"Scott Ritter is an unreliable source who often makes things up," doesn't entail "the opposite of what he says is true in all cases." It means he's an unreliable source who has a terrible track record.

do we really know whose payroll he is on?

Yes. He works for Russian-stated-owned media companies. Sputnik and RT being owned and run by the state isn't a secret. Ritter being a contributor for them isn't a secret or some sort of supposition either. His crimes, also aren't innuendo but actual convictions, which are relevant to the degree that they explain his career choices and that multi-time pederasts who get multi-year prison sentences don't tend to be the most morally upright folks in the world.

I would not look to Scott Ritter for information about anything. He's not even a Tucker Carlson-tier propagandist but a full on state mouth piece. He's on the payroll of Russian state media and jettisoned whatever remaining credibility he might have had claiming that Ukrainian military raped and massacred their own civilians in order to blame it on Russia in Bucha.

He also has a history of famously bad takes (see below). He tries to leverage his "experience as an intelligence officer," for credibility, but the guy was an O-3 after 12 years.

Since his convictions as a child sex offender essentially preclude his working in the defense industry he seems to have decided peddling Russian talking points, no matter how ridiculous, was a solid career move.

Sure, but so is "if mind creates nature..."

If mind (and rationality) is completely sui generis, then I'm not sure why solipsism and radical skepticism about any external world wouldn't be justified. Our entire epistemological toolkit could only be said to apply to mind. And really, it would only apply to our own particular mind, as we'd have no reason to think all minds shape reality the same way. Any "noumena" is forever beyond us, and we might as well be locked in our own separate worlds, as Locke feared.

This problem plays out with the Kant - Fichte/Hegel divide, but it interestingly seems to show up in the mind of Augustine 1,600 years earlier. Augustine famously invokes what is essentially Descartes "cognito ergo sum," for dealing with radical skeptics, but he still has Locke's concerns about everyone being "locked in" to their own world by the senses. His bridge back to a unified world is the universal Logos through which things are known, in the dialectical phenomenology of "De Trinitate." What I find interesting here is that, down to the dialectical/phenomenological style, this is in a lot of ways similar to Hegel's version of the "transcendental deduction to repair the dualism problem. Both attempts are far from clear, but I think they're right to start from the essential aspects of experience.

Yes, and also, don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

Yeah, apparently they had done a lot to fix Chat GPT's famous problems with primes. Interestingly though, since it is sort of a black box, they got it to do a lot better on those questions for awhile, and apparently new tweaks have led to it failing them more often again. It's not meant to be a mathbot, so I don't really hold it against it.

I've seen it first hand with code. It's remarkably good at writing code in common languages like Java. If you ask it to use proprietary languages like DAX, it is less reliable. I asked it to use the quite rare logical language of Prolog as a test and it spat out convincing looking gibberish.

But that makes sense. It's only going to be as good as its inputs.

German land forces are indeed very anemic. Their ground forces are below 63,000 and their reserves are not large.

In general, if you're going to rely on a very small standing army then you need to maintain conscription and a large reserve to quickly mobilize a larger force if needed. Poland, with less than half the populace, maintains 100,000 soldiers in its ground forces and has significantly larger reserves.

Germany is sort of the paradigmatic example of the free rider problem in alliances.

Rationality doesn't exist in the world tout courte. It is derived from the consistency of the relationships between ideas and experiences. (Even ChatGPT agrees!)

Doesn't this sort of beg the question by assuming that rationality can only exist as part of mind?

If mind emerges from nature, and nature has no order, how does mind develop this trait? Natural selection, thermodynamics, etc. seem to imply order that exists prior to minds. Indeed, they seem to be prerequisites for minds.

Plus, if order and law-like regularities — rationality — is something that only exists in mind (as opposed to "the whole world,") then it would seem to me that we can only know things about mind.

Plus, if mind creates these things, why would different, discrete minds create them in the same way? Why wouldn't we have as many worlds as minds? We could posit a sort of collective mind, or that each individual mind fixes the properties of the world in its own small measure, but this still doesn't explain why they do so in the same way. A dolphin has a very different mind from me, so it seems like we should shape the world in very different ways.

If we assume there is a common grounding for how minds work though, this isn't mysterious anymore.

As for the expertise of Chat GPT...



:grin:

This really depends on how you conceive of free will. I personally find compatibalist arguments for free will that are grounded in process metaphysics and strong emergence most convincing (for reasons that are pretty far afield and related to physics/philosophy of physics).

In such a view, you can't really get rid of free will without radically altering the structure of reality. Our free will comes from the fact that:

A. Our conciousness emerges from the world.
B. Our conciousness causally interacts with the world (seems about empirically supportable as any claim).
C. We are, to varying degrees, self determining systems. We are obviously not completely self-determining, but what we do has to do with things that are internal to us. Likewise, we shape our own enviornment, meaning the system representing our "will" is not easily demarcated by any simply superveniance relationship.
D. Facts about larger systems are not reducible to facts about "parts" of those systems. In part, because processes are not always decomposable, "more is different."

It would seem to be to be impossible to remove this sort of free will without radically rewriting the physics of our universe and what it is.

I personally find epiphenomenalism sort of ridiculous. We want to reduce all phenomena to physical causes, but then decided that the broad class of phenomena involving all observations is actually completely causally disconnected from everything else, totally sui generis. What motivates such a contention? Simply that phenomenal awareness causes problems for some popular models.

I'd liken epiphenomenalism and eliminitivism to finding that your boat has a giant hole in the bottom. Some people want to fix the hole right away. Some people say, "get, we're still sailing, let's just try to get to port and worry about it later." Eliminitivism just seems to solve the problem by denying there is a hole or that taking on water is a problem for boats.

Hamas has participated in one fair election. It was held almost twenty years ago now. In that election they won a slim plurality of the vote, not even a majority. The garnered 44.45% versus Fatah at 41.43%.

Hamas never allowed elections to challenge its rule again. It attack Fatah in a violent coup, resulting in a short war in which Palestinians were fighting each other in Gaza. Fatah took heavy losses and withdrew from the Strip.

Hamas does not allow challenges to its rule. When protests against them have cropped up they have been violently suppressed. They have been reported to international organizations for using torture, rape, and disappearances to enforce their rule.

That said, it hardly seems fair to the Hamas' slim electoral success to Gazans. A poll from 2022 had a full 70% of Gazans in support of Fatah returning to run the strip and Hamas' military being completely disbanded. This is saying something, since Fatah has plenty of problems with corruption and misrule as well.

I've heard this said elsewhere but I don't think that's an accurate description. I take Kant to be pointing out that the mind is an active agent which dynamically constructs the experiential world through synthesis of perception, judgement and inference. It is not a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which passively receives impressions from an existing world. Kant describes the sense in which the mind creates the world (although creation might be a problematical term due to its historical association with divine creation - 'constructs' might be a better choice of terms.)

Right, interpretations of Kant have broken into differing camps. However, the more popular one seems to be the dualist camp, the camp that draws a hard dividing line distinguishing "internal, mind-created map" from "external territory." The other way to interpret this is through the frame of subjective idealism. Per this view, we can say the mind creates/constructs the world (broadly taking, Fichte would be taking this approach to Kant's dualism problem).

I think these both have problems. The first posits a sort of hard dualism that seems difficult to support. It has both empirical problems and problems related to dogmatic presuppositions undergirding the transcendental deduction. That, and its starting suppositions seem like they can lead as easily to subjective idealism as the map/territory dichotomy, and it seems hard to say why we should support one over the other.

