I am going to take example from life that existed before us, ones which existed without emotions, namely micro-organisms.
Ever since they are created, they only have 2 goals, these goals are the 2 most fundamental goals of life which can also be intepreted as the only logical meaning to life.
These 2 goals are- (can also be intepreted as 3)
1) Collect information and knowledge about the world.
2) Reproduce and pass on this information to the offsprings.
The reason these goals exist is because of mortality — Kinglord1090

There is a psychologist who argues that humans are motivated by knowledge. That is, we strive to make sense of our world, that each of us is like a naive scientist, and we are constantly devising hypothesizes and putting those hypotheses to the test. Let me bring this back to our hypothetical of a world
without emotions. I think we can agree that in this hypothetical people would still possess all the other mental capabilities: memory and learning , perceptual and cognitive abilities , and as you said, the sense of physical pain. We also would be goal-oriented, but we would be motives toward knowledge goals rather than emotions ones. Let me now elaborate on this model: as part our our desire to know, to predict events in our world and anticipate what will happen next, we would be driven toward friendship and social relations, because the world is a more interesting , intellectually challenging place when we interact with others , share information and ideas with others.

Now, since we would find others to be valuable to us in furthering our goals of understanding our world , we would be motivated to protect our friendships. We would als suffer from the loss of those friendships. Of course , it wouldn’t be an ‘emotional’ loss , but it would still be the experience of loss. So we would have all sorts and varieties of experiences of loss and gain of access to knowledge. This psychologist describes a few of these scenarios. For instance , he describes the anticipation of events that lie outside the range our our construct system He also describes the experience of being dislodged from ones core role. That is , we always have an understanding of what role we play with respect to other people in our lives , and there are times when our ideas and understanding change enough that our role changes with respect to these persons. We may become confused about where we stand , or disappointed that we aren’t fulfilling our obligations to them. Then there is the scenario where someone lets us down, falls short of our expectations of them and we react by trying to get them to do what we believe they should have done in the first place.

The reason I’m describing these scenarios to you is that these are the psychologist’s definitions of emotion. The three scenarios depict anxiety, guilt and hostility. He radically rethinks the usual definition of emotion as some sort of juice or energy. Instead, emotion to him is simply the scenarios that we find ourselves in where our access to knowledge is threatened, where we find ourselves in chaotic and puzzling circumstances that don’t make sense to us. I think you would probably want to argue that emotion as you see it is this juice or energy that comes over us and interferes with our ability to achieve understanding, but this psychologist’s view is that striving rationally to achieve gain of knowledge and prevent loss of understanding , and anticipation of situations that may pose a threat to such goals , is precisely what emotion is.

And even then, there is a world outside my mind. — fishfry

There is very definitely a world outside your mind. The issues is how we understand the relation between the subjective and the objective aspect of experience. There aren’t simply in themselves subjects and in themselves objects colliding with each other. Even Kant knew better than that. We have to understand that what it means to be an object is to play a role in a constructive process that a subject generates in an intersubjective space. And for its part , to be a subject is to be changed in its organization and understanding by the objects it construes. So each side of the equation is changed and shaped by the other.

“Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it.

It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory.

It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what e cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)

It's been have known since Immanuel Kant that we have no direct access to knowing reality. But I don't think that's relevant to my point. I'm not saying that science is completely objective, but it's the best means we have of understanding the NATURAL world. Art and philosophy are ways of exploring the human condition. — Ross Campbell

It’s the best means we have if you believe that science should strive for complete objectivity ( even if it can never attain the thing in itself). That was Kant’s view, that science asymptotically approaches an objective understanding of the natural world as a limit.

According to the above thinking art can’t progress the way science can, because it only explores the human condition. The philosophers I read disagree. They argue that understanding f the objective world is only possible through understanding the human condition. Put differently ,what we call objectivity is itself an articulation of the human condition because the agreed upon object is constructed through inter subjective consensus and this interaubjective activity is the negotiated product of subjective perspectives.

They argue the only difference between what the arts and humanities, and the sciences do, is a matter of method and way of articulating ideas, but science is inextricably bound up with all other modes of human creativity and they all develop and change from one era to the next in tandom. In fact the cutting edge of philosophy tends to get to new vistas of discovery before the leading edge of the sciences( Kant vs Einstein, Nietzsche vs Freud, Hegel vs Darwin and Marx). The sciences
are just conventionalized versions of philosophical inquiry, defining ‘nature’ in a restrictive way as mathematizable objects rather than in the more comprehensive and fundamental way that philosophy does , and science’s conception of itself changes from era to era in parallel with changes in philosophy and other modalities of culture.


“Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it.

It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory.

It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what e cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)

But surely the world didn't come into existence when you were born. Or when the first fish crawled out of the ocean (or whatever they did, I'm not a biologist). — fishfry

But when we model the world we’re not capturing it in a bottle, we’re interacting with it, making changes in it for our purposes. I know this seems counterintuitive. For centuries we assumed that the world is a set of object out there and our job is to mirror it with our representations.
But when we know something we are engaged in an activity involving that thing, transforming that thing in a certain way. Perceptual psychologists discovered this about the way that we perceive our perceptual world. To perceive something is not a passive inputting of a stimulus. It is a constructive activity involving anticipating of the way the world will respond to our behaviors in relation to it.
Looked at this way, the evolution of knowledge isn’t getting closer and closer to something sitting static out there. It’s the building of something always new, in conformity with our changing needs and purposes. At each step the ‘outside’ world only announces itself as affordances and constraints intricately responsive to our creative efforts.
Math and logic are a part of this but are only one element in a dance that moves back and forth between the fixing of set patterns and their dismantling and reformation as fresh structures.

If I understand what you're saying (and it wasn't till the very end that I thought I did), existence is what it is, and math is a secondary thing that humans use to model and explain it. In which case "math is everywhere" spoken by humans, is in the same sense that "echoes are everywhere" is to bats. Which is to say, "math is everywhere" is purely a human-centric conceit. Math is nowhere at all, except in the mind of humans. — fishfry

I didn’t mean to distinguish between the world for us as humans and the world as it supposedly is in itself. This distinction belongs to the abstracting act that makes math possible. Math and formal logic evolved along with the concept of the external object. Each implies the other, and both are abstractions from our pragmatic engagement with the world. We are always pragmatically involved with things. Things matter to us, are significant to us in relation to our concerns and goals. Out of these contexts of relevance , we abstract what we call empirical objects which supposedly exist in themselves, apart fromour interaction with them and the purposes for which we are involved with them. This abstracting and separating off of an external world from pragmatic subject-object engagement makes mathematics and formallogic possible , but at the expense of losing sight of the pragmatic contexts which not only generate mathematical and logical objects but give them their meaning. Math is everywhere is the same as saying empirical objects are all around us , as if we are just one object among the furniture of the world. But fundamentally, the idea of a world of things existing independently of us is incoherent.

“… we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)….
natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable; they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations' of intersubjective experience.”
(Evan Thompson)

going by what Hillary Putnam says, philosophy is math and vice versa since both seek patterns (generalizations) but mind the words "...we always lose..." which to my reckoning simply means that the patterns philosophy is interested usually don't cover all the bases i.e. there are exceptions that gum up the works. — TheMadFool

Post structuralist philosophy is based on the idea that what gives a pattern its meaning is it’s difference from a previous pattern This difference both defines the pattern and reminds us that patterns always depend on something outside of themselves in order for them to be what they are. Their condition of possibility is the flow of time and history. One could liken this to a hegelian dialectical movement , with the difference being that dialectic makes the flow of history itself into a logical pattern. Post structuralism, by contrast, sees the transition from pattern to pattern as not capturable in any logic. Even without. stable patterns themselves (cultural, empirical) we find this incessant movement , and this makes math and logic tricks that we use to ‘freeze’ the incessantly transformative movement of experience into abstracti objects and forms. To see math everywhere is to pay attention to a second order derived action that we perform that covers over its basis in living.

Mankind has a natural instinct to understand. — Ross Campbell

Yes, and understanding takes place relative to a personal construction system , which could also be called a value system. There is no direct knowing of the world. Instead , we construct interpretive frameworks and organize our understanding of the world through those frameworks.

What's this nonsense about science being a wiil to power. — Ross Campbell

Knowledge is pragmatic. That is, we recognize the meaning of the world as it relates to our interests and goals(our will). Will describes the perspectival nature of knowing. ‘power’ isn’t about dominance but about the fact that we assimilate the world into our schemes. So will to power is the motive of assimilating the world to our value perspective. Isnt that what scientific theorizing does?

