Presentism is not just about existence; it also entails the A-Theory and the reality of temporal passage. — Luke

What do you mean with the reality of temporal passage?

Problem is that if it's an incoherent notion, then science is undermined when it comes to things like evolution and our origins. How did we come to exist if there is no way the world is? It didn't begin with us. — Marchesk

It's not a question of ontology, I don't think, but of epistemology. The world exists without me, you or anybody observing it. But the notion of finding out how things really are outside any perspective is unintelligible I think.

What about the perspective itself? From where is it viewed to say that there is a "how things are" for a perspective? It creates an infinite regress of needing perspectives as the structure for the subsequent perspectives. — Harry Hindu

I don't quite understand how get to the that infinite regress. But yes, you can be correct or wrong from a giving perspective, i'd say... which is to say, it doesn't have to lead to something like epistemological nihilism or relativism, or something like that.

Well, that was what I was saying when it comes to viewing the same thing with different senses. How something tastes as to how it appears is different, but is the difference a result of the difference in the senses, or different properties of the object? When we disagree, is our disagreement about the nature of the the thing, or the nature of our view of it? — Harry Hindu

It depends obviously, sometimes a difference will be due to having a different view on it, and you can be both 'correct' from a given perspective... but you can also, like I said, definitely be wrong about something.

This is what is often misunderstood about perspectivism. It's not the same as relativism or subjectivism, in the sense that every point of view is subjective and therefor equally valid or as correct as the next. It's just the acknowledgement that things are viewed from a certain perspective and that different perspectives are possible. And eventhough knowledge is allways partial in that sense, it nevertheless is 'objective' or 'about the nature of the thing', for lack of better words.

I have no idea what you are getting at. What transcends language, what do you mean? Lots of things transcend language, it's just a tool we use to communicate and describe the world.

It only applies to language because you need statements in the form of say X = Y and X does not = Y to be able to speak of a contradiction... the universe itself is not made up out of statements that can contradict eachother, so it doesn't make sense to say that contradictions or paradoxes are build into the universe.

Is "how things are" always a view from somewhere? What about a view from everywhere? — Harry Hindu

Yeah that is at least the conclusion that Nietzsche for example drew from it... that if the true world, or how things really are, is an incoherent notion, what you are left with is perspectives. Everything is a allways viewed from a perspective.

Because what would a view from everywhere mean? That you view all perspectives at once maybe, i.e. a table from all sides, the molecules it is made out of, the protons and electrons and the wavefunction etc etc. ?

It think we see at least parts of the only world we have access to with our senses. And maybe you can learn more about it by looking at it from different perspectives. But the fact that there are other possible perspectives still, doesn't render the perspective we do have false or obsolete.... certainly not for our purposes.

To the point of the OP...

The first thing one needs to understand that the universe or reality or whatever... cannot contradictory by itself, or rather it doesn't make sense to say that it is or not. Only the things we say about it can be. Contradictions are a language thing only.

What do we mean with 'how things are'?

:-)

You seem to be implying that temporal passage is possible under Eternalism? How so? — Luke

The whole spacetime-block is 'static' viewed from the outside, but with-in the model, time and change are part of how things are situated in that space-time block. You have things at postion X1 en time T2, and then at position X2 en T2. This is change.

The difference with presentism is mostly that an eternalist wants to say that the past and future are equally real as the now, whereas for a presentist only the now exists.

The problem is with the word 'real' really. A presentist wants to start from the more or less intuitive and practical view that what is real is what we experience, and that is only the now. An eternalist bases the notion of real more on science, and Einsteins theory of special relativity, where the concept of a now doesn't really make sense.

You never eat the same soup twice. — jamalrob

Yes Heraclitus...

I think ultimately the point is to collapse the whole real world/apparent world distinction. Since the 'real world' or the thing in-itself is an unintelligible concept, the concept of an apparent (that is there only in contrast to that real world) also becomes meaningless... and you left only with the one world we perceive.

Kant -> (Schopenhauer) -> Nietzsche

I'm a generally a sceptic (not of the absolute kind), not because I don't trust the senses, but because I generally don't trust what people make of them... because of biases, preconceptions, dogma's and generally because there is no guarantee that the world is knowable, in the sense that we always should be able to derive general abstract principles from particulars. I think the reliability of sensory information is the least of the worries of a sceptic, but maybe that's just me.

