You do make me wonder how I'd experience it now. It's been about 20 years since my Jung phase. On the other hand, I had a second Freud phase a few months ago. He did age quite well for me. I'd recommend the case study of the rat man. The details! Because he protected their identity, he could expose the secret, complicated lives of neurotic and often brilliant strangers.

So his philosophy is phenomenology? — frank

Yeah, I think he and Heidegger are often saying the same thing in very different styles.
Lee Braver's work is largely about their intersection. His book on anti-realism follows the trail from Kant to Derrida. Basically less and less is held fixed.

A link to an article on how Kant and Schopenhauer anticipated Freud’s ideas was posted here some time back. When you think about it, the provenance is fairly obvious. — Wayfarer

I agree. Freud was careful not to read too much philosophy as a young student, as I found from his bio. But he did credit Nietzsche with exceptional self-knowledge ('more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live').

Something I don't recall seeing in Kant or Schop is anything to do with dream interpretation, slips of the tongue, or free association. I also don't see much of a direct Kantian influence. I think Freud fits in the 'tough minded' category. He constantly reworked theories, had a nose for detail (his case studies are vivid), and had a pessimist's sense of humor.

By Weltanschauung, then, I mean an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind. When one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organise one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose.

If that is what is meant by a Weltanschauung, then the question is an easy one for psychoanalysis to answer. As a specialised science, a branch of psychology – ‘depth-psychology’ or psychology of the unconscious – it is quite unsuited to form a Weltanschauung of its own; it must accept that of science in general. The scientific Weltanschauung is, however, markedly at variance with our definition. The unified nature of the explanation of the universe is, it is true, accepted by science, but only as a programme whose fulfilment is postponed to the future. Otherwise it is distinguished by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is, at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration. It appears that this way of looking at things came very near to receiving general acceptance during the last century or two. It has been reserved for the present century to raise the objection that such a Weltanschauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it overlooks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the needs of the human mind.

This objection cannot be too strongly repudiated. It cannot be supported for a moment, for the spirit and the mind are the subject of scientific investigation in exactly the same way as any non-human entities. Psycho-analysis has a peculiar right to speak on behalf of the scientific Weltanschauung in this connection, because it cannot be accused of neglecting the part occupied by the mind in the universe. The contribution of psychoanalysis to science consists precisely in having extended research to the region of the mind. Certainly without such a psychology science would be very incomplete. But if we add to science the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and animals), we find that nothing has been altered as regards the general position of science, that there are no new sources of knowledge or methods of research. Intuition and inspiration would be such, if they existed; but they can safely be counted as illusions, as fulfilments of wishes. It is easy to see, moreover, that the qualities which, as we have shown, are expected of a Weltanschauung have a purely emotional basis. Science takes account of the fact that the mind of man creates such demands and is ready to trace their source, but it has not the slightest ground for thinking them justified. On the contrary, it does well to distinguish carefully between illusion (the results of emotional demands of that kind) and knowledge.
— Freud

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm

Regarding therapists - if they’re any good they will show you things about yourself you would never otherwise find out, or at least they will greatly expedite it. — Wayfarer

I suppose you must be right about a really good one. I prefer the idea of daringly honest friendship.

I read Answer to Job a long time ago and remember being quite impressed by it. I already liked Job, but Jung gave me new perspectives on that ancient and profound book.

There's a bias against accepting that we're equipped with a kind of faith. Faith has the same relationship to doubt as the eternal has to change. They're a package deal. — frank

Nice way of putting it. It took me a moment to see the analogy, but yeah, that makes sense.

As language games and forms of life change, that remains the same. So Witt was discovering an unchanging feature of the mind? — frank

As I read him, he's discovering or at least modifying a vision of some kind of permanent structure (of the mind if one embraces how social-public-embodied the 'mind' turns out to be.) IMO, this is related to what Hegel meant by zeitgeist/timespirit.

