The real fire means you don't where the center is, and you're talking to one another without any one having a landline to it. — csalisbury
The world is mucky, chaotic, mean. Many - if not most - people seem drawn to philosophy to get away from the world. The level of explanation seems sturdier, safer, clearer than what you've experienced in life. — csalisbury
Perhaps you'll agree that it itself is a landline. The state of truth is an abyss, but the abyss recognized as such functions as a foundation. 'I know that no one really knows (and that's enough for my performance of the hero).' — jjAmEs
Talking about the fire is one thing; going to the fire is another. Here, I'm talking about the fire. — csalisbury
Ecstasy comes into play, that's a sure sign a protective force (a psychological Daemon) has taken over and is showing a movie of Things Are Now At The Level of The Rarest Stuff. That's always a hoodwink. — csalisbury
I know what you mean. I can only talk about the black dragon when he's not around. When he's around, the futility and obscenity of talk is palpable and paralyzing. That's the black fire.
But you maybe you mean the good fire. — jjAmEs
I'm not sure I understand you. I do think that we humans are deeply invested in various performances. In this space we have no choice but to be self-conscious and perform. More than most perhaps, you and I work this self-consciousness into our performance. I do think that the rarest stuff is mostly found in unbearably tender places that can only be talked about (if at all) in whispers. Or in very rare friendships and perhaps under the influence. Maybe some of us have a 'secret doctrine.' And all public-facing doctrines are all the more suspect and shallow in the light of this. But 'doctrine' implies something too articulated and stable.
But I'm down with protective forces and characters in general as trauma-generated 'illusions' or hoodwinks. 'Truth' and madness are dangerously familiar here. The 'sane' monkey rides the network of norms, and all that Nietzschean stuff about lies that keep us alive come to mind. — jjAmEs
The Black Dragon & The Good Fire are childhood ways of navigating a tough space. They do good work, for us as kids, but they eventually have to go. — csalisbury
My immediate reaction to the OP is that the *kind* of explanation at issue (broadly: Why X? or What explains Y?) is too broad and underdetermined. What I mean: explanation is usually on the order of: "explain X about Y" or "why is it that X now and not later", or "why does the phenomenon of X take place at all?". In all three cases there's something like a 'third term' involved: you're never just 'explaining X', you're explaining something about X. (in the back of my mind - Deleuze: not 'what?' but: who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?). — StreetlightX
I think the metaphysical illusion - the Ultimate Because - comes about when we think we can dispense of this third term. What the third term introduces is a kind of naturalized perspectivism: it introduces a motive, something that animates inquiry, it puts the inquirer back into the inquiry, and dispenses with the idea that there are 'neutral' questions. Explanation is always relative to a frame of inquiry (which doesn't mean it's 'subjective' - a frame of inquiry is largely determined by the phenomenon itself: asking the right questions is as much a matter of 'getting the answer right' as... getting the answer right).
So w/r/t explanation existing prior to philosophy - yes, but also no. I wanna say: there's always an implicit philosophy in any explanation, and the 'spontaneous' frame of reference is egocentric bodily life: why does dad hit the bottle? Because he suffered abuse of his own, because life is shitty, etc (implicit: can I use this info to avoid his outbursts of rage in my day to day?). Philosophy, when undertaken explicitly, 'de-indexes' inquiry from egocentric concerns and 'attaches' them to other 'third terms': what is the phenomenon of dads hitting the bottle indicative of? Should it be treated sociologically? psychologically? Does it tell us something about 'the human'? etc etc.
Philosophy multiplies frames, makes them proliferate, introduces new 'third terms' motivated by [anything whatsoever] (in the back of my mind - Brassier: "Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living": again - not a matter of 'subjective inquiry', perhaps the opposite - but not 'objective' either). My line of thought is that once explanation becomes de-coupled from a 'view from nowhere', once explanation is always 'from somewhere' then the kind of aporias and anxieties you outline if not dissipate, are at least transposed elsewhere
Scared kid & monster for me too. — csalisbury
I don't want to presume too much, but it seems to me that we're both susceptible to what the psychologists describe as 'splitting' where most important things in our lives are either hyper-valorized or largely devalued. — csalisbury
I see them as something that causes me pain that and any fleeting dionysian delight is purchased at too dear a cost...
I also understand that you may very well be perfectly aware of all the above and simply feel that the highs and lows are worth pursuing for their own sake. — csalisbury
The only way out is to let thoughts about masks arise and pass away, without giving them to much credence, one way or another. — csalisbury
The 'third term' is a way of determining how, and in what 'region,' x will be brought into the space of reasons. — csalisbury
I find myself with friends, just compulsively explaining things. A few years back, I got hip to what was going on, but couldn't quite stop it. I realized how lonely it made me, but I couldn't seem to 'snap out of it'.
I think this is because relying too heavily on this coping device meant I didn't develop other ways of interacting with the world or other people very well. When I sense that someone is trying to 'reach me', reach the me behind the explanatory monologue, I reflexively withdraw. This, in turn, leads me to rely even more heavily on explaining. What I've found is that it's very difficult for me to develop other ways of living. This makes me feel helpless and frustrated and makes it more tempting to return to 'explaining' (or drinking, or making ironic jokes). Again, this looks a lot like how addictions function. — csalisbury
Explanation' is something that exists prior to philosophy. — csalisbury
But this does not have to be a one way street (gustatory). The integration here can and should modify the space of reasons into which it is brought as well. There's a great paper by Reza Negarestani which I constantly come back to, and which I think is pertinent here, where he notes that there is a way of understanding in which:
"Looking at the space of the universal, through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects by simply scaling up and down the same image but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context—a window into the universal— undergoes as it expands its scope and becomes more true to the universal.
...The transition from the local to the global requires something more than the juxtaposition or addition of local contexts. It requires a form of interknitting multiplication between localities that while it acknowledges their particular specifications (parameters and orientations), takes localities beyond their immediate and restricted ambits. It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy. It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions and new intuitions of locality and globality. In this respect, universality becomes the operation of productive locality which is globally oriented". (cite).
I grant that the above is not easy to do, nor does it comes naturally. It takes a huge amount of effort to keep the whole structure supple, mobile, responsive. It can, on the contrary, rigidify, such that one is always looking to 'bring things back' into the prefab fold (apokrisis was this kind of 'explainer', par excellence, almost to the point of parody). This is explanation as lego-set. But explanation can also be kaleidoscopic in nature: you add a piece, give it a shake, and the whole thing changes (a Deleuzian vocabulary might talk about intensive and extensive approaches to explanation).
I see the Ultimate Because as the rigidifying of this structure, an attempt to 'fix' it and find its Final Form. This danger is real, but it can be mitigated. — StreetlightX
. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself.
I don't know that it needs to be broken, maybe just chanelled differently, put to use in a different manner somehow. The Deleuzian in me says: put it in connection with things, other things, other people, other practices (hard to do right now, I understand). — StreetlightX
I agree. I could be lying to myself, but I feel something like an internal equilibrium. I'm more or less at peace with myself despite certain eccentricities and excesses and concerned instead about the world, making a living, affording a certain privacy and security, and (maybe the biggest ) the biological reality of aging. I'm healthy now, but I know what's coming. My old man is in a wheelchair from a stroke. I think I'd prefer a clean and certain death at a certain fixed time sufficiently far away to the smoky maze in which the Minotaur lurks somewhere or another. Married aging couple and all that that implies. — jjAmEs
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