I remember once watching two men 'battle it out' at work in a way where one tried to prove to the other that they knew better about a subject and yet both didn't actually know what they are talking about. What astonished me in the experience was the tone, the body language, the attitude of confidence as though such behaviour represented 'truth' over the very content itself. — TimeLine
It happened on here too between Agu and someone else, I think it was Vagabond and they both looked just as stupid as the other, writing massive essays without contributing intellectually at all. When I said that they should stop and actually talk about the problem in the OP, I got 'no, we have to do this.' Women back away because we know we get brushed aside during this weird Alpha display. — TimeLine
I want to try to bring this all back. The pessimist view is centered around a demand. The pessimist is someone like Barry, hounded by anxiety-eliciting phone calls. Besieged constantly. What he does isn't confront Hoffman. Instead he says: Listen: life consists of these awful, immiserating phone calls. Do what you will, the phone calls we keep coming. What you need to do, then, is always be aware that no matter what you do, a phone will eventually ring. That's what it comes down to: we run around all we want, but all we're doing is ignoring a ringing phone. — csalisbury
I was raised religious (not super-strictly, but religious enough) and had the nihilistic vision in response to that. — csalisbury
I guess more accurately it was visited upon me. We had been studying the egyptians in school and I was like man they really believed in that stuff, as much as we believe in christianity. — csalisbury
But anyway, got into Nietzsche because I thought he'd fit my angry atheist thing, and was quickly, blessedly, disappointed. — csalisbury
Strangely, I got into pessimism after Nietzsche. But then got Nietzsche again, better, after that. I think Pessimism is kind of great as a station along the way. — csalisbury
Yeahhh, agree. There's some literature (mostly french) on the Marquis de Sade along these lines. The weird thing about his monstrosity is how meticulous it is. 100 Days of Sodom, for instance, doesn't feel all that animal at all - it's more like an exhaustively worked out system of perversity. — csalisbury
His whole existence is an attempt to maintain a facade of legitimate adulthood while dealing with a simmering rage in the face of these humiliations. — csalisbury
We recognize Daniel Plainview's massive flaws, but we still respect him, or are at least in awe of him. (want to emphasize this. There Will be Blood is certainly not a celebration of Plainview, but its most sympathetic to him.) Paul Dano, on the other hand, is seen as a shrewd manipulator. He's contemptible, and the movie is basically about how Plainview's skilled attempt at control is ever-shadowed by a weak manipulator with whom he has to vie. — csalisbury
All of this struggle ends in a bizarre, childish humiliation that the director and audience recognizes has been won at the expense of Plainview's soul. — csalisbury
Skipping Inherent Vice for now — csalisbury
Phantom Thread — csalisbury
Unless it's actually a matter of S&M. — frank
That sort of thing can be a source of creativity. Its more likely to be destructive if its unconscious. — frank
Even bringing it up is a kind of saturnine thing to do, but men and women were on the scene in the discussion. — frank
It's one thing to conceptualize this nobodiness, it's quite another to embody or realize it. Nobodiness can easily be written into the fabric of our personal narrative. — praxis
The 'problem' is that this 'nobodiness' easily becomes another sophisticated ego-narrative. Has this or that person achieved a sense of personality being an illusion? Something like the 'noble savage' seems to reappear. — syntax
Well, a major part of my meta-narrative is 'institutional religion getting it wrong from the outset'. — Wayfarer
When I studied comparative religion and history of ideas, I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be no obvious equivalent to the Indian understanding of mokṣa (spiritual liberation) in the Western religious traditions. — Wayfarer
What has been lost in the transition to modernity, is the sense of the basic fallibility of human reason, corrupted as it is by the 'original sin'. — Wayfarer
Oof, hits close to home. Think you're right tho. — csalisbury
It has struck me that what Sloterdijk is talking about in the text that's been quoted is not too different from what I'm saying, is it? — T Clark
The games make sense without much of the theoretical background. Adult/child don't have to be interpreted as features of the psyche with a rich structure, things still work with the approximation that adult = the responsible, fettered one and child = the irresponsible, free one. Most of the games take on the character of responsibility shifting, disavowal or branding. — fdrake
Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the patient (whether parent-like, child-like, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior.[1] In transactional analysis, the patient is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of unconsciously held ideas. — Wiki
I'd recommend 'Games People Play' by Edward Berne. — fdrake
