philosophy leads to no truths. — Gregory

How about soft, fuzzy truths that we're never done clarifying?

All three of these philosophers seem kind of anal to me so I prefer pure German and Italian idealism — Gregory

That's a fun sentence.

We learn how to talk simply by hanging around, not by learning rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

es, and this makes good evidence that these norms do not exist as any sort of rules — Metaphysician Undercover

'Rules' is just a metaphor to be interpreted in context. In general the 'rules' are not explicit.(We may agree more than you think.) I see meaning out there in the interactive hustle & bustle and not in here, directly present to an infinitely intimate mind-eye. It's patterns in our doings, including our mouth-doings. Patterns, rules, games. I say don't cut your fingers on the envelope.

.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

(?)

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.)

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:

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.)

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.

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.)

If Wittgenstein is talking about his own writing then it seems fair to say that his writing is, at least in part, esoteric. It appears to be a self-selective process. Those who gain access do so because of some ability or characteristic that others lack — Fooloso4

I think the main obstacle to 'getting' Wittgenstein (from my POV, of course) is an emotional attachment to metaphysics and/or religion. Folks don't want the ghost in the machine and directly present & exact meaning to vanish before them.

You don't have to pay to read the texts & they aren't passed around like secrets. Instead there are just readers who recognize (or not) the value or correctness of other readers' interpretations (which as you note can involved the creation of separate inner circles.)

If a tone deaf person criticizes music ...

So one gets told that there are things one cannot understand. One is excluded from some group. Some thusly excluded people handle this by downplaying the importance of said group and its expertise. Some do it by playing it up. — baker

:up:

I think it's also fair to say that some groups are formed in the first place as a reaction against mainstream views. A 'godless' 'scientific' 'materialist' (etc.) worldview is just intolerable or depressing to some people. The fundamentalist is directly opposed, while Romantics and 'spiritual but not religious' options try to give the 'devil' at least some of his due.

I think it's true that we model nature in terms of mechanism, and the notion of mechanism inherently involves the idea of lifelessness, lack of agency. — Janus

Right. I'd say that we do (the 'educated' in 2021) while humans in the past and some even now dance for the gods to make it rain or trust prayer handkerchiefs to cure cancer. That might be the 'big' shift, which is an emotional shift as much as a conceptual shift.

Some spiritual visions, for example Spinoza's, involve learning to let go of this caring which is rooted in self-concern and the anxieties it induces. I think such a vision also requires letting go of our models of nature, or at least of the belief that they reveal something about the nature of reality, since the map is never the territory. — Janus

:up:

I'm with you there. I think some would like to take useful models in a metaphysical way so that the physicist can replace the priest. As Lange stresses (responding to the Spinoza comment) in his history of materialism, Epicurus only cared about physics to the degree that it liberated humans from the fear of death, demons, etc. This isn't to speak against physics but to emphasize the point above.

It's similar with "esoteric knowledge". Adepts in some esoteric discipline spend a lot of time discussing those esoteric topics, and within that reference frame, their discussion is rational. An outsider, however, cannot rationally, meaningfully participate in such discussions. — baker

I basically agree with you here. I'd say that 'rational' roughly refers to the 'universal' inner circle, which connects to political freedom, especially freedom of speech. A non-universal circle would put some individuals' statements above criticism. A Scientologist doesn't challenge Hubbard's doctrines but merely interprets him in this or that tolerated direction.

The 'works whether or not you believe in it' criterion of science/technology works only for things, not for persons. That's not much of an achievement. To limit one's life to things that 'work whether or not you believe in it' makes for an impoverished, zombified existence. — baker

I think there are tools that work on people (drugs) whether on not those people believe in them or not, but I agree. I'm not arguing for scientism. Overall I like our free(-ish) society that allows for DIY religion. If someone wants to be a Catholic or a scientologist, because it works for them, fine. If they want to get their kicks from secular philosophy and novels, also fine.

