I think it primarily means there is a larger world humans are but a small part of. We are late on the evolutionary scene, we only occupy the land surfaces of this planet, for the most part, and there are tons of other stars and planets out there.

The real world is the far bigger and older world, where only a little tiny bit of it has human society. — Marchesk

For me your perspective takes too much for granted. It adopts the scientific image of reality as a metaphysical image of reality. This god's-eye-view of humanity as a speck is not false but partial. It includes and supports "irrational"-emotional investments. It doesn't even address most of our actual experience. To call most experience unreal seems "unrealistic" to me. Yes we want to predict and control the movement of "public" entities. Science has justly earned our reverence in this regard. Nevertheless, this massive success in one realm arguably tempts us with a scientism that is willfully blind to whatever is not subject to the scientific method. We ignore how we non-theoretically and for the most part experience space and time.

To be clear, I'm not clearing a path for some religious argument. Most religious theses strike me as every bit as scientistic as scientism proper. I'm trying to point behind the entire paradigm that functions like the invisible water we swim in without noticing. We have, in my view, a notion of language that isn't "accurate" with respect to a less-biased just-hearing-it. Deferred and not until the period revealed is the meaning of this sentence. Where then if not in some violent-if-useful abstraction is the physicist's now? Only within this smeared-deferred meaning-making does physics exist.

Admittedly this meaning-making itself is contained in the space-time of physics. So we have a mobius strip. The mind-matter distinction emerges from this meaning-making. There is a tension between modes of speaking. Convergence-coherence is something we strive for but perhaps never have. I'm inclined to speak of a reality that is never finished naming itself. For me scientism would be a way to dodge or oversimplify this ambiguity. It cuts the knot, stops thinking --afraid of being gullible or 'subjective' perhaps.

That was probably the first sense of "inform", where Plato referred to the creation of particular things as matter being informed. Matter is passive, and receives a form. Aristotle produced a similar description of the mind, it receives intelligible objects, as forms. This produced the need for the "passive intellect" to account for the reception of forms. The Neo-Platonists and Christians went even further to say that matter is created in the act of informing. — Metaphysician Undercover

So maybe Plato was proto-Kantian? I'm understanding Heidegger at the moment as an "improved" Kant. It seems that Kant was most interested in understanding the possibility of Newtonian nature. He was interested in the possibility of objectivity. It was a "scandal" that there was still no proof of the objective world. For Heidegger it was a scandal that such a proof was thought necessary. A less biased look sees how purpose-driven our informing of the substratum or matter is. The disinterested staring at present-at-hand entities is not at all our primary mode of experience of what is. "Matter" is revealed to us for the most part as resource or tool-to-be-used. Language use involves a deep sense of being-in and being-with. True statements conform not to some dead external "matter" but to being-with and being-in.

"Information" properly refers to the act of informing, though we commonly use it as a noun referring to a thing called "information". If "information" refers to the activity of informing, then it really doesn't make sense to speak of information as not being physical, because the passive thing receiving the form will be physical. There are two parts to the act of informing, the immaterial form, and the material thing receiving the form. If "information" is used as a noun, referring to the thing doing the informing, then we are speaking of nothing other than th e forms themselves. And if the forms are assumed to be non-physical, i.e. exist independently from matter, such independent existence needs to be demonstrated logically.

The independent existence of forms is necessitated by Aristotle's cosmological argument, that is the necessary logical demonstration. The consequence of this principle is that not only is matter a passive receiver of forms, but matter is created in the act of information. This accounts for the fact that the living soul creates its own material body. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me "information" doesn't have a fixed meaning. There is the modern scientific meaning properly used within that context and then the vague everyday meaning successfully vaguely employed non-scientifically. I do like the background you provided. To in-form as the imposition of form is nice. I also see matter as created in a distinction that is not material. We use a sign to refer to what is not sign.

I really like the way you’ve been expressing this. But I think the weakness is that it depends heavily on the metaphysical truth of some communal or shared state of being, when the phenomenal mind is so completely private and unshared.

So it is both an appealing notion - expressed in many philosophies - but also fails unless we can define the “ground state” in something other than the usual mentalistic terms. — apokrisis

To my mind this brings up the grounds of phenomenology --or actually its groundlessness. "To the things themselves." But what normalizes this discourse? How do we know that Heidegger is "correct" about being-in and being-with-others as the phenomenon? It just "sounds right." It convinces. Since the phenomenon is the "thing-in-itself" for Heidegger, this is still "metaphysical" in some sense. But strives for some analogue of presuppositionlessness. Yet the method itself reveals that things are always already preinterpreted. This is the "guilt" of being Dasein, of having a past, of not being able to get behind the past. I believe this is what is meant by "finitude." The "perfect" phenomenology is impossible. Or rather an attempt to go to the things themselves reveals the impossibility of taking an eternal-atemporal or before-the-past view of them. Being is so entangled with time as history (preinterpretedness) that we can't have it pure.

As far as "mentalistic" goes, I think trying to get beyond this framework is a big part of radical phenomenology. I guess this is already in Hume. Look for the subject and you can't find it. It exists in a certain sense only in the way we use the word "I." The distinction mind-matter is also a tool that works in daily situations that philosophers have tended to absolutize. We try to reify a mark-noise that exists for the most part as a ready-to-hand tool. We look for a present-at-hand "non-physical
" entity just because we have the word 'mind' misleadingly ripped out of context/use. It's the same with the word 'real.' Perhaps (later) Wittgenstein is usefully thought of as a phenomenologist of language use. But philosophers don't want to understand his critique, since it threatens the project of building a crystal castle from these reifications.

Alluding to the divine kind of works for me if it again has nothing to do with anthropomorphic creators, or creating forces. — apokrisis

I'm with Feuerbach on the divine. It's "just" the highest human feeling-thinking. Of course this "just" is also the most unjust adjective possible here. For me the usual alien creators or forces are dead machines. They have life only to the degree that we project what is most highly human on them. The "philosopher's god" often strikes me as a scratching of the systematizing itch. I'm not saying such an itch as bad. I'm suggesting a continuum of notions of the divine. On one side there is love, for instance, and on the other side a "mechanical" apex employed the knowledge-hero.

There is a mathematical magic at the heart of Peircean metaphysics, a self-making relation that can call forth being from its pure inescapable logic. And then that meaning-forming, structure-creating device points deeper to its own ground, its own precondition, in the “not-being” of Apeiron, of Firstness or vagueness.

So reality swims into existence. And it condenses out of neither some ur-substance, nor some rarified divine mind - ur-phenomenology. The ur-potential of the Apeiron has to be a still more subtle concept. — apokrisis

I can somewhat relate to this. There is a "productive logic" that calls beings from being which is nothing (Heidegger's idea) or from the apeiron. There is emergence from a postulated background or source. Being is not itself a being. Or our image of the source is not the source itself. Our image of the source emerges from the source as its self-representation. I think we agree that distinctions emerge, that no distinction is fundamental. There is a kind of logic that is ontology. Reality is a self-thinking "thought," but of course "thought" is the wrong word here. The "thought" cannot be mental, since thought or difference or distinction is prior to the mental-physical dichotomy as its condition of possibility.

Yet I can see that that approach to metaphysics is by-passing phenomenal being, which is actually the basis of our particular being as humans. So to match the ur-objectivity of the pansemiotic metaphysics I just described, there is then the ur-subjective description that would formally complement that.

There is here the possibility of two complementary metaphysical projects. — apokrisis

I agree, to the degree that I understand. For me there is a "Hegelian" project (or Peircian) and a "Heideggerian" project. I can imagine complementarity and I can also just see both projects as fascinating and worthwhile in themselves. We can such try to see clearly what it is like to be human in the non-theoretical mode (by seeing around this theoretical mode) and we can push the theoretical mode to extremes.

t0m,

Thanks for the response. — cincPhil

It's a good thread, a deep question.

I began to question things. Suddenly, I was hit with the same feeling that probably hit Sartre and Nietzsche: emptiness and despair; the fear of the black void, if you will. I became truly terrified. I sincerely hoped that God existed, but I asked myself, had my last thirty years up to that point been a waste? Had I been following some sort of false hope, or even worse, a lie? — cincPhil

I've been there. I absorbed a certain amount of religion, then gave it a real go at 15. But thinking about free will, hellfire, the "mechanical" nature of theology/metaphysics, exposure to secular thinkers, etc. "killed" the usual version of God for me.

So I immediately started searching for answers. What I found is that, for a sincere seeker of truth, reason leads away from dread or despair, and towards hope, love, and even something beyond all of it. — cincPhil

I can relate to that. At least I think that "atheism" can touch the "divine." All of these mere words can only do so much out of context. I feel "behind" words in a way that is more conceptual than mystical. Or I'd describe the mystical in terms of feeling. Nietzsche's profound portrait of Christ in the The Antichrist hints at this.

How does God make morality objective?" St. Anselm saw God as the greatest conceivable being. Simply put, if one were to conceive of a great being, and you could imagine anything greater or better, then that would be God. So God, if he exists, would need to be maximally great. Classical examples of maximally great attributes would be things like omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, moral perfection, and personal existence. If God were indeed morally perfect, then objective moral values would be grounded in his character. By his very nature, he would command what is right, and give what is good. So if God exists, morality would not merely be a subjective set of social conventions produced through socio-biological evolution, but instead, morality would be objectively grounded in the nature and character of God. — cincPhil

Respectfully, I think you're accidentally dodging the question. From my perspective I'm pointing at that leap that grounds moral values in His character. Here's the issue for me. What does it mean to say that God is morally perfect? Influenced by Feuerbach, I contend that "moral perfection" is deeply and completely anthropomorphic. The "content" of moral perfection can only be, it seems to me, some version of the ideal (wo)man, even if this (wo)man is immaterial, etc. The "feelings" or "motives" of God must be the kinds of feelings that humans can worship or revere. Otherwise God is just an alien we don't understand --hence my talk of a law enforced by the threat of punishment. God only makes sense, in my view, as an image of that which is highest in human experience --love, wisdom, freedom, etc.

