I've felt bored since I was a small child. The feeling has never left me... — Tom Storm

If it never left you, you wouldn’t know you had it. What I mean is boredom is a comparison, just as sadness or happiness. It requires a letdown from a state which was non-boring or at least less boring. We live our lives as a series of creativity cycles, and boredom is one element of these cycles, the phase of the curve where what had held our interest become constraining and redundant. This indicates that in boredom a part of ourselves has already moved onto the next cycle, but we perceive the incipient phase of the new as a landscape without recognizable landmarks, as dull and empty.

Maybe my problem is that I've always felt everything was contingent upon culture and history and that there is no foundation or point of reference for humans. Perhaps I need to become a Christian fundamentalist to self-overcome. — Tom Storm

Existentialists like Sartre were caught in transition between two worlds, the old one of foundational certainty and the new one of ungrounded values. As a result their philosophies were an act of mourning the loss of the old. They hadn’t yet reached the point of affirmatively celebrating ungroundedness , because they still considered negation as a bad thing, inferior to ultimate truths. So they believed they were stuck with an inferior way of life but couldn’t go back to the old one.

Nietzsche has the whole spiel about how others decide where they want to end up re morality, and then invent reasons for getting there. It's a good critique, but it seems like it could easily be turned back on his own work and his fairly rigour free retelling of Jewish history that just happens to paint a picture where the "real story," lines up with his beliefs.

I always felt these had a lot in common with the old: "you only reject the obvious truth of Christ because you're blinded by your own pride and shame at your sin." I'm not against arguments from psychoanalysis as a whole, but they seem to easily fall into this problem of being "too neat." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps. Then again, your reading of Nietzsche may be too neat.

I've never understood the point of 'continual self-overcoming'. What does this mean (or look like) in practice when you are going about your daily business? It sounds kind of tedious — Tom Storm

We all do it anyway, whether we want to or not. Another way to put it is that life takes you where it wants you to go, not where you think you should. The feeling of tedium, boredom, meaninglessness arises out of being stuck in a situation, set of practices, way of life, a value system or worldview that one no longer fully relates to. But if we are taught that the way of moral, spiritual and empirical truth involves chaining ourselves to fixed, foundations, we will consider overcoming to be a mark of immorality, irrationality, madness, nihilism, infidelity. As a result we will bear the tedium of our chains as a sign of righteousness. Your emotions tell you how continuous your self-overcoming should be.

Do you mean propositional logic? — Tom Storm

yep

If the "weak" can constrain the "strong", then the "weak" aren't actually weak, and the "strong" aren't actually strong. What gives — baker

It’s more a matter of constraining the impulses of strength within oneself. By ‘strength’ Nietzsche meant a will to continual self-overcoming ( not personal ‘growth’ as in progress toward self-actualization, but continually becoming something different). The weak path is toward belief in foundational morality, a god who favors the meek, universal truth and the supremacy of proportional logic.

It's very odd to talk about the "practical implication" of truth — Leontiskos

Unless, of course, one is a pragmatist.

When a human being makes a decision of any kind—moral or otherwise—they always do so for a reason. For example, "The Earth is X distance from the moon because of the parallax measurements I collected."

Now when one says they ought to do something, they have made a decision, and there is a reason for their decision. The reasoning process involves apprehended truth (i.e. that which is apprehended to be true — Leontiskos

Your notion of truth is just one theory of what truth means. Not everyone who does things for a reason would explain their reasoning on the basis of your theory of truth. For instance, some would say a decision is placing a bet that the consequences of one’s decision will be more or less compatible with one’s anticipations.

Plenty of rational "immoral" choices to make in life. Why not just say good and evil? It's the same pathetic equation. — Vaskane

I agree here. There are an infinity of competing rationalities out there. But we do tend to find some value systems more pragmatically useful than others, given our purposes within our local communities. Do you suppose there is anything like a progress of pragmatic rationality?

In one possible world babies suffer if they're murdered and it's immoral to murder babies.

In another possible world babies suffer if they're murdered but it's not immoral to murder babies.

In both worlds we believe that it is immoral to murder babies.

What is the observable difference between each world — Michael

Absolutely none. So why don’t we dump moral realism and moral subjectivism and all other moldy conformist dictums stuck in the 18th century, which blithely ignore all the exciting ideas coming from current research in evolutionary biology, anthropology , psychology and language studies?

I'm invited to a dinner party.