For the most part our actions are determined ( determined by the information that composes us ), but in any moment of consciousness a multiplicity of causal information intersects, with some randomness, such that the unforeseen arises.. — Pop

That does sound like Varela:

“ It is perhaps is best to start with the notion of a state or phase space : a domain of variables or
measurements which attempts to completely specify a given process. Such specification is a law
or a rule, and these system are therefore deterministic, in contrast to a random dynamical
systems. The sequence of subsequent states evolving according to the dynamical rule describes a
trajectory in state space. In the case of continuous time, the system is defined as a flow.”

Purposes" are intentions and, as far as I can discern, it does not make sense to say "purpose" "underlies" anything. My (thread) purpose. — 180 Proof

If one begins from a framework of neo-Darwinian empirical causality , then purpose, intention and chance-randomness are co-determinative. Intention , by this thinking , is derivative of random
chance. It seems that enactivism may shift that thinking a bit, giving the self-organizing system a normative unity that is perpetually oriented toward purposes. I don’t know that this implies an endless regress though. Certainly the Nietzschean Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of intentionality don’t see change and randomness as the other side of the binary, since they are not beginning from objective causation Nor are they starting from a metaphysical ‘ purpose’. Rather, a radical interaction between subjectivity and objectify leads to a thinking which is neither of a chance-intention binary nor of metaphysically foundational purpose.

give me 1 reason on how a life without emotions wouldnt be peaceful, and if i am not able to solve it logically, i would accept that emotions are necessary. — Kinglord1090

Without emotion as you are understanding it, every major political conflict on earth would remain exactly as it is today. Keep in mind that violence doesn’t just consist of temper tantrums There is institutionalized violence. The justice system dispenses violence in the form
of punishment , law, incarceration. These are not ‘emotional’ and yet they are violent. Many wars are decided on via rational calculation of what is is in one’s county’s economic interest.

All of these conflicts are over ideas , not emotions.

I dont even understand what you are talking about anymore — Kinglord1090

Why do you think the word would be at peace without emotions ? Give me an example from
today’s politically polarized situation. Let’s say we remove
the emotional capacities from Trump supporters and Critical Race Theory supporters. How do you envision this to change their relationship and understanding of each other?

2) Live in a world with eternal peace, but no way of being happy.
My choice is clearly the second world.
I dont want to see anyone suffer. — Kinglord1090

Maybe you should check out the anti-natalism threads.

would you rather live in a world with murder and crimes instead of choosing peace? — Kinglord1090

The cause of such violence is not irrationality but rationality. That is to say , that there is only one correct version of the rational , the belief that the rational and the logical is not based on the subjective, that the order of the world has already been laid down for us as a perfect machine and all we have to
do is apprehend this perfect order. Because if that’s what you believe , then every time someone disagrees with your model, you will attribute their deviation as irrationality and emotionality.

You should get out more. — Protagoras

battery needs to be recharged

that important part isnt enough to compete with eternal peace. — Kinglord1090

We don’t get eternal peace by eliminating emotions , since they are not irrational. Instead we need to listen to what our emotions are telling us about the gap between our way of looking at the world and the way others do. The next time you feel anger or guilt or some
other emotion, rather than seeing it as illogical, try and see it as attempting to educate you that your frame of rationality needs to reconfigured. What you are doing f is blaming the messenger( emotion) for the message ( there is something in your world that you are failing to cope with )

Yes they were inspired by maths and logic, but math and logic were inspired by the human brain in the first place. — Kinglord1090

One could say that math and logic were generated in human brains , but that’s very different from saying that we understood how the brain works. The calculating machine model of the brain that you prefer can be very useful in physics , which is field that rose up
simultaneously with logic and math, but has proved to be much less useful in understanding biological and psychological phenomena.

my side of belief guarantees peace.
So, if its a trade between a part of intelligence for infinite peace, i am pretty sure you know which one people would choose. — Kinglord1090

My view is that what you are calling emotions is based in logic itself. Let me explain. Let’s say I am a scientist and I generate a theory to explain some aspect of the world. I have tested my theory and so have others and it does a pretty good job of describing, predicting and organizing the phenomena. But there is a rival theory. It also has been tested and does a pretty good job of describing things. But the two theories describe the same events in different ways. They both use airtight logic , because of course all logic is is a kind of window dressing to make sure that one’s theory is internally consistent. Logic can’t tell you which theory to choose because you can’t simply read that off of the world. The world is amenable to an infinite variety of interpretations. The generating of a theory isn’t a logical endeavor , it’s an intuitive creative endeavor. Logic only comes into play after we have created the model. The violence between people isnt a result of the failure of logic, of irrationality. Both theories I described in my example are rational , they just use different frames of rationality. Most violence is the result of clashing rationalities , and clashing logics. You cannot get rid of the basis of emotion in humans because it resides in the subjectivity of how we interpret our world.
No airtight logic will protect us from
frustration , hostility , anxiety , guilt and sadness. In fact , airtight logic’s can get us into trouble because they prevent us from adapting to logics that are foreign to us.

