I don't know how you're seeing divine knowledge as a component of dualism. How does that work? — frank

I don't see it necessarily as an aspect of dualism, that was the point I was trying to make. Pre-socrates I think it was mostly a matter of a wider or better perspective on the same world. The Gods had a birds-eye perspective and humans merely a frogs-perspective or some such, less complete and more flawed. The difference is merely one of scale on the same continuum, not a real dualism which assumes another transcendental world (a real difference in kind).

I think the dualism came from Plato and Socrates (who probably had their inspirations too no doubt), where an emphasis is put on reason, that is consciously thinking things through logically in non-metaphorical literal concepts, in universals (i.e. dialectics). To me that seems to be the way you get to the idea of an immaterial, eternal and transcendental realm, because universals are a-temporal and immaterial.

Yes globalisation and offshoring would suggest one has to look at things at a global level, and not at the level of national economies. A lot of the most pressing ecological problems and key resource reserves are also to be looked at globally.

Maybe so, they certainly had a concept of the divine in general, and 'divine knowledge' for instance. But the Gods generally don't seem to have come from another realm, but were part of and interacting with this world... they lived on mount Olympus.

What I envision as 'divine' and 'divine knowledge' for the pre-socratic Greeks, is not necessarily something coming from another transcendental realm, but just something more perfect and complete because they had a better point of view from on high. Like you have a better and more complete view of the earth from orbit then from the surface.

There is the underworld where souls go after dead yes, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of place where one would go looking for divine knowledge exactly.

No doubt you had all kinds of dualisms before, but the christian spirit-body dualism, and the emphasis on the word of God (religion of the book) seems like a new thing coming out of a culture that put a lot of stock in reason. Philosophy was an invention of the Greeks.

My perhaps ideosyncratic take is that a misunderstanding, or deformation, of the 'logos' by Plato, later taken over by Christianity, is the origin of this dualism.

Consider that in Heraclitus metaphysics of becoming, "logos" is the regularities or patterns in the world that can be apprehended by us because we evolved from this world. We can to some extend intuït them, or understand them because we have an innate abilty to recognize patterns.

Note that 'reason' doesn't necessarily come into play here, we do not need to consciously think through formal arguments to be able to derive patterns from our experiences.

Heraclitus was no dialectician!

In Plato (and Socrates) dialectics became the dominant form of arriving at truth, that is via conscious logical arguments. Concepts and language are the building blocks of these arguments. And a feature of language is that in abstracting concepts from the world, from particulars to universals, it pulls them out of their spacio-temporal context.... concepts are immaterial and eternal. That is the spirit.

Plato takes these unchanging forms as primary or real... eternal being instead of constant becoming. An understanding of the structure of the world, i.e. Logos, then is arrived at via conscious reasoning in terms of a-temporal concepts.

From the patterns of a temporal world of becoming we are a part of, Logos morphs into a transcendental realm of reason, and later into 'the word' of God... and so you get a spirit split from the body.

The Chinese knew not to make the same mistake as the dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.

The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles. — Colo Millz

I would submit that neither works at this point.

Reason was never all that great at the task at hand.

And refining wisdom of the past doesn't work anymore because the world has changed a lot since the scientific and industrial revolution and is changing at an ever increasing pace, so that refining the tradition incrementally can't really keep up with that pace.

IMHO the most important parameter is “carrying capacity”. This is the number of living organisms (crops, fish, trees, people) which a region can support without environmental degradation. This concept explicitly recognises that there are physical limits to growth. However, you rarely hear economists talk about this. — Peter Gray

Ooh you hear them talking about it, but almost exclusively in disparaging terms. Limits to growth is not to be taken seriously and actively fought against because it's an ideology set on destroying our civilization.

And to be fair, it would probably destroy civilization as we know it, if we were to actually try to take these limits into account, because growth is assumed and necessary to keep the system going. But then again, if we go ahead and reach the limits it's only a matter of time before civilisation collapses anyway because of ecological degradation and resource depletion... so it's not much of an argument.

Carrying capacity, and bio-physical limits are also not entirely fixed, in that one can increase the capacity and stretch limits with technology... but that also is only delaying the inevitable it seems to me. Still that is I guess the main argument against limits to growth, technology will solve the issues as we encounter them. It has in the past, for instance the green revolution or fracking (peak oil), and so it will do so again in the future. Again, a tentative argument at best if one thinks things through for a couple of seconds, but people will believe what they want to believe I guess.

