Likewise, if reason is simply an evolved adaption, then why should we trust it? — Wayfarer

I don't think we have any choice. We employ reason to doubt the perfection of reason. Reason is who we are when we're not just meat. We're embodied language that weaves an origin story for itself, but we never seem to be done editing our stories and therefore our own identity, which is a sort of story.

But why are his arguments immune from that criticism, whilst every one else's are not? — Wayfarer

Of course they're not, but there is a sort of performative paradox there. If he said "here are some potentially useful strings of symbols and noises that you might like," the situation might be different. If one clings to the absolute in some form, it seems hard to incorporate an evolving mind. Or one can try to do without it, improvising without perfect narrative sewing everything together. (I think most of us have core beliefs that we cannot justify to the satisfaction of others. So folks just arrange themselves into subgroups with shared, unjustified core beliefs. Justification is a different issue, so I'll stop there.)

We're still biological beings, but that is not all were are - so the attempt to describe or anticipate all our potentialities or capacities in purely biological terms, is reductionist. — Wayfarer

I agree. There's a line between nature and history. The historical realm is one of language and intention.

Has anyone watched this? It's a Black Mirror episode. Bing is the "ugly" intellectual who pops a hole in a dream within the dream. There's an appetite for Bing with his glass to his throat, just like there was an appetite for grunge. There's an appetite for dissonance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

Some of the past's best works were mainstream at the time, so I don't think that's the dichotomy. Bach or Beethoven were successful in their time. — Noble Dust

True, and Shakespeare was respected in his. So the mainstream doesn't exclude greatness. But surely we forget much of the mediocrity of the past. Currently TV is in something like a golden age. I don't read many novels these days, since I'm finding such sophisticated and well-executed narratives in various shows.

I never interpreted that book that way, but I guess I can see that. I'm not sure what you mean by philosophical glamour. As far as the shallowness of mainstream music, I think that has as much to do with money as anything else. Music now is a capitalistic money-making industry; that wasn't the case until about 100 years ago. In the past, the gatekeepers were wealthy patrons; rub someone wrong and you don't get any funding, but now it's just economics. Of course there's a philosophical underpinning as to why wealth and beauty and youth are worshipped in this age as well. That's tied to nihilism and the "means with no ends" era of the internet, and technology that evolves on a bell-curve... — Noble Dust

Of course Notes from Underground is about (among other things) consciousness in excess as a curse. But self-consciousness is a big part of his disease. He obsesses over slights, obsesses over how he looks to others, experiences himself as a object of contempt when he wants to be admired. The Crane poem about the suicide arriving at the sky gets the dark humor right.

You make some good points about the money factor. I think the youth/beauty worship is perhaps related to our electronic devices. We see images so often in such high resolution that we have a sort of "oil painting" second reality of advertisements, most of which employ models to portray how consumers want to see themselves. If the ad (for realism) features older actors, they tend to be slim and have great skin for their age. So the world of images is a much better looking world than that world in which these images are embedded. This echoes what I mean by "haunted by God." We might say that reality is haunted by the imagination as ellipses are haunted by the perfect circle.

By philosophical glamour I just mean status and fame. Everyone wants to have read you. It's the intellectual version of popularity. It's often enjoyed indirectly, since it's hard to directly pull off for obvious reasons. The indirect method is to surf on the coattail on whoever's in, which is to say proclaim and exalt them. There are A-list philosophers who one might feel ashamed of not having read, for instance. Other philosophers are taboo. You lose points for suggesting their ideas are worth talking about. Anyway, we still allow our intellectuals to be ugly, perhaps for the reason that we allow our male comedians to be ugly, as a sort of symbol for the "objective" and traumatically "real."

Yes, the theory of evolution does suggest that reason isn't pure. And yet have this impurity as a result of this same "impure" reason. It's plausible that reason is a evolved tool. But does this impurity really reduce its value? Is pure reason something like an impossible object of desire, like a perfect circle never to be found among actual circles?

Just to be clear, I also see it as a valuable quality. I guess it is a shallow age, but I wonder whether "deep" art has ever been mainstream or whether we view the past through the lens of its best works. Wasn't most oil painting just portraits of the rich and their property (John Berger, etc.)? A few painters occasionally did something grand and spiritual, and those we hang up in secular cathedrals (museums).

