farm out in the country, even if comes to something as simple as milking a cow. It would be a nice escape to be on a farm for a bit. — Swan

I relate. I think about a little piece of land, a tiny house, a life more physical and rounded, where I use lots of tools that keep things up and running. My training involves computers, but part of me rebels against the idea of staring at screens 40 hours a week. It's just so discarnate. And then the products I'd be making would only push the culture further in that direction.

I too can get overwhelmed with a lot of the chaos. Often, I need long periods of complete silence, and keep the radio off during my work commutes. If I can't have good music, or listen to a lecture of some sort, I'd prefer complete silence. — Swan

I highly relate to this. I love silence. Maybe it's because I want to enjoy the quiet noise in my own head. I think McLuhan saw it coming, the dissolution of certain way of being in the electrified hyper-connected global village. The lonely crowd. Yet I also love the stimulation. Ambivalence.

I remember some of his aphorisms, like ‘the task of psychoanalysis is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness’. I remember thinking at the time, nothing more than that? — Wayfarer

I read that line as deadpan humor. Freud and Jung talked for 18 (?) hours when they first met. To me this suggests that Freud loved ideas, loved his system. Since he was a creator and inspired by Romantic thinkers, I'd lump him in with the artists. I'm guessing he knew intense joy.

Great response. I really don't know. I take the freedom (such as it is) of the US system for granted. My suspicion is that we're all a little mad, and that maybe life would be dreary without that madness.

In the club are the rational ones. And ideally we reconcile using reason. Against the unreasoning or the unreasonable, it seems that ultimately, it's force that's needed. A problem with that, among the many, is that unless the force is applied, the transgression against reason may very well prevail. — tim wood

That does sound reasonable. My concern on this issue is that most of us identify with reason. Even if all the 'religious' or unreasonable people were put away, would we not still have conflict?

I'm also concerned that human beings aren't essentially prudent. Notes From Underground is a great picture of human complexity.

There seems to be a background fantasy of the end of history, where everyone is rational and woke. But we knights of reason would lose our dragon and our purpose there. There is no joy in the tavern as on the road thereto ?

I'm afraid my worldview would not be very comforting for most people. It doesn't "justify" evil, but merely accepts that both Good and Evil are inherent in a dualistic dialectic universe. — Gnomon

Thanks for the post. I'm thinking that we share a sense that the world is aesthetically justified, if it all. From my perspective, your philosophy (and Hegel's) is a kind of conceptual art. I think Hegel was actually religious, whereas I don't get that from you.

Hence, unlike the dueling deities of the Bible, in G*D's "world" there can be no Good versus Evil, but in an all-things-are-possible sense, you could say that G*D is BothAnd, i.e GoodEvil . — Gnomon

I also see 'God'/reality as good-and-evil -- and beyond and before good and evil. There's my ordinary life in the world where things are good and evil in the usual way and my philosophical self that knows better or knows differently.

Sounds like Adam Smith's theory of the "invisible hand" of free-market Capitalism. So, is G*D a capitalist? I don't know, but freewill Agents, serving their own interests, inadvertently serve the general interest. — Gnomon

That's a fun relationship to point out. I never connected the two before.

That sounds more of an admission of guilt than a statement of fact. — NOS4A2

IMV, we could use more admissions of guilt. Innocence is ignorance, purity fiction. To me knowledge almost requires guilt. That's the toll to be paid, a loss of innocence.

I respect what @praxis did above.

Or is all ungrounded belief necessarily ultimately evil*. — tim wood

Hmmm.

What is existence for? What does all of our rationality aim at ?

Do 'we rational ones' have a good plan, tend to agree? Who's in the club?

For witless or thoughtless "Last Men", vapid days & nights without consolation of the fetish-rattle of a liturgical g/G reduces their vacuous lives to, in effect, just killing time on a chinese water-torture rack till they expire. — 180 Proof

Now that's poetry! And such a fascinating tonality is only possible with one foot in the grave. Here's a nice passage that comes to mind.

The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life....
And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. — Hegel

Or worse: nothing but g/G-shopping like an interminally bored trophy-wife who sloppily stumbles along in the always-fading light from one pharma pill mill to another pronouncing each new fix "holy" ... until the next PCP dealer* comes along and scripts a new fix. — 180 Proof

This too. Yes.

