I know someone whose musical work is so far beyond those of whom you hear on a regular basis, qualitatively speaking, that it's unbelievable. Yet, most people will never know his name, let alone that he was a musician. Nothing about that makes him a musician any less. To drive this home, most species that have ever lived on Earth have been exctinct for many millenia, doesn't make them any less a species. — Garrett Travers

I think you are talking about different things. I am talking about calling yourself a writer when you have never written (apart from emails or texts).

The matter of being unknown or unrecognised is quite different. So is the nature of species extinction. Both have contributed in a measurable way. My writer has not.

Well that's all very amusing but do you have any views worth defending or do you just make bold claims?

What is a scientific truth? How is it true?

I wonder, if a scientist never contributes to the body of accepted science, is he/she still a scientist? — Garrett Travers

Over the decades I've met many writers who have never written anything... :wink:

Close to what we're trying to do here. — Wayfarer

Worth noting that Paglia is a strong atheist. The problem is people hear atheism and think Dawkins when they might well be closer to Nietzsche.. :gasp:

...framed in contrast to some spiritual quality he can only imagine exists. Maybe clinging to fantasy casts the world as solulless physicalism, obscuring the miraclulous nature of everyday reality with gaudy decorations constructed from human imagination. — karl stone

Not a terrible attempt at doing a reading of my OP. But I did mention there I was a half-arsed secular humanist. It might pay you to speculate what the other half might be...

Here are the questions that have so far led to 26 pages of divergent responses. Why don't you have a go at something substantive?

Does enlightenment necessarily involve transcendence and higher consciousness as understood in spiritual traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism? Would some include 'illuminated' figures from different traditions such as Jesus? Is there a difference between wisdom/self-realization and enlightenment? Does the word enlightenment hold any real meaning, or is it just a poetic umbrella term for a fully integrated and intelligent person? — Tom Storm

:up: Indeed and there is a ripper on this by Nietzsche which I can't find at the moment.

True morality consists of behaviors that maximize the well-being and happiness of the individual performing the actions, while simultaneously respecting the sovereign boundaries of all other human beings. — Garrett Travers

I agree with the sentiment for the most part but am not crazy about the term 'true morality'. Where's your evidence? This seems to be simply a presupposition you have settled on (no doubt based on some reasoning) but it does not carry inherent truth value.

I generally hold that how actions impact upon the flourishing of conscious creatures is the best foundation for morality. But this requires making the decision to accept this presupposition.

Maybe not, but my guess is that you agree with my take on emotion. We want to direct our lives by relying on reliable knowledge, clear perception, logical thinking, and settled emotions — Bitter Crank

I've always thought that for the most part we are drawn to philosophy and ideas through emotional needs. We don't select using reason, for instance, unless our emotions have made us privilege a rational approach, perhaps because we are afraid of chaos and crave order. But in general, because our culture privileges reasoning, most of us indulge in post hoc rationalisations for the choices we make. It's expected that we justify our theories and views with evidence and from a calm base even if those views are selected to support how we feel emotionally about being in the world.

I didn't say you said it. All I did was walk through my take on this idea.

If all philosophies are based on fairytales then does that not make 'Pragmatic Epistemology' based on a fairytale. — universeness

My reading of the argument, with which I largely agree, is that you need to get past the fairy tales and see how the beliefs are used in practice and what happens. I think what distinguishes the pragmatism of @T Clark is its efficacy, as opposed to other fairytale derived systems.

Richard Rorty (who has no particular bearing here except that he is a self described neo-pragmatist) says we can say nothing about the true nature of reality but we do know something about how to justify beliefs. This latter is the significant part of the project.

The pop singer Madonna grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. Though she had been a Catholic for most of her life, she joined a “Kabbalah” sect in the 90’s and later took an interest in Indian religion before taking up the study of Islam as well as getting herself a Muslim boyfriend. — Apollodorus

Of course none of us can guess at Madonna's motivations, but this all seems to be the typical trajectory of a restless showbiz type who constantly playacts with charged but superficial images and appearances in an endless quest, and by association with such images, to remain relevant and interesting. I wonder if it's all just surfaces for her and if there is any depth at all.

