I've been careless in language. — Tom Storm

Count me in. That's why I'm here in this thread.

:up:

maybe that’s the price of debunking myths and sacred cows. — Tom Storm

We have plenty of our own.

Isn’t it all just stories and myths, with some proving more useful than others depending on the circumstances? I don’t begin with the idea that we ever stumble onto some final truth, only that we keep finding frames or descriptions that serve us better for the purposes at hand. Or something like this.

Depends on who you ask ;-)

That’s very true. :grin:

Do you believe in a kind of perennialism, the idea that a lot of these religions or wisdom traditions point to a similar thing, but just use different conceptions for it? Or do you think they really are fundamentally different in some important ways.

I was struck by the similarities for instance between Heraclitus notion of the wisdom and the Doaist. This notion of the one/doa/logos that is beyond conception, desire being the thing that leads us away from the one etc etc... Both are situated arround the same time, 500 BC. It is possible that they influenced eachother, or rather had older sources in common, but more likely is probably that they independantly came to similar conclusions because of the way things are.

A certain guy with a moustache would say the Western tradition, Christianity is still a young tradition, and that this ascetic path eventually leads to a kind of Buddhism where the will get negated (for instance Schopenhauer). Maybe that's overly reductive and determinist, I don't know. But it does seem to me like a 'logical' path a tradition would follow give the nature of world (changing, impermanent) and the nature of the human mind (fixating, grasping for permanence).

How does one reconcile with the ever changing impermanent without negating the will altogether? Some of your quotes seem to point to moderation, some of them to a more total renunciation of worldly desires, some seem to point to a kind of Amor Dei and some of them seem more like the Epicurian notion that abstinence ultimately intensifies pleasures.

So yes, maybe there are different ways to deal with the question.

Do you believe in a kind of perennialism, the idea that a lot of these religions or wisdom traditions point to a similar thing, but just use different conceptions for it?

Broadly, I think the perennialists have a very strong case. There are very strong similarities across disparate traditions, and in particular a sort of "virtue ethics" seems dominant across the pre-modern world. A lot of other ideas, such as the insufficiency of worldly goods, the need for freedom and self-determination to be cultivated, education as primarily the development of virtue, apophatic theology, the need to move beyond dependence on fortune for liberty, etc. show up in many places, as do similar metaphysical insights.

However, I think perennialists often bulldoze over crucial distinctions and misrepresent traditions to make them fit into the neat narrative they want to create. Different traditions share crucial elements, but then often diverge in crucial ways. For instance, Stoicism and even moreso the ancient skeptics tend to go, IMHO, too far in pursuing dispassion as opposed to "right passion." Speaking very broadly, "Pagan philosophy' tended to undervalue the body, and the metaphysical importance of embodiment in comparison to the early and medieval Christians.

Philosophy of history is a particular outlier here in that a great many traditions tend to flatten out the importance of human history (and so politics, and often individuality) due to their other commitments. This is a place where the modern tradition often gets more right in my view (although it often goes too far in this direction). This is certainly true of Christianity, although it has some of the standout counter examples in Dante and Solovyov. Attar of Nishapur's Conference of the Birds shares a lot with the Divine Comedy, but a key difference is the respect for individuality and the historical-politcal in Dante, because he is able to resolve the dialectic between the mutability of history and divine union in a more complete way (a synthesis versus a sheer negation), and the dialectic between individual freedom (as the openness of the rational appetites) and the observable fact that people exercise very real causal powers on the moral and intellectual development of others, and their freedom, for better or worse.

These differences are quite important though. Also, perennialists sometimes tend towards outright misrepresentations to make their subject matter more palatable to their key audiences (particularly in the New Age space) and we end up with weird things like "Meister Eckhart the Buddhist."




I forget exactly where, I think it's in a few places, Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad." He says that a formally educated, wealthy person might be able to give more sophisticated answers as to why something is desirable or undesirable, but that this is ancillary to being truly "educated." If the more sophisticated person is nonetheless not properly oriented/cultivated such as to desire the good and abhor evil, then they are in an important sense uneducated (unformed); whereas the unsophisticated person is educated, although lacking in sophistication.

