Sartre. I don't think he's perfect. I don't always agree with him. But that's part of the fun, sorting the good from the bad, deciding where X "went wrong" with respect to one's own in-progress philosophy.

I don't want to argue about what God is or isn't, or whether or not it is or is, but just that there are things beyond you. If you go to learn a discipline, you subject yourself to their mastery. You listen intently, take them seriously, study what they tell you to, practice what they tell you to, and eventually things start falling together.

Now imagine two disciples, one doesn't pay attention, believes that the professor is an idiot, doesn't engage in the practices, doesn't study the material, and the other does the opposite. Which student do you figure will master the discipline, and which will not? Which will become an authority on the subject, and which will not?

No masters, or teachers are Gods or infallible, but you need to move through them, and beyond them in order to truly figure that one, it is far more difficult to reinvent the wheel, from scratch, thinking every other wheel maker a fool from the beginning, and a far better wheel than has ever been made before.

You of course do need to be on someone's level before you can understand them, and their are certain behaviors and attitudes which are not very conducive to getting there, and there are other behaviors and attitudes which are. — Wosret

I largely agree. History is driven by this quest for the beyond. Alienated man pursues his apparently distance essence. The student trusts the guru as the possessor, for instance, of this essence. So projection/alienation is absolutely central to my thinking.

Riffing on Hegel (without appeal to his authority), absolute knowledge is only possible at the end of history--in this case personal-ideological history. The student becomes the guru only when projection is overcome --when projection is recognized as projection. So the guru is self-subverting all along (in my vision of this process), but the student has to gather the nerve to live without the projection. Why?

Because the projection is a crutch. The projection is an essence for the student, a refuge from freedom. (This is a Sartre-Hegel blend.) The guru tries to tell the student that he "exists" or "juts out" from the given. As I see it, the guru's message is that there is no guru. Less paradoxically, the student's attitude toward the guru is the itself the unwisdom of the student that must be overcome. This can only be done in terms of the student's "misunderstandings" or "projections." He is deaf to that which does not relate to the sacred as he currently conceives it. Critique is immanent. Positions collapse only on their own terms. They fail their own criteria for success or validity and mutate in order to ease this tension or correct this failure. The process continues until alienation is overcome. Otherness is grasped as temporary, fictional, provisional. The criterion ceases to fail itself ("absolute knowledge" or what-you-may-call-it.)

A fuzzier version of this is the young man's hero worship of the great dead philosophers. He admires them in a way that forecloses the possibility of him becoming them. They themselves "spoke from the I" charismatically. They got themselves taken as authorities. They imposed their personalities as Truth. So young men not yet come of age argue with one another in terms of their chosen Father images (favorite philosophers around which they cannot see). Just as Christians quote the bible, the young thinker quotes the secular scripture of the famous dead thinker. Of course (as you say) we can't start from zero. Life is too short. We need the shortcut of centuries of thinking. But we are only fully mature when we can venture forth and "speak from the I" and our own here and now.

If one is "possessed" by the spirit of seriousness, then one can find no use for my word-art. That's OK. I love to read philosophy, but I don't usually find much agreement among them. They find me frivolous-narcissistic-irresponsible and I find them alienated-inauthentic-"superstitious." To question the basic scientistic/objective pose of the metaphysician is perhaps to go beyond or before metaphysics. When Plato and Socrates and the gang imposed a distinction between what they were doing and what the other wordsmiths were doing, they instituted "sacred sophistry" or anti-sophistry or philosophy. I think most intellectuals experience this pose as a necessity. That's what thinkers do, science.

But this view of thinking is contingent. We happened to get religious about certain conceptions of the use of conception itself. Because I use declarative sentences rather than a tiresome train of pomo-qualifications, you can say that I'm still doing "science" here. But I am more generally stringing words together and clicking "Post Comment." I am spraying spores of my own personality as an option for others. It's a culture-product. Lots of philosophers are as subjective, autobiographical as Kerouac. Few of them admit it. That's the gimmick of these particular spores. The objective pretense is abandoned even as it is employed to communicate this abandonment. (Declarative sentences insist that language is bigger than declarative sentences. Language is represented as being bigger than representation.)

Maybe you don't get it. That statement itself is exactly the kind of seduction it describes. It is a transpersonal bluff that recognizes itself a such. You might say that I'm an ironist doing performance art. But that would not be some final description either. I'm not doing science. I'm doing something more general with sentences. I include objective-sounding statements in this performance. The meaning is holistic. I'm not doing word math. I'm sketching a personality. Not even my own personality but a "fictional" post-philosophical position that I find fascinating and indeed embrace. 'Course I'm never done playing with it, building it, etc.

