You have touched such a lot of the deepest questions that have been faced for thousands of years by all human beings. The specialists in these questions habe been essentially philosophy and religion.
So, first thing first: you are not the first one person in the world raising these questions. People have spent lives, energies, every kind of resources to deal with these questions. Their results can help you a lot, but you cannot understand anything if you want get quick answers: this would be the marketing mentality, of getting things easily, quickly, simply. The problem with this mentality is that it, because of this way of proceeding, says implicitly, and contradictorily, that these questions are not important. I am not saying that this is your mentality: it is just a risk, if you don’t have the patience of dedicating to your questions an appropriate amount of time and study.
After making your list of questions, I would suggest you to put them in order, any order, whatever order seems best to you. Then start from the first one and start doing some research. At the same time, try to organize your familiarity with philosophy, by organizing a path of study of it.
This way you will have taken your questions seriously and you will show yourself continuously that you are taking them seriously.
On the contrary, if you will get randomly distracted by one random question, random discussions, random everything, you will enter the contradiction I referred to: you are giving importance to your questions now, but the way you will end up dealing with them might tell that actually you aren’t.

One of the main latest phenomenons in philosophy has been the distinction between “continental” and “analytical” philosophy. More specifically, I think that continental philosophy has become essentially postmodern philosophy, while we know that analytical philosophy is essentially philosophy of language.

Postmodern philosophy has ended up realizing that we cannot talk about truth, reality, objectivity as if they were free from the relativization coming from subjectivity, that is present whenever we think and talk.

It looks like analytical philosophy didn’t like this final result, because it attacks radically our human pride of being able to get in control of everything. As a result, analytical philosophers decided to reveal (I am saying this intentionally: they decided what to reveal before finding what would have been revealed) that whatever we think is managed by language, including whatever we think about subjectivity. This way they have felt like they recovered philosophy to its pride of being in control of everything.

On the other side, postmoderns can still object that, while studying language, analytical philosophers cannot avoid to do this from inside it, so that the philosophical study of language cannot make any claim of being objective. To the degree that it is objective, it is not philosophy, it is just science. In all aspects where it is not objective, it falls, despite its intentions, into the category of postmodernism, that is, subjectivity.

You can see that this story, behind the external line, is a story of emotions: the human desire to get in control, get power, understanding, knowing what we are doing. Another side of emotions, instead, likes to dive into them, not to get in control, but to listen and enjoy them; this swimming inside can reveal to us what we are, much more than the method of gaining control can.

We might say that the whole history of philosophy is an emotional history. When we discuss if reality exists, what being is, whatever line we follow, our decision about our choice on the direction to follow is largely dictated by our emotions. Afterwards, we make all efforts to tell others and ourselves that our choices are a product of logic and reasoning, because admitting that they come just from emotions and desire would make them weak in a debate.

That said, I think that today a good philosophical way of appreciating emotions is to cultivate the awareness that, whatever we talk about, we are always under its influence, we talk from inside it. Even if I talk about a tree in the forest, I am talking from inside it, because, as soon as I start thinking about it, my emotions and my thoughts are already influenced by it.

Facing this awareness, we can decide if we want to enjoy the pleasure of swimming inside what we are talking about, welcoming the awareness of our weakness as human beings, or if we still want to behave like immature children, who want control, power, domination. Science is, to a certain degree, on this side, but science does this from inside its well limited framework, science doesn’t make claims of ultimate and universal understanding, that is instead what has made and makes a lot of philosophy childish, immature, psychopathic: wanting total power, universal power.

Philosophy can dialogue with science, but, if it wants to be philosophy, rather than an immature child who pretends to make science behind the mask of a philosopher, I think it should explore this experience of swimming inside emotions, concepts, logics, reasonings and openly admit it.

Those monks and so called spiritual masters who cultivate control of emotions do it always from inside a specific understanding of what emotions are, what the world is, what we are, otherwise they wouldn’t have any reason why they should control emotions. At the end, they are still inside this immature will of power, that is raised in our emotional world whenever we try to build metaphysics. It is clear that, according to what they do, they consider emotions as something negative, that needs to be put under control. But how can you know yourself if you embrace the road of metaphysics, framing your mind inside a castle of ideas, wanting to master and to understand, rejecting the way of listening, of weakness, of diving in, swimming, admitting your subjectivity, enjoying your humanity from the inside where you already are?

These are the ways I see about philosophy and emotions:

1) let’s leave to science any work that is inspired by control, maths, measurement, power;

2) let’s be philosophers and do philosophy with the essential awareness of being inside our humanity, weakness, subjectivity; there is a lot, an infinite world to explore from this perspective, because it involves our entire existence;

3) let’s cultivate a dialogue with science without pretending to go beyond its limits by trying to build confuse, ambiguous, not so honest mixtures of science and metaphysics.

Conclude that not everything is relative? — Banno

We cannot conclude that not everything is relative, because this actually brings us to the contradictory consequence that everything is relative. Let me show the process. The starting point is

1) something is non relative.

