I'll just leave it there, and see if it appeals to anyone else. — unenlightened
Kant realized that Hume’s world of pure, unique impressions couldn’t exist. This is because the minimal requirement for experiencing anything is not to be so absorbed in the present that one is lost in it. What Hume had claimed— that when exploring his feeling of selfhood, he always landed “on some particular perception or other” but could never catch himself “at any time without a percepton, and never can observe anything but the perception”— was simply not true.33 Because for Hume to even report this feeling he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.
Hence what Kant wrote in his answer to Hamann, ten years in the making. To recollect perfectly eradicates the recollection, just as to perceive perfectly eradicates the perception. For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all. If everything we learn about the world flows directly into us from utterly distinct bits of code, as the rationalists thought, or if everything we learn remains nothing but subjective, unconnected impressions, as Hume believed— it comes down to exactly the same thing. With no self to distinguish itself, no self to bridge two disparate moments in space-time, there is simply no one there to feel irritated at the inadequacy of “dog.” No experience whatsoever is possible.
Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34 As contained in one moment. Think of experiencing a flow of events as a bit like watching a film. For something to be happening at all, the viewer makes a connection between each frame of the film, spanning the small differences so as to create the experience of movement. But if there is a completely new viewer for every frame, with no relation at all to the prior or subsequent frame, then all that remains is an absolute unity. But such a unity, which is exactly what Funes and Shereshevsky and Hume claimed they could experience, utterly negates perceiving anything at all, since all perception requires bridging impressions over time. In other words, it requires exactly what a truly perfect memory, a truly perfect perception, or a truly perfect observation absolutely denies: overlooking minor differences enough to be a self, a unity spanning distinct moments in time.
William Eggington - "The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Heisenberg, Borges, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."
A genuine miracle is occurring — a supernatural violation of natural laws, or I am probably in a universe (within an infinite multiverse) where an extraordinarily improbable natural fluctuation — say, a “Boltzmann fish” scenario — has spontaneously produced the fish.
If I I think I probably live in a multiverse, which explanation would Hume think I should favor? — RogueAI
Can you explain that further? — Fire Ologist
But I could see our experience of our own mind being different than our sense based experience. — Fire Ologist
Because they have withstood defeater screening across the routes of justification available to me: testimony, reasoning, sensory experience, linguistic clarity, and logical consistency. If new defeaters arise, I will adjust. But until then, the best explanation for their stability is that they are tethered to truth — Sam26
And I believe that a society that strives for constant liberation from anything restrictive and oppressive is liberated to the point of freedom from being — Astorre
For example, if T is not traditional-T but rather pragmatic-T or communal-T, then of course JTB is undermined. — Leontiskos
It ensures that both justification and understanding are grounded in observable criteria within language-games. — Sam26
In my own work I have drawn a parallel between these hinges and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems,
just as Gödel showed that no consistent formal system strong enough for arithmetic can prove all the truths it contains or even establish its own consistency from within, Wittgenstein shows that epistemic systems rest on unprovable certainties. Both reveal a structural limit on internal justification. Far from undermining knowledge, these limits are enabling conditions: mathematics requires axioms it cannot justify, and our epistemic practices require hinges that stand fast without proof. — Sam26
On this point, Wittgenstein’s contribution is not to propose another model of knowledge beside JTB, but to dissolve the demand for an ultimate account of justification outside our forms of life. The factivity of know remains untouched, as does its commitment to belief. What changes is our view of justification: no longer a timeless condition, it is an activity rooted in our shared background. When Wittgenstein says that “knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgment” (OC §378), he is not abandoning JTB but pointing to the human practices in which justification has its weight. — Sam26
The history of "justification" as a theological term turned philosophical is itself telling here. To be "justified" was originally an internal process, a change in that which is justified. It meant "to be made righteous." With Luther, it is displaced to external divine judgement, an imputation. Then it ends up becoming a philosophical external imputation that devolves down to either the community or the individual. A "justification," of claims to be in contact with reality (in possession of knowledge) on the basis of appearances needs some metaphysics of how appearances relate to reality. If this linkage doesn't exist, I am not sure how J ever falls into place or how T would ever show up in our experience. But if J is about the private and communal imputation of status in the first place, and not about a relationship between the knower and known, how could it ever bridge the gap? — Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm a bit puzzled about you are getting at here. — Ludwig V