Good quote. I don't totally buy the dichotomy between amusement and seriousness. Divine malice. Seriousness of the child at play. As far as gazing on the frivolous multitude, my view offers its own version of that pleasure. It is free of the common pretense, no longer alienated or finding its essence beyond itself. "Nothing human is alien to me" and eventually "nothing alien is inhuman to me."


F R MA M N O LY


"FOR MADMEN ONLY" (the flickering sign in Steppenwolf)

Sure. But to get nit-picky about my language is not necessarily to respond thoughtfully. Obviously you may hate my perspective. I offer it without justification, like a piece of sculpture or a dick joke. I try to state it forcefully (engrossed in shaping the concepts into sentences), but it is of course a joker's or asshole's philosophy. Divine malice, the laughter of the gods, etc. It irreverently questions "the spirit of seriousness." The film A Serious Man also did this. The nice guy scientist lacks a certain oomph as a protagonist. There's something flat in such an ideal. (Notes from Underground also comes to mind.)

Why are you even talking to me then, if we're both just irrational anyway? Why reason with me? What's the point of that? There couldn't be a reason I guess, just irrationally doing so, for no reason.

Also, is everyone irrational? That's a transpersonal claim... — Wosret

I've been down this road before. We exert ourselves in the world through language by seducing otehrs to see the world in our own terms. Our sentences are viruses. Moreover we (including myself) like to spit out our favorite ideas. It amuses me to paint these words on the public wall. Maybe someone will get where I'm coming from. Maybe someone like you will test my wits with objections. I like playing blitz chess & I like playing with ideas.

I think our motives our irrational, yes, but that "rationality" is the symbol-employing pursuit of our heart's desire. The mind is the tool of the dark heart. I offer that not as science but as a tool. The representational paradigm has its limits. It's constrained by the transpersonal pose. Representation is also (often) persuasive. I impose my interpretation as reality itself. I am well aware that I cannot control the meaning of my strings of words. I think Derrida has a point that the ideality of language means that every sentence is a mirror of our own finitude. Am I present the necessarily iterable concepts that I string together? They outlive me. They are objects in a quasi-spiritual realm that "haunts" the realm of sensation and flesh.

What we're maybe really talking about is re-envisioning of philosophy. Typically it seems to be envisioned as a kind of objective science. But we can widen that notion by not assuming objectivity. It's a genre or an historically organized collection of sentences. Philosophy can be understood as a branch of philosophy that assumes or institutes the universal pose. I'm trying to speak from outside that pose, and I tend to be misunderstood when doing so.

Who care's if they're servile, or inauthentic? You're just speaking from some alien position, it isn't as if it's true. It wouldn't matter if it was or it wasn't either, as that would require a value for the truth. — Wosret

Yes, I am "irrationally" invested in autonomy. It just is sexy. As I said, I think we have notions of the ideal man that we compulsively "incarnate." We have a passion for what is largely a vague image that we therefore conceptually elaborate.

Let me be clearer. It does make me feel good. But colloquially "feel-good" positions are often maternal. "It all works out in the end. Karma's got your back. The real is the rational is a the real." My little song is a dark song of the heroic ego facing the void, dying alone. It's sexy in an austere way. It's bleak. Of course it's macho. No doubt: for me philosophy has been a conceptual elaboration of masculinity. Phallogocentric and all that jazz.

Saying that on some meta-level analysis you think they're all valid, but we can't help but act otherwise doesn't actually change anything then, if we all act like they're true anyway, then there is no difference besides some kind of back-handed dismissal, or enlightened self-awareness that you can't in any sense actually enact. — Wosret

I'm saying we are irrational wills clashing in the void. Some of us convince ourselves and others that the world is not like this. It is not a void of clashing wills. They say that they know this God fellow or this universal rationality that elevates them beyond the mere assertion of personality. They identity the substance or kernel of their personality with a principle or image that is transpersonal.

But an earnest pursuit of the transpersonal (Nietzsche's quest for the truth about truth) can result in a generalized skepticism with respect to the transpersonal. One can ask one's self: do I really give a damn about posing as a scientist or the agent of some god? Or was this all along the assertion of the value of my individual personality? Such a person can cut out the middle man, drop the objective-righteous rhetoric and assert the I directly in terms of its dark charisma.

