Very cool. What I had in mind was the crash of a worldview or some self-identification that rips one open so that one has to come up with richer synthesis of the self ---a synthesis of what one was and what one crashed into. For me youth was a sequence of unstable positions (highs and lows), falling upward into greater complexity, until, well, this sort of endless noon. I still read things, work on the details, but I feel a hell of lot more found than lost. And yet it I did this finding myself. I don't at all assume it's universally valid. Experience suggests otherwise. Maybe we all need "religion" customized for our unique wiring.

I think my system could handle it, but what about this nicely organized life? You get a marriage organized, a career on track, and then the two key features of red nights are threats as much as promises. If I tumble out of grad school, I'm going to find me a red night. But I'd rather not tumble. "Lord, please let me conquer mathematics at the baller level. "

I did take it out of context. I'm a little familiar with Eagleton. I don't love Dawkins. It occurs to me that lots of people might use "God" in a 'soft' way. They don't pride themselves on sharpening every concept, so they don't appear here, for instance, to defend their views. For some of them, maybe God is like some wisest part of their self, the perfect audience for authentic conversation. So omniscience would be a philosopher's cold version of the wisdom and not the knowledge of God as experienced. As a teen believer, I sometimes experienced God as someone who listened but never spoke. But this was mixed up with sin and Hell and the idea of the Bible as a "magic" authority. The best part of God was the least propositional. God is a person, then --just also what we'd call an imaginary friend -- at least that's how I read my past, anyway.

Nice point about the vertical dimension. I lovedFlatland. I suppose philosophy is to some more about science and to others more about wisdom. I think we need wisdom in order to place science in a greater context. We always already have a philosophy. It's just that there's usually room for improvement. Progress is falling uphill.

I learned a thing or two then that wasn't on any page. I'm guessing you can relate. Yes, young enough to still remember. Life is more refined and predictable these days, which I suppose I must prefer. A dose of soma and a stop by the feelies would be fun though, once a week.

I like that story. If he tells others, they might not exactly disbelieve him (though most would). There's also the problem of not being able to make use of it. We primarily want to control or benefit from things. If the hole-in-one cannot be achieved on demand on at least with regularity (every month, say), then it's going to be neglected for other options. It wins us or not as a tool.

Freudian typo. In the old days some especially wicked nights were lit by red bulbs.

I get that. I was reading some Jung a while back and he was going on and on about some crap. As I read, it occurred to me that he was a product of his times. And then somewhat abruptly, Jung dropped out of his philosophizing and basically stated that he was a product of his times. Holy shit. He knew.

My fascination with culture and history is related to that... wanting to see myself by seeing how I'm a product of my time. Maybe you and I are fundamentally doing the same thing, just in different ways. — Mongrel

I got some mileage out of Jung back in the day. His ambivalent criticism of Ulysses definitely gave me the impression that he was of a different time than mine. I loved "whatever is unconscious is projected." So self-knowledge is a 'harmonic' assimilation of the "shadow" and the "anima," etc. Even alchemy can be read as an unwittingly coded fantasy of the self's drama. Feuerbach and Hegel come to mind. Anyway, I like that Jung confessed that he too sees through borrowed eyes.

I like the idea of looking into how one is a product of one's times. Yes, this and the way we are a product of our direct influences, aesthetic and intellectual. There's also the past personalities we've worn or were and still remember in a sort of Russian-doll gallery. I guess self-enlargement is a goal, too, so that one's history is a story of progress. (I like to study the unstable heroic dramas the self casts itself in, as an inescapable structure or archetype.)

He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. — Terry Eagleton

But if that's all "He" is, then where is the personality or value? He looks here like the projection of the PSR (itself perhaps a rule-of-thumb or a prejudice or ambiguous) "outside" the totality. Only a little cognitive dissonance is relieved. One doesn't love or pray to a condition of possibility. It seems we have an obviously anthropomorphic god (that actually works some people, however 'uncool' or 'irrational') or a more sophisticated still-anthropomorphic god (PSR, etc.) Or we can take either negative theology and/or the incarnation myth all of the way. God is meaninglessness or we are all the God worth worrying about. Or some new poet comes along with other options.
Maybe what matters the most is how we position our intellectual selves with respect to this family of 'God' meanings. That is accessible right here and now. Is this not at all related to picking out a nice jacket for October?