Now, Plato's point here sort of goes with what you each have said in different ways. In general, we do not love the good by default. While people might have more or less of a talent/inclination towards specific virtues and vices (e.g., tempers can "run in families"), in general they won't attain to a state of virtue without some cultivation. Indeed, without care and cultivation, at the limit, infants and children will die, so there always needs to be some cultivation (some "education").

So, this is obviously a broad view on education, one a bit at odds with how we use the word today in English. It has some appeal though. But education wouldn't quite be the same thing as wisdom. It is rather, a sort of virtue and desire for virtue, which is itself prior to (although also comingled with) wisdom (for Plato anyhow).

Doesn't society always attach that judgement on the individual while being equally convinced of its own inherent worth?

Do you mean "modern society?" I think this doesn't hold for many societies. For instance, surely it didn't tend to hold for American slaveholders vis-á-vis their slaves, nor in the context of the violent tribalism of the Near East, or even within Roman culture. I would say this notion is a product of a convergent evolution between different philosophies, with it being most strongly rooted in the West in the context of Christianity (for instance, this sentiment motivating, if not quite the end, then a precipitous decline in slavery throughout Christendom in antiquity and the taboo on infanticide).

Modern liberalism takes this up and tends to justify it in a different, more procedural way (e.g., Rawls). I think this has always been aspirational though. Certain individuals are not particularly valued by society as ends, and then individuals are also excluded from "society" based on convenient criteria (the immigrant, the overseas laborer who produces for the society, etc.)

But even if we accepted that individuals possess inherit worth, I don't see how that carries over to wisdom. Under liberalism, questions of telos, etc., the traditional domain of "wisdom," are generally privatized and the opinions of the fool are in a sense as sacrosanct as that of the saint or sage (e.g., Rawls' individual who sees counting blades of grass as the highest good).

Being worthy of love is something in the eye of the beholder.

Ah, but this is precisely what most wisdom traditions explicitly deny. This is more of an assumption of the liberal/Anglo-empiricist paradigm, the placement of "value" on the subjective side of the "subjective/objective ledger" (generally paired with the denial of the rational appetites for Goodness, Beauty, and Truth per se). For example, see above with Plato on "education," which is all about loving and despising what is truly worthy of each.

But this is hardly a judgement unique to the wisdom traditions of the West. The East also tends towards a position of "proper" beneficence and "proper loves." This is one respect where I think the modern tradition (and it's more true of empiricism) is an outlier.

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale.

I guess I am questioning if they are generally understood to be the same thing. "Intelligence," as commonly used, tends to be viewed procedurally (i.e., as discursive ratio) or even computationally. Wisdom by contrast tends to deal with ultimate ends. An IQ test is supposed to measure intelligence, but it's unclear to me if it says much of anything about a grasp of ends (at least directly). So, I suppose my question is if "intelligence" covers the (ultimate) desirability of ends. If discovering what is truly worthy is "problem solving," it still seems like a particular sort of problem solving.

Certainly, intelligence as something like IQ doesn't seem to, even if we broaden it a good deal. But on a broader view of intelligence they do seem quite similar, and so I could seem them as perhaps largely being distinguished as a power versus a habit. Although, I think we can usefully distinguish between different intellectual virtues: practical wisdom versus science versus the traditional view of sophia, since they have different ends and ends define whether or not a habit/skill it being trained/developed well or poorly.

So the brain exists to do cognition (broadly speaking). And the primary functional division that then arises for the neuroscientist is between attention and habit. The intelligence of the ability to consciously focus and figure out something complicated, coupled to the wisdom of accumulated habit which allows you to react to everything else as if it were already completely familiar and reflexively understood.

I don't really disagree with the idea of comparing wisdom (or virtue) with a habit or, more loosely, a skill.

One of the early papers in the volume Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (which you might find interesting @Tom Storm ) looks at how experienced chess players are better at reconstructing chess boards from memory. They are, however, not particularly better at reconstructing wholly random chess boards, only ones that would develop from normal, goal oriented play. And, when they narrate their construction, the experienced players tend to reconstructing games based on strategy, rather than blocks of pieces/color, as novices do. The experienced players vastly outperform novices despite not performing better on more general memory tasks.