Video killed the radio star. You have to look like heroic youth and beauty even to sing about it these days. This isn't all bad. The perfect execution of the fantasy is indeed consistent between the media. Why not have the visual ideal sing about the spiritual ideal? But here we are at the center of the fantasy: to be young, beautiful, profound, famous, and rich. (Of course it's wise not to pine away in envy, but I like clarifying the fantasy. We can make peace with the gap between fantasy and reality later in all of the usual ways, likely by consuming the art of said fantastic objects/persons. And of course philosophical glamour makes room for the ugly. Like the Underground Man of Dostoevsky who wanted to look very intelligent at least if he could not be handsome.)

So the inescapable implication is always that mind is a product of mindlessness. That, I think, lies behind a lot of the angst of existential literature in the 20th C - the sense of 'thrown-ness', having been born out of chaos in a meaningless universe, and now being able to contemplate that. It seems the implication of the 'life as chance' attitude. — Wayfarer

Yes, this is the heart of the matter. But consider this scenario. Somehow it is establish (and everyone agrees) that there is indeed an intelligent creator. But it is also established that this creator is just watching and refuses to interfere. The angst would have a different flavor, I guess, but a God who does not help or harm us (who has no buttons for us to push with prayer and sacrifice) is not emotionally relevant. True, theology would become highest science again, since we'd need to understand the mind of God to make sense of his creation. But would we really evade thrown-ness here? The existence of this God would still have a sort of brute facticity. While we might explain the creation in terms of God's personality, we've only shifted brute facticity to this God's personality. And it seems to me that we could only understand such a personality in terms of our own, by analogy. I think we can't help but anthropomorphize, though of course we are wise to guard against doing it unconsciously.

I guess "childish" is pejorative, but then there is disdain for the impractical artist, for instance. The successful rock star or painter or writer is envied. The young artist who is not yet recognized is a question mark, especially if they are charming and attractive. Their like high-risk high-yield investments. But the aging dreamer is not so lucky, unless they are quite sure of themselves. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to rail against (or take the side of) the mystique of fame and money. I'm just trying to understand and clarify this tension. Some of us dream of being great writers or world-historical philosophers, which is to say we dream of being Christ figures, really. Did we get too much breastmilk as infants? I suppose I'm thinking of the dream of power and actual worldly power, where no actual worldly power can compete with the dream. So who loves power the most? I think of lonely, unwordly Nietzsche fantasizing about worldliness, writing lyric poems in prose to his Christ image.

I think, ultimately, all such questions are undecidable, on the grounds given by Kant in his section on the 'antinomies of reason'. But I also think at the very least, the fine-tuning observations ought to give pause to the idea that seems so obvious in our day and age, that life arose by chance. — Wayfarer

Great quote from Albert. I do agree that certain questions are undecidable or even pseudo-questions. I think we can test such questions by considering what sort of answers we are really hoping for when we ask them. If A comes from B, then where does B come from? Either B is just there or it came from C, and so on.

If life comes from chance, I suppose that means its the result of probabilistic laws that are just there. The casino is just here, and it happened to generate creatures who could analyze the slots and call the casino a casino. On the other hand, let's say a human-like intelligence is somehow responsible. I stress "human like" because that's how we understand intelligence. Then this intelligence was just there and decided to create creatures who could (within the limits of their own intelligence) conceive of this intelligent creator. In a sense, we still have a machine in both cases that spits out the world as we know it, but one of the machines has a quasi-human face. So the universe does or does not give a damn (was or was not constructed with human needs in mind). If some thinkers adopt the first view, it may be to simplify their practical calculations or just to do away with the uncertainty.

But each of us has certain presuppositions that dictate what we count as evidence and how we evaluate it, and different people can have different presuppositions, such that what is reasonable to some is not to others. I see it as an important role of philosophy to expose those presuppositions so that we are not adopting them uncritically. What are you assuming when you claim to know that the Big Bang happened, which another individual could reasonably dispute? — aletheist

Great post. That's how I see philosophy, too. It's abnormal discourse about the norms of normal discourse.

Thanks. I agree that acceptance seems monstrous. In my view, there's no cure for life, no perfect philosophy that destroys cognitive dissonance and annihilates the angst of freedom. Of course there are some perspectives that do a better job than others, and I'm always looking for an update. But, anyway, I'm not trying to take either side here. I was and still am "God-afflicted." I have "grown up" and improved my position in the world, for instance, but I feel that no particular "objective" achievement "beats the game." It's as if money just buys the opportunity for fantasy, partially embodying it (allowing us to wear certain clothes or call ourselves experts) and partially allowing it (giving us quiet, private, comfortable homes in which to enact our truer selves.)

