But I also cannot but agree with ↪apokrisis: how do we know in which direction it is "correct" to philosophize? It follows that for any statement, some starting axiom is needed, which can be different for everyone.

That's the fundamental question of ethics, no? @apokrisis is essentially advancing his own answer to that question here and in the recent thread on wisdom I would take it. Likewise, it's not like liberalism doesn't answer this question. You cannot have any sort of large organization, let alone a state, without answering key ethical considerations and making judgements about the human good, even if only by default. I'd argue that everyone answers these questions (re method, truth, and values) one way or another, either reflectively or non-reflectively.

My point here was that the problem of "philosophical praxis as consumer product," combined with the general separation of theory and practice leads to a practice with shallow answers to this sort of question. Or, there isn't any real questioning at all, but rather a default to the (neo)liberal preference for skepticism and abstract "choice" (which, IMO, is not always "informed choice"). Or, if there has been such questioning, as in Kurt Hahn's case, cultural and market forces tend towards stripping out any firm answer and instead prioritize individual choice (as liberalism tends to conceive of it, in economic terms) as the ultimate good, so that a structured focus on any other good has to take a back seat.

Now, people can certainly object to any single answer on values, but it hardly follows from this that values can be ignored. If one raises up "pragmatism" or "choice," as a solution to the values question, this is just to have recommended the prioritization of a different sort of value. If one says that "spiritual" questions are ridiculous distractions, and the good life focuses on the pragmatic pursuit of worldly pleasures/goods (Charles Taylor's"exclusive humanism,") that isn't a non-answer on this question either. The problem I was hoping to identify is a sort of praxis that tries to go with a "non-answer" and so ends up simply affirming whatever we already happen to believe (a non-answer is still an answer, it affirms instrumentalizing praxis).

I guess this is sort of a larger issue. Skepticism about philosophy and values leads doesn't negate the imperative to answer such questions. They still get answered.

What is the “original anthropology” that supported these practices? — NOS4A2

Obviously, this varies from tradition to tradition. But, for instance, I would say the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and then much of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition have a lot in common in how the view the nature of man and the human good. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is probably the paradigmatic idea of the late-antique synthesis here.

Obviously, Eastern sources have a different tradition (although there are some similarities). I just meant to contrast this with the rather thin anthropologies that have been very influential in folks like Nozick and Rawls, which don't leave much room for virtue (excellences vis-á-vis what it is to be man) but instead focus on a sort of abstract choosing agent. Here the right is elevated above the good (and so the human good).

I think the creep of the language of economics and the corporate world into wellness/mindfulness literature, or the Manosphere, is a good, if extreme example. Obviously, Homo oecononimicus, the atomized, self-interested utility maximizer is about as thin of an anthropology as you can get. You have a black box of preferences, and then the abstract game theoretic chooser.

Do you believe pre-modern philosophers were acting without self-interest, and that their philosophical activity had no telos towards their own self-development, but towards something else? — NOS4A2

Absolutely not. I am not a big fan of modern ethical theories in general, and the separation of "moral good" from "what appears good (desirable)." Aristotle focuses on the good as "being qua desirable," and this is carried on in other traditions.

The questions of "what sort of life is best for man?" or "how does one live a good life and become an excellent person?" are obviously going to have relevance for the self, right?

When I mention what I see as a corrosive focus on the self this meant to suggest the idea that ethics must be uninterested in the self (a sort of Kantian turn). It's rather rejecting the idea that the self, in its current form, with its current desires, is the measure of what is good and truly desirable. It's the collapse of a reality/appearance distinction in terms of what is most desirable/fulfilling that I find troubling in a sort of "consumerist" context.

The above was what I had in mind. What could knowledge of "(spiritual) truth, goodness and the divine" be but "esoteric knowledge" if not merely a matter of understanding ordinary truth and goodness as commonly conceived? — Janus

The world "spiritual" is not in the original quote. Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, and their successors broadly orient their ethics and grounding of the human good in this way. Does their ethics require "esoteric knowledge" to practice? I don't think so. They certainly refer to such ends, particularly Plato, Plotinus, etc., but the whole point of dialogues such as the Charmides, I take it, is about the ability to make progress and refine understanding without such an end "in hand." Likewise, Aristotle's ethics provides a robust account of the human good and the development of virtue, while still pointing to contemplation as its highest point (Book X of the Ethics) and climaxing in Book XII of the Metaphysics.

By contrast, the ethics of liberalism has tended to remain firmly wed to the Reformation (particularly Protestant) vision of ethics as a sort of divine command, only now with God lopped out. The focus on law and obligation, highlighted by Anscombe in "Modern Moral Theory," or Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, etc., dominates utilitarianism and deontological ethics. It also leads to the very thin anthropology I was speaking to, since the entire idea is that ethics must necessarily be about rules, and since divine revelation is ruled out, and paired with the general skepticism of empiricism, we get a foundation of "rules all 'rational agents' will agree to." Or, because this is unconvincing, you get anti-realism and an ethics of sentiment that collapses any distinction between what is currently desired and what is truly desirable.

This is precisely what absolutizes individual preference and privatizes any deeper notions of teleology.

Self-help teachings and practices, if they are effective, should help people to live better lives. Of course I realize some of them are all about how to achieve financial success, but is that really such a bad aim for someone if it doesn't degenerate into acquisitive greed, especially if they aspire to be a householder and parent? — Janus

A focus on wealth (or career success as a proxy for status) as a primary aim seems to be a paradigmatic example of "putting second things first," no? Sure, wealth is useful. There are plenty of miserable wealthy people though. Wealth is only useful in parting with it; it's a proximate aim at best.

"What we ought to do" is of course important too. In Australia, several years ago there was a move to teach ethics in school, but the kibosh was put on that idea when religious organizations objected that ethics could not be effectively taught without God. — Janus

Exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. The "privatization" part of secularization makes it essentially impossible to have any public teaching of ethics per se. Of course, ethics is still taught, just not directly and reflectively.

The reduction in religious circles of ethics to religion is another consequence of the focus of obligations and rules, and the crowding out of any focus on the human good form a teleological perspective. The origin point for this sort of outlook is the same as it is some forms of liberal athiesm ironically.