Now obviously a good deal of this is explained in terms of chunking strategies, data compression, etc. Yet the goal-directedness of play also seems to be a crucial component of reasoning. Chess, is of course, easy to study, but also very far from virtue or wisdom. The goal of chess is fixed. But an element of virtue, and particularly wisdom, has to be discovering which goals are actually choiceworthy (the end is not fixed, or is at least much broader), and this is precisely where I see the biggest gulf between common uses of "intelligence" and "wisdom." Boethius' musings in the Consolation on the instability of worldly goods, and the lack of freedom dependence on them generates, is for instance, not so much "problem solving," as "ends finding/valuing."

Commonsense ought to matter more in everyday life. But society has changed. Work itself has become more computational than practical. Or perhaps more polarised into computational and emotional intelligence as the focus of what people do.

So talk of IQ assumes a generalised intelligence or G factor score that you can attach to an individual. But we know it isn't quite so simple. And what the labour market prizes is itself evolving in time.

Yes, but I think it's fair to say that the market is often foolish. Whereas wisdom is generally judged according to the wise, no? The market doesn't value wisdom for the same reason the fools tends to spurn wisdom... lack of wisdom.

Okay, then educate me. How do you understand Taoist wisdom. — L'éléphant

A bit out of scope for this conversation.

experienced chess players are better at reconstructing chess boards from memory. They are, however, not particularly better at reconstructing wholly random chess boards, only ones that would develop from normal, goal oriented play. And, when they narrate their construction, the experienced players tend to reconstructing games based on strategy, rather than blocks of pieces/color, as novices do. The experienced players vastly outperform novices despite not performing better on more general memory tasks. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Proves my point. Cleverness turns into wisdom over time as what was novel becomes the routine.

The novice player tries to be clever with elaborate ploys. The experienced player is seeking to mimimise errors and build pressure by position.

So cleverness and wisdom are both the same and different in being different stages of a nautural progression in skill acquisition. And the chess example applies to the game of life in this way. We have to start by making mistakes in a furious way to begin to learn. We need to invest in analysing the particular to discover what critically matters. But then we begin to master the situation and can instead operate with a weight of skilled and unthinking habit. We can shift our attention up the scale to the big picture where it is about minimising errors and building pressure by position.

It is a further question if some people are especially good at one and not the other. On the whole, the psychologist would say it is just catching people at different stages of this simple intellectual trajectory.

Note the reduction of wisdom to mere cleverness. Something has gone astray.

I'd say the two only seem similar because the ends pursued in chess are obvious and fixed. Indeed, I'd say being good at chess is a skill/techne, not wisdom. But consider people who are quite "clever" at navigating their life such that they can satisfy their appetites, amass wealth, win over romantic partners, etc., and find themselves at mid-life completely miserable. Surely, they have been "clever" and intelligent in some sense, but have they been wise?

For instance, was Jeffery Epstein wise? He certainly seems to have been clever. Had his fortunes not taken a turn and he remained out of prison and the public eye, would he then be wise because he was able to achieve the satisfaction of his appetites and to flourish according to most contemporary standards for "success?" Would he have been wise if he had simply been more inconspicuous about his crimes or kept strictly to the local age of consent?

I forget exactly where, I think it's in a few places, Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad." He says that a formally educated, wealthy person might be able to give more sophisticated answers as to why something is desirable or undesirable, but that this is ancillary to being truly "educated." If the more sophisticated person is nonetheless not properly oriented/cultivated such as to desire the good and abhor evil, then they are in an important sense uneducated (unformed); whereas the unsophisticated person is educated, although lacking in sophistication. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is a reasonable point.

But education wouldn't quite be the same thing as wisdom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Intuitively that seems right too.

Certain understandings of wisdom, then, rest on the ability to know or intuit the Good, or on union with God, with the source of this wisdom rooted in a transcendent origin.