Which does raise the possibility of being wrong. And humans have been plenty wrong about the world over time. — Marchesk

Yeah, but we were not wrong because we trusted our senses... but because we inferred things from them, that we had no real justification to infer.

There's no need for example to assume flat earth from the surface we see being mostly flat... because a circle with a big radius also looks flat from the perspective of a smaller being. Both flat earth and spherical earth fit that observational data, but we just assumed that it had to be flat for a time (for understandable reasons, but that is not the fault of the senses).

There is no way to verify what we perceive, with some other real world data... like I said earlier in the thread, we only started to make scientific progress when we started to take observations seriously.

So much for philosophy then. — Michael

Philosophy is about examining our assumptions, yes, and getting by with as few unjustified assumptions as possible... but sometimes there is no way forward, and this is one of them I'd argue. Well, you could veer off into all kinds of metaphysical speculation, but I prefer not to. I assume that my senses tell me something about the world, because it think it will make for a better live... and that's it essentially.

The epistemological problem is a dead end. It's not like there is an other way than via the senses that we can access this real world to verify if our senses are telling us something of that world. So there is no way to 'address' it, other than just assuming that our senses do tell us something about it and getting on with our lives... or not.

Nietzsche quote that seems relevant here :-)

The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)

The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

Distrust of the senses has been a perennial issue in Western philosophy it seems, but ironically we only started to make progress historically when we started taking perceptions seriously.

I don't think perceptions are the main worry for knowledge, but rather what we infer from them. Reason, biases, preconceptions etc... all have held knowledge back more than the senses. That is, unless you want to argue that what science has achieved can't be deemed knowledge because it has to assume that our perceptions tell us something of reality without justification. But then, what would constitute knowledge? Nothing right, if knowledge is possible at all, than it is only because we perceive part of reality through perceptions.

So in the end we are presented with a choice between no knowledge at all, or assuming that our senses do tell us something of reality and try to work from there. Seems like an easy enough decision to make.

Sure, it probably depends on the person to what degree... still I'd guess that most people would agree that dreams, imagination or illusion are less detailed than perception.

Do you think what you are dreaming of is equally real as what you perceive? And if not, why not?

Ask the people who claim that things have a look even when not being seen. — Michael

Yeah sorry, I know you were just presenting a view, not necessarily advocating it. I was tackling the idea, not the man :-).

whereas it doesn't have the taste we taste it to have when not being eaten — Michael

Yeah the problem is that this sentence doesn't even make sense to begin with. What would it mean to have a taste when not tasted? The property 'sweet' only makes sense in relation to a sense-organ that can taste it. That doesn't imply that that sense-organ causes that property to appear in the apple though, just that you need a taste-sensitive sense organ to be able to detect that property of the apple.

I know from the taste of an apple that something about it elicits in me a sweet experience, but that doesn't really tell me anything about what the apple is like when I'm not eating it. That's indirect information. Whereas I know from the look of an apple that it's round, and that tells me what it's like when I'm not looking at it. That's direct information. — Michael

I don't see the difference. Tasting an apple also tells you what it tastes like when you are not tasting it?

To summarize my objection (now that I've thought about it some more), we have similar experiences to perception like dreams, hallucinations, illusions, imagination, memory in which we're directly aware of the mental contents of our experience. What makes perception different from all other experience? — Marchesk

I think Hume said something along the lines of, "they differ in intention".... and I think I can agree with that. Dreams, illusion etc don't seem to be that detailed, vivid... or they seem to be 'lower resolution' if you will. I can try to imagine a face of someone I haven't seen or a while, but the imagination is never as accurate as the 'direct' perception.

So while our brain does seem to play a vital role in the construction of a perception, and is able to create images without direct(!) sensory input, it does seem to be doing a better job when it gets direct input.

And I mean, to me this is enough, I don't need a hundred procent certainty. It seems reasonable enough to assume that the more clear picture is a better representation of reality, then the worse images (It doesn't seem all that likely that the brain would be better at producing higher resolution images without the sensory imput).

But there are other reasons too. Dreams, illusions etc often don't fit into our overall picture of the world. Our system of beliefs gets tested and refined to our perceptions of the world as we go through life... and solidify more and more the more experiences we have. One outlier perception, dream imagine or illusion usually isn't enough to change ones beliefs.