But from here we have these consequences:

2) non relative means universal, that is, same for all subjectivities, able to take into consideration all subjectivities.

3) As a consequence, "universal" means able to take into consideration the subjectivity of those who say that something is universal.

4) If we consider that, whenever someone thinks that something is universal, this is always conditioned by their subjectivity, we have the consequence that the idea of "non relative" is always relative, which is equivalent to say that

5) everything is relative.

If we think that 5), as a consequence of itself, is relative and this takes us to the conclusion that something is non relative, we are taken back to point 1). But we have seen that point 1) has, as a consequence, its opposite, that is, point 5). Moreover, as I said before, we cannot apply point 5) to itself, because this would mean adopting a logic that it shows as being unreliable, because it is relative, as point 5) says.

In this situation, I think the best thing is to adopt point 5), but not considering it as an absolute statement, which would take us to point 1). Rather, we should consider the statement in point 5) as just the best we can conceive, the best way we have, as humans, of thinking about everything. This way we can adopt point 5) without considering it an absolute.

I know this objection. I'm going to explain you the question.

If we say that everything is relative, we are forced, by the content of the statement, to apply it to itself: if everything is relative, it follows that the statement itself must be considered part of everything, so that it is to be considered relative. As a consequence, we are forced to conclude that it is impossible to say that everything is relative, because this statement makes itself relative. Actually, we can reveal a trick in this conclusion, because it chooses to accept and adopt a logic that has to be considered relative, that is, unreliable. Let’s see in detail how the trick works. What follows is the first sight, apparently correct and complete, of the reasoning:

1) we say that everything is relative;
2) we apply the content of the statement to the statement itself;
3) we conclude that the statement itself is relative.

Now let’s reveal and show the steps that are actually hidden and ignored in this reasoning.

1) We say that everything is relative.

1a) Hidden step. We accept and adopt the logic that allows to formulate the statement, in order to deduce its consequences.
2) We apply the content of the statement to the statement itself.

3) We conclude that the statement itself is relative.

3a) Ignored step. If the statement is relative, its logic cannot be adopted, because relative means unreliable.
3b) Ignored step. If its logic can’t be adopted, we must nullify point number 2).
3c) Ignored step. As a consequence, the statement “everything is relative” can’t be criticized, because, in order to criticize it, we need to make use of its logic, but we have seen that adopting its logic brings to negate its logic itself.

As is shown, once we have realized that everything is relative, we can’t carry on by applying the statement to itself. If we want to carry on with something, we need to adopt different logics, different structures, different languages and ways of reasoning.

If we think that, since its logic is invalid, then even point 1 must be negated, this conclusion, actually, doesn't take us to any better situation: we will have to face even more difficulties and contradictions.

My conclusion is that, since we cannot think without using our mind, therefore whatever we think cannot claim any truth, any reality, any objectivity.

It is, but I cannot understand how you get the conclusion "therefore one cannot think".

Can you give any evidence that in what you said there is anything, even just a tiny bit, free from any conditioning of your mind?

I cannot know why I am barking loud: it is like wanting to explain why we do philosophy. We just do it, we don’t know the reason. We don’t even know what “reason” means, so how can we know the reason?
You cannot believe me, because we believe what we think is truth, but I am not saying truth, I just bark.

It cannot work. Thinking that it works, even just a little, means that we have some ability get access to the truth, to reality, to how the world really is. This is what some philosophers do, trying to save metaphysics, at least just a bit, seeing that metaphysics doesn’t work. But this isn’t so correct intellectually: metaphysics is not about a degree of validity. If one tiny bit of metaphysics works, it just means that metaphysics works, it doesn’t matter how much. But the problem with metaphysics is total, just because metaphysics itself is about the total, the universal. It is the very concept of truth itself that is pretentious, it is an attempt to definitely master the world, even if a specific philosopher can have a very humble heart and doesn’t realize how much will of power is contained in concept of “truth”.
Metaphysics cannot work because it is contradictory. Once we realize this, it means that every bit of it is contradictory, it doesn’t matter how tiny this bit is.

You do not directly experience even your mind, because even the very concepts of “direct”, “experience” and “mind” are all constructions of our mind. We can go further, to a meta-level, and realize that even the conclusion that everything is a construction of our mind must be, of course, a construction of our mind. We might conclude that we never know what we are talking about, what we are perceiving, what we are thinking. Everything is filtered, contaminated, polluted, distorted, changed, and even by writing this very line I cannot say that I know what I am saying, what I am talking about.
All of this is just fine: it is just a result of the roughness of philosophy, despite our idea that philosophy is something very clever, very refined. It is just a very rough and weird playing with words, ideas, concepts, that were born to manage our existence in this world, to chase animals, to manage our social relationships. Imagine a dog who decides to elaborate his production of different ways of barking, feelings, reacting, to build a whole system that is supposed to get him an intellectual mastering about how the world is, how things work. This is philosophy. Obviously, an organized system of barking will never be able to master an understanding of the world. Curiosly, humans think they can, and then they are even surprised seeing that it doesn’t work.