I'd say the two only seem similar because the ends pursued in chess are obvious and fixed. Indeed, I'd say being good at chess is a skill/techne, not wisdom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. But the brain doing all this is the same brain with the same cognitive structure. So the only difference is that playing chess is a highly constrained and artificial task – thus good for extracting the story of what is going on in a controlled setting. And then cleverness~wisdom is this standard brain trajectory applied to our lives in their most general and uncontrolled settings – the lives we live as social creatures interacting with the perils and opportunities of a complex physical environment.

So wisdom and intelligence are of course socially-constructed as well as something innate to our evolved brains. What is wise or what is clever is framed by a collective social judgement.

But consider people who are quite "clever" at navigating their life such that they can satisfy their appetites, amass wealth, win over romantic partners, etc., and find themselves at mid-life completely miserable. Surely, they have been "clever" and intelligent in some sense, but have they been wise? — Count Timothy von Icarus

How does that contradict anything I said? Society would judge them as having being immature, or just unlucky perhaps, and now wise after the event. These miserable folk clearly developed their habits, but unwise ones. And society might even deserve the blame as its own "wisdom" might have set out the game of life in a fashion where being miserable was rather an inevitable outcome.

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. They only have to be pragmatically effective – optimised enough to keep the whole social game going. There is nothing transcendent about either cleverness or wisdom.

Would he have been wise if he had simply been more inconspicuous about his crimes or kept strictly to the local age of consent? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are conflating personal wisdom and collective wisdom. It is important to see how these are two different things – and thus how they can also come together as the one thing. You can't really have the collective social view unless people can freely dissent from it – and learn from the error of their ways.

So how do you build a wise society? Allow the creation of social institutions to flourish. Allow wise habits to take up a permanent presence. The standard pragmatic answer.

How do you build a wise person? Let them grow up in a wise social context where the wisdom is being institutionalised in this fashion over all scales – from the wisdom appropriate in playing chess or planting out seedlings, to the wisdom in life choices that result in the win/wins for yourself and those around you.

Of course our societies are never perfect. But then who ever said that Nature even has a notion of the Good?

Well, theists of course. But I only speak for the pragmatist here. :wink:

Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung

Note the reduction of wisdom to mere cleverness. Something has gone astray. — Banno

There’s something a bit cheap and glib about mere cleverness, which seems to locate wisdom closer to nous and virtue. Perhaps there’s moral cleverness?

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. They only have to be pragmatically effective – optimised enough to keep the whole social game going. There is nothing transcendent about either cleverness or wisdom. — apokrisis

That has a sort of Rorty-like feel to it. The contingency of wisdom as part of an evolving vocabulary.

Society would judge them as having being immature, or just unlucky perhaps, and now wise after the event. These miserable folk clearly developed their habits, but unwise ones. And society might even deserve the blame as its own "wisdom" might have set out the game of life in a fashion where being miserable was rather an inevitable outcome

Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.

Leaving out sophia and looking only at practical wisdom, Plato's notion seems pretty appropriate here:

Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad."

Cleverness may turn into wisdom. It may also turn into adaptive habits aimed at unworthy ends.

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life

Certainly not all habits are wise though. And yet all habits might be considered to be "pragmatic" as achieving some ends. The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise."

Prima facie, while people or societies might not tend towards maximal vice, neither do they appear to naturally tend towards perfect virtue.

Plato's notion seems pretty appropriate here: — Count Timothy von Icarus

So it always has the same aim. Wisdom always aims to be wise?

Not sure this is a huge step forward. That’s the trouble with talk about value as something transcendent rather than an everyday story of evolving an adaptive fit between an organism and its environment.

So it always has the same aim

Sure, in a broad sense. Practical wisdom aims at making the choices that are best, and at properly valuing ends and means to those ends.

There is nothing particularly "transcendent" about that, and at any rate I find the term "transcendent" to generally be unhelpful because it is often a source of equivocation. I guess the problem I see is that anything can be said to be "adaptive" if we are given free aim to choose the ends that we are supposedly adapting towards, but not all adaptations/actions appear to be wise.