I'm not sure I'm understanding you though.

if the opportunity came along, I think I would greatly benefit from Jungian analysis, in particular with respect to ‘integrating the shadow’ — Wayfarer

I think it would be fascinating to talk with a pro, but my default position is that we can't help doing self-analysis after reading psychoanalysts (and I'd count certain philosophers as such.) The 'shadow' was definitely one of the concepts I valued/value in Jung. If persona is mask, then it's all (the wicked stuff) at least dormant in us all.

Re 'the person' - Cultural differentiation is something that occurs over centuries, individual differentiation over lifetimes. The various depictions of psyche as spirit or soul in religious philosophies are supposedly intended to awaken the subject to the eternally-existent essence (the ātman) - which is 'transpersonal'. — Wayfarer

As you may know, Schopenhauer talks about seeing through the veil of the principle of individuality. Now that I'm on the lookout, I find versions of this idea in many thinkers. Definitely the tone and context vary, and the transpersonal entity isn't always eternal. It might be as fragile as a way of life.

The 'laborious to read' caught my eye. Bad philosophy and maybe even mediocre philosophy is worse than no philosophy. I mean that it's actively annoying and boring, of negative value. I'm also of the opinion that boredom with a book should be trusted. Put it down and find something that grabs you.

For whatever reason, I did take to certain philosophers like a duck to water (Nietzsche.) I have the disease, and the primary symptom is a compulsion to make general and hopefully profound statements about existence. I also took to Freud as a newly minted atheist (at around 18), and I read him 'philosophically,' as a dirty old man stained with experience who cast a dispassionate eye on human nature. The Future of an Illusion. Civilization and its Discontents. It doesn't matter so much to me whether this or that Freudian hypothesis was/is correct. The approach, style, and subject matter were already worth the price of admission. I read his last book first, the one he never finished, the one that summed it all up, The Outline.

Thank you! Amatya Sen is a new name for me. I've been curious about Cassirer (I like Gadamer, and they are connected rightly or wrong in my mind.) I'm just recently really looking into and appreciating Peirce. Couldn't get into Merleau-Ponty when I tried, but perhaps the moment was wrong. I do like Epicurus, and in general Lange's history (which really celebrates him) impressed me. (I could only get the first volume, so I guess he's barely in print.) I stop there, even if some of the other names tempt me to say more.

I like that you mention the order of your exposures/studies, because that seems important here. For you, Heidegger wasn't offering anything fresh. I read and thought about Wittgenstein first, so I largely understood him as being systematic and explicit where Witt was elusive and aphoristic. I'd also read many criticisms of his work, so I went to the wizard well warned. I wasn't completely numb to the dark charisma of the ethical stuff, but I could never quite make sense of it, and I'm not sure that Heidegger could either. I like Van Buren's dissertation on his early stuff.

Anyway, I think our ontological stances are similar, and I appreciate you taking the time to pass on some experience.

Interesting. Can you expand on this a little? — Tom Storm

Sure. For context, I went to school as an older student than most, not because I was a dunce but rather because I was an alienated autodidact, and I was reading and agreeing with stuff like this.

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge of accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant — as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say "set aside" rather than "argue against" because their attitude toward the traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth century philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They do not devote themselves to discovering false propositions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors (though they occasionally do that too). Rather, they glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment. To assert the possibility of a post-Kantian culture, one in which there is no all-encompassing discipline which legitimizes or grounds the others, is not necessarily to argue against any particular Kantian doctrine, any more than to glimpse the possibility of a culture in which religion either did not exist, or had no connection with science or politics, was necessarily to argue against Aquinas's claim that God's existence can be proved by natural reason. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey have brought us into a period of "revolutionary" philosophy (in the sense of Kuhn's "revolutionary" science) by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate. — link

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/rorty/

In other words, philosophy was dead (but long live philosophy!)