Cyrus the great seems to have been the first in recorded history, maybe/probably it goes back further, as an answer to religious conflict as empires formed and tried to incorporate diverse religious traditions in one political entity. It's an empire 'meta'-valuesystem it seems to me.

Yes I think I can agree with that. I have come to see it also less in binary terms.

I left something out of my last post. I said that we are born with certain things. That’s true, but we also learn things from what we observe and experience. Those are not necessarily traditional or conventional, or even social. — T Clark

And yes we are part of the world, which puts some structural demands on us.

We have a nature, the world is a certain (changing) way... within those bounderary you can have diverging traditions, but not with infinite variation.

It was reading some scholarly article this afternoon about Nietzsche and his views on the laws of Manu, and on laws in general, which one could see as a kind of tradition, or a convention if you will.

He seems to think that these things do not form arbitrary exactly, but also not as a result of reason strictly speaking, but rather as the result of an artistic vision with a certain kind of society in mind.

This then gets codified and passed over the generations as the Truth, the law, the word of God etc... a holy lie.

Tradition then precedes people... it educates and forms them into what they are. So insofar as the OP is asking for a justification for tradition, he's got it exactly backwards if we follow this line of reasoning. Tradition, convention is typically what can be used as a justification.

One could say we have moved past that, and rely on reason now for justification, but reason will, as you say, necessarily have to go back to some kind of value because it doesn't say anything on its own.

I would say the assumptions, what values are deemed more important, are ultimately a matter of convention... of tradition. To say otherwise one would have to assume some objectivity to values, and that is a whole other can of worms.

Aah ok, but then I would just say this isn't about logic. That is, when people say they follow a tradition because that's what they did in the past they aren't making a logical argument, nor should they I think. Do you think people should be able to make a logical argument for everything they do, that seems off to me.

A logical argument perserves truth from the premisses to the conclusion... but the conclusion is only true if the premisses were true to begin with.

Anyway this is beside the point of the OP probably, I also don't quite got what you were getting at.

About conservation of truth.

Ok that's a more nuanced position already.

Let me present you two other possible problems with reason alone re-evaluating traditions.

One, people are to some extend creatures of habit, and at least in part formed by the traditions they are inculcated in... and will have trouble changing. Constant and rapid cycling through traditions might be bad for that reason alone, it risks creating anomie.

Two, I doubt a lot of people are really able to think through all first, second and third order effects of a certain tradition by reason alone. Often the effects of a tradition play out over multiple generations, and it's actually really hard to accurately and completely assess them without the benefit of experience over longer periods of time.

Alright, go for it!

Can you make the case that an appeal to reason yields better results than an appeal to tradition, not only on an individual level, but also on a societal level?

I don't think there's much to say about it, other than stating the obvious that perpetual growth is indeed not possible.

The only question then is when will growth stop? And that is largely a question of our ability to keep increasing available energy. Rome had donkeys and slaves... we have fossil fuels but those - being non-renewable in the short term - will run out eventually.

Maybe we will be able to transition to other forms of energy like nuclear or 'renewables' and increase available energy even more, or maybe not... in any case, at some point we would eventually hit some hard physical limits.

Ok start here.

Does illegitimacy even have meaning absent any legal order? Isn't legitimacy only a thing if there is already an established (legal) order? Or what do you take the word to mean?

And if it indeed doesn't have meaning in that case, then the whole question of what is a legitimate author of a constitution is in fact a meaningless question, and consequently the whole argumentation following that has no real basis.

Not theocracy, the Chinese are secular-ish... It's just the idea that those in power can rule, until they have shown to be unworthy of ruling.

I'm probably in favour of a kind of minimal state, though I think our societies have become so complex and highly technological that a lot would probably have to be included in that minimum. To give an example, you probably need some kind of environmental regulation now that we have the capacity to pollute as much as we do. That used to be less of an issue.

The mandate of heaven.

There's always going to be people and groups vying for power in some way or another.

People in power will determine what the constitution looks like, by and large.

But if they diverge from what people want so bad they risk revolt and losing the mandate of heaven.... and then you get another group with the power to change what's in the constitution, probably more in line with what people want.