A demonized Sartre is sort of what I have in mind. He didn't have the nerve for existentialism. He worked in a Kantian ethic and eventually sold it out to Marxism. He collapsed into a high-brow moralist.

You will behave as if some values are superior to others, and some are wrong — Wosret

Yes. Some of us pose as if we have an authority to justify this action. Others find reaching for this authority too servile or inauthentic.

So you were saying that my opinions were value laden, and therefore equally valid to everyone else's? — Wosret

No. Not saying that. We will kill and die for our own values. I'm no hippy. My "leap of faith" is organ deep, just as yours is. Equally validity is the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that I don't pretend to speak from some objective place. I "speak from the I," without justification in terms of some alien other. It's an "evil" position, not some feel-good maternal nonsense.

I think a difference in our attitudes may have something to do with "embracing the killer." The novel Steppenwolf comes to mind. From the wolf's point of view, war is beautiful. Men would not return to it again and again if it did not appeal to them. Rich, comfortable, civilized nations sometimes go to war. There is an "excess" in man's psyche that finds peace boring or repressive. Part of us wants to kill and die. Orgasm has been called the little death and that figures in too.

There is the desire to survive peacefully (a constructive, future-invested drive) and a drive to give one's self away to the moment. "Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll" are related to this second drive, along with war.
From my point of view, there's a safe, righteous kind of thought that dominates the public space. For instance, you mention the "sins" of man as if you yourself cannot relate to the joy in destruction. Maybe you indeed cannot relate. But I for one enjoy shows like Gomorrah. I love Breaking Bad. I root for the evil hero. That's the inner gangster, etc. TV is a magic circle where the repressed beast is allowed to feed on the flesh of his enemies. It's like "true blood" (the product within the show of the same name.) If we do establish peace, it'll probably be by means of virtual as opposed to actual war.

In short, I experience condemnations of man's evil as incomplete or not quite convincing. I think the ambivalence runs through the center of the individual heart.

I should also mention that "virtue signaling" isn't even an insult, and signal theorists denounce it as an insult. It just means signaling, and can only be construed as an insult in the sense of dishonest signaling, what values you're signaling you do not actually hold, or enact, or preaching to the choir. The pejorative thing though, is a politicized, rather than scientific notion of virtue signaling. — Wosret

I don't at all understand it as an insult. If that's what personality is, then "accusations" of virtue signaling can only be more virtue signaling. So to be clear, I understand myself also to be virtue signaling. I "confess" it. I was just trying to point out that accusations of arrogance also assert knowledge-virtue.

I more or less define personality as the assertion of some notion of the ideal. The objective/universal pose is one that asserts some moral/intellectual ideal as binding for all humanity. The less common subjective pose is one that presents sentences as tools for others sufficiently like himself to appreciate such tools. I identity with this subjective pose.

From my perspective (asserted as a lived vision of the world), we all act and a speak from irrational foundations. Our criterions for true and false and right or wrong cannot justify themselves. We act and argue from investments that we can only rarely sincerely put in question. If we occasionally manage this, it's because the shape of that investment is self-referential. Perhaps I let go of my notion of being a "good guy" as I try to realize my ideal self as ruthless pursue of the truth. This is what Nietzsche especially means to me. In pursuit of the truth, morality is finally put into question. But then the pursuit of truth itself as an unquestioned absolute value is put into question. It can even be said to put itself into question. And that's how the subjective pose is born from the objective pose. (So I venture as an assertion of unjustified personality.)

This cannot be true for someone that says that they're in a position to judge the highest, maximal point, to judge infinity. They are either judging what they see as a human being, and their conception in a weak form, or are mightily awesome themselves. — Wosret

I didn't mean to come off as rude, just to be clear.

For me the issue if whether the "infinite" has any content. What I took from Hegel is the vacuity of the thing-in-itself. I'm taking this out of context and understanding it spirituality. If I believe in a perspective that surpasses my own (like the mind of god), what exactly am I believing in? All I seem to have is a bare negation of my own perspective.

Let's say that God is to man as man is to dog. What can a man be to a dog? Perhaps only an ideally clever dog. If the dog could understand man, he would already be man, albeit strangely trapped in a dog's body.