But there's also what I discovered in books as an autodidact, that Russell hated Hegel and Nietzsche, and gave them crude and bogus entries in his History of Western Philosophy. That's the prototype. People take this stuff personally. It's basically religion for atheists (though there are a few theists in the game.) Or the exciting stuff is. For instance, I think Schopenhauer's great. That says as much about me as it does about Schopenhauer. I had a prof who disliked thinker X, the author of the first quote, while I thought thinker X was great. Is it a coincidence that thinker X was a critic of my prof's approach? It was in that class that I learned that the present king of France is bald. But I didn't think much of my prof. He was no dummy, but at the same time he was just another guy who had read some books and formed some opinions about them. Another anecdote: I looked up the work of a teacher whose class I considered taking. Not bad, but not at all beyond the level of the good posts I see by others on this forum, and very much expressing a personality. There are technical realms (like medical ethics or the philosophy of QM) that I've never looked into, so I can't speak about them, and those didn't tempt me in terms of majors. I wanted to talk about Wittgenstein & Hegel & Nietzsche & maybe even Freud and Jung, which seems pretty close to wanting to talk about Jane Austen or Homer. It's hard to get paid for such pleasures. That too was a factor. I had a knack for technical thinking, and a mixture of prudence and vanity led me that way instead. (In another life, I can imagine getting into the right school with the right profs and really enjoying that path, however ultimately personal the whole game is. )

On my atheism point:

A 2014 survey by David Chalmers and David Bourget on nearly 1,000 professional philosophers from 99 leading departments of philosophy shows that 72.8% considered themselves as atheists, 14.6% considered themselves as theist, and 12.6% as something else. — link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#:~:text=A%202014%20survey%20by%20David,and%2012.6%25%20as%20something%20else.

I'm an atheist myself, so I'm not complaining about that. I'm just speculating that the philosophy I like tends to be so personal and entwined with heroic self-image partially because of that.
And you can just imagine how embattled theists must feel.

Of course, B, persons (I like 'people' in this context, cuz that's how persons actually talk.) As you seem to be inching toward the recognition that persons can collectively recommend and prohibit, it's a small step to zoom-out and see the most basic norms existing independent of institutions (or a small step to arguing for polytheism.) Of course I'm not identifying norms with the prescriptions/proscriptions of institutions, though obviously institutions tend to express norms. That doesn't mean people can't criticize any particular institution. As I said, we live in a highly complex & pluralistic society. Read WaPo for 15 minutes and it's all there, the world in its ugly glory. If you want to analyze all this in terms of desires and fears, that seems reasonable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/

OC2 is relativism. Relativism is the view that truth and knowledge are not absolute or invariable, but dependent upon viewpoint, circumstances or historical conditions. What is true for me might not be true for you; what counts as knowledge from one viewpoint might not do so from another; what is true at one time is false at another. Paragraph 97 arguably shows that the relativism implicit in this aspect of OC is of a classic or standard type. Its presence in OC is entirely consistent with its presence elsewhere in the later writings: one remembers the lions and Chinese of PI. What was left open in those earlier relativistic remarks was the degree of strength of the relativism to which Wittgenstein was committed. OC2 constitutes a claim that the framework within which claims to knowledge and challenges of doubt equally make sense is such that its change can reverse what counted as either. That is classically strong relativism. — AC

AC is responding to passages like

65. When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology ...

97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift.

99. And the bank of the river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited.

166. The difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing.

256. On the other hand a language-game does change with time.

336. But what men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters. — W

I think he exaggerates the tension. I read W as making general points about language and belief that he expects to remain true. Just because some of what's considered reasonable alters doesn't mean that there's no relatively fixed point or relatively neutral matrix (or just a fixed point if you'll allow vague theses.) Probably all philosophy tries to conquer time, so the issue is not whether it finds or declares something fixed but how much it finds or declares fixed. For instance, Braver reads (the later) Heidegger as modifying Hegelianism. There's still something like the Zeitgeist (an understanding of being, perhaps like a form of life), but now it wanders aimlessly. So what Hegel held fixed (the destination of historical drift), Heidegger and seemingly Wittgenstein jettisons.