EDIT: And maybe to drive the last point home some more, if we expereince those outlier images, what we tend to do is test them against the world... we try to repeat the experience to see if it was indeed real. And perceptions of the world seem to be a better source of repeatable experiences than dreams and illusions.

For me I think it's not about a blind obedience, but we are kind of obligated to submit to duty whether the laws were fair for all of us or not. — Mathias

I think that could be a fine conclusion...

Start with this question, what is the value of obedience and duty? Why would it be a good thing to begin with?

I suppose the answer to that question could be something along these lines: We are social beings, live in groups and have competing wants and desires etc... And so, there is a need for some rules to live together. And if we need some rules, someone needs to decide and enforce those, because not everybody will agree and follow them out of their own volition.There needs to be some authority in short.

Once you establish that, it basically follows that dis-obedience is bad in principle. Because if they don't obey, it undercuts the whole order and we are in danger of being back at the beginning. Simply put, there seems to be some value in order and social cohesion, even if the rules are not allways equally balanced and fair for everybody.

That would be the basic principle, and then you could go into exceptions, i.e. why 'blind' obedience could be problematic, and more generally under which circumstances it would be better to disobey. The poster child for this would be Nazi-Germany. People obeyed alright, yet it is rightly considered to be one of the gravest atrocities in the history of mankind. Germans should have disobeyed. Why? Because people were systematically killed in the millions... There is a moral baseline, or basic human rights if you want (although i'm not a fan of the concept of natural or universal rights), that should never be crossed.

So eventhough obedience is good in principle, there seem to definitely be circumstances wherein it is better to disobey. Therefor 'blind' obedience cannot be a good thing. People should evaluate when obeying the rules if certain moral lines are not crossed.

Ok fine, I suppose we were talking past eachother then.

Don't you think it is strange though to view those two as seperate from eachother?

I do think Aristotle for example was conceptualizing morality as lived in Greece at the time.

You also seem to insist on using myth as a pejorative. Those weren't written overnight, I think plenty of reflection, moral and other, went into them.

Are we talking about Greek culture or Greek morality theories? The problem started when someone spoke of the Greeks' concept of morality being more Aristotelian than Platonic. We weren't talking about cults and myths. — David Mo

The "Greeks' concept of morality" is the morality as lived by the Greeks, right? What else would it be? And myths, like those of Homer, are historically, among other things stories to preserve and instruct the morality of a culture. So if we are talking about morality as lived by the Greeks, the myths are certainly relevant it seems to me.

Referring to Aristotle as a source of information about that Greek morality makes sense because he was a kind of proto-scientist/empirist, case in point being all those elaborate taxonomies he was so fond of making... Referring to Plato as a source doesn't make as much sense, because he was a rationalist/idealist. And either way I don't think his ideas about morality where all that representative of Greek morality, for the reasons I explained earlier.

And i'm not talking about how Greek idea's have been received and used later on, that's not Greek culture, but European Christian culture.

Every moral system includes the individual and the collective. Whether it is a system based on virtue, duty or consequences. When you talk about "it's wider" I don't know what you mean. If you don't mind, you could explain. Thank you. — David Mo

Wider conceptually, like the concept 'fruit' is a wider concept than 'apple'.... it includes more things.

The Greek tradition was not uniform. There were several opposing tendencies. The Platonic tradition was one of the most important. As you know it reached Hypatia of Alexandria or St. Augustine in the Christian era through Neoplatonism. You have no reason to exclude it. — David Mo

Sure Plato was Greek and so what he produced is technically part of the Greek tradition... And yes, in retrospect, he has to be considered one of the pillars of Greek philosophy, because of the massive influence he had on the later Christian European culture. But what's more interesting to me is how it fit into Greek culture back then. Let's not forget that philosophy as a whole is only a small subset of culture to begin with, that is the case right now and it was also the case back then. Greek culture was among other things, the Homeric myths, tragic plays, a pantheon of flawed Gods etc. etc... and then came Socrates and Plato. They were in direct opposition to the culture of their time. Socrates got his hemlock for corrupting the youth, and Plato was explicitly trying to replace existing Greek culture by his Philosophy of ideal forms. It was not merely an extention of Greek culture or one of the many different strands... Check his views on music and poetry and how he sought to minimize their 'bad' influence on people. And to be clear this is not akin to someone lamenting the bad influence of 'pop culture' right now. In a predominately oral tradition, music and poetry were the main vehicles for the propagation of the culture. I could go on... but the point is that Plato, notwithstanding his huge legacy, is probably not a very good example of the traditional Greek view on morality.

