Oh @schopenhauer1, you're such a knucklehead. You can't fool us. We know this is just Antinatalism, Take 73.

When Heidegger was thrown into the world, I think he must have hit his head.

Yes in a rough way, and you notice here in the article:

Awareness and acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of Dasein is characterized as a state of "thrown-ness" in the present with all its attendant frustrations, sufferings, and demands that one does not choose, such as social conventions or ties of kinship and duty. The very fact of one's own existence is a manifestation of thrown-ness. The idea of the past as a matrix not chosen, but at the same time not utterly binding or deterministic, results in the notion of Geworfenheit—a kind of alienation that human beings struggle against,[2] and that leaves a paradoxical opening for freedom: — Thrownness

This might describe a lot of what I am talking about in terms of structural suffering and unable to change systemic parts of either existence itself, culture, or circumstances one is brought into.

Oh schopenhauer1, you're such a knucklehead. You can't fool us. We know this is just Anti-natalism, Take 73. — T Clark

I do like focusing on existential matters and basic assumptions- why people assume "dealing with" is good. Why people assume "progress" is something people should pursue. Why putting more people into the world is a good thing, etc. If I talk to you about the induction of electricity through copper wires and power stations having huge magnets that spin and create electricity that is pushed through metallic wires.. You might ask, what is the reason? Well, I want to know how electricity works. Why? Well, a lot of modern society runs on this? Who were the people involved in understanding electricity to the point of utilities that generate large amounts of viable electricity and electrical components? There is all this minutia but it's all based on assumptions- by the people who created this stuff, by the people who consume it, by the people who study it's history and science. The ideas of logic, fundamental laws, complexity, emergence, language, etc. In other words, all these assumptions but it goes back to existential attitudes like the very ones I bring up.

In other words, all these assumptions but it goes back to existential attitudes like the very ones I bring up. — schopenhauer1

I think I know where you come from and you know the same for me. After a few tries, we've found that we're not going to convince each other of our positions. I'm comfortable with that.

I was teasing you. It was intended to be friendly teasing.

Philosophy is like using a baseball bat as a hammer.

It works for a little while before it gets worn to mush and all kinds of nails stuck in it and its usefulness deteriorates exponentially.

My normative claim here is that we should not just accept this as "good" simply because it is the reality. — schopenhauer1

Then no value should be assigned to it. Doing things and dealing with others are just a feature of life. Being aware of the differences between the way we want things to be and the way they really are somehow drives both individual and social change towards minimizing the difference between that which is not as we want it to be and the ideal. This is very similar to what happens in nature : electric potential difference causes electrons to flow, pressure differences cause fluids to flow etc. but when the difference ceases to exist those flows also come to a halt and when all differences of energy of all kinds cease to exist life will also cease to exist.
In the end dealing with things may not be good or bad but if you deal with them you may get closer to this ideal world you and I want. If we actually got to create this ideal world then life may not be possible because the ideal world and the actual one are mutually exclusive. The only thing left is to improve the world for us and for the rest of the people even if that is achieved asymptotically.

When Heidegger was thrown into the world, I think he must have hit his head. — S

When Heidegger [thought he] was thrown into the world, I think he must have hit [the nail on the] head.

There, fixed it.

I think I know where you come from and you know the same for me. After a few tries, we've found that we're not going to convince each other of our positions. I'm comfortable with that.

I was teasing you. It was intended to be friendly teasing. — T Clark

I know :D

It works for a little while before it gets worn to mush and all kinds of nails stuck in it and its usefulness deteriorates exponentially. — whollyrolling

I think you are saying that philosophy doesn't assume anything. I think it is good. We are not robots who just do stuff, but ask why, analyze, compare, look at underlying metaphysical and epistemological and ethical underpinnings.

There, fixed it. — Purple Pond

:ok:

But even the most mundane stuff can be seen as mildly annoying to deal with — schopenhauer1

It can be, sure. There are a lot of ways to look at it, including the zen "wash the dishes to wash the dishes."

