This situation seems rotten itself as there is no unmitigated good. That is to say, one cannot just experience good without it somehow having itself a negative consequence (boredom, no longer novel, etc.). — schopenhauer1

I don't think boredom is a universal problem. It could be that our age is so entertained that it's no longer a problem. Or maybe I'm a lucky eccentric in this regard.

The situation is rotten indeed at times. Also it's great at times. Cliche but true.

he reason the world of becoming is condemned so much throughout the history of Eastern and Western philosophy is a problem of the philosopher's own impotence — Albero

:up:
Becker's The Denial of Death continues this kind of thinking. How do vulnerable human beings make peace with their situation ? I'd say primarily through myths that give them a heroic role (as simple in many cases as a good mother, a true patriot, a real man, etc.)

Why the disturbance? Why not Nirvana?

So ensues layers of post-facto reasoning. Here comes that shifty subversive "balance" again :smirk: — schopenhauer1

To me there is no answer to the ultimate why question. There can't be, which means maybe that the ultimate why question is not a proper question.

I like to think of the negative Socrates, the one who knew he didn't know, who could admit it.

In this perspective, non-being is not synonymous with nothingness or annihilation but rather represents a state of freedom from the limitations and fluctuations of the material realm. — Existential Hope

Not exactly sure if I understand. Perhaps you could expand?

Caring about suffering in the abstract is not our strong point. — schopenhauer1

There seem to be evolutionary reasons for that. As the likelihood of shared genes increases, so does the likelihood of bonding and cooperation. I feel the pull of the universal human family, but these days I can't forget that in-groups depend on out-groups. There's no us without them. Just as the body shits and externalizes, so does the group. If aliens attack, then we'll have some fiery humanism.

so denial and vehement dismissal is the only way to react if confronted with it. — schopenhauer1

There's also the sublimated evasion, sort of what I'm doing, though I can't sincerely call it an evasion. Most people cling to life and avoid death most of the time.

My own suggestion (if you recall) was to make suicide easy and painless --and cleaner, because that's the tricky part for the suicide who wants to be polite and not leave a mess. This fits the individualism of our times.

But I think Zapffe counteracts the determinism in a way. He psychologizes it rather than mechanizes it. In other words, it is learned, cultural, a defense mechanism perhaps, but one that can be unlearned by knowing about it in the first place. "Oh, mea culpa, I am just throwing up a defense mechanism by ignoring, denying, and anchoring". — schopenhauer1

I tend to see one myth displacing another. It's not that we get beyond orienting metaphors and heroic roleplay (defense mechanisms). We just (hopefully) trade up. To me Freud (for instance) is an instance of the archetype that might be called the hero of consciousness, which goes back to shamanism. Zapffe is a version too.

And of course my not giving phenomenology enough credit is mostly a rhetorical ploy to keep the discussion in an area in which I am both more comfortable and more interested. That's not something I am alone in doing. It is quite self-consciously done. None of which detracts from my criticism of phenomenology. — Banno

I appreciate the honesty, and indeed we are all personalities on a stage.

Phenomenology would build an understanding from a foundation of personal, private, indubitable phenomenal experience. — Banno

That might fit some of early Husserl, but it's very much counter to the later Husserl and to all of Heidegger. The phenomenon for phenomenology is not what is was for Kant. Husserl is even a direct realist in his weird way (not just my opinion, but also Zahavi's.)

I just feel the need to stick up for the sophistication of the movement.

I think the phenomenologists overcome internal/external, but it's very easy to read our Cartesian assumptions into their work. — Moliere

:up:

Oh yeah for sure, good points on the public performer. It's more an industry they have created for themselves, not trying to create real dialogue. — schopenhauer1

Right. And, to be fair, they may be truly invested in or identified with their finite-exclusive personality. We can hide from our terrible ambivalence in the illusion of being simply virtuous, projecting the repressed on others. 'Whatever is unconscious is projected.' Joyce has his universal figure split into opposing sons in Finnegans Wake. We wear the mask not only for others but also for the mirror.

There's an old meme about the paralysis that comes with too much vision. What keeps the rat on the wheel ?

As I see it, antinatalism is extremely unlikely to succeed, become popular. Is that how you see it ?

Still not what I'm talking about though. Social issues and existential issues are not the same, and perhaps even a bit opposed. — schopenhauer1

There is something special about AN. I agree.