I, on the contrary, let religion itself speak; I constitute myself only its listener and interpreter, not its prompter. Not to invent, but to discover, “to unveil existence,” has been my sole object; to see correctly, my sole endeavour. It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this; it is not I, an insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God; it is not I, but religion that denies the God who is not man, but only an ens rationis, – since it makes God become man, and then constitutes this God, not distinguished from man, having a human form, human feelings, and human thoughts, the object of its worship and veneration. I have only found the key to the cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology; – but in doing so I have certainly committed a sacrilege. If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism – at least in the sense of this work – is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature. — Feuerbach

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec00.htm

Second, you seem to have confused punishment with morality. Moral values do not always carry obligations. For example, it may be good for you to start a non-profit, but you are not obligated to start a non-profit. It may be good for you to take a humble job, but you are not obligated to do so. Because moral values do not carry obligations to act, consequences are irrelevant, and therefore punishment need not be considered when discussing moral values. Actions come in when we discuss moral duties, but even then, the question is about the nature of those duties, and whether they stem from objectively grounded values, or subjective experiences.

If you are interested, I hope you will refer back to the argument, and read a few of my responses to different people. I believe I have illustrated it fairly well. Thanks again. — cincPhil

I can see why you interpreted me that way, but I was really trying to get at the point above. I did go back and read earlier posts. I don't think the absence of objective morality entails a dog-eat-dog mentality. I think we are already social, already moral. On the whole we don't want to be evil, though admittedly we have anti-social tendencies. My theory is that much of morality is "objective" in the sense that we will always find something like a core set of prohibitions/duties in any society. It's a blurry "core" around which lots of less-settled prohibitions/duties are still being established and dissolved. As I see it, the "scientistic" vision of man as an animal is too quickly adopted as the only viable metaphysical flavor of 'atheism.'

Even if we are thrown here into a godless nature, this godless nature is itself a cultural construct --good for predicting and controlling public objects but far from an exhaustive account of being-there or existence in all of its complexity. And of course it's powers of prediction and manipulation are still very finite. I say show me the machine that can predict word-by-word the philosophical masterpiece of the 22nd century. I suggest that humans can only be understood historically, culturally. The image of godless nature is still impotent in that regard. Its superior method in one sense is only superior by severely limiting itself to quantitative prediction and control by means of lifeless, ideal entities. "Nature" is a systematic image that is "pasted" over the world as know. Dazzled by its success in one realm, we are tempted to adopt it as an understanding of existence as a whole. (Yet I personally offer nothing supernatural. My loyalty is to something like phenomenology, going to the things themselves as we experience them. I don't reduce being in love to atoms, for instance. Being-in-love or listening to Erik Satie "is what it is." No ultimately pragmatic predictive-manipulative methodology removes that "is-ness.")

Yes, science will never be able to explain "first person" experience in "first person" terms, but then it doesn't, and cannot ever, given its methodology, do, or even aim to do, that. — Janus

Good point. For me this notion of explanation itself is also insufficiently analyzed. What is an explanation? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/ Is this the "deeper" kind of explanation that we vaguely have in mind in the first place? I don't think so. But this kind of thinking threatens a certain kind of scientistic metaphysics, too. How satisfying can any explanatory abstraction really be here? What does it really accomplish?

In a broader context, why do we assume origin determines the meaning of the situation we find ourselves in. How we got here is not necessarily significant. Do certain configurations of non-conscious "parts" become conscious if put together a certain way? That seems to be the case. I wasn't here. My mother conceived and converted her food into the bodily foundation of my consciousness which seems to have "faded" into this body --or so it seems.

Did life as a whole "erupt" this way from swirling non-conscious stuff? Did a hard-to-find God stuff a soul into a fetus? Are there millions of possibilities that haven't occurred to me? How is this origin significant? If that hard-to-find God is still around to help, then maybe it is. But the significance flows from the still-around-ness. In short, what is the situation now? Are we limited by our origin, whatever it was? Is the argument about origin "really" aimed at cultural criticism? If so, do we need the origin apart from the questionable general sense of the origin's centrality?

It never ceases to amaze me, the ease with which people seem to assume that 'we're just animals', when the difference between h. sapiens, and every other creature is so manifestly and entirely obvious. It's kind of a cultural blind spot, an inability to recognise the obvious. — Wayfarer

I agree. Sure, for a biologist we are animals. But since when is biology the most fundamental word in our self-interpretation? In short, it's scientism. One might argue that humans are never sufficient finished to be defined in the first place. And who's doing this defining if not the unfinished human? I'm not saying that we are not (also) animals, but stressing that there's something complacent in such a reduction. The idea that we are only clever monkeys is "faithful" and "religious" in a generalized sense of the word. It isn't neutral or objective away from its narrower employment. It interprets existence.

This is one of the better bits of Hegel for me, though (as with Nietzsche in The Antichrist) he's not describing his own position. I don't know what you'll make of it, but it's a great portrait of a seductive if extreme ego-ideal.

Now so far as concerns the closer connection of Fichte’s propositions with one tendency of irony, we need in this respect emphasize only the following points about this irony, namely that [first] Fichte sets up the ego as the absolute principle of all knowing, reason, and cognition, and at that the ego that remains throughout abstract and formal. Secondly, this ego is therefore in itself just simple, and, on the one hand, every particularity, every characteristic, every content is negated in it, since everything is submerged in this abstract freedom and unity, while, on the other hand, every content which is to have value for the ego is only put and recognized by the ego itself. Whatever is, is only by the instrumentality of the ego, and what exists by my instrumentality I can equally well annihilate again.

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.

Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.

These three points comprise the general meaning of the divine irony of genius, as this concentration of the ego into itself, for which all bonds are snapped and which can live only in the bliss of self-enjoyment. — Hegel

To be clear, I don't think we can really control in "animal matters" what we find valuable like this. So this exaggeration is only relevant in the narrow sphere of religious-metaphysical discourse.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

No longer does the world seem to run smoothly as it did in when our minds were focused or attentive to some task. Now the world itself seems to lack significance. The void of nothingness stares in our face and forces us to flee. The feeling of existential dread is that all consuming feeling that at the heart of the world there is nothingness, at the end of the day there is blankness. When we are focusing our attention we stay at the surface of things. Life makes sense.. things seem logical. Boredom breaks this barrier and shows it for what it is really. We cannot describe what the world is because there are no words. As stated before, it is ineffable. We can only describe the feeling, and that is one of existential dread. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, this nails a theme in Being and Time. Apparently Heidegger switches from angst-dread to the attunement of profound boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. These attunements "open" the world in a certain way (or just the abyss?)

We are always viewing things from our subjective "I" self. Our stream of conscious inner world. Heidegger might have referred to this as "Ready-at-hand". This subjective world is the world of daily life that we all live in. — schopenhauer1

As I understand it, Dasein is mostly not subjective. We are lived by the "they" for the most part. Not only that but our sense of ourselves disappears in the task. Dreyfus uses the example of driving. We become the driving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaGk6S1qhz0 The subject-object paradigm is inherited from Descartes and conceals/obscures a more basic revelation of what is.

Schopenhauer thought music was somehow a representation of the Will itself. Though other forms of art also had an ability to bring about aesthetic pleasure by "stopping" the Will momentarily, music's flowing quality was most like Will. — schopenhauer1

Ah, yes, I remember that. I think he was on to something profound. As a philosopher who took music and sex very seriously, he drilled deeper than most. I first read about him in Durant's Story of Philosophy. I loved him right away. I still do, though I can only make sense of the world as will and representation along Heideggerian lines. Life is interpreting care or caring interpretation, a whirlwind of embodied passion-driven conceptualization (and maybe also a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, [ultimately or finally] signifying nothing [while otherwise signifying all kinds of things].) Music mirrors the caring aspect, while philosophy perhaps meta-thinks.

Moving forward for what? Moving for rest? Sounds like the same instrumentality. Progress is really instrumentality. It also gets trampled. Why must it be carried out by yet more humans in the first place? Novelty in technology and science and projects. Slaves to our own curiosity and goals. — schopenhauer1

I suppose my theory is pretty similar to yours, really. We enact a fantasy role, just because. It's a brute fact of our nature, as I see it, that we wired to transcend/dominate. Maybe most of behavior is just "animal." There is only so much "spiritual eros" as the apex of a less glorious foundation. I continue to read the "slave" metaphor as embedded within a particular crystallization of this desire --one I can mostly relate to. Here's the "master" as opposed to the "slave."

The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life...And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. — Hegel

This can be taken more or less literally. It implicity includes 'ironism," as I see it, although Hegel the system-man tried to downplay "The Irony." For me transcendence is the (theoretical) death of every "fixed idea" of the self. Man is incarnate/mortal freedom potentially dialectically revealed to himself as such. But "freedom" is the dying of the apparently necessary into the contingent. The metaphor works because that which is understood as necessity is therefore non-optional. Freedom-death discloses possibility buried in false necessity.