So yes, there is no legitimate author, but you will have an author.

In a way Hobbes was closest to mark. The last thing one wants is a constant war of everybody against everybody as that is worse for everybody in the long run, so it makes sense to trade some freedoms for peace.

The difference now is that it will be happening on a global scale and in the centre of the 'empire' that conceived of and constituted the global order.

Also the Japanese are probably a little less prone to revolting than the western world.

There are these moments in history where a large enough group are fed up the current order and everything gets thrown in the balance, and you basically get a different system before and after.

Bookburnings and iconoclasm are not just some temporary outbursts of collective insanity, but a conscious effort to wipe away existing traditions. I think we might be due... but I hope you're right.

The real question which seldom seems to be answered is how our economic system that is fundamentally based on growth can handle the decrease of global population. Our financial system simply needs growth, just like the pension system. When the whole system is based on debt, you need that perpetual growth. If Japan (or now South Korea) shows us what will happen, the future seems to be of anemic growth. — ssu

Yet this won't be a dramatic event, but a thing that basically countries will cope, somehow, but it will have huge effects. Yet just like climate change, the real political outcomes will be disguised as crisis that cannot be directly linked to such subtle change as this one. — ssu

But you do see it now that the system will have to change... the stars are aligned (population decline, climate change, geopolitical shifts etc). Political crisis and conflict are typically the way these changes get implemented, in leaps and bounds, Trump is just the start of it.

It's the fertility rates that are dropping, all over the world and consistently over a long period now. Population will still increase for a while, because of increased life expectancy, but probably will start dropping rather sharply somewhere in the latter half of the century.

The long and short of it, is that it's good for the biosphere and bad for human societies.

Ecologically a lot of the issues are downstream of the sharp increase in population after the industrial revolution because we have taken in a lot of space and our production and consumption has become a strain on the natural world. From that perspective it is good that human population doesn't seem to be increasing indefinitely.

Economically and socially however, a society, or maybe rather our kind of modern societies, will have trouble keeping afloat. Economic growth is assumed and necessary because we rely on it to pay off our debts. For an economy to grow you typically need a constant influx of people of working age. Innovation, another necessity for economic growth, will presumably also decrease as the demographic ages because that generally comes from younger people.

Politically, parties and people tend to view it exclusively from one or the other perspective, even though both are true. It's easier to deny one or the other perspective, because the idea that both are true is rather unsatisfactory as the problem seems hard to solve then... either you get economic and social issues because of decline in population and a skewed demographic pyramid, or you get worse ecological problems because of ever growing economies which will eventually also cause social and economic issues.

I don't think the politics of it matter all that much either way, because policy efforts to increase fertility rates have hitherto been mostly unsuccessful.

For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with your conclusion. Landa's interpretation, not only of Nietzsche, but also of its cultural reception and effects, seems forced. If anything one would expect it to shift opinions away from bourgeois ideology, because it's an ideology based precisely on utility.

Nietzsche devaluates utility and that somehow gets co-opted to strengthen an ideology based on utility?

Do you believe in a kind of perennialism, the idea that a lot of these religions or wisdom traditions point to a similar thing, but just use different conceptions for it? Or do you think they really are fundamentally different in some important ways.

I was struck by the similarities for instance between Heraclitus notion of the wisdom and the Doaist. This notion of the one/doa/logos that is beyond conception, desire being the thing that leads us away from the one etc etc... Both are situated arround the same time, 500 BC. It is possible that they influenced eachother, or rather had older sources in common, but more likely is probably that they independantly came to similar conclusions because of the way things are.

A certain guy with a moustache would say the Western tradition, Christianity is still a young tradition, and that this ascetic path eventually leads to a kind of Buddhism where the will get negated (for instance Schopenhauer). Maybe that's overly reductive and determinist, I don't know. But it does seem to me like a 'logical' path a tradition would follow give the nature of world (changing, impermanent) and the nature of the human mind (fixating, grasping for permanence).

How does one reconcile with the ever changing impermanent without negating the will altogether? Some of your quotes seem to point to moderation, some of them to a more total renunciation of worldly desires, some seem to point to a kind of Amor Dei and some of them seem more like the Epicurian notion that abstinence ultimately intensifies pleasures.