Honesty does not exist, it never existed.

Let’s go to the very roots of the question.

Maths is not honest when it tells you that 2+2=4, because that moment Maths is hiding from you all the contradictions and absurdities that it contains, such as imaginary and irrational numbers. If Maths, that we assume as the most elementary base that we can conceive at the roots of the world, is dishonest and contradictory, if nature itself is dishonest, how can we be honest? This means that the very concept of honesty is just a product of our creative imagination, like winged horses.

We can try to be honest, because we need to criticize the metaphysics of Maths, but we can only proceed in a very humble way, by vague, weak and generic attempts, referring to our creativity, poetry, humanity, making use of a lot of criticism and self-criticism, nothing more precise or definite than this.

I think most philosophers failed in dealing with the topic of love, either by ignoring it or by dealing with it in a wrong way, like the examples you referred to, because they have been, and still are, conditioned by an idea of doing philosophy that is meant as power over concepts, grasping, defining, mastering, controlling, dominating. This mentality contradicts radically the topic it wants to deal with: an essential aspect of love is vulnerability, that is, you choose to lower many of your protective defenses, walls, barriers, screens, you choose to expose yourself to the other person to help contact, communication, understanding, as much as possible, as directly as possible, you accept to be deeply questioned.

In this context we should try to avoid falling exactly in the same mistake in this very discussion, wanting to get a strong understanding, a mastering definition, of what love is.

Once we have realized this, the question becomes: why do we want to define love? Why do we want to understand it? Are our reasons equal to the topic we dare to deal with? Is the very concept of “understanding” equal enough to the topic of “love”?

That said, it seems to me that all definitions referring to the concept of “union” fail to say anything meaningful about love. They are just metaphysical stratagems used by metaphysical mentalities who want to dominate love, which is an hypocritical oxymoron, hiding our lack of humility. You can easily realize that you can love without union and you can be united with somebody without love. Union is nothing about love, it is just an abstract metaphysical concept that winks at some emotional involvement.

Once we have made clear that metaphysics (that is wanting to understand what, how, why, things are) is irrelevant about the topic of love, we need an alternative ground to start from.

My alternative ground is the mentality of becoming, that is connected to relativism, postmodernism, subjectivity, self-criticism.

This makes me define love as a set of three essential elements, each of them necessary for love to exist, and all of them suffient, that is, if all of them are there, then love is there for sure. They are:

1) growing
2) helping to grow
3) emotional involvement.

“Growing” means that you want to improve, question, self-criticize yourself for all of your life, about any aspect of you; you never take for granted that you are right, that you have got the truth. This guides you to expose, to a certain degree, your vulnerability to the other person, depending on the different situations.

Helping to grow means that you want to be active to do the best you can to help the other person to grow; in this context you need to consider both what growing means to the other person and what it means to you. Both perspectives might be right or wrong, what is important and overcomes any problem is doing it in the context of point 1: I want to help you to grow in a context of questioning what growing means to you and what it means to me.

All of this work about growing would be not so human, not so fully involving, if it doesn’t involve emotions. This has an important role in making the different kinds of love: the different kinds of emotional and bodily involvement make an essential difference between love for your children, love for you partner, love for your preferred hobby and so on.

Once you make clear these three points, you can easily realize that you don’t need metaphysics of what “union” or “person” is; such metaphysics are useless and totally exposed to criticism.

If you are practicing the three things I said, you are loving already and you are already on a path of growing and improving your love. You don’t need anything else, you don’t need to wonder if there is union between you and the other person, you don’t need to have clear metaphysical, philosophical concepts. I think this can help people to grow in their ability to love, rather than reflecting about their union with other people, with the world or with other things.

As a postmodern, as a follower of Vattimo’s weak thought, I see all of this as the nth temptation of philosophy to establish a good ground to support dictatorship.

We can even interpret the whole world, nature itself, as something fortunately based on contradiction and disagreement. I agree that contradiction and disagreement cause suffering, but this suffering is much less than suffering caused by dictatorship. Think of Hitler: he is the reference point of the attempt of our minds to get agreement from other people. Fortunately nature continuously disagrees with itself. This confuses us, our human nature needs a degree of agreement, comfort, love, support, but what we need is not agreement as a fundamental philosophical category. The fundamental philosophical category should be the opposite: disagreement, progress, research, looking for new and different things. The mentality that looks for agreement prepares racism, so that those who have different cultures, different mentalities, are seen as a problem rather than as a resource to make us and the world rich of variety and difference. Disagreement is the treasure that we should be looking for every day and every moment, more precious than gold and diamonds.
As I said, we are humans, we need degrees of comfort. For this reason we should be careful not to turn disagreement into a new metaphysics, a new system.

it can puzzle and distress individual philosophers — J

If disagreement puzzles and distresses any philosophers, this tells me that they are far from being good philosophers, they are just aspiring dictators that don’t like to be contradicted.

high hopes for something like a scientific philosophical method — J

Let’s leave science to scientists and philosophy to philosophers. Philosophy can dialogue with science, of course, but a philosophy that wants to be science is just disguised dictatorship.