The subjective idealist position seems to have problems too. If the mind creates the world, did the Moon exist before minds? If we say "no" we have plausibility issues and problems with determining how it is that different discrete minds live in the "same" world (i.e., wouldn't each mind "create" a different world?). If we say "yes," then we've re-imported a dualism where there are inaccessible noumena that causally interact with the mind, but which we can know nothing about.

IMO, the mistake is in thinking that the way in which the mind interacts with its environment isn't guided by the same principles that obtain throughout the world. The mind doesn't need to be a blank slate, a window, to avoid problems with dualism, it just needs to function according to the same global rationality. If this is the case, then we can say things about "mind-independent reality" just fine.

If rationality doesn't exist in the world, then the entire scientific project and empiricism is doomed from the outset.

There is Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, which attempts to include a number of other factors in explaining evolution. It focuses on genes less than the traditional model, including the effects of niche construction, feedback from the environment, behavior, etc. in selection. It's been controversial but TBH I see at least some elements of it likely becoming part of the mainstream in the future.



Intelligent design comes in many forms. In general, the ones that center on biology haven't been particularly successful at convincing biologists. Those focused on the entire universe appearing "designed" have been more successful. Physicists pay a good deal of attention to the "Fine Tuning Problem," and it's mentioned in virtually all popular science books on cosmology these days. That's not to say these arguments have convinced people of the need for God to explain the universe, but rather that "there are things we need to explain that we currently cannot."

Hm. So Eros is innate to the soul, but Eros for the good is not innate to the soul because Eros is blind. Thank you, that helps!
I suppose that Plato was just lucky that his desire was for the good, and then he wanted to school everybody on what he saw was the right path for the betterment of the soul?

There are varying interpretations on Plato, but my take would be that desire of the good is in everyone. However, this desire is often corrupted or overrun in various ways.

There are two problems Plato diagnoses. First, we can be internally disordered, at war with ourselves, our actions driven by desire, instinct, and circumstances. When we do not understand why we are acting, we are effects of other causes, and thus not fully self-determining, and not fully "real" as ourselves. Even if we love the good, we do not pursue it in this disordered state. Second, we can fail to know what is truly Good, and be led into evil by ignorance.

Plato describes the soul has having multiple parts in the Republic. Only the intellect is capable of unifying the soul, ordering the desires, and allowing us to be more self-determining and thus freer. Why is this? Because the intellect is always going beyond itself. In wanting to learn the truth, we go beyond our current beliefs, transcending our current selves and reaching outwards. In this mode, we are not defined by externalities, but rather incorporate them into ourselves.

In the Republic, Plato says that, in general, people want "what is really good" not just "what appears to be good at the moment." If we want X and find out that we were mistaken about X, that in light of the truth, Y is better, we will want Y.

Arguably, Plato is begging the question here. Obviously if we think something is "better" we prefer it. But I don't think this is the case, because by "better" he means "more morally good," or "more true," not just "preferred." Yet Plato does not think we always choose the good. Disordered desire and instinct can make us act in favor of the less good. His point was only that the intellect always has a desire to "know what is truly good and really true" and that this transcendent element of the intellect is what makes it fit to have authority over the other parts of the soul.

The wicked normally don't think "I am evil." E.g., Hitler did not see himself as a monster. Thus, evil is often born of an ignorance of what is truly good. People can have a love for "the Good" and still fail to know what the good truly is, resulting in evil actions. The other way people end up acting evilly is that they are disordered. They do what they think is bad because desire rules over them; intellect is not unifying the person, but rather they are divided against themselves.

Love is important here because love is also transcendent. For Plato, what we love in others is the Good in them. Love is based in our desire to be unified with the Good. In this, it is also transcendent. The ideal state is one of seeking knowledge, in love, because only in this state are we continually going beyond our current beliefs and desires, transcending them as we reach out for the Good. When one hates something, one is defined by that relation. But love is a broadening of identity.

Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present is a summary of this I really like. It is sort of poorly named, because it isn't so much about what we generally call "mysticism", as it is about Plato (and to a lesser extent Hegel)'s conception of morality and freedom (although I think Wallace might be reading a bit of the later Platonist theologians back into Plato.)

I will just note that all the cases of overcoming you mention are about (extremely rare) individuals overcoming barriers to self-actualization. This doesn't address the problem of how living in a society built around servant - master relations and resentment compromises both the servants and the masters' freedom (i.e. Saint Augustine on "commonwealth's" in the City of God, Hegel on the lord-bondsman dialectical in the Phenomenology). The social whole can never turn towards a holistic revaluation because certain values are essential in anchoring the master's status as master. The individual master is not free to dispense with them without becoming a servant, and thus becoming subject to all the constraints on their freedom that servants face.

You see this in the clash between the liberal ideals of a good portion of the US upper classes, their faith in rational technocracy and desire to see the empowerment of all individuals, versus their existential fear of falling off the top rungs of the ladder into the masses below. They are unable to actually embrace the policies they idealize because to disarm first is to risk simply becoming a servant. In this way, they are not truly free to reshape the values that define their lives. Hence why wealthy liberal enclaves will still have vociferous Not In My Back Yard NIMBYism, refuse to build high density housing, refuse to integrate school districts across arbitrary borders, etc.

This is the problem of social freedom, to borrow Axel Honneth's typology:

Negative Freedom is defined by a subject’s freedom relative to the external world. It is freedom from external barriers that restrict one’s ability to act, e.g., the government or thieves seizing your tools so that you cannot work.

Reflexive Freedom is defined by subject’s freedom relative to themselves. “Individuals are free if their actions are solely guided by their own intentions.” Thus, “man is a free being [when he] is in a position not to let himself be determined by natural drives [or circumstance].” i.e., when his actions are not subject to contingency. Other philosophers have also noted that authenticity, and thus the free space and guidance needed for us to discover our authentic selves, is another component of reflexive freedom.

Social Freedom is required because reflexive freedom only looks inward; it does not tie individual choices to any objective moral code. This being the case, an individual possessing such freedom may still choose to deprive others of their freedom.

Since individuals will invariably have conflicting goals, there is no guarantee that anyone will be able to achieve such a self-directed way of life. Negative freedom is also contradictory because “the rational [reflexive] can come on the scene only as a restriction on [negative] freedom.” E.g., being free to become a doctor means being free to choose restrictions on one’s actions because that role entails certain duties.

Ignoring a lack of social freedom doesn't make it go away. The aristocrat isn't truly the standard of by which good and bad is judged so long as they are forever constricted in their options by such social pressures. So, to an example Nietzsche returns to often, ancient Athens, there we see an endless cycle of social wars, the lower classes rising up to depose an aristocracy or vice versa. Even a great figure like Solon, given a historical chance to reshape his culture's values, faced constraint to his freedom on all sides from the rifts between Athen's classes. And of course, a cycle that leads to periods of violent dictatorships on a regular basis (aristocratic or popular), has the effect of constraining freedom as well.

I'll have to think about it. Like I said, the layout seems right, at least as respects the common flow of things. But this seems more "what usually happens" less "what is ideal." What is ideal is 4, no matter the process. I also think you can have most of the elements of 4 without 1-3 in the form of deep friendships. These can be passionate, but not sexual, e.g. the fictionalized version of Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy in "On the Road."

But whereas "eros" might be used to refer to attraction and sex in general, the English "love" seems quite disconnected from this. To be sure, there is a relation, but plenty of people will say they are not "in love" with people they've slept with or are attracted too, while most will say they "love" their family members.

