Thank you for your response, I am really interested in the idea of outdoor practices. What is particularly interesting is the lack of a methodology for such activities in the field of academic philosophy. It seems that a true philosopher should reject all physical and practical aspects, and focus solely on rational reasoning. However, where better than in harmony with nature to experience one's own physicality and connection to the world and others?


Regarding your first part of the response, about Gaddafi and Putin, I believe these topics were discussed in another thread. Feel free to respond there, you would greatly add to the discussion. By the way, a little bit about "that" topic. The impetus for its start for me was that I noticed that on this forum, philosophers are ready to argue about the nature of the mog, the universe or understanding, but when it comes to liberalism - here the majority of the precondition - "liberalism is holy". Further judgments are built from these considerations. What then is liberalism as not an ordinary belief? So I decided to find out, and that's how the topic came about.

The "Golden Rule' sums it up. Although I think it would be better formulated as "Do unto others as they would want you to do unto them". Individual flourishing is important and so is community flourishing. If you flourish at the expense of others then you harm the flourishing of the community. — Janus

Exactly. Flourishing is a balance of two imperatives that at first blush seem antithetical. But arranged in the architecture of a hierarchy, we can see the natural logic. A social system seeking to maximise its growth potential and adaptive flexibility must be "good" at creating suitably motivated individuals within a fairly constraining community. What is being optimised is a balance between local independence and global dependence. Each in themselves is the opposite of the other. But each also provides what the other one is missing.

The ideal situation is where both sides of the bargain feel the deal being struck is fair. A win-win. I get to do anything I can imagine wanting to do ... to the degree that I can also rely on everyone else being there to bail me out when I stuff up. And everyone else says I'm free to stuff up as much as I like, but there is a limit to the bail-out that the community is willing to provide. In the long run, my free action has to be judged as being a positive contribution to the community.

The end is survival and flourishing. — Janus

And in biology, death and decay are part of the cycle. Or part of the great re-cycling. :grin:

Nature has to have a way to break down its own adaptive structure as it has a habit of becoming too optimised, too adapted.

You couldn't have an efficient process of evolution unless bodies got routinely destroyed to make way for the fresh contest of a new generation of gene recombination. The big step from simple single cell life – based on cloning and gene exchange even across species – was the ability to cleanly separate an immortal germline from the mortal body.

And even at the level of ecosystems, the old eventually must give way to the new. You have the canonical life-cycle that is immaturity, maturity and senescence.

To be young is to be growing so fast and furiously that many mistakes get made, but also many mistakes are recoverable. Growth papers over the accidents and starts to establish the smart habits that define the mature organism. But individual organisms and even whole species and ecosystems can become over-adapted to a way of life they have co-created with their environment. Senescence becomes the stage of life where the organism/ecosystem has become so wedded to predictable habits that they are both super-efficient but also fatally brittle.

A mature forest is a vast maze of stable relations that recycles itself so efficiently that it produces its own soil. It even makes its own rain. It is the opposite of wasteful and has arranged the world exactly to its wants. Even lightning strikes and forest fires are incorporated into its collective genetic scheme – its global identity.

But then there are always perturbations larger than its own adaptive time frame. A volcano erupts and temperatures drop. Or a land bridge emerges and new kinds of animals or pests arrive. The forest might be flourishing and supremely optimised. But in achieving this high state of efficiency and purpose, it then lacks the furious growth and wild experiment that is natural to youth. Suddenly it is in a world it no longer knows and has lost the capacity to learn about.

But nature rolls on. A life runs its course, always aiming for complete mastery over the world that it finds. And it all works until it suddenly doesn't. The carcass is recycled and the game of life is renewed.

I like this view as it says each stage of life is optimised in its own obvious way. We are immature – and that is itself already an optimal balance between clumsy mistakes and necessary life lessons. We are mature, which sounds really good, but now also a mix of mistakes and lessons. It is only the proportion of the two that should have progressed in some sensible fashion. We should be highly effective but also able to pick ourselves up off the floor.