But that's the real issue here, isn't it (or one of them)? The demand for recognition, for respect. — baker

Exactly. That's one of the reasons I mentioned Kojeve, who focuses on this as a driving force in the human history of war, work, and ideology-religion-philosophy.

A proposed exclusivity of knowledge does generally become offensive in matters that concern man's basic sense of morality, epistemology, and issues of "the meaning of life". The idea that only a select few should be able to discern correctly what is morally right and what is wrong, or how to know "how things really are", or what "the meaning of life" is -- such an idea gets to us, we cannot be nonchalant about it. — baker

Right. If the person holding such views is low status in 'worldly' or 'charisma' terms (can't boss me around, doesn't seem worth impressing) & if they are obnoxious or arrogant, then they are just mocked for vanity and delusion, behind their backs probably. If they can boss me around, then their ideology might be perceived as a threat to my freedom. The charismatic ideological opponent will cause me cognitive dissonance & might even persuade/convert me. Then we march under the same flag and perhaps argue about who's closer to that flag (the 'sacred')...but hopefully take some time to enjoy being insiders together.

However, it's not all doom and gloom as such events have occurred in the past and have been dealt with quite well and without the need for a major overhaul of the existing framework of knowledge. — TheMadFool

I think there have been major overhauls, so the reason I'm not doom & gloom is because I think we can keep adapting with new major overhauls.

at its heart it'll always be just one of countless different ways of understanding the universe, Homeric gods being one of them.

I hope I didn't misunderstand you. — TheMadFool

I think we're somewhat on the same page. To me science is mostly manifested and matters as reliable prediction and control, as tools that work independent of my trust in them. Other tools, like stories about the gods, are seemingly more useful for group morale or personal orientation in a pluralistic society. (I should add though that Q probably had 'using' the gods in mind by working them in to explanations of events. The wind didn't blow to move the ships because Poseidon was mad. So let's sacrifice a virgin princess, etc.)

I like the spirit of it, but did you notice:

Logical positivists within the Vienna Circle recognized quickly that the verifiability criterion was too stringent. Notably, all universal generalizations are empirically unverifiable, such that, under verificationism, vast domains of science and reason, such as scientific hypothesis, would be rendered meaningless. — link

Here are some other views (or leads/samples you might find interesting.)

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement -- especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?

For vividness I have been speaking in terms of varying distances from a sensory periphery. Let me try now to clarify this notion without metaphor. Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience -- and in a selective way: some statements to some experiences, others to others. Such statements, especially germane to particular experiences, I picture as near the periphery. But in this relation of "germaneness" I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience. For example, we can imagine recalcitrant experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are brick houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs, along with kindred statements. A recalcitrant experience can, I have already urged, be accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Quine

http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/Class%20Readings/Quine/TwoDogmasofEmpiricism.htm

The idea that observation "strictly and properly so-called" is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are made "in conformity with the semantical rules of the language," is, of course, the heart of the Myth of the Given. For the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by these self-authenticating episodes. These 'takings' are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the 'knowings in presence' which are presupposed by all other knowledge, both the knowledge of general truths and the knowledge 'in absence' of other particular matters of fact. Such is the framework in which traditional empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation of empirical knowledge.

Let me make it clear, however, that if I reject this framework, it is not because I should deny that observings are inner episodes, nor that strictly speaking they are nonverbal episodes. It will be my contention, however, that the sense in which they are nonverbal -- which is also the sense in which thought episodes are nonverbal is one which gives no aid or comfort to epistemological givenness.
....

...If I reject the framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because I want to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation. For to put it this way is to suggest that it is really "empirical knowledge so-called," and to put it in a box with rumors and hoaxes. There is clearly some point to the picture of human knowledge as resting on a level of propositions -- observation reports -- which do not rest on other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them. On the other hand, I do wish to insist that the metaphor of "foundation" is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former.

Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static character. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once. — Sellars

http://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm8.html

How are you supposed to know what to do without being told what to do? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm confident that you mostly learned language just by hanging around. Pronouncing words correctly is not even explicitly taught.