In that case, balance is the shady subversive word used. Thus one is quieting to become better at the parts that are not quiet. It is not to diminish one's need for need. It is another self-improvement strategy to live in the world of noise. It's not gnosis, its simply routine like the health-shake, exercise routine, etc. — schopenhauer1

The balance involved is thermodynamic or biological. Game theory dictates that counterculture is a parasite. In my opinion, the free will thing is roughly a misleading illusion. The culture of responsibility itself emerged as a faster way to get the coal out of the hills and burn it.

Perhaps I embrace the fatalism in Schopenhauer more than you do. When I was studying Darwin, Dawkins, and Dennett, I had Schopenhauer in mind. These evolutionary thinkers vindicate and naturalize his insights, making them stronger and less sentimental. I took from them an even harsher brew (those offensive 'moist robots,' slavishly serving the machine-cold code with mathematical necessity.)

I'll be impressed if humans stop eating pork because it's Ethical to do so. Asking them to stop breeding is on another level entirely.

They rather therapy to be individualistic, about their ego and how they move about in the world, not the human condition tout court. — schopenhauer1

There's plenty of 'politicians,' though, who attack apolitical ironists as escapists. 'Ethical socialism.' The rule is grand social issues, the spirit of seriousness. "I am a serious and respectable public intellectual commenting on The Serious Issues of the Day. "

But can there be more of a communal commiseration aspect to it rather? Like, "I see this, does anyone else see this? Isn't this crazy?!". — schopenhauer1

Totally, and I think Beckett's work is part of that. He's grimly hilarious. He's willing to face the horror, describe it, while also acknowledging the part of us that's addicted to it. He's got one sad hobo character who invents a complicated ritualistic system of sucking stones and moving them from pocket to pocket. He describes this system in hilarious detail. To me the 'muted post horn' or 'open storm thud' (as I've also seen it, a sneaky anagram) is a little piece of tragicomical graffiti. In the shadows of the Resentment Industrial Complex, riding like a parasite, is a little symbol of the undecidable undecided infinite.

'Does anyone else see through all the simple-minding bullshit that drowns out almost everything ?'

'Does anyone else confess the complexity and ambivalence and ambiguity of our situation ? Or is everyone just a false doctor with a snake oil cure, looking for clicks and clams ? '

For more on the post horn theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49

I was explaining how the the first written myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, spoke of gods who were pissed at all the noise the humans made so flooded the Earth. Why do people want to create the din of noise? We can't be quiet? — schopenhauer1

I love this part of the story by the way. Freud might relate it to the death drive. Let's all just go to sleep.

The answer to your question might be simple. Such a trait, a preference for Silence, would remove itself from the gene pool. It can only linger on the margins as a kind of parasite or stowaway, possibly serving the Noise party in the long run.

Good question. As others have noted, philosophy has often associated the Real with the permanent, with that which defies time and refuses to change -- that which is complete and sated and blissfully motionless. As one poet put it time is fire in which we burn. Cue also the fire sermon.

Bhikkhus, form is burning, feeling is burning, perception is burning, volitional formations are burning, consciousness is burning. Seeing thus, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple experiences revulsion towards form ... feeling ... perception ... volitional formations ... consciousness .... Through dispassion [this mind] is liberated....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

Cue also Ernest Becker and Sartre. The untrustworthy boy becomes a man whose promises can be relied upon. The movement is from ape to god, towards a 'god' who can only be approximated by the flesh. I get control over myself. I get off approximating the self-caused self-directed self-pleased unmoved mover. The stoic is a statue of virtue, nobly Static. His child dies or his leg is broken, but He is proud and content (proud of being proud and content.

The old man preacher of omnia vanitas, who takes many faces, glories in the transcendence of the truly human symbolic realm over the stupid accidents of the realm of mere flesh. He speaks from royal eternity, greater than the passing kings of this world, identified (more or less explicitly) with the graveleaping softwhere that knows itself immortal.