Nietzsche is a great case. He was God afflicted. His superman is a modified Christ figure. He got an ideal/idea in his head of worldliness as holiness, an inversion of the usual formula. But he was a man of concept and music, which is to say of the dream. He dreamed of himself as the most awake man. Not scientism but some other kind of objective face of God was central to his myth, despite the talk of perspectivism. Since ultimately we must have perspectivism as living truth (with all of its contradictions) to really give a damn. In short, we want our private dreams recognized as public spiritual reality --or at least some nagging part of us does. I think this was Hegel's answer to the The Irony.

The next form of this negativity of irony is, on the one hand, the vanity of everything factual, moral, and of intrinsic worth, the nullity of everything objective and absolutely valid. If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow and empty and itself mere vanity.[53] But, on the other hand, the ego may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead become inadequate to itself, so that it now feels a craving for the solid and the substantial, for specific and essential interests. — Hegel

Of course Hegel takes sides with the "grown-ups" here. He himself clearly wanted (and achieved) worldly recognition. The "solid and substantial" is (to me) the objective and the social. I remember shifting from a vision of myself as an artist (more of the God-like creator role) to the scientist. There was something beautiful about the cold and the objective. It had a "weight" that music, for instance, did not have. Of course I'd still rather live Mick Jagger's life from the beginning than Isaac Newton's. But it's easier (though not easy) to make it in an objective discipline, especially if you're ambivalent about becoming a fixed avatar in the mind's of your consumers. (Fame is commonly craved and yet I'm sure there's a hellish aspect to it.)

Yes, what's left is mysterious for now. We can always explain the currently unexplained at a later time. But I'd argue that at all times we are working in the context of unexplained laws. Sure, we are working to explain them, but this usually involves generalization. "If we assume that the energy in the universe is constant, then we can derive X, so that X is a consequence of constant energy." But why should energy be constant, for instance? Well, maybe that's patched up with something else. But it seems that our first priority is a theory that predicts accurately enough for our very practical purposes. So we'll settle for recognizing a pattern that we can't yet embed in a larger pattern. As you say, the day may come when we can embed the mysterious but useful pattern in a larger pattern. But I'd suggest that our largest pattern or "theory of everything" can't escape brute facticity. If it could be explained by one of our other theories, then it wouldn't be the largest pattern or a theory of everything.

Just to clarify (and this may connect to your notion that bruteness can be placed anywhere), I think the brute necessities are relative to the consciousness involved. A scientist might create a more general law that converts what was once a brute law into a consequence of the new, more comprehensive law. This new law will likely become the unexplained description of the way things are. I suppose my argument would be that our first-person situation always involves certain brute necessities if we bother to trace our beliefs back far enough.

I suppose a consequence of my view is that the world must remain fundamentally "mysterious" or "miraculous" in the sense that it cannot be explained as a whole. Explanation is a local, "finite" affair. For instance, "God did it" just seems to sweep the brute fact of existence behind a super-human mask. Cause is shifted to intention or human-like motivation. But right away a psychology of God becomes possible. Why did God do it? Psychology relies on the projection of necessities, too. So God's mind is a "machine" to the degree that it is intelligible at all.

Actually, I was trying to say (perhaps ineloquently) that something is indeed fundamentally "brute." These are the "prime" necessary connections. They are merely descriptive. "That's just the way things are."

What I want to know is if you want God to exist and also your reason why you want God to exist or not. — TheMadFool

I might have voted yes, but I don't know if you have the sort of God in mind who creates a Hell. If we are talking about my version of good God, then, sure, why not? What if all suffering down here is something like a palate cleanser, intended to heighten enjoyment by contrast. We live in the apparent absence of God and in the presence of scarcity and violence and then "die" into the "real" world. This is just a nice dream, though, in my opinion. Hell yeah I want omnipotence on my side. If I can't be God, I'll settle for being one of his beloved children, a prince if not the king. I don't really think it's better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, not if it's a real Hell and a real Heaven.