In the Function of Reason, Alfred North Whitehead charts out the goals of life as: to live, to life well, and to live better (which is remarkably similar to St. Maximus' "being, well-being, eternal being"). Now, adaptation can be ordered to any of these. Whether or not something is "adaptive" as opposed to "maladaptive" depends on ends (i.e., what it means to "live better"), and that's exactly what practical wisdom is supposed to help with.

Society is always adapting, but it appears that societies can grow more or less wise or more or less virtuous. For instance, Nazism was an adaptation to the pressures of post-war economic and political circumstances in Germany, but in general we'd want to call it "maladaptive." Another example might be the tendency for people to fill spiritual needs, or the need for recognition, with radical manichean politics. As a "coping mechanism" this is in a sense adaptive, but we might think it is also deeply flawed (unwise). Wisdom would be prudent adaptation.

I guess the problem I see is that anything can be said to be "adaptive" if we are given free aim to choose the ends that we are supposedly adapting towards, but not all adaptations/actions appear to be wise. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem lies in making a circular argument. If wisdom is defined as some single essence - such as the good, the worthy, or even the adaptive - then that ends up saying nothing. You find yourself getting confused by having to deal with an endless array of exceptions to the rule which is precisely what pushes the rule off into some unplaced and abstracted realm where no more can be said than “well we all know true wisdom when we see it”.

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

So rather than getting bogged down in all the exceptions to the rule which - folk who weren’t really acting wisely as they were merely being clever - I have attempted to reframe things in the more properly dichotomous terms of how cleverness and wisdom could each stand as the other to its “others”. How they could be both essentially the same and also then defined by what could make them different.

A temporal trajectory, a story of growth, does that. And I root it in the reality of the brain’s processing architecture. The brain as a cognitive organ is all about making sense of the world by dichotomising it. The principle dichotomy here is the one between attentional processing and habit-level processing. Between having to work something out and being able to rely on engrained experience.

So the choice is either to have an endless debate over the meaning of an unplaced abstraction or to ground the debate in a reality that metaphysics has always understood best in terms of a “unity of opposites”. A dialectic logic.

Whether or not something is "adaptive" as opposed to "maladaptive" depends on ends (i.e., what it means to "live better"), and that's exactly what practical wisdom is supposed to help with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an example of failing to discover the relevant dichotomy and simply thinking in terms of a monistic imperative and its absence. You only give yourself the options of adaptive vs maladaptive and so your argument goes in a loop. The Platonic ideal always eludes the sorry grasp of the real world. We can always aim higher and therefore always must be in need of aiming higher.

It is the standard bad metaphysical argument that folk torture themselves with. Or torture others with by shifting the goal posts deeper into Platonia.

So what is the proper “other” that grounds adaptive? Well the Darwinian story is that variety is what evolution requires. It is exceptions to the rule that feed the existence of that rule. Every individual must take the risk of being a mistake so that statistically the collective success emerges.

Bring this back to the wisdom issue and we can see that it would be unwise never to risk being unwise. We need to try to be clever as mistakes are how we would begin to learn to eliminate mistakes from our behavioural repertoire.

So the way to understand wisdom is how I describe. It is about learning to play the game of life as the game is presented to us. We have to risk mistakes to make progress. We then have to fix what works so that the successes accumulate.

And a biologist would even tack on a state of senescence or niche over-fit to this analysis. An organism can be so closely adapted to its given environment that it becomes fragile if that environment suddenly changes. One could become “too wise” if one has habitual answers for everything in their immediate sphere and then discovers the world is somehow much larger than they expected.

Pragmatically, the goal posts on what is “good and worthy” could get shifted by unpredicted changes in the world. Just another thought to throw into the mix here.

I wonder if it is possible to become wise by learning from the foolish? After all, with discernment, watching a fool and what happens to them can be very instructive in learning what not to do. — Tom Storm

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise" William Blake

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise" William Blake — Janus

Is this a paradoxical way of saying practice makes perfect?

I guess it's helpful for us to distinguish a fool from a 'simpleton'. In as much as a fool may learn and acquire knowledge by learning from mistakes, but a simpleton may have cognitive limitations. I think there's an innocence in foolishness.