And, related:

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-referrent existence... — Hegel

Seems to me that the pills and the therapist will tend to cover all of this up. A free consciousness (which can only speak of itself with some measure of irony) is well beyond the neo-spiritual 'authority' of the therapist. To keep both feet on this side of the grave is to be a slave. Self-preservation at all costs is slavery --and absurd, since death gets it all. To merely extend life, project an enviable lifestyle on social media, collect objects,...a kind of living death because (strangely) it does not live death. I too, still alive, am an ambivalent slave that dreams of mastery, or merely partially 'incarnates' it. I project an enviable lifestyle here, even if or because I label my medicine bottle with an XXX.

I'm grateful to engage with you, by the way.

Now that is a profound statement, with multiple resonances or over-determinations:
* to force others into some kind of rigid structure;
* to reduce all meaning to a supreme Monologic meaning (one correct interpretation);
* sadism — uncanni

I like your breakdown. The sadism/cruelty is what Nietzsche understood so well. To me sophistication is related to turning this sadism inward, against the self. My sense is that it can't just be abolished but only steered. Any life structuring narrative seems to impose at least an implicit hierarchy. Every crystallized notion of virtue casts a shadow.

'Monologic meaning' is a good description, I think. Our temptation is to find and impose this meaning. Spengler called it 'ethical socialism.' It's what we Faustians take for granted: one true path and the duty of homogenizing the world in the name of this path. I like Feuerbach for demonstrating the birth of humanism from Christianity. Monologic has monotheistic roots, it seems. I can't be against it in a simple way, since my own pursuit of truth is the pursuit of single truth. To me the living option is irony of some sort.

It's when we realize that the dialogue is open and infinite--that that is the nature of the philosophical dialogue--that we can settle in and let our ideas develop and our understanding deepen. In striving to have a rational understanding of our interlocutor, I think that we deepen our experience with the world at large. Even us cyber-dialogists. — uncanni

I totally agree. I think this realization can be painful. It's the death of the usual spiritual comforts. One has to set sail on a dark ocean of personality and even embrace a permanent identity crisis. One becomes everyone and no one. For me the journey has been strange. It's lonely and yet the opposite of lonely, humble but proud.

Somehow cyber-dialogue fits all of this. I don't want to be publicly tied to the wild thoughts we're exploring here. I don't want to force freaky-difficult-'infinite' consciousness on others. We strangers meet here to be wildly honest about the wonder and terrors of life. We create a wall of digital graffiti.
I don't think I was ever so honest in a paper written for school.

I think my gist may come from my experience with people that take high-doses of red-pill(s) have a high susceptibility to get dogmatic — Swan

I know what you mean. The pill metaphor breaks down. As I see it, it's just human to crave authority. And it seems to me that we all believe in something, however vague, and act and talk from that.

Some fall into reckless ideologies - or start falling back into a religious state of mind. Take the scientism crowd for instance - I do not think red pills should become fetishistic placebos for (few joys) we happen to have in life. Moderation in all. Some red-pillers are often unskilled with managing their psychological health in accordance because they think that 'red pills' hold explanatory answers (that MUST be it, 42). — Swan

I totally agree. The red pill is one more blue pill. All of the pills are blue pills, in a certain sense. As I see it, we use words to orient ourselves in existence. I also agree about scientism, rationalism, just about any -ism. And my own whatever-ism.

The explanatory answers of the red pills. Ah yes. I love this theme. Conspiracy theory, the general fantasy of unveiling the truth. We like sexy grand narratives. We are lost without oversimplifications, myths. One of the more seductive and confounding myths is that of living mythlessly.

I like to think that I handle 'the voices' well, but too much of anything results in overexposure and high-sensitivity if I do not let myself desensitize in some fashion, because then you just get low-receptive people calling the dogmatics idiots (when they may or may not even be wrong). — Swan

Indeed. And sometimes it gets too mean for my taste. And even the positive stress (when real conversation happens) reminds me of nicotine. The world today is just so crowded, noisy, and pluralistic that I need TV, nicotine, news, books. It's like treating over-stimulation with over-stimulation. I think about moving to someplace outside the city. I have envied janitors who work alone at night. Hard to know if it's an idle fantasy.

