Thank you for this fresh meat. Good to know.

I think the historicist or determinist charge is probably fair, but is he not more that this too?

In The Genealogy of Morals, one set of conditions binds the alternatives to it. Changes happen but they are also new expressions of what happened before. Finding this ground is not like consulting a map before taking a trip. — Valentinus

I'll look for an accessible article on Nietzsche's epistemology. Everyone seems to describe him as a perspectivist.

I think the historicist or determinist charge is probably fair, but is he not more that this too? — Tom Storm

Maybe the charge is fair. But in what court of consideration will the matter be judged?

Being accused of being both an historicist and a determinist at the same time is odd. Strauss only concerns himself with charging N of being the former. The idea of Eternal Recurrence is a kind of determinism. But it is aimed specifically against the world and us in it being seen as parts of an overall plan. He calls it a doctrine. A god to up put a fight against other gods. It is not presented the way the Apollonian and Dionysian are presented as grounds for our existence.

I'll look for an accessible article on Nietzsche's epistemology. Everyone seems to describe him as a perspectivist. — Tom Storm

There is a large disagreement about what being a perspectivist entails. There are some who dismiss N for using this language because they assume that he doesn't accept that being in different places to see things from different points of view requires accepting an "objectivity" that he is said to deny. It seems more simple to me to read the text to mean he did embrace the reality of the different places.

Your results will vary.

"Who is that person behind the curtain?" - Dorothy — Valentinus

:up:

I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters—that dignified philosophic abstinence to which[Pg 196] a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the factum brutum, that fatalism in "petits faits" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation)—all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,—make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject—he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"—has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself—the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable[Pg 197] females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it—and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, our world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief—even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine
....
[A]rt, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic corruption that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for[Pg 200] instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life).
...
Has, perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his... irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane—he rolls faster and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"—Well! this would be the straight way—to the old ideal?—All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as unnatural—by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason—nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's contempt of himself, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to counteract the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's victory over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query as God? — Nietzsche

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52319/52319-h/52319-h.htm

I quote this not to agree or disagree with all of it but because it's stimulating.

Timely quote.

Nice and thanks. I just can't read an entire book in this tone. The observations are rich but for me the prose is so swollen, passive aggressive and rhetorically portentous, I just can't do it.

Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. — Nietzsche

Endless possibilities here. "Plato a douchebag, Homer a genius: discuss". I get the feeling that the people who like FN already agree with him.

...thinkers like Leo Strauss who charge Nietzsche with being an "historicist" rather than someone who recognizes the "discovery of nature." — Valentinus

Nietzsche had an enormous influence on Strauss. If you are interested see the transcripts of his lectures on Nietzsche:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo26955789.html

Here is the abstract from Laurence Lampert's Leo Strauss and Nietzsche:


The influential political philosopher Leo Strauss has been credited by conservatives with the recovery of the great tradition of political philosophy stretching back to Plato. Among Strauss's most enduring legacies is a strongly negative assessment of Nietzsche as the modern philosopher most at odds with that tradition and most responsible for the sins of twentieth-century culture--relativism, godlessness, nihilism, and the breakdown of family values. In fact, this apparent denunciation has become so closely associated with Strauss that it is often seen as the very core of his thought. In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, the eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert offers a controversial new assessment of the Strauss-Nietzsche connection. Lampert undertakes a searching examination of the key Straussian essay, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil." He shows that this essay, written toward the end of Strauss's life and placed at the center of his final work, reveals an affinity for and debt to Nietzsche greater than Strauss's followers allow. Lampert argues that the essay comprises the most important interpretation of Nietzsche ever published, one that clarifies Nietzsche's conception of nature and of human spiritual history and demonstrates the logical relationship between the essential themes in Nietzsche's thought--the will to power and the eternal return.

Edit: It was Nietzsche who taught Strauss how to read and write between the lines.

The dialectic opposing this approach is voiced by thinkers like Leo Strauss who charge Nietzsche with being an "historicist" rather than someone who recognizes the "discovery of nature." — Valentinus

Is Strauss championing empiricism ( the discovery of nature) over what he is reading as a subjectivism in Nietzsche?I think the causative dynamic of will to power would be a genealogical- psychoanalytic method of historical analysis, a differential of forces.

Nice and thanks. I just can't read an entire book in this tone. The observations are rich but for me the prose is so swollen, passive aggressive and rhetorically portentous, I just can't do it. — Tom Storm

I don't like the tone either, though I liked it more when I was in my 20s (what a surprise!). I tolerate the tone for the richness of thought. I speculate that maybe his mad passion (cause of the tone) was also cause of the richness. This stuff burned in him.