:up: Foolish practice makes perfect foolishness? Would perfect foolishness be wisdom? (there was also a tradition of fools being wise as shown in KIng Lear).

Maybe it's more along the lines of not being afraid to make mistakes, being playful and learning to see your foolishness, what it consists in. If I become afraid of others seeing my foolishness and hide it, then I will have less of an opportunity to see it myself.

Wittgenstein said something similar: "Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."

Simpletons are something else, but I agree there is innocence in foolishness, and simpletons are also, like animals and (some) children innocent.

Wittgenstein said something similar: "Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense." — Janus

:up: Nice.

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise" William Blake — Janus

Alan Watts used to quote that all the time.


Between drinks.

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

I'm confused, how is "good and bad" (or "beautiful and ugly," "true or false," or "one and many" for that matter) not "dichotomous?"

Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least.

A reduction of goodness, beauty, truth, metaphysics, etc. to talk about brains and natural selection seems, dare I say, unwise.

I'm confused, how is "good and bad" (or "beautiful and ugly," "true or false," or "one and many" for that matter) not "dichotomous?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m confused. Isn’t this supporting my point? Each of these are a pair of terms that are being dialectically opposed. Each is understood as what it is to the degree that it is not the other.

Ah, I see now, you meant:

The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly “other” to in a measurable fashion.

...as a criticism. I took it as a recommendation; as in, we need to find dichotomies.

I don't think the bolded is true though. Dominant theories of goodness from Aristotle on (and one might even include Plato here) primarily think of bad/evil (and falsity) in terms of privation. The two are contrary opposites. But prima facie, this no more makes goodness (or beauty, truth, and unity) impossible understand than it is impossible to understand light because darkness is merely its absence, or heat because cold is its absence. Light and heat have a positive content, and so does goodness and truth. If one dispenses with these, then I'm not sure what inquiry would consist in; our goal could no longer be truth (knowledge/understanding), and such a goal could no longer be good to pursue.

So what is the proper “other” that grounds adaptive? Well the Darwinian story is that variety is what evolution requires. It is exceptions to the rule that feed the existence of that rule. Every individual must take the risk of being a mistake so that statistically the collective success emerges.

What is "success" here? A difficulty is that natural selection and related theories have been philosophically interpreted in extremely disparate ways. You get articles to the effect that "reality is evil" or Tennyson's famous:

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —

...right alongside the Lion King's "circle of life" (and more sophisticated versions). I've also seen thermodynamics used to justify a sort of Hegelian providential progress towards "being knowing itself as self, as the Absolute/God," a sort of twist on de Chardin's Omega Point. I don't think "empirical evidence" dictates that one be preferred over the other (although wisdom might).

Success is often interpreted simply as reproduction. In which case, chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle have been the beneficiaries of a tremendous adaptational boon. And yet, one could hardly look at your standard poultry "factory farm" and not come away questioning if this is "success."

I don't think the bolded is true though. Dominant theories of goodness from Aristotle on (and one might even include Plato here) primarily think of bad/evil (and falsity) in terms of privation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a problem with dichotomies. They don't become fully developed until they are turned into hierarchies. That is, it is easy enough to claim the opposite as simply a lack of the thing in question. A simple anti-symmetric state that can be reversed.

So if I turn left, I can fix that by turning right. Or if I turn away from the good towards the bad, then I can turn back towards the good again. The dichotomy only gets as far as privation, as you say. Badness is a lack of goodness. Goodness is complete in its goodness. Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far.

The tricky things is to form dichotomies that are asymmetric and not easily reversible because they have been moved far apart from each other in terms of hierarchical scale. These would be proper unities of opposites. Things that are the complementary bounds of what is possible in the way that the triadic structure of a hierarchy is formed by the scale difference which is to be divided as completely as possible by a local and global bound.