In other words, earnest 'relativism' tends to be partial. You get called a 'relativist' if you don't hold things fixed that the other guy does.

I wanted to find a 'salute' emoji, but no luck. I'd be glad to hear any thoughts you have on that quote. It's rich!

.

Only a mind can prescribe or value anything. If you think otherwise, provide an example of something that is not itself a mind and that issues a prescription. — Bartricks

I think you are taking your language too much granted. I think you mean

transitive verb

1a: to lay down as a guide, direction, or rule of action : ORDAIN
b: to specify with authority — link

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prescribe

Here's the WHO 'laying down as a guide, direction, or rule of action' some COVID precautions.

What to do to keep yourself and others safe from COVID-19
Maintain at least a 1-metre distance between yourself and others to reduce your risk of infection when they cough, sneeze or speak. Maintain an even greater distance between yourself and others when indoors. The further away, the better.
Make wearing a mask a normal part of being around other people. The appropriate use, storage and cleaning or disposal are essential to make masks as effective as possible.
Here are the basics of how to wear a mask:

Clean your hands before you put your mask on, as well as before and after you take it off, and after you touch it at any time.
Make sure it covers both your nose, mouth and chin.
When you take off a mask, store it in a clean plastic bag, and every day either wash it if it’s a fabric mask, or dispose of a medical mask in a trash bin.
Don’t use masks with valves. — WHO

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public

I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing this is the distillation of a medical consensus. Presumably you've also heard of peer review. If you brush your teeth, and I expect that you do, perhaps you can tell me which particular mind prescribed that. Who in particular told you not to pick pockets? If you can think of someone, then why should they have authority over me? But of course 'everyone knows' that one brushes one's teeth and one does not pick pockets. To not know is to be a child or a problematic adult.

I don't see anything uncommon in collective entities (organizations, institutions) recommending and forbidding various activities. It seems highly unlikely indeed that we can typically credit such recommendations to a single employee/agent. Or just consider democracy. What I'm saying is so trivial that I'm boring myself too here, and not just you.

OC1 thus states that scepticism gets no purchase because our beliefs inhere in a system (the first component) which rests upon foundations (the second component), which latter non-negotiably constitute the conditions upon which our beliefs have content — AC

What's this gap between the system and the foundations? IMV, it's more like the system is the foundation of inherited, shared practices (in this context the ways we use words, the 'way things are done around here.' )

But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system ... The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

I have a world picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting (WR252).

341. The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges upon which those turn. — W

I think it's unfortunate that W talks of propositions exempt from doubt. Knowing what cheese is (how to use the word 'cheese') doesn't seem to be constituted by some proposition. I use the example again of 'energy' in a doubt about physics. 'What if energy isn't conserved?' The whole 'world' of physics is tangled up with this doubt (meaning holism., Quine, etc.) I like the pragmatists' vision of belief as something like a ready reaction. Doubt paralyzes, while the absence of doubt proceeds more or less smoothly. It seems to me more a matter of 'knowing one's way around' (annoyingly fuzzy.)

OC1 thus states that scepticism gets no purchase because our beliefs inhere in a system (the first component) which rests upon foundations (the second component), which latter non-negotiably constitute the conditions upon which our beliefs have content and which therefore constitute the conditions even for doubting, which, therefore again, cannot take the foundations for their target. The justification for the foundations is thus effected by a "transcendental argument" : restated, it is that foundational beliefs (expressed by what Wittgenstein calls, in senses of 'logical' and 'grammatical' special to OC, logical or grammatical propositions; see e.g. 51, 56-8) are what make the system possible, and it is within the system that claims to knowledge and challenges of doubt are alone intelligible. A clever encapsulation of the transcendental argument is given at 248: 'I have arrived at the rock-bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.' — AC

I don't think W suggests (and I don't personally think) that the 'foundation' is piecewise impervious to doubt. We can question any little piece of the system that we can manage to become aware of. I think @frank was defending this aspect of skepticism, and I agree. Maybe W's view (and a more reasonable view) is something more like Neurath's raft. We can analyze any particular word, suggest new ways of using them, but we can't do this with all words at the same time. Because we depend on living, current conventions to be understood (even by ourselves.) The radical or complete skeptic is a babbling dada poet.