So I won't die on this hill, but I think the monstrous inner child and the overdemanding [something like a superego] are closely interrelated. They need each other. — csalisbury
Have you ever seen the movie The Master? — csalisbury
The movie is a perverse love story. The 'master' needs some utterly unreflective jumble of desire and impulse as the raw material for the imposition of his will (imposed under the false auspices of 'healing') & Freddie seems to need his absolute attention and concern. — csalisbury
Infinite demand recognizes infinite demand. They reciprocally provide each other with limits they can't give themselves. — csalisbury
My hunch - and its just a hunch - is that children aren't really monstrously demanding the infinite. — csalisbury
From the unskilled parent's perspective the child's inability to do this - its inevitable reversion back to [screaming, punching their sister etc] - does constitute an an unbounded monstrous. The parent doesn't know (probably weren't taught themselves) how emotions work, what their rhythm is - so all they can see is an eternally recalcitrant monstrousness that will always resist their limits. The child, on the other hand, is never taught how to meaningfully engage with their emotions. They just experience an irruption of overwhelming [ ineffable ] which irrupts in a household that has no place for it. Over time this turns into a feeling that certain needs are by nature unbound and unaddressable. If the child goes out on its own, it'll probably wind up in cycles of self-destruction. (One cycle, which I fell into, is one of Salvational Force (Girl, substance, philosophy etc.) disappointment, New Salvational Force etc.) — csalisbury
What I kind of think is that you need a more complex and subtle relationship with yourself, where you allow the child wide berth when you can (like the parent who lets the kid run around screaming in the park, waving to the child when it looks back, until he finally wears himself out and wants to nap) and find a gentle way of communicating to it that you need to take control when life requires it. You don't yank its arm, or tell it to shut up. You figure out how to communicate the situation with a kind of affection. — csalisbury
I will reply more at length, but while the thought is with me - have you ever run across Horkheimer’s book The Eclipse of Reason? It’s about the only ‘Frankfurt school’ text I’m familar familiar with and says a lot about this theme. — Wayfarer
However, over time the meaning of ‘secular philosophy’ changed, in that it is often taken to mean or imply that it’s a philosophy that is consciously non- or even anti-religious. That stance is obviously writ large in the writings of so-called ‘secular humanism’ although that spans a wide spectrum of views; but there is a strongly anti-religious strain of that kind of thinking [e.g. everything published by Prometheus Press]. But one consequence of this is, again, anthropological, in the sense that it has implications for ‘the human condition’ or what it means to be human. — Wayfarer
I find, on this forum, almost everyone will fiercely defend the view that humans are essentially animal.. — Wayfarer
So the upshot is that what often is said in the name of secular humanism IS philosophically barren. But it’s also true that it doesn’t have to be. Actually it’s got nothing to do with ‘secularism’ as such - what it comes from is taking methodological naturalism as a metaphysical principle, which it isn’t. That’s the problem in a nutshell. — Wayfarer
Interesting observation. Indeed Schopenhauer was independently wealthy. — schopenhauer1
Not in the real world. I haven't seen many "Communities of Existential Thought" in many cities. There's probably one or two somewhere I'm sure on a meetup site, or perhaps just philosophy meetups, but generally there is not. Ironically, we only relegate religious institutions for this kind of thinking, and that is wrapped up in the trappings of supernaturalism, traditions, custom, allegory, and historical baggage. — schopenhauer1
But then, is a life worth starting because it has complexities? The antinatalist does not assume that the answer is yes. — schopenhauer1
Starting a whole new life on behalf of someone else seems to me as good a reason for a reason as any other decision. — schopenhauer1
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2099162Given the terrible truths about the human situation, it is hardly surprising that Nietzsche took so seriously Schopenhauer’s challenge, namely, why prefer life to non-existence? These “terrible truths”
differ, however, in how they inflict their pain. All the “terrible truths” are terrible if contemplated, if internalized, and taken seriously. But some of the terrible existential truths are, of course, constituted by pain and suffering: they are terrible for those undergoing them. I take it that the Schopenhauerian challenge depends primarily on the former, rather than the latter: that is, Nietzsche’s concern is why we who confront seriously the terrible truths about the human situation--even before the ones constituted by pain and suffering befall us—should keep on living, when we know full well that life promises systematic suffering, immorality, and illusion? Why not accept Schopenhauer’s apparent verdict, and give up on life altogether?