So yes, maybe there are different ways to deal with the question.

I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist? — Tom Storm

I can bring some wisdom skepticism to the table, not necessarily about its existence, but about its value.

In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

The basic intuition they generally start from is that world is a continuous changing and interconnected whole... the one.

Conceptualisation, dividing the one into parts with the mind, is thus not merely a neutral, but an active process, implying some force or desiring involved in the dividing.

But since the world is an interconnected whole, the conceptualisation is also an imposition and thus falsification of the one.

To be better attuned with the whole, one needs to let go of these conceptualisation that lead him astray, ... and letting go of these conceptualisation means letting go of desire.

And so you get the ascetic ideal, and taken to its ultimate conclusion, the will to nothing... nihilism.

But then the question becomes, as living beings, have we not thrown out the baby with the bathwater?

I can give you some of Nietzsches thoughts on it, he doesn't think there is simple or direct causal link from one conscious thought to another, but that they seem to cause eachother because they come from a similar unconscious wellspring so to speak.

Josh quoted the following passage from his notebooks in another thread:

“Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! - Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.” “Supposing the world had at its disposal a single quantum of force, then it seems obvious that every shift in power at any point would affect the whole system - thus, alongside causality, one after the other, there would be dependency, one alongside and with the other.” — Nietzsche

Yes, so to bring this back down to the criminal, this is part of what they do that is laudatory. They might be unsavory or even evil in some respects, but they are tearing down something that has to go.

But on the bolded part, I would simply disagree with this. It's correct in the context of the 19th century, where notions of causation, reason, etc. have already been drastically deflated. I would go as far as to say that notions of the Good, reduced from limitless fecundity, a presence is all that even appears desirable, to "universal maxims" or a "moral calculus," already amount to a conceptual castration of the Good. Reason too loses all its erotic elements and become wholly discursive and calculative, lacking all appetite, and is thus disqualified from any sort of leadership role except as a sort of "hired executive," acting in the service of the appetites.

Against this though, even if one accepts the thesis that a broader view starts with Plato (and I think this is false, you can see threads in Homer, in the Hebrew wisdom literature, etc.), it became the dominant thread in Pagan and Christian thought by late antiquity and survived over a thousand years, finding ample space to flourish in Judaism and Islam. It was the Reformation, an upswell of fideism and the efforts of figures who were decidedly critical of reason and who wanted to invert the old narrative that unseated it. Not until the Enlightenment, when all the terms of the narrative have already radically changed, does reason start to eat itself (and I'd say this is because it loses its erotic elements, but that's a bit off topic). Things like Plato's Socrates exploding into ecstatic dithyrambs on love have essentially been excluded from the deflated "logos" of the Enlightenment; it is closer in some ways to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, although it is more a union of the two. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes just blaming it all on reason is maybe a bit vague and not all that helpfull... I'll try to clarify what I meant.

If I understand Nietzsche correctly, it's not reason exactly that he sees as the problem, but the use of language in conscious thought to get to (universal) truth.... 'rationalism' rather than 'reason' if you will.

He thinks there is reason, even prior to consciousness and language, in the instincts. And these are typically not directed at discovering universal truth, but have 'reason' to them in that they serve life, particular biological organisms... they are perspectival.

The issue he has with the dialectics of Socrates and Plato's forms, is that it abstracts away to lived context and tries to get at some ideal universal conception, and consequently does away with perspective.

And Christianity, with the 'word of God' and its universalism, he sees as a continuation of that. He also thinks the reformation was a shame, not because it deforms Christianity in some way, but because it turns back the renaissance which was allready a first attempt to get away from Christianity.

I don't think you get the enlightenment and this turn to scientific materialism without the idea that there are universal truths to be discovered. It seems to me it happened in the West, and not in say China, for a reason.

As an aside, Plato famously wanted to do away with the influence of the poëts because they led people away from the Truth in his view. But poëtry it seems to me is precisely the way in which eros gets conveyed in language. It works not only on the rational intellect, but also 'moves' the whole body and the affects with it rhyming, meter and use of imagery. So I probably agree with you that part of the issue it the loss of Eros in the use of language, though I suspect I might have another conception of eros.

There's a lot I want to reply to in your post there, I'll see if I can tie it all together somewhat.