The commonality between 4 and stroge/agape jumps to mind here. The "ideal/universal" seems like it can/should be realizable in many forms. That's what makes it the "universal," the truly self-determining, it isn't bogged down in the particulars. 1-4 might be the way it goes for most happy couples, but it seems plausible to talk about a celibate priest living a "love filled life" without stretching the term.

If people end up suffering because they don't go through 1-4 as expected, this seems like it could be a case of the type of "lack of understanding" Plato is talking about. It's mistaking accidents for substance; what people want is the substance, they suffer for chasing accidents.

I don't see what your reply has to do with my point, re advice on how the particular person should live versus how society gets on as a whole.

You seem to be spoiling for an argument. Might I ask how many other philosophers you've studied? The difference between philosophers who focus largely on the collective versus Nietzsche's much more individualist ethos is not really a point of controversy.

Second, if you want to meaningfully engage with people, it would be helpful to know what it is exactly that you're contesting, rather then dropping long block quotes.

For example, what does BG&E 45 and 188 say to you about how public education, positive freedom from poverty, etc. are provided such that individuals can engage in self-development? How does the malnourished urban worker who cannot read and has been working 12 hour shifts in a factory since they were a child attend to "virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, [and] spirituality?" How should we expect such a person to engage in the revaluation of all values or even to have the time and wherewithal to be reading anything on such an endeavour? Essentially, how do they become the pumped up ego of BG&E #9?

This, I would argue, is an important thing to grapple with because there are obvious ways in which our freedom is affected by the freedom of those we share society with. For example, the patrician practicing "patrician morality," is actually only so free to revalue all their values. In a top down society based heavily on slave labor, the master is not free to lift their boot lest they be overthrown and cast down to the ranks of the slaves (or the dead). A "self-determining" morality ends up being heavily determined by that which lies outside itself unless it is adopted widely, we all face constrains, some much more than others.

We get some consideration of this, but it's mostly critique, not solution (BG&E 200, Gay Science 338). Funny enough, for all the invective against Kant, these are largely arguments against treating the poor as means, as utility machines to be satiried. From a policy standpoint, "just learn to overcome," seems incredibly naive. People won't do it. Not in the aggregate. And even more, no matter how self-determining you think you are, you too will be constrained by this unequal development. The people in the rich walled neighborhoods of Latin America must still hide behind their walls, flinching from the favelas, etc.

The devil is in the details here though. What is meant by "observer" and "observed?" Decoherence seems to even suggest it might be a gradient.

The term "create" seems to me to lead to confusion towards the thought of a creatio ex nihilo.

It would be a creation from a well defined space of possibilities rather than ex nihilo.

Anyhow, circling back to the main topic:

IMO, the problem is the Kantian assumption that the world is "out there," as something we need to map "in here" in the first place. Scientists create the world to the extent that they shape how we subjects (part of the world) experience things.

The way in which a thing is experienced is a real relationship that thing has with the subject, a property of the thing. This is a real relationship, our internal world is not somehow a "less real" echo of the rest of the world. If things are defined by their properties, then we can say that, in important ways, things evolve with our collective understanding of them; the relations that define them change. Because of this, it's fair to say things change as we develop new understandings of them; the thing has new relations that did not obtain before. This is not any different than saying that "new particles" emerged in the early universe as relations changed, making things that were previously indiscernible different from one another.

This idea is easier to accept for more obviously protean terms. "Communism" today simply isn't the "communism" of 1848. It's evolved. However, a solid look at what is meant by "particle" will show a similarly protean evolution. Thus, particles evolve too.

Against this, there is generally an assertion made about particles being "out there" versus things like "communism" being "in here" phenomena. Yet, since the "in here" and "out there" bleed into each other causally in a seamless fashion (e.g. communism brought about plenty of "out there" changes) this dualism seems unwarranted.

Kant's dualist legacy seems to leave us having to choose between all the evidence for anti-realism re science and all the very good reasons we should like to claim there is an objective world that gets "discovered." Drop the dualist assumption, the noumena, and you have no good reason to go on spinning your head over "maps versus territories." If you start with noumena, then I don't even see how there is any reason to be a realist in the first place

Or to sum up: rather than "discovering vs creating" we might simply acknowledge that new things are constantly coming into being. One of the new things coming into being is our refined understanding of the way the world is. This is new, created through our efforts. However, the world is a rational place, and so the same rationality that has existed the whole time also shapes what is created, thus we are discovering principles that have always been in effect. Science, systematic inquiry in general, is the process of the rationality in being becoming known to being as subject, substance as subject.

The breakdown of types seems fine. It just seems to be missing something to say only that: "love leads to suffering." This is surely true, but just as true is the fact that love also leads to happiness. Moreover, it does not seem to be in any way the case that lack of eros, of itself, precludes suffering in any way. Indeed, lack of eros is often specified as a source of suffering.

Against the total preferencing of agape over eros, we could consider Plato's position: It is the settling for mere lust, for what is less real, that is problematic re eros, not eros itself. Settling in this way makes us an effect of causes we cannot fathom. Passion, ecstasy, eros - are these necessarily to be despised? "No," is Plato's answer. It seems these can be apprehended in spiritual ways, e.g. Rumi, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bonaventure. Finding what is truly self-determining is always transcendent, and eros is no different.

After all, what happens in the end when Eros meets Psyche? Though there is suffering and travails, all ends well in a divine comedy, with Hedone born of the meeting.

Schopenhauer's view seems more in line with the later Gnostic retellings of the tale, where Psyche is the human soul, continually drawn into the suffering of the material world by the manipulations of Eros/Cupid.

Which version gets at the heart of things? Both I'd say. There is Eros as the tempter, adulterer, and prankster, Eros as cause and master over man, and there is Eros as divine love, transcendent union instead of cause-effect, Boccaccio's Eros, the Eros of the Canticle of Canticles (the love of the divine and soul).

It would seem to me that the difference is in the experience and knowing, in the soul. You can read the Canticle of Canticles as a lewd and surprising addition the Jewish prophetic cannon or you can read it as a love song between God and the soul (individual, e.g., Origen, or collective e.g. Saint Augustine). Which is sort of Plato's point; it's the knower, the subject's relation that makes the difference.

Schopenhauer's overall theories notwithstanding, his personal problems with relationships, some of his misogynistic rants, which would be well at home on "Manosphere/Incel/Black Pill" blogs today, seem to suggest missing this side of eros, the side animating Dante's sublimity or Shakespeare's eternal Sonnet 18 ("When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st./ So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.") I mean, are these writers, or us through them, celebrating only lust? It seems not. "On my bed by night, I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him but found him not." (Song of Songs 3:1) - seems to appeal to more than a woman missing a warm body.

I think Schope's student Nietzsche gets a good deal closer in his later works as his appreciation of the "Dionysian" grows, although I'm a little weird in that I like Birth more than a lot of the later stuff. I still see a value in diagnosing naiveté about eros, but it's not the end of the story IMO.

What is determined though, what our measurement will be? Or maybe the possibility that was actualized is retroactively determined? Or maybe all possibilities occur and we only gain information about which possibility occurred in our universe?

The problem is that there are several equally supportable explanations for what is going on. Popular scientists muddy the waters by declaring that one such position is "what science says happens," or more often by declaring various perfectly defendable positions "absurd." Ironically, one of the models that best keeps our classical intuitions in tact, and keep locality, is retrocausality.

Who knows, but I might meet a future Gavrilo on the street today, and just a friendly smile divert him from the path of destruction? For certain every mover and shaker needed to suckle and have their diaper changed before they rocked the world.

No doubt, although they might hate to be reminded of it. Anyone who forgets this ends up emotionally stunted.