Of course, with characters like Madonna it’s difficult to tell if they are serious about something or they just do it for the publicity-driving “shock value” of their statements and actions. — Apollodorus

Indeed. The perennial philosophy and the New Age movement were as popular as Netflix when I was young (I mixed in those circles for a few years) and it frequently seemed to be fuelled by a resentment of the Christianity of the West and often the West in general. I often think this is an outcome of the modernist mindset to go against the West's own presuppositions.

How about 'transformative'? — Janus

I can see some uses for this. The issue is it could be used to describe both enlightenment and The Enlightenment and I am trying to find words to distinguish projects.

Is this "Spiritual Care" mandatory? — baker

No

"Spiritual" is a fitting word. It conveys the vagueness of the "spiritual" endeavor and sets the task at hand, namely to clarify things for oneself. — baker

Interesting perspective.

Yeah, better to just be a patronizing, bossy asshole, right. — baker

Is that a recommendation or a question?

I don't like the word 'spiritual' much but I think English doesn't have many useful equivalents. I found this passage in one of the essays of Nishijima roshi. — Wayfarer

Thanks. Yes, spiritual can be problematic. As you say there are so few simple words that can be used as an alternative in a plain English discussion of such matters. Happy to hear from anyone with a useable alternative. I think I generally use spiritual as an alternative to idealism.

One of my teams at work is called Spiritual Care and while that might sound delightfully vague, it does significant work helping people who are sick and in palliative care make sense of death and loss and find hope and connection to others. So part of me uses the word without irony and without quotation marks.

What is real is much greater than what exists. Hard idea to get. — Wayfarer

I have a sense of this. Reminds me of that quote often erroneously (I think) attributed to Einstein - “Not everything that can be counted counts and not every thing that counts can be counted”?

I suspect anyone who as worked with suicidal people knows that what is real is often greater than what exists. For me this is the nature of minds, if nothing else.

What about the word enlightenment - should we abolish it in its numinous guise?

Both of these are completely different from the Enlightenment of 17th-18th century Europe which occurs in a very different cultural and historical context. — Wayfarer

Do you think the 'spiritual' use of the word enlightenment is useful? It seems to me a theme here has been those who think of it as knowledge (in the more rationalist sense) and those who see it as part of a contemplative tradition - emerging, let's say from the logos?

What's the difference between having no choice and nirvana? — Agent Smith

Not sure but it reminds me of Nietzsche's famous final line from On The Genealogy of Morality -

"Man would rather will nothingness than not will."

Trump/Putin for 2024! :yikes:

The most fundamental awareness in philosophy is awareness of one's limited capacity and wealth of knowledge. — Garrett Travers

That feeling has always filled me with a kind of dread. :wink:

The Pragmatic Buddhists eschew the very notion of enlightenment as a dangerous fantasy or pitfall, instead focusing on a gradualistic increase in self- and world-awareness. Or, say, a gradualistic decrease in ego-illusion. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes, that is worth mentioning.

Sure. I originally did the OP because I wanted to understand better the options available under that famous rubric, given the dispirit traditions one can shoehorn enlightenment into. And I wanted to separate it from The Enlightenment, a similarly named but different project. Personally I think people's notions of enlightenment usually reflect their value system and don't often point outside of their experience or their attractions.

Ok. I'll sit with that for a bit.

Enlightenment is waking up from the somnabulatory state cluelessness. — Garrett Travers

I wasn't using the term journey literally. :wink:

If you wake up from a clueless state you are still clueless. That's my point about a brief 'journey'. Recognizing you are clueless is an important step but in philosophical terms, is this not to enlightenment what premature ejaculation is to sex?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'philosophical tradition'. Do you mean all of them? Every one?

The importance of perception. Did Dr Johnson refute Berkeley or just hurt his foot? — Edmund

He just hurt his foot. If idealism is true then of course things 'appear' to look and feel solid. That's the point.

I tend to perceive the universe as being musical. Which is an expression of both mathematics and language. — Bret Bernhoft

A not unpopular view - "The mind of God is music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.'
Michio Kaku

Many people are weird enough to catch our attention, but not weird enough to make any breakthroughs. — Agent Smith

With a few small adjustments, that could be one of Nietzsche's. :up:

To be enlightened is to have discovered that you know nothing without the application of philosophy. — Garrett Travers

That sounds like a very brief journey to enlightenment then. "I am ignorant without philosophy; I wonder if there is something new up on Netflix..."

Cool. I'm here to see what I may have missed. I am mainly interested in values and morality.