There are relatively few claims about Nietzsche that are uncontroversial, but I hope this one is: Nietzsche was always interested in responding to that Schopenhauerian challenge, from his earliest work to his last. And the animating idea of his response also remains steady from beginning to end, I shall argue, namely, that as he puts it in the new 1886 preface to his first book, 1872’s The Birth of Tragedy, “the existence of the world is justified [gerechtfertigt] only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (BT: Attempt 5). He is here explicitly summarizing “the suggestive sentence...repeated several times” in the original work a dozen years earlier: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (BT:5) and “existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (BT:24).6 This kind of “justification,” whatever precisely it amounts to, is equivalent in Nietzschean terminology to taking a “Dionysian” perspective on life. — Brian Leiter
The antinatalist asks the "why life?" in the first place. It grates on people who never stop to ask this question or who have projects and goals that they do not want to question the importance of. It is a slap in the face- more personal than almost anything else. — schopenhauer1
Interesting point and I think there is something to it. This is why there should be existential communities- we can call it "The Joy of Pessimism" akin to the Joy of Cooking or the Joy of Painting :D. — schopenhauer1
As for the production idea of this thread, the point is that we can never have full knowledge of the very world we use to keep us alive. Hunter/gatherers know the man-made tools that they use. Our ancestors did at least. But here we are, using this computer, and I am sure most of us wouldn't know much except generalities about processors, RAM, binary code, source code, etc. that still wouldn't scratch the surface of all the functionalities. Of course, SOMEONE might know every piece of information that goes into how the computer functions (still doubtful because of the programming aspect), but they don't know about some other phenomena that they use in daily life. It is a very subtle point I am making that I think people have missed. — schopenhauer1
Read books that you really, really enjoy reading rather than reading books that you think might offer a cure. — Bitter Crank
From the viewpoint of anthropology of religion, there’s probably a reason why such pursuits are the prerogative of ‘meditative minorities’ - namely, because the way is narrow, and the path difficult. — Wayfarer
Divesting oneself of the imagined selves and social selves that comprise one’s sense of self, which is what the mystical path entails, goes against the current of everything deemed socially useful. — Wayfarer
In fact, in most religious cultures, the special role of the religious is recognised - the original meaning of ‘secular’ was to demarcate the two kinds of lives. Whereas now it’s all secular [or fancies itself to be, although how much of what it thinks of as ‘secular’ is actually sublimated religiosity is another matter.] — Wayfarer
A mischievous thought I often have is that the aim of so-called secular or Enightenment philosophy is actually to make the world safe for the ignorant - ‘ignorance’ in the sense of ‘avidya’, spiritually unaware. — Wayfarer
Whereas, again, in a religious culture, one’s ultimate identity is understood in terms of union with the Divine or liberation from the wheel of life, secular culture by definition has no aim beyond - well, what exactly? More and more pleasurable experiences, better health, greater utility - ultimately space travel, the physical pursuit of heaven. — Wayfarer
Notice the reflexive link between ‘reality’ and ‘survival’. This is because evolutionary biology, which has displaced religion in the meta-narrative of secular culture, can only ever envisage ultimate ends in terms of ‘what survives’. Never mind the Sisyphean connotations of surviving for the sake of surviving - I breed, therefore I am - there’s actually nothing else on offer. There’s only only one kind of end available, and it’s physical. — Wayfarer
This alienation from factors of production is a problem as we are atomized from the sources of production- reduced to a tiny infinitesimal fraction of the larger pie. — schopenhauer1
Frustration is always bound up with self-condemnation. — csalisbury
Can we have communities of existential discussion? I haven't seen it, and it would be interesting to see how that would work — schopenhauer1
No one has committed a pessimistic crime by not using their ability for self-awareness regarding their paths of care or circular routines. I don't condemn it, but there is a recommendation to be aware of it. One can be caught up in the routines without knowing the bigger picture of it. When you do see the bigger picture, you tend to see that aesthetic perspective I was talking about of striving will that wraps itself in layers of circular routines in the individual's umwelt. At the bottom of it is a sort of emptiness/boredom- a dull silence that we wrap more routines around. — schopenhauer1
