Well it's not bad faith if one is being authentic: they are opposites. On Sartre's model, it is the waiter more so that he finds to be in bad faith. — unenlightened

Although drinking may not involve acting, like the waiter play-acting the role of waiter, it could be seen to involve the avoidance of freedom and responsibility. In ceasing to worry, we cease to face up to the need to take up a stance on a life that has no transcendent meaning. At least, that's the way that drinking might be thought to be inauthentic: when we drink, we deceive ourselves for a while, and the mind-altering effects stand in for the taking on of a role. Even when thus inebriated, we know and can talk about our life projects, the problem of freedom, and so on, and yet it's as if we're talking about them as observers, unwilling for a time to grapple with them directly.

But it's this wry, sceptical, removed stance on our anxious selves that I like about drinking. Although @Moliere is surely right to point out that not everyone is like this with alcohol.

Getting inebriated is not comparable to playing a musical instrument or other cultural pursuits. Sure, anything can be 'escapism' but alcohol changes your perception by altering your body chemistry. — Wayfarer

I'm aware that the experiences are different, but they are comparable, in exactly the way I compared them. You suggested that becoming temporarily at ease with life is foolish. Or did you mean that doing so only under the influence of alcohol is foolish? If so, why?

But what occurs to me is that if you want to have a drink, don't try and rationalise it as some life-altering event, because I'm sure that will only have one outcome, and it won't be a good one. — Wayfarer

>:O Thanks, but I'm fine. I drink less than I used to and expect to drink even less in the future.

I expected the charge of attempting to dignify drinking more than it is due, and maybe I am, but really I think I'm just trying to look at it differently. And note that I'm not trying to justify my affection for drink. In English-speaking cultures drinking is often regarded as something shameful, or naughty (at least in middle-class circles), and I want to see past that, because I don't think there's anything to justify. I want to say that it's not a case of slipping weakly back to a habit or escaping into oblivion like a coward, as TimeLine believes. No: it's a way of life!

(This is TPF so I have to point out: the last sentence is not quite serious)

I think alcohol is a temporary shortcut to removing inhibitions. If you work on your inhibitions by addressing the reasons they exist, you shouldn't need alcohol to open up and 'be yourself'. — CasKev

Why do that if I can just have a bottle of wine? I regard the anxiety we are able to leave behind when drinking to be part of the human condition, or part of the condition of alienation that everyone experiences. That is, it's a society-wide phenomenon that is not amenable to self-help. Anyway, I don't think it's as simple as you make out, though I realize your description is the common sense one. As I've been trying to say, drinking is not merely the negative act of removing inhibitions, but is, or can be, a positive one: a choice to take up a different stance on life and the world.

Plus alcohol brings with it the risk of hangover, drunken mistakes, not to mention anger and depression in some people. — CasKev

And who wants to take risks, right?

As a soft ball Methodist faggot... — Bitter Crank

Contender for the first clause of the first line of your autobiography?

I commonly experience both, and no I don't consider them to be the same experience. That would be foolish. As I said in the OP, I consider them both to provide a way of keying in to the world, of finding a home in it. This is the feeling of losing oneself and becoming oneself at the same time that I was talking about.

I've only gotten sick (really horrible hang overs) from wine. Some of it was good, some of it was rotgut. Didn't seem to make much difference. Never gotten sick from beer, gin, whiskey, rye... — Bitter Crank

Everyone says this kind of thing, including me. Whisky makes me depressed for days, wine is fine, and so on. But they say (and they would know) that the kind of alcohol you drink doesn't make any difference, that the difference is how much you drink, which is what varies when drinking different kinds of alcohol.

You had made yourself fully present to life and fully at ease within it. You weren’t oppressed by the past and you weren’t worried about the future. — Edmundson

A fool's paradise. — Wayfarer

No more than, say, playing a musical instrument in a band. Do you think it's always foolish to, by a special method, become temporarily at ease with life?

But if it is obvious that everything is great and will only get better, why write long books about it?

Like Berman said, if it's something that is obvious then writing a book about it is like writing an 800+-page book saying that the Pope is Catholic. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It is not obvious. That is precisely why the books are being written. It takes an effort to look beyond the doxa, which has it that things are getting worse, to see what is really the case.

(Note, I'm not saying everything is great and that everything has been getting better)

I don't know, what do you think?