That's what I'm saying - in ancient philosophy the primary distinction was been 'reality and appearance' - the 'ordinary people' (the hoi polloi) were always fooled by appearances - prisoners in the metaphorical cave - whereas the philosopher ascended by reason into a greater reality. Much of the 'mystical Plato' has been redacted out of the modern interpretations. — Wayfarer

I won't say that Plato wasn't on to something. Actually I think philosophy is about ascension into a greater reality, but this is also in Hegel. It's a question of location perhaps. Are we talking about an enlarged perspective? Better concept-tools? Heights of feeling? Because that's a reality I do not doubt. I don't even mind the elitism in the private sphere. Certainly that's part of the issue. Claims of hidden realities or access to gods have been abused, or that's the perception. But I like the mystical and think the mystical in terms of subjective experience. I don't think there's much of a bias against that, even if there is skepticism, for here too it's easy to imagine a bogus guru.
I think we want happiness and largely map the objective in terms of what resists our desire or offers pleasure.

Frege demolished correspondence theory. That's what a fair amount of 20th Century AP is about... trying to come up with a response. I see it being tied to some fairly seismic issues related to disintegration of religion and the rise of materialism. It's not about philosophers trying to take over the role of the dictionary. — Mongrel

Sure, the correspondence theory falls apart as the air gets thin. But in the ordinary world of ordinary objects, that's how we talk and live. We're only philosophers part-time. I agree that at high altitudes it is largely about religion, materialism, and various 'concept religions' clashing, most of them assuming that they are representing something accurately. Also, sometimes as philosophers we are just working out our own worldviews with a purpose. We think in terms of the claims that deserve and do not deserve our respect. We refine our positions according to some image of wisdom and style.
For me it was quite a head change to abandon the notion that truth was singular. We inherit a physical world that we mostly agree on (beds, food, cars, faces) and then construct a layer on top of this world that is under-determined by practical life. It's OK to believe in God or pure reason or not, as long as one stops at red nights, pays taxes, doesn't commit murder. In a pluralistic culture that largely assumes the singularity of abstract truth (someone must be right and others wrong), we're smacked constantly with incompatible claims about unseen entities, including gods, quarks, sin, duties, etc. This is not exactly innocent, since it's largely about justifying and attaining power. We can look at such belief systems (for belief is largely systematic) as individual adaptations --largely used for solidarity. To abandon the notion of the "correct" system of abstract thought for the notion of continual improvement in terms of pain/pleasure (high and low) rather than accuracy is to welcome the partial assimilation of otherwise opposed belief systems. Rather than "X is true," we have "you might find a use for X."
I still think that (on forums at least) there is a fair share of writing the 'official' dictionary.

It seems that we'd have to be God to understand God. Hence the fascination of the incarnation myth and Feuerbach. Unless we have "direct access" to God (which means what? unless we are God? or the totality knowing itself?), we would seem to need concepts and feelings as a medium. Even if we are God, we'd need a dialectical process to make this clear, we'd only be potentially God. And this wouldn't be the ground of being or timeless authority that is usually craved. But, in any of these cases, God for us would always be concepts and feelings. (How we could insure others that claims of "direct access" were not just concepts/feelings? What would that mean, though, if not God as object?)

How do you see this tying into issues to do with truth? What is your theory of truth, btw? — Mongrel

I guess I'd try to paraphrase any statement by looking at it in as large a context as is reasonable. I think it's safe to assume that assertions are offered (in a polite conversation) as potentially valuable strings of marks and noises.
I don't know I have what would be called a theory of truth. I like to emphasize strings of marks and noises as tools in the hand of beings with "irrational" purposes. So my criterion is a generalized utility. I think the correspondence theory of truth is great for less abstract propositions. On this less, truth and utility are just about the same. I don't want to deny common sense objective reality or ordinary language. But I think we drag the correspondence theory's massive utility away from its strong intersection with utility into the abstract realm (along with PSR and LEM). But for me this abstract realm is ambiguous. It's hard to make PSR and LEM look necessary. That's when we look at strings and marks of noises in the context of the entire personality. How do they live? Are they happy? What do they deduce from ambiguous/abstract beliefs in terms of actions and less ambiguous propositions?