So what exactly is the need for more people? — schopenhauer1
The barebones of the world is a community, not a man alone with the void. Nobody exists and survives without others. It's a failure to meaningfully engage with, and get 'caught up' within your community that causes this sense of "void". It's why people are so depressed in the modern world. It's why people commit suicide. And probably why people advocate antinatalism. — Inyenzi
If I had to write an autometanarrative, I wouldn't know how to do it other than the way I have. Maybe not exactly the same way, but the same general approach. I've tried before and I can't make it work. It feels false. It feels not me. — T Clark
I have found that, when I do put people into boxes, it's a mistake. I regret it later. It doesn't work. It makes me make bad decisions and act like an asshole. This is not a statement of principle, it's what I've learned from experience or maybe always knew.
You will see that all my discussions end up with a quote from Lao Tzu eventually. This time I'll go with a paraphrase - The person who can be characterized is not the eternal person. — T Clark
I personally relate to this 'nobodiness,' which I associate with the sense of wearing one's life as a mask ('personality is an illusion'). The 'problem' is that this 'nobodiness' easily becomes another sophisticated ego-narrative. Has this or that person achieved a sense of personality being an illusion? Something like the 'noble savage' seems to reappear. This kind of thinking is also presented in Love's Body. Is it not that case that any valuable 'spiritual' insight can be used in an ugly 'unspiritual' way? As insights become institutionalized and hardened for general use, do they not tend to lose force?The mania for "identity" seems to be the deepest of the unconscious programmings,
so deeply buried that it evades even attentive reflection for a long time. A formal somebody, as bearer of our social identifications, is, so to speak, programmed into us. It guarantees in almost every aspect the priority of what is alien over what is one's own. Where "I" seem to be, others always went before me in order to automatize me through socialization. Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, however, no life has a name. The self-conscious nobody in us —who acquires names and identities only through its "social birth"-remains the living source of freedom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop in the course of individuation from an areflexive "narcissism" to a reflected "self-discovery in the world cosmos." In this Nobody, the last enlightenment, as critique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. If mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of preindividual emptiness used to be exclusively a matter for meditative minorities, today there are good reasons for hoping that in our world, torn by struggling identifications, majorities for such enlightenment will finally be found. — Sloterdijk
The message underlying the violence and destruction is purely and simply self expression, with no higher meaning or purpose. — Shatter
Sounds like an icon complex or fear of enthusiasm. Or more raw, as the guy in the movie about Turing said: it feels good to be mean. — frank
And that would indeed seem to suggest a balance between scientific capitalism and a philosophy that emphasises the ‘fruits of contemplation’. — Wayfarer
In order to survive, one must be schooled in reality. Of course. Those who mean well call it growing up, and there is a grain of truth to that. But that is not all. Always a bit unsettled and irritable, collaborating consciousness looks around for its lost naivete, to which there is no way back, because consciousness-raising is irreversible.
...
Arguing behind the back and through the head of the opponent has become common practice in modern critique. The gesture of exposure characterizes the style of argumentation of ideology critique, from the critique of religion in the eighteenth century to the critique of fascism in the twentieth. Everywhere, one discovers extrarational mechanisms of opinion: interests, passions, fixations, illusions. That helps a bit to mitigate the scandalous contradiction between the postulated unity of truth and the factual plurality of opinions—since it cannot be eliminated. Under these assumptions, a true theory would be one that not only grounds its own theses best, but also knows how to defuse all significant and persistent counterpositions through ideology critique. In this point, as one can easily see, official Marxism has the greatest ambition, since the major part of its theoretical energy is dedicated to outdoing all non-Marxist theories and exposing them as "bourgeois ideologies." Only by continually outdoing the others, can ideologists succeed in "living" with the plurality of ideologies. De facto, the critique of ideology implies the attempt to construct a hierarchy between unmasking and unmasked theory. In the war of consciousness, getting on top, that is, achieving a synthesis of claims to power and better insights, is crucial.