I can relate to annoying certain instructors with philosophical questions. I didn't major in philosophy, probably because (then as now) I saw it largely in terms of expression of personality. There's something bogus about the academic power dynamic (prof and student, I mean, but maybe not only that), and we both know that certain thinkers are allergic to certain other thinkers. Then, as Hegel writes somewhere, everyone thinks they can do philosophy, that it's nothing, so it's also dicey in that sense. Something technical, however, will get even your philosophical ramblings taken more seriously.

I think I agree. It's as if we know how to say that we know that something is such-and-such. I totally agree that facility with 'know' is part of a larger facility, the big language game. I also agree that talking about hands does something like imply the existence of hands. I would add, however, that this is like making definitions, a poetic act, an expression of skill. As individuals we can abstract rules from the conversations we observe. But perhaps you'll agree that it's not strictly metaphysical. It's more empirical. 'It doesn't make sense to talk about hands if there are no hands.' That's of the form of 'one doesn't do such things' or 'that doesn't fly around here.'

That's cool, a lot of writers on this forum don't like Hegel. — Gregory

I think this is the tender-minded thing. There's also the tedious anglo-versus-continental thing. I got around to Hegel because so many thinkers I already liked make positive references toward him, but that's my general method for finding stuff.

Anyway, here's one of my favorite Hegel quotes.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.

Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did in fact consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity.
— Hegel

Lots of what I also find in Wittgenstein & Heidegger in that.

But if knowing something presumes believing it to be true, how could knowledge be "definitionally something more than... psychological states"? Knowing is a psychological state. — Banno

I'd look at 'knowing' in terms of the highly complicated role it (the word) plays socially. Intuitively, there's a private 'sensation' of being sure, but I think we both agree that this beetle can't be getting things done. I lean more toward something like: we learn the use the word 'know' appropriately in the same way we learn to drive. It's a skill, just like making plausible definitions which nevertheless always fail to dominate unpredictable re-contextualizations of a word. Counterintuitively, knowing what knowing is may be far more like knowing how to drive than knowing how to offer a definition. What's nice about the driving metaphor is that it stresses how interactive and jazz-like language is. No one person governs meaning. It's an emergent phenomenon.

I think the big version of the Logic will be like the smaller version (which overall I liked, without grasping all of it or needing to.)

I don't dispute something like archetypes or biological inheritance, but I had something far more ordinary in mind. I'm talking about us both speaking English, both living in a world where there is the internet, there are automobiles, there are dishes to be washed. Then there's these thinkers we can talk about, which exist publicly. Finally, there are unwritten and perhaps unwritable norms for having a conversation about such things, to which we mostly automatically conform.

Pinkard's book is about the The Phenomenology of Spirit.

they were too busy pulling habits out of rats. — Wayfarer

:clap:
Love that joke!

I like to think that we foolosophers can sometimes manage to be ontological and not just ontic (which is maybe what you meant?). The 'sociality of reason' is the theme and the title of a good book about Hegel. The intro is especially impressive, and it's nice that Pinkard tries to put the gist of Hegel in more modern terminology.

