sometimes people make too much hay out of the relation of power to knowledge in science and then draw over-reaching conclusions. — csalisbury

I think I relate & agree here. I tend to blend the prestige issue with the demarcation issue. I think ordinary people care about science because of its power. We can lump prediction and control into a subset of coping if we want, or of tools that work with or without their users' faith in them (where Buddhism or Satanism or Hegelianism may or may not work., depending on investment, perhaps because investment/hope is the main course.)

I think I relate & agree here. I tend to blend the prestige issue with the demarcation issue. I think ordinary people care about science because of its power. We can lump prediction and control into coping if we want, or tools that work with or without their users' faith in them (where Buddhism or Satanism or Hegelianism may or may not work.) — j0e

Right - science yields antibiotics (to take the low-hanging, cliche defense of science), but that doesn't get at the everyday way many people relate to Science, capital S. I know some people who delight in digging up evidence as to why Jesus wasn't a real figure, while idealizing science. That thing is pure ideology (I think they'd probably be the same people who, if they lived at the time of Hezekiah, would have paid lipservice to his rediscovery of Deuteronomy while bashing the other beliefs of the time. i.e. 'the rubes in the rural areas still pray to Ishtar while those in the know, know that the power-center is pure Mosaic. If you're not a redneck, it's clear. Everyone I know at the temple agrees, and we have a good laugh at their expense, drinking wine at home.)

But, still, science has antibiotics and a million other things, in a way Hezekiah doesn't. Certainly. I think I want to say that the impulse behind the scientific method is the same impulse we have when we are skeptical of its claim to truth. And that, I think, is good. The same monks who thought hierarchy was bunk, and wanted to experiment, came up with ways to experiment. We can come up with ways to value what they did, and also see how it's limiting in some ways.

Anyone can read the book, but it is written for the few who understand it. If only a few will understand it then most who interpret it do not understand it, for they cannot hold different opinions about what the text means and all be correct. — Fooloso4

Both Witt and Nietzsche were pioneers, ahead of their time, probably used to being misunderstood. I find it plausible that the times caught up with them so that many more understand them than they might have dared hope.

I don't think that even the author knows the exact meaning of their text or that such meaning is stable (influenced by Witt himself and Derrida and others on this matter.) But I think it's fair to project a stable-enough gist (intention) and finally mostly tune it in (or believe that one has.)

I agree that two wildly different interpretations/projections can't both be right, but it's possible that more than one will be valuable.

If you're not a redneck, it's clear. Everyone I know at the temple agrees, and we have a good laugh at their expense, drinking wine at home. — csalisbury

This is another great issue. I think people believe in 'Science' (as featured on bumperstickers and yardsigns) also because the Good people do (politics/class). To not believe in Science is to be a redneck or some other backwards monster. Hopefully I'm responding to correct point/prompt.

(Because the TV tells them to.)

the impulse behind the scientific method is the same impulse we have when we are skeptical of its claim to truth. And that, I think, is good. The same monks who thought hierarchy was bunk, and wanted to experiment, came up with ways to experiment. We can come up with ways to value what they did, and also see how it's limiting in some ways. — csalisbury

:up:

Yeah, that's it exactly.

Yeah, that's it exactly. — csalisbury

I'm with you very much on that, the ideology of science, the sloppy and absurd attempts to claim it and use it without respecting its 'spirit.' Beyond all the utility there's something pure, a child's curiosity. Like how many eggs do black widows lay on average? This is biology/statistics a person could do without textbooks or instruments, just to know. There's already the concept of a random variable here, nature as a casino. (I love the 'imperfections' of spiderwebs, the tension between the ideal and the actual one finds in them.)

That was always my criticism of U.G. Krishnamurti, back when I used to talk to people who talked about U.G. Krishnamurti. His thing was that he didn't care at all about guruhood, that people came to him and he didn't even want it. Still, on his deathbed he dictated a guru-y swan-song. He knew what he was doing the whole time. So it goes. — csalisbury

I found him fascinating once but was eventually put off by certain contradictions. That's how complicated this game can get. There's always a cave or a bottle or a matrix. We can't escape this structure completely without inhabiting it naively, so we seek and half-find a reasonable version of it.

(?)