"Hey, bert1, nice of you to come. Have you had a good day?"
"Yeah, fab. I killed 21 babies. Great day!"

Has bert1 understood the concept of moral obligation? — bert1

.

Perhaps. But I might question bert1’s understanding of proper dinner party etiquette.

Interesting. I see where you are coming from. Do you think it is possible to formulate any general principles that can be used to assess actions? Or is this a pointless exercise? — Tom Storm

I would throw out the notion of immorality as bad intent, and along with it justice as blame and culpability. In place of principles to assess moral blame, I would focus on techniques and strategies of exploring, refining and clarifying workable ways of making sense of and relating to others. How do we know when our social sense making is failing us? Affectivities such as guilt, anger, anxiety and threat define the contours of the disintegration of permeable ways of anticipating the actions of others and oneself.

In a paper on George Kelly’s ethical model, I wrote:

If it is the case that Kelly has no use for constructs like blame and forgiveness, what is left of the notion of ethics for Kelly? Whether it is the person striving to realign their role with respect to a social milieu that they have become estranged from (Kelly’s unorthodox definition of ‘sin’), or members of a community concerned about the effects of a particular person's behavior on those around them, Kelly's view of ethics provides a pathway around hostility and blameful finger-pointing. We can strive for an ethics of responsibility without succumbing to a moralism of culpability. To the extent that we can talk about an ethical progress in the understanding of good and ‘evil’ from the vantage of Kelly's system, this is not a matter of the arrival at a set of principles assigning culpability, but , from the point of view of the ‘sinner', of the gradual creation of a robust and permeable structure of social anticipations that increasingly effectively resists the invalidation of guilt. Kelly's ‘ethical strategy' to deal with one's own sin, then, is social experimentation in order to achieve a validated social role, which is not at all about conformity to social norms, but making others’ actions more intelligible.

For the classical realist the extramental world can be known in itself precisely through the rational, perspective-grounded mind.
— Leontiskos — Leontiskos

And for the New Materialist knowing the world is interacting with it and interacting with it is changing it.

↪Wayfarer ↪Joshs I'm well aware that we cannot speak about the nature of what lies outside the scope of our experience and judgement. So neither of you seem to have carefully read and considered what I've been saying, which was in no way contesting this obvious truism. — Janus

Would you agree with the following?

“Questions, what things ‘in-themselves’ may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? ‘Thingness’ was
first created by us” (Nietzsche, WTP 569). Just talking about an uncate­gorized reality is already applying categories like “thingness” to it, and hence is precisely not talking about something uncategorized. If we were to remove all categories, then ex­istence, substance, and causality would have to go, and they are the mate­rials from which Kant built his concept of noumena as the source of our sensory data. Indeed, they are the conceptual resources that any discussion must draw upon; withdraw them all and we are left with, as Hegel said, just “a pure direction or a blank space” (Hegel, PS 47, §73).

Good­man puts it succinctly: “We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described” (Goodman 1978, 3), or “talk of unstructured content or an un­conceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating;
for the talk imposes structure, ascribes properties.”

In loose terms it brings a previously non-existent obligation into existence. There is now something in the world that was not there previously: the obligation
— Banno

What bizarre, magical thinking. As if, *poof!*, a newly minted promise, shiny and golden, floats down from The Land of Ought.

The promise exists in the mind of the promiser, and their audience. That's it. — hypericin

Among the alternatives to physicalism is the idea that thoughts are real objects in the world.

Chicago, Illinois ( from a native American word for smelly onion)

Some languages certainly seem more suited to rhyme. The Inferno sounds far better in the original for example. English is not a particularly great language for poetry — Count Timothy von Icarus

On the other hand, it has been said that English is better suited to rock and roll than other languages , maybe due to the syllabic compactness of its vocabulary.

If I can’t make sense of this then perhaps I ought abandon my dogma and either accept that all moral sentences are false or that no moral sentence is truth apt. — Michael

You seem to be burning some of your Analytic philosophy bridges. Keep this up and you’ll have to join us Continental relativists. Wouldn’t that be a revolting development.