But I admitted as much just a bit further down. A better coping strategy as it is unflinching, closer to what is going on. Interpretive perhaps, if everything is, but interpretative par excellence ;)! — schopenhauer1

I should have acknowledged that admission more. I like the framework of comparing coping mechanisms, of "shopping for personality" as I call it. We create, discuss, and compare "operating systems."

I've tried Steppenwolf, but couldn't get into it as much. I can try again. I always liked Siddhartha though. — schopenhauer1

I read Siddhartha first and loved it. I was locked up as a troubled teen when a Buddhist white-guy-teacher recommended it. I also read Anne Frank's diary and Catcher in the Rye. Of course I was a poet then, typing what I could remember of the notebook I lost when I almost drowned alone in muddy creek. The banks were slick mud. I had to plunge my hands into this mud to grab at tree roots. That was the second time that muddy water almost claimed me. Fuck brown water.

What I mean is tremendous pain in the present, is washed away as "not so bad" in hindsight. It is the perception in the present vs. the tendency to Pollyannize after-the-fact. We would probably go mad otherwise. It is yet another coping strategy, but this time automatic and unconscious. Past events made brighter, future events overestimated. Then there are other mechanisms like adaptation. We adjust to less ideal circumstances and compare to those less fortunate. This is all related to the contingent physical/mental harms we face. The structural harms of existence as I said are more subtle and grinding- the instrumentality. — schopenhauer1

I don't deny that this plays a role, but the above also plays a role in your own defense of your interpretation as a better coping mechanism. I'm not claiming to be beyond investment in my own role, just to be clear. William James wrote about the inertia of belief systems. We all prefer to tinker rather than revolutionize. We evolve varying systems within our varying lives. As I see it, there's no reason to insist that any system is objectively right, though some hero-myths are founded on making these kinds of claims. My "ironism" is strongly connected to the making-contingent of what Spengler called "ethical socialism," which has nothing to do with economy. It's just the usually assumed "scientistic" framework that understands the spiritual-metaphysical in terms of finding and sharing a single truth-for-all. I now think in terms of offering sentences as tools/options that may or may not be useful to others.

The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone — Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race

This is the dark truth at the heart of the question: is life good? I have lived this question. I continue to live this question. It is constantly answered and asked again. Answering it for others strikes me as a stretch. For me life is justified, if it is justified, in terms of feeling, or aesthetically. Existence shines and screams against the foil of nonexistence. Suffering is certain. Pleasure is certain. The computation of what it all means or is worth is less certain--as I see it.

However, despite this meager dichotomy we are always thrown in, it is true that we always kill ourselves too late. — schopenhauer1

I just can't agree with you here, though I have a sense of what you mean. I like the idea of the old man picking his moment, doing it to avoid the indignity of melting away cowardly from a hopeless disease. Or maybe his bodily frailty is such that the game is no longer worth the candle. Or maybe in a fight that he knows he will lose, striking at his enemy nevertheless (the stuff of movies.)

But through aesthetic sublimation we are putting that idea of not-being-born in the first place into the consolation of pessimistic understanding and aesthetics. Contingent and structural suffering as an idea might need not always be on the mind, but when existential matters of life THE MEANING OF (pace Ligotti) comes into play, this aesthetic understanding is there for those of us who see this aesthetic vision of the human condition. — schopenhauer1

I can relate to this. We seem to agree that life is justified aesthetically.

Thank you. It looks like you think deeply on this as well. Everything is interpretation for you. It's all a postmodern thing. However, your birth preceded your interpretation of everything as an interpretation. You may be putting the cart before the horse. Everything is not just content for the author. Some things you cannot author yourself but are authored for you. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, I understand myself as a "dark" thinker who "goes there." I do see that we are thrown into brute fact. We don't possess our own foundations. It is "shameful" to have a body in a certain sense. It makes us vulnerable to others. We are gods "trapped" in dogs. That's the crucifixion myth for me. The "divine" only exists in a context of suffering and humiliation. The given that you mention is what we interpret. That's why (for me) it's interpretation rather than pure fiction. It is constrained. It must cope, affectively justified if at all. I think we agree on that.

The Parmenides is one of the principal dialogues. It's deeply mystical. The difficulty is with these materials, such words as 'thought' and 'knowledge' - and even 'is'! - are laden with unstated meanings that have to be drawn out by scholars expert in the tradition (which I'm certainly not). — Wayfarer

Ah yes, Hegel used that dialogue as an example of "the labor of the concept." Is it mystical? I've only skimmed it, and I wasn't the frame of mind to get absorbed by it. I'm not saying it's not.

"What is', is rather like the Indian 'sat' , or truth. Perhaps it denotes an awareness, typical of mysticism, that is in some sense beyond or outside time and space. It would have to be something like that, otherwise what he says makes no sense. — Wayfarer

Interesting. That's plausible. As you may know and seem to hint at, Popper had a go at this. He understood it as "pure logical reasoning" as opposed to sense experience. The way of illusion is all the useful pragmatic "knowledge" that is metaphysically-logically false. IMV, that is a reasonable if limited interpretation. It's hard working with only fragments. The poetic form indicates a high feeling. Is that elation wonder or a sense of the power in the logic that pierces the rich illusion? Or both? Something else entirely? Something esoteric or mystical?

He sharpens the question, what do we really mean when we say what something is? Recall, this is generation before Aristotle with his ‘substance and accident’.

For to be aware and to be are the same. (B 3)
— Parmenides

Obviously enigmatic, but I would say this is a reference to the apodictic reality of being - the same idea, basically, as the Cogito. — Wayfarer

I'm a broken record, but sharpening the question of what we mean by 'is' is the 'one thought' of Heidegger's life and work. That quote does remind me of the apodictic reality of being, and perhaps also of "only as phenomenology is ontology possible." But (following Heidegger) the tradition is 'wrong' to think of the phenomenon as a mask worn by the noumenon. The phenomenon is the thing itself from a different perspective that sidesteps the ultimately scientistic Cartesian framework that understands the human as a disinterested knower or isolated subject of the (mediated) extended matter in physics-space.

I like Parmenides' idea that all awareness is being. For practical reasons we divide this awareness between only-private and private-but-public-also. In our usual mode of talking, we start with agreed-upon alreadyclarified-or-revealed or 'thematized' phenomona. But our most human mode employs a "productive logic" or poesis that "opens" a field for science (or just 'business') by disclosing-inventing the entities and basic framework involved.

What appeals to me especially is getting behind or around all the pre-interpretedness that we don't think to question (since it's almost invisible as we use it) that traps our thinking in certain loops.

There is an assumption behind idealism~realism which is about being an immaterial soul locked in a material body, a physical world. So selfhood is taken for granted. It is all about starting with the bare givenness of experience. Then we have to work out what is really real.

And a corrective to that is instead not making self primary. The real first ground of being is the communal one. We are already in a world - the social tribal one. Our first experiences as babies is human contact. It is everything. So the communal mind - in some very important sense - is there before the private self becomes individuated (and aware of being trapped in a body that is trapped in a world).

So this seems to go against Heidegger. Maybe you will correct me on that. — apokrisis

You did get my point, yes. But this is "with" Heidegger. "Dasein" in its everydayness is lived by the "they" or the anyone. Dasein is "primordially" "being-in-the-world" or "being-with-others." And the goofy word 'Dasein' is used instead of 'human' or 'subject' in order to dodge the Cartesian tradition which has concealed the phenomenon of "primordial worldliness" or "being-in" with its now invisibly- ready-to-hand pre-interpretation.

So we tend to start with a massively loaded notion of ourselves and our situation. That "first wrong move" constrains everything that follows. Hence a destructuring of metaphysics is necessary in phenomenology, a breaking of the concealing crust of "pre-interpretedness." He also very memorably writes: "only as phenomenology is ontology possible."

But it is definitely pragmatism - Peirce's ultimate theory of truth being based on "that judgement towards which a community of thinkers would eventually tend". — apokrisis

Yes, the "everyday self" is especially reminiscent of pragmatism. Dasein is fundamentally care. Even time itself can be explained in terms of the shape of this care, a shape described by Heidegger with temporal metaphors but seemingly untimelike apart from its explanatory power with respect to the time of being-with-others and physics-time. Basically time is "de-worlded" as we move from the individual working on some individual project, then to the social world's holidays (for instance) and finally to the pure clock-time of physics. This is brilliantly presented in The Concept of Time, also known as the "first draft" of B&T.

Then of course know-how is lit-up by the analytic of Dasein as the everyday mode of disclosing entities. They are perceived in terms of their use, in terms of their in-order-to for-the-sake-of. Equipment exists as a network. A pen makes sense in terms of paper to write on. We write a paper in-order-to get published in-order-to get tenure for-the-sake-of living a life of the mind. But this "in-order-to" and "for-the-sake-of" is by no means any more explicit than the tool that vanishes the more it is available or ready-to-hand. The theoretical mode of "just staring" has been given an unjustified priority (concealing the phenomenon of know-how) in order to "ground" eternal "truths" understood as correctness as opposed to the disclosure that makes correctness possible.

Finally, Heidegger includes (in his own terms) the dialectic between the they-self and the 'authentic' self. "Authentic" seems to be a misleading translation of eigentlich. It should perhaps be "real" Dasein or Dasein at its most Dasein, which is to say a "poetic" discloser of being. I think "authentic" Dasein is just Dasein in the mode of revolutionary-'abnormal' of discourse. "Inauthentic" Dasein is the routinized normal discourse of "idle talk" that doesn't dig deeply into what is said. This is pretty much what Rorty made of eigentlich. I think it also describes a mode of experiencing time. It is not a sense of monotonous hurriedness but involves a reticent, anxious joy.