It is the nature of experience that it is constantly overturning logics. The only way to eliminate emotion is to eliminate experience.

Yep. i think people want to believe in an easy formula to guide their lives.The world is a giant machine and all we have to do is figure out how it works mThe. we can throw away such messy things as subjectivity, feeling , values , interpretation, and just follow a logical blueprint.

Well, animals and plants don't have emotions like humans do. — Kinglord1090

It used to be commonly thought that animals don’t have emotions. Now we know that they are capable of a huge range of complex emotions, just like we are.

We go through surgeries to remove appendix and wisdom teeth as they are vestigial.
Why can't we do the same with emotions, then? — Kinglord1090

Emotions are our body’s way of telling us how well we are coping with situations. But even without feedback from
the body we would still be affective beings. When a friend borrows your car , smashes it up and doesn’t tell you , you will feel anger because anger is your sense of disappointment combined with desire for retribution. When you have an upcoming root canal appointment you will feel anxiety because anxiety is out anticipating and preparing for a potentially negative unknown future. When you cheat on your wife you may feel guilt because guilt is just your sense of you letting yourself and others down.

emotions often goes against logic. — Kinglord1090

This is an older traditional notion of the relation between emotion and logic and it has been discarded by many psychologists today. Emotion was thought of as extraneous to thinking , a mere spice that was sprinkled on top of concepts, and usually disorganizing to thinking. The opposite is now thought to be the case.

Yes, computers and robots are not human.But the inspiration for making them was taken from human brain. Scientists tried to replicate the way a human brain works, and they ended up with computers.
Which is an undeniable proof that the way a computer works, that is, by logic, is an essential part of humans. — Kinglord1090

The inspiration for making them wasn’t the human brain initially. It was models derived from logic and mathematics. We then turned around and tried to model the brain on the calculative principles of our computers. That approach has recently been dumped because psychologists discovered that a brain doesn’t function like a calculating machine. It is intuitive, goal oriented, normative , wholistic, oriented rind what it cares about, what matters to it. These are all things that our computers lack, because we designed them with no concept of the role of afffectivity.

Did you know that individuals with damage to areas of the brain having to do with affect cannot function effectively, even though their intellectual capacities remain intact? This is because they cannot make any decisions. Nothing matters to them more than anything else so there is no basis for them to choose a path or form a goal.

Science begs to differ.
If we go to the root of all emotions and desires, we are not that different from robots.

I believe that emotions an — Kinglord1090

You’vegot a lot of catching up to do when it comes to the attitude of science , specifically cognitive science , regarding the role of affective with regard
to thinking.

According to current accounts, cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world . According to
the newer thinking, affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Ratcliffe(2002) puts it,“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”(p.290). In affecting reason, feeling affects itself.

One can hold the altruism without a foundation? — Tom Storm

Well, the altruism would have a foundation , albeit a contingent and local one. This reminds me of Derrida’s response to all those who say that deconstruction is an anything goes philosophy without any basis for norms.

“For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.”

“Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy. I should thus be able to claim and to demonstrate, without the slightest "pragmatic contradiction," that Searle, for example, as I have already demonstrated, was not on the "right track" toward understanding what I wanted to say, etc. May I henceforth however be granted this: he could have been on the wrong track or may still be on it; I am making considerable pedagogical efforts here to correct his errors and that certainly proves that all the positive values to which I have just referred are contextual, essentially limited, unstable, and endangered. And therefore that the essential and irreducible possibility of misunderstanding or of "infelicity" must be taken into account in the description of those values said to be positive.”

I know for sure that he despised Christianity and all it's values and he also despised nearly all secular ethical systems prior to and during his time. — Ross Campbell

Just curious , and you don’t have to answer this, but do you consider yourself a Christian?