I don't know what civic virtue or modern revolutionary morality you are referring to?

Again, I'm not saying that virtue can have no eye for the collective, I'm just saying that it goes further than that.... it a wider idea.

And plato was no example of the traditional Greek view on morality... he was a radical break from it. If you don't get this, I don't think we can much progress in this discussion.

I don't quite understand. If virtue is moral it should imply some kind of action with respect to others. I don't know how a character that doesn't behave well towards others can be moral.
Could you explain a little more the opposition between moral virtue and moral action? Thank you. — David Mo

Yeah sure, I'll try to articulate my view on it... but virtue is a term used for a whole host of different things historically, so it's not that easy to say something clear and definite about it.

I think they are not so much in opposition to each other (although they can be), but rather different in scope. Virtue ethics is the wider and more encompassing idea, that also deals with the more general question of how to best live ones life. And that includes moral questions, but also things that are not necessary strictly moral.

The example I gave of something I think is virtuous, but not a moral obligation, is "taking care of yourself". That would be, I presume, typically part of virtue. Or another example would be maintaining good relations with other people in your community. There is no moral obligation to do that, I don't think, you don't 'have' to do that... but it does probably make for a better life if you do. Underlying virtue theories are psychological and sociological ideas and a host of other context of what it means to live a good life as a human being.

Moral obligations on the other hand are just that, moral obligations in the form of X is wrong, or Y is the right thing to do. In my view they are 'social agreements about what a society or community considers to be acceptable or not acceptable behavior' (that's what I think anyway, but people are known to disagree :-)). The goal is not necessarily making your life better, but to make sure that people can live together in a community without harming each other. Or maybe in a more active sense, the goal can be to make sure that people living together help each other out.... But whatever the extend of the concrete moral obligations, the underlying idea here is that the individual gives up some of his freedom to act, and in return other people will also refrain from certain behavior that might impact him negatively.

So maybe to summarize, i'd say there's a difference in scope and goals, and also in origin. Moral obligation come from a community or collective, whereas virtue is more centered around the individual. Often a virtue theory will include and agree with moral obligations of the community, as from the perspective of living a good life, moral obligations certainly can have value... but it doesn't always have to, because in the end they have different goals in mind and those can conflict with each other.

Taking good care of yourself?

Virtue is more concerned with generally building a good moral character, and so seems to apply even to acts where other people are not involved.

Moral obligations seems to imply other people. Unless you would want to take the view that you have a moral obligation to yourself also.

A war of all against all seems worse than a war against a single ruler?

And I think that the idea was that the social contract would adres some of that mistrust by regulating that relation. If the ruler doesn't hold up his end of the bargain, than the people will rebel, which is what has in fact happened numerous times in history. The relation is only assymetrical vs an individual, not if the people unite... or rather then it's assymetrical in favour of the people. So a ruler allways needs to make sure he doesn't alienate to many people... Mandate of heaven!

Yeah, I guess that how it usually goes in democracies. First something really bad needs to happen before an issue is taken seriously and policy measure can be taken... and then they overreact for a while so it's abundantly clear to the voting public that they really really did something about it.

We still have the military parading around in our train stations after the 2016 terrorist attacks...

It's all so reactionary, no vision to be found at all.

I again agee for the most part, certainly in the west there should be no question that the authoritarian argument is a weak one, but if you live in Syria or Russia right now, I'm not so sure. I think both can be true at the same time, namely that it is the best way to fight the virus and that it is also a ploy to increase power of authoritarian leaders.

I do not really want to argue the point, because I think ultimately you are probably more right than wrong.... but that data don't really 'proof' that one policy is definitely better than the other, because you cannot separate out other factors like the general culture of a country or for instance the fact the Chinese population have dealt with outbreaks recently.

It's an indication, sure, but I sincerely believe that no matter what measures countries like the US or Italy would have taken, it still would probably have been worse than in China... unless maybe you would go that far to shoot down people in the streets who don't follow the rules. Measures can only be as effective as people are willing to follow them.

Thank you for deeming it worthy your time to actually argue the point!

And I mostly agree with you, the economy should be there in the service of the rest of society and not the other way around.