And it is completely in line with my social constructionist viewpoint of human psychology. We are not born selves, but become individuated beings via the shaping constraints of our family, our tribe, our culture, our era. — apokrisis

Yes. I agree complete. Perhaps I stress more than you do, however, the developed individual as the "cutting edge" of the group. On the other hand, I'm sure we both see a dialectic.

I would point out how it is theistic notion of supernatural spirit or soul - the Romantic notion of human psychology - which is at odds with this view. So while you talk about it in an appealing warm and cosy ways, the emotional value, that fits quite happily with a naturalistic perspective. — apokrisis

Hmm. I think you are projecting a little on my position. But I will grant that the "hero-image" of the individual can be traced back to the religious tradition. If anyone is aware of this as hero-image, I think it's me. I'm concerned with a phenomenological objectivity, an accurate description of how hero-images generally constrain interpretations of the world. So physical science isn't as important to me, except as it figures as a notion of the "truly" real within particular "understandings of being" for-the-sake-of enacting a particular version of the "knowledge hero." I don't think of my view as warm and fuzzy. It almost presupposes a certain "death" of more typical basic frameworks, those same frameworks it demystifies and tries to explain in terms of a generalized will-to-virtue. (This will-to-virtue is the postulated brute fact, though one could presumably trace it back in terms of biology, etc. But it would explain this same tracing-back that explains it.)

Anyone can ask whether what they perceive is real or not, and plenty of people do at some point, even if it's over a joint. — Marchesk

For me this word "real" is part of the "problem"? What do we mean by "real"? Or do we mean all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts? I think a primary meaning involves "being-with-others." That's the real real world, I tempted to say. What matters is how shared a situation is. If we're all in the Matrix together, then the Matrix is as real as we might want it.

I have no sincere doubt about being-with-others or being-in-the-world. The universe of the scientific image (a non-primary abstraction that functions as a tool within the "real real world" of being-with-others) includes my brain, etc., so I have reason to think that my experience of this physical substratum is mediated. But apparently we all mediate this substratum in roughly the same way, so that the world can be shared. I think others see red, blue, yellow as I do. They feel love and hate, understand calculus, and so on, more or less in the same way. Even if this was "in" the Matrix (and it sorta is in terms of mediation), it would still be 'real' in the most emotionally relevant sense, at least for me.

I didn't mean to imply that it was all a waste of time. I'm just saying there have been philosophers who eschewed a certain kind of a philosophy for a long time. I have earnestly wrestled with metaphyical issues, and I still do. But pragmatism, etc., has IMV helped me keep my eye on the ball. Some issues now look like dead ends, which opens up time for other more 'living' issues.

Indeed. Aren't they Kant's 'primary intuitions'? — Wayfarer

Right. That's how I understand it. Then entities are revealed as 'unities' in relation within these intuitions.

But I'm so glad you see the point. Really this is the single issue that has been my main interest, ever since joining forums, which must be getting near to 10 years. It has to do with the fact that rationality, rational relations, can be understood to be true with reference to nothing other than thought itself, and yet (miraculously) they are also predictive with respect to phenomena. It really is an astonishing thing, which most people simply take for granted - like, they use it all the time, without actually noticing what an amazing faculty it is. That is actually the primary sentiment behind the essay of Wigner's, 'The Unreasonable Efficiency of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences'. Why should it be that the 'laws of thought' can unlock all of these undiscovered facets of reality? That, I think, is near to the heart of the entire Pythagorean-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. — Wayfarer

I agree. It's amazing. I think we tend to get "sucked in" to taking care of business that distracts us from wonder. As far as why thought can unlock reality, you probably remember that's one of my big issues. As I see it, introspection and mediation on what we tend to mean by "why" reveals that any 'explanation' has 'brute fact at its apex. For me this is fine. Wonder becomes a logical necessity, a conceptual result. It's not (only) how but that the world is that is the mystical or wonderful.

Was Parmenides struck with wonder? We know that Plato was influenced by Parmenides.

One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is.

Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thinking apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered. (B 8.34–36)

For to be aware and to be are the same. (B 3)

It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not. (B 6.1–2)

You will know the aether’s nature, and in the aether all the/ signs, and the unseen works of the pure torch/ of the brilliant sun, and from whence they came to be,/ and you will learn the wandering works of the round-eyed moon/ and its nature, and you will know too the surrounding heaven,/ both whence it grew and how Necessity directing it bound it/ to furnish the limits of the stars. (Fr. 10)

…how the earth and sun and moon/ and the shared aether and the heavenly milk and Olympos/ outermost and the hot might of the stars began/ to come to be. (Fr. 11) — Parmenides

The idea that thinking and being are one seem proto-Kantian to me. Language-concept makes entities possible as entities. "It is" reveals or suggests pure intelligible presence.

I've linked the concept of broken tool with boredom. When we are at the surface of things, and they are running smoothly in flow, we do not see things at their core. But, when we are profoundly bored, it is like a broken tool experience. This is where the reality lies, beneath the veneer of our usual goal-process driven stance. If you want to add any more Heideggarian to what I am saying, please do. — schopenhauer1

As I understand it, Heidegger doesn't think in terms of the "core" or the true entity --with the exception of the 'core' or most deeply explanatory kind of time. He (at first) just describes the different ways that entities appear or disappear for us (the ways that Dasein reveals and conceals them). His big picture purpose in The Concept of Time is (unsurprisingly) to offer a new analysis of time. He offers 'primordial time' or 'originary temporality' as an otherwise un-timelike irreducible explanation of world-time and physics-time. This primordial time is (as I read it) just left as the brute fact of Dasein's (our) basic structure. The metaphorical "future" of this primordial time is something like (?) a not-necessarily conscious 'ego ideal'. Or that's how Blattner interprets what he calls Heidegger's 'temporal idealism.'

So far Blattner's sense of the big picture gels most convincingly with what I've read. The "existential" stuff in B&T about living one's death is some kind of metaphorical portrait of the most Dasein-like mode of experience time. It's the hardest part to make sense of, but it seems to involve the 'poetic' revelation of reality. It's opposed to routinized idle talk and the crusty pre-interpretation of the world that one inherits from the they and mostly lives as the they. I think Kuhn's normal versus abnormal discourse is somehow analogous. Dasein is most Dasein-like (its 'own' or authentic) when in this revolutionary mode. Anyway, the 'authentic' mode of experiencing time is anxiously or soberly joyful. This 'authentic' mode is the hardest thing to parse, though, so that's just my tentative interpretation.

But the point of the post was the inherent/forced need to maintain the order. We have to put energy into the system to keep it at order. We have to keep the system going for fear of decay, stagnation, destitution. There of course is no choice here. Either stave off disorder or die. — schopenhauer1

Yes. I agree with you completely. I think we are 'exploitation' or 'fending-off' or 'care.' We are a stomach on wheels with a periscope. The spirit is a 'stomach' for processing experience and adjusting trajectory. Life is endless war. Walking is a sequence of interrupted falls. Our only disagreement seems to be about evaluating this structure. I understand myself to be 'philosophically' neutral but personally affirmative. I do not claim that life is objectively or intersubjectively good. I do claim that some individuals are lucky enough to like this structure more than they dislike it. I don't deny that bias plays a role in this interpretation. On the other hand, I think that interpretation changes what it interprets. Our interpretative 'software' steers feeling itself. Apart from the structure which we both agree on, there's just ineffable feeling. Coltrane's 'Afro Blue' can be heard as a portrait of a more pleasant mode of this 'fending off' disorder. I'm very into music. I think it 'says' what concept can't say about feeling.

Thank you. As far as final description, I admit there are a handful of common goods we experience (i.e. achievement, relationships/connections, learning/discovery, aesthetic pleasure (including humor), physical pleasure, and being absorbed in stimulating mental/physical activities). But eventually, even these get trampled in the wheel of instrumentality. If one focuses narrowly and not on the big picture, this would seem all that is justified in existence. If seen in totality, not so much. It becomes the Aristotlean balancing act- the Golden Mean. Just another coping strategy. More energy to put into the system. The joke is on us. Pragmatism, another coping mechanism. — schopenhauer1

For me any particular 'big picture' also gets sucked into "instrumentality." I like to think of pragmatism as descriptive rather than normative. Coping just is the fending off of disorder. Or more completely it is just as much the institution of new order. We get more complex as individuals and societies. I like the widening, ascending spiral as a metaphor. The circularity of the spiral acknowledges the repetition.

Anyway, I can only see the theory of instrumentality itself as one more coping strategy. I view it as a form of transcendence. It imposes an 'essence' or 'understanding of being' that allows the imposing individual a distance from the 'devouring mother.' For me what I call 'ironism' is a different move in the same family. I personally make the 'will-to-virtue' or 'ego ideal' primary. But 'believing' in this primacy means that the theorist of the 'will-to-virtue' is himself enacting a version of the knowledge-hero. That's where the irony comes in. The theory can no longer be asserted so innocently. It puts its own game in question without extinguishing that game. The role of the objective-knowledge-hero becomes optional, although it evolved from understanding this role as necessary. "Transcendence" is a newfound distance from every game, except from the game of perceiving the game as game. One's identification with dis-indentification itself is still an ego-ideal, though arguably a kind of "final" position or "end of ideological history." That's my take on Stirner, who probably just ran with "The Irony" in Hegel's lectures on fine art. It's the 'best' idea I've found in philosophy. Nietzsche's portrait of Christ is a mixture of this with other, less appealing elements.