A way forward in moderating the Hegelian focus on the general and over-preferencing the organic whole above the individual might be Von Balthazar's concept of "Theodrama." That is, I can see an argument for drama as the proper analogy for the historical. The plot only hangs together as a whole, and yet each role is crucial.

Sometimes we are the chorus, sometimes we take center stage. Yet every role is important; what is Greek drama without the chorus? Something far less surely. What is a play without its audience, and don't the actors watch from back stage as well?

Actors rise to roles of prominence and are then retired. She who plays Napoleon today might be in the chorus next week, or perhaps a side part, Diocletian tending his cabbages.

An actor must draw the energy for playing their role from something essential to their deepest, inner self. Thus, they need to be in contact with that self through contemplation. Self-actualization, authenticity, these do not preclude stepping into world historical roles (one need only think of Dogen, Rumi, Saint Ambrose, etc.). Rather, it means owning the roles we step into (not unlike Hegel's conception of positive freedom through accepting duty).

Elsewise, we end up wearing our roles and masks like shackles. They aren't things we slip into in order to partake in the grand drama of history — something empowering — but rather a prison of sorts. Hegel, and thus philosophy of history more generally, has suffered from being too focused on the inevitability of certain trends to focus on the need for the individual to own their role, to ride the course of history (maybe even to tame it). Your Jungs, Mertons, and Nietzsches, though very different, share a flaw in not looking to the general course of the gyre of human events, missing the tree's role in the forest.

Why would we value the opinion of a man who appears to have a severe emotional/social problem? How does Neitzche benefit the whole of society?

It might be even more apt to ask how a collection of Nietzsche's ideal souls avoids stepping on each other's freedom? There is much to like in Nietzsche's lyricism, but the lack of any deep conception of social freedom, i.e., how individuals are essential to empowering each other's freedom, always struck me.

You see this in those Nietzsche inspired as well. There are no children in Ayn Rand novels. The question of: "how does one become educated and developed enough to partake in this overcoming, to even understand it," seems to be missing.

Partly, I think this goes back to a misunderstanding of Plato that crops up in the "masters of suspicion," e.g. Hume and Nietzsche. Nietzsche certainly allows that freedom is important. He also certainty rejects Plato's view of why reason is key to freedom (i.e. that only it can unify the disordered "parts of the soul" and master circumstance). However, one can't really be sure if Nietzsche actually understood Plato's argument. Certainly he seems to miss its more sophisticated formulations by the Patristics, whose focus on self-mastery/unity is caricatured into "slave morality." He tilts at a lot of strawmen.


I tend to agree with Kaufman that Nietzsche is best as a diagnostician. He finds problems better than solutions. Even if he doesn't seem to understand Hegel and Kant very well (particularly the latter), this doesn't really matter. He's an antidote to an overly cerebral focus on the general. Are there perhaps better formulations of this solution? Personalism seems to have a lot to offer here.

I do think Plato and Hegel actually understood this need; it comes out in their more mystical work, but it's easy to miss it. Especially in Hegel, he's a terrible writer. Nietzsche is actually fun to read, even if you have to sometimes wince at him. Being bold has its costs. Even people who get Nietzsche very wrong get something of what he is saying. People who even manage to get folks like Hegel or Whitehead right still end up with a muddle.

An interesting element of John Paul II's thought is his views on love and marriage. He takes it, partly from Scripture, that man and woman are created to be in communion with each other. In the ideal state, both are subjects, persons to one another. Our bodies are "sacramental," outward signs of a more important internal (spiritual) truth about our personhood and our internal experiences.

Thus, the body as object is not what should be essential. The body is a sacramental gift through which the inner unity of personhood can express itself to others. Love then is communion of persons. A man and woman becoming "one flesh," (Genesis) is an outward sign of this spiritual communion.

The body is freely given as a gift to the other person as a means of communion, but it is spiritual communion that is most important, the recognition of one person that part of their self lies in/is completed by an other.

This mirrors the relationship between the persons of the Godhead, each of which is distinct but in communion. There is the love of the Father for the Son, and that reflected love. That is, Lover/Beloved. The Holy Spirit is in here as hypostatic abstraction (Thirdness), as "the love of the lovers," (Saint Augustine, De Trinitate).

Likewise, human love, through the powers of procreation, also produces a person from the relation of lover/beloved. Very neat.

Of course, in our fallen world we become estranged and begin to treat each other as objects instead of persons. This is where the sin of lust comes on the scene. People see each other as objects or present themselves as objects. So too does shame enter here, as a coping mechanism to deal with lust. Mankind, in its originally innocence (the innocence of childhood) feels no shame because it has not yet made its body and others an object to itself.

Good stuff from what I've read so far, although I'm not sure what's particularly Thomistic about it.

Do you agree with Hanover's assessment that bombing was the only way to defend Israel?

No, particularly if we widen the window for when different policy interventions could occur. The easiest way to defend Israel would be to have the border properly garrisoned and monitored. It would not have taken a particularly onerous amount of resources to push back the initial Hamas assault. The heavy equipment they used would be extremely vulnerable to even older AT weapons and the paragliders were so low as to be easily taken down by simply having infantry with a GPMG there.

I'm not super familiar with Schopenhauer, but wasn't his take that this is sort of an irrational takeover by the "will to life?" His whole: "If children were brought into the world by reason alone, would the humanity continue to exist?" To which I take it the answer we're supposed to have is "no."

Seems in the bucket of "love as inscrutable Eros."

Words can be used to refer to these "aspects of our own ontological being", but they aren't them. If this thread was instead "What is pain", it'd be equally misguided.

Do words have to "be" the things they refer to have content? I don't see how this line of reasoning doesn't similarly make talking about "triangles" in general impossible, or "matter," or "American drug policy," or "energy" for that matter.

Do words necessarily have to refer to unique things or can they refer to general principles/universals (or tropes if you don't like universals)? Moreover, can't they refer to sets, potentially sets of universals that share properties?

A wide variety of "states of being" can qualify as love or pain, and thus we lack specificity. What I wanted was additional information and context. If the thread was "What is pain", and didn't even specify if we're discussing emotional, physical or psychological pain, wouldn't that be absurd?

Why would it be absurd? Simply because you can break something down into a smaller typology?

Would it likewise be absurd to discuss energy because it can be broken down into kinetic energy, nuclear, electric, etc.? Is "American gun policy," impossible to discuss because it varies by state and municipality? Surely there is commonality here.

Plus, even if we're allowing that any universal is just a name for reducible traits in some physical system, it seems trivial that various brain states correlating with deep types of affection are going to have similarities they don't share with states of various sorts of disgust, loathing, or indifference. Phenomenologically, there is a similarity as well, such that while "Ted loves Donna," might refer to several different types of love, its content clearly has a phenomenological reference that is distinct from "Ted hates Donna," or even "Ted lusts after Donna."

2. Both "love" and "pain" rely on interpretation, and I may interpret "states of being" as love, even if you or others do not interpret those same "states of being" as love.

All sensory data requires interpretation and the same is true of readings of specialized instruments. Plenty of people still claim the Earth is flat, that the germ theory of infectious disease is wrong, etc. That people can disagree on the meanings of words or sensory data doesn't really say much because some people will disagree about virtually everything.

3. A state of being that can be referred to as "pain", may qualify as "pain" for a multitude of different reasons. These reasons can drastically change the thing we're discussing. Pain is a great example, see how emotional pain from grief is very different from emotional pain from betrayal and so on.

And yet it seems like there must be some causal explanation underlying the application of the same word to diffuse states and some causal explanation for how people generally understand these words so easily.