That is indeed a problem. But we can't solve all the problems at the same time. For the purpose of defining knowledge, we can assume that we have a concept of truth and worry about what it is on another occasion. — Ludwig V
To avoid the circularity, you have to posit X as true without knowing it to be true, — J
My concerns with JTB are all about how the truth of P is supposed to be established — J
To put it another way, the possibility of p being false seems to me to be irrelevant to the question of knowledge. What is relevant is whether p is or is not false, on the assumption that if it is not false, it is true. — Ludwig V
Well, my approach would be to explain that certainty and doubt, possibility and impossibility, etc. are meaningless without a concept of truth. — Ludwig V
Wouldn't you say that the collapse of superstitions, smoking, and other harmful practices has followed just such a process? — Tom Storm
Wouldn’t we say instead that, rather than being about right or wrong, communities develop methods, approaches, and beliefs that work for a time and then no longer work, or no longer meet needs? — Tom Storm
You’re trying to run all these concepts through a propositional logic wringer, which, as I said before, presupposes that the terms we are comparing do not alter their sense in the very act of comparison. Without its dependence on the fixity of its terms, logic can’t produce its laws, and you’re clinging to these laws as the ground for your attempt to refute certain philosophical approaches as self-contradictory. If you start from a ground of identiy and then explain difference as emerging from or dependent on identity, then you will always be able to use propositional logic to ‘refute’ philosophies which claim to ground identity in difference.
But doesn't this assume a metaphysical standard of usefulness that a pragmatist wouldn't recognise? In reality, actions always produce consequences, and “success” is judged relative to the goals and expectations of the community. There's no call for a separate idea of what is “truly useful”. What current practice affirms as useful is what matters, because usefulness is determined by how practices function and coordinate behaviour. The claim that “what is truly useful cannot be whatever current practice affirms” is imposing an external measure that pragmatism wouldn't recognize. — Tom Storm
"I know that I know ..." is pure pleonasm — Ludwig V
That's an interesting question. If everything we cognize is counted as "physical", then would not metaphysics, thought of being what is beyond the scope of physics, or any other science, be thus taken to be dealing with the non-cognitive? — Janus
I see this on the John Oliver show all the time, crude, sexual jokes about Reagan and such. It bothers me too.
I just read "Rebel Sell" by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, 2004, but still immensely valuable today. They identify opposition to 'conformity to a totalizing system' as the rebel 'stance' taken by much of the left since the 60s.
They note not just how silly much of that thinking was, but also how it came to valorize rejecting social norms of all kinds, social norms that have much more value than they ills that are supposedly reputed by 'sticking it to the man' and being rude. — Jeremy Murray
as a paradox to be reduced to its correct monistic answer — apokrisis
But then place that in a context where it is being shaped by a communal telos. One knows whether one is fitting in or striking out as the distinction becomes very clear in one’s mind. To compete or to cooperate becomes a choice one has to own and so a power to spend wisely. — apokrisis
Freedom is the power to act. Constraint is the collective rational good. — apokrisis
Fukuyama is good at giving a structuralist account of how every society in history has had a similar set of ingredients, but balanced somewhat differently due to historical and geographic circumstance. And through examining that evolutionary variety, a general systematic trend can be observed. — apokrisis
They acknowledge the necessity of periods of stable cultural norms, but take delight in their deconstruction. One could say that betterment for them is tied to the most accelerative cycling between stability and radical change we can manage. — Joshs
It is not a question of a conformity between this overarching schema and some reality outside of it. The schema directly expresses a real world in a way that is as real as it gets, via patterns of pragmatic use. — Joshs
This seems to assume that for constraints to matter, they must exist independently of the practices they describe.
Temporary denial or disagreement doesn’t undermine them, practices that fail to work or coordinate with reality naturally fall away, regardless of belief. — Tom Storm
Even if no one explicitly believes a constraint will operate, it manifests through the success or failure of practices in practice. — Tom Storm
but I think Hobbes' is the most central, coherent, and enduring philosophical basis of liberalism — Leontiskos
For example, one might use bite-sized quotes from great thinkers to feel the immediate rush of sophistication without much care for what the quotes are really about. — GazingGecko
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.
