I'd never hang you.

My theory about theories is that theories are useful for some finite thing, idk what, depends on the theory, the subject matter.

my theory about theories that aren't that kind of theory is that they're not good.

My feeling is it's a good op if it isn't trying to engage Heidegger.

If it is, well....

Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.) — apokrisis

I mean, I guess that hinges on what you think 'theories' are supposed to do. So, specific theories - theories explaining this or that phenomena according to this or that model - yeah, they shouldn't bow to any personal feelings. Theories of Everything - well...

Another way to put this - I"ve seen people shit on poor working-class people all my life, in print, online, in movies. Not a big deal.

But one time, long ago, my high-school girlfriend got accepted, from bumfuck maine, to Columbia, in NYC.

I followed her out there, nothing to my name. Went to a party in manhattan and someone there, comfortably new-yorked, sized me up and let loose the same poor-maine stuff I'd read without ever blinking an eye. It was different then. I got mad. And he, in retrospect, won. He held his ground. I looked foolish.

He had the power, he was in his element - it was up to me to hold my ground in the face of that. He didn't have to defend shit. You can see how it's a different thing. Words aren't just words, depending on where you're at.

Earlier, we briefly discussed how we both "felt" as though we may have existed in some form before we existed here on Earth. It sounds fantastic and the skeptical alarm bells are ringing loud and clear that this is magical woo, but a similar feeling arises in me when I contemplate Being as opposed to being. If the Scholastics are correct, and God is the eternal, infinite ground for Being, then the entire world could end and God would remain. God is, He always was and always will be.

That there is something more to the world than the world, that the foundation of the world permeates every facet while simultaneously extending beyond the finite, is an idea that I think is at the heart of religious sentiments. — darthbarracuda

Sorry to respond so late. Rocky past few days.

I'm convinced of this, though, to my core, especially the last paragraph.

This is extra-philosophical, but the best model I've found for this is Proust talking about involuntary memory. You can have everything arranged just so in your thought. You can voluntarily try to remember the past, and it'll fit into your just-so arrangement. But sometimes you'll get a hint of something (a scent, an image, a feeling) that will activate a much-deeper much-realer connection with reality. That'll make all your philosophical thought seem like lego-models, in the face of what actually is.

And then that connection and understanding will fade. But it's so much more....something - it feels realer than anything else, in a way that is absolutely authoritative, from within itself.

They have a term for this in Kabblah too - the 'reshimu'

This is from some chintzy kabblah site, but so be it:

"The reshimu is compared to the fragrance of the wine which remains in the glass after having been poured out of it.

The reshimu is the consciousness of knowing that one has “forgotten.” It is the consciousness which arouses one to search for that which he has lost, the awareness that God is “playing” with His creation, as it were, a Divine game of “hide and seek.” A forgotten melody lingers in the back of one’s mind, and although he is unable to remember it he continuously searches for it, and whenever he hears a new melody (that might be it) it is the reshimu which tells him that it is not."

-----

This quote too, Gravity's Rainbow:

"Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting through an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly"

There's also the possibility that the Stoics and Epicureans were talking out of their ass and were playing lip-service to an equanimity and serenity. The Greek peninsula gave birth to all sorts of philosophical life-coaches in the midst of political turmoil. These "sages" garnered followers and actually competed with other philosophical schools to gain adherents. — darthbarracuda

This is a super interesting way of framing things. Equanimity would've been a hot commodity back then, so maybe they were just superior marketers.

I've also had the thought that a good chuck of stoicism might be post-hoc rationalization of the anhedonia that follows on the heels of deep trauma - plenty of trauma, back then, to go around. A more genteel version of people who've been hurt and then brag loudly that they don't give a fuck, and even believe it.

Either way, as a strong emotional avoider, I'm of the belief that emotions have to be worked through, not bypassed or bracketed. Including fear of death, if you've got it (I believe some people don't, or at least not to the same degree. I didn't have it for a long time, but somehow I contracted it.)

You have to take setting into consideration tho, don't you? Like: if you know what you're doing, like you say he probably did, and you say that to someone's face on live tv and its during a debate about emotionally-charged issues - that feels less like a general provocation and more like baring your teeth openly in active confrontation.