What can we discover in the history and practice of philosophy that might account for such widespread inability to converge on a consensus? — J

This inability to converge on a consensus is exactly what has made philosophy productive, a way for growth, discovery, progress, in any epoch.

Now you might answer: “Well, I disagree totally with you and, as a consequence, you should be very happy about this”. :grin: This would be just a trick, because disagreement from love for disagreement means wanting, at the end, and environment where disagreement is discouraged. So, in that case you would disagree with me, not because you want to encourage disagreement, but for the opposite. In other words, the disagreement of Hitler with Hebrews is much different from the disagreement of Hebrews with Hitler, they are the opposite of each other in their final result.

You can notice that my disagreement from you is an encouragement to discuss, explore different perspectives, enlarge our horizons; your disagreement from me would mean, instead, discouragement of plurality, invitation to close our minds and our horizons inside some kind of cage.

A philosopher is free to recommend other approaches — J

So, why do you see disagreement as a problem? Why should philosophers agree about something?

It looks like you identify philosophy with rationality, but they are not the same thing.

You can't say anything about the nature of the world, because in that case you are just making metaphysics, which is self contradictory, because metaphysics claims to be able to embrace all perspectives, while actually it ignores that itself belongs to a limited perspective.
So, you can't say that the world is systematic, because in that case you are just generalising a concept that actually belongs to your specific perspective.

one cannot argue seriously for the impossibility of the conditions of an argument being meaningful — plaque flag

Haven't you said this from your own perspective?

perspective can't really be avoided — Wayfarer

I agree, but we should be careful not to turn perspectives into objective realities. This mistake can be avoided by considering that, by talking about perspectives, we, as a consequence, need to apply the relativity of everything to the idea of perspectives as well, so that, at the end, we need to admit that, ultimately, we don't know what we are talking about.

If I believe that the Jones is guilty, while you believe he is innocent, aren't we both believing about the same Jones ? — plaque flag

There's no way of being sure that we are both believing about the same Jones.

You are trying to build a system that includes freedom. This is contradictory. Why do you want to introduce freedom in a system? We introduce elements in a system if they are needed to explain something. What does freedom explain in a system? Nothing. It's like wanting to imagine the existence of a new planet in an astronomical system where everything is already explained. Why do you want to introduce another unneeded planet? Moreover, if you find an answer to this "why?", then you have found the cause of freedom, but, if freedom has a cause, it is not freedom.
In other words, freedom must be, by definition, impossible to explain, otherwise it is not freedom. If it is impossible to explain, then you cannot make it part of a system.
That's why it is nonsense to discuss about freedom in any philosophy that wants to be a system, a systematic philosophy.
Freedom is a psichological, emotional, human need, so it is good for non systematic philosophies, like nihilism, or postmodernism. In systematic philosophies it just creates contradictions.

Saying that we are perspectives implies that the idea that "we are perspectives" has a meaning only inside the perspective of those who say it. This is equivalent to say that it is meaningless, because its meaning is entirely limited inside itself, entirely determined by itself.

It begins with the narrative — Astrophel

If this is true, it means, as a consequence, that what you said has a meaning exclusively inside your narrative, you are inside your narrative as soon as you think and talk. As such, what you said cannot be considered objectively true, because it is inevitably conditioned by itself. In other words, what you said is meaningless.
Consider that what I have written now, in this message, comes from agreeing with you: I started by saying “If this is true...”. As a consequence, you cannot object anything to what I have said, because objecting to what I have said would mean objecting to yourself.

Even when you tell yourself your internal story, you cannot deduce that you exist, because, whenever you make use of the idea of existence, you are making use of the mental structures of your brain. You can never take control of these structures, because you cannot think of them without using them again. If you think that this is evidence that your mind and your mental structures exist, it becomes automatically evidence that you are using them and, consequently, you have no control on what you are talking about. So, at the end, talking about existence, even our own existence while we are thinking about it, is completely meaningless: as soon as you think it has a meaning, you are automatically saying that you are a machine that is manoeuvred by that meaning, so that you cannot say anything meaningful about what you are talking about.

your perspective that it's a perspective is itself a perspective — Tom Storm

I completely agree, that’s why I said that, after our work, we need to keep in mind that the very concept of perspective is completely unreliable, because, after all, it remains a hidden way of saying that there is an objective reality, from which perspective tries to be different.
We cannot free ourselves from perspectives, because we cannot free ourselves from our brain, we cannot think without using our brain, and I know that this is already a perspective.
I even think that Socrate’s knowing that he didn’t know nothing is already knowing too much, it is actually a claim of knowing really a lot.
After that, I think we are driven to aknowledge that language forces us to make statements that, as such, are far from being correct, aware of perspectives, humble. But attention to language shouldn’t make us go to analytical philosophy. I think that analytical philosophy is another masked metaphysical philosophy, because it takes language as a hard point, a hard basis to inquire into our reasoning.
Once we realize that we are prisoners of our brains (the experiment of brain in a vat is not a mental experiment, it is just our condition: the brain is the vat of itself, from which it cannot escape), I think the best we can do is to go to our humanity, psichology, emotions, literature, myths. Not in an obscurantist mentality, but exactly after being enriched by the research we have made about metaphysics, perspectives, criticism and self-criticism.
After all, the fear of the infinite recursion you mentioned is a consequence of carrying on by applying a mental methodology based on wanting to understand, to control, to master what is happening in our reasoning. Now we know that we cannot get any ultimate mastering, so I think it is better to stop trying to build new metaphysics and, rather, go to humanity, humbleness, weakness.