But how do you make sense of the world with ourselves as ultimately incoherent random states of mind? — dazed

Well I do have a grim sense of humor. It seems that existence is a strange dream, but it does have a continuity (it mostly coheres). It's a story. We are thrown into a play without an author, or that's what some of the characters say.

People without God often substitute moral and/or scientific progress (humanism, a rationalized notion of incarnation.) Then another project is just the infinite extension of consciousness, in the face of absurdity and mortality. MacBeth suits up for the last battle, knowing that all his charms and prophecies have failed him. A little before that he says:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. — Shakespeare

There are equally dark lines in King Lear and Hamlet. So a grim sense of humor and a realization that I'm not alone helps me. In some ways I'm less alone than ever. Our common fate is to live this absurd dream without foundation or excuse. It's hard to talk about, because it's dangerous. Even though our culture pretends to respect Shakespeare and so on, all this 'high' culture is creepy. It puts one outside of life, with one foot in the grave.

Check out the ending monologue of American Psycho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__BBylQ6srM

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing. — A P

Now Bateman is a villain in his fantasy life, so the feel of this ending is just so strange. But 'this confession has meant nothing' captures the sharp edge of 'existentialism.' We throw ourselves into Hell for our own amusement, and this Hell-for-atheists is the experience of life as disgusting noise, random and incoherent. Consciously it's something unfortunate that happened to us, but unconsciously (so runs my dream) it's a larger, more ferocious consciousness clawing its way out. Profound suffering is something we even crave. 'I am a sick man. I am a wicked man.'

I don't know if you'll find my blanket as warm as I do.

A last quote:

289. In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave—it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine—his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. 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."

...
292. A philosopher: that is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from the outside, from above and below, as a species of events and lightning-flashes PECULIAR TO HIM; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a portentous man, around whom there is always rumbling and mumbling and gaping and something uncanny going on. A philosopher: alas, a being who often runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself—but whose curiosity always makes him "come to himself" again.
... — Nietzsche

Gotta throw in this one, too, in its own box.

Alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted thoughts! Not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious, so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious! And was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brush, we immortalisers of things which LEND themselves to writing, what are we alone capable of painting? Alas, only that which is just about to fade and begins to lose its odour! Alas, only exhausted and departing storms and belated yellow sentiments! Alas, only birds strayed and fatigued by flight, which now let themselves be captured with the hand—with OUR hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer, things only which are exhausted and mellow! And it is only for your AFTERNOON, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds;—but nobody will divine thereby how ye looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved—EVIL thoughts! — Nietzsche

with the names of the figures asking questions and proposing answers often just convenient names for those questions and answers, because we've got to label them something if we want to refer to them without restating them in whole over and over again. — Pfhorrest

:up:

Right. I'd just add that philosophers can be enjoyed also as characters. We get to know strange, fascinating personalities.

Mostly though, it is reflecting on life as we live it, for better and for worse. That is the main entrepôt for evaluating reality. — Bitter Crank

:100:

Lovely. The quintessence of Bakhtin's dialogism: interlocutors understand their own ideas from different perspectives by listening to how the other uses their own words/concepts. This should lead to expansion, clarification and deeper understanding of said ideas. Free minds never try to repress or distort an other's ideas. — uncanni

Thanks. I like your take on it too.

who then came up with the very Orwellian phrase, "Within the revolution: everything; outside of the revolution: nothing." And complete censorship clamped down on any but the most socialist realist artistic expression. Ultra-orthodox. — uncanni

Ah, I didn't know about that. But the Orwellian paint-job is familiar and believable. Domination usually has a flowery excuse. I'm quite fascinated by ins and outs of such justifications.

I think we are (all too often) bound ourselves by our desire to bind others.

All these voices are like an addictive drug. I get stressed in a pleasant way, so my problem is that I tend to find would I should be doing boring. My mind gets revved up. I keep thinking philosophy, philosophy, philosophy.