Not my thoughts at all. It's not contemptible that drinking puts you in such a state, but enlightening. I always wondered what the allure to drinking really was. I didn't fully appreciate it's effect on other people. I mostly just get tired, and if diligent enough, nauseous. I always felt my limited response was a strength, but, with what you say, I'm not entirely sure. I am sure that my condition is safer than yours. — Hanover

A hearteningly non-boring, non-judgmental response. I award you the title of honorary drunkard.

it provides them with a scapegoat or excuse to justify their own bad behaviour. There is an inherent weakness in this where people delude themselves into thinking that their choices are no longer theirs and thus they are morally safe; hey, it wasn't really 'them' just like how people blame others for their own misdeeds or even play social games to sneakily avoid responsibility for what is essentially their wrong decisions. — TimeLine

I guess it can be like that, but mostly what I observe in myself and others is (and the article goes into this) shame the following day, the shame of having revealed oneself too openly or of having transgressed boundaries. The quintessential shame of the hangover represents an inability to avoid personal responsibility, and those who feel the most shame are very often let off the hook, not by themselves, but by others. (I must stress that I'm talking about what I regard as the normal experience of drinking, not the violence and destructiveness that alcohol abuse can produce).

I don't like that. It lacks existential adventure because to me, I find it thrilling facing my fears and being brutally honest. The alcohol in the above-mentioned is not revealing anything but your cowardly escapism from the sensation of social anxiety that you may feel, but for me coming face-to-face with that feeling and defeating it is so exiting. You expose your vulnerability, your need to feel belonging by doing the same thing for the same reason that others are, a need for love and a fear for rejection. You are escaping from your reality rather than changing it and making it what you really want, which is just a shame really. — TimeLine

Certainly drink can be cowardly escapism, but this is such a pedestrian point that I feel there must be something deeply wrong with it. First note that by "anxiety" I mean it more in the general existential or Heideggerian sense than simply "social anxiety", although that may be an expression of it. I mean that in drinking we choose to drop this basic anxiety for a while and forget the paraphernalia of who we are, that we might have larger projects in life, that we will one day die and what are we going to do about it? It's easy to regard this as escapism, but I've tried to suggest a different way of looking at it. In the same way as "don't take yourself too seriously" is sometimes good advice (advice that bores and snobs and fanatics never learn to take), "get drunk once in a while" might be similarly good advice. In fact, getting drunk once in a while is a good way to stop taking oneself too seriously. It's a way of taking up an essentially humorous or playful stance on the world.

I don't drink because the social anxiety builds up until, on Friday evening, it all gets too much and I retreat into a warm loving wine. That is your caricature, and it doesn't fit many of the drinkers I know (except for a couple of alcoholics, who don't wait till Friday, or evening for that matter). It's a definite decision, a decision to have fun. You may choose to regard it as mindless fun, inconsequential fun, irresponsible fun, and no doubt many other bad things, but to me it is not like that. And I don't especially want to either escape from or change my reality. I want to take up a different stance on it, or get inside it in a different way.

Drink is not without its downsides, of course, and the very fact that we must mourn for that sense of wholeness in the morning suggests it's no more than a small glimpse into a kind of life we might be able to achieve some other way. But at the very least, given the kind of society we live in it seems rather too earnest and proper to turn down, based on some inflated sense of one's bravery in the face of the unintelligible universe, the chance of improved social interaction.

A lot is not so good here, but anything is better than nothing.

1. Citations should be in grey body to distinguish them better from the answer.
2. We should get a set of basic logical and mathematical symbols, and some more smilies.
3. We should be able to mark words ot sentences and color them differently. — Pippen

1. Quotations are indented and surrounded by big quotation marks and are sufficiently distinguishable from the rest of a post, at least to me and I suspect most others.
2. As Michael said, we have MathJax.
3. I don't see at all how colours would help, and I don't know what you mean by "mark words or sentences".

So your three complaints--two of which are eccentric and one of which is already a feature--don't seem to add up to "a lot is not so good here".

Make sure you're not on the roof when you feel like being authentically you! — Evol Sonic Goo

Okay Evol, at the risk of being too serious: I'm sure there's an endless supply of videos of drunk people that we can watch at our leisure on YouTube, but as I said in the OP, I'm not really talking about getting totally wasted.