Then senescence isn't actually failure as yet. It is becoming so well rooted and wise in the ways of a world we have helped construct that we are highly efficient and don't need to sweat the small stuff anymore. However, that complete adaptation to some knowable horizon can only extend so far into the future. And something will always come over the horizon to knock us down.

At the ecosystems level, it really is left to chance – vagaries at the geological level of weather, plate tectonics and crashing asteroids. But at the level of individual members of species, nature throws in some planned obsolescence too. Hearts, teeth and hormones and other things don't have to be built to last forever. Especially if the vagaries of disease, famine and accident are likely to take you out of the game anyway.

Yeah, I think this is right, despite the fact that we seem to be beating a dead horse. — Leontiskos

Nope. You keep turning away from a live discussion in order to flog the same old strawman.

:up: :up:

:fire:

I think that identifies a very common thread in modern culture, but I think it oversells its reach. Surely, plenty of people do think they have reached a sort of "radical innocence," where as Yeats put it: "its own sweet will is Heaven's will." This seems to be the case in various hedonistic pop culture subcultures, and there is also the harsher example of the Manosphere I mentioned in the OP. There is the promise of edenic hedonist polyamory in various social scenes, enhanced by a growing cornicopia of pharmacological innovations, or else the worship of sheer power and self-assertion one finds in others (and sometimes the two are mixed together in various subcultures). It seems to me that is largely the upper class, and what remains of the "striving middle class" that suffers from this residue of guilt, probably because their literature (a dying art) sells hedonism and the pursuit of power as a sort of specifically moral act that must still somehow be justified, whereas the popular culture versions just celebrate themselves reflexively (showing there was never much of a gap between Nietzsche's "master morality" and his "last men.")

So, I can certainly see the phenomena the article speaks to, and it is very potent, but it also seems more absent in some wide areas.

It makes a great point:

Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be “right with the world.” One would be right to expect that such a powerful need, nearly as powerful as the merely physical ones, would continue to find ways to manifest itself, even if it had to do so in odd and perverse ways.

Not "nearly as powerful," I would say. The appetites of logos are more easily crowded out and disordered by epithumia and thymos (more easily disordered because they demand to rule and order the lower appetites) but they are also stronger. From monks renouncing status, wealth, and sex, to martyrs, to revolutionaries, etc., the appetites of logos routinely show themselves to be capable of wholly overwhelming the desires for physical comfort, or even life itself, and those for honor and regard.

Liberalism could arguably defend itself in terms of giving individual man, and civilization collectively, a better structure for embracing these appetites than any past system through its open-endedness and promotion of technologies of information and discourse (as well as education). But, since it tends to make such appetites wholly privatized, skirting them in education and governance, as well as ethics and political theory, it can make no such claim. Instead, merit has to be banished from political theory because it cannot be justified without an ordering telos. We can have "meritocracy" as a sort of procedural sorting, but never merit. Perhaps that's one source of guilt. Those most invested in gaming the "meritocratic" system are the one's most aware of how it is more of a procedural game than anything else, designed to ruthlessly sort winners from losers not based on any criteria of virtue, but with an eye to procedural efficiency.




Which liberal theorists did you have in mind here? I was thinking of Rawls, Fukuyama, Nozick, or further back Mill, Locke, Hobbes. They tend to ground politics in contractual, procedural terms. For Rawls, a procedural justice must be elevated above the good because the human good is irreducibly plural and private. A person might, for instance, find the pinnacle of the human good in meticulously counting the blades of grass in a field and there would be no reason not to affirm this (Rawls' example).

