Anyway, there is the famous phrase of a branch line from Kant to Auschwitz - about the connection between enlightenment and industrial genocide. I guess there is a connection, mostly chronological and geographical. But in that sense there is a 12 lane super-Autobahn from Nietzsche to the Nazis. Yes, they vulgarly misread and misinterpreted him. Or misreconstructed him - but can you misreconstruct, how would that be defined?

He did provide so much material for that particular misreading with his choice target of comfortable bourgeous liberalism and egalitarianism and that style of burning, fanatical, take no hostages style of preach..., sorry, writing. His railings against the fascist and stalinist hypocracies and sanctities would have been more refreshing and more useful, historically. But still, Mad Friedrich is truly a giant, a fundament of our confused Western modernity.

The very question itself is so full of presuppositions and premises that it should be thoroughly deconstructed and reassembled to make sense. As it stands it's a 17th century question, though in some form asked by the Greeks somewhat earlier and somewhat better. The short answer is that there likely is an "external world" but it appears not to be static Cartesian "external material world" and nor do "we" appear to be static Cartesian subjects loftily observing everything and doubting everything. I wonder if much more can ever be sensibly said, so we should probably stay quiet about it, wovon man nicht sprechen kan etc.

Strange, memory scepticism et al. I had no memory of ever opening this thread and was about to write a pretty identical post :) Anyhow, my attitude still remains: philosophy is rather frustrating and its sub specie aeternitatis hubris breathtaking. Maybe it's worthwhile to try the impossible, but literature and history are to me more profound and much more interesting, and more comprehensive fields. Philosophy is a very useful angle to most human activity but it shouldn't be overdone as you will only get a headache and not get much anywhere :)

Well, as a liberal who has come to admire Crazy Friedrich quite a bit, I think that he was being Nietzschean at rather an unfortunate point in history. He would have been much better say a generation after himself but that's admittedly a pretty impractical wish.

As an answer to the question posited in the title, it depends on our idea of language and meaning. Obviously, as a purported description of actual empirical events in the past, it is totally absurd if taken literally. Nope, as far as we can reasonably know, and that is really, really far, the world was not created on a rainy Tuesday afternoon 6127 years ago.

This imbalance has to do with our connection to the infinite, as Kierkegaard would put it. The vacuum of an infinite (God / Awe), has left us in a loop of hedonistic despair that has arisen from an imbalance in our self relation (to the finite / infinite). We now end up searching for the infinite in finite things and lose ourselves. What's missing is a new connection to the infinite, one of rapture and awe. Nietzsche suggested that this could potentially be our connection to growth itself. To act as bridges for the elevation of our species, growth as the essence of life. To feel ourselves grow in strength and power in the struggle for growth itself. Interesting proposition, but does it bring the same rapture that a "God" might? Perhaps not. Unless we see ourselves becoming gods.

Well, obviously there is a huge hole left by the primitive organized Christianity in our modern Western civilization, blown away fundamentally by very efficient, very much working and amazingly profound and far penetrating natural science - and its considerably less impressive applications. Mad Friedrich lamented this situation too. But I don't think magic tricks and insence would do the trick with our enlightened, rational and technocratic civilization still being around. Obviously if it would collapse we would get after a period of sheer barbarity and bloody chaos a new organized superstition as a certain improvement to the primitive chaos.

(Ps. Getting to be kind of gods through techonology and the end of scarcity would actually be one of the more realistic alternatives to either apocalypse or ever continuing cycle of primitivity and aggression. Iain M. Banks is hopefully a clairvoyant :smile: )

Sure. I think that "reality" (of which usefulness as a concept I'm far from sure) is at least slightly out of focus for us. Permanently. But, this said, natural science does work: it predicts things that then do happen, it has explained most of the material world and might quite likely explain the remaining bits too. Scientists do very important work, but that does not qualify them to be profound or even semi-profound thinkers, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I don't see myself as a relativist, I strongly suspect and think that there is an independent and objective reality, I just don't think that we can ever be sure of it. We are limited, our brains are limited. And yeah, I'm not a fan of Heidegger but I think that Dasein is a very relevant concept. That's what we have in this world, how we experience this world.