Endless possibilities here. "Plato a douchebag, Homer a genius: discuss". I get the feeling that the people who like FN already agree with him. — Tom Storm

I think you are probably right about 'younger' thinkers, but personally I'd be slow to generalize here. Maybe Nietzsche is battling his inner Plato. They are both something like supreme prose poets. Thinkers I trust have said that they are both masters of prose in their respective languages, and even in translation both of their gifts are clear and perhaps similar. Both are also dialectical, crammed with personalities (plural.)

You posted a quote earlier that inspired me to get that book back out. Thanks!

Is Strauss championing empiricism ( the discovery of nature) to what he is reading as a subjectivism in Nietzsche?I — Joshs

Strauss locates the "discovery of nature" as an accomplishment of Aristotle and the like. The issue of the "subject" is whether human nature exists or some other realm of causes is involved. Strauss seems to be avoiding the role of empiricists and meta-physicians who used "history" before Nietzsche did.

I get the feeling that the people who like FN already agree with him. — Tom Storm

I should make clear that I don't agree with him. But he is the one who said that bothering to oppose a point of view is a recognition of it. Maybe even an argument for it. It comes with the territory.

But he is the one who said that bothering to oppose a point of view is a recognition of it. — Valentinus

:point:

BTW, the theme of recognition is also great...the struggle to be recognized, the will-to-recognition...

I should make clear that I don't agree with him. But he is the one who said that bothering to oppose a point of view is a recognition of it. Maybe even an argument for it. It comes with the territory. — Valentinus

Sounds like an argument borrowed from the Tao Te Ching. I'm disappointed to learn that Nietzsche is a metaphysician after all. :wink:

I'm disappointed to learn that Nietzsche is a metaphysician after all. — Tom Storm

What's funny is the repetition of the 'getting out of the cave' motif. Eventually, the 'cave' is just the cave motif itself, so one tries to get out of trying to get out the cave, or out of the cave-like illusion that there's a cave to get out of. It's hard to imagine a way out of this structure. Anyone with a story to tell is going to have something like a good guy and a bad guy and something like a journey from a bad place to a good place. Even the 'anti-philosophical' Wittgenstein has his bottle and flies.

Nice! :cheer:

Danke!

BTW, found another quote that inteprets Nietzsche without the annoying tone.

As early as 1873, Nietzsche described metaphor as the originary process of what the intellect presents as "truth." "The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops its chief power in dissimulation." "A nerve-stimulus, first transcribed [iibertragen] into an image [Bild] ! First metaphor! The image again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he (the creator of language] leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one." In its simplest outline, Nietzsche's definition of metaphor seems to be the establishing of an identity between dissimilar things. Nietzsche's phrase is "Gleich machen" ( make equal ), calling to mind the German word "Gleichnis"-image, simile, similitude, comparison, allegory, parable-an unmistakable pointer to figurative practice in general. "Every idea originates through equating the unequal." "What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; ... truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, ... coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." I hold on here to the notions of a process of figuration and a process of forgetfulness. In this early text, Nietzsche describes the figurative drive as "that impulse towards the formation of metaphors, that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment-for thereby we should reason away man himself . . ..Later he will give this drive the name "will to power." Our so-called will to truth is a will to power because "the so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer." Nietzsche's sense of the inevitable forcing of the issue, of exercising power, comes through in his italics: " 'Thinking' in primitive conditions (preorganic) is the crystallization of forms . . .. In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemas, ... making equal what is new." The human being has nothing more to go on than a collection of nerve stimuli. And, because he or she must be secure in the knowledge of, and therefore power over, the "world" (inside or outside), the nerve stimuli are explained and described through the categories of figuration that masquerade as the categories of "truth." These explanations and descriptions are "interpretations" and reflect a human inability to tolerate undescribed chaos-"that the collective character [Gesamtcharakter] of the world ... is in all eternity chaos-in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [human weaknesses-Menschlichkeiten] ."As Nietzsche suggests, this need for power through anthropomorphic defining compels humanity to create an unending proliferation of interpretations whose only "origin," that shudder in the nerve strings, being a direct sign of nothing, leads to no primary signified. As Derrida writes, Nietzsche provides an "entire thematics of active interpretations, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself." — link

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

I like the idea that 'analogy is the core of cognition,' that the 'metaphysical' animal is a metaphorical animal. Poets all, even when we'd rather not be.