However, I'm not sure it is necessarily always bad to engage with wisdom porn. It might be a gateway to more genuine forms of engagement. One might learn important things as a side-effect. The question is, if one removed the immediate gratification, facing the difficulties of philosophy, would one still engage? — GazingGecko
Rorty doesn't claim it is always true outside the context of human beliefs and practices; the constraints are descriptive of tendencies in those practices, not eternal laws. — Tom Storm
Even if beliefs shift, practices that fail to work or coordinate with the world will disappear, while useful practices will persist. — Tom Storm
Nor does the conditional nature of these tendencies mean “anything goes.” — Tom Storm
A metaphysics IS a boundary, setting up criteria for correctness, and more importantly, for intelligiblity. — Joshs
If this is an equivocal use of truth and knowledge, then it also prevents either of these terms from being rooted in an essence — Joshs
But we can’t choose to inhabit all stances at once , or observe them all from a sideways on or god’s eye perspective from nowhere. — Joshs
Doesn't this objection misunderstands what Rorty means by truth? He is not saying that popularity or peer approval automatically makes something true; rather, truth emerges through ongoing practices, dialogue, and testing. Criticism of his ideas does not make them false, this is part of the very process through which we evaluate and refine our beliefs. It's the Conversation. In this sense, the theory is not self-refuting; it simply describes how truth is negotiated and maintained within human communities. The fact that Rorty often said snide things doesn't mean these should stand for his entire philosophy. — Tom Storm
1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?
Now either the italicized statement is true outside the context current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.
Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.
If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus
It may be hard to see how this amounts to anything more than ‘making stuff up’ while ignoring the real world, and it may be equally hard to see how any sort of stable understanding can be achieved such that scientific-technological and ethico-political progress is possible. — Joshs
I think it misses the point to treat postmodern hermeneutics and phenomenology as making arguments designed to ‘refute’ or dismiss the opposition. — Joshs
It is perfectly correct and true, as far as it goes and within the bounds it sets for itself. — Joshs
I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be something like this. And in the situation where sign posts and sides of roads are taken for what they are unproblematically, agreement is enough: I see it, you see it, it's there by the road, and no issues emerge. But let's say I was being metaphorical, and I meant the sign post to be an augur of future events and the road meant to be the road of progressive living events. Or perhaps I was being ironic, referring to some blunder I made about sign posts earlier. The point is, for every meaning we can assign, we can imagine alternative ways the language can be taken, and in being taken differenly, the question of what it IS, has no final context, if you will, as if God were to declare once and for all that sign posts are just "this and only this". This "in and out" of identity undermines any thought of determinacy in what is being said. In the sentence, "There is a sign post by the road," I am now not referring to any actual sign post at all, but it is just the object language to my metalinguistic talk about the variability of language.
I am saying ALL language is like this. If contradictions are the gainsaying of what something IS, then contradictions are always already implicitly in the margins of whatever is said. They too, rise and fall, come and go. This is why nothing is sacrosanct, for the moment it is said, — Constance
Not absolutizing. Rather, Hermeneuticizing. Contradictions are confined to where they turn up.
They are just saying essentially two things: One, whatever is affirmed is spoken, written, gestured or otherwise affirmed in language. So it is a philosophically responsibility to give language analysis for the way meaning is handled. And two, the assumption that the world is received in some kind of mirror of nature of perception is, IF this assumption is grounded in naturalism or physicalism, demonstrably false. Brain's are not mirrors. But if this assumption is grounded in the phenomenon, the simple givenness of the what appears, then the "distance" between the perceiver and the perceived is already closed, and epistemology becomes a very different problem. — Constance
True in science, yes. But this truth is irrelevant in dry cleaning of knitting of bowling. A physicist can give a rigorous analysis using equations and specific language involved of knitting, perhaps, but this would require moving into another framework discussion. — Constance
Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.
Say we have a privileged, wealthy guy with a "good family" who cares for him. He has lots of opportunities. And he follows the middle to upper class dictum: "get good grades and wrack up accomplishments so you can go to a good college, and do the same there so you can get a good job, and then you can get a good job and do what you want."
He does this. No extraordinary evil befalls him. He has no extraordinary vices. Maybe he drinks or smokes pot a bit too much, or plays too many video games, or has a porn habit, or cannot get a girlfriend, or cannot keep to just one. Maybe not. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And he's miserable. He's prime bait for radical ideologies of one sort of another precisely because he "did everything he was told," and is miserable. This isn't an uncommon phenomena. That's sort of the recruiting mantra of radicals on the right and left, although it certainly helps if people struggle in the labor market or are "overeducated." We could imagine this sort of thing playing out across many gradations. It can even happen to the ultra wealthy (perhaps particularly to the ultra wealthy).
