Comments

  • Best weather to buy pizza?
    Confusing. Firstly, the most important things you can do with a pizza are make it and eat it, and yet you only mention buying and ordering. Secondly, I know of the Fahrenheit scale but the numbers mean nothing to me, except that higher numbers are higher temperatures, just like other temperature scales. Thirdly, I don’t know what ambient temperature has to do with pizza. Certainly, I eat pizza in warm weather more than cold, but that’s mainly because I eat pizza only when I eat out, and when I eat out I like to sit at outdoor tables and don’t like sitting inside very much.

    So I voted while imagining that the numbers were Celsius, according to which I’d happily eat pizza in temperatures around 25 degrees, which is warm.
  • Bannings
    ↪universeness
    Sorry, I’ll try to insult you more directly and competently next time. :up:
  • Bannings
    ↪universeness


    You must have missed when I called you a radge here:
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/752675
  • Bannings
    ↪universeness
    Paisley is full of radges like Clarky, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
  • Bannings
    ↪universeness
    Yes, that was part of the problem.

    Nice Paisley reference.
  • Bannings
    I banned @introbert for being mostly unintelligible.
  • Currently Reading
    The Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard.

    A collection of some of his earlier short stories. Mostly great. Lots of surrealism, Freud, Jung, and genre-wise more slipstream than science fiction.

    I’ll probably read a volume of his later short fiction next. Two stories I’m particularly interested in are “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race”.
  • Morality is Coercive and Unrealistic
    I usually use hyphens for dashes but in this post—in your honor—I've used em dashes. — T Clark

    Much appreciated.

    What a pain in the ass they are. — T Clark

    Don't blame the dashes. Blame the world.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    I think the content of your post that I took the above quotes from is fair enough but I think the assumptions made in your last sentence are inaccurate. You assume I don't understand before rejecting.
    I disagree.     — universeness

    Yes, that was unnecessary. I was probably just trying to wind you up. It's a Scottish tradition; you can take it.

    My point is that identifying reasons for falling in love with someone is not post hoc. They are present in your thoughts during the very moments that the experience starts imo, the reasoning is just very fast and 'flash like'. — universeness

    This is the issue and I think you're wrong. It reminds me of something that Bertrand Russell said about perception somewhere. He said something like, perception is inference from sense data to an image or model of the environment, and when it's automatic--because the environment is familiar and doesn't contain any surprises--it just means that the inferential process has just got really quick. This idea works no better for perception than it does for love, and I just think you're misunderstanding your own feelings.

    You, and imo, Zizek are suggesting that such as 'oh my goodness look at her over there, I think I'm in love!!' has no reasoning behind it. I think that's untrue. It's just that all the reasons are happening at top speed in your head. — universeness

    So you might be conflating causes and reasons.

    Aesthetically stunning ....... tick
    Posture alluring (sitting or walking) ...... tick
    Body language ....... tick
    These reasons are manifest in parallel thought.     — universeness

    This is quite comical though. You don't fall in love using a checklist.

    But what you're talking about here is an assessment of attractiveness, which I accept might have a checklisty character, although even then I think it's probably post hoc. In any case, the assessment of attractiveness is not falling in love.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    Basically I agree with you. But the local religion is also part of the social and geopolitical situation. So perhaps it might be more accurate to say that religion is only part of the problem, or one factor in the problem. Or, perhaps still more accurate, that the local interpretation of the religion is a factor in the problem. — Ludwig V

    :up:
  • Atheist Dogma.
    living in a liberal secular society — Jamal

    I'm not in Russia right now BTW
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪fdrake
    And when I say the things I've been saying it feels kinda wrong, in that I'm speaking from a position of privilege: the privilege of living in a liberal secular society that makes it too easy to take a contrarian anti-militant-atheist line.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    Religion's an enabler of those prejudices though innit. Not in the abstract. But would the world have had Qutub without an amenable Islamic ideology? I doubt it. Female genital mutilation without the religious practices that mandate it? I also doubt it.

    Being strongly critical of politically ascendent religion is an attempt to create a liberal notion of freedom, which must be affirmed to make more radical freedom possible. IMO anyway.     — fdrake

    I agree. But being strongly critical of politically ascendent religion is not the same as being critical of belief in God as such. Militant atheism seems precisely too much "in the abstract". I mean, it doesn't seem fit for purpose in undermining fundamentalism and female genital mutilation; these might be better undermined by variant interpretations of scripture.

    But I'm not strong on that point. I'd probably applaud a stronger anti-theistic movement in those parts of the world where theocracy is strong.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    Some of the conversation here has got me thinking. In my extremely secular milieu, militant atheism seems ... silly. But in, say, the US Bible belt or the Middle East, religion is still a very big deal and causes a lot of problems. There is an Islamic civil war on several fronts, one of which is a meaningful yet mostly religious dispute between different interpretations and traditions of Islam (Sunni vs Shia). In those circumstances I imagine an atheist might develop an extreme antipathy to religion in general. And in fact I know some Iranian Leftists who go out of their way to offend against Islamic customs and assert their atheism (they're not living in Iran).