A circle is infinite and finite in different respects just like a Mandelbrot set has finite area but infinite perimeter. There is no respect in which humans are or can be infinite. — Lionino

Interesting. That makes me wonder. In what respect is a circle or the Mandelbrot set infinite? In the case of a fractal, it is a non-linear series where we take the product and feed it back in as input, making it recursive. We can think of pi as an infinite series also. The further we take the computation of the series , the more accurate is the calculation of the circle’s shape. Does this mean that the infinity of pi is a kind of infinitesimal? If we take the human body as a series of shapes and contours, don’t we get into the territory of infinitesimals in mapping its topography? Aren’t coastlines fractals, and if so, isn’t the human body composed of such fractals? Another thought: since there are no perfect circles in nature, the infinite series of pi exists only as a calculative activity of the human mind. If the mind is finite, then where does the infinity of pi exist except as a hypthesis?

Yes, but the judgement that that they may have an existence outside of any perspective is neither demonstrably false nor unintelligible. You seem to be trading on the obvious truism that all our judgements are mind-dependent to draw the unwarranted conclusion that all existence must be mind-dependent. Existence and judgement are thus unjustifiably conflated — Janus

I would assume that Wayfarer wouldn’t deny existence outside of perspective. But as an exercise, try to imagine constructing a sentence describing such existence. To begin with, the subject-object grammar of language must be bracketed off, including any properties or attributes (location in space and time, size, weight, color, shape, etc) ascribed to said existence. Perhaps rather than unintelligible, one could say such existence would be profoundly devoid of meaning, given that the meaning of describable objects is tied to their use for us as prescribed by some sort of grammar.

A world with no existence is metaphysically impossible because metaphysics deals with existence.
A world with no existence is logically possible because logically there are possible worlds where nothing exists. — Corvus

Metaphysics can also be taken to mean a perspective, paradigm or worldview within which we make use of and interpret the meaning of such concepts as existence and logic. Without a metaphysics, we wouldn’t be able to makes sense of notions like existence and logic.

Basically, there is nothing controversial about this, things that are logically possible are not always physically possible. For example: "I am flying faster than light". The laws of physics state that is impossible, however, it is not logically impossible, as there is nothing logically necessary about the speed of light.

However, what would something metaphysically impossible but logically possible be? — Lionino

We can see from the varied responses to the OP that the concept of metaphysics is understood in distinctly different ways within philosophy. My understanding of metaphysics comes from the way the term is employed by postmodern , post structuralist and phenomenological philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Whereas your Venn diagram seems to derive from Analytic approaches, if I were to draw up a diagram, metaphysics would be the circle encompassing the physical and the logical. Formal systems of logic, from Aristotle to Frege, presuppose a particular overarching metaphysical framework as their condition of possibility. Metaphysics taken in this sense refers to a gestalt framework constituting a web of interconnected elements of meaning. It is a perspectival worldview or system of values. Logic, as a historically situated cultural construction, doesn’t sit outside value systems but is instead a product of a particular system . What is possible or impossible is defined on the basis of the way a metaphysical system is organized. When we move from one metaphysics to another, the criteria of possibility change along with it, including how we understand the workings of logic.

If I was a criminal I would still consider it "harmful" to me if you locked me up, If I was a murderer I would consider it harmful/hateful if you killed me in retaliation.
— mentos987
So what? Most criminals 'believe' they are not guilty of their crimes. — 180 Proof

And by using the normative label criminal, we can smugly justify our ‘belief’ that the locked up other is deserving of the harm we cause them. Bully for Hillel for being a non-relativist, but this doesn’t magically turn labels like crime , murder, harm and hate into universally transparent meanings.

↪Joshs Can you distinguish between politics (or jurisprudence) and ethics, Joshs? Hillel's principle, as I call it, concerns moral encounters with others (M. Buber, H. Arendt, P. Foot), not some instrumental, or ideological, calculus. — 180 Proof

I don’t understand how the distinction between politics and ethics impacts on my comment. Whether we are talking about thought or action, the political scenario I described gets its sense and justification from its underlying ethical premises. Thinking or acting ethically, apart from the specific political context, requires an interpretation of the meaning of hate/harm. Otherwise these words are without sense. Are we to simply presume that what these terms stand for is transparently obvious to everyone? Isnt the problem of interpretation the central issue of ethics? And doesn’t this problem make all ethical questions inherently political?

↪Joshs I can't follow you — 180 Proof

The worst atrocities in history were committed by those who believed they were morally righteous. Technically, they were following Hillel’s admonition, because ‘doing no harm’ offers no way to distinguish who is really acting justly from those who just believe they are acting justly.