Here is Han's point: in the autoexploitative context of modern liberalism, this man's unhappiness is a personal failure. The self is a project, and it's happiness is a goal that has to be achieved as an accomplishment.
And there are lots of men and women who have encountered this sort of "personal failure." Millions it would seem. So the question is, at what point do we stop thinking this is an aggregate of millions of personal, individual failures and begin to say it is a systematic, social failure or a philosophical failure?
Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other. Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself. Today’s narcissistic “achievement-subject” seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One — a mirror affirming the latter’s image. This logic of recognition ensnares the narcissistic achievement-subject more deeply in the ego. The corollary is success-induced depression: the depressive achievement-subject sinks into, and suffocates in, itself. Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love — which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.
Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama — only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” Achievement society —which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project— has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.
- "The Agony of Eros," Byung-Chul Han
So balances can be “good” or “bad”. And the difference? One in some quantifiable sense works and the other doesn’t. A typical way to quantify this would be survival. The good balance has the further fact that it lasts. It persists. It is successful in perpetuating a state of homeostatic identity even in the face of environmental perturbation, etc. — apokrisis
Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be “right with the world.” One would be right to expect that such a powerful need, nearly as powerful as the merely physical ones, would continue to find ways to manifest itself, even if it had to do so in odd and perverse ways.
It seems that a true philosopher should reject all physical and practical aspects, and focus solely on rational reasoning. — Astorre
However, where better than in harmony with nature to experience one's own physicality and connection to the world and others? — Astorre
but when it comes to liberalism - here the majority of the precondition - "liberalism is holy". — Astorre
To raise again the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses — except the sense of the past — as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. Comte would have substituted a religion of humanity for its enfeebled predecessor; Max Weber proposed no substitute religion. Matthew Arnold could still listen for distant echoes of the sea of faith; Yeats knew there was a desert where once that sea might have been. To raise up faith from its stony sleep encourages the possibility of living through again the nightmare history of the last half century. Yeats did not hope for either restoration or parody of the established faiths. Rather, he prayed for a very modern sort of Second Coming, in which men would recover their innocence, [4|5] chiefly by accepting the fact that it is self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting — "and that its own sweet will is Heaven's will." In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil.
...
So long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process sublimation... Now our renunciations have failed us; less and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke's panther, forever looking out from one cage into another. Because the modern sense of identity seems outraged by imprisonment in either old church or new cage, it is the obligation of sociologists, so far as they remain interested in assessing the quality of our corporate life, to analyze doctrinal as well as organizational profiles of the rage to be free of the inherited morality, the better to see how these differ from what is being raged against. I shall attend to a few of the exemplarily [5|6] enraged, and to the sense in which it may be said that they express general sentiments...
During the nineteenth century, when sociology helped in a major way to construct the central experience of deconversion toward an anti-creedal analytic attitude, that discipline suffered frum a vast over confidence both about its own advance and about the progress of the culture, which it understood as undergoing varieties of such deconversions. "Progress," wrote Spencer,4 "is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect." A basic transformation of culture appeared both inevitable and desirable...
In fact, evil and immorality are disappearing, as Spencer assumed they would, mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal, to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations. Freud sought only to soften the collar; others, using bits and pieces of his genius, would like to take it off.
By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that areto be called in the present volume, ''therapeutic ," with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.8 This is the unreligion of the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world...
Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory tor some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of personality. If this re-structuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions... Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends to therapeutic use...
...I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.
The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy economy of abundance...
Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system.But without the discipline ot work, a vast re-ritualization of social life will probably occur, to contain aggression in a steady state and maintain necessary levels of attention to activity.The rules of health indicate activity; psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture.Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints.If ''immoral" materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The end goal is to keep going. Americans, as JF. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.