We are not robots who just do stuff, but ask why, analyze, compare, look at underlying metaphysical and epistemological and ethical underpinnings. — schopenhauer1

As in this lost haunt of my imagination where philosophers gather:

Back to the tavern we creep, its drinks calling,
Where the inquisitive sit, pondering.
One and another says, We’ve more questions,
For we’ve all been born here without asking.

The scroll writes itself, my wondering friends,
Having not any plan unto its ends,
In this life borrowed from death that it lends,
So, we know not how the veil weaves and wends.

What can we do, as thrust into life?

Life’s object must be mental happiness,
For thoughts are all we can think, feel, or sense.
Aim for this euphoric state of well-being,
For true paradise is a state of mind.

Happiness is a way of life that celebrates
A living aliveness—that then opens gates
To further adventure, friendship, and delights,
To joy, success, triumph, and greater heights.

Who can we blame for our selves unmended,
For base nature’s ingredients blended?
You could invent ‘Allah’, as the baker,
Who disowns His recipe intended.

No. What's this wonderland? I'm baffled here.
What sends me though the ages, to my bier?
You’ve near said: death sifts the best from the rest;
And, overall, you cannot not be here.

What my life’s narrative that I hie through?
No matter it, for any one will do.
What’s left, then, in all common, as the clue?
We’re back to being—experiencing a ‘who’.

Where am I going? Am I important?
You’re going nowhere; here is your life’s plant.

Then no value should be assigned to it. Doing things and dealing with others are just a feature of life. — Alan

True based on being a fact.

Being aware of the differences between the way we want things to be and the way they really are somehow drives both individual and social change towards minimizing the difference between that which is not as we want it to be and the ideal. — Alan

Yes, but again, the initial separation is there, and then the (basically) forced working towards fixing the gap. This is deemed as good and then mumblings of meaning attached to this pursuit.

In the end dealing with things may not be good or bad but if you deal with them you may get closer to this ideal world you and I want. If we actually got to create this ideal world then life may not be possible because the ideal world and the actual one are mutually exclusive. The only thing left is to improve the world for us and for the rest of the people even if that is achieved asymptotically. — Alan

In the end, there is dealing with. It cannot be avoided. We are forced-oriented to it. However, is this something we should identify with simply because it is an inescapable feature? No, rather it is a forced "thrownness" on the person. It's like being on a game with obstacles you cannot escape.

It can be, sure. There are a lot of ways to look at it, including the zen "wash the dishes to wash the dishes." — Terrapin Station

But the fact that there is even a reason to zen out on washing dishes is a dealing with.

Interesting themes there.

Schopenhauer1 So it seems you just want everyone to accept that dealing with stuff is actually bad. Then what ? Are you ok with thinking everything you do is shit because there could be a better world and you were not born in it? Would you still do it? If everyone thought the same way then we would either lose the will to live or stop thinking about it as bad and you would get back to the starting point.

Interesting themes there. — schopenhauer1

And so they went on, deeper, since, well they had to [do something]:

Upon all worlds our shadows are cast,
From our inner musings that are so vast,
While we savor the gladness of life.
We’re off back to the inn to hear what’s asked.

Oh why, why is there anything at all?
There has to be, for Nothing has no call.
No birth, nor creation, choice, or option?
Even the Great Wheel knows not its withal.

What happens, from there being no election,
Of that which hath no point for direction?
Everything happens, as it e’er changes,
Revealing all faces of complextion.

What becomes of this potential everything?
Anything, as all its possible rings.
What’s the information of All these things?
Nothing, so it e’er jitters, flutters, and sings.

What sense to it all, in that it must be?
What is the message of eternity?
The only missive of all time is being,
Its point is but that it cannot not be.

But what’s the base of the basis, as First,
The simplest from which all things fill their thirst?
The first, simple, fundamental monads
Compose complicates, uni-versed.

So, we’ve it wrong that the base is complex?
Yes, as wrong as opposites can expect,
For complexities are of e’er the less,
Of more and more underlying simplex.

Is future connected to the present?
Yes, and in more ways than you’d want it sent,
As the consistencies you might resent:
All future flowers from seeds of the present.