It seems to me that you would like to build a non-dualist philosophy, but actually, at the end, you are still dualist.

You wrote

what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — Wayfarer

Thinking that whatever we say about reality is conditioned by our perspective doesn’t make you a postmodern. You are still assuming very well that reality exists independently of our mind, even if it is impossible to us to think about it without interfering in this thought with our mind.

Your exposition contains an ambiguous language, but actually there are clear signs that you are far from exposing to radical criticism the very ideas of existence, reality, being.

Pinter has the same ambiguity in the passage you quoted:
“nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist”.
The additional note “except that they exist” destroys the whole argumentation, so that the whole reasoning is nothing at the end, it is still just an old metaphysical philosophy that tries to be a bit more clever, but actually is just hidden behind a mask that pretends to take into account the existence of perspectives.

If you truly want to take perspectives into account, you should consider that the whole idea of reality imagined by perspectives is itself a perspective. Talking about perspectives is itself a perspective. As a consequence, the very concept of “perspective” has to be considered completely unreliable; this, obviously, doesn’t make metaphysics valid again, because metaphysics has already been demolished by considering perspectives.
As a consequence, once we demolished metaphysics by considering perspectives, and then we demolished perspectives by considering that they must apply to themselves, we need to find different routes for philosophy, to see how to proceed after that. Surely we should avoid all those masked ways of bringing metaphysics back to life (like this one I commented on, for example: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/840414).

I think maths underlie our "universal logic" — Skalidris

This is what happens in science, but science is liable to be exploited for violence. This is the problem with the concept of “universal”: it is just a mask to hide our limited, local, particular perspective.

The concept of “universal” is itself contradictory: “universal” means that something is the same from all perspectives. “From all perspectives” means that it is able to take into consideration even the specific perspective of the specific person who is talking about it. Then how can the concept of “universal” be universal, since it comes from a particular perspective? This is the contradiction of “universal”.

The example you made is meaningful, because you mentioned a homeless: unfortunately, universities don’t recognize the importance of a homeless, unless the homeless, as you said, finds a solution to a math professor. But a homeless, in order to find such a solution, needs study and study needs money. So, your reasoning actually can be used to justify a capitalist system where instruction is kept closed into the hands of those who have money.

“You, you homeless, are you able to find an original solution to a math problem? No? Then stay homeless, you don’t deserve help!”

This is what the universality of Maths is able to make in society. It is not by chance that today the richest people are those who master Maths, which is economy, money, investment, banks, computers, Artificial Intelligence, weapons.

So, the question becomes: if Maths is so universal, why is it so strongly connected to such a lot of injustice in the world, even in the world of animals and plants?

I think the situation you described has already been happening in nature since the world existed. What you have described doesn’t apply to philosophy only, it applies to everything in nature. The natural selection of living beings happens exactly this way. We can take some general thoughts from what we can observe both in nature and in philosophy.

One thing that happens is that nature, including the world of philosophers, doesn’t care about immense wasting of resources, ideas, possibilities, anything. I think I don’t need to find detailed evidence to say that, if an extraordinary animal (or a philosopher) has just the bad luck of being born in an unfavourable environment, it doesn’t matter how marvellous it was. Nature doesn’t care about destroying whatever is not favoured, either by their own characteristics or by their bad luck about the environment where they were born. The world famous violinist Salvatore Accardo said in an interview that he had some chances of having very good talented pupils, but they had just the misfortune of being born in a family that didn’t favour at all their talent. The history of science is full of examples of brilliant minds who struggled before being appreciated as geniuses.

Another thing, that we can notice as a general consequence, is that almost everything is based, to a great extent, on power. Power can be considered another way of expressing the luck I have described. If you don’t have enough power, either in yourself or provided by your environment, you will die. This is what happens not only to living beings in nature, but to ideas as well. This means that a lot of ideas that we follow today because we think they are true, or better, actually they have survived just because for some reason they have got power. Certain religions, including their heritage of concepts and mentalities, have been successful because, to a great extent, they have been imposed thanks to political power. This means that today, when we think, for example, that philosophy should follow this or that method, we are, to a great extent, just passively reflecting the mechanisms of power that have shaped the history of ideas of the centuries before us and still shape our minds. In other world, an idea is not true because it is true, but because some kind of power has been able to impose it. We can think in these terms even about scientific evidence; even all the Maths and Geometry theorems, that we are able to prove in so clever and irresistible ways, can be considered just another way how power is able to impose itself as the fundamental law, fundamental rule, in nature, in ideas, in everything.

existing ideas have to be understood first in order to overcome them — simplyG

This is undoubtedly a good method, the best method, but history of culture shows that a lot of brilliant ideas have been discovered by ignorant people, probably because, thanks to their ignorance, they were less conditioned by traditional mentalities. This does not mean, of course, that ignorance is the best method for progress. It just happens sometimes, in all fields, and even in nature: some discoveries, or even important changes in the evolution of living beings in nature, have happened thanks to mistakes, wrong solutions, distortions, that in theory should just have been unproductive failures.