Right, and I can see where Joshs is coming from because I think Landa's thesis is somewhat obscured here because we are starting with Chapter 6. The earlier parts of the book are all on Nietzschean heros. This section is specifically on villain characters who are nonetheless embraced in some sense. The thesis is not that Nietzsche supports villains above heroes, but rather his relationship to a certain sort of response to a certain sort of villain that has evolved in Western culture.

I think, to your point, this insight, a sort of self-knowledge and self-respect vis-á-vis one's own (and the world's) arationality and amorality underscores the admiration for a sort of villain: the "insane" villain who is merely being honest about the greater insanity of their own context, and is thus in a sense performing an act of self-mastery and yes-saying, affirming the world-that-is and not the imagined moral world-that-ought-to-be that is ultimately mere delusion. The Joker is a sort of paradigmatic case here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The insanity or madness Nietzsche is often talking favorably about in his works is not the insanity of a nihilistic Joker or some of these unhinged villains you see in Western Culture. It is rather a kind of noble man, the man of passion. He calls it madness because passion is juxtaposed to being reasonable, to being concerned with utility (The conscious mind reasoning with language, is using concepts that are common to the group in origin, and therefor often concerned with utility for the group). The passionate man is mad or unreasonable in the sense that he isn't concerned with utility.... he spends himself in pursuit of that passion, often to the detriment of himself.

But note, this is far from nihilistic, or some kind of random disordered madness, It is directed at achieving what he is passionate about. That ruling passion serves as an ordering principle of his instincts, whereas a villain like the Joker would be more of an example of someone where anarchy in the instincts rules, a degenerate in Nietzsches view.

Something else that comes to mind when thinking about these villains in Western Culture, it seems to me, is that the grotesqueness of some of these villains in part comes out of common tropes in Christian culture. In Nietzsches view the inversion of orginal noble values of good and bad into Good and Evil is not merely an exact inversion of these values but also a distortion. Moralising is distorting. Good didn't merely became Bad, but Evil.... a kind of demonization if you will.

What I think might be happening here with this sympathizing with these villains in Western culture is on the one hand a sense that we want to fantasize about setting free some of these impulses that have been suppressed in a Christian culture. But in doing so we still end up using these exaggerated distorted Christian tropes because that is what we are familiar with... because Good and Evil is the distorting binary we are used to thinking in.

Contrast this with earlier visions of the good life and self-mastery, where logos (reason) must order the lower appetites and passions. Logos has authority here precisely because it is:

A. Capable of knowing and desiring the Good.
B. Is itself a participation in a sort of greater Logos that perfuses and goes beyond the world.

In later modern narratives, there is first suspicion and the a denial that human logos can actually perform this function. This makes the old sort of narrative a sort of delusion and slavery that the villain exposed and transcends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've read your excellent thread on "Arguments From Underdetermination and the Realist Response", and I was planning to react to it but couldn't find the time... but I think what I had in mind is relevant here.

When you talk about "pre-modern" thinkers viewing things this way, I would want to say you are really talking about pre-modern thinkers after Socrates. In Nietzsches view Socrates and Plato were a break from what came before. Pre-Platonic Greece was Sophist, and reason was seen predominantly as another tool for convincing people, not necessarily to find universal truth... rhetorics rather than dialectics was the name of the game. The idea that we can arrive at truth by conscious reasoning, by dialectics was alien to most Greeks. At the time that was the radical idea, and the start of a complete re-evaluation of values (later picked up and spread by Christianity).

The logos is indeed often translated as 'reason' or 'the word', certainly in Christianity, but I think pre-socrates (and thus pre the Socratic re-evaluation of values) it had another meaning. In Heraclitus for instance is seems to me the Logos is more a kind of regularity, patternedness in nature that we can sense or intuit. Heraclitus was the opposite of a dialectician, not writing in arguments but aphoristically. He was very much advocating being more attuned to the logos, but reason was clearly not the way to do that. I think, with Heraclitus and Nietzsche, that we recognize patterns (the logos) by sensing and observing, not necessarily by conscious reasoning.

