Well I think it's not so... rather the stoic would advise one to stop focusing on the misfortune, and instead switch one's focus to something more productive. — Agustino

Stop doing this, stop doing that. Ultimately it just amounts to 'that problem you have? Just don't have it anymore.'

Well suck it up can be an advice. What if someone sits in their room and laments the death of their sister day after day? — Agustino

I think that would be an entirely understandable reaction, and it's not necessarily my place to tell them how they should react to the death of a loved one.

Depends how you define "not doing anything". If whatever you're doing takes effort, then it's not "not doing anything" in my books. Simple as that. — Agustino

"O Stoic, misfortune has befallen me. What shall I do?" "Not this, not that." "What then?" "..."

Don't you see the blindingly obvious: that the stoic attitude doesn't tell you not to do anything in your power to prevent pain, BUT RATHER provides you with an attitude to have against the pain that you can't - or fail to - prevent? — Agustino

But it doesn't provide you with an attitude in the first place, it just pettily moralizes about how grieving is stupid. "Suck it up" literally means nothing -- search it round and round, and you will find there is literally nothing you can actually do that corresponds to what the Stoic tells you to do. The Stoic essentially says, just be such that whatever bothers you, doesn't, or doesn't as much. There's no advice.

And again the idea that the universe is fixed and unalterable and that your suffering is beyond your control does stop you, if you take it seriously, from preventing further suffering. And after all, you have a solution for alleviating it, just do nothing and it will somehow not be bad anymore.

I'm sure all of us want to learn and make our lives better. — Agustino

I doubt it.

Ultimately, yes. As I said, I think philosophy is about testing claims for self-consistency. That is, you're only called on to defend what you put forward on your own terms, not made up external ones. At the basic level, someone can always deny that a certain attitude is what they're concerned with, in which case the criticism ceases to make sense. But usually what happens is that people want to say two things simultaneously which by their own criterion they can't. And that is where Socratic philosophy, focused on the question, irony, aporia, and dialectic begins. But all you can do to the positivist is scorn their attitude: I don't think that their core principles, understood in a nuanced way, are self-contradictory.

No, I think philosophy is about testing claims for self-consistency on their own terms. The attitudes that cause one to want to try to make claims to begin with can't be legislated. You have to have a kind of attitude toward inquiry.

I don't think a nuanced understanding of logical positivism is self-refuting. It does in a sense hang upon nothing, though, and so can only be justified by a certain cultural attitude.

Yes, because in many cases not doing something is harder than doing something. Hence it also counts as a doing merely because it takes active effort. — Agustino

Nevertheless, the Stoic solution is, as I said, not to do anything.

Ok TGW, so you think we can ALWAYS prevent getting hit by tornadoes and all tragedies in our life? If not, then what are we to do when we can't prevent it? — Agustino

No, but you are asking the wrong questions. I think the question of what to do with pain is misguided – there isn't a way to put band-aids on it, but it can to a limited extent be prevented. Stoicism often bleeds into vulgar 'self help' philosophy: don't eat too much! and so on. It's also in a sense reactionary, in that it takes the universe to just naturally be what it is, with it (sometimes literally) being impossible to change, and hence one has to buckle down and accept one's lot (which includes its suffering) rather than take seriously the possibility it might change.

Yes, not obsessing is doing something when you take into account that most people would obssess in that situation. — Agustino

So not doing something is doing something? Wild...

But we can't prevent getting hit by tornados or any other potential tragedy. — Agustino

Not with that attitude!

(and this is not doing nothing) — Agustino

How is that not doing nothing? The response is 'not to...'

If you disagree with this response, then I am asking you: what should your response be? What is the response that minimises suffering if not this stoic one? — Agustino

I disagree with the framing of the question. It should be, how should we prevent getting hit by tornadoes? What really minimizes suffering is of course anti-natalism. Barring that, I think a reasonable Cyrenacism is the way to go, though that doesn't entail any specific life advice (that I don't think philosophy should endeavor to give).

Don't aggress me!

How does this paradox of "everything comes from 'outside' oneself, but in such a way that there is no 'world' outside, either" exist in the first place? — schopenhauer1

I don't know. There are myths about the supposed 'world' actually being a fractured dream, where some deity broke apart due to its own loneliness or from some deficient emanation, but I don't think that's a good way of putting it.

Keep fighting the good fight everyone.

If you disagree with it, it's probably a misuse of language.

I'm not going to go and studiously read through all that material — Sapientia

I know you're not. Kek!

By "real deal" I assume you are referring to pain caused by nociceptors. Presumably this could be solved by technology. — darthbarracuda

It could be mitigated, but new pains would arise. Those who medically cannot feel pain do not by that token have 'good' lives in any sense.

As if problems only affect me because I 'allow' them to. Am I God or something? 'Stop, problem, you may not do that!' Kek!