We can take Hegel himself as an example. Imagine a 20 year old who picks up the idea that Hegel is some master sage. He has a vague belief in some superior perspective but no actual grasp on this perspective until he reads Hegel. As he understand Hegel, he becomes Hegel. In short, we only understand or know what we have already become. I think Hegel continued this kind of thinking:

Now the essence of critical philosophy is this, that an absolute self is postulated as wholly unconditioned and incapable of determination by any higher thing...Any philosophy, on the other hand, is dogmatic, when it creates or opposes anything to the self as such; and this is does by appealing to the supposedly higher concept of the thing, which is thus quite arbitrarily set up as the absolutely highest conception. In the critical system, a thing is what is posited in the self; in the dogmatic it is that wherein the self is posited: critical philosophy is thus immanent, since it posits everything in the self; dogmatism is transcendent, since it goes out beyond the self. — Fichte

Only in comparison to dogs. The only thing that makes us stand apart from all the other animals is pattern recognition and an incredible rate of learning - again, in comparison. — MPen89

IMO, this is quite a stretch of the word "only." But for me this is not really an "objective" matter. We disagree perhaps in the realm of values or fundamental existential investments. From my perspective, you are speaking from a desire to humiliate man.

I'd also point out that we have killed billions of each others, constructed weapons to potentially render our own environment uninhabitable for many years, and it wouldn't take long on a Google search to start reading about some of the sick unimaginable things that some people have done to each other on a 1 to 1 basis. Yes, humans have done great things and in comparison to dogs we may seem like gods (until perhaps we come in contact with some being far more intelligent than ourselves), but aren't we also a bunch of narcissistic demons with a flawed sense of reality? — MPen89

For me these are two sides of the same coin. We are indeed narcissistic demons, and God was created in our image. Note, though, that as a human you judge humanity. I'm not accusing you when I say that your position is one more assertion of a standard or a norm, one more imposition of an ought-to-be on what-is. The violence you mention can be chalked up to human tendency. Religious wars phrased moral preferences in terms of the will of God. Secular war is expressed in terms of abstract principles. And you and I right now are engaged in a polite war of ideas.

But my position is really about zooming out, trying to think beyond good and evil. I realize that this detached or amoral position is "evil" for other perspectives. When I speak of man as a god, I'm thinking of the individual's ability to put all inherited values in question.

What if you are wrong and you die? How do you know that everything is empty? — Lone Wolf

There is IMO something that might be called a leap of faith or rather unfaith in atheism and/or the denial of afterlife. As I've wrote elsewhere, I think we can find only irrational foundations for our otherwise rational or rationalized positions. I can make a case for my position. I can explain why it appeals to me. But I don't pretend to be doing an absolute science or "word math" with the language I've inherited. In short, my lifestyle is a measure of my subjective certainty.

In an ideal logical sense, I could of course be wrong. But if religion is a matter of knowledge in the sense that God is a tyrant who may be hiding and waiting to punish the skeptical, then what we are really talking about is a quasi-scientific hypothesis. God becomes a monster toward which we can only feel fear and contempt. If I somehow became certain that such a tyrant existed, then I would submit. Eternal suffering is that kind of threat. But why is a God who rewards critical thinking and autonomy any less likely? Why not postulate a God who punishes believers or those who claim to know his nature and intentions? What if God despises all prophets as false prophets? Of course I don't think there is a God, or at least not the kind who metes out justice in the afterlife.

We don't have the freedom of choice. We all have to go to school, we all have to work or contribute in someway. Where's the 'wild' aspect in our 'civilized' way of life? There isn't one. — Reece

Isn't the problem with nature rather than civilization? You or I could decide to just be homeless. But we have to feed ourselves, right? Just as we did, our parents found themselves "thrown" into this world. They did this or that to survive until they could reproduce. Others never made it that far. We are at the ass end of generations upon generations of compromise and conquest. It's in our genes and jeans to play along, do what has to be done. There's another "freedom" or "negativity" involved so that some of us will opt out and die before they must. But most will continue the game. The casino usually wins.

My main point is that there's a tendency to blame "society" when the real horror or problem is deeper than that. We are just about too smart to embrace our roles as needy, mortal animals. Language offers a hint of immortality. I think it was Feuerbach who pointed out that God has the qualities of human reason (language with its collision of ideality and materiality.) If I can say something meaningful in language, this ideality or meaning also reveals my death to me, or the distance of my dying body from an infinitely repeatable idea. In short, we are the haunted space between dogs and gods.

Great post, Sam.

I don't know you, but I gather you've had a realization about language (esp. philosophical language) that I've also had. The word "real" is maybe the ideal choice for trying to express this realization to others.