Yes, meaning holism and a shift toward worldly context. I'm not saying concept clarification is never worthwhile. I like analyzing "explanation," for instance. But there's also the issue of meaning-by-fiat. No matter what consensus philosophers achieve (which probably won't be much), we all have to get out and the world in the jungle of varying uses and mostly live there. Moreover, it's unlikely that philosophers are going to tame this varying use with their expertly determined 'correct' use. So to me there's a certain futility in the enterprise.

I think you misunderstand me. Perhaps I didn't provide enough context. The word poet evolved from the word for creator. I was thinking instead of:

[World disclosure] refers to how things become intelligible and meaningfully relevant to human beings, by virtue of being part of an ontological world – i.e., a pre-interpreted and holistically structured background of meaning. This understanding is said to be first disclosed to human beings through their practical day-to-day encounters with others, with things in the world, and through language. ..

"[T]he world is not a possible object of knowledge – because it is not an object at all, not an entity or set of entities. It is that within which entities appear, a field or horizon [that sets] the conditions for any intra-worldly relation, and so is not analysable in terms of any such relation. " (Mulhall)

The implication is that we are always already "thrown" into these conditions, that is, thrown into a prior understanding of the things which we encounter on a daily basis – an understanding that is already somewhat meaningful and coherent. However, our understanding cannot be made fully conscious or knowable at one time, since this background understanding isn't itself an object:

"All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument... as the element in which arguments have their life." (Wittgenstein)

— Wiki

So being-disclosure enlarges the system. This reminds me of the "commonsense" background presupposed by abstract thought. Or unconscious inferences...

There are different uses of "truth." Maybe the unit of meaning is not the sentence or the paragraph but all of human history. Maybe zooming in on individual words as if they are legos can only take us so far (not worthless, but not enough). In life as we live it, we deal with personalities as a whole. To mock objective truth is just humility about our own beliefs in one scenario and irresponsibility in another. We want to know if we can count on someone. We want them to know that they can count on us. Take language out of the context of meaningful action, and it becomes fuzzy.

I think what needs to be understood is the sense in which the 'manifest realm' (the 'ten thousand things' in Chinese terminology), is the domain of phenomena, of existing things. We are conditioned by modern thinking to believe that this is the fundamental real, but no traditional philosophy accepts that. — Wayfarer

I'd say rather that this is the common sense foundation of the real or objective. In Plato's time, I'm guessing most Athenians took boats, swords, and olives to be real. To call these things illusions with respect to something mental or immaterial was a bold challenging of common sense. Indeed, we have no choice to but to treat such objects as necessities and/or threats. Perhaps there's a shift toward taking these 10000 things as the only real things.

Which totality, do you mean the inductive principle which classes all caused things together as contingent? The cause of that totality would be the human mind which uses the inductive reason. — Metaphysician Undercover

By totality I mean everything, including the discourse about it that we're having right now. This includes the human mind.

What do you mean by this, "projected 'up'"? — Metaphysician Undercover

One could argue that the PSR and LEM are learned "prejudices," acquired in an everyday context. We project "necessary" relationships (laws of nature, physical and human) in order to map and thrive in the world. If some event surprises us, we look for a "cause" or "law" to put it under. So "everything has a reason" because thinking is largely the construction of a system of such reasons. In that sense, the PSR may be merely descriptive of the kind of thinking that tends to work for us. Similarly, less abstract propositions (there is garlic in this dish) are indeed true or false. But "the real is rational and the rational is real" is perhaps too ambiguous for the LEM. The LEM itself is perhaps to ambiguous for the LEM. So this "projection upward" is just the taking what may be merely useful prejudices as axioms for the derivation of metaphysical truths.

In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground. — Zappfe

Depressive states are perhaps sustained in a mind seduced by such an image. (This is not to say that there is something other than seduction by images when it comes to grand judgments about life as a whole.)

It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living. — Zappfe

Is the alternative of filtering and selection supposed to be truth rather than chaos? Much thinking is unconscious. I believe that. But how is this mass of unconscious thinking the truth rather than the background? Repression is used in a sly, pejorative way, as if there were something to recommend the alternative.

The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. — Zappfe

This is structure itself, unequal forces in collision, temporary stability. These 'repressional mechanisms' are (in the human sphere) tools for the achievement of purpose. Don't lie. Don't steal. It's better for most of us if most of us don't. Don't text and drive. Focus. Etc.