I advocate that if we are going to use coping strategies, have one a bit closer to what is going on. That is to say Philosophical Pessimism. One can still live be a pessimist. One can live and even experience the normal "goods" that come about in the course of time to the non-chronically depressed. That is to say, we can see the pendulum swing, the forced choice of putting more enthalpy into the system, our restless natures, the instrumentality and be consoled in it. Reading a Schopenhauer or Cioran or Ligotti and having a turn of phrase that matches the insights into the human condition consoles without distracting/repressing/ignoring. It is sublimating in works of writing/art, but it provides connection without flinching. — schopenhauer1

Well said. I haven't looked at Ligoti, but I've been deeply moved by Schopenhauer and Cioran. I especially like Schop's essays. I had that Penguin paperback anthology with a portrait of young Schop on the cover. That to me is "real" or "deep" philosophy. It gets to the bottom, the life-and-death stuff. I like Cioran for being so daringly extreme. I don't hide those kinds of thoughts for myself. I know evil and horror. I let the magic theatre of the mind show what it wants to show. Have you read Steppenwolf by Hesse? There's a great analysis of the "the suicide" as a type. It's a great book generally. Then there's Dostoyevsky, the master. The Possessed, for example, is just so wickedly, darkly funny. "Divine malice" and the "laughter of the gods" are choice phrases. I have been in extremely dark modes and suddenly burst out laughing. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness" (Sam Beckett). Last but not least, there's Blood Meridian. Ol' Cormac knew the devil in man. The will-to-power is nightmarishly incarnate in "the judge," a radically dark philosopher who practices what he preaches.

Ah yes, weight to the game. Pragmatic extolling of balance and integration of pain with pleasure. It is all instrumentality, my online friend. Weight, no weight, you need to need. There is no choice. Put forth more enthalpy, that wheel does not turn itself.

P.S. I do appreciate your thoughtful responses, I just don't agree much with some of the pragmatic slogans.. it's a balance, no pain no gain, etc. The main rebuttal is the forced nature of it, the instrumental nature that keeps deprivation at a premium, the innumerable number of contingent pains that are unwanted/unexpected but must be overcome (to only be played down in HINDSIGHT if it's not a lifetime debilitation), the need to get caught up in a flow and get back to the surface of things, and the constant need to maintain order from disorder and put more energy into the system. — schopenhauer1

I largely agree with the first part. I won't say that there is no choice. Some do put that shotgun in their mouths. But generally we are thrown into caring and needing, and we don't leaving willingly, even when it hurts like hell. I occasionally contemplate suicide, not as a live option these days but what it means. I allow my mind to go there. I even keep it open as an optional response to brain cancer or other personality-melting diseases. Suicide can be noble, IMV, and I don't judge suicides generally. Who I am to judge? What do I really and certainly know of the feelings of others? I've had acquaintances who did it. Others overdosed on drugs. Yes, they are missing out on some amusing "ripples in the nothingness," but they also have fewer problems than I do (the usual taking-care-of problems of life). Yet I'm glued to these problems/projects. And I'm also glued to women in general and one in particular. And the pleasure of writing. A dead man has lost everything, both the agony and the ecstasy.

On the last part, I understand the "hindsight" argument, but I don't find it conclusive. I think I addressed that in the biased interpretation that can actually steer the situation it interprets.

*I appreciate the friendliness. I enjoy our conversations. I respect that you are knee-deep in the "real" stuff like your namesake.

One point which I've been trying to make in this thread, is that it came to Plato's attention that these Forms which are outside of, or prior to material existence, are not the human conceptions of universals as is commonly attributed to Platonism in the modern representation, they are, as described in "The Timaeus", the forms of individual, particular objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

That sounds plausible. I read parts of Plato closely but have utterly neglected other parts. For me that's secondary, I suppose, because something like conceptualism is more plausible to me.

Particular objects are perceived, as it were, already infused with conceptuality stemming the spontaneity of the rational subject herself. — Wiki

Because I know that (in some sense) I'm "in" a brain, it makes sense that a semi-automatic conceptual processing of sensory information is going on. Concept seems central to this processing. But this theory itself is part of the less automatic part of that processing, so we have a strange mobius strip. Concept is. Intelligibility is. Hypotheses about its nature or origin occur within this 'is.'

I’ve never read about theology, because I don’t think scientific, logical or philosophical conceptual reasoning applies everywhere, so I have no idea what sort of concepts theologians can write whole books of information about. Also, I’ve never understood what philosophers mean when they speak of God. — Michael Ossipoff

I don't know much about theology in general, though traditional theology does use logic to "prove" the existence of God. I did study some "negative" or apophatic theology, which is closely related to extreme forms of atheism. I don't have a sense that there is some God outside of us. I agree with Feuerbach. Religious thought is anthropomorphic, but that's a good thing! At least for Feuerbach. Man is the god of man. In the myth of the incarnation this becomes explicit. I read these myths as coded truths about human nature.

My metaphysics (Faraday, Tippler, and Tegmark, and (from what I’ve heard here) Wittgenstein too, beat me to it, in its main basis) is about hypothetical things too, based on inevitable abstract logical facts, to explain our world and life-experience. — Michael Ossipoff

If you can summarize this, I'd enjoy a sketch of your basic view.

I feel that individual experience is fundamental and primary to lives and worlds (from our relevance-point-of view), but I don't know how a nonphysical life-experience possibility-story could play out. — Michael Ossipoff

I deeply agree with you here. What I'm really interested is the structure of life as we intimately know it. Heidegger's phenomenological "analytic of Dasein" is something I'm really getting into lately. I highly recommend The Concept of Time, if you ever decide to look into ol' Heidegger. It's only 100 pages and it's the first draft of his famous Being and Time. Best book I've picked up in a long time. Of course B&T itself is great, too, but I like the density and focus of the first draft.

But any philosophy about God in terms of knowledge, facts, logic, metaphysics, and philosophy, or philosophical elaboration of detail, or philosophical explanation—is incomprehensible to me. — Michael Ossipoff

It's kinda funny that we misunderstood one another at first, because this is more or less what I was trying to say in my talk of "empty negation." To convert God into propositions is to kill off the "force" of the word, what the word has hinted at. For me the "divine" only makes sense as feeling, as a mode of being alive. I do think this mode is supported by the "right" kind of thinking, but "feeling is first."

Maybe a verbal dance with a Kevin helps us to perfect our tango. Maybe, though we do wish Kevin would check himself sometimes, we recognize he may bring out as much of the best as the worst in us and if he were absent in every way in all of us, there would be a little less spark in our engines, a little less juice in our marrow. Don't get me wrong, I'm not glorifying Kevin, Kevin can be a right pain in the ass, just putting the lad in context, just staring into a bubbling cauldron and wondering if what makes it toil and trouble is also what makes it potent and keeps the magic alive. — Baden

This is pretty great. And aren't we all Kevin, at least a little bit? There's an "excess" that makes an individual an individual. Take out all of the Kevin and somehow it's all grayly safe and safely gray. Or shall I sey "grey"? (Also the anti-anti-Americanism was nice.)

At least, I don't think it would have taken all the way to Wittgenstein to notice the problem. If it's that hard to figure out, then something else is going on. — Marchesk

I'm not trying to gang up on you here, but I wanted to respond to this. As I see it, only philosophers ever bother with the issue in the first place. Is it possible that we philosophers like to argue? What's nice about certain issues (like this one) is how impersonal they are. They also can't be answered by science. They are elusive, linguistic. We can play these games forever, even name various openings as if we were studying chess.

One might say that most people indicate a figuring-out that it's merely a verbal issue by just turning away from (this aspect of) philosophy as 'silly' talk. Bertrand Russell's people teased him with "no matter, never mind" when he said he wanted to be a philosopher. Heidegger wrote something about philosophy being the kind of talk that makes the maids giggle (something like that.) Diogenes and other "lifestyle" philosophers insisted that philosophy was a virtuous way of living and not primarily an endless dialectic about epistemological niceties. (Have you read Eminent Lives by Diogenes Laertes? A great little book!) I personally admire Epictetus for his absolute focus on ethics.

In short, it didn't take "all the way to Wittgenstein to notice the problem." It's just that some people kept on playing the game anyway, 'cause they enjoyed it or were compelled to run the loop, having ignored boring common sense and not yet having been persuaded from within the game by a witty Wittgenstein, jovial James, or naughty Nietzsche. (Couldn't resist.)

I should maybe say that they make space and time possible as concepts. They make talking about space and time possible? Putting event A before event B in an intelligible way, saying that X is to the right of Y.

That may be right. But is it a paradox for my position or rather its useful feature? — apokrisis

I don't think it's a paradox. I'm just trying to squeeze a little acknowledgement from you with respect to what I like to theorize about. Your position is pretty likable. I'm not "against" it.

I could sum up my approach as pragmatic. It is the attempt to stand on the middle-ground, having discovered the limiting extremes. — apokrisis

I relate to that quite a bit. There are certain limits, though. For instance, I'm not a parent. I probably won't have that experience. But then parents don't know what it's like to age without children. Our lives have a particular shape. We can't simultaneously pursue extremes of irresponsibility and responsibility. We can't see from two gender or racial perspectives at the same time. Or if we somehow do, this itself is a particular shape. Ideally we can ignore what is idiosyncratic about the shapes of our lives. Certainly the physicists and the mathematician can do so in their work. But can the most general kind philosophy be truly independent of this particularity? I can try to do this in my own case when I focus on the general structures of worldviews. I can point out examples. But even this detachment already requires a certain "existential" position. It requires a "negative" or "freefloating" worldview, something like an ironism or nihilism. One has to (perhaps) identify with disidentifiation itself.