Here's one version of this:

Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is

a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137)

In light of the emphasis placed in his later works on the practical existential needs of the embodied individual subject, it should be noted that during his early idealistic phase Feuerbach was strongly committed to a theoretical ideal of philosophy according to which contemplation of and submersion in God is the highest ethical act of which human beings are capable.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

The human species is basically understood as a self-loving god. Feuerbach, a bit like Schopenhauer, acknowledged the centrality of sex. Unlike Schopenhauer, he got to experience a happy marriage. Now S had a wacky theory of sexual shame that only suggests to me a personal issue. He is wiser in other moments (he was full of insights and contradictions.) F saw that our love for other human bodies and other human minds was the joy and justification of life, for those who could get enough and had the crucial material-political context for the development of their human potential. Hard to expect the starving or hunted to end up with a sunny curious disposition.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's wrong to argue AN on a philosophy forum. Anonymity and the lack of funding is important here. The politician is a public performer who develops a persona as a brand. They win power, fame, and money from playing their role. It's in their interest, as persona product, to keep things comfortably finite and one-sided. Don't expect the politician to look into their own motives or discuss how nice it is to be famous and admired. To be sure, they'll have a sentimental yarn about their love for the oppressed, etc., which may indeed be part of the truth.

Schopenhauer was serious, but his aphorisms had some humor. — schopenhauer1

Yes. What is the nature of humor ? Is it a sly confession of ambivalence ? Of the pleasure we take in disaster ?

I'd say it is serious in that people are seriously affected by birth and suffering. So the stakes are high, no? — schopenhauer1

Sure. And gallowshumor references the situation of one about to die. Most of us care at least a little about strangers, but just about everyone cares intensely about their own death in the new few minutes.

I like this one:

At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?"

It seems something to do with evangelistic outrage. — schopenhauer1

Yes. There's also a psychonanalytic theme here. The 'surface' of a personality is a mask or a performance. The finite personality depends on what it excludes for its value. If the Cause succeeds, I lose my heroic role, the very meaning structure of my life.

E.M. Cioran I think represents a gallow's humor sort of approach to AN. — schopenhauer1

Yes, Cioran's tone is often exactly what I have in mind. Samuel Beckett is relevant too: nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Nietzsche writes of the festival of cruelty, ambivalently aware of our enjoyment of the spectacle of suffering and humiliation. Joyce brilliantly explores the enjoyment of one's own humiliation in Ulysses (cuckolding), akin to the self-vivisection of Nietzsche's introspective ascetic. This self-vivisector is an image of critical reason, of poisoning and poisoned Socrates, corrupter of youth, destroyer of comfortable platitudes. This is Nietzsche's Hamlet-like significance. He endlessly turns his knife on himself. He subverts himself, would rather be a buffoon than a pompous politician. He wants company on the endless dangerous road, like Whitman, rather than followers who, as followers, have already lost him. In short, I'm talking about Nietzsche (or Freud or Shakespeare or ...) as possibility rather than substance. We re-enact their heroic intentions, make it new, etc.

How many planets are in our solar system? The number of planets is both an observation and an imposition. — Banno

Great example. The criteria for membership in the planet category are contributed by us, though clearly within various constraints that we did not choose. So statements about planets depend for their truth on our own semantic and logical norms as well as upon a world that constrains us.

And for my money the best way to talk about the various bits and pieces of our everyday use is with a bivalent logic.

That might not be the case in other specific circumstances, nor in ethics, aesthetics or mathematics. — Banno

I agree. In everyday life, the framework is relatively transparent and trustworthy.

I'd add metaphysics and epistemology to your list in the second sentence.

A realist will say that either there is water at the poles, or there isn't - that either the statement or its negation is true. An anti-realist may say that the statement "There is water at Mercury's poles" is neither true nor not true, until the observation is made. Which is the better approach? — Banno

I suspect that most will agree that a binary approach makes more sense here. It's on that side of a continuum.

On the other side there's the issue of whether a given Turing machine will halt on a given input. Part of me wants very much to say of course ! But there's no upper bound on how long it could take to find out.

Am I an antirealist because I start to suspect there's no obvious answer here ? I find the realism/antirealism debate itself somewhat murky. Popper's realism appeals to me. But tentative hypotheses (held self-consciously fallibly) and instrumental hypotheses are practically the same.

You might be too hard on pragmatists. To me, anyway, the original spirit of pragmatism is about not wasting time on differences that make no difference. It's a reaction against a tendency to get bogged down.

Anti-realism holds that stuff is dependent in some way on us, that thinking makes it so. — Banno

As I see it, it's our statements about things that depend on us and the world out there. An awareness of the contingency of our frameworks can make one reluctant to insist that a statement must be true or false if it is meaningful. Meaningfulness is not trivial, either.