In my experience, this realization is hard to communicate, perhaps because there is a strong itch in philosophical types to do math with words. As I understand it, this "realization" is a direct threat to the game of word-math. It's an image of that game's futility and even ridiculousness.

f there is nothing after death, then there really is nothing to face after death; life is but an empty dream. — Lone Wolf

I think there is nothing after death. Also, yes, life is "ultimately" an "empty" dream. "All is vanity" = Everything is empty. But this is only ultimately.

If one decides to live (by not killing one's self), then one has to make decision after decision in the face of uncertainty and ambivalence. Marriage, career, friendship, free time, health problems, etc. etc. etc.

So this empty dream is crowded with incident.

When life is going well (is mostly fun and pleasant), then it has a positive net value. Just as you don't want to lose your cash-stuffed wallet, you don't want to lose your fun and pleasure. That's a move from net value to neutral or zero value. Yes, we won't be able to make that calculation in the grave. So with Nabokov we can say that the fear of death is the master madness. All this struggle to stay alive can indeed appear like madness to one in a specific mood. This is just one of the mood-based perspectives that has no comfortable abode in the busy and earnest public discourse.

When one is "pregnant" with a project, death is a threat to its birth. As ol' Schop put it, the writer is an insect that wants to lay its eggs before it dies. Once those eggs are laid, good night. For most creative types, their own still-developing "infinite" personality is an egg that's never quite dropped. As I start to feel physical aging, I see that it's probably only the slow failure of this "vehicle" that will allow me to welcome as opposed to tolerate death. As S. Johnson said, "it's not use whining." But heroically not-whining is not the same as crawling with a sore body into a soft bed.

Of course life can also appear as a net "bad" or an obscene horror. Anyone who has not seen this "horror" is maybe a little shallow. But those who can only see this horror are maybe a little out of touch with the monster in themselves who likes it just fine. Opinions, obviously.

I can mostly relate, but I think the gap between us and other animals is extreme. We are like gods trapped in dogs. We've been to the moon, brother. We can cognize the end of all life on the this planet, if not all life in the universe as we know it. Of course biologically we are animals. I have no taste for woo. Our capacity for thought is uncanny.

So for me we are "gods" trapped in the dying bodies of "dogs." We spend decades developing unique personalities until we are able to utter sentences that know human before did or even could utter. So there's some tragedy in our deaths. For me the tragedy is greater where the individual is greater. But there's also beauty in death and even a constant dying within the individuals who attain the sense of themselves as "gods." We are "gods" because we can peel our identities away from the given. We die into a virtual divinity. This "dying" is (as I see it) the death of our childish, tribal fantasies --the deaths of the same identifications that allow us to be civilized (thoughtful) in the first place.

Thanks for sharing. Great story.

I think that it's astonishing that anyone thinks that they're in a position to judge the creator of the fucking universe. The immeasurable arrogance of people... always the smartest, beatest most righteous ones that ever lived... nothing worthy of subordinating themselves to, they're just that awesome. — Wosret

Consider this, Wosret. Any "creator of the fucking universe" is for me a mere hypothesis, an image or concept in my mind. I am indeed in a position to judge this image of my mind. On the other hand, I can only judge this ideal image in terms of other ideal images/concepts also in my mind.

As far as the resistance to subordination goes, this is itself a subordination to an ideal image that includes independence, critical thinking, etc. In other words, I can resist being subjugated by the usual rhetoric of false humility precisely because I am already subjugated by a self-referential rhetoric authenticity, the sacredness of my own mind, etc.

From my perspective, your position in the quote above is blind to its own arrogance. IMO, all positions function also as self-advertisements, virtue signals. You seem to me to abase yourself in order to exalt yourself. I don't judge or blame you for exalting yourself. That to me is essentially what we are. I consciously exalt myself via philosophy.

I struggle to shape my ideal self, which I am always already subordinated to. Because this ideal includes self-criticism, it is more mobile to some ideals, more subject to what amounts to self-editing.

For me, the best philosophy is the rhetoric of self exaltation, either on the individual level or in terms of one's community (a less direct but more common target of public narcissism). I only criticize you for writing as if you were not doing this.

True, there are some foreclosed issues. But really that's what communities are made of to some degree. We recognize one another as truly human to the degree that we don't eat children for instance. It's impossible to debate such a thing seriously. Such a debate belongs in a dark comedy. This is an exaggerated issue to get the point across, which is that communities have "irrational" foundations. A certain background is presupposed and not subject to questioning. The Nietzschean-style philosopher can wander in the abyss "before" such foundations, of course, but there's a reason it's called the abyss.