But of course, fundamentalists find their own theories of praxis and various popular luminaries to be "helpful." If what is helpful is just what individuals find to be helpful, then the ideology motivating this sort of rejection of ethical education will itself be unimpeachable.

When I was hanging around New Age and Theosophy circles it was extraordinary how much of the activity was narcissistic and virtue signalling- “I’m more aware/developed/higher than you.” — Tom Storm

:up: this was largely my experience as well. I think there is something quite similar that could be said about modern reinventions of esoterica by figures such as Crowley, Evola, Peter Carol, where they essentially take the language and external symbols of a tradition and cut out all the teleological grounding actually.

the switch towards a "thin" anthropology, and the liberal phobia of strong ethical claims tends to unmoor them from any strong commitment to an ordering telos that structures the "self-development" they intend to promote. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Unmoored is the post-enlightenment state of affairs. And it is self-defeating: in the name of freedom, this unmooring makes us unable to be free, as in the name of self-development much advice diminishes the individual.

talk of “your good” or “finding your authentic self.” — Count Timothy von Icarus

My good will never be as good as the good. I am authentically in flux, so by only seeking my authentic self, without seeking virtue and objective moral guidance from outside myself, I never actualize something that is only potential in me. Basically, if one admits to oneself what one’s authentic self really is (namely, a potentially good person in need of assistance) one should be drawn out of one’s self (or instructed to look deeper into experience than merely at one’s self).

In the Western tradition ascetic/spiritual exercises were meant to re-order the soul toward truth, goodness, and the divine. In Buddhism, mindfulness is embedded in the Eightfold Path and oriented towards liberation. By contrast, modern adaptations tend to treat these disciplines as mere tools for the self-interested individual, e.g., a means of coping, maximizing productivity, reducing stress, or achieving “authenticity.” I have seen this particularly in some pieces on Stoicism I've read that seem to be largely aimed at the "tech-bro" crowd. A commitment to truth gets shoved aside for a view of philosophy as a sort of "life hack." — Count Timothy von Icarus

All of the transcendent, metaphysical aspects of philosophy have been mocked as superstition. Thrown out once and for all by Nietzsche and buried by post-modernism. But the self-helpers still find a sort of role-playing as metaphysician yields some physical benefits (for some unexplained reason), so they dress up like a philosopher to satisfy the deepest human cravings with tidbits and appetizers despite no sense of principle (because despite some traditional practices yielding practical benefits, “‘self’ help” is anathema to most all of our traditions. The East teaches us that seeking/finding any authentic self (in the liberal sense of self) is the opposite of enlightenment, and judeo-Christian-Islamism teaches we need God’s help, not just our own.

fragments of older ascetic traditions that have been hollowed out by modern ideologies. — Count Timothy von Icarus

With no respect at all paid to these older sources. We are too enlightened now to truly admire anyone pre-1969 (except maybe Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche).

Philosophy itself has been thoroughly academicatized and professionalized. Outdoor education and similar areas might have a better claim to its ancient mantel at this point (that is, they come much closer to how it was practiced) — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have always said that wisdom most often is found outside of academia. This is the case by conscious choice of many academics. Some universities are downright dangerous places for some individuals who naively seek wisdom there.

You argue that modern liberalism, in the guises of personal
improvement, self-help and wellness programs, gives preference to the desires of the individual over the community, but you don’t question the split between personal and collective desire this presupposes. You also don’t mention that an ethic of the collective good and an ethic of self-actualization have in common the grounding of will in a metaphysical subject. The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired. More enactively inclined approaches reject the idea of an innate ethical disposition in favor of a notion of phronesis, an ethical wisdom or attunement that centers on the attainment of compassion. This compassion, in turn, arises out of the realization of no-self, the awareness that the grasping ego is a mirage we cling to. Shaun Gallagher explains how Francisco Varela derives this notion from a melding of enactivism and Buddhism:

For Mencius , the Good is tied up with natural
kinds of innate dispositions plus the cultivation of those dispositions. This notion of a natural disposition may not satisfy everyone as a concept of the good and indeed it doesn’t satisfy Varela, even if he retains it as a kind of implied starting point. Likewise, natural disposition
should not satisfy enactivists, since nothing in enactive principles pre-ordain natural disposition as in any way intrinsically good. It’s in his third lecture that he takes the analysis I think one step, or we might even say, he has a quantum Leap involved here. One step further, providing a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless
virtual self , an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes and he then links this conception up with Buddhist practice. and I think this leads us to Varela’s core thesis , where he says ethical know-how is the progressive firsthand acquaintance with the virtuality of self. the emphasis in his analysis is going to fall on cultivation.

Putting the self in question is a kind of deconstructive phase of Buddhist mindfulness practice, out of which comes something more positive, and here he quotes a Buddhist scholar who says when the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born and compassionate arises without pretense. So it’s funny because Mencius’s kind of natural disposition is implied here but what is added to this idea is the notion of compassion. so if we ask where precisely is the notion of the good in Varela’s work, the answer is the Buddhist conception of compassion. The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering. So for Varela and for Buddhist theories this is closely tied to the conception of or the elimination of the self as a source of suffering.

You argue that modern liberalism, in the guises of personal
improvement, self-help and wellness programs, gives preference to the desires of the individual over the community — Joshs

I think this is probably true to some degree, particularly in some specific areas of the self-help space (the Manosphere being a hyperbolic example). However, I think this is somewhat ancillary. Sometimes, there is a big focus on community mixed in, outdoor adventure education being a prime example. IMHO, the larger issue is the collapse of the distinction between apparent/current individual desires and what is truly desirable. It's normally not an "anti-realism" about the human good, but rather a sort of bracketing/privatizing move that justifies this. But you can't have praxis grounded in ends that lie outside current desire (a telos) without that distinction.

The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired — Joshs

I don't think they're entirely in the wrong here either, insomuch as virtue is desirable. But it strikes me as quite optimistic. We might believe that the attainment of virtue fulfills desire, even the deepest desires, and still believe that misordered desires can lead inexorably away from virtue. At the limit, the notion that fulfilling current desires (whatever they happen to be) always leads towards virtue (the enjoyment of right action) and freedom would essentially be the denial that vice exists, i.e., that no one can become habituated to bad action.