It might be instructive (though not creative) to list which aspects of cognition/reasoning are impaired/improved at full tipsy and score them for tendency to creativity. — Jake Tarragon

Off the top of my head: inventiveness and originality, and a willingness to transgress boundaries (obviously important for creativity); a willingness to engage with people you'd otherwise be too inhibited to strike up a conversation with (material and avenues for further creativity); openness to different ideas thanks to one's openness to different people.

The creativity I'm talking about is that of making new kinds of conversations, new ways of making collective decisions, new ways of behaving in public, of experimenting beyond the mores of propriety. I wouldn't say that alcohol works well as fuel for other creative activities like writing or making music (up to a certain point it can occasionally work, but generally anything that requires sustained concentration only suffers).

Does "creativity" result from being simply absorbed or is a cognitive element necessary I wonder? — Jake Tarragon

Well, I don't think we can oppose them, because being absorbed always involves cognition, though maybe not reasoning.

If it is so obvious that everything is going so great in contemporary times, why all these books about it? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Because the idea that everything is getting worse is so widespread, not because everything is getting worse.

A back pocket seems like a reckless place to keep a miniature Englishman.

Many people on this forum quote long-dead philosophers as if they were prophets - as if what these long-dead philosophers wrote or said is above criticism (set in stone) — Harry Hindu

But do they really? Don't they usually quote canonical texts because they're especially insightful, original, and thought-provoking? For me, words that invite criticism may still be worth quoting, precisely because they are so provocative.

Yes. Or, the annoyance could be at the tendency of those who do philosophy to lose sight of common sense and overlook conventional wisdom, evidenced by, for example, asking ill-considered questions or feigning ignorance. — Sapientia

But questions that ignore common sense and conventional wisdom are not necessarily ill-considered. You can't be philosophical without asking such questions. To those who regard common sense and conventional wisdom as beyond question, philosophy will always appear ill-considered. Note that you cannot decide ahead of time which examples of common sense are questionable and which are not, without, of course, going beyond it.

There's this typical approach to philosophy which has quite a lot in common with the ways in which children think and behave, and that's not necessarily a good thing or something to be proud of. It's one thing to be open-minded, but another thing to lack a good mental filter to separate the wheat from the chaff, and sometimes I think that the two get confused.

It's not necessarily a bad thing or something to be ashamed of either. And separating the wheat from the chaff is an exercise of rationality and good judgment that may not require an anchor in common sense or "grown-up" thinking. On the contrary.

Conventional wisdom has told us that God created Man and the universe, and now tells us that the brain is a computer (at least to me, it seems that among the scientifically but non-philosophically literate this has become something close to common sense, but you could think of other examples). It's surely the job of a philosopher to question such thoughtless prejudices.

What I find stupid about philosophy is what is revealed when a philosopher is asked about some topical social or political issues, whereupon they invariably spout the dullest platitudes. Perhaps the Continentals are less guilty of this, working in more of a self-aware and historically-aware mode than the Anglos. In any case, all it means is that most philosophers are not philosophical enough.

>:O

I don't really want to receive cash or checks.

Btw for the web developers among you, which text editor do you use? Atom, Coda, Sublime, Textastic, Brackets or something else? — Agustino

I used Sublime for a long time, but now I use Visual Studio Code. There's not a huge difference, but it seems more solid, and looks prettier with less fiddling around.

Be thankful that people with good taste are in charge.

I would pay for the whole thing myself rather than see ads. Thankfully, the minority of members willing to cough up money provide just enough to keep it going, not least the large one-off donations we've had from a couple of people.

No ads here, thank you.

Also in fútbol.

It is an interesting portrait. Part of what is odd about the photograph is that it was seemingly taken at a high aperture so that the distant clouds appear to be at the same depth as the subject. — geospiza

I think the effect isn't owing to the aperture choice but to the relatively low point of view, such that there are no features on the ground to put him in context. This is why it almost looks like he could be standing in front of a painted stage background. (EDIT: Actually, the aperture width might contribute to this, so you could be right).

I dislike photos that are overcomposed. Lots of wedding and family photos are like this. Is that the same thing as conveying an external meaning? — geospiza

That's not really what I meant. I just meant I like images for their thisness rather than for any kind of message or overt symbolism.

If you can't get wisdom from your bartender, why drink? — noAxioms

Wisdom from the bottle.

My avatar is Max Ernst with a dog on his shoulder against a blue sky with fluffy clouds. I happen to like Max Ernst's art, but really I just like the photograph. It's striking and amusingly odd. I don't like images that exist primarily to convey an external meaning.