The danger for Nietzsche (and also someone like Adorno) is not necessarily that we are in the process of losing faith in reason in an absolute sense, as something that is necessary for every good functioning society, but that that happened to be a core part of the myth our particular civilization believed in, be it still under Christianity or after Christianity with the enlightenment. Because typically after the faith wanes, you get barbarism. Anyhow, Nietzsche believed all of this is more or less inevitable, because reason is a dissolvent for myth and faith, and so a civilization based on that will eventually eat its own tail. Realizing this, he felt compelled to become sort of an accelerationist, wanting to clear the old to make space for the new.

Anyhow, I am familiar of readings of all of Nietzsche's more "brutal" passages as a sort of allegory for peaceful self-development. I don't really buy it though. For instance:

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity.... — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're not mistaken that he very much means what he says.

Joy is the feeling of increase in power — Spinoza

With Spinoza Nietzsche considers this a physiological and psychological truth. Denying it leads to bad conscience, the will to power turned inward, and all the negative consequences that come with that.

He doesn't see this as a moral evaluation, but as descriptive of how we work and the consequences that come with it.

The way to address this would be to show that he is factually wrong about this.

Thus says the scarlet judge: ‘Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to steal.’ But I tell you: his soul wanted blood not booty: he thirsted for the joy of the knife! But his simple mind did not understand this madness and it persuaded him otherwise. ‘What is the good of blood?’ it said. ‘Will you not at least commit a theft too? Take a revenge?.’ And he hearkened to his simple mind: its words lay like lead upon him—then he robbed as he murdered — Count Timothy von Icarus

His instinct, his will is for blood, his reason leads him to justify what he instinctually wants to do in terms of what is commonly considered to be 'reasonable' or useful.

The point I think Nietzsche is trying to make here is simply that reason or conscious thought is often only rationalisation or justification after the fact (and thus falsification) of things we just want to do out of some instinctual or a-rational drive.

Check out for instance aphorism 354 of the gay science, 'The genius of the species' to understand how Nietzsche thinks about conscious thought, and I think this passage will make more sense.

That is the problem with our current socio-economic system : money & power have become separated from political responsibility. — Gnomon

China doesn't hesitate to put oligarchs in jail, there the political still seems to control economic interests. Not sure what that means, but one could say it is at least still possible to have money bow for some kind of political project.

The thing that is different now is the mobility of capital. Companies or not beholden anymore to some place or community, but can shop all over the world and force favourable conditions from governments who are put into competition with each other.

So yes things tend to oligarchy, the question to me seems what kind of oligarchy. The king and nobility in a feudal system usually still had some responsibility to their subjects, because they were ultimately still dependent on them for their power. The current oligarchs have no such issues, they can be parasitic to a place and community and just pick up and relocate to somewhere else when things go south.

I bet a good part of them only pretended to believe.

The twist is that in the Christian myth, Abraham and Isaac turn out to be the same entity. They're two aspects of one God. So at best, the story is horrifying, at worst, it just makes zero sense. — frank

I wouldn't expect the typical believer to be that concerned with thinking things through to this extend.

I wonder if swallowing the cognitive dissonance could be taken as a personal sacrifice. Christianity is really gruesome and then the Holy Communion is supposed to give you some of Jesus' blood and flesh to eat, just in case the whole thing wasn't weird enough up to that point. — frank

It wasn't weird at the time, Christianity took from common tropes. Maybe it is now and that's part of the reason it doesn't work as well.

So this is my question: is it more that a bizarre narrative (whether Christian or Q-anon, or whatever) is a expression of something deeper in the community? Or is it something that's warping the consciousness of the community? Or both? — frank

I don't think the narrative is so bizarre compared to other myths, it is bizarre if you expect it to be realistic in a modern way. But yes I think it is an expression of deeper needs of a community, and it has in turn an effect on the consciousness of the community too yes.

I think a community forms around or with certain ideas and narratives, otherwise it's not really a community. I've said this part before, but etymologically religion comes from the verb 'to bind together'... I think as an eu-social and language-using species we need something that fills that function.

The Christian myth wasn't that different from other mystery cults and resurrections stories of that time. Resurrection was a common trope going around in the Hellenic world at the time (see for instance the cults of Osiris, or Mithra).

One common theme in religion going back as far as we know, is sacrifice to appease the Gods. It used to be more human sacrifice because the blood of humans was thought to be more powerful for that purpose. Gradually that changed to animals and such, but you had to sacrifice more and more to get the same result because the blood of animals is less potent... If you sacrifice the literal son of God, well now we are talking some real sacrificial value.