    On the other hand, even in those circumstances, I can't really see how militant atheism would be either effective or necessary, since for most Muslims, their religion is just what gives shape and meaning to their lives at the ordinary everyday level. It's a luxury for me to say it, but it still looks to me like religion as such is not the problem, but the social and geopolitical situation in which religious divisions take on greater significance than otherwise.
  • Currently Reading
    Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Tom Storm
    Absolutely. And this opens up a related can of worms. It turns out that there is no neat separation of reason and emotion, that in fact reason is not even reasonable without emotional motivation and guidance. This is what Antonio Damasio‘s book Descartes’ Error is about.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    If you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them — Zizek

    Are you looking for the opinion of others regarding this quote, before you offer your own?
    Is another way of putting this:
    If you love someone then you must have no reasons to!     — universeness

    Well, it seemed relevant to your debate with unenlightened, and I agree with it.

    Of course, maybe you can come up with reasons if you think about it, and this doesn’t necessarily negate the love. So, sure, it might be an exaggeration…

    But only exaggeration is true. — Adorno

    What this means is that sometimes you have to exaggerate to speak the truth. It’s a way of uncovering the essence of an object by pushing against the limitations of reason. Or, it’s a way of cutting through the bullshit, directing your thought in a motivated way that has no time for trivial counterexamples. A dangerous game, but probably important to insight in general.

    But it could also be interpreted not as an exaggeration. What is it to “have reasons”? If it’s to have arrived at the love through ratiocination, or if it means that reasons are somehow constitutive of it, or are the motivation for it, then the statement is accurate. I don’t decide to love someone based on a deduction.

    So under that interpretation, giving or thinking of reasons post hoc is not what “having reasons” means.

    Neither does it mean the causes of your love. An omniscient psychologist’s discovery of the objective “reasons” that you love a person—which would mean the causes of your love—is not what is being discussed. What it’s about is having reasons of your own, as justification for your feeling.

    It’s a rich insight (though hardly an original one), so try to understand before rejecting. Be curious.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    If you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them — Zizek
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪universeness
    It still looks like shouting to me, even if it’s single words. I suspect others feel the same, but I could be wrong.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪universeness
    You know you can use italics instead of shouting with capital letters?
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪universeness
    I don’t think I need to quote you, since I estimate that most others reading this exchange will see exactly what I mean. I’m not trying to convince you that you’re fanatical.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    your floundering friend — universeness

    This was my favourite bit.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    Debating you on the area then, is only of value to any readers, of the exchange who may be in danger of theistically ossifying as you seem to have. That possibility alone is worth my effort and my attempt. — universeness

    This was in response to @Hanover but it struck me as especially deluded, so I’m butting in.

    You give the impression of someone who has waded into a conversation without understanding what the conversation is about, but decides to rant and rave anyway. If I were undecided on the God question, and if your posts had any effect at all, I think you’d turn me towards God. As it is, I’m an atheist, but still think Hanover’s position is far more interesting than yours.

    Atheism as such is not a religion, but your sort of atheism is fanatical. Earlier on in this discussion, people including me and you were discussing the causes of oppression, totalitarianism, and genocide, and we broadly agreed that religion could not be identified as the central cause. Better candidates for that cause would be fanaticism and absolute certainty.
  • Technique & Will: A Connection Between Schopenhauer and Ellul?
    Not explicated in his theory is a comprehensive account of how the Will (as manifest in humans or rational animals) utilises its immediate environment. Ellul's conception of technique appears to provide a tenable hypothesis of how humans have come to utilise both inherent faculties (such as cognition) and external resources to reach optimum conditions for evolution. I believe (though I admittedly could not argue this yet) that technique provides adequate motive for the actions of an organism that could not otherwise be reduced to the driving force of Will. — Victor C

    This will be a superficial response…

    On the face of it, Ellul’s concept of technique, rather than providing a motive or force where the Will fails to provide one, just fills in the details, i.e., describes some of the ways in which the Will is manifest. Technique is, if you like, the particularly human, and particularly modern, manifestation of the Will.

    It’s essential to Schopenhauer’s concept that the Will underlies everything, that there isn’t anything that doesn’t ultimately reduce to it. So (again on the face of it), it seems at least compatible with Ellul’s technique, since the latter doesn’t appear to be operating at the same transcendentally metaphysical level.