Postmodernism does not in my opinion undermine the basis of empirical science. If we were to follow Nietzsche's value system society would have to abandon compassion and kindness and pity because they're a slave mentality and we wouldn't be able to trust the whole scientific enterprise because he attacks that as well. If it wasn't for science we would be still living in caves. — Ross Campbell

You’re right, postmodernism doesn’t undermine the bias of empirical science , they make explicit that basis, which is what Nietzsche does. It’s not a question of saying that airplanes can’t fly and our other machines don’t really function. The postmodern , and Nietzsche’s , croute is not of the results of science but of the way that it has traditionallly thought of itself, how it has branded itself. For instance , that empirical proof is a matter of matching our models of nature to the real world. That assumes what Rorty called ‘science as the mirror of nature’. It ask
goes by the name of the correspondence theory of truth.

There are postmodern approaches within psychology now. You can look up enactivism, 4EA( embodied, enactive, extended and affective cognition ) . autopoietic self-organizing systems approaches , and there you’ll find rigorous research ( Shaun Gallagher , Evsn Thompson , Alva Noe, Matthew Ratcliffe ) on autism, schizophrenia, emotions, empathy, depression ,visual perception and language which reject your view of science.

I'm aware that empirical science has been shown to less reliable than it was previously thought. That's why most scientists would say that their theories are not watertight but are based on the evidence available and are open to being revised. — Ross Campbell

You miss the point . Lamenting science’s lack of reliability implies the classic belief of science as correspondence with nature.

I’m with psychologist George Kelly on science.

“To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.”

The classic view of science sees it as a more ‘rigorous ‘ avenue toward ultimate truth than than the humanities of philosophy. It is supposedly superior by virtue of its method as its use of mathematics. But all this has been called into question. What hasn’t been called into question is the usefulness of science, but not because it gets more reliably to a representation of the
‘way things really are’.

If we were to follow Nietzsche's value system society would have to abandon compassion and kindness and pity because they're a slave mentality — Ross Campbell

We wouldnt need to abandon kindness and compassion
any more than we would need to abandon science. But in both cases it would useful
to abandon our prevailing superstitions about the basis of kindness and compassion and the basis of scientific
truth. We care about others to the extent that they are like ourselves. That is , they share our value system. What we call evil is what is profoundly alien to our way of thinking. This is the basis of compassion and kindness. Nietzsche supports altruism but recognizes that our ability to relate to others is limited by our value systems , and those values are always in flux over longer periods of time. To follow the Christian injunction to locenone another amounts to assuming a single value system locked into place for eternity that we are forced to conform to. I don t mean here that love is a value system. Of course we love what we know , what we relate to , identify with. We don’t need a religious injunction to tell us that . It comes naturally . We don’t need to be told to have compassion, to be kind , to love. We need to understand how our shifting values, paradigms, word views change our ability to relate or others. We need to stop trying to force conformity to one worldview , and to stop labeling deviation from that worldview evil.

Put differently , Jesus’s injunction to love thy neighbor presuppposes that we are making a choice whether to love or hate, to have compassion and kindness or apathy. It explains such social attitudes on the basis of intent and assumes that the world is interpreted in essentially the same way for all of us. Thus we are urged to love each other , and when we don’t our character and intent is blamed. Nietzsche is arguing that choice and intent is not the basis of feelings of compassion or hate. Instead, we live in very different worlds, even within the same community. We love or hate as a result of how our worldview make sense of our social world , not because of personal whim or choice. Urging compassion and kindness is both unctuous and dangerous from this vantage , because it ignores the real basis of social tension and instead blames it on the choice not to be compassionate. This makes a Christian moralism a less kind form of social understanding than Nietzsche. Nietzsche doesn’t blame intent but sympathizes with each person’s situation. That is why his position is beyond good and evil. the ‘evildoer’ lives and loves in a different world from mine , and his values are as justified within his world as mine are within mine.

Now you see my beef with science and philosophy!? — Protagoras

For centuries these have left US out of the picture , as if our relation to experience was not necessary to the facts of the world.

Would you say there are people whose superordinate system rather than triggering negative emotions when in new unknown experiences or territory "Focus" hard and actually thrive joyfully in spite of the unknown? — Protagoras

Well, if I shift back a minute from Kelly to Gendlin, Gendlin would say that in feeling ‘ stuck’ in a new situation where one does not know how to go on , to move forward, one can use the technique of focusing to tap into one’s bodily implicit intricacy. The body knows how to go forward because it is always implying new possibilities.. But to make that knowing fully conscious and articulate , one has to get in touch with the bodily felt sense of the situation as a whole. Usually we just get stuck in a piece of the situation and react with narrow emotions., which keeps us trapped in the same cycle of thinking. When we sense the situation as a whole it begins to shift and create new possibilities of meaning for us.