Every existential quantification applies to a particular domain of discourse. Informally put, it's true that Harry Potter exists assuming the domain of fictional characters, or the domain of Harry Potter's fictional world, etc.

Is there any truth to John McEnroe's statements? Is there anything wrong with what he said apart from whether or not the statements are true? What were his motivations and are those motivations relevant to judgments about the propriety of making such statements? — geospiza

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but I can speculate. Or at least, I can supply one interpretation of what he said, and it seems plausible that he could have meant it in this way, in which case what he's saying is not as pointless as others here think.

Given differences in average strength and whatever else may explain the average performance differences between men and women in tennis, McEnroe may have been reacting to the constant wish to compare Williams to male players. He might have been saying that it's silly and demeaning to constantly wonder how good she is compared to men. He demonstrates this with a dichotomy: she would only be 700th in the world if she were competing with men, and yet, she indisputably is one of the greatest athletes ever.

I have a lot of respect for women — Agustino

Indeed, women are precious creatures whose virtue must be protected from the temptations of licentiousness. ;)

And so now a diversion into the wisdom of affirmative action? Nothing I've said hinted at whether affirmative action programs were morally, Constitutionally, or pragmatically sound. What I pointed to was the injustice of discrimination, not to whether our legislatures have properly addressed the evil.

Regardless, it is likely we share the same conclusions on this subject, but I'd suspect for differing reasons because I tend to look at law very pragmatically, and I see such programs as offering little good and usually to those least needy, but all of this is a major degression and topic shift. — Hanover

Agustino always has some bugbear in mind, a generalized target, whether it's cultural marxism or feminism or progressives or whatever, and that leads him to conflate independent claims and positions. If he sees a claim that strikes him as a bit too lefty, he then attributes to you all kinds of other claims, claims that go together in his caricature.

I do something like this myself, because often what I'm arguing against is ideology. But in this case, the two positions Agustino is lumping together really are best treated as independent: like you, I think that the relegation of women to subservient roles is historical and social, but I am no great fan of affirmative action.

Hanover's post suggested that the reason for social inequality was arbitrary, which is wrong. It wasn't. And that's also what the women's studies feminists seem to believe, which is just bullshit. — Agustino

No, his post did not suggest that. The very fact that it is the historical subjugation of women he was talking about implies it is not arbitrary. And being a woman is a biological fact (contra some modern theorists who might say otherwise), so one could say that the biological fact of being a woman determines whether one is going to be subjugated as a woman, but this obviously wouldn't be saying much.

Not only that, but his whole point was that, far from being arbitrary, it is the specific facts of a social environment that determine how a person's biology will affect their life.

All right, I guess we can kind of agree on all that. Even so, it's obvious that you wanted to emphasize the biology, as if doing so somehow went against Hanover's point. It doesn't, which is why I made my contribution, to point out something you appeared to be missing.

The answer is that it depends how you slice it. One can go along with you and say, in a manner of speaking, that the fact of pregnancy determines the role of women. But this leaves too much out. The full statement ought to be: the fact of pregnancy determines the role of women in a social environment in which women are bound to the household, subservient to men, unable to pick and choose between social roles, where childcare is unavailable, and so on. You wanted to say that biology is primary here, but if what I've said so far is true, it is the social environment that is crucial.

I don't see what your problem is here, and I don't know what your emphasis on "should" is about, as I didn't accuse you of saying that biology should or must or necessarily determine social facts. You said...

The truth is there are biological reasons for this. — Agustino

And my only point, building on Hanover's original post, was that it is the social environment that determines how the biological facts of pregnancy etc., happen to affect women.

Well, that's precisely what you did (setting aside your sneaky "necessarily"). You explained social facts with an appeal to biological facts. You strongly implied that you think the fact that "women have traditionally been relegated to submissive roles" is down to biology.

I don't see the relevance. Just more opinionating.

IF women have traditionally been relegated to submissive roles (which by the way I don't think is the case everywhere in history), then why did this happen? Is it an arbitrary thing that it was women who were relegated to submissive roles and not men? :s It seems to me that you have internalised a very leftist way of looking at this situation.

The truth is there are biological reasons for this. — Agustino

The point is that it's the social environment that determines whether the biological facts--of pregancy and giving birth--lead to such relegation. Nowhere in your post do you show that it's the other way around.

Cheers. I love medium format film. :)