    Oh, and welcome :smile:
  • Currently Reading
    The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch — Jamal

    I liked it. It’s a short apocalyptic science fiction novel that subverts the escapism and nostalgia of cosy catastrophe by reducing the protagonists to selfish, deluded, incompetent “worms” in a world of transcendent evil. The humans, caught up in…

    their own, purely human evils, were not aware of the all-pervading presence of the larger evil that lies without, which we call reality. There is evil everywhere, but we can only see what is in front of our noses, only remember what has passed through our bellies.

    There is a lot of biblical allusion too, but none of it offers redemption or hope. It seems to be employed to mock religion, and to mock humanity itself.

    I was wondering what made it enjoyable despite its unremitting pessimism and several disturbing scenes. I think part of it is the perverse sense of fun in trashing the facile tropes of popular post-apocalyptic fiction, which is at the same time a more general critique of human delusions. The art of its execution, and the simple thrill of subversion, are what’s enjoyable. In a pleasing dialectical twist, the artistry of the most pessimistic fiction is itself life-affirming.

    That said, none of it feels so shocking and important as it probably did in 1965, it falls a bit flat in the middle (I got pretty fed up with the long section set inside the roots of the giant plant), and it’s not as experimental or interesting as I’d been led to believe by Disch’s classification as a New Wave writer. Still, I’ll read more of his work; this was his first novel.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Tom Storm
    ↪Vera Mont


    For what it’s worth, my own meagre experience writing stories aligns with what you’re saying, Tom. To a surprising extent, I don’t know what I wrote until someone else points it out, or I see it later on when I’m revising it. Working on it to get it right is not an exercise in consciously sharpening the intended meaning of the piece; it’s a formal or intuitive activity. This is why writers, musicians, and other kinds of artists often talk about channeling a greater force, rather than commanding all their resources in an explicit and conscious way.
  • Currently Reading
    ↪Noble Dust
    I still don't know what it is.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Tom Storm
    If I get the time I think I’ll make a new discussion about it. There are a few ways art can be truthful. Making connections, cognitive estrangement that allows us to see things anew, analysis of personal experience (the phenomenology that @Janus mentioned), and so on. But the thing that springs to mind is Adorno’s notion of the non-identical. There is always something about the object (a pair of boots, a gas station, marriage, or the Russian aristocracy) that escapes our concepts (and thus escapes science), and yet is not necessarily always perceptible merely by sitting there looking at it or by contemplating it. This is where art comes in: to give shape to this experience. That’s roughly the idea.

    In War and Peace Tolstoy occasionally leaves the story to expound non-fictionally on the causes of historical change, but it’s a common observation that these bits are less true to life and the world than the fictional bulk of the book. It’s interesting to look at how this works.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    And an offshoot of theism, which is that there is an intentional creator, is that the non-fiction is as much a creation as the human fiction, allowing both the same sort of analysis. That is, read the tales of your life as you would a novel. — Hanover

    Does it follow from this that the creator is created too? Anyway, as you might expect, I’d go a bit further and say that the creator is also a fiction. A meaningful one.

    the world could not exist without you — Hanover

    Thanks.

    And none of this requires some leap of faith. It's just a perspective (either culturally instilled or by personal decision) of how you look at things. — Hanover

    I think it’s a fundamental social perspective though. It’s what underlies the idea that alongside science, we can investigate the world with the arts and humanities. The latter explore meaning, including the meaning of that which is investigated by the former.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Hanover
    :up:

    The reduction of truth to facts and information is characteristic of our age, with its “strong fact/value distinction” (quoting the OP).

    It’s kind of frightening that the idea of artistic truth seems so alien to people now. Worthy of a separate discussion I’d think.

    People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them — Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    I think you successfully interpreted my cryptic comments, which I didn’t realize were cryptic. I was mostly just summarizing the Frankfurt School and similar critiques of positivism, scientism, the administered society, and the Enlightenment.

    I shouldn’t have said “a norm of rational behaviour where the means are paramount”. What I meant was the social situation in which it is the means that are susceptible to rationality, rather than the ends. At the personal level, ends may remain paramount, but these tend to be seen as subjective, a matter of taste or whatever. At the social level, political parties campaign on how best to run the economy, not on what kind of economy there should be—and there too, ends may remain paramount (winning elections for the party, profits for owners of capital) but the rationality of basing a society on the profit motive is not questioned, thus the ends here are unexamined.

    What I’ve just written might be a bit of a mess, but since your hermeneutic track record is so good, I’ll lazily leave it to you to work it out.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    In relation to the op then, can you put your finger on the "dogma" or even the ideology involved here, which could motivate this sort of atheist politicism. Surely the issue is more complex than the "fact/value" distinction of the op. It appears to me like the proper subject matter would be better described as the power/money relation. The relation of fact over value does not seem to have the same motivating force as the relation of power over money. "Value" and "money" are comparable, which would mean that the dogma which motivates such an atheist movement is power based rather than fact based. — Metaphysician Undercover

    I don’t think they’re competing explanations. I’d say that the power/money ideologies build upon the fact/value separation, because the reduction of values to subjective preferences—this being the corollary of the triumphant objectivity of science and the profit-driven progress of technology—entails, through its removal of meaning from the social and natural whole, a norm of rational behaviour where the means are paramount, and the ends are the unexamined personal preferences conditioned by a socially stratified society, i.e., status, power, wealth.