: in most instances it is, in fact, more hateful/harmful to victims not to "imprison criminals" than it is to do so. — 180 Proof

And in a world where abortion is murder and transgender is a moral sickness it is more hateful/harmful to victims (fetuses and confused children) not to punish those involved in abortions and those promoting transgenderism than it is not to do so. Again, what is hateful/ harmful turns on who is determined as just and who is a victim.Hillel’s admonition leaves out the crucial question of how to ground determinations of justice and injustice.

IMO, no one yet, secular or religious, has improved on ...
That which is hateful¹ [harmful] to you, do not do to anyone.
— Hillel the Elder, first century BCE — 180 Proof

Shouldn’t that be changed to UNJUSTLY hateful or harmful? Isnt hate just a strong version of blame? I see billboards stating ‘Jesus says love your enemy’ and ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’. Doesn’t this give us permission to lovingly oppose , restrain, blame and punish those we judge as wrongdoers?
In what sense are these actions not perceived as harmful violations from the vantage of those we find culpable, those we feel obliged to correct and reprimand?

Think of all the forms of blameful thought and feeling that we believe justifies our responding to others in ways that they will consider as harmful to their autonomy, such as punishing, ignoring, shunning, insulting, depriving, demanding conformity to one’s idea of the just.

All forms of blame, including the cool, non-emotional, rational desire for accountability and justice and well as rageful craving for vengeance, are grounded in a spectrum of affective comportments that share core features. This affective spectrum includes irritation, annoyance, hostility, disapproval, condemnation, feeling insulted, taking umbrage, resentment, anger, exasperation, impatience, hatred, fury, ire, outrage, contempt, righteous indignation, ‘adaptive' or rational anger, perceiving the other as deliberately thoughtless, rude, careless, negligent, complacent, lazy, self-indulgent, malevolent, dishonest, narcissistic, malicious, culpable, perverse, inconsiderate, intentionally oppressive, repressive or unfair, disrespectful, anti-social, hypocritical, disgraceful, greedy, evil, sinful, criminal, a miscreant. Blame is also implicated in cooly, calmly and rationally determining the other to have deliberately committed a moral transgression, a social injustice or injustice in general, or as committing a moral wrong.

In sum, if justice is in the eye of the beholder, then so is hate and harm.

it assumes a universal ground or standard, the good in and for itself.
— Joshs

OR, perhaps they're merely suggestions that some people will find agreeable, and the people who don't can ignore it. Many people naturally have similar ideas about morality, even if it's not universal and objective — flannel jesus

I agree wholeheartedly that these can be taken merely as non-objective suggestions, but my possibly mistaken impression from the OP was that moral goodness has an objective foundation. Is a common definition of the good possible without such an assumption?

• The vast majority of us simply try to be good, but what it means to be good differs between us. Confusion and misery can follow from this and some of it could be avoided if we have a common definition of how be good and how to seek to be better. — mentos987

You should follow your instincts and your heart and utilize this commandment to remain civil so that you may live in a civilized world. — mentos987

How does our heart direct us to the good without itself being directed by something universal?

This conception comes straight from the definition of god as the in-itself.
— Joshs

You'd have to demonstrate that for anybody else to accept it. — flannel jesus

What Joseph Rouse says about science I think also applies to purportedly non-religious accounts of the good.

I also think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates.

In every other respect, the assumptions underlying your commandments are fully ‘religious’ in formulating an idea of the good that is universalizable. This requires a kind of faith in goodness, the same faith that underlies godliness.
— Joshs

It doesn't appear that way to me. It appears to me like he's offering commandments to people who want to go good. No religious-like faith required for that. Some abusive want to be good people. Well, if you want to be good people, here are some ideas — flannel jesus

The question is how ‘good’ is understood. Let’s say I define moral goodness as my inclination to praise and encourage those whose values I relate to, and my need to correct, punish or righteously condemn those whose values appear alien , and thus dangerous, to my own or those of my community. According to this relativistic definition, what I call moral goodness is not a measure of some universal qualiity floating out there in the world, but how intelligible other people appear to me ( or in the case of my own guilt, how intelligible my actions are to me).

By contrast, what makes the OP’s formulation of goodness religious in the most general philosophical sense is that it assumes a universal ground or standard, the good in and for itself. This conception comes straight from the definition of god as the in-itself.