In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance. — Zappfe

So are adults living without illusions, or not? If so, what is Zappfe bringing? Is he not also trying to paint adults as such children?

We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. — Zappfe

Easy to agree here. And I find it easy to see Zappfe as the salesman of one more anchoring (pessimism), one that I began to resent and finally took pleasure in burying.

Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it – the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life. — Zappfe

The object was the goal. Then a new object becomes the goal. So we can posit a goal archetype. But sometimes the goal is the sandwich we can make downstairs. We can also make living on this gradient a goal, aware that permanent satisfaction in a given object is not to be expected. No goal is central (all is vanity) but a life with many goals and attainments is good --or can be good.

The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.
The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.

The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation – they gain in significance thereby.

Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here. — Zappfe

This is more than a 'remedy against panic' in my view. Indeed, I prefer to see panic in terms of a clash of hero myths. When aren't we posing as heroes in a drama? This "rareness" is maybe just Zappfe being oblivious to the fact that most are consumers of personalities largely constructed by others (like Zappfe, for instance). The anxiety of influence is rare, but that's because not everyone casts themselves as a truly original personality potentially worth imitating/assimilating. We heroisms of humility and altruism that often work against posing as unique or beyond the law or...etc.

Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.

– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?

– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.

– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.

He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole. — Zappfe

This guy is the anti-Nietzsche, isn't he? This is the same mania of Thus Spake Zarathustra. It's (to me) nakedly a grandiose religious conception. It's the sort of thing Nietzsche suspected was hiding in the "great sages," but here it is proclaimed boldly, the religion of anti-life, anti-earth, and not in the name of some better place or better principle. In the name of nothingness, right? And yet it takes a pleasure in speaking itself, a pleasure in the existence of midwives to offend. It needs the very 'problem' it wants to diagnose and cure. Zappfe climbed his mountains. Schop. played his flute. They wore their dark views like a smart new jacket from the local H & M. I won't hypocritically curse them for this. That's just the way it is. It's fun to play dress-up. Life as endless play, however edgy and grim...

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice. — Bukowski

Bukowski omitted "writing" or being-Bukowski because (perhaps) 'illusion' is just the the other guy's (more or less stable ) solution. My solution frames the solutions of others. Do we not always look through such a frame? Does this game have an outside?

First, things which have a beginning have a cause. To dispute this inductive premise you simply need to find things which have a beginning and have no cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what is the cause of the totality? If we can always tell ourselves that we just haven't found a cause yet, then we can avoid a counterexample.

The PSR looks like a pragmatic maxim evolved to succeed in a world of objects. If we find a car parked in front our house that we don't recognize, we assume that someone drove it there. We don't expect cars to just materialize out of then air. But we can conceive of thing. We want causes or necessary/expected relationships so that we can predict/manipulate objects, including other humans. So we all have some vision of human nature as well as object nature. It looks the same with the LEM. Lots of worldly propositions 'must' be true or false. Someone did or didn't fasten their seatbelt.

But all of this gets projected "up" for application to the totality (PSR) and to abstract propositions that admit of ambiguity (LEM.) Yet the strength of these principles (more descriptions or admonitions perhaps) rests on ordinary life.

And thus - departing from usual mechanistic thinking - the ground and the context are also coming into being via the production of the figure or event. — apokrisis

What you say that this is a sort of poetic act? That beings are disclosed by/as new concepts of things-background pairs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle

Must the PSR be true or not true? Lots of metaphysical statements can be accused of ambiguity. I tried to give statements in an earlier post that challenged the application of LEM to more abstract propositions.

Mind and body interact in immensely complex ways, we may not understand these mechanisms, but for sure these "realms" are not separate from each other. Without a body there would be no world to sense and there would be nothing to refer to. But without the mind nothing would be able to refer, there would be no "I" and experience would probably be an incoherent primordial soup, slightly laced by instinct — Wilco Lensink

Good points. The "I" that pretends to think learned a language as a child bumping into objects. The "i" is passionate, too. There is something profoundly "trans-physical" about words, though. Maybe this is what the legacy offers us, a focus on to what degree reality is made of (the meanings of) words.