There is a very strange interlude in Fukuyama's latest book, a defense of liberalism, where he attacks this element of liberal theory with an example. There is the layabout wealthy young man who doesn't work, lives off his parents, is completely unengaged with politics, and spends his time consuming video games, drugs, alcohol, pornography, and other forms of digital media while remaining wholly self-interested. The contrast case is a dutiful young women from a poor family who supports her sick mother while pursuing an education, and is as engaged in politics as she can be. Fukuyama claims that we can condemn the former and praise the latter because the two don't come down to racial, sexual, ethnic, or religious identity. However, it's totally unclear if he has actually left himself any grounds for doing this in his liberalism. Indeed, he constantly refers any "ultimate question" about human flourishing to the Thirty Years War, as if answering these in any concrete form can only participate apocalyptic violence.

So why are stable relationships better than pornography or prostitution? Why is one supposed to help one's parents rather than pursue one's dreams (even if those dreams are largely hedonistic)? In virtue of what is one deserving of merit and the other blame?

I've read all of Fukuyama's books so I can say pretty safely that his only option is to justify his ideal case with an appeal to what "makes society work best," which will of course, in his terms, be an appeal to greater consumption, more safety, and the "reasonableness" of prioritizing epithumia.

I think the idea that our only problem is that some sociopathic bad apples spoil the batch re liberalism is over optimistic. Certainly, it has been argued though. But even if this was so, it would suggest that liberalism has a profound tendency to elevate the sociopathic few to leadership positions across society, from corporate board rooms to senior government posts and many places in-between.

Whereas, I would say that it's hardly surprising that an elite who was raised on the axioms of moral anti-realism, the "(contained) greed is good" of Ayn Rand and much contemporary economic theory, a relentless focus on success (climbing the "meritocratic ladder"), and power and the satisfaction of current appetites as freedom turn out to be a recalcitrant leadership class when they come of age.

It seems that a true philosopher should reject all physical and practical aspects, and focus solely on rational reasoning. — Astorre

Well, this is certainly not the view that dominates in pre-modern philosophy, in either the West or the East. Eastern philosophy has a heavy focus on praxis and asceticism, as did the major schools of Western pagan philosophy, and certainly Christian philosophy as well. The idea that anyone can just slip into a state of pure, dispassioned rationality without any cultivation of virtue is an Enlightenment idea. Whereas, if the nous is clouded and most men suffer from disordered appetites, serious praxis must be undertaken, and praxis is central to the intellectual virtues.

Pierre Hadot's stuff is pretty good on the huge gap between ancient (mostly Pagan) "philosophy as a way of life," where the paradigmatic philosopher is a sage and holy man, and the Enlightenment ideal of sheer procedural reason.

However, where better than in harmony with nature to experience one's own physicality and connection to the world and others? — Astorre

Right, and with outdoor education, it's also recognized as a good environment for avoiding distraction and cultivating virtue and character. People are outside their comfort zones, which allows for progressive challenges, and there is also much more immediate, natural feedback when one acts unwisely. It also helps with community because the small group cannot turn outwards, while the basic nature of the skills being practiced tend to mean that everyone can contribute meaningfully to collective success.

There are large differences between the practices but they share some core similarities that are interesting.

but when it comes to liberalism - here the majority of the precondition - "liberalism is holy". — Astorre

Well, just because liberalism is founded on skepticism and preaches a certain sort of quarantined pluralism doesn't mean it isn't an evangelical ideology, or any different from Marxism in that respect. From the beginning it spread itself through violence. During the French Revolution, the clergy were seen as a threat, due to being an outside source of moral authority and wellspring of an alternative sort of philosophy. When the guillotine proved inadequate for the pace required for massacring them, they turned to constructing sinkable barges so boatloads could be drown together at once. The activities of the Infernal Columns in the Vendee served a similar "liberating" raison d'être.

More recently, from the opening of Japan to US trace at gun point, to Cold War coups, to the post-Cold War era of unchallenged neoliberal hegemony that has seen interventions by liberal states across the globe, that order hasn't shied away from using coercion or even violence to spread its system. This isn't inconsistent with early liberal theory. Both Locke and Mill adopt a similar position that it might be acceptable to enslave backwards people to "free them from indolence" and so lead them to economic prosperity (a key pillar of freedom in liberalism). There is likewise also a long tradition of justifying the use of coercion to dissolve cultural institutions and norms that cut against the grain of liberal pluralism, or to safely quarantine them.