So yes, the scientist can play the virtuous hero. But am I blindly compelled to do that? Or is that a mode that I can switch on, switch off, by virtue of being able to stand back and see the shaping polarity in play? — apokrisis

That's a good question. I think we can attain some distance from our "heroic" investment, especially if this distance is already part of that heroic investment. The heroic scientist is less heroic the more ignorant he is of the condition of his own possibility. The extreme case would be in Kojeve, where his "wise man" is explicitly and for himself a hero of self-consciousness. That wise man is one who can give an exhaustive account of the reality that must include him as its self-consciousness.

I understand that I do in fact stand for an extreme of individualism and self-actualisation. Looking back, I can see when this was just a blind drivenness. And now that it is a self-aware thing - informed by the science, the social understanding - the irony is that to speak of this as the actual human condition is as about way off the socially accepted map as it gets.
...
It's funny. The more I accept the truth of my socially-constructed nature, the more "individualistic" a way of living that will be within the general culture in which I live. — apokrisis

I relate to this to, in my own way. The self becomes more impressive, more substantially individual, only by "falling out of love with" its petty idiosyncrasies and "taking the impersonal personally." I've always been able to relate to you on that level (your "highmindedness") even if I bang my own vision against yours as an experiment. I also think in terms of a blind driveness. Schopenhauer mentioned "irritability" as the raw material of a philosopher. I do think a certain "aggression" or will-to-master is in play. We beat the ambiguity into a nice shape. Since language is always already social/iterable, this beating-into-shape is not just personal for those whose personalities are already passionately impersonal.

It is not that most people don't learn this at the level of everyday commonsense. People generally have a functional relationship with their social locality. Families, friends, careers, small set-backs, small triumphs, are plenty enough to knit a good life from. It is only on philosophy sites that you get such a congregation of the socially displaced, the eternally questioning. The nihilists, the absurdists, the fanatics. — apokrisis

I've definitely noticed the nihilists, absurdists, and fanatics. I'm not sure that either of us is completely free of what's questionable in forum types. I understand myself to be a sublimation of some of the greener "nihilists" and "mystics" here. I don't know about you, but I use this forum for "self-overhearing" as I much as I do for hearing. It's more fun to work out my ideas in conversation, against resistance. Of course sometimes I just learn from others. Finally, I really am interested in the zoo of self-elaborating personality. I can watch from a safe distance here.

I can relate to that. One could even say that the forms are outside of space and time in the sense that they make space and time possible. I suppose Kant put them outside of space and time. For me there are basic forms (like the intuition of unity) that are truly outside of the time. They are always already there. That intuitively grasped "unit" is why (some) math is eternal truth, for instance, IMV. Other concepts like "justice," however, are arguably subject to the "dialectic" or historical evolution. So they would be "in" time. For Kojeve man "is" time as an embodied concept system increasing in complexity and self-knowledge. The "forms" are the intelligible-speakable form of self-describing reality itself.

But that's a digression. I sense a flame too. Or really I'm on the bonfire. Meaning is the least deniable thing, one might say. To deny meaning is to employ meaning. To insist that meaning is physical is to employ the meaning of 'physical.' The "physical" is already an abstract entity. As Hegel noted, we can't point at an particular unless it's already conceptualized and included in a universal, even if it's just the universal of the thing devoid of other determinations. There's already the projection of unity, that most basic and eternal of meanings as I see it.

The dichotomy of quantity and quality. And then you have that divided by the dichotomy of the subjective and the objective.

Good art is a rationally creative process just like good science. Both aim to tell a "truth" about reality - reality as it can best be experienced.

So I get that you want to make both extremes fully part of your life to make it a life with real felt breadth. You don't need to sell me on that. — apokrisis

I don't exactly know how I'd arrange the quantity-quality and subjective-objective dichotomies with respect to one another, but otherwise you get where I'm coming from.

But to be clear it's not just a matter of how I want to live my life as an individual but (especially in this context) how I build a truly "objective" picture of reality. The "biggest" picture of reality might involve billions of individual narrative-approached "life-worlds," perspectives if you like on the shared "physical kernel." The "scientific image" is a reduced, ideal overlap. The theme that I aim my "objective" thinking in terms of is way individuals explain themselves to themselves. Granted, I am biased in the sense that I focus my theorizing on what interests me, what my background is, etc. But I don't think I'm an exception.

Right- Nietzsche, got it and I don't buy it. — schopenhauer1

I like Nietzsche, sure, but my favorite part of the The Antichrist is the portrait he paints of his opponent. Nietzsche is often too political, too earnest for me. None of these thinkers is "the guy." At the moment, though, Heidegger's analysis of time is really impressing me. Even if you disagree with me on the value of life or whatever, I still think you'd find it interesting --even if only to enrich your notion of instrumentality. We all take what we can use. He's the master poet of that when it comes to the they-self.

We are burdened with keeping disorder at bay. We are burdened with building order and moving forward. It is a wheel that is placed upon us in instrumental fashion. Saying things like "it's the process not the goal" is just trying to justify what is essentially a truisms of how we "spin" our burden into a positive in order to tell ourselves it is okay. — schopenhauer1

For me it's like conspiracy theory to understand a report of experience as a "spin." I don't deny that one could spin things this way, but the possibility of spin doesn't annul the actuality of amused absorption. It feels good to do something well. You can call that a flight from boredom. I'll even acknowledge that there's some truth in that. We are "programmed" for flow, for action, for productivity. Boredom is arguably a form of pain that directs us away from an unhealthy stagnation.

A "bad" flow would be an overwhelming challenge, more pain than pleasure. The you could say that we bounce between boredom and a painful taking-care-of. That's true, too, in its way. Those are the extremes, boredom and too-much-challenge. But between those extremes are non-negative and sometimes very positive states. We can imagine integrating a pleasure-pain function over time. Do you think this integral is always negative?

From my point of view, you are very good at describing what is especially sucky about life from the perspective of a philosophical type. I always relate to what you're talking about. I'm just surprised that you insist that this is the whole story or the final description.

See it for what it is, something we must do, that just keeps going and going and going over and over and over. What other choice do we have but to make up pleasant aphorisms like yours "enjoy the process", "embrace the struggle"? — schopenhauer1

Yeah, we "must" do it (except for the few with the nerve for suicide). I'll grant that. But doing it isn't always bad and is sometimes quite good. As far as aphorisms go, it's true that there are imperative platitudes like "enjoy the process." These can function as tools to get the flow back on track. If life is "meaningless" and one is nevertheless going to survive, it is only "wise" to learn to enjoy it. So that's the kind of thing one says to the unhappy. A less responsible person might encourage suicide, but who wants to get tangled in other people's deaths?

But notice that you've transformed what I presented as a report common among artists (the best part of creation is not having-created but the ecstatic act of creation) into a feel-good slice of cheese. I have as much contempt for that kind of cheese as you do, I'd bet. The "other choice" that we have is to actually enjoy it. Perhaps this isn't simply a choice. I just tend to actually enjoy overcoming resistance. I've been reading Heidegger, for instance, and it's a pleasure when the fog clears. Pushing through that fog isn't pure pleasure. There's a certain amount of friction-frustration. But it's a net-good. I keep going back for more. I also just finished about 6 hours of statistical inference homework. Not all pleasure, but an absorbed struggle with the thoughts and symbols punctuated by victories. Then there's the satisfaction of writing out a nice final draft. Yes, I have to do it to pay my bills. But that's part of why it felt good. That "having to" gives a weight to the game. Living up to that having-to feels good, as long as it's not too difficult.

Yeah, I think you misunderstood my tone and intentions. That's OK. I hope I wasn't too rude in return.

As I said, i feel there's a good intent, benevolence, behind the goodness of what is. It's a feeling, an impression. I don't feel that anything about it is knowable, or part of the world of logic and factual issues, but neither do I doubt the feeling. — Michael Ossipoff

I can relate to this. I don't know if you saw Nietzsche's interpretation of Christ earlier in the thread, but it's a negative theology of feeling, one might say. It has nothing to do with "logic and factual issues." In other words, we seem to generally agree in some important way. My 'theology' is so negative that I feel absolutely no piety toward the word 'God.' All words are just concepts for the concept mill.

I don't feel evangelical about it, but I am always on the lookout for others who feel a transcendence of mere concepts as religion or mere politics as religion. For me there's something like a realization that puts one "behind" words. There are words for this realization, but these words don't tend mean anything to most philosophers. I think we really do just vary so much as individuals that there's just no reason to expect convergence or assume that there is "one right way" to be "spiritual." Some are "wired" sufficiently similarly and have had sufficiently similar experiences to bond over a paragraph. But it's rare. We mostly talk past one another. I can accept that. Still, I enjoy sharing my words and reading the words of others, even if they mostly bounce off in either case.

A painting is exactly like a bicycle in making it obvious how you are meant to view your world. It is another part of the technology that Heidegger was talking about.

If something is hung in a gallery as if its contains sacred meaning, then we know the hushed tone and clever reverence with which we must approach it to be "part of the club" - even if it shit in a can. — apokrisis

This is too cynical, IMV. No doubt that's part of it, but "hushed tone and clever reverence" as the highest aspect of experiencing art ? Also reducing paintings to bicycles seems a little extreme. I'm no Heidegger scholar, but it's my understanding that he gave art a high place (especially poetry) as one of the ways that the world is revealed.