To me, it seems ridiculous to conclude that any time a group of things are behaving in a similar way they are following a normative rule. Unless the rule is explicitly stated and the agent reads and understands it, then there is insufficient evidence to say that consistent behaviour is proof of normative rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not a group of just any kind of things, but a group of human beings or (I just discovered, checking on a suspicion) some animals.

Social norms, or mores, are the unwritten rules of behavior that are considered acceptable in a group or society. Norms function to provide order and predictability in society.
[/qoute]
https://examples.yourdictionary.com/social-norm-examples.html
— link

A paper in PNAS this week explored differences in social behavior between four different populations of chimpanzees, finding that the groups had very different norms when it came to hanging out together and grooming one another. They point out that this means studying one population of chimps might not always be enough for accurate claims about the species as a whole. — link

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/chimps-have-different-cultural-norms-about-friendliness-too/

Even chimps seem to have varying local norms. Nice!

Unless the rule is explicitly stated and the agent reads and understands it, then there is insufficient evidence to say that consistent behaviour is proof of normative rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think that works. When children misbehave they are corrected by parents and peers. We don't get a manual of everything to do or not do. Some things are made explicit, of course, but generally only when they need to be, when a child misbehaves or the situation is complex (websites tell US visitors to Sweden, for example, which differences to prepare for to avoid being rude.)

Moreover norms change. People see other people mocked or insulted for online speech (to name an example) and update their sense of what's acceptable. Such norms aren't exactly articulated. It requires skill to stay on the right side of the line. Comedians work right on the edge, and we love or hate them for it.

Such a conclusion leads one to believe that molecules, atoms, and fundamental particles are following normative rules, and panpsychism in general. — Metaphysician Undercover

It would (slightly) violate the norms of intelligibility to use 'norms' for fundamental particulars. A panpsychist might make a case, but that would be an attempt to get us to think in uncommon ways. Some attempts like that do succeed. I don't believe that rivers always had mouths.

When you see a swarm of insects, or a flock of birds headed south, would you say that these creatures are following normative rules? Herd mentality ought not be described as following normative rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

On the contrary, 'herd mentality' is a good phrase for the kind of linguistic norms I have in mind, if one ignores its connotation.

If you simply observe others doing something, and decide to behave in a similar way because it appears to be advantageous, this ought not be described as a normative rule. — Metaphysician Undercover

The individual's decision is not the rule. I can decide to drive wearing a blindfold, but this violates the rule or norm that I drive carefully whether I like or recognize that norm or not. It's not up to the individual, excepting that individuals contribute in their small way to maintaining or shifting norms.

If there is more, all well and good, but no one knows this more for sure, here and now, and yet we must thrive together only on what we can know here and now. — 180 Proof

:up:

Like decadent bourgeois Rorty, you sussed-out correctly, j0e, whom I can't stand. — 180 Proof

Just curious, but is there anything you like in him? And what do you loathe? I can guess to some degree from "decadent bourgeois," but more detail would be appreciated.

Beckett wrote to me about my book Démiurge, "In your ruins I find shelter." — Emil Cioran, Cahiers 1957-1972

:fire:

I mentioned feeling being made central to religion for some thinkers without a concrete reference.
I dug up one in case you are interested.

Schleiermacher has a large measure of sympathy with the skeptics about religion whom he means to answer. But, at least in his early period, his sympathy with them also goes much deeper than this. In On Religion he is skeptical about the ideas of God and human immortality altogether, arguing that the former is merely optional (to be included in one’s religion or not depending on the nature of one’s imagination), and that the latter is downright unacceptable. Moreover, he diagnoses the modern prevalence of such religious ideas in terms of the deadening influence that is exerted by modern bourgeois society and state-interference on religion. He reconciles this rather startling concession to the skeptics with his ultimate goal of defending religion by claiming that such ideas are inessential to religion. This stance strikingly anticipates such later radical religious positions as Fritz Mauthner’s “godless mysticism”.
...
...for Schleiermacher religion is founded neither on theoretical knowledge nor on morality. According to On Religion, it is instead based on an intuition or feeling of the universe: “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe”
...
He recognizes a potentially endless multiplicity of valid religions, and strongly advocates religious toleration. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schleiermacher/#PhilReli_1