Ginsberg was supposedly exhilarated, but he had lived quite a life and was probably ready for a new experience. "A consummation devoutly to be wished." I think death can have a beauty even for the happy. Indeed, a certain kind of constant dying is arguably identical with constant rebirth. Nobby Brown contrasted "life-death" as a Dionysian unity to something like Apollonion un-death. or un-life. To really live is also to die, while a different force wants to freeze the chaos, cease the cycle. Perhaps philosophers especially want to stop the wheel. They are "undead." The flux is frozen or converted into snapshots, "eternal truths." We can find this perhaps in an ambivalence toward "the woman." The "male" energy might be said to yank the individual out of the mother and out of nature --out of the flux. Death is the womb, the mother. Horror to the anti-natural silver rocket of the masculine principle. Kinch didn't like baths in Ulysses. Henry Flowers liked taking baths a little too much. Hence their fusion or reassembly as the theme of the book.

But to be clear, I'd feel some fear if faced with dying in the morning, for instance. But I wouldn't lose my mind. I'd buckle down for the supreme test of my philosophy. Going out like a boss.

So, all talk of an after-life, or not, is mere speculation. — TheMadFool

I hear you. But it's also logically possible that I'm a pink dragon in the midst of a long dream of being human. I don't find the afterlife plausible. I personally have no attachment for an insincere agnosticism. Don't get me wrong. For you it may be sincere. For me it would be fake. I don't pretend to doubt what I don't doubt.

As for personal immortality, I don't see its purpose. The highest part of me is not particular to me at all. Nothing so precious about this body or these memories. I truly live in "universal" thoughts and feelings, the usual passions and the shared realm of language. Fortunately we can (through language) inherit the work of those who precede us. They continue on in us. As a philosopher, I am inhabited by my influences. Their work is not lost, not all of it.

I think it was Schopenhauer who described corpses as the shit of the species, just as shit is the shit of the individual. I love this flesh, this vehicle...but I love it as a still-healthy vehicle. The flame passes from melting candle to melting candle. The real death is that of the species. I'm even at peace with that, somehow. Nothingness is OK. The adventure of being is glorious and terrible. I'd prefer the continuation of the human adventure. But there are worse things than nothing at all.

The dying process might be sucky, but I actually think that the nothingness that I expect to result from that process has its charms. Before I experienced a certain sense of completeness of self-realization, this nothingness was something to be tolerated. It did at least put a limit on individual suffering. Also it makes every possible mistake in life merely temporary --at the cost of doing the same to every possible success.

So I don't give cryogenics much thought. If I was extremely rich, I might think it over. But perhaps the real problem is aging. I'd love to be 17 again without losing what I've learned since then. I do so many things differently. I suspect that this is a common fantasy. Even if a person is fairly happy, they can probably look back at lots of wasted opportunity and unnecessary compromise/settling.

Isn't the introduction of qualia meant to show that not all forms of information can be rendered in the third person, which is what would be required to give a complete scientific explanation of something. — Wosret

I would go further and say that not even general, second hand information is really explained, or understood deeply... — Wosret

In my mind the issue of qualia is connect to the issue of being or consciousness in general. As far as I can reason, existence as a whole is irreducible contingent. I share this with you especially because of your second quote above. My thought is that explanation is relative or between beings. That beings are here in the first place seems inexplicable in principle. Redness, for instance, would be a sensual version of this problem.

Thanks for the info. I don't read about this stuff often, but I was under the impression that class-consciousness was stronger once than it is now. I've watched some Chomsky documentaries, etc. It is indeed quite fascinating, but (for reasons sketched above) I never waded in that deeply.

As no one from nowhere special with no connections, I grew up experiencing the economy as another layer of nature. I adapted to it as individual. Give me just "enough" though and I'll immerse myself in the matrix of abstract non-revolutionary thought. Or maybe it's revolutionary, but it's a private revolution --a leaning in to the atomization that capitalism arguably encourages.

Thanks for a well-written, honest answer. That you make a living offering your analyses is enviable! I continue to indefinitely postpone writing "my book" (without expectation of pay). My career is intellectual but not philosophical. So it's one kind of thinking at work and another at play (the detached and form-fascinated contemplation of "terrible" ideas). But, anyway, lots of thinking. So small-talk, however friendly, moves a little slow for my taste. Hence no longing for lost community, but only a desire for rich, "serious" or intense conversation as is sometimes found on forums like this and among good friends.