This quote is from the intro. In general I like this book, though Derrida can be exhausting to read.

Here's one more.

Now if the "subject" is thus put in question, it is clear that the philosopher creating his system must distrust himself as none other. And indeed Nietzsche articulates this problem often. He couches his boldest insights in the form of questions that we cannot dismiss as a rhetorical ploy. Writing on "The Uses and Abuses of History" as early as 1874, he warns us: "And this present treatise, as I will not attempt to deny, shows the modern note of a weak personality in the intemperateness of its criticism, the unripeness of its humanity, in the too frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from arrogance to scepticism." The spirit of self-diagnosis is strong in every Nietzschean text. "Every society has the tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures-at least in imagination­ ... Among immoralists it is the moralist: Plato, for example, becomes a caricature in my hands." Quite in passing, he places a warning frame around all his philosophizing: "One seeks a picture of the world in that philosophy in which we feel freest; i.e., in which our most powerful drive feels free to function. This will also be the case with me!" In a passage in The Gay Science, he spells out his version of the particular problem that leads Heidegger and Derrida to writing under erasure : How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense, " does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the otherhand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence [ein auslegendes Dasein]-that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspective forms [perspektivische Form]" and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.
— link

@Joshs
(Still not being notified of certain posts - I only found this one by chance)

What differentiates naturalism is its presupposition that the person holding a meaning can define it as ‘information’, which presumes that the person holding it “ does. to have much impact on it “. — Joshs

It's not just a presumption though is it? It works. I presume that in seeing a 'tree' and studying it, I'm not having much impact on the social construction 'tree', but I'd be absolutely right about that, the social construction changes very slowly in response to thousands of small changes and even then the very basics (form, colour, physical relation) barely change at all over millennia. I get that it's an assumption, but not one is made lightly, nor without good cause.

This is clearly not the case with phenomenology (as colloquially defined - I note your different technical specification). Here we have descriptions of 'experience' change with the wind, from minute-to-minute sometimes, and notoriously well affected by mood, cultural milieu, and recent history.

I do have a good deal of sympathy for the reduction of the binary you describe. I think metaphysically you're right. But pragmatically, there's such a wide gulf in the degree to which we expect the subject to 'form' the object between, say, physics and religious experience, that if we were to be more careful about our language we'd be doing little more than changing the names. A peppercorn royalty paid to to Husserl but otherwise business as usual.

As far as ‘ anchor of fit to world, surprisingly , a reciprocal anchor of fit extending from subject tot world and world to subject can actually be a more pragmatically useful sort of anchor of fit than the representational realist version. — Joshs

I'd like to hear about some examples of this.

If I send you a box of Oreos, will you read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception? If after reading it you still feel the same about phenomenology at least you’ll have a better sense of what’s being compared here — Joshs

I don't know what Oreos really are (some kind of biscuit, I think), but I will add it to the reading list.

Nietzsche on human nature and history:

Nietzsche's rejection of human nature is the rejection of an essential nature, a teleology, an actualization of the human form or kind.

In The Uses and Abuses of History Nietzsche talks about first and second natures. Our first nature is our "inherited customary nature". Eventually this is rejected. In its place

"We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies."

This cycle repeats itself, every

"...first nature was at one time or another once a second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature."

It is for this reason Nietzsche says:

"This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential."

"With the phrase “the unhistorical” I designate the art and the power of being able to forget and to enclose oneself in a horizon with borders; “superhistorical” I call the powers which divert the gaze from what is developing back to what gives existence an eternal and unchanging character, to art and
religion. Science (for it is science which would talk about poisons) sees in that force, in these powers opposing forces, for it maintains that only the observation of things is true and right, the scientific way of considering things, which everywhere sees what has come into being as something historical and
never as something eternally living. Science lives in an inner contradiction against the eternalizing powers of art and religion just as much as it hates forgetfulness, the death of knowledge, when it seeks to remove all limitations of horizons and to hurl human beings into an infinite sea without frontiers, a sea of light waves of acknowledged becoming."

@Tom Storm

All of this sheds light on the question of the death of God.

Those essays sound interesting. I will check them out.