Right! the impulse is good. And, to be fair to science, you can do the same thing to the arts. It's fun to mess around with paint, it's enthralling to have a vision of something pretty, and painstakingly paint it - maybe even a painting of a black widow laying eggs. But then you get to school and it's like - you want to paint a black widow laying eggs? At that point, you, the undergrad painter, have to suss out what's happening and learn what's accepted. If you have the skill to do so and go through the gauntlet ( if you have: pure talent, political knowhow, emotional sympathy, intellectual knowledge of the state of affairs) you can pull a Georgia O Keefe and paint black widows laying eggs. but only after squeezing through it. And I guess I don't think that's entirely wrong - the vision has to be tempered by the times, and its ability to ascend beyond the times is only legitimate if its been tested by them.

But that's it - there's something similar about reposting a 'fuckyeahscience' facebook post and a 'fuckyeahart' van gogh - that is just pure signaling, in the same way.

All that rigamarole and whatever it is - i guess its like 'first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then then there is' - but it's like a push to get back to the simple thing

More often than not they are passed around without any awareness that they contain secrets, but what is behind a locked door is a secret. — Fooloso4

Just to be clear, I think there's an esoteric element in lots of good philosophy. Take the bottle and the flies. It's one thing to let this metaphor wash over you with no effect and another to think back to when one was in the bottle, back before the ideological sea-change. Witt (along with others like Derrida & Saussure) radically changed the way I think about language, which reverberated and reverberates through my understanding of everything else. When I talk to people about this (not in general like right now but the details) they give or fail to give me the sense that they've grasped it. That we donut meow what we are barking about.

I found him fascinating once but was eventually put off by certain contradictions. That's how complicated this game can get. There's always a cave or a bottle or a matrix. We can't escape this structure completely without inhabiting it naively, so we seek and half-find a reasonable version of it.

(?) — j0e

Yeah, i don't know, I'm in the same boat. I've really wanted a guru at parts in my life, and have alwaysfound something to distrust in everyone. I like the forum split in some ways. argue stuff on here, live a normal and unphilosophically related life irl. I don't have a mentor but i'd like to think if I found one I wouldn't hold him to a nirvana thing - I'd just try to figure out how he managed not to go berserk by 60, and try to learn from that? I assume anyone I trust will eventually do something I find abhorrent. I do things I find abhorrent. So what I'm hoping is I can find peace of mind to be like, ok yeah, you've lived this life too [x], how'd you make it work?

On the question of being understandable–One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand:
perhaps that was part of the author’s intention–he did not want to be understood by just
“anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audiences when they wish to
communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.”
All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time
keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance,” understanding, as said above–while they
open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. — Gay Science Aphorism 381

There's an art of leaving just enough in the stains for other maniacs to decipher. Or I mean that's just some crazy shit a friend of mine said to me once.

I like the forum split in some ways. argue stuff on here, live a normal and unphilosophically related life irl. — csalisbury

I think there's something profound in our anonymous situation. I do talk irl about this stuff when I can (not often these days), but here there's a concentration of one's philosophy-writing self.

I've really wanted a guru at parts in my life, and have alwaysfound something to distrust in everyone. — csalisbury

I can relate. I can think back on a string of intellectual heroes, father figures. Slowly the fallibility of all humans comes into focus. As you say, everyone does something nasty at some point. There's a little bit of the monster in everyone or they're not human. Or I just don't believe in the Sage anymore but only in people who are better on the horn, better on the horse, for awhile. (My old man was a god when I was a boy. Now he's in a wheelchair without teeth.) So I make peace with dying in sin, never being perfect, one corner of my temple unfinished. This is a song I can sing now with my espresso buzz and nicotine patch and Coltrane playing and the feeling that I'm being understood, recognized...

What's the song? a quick glance at the clock tells me too late to buy a beer, but i got some weed and tobacco.

What's the song? a quick glance at the clock tells me too late to buy a beer, but i got some weed and tobacco. — csalisbury

By song I just meant me being able to make peace with dying in sin, saying yes to the mess. I don't want to front like I'm always doing so well, that life couldn't kick my ass if it wanted to. I'm tiny in the hand of God/Nature/Whatever. (More's the pity! Ain't celebrating this hand. Or am I? Don't know now.) Soundtrackwise, I just fired up A Love Supreme.