Fine, but not; you leave me with mystery.
What is going on here? For what purpose me?
You and it are the riddle that solves itself.
You are exactly ‘being’ in its spree.

Awesome poetry. Did you write it or does it belong to some other author? I would like to see more of it.

Did you write it — Alan

Thanks. Yes, I wrote it, and it's from my sequel to the Rubaiyat (called 'Rubaiyat II'). I've been putting the quatrains in the threads as appropriate to the OP, and the unused or all will probably end up in my Omar Khayyam thread that has just begun (see 'Austin's Golden Rubaiyat' video there). More such videos on Vimeo.

The poetic form is described here:

The verses beat the same, in measured chime.
Lines one-two set the stage, one-two-four rhyme.
Verse three’s the pivot around which thought turns;
Line four delivers the sting, just in time.

(Ten syllable lines are about the most one can speak without taking a breath.)

We are in an initial state of dissatisfaction or deprivation that must be dealt with, repeatedly until unconsciousness/death. This whole system is deemed as "good" by many, but not reflective about its deprivational nature that is there to begin with. If life presents itself as challenges to "deal with" (get and keep a job to survive, let's say, or making more comfortable environs for yourself), then what is it about this that is "good"? — schopenhauer1

Exactly. Without dukkha, there exists no impetus to act. Yet we humans are perpetually caught up in action - striving towards, maintaining, dealing with - all in response to dukkha. Things are never completely and totally as we want them to be. People come to identify with and support (eg, through procreation) the conditions of human existence because they don't grasp the deprivational nature of their lives - the dukkha that pervades their existence. That (some) people identify with the conditions of this life, and even come to as they say "relish the challenge" in no way negates the existence of challenges being a bad thing in the first place. However, when we conceptually grasp the absence of our existence (i.e. non-condition, non-existence, un-born), the negative conditions of our lives reveal themselves in contrast. The unborn do not even have desires to be satisfied.

Schopenhauer1 So it seems you just want everyone to accept that dealing with stuff is actually bad. Then what ? Are you ok with thinking everything you do is shit because there could be a better world and you were not born in it? Would you still do it? If everyone thought the same way then we would either lose the will to live or stop thinking about it as bad and you would get back to the starting point. — Alan

Yes, T Clark is kind of right. This is yet another reason not to procreate someone else into this situation. What this could inform us, the already-alive is about our own conditions of human existence. It tells us where are striving comes from, our constant dissatisfied state. Perhaps it will bring empathy when dealing with others and ourselves. In a way we can never be satisfied, only temporarily satiated. The ship is always going to leak- it will never be waterproof.

Ironically, I read an article in The Atlantic of of a reinterpretation of Job by Edward L. Greenstein here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/job-edward-l-greenstein/594769/

According to this interpretation, instead of Job showing contrition when YHWH shows him this spectacle of how he created the stars,and can make nature do all these seemingly miraculous things, Job essentially does a white knuckled fist to God and simply says he feels sorry for everyone in creation. I'll just share the last part of the article here and bold what I think is important.

But then: enter God. “Up speaks YHWH,” as Greenstein puts it, momentarily folksy—a voice “from the windstorm.” “Bind up your loins like a man,” God warns Job, before stamping on the effects pedal and delivering perhaps the most shattering speech ever recorded. Question after question, power chord after power chord: “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? … Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades, Or loosen the cords of Orion? … Do you give the horse its bravery?” No explanation; no answer for Job; no moral or theoretical content whatsoever. It’s the interrogation of consciousness by pure Being, by the Logos, by the unstopping, unmediated act of creation itself. Do not try this at home. “Does the falcon take flight through your wisdom, As it spreads its wings toward the south?” The human intellect shrinks before the onslaught. The language is incomparable. God, it turns out, is the greatest poet; no one can touch him.