Philosophy is a special field in all of this situation, because it tries to be aware of it at the highest and deepest level. Now a crucial question arises: isn’t a lot of philosophical research aimed at gaining more and more control and power on what we do, what we think? Isn’t the search for awareness and knowledge equivalent to a search for power, at least to a great extent? Shouldn’t philosophy expose to criticism all of these things? How?

That’s why I think that today’s philosophy, like analytical philosophy, is a failure to a great extent: because it looks for power, hidden behind the mask of wanting to understand, wanting to know, so just still following passively the power mechanisms of nature.

That’s why I appreciate postmodern philosophy: because it tries to go against the inertia of nature based on power. I love, together with postmodern philosophy, the “weak thought”, elaborated by the great philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who died just a few days ago, on the 19th of September, ended up not very much appreciated, even almost unknown, as far as I perceive, if compared to the greatness of his philosophy, in my opinion.

This is also the revolutionary concept contained in the idea of Jesus as a God who ends up dying on a cross, that is, in a total failure; a revolutionary concept unfortunately ruined by the overimposed idea of the triumphant resurrection, at least if we consider the way it was developed in classical theology, not to mention all the betrayals made by Christianity after him.

Wouldnt that mean that getting a different experience from what the artist is communicating is impossible? That is, if art is only communicating experience of the artist then when someone gets a different experience (a different emotion for example) then we couldn't call it art. — DingoJones

Actually I agree with Gadamer's idea that, in interpreting something, there isn't much point in looking for the intention of the author. Once it has been produced, a work of art gains a state autonomous from its author. So, I think it is even legitimate to criticize the author's interpretation of their own work and disagree with them. But this does not mean that the author and their intention are just negligible. I still think that reference to the author’s intention is the best criterion, provided that we are aware that actually it is impossible to reach and that even the author might not be the one who has the best awareness about their own intention. I would add, also, a reference to the "hermeneutic circle": when I interpret art, I am also interpreted by it.

As I said, art is infinite, so “aesthetic experience” can have a lot of meanings. As a human, I don’t want to waste my time with low quality aesthetic experiences, so I want to look for the richest ways of enjoying art. This does not mean that what I consider less rich ways should not be practiced. It is just my way. I think that the richest way to live an aesthetic experience is when you try to think that there was an artist who tried to communicate themselves. This does not mean that enjoying a stone shaped by nature is meaningless. Personally I find myself very prone to admire the stones that I step on, for example, when I have a walk near the sea, and I admire them in themselves, as they are, I am not a believer in God.
However, I find that a work of art produced by a human gives me a richer experience than the one I can have with things produced, for example, by nature; I even think that I have to continuously educate myself to the appreciation of art produced by humans. Primarily, not exclusively. Secondarily, there are other things, like the works of art produced by nature and everything else, even including art produced by AI.

I think you misinterpreted what I wrote, as if I was talking about one single thing and nothing else, while actually I have been talking about degrees of importance. Degrees does not mean that what is secondary and below can be ignored. As in a house, you can’t have just the pillars, just because they are the essential. As in a path, starting is the primary most important step, but you cannot stop just after the start. Many other examples can be made. If an abstract painting is upside down and nobody notices it, this doesn’t mean that the correct direction can just be ignored.
We can consider that actually everybody approaches any work of art by steps, it cannot be otherwise, simply because we are humans and we are immersed in the flow of time. I think that, in the gradual personal approach that everybody builds in their enjoyment of art, the fact that art is communication of what the artist has inside themselves should be kept all the time as the essential reference point. This does not mean that you just need to concentrate on this aspect and ignore everything else. Art is an infinite phenomenon, so, stopping at any stage, at any aspect, is just disrespectful of it.