I challenge the LEM and that challenge has not been addressed. It's no big deal. I'm just saying that I think you need the LEM, and that the LEM is problematic. Why? In a word: ambiguity.

his applies even to our quest for meaning - what meaning we do derive from our lives seems to be fundamentally reactionary. Tragedy leads to meaning. — darthbarracuda

Felix culpa? Thrownness. It's hard to imagine a better drama. If the protagonist had some tiny guarantee of justice or success, it would be a smaller tale. I checked out your blog and found a link to some guy whose theory was that irony was maximized in the creation of the world. I like that. There's a humor in Dostoevsky that surpasses just about everything mortal. I call it the laughter of the gods. It haunts all human earnestness. Hesse explores it in Steppenwolf.

Maybe we have a purity myth versus a completeness myth here. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. In Hesse's Siddartha the future Buddha sees in the ferryman/sage all human faces, including murderers and prostitutes. That's what I like in Hegel, too. We have increasing complexity, not a whittling down. The higher evolves from the lower and depends on it for contrast. I suppose I sacrificed the good to the true, thinking as I abandoned religion that the good was a candy-coating. It's not so simple, of course, but I see the philosopher as a man of the darkness as much as of the light. Under-standing. There's that fruit of the tree of knowledge as sin. Catholic upbringing backfired. The serpent turned out to be my guy. And yet: "Be wise as as serpent and gentle as a dove."

Any "man-hater", "extremist" or "TERF" is most certainly a feminist-- they are concerned about protecting and advancing the rights of women. On some issues, they just aren't very good. But such failures do not amount to an absence of feminism. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But that's exactly why many women are ambivalent about the term. They don't want to be confused with man-haters. It's obviously why some men are ambivalent about the term.

I looked up TERF and found this quote:

transgender woman are in fact men using an artificialy constructed feminine apperance to exert patriarchy from the inside of feminism and believe it or not, to gain access to womans bathrooms in order to rape them. — Brennen

(Those aren't my misspellings.)
This "patriarchy" is like the devil. Men are the witches (excepting maybe those who cheer from the bench). Is there actually a patriarchy? Well, maybe, but who can use such a sullied word now? 'Rape' is also being smeared around like mayonnaise. If everything is rape, nothing is rape. If everything is patriarchy, nothing is patriarchy.

Only a tiny segment of the population is this twisted, thankfully. I don't take it any more seriously than Stormfront or end-of-the-worlders hiding out in caves or Alex Jones' morbid porn self-righteously purveyed as hidden truth. I don't take politics terribly seriously, either, though. I think we improve our lives more directly by eating well, spending our money well, choosing our friends well, working hard. But then we crave religion, and resentful ideologies look like religions. We've got something on the cross and evil spirits like "patriarchy."

What I was trying to say before is that I think most of what we consider to be enjoyable or pleasurable moments are actually just a reaction to a need or a desire: the relief of anxiety, or suffering-in-disguise. — darthbarracuda

I was first exposed to this view via Schopenhauer, but I don't think it's an accurate conception of pleasure. True, pleasure includes the cessation of pain. But when I first fell in love (and it was reciprocated), this earth became a paradise for me. (It's still good and still her, but there's nothing like the beginning. Things become warm and comfortable.)Then of course there is the combination of friends, drugs, music. I've been so "blissed-out" that I didn't even want to speak. Words were cups too small. Paintings of Christ making that hand-sign come to mind. There's just no way I could begin to describe this as mere cessation of pain. And then there are especially good sexual encounters that again one wouldn't dream of reducing to cessation of pain. True, we need some hunger to enjoy food and some lust to enjoy sex, but even this hunger/lust is mixed (if life is going well) with the anticipation of its joyous consummation. Finally there are philosophical pleasures. Great new ideas are like love affairs of the mind. Conceptual revolutions are like falling in love. You assimilate them, take them for granted, and then find a new revolution. These are peak experiences, hardly available upon demand or without risk. But they help me make my case that pleasure is not just relief. I can't know what intensities you've had access to. But I insist that 'spirituality' is largely a matter of the heart and therefore of experience which alters the sense of what is possible. ( I must admit that I have been lucky. I wasn't born to a rich or educated family, but I was given (by 'the gods' or chance) decent looks, great health, talent. I really can't know the pain/pleasure ratio of others. I just know that I got better at finding pleasure and dodging pain, and that much of this was an adjustment of ideology, slowly and painfully achieved. )

All of your post was great. I'll pick out a few favorite lines.