Well, I'm a Humean when it comes to the possibly universal truth of you having woken at 8am today. You might be totally mistaken. You might not even be there though I think it is pretty likely that both things are sensibly true, you probably really did wake at 8am and you really most probably do exist. I think the best competitors for being universally true are logical propositions. But then again I just might imagine that a logical proposition is sound, as it is just my limited brain that tells me that it is universally true. It's not really within the realm of reasonable suspicion but it is within the realm of suspicion.

Well, yes and no - we are local, but we can aspire towards the universal. It's just that we can never totally reach it. To be human means to be subjective and limited, but there are great variations in how subjective and how limited. I just think that every philosophical enquiry should start from history, from the narrative of how these particular meanings and concepts emerged in a particular place and in a particular continuum of slow time.

The basic thing of my "philosophy" is locality, of being born into history and thus into ever shifting meanings and customs and ways of thinking. I think we can never completely detach us from that inheritance: no "sub species aeternatis" for us ever. But we can make a serious effort to see, starting from this point of being locally born, into varyingly narrow circumstances on a likely random arc of a history - but the effort is way more harder than the contemporary academic philosophy seems to allow.

This is a theme I have been wondering about for years. I will just copy-paste a couple of my blog posts on this subject:

For me history is at the centre - it is the central science, the central study. In comparison physics seems a simple if quite an esoteric field, mathematics a self-evident logical game with only fairly mechanical complexities etc. etc. About the structure and workings of the subject matters of all natural sciences we understand so much more than about our inexplicable human experience of being in the world. We have next to no penetration of this chaotic process, being immersed in it, seeing only dimly and never far. We have ever more minute comprehension of the nature and dimensions of space-time but have no theory of historical causation.

We can explain the physical universe in the language of hard science but can't do the same for the smallest of historical events. Perhaps that is why we have only a very limited perception of the strangeness of our path, of this mad shooting arc that has brought us to this completely unique new society, only mere decades old. One can only wonder what is yet to come - will the explosion into more complexity continue or will it all come to arupt halt at some stage? In any case there is no control of our direction, we ride a huge wild wave without any meaningful way to influence its course.

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It is interesting to note that so far the attack has mostly concerned the Christian part of the twin pillars: the chipping away of the non-materialist universal values, of compassion and kindness, of charity. The cancer has also manifested in the many perversions of Christianity witnessed today (especially in the US), that have not much common at all with the old universal church and it's traditions variously kept and stressed in the traditional Western and Orthodox denominations (including the church of Rome which is no universal church). Instead there is a kind of mock-"Christianity" as fashioned by Capital: brutal and non-compassionate sanctioning all sorts of moral sacrileges.

Athens, I suppose, remains at the core: the rebellious idea of emancipation and personal liberty. But without the influence of Jerusalem it was a savage, barbarian creed - narrow to the very point of meaninglessness. And it might easily be the next target with this feast of greed and hatred and willful ignorance. For without christian-humanist values why should we be overly concerned with notions of citizens' rights and impartial justice, wouldn't they just be empty, undefended, uncomprehended past citadels then?

Well, this is history - we had lazy days of blind hedonism, minding our private businesses (as one should in a civilized society) but that might prove to be only a temporary pause and now those interested in maintaining the structures of enlightenment and reason might have to find another mode of passion and fighting to defend them.

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There is really much in us that has come via Jerusalem - our vague, christian-agnostic humanism is basically just the New Testament translated into secular society. (In my personal case the connection is of course much stronger coming directly from a background of living, if very liberal, Christianity.) Liberalism, in the end is not a very Greek value. (And we don't hold it in the Greek way, but tepidly, half-heartedly.)

But the basic modern situation: freedom, passion, emptiness, is quite pure Athens. Not that many really would confront it. Some problems do arise in connecting liberal humanistic values with this Nietzschean condition of being in the world, but to my mind there is nothing inherently impossible in achieving a rational balance.

Art also is a very Greek thing - especially in the form where esthetics are seen as fusing with ethics (a view very close to my heart). Art is the central thing, next to it love and justice. Perhaps that is the fusion, our common inheritance - increasingly wasted inheritance, I suppose.