If you are into those two thinkers why even bother with the vast majority of continental thinkers? The ideas of those two if refined with some freud are sufficient. — Protagoras

I have always said the ultimate test of any philosophy is how well it serves as a psychotherapy. What can it tell us about ourselves and others that rival psychotherapies miss?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Kelly His writing is packed with a playful humor which I see as reflecting the implications of theory itself. He is often credited as the founder of cognitive therapy but he didn’t want to be seen as a cognitive psychologist because cognition is too closely linked to logical criterion of meaning. Instead, he called his theory the psychology of personal construct. A construct differs from
the classical definition of a concept. If a concept is the dictionary definition of a word, then a construct is the particular sense of a word’s meaning that is unique to our own construct system. We may both use the word ‘dog’ when pointing to an animal , but they may mean slightly different things to each of us. Each construct gets its meaning from its role within a system
of constructs. Think about it this way. Our lives are organized by overarching themes having to do with the way we see ourselves in relation to others, what we stand for, etc. This would be the superordinate aspect of our construct system. The limits of our superordinate system
define a the limits of what we can understand , what we can make sense of. It also defines our affective limits. Those experiences that trigger anger, threat , guilt or fear are events that lie just outside the range of convenience of our total system. Negative emotions define our intellectual frontier. when we find ourselves in emotional crisis , we are prompted to reconstrue our situation , to find alternate ways of making sense of our world. In this way each of us is an incipient scientist.

The core idea of Gendlin’s is that whatever we experience occurs into an implying. That is , the body is an interconnected mesh of behaviors, thoughts and feeling that functions as a single totality and always implies a next move. So what occurs as this thought or this perception isn’t a something out there disconnected from an in here. Objects don’t appear as cut off from our implying of them. They are connected to our implying as relevant and significant in some way, and this has a certain boldly feeling associated with it. The way we use words comes out of this bodily implying.

When I say a critique of rationality I'm talking foucault level of saying science is just control. However,I don't go foucault level of subjectivity being constructed purely by culture etc,nor do I say religious experience is invalid. — Protagoras

Are you familiar with the work of Eugene Gendlin? He wrote about an approach that he dubbed ‘after postmodernism’. His approach , which he worked out when he was working with Carl Rogers, shows how logical forms and patterns are generated out of an implicit intricacy , which is not just the imposition of culture and language on individuals, as the postmodernists claim. One can think beyond language and culture. Gendlin argues that this implicit intricacy is both intentional and affective, before any notion of a split between feeling and thought. I wonder if this might be of interest to you. I’m also a big fan of the psychologist George Kelly, who also abandoned the distinction between feeling, knowing and doing.

Joshs
Your talk about vulnerable and alienation is just your defensiveness — Protagoras

I don’t have all that much to defend because I don’t have that high an opinion of myself. I’m just another shmuck on here trying to learn a thing or two. But there’s no question we all make ourselves vulnerable when we share our ideas , because they are a partn of who we are, and it can be devastating to have our self-image challenged. I think that’s why conversations often deteriorate into name calling.

Yes,the last point is interesting. We could have a good discussion. But if you want that,then talk in your own words,not just quoting others.

I like discourse with you on some level because you actually acknowledge intuition and a critique of enlightment "rationality",which is very rare on this forum. — Protagoras

I think within the continental tradition, and hewing closely to texts of part of that style, but I certainly don’t have to include quotes.

There are a number of contributors here who critique Enlightenment rationality, including Antony Nickles , Xtrix and Streetlight.

Listen guy. Don't pigeon hole me or try to patronise me. — Protagoras

I don’t know you well enough to pigeonhole you. All I know is you’ve been on this site for less than two weeks and have already managed to show hostility to all but two of the people you have engaged with here. I think that’s some kind of record. Does that mean you are one who ‘doesn’t play well with others’? I guess that’s not for me to say. You’d know better than I if you have a pattern of feeling alienated from the social groups you find yourself involved with. Maybe that’s because you’re the only righteous one amongst all your peers. But if so that must be a lonely cross to bear.

Listen

If your too anal and think I need to show proof of every bit of malevolence in historical matters then you keep believing the narratives dealt to you by the powers that be. — Protagoras

I was hoping you’d humor me and show prooof of the specific malevolence you claimed.