    Obviously this is not to say that power and wealth were not pursued in the era of enchantment.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Hanover
    I realize it’s a fine distinction and I’m just trying it out.

    For hope to have any value, you must have the optimism it can happen — Hanover

    No, that’s still just hope. The way I’m using the terms right now, optimism is when you believe it will happen. When you believe it can happen, and you want it, that’s hope.

    Hope’s value doesn’t come from some will to believe or some such personal courage, but from one’s experience of bad stuff.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪universeness
    Your post is mostly misguided, but I will say that the point of “hope without optimism” is that optimism in effect dismisses the horrors that people have experienced, because it is a temperamental and unearned turning away from reality in favour of an imagined great future; and without knowing and feeling the horror, it negates hope in the most meaningful sense, namely the yearning for a better world in the midst of the lived and felt reality of hell on Earth.

    The optimist thinks it will happen, come what may, thus nothing already experienced matters at all. In contrast, the hoper wants it to happen, despite everything.

    It was partly your posts that prompted me to write this hammily rhetorical stuff a few months ago:

    The idea of general progress is necessarily one of forgetting. It sits alongside a dismissive attitude to suffering, a callous and shallow triumphalism (I know because I was guilty of this myself). Not only that, but the narrative offers either the present day or a future utopia as a stand-in for the Day of Judgement, or perhaps for heaven, and it begins to look like a matter of faith. Faith that progress can redeem humanity, that everything will be worth it in the end.

    The truth is that nothing can absolve humanity of its crimes and nothing can make up for the suffering of the past, ever. Nothing and nobody will redeem humanity. Nothing will make it okay, and we will never be morally cleansed. We certainly ought to strive for a good, free society, but it will never have been worth it.     — Jamal
  • Atheist Dogma.
    radical optimism — Hanover

    Sounds all right. It’s the triumphal rhetorical banalities I don’t like.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    You seem to accent the negatives more than you accent the positive achievements of humankind.

    Are you another pessimist?     — universeness

    You ask me this because I attempted to confront the reality of the twentieth century? Why should I be an optimist? Seriously, why? This is a venue for philosophical thinking and discussion, not for atheist proselytizing or rousing the masses into revolutionary fervour.

    Optimism is often facile and banal.

    The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential. — Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism

    The title is where I'm at: hope without optimism.

    Or is it the other way around? :chin:
  • Atheist Dogma.
    Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? — Hanover

    "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

    So yeah, in some ways it hasn't gone very well so far, despite N's optimism.
  • Atheist Dogma.
    ↪Hanover
    @universeness

    On the atheism of the Nazis, there seem to be roughly two positions from the capital "A" Atheists here: (a) National Socialism was a religious movement; and (b) National Socialism was not an atheist movement, shown by the fact that it was happy sometimes to use religion to gain and maintain power.

    Position (a) can't really be taken seriously, but position (b) (which seems to be where @universeness is coming from) is usually just a defence against those militant theists who claim that atheism is inherently evil. I think (b) is fair enough. The Nazis emerged from a still quite religious milieu, which most of them did not care enough about to give it much thought for or against, thus they were neither religious nor atheist in general, and there was probably a diversity of opinion among Nazis on the issue.

    But some leftist atheists during and just after the war came to believe that there was something in the secularized culture of modern Europe that allowed totalitarianism to happen. European antisemitism at the time of the Nazis had become scientific in character (it was pseudo-scientific, of course). It took up the older religious tradition of antisemitism and ran with it in a racialist direction, so it was motivated and justified differently than it had been in previous centuries. So some pessimistic atheist social theorists blamed the very historical evolution of which the loss of religion's social importance was a central feature. From this point of view, it is something in the process of secularization that led to totalitarianism and genocide (the instrumentalization of reason and all that). In other words, religion was being lost, and without anything to take its place, bad things happen.

    This seemed to be further supported by the existence of another of the world’s most brutal and totalitarian regimes, one which was atheist and which engaged in the persecution of religion, namely Stalin's government of the Soviet Union.

    Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory.
  • Currently Reading
    The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch.
  • What is everyone's favorite Spring/Summer weather?
    They say the clouds keep heat in, but honestly would rather see sun even if it were colder — TiredThinker

    Similarly, they say turnips are good for you, but—get this—I would honestly rather have a pizza or a burger, even if it were less healthy.
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