These recollections, echoes are indeed quickly fading. And not only of Athens but of Jerusalem as well, and there is a certain Roman luxury and opulence in our lifestyle, a certain decadence. One does wonder what is to follow all this, what rough beast.

https://stockholmslender.blogspot.com/2016/12/athens-and-jerusalem.html
https://stockholmslender.blogspot.com/2008/02/from-athens-via-jerusalem-to-shopping.html
https://stockholmslender.blogspot.com/2011/09/inheritance-of-athens.html

"Reality" is one of those classic concepts that will end up in endless metaphysics - you go to Descartes or Hume or Kant or Nietzsche, the usual army of the unalterable law... I would say, pragmatically, that reality, for a large part, is the part, the overwhelming part, of the material world that we experience that doesn't bend to our will. As much as I want the Moon to be made of Camembert, it just stubbornly stays a rock (as far as we can reasonably know). Etc.

Helsinki is the capital of Sweden.

If n is any integer, then either n is even or n is odd.

Killing is wrong. (Except maybe in certain individual or collective cases of self-defence or prevention of even worse outcomes, based on certain criteria as defined in the AppendIixes I-XXXIX.)

It appears to me that it is several categories easier to refute or verify the factual truth of the first and second sentences. The last one will lead to near infinite complications and qualifications - almost as it would not be a hugely factual statement about the nature of our experience of the world.(Obviously there can be many other definitions of a "moral fact" but none appear very useful or very "fact like".)

I guess "moral facts" are a third main category of facts that otherwise tend to be divided into the main camps of empirical and logical and which tend to have robust methods of defining truth values and conditions. Anyway. I have always found moral realism odd and unproductive. It might be true, who can tell, but it is definitely unhelpful. If there are moral facts, they seem rather shadowy and elusive, slippery things - there is little or no clarity and lots of seemingly arbitrary characteristics.

The tone is mostly amazingly civil here. You can find many really knowlegeable people and enlightening discussions and debates. Some content is obviously less interesting but by and large an excellent forum and community I have found.

Well, to my mind I have empirism to my side. Yeah, we obviously have many longstanding biological impulses, but we seem to be a hyper-cultural species at the same time. We have Lena Dunham co-existing with whatever fundamentalist imam or priest. It really hard to make the argument that nothing essential has changed when basically almost everything essential has changed. We are meaning giving species, we keep changing our beliefs and our understanding. We are not apes on the savannah no more...

Well, we do have had quite radical cultural evolution and change. As species we are maybe 250 000 - 300 000 years old, and within that time period people's beliefs and knowledge have change absolutely crazily. We have changed from non-verbal apes to highly aware persons wondering about Plato, Socrates, Aristotle et al. It's only a bit under 200 years ago, when people really genuinely had absolutely bonkers beliefs about sex and gender etc. It's pretty hard to see that everything would have stayed the same as we have progressed (or changed) from hunter-gathering to agriculture to industrialism to post-industrialism. People are not static, nor non-changing.

I wonder if in a morally perfect world male lions would not kill the existing cubs of female lions in order to get them into heat? Or if there would not be rapes among animals? What would a perfectly moral person prefer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion_among_animals

In many ways it seems that the only immoral - and thus at least slightly moral - species in the world are us humans. This doesn't directly answer the OP, but it seems that in some senses our species really is unique, for better and for worse. I don't see much inherent value in this teeming life here, though obviously this evolutionary anarchy seems better than lifelessness, but there seems to be so much unfair and utterly cruel things in the nature. Would it maybe be moral to interfere with them?

Nature is amoral. There is nothing immoral a lion, a bat, a bee could do. Obviously the worst behaving species is us humans, as we are the only species that can behave immorally. It's a certain distinction, I would say.

Well, I would absolutely want a massive public-private investment and action plan to counter global warming and other environmental dangers - quarter by quarter reacting "invisible hand" capitalism will not do the job. I think humanity is totally worth saving, we are some of the best people here - and some of the worst, admittedly, but the place would be much poorer and less interesting with just plants and spiders and fish and viruses and what you have.

Oh, the planet will go on for billions of years until it's destroyed by the Sun. We are desperately dependent on our enviroment staying clean and stable, the other way round not so much. We cannot stop life on Earth, only our own life. The industrial age has lasted bit under 3 centuries, an absurdly meaningless blink of an eye in the geological and biological history of the planet. And the nature manages mass extinctions fine by itself, thank you. It's just stuff that happens - unless stuff that happens is given meanings from the outside. So, not to worry, life will totally carry on happily without the humanity. Maybe it takes like a really "long" time like half a million years after us, but life will bloom again. Mindless, red in the tooth and claw, mercilessly and mindlessly continuing onwards..