The trouble I have with this is that it's not always clear how you would separate out the two opposing views from each other when it comes to making concrete decisions relating to the economy. In case of early Trump and Johnson reactions to the crisis, they probably did have the economy as monetary value for a certain class in mind rather than the interests of the society at large. We know their ideologies....

But more generally, everything seems so tied together that it seems hard to separate out an economy in service of the public and an economy as a moneymaking machine for the rich. Suppose the stockmarket is in danger of crashing. One might say, that's fine, it's just a bunch of traders, banks and the rich loosing out on making more money, who cares... but wouldn't this also have consequences for the rest of the economy so that in the end it has real consequences for the general public and the poor? And I understand that this is a 'designflaw' in the system to put it euphemistically, and that it could and should be otherwise in a number of ways... but until it is actually otherwise, it doesn't really matter right, because it still will have real consequences that are bad for the general public.

And I don't doubt that politicians want to tell this story to keep people in line and use it knowingly for that purpose. But at the same time I don't think the story is completely made up out of whole cloth either. So yeah, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this information.

So you think that in no circumstance when deciding policy, human live can be measured against other values? There was a point to the example. If it can be done in other cases, what's different here? I'm not arguing against lock-down right now, to be clear, I agree that there shouldn't be any doubt. I'm just saying that at some point the question will come... and that could be a question where philosophy could actually be informative. If you don't want to go there, that's fine.

More berating remarks, great!

I'm not faffing around the point. It's a decision every government across the globe will have to make in the coming months. If this is not a moral issue that is relevant for real world decisions than I don't know what would be.

No, there isn't. Until the virus is under complete control, there is no question. It's that simple. Anything else is dissimulation and the effective murder of populations - primarily the poor, the old, and the sick. If you think differently you're objectively wrong. — StreetlightX

Nah, I'm not objectively wrong, I know I'm not. Because there is no complete control. Or at least the definition of complete controle is under discussion. At some point people will have to make a decision when to relax measures. Do we do that at 1%, 0,1% or 0,01 % risk? There will allways be some amount of risk, however miniscule, and so whether you like it or not human life is not a absolute. It never was, otherwise we wouldn't allow traffic, because we know there will be traffic deaths every day. And it seems relatively uncontroversial that we shouldn't ban all traffic. Maybe you could make the case that traffic deaths is different than this one, and that would be fine, but at least it needs to be argued. That is what philosophy should be about it seems to me.... otherwise it's just blind dogma.

:up: The number of infections will start going up again when the lockdown ends. If we do it in steps, there's going to be frustration. The people making these decisions are flying blind. We've never dealt with an organism like this before. — frank

Yeah it really is unprecedented. In the short term lots of testing is going to be vital, so we don't need to keep flying blind. And in the mid to long term, there will very likely be a vaccin.... and more knowledge, better measures and infrastructure in case of new outbreaks.

This is not a response to what I wrote. It's hard to see, in fact, what it is at all. Did I argue that we shouldn't 'take into consideration the economy we have' when 'deciding how to act'? Arguably this is the only thing I have done, insofar as everything I've written is nothing but a critique and 'consideration' of exactly the misery wrought by 'this economy', and which threatens to deepen given the the instincts of certain well-placed individuals in response to CV. So one is hard pressed to know what in the world you think you're responding to. — StreetlightX

Is all this hyperbolic disdain really necessary?

If all you did was write a critique of this economy, then you are the one answering besides the point because the issue you were responding to was about the moral considerations in weighing the economy against individual lives :

As far as moral questions go, the "general economic consequences" Vs "individual lifes" conflict is a lot more interesting, I think.
— Echarmion — Echarmion

If you point was that 'this economy' is the cause of the fact these moral questions need to be formulated in this way to begin with, then I have answered exactly to the point.

The only ideology is that which remains blind to both history and ongoing ecological devastation wrought by capitalism, including the ecologies of human populations all over the earth (witness, incidentally, the flourishing of ecosystems and sky around the world in the wake of the shutdown of capitalist production). It takes a wilful ignorance or unquestioned indoctrination to think that statements of reality are 'contentious'. When your leaders have the open audacity and shamelessness to argue that gramps probably ought to be written-off and you call critics of this 'contentious' then your scale of what is and is not contentious is so far off median that you've lost the capacity to pronounce judgement on anything. — StreetlightX

Statements of reality? Please. There's numerous ways in which you could frame and describe that. You choose to use those words and choose to omit a whole lot more, because you clearly have a political agenda. That's fine, but it's not philosophy.