Regardless of how protean language seems to be, I don't think this warrants positing that it is somehow acasual, sui generis, or supernatural — somehow floating free from the world. To be sure, you could flip around the meanings of words and have an intelligible language, but language still has a causal history that allows for its use. The claim that "nothing in language necessarily maps to the world" doesn't preclude contingent mapping.

I don't agree at all that people would be at a total loss if someone were to say they are experiencing "pain" and they failed to specify which type of pain. They still have an idea of what is being referenced.

"Love" and "pain" are invented concepts, and the "states of being" you refer to aren't determinative of what these concepts mean. It has much to do with our cultural and philosophical perspectives. Our understanding of love could be influenced by a famous movie or book, and it has, with works such as Romeo and Juliet or Snow White. Such influences fall far outside the realm of introspection or science.

It seems to me the "love" is generally understood better than "energy," "information," "complexity," and "work," all of which have a plethora of competing definitions in the sciences and yet remain incredibly useful there.

"Invented concepts," cannot be free floating from the world unless language is causally distinct. As for bi-polar disorder, etc., is the argument that words only have meanings to the extent that they are operationalized?

I doubt many others could explain "unity of being" as you understand it. I'm not entirely sure of what would be determinative of whether the distinction would be a "human universal".

How many people can explain quantum chromodynamics like Wilzek? Surely, people can be "more right," about describing things than others, e.g. Keplar in his day re the solar system. Is the poet, philosopher, or psychologists excluded from such expert knowledge re love? Perhaps, but the fact that people can disagree with them cannot be the reason for this.

I'll definitely allow that some subjects are much more difficult to attain certainty on than others. However, I don't think a hard line between "knowledge of real things," and "knowledge of invented things," works without some sort of dualism. What necessitates this hard epistemic wall? How are Romeo and Juliet and Snow White causally distinct from other experiences?

I imagine most would agree or disagree based on their preferences and personal experiences.

Yeah, but this seems to be largely true on the cutting edge of science and metaphysics too. But I guess the question is one of "current lack of good evidence," versus "the impossibility of good evidence."

Terms also get more specifically defined in light of better evidence.

As to "dogmatic" attitudes against teleology, I came across this today. Generally, it's not considered good form liken opponents to immature children or proffer psychoanalytical explanations of other's disagreement, but this is a topic where it seems very common (particularly surrounding the EES debate).

This really is what you might have expected all along. You are replacing a spiritual view of the world with a secular one. You are replacing one with meaning by one without meaning. You can try to keep as much as you can of the old picture, but you should not be surprised if in the end you lose things that were considered absolutely crucial. That is what the move from the sacred to the secular is all about. Some of us call it a loss. Others of us call it “growing up.”

Anyhow, IMO teleology seems alive and well, it's just been naturalized and given the name "function," or gets framed in terms of "constraint." I see nothing wrong with this. There is definitely a sense in which "eyes are for seeing." If eyes didn't see, we wouldn't have them.

But it's useful to distinguish between teleological explanations that appear to invoke first person experience and volition versus ones that simply focus on the appearance or likellyhood of an end state given the characteristics of that end state.

End states can't "cause themselves," without retrocausality. But even explanations of purposeful human behavior don't hinge on retrocausality, so this opposition turns out to be simply a strawman.

The fact is that, even if end states are causally inefficacious, equilibrium-based explanations have significant explanatory power. E.g., "why do balloons take on their spherical shape?" The equilibrium-based answer is based on the characteristics end state (equalizing pressure), and while we could explain it in other terms, it doesn't seem possible to explain a good deal of physics without taking into accounts the idea of constraint. For example, I have only seen explanations of the formation of quark condensate in terms of the overall stability of fields.

What we have here seems to be a difference between "top down" and "bottom up" explanations. The first appeals to general principles, laws, etc. that dictate ends, whereas the latter deals with decomposition and parts.

The preference for bottom up explanations is sometimes grounded in the idea that only these can explain the "causal chain of events" undergirding phenomena. This seems justifiable in some cases, but not all. We can't describe the process by which a volume of hydrogen gas reaches equilibrium in terms of the collisions of molecules as mechanism supposed. Top down law like behavior ends up being essential to explain why we end up with a classical world that at first glance looks like it will require only bottom up explanations.

This is important because the demand for only bottom up explanations and the rejection of any form of telology, no matter how naturalized, seems to be grounded in metaphysical assumptions about how wholes must decompose into their parts. I don't think such assumptions are generally warranted.

At the same time, the teleological explanation the focuses on the end state can often be more accurate and parsimonious. Indeed, we often build our causal theories of how equilibrium is reached only after equilibrium laws are formulated, a sort of retroactive and often speculative flip to preference the bottom up explanation. Similarly, the empirical support for the top down tendency can be great, while support for the supposed bottom up causal mechanism can be weak (e.g. market equilibriums). This is a problem when it makes us conflate our certainly regarding the general tendency with a certainty regarding our explanation of it.

I used to think this had to do with the preferencing of the more "certain" sciences. E.g., Vico's list of "the new science," where mathematics is the most certain, then physics, then chemistry, etc. But I've realized this can't be right, because these fields very often focus on top down explanations. Rather, it seems more grounded in a metaphysics of decomposablity, the belief in a single "fundemental level" to being.

Maybe such a thing can be discovered. But even if it is, it still seems like it might be impossible to preference one type of explanation over an other, which means the characteristics of end states will remain important in explaining how they come into being - telology or telonomy if you like.

I suppose you can still see top down explanations as "mechanistic," but they seem more "organic" in ways.

Why again did Nietzsche want to coupe himself up with Paul Ree and Lou Salome? To drive themselves greater heights in overcoming the tension between antitheses and inciting to greater and greater births (pregnancy).

Recalls to me the idea of Plato's "giving birth in beauty." But then this:

I may almost say that I have never read[Pg 6] anything in which every single dogma and conclusion has called forth from me so emphatic a negation as did that book; albeit a negation tainted by either pique or intolerance. I referred accordingly both in season and out of season in the previous works, at which I was then working, to the arguments of that book, not to refute them—for what have I got to do with mere refutations but substituting, as is natural to a positive mind, for an improbable theory one which is more probable, and occasionally no doubt, for one philosophic error, another."

and this:

We shall have gained much for the science of æsthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis,

...make me think as well of Heraclitus' tension of opposites, or even more so Eriugena and Hegel's dialectical progression through opposition.

But with Nietzsche, the problem I always find is that he's a bit too disordered in his approach. The aphoristic style makes him a joy to read and a pain to systematize. If the problem with folks like Plotinus and Hegel is that they are too focused on the abstract, the general, and the rational, losing the powerful influence of the specific and dramatic on the course of human life (and human history), the problem with Nietzsche I find is a lack of focus on the general.

If man rises out of mediocrity, and overcomes resentment, developing a love for his own life, how can a free community of such beings exist? And how can people support each other in such a venture? I don't think we really get an answer. Social freedom isn't directly addressed.

Nietzsche can be responsive to Ree because he knows him, shares a friendship with him. But what about his fellow philosophers, the ones he disparages so vociferously in some passages? I don't think it's unfair to say there is a fair number of strawmen in Nietzche's critique of his philosophical brethren. Nietzsche was the first philosopher I read, so I took his critiques as gospel, but returning to BG&E 12 years later, I realized that for all his achievements, he often seems overcome by the very resentment he speaks against. There are more uncharitable philosophers (Russell), but not many more. Yet there might be a potent lesson in that. As Nietzsche seems to allow, perhaps such irascibility is a goad to developing his "yea-saying," but it would seem to be a goad that must be left behind at some point.