Heidegger aside, I contend that we use art to make sense of the world as much as we use physical science. Isn't what you individually experience as a whole a function to some degree of the art you've been exposed to? I can understand deciding to ignore that and do metaphysics in a way that ignores the subjective aspect. But from my point of view it's a reduction of the field, justified by an attachment to a more reliable if narrower method.

ou’ve then lost a lot more than information - you’ve lost an idea, that might have had profound and far-reaching consequences in the physical sciences. How could you possibly quantify the consequences of that? You might be able to encode it in - I don’t know - a few hundred bytes. But the principle the equation describes might have ramifications and applications that revolutionise industry. So - how much information was actually lost? — Wayfarer

Interesting point. I hadn't thought of it that way.

What I had in mind is the direct experience of meaning. Meaning is. Similarly redness is. We "live" in language in that cannot be quantified. We can quantify how many bits it takes to encode a string of letters of course, but that's just the "shell" of meaning. And yet meaning seems to need a body, if no particular body. In any case, it seems to me that reducing meaning to information "throws away" the depth of the question, however practical such a reduction might be otherwise.

You'd probably really like the description of everyday Dasein as "taking care" in The Concept of Time (the ~100 page first draft of B&T). He talks about the monotony that results from this basic way of experiencing time. I don't think this is the only way to experience it, though. I know very well the experience of beating back disorder. There's a nightmarish futility involved. There is not apparent "reason" that we should bother. Life is perceived in this mode as an absurd fending off of the inevitable.

You use the "slave" metaphor. Are we slave though? Suicide is an option. We choose to keep fending off this disorder. I suggest that a certain kind of this fending-off is what we love about life. There is a "right" amount of resistance that we "live" to overcome. We love imposing order on disorder. We are this imposition. If we fantasize about killing disorder, we fantasize about killing ourselves. I think this is the "death drive." Part of us wants to freeze time. That which is present is always slipping away. We don't have time. We want to grab the wheel and stop it, to have time to think and be.

Many people feel it is their duty to produce- art, entertainment, bullshit and equally want the congratulations. Slaves to our projects. — schopenhauer1

For some (especially the young) this production may feel like a duty. But it's a cliche among artists that the process is "the point" or the "real thing." We don't most genuinely make art to have made art. It feels good to make art. We are absorbed in the process. We with all our vanity and ambition dissolve into the worked-over object. It is a self-justifying activity. From my perspective, you are maybe being still-too-metaphysical in "missing" a justification for human activities that exists outside of the pleasure in these activities themselves. We only occasionally "notice" the futility of our battle against disorder. To notice this we have to slip out of our usual un-self-conscious enjoyment or contentment in waging this "war" that is at best experienced as play.

Do you not see the genius in discovering that materiality can only hold a certain amount of meaning? — apokrisis

But isn't the problem the interpretation of meaning as reducible to bits? I love bits. It is eye-opening that the universe can only "store" a finite number of bits. But this abstract universe and there bits are themselves "information" in the more "primordial" sense of meaning, whatever it means for something to mean. We can make the question more manageable and more productive by deciding that meaning is bits. But this cuts the knot. What is it to mean something? What is intelligibility itself?

But then Romanticism is just as much a socialising technology. We become self-actualising supermen to the degree that we employ a diet of Marvel comics and other romantic imagery to fabricate "a self" for ourselves. — apokrisis

I agree that we fabricate selves. "Marvel comics" involve a less sophisticated version of this, but how are you and I exempt from having to fabricate ourselves? I still contend both of our basic "metaphysical" positions are intimately related to our own notions of the virtuous individual. The "true" scientist or philosopher is every bit as heroic as Wolverine. Your demystification of individuality is (in other words) an expression of individuality. We are "selling" ourselves, one might say, asserting implicitly the potential value of our words for others.

Our broad choices are to behave like machines or behave like spirits. Cartesian dualism wins both ways. — apokrisis

For what it's worth, I'm against this dualism. The Cartesian subject and object paradigm is one of the pre-interpretations that I find questionable.

The Barbie doll and the Glock pistol are both coming from the damaging extremes of social self-construction. The philosophical critique only becomes interesting once it gets both the mechanistic scientific view and its "other" of romantic irrationalism firmly in its analytical sights. — apokrisis

I would maybe contrast quantitative mechanism to "artistic"/metaphorical/interpretative thinking. Both seem essential and always already in operation. The autonomous spirit (pure "Satanic" incarnate freedom) is one abstraction at the end of the continuum and the utter dissolution of the individual into its background or source is just as questionable on the other end.

But my point is that something can't count as evidence unless there is a theory framed to be countable. — apokrisis

I'm by no means against quantitive evaluations of assertions. But is it not a "non-quantitative" assertion that only such assertions should have weight? The "not even wrong" framework is "not even wrong" by its own notion. That falsifiability should be the criterion is itself not falsifiable. You see what I mean? Metaphorically speaking the "law" itself is the supreme "crime." I suggest that such frameworks are "justified" pragmatically. They are experiments that "worked." If evaluating assertions in a particular way gives us what we want more than it leads to disaster, then we tend to keep evaluating them that way.

So what is Romanticism counting? As a theory, what actually possible measurements does it suggest. If it doesn't offer any, then it is not even a theory. It is just an idea that is "not even wrong". — apokrisis

I think we are talking about the realm of value or motive here. There's a certain "objectivity" in a great art. It resonates for a culture. It concretizes that culture's ideals. Maybe the dominant ideals can be made partially explicit in theory, but I grant art and literature an important place in the revelation of reality. Art is not just "subjective" or amusing. It's at the center of a culture's understanding of existence. Some quantification of this realm is possible. We can see measure the proportions of a culture's ideal woman. But I don't see why we would measure our understanding of cultural ideals only in a quantifying manner. We don't just want to manipulate and predict. We want to participate in and grasp or enjoy these ideals. We aren't only manipulative-predictive knowers.

There is a rational sociological explanation for the fostering of irrationality. Convincing folk they are self-actualising beings creates the pool of requisite variety that rapid cultural evolution can feed off. Society becomes this great big competition for attention. Apply a ruthless filter over the top of that, and hey bingo, out pops out your master race. Or at least the ruling elite.

Of course there is then the rational reaction - the PC response to try and declare everyone some kind of cultural winner. Prizes all round. Everyone gets an equal share of the social limelight.

Yeah right. Dream on. — apokrisis

I relate to all of this. They are excellent points. I'm not defending the holy individual here, though I do think there are limits to this dissolution of the individual into the social. I'm really just trying to be accurate about the world. For me, however, this very notion of "world" is in question. I don't assume the world of natural science. To me that is a useful abstraction that exists within a more "primordial" notion of the world. We are in the world with others. But I don't think the spatial notion of objects next to other objects captures this "in-ness" or "with-others-ness."

Vygotsky and Mead were contemporaries. So we are talking about many people making the same "discovery" once the social sciences became actually a thing.

You had biological science and evolutionary theory emphasising how much the human mind is the product of hereditary and anatomical machinery. That was the big theme of Victorian science. Then followed the sociological correction as that became an established field of inquiry with its own professors and journals. — apokrisis

Thanks. That was eye-opening. On Vygotsky:

Internalization can be understood in one respect as "knowing how". For example, the practices of riding a bicycle or pouring a cup of milk are initially outside and beyond the child. The mastery of the skills needed for performing these practices occurs through the activity of the child within society. A further aspect of internalization is appropriation, in which the child takes a tool and makes it his own, perhaps using it in a way unique to himself. Internalizing the use of a pencil allows the child to use it very much for his own ends rather than drawing exactly what others in society have drawn previously. — Wiki

The bicycle is "ready-to-hand" in the knowing-style of "know-how." This is largely the way that things exist for us, not as entities for disengaged theory but rather as tools that become invisible the more successfully we use them to pursue the goal we are conscious of while using them. Do you agree?

Everything has to start with phenomenology or the givenness of experience. And that is quite anti-science in a general way. It is always shades of idealism.

But then that is why I like Peirce. He was already there with a much more powerful scheme than Heidegger ever managed.

Not to say that Heidegger is thus wrong. I'm just unsure that he adds anything. — apokrisis

You may be right. I don't know enough about Peirce. I don't know how closely you've looked into Heidegger. I agree that phenomenology is going to look like idealism, perhaps because a certain "objective" present-at-hand framework has become an invisibly dominant pre-interpretation.

In the end, the claims of being fundamental are stronger for the Enlightenment view - the method of objective reasoning.

You can dispute that and we can weigh the evidence.

(See, the scientific method wins again as the best way to do actual philosophy.) — apokrisis

By "pre-science" I mean the establishing of what counts as evidence in the first place. Even the idea that disputes 'should' be resolved in terms of weighing evidence is already a commitment. It makes no sense to weigh the evidence for a weighing of evidence as the right method. We inherit a fuzzy criterion. "Abnormal" discourse challenges this criterion, while "normal" discourse employs it to make warranted assertions.

But Romanticism was also literally the reaction to the Enlightenment. So it is post that science and metaphysical turn. — apokrisis

That it came later should give us pause. To view entities as present-at-hand for an ideal subject was a massively useful idea. Public objects became predictable and manipulable in an unprecedented way. We started to think that this non-intuititive way of "deworlding" objects gave us the real object. I'd say that it just rips the object from the fullness of our experience of it in a way that's good for certain purposes. Beyond the usual "sentimental" objections to this, there is also the question of not wanting to inaccurately understand the world by uncritically being trapped in just one framework.

