Once we have escaped, are we all in the same place, or infinitely different places?

So there is one cage from which we might escape, but as many ways as there are individual human beings of escaping it?

Merkywurdy (if I may give you a pet name, but not in any derogatory sense, but just because I am prone to do so to those I feel some familiarity with), some of the things you say seem to contradict themselves.

For example, you reject the notion that all men are created equal, yet you assert that they indeed are, insofar as you also say that each is born into a cage the key to which he possesses, subverting the Platonic cave, into which everyone is born, but the ability to exit only a few possess by their natural but unequal ability. Is this a fair characterization?

Is not wearing a mask in public a form of free expression, like burning the American flag, or wearing a tee shirt that says “Black Lives Matter”, or one that has the Thin Blue Line flag emblazoned on it?

Freedom of expression was born of the idea of freedom of speech, a child of the Enlightenment; the idea was that philosophers and scientists ought to be allowed freedom to publish their thoughts and conclusions, however opposed to the political/religious authorities...but with this caveat: that the products of science benefit, not just the thinkers (who, after all, just wanted to understand the truth of nature), but humanity at large, through the application of their knowledge to the practical problems of mankind.

It seems to me that this pandemic has exposed a theoretical flaw in the foundations of the Enlightenment. Medical science looks at the data, and concludes that masks significantly reduce the virus’ spread, and therefore promote public health; on the other hand, using the same arguments that a Copernicus or Galileo might have used to justify adhering to their discoveries and findings in opposition to ecclesiastical authorities, ordinary citizens rise in revolt by refusing to wear those same masks!

Dr. Strangelove (if I may translate your name into my native tongue), I assume that your independence of thought from the “rabble” extends to less physical issues than the current pandemic, to questions like, for example, whether it is is true, as Aristotle asserts in the Politics, that some men are born slaves, or whether the dictum that all men are created equal, as a certain famous late professor of political philosophy suggested, is a democratic prejudice...

... may I ask what your opinion on these topics is, and whether you think human beings ought to be free express dissent with regard to them?

It is a difficult situation...

I now am living with a woman, and have been for many years, under the same roof, whose family lives in various parts under different roofs, from children to grandchildren to great-grandchildren, who insists on meeting with them over Christmas, as we’ve always done, and they are in agreement with that. I am not, because I realize that we may get infected.

I tell her, “just wait till next year: we will be vaccinated, and then we can get together with your family as we’ve always done”, but she is obstinate.

What am I to do? I have the choice of refusing to go with her, to gather with her family, possibly alienating them from my affection, or going with the flow, gathering with them, but contracting COVID...

What a difficult position a virus and a division of mindsets about it have put us in!

This virus could not have been engineered in a lab as precisely as it has been by nature to divide ppl.

To call public efforts to contain the coronavirus tyranny, is like calling a dust-devil a tornado; a creek, a river; a pond, the sea;...

...hunger, a famine; poverty, destitution; uncertainty, paralysis. It’s like calling Trump King Midas, or a child’s finger-painting a “Rembrandt”, or the whirlpool in a tub drain, Charybdis.

Of course, hyperbole can be used in all such examples to elevate, toward some rhetorical or poetic goal, certain low objects to an exaggeratedly higher level; but to call the mandates of mild administrative governments, meant to mitigate the illness and death due to epidemic, tyrannical, in a philosophical discussion, is not only to dilute real tyranny to the point of nothing, but also to turn it on it’s very head: far, far more souls have been, and are being even now, lost to the malevolence of tyrants, than will ever be saved by the humanitarian efforts to mitigate COVID...

...and many of these efforts are being, or have been, made by currently tyrannical governments!

Nowhere: a nonexistent place (Webster’s)

Place: where something is (should be Webster’s)

That there is a place for nowhere in the dictionary means that it is somewhere...

Nowhere is, by definition, not anywhere, so nowhere can’t be anywhere, because nowhere has a place, and nowhere is nowhere...

What we have on our hands (nowhere) is a place which is no place. Paradox!

Ha ha!...that made me laugh...

Describe to me the “color” of your peculiar life, and, you mad fool, I will (I promise) return the favor.

The “beauty of ugliness” makes me think of Socrates, as he, in Plato’s dialogues, led his aristocratic interlocutors to consider how a wooden spoon, for example, is more “beautiful” than a golden one, because it is more serviceable in cooking...

...it also leads me to think of how, when I see an old beat-up pickup truck run down the road, with mud caked inside the wheel-wells, I think how beautiful it is compared to the new unblemished ones that are washed regularly at laser car washes, and never taken out into the boondocks to haul firewood or lumber.