The love of one's own fate as the highest love -- it's an interesting thought. It seems to be at once possibly the most transcendent type of love and the least, completely universal in terms of our experience and completely particularized.

Due to this, there is therefore no necessary dyad between love and hatred: while the later will always be dependent on the former, the former can well occur in the complete absence of the latter.

I think this is right. This is why the God of Plato and the Patristics "all loving," as opposed to being indifferent, jealous, or wrathful. Hatred involves being determined by that which is outside of one:

...something that’s entirely One can’t be “jealous” of others, opposed to them (even by being “indifferent to” them) and thus governed by its relation to them. So if the demiurge is to be good and thereby One, he can’t be “jealous.” And this is why Plato tells us that the demiurge set out to make everything “as much like himself as possible” — to share his goodness as widely as possible. This is why, as the Greek/Roman Platonist Plotinus put it some centuries later, the One “overflows.” ["boils over" per Eckhart]

This seems to be the reason why the demiurge as “intellect” is not indifferent to mere creatures like ourselves, but seeks to encourage us — all of us — to pursue the Good. In this way the demiurge is less “contained,” less restricted by us than it would be if its relation to us were characterized by indifference or “jealousy.” To the extent that the demiurge helps us to resemble it, we are like extensions of it, rather than separate containers around it, which would make it “many” (rather than one) by our relationships to it.

As you’ll notice, this is very much the idea of inner “freedom” that Hegel promoted. To the extent that a being excludes others from its sphere of concern, it is determined by this relationship (of exclusion) and it isn’t self - determining or, in that sense, free. So the possessor of inner freedom doesn’t exclude others from her sphere of concern.

What if we saw history as something that includes everyone? Would our moral perspective change?

Probably not as much as we'd hope. Theories to the effect that history is "caused by everyone," with no one person being particularly important, have been around for a long time. The second epilogue of War and Peace is all about this sort of idea. And more recently there have been histories with a focus on marginalized groups, etc.

Perhaps they just need to get out to more people, but I'm not convinced they're bound to have much of a moral impact. To my mind, the problem is this: if we're all equally important to history, then we're all equally irrelevant as well and equally not responsible for what transpires. We each end up with a 1/8 billionth share responsibility in world history.

Plus, it seems hard to justify such explanations in some cases, where it does seem like individuals have a large amount control over historical moments. The most obvious case is that of the leaders of centralized autocracies. It certainly seems that, had Hitler indefinitely suspended plans to invade Poland, World War II as we know it would not have begun in Europe.

However, this ability of some individuals to have an outsized role in the course of historical events is instructive for "every day people," as well. Gavrilo Princip happened to be positioned to change history when he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Mohamed Bouazizi's self immolation likewise set off a cascade of world shaping events in the form of the Arab Spring.

Might World War I and the Arab Spring have happened otherwise? Prehaps, but there are plenty of examples of "explosions waiting to happen," that defuse themselves without ever resulting in a crisis (e.g., the Cold War). One way to think of contingency in history is to think in terms of the stability of some historical trajectory instead of thinking in terms of causation. Some trajectories seem more resilient to change than others. History is too messy for straightforward casal analysis of the sort we use for bowling balls. Analogies to complex feedback systems with tipping points seem to work better.

But I think this also speaks to the moral value of every person. I find a lot to like in the "big picture" historical thinking of Hegel and his followers, but it also seems to miss to influence of the particular individual.

Personhood is embedded in language, with such words as "I", "you", "person", "self", and special words which single each of us out individually. Since we largely think in language, personhood is imbued in our thinking.

True, although this seems like a partial explanation at best. We'd then need to explain "why" human language is like this. The advocate of personalism has a ready made answer — because language is developed and used by persons. Why else should diverse codes for storing and transmitting information all center around an "I" and "we."

Likewise, drugs sort of provide support in both directions. On the one hand, persons seem less than basic if they can be disrupted. On the other, you have the fact that persons seem to reconstitute themselves despite disruptions, so they aren't easily dispelled like many illusions, but remarkably robust. Plus, people with NDEs and drug experiences of "ego death" still tend to describe these experiences as "theirs," which gets back to language.

Personalism seems to work pretty well with modern epistemology (unlike metaphysics). When it comes to discussions of what is known, instead of what "is," it seems like persons tend to be accepted as the fundemental "knowers." We don't talk of words "knowing" their meanings or books knowing their contents. "Knowing" then seems to presuppose a sort of personage, as opposed to the mere encoding of information.

Or then there is the way like the militaristic Europeans came to be pacifists and have this integration effort even to this day: have such violence as you had in WW1 and WW2 and then it's enough of bloodshed.

Exactly. Although, I've heard pessimists chalk this up to all the ethnic cleansing in that period, which effectively homogenized many areas. I think it's something like 15 million Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe, with a further 500,000 to 2.5 million civilians being killed (1940-1948).

I prefer to be an optimist. That we don't hear about some great German project to reclaim all this land to the east, parts of which they had held for centuries, says something about peoples ability to move on given the right context.

The Ukraine war, like the Winter War and Soviet-Polish War before it, seems like the opposite phenomenon. A self destructive inability to move on. Putin's own words on the subject certainly seem to look backwards more than forwards.

I would say the latter. The "world-historical individual" only ever wields their great power through the emergent whole.

This is not to say that single individuals cannot wield tremendous influence at global scales. I imagine 20th century history would be quite different if Adolf Hitler had died of a stroke shortly after becoming chancellor for example. But such individuals wield so much influence in virtue of the institutions and systems they sit astride. The "absolute monarch," is both empowered and constrained by their state, shaping it even as it shapes them. They sit at a leverage point where their individual acts can make a lot happen, but they only have this power because that leverage point exists.






Absolutely. Human ability tends to be on a roughly normal distribution. Wealth tends to follow a power law distribution. Compound returns on capital and the general existence of positive feedback cycles that make the poor poorer and the rich richer inflate small differences into large ones.

Speaking of Girkin, apparently he is running against Putin as a presidential candidate? But last I saw he was arrested and disappeared, and the last picture we have he looked pretty beat up. Then his lawyer got arrested.

Makes me wonder if he is being coopted as a sort of "controlled opposition," or simply has a death wish.


Back when it seemed like Kadyrov was going to die (after allegedly burying his still disappeared friend and doctor "for poisoning him,"), Strelkov disappeared, and Prigozhin was killed — all in the same few weeks — I began to get serious Game of Thrones vibes from Russian politics. This was back when Shoigu had barely been seen since the coup too. Things seem more stable now.

Well, you could consider phenomenological personalism, in which "persons" and thus "personal identity," are ontologically basic.

Of course, you could consider that this is just a cheap move. Making something a "brute fact," doesn't exactly explain it. However, I think there is something to the idea that "we are all persons," and that we only experience things "as persons," which does seem to leave some grounds for claiming that personhood is at least phenomenologically basic. But there does also seem to be grounds for dismissing this as mere illusion.

TBH, I've only dabbled in this set of ideas so I probably couldn't make a very good case for it. I find it interesting though.

I don't think the US shows the Occupied Territories as part of Israel on any official maps either. The US generally refers to them as "Occupied Territories." This is why Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem was a big deal; it was a tacit, if not open acknowledgement of Israel's possession of the land.

Way back in 1995, Congress passed an act urging that the embassy be moved there, but presidents of both parties demurred, seeing it as needlessly provocative.