I'm impressed, naturally, that you read about Andrew Young slamming Mondale aides and didn't call out of work to nurse your rage. But what's the point of that anecdote? Do you think its a scenario roughly equivalent to one tiff mentioned - only you reacted better? If not, then what's your point?

I like the idea of heaven, if there were such a thing, being more akin to the inexhuastible imaginative play of childhood.

Can't do justice right now to the op, but I think Phillip Larkin's Aubade captures the fear of death (as absolute end) elegantly without the grandiose heideggerean trappings:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house



I think part of the problem is that 'understanding our place' fails when we confront the placelessness of death.

Being reaches beyond the personal, not-being does not. The dreadful is the closing in. That is why the question is a reawakening of the trauma and not of the reaching beyond of birth. — unenlightened

I don't agree with first sentence tho. You said it authoritatively but I can't see why that's the case.

I feel like you can solve the paradox like this: We can intelligibly indicate the limit beyond which intelligibility fails.

I agree that there's no answer. That's the crux of it. 'Shut up!' can be an appropriate response, depending on the situation. If one of my co-workers bounced the question off me, iI'd be more than a little off-put. Neither the place nor the time.

But there are other responses just as appropriate, depending on the place and time. I recently went to see a Kirtan performance and the the chanter gestured toward the question in some of his between-chants banter. In this setting, the kirtan itself is an appropriate response to the question. The chant is enriched and made deeper by the question. The chant isn't an answer, but the lack of an possible answer is built into the chant's power.

Birth-trauma isn't many degrees of separation from 'thrownness.' I like that take. It's mine too, usually. But I feel like birth trauma is more an explanation of why *I* am - why any *I* is - drawn to the question. Why is something like birth trauma possible? I think the question - why does anything exist - reaches beyond the personal, even though the personal is our way in.

In my mystical and esoteric moments I am drawn to the idea that what we call the world is a temporary dream in an endless sleep; that consciousness is an insomnia in a population of dreamers, or a momentary divorce from the unconscious deep. The idealist/panpsychist undertones are clear. — darthbarracuda

Same. I like the idea of 'awakening' being the same thing as 'falling back asleep.'

When I was a teenager, I worked at a weird kind of lake-island resort in Maine. The vacationers owned houses there, it was accessible only by ferry, and they'd stay a few summer-months a year. We - the staff - would cook and wait on them, run the ferry, do maintenance etc etc. We - the staff - lived in a kind of bunkhouse, on the island, and would spend most of our off-hours getting very intoxicated. There was one kid on the staff, a hardcore stoner, who had this goal: To get so stoned, it would feel just like being sober. This became a kind of running joke, and we'd give him shit about it: Why not just not smoke? etc etc.

But there's something about that idea I always liked.

I'm reading a message into your sketch, one that might not be there. But, if it is there: 'what conditions are necessary for asking the question?' is a different question than 'why is there something (rather than nothing?)'

More like Carnap than Dewey, I would think. But I'll acknowledge "the nothing" and the fascination "it" has for some baffles and intrigues me. For example, I would pose the question as "Why is there something?" There is no "instead of" alternative. This nonentity is seemingly profound and fearsome, and I wonder how and why it can be that. — Ciceronianus the White

I guess I mean the 'swabian peasant' thing seems like the kick, the positivist tinkering just potemkin-philosophy in the service of Being Wry.

If what you're worried about is the spookiness of the language, I wouldn't disagree. It *is* a bit trumped up, and over-solemn, like Kubrick. But solemnity is a tonal preference, like wryness. Some like it, some don't. You can read Heidegger, and appreciate his thought without loving his vibe. Sloterdijk, for example, isthe polar opposite of Heidegger tonally (joyfully cynical, legitimately funny)while basing the lion's share of his thought on H's work.

Anyway, if there was no alternative, like you say, the question wouldn't make sense, even as you rephrased it. But it does make sense.

Well, consider what it means to negate, and what negation means, and therefore what is meant by "negation of everything." Is it the denial of everything? The absence of everything? The claim that "everything" is false? Causing everything to be invalid? The destruction of everything? What could be more futile then such a denial, or to claim that everything is absent, or false, or invalid, or destroyed? What would be more futile than to be concerned what it will be like not to exist or with what it would be like if nothing existed?