Has anyone had that Nietzschean moment where you come down from the mountain, so to speak, and applied your philosophy to living and to the people around us? I find that if I don’t live up to my philosophies and apply them to life, I get a growing cognitive dissonance. These pangs of conscience, I suppose a sort of hypocrisy, compel me to act. This acting out of a philosophy puts my principles to trial and error (I may refine or lose some here and there] but I feel that I’m not lying to myself. — NOS4A2

Yes indeed. To me that's how ideas are tested, and that's why book learning alone isn't worth much. Life evaluates the books as the books inspire life with new possibilities.

I will say this, talking/discussing philosophy with others I find very stressful. I find this forum stressful as hell. Half of it is just folks throwing bad medicine laced with nonsense and cheap red paint at others, that NO ONE is opening their mouth OR minds for. — Swan

That's some of what I mean by the red pill --an exposure to voices, voices, voices. And what these voices talk about is the other voices. Interpretations of interpretations of interpretations...

'The spirit is a stomach.' The ability to digest the overwhelming plurality of dissonant voices does seem to depend on something solid, something not in doubt. Or something that only changes slowly. Sudden revolutions are dangerous. A gradual drift is maybe safer and more common.


I'll add a Nietzsche quote here that gets at this.

That imperious something which is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the "outside world." Its object thereby is the incorporation of new "experiences," the assortment of new things in the old arrangements—in short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power—is its object. This same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and in fact "the spirit" resembles a stomach more than anything else). Here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them—the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein—it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—COUNTER TO this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside—for every outside is a cloak—there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words. He will say: "There is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit": let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and glorified—we free, VERY free spirits—and some day perhaps SUCH will actually be our—posthumous glory! Meanwhile—for there is plenty of time until then—we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA must again be recognized. — Nietzsche

I've looked into Shogi. Fascinating! I've actually invented quite a few games, some of them with psychedelic rules. One of these days (so I tell myself), I'll make an app or at least put the ideas out there.

How much philosophical education do you have? — Pfhorrest

I've been reading (and more importantly living) philosophy for about 25 years. My formal education is in something more objective and less fun.

I got into 1 minute games on various websites. It was a blast, but it made me a worse player. I just couldn't resist turning it into art, making mad sacrifices, playing on the time/panic element.

Another great game is Stratego, which is best modified so that each player starts with maybe 10 pieces (from some varying menu). This adds the element of bluff, and all that space makes the scouts especially important.

Thanks for the link. This part caught me.

The archetypical examples of such appeals to faith are essentially appeals to authority. Some trusted religious figure or holy book says that something is true, and that assertion is taken as not needing any support: the assertion itself is taken as self-sufficient. — link

http://geekofalltrades.org/codex/fideism.php

I get the impression that this thread isn't supposed to be for arguing for or against faith, religion, god, or theology, but just for trying to come up with definitions of all of those things that satisfy all parties. — Pfhorrest

Fair enough. I guess I've just tried to emphasize that intellectual types tend to focus on articulated beliefs when it comes to religion, as if religion was a competing philosophy. I see philosophy instead as a competing religion. I'm oversimplifying, but philosophy is roughly humanism. Questioning is sacred.

So I'm against fideism too, because I'm invested in some image of the sacred, autonomous mind.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. — Emerson

On the other hand, this to me is some kind of faith. How do I know that I'm not crazy?

By rejecting appeals to authority, just like with appeals to popularity, and raw appeals to your own faith, I am only saying to hold all such opinions merely tentatively, remaining open to question and doubt. — link

I'm down with this principle....but, in the spirit of this principle, why are we attached to detachment? In what are we invested that urges us not to be fools? I agree that expecting others to believe on authority is bad. Bad how? I think free minds want a symmetric relationship with other free minds. They want to see their own freedom/infinity reflected and recognized.

Sounds good! I also answer your OP a little more. Philosophy has mostly been good for me, but it's led me down some dangerous paths. Nietzsche was a dangerous brew for me in my 20s. I've read many thinkers, but I tend to love the 'evil' thinkers. I don't mean they were bad people but that took delight in describing what unsettling about existence. They offered the red pill. Like the chess player Tal.