In his book, Natural Right and History, Strauss does a poor job of reading between the lines of Nietzsche. For instance:

"Physical" power as distinguished from the purposes for which it is used is morally neutral and therefore more amenable to mathematical strictures than is its use: power can be measured. This explains why Nietzsche, who went much beyond Hobbes and declared the will to power in terms of "quanta of power." From the point of view of legal exactness, the study of the ends is replaced by the study of potestas. The rights of the sovereign, as distinguished from the exercise of these rights, permit of an exact definition any regard to any unforeseeable circumstances, and this kind of exactness is again inseparable from moral neutrality: right declares what is permitted as distinguished from what is honorable. — Leo Strauss, chapter 5

Casting Friedrich in the role of Thrasymachus is a popular activity.

In regards to viewing political power in the context of cultural formation, it is puzzling to me that for Strauss, Nietzsche is the only donkey available for such work when Hegel is nearby, quietly nibbling upon the grass.

I am away from my books for the next few weeks and so cannot read the passage in context or any footnotes to passages from Nietzsche.

I will note that potestas is a term from Roman law. "The rights of the sovereign", that is, the lawful power or authority of the sovereign. That power or right is independent of its just or moral application or use. It is in this way "inseparable from moral neutrality: right declares what is permitted as distinguished from what is honorable."

Thrasymachus claimed that justice is the advantage of the stronger. This is different that what Strauss is saying. He is pointing out that the question of potentas and more general power is separate from the question of justice or morality.

In the Will to Power Nietzsche says: “What determines your rank is the quanta of power you are; the rest is cowardice.” That is, a measured amount of power, which supports Strauss' contention that "power can be measured". Based on the quote from Natural Right and History it is not clear if the reference to Nietzsche mat this point is limited to the his use of the term 'quanta'.

The answer to why Nietzsche rather than Hegel might have something to do with the difference between their understanding of history.

You have fairly represented what Strauss is discussing in the passage. I question that "power" as conceived by Nietzsche is the equivalent of political might as conceived by Hobbes. What is deemed to be "honorable" is integral with the ordering of rank.

I don't think Strauss was suggesting an equivalence. One key difference is Nietzsche's focus on the individual as opposed to Hobbes' sovereign within whom all power lies. The importance of the individual for Nietzsche not a matter of rights but of the power to invent and create.

I think that's true to an extent. My comments here were aimed at non-scientists (in the main), so the critique would still apply. If one needs to be embedded in Buddhist practice to be able to judge what it can and cannot discover, then we should expect to hear about the limits of neuroscience only from actual neuroscientists. Alternatively, if layman can say what neuroscience can't account for it seems one-sided to say the least to claim that I'd have to practice religion to be able to comment on what it can't account for. — Isaac

Insofar as someone is just repeating the claims of experts from a particular field, and is straightforward about doing so, it's not clear what the problem is. Other than perhaps that they're trying to gain some benefit for themselves, by association. I guess that's a philosophical-ish equivalent of name-dropping at a party.

As such, the claim here, oft repeated, that science does not account for X in the way that religion/phenomenology/woo does, can only come from a Buddhist neuroscientist!

Re: underline part: Sure, and this is trivially true. Science does not account for, say, the meaning of life the way religion does, nor the way economics or art theory do. One needn't be an expert in either field in order to notice this.

It's not just the old science vs. woo, mind you. In many fields of human interest, but which are of vital importance to many people, science is quite useless or inapplicable. Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ...

Plato set the bar for knowledge very high. — Wayfarer

It is important to consider what it is knowledge of. Socrates acknowledged that the artisans had knowledge. The knew their materials and how to work with them to produce a product. If asked the could give an account (a logos) of what they were doing and why they did it the way they did.

It is when it comes to what Socrates calls the highest and most important things that we have no knowledge. Self-knowledge is important with regard to this. Socrates said that he knows that he not know. He seems to regard the universe as intelligible, but to either confirm or deny that would be to claim to know something he does not. know.

Since the main topic here is Nietzsche, I will mention that it was Nietzsche who was responsible for the renewed interest in Plato. This is in line with his rejection of Hegel's claims regarding history.

I don't think Strauss was suggesting an equivalence. — Fooloso4

The passage I quoted asserts the equivalence without qualification. If that was not his intention, he didn't make it clear in that place.
Maybe this discussion falls outside of the concern of the OP. I will mull until it comes up again.

Again, I have not looked at it in its larger context but from what you presented the topic is physical power, not its use. As such, power is morally neutral. Nietzsche comes up in the context of the measurement of power, a quanta of power. It is in the ability to measure power that Strauss says that Nietzsche went beyond Hobbes. The discussion then shifts away from Nietzsche and Hobbes to potestas. The right of the sovereign as distinct from the use of those powers is morally neutral.