I think it's less like this ^ and more closely related to 'why is there something rather than nothing?' It's one of those things that remains strange no matter how long you reflect on it. He's certainly not saying that there aren't things, or that everything is 'false.' It's that there's ultimately nothing holding any of it together. The world just is.

I always took your intrusive, repetitive comments on Heidegger threads to be basically a form of bad-faith roleplaying (you get to dress up like Dewey for a second, the way some people affect a pipe). I'm starting to wonder if maybe deep down, you're secretly drawn to him. Protesting too much, and all that.

Song's closer to my metaphysics than anything else I've read, I think.


[lyrics]

Time passed hard
And the task was the hardest thing she'd ever do
But she forgot
The moment she saw you


So it would seem to be true
When cruel birth debases, we forget
When cruel death debases
We believe it erases all the rest
that precedes


But stand brave, life-liver
Bleeding out your days
In the river of time
Stand brave
Time moves both ways


In the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life
The nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life


The moment of your greatest joy sustains
Not axe nor hammer
Tumor, tremor
Can take it away, and it remains
It remains


And it pains me to say, I was wrong
Love is not a symptom of time
Time is just a symptom of love


(And the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life
The nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life)


Hardly seen, hardly felt
Deep down where your fight is waiting
Down 'till the light in your eyes is fading
Joy of life
Where I know that you can yield, when it comes down to it
Bow like the field when the combs through it
Joy of life
And every little gust that chances through
Will dance in the dust of me and you
With joy of life
And in our perfect secret-keeping
One ear of corn
In silent, reaping


Joy of life
Joy
Again, around–a pause, a sound–a song
A way a lone a last a loved a long
A cave, a grave, a day: arise, ascend
(Areion, Rharian, go free and graze
Amen)


A shore, a tide, unmoored–a sight, abroad
A dawn, unmarked, undone, undarked (a god)
No time, no flock, no chime, no clock, no end
White star, white ship nightjar, transmit, transcend


White star, white ship–nightjar, transmit, transcend
White star, white ship–nightjar, transmit, transcend
White star, white ship–nightjar, transmit, trans

So "the nothing" (which we must remember itself nothings, according to H) is nothing (pun intended) but a feeling, a state of mind? — Ciceronianus the White

Lawyer like yourself oughta see that, in the quote quoted, he didn't say this, at all.

the nature of the intoxicating or corruptive caryatid which is ever present amidst the swallowing legends of protruding or protesting miscibilities of every and only philosophical conundrum — AR LaBaere

Why caryatid?

Have you ever experienced this? — frank

yeahh

there's my apo!

So what I'm saying is that your bildungsroman post is unmoving in that:

things only plinko into the Final System if you always had the Final System in the back of your mind. Your reponse w/r/t hippie-ism is shot-through with: where is this heading? What's the goal?

doesn't that miss the point? (it does)

but


"If you can't give an organic reason for why the drugs would be a true benefit, then you don't understand what you are doing."

The shirt is chafing on the bare skin here. Is this worthwhile in itself, or will it help abate the chafe?



reworded:

[How does being a hippie on acid help you realize biosemiotics and talk about it often, and in the same words, to people who don't care about biosemiotics]

But it works both ways. What is it like to have a mind that has never been blown? :grin:

Or if we are talking about the advantages of things being revealed, what is it like to have a mind that understands the neurochemistry? Will you ever know what you are missing?

We can all play these games. I say judge them on the pragmatic fruits. Which kinds of revealed truth are going to be of the most value to you over the course of a lifetime.

And of course, I am alert to the fact that our choices of which avenues of experience to pursue are the ones that end up defining us, so shaping our feeling about the answer as to what mattered. Your drug experiences may indeed be fundamental to your resulting sense of self. They did become the invaluable part of "you being you".

So you can't be persuaded they might be trite experiences when they are experiences integral to your ego. I respect that. It is why I say I am not making any high ground moral judgement. — apokrisis

What makes something 'trite'? Something overdone, done-do-death, done so thoroughly there's nothing to gain from watching it be done again. Like a fruit squeezed of all its -

Hippies are squeezed to you in this way. You've squeezed from hippies what you can, so all that's left is an abstract, schematic [hippie]. You've drained hippies of what they claim to be saying, and what's left?