I would like some examples of these harder problems. Are you referring to things like cancer and tornadoes? — darthbarracuda

Yeah, or hunger, and so on. But even solving their manifestations through technology or whatever still leaves you with the basic structural problem which is more something like...I don't know, sensitivity which is required for life plus entropy? Or if your Buddhist inclinations prefer, dukkha. Though even that's not enough, because it often takes the form of the 'real deal' pain, not stupid self-help 'oh I'm unsatisfied with my life' bullshit.

But you can read their stuff and see they aren't. Kek!

I think I am beginning to get old-school metaphysical again! Indeed there is a ground, but it is a relative ground: I am a ground relative to you, you to me, though that doesn't mean there's any space in which we interact. So there is no traditional ground, the world hangs upon nothing, yet in another sense everything hangs on everything else, because there is no world, just a bunch of blindness, relative grounding without any shared space or common world or interaction. Hence epistemological loneliness and the odd compulsion some have for solipsism, but coupled with the ultimate failure of all transcendental principles, so that nothing is 'grounded' in oneself either, everything comes from 'outside' oneself. but in such a way that there is no 'world' outside, either.

That is more pessimistic!

Nah, life's harder problems aren't dependent on mood. They're dependent on, for example, being an organism that decays and experiences incredible pain unless it receives chemical energy, which requires digesting food, which requires acquiring food, which requires labor, which ensures yet more pain, and so on. They're deep structural problems with the way the world is built, not little psychological whimsies as so many in this thread are trying to claim.

But the Stoic response is to do nothing, really. All problems are illusory.

But why in the world would realism require verfication-transcendent conditions? — StreetlightX

Fitch proved it, remember? At least, if you want to preserve non-omniscience. Kek!

The suggestion that learning language primarily consists in paring down possibilities rather than acquiring new capacities is so profoundly ignorant I don't think it deserves comment.

I'm not sure about contentment. I've certainly felt respite, but it feels more like getting a break to breathe from drowning. Not only is it not a positive enjoyment, but rather one that's only defined relative to just how bad what was previously happening was, but it's also backhanded in that that respite is precisely what allows you to live and continue to suffer more.

The world is constructed in such a way to systematically make people suffer, as if it were 'designed' like that. Those systematic forces are too fundamental to be changed with banalities about 'just enjoying life.'

Whether or not bad things happen to you is determined first by how you define bad, — WhiskeyWhiskers

No it isn't. If it was, you could just define bad so that it involves only things that never happened to you, and your life would become perfect (it would have nothing bad in it). So that's clearly false since people don't have that power.

Can you justify this please? — Agustino

Maybe. Are you familiar with Hegel's comments on Stoicism?

What do you disagree with here? — Agustino

I think it's possible for bad things to happen to you regardless of what your response is to that happening.

It's really great. When you're hankering for the deep shit, go back to the Treatise, and then if you want to go deeper go back to Berkeley's Principles.

I'm not big on the idea that philosophical problems are perennial, unanswerable, or mysterious. To take just one example, I believe that the so-called 'problem of perception' was actually definitively resolved over two thousand years ago in ancient Greece. The reason it persists is not because it remains mysterious, but because people are not very good at arguing. With other sciences you don't have to be that good at arguing, because eventually some material technological circumstance (or ideological one) forces people's hands and everyone just accepts that there's some sort of consensus on something (even though there's probably not). Progress largely comes from forgetting about disputes, rather than resolving them, and it's hard to forget in philosophy because it's a discipline obsessed with its own history, and whose results don't come in technological form.

How would you suppose that the pessimist's admission that the world is actually bad is important for recovery versus the heroic platitudes of the Stoic? What makes this admission essential? — schopenhauer1

Admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.

Actually, I'm generally in favor of anonymity as well, but it might be unworkable in this format.

If translation is possible then the sense must be retained, which means that the logic of the semantic units is more or less equivalent. From this it follows that if "tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" semantically counts as a word then its English equivalent must also. — John

Doesn't follow.

*masturbates furiously*

I didn't say they were.

Can you elaborate on this or give an example? — schopenhauer1

Nobody disputes that the world is full of suffering. Stoicism seeks to heroically stand against that fact by declaring that nonetheless, this is irrelevant to the world, or really one's life, being good. Even in the worst of worlds the Stoic sage stands strong and is totally unharmed by it. He is unbreakable. There is, on the one hand, the suffering that actually occurs; but then, at a remove from this, there is the way you respond to it, and only what you rationally choose, or fail to choose, can make your life good or bad.

The Stoic thus provides a kind of loophole with which to paper over the 'badness' of the world by redefining badness such that suffering is indifferent as far as it is concerned. The solution is therefore a kind of denial that there is really at bottom a problem, as the pessimist might. It may be hard to live as a sage, but ultimately it is your fault if you don't live a good life, and in principle nothing can make your life bad, and the world itself can't be bad of its own accord.