Now, I can see a case for the idea that no one flourishes in a state of vice, and so there is always an impetus for change, but the whole idea of "disordered desires" is that that impetus can become ignored for prolonged periods.

The second approach is more interesting. It's in line with many of the critiques of instrumentalized mindfulness, which write off that deconstruction phase. The metaphysics underwriting that move also aren't embraced, because no clear metaphysics is; that's sort of the idea of making the praxis portable and instrumentalizing it, but also the risk.

The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired. — Joshs

A common notion in modernity, found in things like the "invisible hand," is that one should just focus on X and Y will work itself out. "Just focus on what is personally desired and your biological or spiritual compass will guide development in a way that takes care of the ethical." Ayn Rand's Egoism is of a similar modality.

Building on some of , I would say that this requires a kind of naivete about the easy coupling between the private good and the common good, or between the self-interested act and the noble act. "Would that it were so!"

but you don’t question the split between personal and collective desire this presupposes — Joshs

...and the "split" is a phenomenon of philosophical anthropology. It's not so easy for children of Hobbes to reprogram their belief in the split.

The difference between self-help and philosophy may be about the analytic concepts of philosophy and the pragmatic aspects of life. This is most obvious in ethics but how one copes with personal problems is also relevant.

Self-help may be seen as less important than wider spheres of ethics. However, how one views personal issues may also be relevant to issues of wider concern.

Also, while the issues identified might stem from elements of liberalism, I should probably do a better job precisely identifying which elements. A program like Americorps is obviously very grounded in liberalism (being a US government program) and yet I would say it has fewer of these deficits. It is certainly community oriented. I think a key difference there might be that it doesn't have to operate as a business, or to necessarily "sell itself" in the way other avenues of praxis might.

I'd argue that everyone answers these questions (re method, truth, and values) one way or another, either reflectively or non-reflectively. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But if there is no God and we know “the good” to be a necessary organising idea that is always socially constructed, then that puts moral philosophy on a quite different basis. One rooted in naturalistic metaphysics rather than transcendental beliefs.

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God.

If the self help industry seems an issue as it is lightweight and commercialised, isn’t that more because it seems to sell non-Western practices as a distraction from the faults of the Western socially constructed view of life, or because it sells the promise of an insider’s track to mastering that way of life, with all its flaws.

Therapy based on a pragmatic understanding of human social organisation doesn’t need to us to become either medieval monks or masters of the universe. It is just the commonsense approach of understanding why the game is what it is and how to think your path through that.

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God. — apokrisis

At a certain point these begin to sound awfully similar. Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss…

Meet the new boss… — Joshs

Auguste Comte, generally recognized as the father of social science, explicitly modeled his approach on that of religion in general and Catholicism in particular with his "Religion of Humanity." Indeed, thinkers who apply evolutionary thought to the social sphere don't generally draw a hard and fast distinction between religion and social doctrine.

here [Shaun Gallagher] quotes a Buddhist scholar who says when the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born and compassionate arises without pretense… The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering — Joshs

One thing that might be understood about what we might call ‘religions of the spirit’ is that the very knowledge of the ‘higher truth’ is itself liberation, is itself ‘the Good’. It’s unmediated and inherently peaceful, joyous, and totally fulfilling in a way that knowledge of mundane facts can never be. So it’s not a matter of ameliorating social conditions or improving political systems (which it may or may not do). So the ‘ending of suffering’ is putatively a state where all the factors leading to suffering, and its causes, are for once and for all ended. Believe it, don’t believe it, that, at least, is what it is about.

At a certain point these begin to sound awfully similar. Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss… — Joshs

Social theory tells us why humans have to organise under transcendent narratives. We have to believe in something bigger than ourselves to accept that as our common tribal identity.

So yes. That is just an essential feature of the semiotic technology. We can accept a boss if that boss is also subsumed into the collective identity by being just as restricted by some supreme boss.

The supreme boss could be a narrative about ancestral spirits, a god in heaven, or a moral philosophy encoded as law and political structure. We can accept kings and presidents if they too bow a knee to some transcendent power that properly closes the human social system and gives it a known identity as it now has its clear boundary.

This narrative is not a fiction in our lives. We have to believe in its reality. Otherwise our own identity would be unmoored.

So my pragmatism doesn’t put an end to the need for a transcendent narrative. It just opens the way to a self-conscious discussion - a philosophical discussion - of the evolution of the jumble of such narratives that we find being handed down.

But if there is no God and we know “the good” to be a necessary organising idea that is always socially constructed, then that puts moral philosophy on a quite different basis. — apokrisis

I don't see how that follows. Presumably, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a trap, yet I'm not sure how this would be "socially constructed." Likewise, ceteris paribus, it is bad for man to be lit on fire, and I'm not sure how this would be "socially constructed" in any strong sense. Certainly, our notions of the good are always filtered through culture, because man is a social animal. The human good is inextricable from social constructions. But it also seems obvious to me that the human good is affected by principles that lie prior to any particular society, just as human nature is prior to human culture, in that the latter cannot exist without the former and is always shaped by it.

That the Good is an organizing principle I can get on board with, but as a prerequisite for intentionality and goal-directedness, it's a much broader principle than simply a principle of psychology or political science. This would make it posterior to biology. Not to go off-topic, but from a metaphysical lens, it's the Good, as "that to which all things strive," that makes anything any thing at all, in that true organic wholes emerge (are unified) by being oriented towards an end (i.e., organisms). Hence, it would seem to me to play a central role in resolving the Problem of the One and the Many.

That said, I don't really disagree with you in that I'd allow that politics/political science would indeed be the architectonic science of practical reason, in that it has the furthest reach (for man) and deals with the most common of goods. I don't see why an understanding of the Good as a metaphysical principle would be at odds with this.

One rooted in naturalistic metaphysics rather than transcendental beliefs. — apokrisis

The problem I have with "naturalism" is that it is equivocated on so broadly that I can never be quite sure how to respond to it (not a dig at you mind you; it's just become a real problem. When everyone is a naturalist it doesn't really tell you much!). What is naturalism here? The idea that everything that exists is changing? The idea that everything is mechanistic?