People tend to want to blame something or someone for their misgivings, and will look for stories to believe in that give them a narrative that supports that. For more recent examples look at Q 'anon and all the bizarre conspiracy theories that contributed to anti-establishment politics taking over. The Roman empire had a lot of enemies, external and internal. As it started crumbling more and more in the 3th century, Christianity with it inversion of values and apocalyptical vision, had the ideal anti-establishment narrative for end-of-days Roman empire... Christianity was essentially an anti-imperial collapse cult. That there are some holes in the story matters less than the motivational boxes it ticks.

Your first reference at the end is a link to the stanford article about meta-ethical constructivism, but you don't actually talk about it in the essay as far as I can tell.

You could categorise constructivism in the same bracket as error theory, i.e. anti-realist but cognitivist, but it does come at the whole issue from another direction.

Error theory would say moral statements are meant to be truth-apt (cognitivism), but can't be objectively true because they cannot be found in the world (anti-realism), coming to the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion that all moral claims are false.

Constructivism kindof bypasses the whole issue by allowing moral claims to be true eventhough they aren't "objectively" true... because they are conventionally true. For a constructivist "killing is wrong" means "it is true that in this community of people it is agreed upon that killing is wrong". It isn't objectively true, but it isn't just a matter of individual subjective opinion either...

As someone partial to constructivism, this whole exercise of categorising ethical theories in categories of realism/anti-realism, cognitivism/non-cognitivism and relativism/absolutism seems fundamentally misguided, and it is probably one of the reasons why the whole field seems so problematic.

Maybe Art, like so many things, is just a word only unified in naming and concept, but covering many diverging different things.

Edit: Why would it be a singular thing? Why should it have an essence accross obvious different disciplines? Because essences is what philosophy is supposed to reveal?

In my understanding of the idea of disinterested interest it has something to do with:
- letting the muse inspire the art, where heart drives the interest but mind does not judge, disinterested in itself and only interested in staying absorbed in the passion.
- like improv, where there is no time to deliberate,
- like not letting yourself get in your own way,
- an earnest openness.

Seems like a meditative, more eastern way of approaching activity. — Fire Ologist

It does seem to have a lot of similarities with the ideal of wisdom put forward in the east, but also with for instance Heraclitus.

The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own. — Heraclitus

What I think they are pointing to is yes, a letting go of fixed ideas of what you want to world to be, so that you can see it like it is and be inspired by it... becoming like a mirror of the world, or letting the world flow through you.

Nietzsche would see something problematic in this process of 'objectification' or 'disïntrestedness', I'm not entirely sure, but I guess because he just saw the perspectival (which is necessarily interested?) as essential for art and life.

Schopenhauer too... and Nietzsche wasn't to happy with it.

How do you do away with bad ideas, and how do you identify them as bad? Is it just that they don't provide a non-religious theodicy?

I'm guessing not because you go on to say "tragic/sensual/empirical" as something good whereas "spirituality, metaphysics, over/mis-use of dialects or reason" is bad -- in the aesthetic sense.

If no further answer then cool. We've reached the aesthetic terminus. — Moliere

I guess it's about the basic assumptions a philosopher makes and the way they use langauge because of those assumptions. Certain ideas and ways of thinking hang together more or less coherently and give rise to distinct worldviews depending on the basic assumptions one makes.

If for instance one doesn't view the Forms, Ideas or the Logos as the fundamental underlying reality, one would have to view reason, and the use of the dialectical method for instance, with a lot more scepsis.

I think the way one leans vis-à-vis those basic assumptions typically colours the rest of ones philosophy.

I think that's a common experience for people who read philosophy. Eventually you start to focus in on the couple of things that really interest you because there's just too much out there to be able to read it all.

But I like to wander around, still. I'm uncertain that much philosophy is truly bad, but only appealing to some other aesthetic. Not quite -- there are times where I don't think this -- but it's the idea that I'm thinking towards. — Moliere

For me it's not so much that there is too much out there, but that I have decided on some basic assumptions and want to progress in a certain direction from there. Coherence is typically also one of the goals of philosophy, and I feel like you can't progress if you leave everything open. These assumptions have consequences.... and so that means you try to do away with ideas that don't work with them.