It seems to me that the pessimist by contrast admits that the world is actually bad. And that admission is important for recovery. Heroic platitudes won't improve the world.

Can you elaborate on this or give an example? — schopenhauer1

It's just a core tenet of Stoicism. Pleasure and pain may be choice-worthy or avoidance-worthy in some respect, but they're not 'good' and 'bad.' Only living in accordance with a certain ideal is. So a person who's tortured, if he sticks to his Stoic guns, might endure extreme pains, but his life would be no worse on that score. Bad things cannot happen to good people.

My own opinion...

1) Does the Stoic ethic provide an answer to the existential boredom/instrumentality/annoyances/negative experiences/desire/flux/becoming-and-never-being, etc. that the Philosophical Pessimist poses? — schopenhauer1

No. I pretty much agree with Hegel that Stoicism ultimately is empty posturing. It gives itself a kind of ideal to reflect on that makes one think these things are answered, but when the rubber hits the road, it's ultimately impotent.

2) Is Stoicism a kind of Philosophical Pessimism or at least close cousins? If it is not a kind of Philosophical Pessimism, how might they differ? — schopenhauer1

No. Stoicism seems to claim that if you behave the right way, bad things literally cannot happen to you.

3) How might a Philosophical Pessimist's answer to solving life's sufferings be different than a Stoic's? — schopenhauer1

I think the pessimist ultimately takes the problems of the world seriously in a way that Stoic does not.

-contains much suffering (empirical), and thus not good. (negative contingent pain, negative experiences in general, etc. (pace Benatar and partly Schopenhauer) — schopenhauer1

Stoicism doesn't consider suffering a bad.

It helps to think of Stoicism as existentialism, but for grownups. — Pneumenon

Stoicism is anti-existentialist in a lot of ways. It claims that man has an essence, that good is a kind of eudaimonic goal, and that this can be achieved by living in harmony with a pre-established ideal.

Because languages are different.

For me if "Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" counts logically and semantically as a word then it follows that its English translation must also — John

No it doesn't.

If the point of likes and karma is to create some positive incentive to post or some positive reinforcement for doing so, allowing that without the possibility of negative feedback encourages a maximization of posting at the expense of quality control, because there are no negative repercussions for 'bad' posts, only positive repercussions for 'good' ones.

Get rid of it entirely. The model of likes and dislikes, karma, and so on, are meant for a model of interaction that has nothing to do with the goals of a philosophy forum, and they're poisonous to good discussion. Having only likes and no dislikes is maybe the worst possible option, but nothing would be best.

I don't think words can be considered to be the units of linguistic meaning, because a word by itself has no particular context. — John

But the meaning of the individual word can equally be seen as a template for what it contributes given some context: clearly speakers have this sort of knowledge of the meanings of individual words, or else dictionaries would be literally incomprehensible, let alone writeable.

↪The Great Whatever "Socratic irony" should have a more modern name. Perhaps "malicious bracketing?" :P — Pneumenon

'Bracketing' is good. It's what's at stake in the Skeptic, and later phenomenological, notion of epoché, which is quite Socratic in origin.

Rather, I'd like to ask: "How do you communicate the stuff that's left after the collapse of language?" — Pneumenon

With gentle lovemaking...no, with language too, but it would just be a changed language, language disenchanted.

I seem to remember you saying that people can't relate to one another meaningfully. Is this an example of that? — Pneumenon

I don't know, I think that's one of those truths that, so to speak, you only say at night. It shouldn't be made the theme of a philosophical project because it can't be thematized. But those who think it at night know it, and all the philosophical posturing in the world won't change it.

For me, if a sentence counts as having a linguistic meaning then the meaning can be given in concrete terms, which means it can be translated. — John

But 'hello' obviously can be translated, and is in almost any pedagogical language text.

I actually don't think words have meanings at all — John

That doesn't seem plausible, especially given your contention about translation: we can perfectly well translate many single words, not just sentences.

I mean 'irony' in the broad sense of exploiting customs for something other than their conventional purpose. So specifically in philosophy there's the tradition of 'Socratic irony' with dialectic: in the course of a dialogue, Socrates might ask a question, and he exploits this to get an answer from his interlocutor, but for a non-conventional reason (he doesn't actually want to know the answer, but is rather drawing out an answer from the interlocutor in order to test its internal consistency with other admissions, often to get the interlocutor to see that he is mistaken or has contradictory beliefs). So in using language or metaphysics ironically, one propounds linguistic statements, maybe even metaphysical ones, but it is sort of with one's fingers crossed -- with the knowledge that the purpose of doing so is to explode the very system one is making use of from the inside.