What does Christianity look like when God no longer holds our fate in Her hands? — Preston

One of my favorite works of philosophy is The Essence of Christianity. It argues that the essence of Christianity is humanism. But it also argues that miracle is at the heart of religion. Providence! As soon as the world becomes a lawful machine indifference to man, any kind of pantheistic residue of God is a dissipating vapor. Feuerbach interprets the myth of the creation of matter as the human wish to utterly dominate matter. God is our fantasy super-self. We want to have created Nature for our pleasure and be able to switch it off when it starts to hurt. If we abandon this fantasy of absolute control on our behalf and settle for increasing but limited control through technology, we switch into a more "Satanic" or tragic view of heroic man versus blind, massive bitch-Goddess Nature. But what then is the purpose of life? To get better, stronger, more conscious, freer. But to what end? It's as if the goal is a direction rather than a place. Up. More.

In my way of thinking about things religion/ ethics/ morality/ ideology/ labeling things 'good'or 'bad/ and even any kind of system of beliefs you can think of are ALL MERELY LABELS FOR THE SAME THING. — dclements

I agree. It's as if personalities are founded on core beliefs. Sometimes a core belief is abandoned and a person experiences a revolution in their thinking. A child who believes in God might eventually decide that the sky is empty and the universe doesn't care. That all the talk of right and wrong is just talk about preferences. Those with power prefer X and will punish Y. So the world is transformed from a righteously ruled rational realm to a chaos of force, persuasion, and self-invention. I think those who want God not to exist are attracted to being a small, fragile god themselves. Indeed, the lonely little man in the void is simultaneously grand and godlike in his consciousness. To lose God properly is also to lose every ideology that might dominate the individual (it's just monkey-breath in the void, right?) On the other hand, our starring monkeys want a dominant position. They want their self-invention recognized and thereby realized objectively. So they identity themselves with trans-personal principles (politics, art) that others also identity with, so that status becomes a measure of incarnating truth or justice or science rather than the traditional God. But as you say, it's more or less the same. The point is to climb to the high place. The point is status and its enjoyment in terms of some virtue. Of course I would use this theory to explain the creation and presentation of this theory.

Last verse gives me chills...Howlin' Wolf, Back Door Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVIA1n5ng4Y

In my experience of studying philosophy, it seems one of the most disliked positions has been nihilism and post modernism, even if the former isn't really that much different than regular old skepticism. — dclements

As I read this, some great passages in Hegel came to mind. This one in particular seems to capture "nihilism" in way that does justice to its allure. It's a Satanic/Romantic position. As someone else mentioned, a truly "nothing" position is worthless. What the less eloquent Adult Swim nihilist might want to say is something about freedom, self-posession, and transcendence of everything finite. But here's Hegel on The Irony. Sartre, Stirner, and Nietzsche all seem fused together here. Hegel just passes through, having (no doubt) tried this perspective and found it unsatisfying.

Now so far as concerns the closer connection of Fichte’s propositions with one tendency of irony, we need in this respect emphasize only the following points about this irony, namely that [first] Fichte sets up the ego as the absolute principle of all knowing, reason, and cognition, and at that the ego that remains throughout abstract and formal. Secondly, this ego is therefore in itself just simple, and, on the one hand, every particularity, every characteristic, every content is negated in it, since everything is submerged in this abstract freedom and unity, while, on the other hand, every content which is to have value for the ego is only put and recognized by the ego itself. Whatever is, is only by the instrumentality of the ego, and what exists by my instrumentality I can equally well annihilate again.

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.

Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, 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)[52] 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.
— Hegel

Notice how habit is meant to explain our confidence in causality. A habit is a causal psychological explanation for some behavior. Hume invoked causality to explain our faith in it!

This contradiction reveals a fact about explanation. You cannot have any explanation without causation. — Marchesk

Great point. I like Rescher on this issue. As I understand or explain it, we "project" a necessary connection between conjoined events. We just seem born with this ability/tendency. A world without necessity is a chaos. As I see it, Hume showed that our most important kind of knowledge is not deductive and cannot be justified by "pure" reason.

This contradiction reveals a fact about explanation. You cannot have any explanation without causation. The best you can do is describe how events have been conjoined up to this point. Nothing happens for any reason, it just is, and it might not be the case tomorrow. — Marchesk

I agree. Explanation of X is something like: the appearance of X was necessary given conditions Y and Z. But this is just an appeal to a necessity which itself remains unexplained. Or if this necessity is explained by other more general necessities ("laws"), then we still always have some irreducible or "prime" necessities that just are what they are for no reason at all.