Good points, explanations, and elaboration. This reminds me of the "silver rule": do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. — Leontiskos

The Golden Rule is a recipe for immorality, because it can be used to justify whatever prejudice one harbors. For instance, ‘if I were a homosexual, I would want you to treat me as abnormal’. That prejudice justifies discriminating against others, without violating the Golden Rule. Do unto ‘others’ only applies to others who are like you in certain key respects that pertain to their humanity. We don’t generally apply the golden rule to livestock, insects or plants, or to any other being that appears to us to be somehow less than fully human in the moral sense. Thus we see how , at various times in human history, those who were regarded as only 2/3 human, evil, barbarian, heathen, pathological or demented were treated differently than we would want to be treated, without the golden rule being violated.

Does the silver rule, simply by using the negative grammatical form, resolve these problems? No, because it merely protects others who, based on one’s own biases, are acting righteously. In other words, we would not want others to mistreat us when we are acting in a way that is morally correct, but when we stray from the path of moral goodness, we deserve to be excoriated, punished, corrected, disciplined, shown the error of our ways, be given a taste of our own medicine, rehabilitated. Isnt the silver rule consistent with how atrocities have been justified throughout history?

This is a thought challenge where I try to form the perfect commandment for anyone that isn't religious. — mentos987

This strikes me as appealing to those who only think they’re not religious, that is, who are not religious only in the sense that they do not actively participate in any formal religious institution. In every other respect, the assumptions underlying your commandments are fully ‘religious’ in formulating an idea of the good that is universalizable. This requires a kind of faith in goodness, the same faith that underlies godliness.

↪Joshs Oh please. A confused little boy like Leontiskos doesn't have the balls to be an authoritarian — hypericin

I dunno. Seems like he’s developing a cult following.

One could of course ridicule such a person for their irrationality and self-contradiction, or respond to their angry outbursts which occur as a result of their self-apparent irrationality. I do not find this to be necessary in this case. — Leontiskos

Some believe that it is best not to assume a direct correlation between a person’s philosophical perspective and their behavior in social situations. Others believe that the latter are a reflection of the former. In this case, I am inclined to argue that Leontiskos’s above personal comments are guided, and limited, by the strictures of their moral philosophy. Depending on one’s perspective, one can take this as praise for the clarity of a foundational morality, or as putting into question the thinly disguised authoritarianism and empathy-blindness that such a fundamentalism generates.

both in the post I was responding to and the post you responded with, you are are preoccupied with rhetorical-pejorative terms, such as "moral failure," "evil," etc. (and this is a little bit ironic given your allusion to Zen).

People shouldn't contradict themselves or make intellectual mistakes. They do happen, and then we correct them (because we know they are bad). "One swallow does not make a summer." But those who contradict themselves with abandon and without qualms, or assert and publish what they know to be false, are intellectually dishonest and intellectually depraved. They have made a habit out of bad intellectual acts, and have hence become unreasonable and untrustworthy in matters of the intellect. I don't really care whether we call this a moral failure. I don't think most people have any precise idea what they mean when they use that term, "moral." — Leontiskos

I’m not sure how you would formally define the concept of blame, but it seems hard to avoid the connotation of blame when one accuses another of being intellectually bad, dishonest, unreasonable, depraved and untrustworthy. Would you use such terms to describe the behavior of someone who has recently suffered a head injury that makes it difficult for them to recall or process information?
I would assume not, because you might point out that that person cannot help their deficits. They are not deliberately intending to contradict themselves with abandon, to lie or misinform. These behaviors are the result of something they has no control over and would not endorse.

What makes a person blamefulness, culpable, responsible in our eyes in an ethical sense is connected to how we understand the concept of intent or will. There are vitally important practical implications associated with how our moral philosophy makes sense of the process of intending or willing. We can see these implications manifested in the free will vs determinism debate. For instance, modern attempts to defang concepts of moral blame begin with moral responsibility, or blame, skepticism, which has historically been defended by Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Voltaire. Contemporary representatives of this group like Galen Strawson, Derk Pereboom and Martha Nussbaum argue that our blame practice is morally inappropriate because we lack free will or a certain kind of knowledge
These approaches endeavor to take the sting out of blame, resulting in a less violent understanding of moral action. For instance, Pereboom rejects the idea of blame as moral responsibility because he claims that:

what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, whether that be determinism, chance, or luck, and because of this agents are never morally responsible in the sense needed to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments—such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, backward-looking blame, and retributive punishment.” “In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.” (Caruso 2018)

I wonder how your Aristotelian-Thomistic approach compares to the position of blame skeptics like Pereboom and Nussbaum.