:up:

I know some people who delight in digging up evidence as to why Jesus wasn't a real figure, while idealizing science. — csalisbury

I think ordinary people care about science because of its power. We can lump prediction and control into coping if we want, or tools that work with or without their users' faith in them (where Buddhism or Satanism or Hegelianism may or may not work.) — j0e

The ordinary people I've known are not all much interested in science to be honest. Sure, they recognize its efficacy, but they also think it gave us nuclear weapons and climate change. Science is the creator/destroyer God, if you like.

People often live unexamined lives and they might think science is more plausible than religion (only because fundamentalists' theistic claims are so inane) but when it comes to scientific positions, they don't know the Newtonian model from, say, the Copenhagen Interpretation. If there are sages these days they might as well be the likes of Roger Penrose or Neil deGrasse Tyson, talking us through the Hermetic conundrums of the initial singularity and quantum field theory. The fact is we need science elders to talk as through ideas because quite frankly much science remains as inscrutable to ordinary folk as Plato's theory of forms.

The fact is we need science elders to talk as through ideas because quite frankly much science remains as inscrutable to ordinary folk as Plato's theory of forms. — Tom Storm

Definitely. My formal education is in STEM and now I know how stupid I am in a new way, how little I know relative to what the species as a whole knows.

Maybe Newton's right about the pebble too. What mad infinity of discoveries is possible? Especially if we don't obsess over boiling them down to one.

Science is the creator/destroyer God, if you like. — Tom Storm

I agree. Our sci-fi shows that we're no longer in an optimistic age. It's a mixture of dread and hope. I've been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Call it a guilty pleasure, but I love it.

I'll check it out.

.

It's interesting to compare deGrasse Tyson to Penrose. deGrasse Tyson, of course, inherited Comos. Penrose does interviews but he's sort of withdrawn, gesturing as best he can at something untranslatable. You can see deGrasse Tyson at a beer hall, on trivia night. Penrose is sort of library-at-the-end-the-night-with-brandy.

I think there might be a hard limit. I am only slowly accepting I won't understand our age's cosmology and physics. I wonder if part of the problem is that, with religion, it was always clear what register a mass, or a elusinian mystery, was supposed to be in - its not clear what register science is supposed to be in. And part of that is the priests an mystery-guardians were directly tapped in, in a directly transmissible way - now there's always an inherent difference - they know the science, you don't, and its not a matter of consecration, or induction. They're just the people with the brains and focus, who learned it. What to make of it? We have to cobble it together from their various presentations, in totally different registers.

For example, the Carl Sagan Cosmos used the imagery of a spaceship cruising. And then, imagine a planetarium at 12. A feynman lecture. a look at the equations in a book one time. Brian Greene, softly guiding you. Carlo Rovelli trying to make it weird and electric but intuitive. All these very distinct vibes on the same subject, but you can only know the subject through years of study.

I'm saying that the relevant point here is how one deals with such exclusion. How does one deal with unknown things, things currently unknowable to one, things currently undecidable to one. How does one deal with ambivalence and uncertainty. — baker

Well, mostly by trying to resolve it (if one has the time and inclination) or ignoring it if not. Since most people engaging here are doing so as a hobby outside of their normal jobs/lifetasks I'd say most are of the former persuasion - "let's have a crack at resolving a bit of this uncertainty". It's better than Netflix.

"Rational" is one of the most debated terms. I refer you to Elster's classic Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality.
Like I said earlier:

If you want to limit the meaning of "rational" to a particular flavor of secular academic discourse, then you should recognize this as a matter of your choice, not a given. — baker

Who's not recognising it as a choice? I just presume I'm discussing the matter with people who consider 'rational discussion' to be an activity non-experts can engage in, otherwise what the hell are they posting on a non-specialist internet forum for? What's the point in putting up a post purportedly to discuss some matter and then saying "Oh no-one can actually discuss this because none of you are initiated into my sect"? I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to make that no-one would do that.

Nicely put on all counts. Penrose is English and aloof and mysterious compared to garrulous, amiable American Tyson. Age and culture aside, I figure they are both sages representing different schools. I have never understood much science or been particularly interested. Ultimate truth or higher truth (whatever the source) has never been a thirst of mine. I am pretty comfortable with tentative working models based on the best evidence we have for now.