You have "freewill" as that is how you get trained - particular in modern Western society with its huge concern to produce self-actualising individuals. — apokrisis

That's sounds plausible to me. It's just that this notion of the shared world in terms of tool-use is at least as old as Being and Time. So it's odd to see it presented as some new idea in a 1979 book. You focus on the emergence of the individual self, which is important. But what I quoted reminds me of the emergence or generation of "one" or they-self or "everyday Dasein" as the foundation on which the individual self is built. This is the 'operating system' that makes theory and individuation possible.

That's interesting. But that it can't answer why the word-tools work means that philosophical questions remain. Maybe Witty relegated that to the mystical. I understand the appeal of that. — Marchesk

I think that "works" points to the 'irrational' motivations at the center of life. Why do we care if our house is destroyed by the tree? Why do we want a coherent theory of reality? Is "Dasein" fundamentally "care"? I think so. A certain "care" is the "brute fact" or final word, it seems. Is this 'care' something we can express? I think so. Artists, painters, musicians, and poets do a pretty good job of it. I suggest that we make sense of our theoretical practices in the wider context of what it means for us to exist. (The "mystical" in Witt is fascinating, but I understand it as a precise wondering at the brute fact of the existence of the world-grasped-as-a-whole.)

We want to be 'noble' or 'good' or 'stylish.' Can theory make our "image" of virtue completely explicit? I don't think so. But theory can take this image of virtue into account as an explanatory entity.

As an aside, you may want to highlight what you respond to and click the quote button that appears. That'll put the quote in a box and let the quoted person know that you've replied.

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I don’t understand the question. What should an expectation mean?
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(rhetorical question—Don’t bother answering) — Michael Ossipoff

Why would ask a merely rhetorical question about a question you didn't answer? IMV, this misunderstanding or failure-to-grasp is all there in the way that question slides off for you.

I don’t want to criticize anyone’s religion, or say that anyone’s religious beliefs aren’t valid.
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So, if you believe that you comprehend God, or all of Reality, I won’t say that you don’t.
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But yes, I wouldn’t make such a claim about myself.
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We can just agree that you’re more ambitious than I am. …and maybe a bit more doctrinaire. — Michael Ossipoff

No. I'm looking at what words like 'God' or 'all of reality' could feasibly mean in the first place. We can go back to Parmenides: nonbeing is not. Some words have no real conceptual content. They are just negations in a dry conceptual sense. But they can have great emotional content. The philosopher's God gets its emotional content from the non-philosopher's anthropomorphic God. But the philosopher cleans this up by emptying the concept of everything determinant. The word still drags along a certain emotional content, however devoid of conceptual content.

It was an expression of skepticism regarding human ability to comprehend all of Reality, including God. I admit that I’m surprised to hear that you believe that you comprehend God, but I re-emphasize that it isn’t for me to tell you that you don’t or couldn’t.
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But, as for whether that “negation” is empty or full, I’ll defer to you on that issue :D — Michael Ossipoff

Nothing is easier to comprehend that God as the negative object. Hegel made this point long ago. If the absolute is "drained" to an image of pure transcendence (=ignorance), then it just meres the idea of the transcendental subject, the bare unity of apperception. The negation is a negation of determinate content. I'm not against agnosticism. I'm just suggesting that one way of understanding it is as the worship of a question mark. Ultimately it's a heroic abstinence. "I know that I don't know." But ultimately one takes pride in a form of knowledge. So there's something slippery and questionable involved. It's not so modest as it poses?

One thing that brings your meaning into question is that “Exist” isn’t philosophically defined. Anyone can and does use that word with whatever meaning they choose. — Michael Ossipoff

Yes, this meaning of being is a great issue. I'm knee-deep in Heidegger at the moment, and that's his jam. What does it mean for something to be? We toss off the word 'is' all the time. We argue about beings. But we take this 'is' for granted. Yet this 'is' may be the deepest of issues.

There’s really no basis for a conversation with you. I can’t relate to your conceptual notion of God, or your belief that you understand God, or your belief that you understand everything that exists for you.
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In general, I avoid conversations with people who hold doctrinaire conceptual religious beliefs. — Michael Ossipoff

You are missing the key fact that I'm at least as "agnostic" as you. You seemingly can't help but frame being challenged in terms of this drama of the "doctrinaire" versus the noble agnostic. Suffice it to say that you have radically misunderstood me, all too confident that you know where I'm coming from. You are of course free to scurry away secure in what I'd call your own (generalized) religious belief. From my perspective, you are being insufficiently self-conscious, refusing to see your own investments/decisions as such. It's cool if you want to end the dialogue. But it's pretty lame to make some long post and then "storm out of the room" by insisting the conversation is over. If you are done talking, then just don't reply.

Did these questions originate with metaphysicians, or are they ones that naturally occur to human beings upon reflection? — Marchesk

I think they naturally occur. But then a sophisticated tradition emerges. Would you agree that metaphysics can become a clever game? I would separate "toy" from earnest metaphysics by looking at the feeling tone involved. If one is just enjoying one's cleverness (nothing wrong with that), then this is toy metaphysics. If one is 'wrestling' with existence, trying to make better sense of it, then this is 'real' or earnest metaphysics. Note that this is just a tentative-useful-fuzzy distinction itself.

If I may rewind: let's say your OP is 'really' about what is good or virtuous. The 'pragmatist' in me would suggest 'going into' how the mental construct issue bears on that. Why do you want or not want the object to be a mental construct? Question the question, I'd say. How does it figure in the bigger picture?

It means that perception is experienced inside our minds, just like the case with dreams. — Marchesk

I get that, but I'd suggest that "mind" itself has no exact meaning. It too is a fuzzy tool employed by practical concern.

If we don't have access to external objects, then only our bodily sensations matter, and thus, pleasure is the only good. — Marchesk

For me we clearly have access to external objects. Philosophers can describe this access or more or less direct, but I don't think anyone sincerely denies living in a world of objects and others. I do acknowledge that the "good" plays its role here. I posit that our notion of the virtue or the good is a dominant kind of concern that gives meaning to otherwise merely metaphysical concerns. So metaphysical concerns are or can be 'religious' in a certain sense. Metaphysics can be a 'theology' that justifies and sustains some notion of virtue or the good. But the influence goes both ways. We will modify our notion of virtue if presented with a compelling redescription of what ('really') is.

But metaphysical questions aren't concerned with being pragmatic. If you want to be pragmatic, then everyday common sense and science are enough. But some human beings like to ask questions about the nature of our existence, what we can know, etc. — Marchesk

I'm thinking of the philosophical movement of pragmatism. I think it evolved within an earnest quest for non-banal eternal truth. It is an attempt to tell the truth about the truth, one might say. It's a meta-metaphysics (and yet just a metaphysics) that gives a new priority to concern, motive, embeddness, embodiness, etc. --in an attempt to tell a better or more accurate truth. But admittedly it "ironizes" the notion of accuracy. Accuracy is reimagined as successful adaptation. Truths are word-tools that work. What is it to work? There we move into the realm of feeling and ineffability.

On affordances:

During childhood development, a child learns to perceive not only the affordances for the self, but also how those same objects furnish similar affordances to another. A child can be introduced to the conventional meaning of an object by manipulating which objects command attention and demonstrating how to use the object through performing its central function[6] By learning how to use an artifact, a child “enters into the shared practices of society” as when they learn to use a toilet or brush their teeth.[6] And so, by learning the affordances, or conventional meaning of an artifact, children learn the artifact's social world and further, become a member of that world. — wiki

Isn't this just Heidegger? Sorry for what may be a digression. But I think we can work this into my response to the OP by understanding distinctions like mental-versus-nonmental as more tools that we learn to use as children. Then metaphysicians rip these tools out of context and try to do eternal super-science with them...

he reason the language game answer doesn't work for this is because the difference between a dream tree and a perceived tree matters a great deal. If I dream of a tree falling on my house, but upon wakening, realize there is no tree near the house, then I forget about it. — Marchesk

Perhaps you misunderstand me. You give exactly the example that I gave. Non-metaphysically that's where the distinction matters. Do I need to worry about the tree? Or was it only a dream? We all inherit and employ a fuzzy but successfully employed distinction between dream and non-dream, or only-mental and mental-and-physical.

I'm just suggesting that this fuzzy-useful distinction "should" only be pushed so far. I don't know if it's something we should bother to try to build absolute truths on. What does it mean to say that "we behold a mental construct"? How is this "cashed out" in action? If we somehow knew that is was true, then how would we behave differently? We did this with the dream already. Knowing that the threatening tree was only a dream allows us to shift our practical concern elsewhere. I'm suggesting that we trace fuzzy distinctions back to the practical concern that employs them. (In short: pragmatism.)

You cannot build a language out of nothing but variables and expect it to be able to describe the feeling of kissing a cute girl. — Akanthinos

I really like this. I can imagine a comedy about a very theoretical guy who tries to encode this kissing of the cute girl in a string of ones and zeros. You also mention that piece by Satie in the rest of the post. That's one of my favorites. To me this thinking of the experience if kissing the cute girl and of hearing great music is already enough to demolish the fantasy of describing reality in some cold, precise language. Metaphysics is always a symbolic reduction of reality. It is a tool that functions within the "real" that largely utterly eludes symbolization. "Feeling" is why we bother with such symbolizations, and yet there's a massive gulf between the symbol and the feeling. If we think in symbols (and I think we do), then metaphysics can hope to model the thinking aspect of life. But feeling is the ghost in the symbolic machine that gives it life in the first place.