I can't actually cope with Nietzsche! I tried reading him a few times but found it too emotional. I'm vaguely aware it's the sort of thing he says though. — bert1

Sure is. Especially the part about morality being a trick of the weak to constrain the strong. This is what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

There is only power, interests and negotiation. Morality is a trick of the weak to constrain the strong. Morality is what other people want you to do. Often it's in one's interests to do what others want. Or at least not do what they don't want — bert1

Someone’s been reading Nietzsche.

I am not surprised that you would pat yourself on the back like this, with no account in sight. It occurs constantly. I find your own thoughts on most subjects to be vacuous, and yes, thread-derailing. For example, your post <here> was one of the most unintelligent things I have read on this forum. — Leontiskos

I hadnt intended those remarks on realist and subjectivist morality for you, although it’s true that I figured you would see them. That I find certain approaches to morality unpalatable does not mean that I dont accept their value for those who embrace them, it just means that they don’t work for me. As far as back-patting, I think we should all pat ourselves on the back, don’t you? Each of us feels a secret sense of superiority over others, an illusion born of knowing ourselves better than we know anyone else.

I recognize that your arguments are based on careful reading of the relevant theological and philosophical scholarship. So if I were to directly engage with you on these topics I would attempt to form a bridge between your background and mine. Who knows, the interchange might even be non-vacuous.

As we social primates do, in the heat of the moment I'm prone to see people as evil and act on the basis of such mental projections. However in this era, where dishing out the law of the jungle is seldom well advised, I think it is generally better to recognize one's mental projection of evil, for the monkey mindedness that it is, and try to achieve a more enlightened perspective. — wonderer1

You god-denying heretic

I think conscience is just self talk. People’s conscience also tells them they should have killed that rapist when they had the chance. They should have kept the money they found, etc. We call self-talk conscience when the talk seems to match conventional behavioural expectations as we might find them in church or a popular sitcom. Many people regret not stealing or lying or beating the shit out of someone, although they might find comfort behind a pretence of having done the ‘right thing.’ — Tom Storm

I’m with you here. I find both moral realism and moral subjectivism to be fairly nauseating, but my own touchstones on the subject of morality are so far removed from these ways of thinking that bringing them in would just derail the thread. Of course, that won’t stop me from sneaking in a quote from Ken Gergen:

We commonly suppose that suffering is caused by people whose conscience is flawed or who pursue their aims without regard for the consequences to others. From a relational standpoint, we may entertain the opposite hypothesis: in important respects we suffer from a plenitude of good.

:100: You'll like this, if you haven't seen it already. — Wayfarer

Great video, thanks

Isn't there a duality here of mind and things that matter? Doesn't a deep examination into relationships involve an examiner and what is examined? Doesn't that examination require mind? What is the inherent value of the relationship between humans and blood sucking disease carrying — Fooloso4

Rather than a duality, what is implied here is a reciprocal dependence. Mind is defined by what matters to it, which is contributed by the material relations we are immersed in.

Do you find artistry and spiritual significance in clearing a clogged toilet?

Isn't there inherent value in a quality inquiry that discriminates between positive and negative value? A farmer's ordinary activity of spreading pesticides and petroleum based fertilizers certainly is significant, but by doing so while being present in the moment may sidesteps or short-circuit the ability to see the harm being done. One must be mindful that the ordinary activity of burning fossil fuels, say, to keep that beautifully maintained motorcycle running should not be raised to the level of artistry and spiritual significance. — Fooloso4

What Pirsig was onto was what is now called skillful coping, a contextually sensitive immediate embeddedness of subjectivty in relevant activity with the world. Skillful coping is not some rarified offshoot of cognition but the basis of all thinking. What we call logical, rational reasoning is only a narrow derivative of skillful coping, and one which prevents us from seeing all the relevant connections between the aspects of the world that the dualistic thinking of formal logical reasoning conceals from us.

↪Banno
Not at all. But this is where Wittgenstein was heading - that at some stage the justifications have to end, and we say: "This is what we do!"

But why must it end there? This seems like fleeing from battle while declaring your victory. Admitting that your belief is just an arbitrary dogma gets you points for honesty but not much else — goremand

Not only that, it reveals an implict doubt and self-questioning that directly correlates with the intensity of dogmatic certainty.