Widely regarded as a creative genius and one of the best attacking players of all time, Tal played in a daring, combinatorial style.[2][3] His play was known above all for improvisation and unpredictability. It has been said that “Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem".[4] He was often called "Misha", a diminutive for Mikhail, and "The magician from Riga".
...
Tal was the archetype of the attacking player, developing an extremely powerful and imaginative style of play. His approach over the board was very pragmatic—in that respect, he is one of the heirs of ex-world champion Emanuel Lasker. He often sacrificed material in search of the initiative, which is defined by the ability to make threats to which the opponent must respond. With such intuitive sacrifices, he created vast complications, and many masters found it impossible to solve all the problems he created over the board, though deeper post-game analysis found flaws in some of his conceptions. — Wiki

He created vast complications! That's the red pill, and it's addictive. Philosophy is a celebration of the infinity of consciousness, and consciousness is self-mutilating, armed always against what it was in the name of what it might be.

Believing the unbelievable (all-too-often, even) in order to defend of the indefensible.

In the millennial wake of religious wars, pogroms, inquisitions, martyrdoms, marital rapes, misogyny, homophobia, chattel slavery, self-abasing vicarious guilt, bigotry & scapegoating, the above sounds to me very much like an apt definition of Faith. As a learned wit once said "... For good people to do evil things, that takes religion." :victory: — 180 Proof

I agree with all of this, but why wouldn't this include secular politics? Like some of the stuff that happened under Stalin? This isn't a defense of theism by any means. It's more an extension of atheism. Gods and angels are the superstitions of less critical, less conceptual times. Our superstitions are 'freedom', 'justice', 'equality' ,' rationality', 'science.' I don't mean that these concepts are bogus, but I do mean that these high words get tangled up in low deeds. In other words, magical thinking is just as happy with secular abstractions.

I now believe that I am a biological process, who's primary driver is a brain. I am no means a coherent whole but rather a collection of competing desires, interests and emotions. These are ultimately the causal forces that result in my behaviour. And you can see the incoherence of this collection in the incoherence of my thoughts and behaviour. — dazed

Right. You might like wrestling with Nietzsche's work (who saw the self this way), not as a cure but as a profound exploration of the 'disease.' IMV there is no cure. The 'disease' just becomes more entertaining, even a show for 'the gods' (our infinitely ironic consciousnesses.) ' The jokes on us, but it's an endlessly fascinating joke.

And so when the brain described as "I" is faced with options it previously used reason to arrive a reasonable decision, relying on deep theistic structures to reason a way through. And I was pretty good at this kind of reasoning, a public speaker and debater who sometimes won! — dazed

This is a great theme too. IMV it's a familiar and comfortable illusion that we use reason explicitly to make decisions. To me it looks like most of it happens in the dark. Our animal knowhow does most the work. Explicit reasoning steps in where auto-pilot needs help.

I can see how your success at public reasoning could add to the burden of losing God. In the beginning was the word. It's the dream of conquering existence with a bulletproof system of words.
To me God is the human fantasy. I want to be God. I want to be above the meat-grinder of Nature. I want to be self-sufficing and invulnerable. I want to always know better, win every argument. Or part of me does. Another part of me wants to be in love, which is to say dominated by some beauty that is out of my control. Being a mortal puts me in the middle of these opposed projects.

But now I am a muddled mess, there is no underlying deep structures that the brain can rely on to reason its way out. There is no room left for "ought", just "is". I have recognized my brain to be the animal brain it always was. But the animal brain really ultimately only pursues self interest. — dazed

Here I'd just say watch out for taking self-interest as the simple truth. We are radically social animals. The 'self' is a bunch of group memberships. So self-interest is other-interest. When I first embraced atheism, I felt quite alienated. I also thought selfishness was the truth. But slowly I realized that reasoning itself is inherently other directed, social. The concern for truth is always already social. To hold the truth sacred is to still believe in something above utility.

So in my view your are going through a necessary freak-out as you transition from an old sense of who you are and what existence is all about to a new one. I don't want to sound too positive, because life will always be terrible at times. And a person can feel like a wise man one month and end his life the next. It's almost as if words are always spoken from moods and situations. The characters in the play are states of mind. Actual human beings are sequences of states of mind. That's why (IMO) Shakespeare and others need an entire cast to express themselves. Too many voices, too many feelings to fit behind one mask.