Listen

You stick to your comfortable post modernist narratives.
— Protagoras

I’d rether you present an interesting critique of those post modern narratives. Isnt that what we’re here for?

Listen

As if I owe you a detailed spoon feeding of how to asses narratives. Do your own research and use your own brain not relying on academics to justify your every viewpoint — Protagoras

A good policy for all of us . But wouldnt it be quicker just to say that you don’t have any specific evidence to back up your assertion concerning Einstein rather than give me a lecture on interpretation of narratives? That’s what someone does who’s trying to cover their ass.

Listen

And the irony of ",conspiracy monger" when you read deleuze,Nietzsche,foucault et al and say there is a variety of perspectives. — Protagoras

That could be an interesting starting point for a discussion, Much better to go in that direction than just throw it out as an attack one-liner. It makes you more vulnerable but the other direction just closes you off to people.

I still think it makes perfect sense to talk about the individual. The term is used widely in public debate, as well as academia. — Ross Campbell

Of course one can talk about the individual. The question is what is the relation between the individual and culture. There many different philosophical positions on this issue, ranging from Enlightenment rationality to Kantian idealism to Marx and Hegel to postmodernism. It sounds to me like your position is a traditional one. You talk about individual character , and emphasize empiricism in the old fashioned way without seeming to have any acquaintance with the wide range of discourses in both analytic and continental philosophical traditions which deconstruct and problematize the assumptions underlying empiricism and individualistic approaches to personality and ‘character’. You had no idea that Nietzsche is embraced by postmodernists, even though a two second search via the keywords ‘Nietzsche Postmodernism’ would have given you numerous sources verifying this.

It seems absurd that a thinker such as Nietzsche can eschew thousands of years of philosophical wisdom , not just particular philosophers but the whole tradition of philosophy since the ancient Greeks. — Ross Campbell

Haven’t you heard the news? Multiple generations of philosophers at least since Schopenhauer have eschewed thousands of years of philosophical wisdom on the subject of moral values like kindness and compassion. I would also suggest that each era of philosophy since the Greeks has consisted of eschewing fundamental tenets of previous approaches. You act as if philosophical innovation froze after Kant.
Many, including Freud , have remarked at the similarities between Nietzsche’s psychological model and that of Freud. Do you think Freud ‘eschewed thousands of years of philosophical wisdom’? And what about Darwinian based models of altruism?

I think this discussion has digressed from my key point and that is that In my opinion Nietzsche is mistaken in his contempt for the time honoured values of compassion and kindness. — Ross Campbell

I think in order to understand what Nietzsche means by compassion and kindness , and why he is critiquing the traditional metaphysics underlying these values, it is absolutely necessary to see his criticism in the context of his larger philosophy. , which is centered around the Will to Power. You can’t just extract a few concepts , assume
that your definition of them is Nietzsche’s, and then assume that he is dissing them.

I don't see how Aristotle's ethics which are grounded in empirical evidence and common sense is other wordly. — Ross Campbell

Nietzsche may have been the first to recognize that empirical evidence and facts in general only make sense in relation to the larger value systems that define them. Analytic philosophers like Quine , Sellers, Putnam and Davidson refer to this as the untenability of the fact-value distinction. We cannot separate facts from values , and this is what philosophers of science like Kuhn were getting at in showing that scientific theories ( paradigms ) dont mirror or represent the world( the traditional notion of empiricism) , they interact with it. It is necessary to understand these and many other facets of Nietzsche’s approach and see how they all connect up with each other in order to see what he is up to in his treatment of values of compassion and kindness.

I’m not assuming that you will come to embrace Nietzsche’s point of view on ethics, but until
you can produce a coherent summary of his overall project that bears some resemblance to scholarly interpretations then I don’t think you should assume that you are grasping his terms.

I'm saying nearly everything we have heard about Albert Is mainly prooganda. — Protagoras

Like what. Please give examples. Otherwise I might take you for a conspiracy monger. For someone who’s big on empirical truth and correctness you seem to throw out a lot of unsubstantiated claims. If you have specific evidence that he didn’t create special relativity while working in a patent office , let’s have it. Otherwise don’t waste my time or the time of other readers of this site.