Apel adds to this perhaps.
Apel argues that the most important contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of all understanding.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

Hegel summarized idealism as the emphasis of the unreality of the abstract. We can try to imagine the world stripped naked of all the things we say about it: an unreal abstraction, which may be useful. We imagine the planet before we got here, but we can do so only because we are here, etc. But also the self without a world to be in is an abstraction. A Turing machine with infinite memory, etc.

That emphasis on internal/external is a derangement from phenomenology. — Banno

Perhaps you don't give phenomenology enough credit. Husserl alone is already great. Also the realism/antirealism seems like an echo, with realism favoring the external.

I agree that it's about what's best to believe. But William James would probably agree with that.

I don't know if you'd count me as an antirealist. Probably? For me the Lifeworld is primary. Promises are as real as pebbles. Norms permeate human experience. I don't see how they can be boiled away, because logical norms are what give claims of reduction any authority they might have in the first place.

How external is reality supposed to be for the realist ? If it's external to the species, then I don't know how much sense that can make within a human inquiry (allowing for the weird glitch where our mathematical models point before our emergence. ) If it's external to individual agents, then that's fine. The world was here before me and will outlast me.

It's batteries and clusters and systems and hierarchies of concepts, never just one at a time, that we deal with, — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Neither "the balanced end of an enquiry" nor "how someone ought describe a situation" lead inevitably to truth. — Banno

I agree. No guarantees. But we do trust some reports more than others. 'Objective' has a use. I myself strive to be objective. It's a key philosophical virtue, right ?

I'm puzzled by folk differentiating 'objective' truths from truths. Prefixing "subjective' or 'objective' to truth seems to me to do no more than muddle the nature of truth. — Banno

I agree. The truth is the truth. Claims can be more or less objective, more or less biased. Private toothaches can function in the inferential nexus, as explanations for being rude, etc. They are still in the world at large, the lifeworld. What-it-was-like-for-Sally is not meaningless, has a role in the always public language. But 'subjective truth' is misleading. Claims about Sally's experience can be more or less true, but that's different, because Sally's experience is a piece of the world.

All roads seem to lead back to the co-given-ness or logical interdependence of self-world-others-language.

Worthy of Monty Python. Have you a view as to the sense of "we experience representations of plants and animals"? Seems much like experiencing our experiences... — Banno

I agree with you that we just experience the plants. I think 'representation' works best in an interpersonal situation. Like a cop quoting a witness. 'Buy you said [re-presented (what had happened) ] that Joey threw the first punch. ]

People sometimes like to talk as if they could see around human cognition (but of course necessarily with it.) So somehow the lifeworld gets reduced to a representation of the scientific image (Sellars) which is paradoxically a mere part of that lifeworld.

It's not a perfect distinction, but there's no need to treat it badly for all that. I studied math, and it's relatively analytic/syntactical. As with so many distinctions, we mostly need to simply remember they are historically evolving and imperfect tools.

If you like; I've no clear idea of what the difference between an oyster-for-me and an oyster-for-anyone might be. Isn't it all just oysters? — Banno

More generally, think of a juror listening to testimony. Everyday we try to see reality through the people we talk with. That thread about media bias is relevant here. The 'objective' truth is something like the balanced end of inquiry or the way a human ought to describe the situation. This would include reports on the quality of the oysters at a restaurant. Maybe Bobby has always hated seafood or resents the owner of the joint for dating his exwife.

Oh no I'm not saying he's an idiot, sorry if that's how it came across.

It's just that it's hard sometimes to realize how far our understanding of the world has come since then, especially neuroscience and other fields. They worked with what they knew at the time so I wonder what they would say with what we know now. — Darkneos

I didn't take it that way. I think we maybe agree on the proper mix of appreciation and irreverence. Some of the old geniuses might be able to revolutionize philosophy again once they were up to speed.

.

Yes, all that. And as you seem to note, what is experienced is the world. We should avoid Stove's gem - the false argument that we only ever taste oysters with our mouths, hence we never tase oysters as they are in themselves... — Banno

I agree. We experience the world, not our experience of the world, and not our experience of our experience of the world, and not our ...

For me the way to avoid the oyster problem is to contrast the oyster-for-me with the oyster-for-anyone. Objectivity is just the lack of bias, lack of individual rather than species distortion. It might not make much sense for humans to worry about species or human distortion.