I can't say that I envy the rich much. If I have health, quiet, some food, and an internet connection...then I'm OK. Happier than most.

Perhaps it's just an exaggeration. Some mothers will take a lot of sh*t before they throw in the towel.

I think it depends on the language game one is playing. In one sense, everything is clearly an expression of self-interest. If I sacrifice for those I love, I satisfy my love for them, etc. If I die for my country, I satisfy my intense love for this country, even at the cost of my own death.

But "selfish" is often used to call out a "cheater" in some social system. A "selfish" person is a bad team player. Those who accuse him or her of selfishness are concerned for their own interests. Why bother calling someone selfish unless it interferes with one's interest? Nevertheless, they are prudent to team up and accuse the freeloader of violating a notion of fair play.

Wittgenstein definitely influenced my answer here. As you may know, he advises philosophers to see how words are used in context. If we pluck "self interest" or "selfishness" out of its varied uses and treat it like a static entity, then we get apparent contradictions. We get lost in philosophical debates about an unreal entity (context independent meaning) that philosophers invented in their confusion in the first place.

Allow me to question your question. What would do you if you somehow knew that all things were determined? I don't throw in the presence or absence of God. All you get in this hypothetic scenario is certain knowledge that the future is fixed.

Would you change your behavior? What you stop feeling guilty about or proud of certain past actions? How would this affect your projects, ambitions?

Look, the masses only need to be appeased enough to keep them from rioting. The rich have to be pleased and be given plenty of real treasure, not just bread crumbs which the poor get. Since the wealthiest 1% control so much of the wealth, they are in a very real position to punish congressmen who get in the way. — Bitter Crank

Good point, this contrast between appeasing and pleasing. Still, one might think that a political party (after a rough start) could actually swell by delivering on its promises to tax the rich. The novel 1984 comes to mind. Winston sneaks off to talk to a "prole" about history and the prole blathers on about how his local bar used to serve a much bigger or better beer (something like that.) But that's not quite right for today. Some are completely tuned out, but others quite tuned in --except to the culture war and not the class war.

My thesis would be that the rich can only buy the government by dividing the poor. The poor are not innocent victims here, though. They just find alternative measures of human worth. Piety/religion on the one hand, perhaps, and a progressive humanism on the other hand. Part of my thesis is that this culture war is made possible by its participants actually having enough for the most part. A well-fed human (or even a stuffed-with-Cheetoes human) shifts quite naturally to symbolic hierarchy.

If we were truly as materialist (obsessed precisely with possessing enviable property) as some insist, the culture war would be dwarfed by pure economic envy. A grassroots party would explode and there would be a (perhaps permanent) bloodless revolution. Of course this would be a disaster. We would be machines utterly absorbed in a point system.

I agree with you there. We do wind up having to make personal meaning of our own existence. — apokrisis

I take it that you don't fear the heat death. Neither do I.

I will be dead long before then. I'm just making a point of the gulf between private and public concern. Why do some work toward changes that they will not live to see? Perhaps for their descendants. Perhaps for other humans in general. Perhaps because it is "the" great outstanding problem. It's public intellectual's Mount Everest. Of course it's fascinating, too. Like picking a scab.

I don't know whether I am proud or ashamed to say that I feel pretty adapted to this mad world. I treat the madness I see lurking on the edges of my daily life as I might see a snake under a rock in the woods on the way to the well. I run my calculated risks, take pleasure in thinking my situation (writing this sort of thing) along with the normal pleasures, and hope the system doesn't disintegrate completely on my watch.

Truth be told, I worry more about lower back pain and skin cancer than global warming.
I have listened to the cacophony of voices for many years. Differing diagnoses, differing cures. If I am choose among Hellenistic descriptors for myself, I should probably go with skepticism. They enjoy serious conversation with a certain detachment --or "selfish" attachment to the local and private.

Where are you in this? Are you passionate about local communities? Or are you more of a Zizek? The world exist, messy as hell, as an opportunity to theorize about it?

What triggered the second, current feeding frenzy by the rich (making them super richer) were changes in tax law, allowing them to keep and shelter much more wealth. — Bitter Crank

But what triggered or allowed these changes in tax law? I'm not trying to imply that there is a simple answer. I doubt there is.