In other words, it is not “nothing” that is the “concept”, but rather “nothingness”, the quality of being nothing...
For example, if I conceive of the thing that we call a “tree”, I don’t refer in my mind to the elm in my front yard, but to a generalized concept that has particular examples that exist everywhere in the world, and have certain properties peculiar to the species subsumed under that name...
Likewise, “nothing” may refer to the absence of any of a number of certain particular things, but when I conceive of “nothing” as a concept, I am thinking of a generalization, like the earlier mentioned “tree”, a thing that might more accurately be termed as “tree-ness”, or “arborality”, or “dendriteness”, as I made the distinction earlier b/w “nothing” and “nothingness”.

But the concept is different from the thing it comprehends...
I can conceive of the concept “nothingness”, but if I “conceive of nothing”, that only means I’m not thinking of anything at the time; it is a problem of semantics merely, not being or reality.

The “concept” is not “nothing”, but rather “the definition of ‘nothing’”; that should unravel the paradox.

It’s similar to the old paradox “moderation in everything”...does that include moderation itself?

I read the posts here, sometimes by ppl who are regulars, having posted thousands of times, sometimes by ones who have remarked a few hundred, sometimes, rarely, by someone who has just begun digesting the quality of this venue, like myself, and all I see are abstruse incoherent references to either modern or ancient ideas and theories or both, sometimes actually citing Greek or Latin terms as though they had read the works in the original languages; how many of you have read Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, or his Dialogues? how many the Gospels in the original Greek? It all comes off as a sort of facade, whoever can appear to be more sophisticated or knowledgeable than his adversary...
...I am compelled to agree with a certain late professor of political philosophy who proclaimed that, “we may be witnessing the end (of philosophy)”.

Reading back over this discussion, I am led to remark on what I see as the hierarchical nature of the scientific disciplines; for, mr. Banno, for example, assumes that no knowledge of man can be had unless it be reductionist, by which I assume he means, unless it be explained by knowledge gained from studying the orders of nature beneath it.

My knowledge of mathematics and physics is rather outdated: I studied them 40 yrs or so ago in high school and university, and much more progress may have been achieved in these fields since then; but I have never heard that we have, starting with only the postulates of these two sciences either separately or combined, been able to predict, as Maxwell did electro-magnetic waves, the periodic table, which, to my mind, suggests that there is a distinction to be made b/w the disciplines of mathematics, physics and chemistry, and that the phenomena of the “higher” science, that of chemistry, cannot be understood simply or solely by the postulates of it’s two lower sisters.

Similarly, I have never heard (correct me if I’m wrong!) that chemists, working from the postulates of their peculiar science, have ever been able to predict that that new thing in nature, based on the carbon atom, called “life”, must emerge, much less that it would take on the infinite variety of form that it has, nor substitute for the science we call biology, with its own postulates that describe its own peculiar phenomena...

Finally, I see that this new object of science, man, emerges as something distinct and superior to the the things that merely live, the objects of biology, with his own peculiar characteristics irreducible to those of that inferior science, and I am convinced that nature is arranged in a hierarchy, from things lower to higher, each governed by its own peculiar laws...

...and, having studied, in a rudimentary fashion, the systems of gov he has established and how each sort influences general thought, have concluded that those who condemn me for being “arrogant” in thinking this way are simply blinded by democratic ideology, which asserts that, to put it bluntly, “nothing is better than anything else”.

I once had a discussion with a man who I finally forced to confess that he believed a human being was not, essentially, any better than a rock; so I asked him, “so you don’t mind if I kick you around in the argument a little?”,...and he was offended!

If any of you can explain how a knowledge of quantum mechanics or general relativity or string theory or quarks, or whatever the post-Einsteinian physicists and mathematicians discovered about the most extreme forms of elementary matter, has any real meaning for philosophy in its highest sense, which I take to mean knowledge of man, his peculiar character and the nature of his life, I would welcome it.

As it is, all I see here in these discussions are quibbles over pure and groundless reductionisms.

Man is not a mere atom, especially not one hurling through the universe at the speed of light, nor can he be explained by mathematical formulae; to understand him we must recognize the scientific validity of such very real phenomena as fear and shame, trust and hope, love and hate; haven’t we all experienced these and other similar things, quite peculiar to our species? Aren’t these the things we really want to understand? If we discount them as mere figments, or reduce them to the effects of merely physical or behavioral laws, all we are doing is explaining ourselves in the light we wish to understand them...

Years ago I had a discussion with my then wife’s father about his infidelity to his own wife: he was a tenured professor at a well-respected university. He explained to me how research into baboon behavior showed that man was a naturally unfaithful creature...as though we could be no better than the beasts...how well such scientific research fit his own agenda!...