Do you think that Kant's synthetic a priori derivation of the "pure forms of intuition" and categories of judgement could be mistaken (bearing in mind that they are only presented as being relevant to the context of human experience and judgement)? — Janus

I suppose that's connected to the philosophy of math issue. I'm open to the mathematical-logical synthetic apriori. It seems defensible anyway, and it goes with intuitionism perhaps. Apriori physics is of course hard to accept.

Perhaps we say, in retrospect, that Kant was doing phenomenology ? I lean toward saying that such things are checked and negotiated in conversation. In math, the semantics are likewise a bit mysterious. What is accepted as proof is public, but what it all means is a bit more elusive.

Why do you think people lack sufficient free will enough? — schopenhauer1

So much could be said here, but we can talk about pork. Do we really need it ? Are pigs treated decently in order to make it ? I guess I'm cynical. We are not fundamentally rational and righteous creatures. I look on YouTube and see the resentment industrial complex. These fuckers are professionally outraged, like the guy with the glass to his throat in that Black Mirror episode.

I gotta name for the type : the politician. It's not just folks actually seeking election but the personality type ('finite') that earnestly brings a narrative of the good versus the bad. Spengler called the general structure ethical socialism, by which he meant the evangelical assumption. Whatever the Good or Truth may be, it's our duty to spread the word. Right or wrong, Spengler thought that some ancient philosophers just 'offered counsel.' I'm personally interested in the 'muted post horn' as graffiti hinting at 'infinite' or 'undecided/undecidable' personality. Antinatalism puts the birthmania into question (offering a counterpolitics, just as earnest.) But there's also the putting of the spirit of seriousness into question, along with the assumption something can and must be done ---one of course does not preach this putting into question, for that would be a misunderstanding --hence graffiti and gallowshumor.

”On could say, then, that the rule for the use of the word ‘same’ is instantiated in performances that are bound together by family resemblance, which means that they have no one thing in common. — Joshs

Note that this statement is aimed at the public concept of the rule for the use of the word 'same.'
The family resemblance point is well made, so maybe what they have in common is reference norm. The same word is used in many ways -- and will be used in ways that cannot be predicted.

FWIW, I grant some kind of radical open-endedness, a sort of frontier. For all our inheritance, there is always danger and novelty.

It's true, of course, that each individual organism needs to construct their own, in some sense 'private', model of the world (and themselves in it), because that's what brain development just is, but it's not true that each organism constructs the framework they will use to construct the world from scratch. There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Yes, this is basically my view. The hardware is inherited from Darwinian evolution (one kind of history). The software is inherited mostly from cultural (another kind of history.) Saussure thought in terms of language being somehow imprinted on individual brains (never exactly in the same way, but close enough.)

Ontogeny gets to recapitulate phylogeny rapidly because what used to be endlessly branching little pathways are now high-speed rails. As Hume put it, there are questions Nature has deemed too important to leave to our own fallible and imperfect reason. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I think Hegel saw cultural education the same way. What took the first explores a long time can be streamlined and summarized. So later individuals are like vampires, the true ancients -- fortunate heirs of thousands of years of timebinding (millions if you count the hardware.)

Well, there’s certainly SOMETHING that constrains our constructions, but aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible? — Joshs

Yes. So the something is slippery. We might talk of a vast blanket of interdependent concepts and practices. It seems to me that we largely 'are' this blanket. We have no choice but take most of this world-navigating conceptuality for granted as world itself. We can put this or that piece of the mesh into question, but only by taking most of the mesh for granted.

Kant said a lot of things but that doesn't make them right. Classical physics was just a model that works at the macro level of things but fails when it gets to the Quantum Physics. It's a "good enough" method for day to day but not for understanding reality, at least according to the physicists I've talked to. — Darkneos

Yes, that sounds right. I don't want to pick on Kant too much, because for his time he was a great genius. According to Popper and others, Newton was just a towering figure. Instruments were not precise enough to find fault with his physics. It was if the source code for the matrix had been discovered, a great triumph for species. Small wonder that Kant wanted to secure this treasure against Hume from being falsifiable. Synthetic apriori truth is tall order indeed.

I've read Beiser on that period of German philosophy, and Kant had his critics from the beginning. He's never ceased having his critics. I suppose one becomes a great name in philosophy more by being interesting than by being right. He's almost a contradiction, a supermetaphysical antimetaphysician.