The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were. — StreetlightX

I complete agree. But "obsession" is slightly pejorative. It's easier to put a coat on than the heat the entire building, especially if we share the building with strangers with different notions of cold/hot. Depoliticization can also stem from the perception of a stalemate. In the US, for instance, there just is not a dominant vision of how the world should be in the first place. Maybe I'm sick of wearing my coat in the building but see the futility in trying to build a consensus.

Perhaps I see others arguing about the thermostat to no great effect. I certainly agree that the problem relative to any image of the way things should be is going to be systematic. But the problem itself can be described as a function of an idiosyncratic notion of cold/hot.

People cannot be made equal in any way that matters significantly. — Wosret

I agree. Freedom leads to economic inequality. If we could somehow start everyone with the same property and offer them the same education, tiny differences in genetics and the evolutions of their personality (in which chance will play) a role will "snowball" into bigger personality differences. Grasshoppers and ants. Most significant perhaps is the inequality (lack of sameness) of the hierarchies these individuals use to evaluate self and others. This factor is probably how massive economic inequality is possible in a democracy. Why doesn't the poor majority just tax the rich and take it wants legally? Because they identify themselves and their position in their private hierarchies in terms of culture, religion, race, etc., as much as they do via class.

Romanticism was the confused reaction to that shock...The true answers lay within the self - its feelings, its values, its striving. — apokrisis

Us individual humans are caught up in forces beyond our control and simply have to hang on for the ride as best we can. — apokrisis

I think these two ideas are related. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the individual. Let's say he's educated, thoughtful, but not rich. He has one vote in a democracy. He is politically negligible. Maybe he's charismatic. But unless he's famous, this charism is also negligible. His voice is a voice lost among millions of voices.

Our individual is faced with a choice. Should he spend his free time away from work reading and thinking about how his nation or even global civilization could and should be improved or even saved from collapse? If he expects no power, than such knowledge is of little value for him. It's not only arguably of little value, the attainment of such knowledge is highly uncertain in the first place. What he is educated enough to know is that the intellectuals do not agree. Those who specialize either can't come to a consensus or cannot be sorted out by the non-specialist.

Do you see where I'm going with this? He can justify a selfish "Romanticism." He can embrace something akin to stoicism, skepticism, hedonism --attempt an individual solution. He can view his actions in the world as a stupidity to be endured. He can climb the career ladder by playing along with structures he doesn't believe in. He can pay his bills, hide in his little house, and pursue his idiosyncratic notion of happiness. Perhaps for you this is the opposite of Romanticism, since it is cynical. But abandoning the folly of the world aligns with the Christian component in Romanticism.

In short, I think you're saying that Romantics resist admitting things are out of their control. If so, I disagree. Or at least there is a "fuck the world" component to some Romanticism.

I'm super, super hesitant to concede that there is anything like a singular 'common sense' to begin with that Heidegger's views would align with. — StreetlightX

In retrospect, "common sense" was a poor choice of words. If we twist Sellars "scientific image" a little into a "metaphysical" image, then what I had in mind was Heidegger unveiling the shallowness of this metaphysical image. "Common sense" enters the picture implicitly via the fact that most humans these days (and probably in his) have no interest at all in the professional version of the metaphysical image. They seem far more impressed by Hawking than Aristotle, probably because the power of technology is so visible in the manifest image. This gives the little-studied but respectable scientific image a weight for common sense that "mere opinions" do not have. Since we could call a vague scientism "common sense" just as easily, I suppose Heidegger is just as much anti-"common sense."

In the general context of the thread, here's a different take on being, related in my mind to Wittgenstein and Heidegger. We can define being as the groundlessness of beings. It is the abyss over which beings shine.

For Wittgenstein, for instance, it is not how but that the world exists that is "the mystical." Why is there something rather than nothing? Is this a "pseudo-question"? A lyrical "cry" of wonder that looks like a question? What answer could we hope to give that would not be itself subject to the question? If the answer is X, then why is there X rather than nothing?

A second question: how is this "why" made possible? What is this recognition of contingency? Is this some deep part of our nature? A necessity? If human being is somehow essentially the recognition or projection of contingency (via the imagination?), then is the human world or world for humans necessarily "cracked" by our ability to zoom out from or negate the given? IMO, philosophy is especially this kind of recognition of contingency. The background assumption, the norm of the discourse, is brought forth to hover over the abyss of its non-necessity, its contingency.

For instance, with Nietzsche perhaps the moral background of philosophy (Truth as an idol, etc.) is brought before the corrosive contingency-projection of reason --in the name of this same Truth.