What 'the sociality of reason' means to me is something like: we don't think (primarily) as individuals. Obviously we have individual brains, but the point is the shared cultural software that runs on these brains. For instance, I'm using my individual hardware to expound on a thought which is not my own so that another brain/person can 'be there with me' 'in' or 'with' the thought. Another way to look at it: rationality and science imply a community. To tell the truth, to see through illusion, etc., implies a community in a world, some gap between the finite (individual, frail) mind and 'what really is.' I think this 'what really is' cashes out in terms of something like what an ideal community would eventually decide. (Or, in more banal terms, what 'those in the know' have already agreed on.) This makes more sense if one thinks of the word as 'all that is the case' (in terms of facts in human language.) While we are all quite sure of some kind of ineffable direct experience, this stuff has no epistemological weight, precisely because it is 'unmediated' and a private show for the lonely humunculus in the skull (or so runs the questionable tale.) What makes more controversial propositions true or at least plausible is their relationship to less controversial propositions. This seems like a digression, but it gets us out of the useless habit of seeking non-verbal truth-makers that can't actually function in a rational discussion.

I'll stop there & see what if anything seems worth elaborating on.

Also, I like 'Dasein is metaphysics.' It's a nice overstatement to get a point across the gulf. I read it as 'we are language' (at least our most particularly human aspect is something like our bravest and highest thoughts and their associated passions.)

Here is the story of the Japanese philosopher of "nothing" during the world war eras: — Gregory

I looked into Nishida back when I was making sense of Stirner.

Starting with An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida’s early work calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it. — link

This intro is nice approximation of what I make of Hegel, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and others (not claiming to have mastered any of them or even that any of them is masterable or has some exact, final meaning ---to the contrary). These thinkers vary in important ways, but all of them saw through the limitations of a crude ego-centered empiricism. (The Crisis-era Husserl could also be included.) What puts people off a connection between Wittgenstein and Hegel is the rational fear of cryptotheism. I say that because religion also treats this theme, and not always in sophisticated ways. As I read Hegel, he saw that religion had an element that enlightenment lacked, which is a recognition of 'the sociality of reason.' Logic is not some dry, dead neutral thing (excluding mathematical logic.) There's a norm involved, a love directed at an ideal community. (You know, gross hippy stuff.)

We don't need to reject these lines of thought merely because Japan joined Hitler in declaring war on the world, right? — Gregory

Again, I really don't think that's the issue here. Of course some people can't get over the political sins of thinkers, but I don't think folks are really so squeamish. I suggest thinking in terms of the tough-minded versus the tender-minded approach. As I see it, Wittgenstein used a tough-minded approach to gesture vaguely toward conclusions more often found among the tender-minded. The tough-minded are anti-systematic, always worried about oversimplifying things, with a pessimistic tendency connected to their openness to facts. The tender-minded 'must' fit things into a usually-optimistic system.

I'd like to hear more about that.

This quote seems relevant.

87. Suppose I give this explanation: "I take 'Moses' to mean the man, if there was such a man, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, whatever he was called then and whatever he may or may not have done besides."—But similar doubts to those about "Moses" are possible about the words of this explanation (what are you calling "Egypt", whom the "Israelites" etc.?). Nor would these questions come to an end when we got down to words like "red", "dark", "sweet".—"But then how does an explanation help me to understand, if after all it is not the final one? In that case the explanation is never completed; so I still don't understand what he means, and never shall!"—As though an explanation as it were hung in the air unless supported by another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or to avert a misunderstanding——one, that is, that would occur but for the explanation; not every one that I can imagine. It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is only possible if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts.

The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose. — PI

Here's another one that really drags the philosophical fantasy into the light.

But now it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light. When this is done the expression is completely clarified and our problem solved. It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation. 92.. This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought.—For if we too in these investigations are trying to understand the essence of language—its function, its structure,—yet this is not what those questions have in view. For they see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out. 'The essence is hidden from us*: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: "What is language?", "What is a proposition?" And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience. — PI

The fantasy seems to be some place outside of language, not be subject to its tricks and metamorphoses (to escape time and ambiguity.) To be fair, I myself am projecting some vague theory of language on W (hopefully resistant to requiring revision in the light of future experience & minimizing unpleasant surprise), but I think this can be done a little less recklessly through its vagueness. Any kind of terminology or system will become stale. Maybe that's why Witt liked remarks. Less pompous, more tentative and flexible, which fits such a complex and elusive prey.