He comes to self-realization in the fire. The hero usually returns after a descend into the earth. He is resurrected and reborn. — Wilco Lensink

I really relate to this, especially the symbol of fire. In T. S. Eliot's poem, "the fire and the rose are one." We give ourselves to death which is life. The opposite of death-life is undeath, a sort of entombment in some fixed crystallization of our selves. I found that idea in Norman O Brown, who wrote: "To be remember is the ambition of the dead." I wrestled with a hell of a lot of hell in my 20s. Now I feel self-liberation not only in fire but as fire. (A funny pop culture image is the T-1000 in T2. The self is liquid that pretends to be solid --until it stops pretending.)

When I withdrew the projections a painful realization dawned that I had made up everything I believed in and I was in fact mortal, would die, would perhaps not return, maybe there was no god, etc. This was devastating. — Wilco Lensink

I had a psychedelic experience that came on as death terror. I had to affirm this death without ressurection, there among my friends (in my mind). But then a massive flood of love "poured" through my chest. I used Christian myths (as myths or passwords) to navigate from death terror, death affirmation, and then incredible love. I can't live everyday like that, but I reaffirm my death (in theory, less viscerally, in the distance) whenever thoughts of mortality return.

To return to the hero myth: I felt like I had fought a dragon. This psychedelic experience of four months was so intense I felt like a survivor. — Wilco Lensink

I've been afflicted a few times in life with intense bouts of depression. Afterward I call such a bout "the black dragon." There's a Sugarcubes line: "with your own voice, I'll tell you lies." Well, the black dragon is a logical monster, and he wants to die, since he's too proud for the risk of humiliation that life demands for us. Here's the odd and crucial thing: it was an affair of the hear entirely. I have/had the same metaphysical system as my usual happy self as I did in these intense bouts. "Desire derailed from mortal things." That's the phrase that came to mind.

After that I was fully enlightened to the fact of how much value there is in giving meaning, to my experiences and to the world. — Wilco Lensink

Well, you certainly have a likable directness and honesty. I'm glad you're here. I get the sense that you indeed have seen/realized something.

That seems to assume that people are "ideal adjudicators," where they'll judge people on merit without bias. — Terrapin Station

Well, I doubt either of us believe in some fixed vision of merit or absence of bias. Legislating against sexism and racism is obviously good. The use of free speech against sexism and racism is also great. But 'benevolent' sexism (and racism) casts an obvious shadow. I'm guessing there are some reasonable defenders 'good' sexism/racism out there, but I'm sure there are crazies out there too. I've read them in their own words.

One negative reading of "idealist" is as a person who does what is 'right' without calculating the consequences. If improvement were really the point, I'd expect the language to be more inclusive, less scapegoating. Problem-fixers suggest realistic alternatives, not devils to blame and exorcise. They don't build a persona that depends on the continuation of the problem. Where would some of these folks be without a victim to rescue and an oppressor to accuse?

That is certainly right. It is the way we sort out the self from the world in terms of the actions we can freely take vs the reality which is their constraint — apokrisis

Very nice way to put it. Fichte comes to mind.

In Fichte's view consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not part of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception. — Wiki

Also Nietzsche's will-to-power could be read as the desire to enlarge of sphere of freedom.

And yet there is also something about science/metaphysics/maths being able to leave the realm of concrete intuitions behind. If we stay anchored in the sensuous - believing things like colour is "real" - then that becomes a hindrance to real abstract thought. Part of becoming a theoretician of any kind is being able to let go of intuitions once some useful-feeling start has been made - the abductive leap - as from there we have to get into the formality of deducing consequences and inductively bolstering hypotheses. The models and the measurements must be allowed to take over. — apokrisis

I totally agree. We clearly don't want to be bound by 'ur-science.' But we can't even support our own heads on our baby necks at first. We learn to walk, learn the names of things, learn a deep belief in selves. Our sophisticated theories can indeed double back against their intuitive, ur-science foundations. To mix space with time is of course an immense violation. Wave/particle duality and raw chance are two more. But yes the models and measurements must take over. And counter-intuitive 'radical' imagination becomes valuable indeed. I'm hardly an expert, but I can see that much.