This is a deep aspect of metaphysical argument that most never get. But you only have to consider the metaphysical dichotomies that have always seemed the most fundamental. Like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, integrated~differentiated, atom~void, matter~form, and so on. Each of these pairs seem to join two things that are as completely unalike as can be imagined in some basic way, and yet they then complement each other as they thus frame all the intermediate states that could arise in between.

Think of black and white as the complete lack of brightness and its equally total presence. Each is the other's negation. Black is zero white, and white is zero black. But then between these two bounding extremes arises any possible number of shades of grey. You can have a grey that is a 1% drip of black in a 99% pot of white. Or a 50/50 mix. Or whatever balance of the two extremes you care to put a number on.

So a useful metaphysical dichotomy comes with a hierarchy of scale in transparent fashion. Complementary limits on being are set. Then everything that actually exists is some gradation – a particular balance – in between.

So instead of a monotonic argument – good is good in some absolute fashion, and badness can only be positioned in some handwaving fashion as "a lack of complete good" – you get a metaphysical story where there is no absolute good or bad, just the relatively good or bad. You can have each to the degree that it makes sense to claim some measured distance that separates the two.

The key is keep the relativity of all things in sight and not falling into the trap of trying to defend absolutes. So wisdom is not something that could be measured as simply a lack of wisdom. That says nothing of any interest about the wider world. But you are getting somewhere it feels if you start to argue that wisdom feels like a lack of maturity.

And then you really get some place if you can see that immaturity – another anti-symmetric statement based on a quality and its privation – is also its own good in that youth has its own complementary value when opposed to age. Youth demands risk and learning. It rewards attempts to be clever. You can see that wisdom and cleverness become joined as a natural continuum of intellectual capacity. Two ends of the one thing. As asymmetric as possible while also being as necessarily connected as possible. And each is good when each is balanced to match the stage of life.

We don't have to turn it into a drama – a conflict of opposites. A dichotomy is the symmetry-breaking that then needs to keep developing until it becomes fully expressed as a hierarchy of "symmetry-stopping". A spectrum of balances where it is the appropriateness of the balance that is the measurable good of the situation. The optimal state for that particular life context and not some attempt to hold up "good" and "bad" as globally-transcendent absolutes. Instead the good and the bad get brought into the world as a practical issue of allowing fruitful variety. The balance that always adapts to the individual occasion. The confluence of opposites.

But prima facie, this no more makes goodness (or beauty, truth, and unity) impossible understand than it is impossible to understand light because darkness is merely its absence, or heat because cold is its absence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, if you are only talking about the something and the lack of that something, the work hasn't been done. Dialectics is about complementarity and synergy. Identifying the win/win story that is having two extreme bounds on Nature that then leave Nature as the everything that exists in-between.

It is very easy to talk monistically about stuff like truth, beauty, good – and even unity – when you don't have to really say anything about falsity, ugliness or evil except that they are privations of the ineffable absolutes. But once you accept the discipline of a dialectical logic, then you have to stop hand-waving and start defining the relation that properly connects the two ends of some spectrum of possibilities.

The categories that make sense are the ones that make sense of all the intermediate cases as being placed at some relative position inbetween the extremes.

That is how we can have a justice system. We can calibrate the spectrum between good and evil in terms of extenuating circumstances. We can both work within a global understanding and rigorously apply individually optimised judicial solutions. Everything can be made relative in a pragmatically flexible fashion. We can live in the real world with something like wisdom.

Success is often interpreted simply as reproduction. In which case, chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle have been the beneficiaries of a tremendous adaptational boon. And yet, one could hardly look at your standard poultry "factory farm" and not come away questioning if this is "success." — Count Timothy von Icarus

There you go. You grab your monistic and transcendent banner word – success – and so now only see a world where everything becomes questionable in the light of its failure to live up to this mighty standard.

But sensible metaphysics has always kept focused on the relativity of the unity of opposites. The dialectic. The dichotomy developed until it forms the hierarchy with its balance that covers all scales of being.

The Platonist will always be disappointed with the actual real world. It is but a pale shadow of what it should be. The pragmatist instead can see that is not the game of existence at all. The world is a system that is optimising itself in hierarchical fashion over all its available scales. That is the image we should have of it when we speak about it.