There's a gnostic myth that in heaven all questions are answered. It's our origin and our ultimate destination. — frank

Nice! From what I remember, Peirce is aware that this community is a kind of heavenly fiction.

He makes the important point that science (well, inquiry in general) is always future-oriented. We want hypotheses that will be true for ourselves and others (even if we also think that they were true and can use them retrospectively.). To me this connects to the OP. The meanings of words are not fixed. What matters most is how they can or will be used, which is in ways we can't predict. So we just do our best to keep up with the jazz, never getting our hands on the score.

Nothingness nihilates by its presence. The existence of nothingness was discovered by Heidegger when he philosophized his way through anxiety. That is why some find his writings comforting. Discourse on Thinking is particularly good, and I think admitting that nothing is real yet remains nothing is an important step along the philosophical path — Gregory

For me the issue is not that Heidegger has nothing in mind when he says the nothing nothings. I do expect him to go somewhere with this strange rhetorical device. The issue is how such rhetoric comes across and the type of listener it seems to be aimed at (gaped-mouthed followers sitting at his knee.)

Fair enough. And I think one can get "Heidegger's" insights elsewhere. It's the same with Jung. To me it's more about the 'chemical reaction' of a reader and a book. As we get older and less unwise, we can look back and see the absurdities and blindspots of thinkers who nevertheless helped us become a little less foolish. With Heidegger, it's easy to speculate that he never recovered from the nazi disaster, & that he reinvented himself as a kind of shepherd guru. I find even B&T somewhat tiresome and pompous.

You've expressed it much better than I could. Thank you. — Luke

Thanks! I had a feeling we were on the same page.

But even if it was and could issue a norm, it demonstrably wouldn't be a moral norm as it itself would be subject to moral assessment. — Bartricks

There's nothing strange (or at least nothing out of the ordinary) about a community subjecting current norms to assessment. We have lots of norms, more or less vague, and we often discover tensions between them (freedom versus security, etc.) Even as individuals we revise our guiding principles, in terms of still other guiding principles.

Plus, as well as being demonstrably false, you're not even engaging with the apparent demonstration that moral norms and values are those of God. Again — Bartricks

I've sketched for you some of the history of that idea, at least of relatively rational versions of it.

Which of those premises are you denying? — Bartricks

Both 3 and 4.

'A mind' implies a single, personal source (not warranted.)

Moral norms are my (our) prescriptions and proscriptions. Tell the truth. Don't steal. Etc. Or do you experience such things as imposed by some alien force? Obviously some norms are less established and more controversial than others. We are highly complex animals, endlessly innovating, discussing, adjusting, etc. Nevertheless, it's the deepest norms that make conversation about the more controversial norms possible in the first place (for instance, the convention of language, but also of not punching someone the moment you don't understand them or agree with them.)

Like a mental placeholder? — frank

Yes, or a point-at-infinity. For Peirce, inquity is about settling beliefs. What's true for this ideal, future community is just reality itself (because there's no meaningful/practical difference.)

Grayling cites examples of very contingent - mistaken - propositions which appear to have been considered "hinge". But so far as they are hinge propositions, they are not subject to investigation. — Banno

One way of looking at things: hinge propositions are context dependent. In a given inquiry, there's a framework taken for granted in which the explicit inquiry makes sense. If I ask whether energy is really conserved, then a vast, vague background is taken for granted, the meaning of 'energy' for instance, but this includes a vague history and methodology of physics. But it's not that an explicit set of propositions is taken granted. It's fuzzier than that.