...
The right of ideology critique to use ad hominem arguments was indirectly acknowledged
even by the strictest absolutist of reason, J. G. Fichte, whom Heine aptly compared to Napoleon when he said that the kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. This critique intrudes into the conditions under which human beings form opinions with either compassionate serenity or cruel seriousness. It seizes error from behind and tears at its roots in practical life. This procedure is not exactly modest, but its immodesty is excused with a reference to the principle of the unity of truth. What is brought to light by the vivisecting approach is the everlasting embarrassment of ideas confronted by the interests underlying them: human, all too human; egoisms, class privileges, resentments, steadfastness of hegemonic powers. Under such illumination, the opposing subject appears not only psychologically but also sociologically and politically undermined. Accordingly, its standpoint can be understood only if one adds to its self-portrayals what is, in fact, hidden behind and below them. In this way, ideology critique raises a claim that it shares with hermeneutics, namely, the claim to understand an "author" better than he understands himself. What at first sounds arrogant about this claim can be methodologically justified. Others often really do perceive things about me that escape my attention—and conversely. — Sloterdijk
So intimacy requires what lord jim is reluctant to do. But no one cares that much, except for jim. In fact they wish hed stay around and own it. They've been displaying their flaws all along, and can sympathize with someone who has flaws too. But the guy who has no flaws or history - he's harder to relate to. The tragedy is that on the one hand Jim thinks they'll be apalled, while on the other hand, just at the moment they're least-apalled, and most sympathetic - that's when Jim leaves. — csalisbury
I am interested in understanding these questions through Western philosophy among other things. And sure, Kant is olde worlde, but his insights into the nature of knowledge are still highly relevant.
You see, the prevailing meta-narrative for a lot of people is that one, we're the outcome of chance, and two, we're animals. And that has philosophical consequences. There's a lot of nihilism in the atmosphere - it might not be dramatic or highly visible, but it's in the air we breathe. — Wayfarer
This feels true to life to me (at least true to life, sometimes). But I'm not making the connection between this and intimacy [qua dissolver (maybe) of metanarratives] — csalisbury
Agree. Being aware of your pre-suppositions is a difficult thing to do. But that's one of Kant's great strengths, IMO. — Wayfarer
It's not a political programme - it's a philosophical question.
I think philosophy was originally about the realisation of a higher identity - hence the reference to Watts' book. But this is now bracketed out, for sounding too much like religion. The culture has been more or less inoculated against any such understanding, at least in part by what it conceives of as religion. And I agree - culture has indeed become entirely focussed on money, glamour, technological power, pursuit of pleasure. But it's the job of philosophy to criticize that, or at least be aware of it. — Wayfarer
The cynic still has hope. That's what the angst is really about. Abandon all hope and there's nothing to be cynical about. The world doesn't need to be saved. — frank
Whatever my metanarratively-woven identity is, it definitely includes joy at seeing Sloterdijk brought into the convo. Best thinker out there, in my opinion [what am I signalling?] — csalisbury
What I want to say, cribbing Sloterdijk's terminology, is that there are a plurality of spheres in which we live. In the public sphere ( our job etc) - our particular identity and metanarrative is less important. Like you've said, we kinda all agree on this neutral background that lets us function. Our particular sense of self is present, but muted. On forums like this (or in real-world friendships) they become much more pronounced. In our private lives - if we write, or journal, or even just think - these things became super-present.
But there's another sphere, intimacy, where all this kind of breaks down. (Intimacy comes in all sorts of varieties, I'm not just talking relationships).
I say this, and I think its mostly right, but I think its also not quite right. I'm paving over something — csalisbury