Beautiful, but I suspect you've read too much 'Laozi' or 'Nāgārjuna' (even possibly Spinoza) into that old Swabian neo-platonist. — 180 Proof

Thank you, and guilty (almost) as charged. I confess that I've updated (fixed) Hegel here with the help of later thinkers. I know Spinoza so far only through Durant who adores him. I have spent some time with Laozi. Feuerbach & Kojeve shaped my repair of Hegel, and I must confess that Rorty (whom I don't think you like) was a big influence.

To map the territory 1:1? No. Not if that map (i.e. that explanation of 'everything') is to be useful as a map (i.e. an explanation of anything). — 180 Proof

I agree, though I do make allowances for 'large' metaphors. The world is 'the Vale of Soul-Making' or that sort of thing.

In my understanding, 'explanations' are models, or precise accounts, of how, under specifiable necessary and sufficient conditions, a particular state-of-affairs (A) transforms – can be caused by some agency to transform – into a particular state-of-affairs (B). The better, more useful and fecund explanations, are effable, falsifiable and defeasible. — 180 Proof

That's an excellent definition. Perhaps you'll agree though that many itch for something More, without being able perhaps to explicate this 'more' (and which turns out to be just a role to play in 'this mess we're in.'

"Why" pertains only to 'intentional agency' e.g. Why did you eat the soap? When asked Why do the stars twinkle on a clear night? one can only answer by translating the question as How do the stars twinkle on a clear night? because stars are not (recognizably) intentional agents, that is, they do not answer questions. — 180 Proof

That sounds like a sharper, cleaner way to use the word, but perhaps you'll agree that everyday usage is sloppier than that (which I'm not celebrating or defending.)

"Why" ... which, of course, is question-begging (or infinitely regressive). — 180 Proof

:up:

Indeed. I accidentally started down the metaphysical path while trying to make sense of what I had been told as a child (Catholicism, Pentecostalism). I couldn't. So I let it go.

The colloquial term denotes anything at all (without exception) ... but does not posit "the All", which makes about as much sense "all the numbers". — 180 Proof

Agreed, allowing for large metaphor talk & the notion of 'The World.'

Great stuff. Well said. — Luke

Thank you.

As far as I can tell, rationality is dead against any and all claims made sans evidence and this epistemic rule applies to itself too. — TheMadFool

My two suggestions are that cognition is largely metaphorical and that rationality is not strictly defined. Philosophers often propose definitions for or explications of science and critical thinking, but I don't think there is or ever will be an exact consensus. Perhaps you've studied logical positivism and movements like that: it's hard to rule out 'metaphysics' or metaphor without relying on both.
I think we'll always be down in this mess together, talking about our talking, experimenting, compromising.

As far as I can tell, rationality is dead against any and all claims made sans evidence and this epistemic rule applies to itself too. — TheMadFool

I agree, claims without evidence are judged irrational, and I think evidence has an ethical-social aspect. We don't just impose our theories/myths on others. We make a case, respond to criticism, work together toward a common theory/myth. I only include 'myth' to emphasize the metaphorical aspect of cognition, something like basic framings of the situation like Rorty's 'mirror of nature.' I also agree that (ideally) the epistemic rule applies to itself. We try to be rational as we decide what it is to be rational (so we work with a rough understanding we have -- what's the alternative? --- in order to improve it.)

If anything this highly commendable feature of rationality - it demands of itself what it demands of others (justification) - clearly points to a willingness to heed & respond to criticisms levelled against rationality. — TheMadFool

:up:

Right! And the failings in logical positivism (one image of rationality) were assimilated by philosophers so that more sophisticated & flexible notions could appear which kept the good and jettisoned what was shown not to work. (That's just one example with a clear plot.)