Solutions to problems are to be uncovered by better social science rather than getting closer to God. — apokrisis

I don't think the human good can be reduced to social (or physical) science. For one, philosophical value judgements are prior to all the normative areas of the sciences.



Au contraire, God is not a seiendes (being); a claim Heidegger would have seen repeated explicitly over and over by the Patristics if he had made it further back than the nominalists (e.g., the opening of Eriugena's Periphyseon). You cannot plop the Trinity on a Porphyrean tree alongside the world. Ipsum esse subsistens, not ens supremum, i.e., act not thing. God as an in-itself is a category error. Teleology doesn't come from above, but from within, through participation in infinite plentitude.

Likewise, knowledge is not the imposition of the "in-itself," but participation in the Logos. To speak of the "in-itself" at all often gets written off as a capitulation to modern univocity. It is God "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28; repeated at every liturgy). The groundedness of ethics here is not an external in-itself, but being as intelligible, given, and above all gift. This isn't violence against difference, but the very gift and sustainment of its intelligibility (the "virtual" being a secularized paradoy of participation in critiques), which is grounded in the relational love of three persons (not a static in-itself).

I am sure there is something to take issue with there, I hardly expect it to be convincing, but the two (the traditional theology and modernity) cannot be lumped together. The latter is (originally at least) a self-conscious rejection of the former. In general, the people who write on this stuff tend to have analytics and empiricists as their primary targets.

Incidentally, there was an influential book published in the 1980’s, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. ‘Spiritual Materialism’ is exactly the kind of self-improvement orientation that the OP is about. (Trungpa was also Francisco Varela’s mentor in Tibetan Buddhism although his reputation has been tarnished due to the circumstances of his death from alcoholism and the misdeeds of his appointed successor, a very disillusioning episode in the annals of Western Buddhism.)

Better and better knowledge orients and organizes itself teleologically on the basis of the ‘way things are’ as a ground of becoming. The divine in-itself has given way to the natural in-itself. Meet the new boss… — Joshs

'The jealous God dies hard'.

But isn’t there commentary on the idea that the ‘myth of progress’ originated with a secularised version of the Christian eschaton? Christianity introduced a linear, purposeful view of history, culminating in an end (eschaton) with cosmic significance (Burkhardt, Lowith, et al). Whereas antiquity largely thought in terms of Eliade's myth of the eternal return.

Modernity, after the Enlightenment, retained the form of historical teleology but emptied it of transcendent content, replacing divine fulfillment with secular goals: reason, science, technological mastery, emancipation, utopia, communism - and now, transhumanism and space travel (Elon Musk et al).

This narrative is not a fiction in our lives. We have to believe in its reality. Otherwise our own identity would be unmoored.
So my pragmatism doesn’t put an end to the need for a transcendent narrative. It just opens the way to a self-conscious discussion - a philosophical discussion - of the evolution of the jumble of such narratives that we find being handed down. — apokrisis

You may believe in the reality of these narratives, but you don’t believe each is transcendent in itself. You believe they are historically contingent. What is transcendent for you is the ‘semiotic technology’ of becoming, what grounds the fact that “social theory tells us why humans have to organize under transcendent narratives”.

God is not a seiendes (being); a claim Heidegger would have seen repeated explicitly over and over by the Patristics if he had made it further back than the nominalists (e.g., the opening of Eriugena's Periphyseon). You cannot plop the Trinity on a Porphyrean tree alongside the world. Ipsum esse subsistens, not ens supremum, i.e., act not thing. God as an in-itself is a category error. Teleology doesn't come from above, but from within, through participation in infinite plentitude.

Likewise, knowledge is not the imposition of the "in-itself," but participation in the Logos. To speak of the "in-itself" at all often gets written off as a capitulation to modern univocity. It is God "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28; repeated at every liturgy). The groundedness of ethics here is not an external in-itself, but being as intelligible, given, and above all gift. This isn't violence against difference, but the very gift and sustainment of its intelligibility (the "virtual" being a secularized paradoy of participation in critiques), which is grounded in the relational love of three persons (not a static in-itself). — Count Timothy von Icarus

So ‘ God’ is just the gift of difference that repeats itself in the contextually relative becoming of experience from
moment to moment? And the intelligibility of understanding arises from the pragmatic enactment of new sense in discursive engagement? Or is there some element external to the utter contingency of contextual becoming, but essential to the Logos we participate in, and essential to god?

The difference between self-help and philosophy ... — Jack Cummins

... corresponds, imho, to the difference between training (therapy) and understanding (surgery).

But if there is no God [ ... ] [then we're] rooted in naturalistic metaphysics rather than transcendental beliefs. — apokrisis

:up: :up:
.

You may believe in the reality of these narratives, but you don’t believe each is transcendent in itself. You believe they are historically contingent. — Joshs

Thanks for telling me what I believe rather than listening to what I say.

I argue for pragmatism/semiosis as ontic structural realism. The final Platonic truth of how existence exists. The metaphysical logic that rules it all - and demands contingency as part of that very structure. What Peirce called the tychism that is the “other” of the synechism. Or what systems science calls the degrees of freedom that are “other” to the global laws or constraints of an evolutionary ontology.

So I believe in contingency and I believe in necessity. They are the diametric oppositions that together can bound the world as we find it to be. Some pragmatic mix of the two arranged into an upper and lower bound on our reality.

I don't see how that follows. Presumably, it is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a trap, yet I'm not sure how this would be "socially constructed." — Count Timothy von Icarus

How can you not see that this kind of attitude is relatively modern? In more traditional times, it was more likely to provoke laughter, amusement and excitement. Bull fighting and fox hunting are still respectable public spectacles in civilised parts of the world.

You are picking examples which illustrate the very opposite of what you intend.

But it also seems obvious to me that the human good is affected by principles that lie prior to any particular society, just as human nature is prior to human culture, in that the latter cannot exist without the former and is always shaped by it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. But have you studied human evolution? Are you familiar with Richard Wrangham’s self-domestication hypothesis where a crucial step that distinguishes sapiens is that we evolved the new dynamic of empathy coupled to cold blooded violence. We evolved a new level of switching in our brains where we could shift suddenly between two new states - essential to becoming socially constructed beings - in that we either feel a nurturing closeness or flick into the other state of a predatory aggression.