Now of course we should still want to have an intuitive interpretation of QM, so as to make some further abductive leap towards an even greater level of generality in theory (and measurement). — apokrisis

This makes sense to me, which is why I think metaphor/analogy is so important. I experience it everywhere in math. The sincere formalist would have a hard time finding a proof.

Of course, empiricism. We can obtain consensus about this manifest image or LCD of human experience. We can measure the application of knowledge claims at least and therefore measure knowledge claims indirectly. Religion doesn't have the cleanest hands and we've all seen wishful thinking. And yet the books in the Bible are treasure. So it's a question of positioning both the traditions of religion and science appropriately on a personal level.
Anyway, there's a good starter criterion for non-empirical knowledge. "Wisdom maketh a man's face to shine." It's hard to see the unhappy man as wise or knowing. Naturally we can only smash words together on an anonymous forum, so we can't apply that here. We really don't know the flesh-and-blood beings who manifest here as streams of text. But in life we judge personalities as a whole, not only the person by their words but their words by the person.

I love Jung.

Hoo, thanks for the Hegel reference! — Wilco Lensink

My pleasure. Kojeve's book on H is nice.

I came to the insight through reading the works of Carl Gustav Jung, some of you may know him. — Wilco Lensink

Big influence on me.

They "project" their world view onto the world, and believe this is the world. Then they try to make this into an objective truth through the scientific method. However, all of this is man-made, even the scientific method and concepts like "truth" and "objectivity". We seem to be caught up in a world of projection, meaning: we realize not that there is a subject watching.
It is clear this applies to researchers who set up (design) an experiment and from this induce universal "truths". However, through this scientific method we may contemplate the concepts of subject and object thoroughly, and we may come to realize how and what we are projecting. — Wilco Lensink

I agree. This is the sort of thing I focus on. I also like the myths/projections that concern value. For instance, the hero myth. I think self-esteem is generally founded on identification with some myth of the hero. Maturity is the evolution of this myth. We not only change in pursuit of a possible future self. That possible future self also changes as we live and interact with others.

We only have the play of our own signs, never direct access to the thing-in-itself.

And we see this in science. We only have our representations in terms of theories and measurements. The structure or form of things is there in our formal descriptions, but the materiality is imputed largely as an act of imagination. — apokrisis

There's a notion of the real as "that which resists." We can bump into things in the dark. Of course if we never interacted with a thing (it never opposed our will), it might as well not be real. There's something like primitive science that we learn as children. Push some things they will move. If somethings getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder, it's coming to get you, or you're coming to get it. We fear and desire these its only to the degree that they "exceed" the sign or are "actually there." We can contemplate things in their absence. Then imagine gluing this idea back on to the "resistance"-in-itself. It's hard to let go of tactile thinking. To pass through solid objects like the Kool-aid man. That would be "magic." That would excite an animal who loves straight lines to the goal.

Anyway, it seems that sophisticated science (science proper) depends on this bodily, sensual "child" or "animal" science. The sense of the self, the correspondence theory of truth, the LEM, the PSR. All of this is hard to shake, though the farther reaches of abstract thought temporarily escape them. Maybe, too, it was as simple as curve fitting. Screw intuition. Fit a curve and extrapolate. Perhaps these escapes are most effectively "captured" for general use exactly by sign systems that boldly leave intuition behind (SR, GR, QM), which then are used for the machines that convince us on the "child science" or ur-science level. We also have this sort of conversation which allows us to steer our thinking at the highest level, forge the criteria for our criteria.

(3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation — Carl Sagan

Wouldn't this just be the movement of information? Impressive if valid. But reincarnation would just be a metaphorical structuring of a child knowing something that it "shouldn't" according to our current understanding of the possible. .

I like that you went all in. I can respect the style without agreeing.

But the difference is that I would say that the idea of the supernatural only arises within a naturalism lacking in sufficient generality. It is reductionist materialism - the claim that the real is just "observable matter" - which begets its equivalently strong "other" in the subjectivism and mentalism of the claim that there is then also the reality of the "immaterial observer". — apokrisis

I agree. Our most general image of nature-life is not the scientific image. That's just a piece of it. All of our talk in the interior is part of our model, and the scientific image can only be constructed and fathomed in a larger context. At the same time, reducing the totality to relationships between measurements, for instance, is extremely useful. It's just bad when it plays as "truest" image.