For instance, what makes the religious right so objectionable to progressive liberals is not that they are religious, which is of course a perfectly fine private choice, but that they bring their religiously informed notions of politics into the public sphere. "Religious freedom" is more ideally "the freedom for religion to become publicly irrelevant." But conservative liberals are not actually all that different here with how they defend the "free market" (even as capitalism dissolves all the cultural institutions they want to conserve; if anything, conservative liberalism is even more obviously self-undermining).

Of course, progressive liberalism faces the same sorts of contradictions in that the dissolution of norms and customs, the marketization of all facets of human life, the procedural meritocracy, etc. all tend to promote the interests of the exceptional individual over the median citizen (and indeed, they were originally advocated for on just these grounds by Mill, Nietzsche, etc.). Norms of constraint and duty are, almost by definition, most binding on those with the wealth, talents, and power to not be otherwise bound by other forms of constraint.

Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed" is quite good on these paradoxes. Or for a more Continental approach, Byung Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" and "The Burnout Society."

Good write-up. I think I agree with the core of your diagnosis, though I have not read your sources. I'm sadly too ahistorical in my philosophical practice. I want to read MacIntyre soon.

In either case, inspired by your observations, I will spin for a while. The following might be a bit "out-there" but I find it to be an interesting angle.

A possible part of the story is that many take what I would call a pornographic stance towards representations of wisdom. Here, I use the term "pornographic" not in the usual, sexual sense, but rather in a generic sense that C. Thi Nguyen & Bekka Williams (2020) define as using representations of X for the sake of immediate gratification, freed from its usual costs and consequences.

Using philosophy as a form of "wisdom porn" in this sense, people gratify themselves without investing the time and effort to deeply understand the content and its context. For example, one might use bite-sized quotes from great thinkers to feel the immediate rush of sophistication without much care for what the quotes are really about.

A problem with this kind of engagement is that it risks shaping how one engages with philosophy. To gratify oneself—to feed the fantasy of being, for instance, an "alpha male"—one might avoid what is true and good, rather instrumentalizing representations of wisdom that feed this desire. If one's engagement is about gratifying a fantasy, then one has a bad incentive to fetishize the parts of philosophy that gratify instead of engaging with the parts that are worthy.

However, I'm not sure it is necessarily always bad to engage with wisdom porn. It might be a gateway to more genuine forms of engagement. One might learn important things as a side-effect. The question is, if one removed the immediate gratification, facing the difficulties of philosophy, would one still engage?

References:
Nguyen, C. T., & Williams, B. (2020). Moral outrage porn.Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 18(2).

Thank you; I really, really like that idea. I have read some of Nguyen's stuff before and liked it; thanks for reminding me about him. If anyone is interested, here is the article.

I am not sure if you're familiar with Byung Chul Han, but he makes a somewhat similar (although also in other ways quite different)

For Han pornographization describes a trend in late-modern culture whereby a loss of distance, eroticism (the ancient and medieval view of knowledge as both a sort of ecstasis and transformation —a "knowing by becoming"), and any negativity in favor of immediacy (and immediate gratification), the subsumption of the other into the self through consumption, and transparency.


In the Agony of Eros, the main theme is about the loss of the Other, leading to everything becoming a form of consumption in "the Inferno of the Same." There is an excess of visibility, whereby everything is stripped bare and flattened into surfaces without depth. I cannot help but see some similarity between this and forms of "anti-metaphysics."

Anyhow, they're similar framings in seeing a loss of depth and claims on us. Han's view is more expansive, although less detailed.