Chimps live in social groups but have only limited empathy coupled to only reactive or hot blooded aggression. Humans tweaked this neurology so that cognitive structure could overlay the emotional circuits. We could extend empathy and so live in close domestic harmony with our surrounds, but also just as usefully, switch into collective organised violence that was premeditated and executed without being a problem for the other thing of our state of domestic harmony.

We could go out as a small band and slaughter a whole herd of mammoths. Then bring back the bounty to share out equally. And this neural dichotomy still deeply marks everything about who we are.

Not to go off-topic, but from a metaphysical lens, it's the Good, as "that to which all things strive," that makes anything any thing at all, in that true organic wholes emerge (are unified) by being oriented towards an end (i.e., organisms). Hence, it would seem to me to play a central role in resolving the Problem of the One and the Many. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is what I am arguing. Except the surprise is that contingency is as essential as finality at this metaphysical level. Evolutionary order is achieved by developing guiding constraints on contingency. But then contingency is still needed so that evolution doesn’t get locked into believing it has arrived in some perfect state of adaptation. Natural selection needs random variety so it can continue to optimise a living and mindful structure of habit.

Accidents can be mistakes or they can be discoveries. But they can’t become understood as either unless accidents are being produced in sufficient abundance.

What is naturalism here? The idea that everything that exists is changing? The idea that everything is mechanistic? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It starts off by opposing itself to the supernatural. It contrasts evidenced fact to narrative myth. It believes in a Cosmos that is somehow its own cause. And right from the first proper metaphysician - Anaximander of Miletus - the general logic of this was being sketched out.

For one, philosophical value judgements are prior to all the normative areas of the sciences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But that is just a socially constructed stance. You might say it is so. You certainly haven’t shown it is so.

It is just a narrative framing so you can claim top billing in the social hierarchy you have constructed in your mind.

The world "spiritual" is not in the original quote. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I thought it was implied, that you were not addressing empirical truth.

Or, because this is unconvincing, you get anti-realism and an ethics of sentiment that collapses any distinction between what is currently desired and what is truly desirable.

This is precisely what absolutizes individual preference and privatizes any deeper notions of teleology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's really very simple, and no need for a law-giving God. There will always be a tension between individual preferences and societal desiderata. It seems obvious that in any community harmony is more desirable than conflict. Right there is the pragmatic basis for ethics.

You say "deeper notions of teleology": but there is no need to "muddy the waters to make them appear deep".

A focus on wealth (or career success as a proxy for status) as a primary aim seems to be a paradigmatic example of "putting second things first," no? Sure, wealth is useful. There are plenty of miserable wealthy people though. Wealth is only useful in parting with it; it's a proximate aim at best. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to be doing that black and white thinking. I haven't said that exclusive or even primary focus on accumulating wealth would be a good thing. It wouldn't because it leads to egregious exploitation of other humans, animals and environments.

Exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. The "privatization" part of secularization makes it essentially impossible to have any public teaching of ethics per se. Of course, ethics is still taught, just not directly and reflectively. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I disagree. I see no reason to think that ethics could not be taught to children without incorporating the threat of divine punishment and promise of divine reward. I think humans become naturally empathetic and compassionate, once they are able to attain a balanced view of their kinship with others, an understanding that we are all in this together.

Of course there will always be some percentage of sociopaths―no society is ever going to be perfect. Teaching ethics would mean instilling an understanding of the balance between competition and cooperation. I think it is fair to say that competition is overemphasized in many modern societies.

Of course there will always be some percentage of sociopaths―no society is ever going to be perfect. — Janus

Interestingly, Wrangham’s self domestication story I just mentioned argues that the genetic change in favour of empathy/cold blooded predation was achieved by tribal groups being close enough to remove any bullies or cheaters from their gene pool by just killing them.

This is still recorded behaviour in tribal societies. Someone makes a nuisance of himself for too long. There is a night of ritualised discussion in the long hut where everyone gets high and muses about the strange visions they are having. Mr X is oddly seen having a nasty accident. The idea hangs heavy in the air.

Next morning, the senior men are on a trip to a claimed sighting of a honey hive up a tall tree. Mr X is teased about being too scared to climb so high, especially where the bees sound so angry. He puts down his spear, starts the climb. Looks down to realise the others are now quietly seated with their spears held easy. Just a certain patient glint in their eyes. Someone ain’t making it home and it will be one of those things.

A few thousand generations of that would certainly have its impact on the percentage of those not adept at fitting in to the small band structure of prehistoric life.

And it goes also to my theme that a belief in the transcendent is part of the larger framework that is evolutionary pragmatism. The men can’t just come out and say we have to murder one of us. The idea has to be sanctified as something that kind of happened because of its own righteous logic. It appeared as foretold in collective mystic ceremony. The idea formed and so Mr X’s fate was sealed. It was probably revealed he was some kind of demon or evil spirit. Everything after that was just pragmatic detail.

See his article….

There will always be a tension between individual preferences and societal desiderata. It seems obvious that in any community harmony [positive sum] is more desirable than conflict [zerosum]. Right there is the pragmatic basis for ethics. — Janus

:100:
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I really liked your idea of outdoor activities. I've been thinking about this for a few days. May I ask you to reveal a little more about how an outdoor philosophy class (or philosophizing) can be linked today? Should it be some kind of practice (borrowed from yoga, for example) or just staying in nature and talking about wisdom, maybe it should be a walk? Maybe it should be a procession (for example, to the sunset) with many stops and conversations? It would be very interesting for me to implement it. What kind of open-air practice is suitable for academic philosophy classes?

I disagree. I see no reason to think that ethics could not be taught to children without incorporating the threat of divine punishment and promise of divine reward. — Janus

Sure, I have no real disagreement there. But liberalism says questions of the human good are, for the most part, private matters. Public ethics must be built around liberal dogmas re pluralism and the unknowability of the human good. Hence, if you try to teach ethics, what you get is different parties raging about how it is not the state's place to make any comment on the human good, because this must remain private. Religious people revolt unless their particular theology is on the syllabus, and likewise "secular humanists" decry not only a particularly Christian ethics being taught, but even a Platonism or Aristotelianism that hasn't been sufficiently deflated to fit the presuppositions of "exclusive humanism."