First test would be to see if you can tell the difference between AI art and human art. If you cannot, that would imply the “hollowness” exists in your mind and not the artwork. — DingoJones

I think this is an important point to get clarifications.
Art can be analyzed critically, trying to define objective elements that witness its value, its richness of meaning, its depth. But this is only one way of approaching art. The most human way, I would say the authentic way, is deeper, intuitive, almost entirely subjective, but, exactly because of this, it is vulnerable, even exposed to be ridiculised. The Italian of the Modigliani hoax happened in 1984 is meaningful: those boys were able to deceive even well experienced and professional art critics.
I would answer: “So what?”
Yes, art critics can be deceived, even easily; we can even be mistaken if an abstract painting has been hung upside down. So what? This means nothing. Art is not maths. These facts do not affect at all what is really important in art.
The essence of art is human inner experience that is communicated. There are many other important aspects, but the essence is the event of communication of an artist’s soul, the artist’s intimate emotions, feelings. For this reason, I want to know who the artist was, I want to know his life.
For example, I might be a victim of a stupid mistake and I might have believed, for all of my life, that a Michelangelo’s painting was a Van Gogh painting. So what? The authenticity of art is not in the objective truth about it. The authenticiy of art is the sincere research for the deepest and richest things that we can achieve; even better if we can add truth as much as possible. But truth is not the condition for art to be authentic. I will look for truth with all of my energies and abilities, but what is important is not reaching it or not; what is important is having cultivated a research for the best that we can achieve; so much the better if we can add truth as much as possible, but this is not the essential condition; truth is not the most valuable thing in art.

Once we understand this, we can understand why art created by AI is not art: it doesn’t matter if it is able to deceive everybody. What matters is that, once we know that it comes from a computer, we know that it cannot contain the richness of a work of art created by a human being.

About this, we didn’t even need to wait for AI: the problem came out already with photography. A good photography can deceive anybody. So what? Being vulnerable to deceit is just a normal aspect of our humanity, that contributes exactly to make us humans.

What is important is not what we find, but what we are looking for.

I think I can add a further explanation about what I consider a misunderstanding of subjectivity, that makes possible the OOO.
OOO wants to make, as it is said in the video at 3:42, “an ontology in which no objects have any kind of special privilege, particularly the human object”.
But subjectivity is not an object. We make it an object when we talk and think about it. But, in that case, what we are talking about is not the real authentic subjectivity, it is the objectified subjectivity.
The real authentic subjectivity is the one you feel in your here and now of your present, while you are thinking about it. As a feeling, it precedes thinking.
If we objectify subjectivity, then we can get an infinite chain of timing, similar to the problem where we cannot establish if what precedes is the egg or the chicken. I mean, we can start saying that subjectivity comes first. But we are able to elaborate the idea of subjectivity by using certain mental structures, so that mental structures come first. But we make use of our mental structures from inside our subjectivity, so that, when we think of them, we do it in a situation of being already conditioned by our subjectivity. And so on. This infinite chain is possible because we are working with two kinds of objects: the object that we call “mental structures” and the other object that we call “subjectivity”. This is what makes possible to Harman to say something like “let’s make a balance between these objects”.
But, as I said, subjectivity is not an object, it is a feeling, exclusively limited to the present of when you are thinking: you feel yourself inside your body, inside your eyes, inside your thoughts, inside the structures that make you possible to talk, between you and yourself, about this feeling; a feeling inside yourself that you cannot share with anybody, because you cannot say to anybody “come in for a moment, come inside me and see what I feel in my feeling inside myself”.
Once you enter in this state of listening to your present feeling your experience of being inside yourself, you can realize that nothing else can precede it, because anything else you can think about would be an objectification, that you put in connection with your objectification of your feeling.
You cannot compare your authentic subjectivity with anything else without first objectifying your authentic subjectivity.
This comparison is what Harman makes with his OOO.

It seems to me the nth attempt to bring back to life metaphysics, realism, objectivity, by using a false interpretation of subjectivism to support it. They say that, with relativism, the subject is taken back to the centre of the universe, but this is not true. When we say that everything is subjective, it doesn't mean that the subject is the strong reference point that determines everything. A critical relativist knows perfectly that, once we say that everything is subjective, we also know that the subject is completely unreliable, otherwise it would not be a subject, it would be an alternative source of objectivity. So, the subject is not the new centre of the universe in relativism, postmodernism, weak thought. The subject is just the outcome of the self-demolition that metaphysics cannot avoid to get. As such, the subject is just an intuitive experience, not an objective entity able to be the centre of the world.

We can consider that what is light and what is darkness can be very subjective from a psychological, emotional point of view. As you hinted, a harsh and violent revenge can be considered light from a subjective point of view.
The opposite of the enlighted rationality are emotions, irrationality, intuition. We can even say that, from a subjective perspective, darkness is just a different kind of light, like a different colour.

Not saying evil is good, I am however saying evil is in one sense inevitable — simplyG

Saying that evil is inevitable is equivalent to say that it is good. Inevitable means that our world is the best possible, so, the kind of good we can afford is the one we have in this world, so, it is the maximum good we can have in this world. This means that any evil we have in this world is just part of the general maximum good we can have in this world. Evil is part of good. Evil is good.
Moreover, from a historical point of view, saying that evil is inevitable prepares a good ground for another holocaust.
Moreover: how do you know that evil is inevitable?