US policy towards Israel hasn't always been a "blank check," e.g. forcing them out of the Suez. Rather, it seems to have evolved more towards one due to electoral pressured within the US and ill conceived GWOT policy.

Anyhow, I think the comparison to Ukraine is useful at showing just how counter productive Israel's apartheid policies have been. In Ukraine, no one outside of a very small fringe want to expell the 17% or so of the population that are ethnic Russians, a good deal of whom were settled there by force as recently as the 1930-1960 period. The groups get along and have a shared identity, despite the horrors of the 1930s.

Yet in the case of Israel, its almost impossible to imagine an empowered PA state deciding that Israeli settlers were "a part of our community." Point being, peoples can overcome historical bad blood, but not if they live in largely separate ecosystem. It's a core example of Israeli apartheid undermining their own security.

So what's the theory of "what love is here?" I'd be interested to hear a take on Nietzsche where love is a critical element of our overcoming ourselves

But, the biggest thing I remember from him (and it has been a while since I've read anything except BG&E) was that men and women's love are actually two different things and that romantic love itself is actually reducible into "baser," things, e.g. jealousy and the desire to possess. But, against him being fully eliminitivist against love, he also has some pretty sentimental things to say about it at times, particularly re friendship. That and "the drive to possess" that love reveals itself to be also ends up transformed in Nietzsche's telling into something "less base," than we might initially find it to be.

However, I fail to see a commonality between all the quotes you've listed, except that they have the word "love" in the translation.

For example:

413. Lovers As Short-sighted People.—A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love; and whoever has had sufficient imagination to represent a face or form twenty years older, has probably gone through life not much disturbed.

This seems to make love fleeting physical attraction.

401. To Love and to Possess.—As a rule women love a distinguished man to the extent that they wish to possess him exclusively. They would gladly keep him under lock and key, if their vanity did not forbid, but vanity demands that he should also appear distinguished before others.

Love is, to a degree, about possession and our own vanity. But it's worth noting that in other places Nietzsche says that "love as the desire to possess" is only true for men. Women want to "be possessed."

The Gay Science 363

... I will never admit that we should speak of equal rights in the love of man and woman: there are no such equal rights. The reason is that man and woman understand something different by the term love,—and it belongs to the conditions of love in both sexes that the one sex does not presuppose the same feeling, the same conception of "love," in the other sex. What woman understands by love is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely devotion) of soul and body, without any motive, without any reservation, rather with shame and terror at the thought of a devotion restricted by clauses or associated with conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is precisely a faith: woman has no other.—Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her; he is consequently, as regards himself, furthest removed from the prerequisites of feminine love; granted, however, that there should also be men to whom on their side the demand for complete devotion is not unfamiliar,—well, they are really—not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes thereby a slave; a woman, however, who loves like a woman becomes thereby a more perfect woman. ... The passion of woman in its unconditional renunciation of its own rights presupposes in fact that there does not exist on the other side an equal pathos, an equal desire for renunciation: for if both renounced themselves out of love, there would result—well, I don't know what, perhaps a horror vacui? Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the conceptions of "possession" and "possessed"; consequently she wants one who takes, who does not offer and give himself away, but who reversely is rather to be made richer in "himself"—by the increase of power, happiness and faith which the woman herself gives to him.

Quite the broad assertion, which maybe gets to 's point. This differentiation goes in some regrettable directions, e.g. the famous:

"Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child."

The two above pronouncements seem to contradict each other. Are children always the purpose of romantic relationships for women, or is it the desire to be possessed?

I don't think we're supposed to come to a dogmatic answer here. These aren't supposed to be a systemic treatment such that everything needs to be ironed out. And in any event, the value of Nietzsche's work is decidedly not in his regrettable attempts to summarize "female psychology" in such ways.

But to be fair, yes, Nietzsche does directly answer the question "what is love?" Yet we get different answers in different places. Plus, even when "love" is reduced to greed, greed ends up being part of the larger story re the Will to Power. This is what I mean by it not being a very "stand alone " theory of love. If you just take his dismissal of love as "actually these baser" things at face value, you lose a lot. But you can't get to the wider view without embracing the entire system.

The Gay Science 14


What is called Love.—The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke!—and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose,—who are now apprehensive for the safety of their "possession"); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as "good." Our love of our neighbour,—is it not a striving after new property? And similarly our love of knowledge, of truth; and in general all the striving after novelties? We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves,—that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves. (One can also suffer from excess,—even the desire to cast away, to share out, may assume the honourable name of "love.") When we see any one suffering, we willingly utilise the opportunity then afforded to take possession of him; the beneficent and sympathetic man, for example, does this; he also calls the desire for new possession awakened in him, by the name of "love," and has enjoyment in it, as in a new acquisition suggesting itself to him. The love of the sexes, however, betrays itself most plainly as the striving after possession: the lover wants the unconditioned, sole possession of the person longed for by him; he wants just as absolute power over her soul as over her body; he wants to be loved solely, and to dwell and rule in the other soul as what is highest and most to be desired.

But, Nietzsche ends this passage with a view of what seems to be a better kind of love — friendship — which he could be quite sentimental about. This is not far off the love as union view IMO:

There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

But does this make friendship a sort of "true[er] love." IDK, because sometimes Nietzsche also has not so flattering things to say about our motivations for friendship, pity, etc. Like the pithy:

"We should not talk about our friends: otherwise we will talk away the feeling of friendship."

Because someone else's doing something wrong doesn't make it right? When did the behavior of Israel become the gold standard of what is moral?

If Russia wants to keep Ukrainian Land then they should just move civilians in to live on it. Seems to be legit for Israel to do.

That's actually the context for the current conflict. Stalin, worried about Ukrainian nationalism, which had been a potent force during the Russian Civil War (e.g Nestor Makhno) put into place policies that amounted to the "enforced starvation of the Ukrainian population." This was paired with arrests and executions of Ukrainian cultural and political leaders and the destruction of cultural artifacts. Stalin's policies killed 3.5-5 million Ukrainians from 1932-1933, around 1 in every 10 people.

According to Lemkin, Ukraine was "perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation". Lemkin stated that, because Ukrainians were very sensitive to the racial murder of its people and way too populous, the Soviet regime could not follow a pattern of total extermination (as in the Holocaust). Instead the genocidal effort consisted of four steps: 1) extermination of the Ukrainian national elite, 2) liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, 3) extermination of a significant part of the Ukrainian peasantry as "custodians of traditions, folklore and music, national language and literature", and 4) populating the territory with other nationalities with intent of mixing Ukrainians with them, which would eventually lead to the dissolution of the Ukrainian nation.

While Ukraine was being drastically and intentionally depopulated of Ukrainians (and Jews), Stalin began settling Russians and some other minorities in the land, particularly out East. These populations were provided with food, with the net result being that Ukraine went from about 9% Russian to 1/5th. (A large wave of mass deportations after WWII also helped achieve this). This was not unique to the Soviets. The Russian Empire had long used forced resettlement to secure territory, and you can see such tactics in use as far back as Babylon and Assyria.

And indeed, the current war has largely been justified for internal Russian audiences in terms of the need for Russia to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine from oppression and assault.

To a much lesser extent, Russia has done similar things in this war, moving people into occupied territories and sending children with living Ukrainian parents to adoption programs so that they can be "raised as Russians." But such things, while certainly reprehensible, are on an absolutely tiny scale compared to the Soviet atrocities.

So, that is sort of the background, particularly for the conflict over the Donbass. But it would be a mistake to frame it as purely an ethnic conflict, because, as a whole, ethnic Russians with Ukrainian citizenship have also opposed Russia's invasion of their country. Thankfully, this old history doesn't have the same salience as it does in Israel. There isn't any popular movement to remove the Russians from these areas (Kremlin propagandists would disagree of course.)