You seem to be doing that black and white thinking. I haven't said that exclusive or even primary focus on accumulating wealth would be a good thing. It wouldn't because it leads to egregious exploitation of other humans, animals and environments. — Janus

That post was written in response to your comment about practical philosophies that were "all about" the acquisition of wealth, hence my response.

There will always be a tension between individual preferences and societal desiderata. It seems obvious that in any community harmony is more desirable than conflict. Right there is the pragmatic basis for ethics. — Janus

More desirable for whom? Certainly not for people who want to radically reshape the society, or for those who profit from or enjoy conflict. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail might rightly get called "Selecting on the Dependent Variable: The Book," but it was well received because the basic phenomena it is analyzing makes sense and has been supported elsewhere. The "case studies" were just window dressing. Their main point is that elites, particularly dictators and their inner circle, often have strong incentives to do things that they know will make their countries poorer, less technologically advanced, and militarily weaker overall.

Why? Because the same reforms that will lead to a better median standard of living, greater political liberty, faster technological progress, a stronger economy, and a stronger military also threaten their control of power and their own impunity. Not only are people like Gaddafi able to control much more wealth than a Musk or a Bill Gates, but they have vastly more power and impunity within their own social sphere. Russia is a fine example of this. Norvell De Atkine's classic study "Why Arabs Lose Wars" is a perfect example of the sorts of incentives at play in the war with Ukraine. You cannot have people who are too competent and charismatic racking up victories because they represent a potential challenge to you (something seen clearly when Putin had to flee his capital as a low-level criminal turned catering chef led his private army on it). But this same sort of issue of "perverse incentives" plays out everywhere, from local government, to corporate boardrooms, to staff lounges, etc.

Man as the political animal cuts both ways. Man might be naturally social and compassionate, but man also has a strong tendency towards overwrought thymotic passions. It seems fairly obvious that man hasn't tended towards a sort of default benevolence. As Gibbon put it: "History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Many of these disasters stem from meglothymos, the desire for honor, domination, and excellence. The idea that "cooperation is best for comfort and security, so people will naturally tend towards it," not only seems falsified by history, but it's also far too weak of a pitch to motivate people to the sort of heroism needed to maintain civilizations.

How can you not see that this kind of attitude is relatively modern? In more traditional times, it was more likely to provoke laughter, amusement and excitement. Bull fighting and fox hunting are still respectable public spectacles in civilised parts of the world. — apokrisis

This response just seems to beg the question that good and bad are only just whatever people happen to currently say they are. But prima facie, it is bad for a bear to get its leg mangled in a trap regardless of "what people currently say," just as its bad for a person to drink mercury regardless of if their society currently thinks it's a panacea for all sorts of ills.

This framing does nicely illustrate the way anti-realism collapses any appearance/reality distinction vis-a-vis values though.

Natural selection needs random variety so it can continue to optimise a living and mindful structure of habit. — apokrisis

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." Now if there is no end being sought, and whatever is "adaptive" is just whatever just so happens to end up happening, all these value terms are simply equivocations. Indeed, "pragmatism" is itself an equivocation if there is no real end involved.

So ‘ God’ is just the gift of difference that repeats itself in the contextually relative becoming of experience from
moment to moment? And the intelligibility of understanding arises from the pragmatic enactment of new sense in discursive engagement? Or is there some element external to the utter contingency of contextual becoming, but essential to the Logos we participate in, and essential to god? — Joshs

No, because God is not just contextual becoming, nor is intelligibility a pragmatic construction. God is the infinite plentitude from which difference flows as gift. God is the ground that makes difference and intelligibility possible. As Hart puts it: "All difference is difference in the light of infinite beauty, and so is secured in its truth by that light, rather than left to drift as sheer indeterminacy."

I really liked your idea of outdoor activities. I've been thinking about this for a few days. May I ask you to reveal a little more about how an outdoor philosophy class (or philosophizing) can be linked today? — Astorre

I was mostly thinking about my own experiences with Outdoor Adventure Education (OAE), which I then found reflected in a lot of the literature. The field has long had a heavy focus on "developing character" or even "education in virtue." It generally focuses on progressive challenges for participants, community work, self-governance, opportunities for leadership, and often a focus on environmental ethics. There is an ascetic component as well though. Expeditions are hard work, and on top of this diets are normally quite plain.

The "solo," several hours, a day, or a few days spent alone in the woods, is a fairly common practice (this was a common practice in pre-modern philosophy too). While fasting is less of a focus, it is still not uncommon in OAE for adults, on a choice basis. I also worked for a program where students helped construct a sweat lodge over a week and then had a Native America ceremony led for them inside. Journaling, writing letters to yourself, and group discussions are also common elements one finds in the ancient tradition and modern OAE (although in antiquity they often wrote monologues as other people as an exercise, particularly Biblical characters). I haven't seen as much "close reading" in OAE though. It doesn't tend to leave a ton of time for reading.

So, there is a rough similarity in methods and aims. However, one thing I noticed, that is confirmed in the literature, is that this focus on "character" has been challenged and has eroded over time, while programs like the YMCA and Outward Bound also underwent a "secularization" process that not only removed Christianity from the programs, but also much of the connection to pre-modern thought more generally, and notions of virtue or character in particular. The latter gets replaced by "therapy," which focuses more on coping, comfort, adjustment, and self-acceptance, and the smooth flow of enjoyment for the individual (and the group as a function of promoting individual enjoyment). One way I've seen it framed is the difference between:

"becoming what you are made to be" (older tradition) and;
"becoming what you want to be." (therapeutic)

To quote Gothe on the early stages of this sort of shift: "humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everybody is everybody else’s humane nurse"

Or as the Catholic Encyclopedia of Social Theory puts it surprisingly polemically:

Freud himself was of a stoical disposition and urged those with the requisite strength and maturity to resign themselves to the meaninglessness of things without despair. Consolation for him, such as it was, came from his faith in reason and science. For those not capable of this, there is therapy. “Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.” Meaning ceases to be a matter of truth and becomes whatever the individual finds soothing. This continues to be a definitive part of the therapeutic mentality, and Freud intended it as a prescription for the weak. But as writers such as Philip Rieff and Christopher Lasch have shown, the other side of this is the pursuit of unlimited self-creation. Rieff argues that the result has been a radical reconfiguration of society and its institutions to place them at the service of the individual’s “manipulatable sense of well-being.” Self-creation is of course a Nietzschean concept, and it is one of the ironies of history that Nietzsche’s grand idea, elaborated with some bombast, should in reality come to mean little more than a higher form of therapy. This is, however, small consolation for the world the therapeutic mentality makes possible and has helped bring into being. Characterized by the increasingly brutal assertion of the self against others, this world is justified by recourse to an argot of psychological and often (in its New Age formulations) “spiritual” elements affirming the supposedly unique and intrepid qualities of a life lived in mediocre selfishness. The therapeutic mentality plays an essential part in sustaining the self in its lonely supremacy and in maintaining modernity’s resistance to the call to transcendence. The viability of the secular project today would not be possible without it.

That might be stronger than many critics would put it, but you get the idea.

For instance, one paper I read noted how some YMCA programs still call their nighttime discussion questions "vespers" after the canonical Christian prayer of the hours, but Christianity was first removed from these, then notions of virtue, and old questions were replaced with one's that tended to focus on individual self-realization in a pluralist framing.

Philip Rieff's book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic is the classic study of this new "therapeutic" paradigm (Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism all have some similar elements in terms of broadly influential studies). They mostly focus on culture writ large, or philosophy and related fields, but the books I mentioned in the OP show how this has trickled down into the self-help industry and related areas.

The OAE literature (which is smaller) grapples with this same phenomenon. Character and virtue have been attacked from a post-modern and situationist angle (although the replication crisis in social psychology and charges of ideological bias have seemingly taken some of the wind out of the drive to fully erase character talk). It's also been attacked as not being sufficiently pluralistic, or precisely because "character" presumes that there is any one better way to be. On this topic, I found a number of papers circling around the fear that OAE was simply degenerating into adventure tourism with the loss of this background.

What kind of open-air practice is suitable for academic philosophy classes? — Astorre

I'm not sure. I would think a camp/farm environment would be fine. I imagine that just having a small group, no distractions from nightlife, networking, etc., and no internet would be a huge boon for engagement. You would get students who self-select for serious study and avoid the tidal forces of digital distractions. But structured time for silence and group labor seem to be time honored/tested practices in both philosophy and outdoor programs. Plus, rustic accommodations and diets are cheap, and having participants work or gardening and repairs can make it cheaper.

Labor wasn't really a thing for the Pagan philosophers, at least in late-antiquity, because of a stigma against menial labor, but the early Christians differed on this dramatically. They thought it was essential for community building, fostering humility, being able to provide aid to the needy, and as a form of meditative practice. Their structured production is what allowed them to take on people from all classes, not just the wealthy, and become sources of aid/food for others in times of need (although it is also what slowly lead to them becoming wealthy and prosperous, which eventually undercut their mission in some places). Ascetic communities, because of their organization, tended to produce a surplus, and this actually led to its own problems because now there was wealth to covet.

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Optimise speaks to the idea of finding a middle path between dichotomised limits. Finding balance within a system of dynamics.

You may read it as finding the best path. But I am using it as meaning the most balanced path. The one that emerges out of the confluence of opposed forces.

And this is simply how Nature works. Physics is based on the finality expressed as the principle of least action. The Lagrangian. The greatest distance covered with the least effort.

If it is a laden term, it is laden with physical realism. Finding the trajectory which balances out the competing forces is the end towards which Nature universally tends.

Good and bad is just a world described as a single fixed direction. There is no balancing described and so no flexibility or dynamism. No emergence or evolution. Nothing of interest or complexity involved at all.

As metaphysics, it makes no actual sense of the world as we know it or life as we live it. Folk can’t optimise their behaviour in terms of being some balance of being reasonably good and reasonably bad.

Of course, we all end up having to arrive at some notion of that balancing act. Pragmatism rules. But all the talk of good versus bad just frames life as a guilty confusion. A constant battle with our failure to meet some impossible and unliveable standard.

No wonder people need therapy if they have been brought up like that. Never good enough and just having to trust their sins will be forgiven. They will ride the up elevator rather than the down one at the final curtain call. Their life will have been weighed in terms of good and bad and they did just enough to tip the balance. Grudgingly allowed to join the club of the good, the true, the perfect, the beautiful, the divine.

Value-laden thinking is the assumption that reality is monistic - to be weighed against a standard measure. But Nature tells us that reality is always relativistic - some balance that is always complementary. An optimisation of two “goods”.

Society is good when it is civilised. When it understands that it is good to be both competitive and cooperative in one’s behaviour. Optimisation is then being flexibly positioned between those two general extremes in a way that seems most appropriate to some particular occasion.

Good versus bad admits to no flexibility. Thoughtful choice isn’t even required of its adherents. It only seems a pragmatically useful idea if you want to run some hierarchy of subjugation. You run the show and you tell people how high they need to jump.

But liberalism says questions of the human good are, for the most part, private matters. Public ethics must be built around liberal dogmas re pluralism and the unknowability of the human good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I disagree―since liberalism advocates both democracy and individual rights it does not accord any notion of my rights being any more important than yours. So, essentially the idea consists in saying that you are free to do whatever you want as long as what you do does not infringe on the rights of others.

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.

You say liberalism entails or is built upon "the unknowability of the human good". This is false in my view. There is just one human good, and that is flourishing, but we must think of flourishing as having two poles―the individual and the communal.

You seem to be doing that black and white thinking. I haven't said that exclusive or even primary focus on accumulating wealth would be a good thing. It wouldn't because it leads to egregious exploitation of other humans, animals and environments.
— Janus

That post was written in response to your comment about practical philosophies that were "all about" the acquisition of wealth, hence my response. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here is the passage you were responding to again.