To a rube like me, anyone (and their ilk) who proclaims without satire or ribaldry that "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself noths) fundamentally is a buffoonish purveyor of metaphysical nonsense (Witty & Freddy), or pestulant charlatan (i.e. "a sophist" against whom Plato prophylactically opposes philosophy). :mask: — 180 Proof

I agree. Or it's buffoonish to solemnly and pompously drop phrases like 'the nothing itself noths.' Nevertheless, Heidegger could and did do much better at times. One my favorites (in just 75 pages) is https://ia802907.us.archive.org/30/items/heideggermartinontologythehermeneuticsoffacticity_202003/Heidegger%2C%20Martin%20-%20Ontology%2C%20The%20hermeneutics%20of%20facticity.pdf

The first part of OC1is interesting because I agree with it, with respect to the set of components attributed to Wittgenstein in support of it, “...The view I shall call OC1 and which constitutes a version of a foundationalist refutation of scepticism, and therefore a contribution to the theory of knowledge...” — Mww

FWIW, I think refuting the skeptic is just a pretext. The radical skeptic is not a serious person. I don't think refuting radical skepticism is experienced as an important task. It's as if Grayling is trying to pull Wittgenstein back into the very game that W is busy demystifying.

It's better perhaps to think of Wittgenstein as doing a kind of phenomenology, which is to say call our attention to what would be obvious if it wasn't so terribly taken for granted. A certain kind of philosophy is trapped in a picture. This picture is mistakenly experienced as necessary (as the way of things) rather than as contingent (the conversation happened to lead us to taking these things for granted.) Both the skeptic and the earnest refuter of the skeptic are trapped in this picture together. Both make their cases in terms of this 'picture.'

When a person lets go of a delusion, is it just the wrong beliefs that change? Or does everything change because all beliefs hang together?

Sometimes when I learn something new, it seems like my whole worldview is altered, so maybe it's the latter.

Societies can also become deluded. — frank

Good point! And we might say that one society is deluded from the perspective of another. I don't 100% buy Peirce's vision of inquiry, but there's some value in it. The truth is something like the ideal end of inquiry, what a future community will finally settle on.

If I start to doubt that these words mean what I think they mean, what can I say about that? — unenlightened

Exactly, and while you are expressing doubts about those previous meanings, you nevertheless enact confidence in the intelligibly of this current expression of doubt.

OC1: Our beliefs are to be found only within language games, each of which is formed by taking some beliefs as non-negotiable. — Banno

FWIW (responding to Grayling), I think the most potent beliefs aren't explicit at all. I use language with the confidence of a squirrel leaping from treelimb to treelimb. I trust the 'meaning' of my statements. Some thinkers may imagine a set of explicit beliefs, only some of which are conscious at any time, but this doesn't sound right to me. You can also find a good critique of this in Being-in-the-world (Hubert Dreyfus). IMV, it's wrong to think in terms of some hierarchy of beliefs, some of which are on a lower, more foundational level. Even if this view is plausible and gets something right, Wittgenstein explicitly stresses groundlessness. Perhaps it's better to think of a centerless system of shared practices, where the linguistic practices are not sharply distinct from non-linguistic practices.

Moral norms and values are not ours: I can't make an act right just by issuing a prescription to do it. Nor can you. Nor can any of us. Same with values. — Bartricks

No single one of us can make a norm, but the community as a whole can and does. Less obviously, no single one of us can even conform to a norm. A norm is only a norm if it's communal. In same way, no single person can be rational. The concept rational drags behind it some rough notion of a community engaged in inquiry (again, it's a norm for assertions.)

I don't mind just leaving you alone on this topic, if that's what you prefer.

This is, no doubt, derivative of Schopenhauer's [ 'gnostic' unconsciousness-noumenon-will ] of which 'individuals' are merely masks/maya. — 180 Proof

That sounds right, and then he got it from somewhere, which is support for the idea itself, I guess.

In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death. — Sch