This example, I think, encapsulates all the dangers that a reductionist philosophy of man runs up against, whether influenced by physics, mathematics or animal behavior: man is neither a body in motion, a number in a statistic, nor a baboon cheating on his primary mate.

Thought this quote from Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (p 71) might be germane to the discussion:

“Plato’s teaching about music is, put simply, that rhythm and melody...are the barbarous expression of the soul...Music is the medium of the...soul in its most ecstatic condition of wonder and terror. Nietzsche, who in large measure agrees with Plato’s analysis, says In the Birth of Tragedy...that a mixture of cruelty and coarse sensuality characterized this state, which of course was religious, in the service of gods. Music is the soul’s primitive and primary speech, and it is...without articulate speech or reason. Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and the passions it expresses.”

Having read over this discussion a couple times, the most striking thing to me is how the original topic, how physics has encroached on philosophy, was quickly turned into its inverse: “the philosophy of physics”...

As for myself, I am unaware of physics‘ encroachment on philosophy, and am curious what the originator of this discussion has to offer to inform me on that subject.

Good point.

Maybe her tears resulted from the unfaithfulness of her husband, who she knew was having sexual relations with professional prostitutes, even while she was pregnant with his last son.

But surely a girl like Melania would dry her tears, and revel in the persona of the greatest beauty of the free world; why else would she have married a Donald Trump in the first place?

I’m not sure Trump’s ascension to power was set up by Obama’s presidency so much as by Hillary’s candidacy...

In general, the eight years in which Obama served were marked by uneventfulness. True, we had a Great Recession, but the recovery was swift, and soon the economy was as robust as ever. One could imagine him being re-elected indefinitely, like FDR, and the cruelest thing I ever heard him say, a man so mild and gentle, was, after Hillary lost, “I could have won this election”: that was an unnecessary public belly-ache directed at his former faithful Secretary of State...though it was probably true...

...but Hillary was just too milquetoast, not a figure to inspire like her predecessor. It was time for another rock star to inspire the electorate...but how different a character!

I don’t have time to respond to you just now Phforrest, but I like your answer; I will respond tomorrow, when I have had time to more fully consider your words, logous, rationes: it is my bedtime.

Barack Obama, a young black man, first in American history, with an Arabic name, becomes president, mirabile dictu, seeming to usher in the great opening of American society so many of us had looked forward to, while adhering to all the long established conventions of our govt...

Then his Immediate successor is an old white selfish bigot, incarnation of king George of England, who would aspire to absolute power, and subvert all those same conventions established over centuries...

One of the tiredest bromides about our system of govt, liberal democracy, that it is fragile, becomes suddenly true, and looking back over the history of the Ancient Greek and Roman regimes one must wonder whether it is true that a state’s demise occurs precisely at the moment it seems to be in its fullest flower, fulfilling its greatest potential, as the Roman republic was when a philosopher had just served as head of state, and the greatest moral authority, Cato Minor, was soon to deny Caesar the glory of pardoning him by taking his own life in that famous and ghastly way.

By “the post that preceded this one”, I mean, of course, the penultimate one, not the ultimate; ie, not Mr. Cummins’, but Bert’s

Rereading Rousseau’s Emile on this subject (Allan Bloom’s translation). Here is a paragraph taken from his (Rousseau’s) instructions to the tutor of Emile, charged with the young man’s education (pp 333-4):
“...watch the young man carefully. He can protect himself from everything else, but it is up to you to protect him from himself. Do not leave him alone, day or night. At the very least, sleep in his room. Distrust instinct as soon as you no longer limit yourself to it. It is good as long as it acts by itself; it is suspect from the moment it operates within man-made institutions. It must not be destroyed, but it must be regulated, and that is perhaps more difficult than annihilating it. It would be very dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to trick his senses and find a substitute for the opportunity of satisfying them. Once he knows this dangerous supplement, he is lost. From then on he will always have an enervated body and heart. He will suffer till his death the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal to which a man can be subjected. Surely, rather than that...If the furies of an ardent temperament become invincible, my dear Emile, I pity you; but I shall not hesitate for a moment, I shall not allow nature’s goal to be eluded. If a tyrant must subjugate you, I prefer to yield you to one from whom I can deliver you. Whatever happens, I shall tear you more easily away from women than from yourself.”
One should look at the context of this passage: here Rousseau contrasts masturbation as an “instinct”, ie as a mere satisfaction of physical need like Diogenes’ example, with the act as one of imagination, freighted with the images of a corrupted society...which speaks much to the post that preceded this one.

Funny, to join a philosophy forum and find masturbation as the most interesting current topic!
The Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes (as Diogenes Laertius tells us in his biography of the philosophers) was caught masturbating, and ridiculed for it; he responded, “I wish I could satisfy my belly by rubbing it!”.