In Leviathan Hobbes says:

"The Power of a Man, (to take it Universally,) is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good. And is either Originall, or Instrumentall."

His concern is with use of power. The amount of power for Hobbes is relative the the power of others. It is more or less, not a "quanta", that is, it does not have a specific measure.

Nietzsche's will to power extents to all of life not just man.

I see no equivalence, but maybe I am missing something either in the quoted passage or in the text.

this is trivially true. Science does not account for, say, the meaning of life the way religion does, nor the way economics or art theory do. — baker

I don't believe that's the case, so what justification do you have for saying it's 'trivially true'. I don't think it's even true, let alone trivially so. Are you sure you're not confusing 'addressing' with 'accounting for'?

That confusion is literally the entire point all of my posts here are making (clearly to no effect whatsoever). All I'm saying is...

That religion claims to account for the meaning of life is not an indication that it actually does account for the meaning of life. It tells us the subject matter of it's investigation, not the success of the outcome.

That science does not account for the meaning of life has no bearing whatsoever on whether non-scientific endeavours do account for the meaning of life. It tells us only what science doesn't do. It remains possible that all other endeavours don't do it either.

If non-scientists can claim that science does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices, then the non-religious can claim that religion does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices.

That religion being a body of knowing-how and science being a body of knowing-that, only makes any difference if religious claims are limited to what the 'how' is ("the correct way to conduct liturgy is..."), but they are not. They include the word 'truth' which is used in the normal context (wherein there's a truth-maker) about matters like the meaning of life.

Are you sure you're not confusing 'addressing' with 'accounting for'? — Isaac

Science, religion, economics, art theory, etc. -- they (can) all claim to account for the meaning of life, and not merely address it, indeed.

That religion claims to account for the meaning of life is not an indication that it actually does account for the meaning of life. It tells us the subject matter of it's investigation, not the success of the outcome.

(Leaving aside that threats of eternal damnation, or simply being burnt alive upside down in a public square have considerable persuasion power --)
I agree.

That science does not account for the meaning of life has no bearing whatsoever on whether non-scientific endeavours do account for the meaning of life. It tells us only what science doesn't do. It remains possible that all other endeavours don't do it either.

Agreed.

If non-scientists can claim that science does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices, then the non-religious can claim that religion does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices.

Yes, but the relations between those claimants are likely going to be rather tense.

One mustn't take religion so seriously, or at face value. Yes, reliigions appear to have enormous power and influence, and they can do horrible things -- but this is still no reason to take their claims at face value.

It's not just the old science vs. woo, mind you. In many fields of human interest, but which are of vital importance to many people, science is quite useless or inapplicable. Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ... — baker

:up:

I agree, and this reminds me of know-how or skill. Explicit principles (from 'folk-psychology' perhaps) can be helpful, but to some degree there's just doing it, like riding a bike, riding a horse. Vonnegut says you don't know what a good painting is till you've seen a million paintings. I love that. No theory. Pure experience. The doormat/asshole issue comes to mind. I think we trust keep error-correcting in subtle ways that we cannot hope to (fully) articulate. I can imagine self-help books accelerating the learning process without replacing it.

Vonnegut says you don't know what a good painting is till you've seen a million paintings. — j0e

Don't want to be a schmo but let's examine this. I can't help myself when I hear these sorts of statements, even though I am sympathetic to this kind of folky insight.

No one can see a million paintings. So I guess he means a lot. How many exactly do you have to see before this aesthetic sensibility emerges? Does it come as a revelation after 200,000 paintings or does it gradually emerge from 50,000? What does he mean by 'seeing'? How do you see a paining? Just by looking? What are you doing when you look? What attributes of good does he imagine we come to see/appreciate just through beholding a shit-ton of paintings? My own intuition is some people can look at a 'million paintings' and be none the wiser.

Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ... — baker

Just because we can formulate a question doesn't mean it is one. How to be happy in life, or choosing a worthwhile career and good relationships are likely unanswerable. Any resolution of these sorts of matters will be based on an individual's needs - and yes also talking to others, reflection, improvisation, whatever. Science is no more useful here than it is in telling you if you enjoyed reading a particular novel. In a similar vein, theorist and writer Stanley Fish has a polemic that in life philosophy doesn't matter. As you go about your business choosing a job or a partner or buying a house or selecting food off a menu, the questions of philosophy don't and can't enter into it.