I've never understood - How can you turn something as simple as my own experience of the world into something so complicated and convoluted. Whenever I start to read something about phenomenology I say "No! No! How does it feel?" — T Clark

Fucking Europeans and their continental bullshit! :wink:

Keep trying. Try to be honest with yourself. Judge your results against the outside world and other people. Do the best you can. How's that? — T Clark

I don't have a problem with this since I am not a philosopher, but I wonder if it counts as philosophy. When you think about the impressive jargon and thought games inherent in, for instance, phenomenology - all that Epoché and lifeworld hermeneutics, this seems somewhat lacking in depth... or pretention...

Hatred my fiend... — HKpinsky

Fortuitous typo, friend...

I don't see what connection this has with pragmatism. Is there one? — T Clark

No idea - just responding to the other guy. Well, perhaps that the acme of pragmatism is to know that the low road is more likely to be the one people take....

If you ask me what my goal is with philosophy, I'll say increasing my self-awareness. — T Clark

I agree, but self-awareness compared to what? How do we measure our improvement in self-awareness? How can we tell the difference between self-serving opinions and awareness?

Jordan Peterson stated that he was haunted by or he struggles with the thought of himself in the role of a prison guard in a death camp during the holocaust and he asks but it's possible to love such work. — universeness

I think his broader point is about self-awareness. As Peterson and may others have mused, everyone tends to think of themselves as hypothetically opposing Hitler or being in the resistance if they found themselves in Nazi Germany. But the odds are you are more likely to be an active supporter, not a dissenter and much more likely a guard, not a liberator. That is the tragic dimension to human behavior and the self-awareness gap Peterson often attempts to highlight.

I'd be interested in knowing more about the relationship between self-awareness and pragmatism.

If I give a beggar a dollar, I don't worry about whether or not they are going to buy alcohol or drugs with it. Begging seems like a hard way to earn a living. There has to be something wrong with a person who is willing to stand by a freeway exit for hours on end in heat and cold, being ignored much of the time (or jeered at), to collect money. — Bitter Crank

Exactly right!

I generally give ten percent. And yes, it is important to research where you are sending your money to ensure you are not giving to an admin heavy, bloated organisation. Philosopher Peter Singer wrote a decent book on this called The Life You Save.

happen as a direct communication from abstract philosophy to ‘normal human beings’ , it happens in stages, by being translated into more and more pragmatically articulated versions over time, accessible to increasingly large segments of the population. The general concepts that led eventually to the computer you are using were first formulated by ‘useless’ philosophers 200 years ago. The concrete technology is just the final stage in a long process of the spread of an idea. As we speak there are a handful of philosophers generating the conceptual basis of what will constitute the next technological revolution 50 or 100 years from now. Only then will ‘normal human beings’ likely recognize its value, and only in a more narrowly engineered form. — Joshs

That's the most elegantly written version of 'your model is flawed' I've read for a while.

Nicely put.

Some random reactions - I come from the reverse of engineering - community work - no maths, few solutions, unanswered questions and jagged edges. Nevertheless, I like your general drift. I guess for me everything needs to start with at least one presupposition, namely that truth or ultimately reality are likely inaccessible or imagined. But I do have a sense about what can help me to manage my environment and this appears to be measurable and evidence based and can generally be shared by a community.

To answer Josh's general point, we are all essentially dependent on the creativity, meaning and perspectives made by others and Christ only knows how deep this goes? Do we care? Some philosophy considers unpacking this to be a most significant nature of enquiry. I wonder if holding a pragmatic epistemology is more of a world view than a philosophy - not wanting to make too much of this, but a key question inherent in setting up one's philosophical orientation is how deep are we prepared to dive and why?

We do things for the tribe because the tribe does for us? So what makes it good versus simply advantageous? — TiredThinker

I never said it was 'good'. In fact there are many people that think ethical positions all fall under a form of reciprocal altruism. If you play nice with others, you benefit. And we know that often there is safety and strength in working together. Hence common wealth.

I think the idea of the 'good' is a more primal or idealist notion and who knows what all that means?

We have society and social contracts that tells us what behavior is correct and what isn't, and we punish or frown upon those that do bad. — TiredThinker

Do we? You need to examine this. There are actually many moral codes and perspectives operating at once in most cultures. And what is 'frowned upon' by some members is encouraged by others. Divorce, free love, abortion, capital punishment, women's rights, homosexuality - humans are all over the shop on these issues depending on religions, cultures, education, region.