And it’s at this point, with Job reduced to a pair of smoking sandals and the divine mega-monologue still ringing in the vaults of the firmament, that Greenstein and centuries of tradition diverge. He has produced his new translation of Job, he tells us in the introduction, to “set the record straight.” Every version of the Bible that you have read puts Job, in the wake of God’s speech, in an attitude of awestruck contrition or reconversion. “Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes,” he says in the King James. “I’m sorry—forgive me,” he says in Eugene H. Peterson’s million-selling plain-language adaptation, The Message. “I’ll never do that again, I promise!” Greenstein’s Job, however, stays vinegary to the end. “I have heard you,” he tells God, “and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up.” The Hebrew phrase commonly rendered as some form of I repent, Greenstein translates as I take pity on. Dust and ashes, meanwhile, is for Greenstein a biblical epithet meaning humanity in general. So the line becomes “I take pity on ‘dust and ashes.’ ” Job’s last word: What a world you’ve made, God. I feel sorry for everyone.

What does it mean? This newly revealed Job, writes Greenstein, “is expressing defiance, not capitulation … If God is all about power and not morality and justice, Job will not condone it through acceptance.” Upon the scholarly merits of this approach, I am unable to pronounce; as an idea, I’ll consider it. We don’t read the Bible, it’s been said; the Bible reads us. It searches us. And here for us in 2019, right on time, with tyranny back in style and riding its behemoth through the streets, is a middle-finger Job, a Job unreconciled to the despotism of experience. He’s been shattered by life-shocks; then God, like a wall of terrible noise, fills and overfills his mind. His response: Thank you, but no.

Gloria Dei est vivens homo, wrote Saint Irenaeus: The glory of God is a living man. Might not the Author of Life look with favor upon this brilliantly resistant creature, this unappeasable critical thinker, this supremely lonely and dissenting figure, this Bartleby with boils—unswayed by the sublime, scratching his scabs in the land of Uz? That might be the rankest heresy: Let me know, bishops. But consider what Greenstein’s nonpenitent, polarity-reversed Job has done to the ending of the book. As before, with the experiment over, Job is blandly restored to a state of health and wealth; as before, God upbraids the sententious friends, the Bildads and the Eliphazes and the Zophars, and sends them off to make some burnt offerings, “for you did not speak about me in honesty as did my servant Job.” The quality or valence of this honesty, however, has turned upside down. It has become a kind of white-knuckle existential tenacity, a refusal to disown oneself even in the teeth of the windstorm. Maybe that’s what this God, faced with this Job, is telling us: Bring it all before him, the full grievance of your humanity. Bring him your condition, loudly. Let him have it. — The Atlantic

Now, I am far from looking to the Bible for any inspiration, but this translation of Job has some good insights, at least as a metaphor for the human condition. The friends of Job to me, are like the equivalent of the guy who says, "Do something about it!". They don't see the bigger picture, the bigger reveal. Job sees existence as a whole for what it is, and ironically (in this translation), existence (God) commends Job for sticking to his guns and questioning the point of being born at all. THAT was the right answer. All this suffering and striving, and Job just says, "yeah, I just don't give a shit anymore, it means nothing to me now, I see that..give me all your excuses and justifications, it doesn't phase me anymore. Give me your 'Do something about its!!' and 'Progress', and 'flourishings', 'the technology of the modern age', and I'll show you striving after wind."

Taking this more existentially, and less mythical-dramatically, life is striving-after, always in a deprived state. The sooner people realize this,the more empathy we have for our state as fellow-strivers, how we treat each other, and how we respond to each other. There is nothing to get after, nothing to be, nowhere to go. Those are culturally-created and perpetuated values that are promoted by many who want to keep it that way. Rather, we are sufferers in and by existence.

@Inyenzi you may like the themes of that article and this post. I'd like your thoughts too.


You may also find this interesting since you are into literature and poetry.

I'm liking the themes of complexity and time.

But the fact that there is even a reason to zen out on washing dishes is a dealing with. — schopenhauer1

Nothing negative though.

Nothing negative though. — Terrapin Station

It's there by fact of being there. Wait that was zen.

This is stuff that's interpretational--whether something is a dilemma, whether it's negative, etc. It depends on how an individual looks at it.

Why did the person wash the dish in the first place?

Why did the person wash the dish in the first place? — schopenhauer1

You'd have to ask them. Usually I do because I ate something on it.

But you didn't have to clean it. Something cultural and personal compelled you.