As a bit of information, it is no longer (or as little as possible) part of the material world, and so free to act as a part of a play of symbols. — apokrisis

Yes indeed. There is a Platonic-enough realm under a different law. We live in a "vortext" of signs and signs' other (feeling-sensation?---but this is already a trespass).

But replacing mental substance/res cogitans/thinking and feeling stuff with a more abstract dualism - one of matter and sign - is what it would mean to actually start explaining the particularity of the observing human mind in cosmically generalised fashion. — apokrisis

I personally can't see how we get out of the system of signs. We can use signs to create a generalized science of the relationships between signs, certainly. The non-sign matter threatens to be an empty negation like the thing-in-itself --though admittedly there's some common sense grounding it nevertheless.)

For matter and sign to be the sharp contrast that emerges, the primal ground has to be also talked about as itself a third kind of abstract. — apokrisis

I agree. If we are pursuing the emergent distinction seriously, we can't favor either of the children. So maybe "matter" for you is just the signs we use in physical science? Or how is it approached?

That's instrumentality right there and anyone of any moral worth, I think, ought to find it repugnant. — darthbarracuda

And this self-conscious repugnance looks like an instrument for the attainment of a sense not only of moral worth but of moral superiority. While aspects of life are certainly repugnant, a pessimistic system rewards the pessimist for exaggerating this repugnance. Disgust as virtue.

Yeah, Kojeve seems to have been quite the character, but he was one of my first paths into Hegel, nevertheless.

I had the idea this is what the thread was about. — Wayfarer

I think we agree on our dismissal of scientism as an option, at least as a personal adjustment. I think we both have access to different non-scientific traditions that sustain us.

I agree that ambiguity isn't generally desirable. But the "language on holiday" metaphor may be apt. There's something priestly, scholastic, unworldly in word-math detached from practice. I'm not confident that the fuzziness of language can be tamed except by such an appeal to practice. How do two positions vary as rules for action? We get equivalence classes of theories this way, with presumably more relevant (and by definition more worldly) differences. I want "worldly" philosophy. I like the image of the philosopher as impiety incarnate, the anti-priest, thought as a chisel against the real as that which resists our will. (But then I get my 'unworldly' fix from pure math.)

I browsed the essay. I find the god-shaped-hole quite manageable. I don't think we can condemn modernity but only the shallow understandings of the metaphysical/spiritual import of the scientific image. We don't have to worship this useful but necessarily reductive tool. I think one can learn to affirm one's mortality and groundlessness, but not without help from symbols that resonate "irrationally"/emotionally perhaps. "Pure" reason and objectivity-for-its-own are strange household gods.

I once had the idea 'you couldn't have a "theory of everything" because "the theory" would have to be included in the "everything" that is the subject of the explanation'. So there would always be a problem of recursiveness, that your explanation includes the explainer. And that seems very close to what Planck was driving at. — Wayfarer

Consider this:

To be sure, in the end, “scientific knowledge” comes back toward itself and reveals itself to itself: its final goal is to describe itself in its nature, in its genesis, and in its development.
...
It is by following this “dialectical movement” of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself — i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech — of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their “dialectical movement,” the Speech that reveals them.
...
Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein). What exists in reality, as soon as there is a Reality of which one speaks — and since we in fact speak of reality, there can be for us only Reality of which one speaks what exists in reality, I say, is the Subject that knows the Object, or, what is the same thing, the Object known by the Subject.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought.
— Kojeve

At issue is this: that naturalism must 'assume the subject'. In other words, naturalism assumes, or begins from, the fact of the intelligent subject in the domain of objects and forces.

But that only succeeds in 'burying the metaphysics', so to speak - denying that there is any metaphysic, whilst actually being embedded in one (for which, see 'the spirituality of secularity', on pages 189-190 of this essay). — Wayfarer

Yeah, anti-supernatural naturalism has to be embedded in a metaphysics that founds it. A generalized naturalism, for which the supernatural is not coherent, can be presented as a description of human thinking. If the supernatural is present in terms of empirical claims, objects as the cause of "natural" objects, then this looks like a revision and enlargement of nature (or the systematic conceptual image of nature.) Of course aiming at Being or the eye that cannot see itself (the metaphysical subject in Wittgenstein) or in mystical passion is something else.