For example, one might use bite-sized quotes from great thinkers to feel the immediate rush of sophistication without much care for what the quotes are really about. — GazingGecko

Yes, I think that's the most obvious example. But I think this would also apply in some ways to the distanced, ironic approach to philosophy, as well. It's a way to engage that makes no claims on a person. This might be particularly true when it comes to engagement with those areas of philosophy that claim that praxis is essential, although I can see it applying more generally. The same might be said of the tendency to "retreat" into the analytic stance so as to ascend above good and evil.

That's difficult of course, because some would probably argue that ironic detachment is the height of wisdom.

It reminds me a bit of what David Foster Wallace said about irony:

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

However, I'm not sure it is necessarily always bad to engage with wisdom porn. It might be a gateway to more genuine forms of engagement. One might learn important things as a side-effect. The question is, if one removed the immediate gratification, facing the difficulties of philosophy, would one still engage? — GazingGecko

Right, the problem might not be such engagement in itself, but it becoming more the sole mode of engagement.

In terms of the more strenuous praxis of much Eastern thought, the Pagan traditions as originally practiced, Sufism, traditional Christianity, etc. there is also a similar phenomenon where one frequently sees contemplation and meditation (which are of course situated in a way of life and long-term cultivation) compared as almost equivalent with short-term experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Perhaps this comes from the undue focus on "peak experiences" in James and others (as William Harmless points out, many of the most famous Western mystics report no such experiences, or make them ancillary, or report experiences extremely unlike short term intoxication, such as the prophet Ezekiel being immobilized for months on end). I think this is an unhelpful conflation, but it also points to a focus on the short term and consumable, and as a refutation of the need for praxis it's a bit tragic. (Mark Vernon's commentary on the Divine Comedy, which I quite liked overall, was guilty of this repeatedly for instance).

I've read all of Fukuyama's books so I can say pretty safely that his only option is to justify his ideal case with an appeal to what "makes society work best," which will of course, in his terms, be an appeal to greater consumption, more safety, and the "reasonableness" of prioritizing epithumia. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I came away with quite a different reading. For example....

Fukuyama's Identity argues that Rousseau was followed by Kant and Hegel in creating the modern concept of identity as universal human dignity, and as thus a fundamental social and political goal. So UN bill of rights encodes that telos.
Notion of dignity starts out with Socrates and Greeks treating it as the distinction due a selfless warrior - those who risk life for the group. It was the respect due to citizens who defended the larger democratic organism in a freely chosen way. Or at least fully committed way - the individual accepting the group telos and submerging his own telos.
Those who were ready to make sacrifice then became the nobles and aristocratic leaders of their own community in peace times. So merchants had low dignity. But romantic ideal became about everyone being citizens prepared to submit to the abstracted collective that stood apart from any individual - but then granted dignity to any individual who met its ideal.
Kant’s contribution was to turn the Christian social theory about the moral choice between good and evil into a secular abstract theory that reason itself guides good choices. Fukuyama suggests this arose as a contrast to Hobbe’s materialistic and biological view of man as a socialised animal. Kant said the better part of man was the capacity for detached and impersonal reason - not constrained by physics. Kant sharpened the idea that humans have a fundamental freedom to choose when it comes to morality, and this divides an individual from the world he inhabits in a way that demands dignity as a basic social fact.
Then Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit argues the warrior is in fact a slave in his selfless risk. Real dignity comes through the human labour that transforms the world into a place worth living. So master and slave come to recognise dignity in each other in sublated fashion.
Where Romanticism turned existential in searching inwards for the source of dignity, Hegel was saying the turn was outwards to the construction of the best political structure to express self-actualising humanity. Hegel was inspired by the young Napoleon pushing through his rational framework following the French Revolution and the 1806 battle of Jena.
So the ideal system was citizens recognised as moral agents, equal under law and capable of democratically sharing in society’s decisions. The set-up was that all individuals have absolute moral freedom, but guided by reason they would choose to do the right collective thing. Or rather, they would be able maximise their own goals within the framework of a global social goal. They would creatively and not slavishly lift up their worlds, in local-global systems fashion.