I disagree. I see no reason to think that ethics could not be taught to children without incorporating the threat of divine punishment and promise of divine reward. — Janus
You seem to be doing that black and white thinking. I haven't said that exclusive or even primary focus on accumulating wealth would be a good thing. It wouldn't because it leads to egregious exploitation of other humans, animals and environments. — Janus
There will always be a tension between individual preferences and societal desiderata. It seems obvious that in any community harmony is more desirable than conflict. Right there is the pragmatic basis for ethics. — Janus
How can you not see that this kind of attitude is relatively modern? In more traditional times, it was more likely to provoke laughter, amusement and excitement. Bull fighting and fox hunting are still respectable public spectacles in civilised parts of the world. — apokrisis
Natural selection needs random variety so it can continue to optimise a living and mindful structure of habit. — apokrisis
So ‘ God’ is just the gift of difference that repeats itself in the contextually relative becoming of experience from
moment to moment? And the intelligibility of understanding arises from the pragmatic enactment of new sense in discursive engagement? Or is there some element external to the utter contingency of contextual becoming, but essential to the Logos we participate in, and essential to god? — Joshs
I really liked your idea of outdoor activities. I've been thinking about this for a few days. May I ask you to reveal a little more about how an outdoor philosophy class (or philosophizing) can be linked today? — Astorre
Freud himself was of a stoical disposition and urged those with the requisite strength and maturity to resign themselves to the meaninglessness of things without despair. Consolation for him, such as it was, came from his faith in reason and science. For those not capable of this, there is therapy. “Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.” Meaning ceases to be a matter of truth and becomes whatever the individual finds soothing. This continues to be a definitive part of the therapeutic mentality, and Freud intended it as a prescription for the weak. But as writers such as Philip Rieff and Christopher Lasch have shown, the other side of this is the pursuit of unlimited self-creation. Rieff argues that the result has been a radical reconfiguration of society and its institutions to place them at the service of the individual’s “manipulatable sense of well-being.” Self-creation is of course a Nietzschean concept, and it is one of the ironies of history that Nietzsche’s grand idea, elaborated with some bombast, should in reality come to mean little more than a higher form of therapy. This is, however, small consolation for the world the therapeutic mentality makes possible and has helped bring into being. Characterized by the increasingly brutal assertion of the self against others, this world is justified by recourse to an argot of psychological and often (in its New Age formulations) “spiritual” elements affirming the supposedly unique and intrepid qualities of a life lived in mediocre selfishness. The therapeutic mentality plays an essential part in sustaining the self in its lonely supremacy and in maintaining modernity’s resistance to the call to transcendence. The viability of the secular project today would not be possible without it.
What kind of open-air practice is suitable for academic philosophy classes? — Astorre
The idea of a “universally agreed upon” classic novel is probably seen as a bit outdated these days. Literary value is filtered through culture, history, and personal taste. What one society or cultural group elevates as timeless genius, another may find tedious, strange, or irrelevant. Hemingway has come in and out of fashion over the past decades, hailed in some quarters for his economical style, but dismissed elsewhere as arid. I find the novels of his I've read arid and dull. Some revere Dostoyevsky for psychological depth, yet to others he is verbose, repetitive and overwrought. I dislike most of Dostoyevsky I have read, except for his mercifully concise The Gambler - an astonishing account of addiction. You can't get away from individual taste. — Tom Storm
But if there is no God and we know “the good” to be a necessary organising idea that is always socially constructed, then that puts moral philosophy on a quite different basis. — apokrisis
One rooted in naturalistic metaphysics rather than transcendental beliefs. — apokrisis
Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God. — apokrisis
You argue that modern liberalism, in the guises of personal
improvement, self-help and wellness programs, gives preference to the desires of the individual over the community — Joshs
The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired — Joshs
The above was what I had in mind. What could knowledge of "(spiritual) truth, goodness and the divine" be but "esoteric knowledge" if not merely a matter of understanding ordinary truth and goodness as commonly conceived? — Janus
Self-help teachings and practices, if they are effective, should help people to live better lives. Of course I realize some of them are all about how to achieve financial success, but is that really such a bad aim for someone if it doesn't degenerate into acquisitive greed, especially if they aspire to be a householder and parent? — Janus
"What we ought to do" is of course important too. In Australia, several years ago there was a move to teach ethics in school, but the kibosh was put on that idea when religious organizations objected that ethics could not be effectively taught without God. — Janus
When I was hanging around New Age and Theosophy circles it was extraordinary how much of the activity was narcissistic and virtue signalling- “I’m more aware/developed/higher than you.” — Tom Storm
But I also cannot but agree with ↪apokrisis: how do we know in which direction it is "correct" to philosophize? It follows that for any statement, some starting axiom is needed, which can be different for everyone.
What is the “original anthropology” that supported these practices? — NOS4A2
Do you believe pre-modern philosophers were acting without self-interest, and that their philosophical activity had no telos towards their own self-development, but towards something else? — NOS4A2