-

But:

'We can all play these games. I say judge them on the pragmatic fruits. Which kinds of revealed truth are going to be of the most value to you over the course of a lifetime.'


We *can* all play these games. How are your pragmatic fruits growing? How well do they evade triteness?

What have you done with your pragmatic fruits recently? Maintained the garden? What were you thinking about as you maintained the garden?

Nuff of that hippie talk! what about sitting in silence and thinking about peirce and being vaguely mad about it and so getting online and posting?? Thats the real pragmatic ----

what?

to clarify : Reality therapy - from what I've gleaned since posty's post -focuses on getting *needs* met. The idea being that meeting needs takes place in the *world* - reality. So reality means 'the real world' in common usage, as opposed to the suffering of an isolated self, whose problems are like a psychic tumor or knot, which can be extracted or untied without broaching the bigger social frame. If we talk about needs as involving fantasy (the fantasy of having our needs met) then there is an unreality involved. But then you could even call oncology work unreal in the sense that cancer sufferers have a fantasy of not having cancer.

I like the idea behind reality therapy. I'd never heard of it before.

Sounds like reality therapy in everything but name?

It's kitsch—the self-indulgent explication of the tragic that destroys its value by transforming it into just another mental commodity to be toyed with and ideologically weaponized, and that paradoxically reduces the subject as messenger of the "unpalatable truth" to precisely the kind of meaningless and impotent force that was supposed to be the origin of its angst[..]

[..] the structural negatives of life are precisely the elements that make possible an orientation within which life as recognizably human, as having value, can subsist.

Well-put, especially the last part.

But that is a play/art and this is philosophy. So we are getting right at it straight on. Sure, we can make poems and stories about tragedy using all the allegory, alliteration, allusion, and all the rest, but that is what makes art different than mere philosophy. Here we are using the avenue of propositions, observations, evaluations, logic, dialectic, discovering ideas of first principles, etc. etc. I don't see why being so blatant makes that bad. I will agree it might be less interesting, but I never claimed to be doing art (though perhaps your world view is that everything is art).

Wait, but the post of yours I was responding to was specifically about aesthetic understanding and had a Bob Dylan quote at its center.

what post are you responding to posty? I hear you talk a lot about maybe transcending ego, but a lot of your posts feel like provocation + plausible deniability. I'm happy to address your concerns, but its hard to ever know who youre talking to, and about what.

i guess what i want to say is: i accept your tragic view - but I'd add: Oedipus cut out his eyes. If he talked about how tragic it was to be oedipus instead - the tragic element would be lost.

and theres sequels, right? there wouldnt be sequels if oedipus was cioran. it would be peverse. "the tragedy of being born oedipus."

I think the tragic view of life is right. Sincerely. What I meant with my question had less to do with humanity agreeeing to stop procreating and more to do with like: what if all the posters here agreed - so there was nothing left to say. what *would* be left to say? I think we agree on what is the case. I really do. I ingested schop, cioran, beckett for most of my twenties. and i love them. but

I like the idea. I want to say it opens a space for the 'art of the possible' - jettison the possible worlds stuff (which, to my limited understanding, seems fine and useful, long as it recognizes it limits and doesnt try and reify formal analysis) but jettison that, and you have a space where an aesthetic (or social) eye can pick out new avenues. I can't play music myself, but I have enough friends who can, where if I'm able to vibe out and listen, you can *feel* when someone has picked up on some potential and starts to bring it into fruition. so satisfying. I know this is all vibes and aesthetics, but its really not subjective. it only 'works' if the potential was there. The 'there' is complex. it's the music, but also the people, and the setting. So more like politics than biology. but maybe the same basic idea.

There's another way to put this: What if everyone here agreed with you?

But, truly, all I have to say, here, I already said in my first response. It wasn't meant to be condescending. I understand what you're saying, but all I would want to say, I already did in that post. I mean you've already said this ^ before.