This is fine except that theism is not at all necessarily "one static truth". — Janus

The most liberal forms of theism I know , post-Kierkegaaedian religion after religion , heretical Christianity etc, reduce dating to a desire for the good, which is certainty a far cry from fundamentalism , but I would argue there is still a static , unchanging element here , and that is the ‘good’ as something that remains what it is as a desire, a trajectory.

philosophy books I've read about existentialists, Nietzsche is listed amongst them. Post modernism came lond after Nietzsche's death. I've never heard Nietzsche described as a postmodernist. In fact the latter is probably a reaction against thinkers like Nietzsche and other existentialists who regard their ideas as the unique product of the thinker. — Ross Campbell

Most books that you read about existentialism probably list Nietzsche as an existentialist because , for one thing, his era overlapped Kierkegaard and dostoyevsky, who were among the first to be called existentialists. Another reason is that , at least in English speaking countries , the first interpretations of his work were by writers who were existentialists themselves. Postmodernism may have come long after his death , but many philosophers have had their work ignored or misread for years until a major reinterpretation puts their ideas i to a whole new light. That has happened with the American pragmatists and phenomenology as well. Heidegger wrote extensively ion Nietzsche ( Heidegger is another one whose work has been miscategorized as existentialist), as did Deleuze.

What do you mean by "the individual is a social creation"? — Ross Campbell

Many post structuralists argue there is no
such thing as the autonomous subject. What we think of as the individual is a construction emerging
social relations. I assure you the originators of postmodernism ( Jean Francois Lyotard coined the term )
we’re enormous fans of Nietzsche.

“Lyotard follows Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in arguing that there is no objective science or forms of knowledge that are not based in a desire or what Nietzsche called a will for power, a point that Lyotard will make by looking at the desire or libido behind the so-called scientific works of the later Marx.”

“Nietzsche is also a precursor for postmodernism in his genealogical analyses of fundamental concepts, especially what he takes to be the core concept of Western metaphysics, the “I”. On Nietzsche's account, the concept of the “I” arises out of a moral imperative to be responsible for our actions. In order to be responsible we must assume that we are the cause of our actions, and this cause must hold over time, retaining its identity, so that rewards and punishments are accepted as consequences for actions deemed beneficial or detrimental to others (Nietzsche 1889, 482-83; 1887, 24-26, 58-60). In this way, the concept of the “I” comes about as a social construction and moral illusion. According to Nietzsche, the moral sense of the “I” as an identical cause is projected onto events in the world, where the identity of things, causes, effects, etc., takes shape in easily communicable representations. Thus logic is born from the demand to adhere to common social norms which shape the human herd into a society of knowing and acting subjects.

For postmodernists, Nietzsche's genealogy of concepts in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (Nietzsche 1873, 77–97) is also an important reference. In this text, Nietzsche puts forward the hypothesis that scientific concepts are chains of metaphors hardened into accepted truths. “

I’m an independent writer in philosophy and psychology. I only have a masters degree and yet my work is accepted in academic journals.

By todays scientism logic he would have been chased off this forum as a lunatic anyway. You need degrees,phds,white coats and to worship newton or the current paradigm to be able to be in our club of science. — Protagoras

btw, I thought you were a realist? It sounds like you’re endorsing Kuhnian science here. How would you describe the nature of scientific progress? Is it cumulative ?

The amount of nonsense and misinformation written about Einstein is legendary... — Protagoras

Are you saying Einstein didn’t work at the parent office when he began generating special relativity?

So your a minimum wage scientist!! I'm sure for the love of science you would work for free. — Protagoras

Wasn’t Einstein a patent clerk when he developed
special relativity?

“ For Einstein, the patent office was "that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”

The fundamental problem with Nietzsche , as with some other existentialists is that they are too individualistic in their thinking. — Ross Campbell

Values and morals are not private issues , as Nietzsche would have it, merely of concern to the individual and chosen or discarded at the whim of an individual, they are social concerns , part of the fabric of society. — Ross Campbell

Ya know , you don’t have to stick with only one group of scholars’ interpretation of Nietzsche. I can introduce you to an entirely different Nietzsche than the ‘existentialist’ one.

Are you aware, for instance , that Nietzsche forms the very heart of a huge variety and volume of postmodern, poststructuralist writings which spread from French and German continental writers like Heidegger, Foucault , Deleuze and Lyotard to English speaking countries, and have had a dominating influence on academic discussion of politics, arts and philosophy? Were you further aware that the fundamental basis of their approaches is that the individual subject is a social creation, and they find direct support for this in Nietzsche’s work? In other words, they don’t interpret Nietzsche as an existentialist at all.