But in more general term humans are social animals who live in tribes, like other animals, especially chimps. Is it any wonder that we work to find ways of getting on together and setting boundaries? It's also pretty hard to rear children if you don't have empathy.

Gosh Baker, those comments sound bitter.

So the GR is asking you, in the case where you're black and have a KKK neighbor, to accept his "observances"? — baker

What observances? Of course you can twist anything to make it sound strange, but let me twist this back for you. The GR can work perfectly well here to recast the racist's understanding of people's common humanity and the importance of seeing all people as worthy of respect. Can the GR end world bigotry and fuckwit behavior? Of course not. Neither can any religious code or ethical system. Are you looking for magic spells that will somehow compel ethical behavior?

Do that, and you will be perceived as a pansy, and exploited. — baker

Has that been your experience? In practice I have never encountered this reaction but I can't say it won't ever happen.

Then why bother with the GR? — baker

Absolutist thinking. If it isn't a 100% done deal it isn't worth doing? Strange.

That's bizarre. Only the neurotic think before they act. The normal person is always sure they have done no wrong and can do no wrong. — baker

Where the hell do you live? In my experience the normal person (whatever that means) has insight and often reflects on their behavior. And as people mature and grow they often reflect more and deeper. And, as for only neurotics thinking before they act, that's a fascinating frame and I would say it's wrong.

Indeed. It makes them strive to grow up, grow strong, and make sure nobody can do to them what they can do to others. — baker

That's a jaundiced view of human nature and, quite frankly, having seen many children grow up, I have yet to encounter this phenomenon unless a child was abused or neglected in some way.

Provided those others are, to begin with, in accordance with one's preferences. If they're not, their "rights" deserve to be violated. — baker

Bad day?

People who champion the Golden Rule always find a way around it. — baker

Always? What is the source of your information, apart from a jaundiced view of human behaviour?

The point is not that the GR will fix the world. The point is it can be a useful frame, a teaching aid, or a navigation point. And it is not compulsory...

It is saying treat others with the consideration you would appreciate - honour their preferences as you would want them to honour yours.
— Tom Storm

Do that, and you will be perceived as a pansy, and exploited.

If you keep kosher then you may need to understand that your neighbour keeps halal. The GR is therefore not asking you to expect your neighbour to accept kosher but to accept that they have their own observances...
— Tom Storm

So the GR is asking you, in the case where you're black and have a KKK neighbor, to accept his "observances"?

True. There are no guarantees in life, period.
— Tom Storm

Then why bother with the GR?

I think the GR mainly applies to the self as a guiding principle

That's bizarre. Only the neurotic think before they act. The normal person is always sure they have done no wrong and can do no wrong.

When kids misbehave to others there's a famous phrase parents tend to use - "How would you like it if they did that to you?" I've generally found kids get this formulation of the GR instantly.
— Tom Storm

Indeed. It makes them strive to grow up, grow strong, and make sure nobody can do to them what they can do to others.

What I like about the GR is that it is an invitation to see the rights of others as inviolable.

Provided those others are, to begin with, in accordance with one's preferences. If they're not, their "rights" deserve to be violated.
People who champion the Golden Rule always find a way around it. — baker

:rofl:

How different can we be, right? — Agent Smith

I think this is the nub of it. There are no different cultural interpretations I know of where murdering or thieving or lying are considered cool.

When kids misbehave to others there's a famous phrase parents tend to use - "How would you like it if they did that to you?" I've generally found kids get this formulation of the GR instantly. What I like about the GR is that it is an invitation to see the rights of others as inviolable.

Nevertheless I also think that with interpreting the GR, the old maxim to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law holds true. In other words, a literal or more concrete interpretation may well be done against to the intent of the principle. If you keep kosher then you may need to understand that your neighbour keeps halal. The GR is therefore not asking you to expect your neighbour to accept kosher but to accept that they have their own observances...

You can refrain from killing, raping, and pillaging, but none of this guarantees that others will not kill, not rape, or not pillage from you.
So now what? — baker

True. There are no guarantees in life, period. I think the GR mainly applies to the self as a guiding principle - I don't think anyone sees it as a magic charm that ushers in ethical behaviour all around. I've always understood it to be like a teaching tool setting forth a simple approach. People seem to love it or hate it.