There would be no fool's gold if there were no gold.

You can think you're done and perfect, it's everyone else that's the problem, and you can let your guard down, but that's when it gets you.

At the very least, if you've heard of these immortal body snatchers, then they have most certainly failed.

How many more times must I say that my semiotic approach is founded not on determinism but indeterminism. Constraints and freedoms co-arise in mutually synergistic fashion. — apokrisis

I haven't made any reference to determinism, but rather to determination. The difference between scientific knowledge and 'humanities' knowledge is that the former can be modeled in determinate ways (i.e mathematically or statistically).

There are a lot of things you don't want to talk about in creating your "unified front" against Scientism. — apokrisis

Really? That's a bold and apparently tendentious claim. Perhaps you can back it up with some actual textual evidence.

Whether it is telling me that your big daddy in the sky is going to come and get me, or yours is the exclusive back-slapping club to which I can't belong, it always comes back to the pragmatics of social power. — apokrisis

Sounds a bit shrill, even paranoid to me.

If a balance is desirable, then why shouldn't a balance be attempted? Why would you let the perfect become the enemy of the good? (Or is this one of those non-commonsense examples of religious/artistic wisdom that I was asking for.) — apokrisis

Educating people broadly is one thing; brainwashing is another. I don't know what letting "the perfect become the enemy of the good" could even mean. What is the "perfect" and whose idea of the "good" do think it is the enemy of, and how?

You mean like ... politics? — apokrisis

Politics as social engineering??? What a laugh!! In what dread orifice have have you been secreting your dome?

So how, in your solipsistic ethics, do you handle paedophiles and crack addicts? They are just doing what makes them feel good, right? Should you be able to curtail their pleasures by introducing some kind of constraint on their lives?

And is virtue not a good even if virtue means some degree of personal sacrifice?

Where do your ethical simplicities stop and some real moral theory start? — apokrisis

What are you talking about? I think you misinterpreted something along the lines. The point of the last post was that you cannot discuss this "balancing act" of good/bad and the lab of human lives lived and testing "what works" without acknowledging that the person experiencing actually has these things in real time, as a person who must feel these things, deal with them. These are real people going through real things. Are you a zombie or something? Does personal, first-person experience not occur for you? Do phenomenological experiences of life events not make sense to you?

Where in this schema does 'contemplation of the One' fit in? That is the 'acme of reason' for Aristotle, as for all Platonists. It is at once aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual. — Wayfarer

I know this is a bit of a side road, but...I don't recognize Aristotle in this. The contemplation of the one comes later, surely, with Plotinus. Aristotle is careful not to say he's a Platonist.

I know you're interested in this interpretation of final cause, and I'm interested in different ways of understand the four aitia or causes, but I can't make the leap.

I don't recognize Aristotle in this. The contemplation of the one comes later, surely, with Plotinus. Aristotle is careful not to say he's a Platonist. — mcdoodle

Well, according to Loyd Gerson, Aristotle remains a Platonist, albeit a dissedent Platonist. And eudomonia includes as its highest form of activity, contemplation of the good. I don't think that Aristotle felt it necessary to spell it out or make it explicit, because it was assumed, whereas nowadays the opposite is true.

What are you talking about? Are you denying that my phenomenological experience is in fact a balance of the positive and the negative?

Does personal, first-person experience with complex variety not occur for you?

Anyway, you were addressing my question about paedophiles and crack addicts. Do you think their "is" should be our "ought"? No matter how good they think something is, would you not wish to draw a moral line on behalf of society?

I don't know what letting "the perfect become the enemy of the good" could even mean. — John

It's a common saying - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

I meant in the context of your use of it.

What are you talking about? Are you denying that my phenomenological experience is in fact a balance of the positive and the negative? — apokrisis

The key word here is BALANCE. You are sneaking in a tricky word. Balance usually indicates some sort of tranquil flow or resolution. But, bad experiences, even if there is some good interspersed is not pleasant, desirable, etc. unless that was my goal and most times it is not.

Does personal, first-person experience with complex variety not occur for you? — apokrisis

Yes, and often times the bad parts of that complex variety can be quite unpleasant.

Anyway, you were addressing my question about paedophiles and crack addicts. Do you think their "is" should be our "ought"? No matter how good they think something is, would you not wish to draw a moral line on behalf of society? — apokrisis

I just don't get the reason you asked the question. You have to explain how this somehow enters the picture, and then maybe I can know how to provide a reply. Are you suggesting that I take some ethical stance that whatever someone believes is the right action must be the right action? Where would you justify that I would claim something like that? My point earlier is that bad experiences are unpleasant to the person experiencing them and are not just some instrumental harm for some greater sense of balance later on. Harm may be "good" in some vague evolutionary sense, but at the moment the harm is occurring it is bad for the individual. I also do not consider the pain involved in exercise or learning something new a "harm" so you don't have to include that red herring, which you are prone to do.

The key word here is BALANCE. — schopenhauer1

True that.

I also do not consider the pain involved in exercise or learning something new a "harm" so you don't have to include that red herring, which you are prone to do. — schopenhauer1

Is that because the pain/effort of exercise/learning are somehow naturally part of a greater balance? So we can enjoy the short term signal pointing towards the long term gain?

It is hardly a red herring that in an ecologically valid setting - life as it is lived - your monotonic moan about "bad feelings" becomes exposed as childishly simplfied "philosophy".

Are you suggesting that I take some ethical stance that whatever someone believes is the right action must be the right action? — schopenhauer1

I realise that you are happy to derail another thread to promote your pessimism, but I thought the topic was ethics. So yes, getting back to the subject, I see a lot of loose talk about "good" and "bad". You want to reduce all analysis to how things make you feel. Yet clearly there is a reason for folk also taking a more hierarchical and abstracted "right and wrong" based view of ethics. The general good can outweigh the individual benefit in most folk's view.

But hey, you might be solipsistic enough to think paedophiles and crack addicts have a right to their phenomenological well-being.

Likewise, you might say that virtue and self-sacrifice are socially-imposed burdens/forms of self-delusion because your "feelings" are always paramount in the ethical sphere.

I mean this shows why pessimism is such a shallow subject once you've got the point. Yes, living involves always a measure of pain and struggle. And yes, existence probably does have no transcendent meaning.

But living is also fun and interesting. Nature is full of immanent meaning - human minds, being the products of nature, can't help but find meaning everywhere.

You can stay on the ride to see where it goes, or hop off the bus and get it all over. But sitting in your seat and moaning the whole trip seems the dumbest choice.

The bus of the happy man is a different one from the bus of the unhappy man.

But who believes in this fiction of either "the happy man" or "the unhappy man"? What's wrong with "the man with a normal emotional range".

It was a take on a Wittgenstein quote "The world of the happy..." etc. I'm on the normal emotional range bus and intend to enjoy the ride.

I'm the normalest. I'm uniquely exceptional at being normal.

Tractatus 6.43: "If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.

In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man"