Self-help teachings and practices, if they are effective, should help people to live better lives. Of course I realize some of them are all about how to achieve financial success, but is that really such a bad aim for someone if it doesn't degenerate into acquisitive greed, especially if they aspire to be a householder and parent? — Janus

Note that in that passage I said " if it doesn't degenerate into acquisitive greed". I was talking about practical self-help teachings and practices, not overarching moral philosophies that preach making money for making money's sake. Teaching people about how to make and manage money does not need to involve, should not involve, teaching people that all that is important is making money. All or nothing thinking again!

More desirable for whom? Certainly not for people who want to radically reshape the society, or for those who profit from or enjoy conflict. — Count Timothy von Icarus

More desirable for the majority―we are speaking about democratic principles after all. That there may be sociopaths is inevitable and lamentable. No society is perfect. people who want to radically reshape societies are ideologues who are usually quite prepared to impose their wills on others, and that is never a good thing.

Man as the political animal cuts both ways. Man might be naturally social and compassionate, but man also has a strong tendency towards overwrought thymotic passions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think most people naturally social and compassionate, and I acknowledge that there will always be a sociopathic minority who will tend to indulge "overwrought thymotic passions". If they indulge such passions and harm others in the process, they go against the flourishing of the community.

Natural selection needs random variety so it can continue to optimise a living and mindful structure of habit.
— apokrisis

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." Now if there is no end being sought, and whatever is "adaptive" is just whatever just so happens to end up happening, all these value terms are simply equivocations. Indeed, "pragmatism" is itself an equivocation if there is no real end involved. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The end is survival and flourishing. Adaptive evolution does not have a prescribed end, but species that overuse resources will eventually pay the price. The balance is always restored, except in the case of us super-clever and adaptable apes that have been able to live almost everywhere. If the resources in one area are used up, affected animals can move to another area if possible, or if not their population will decline, allowing the resources to build up again. Since we have covered the Earth, if resources are depleted everywhere there will be nowhere left to go.

"Optimize" how? This is a value-laden term, just like your earlier invocation of "Darwinian success." Now if there is no end being sought, and whatever is "adaptive" is just whatever just so happens to end up happening, all these value terms are simply equivocations. Indeed, "pragmatism" is itself an equivocation if there is no real end involved. — Count Timothy von Icarus

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

Or as the Catholic Encyclopedia of Social Theory puts it surprisingly polemically: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting quote. :up:
Is the source, "Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy"?

Yes, this is a point Reiff makes in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. I have found that book to be extremely prescient and well written, although somewhat polemical in a way only a book written as far back as 1966 could be, since so much it diagnoses has become hegemonic in academia and sociology in particular.

In particular, his comments about literature dying and culture being dominated by perspectivist psychodramas in the form of video media have been prescient and comments about the need for constant stimulus seem perfectly predictive of the era of the smartphone and "video game addiction" as a serious medical issue.

Just a few quotes:

To raise again the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses — except the sense of the past — as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. Comte would have substituted a religion of humanity for its enfeebled predecessor; Max Weber proposed no substitute religion. Matthew Arnold could still listen for distant echoes of the sea of faith; Yeats knew there was a desert where once that sea might have been. To raise up faith from its stony sleep encourages the possibility of living through again the nightmare history of the last half century. Yeats did not hope for either restoration or parody of the established faiths. Rather, he prayed for a very modern sort of Second Coming, in which men would recover their innocence, [4|5] chiefly by accepting the fact that it is self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting — "and that its own sweet will is Heaven's will." In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil.

...

So long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process sublimation... Now our renunciations have failed us; less and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke's panther, forever looking out from one cage into another. Because the modern sense of identity seems outraged by imprisonment in either old church or new cage, it is the obligation of sociologists, so far as they remain interested in assessing the quality of our corporate life, to analyze doctrinal as well as organizational profiles of the rage to be free of the inherited morality, the better to see how these differ from what is being raged against. I shall attend to a few of the exemplarily [5|6] enraged, and to the sense in which it may be said that they express general sentiments...

During the nineteenth century, when sociology helped in a major way to construct the central experience of deconversion toward an anti-creedal analytic attitude, that discipline suffered frum a vast over confidence both about its own advance and about the progress of the culture, which it understood as undergoing varieties of such deconversions. "Progress," wrote Spencer,4 "is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect." A basic transformation of culture appeared both inevitable and desirable...

In fact, evil and immorality are disappearing, as Spencer assumed they would, mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal, to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations. Freud sought only to soften the collar; others, using bits and pieces of his genius, would like to take it off.

Of course, that last paragraph applied better in 1966 when the book was written. Since then we have oscillated between this and the "detached reason" of the "effective altruist," crowd who would have us reach utopia through a series of technocratically perfected incentives and nudges paired with ever more effective therapies born of neuroscience, pharmacology, and new digital technologies, and of course ever better data collection and cycles of "continuous improvement." It's not so much a brave new world as a continued oscillation between Enlightenment optimism and Romantic Dionysian pessimism. The former crowd has ascended above morality (while nonetheless still practicing a moralizing ideology, as the ideological tenor of the replication crisis in social psychology and sociology attests), while the other either dispenses with it or "creates" it as an aesthetic project. Hence, it isn't only the liberal theorists who have cut out logos, and the champions of "dispassioned reason" have cut out thymos too.

One of the more prescient parts:

By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that areto be called in the present volume, ''therapeutic ," with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.8 This is the unreligion of the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world...

Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory tor some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of personality. If this re-structuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions... Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends to therapeutic use...

...I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.

The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy economy of abundance...

Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system.But without the discipline ot work, a vast re-ritualization of social life will probably occur, to contain aggression in a steady state and maintain necessary levels of attention to activity.The rules of health indicate activity; psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture.Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints.If ''immoral" materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The end goal is to keep going. Americans, as JF. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.

Of course it's dour, but in some ways maybe a bit optimistic. "Plenitude" probably isn't enough, but "growth in plentitude." That seems to have run out though.

I've long felt there's a sense in which the project of modern consumer culture and techno-capitalism is to create a safe space for ignorance (in the sense of avidya, spiritual blindness.)

We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses — except the sense of the past — as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden.

See also The Strange Persistence of Guilt Wilfred McClay, Hedgehog Review.