Thank you, I will keep that in mind. I don't think the meat of my responses denigrate their responses along those lines. I've responded with what I consider a full-throated counter-response. the counter-counter-response has focused on the teen/kid thing, and so my counterx3 response has focused on that. I urge you to reread my posts.

but now that I think of it

trying to cast aspersions of regressive infantile behavior

guilty as charged. And I stand by it

I wasn't accusing you of being adolescent though. I did use the word, but not in that way.

If you feel that same hard-won camaraderie with other pessimists, then good. Not a problem with that. Only you seem to want to convince others too? Or maybe I'm misreading the OP.

Going to come at it by rewriting the OP:


If much of [art] is about "getting it right", then there is something inherently wrong with [art]. The minute someone has complaints about [creating art]not being fulfilling, the immediate response is to suggest a new [style, approach, theme, subject] as if just getting into a [new approach] is the answer to the [absence of aesthetic pleasure]. The assumption here is that to [do art] properly and in balance, one has to [actually broach the stuff that's hard to broach]. The fact that we are born to hone in on [real art] is troubling. It is also not recognizing that there may not be [real art]. There is simply enduring and coping [with the fact our art isn't meaningful]. Again, troubling.

You can also do the same thing with mastery and a craft. You live, and are cared for (or not),but there's a moment (adolescence) where you're called upon to do more. There's a higher pleasure, which is something more than pleasure, in heeding this call.

There's a sublime pleasure in talking, mutually, to people who have met this challenge. It wouldn't exist without that challenge. That's how it is.

We're not owed anything. And if that is metaphysically troubling, consider what metaphysics you have that makes that troubling.

I'd read your OP and was thinking of it when I said that!

I think I understand your point, but - - -

Was gonna type up a thing here, I'll respond over there though

I have had this feeling as well, and I cannot argue for it either.

That's kind of a relief. It's a weird thought, it's nice to know others have it too.

We are souls trapped in fleshy bodies and salvation comes from freeing ourselves from this cycle of rebirth. In a very real sense, people are literally better off never being born and existing in union with God instead of in separation, in the material world.

Maybe non-flesh relies on first being flesh though. Logically, I don't know if this makes sense. But some higher logic. It just is the way it is. Trying to show how it doesn't have to logically be that way is just trying to bend a higher order to the demands of a lower order (logic) which depends on the higher order.

The perfection of not-being can only be achieved through being, which has to exist (for a tip-of-the-tongue reason that can never be adequately articulated.)

We can't understand why, and maybe nobody can understand why, but nevertheless it persists.

I don't know, other than I'm weary.

Me too.

But less weary than I've been for most of my (post-puberty) life.

This sounds banal, but I've found the best way out of weariness is to go to bed early, wake up early, and do stuff. (Don't like Peterson mostly, but his 'clean your room' is right on.) Shower right when you get up, put on some coffee, make a breakfast sandwich. Do some cleaning. Everything seems less overwhelming if you begin the day with action instead of reaction and rumination. Of course this doesn't touch on why one should even have to do anything to even feel just ok. But whatever. We've been born, so we do have to work to be ok, and this does help. I've found it even helps when the thoughts get realllly bad. If you listen to them, they'll pin you down. Getting up and doing something is like cutting a gordian knot. It's hard as shit to get up, but once you do, and have a goal, it gets progressively easier. Also, write 750-1000 words of reflection each night a few hours before crashing- and also write some groggy, grumpy stream of conscious stuff when you get up. Find the narrative in your life. write about the most mundane aspects of your life, don't tie it back to phil stuff, unless it happens organically. If your life is boring, doesn't matter, write it out. Having a handle on your own story is way more worthwhile than a handle on e.g. Kant. E.g. Kant is awesome, but, like, only if you have a handle on the other stuff.

All this stuff has helped me a lot in the past few months. Know this is off topic, but only kind of.

For a while I've felt - can't argue for it - something like:

There is.
That there is a 'there is' is a brute absolute. Eternity.
There is no not being part of the 'there is'.
Not being a part of the 'there is' is only a fantasy from within the 'there is'
There is only the 'there is'
Being born is not a not a transition from not being a part of the 'there is' to the 'there is'
Being born is just a particular kind of inflection of the 'there is'.
There is no such thing as not being born
again: Being born is not being pulled into the 'there is' from outside it.

The 'there is' is eternal and there is no way to leave it, or not to enter it.