I think science is inherently predictive (repeatability being such a key part of the scientific method) but accidentally in service of control. — csalisbury

I can make sense of this as 'pure' science only predicting and not intervening. I like the distinction, but I think pure science would be trapped at a certain level without the invention of various scientific instruments which would contaminate that purity. Consider the telescope that controls light and allows for new observations and new predictions.

If you look at philosophy in the old tradition, it was indeed a cure or a therapy for mistaken belief or cognition, for attaching significance to the wrong things. — Wayfarer

:up:
I think it's still that, even for some professional philosophers, even for atheists.

But because that kind of sentiment is easily associated with religion then it's rejected on those grounds - guilt by association, so to speak, as Pierre Hadot notes. — Wayfarer

By some perhaps, but even despisers of the 'spiritual' are chasing the image of Sophia that they see her.

There's a sense of something missing, both in myself and in the culture. — Wayfarer

For some, yes. And even those who don't feel a spiritual longing want more of what's best in the world we already have (when not absorbed in a play that seizes the moment and finds it complete.)

it is the only composition of mine to have been regularly performed in public, during the 1990's. — Wayfarer

Nice song & nice voice! I'll send you a link to one of the songs I've written.

I think that it is a major problem when people try to impose their views on anyone else, whether it is a mystic vision, or any other. It is unfortunate that people get so carried away with their way of seeing that they think that it is applicable to everyone else. — Jack Cummins

Yes. I guess that's the central problem. Politically, decisions must be made. So we vote. Almost no one gets exactly what they want, but it's better than despotism. One huge issue that we have to decide is the boundary of the private sphere. Even what's yours and mine to decide personally is a matter that must be decided publicly. Issues like abortion and gun control are edge cases, in the US at least.

I agree that music and the other arts do involve entering into states of consciousness resembling the mystics. Even here, we have a problem with people disagreeing about the right way of seeing. — Jack Cummins

Right, and I think these are 'inner circles' in their way. There are classical music snobs and obscure punk rock music snobs and so on. So much of life in relatively affluent societies is about cultivating an image through what we consume, including the 'higher' things like music, art, and novels. IMO, lots of our angst involves this freedom we're condemned to. Instagram, for instance, is a torrent of envy-generating self-advertisement (a this-worldly Hell is created from images of a this-worldly false Heaven.)

I like John Berger's ideas on art, who has interpreted the neglected majority of oil paintings as expensive selfies. It's the exceptions to portraits of the rich and their abundance (or exceptional examples of even just this) that get celebrated as high art.

Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable.
... ...
The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. — Berger

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2507145-ways-of-seeing

Berger focuses on paintings and modern advertisement photography, but clearly other cultural artifacts are caught up in this game. For intellectual types it's books, famous intellectuals, the 'right' intellectuals. This kind of critique of consumerism and vanity goes at least as far back as the Epicureans, who I understand to be escaping (among other things) this sad-manic hustle.

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship. — Epicurus

We're not 'back' in it, we're trapped in it, and the task of philosophy is not to appease the machine, but to see through it. — Wayfarer

To many it was a great accomplishment (perhaps 'the' intellectual accomplishment) to achieve such a view of nature as a system of 'laws' or tendencies that could be exploited in ways that were and are reliable unlike anything we had/have ever seen.

We can't appease the machine in the way we once hoped to appease the angry gods. Or that's my view and probably the mainstream view. To me this is independent of fancier metaphysics. Does nature care? Are we encompassed by something inhuman that has to be dealt with through useful models that might never grasp a final truth or essence?

My understanding is that your position is opposed to this vision of dead, apathetic nature. I guess I'm trying to locate exactly where we diverge & clarify both our positions.

'A rectangular whittling silver lovely little French old knife' does sound weird. Interesting (but unsurprising?) that it's opinion(value) first.

Great example!