Oh, animals are mostly rather boring and plants are even worse. Nature is quite overrated.Humans are pretty interesting, you never know what they will come up with. Though cats are good too. So I would rather save a person than a fly or a dandelion. Though not Hitler or Stalin. Not maybe a very interesting question.

To put it in rather non-philosophical language: that there seems to be someone here who is experiencing the world and at the same time thinking and pondering about that act of experiencing - along with a strong presumption that this is true of other people too, that there are someones there. It appears that the world is populated by conscious or aware minds who inhabit human bodies and who have space, distance to question and doubt all things, including their own reality.

And I don't have a very comprehensive theory of "totalitarianism", obviously there are similarities though, but not a very important concept for me. What I focus on is simply violence, systematic state terror - that's where I find that Stalinism and Nazism are virtually indistinguishable. And such wholesale violence will never be just a rational means to a political end, it's an invitation to madness and sadism that we can't resist whatever the nominal ideological reasons for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents.

To be honest, I find your approach to be so idiosyncratic and anachronistic to not really make much sense. I appreciate your historical knowledge but to my mind you expect totally unreasonable things from actual contempories based on much later events. And your interpretation of the Spartakists and Marxism-Leninism seems bizarrely lenient and accepting. Anyways, very interesting discussion!

Well, I see in your criticism the full benefits of hindsight (plus a very questionable apologia for the Spartakists). The reformist work of the SPD looked like finally having come to fruition in late 1918 and early 1919. The republic and liberal democracy were finally secured with SPD as the leading force - and then they were brutally attacked by these violent proto-communists. They were not clairvoyants, they reacted to circumstances. They thought that German militarism and German reactionaries were a waning force with good justification. They erred about that but they did not err about Spartakists and Lenism-Marxism.

Anyway, I don't see Communism any better than Fascism or even Nazism - below my somewhat lengthy comment on the subject: https://stockholmslender.blogspot.com/2007/05/stalins-willing-executioners-pro.html

No, I just took issue of your sort of defence of the Spartakists and pointed out that they actually violently occupied the premises of the premier national newspaper of the SPD - which gave a very graphic idea how they viewed the SPD and Social Democracy: as enemies to attack with violence. And had they won, they would have obviously liquidated SPD and the Weimar Republic. So, I see the SPD response as perfectly rational, even though the military aid they asked fo was a poisoned chalice. They did not have better options left in the face of this revolutionary violence.

Well, it appears to me that we are very different kind of machines then, so as to make the analogy rather tenuous. But some materialists seem to argue that because our minds - or the illusion of our minds - rise from solely from matter and are pre-determined by it, there really is no "question or mystery of consciouness" or, even, "real" consciousness or mind at all. How this follows, I don't exactly understand.

Btw, I kind of doubt we would have "a true goal" here, surely there are biological and evolutionary impulses, but why would they constitute "a true goal"?

Strict materialists often make the argument that we are essentially machines, that there is very little authentic base for awareness or mind or consciousness (some of this is based on study of brain functions). But thinking of machines, say cars, do they ever wonder if they are basically machines? If we are, we are quite a peculiar kind of machines with tendency to self-doubt and capability for ferocious arguments whether we actually are "just" machines. This would seem somewhat strange behaviour for a car or a hairdryer etc.

I have found "experience" a useful term - we have the experience of being in the world. We are not directly in the world, we experience it and thus are at least somewhat removed from it. There is a space there, a distance. This self-understanding of being in the middle of the act of experiencing the world seems like awareness to me.

We can step aside and see ourselves being born into a specific moment in time, into specific set of local customs and meanings, but we can distance ourselves from that specific moment and that specific cultural context. And then at least aim for universality, sub specie aeternitatis. At least to a degree, there is a space for that. I would imagine that for an insect there is no such space, that insects cannot distance themselves from the world, they don't observe themselves experiencing the world.