So I try to avoid those confused states, I practice mindfulness and stay in the moment and in the micro. But this doesn't leave one very engaged in a deep level in life. It's all just process, I am part of it, but it has no clear direction and no underlying principles. It's just random causality let loose. — dazed

I agree that it's largely random, but I also think the mind finds structures. For instance, people tend to have 'spiritual' projects, vague images of what they should be. Occasionally we are lost in the white noise between channels (if anyone remembers old TVs.) That's like a creative void. If it doesn't drown you, you'll starting finding patterns in the snow. (And lose them again, and find them, and ...eventually turn off the TV forever while others are just turning it on.)

[I'm a clown though, so what do I know? I do wish you luck.]

Consider: We exist, and are part of a vast universe that is wondrous; fearing and desiring what is outside of our control causes us pain, and causes pain to others, and is to be avoided. That, for me, is the essence of Stoicism. Most if not all of what we consider bad or evil conduct results from the fear of or desire for things or people which we do not have but want or want to avoid. The only thing we can know (not that we know, completely), that is worthy of reverence is the universe, which we can experience. A simple ethics, and a simple "religious" feeling. — Ciceronianus the White

Thank for you sharing this. I'm not against it. It sounds great in the abstract. Perhaps it presupposes a certain level of affluence. An animal that has its biological needs met will mostly be bothered by 'irrational' itches for status or titillation. I do like the 'negative glamour' of stoicism, epicureanism, and cynicism. We can go against the flow of our culture, assuming individual liberties, and judge ourselves and others by alternative standards. The philosopher can be counter-cultural figure. He can be proud of his can of beans and look down on those who think they need a $50 steak. He can work a less respectable job for more free time and/or freedom of thought, etc.

Wonder is of course a great attitude. I love philosophy for tending to lift us above the petty issues of the day and mere utility.

I think the Stoics sought tranquility rather than detachment (I think there's a difference). — Ciceronianus the White

Tranquility through detachment perhaps? What I was aiming at was the ideal human for the stoic against a background of the ideal human of other life philosophies and religions. Stoicism seems like one response to the breakdown of community among others.

Some of the ancients thinkers had more sense than we do; they were more sensible than we are when it comes to considering how to live. They didn't allow speculation regarding the transcendent to clutter their thought. It's that speculation, and an inflated sense of self-importance, which creates despair when shown to be dubious at best. — Ciceronianus the White

I'm not opposed to this insight. As I mentioned in the beginning, it's all quite reasonable and respectable. I'd just say that humans are haunted by the transcendent. It's not just God or Tarot cards. It's drugs, sex, revolution, conspiracy theories. We can also be freaked out by boredom. A life with sin and magic can cause suffering, but a life without sin and magic isn't obviously worth living.

'Fitter, happier, more productive.' There's an emptiness in Epicurus' happy animals. It's like the end of history in Kojeve. Or 'man would rather have the void for his purpose than be devoid of purpose.' So man is a sick animal, a wicked animal, a fascinating animal. I'm not trying to argue against prudence. I'm just suggesting that 'nihilism' is related to the dreariness of a reasonable post-religion of prudence.

I'm a cheerful pessimist (i.e. sarcastic absurdist) - philosophizing has helped me daily to grind & polish the lense(s) through which I've made some sense of The Nonsense (& fuckery) of my life, the universe and everything. — 180 Proof

Well said. I think of dark laughter, the infinity of consciousness, a gleam in the eye. It comes and goes. And it's darkly ironic, pessimistic. 'It' enjoys playing with terrible things. Somehow nonsense and fuckery work as a background, as raw material.

Thanks for the kind reply. I love that skull next to the flower. To me that really gets it.

I think you mentioned Nietzsche in some post, so I'm not surprised. That's my jam too. When I'm (godlessly) up, I'm way up. 'I' am 'God' (along with everyone else who knows they are.) It's all connected in my mind with personal mortality, the facing of death. Clinging to the afterlife is clinging to the petty ego. But anti-ego talk is often suspect. It's more like a larger ego eating a smaller ego. Magnanimity from a sense of power, the ability to ignore parasites, the spirit as a stomach than can digest difficult experience. 'Our god is a devouring flame.'


So I guess I see only transformations of the concept of God (an image of transcendence and autonomy) along with what the community appeals to in order to ground its violence.

I just read Engels on early Christianity. Great stuff! It focuses on The Book of Revelation (for reasons explained in the text).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/