Of course, being an English language forum, we hear more about "NATO expansion/aggression" as the cause of the invasion, not "the genocide in the Donbas." It seems to me that English-language efforts to justify the war have completely given up on selling that narrative.

I didn't say Nietzsche didn't have a theory of love, I said I didn't recall one that stood on its own (without having to be tied to the rest of his thought). I didn't really intend for my four examples to be exhaustive, they're just examples of thinkers who focused a lot on love.

Feel free to add what you think Nietzsche's theory of love is. No need to "pull every aphorism on love from every book Nietzsche writes," that doesn't seem particularly helpful.

Know what's so ripe here? You just admitted to never reading Nietzsche, yet your profile picture is of Guts from Berserk and yet Berserk is a story that heavily borrows from Nietzsche's philosophy and psychology.

Did I? I think I've read just about everything Nietzsche ever published. However, I don't recall a "theory of love," that is easy to pull out from the rest of his thinking. Feel free to add if you'd like.

I guess I'm guilty of hyperbole. Of course love is mentioned in other philosophers. One of my key examples is someone from the 21st century. There is a recent "Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Love," etc.

My point was merely that it has not been a major focus on a level with other topics and has generally not occupied a place of significance in systematic philosophy. Now that philosophy is less systematic, people turn their attention to it, I mentioned Scruton, Nozik does too, etc., but it's still an ancillary topic. I would imagine less is published on love as a whole than just Gettier Problems. This stands in contrast to love's central role in the arts.







I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I can see the arguments for a sort of ontological nominalism, but I don't see a case for generally preferencing specifics over general principles. It seems to me that philosophy about general principles can be plenty deep, and that, in general, philosophy is precisely about discovering the most general principles at work in the world.

We should be afraid of being over broad of course, but the payoff of analysis is often in tying disconnected things together.

The maximally specific description of some phenomena would seem in danger of being just a list of events and traits. The "meaning" comes out relationally, in how an event interacts with the whole of existence. E.g., we could discuss a single baseball game in detail, but the larger meaning (do they need to win to make the playoffs?) will depend on what is going on across the broader "world of baseball."



:up: I will have to think about that one. It's an interesting way of putting it. Interestingly, I've heard mysticism also described in the same sort of way, a both "union," but also as "developed art."

Thus, they must be grounded in reality if they wish to reflect reality - and in the case of morality must likely also be universalizable. Saying merely that "flourishing is good for the individual", for instance, could contain myriad interpretations as to what constitutes flourishing depending upon which "facts" you start with, and how broad your scope is.

Might we consider that history is the arbiter here? How many morally loaded ideas have fallen "on the wrong side of history," and become widely anathema? General opinion against child marriage seems to have gained enough ground, at least in the West, to constitute and global moral fact. At least certain forms of racial and sex discrimination seem to be headed in the same direction. The idea of "noble birth," has been consigned to the "dust bin of history."

This is what we might expect if the principles that undergird moral facts are "out in the world," but must be objectified in our morality and institutions through historical processes in the same way that scientific facts are assimilated as a historical process and built into paradigms.

I see the Galileo connection more than the Newton one. I feel like you could almost call 20th century reductive materialism "neo-mechanism," because it turns back to "particles in contact" as the ground of ontology.

Newton's influence seems less clear to me because the idea of sui generis forces that act at a distance allowed for all sorts of ideas that included purpose. You had purpose coming from vital force as its own essential unique type of "fundemental force," and all sorts of "scientistic mysticism" in the late 19th century.

IMO though, the success of neo-mechanism has plenty to do with the philosophical, religious, and social context of the late-19th and early 20th century. It didn't just support a new way of looking at the sciences, but an entire "world view," on a level with the religion its advocates were self-consciously attempting to supplant.



Purpose seems to explain plenty to me, from the shape of hemoglobin to why people will face the wrong way in an elevator if everyone else is doing it.

It seems to me like the case for the abandonment of purpose in explanations is tied to formulations of the causal closure principle when it is paired with certain assumptions about what must be ontologically basic and "fundemental." I do think this is a major mistake in modern thinking. There is nothing even approaching consensus for a way CC can be coherently formulated. Despite this, even critics of CC will say things like:

What this means is that our universe exists as a closed system where things of the physical nature such as atoms can only be influenced by other physical things. If this principle is to be believed, then any type of explanation that is not based in scientific law cannot be used when describing the causal story of physical things. Thus, explanations such as purposeful ones become impossible.

But the above is only true if we assume that the emergence of purpose in the world is necessarily non-physical and/or not fundemental. Note how the above conflates "physical and ontologically fundemental," with the label "physical." Yet purpose is quite obvious to us, so if CC is true, purpose must be accounted for coherently.

And, while CC can't be properly defined, neither can "physical" (Hemple's dilemma). This leads me to think the CC is mostly just a good way to accidently beg a whole boat load of questions. If you don't have a good definition of "physical," and what it means for "all things to be physical" despite the ostentatiously true fact of "mental life existing," then I don't see what CC does for us that the Principle of Sufficent Reason didn't already do with less problems. The big thing for me is that the entire "mental causes"/"physical causes" seems to presuppose a sort of dualism that I don't believe is warranted, let alone something that should be dogmatically enforced.

There is plenty of empirical evidence to support the idea that the mental and the physical flow into each other seemlessly. But if CC is formulated in terms that "the mental is physical," then I don't think it explains much of anything. It reduces to "all real things have only real causes."

Fingers crossed. The size of the prisoner exchange is at least a good indication that it might hold though.

But I do wonder when/how Israel will withdraw IDF losses reported so far are suprisingly light, but the cost of a lengthy occupation would seem likely to ramp up quickly. It's also probably the best way to destroy Hamas' credibility though.

I've heard speculation that Hamas' political leadership was not made aware of the attack before it happened. It certainly seems like they didn't let their allies know, so that has some level of credence. If that's true, it speaks to quite literally catastrophic issues within the groups C&C.

Ha, but how much of philosophy is just that! :rofl:

Perhaps you're right. However, in my experience, there seems to be a strong similarity in the way I love my parents, my son, my wife, my friends, God, and even my country that doesn't apply to most things that I like.

To be sure, they are different in some aspects. With my wife there is eros, with the rest of my family... :vomit: But I've definitely experienced eros without the "love" that I find common to my love for my wife, family, friends, etc.

So the idea of "love" being tied to union or identity speaks to me. It seems like I would be giving up part of myself to no longer have certain feelings.

To say that the glass ought to break is contingent upon our abstract, perhaps even mathematical, knowledge of glasses. So, to call the likely outcome "correct" if confirmed makes no sense even in the context of a model because such a state of affairs is just that: a likely outcome.

I think you have what I was intending flipped around backwards. It's not the observed outcomes that can be correct/incorrect, it's the models that ground our "is statements." That is, "if my 'is statement' is correct, x ought to happen." If x does not occur, it casts doubt on the "is statement," not the outcome that occured. "Is statements" can certainly be correct or incorrect, e.g. "Barack Obama is the current President," is an incorrect"is statement."

This gets to the whole idea of prediction as a way of vetting suppositions about states of affairs and causal transitions between them.

But since Hume thinks cause is just constant conjunction, "is statements" to the effect of "gasoline is combustible," would always be on thin ice anyhow. For Hume, such a thing wouldn't be a claim about a single state of affairs, but rather a claim about all states of affairs involving gasoline and combustion.