The sage, then, does not know any determinate truth about life after death or before birth, the workings of Karma, the mind of God, or Douglas Adam's "the secret to life, the universe and everything", they just know how to live, how to be themselves without fear, and interact with people without fear or favour, but general love and compassion instead, and so on.

The esoteric knowledge is akin to Aristotle's "phronesis" and "eudamonia" and the skeptic's "ataraxia", and not to some kind of quasi-scientific metaphysical knowledge about the nature of reality. It is not the gaining of something so much as the loss of the ego-based angst and alienation which is such a prominent feature of the life of the ego.

Also their knowledge is a "poesis", a "making", and thus akin to poetry. — Janus

:up:

I like this way of looking at the issue.

but I'm interested in the idea of 'the nature of reason' as it was understood in pre-modern philosophy. That's something I think has been lost in transition to modernity. And that's because, in the modern view, 'reason' is subjectivized, relativized and immanentized - it is no longer seen as an animating principle, but as an instrumental faculty. — Wayfarer

These days reason as is 'animating principle' is likely to look like anthropomorphism. We're back to the idea of nature as an encompassing 'machine' that doesn't care about us, which ignores rain dances and prayers. That, I think, is a 'metaphysical' attitude that's already found in Epicurus who wasn't that interested in natural science otherwise.

The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure.

I think there's a version of this in Kojeve, since he describes stoicism and skepticism as escapism for the slaves who are afraid to challenge their worldly masters (risk their lives, their wealth, their reputation.) Otherworldly (pre-atheist) Christianity is a version of this escapism in that it imagines an otherworldly Master for all human beings, no matter their worldly status, thus equalizing them. But Christianity had a social influence and surely contributed to the (atheistic, deistic) American and French revolutions which 'incarnated' such principles politically.

There's a definition, I think from Buddhism, that 'intelligence is the ability to make distinctions'. — Wayfarer

That seems to be part of it, maybe even most of it, but I don't see why making distinctions isn't a skill.

I wonder if he had engaged with Jasper's idea of the 'axial age' and the purported appearance of many of the seminal wisdom traditions (and sages!) all within a few centuries of each other. — Wayfarer

That seems highly likely.

Prior to going to France, Kojève studied under the existentialist thinker Karl Jaspers, submitting his doctoral dissertation on the Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev's views on the mystical union of God and man in Christ. — link

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alexandre_Koj%C3%A8ve

Kojeve's work 'naturalizes' Christian mysticism in some ways.

Note that Kojève was not denying that at one time in history religion had served a critical purpose. Christianity, in particular, was the first universal religion that came closest to bringing about true self-consciousness by teaching that all human beings are equal as well as finite: “the whole evolution of the Christian world is nothing but a progress toward the atheistic awareness of the essential finiteness of human existence.”The Christian faith was the first religion to discover the spirituality of man as free, individual, and historical. This synthesis of the particular and universal as well as the related recognition of theology as anthropology, became possible only in the form of Christian individuality, Christ as man-God. Yet this religious consciousness lacks true (or political) wisdom. The particular problem is that the religious man thinks that God, not the State, is universal and homogeneous at any time in history. Hence he erroneously believes that he can attain absolute knowledge at any historical moment whatsoever, whereas he can only attain the State (not God), and only at the End of History.Unbeknownst to the religious man, only the universal homogeneous state, the final achievement of equality for all on earth, realizes the Christian ideal of charity (love of all human beings as one would love God) — link

https://www.voegelin-principles.eu/history-progress-or-reversal-mythical-prognostications-kojeve-and-mcluhan

I'm not endorsing his views by sharing them, though I value him as a philosopher. You can probably see that Marx was a strong influence.

Shaping arrows is a skill. Reasoning is an ability which can be used to greater or lesser extent but without that ability, there is no way to develop it. — Wayfarer

Just consider how zygotes end up composing philosophy. Does a zygote possess the faculty of reason? If so, then why not earthworms?

Is it even correct to say that children are taught language? Or do they just hang around, get enmeshed in the lifeworld's signaling structures, and get better and better with practice?