So, they occupied the legendary mouthpiece of the SPD in a fit of absence of mind? They only meant to destroy the freedom of expression of the bourgeoisie? If they were not Communists yet, at least they were learning bloody quickly how to best undermine liberal democracy...

And, well, the Spartakists had attacked and occupied the Vorwärts house - some sort of protofascist military headquarters? It's very obvious what would have happened to the moderate left if the Spartakists had won the day: liquidation of Social Democracy and their leaders executed or imprisoned. They were not clairvoyants and could not see to the 1930's. but were defending the new and fragile republican structures. And Communists certainly picked their moment for revenge in the early 30's, they stabbed the sanest and biggest party in the back while it was trying to hold the front against the Nazis.

Though Noske was an unfortunate choice to go to Kiel and onwards to history.

Well, when Communists got into power, they tended to hang the Social Democrats, so... And in the 30's the Soviet Union and Comintern labeled SPD "social fascists" and saw them as a bigger threat than the Nazis. Now that was a classic stab in the back.

Well, there is a perfectly viable ideology of Social Democracy which predated the Soviet Union and has absolutely nothing to do with that hateful tyranny. The modern Nordic countries are a good example of that compromise between the state and the free market within the framework of liberal democracy.

You do have lots of various points indeed! :)

I just repeat this observation here:

But those people who do believe that a person is born at the moment of conception will then have no choice but force - if necessary - a 11 year old girl raped by her father to carry a child to full term. I mean you can't murder an innocent person whatever the context.

In fact any raped woman would be forced to carry the child to conception. Your family could be killed in a house invasion and you could be raped pregnant and you would have to carry the child for 9 months to conception.

Yes, extreme and unpleasant examples but sometimes ethical views can have extreme and unpleasant concequences. And, sadly, when it comes to rape (and even incest) we are not talking about a hugely rare thing. Quite a fanatical thing to believe that a raped woman or barely adolescent girl should be forced to give birth.

Well, here is another pretty typical example:

No more phrases, Swenson: I was once
A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul
And savings banks, Fides, the sculptor’s prize.
All eyes and size, and galled Justitia,

Trained to poise the tables of the law,
Patientia, forever soothing wounds.

And mighty Fortitudo, frantic bass.

But these shall not adorn my souvenirs.
These lions, these majestic images.

If the fault is with the soul, the sovereigns
Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first.

If the fault is with the souvenirs, yet these
Are the soul itself. And the whole of the soul,
Swenson,

As every man in Sweden will concede.

Still hankers after lions, or, to shift.

Still hankers after sovereign images.

If the fault is with the lions, send them back
To Monsieur Dufy's Hamburg whence they came.
The vegetation still abounds with forms.

It is kind of impressive, like some sort of weird word music that stays in your mind, but it then falls totally down when you simply ask "what the hell does it actually mean"? Like what does any of that disjointed stuff really mean, Sweden and savings banks and Hamburg abounding with vegetation? A text full of total non-sequiturs that in isolation can sound pretty impressive but don't beginn to make a coherent whole. So, yeah, nice try but no banana.

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Well, obviously not, this is one of my absolute favourite poems - Lions in Sweden by Wallace Stevens. And I have read plenty of learned analysis of the poem, many quite, well, fantastical (not in a good way). Poetry does not have to make total sense (and far from it being "a weak" art form I think it is one of the strongest and oldest), often it doesn't, and it doesn't, totally, here. I see no reason why a random effort could not succeed as brilliant poetry, what we see in this thread are very early efforts, and even they have really lovely lines and cadences. If there ever will be a full AGI, I bet it will do also art better than regular humans (as well as everything else).

If there never has been a consciouness, you can't take it way. A lump of a few cells is not a person, but most people would agree that a foetus approaching full term already is an independent person with independent rights. The question is of a degree and does not suit a binary, black and white discourse.

But those people who do believe that a person is born at the moment of conception will then have no choice but force - if necessary - a 11 year old girl raped by her father to carry a child to full term. I mean you can't murder an innocent person whatever the context. And the greatest holocaust and sorrow in the world are the countless fertilized eggs that are self-terminated within days of the conception - a gigantic medical programme should be created to prevent this unimaginable killing field. Memorials to these billions of young persons (whether zygotes or embryos) that have died so tragically young should be scattered all over our human habitations.