I don't like Trump, but he does have a point - it's not his point per se anyway - that people will die from an economic crisis too. It's not only about not writing off gramps, it's about not writing off gramps without plunging the US and the world into a giant crisis. And yes the fact that the corona-outbreak exposes yet again that we are too dependant on an economy that seems very fragile, should be a major concern in the future (aside from questions about ecology and social justice), but that doesn't diminish the fact that there is - now - a legitimate question as to how long and how far we can and should go in closing down everything.

And seriously, moral indignation is a poor substitute for good arguments.

The issue is that the chimera is as real as it is illusory: it is real insofar as it is created, forged by power and political will, one happy to countenance the literal deaths of millions in order to sustain it for the benefit of a few.

If the trolly problem is an obvious liminal situation, a situation that exists only in the midst of tragedy and utter despair (and thus an ethical aberration), COVID's larger significance is its exposure of 'the economy' - the one in always potential 'conflict' with the individual - as equally aberrant and exceptional. An abberence so normalized that it takes the utter disruption of global life for people to even catch a glimpse of just how fucked up it is. It's less a question of 'the economy' vs individual lives as it is this economy vs. Individual lives. — StreetlightX

This seems like a odd line of reasoning. 'This economy' is the one we have after all, meaning that insofar an economy serves a function in society, it seems to me that we should look at the effects actions will have on the one that is realized rather than hypothetical economies that we maybe could or could not have.

Something that is created is not illusory, nor does the fact that it is created automatically imply that anything is possible. Things are created in concert with the world, not in some boundless vacuum, there are limits to what you can do with it. But sure, we probably can create other possible configuration of the economy that are more fair, more sustainable, more etc... within those limitation. But that doesn't mean that the one we have should not be a consideration in deciding how to act. We put human lives in the balance with economy every day, otherwise all traffic should be banned immediately for example. Discussion about most policies would be literally impossible if human lives were a hard boundary that should never be crossed.

And one more thing, you are probably perfectly well aware that the the phrase 'literal deaths of millions in order to sustain the economy for the benefit of a few' is highly contentious and politicized. This is ideology, not philosophy... because it's not that simple.

I agree, I don't think you can love other people if you don't love yourself somewhat. The way you treat yourself, the relation with yourself, tends to spill over into your relations with others. So I don't think pretentiousness and assholishness come from self-love really, but rather from some skewed way in which you relate to yourself.

Narcissus was not in love with his self, but with his image.

Your image is the way you envision other people to see you... and you typically want to project a certain image to get respect, praise, etc from other people if you feel you yourself are lacking... i.e if you don't love yourself.

The self on the other hand is not the way you 'imagine' yourself to be, but your whole being, thoughts, body, emotions etc... Love of self involves acceptance of all that in the first place i'd say, which would imply some honesty in looking at yourself. But that is not enough by itself I think. It needs to start from there, but there has to be something tangible in what you do, how you act in the world and relate to other people, otherwise it's would seem hard to keep accepting yourself. So I guess it's a proces of being honest with yourself, accepting what you see, and at the same time working to live up to your standards.

He means what he says really. It's an application of his basic psychology he builds his philosophy on.

He sees man, the will, as a bundle of instincts and drives vying for controle and pulling in different directions. And like forces in physics, if they pull in different directions they tend to cancel eachother out... and so typically the result is that they won't get you that far in one direction, or any direction.

If however, one manages to master these competing drives, keep them alive, and give them a certain direction, then he thinks these will be that much stronger because I presume he thought they gained in strength from having to compete with eachother constantly.

I don't know how this theory holds up today, but I think that's how he saw it anyway.

nstead, I say, look at what the physical sciences do do instead of that, and adapt that to ethical inquiry, by substituting empirical experiences (experiences that "seem true or false", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about reality) with hedonic experiences (experiences that "seem good or bad", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about morality). — Pfhorrest

The difference is that you have a reliable point of reference in the case of physical sciences that's not there for morality. It's not only that those experiences are subjective, it's that those experience are already informed by morality. We do not suddenly wake up when we are 18 or so when we have enough maturity to think about this, and start experiencing good and bad things in a vacuum... we already have been conditioned into some form of morality, which will influence how we value those experiences. So how does that work as an objective science, we measure morality by a moving standard that is itself informed by morality?