So better and worse cash out here as creative vs slavish. One kind of system seeks the win-win of pragmatic realism, the other the lose-lose of slavish autocracy. And in the real world of public record, we can discern a difference in the degree of resilience and self-organisation that marks societies set up in these contrasting ways.

Is it the kind of society that is collectively adapting itself on the fly?

Using philosophy as a form of "wisdom porn" in this sense, people gratify themselves without investing the time and effort to deeply understand the content and its context. For example, one might use bite-sized quotes from great thinkers to feel the immediate rush of sophistication without much care for what the quotes are really about. — GazingGecko

Interesting approach. Developing this logic, it turns out that when we read philosophical works, we are sort of watching pornography: we are watching how someone, using various tools, penetrates all the cracks of other philosophers' ideas about reality. In this case, is independent philosophizing onanism or is it sex?And our collective philosophizing on the forum? Is it nothing other than an intellectual orgy?

I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings with such metaphors, but it turned out funny. It all reminded me of Plato's "Feast" where something like a philosophical "erotic symposium" takes place, where the theme of Eros unfolds from the physical to the divine, from sexual desire to the pursuit of truth and beauty.

Right, but Fukuyama's Hegel is very much Kojeve's deflated, liberal Hegel. Actually, I'd argue that Fukuyama fundamentally misunderstands Hegel in seeing the Last Man problem he diagnoses so presciently as a sort of "paradox at the end of history," instead of what it rightly should be in Hegel's theory, a contradiction that will power a move to a new stage in history, a new challenge that must be sublated by liberalism or else destroy it. I have written on this at length in the past.

Hegel has a very classical idea of freedom as "the self-determining capacity to actualize (and communicate) the Good." He is at odds with the dominant modern view (which dominates both liberalism and the post-modernism it spawned), which defines freedom primarily in terms of power and potency (the ability to "choose anything"), instead of actuality (this itself being a shift that comes from late-medieval nominalism, fideism, and volanturism, which is then entrenched during the Reformation; it's a theology that still grounds—although as an unexamined remnant—much athiest philosophy). At the opening of the Philosophy of Right Hegel explicitly challenges this vision of freedom as bottoming out in arbitrariness, and so contradiction (since arbitrariness is the opposite of freedom).

Hegel sees human freedom progressing through several contradictions it must sublate to become freedom. For example, he can allow that authenticity is an important part of freedom, but only if it is essentially oriented towards a telos and grounded in reflexive freedom, oriented towards a Good, as opposed to being a sort of groundless procedural freedom. This is very different from a theory grounded in the abstract "choosing agent" of Kantian liberalism. The highest stage of freedom involves a sort of moral freedom, where a civilization's institutions come to positively objectify a morality it knows as good (the "free will willing itself," of PR).

Suffice to say, I don't see this in Fukuyama. He has adopted the "Hegel made safe for liberalism (and empiricism)" of 20th century commentators, and in doing so lost some of Hegel's most important insights.

This can be seen in his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, where epithumia and thymos come into view, but never logos. Hegel, by contrast, has logos on top, as in reality, the engine of history. The need for people to see their society as "truly best," and not only to have this opinion, but to know it, is essential.

That, and he also adopts one of the regrettable elements of Hegel, in the idea of a providential unfolding of teleology, the march of man towards an Earthly Paradise in history. It's this that made his "End of History" thesis overstep, and he has been pairing it back ever since, and this is also what makes him tend towards "Whig history" and a justification of liberalism in rhetorically weak terms focused on adaptation and natural selection. But I think Dante and Solovyov see clearer here. Man's freedom is such that we are not on an inevitable march to utopia, and indeed Hegel's project only makes sense in the end because the Absolute as an end, while encompassing and suffusing history, is not reducible to it nor contained in it. History is ordered to something higher, giving it a telos, but also allowing for real failure.