There is a generic widespread mistake in most people who try to face the problem of theodicy. The mistake is in dealing with the problem by making use of logic as the essential instrument to solve it. So, this is the mechanism: we look for some logic, according to which we will become able to get the conclusion that evil is logical, evil can be explained. The consequent conclusion of this mechanism will be that evil is acceptable, evil is fine, evil is good. As you can see, this radical wrong method contains in itself the intention to reach the conclusion the evil is good. Trying to rely on logic to solve the problem of evil is not really a very logical way, because, logically, we can also understand that logic is unable to found itself. So, why should we trust logic, especially in facing this important problem? It is much better to adopt a dynamic and rich approach, that tries to use all of our experiences and abilities, without putting a definitive conclusion in our purpose. Rather, the purpose should be dynamic. Instead of sayng "Let's find an answer to the problem of evil" we should say "Let's work continuously to find better and better, ad infinitum, ways of living this human condition of our existence".

It is not by chance that the Enlightenment was a movement that considered rationality the main reference point for humanity. Rationality is a tremendously powerful and useful instrument, but it also create risks. It seems to me that today philosophy is experiencing something like a new Enlightenment, which means that today philosophers seem unable to appreciate, or even to understand, what is not rational, not logical, not scientific. I am referring especially to analytical philosophy.
It is true that darkness is quickly referred, in human experience, to fear, lack of reference points, not knowing about possible threats, Obscurantism. I said “quickly” because actually it seems that babies don’t fear darkness, until life drives them to develop this fear.
But darkness is also the time for dreams, sex, lovers, meditation, contemplation, slowness, irrationality, the unconscious, deep emotions. Darkness is where life in conceived and grows in the womb, until it becomes “coming to light”, that actually coincides exactly with the very first experience of high discomfort and desperate crying. All the nice and deep things of the darkness seem to be the things that today philosophy has left aside, leaving them, if ever, to literature and art.
Today is the era of lighted screens, primarily our great god the smartphone, then smartwatches, computer screens, tablets, TVs, Satnavs, all things that again push us towards what can be seen, what can be visual, controlled, making us dismiss what cannot be explained. I would say that even music belongs to darkness rather than light, and even painting belongs to it: a great master of lights in painting was actually the master of shades: it is Caravaggio. One of the most important paintings of all times is Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”.

I think that all of this has a lot to say to philosophy today. I call it spirituality.

What percentage is faithful then? 60%, 40%, 2%? And the percentage that is not faithful - how does this reinterpret or efface the percentage which is? What is a Christian to do? — Tom Storm

Once we realize that the Bible cannot be considered entirely faithful to historical facts, the next step is to analyze it, word by word, sentence by sentence, and study which things can be considered true and which ones cannot. Moreover, we need to consider the different perspectives from which what is true can be considered: for example, there is a difference between historical truths and theological truths.
This mix of truth and non-truth is not a problem for historians, archaeologists, scholars, scientists: for these people this mix is very normal in everything they study. Believers are those who most feel the problem of truth in the Bible. Believers have built theologies to explain why the Bible, that from their perspective is God’s Word, contains inaccuracies. One easy explanation is that God, in revealing himself, decided to use, as instruments, sinners, as those who wrote the Bible were, people with all their imperfections, problems, defects. In other words, theologically, the Bible is a particular example of God deciding to become human, flesh, mixing himself with the flaws and imperfections of humanity. At this point the hard problem is: how do we find what is true in the Bible? The problem is not so hard about historical truth; the hard problem is about theological truth. We can quickly say that this problem has never been solved. In the Roman Catholic context, the Church decided to believe that the Holy Spirit guides it in keeping and elaborating the right doctrine. The problem is that this theology is actually a vicious circle: the Church believes that the Holy Spirit assists it in keeping itself in the truth; who established that the Holy Spirit does this? The Church! So, the Church founds the action of the Holy Spirit, that founds the action of the Church. It is easy to perceive this circle like a trick just to hide an unsolved problem. Protestantism decided to believe that there is not an official Church in charge of establishing the truth, because God reveals himself not just to the high hierarchy of the Church, but to every believer. As a result, Protestantism has ended into a scattering of a lot of sub-churches, each one with its own specific doctrines. Additionally, we should consider that the problem of truth has to be examined in comparison with the philosophies of truth.

Because the very concepts of "perfect" and "consistent" are far from being perfect and consistent, because we are unable to assess them without using our brain, and our brain is unable to give foundations, guarantee of perfection or consistency, about itself.

You wrote that 90 or 99% of people will carry on looking for a meaning. As a consequence, you should agree that, by posing your question, you have automatically put yourself in this group. Then you wrote that people find toxic answers. If this phenomenon is so widespread, we should at least suspect that the question itself is toxic. It is not difficult to find reasons for this: for example, the question is reductive: it tries, surreptitiously, to reduce life to something else, to a meaning. Besides, that meaning is already supposed to be better than life, because the question itself implies that life without a meaning is not a good thing. Thus we can see that your question is really toxic, because it contains the ready made assumption that life is not a good thing, unless it finds some meaning as its justification. Such a toxic question needs, of course, to be thrown away and we need to keep ourselves vigilant to avoid any other surreptitious coming back of it under different masks.
Once we have gained this step, a better question could be: what are the best ways to approach life, to connect ourselves with life, to have an as much as possible good and fruitful relationship with life?