.

I am pretty comfortable with tentative working models based on the best evidence we have for now. — Tom Storm

:up:
I don't know what the 'physical' is (beyond hoisting the word into this or that context) or even what exactly this 'reality' thing is supposed to be... but I trust the machines & pills to work. I show it by reaching for them.

Both Witt and Nietzsche were pioneers, ahead of their time, probably used to being misunderstood. I find it plausible that the times caught up with them so that many more understand them than they might have dared hope. — j0e

Nietzsche is explicit in saying he wants to be misunderstood except by a few. Wittgenstein is not quite so explicit, but if his writing contains locked rooms that are not even noticed then he too writes in such a way that he will be misunderstood except by a few.

While it is clear that the commentaries have changed, this is not the same as saying that more now understand the works they are interpreting. For the commentaries differ, and so, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding. And since far more read the secondary material instead of primary texts misunderstandings are compounded rather than reduced.

In the aphorism Nietzsche talks about "nobler spirits and tastes" and "open[ing] the ears of those whose ears are related to ours". I don't think ours is an age of nobler spirits and tastes. Wittgenstein talks about how he is at odds with the spirit of the age. It is not a matter of cracking the code but of a sympathetic attunement, of kindred spirits. And since kindred spirits are so few, they write in such a way so as to address those spirits while keeping others out.

I don't think that even the author knows the exact meaning of their text — j0e

Texts take on a meaning of their own. But when Nietzsche and Wittgenstein talk about being understood they mean according to their own understanding.

In the aphorism Nietzsche talks about "nobler spirits and tastes" and "open[ing] the ears of those whose ears are related to ours". I don't think ours is an age of nobler spirits and tastes. Wittgenstein talks about how he is at odds with the spirit of the age. It is not a matter of cracking the code but of a sympathetic attunement, of kindred spirits. And since kindred spirits are so few, they write in such a way so as to address those spirits while keeping others out. — Fooloso4

I basically agree. I do think our age has some noble spirits though.

Texts take on a meaning of their own. But when Nietzsche and Wittgenstein talk about being understood they mean according to their own understanding. — Fooloso4

Agreed.

I do think our age has some noble spirits though. — j0e

I must confess that I do not know what Nietzsche means by noble spirits. Perhaps the problem is that I cannot recognize what I am not.

Having said that, I think that I might prefer not only to be thought of as a noble spirit but to actually be one. And this leads immediately to the question: by whose standards?

I must confess that I do not know what Nietzsche means by noble spirits. — Fooloso4

I consider that one that of those issues that readers could discuss forever, never settling for some exact and final articulation. We quote this or that passage, but I like to guess at that using the grandest and most golden passages in his work.

Here's my personal view (for whatever it's worth.) I think people in general (including foolosophers like us ) are occasionally in high or grand moods that open 'noble' conceptual-poetic perspectives on existence. They are (we all are) part-time half-ass sages. Recall the times in your life when you were beyond resentment, in love with the world, magnanimous, looking at existence from the heights of that feeling or attitude. If friends are around (as they often are at such times), you want them to be there with you, stand beside you completely equal, because there's plenty to go around, and you don't even want anyone to own it. I'm an atheist but I understand to praise god (or the gods or reality or life or whatever) as maybe the 'highest' thing we do, perhaps within the beauty of friendship, trading poems that discover or amplify this beauty, even if that includes acknowledging the horror too. Foolosophy is one genre of this 'poetry' evolving historically, enjoying and reflecting on itself, perhaps improving on itself.

I know of course that we can't live on the peaks, and that it stinks in the valleys, but I think the stuff people write (and sing and dance and draw and act and so on) can help get us back up there.

I must confess that I do not know what Nietzsche means by noble spirits. — Fooloso4

The little I know about Nietzsche tells me (not me, I ain't telling this to myself) that it's the opposite of the slave spirit. The slave spirit is the birthchild of Christianity: always apologetic, pleading, happy with little favours, not thinking of himself or herself worthy of large favours.

Consequently the noble spirit is not apologetic (therefore dares to look out for numero uno), proud of his or her personal achievements, and does not hide his or her joy over the right to be proud; and feels entitled.