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Possibly everyone knows the novel which was written by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev "Fathers and Children" and if not, everybody must know a philosophical current called nihilism. So, is nihilism the right perception of the world, or an excuse for the lack of talent the person? — Artie

Yes, I know that book. I think you might want to specify more what you mean by 'nihilism.' Weren't some of them political idealists who risked their lives in acts of terrorism and crime?

But beyond that I do not think it is a good approach to equate nihilism with lack of talent. There is only a small step from nihilism to a radical open-mindedness that can potentially revolutionize our ways of thinking. Moreover nihilism is usually the 'output' of a mind that thinks at a high level of abstraction. Such a mind has already gathered the world up as a system and decided that none of those in authority have 'absolute' or 'real' or 'true' authority. I grant that getting stuck here (repeating and dwelling on this idea as the height of all thinking and not continuing the dialectic) might indicate a lack of talent.

I have been through a 'nihilist' phase, and I even still think nihilism captures something important about our human situation, even if it wildly ignores other aspects. The point, as I see it, is to keep moving, keep thinking, keep clarifying one's existence. And this is something the nihilist misses, that his own nihilism is the result of a process that seeks to grasp itself. And of course the nihilist (especially if he bothers to share and defend his position) finds value in his supposed nihilism. As he realizes this, his position will evolve to account for its own possibility. I consider this a Hegelian idea. A description of 'what is' (Reality) that does not account for itself and its own possibility must therefore be a partial description. I personally don't think an exhaustive description of what-is or what-is-for-us-and-not-just-me is possible, but I do think thought has a 'natural' movement toward a more comprehensive and joyful description --which is not to say that it can't get stuck.

If we say that meaning is not really shared, then we seem to be trying to impose precisely on the shared space of meaning. We use persuasive speech to chop down a tree in that space, namely the 'illusion' in this shared space that there is such a shared space.

Clearly the 'space' being contemplated is not like the space in an empty garage. It's more like what-it-is-to-be-networked mysterious by a facility with language that may exceed our own grasp of it within or for this same facility. In one jargon we can place this what-it-is-like-to-be-networked within an individual brain. This gels well with some of our other narratives. On the other hand, there mere attempt to do so happens within this shared space, raising serious issues with an otherwise natural placing of this experience in the particular brain.

Just as neurons work to together to form a brain, so brains might be understood to work together to form something more than just lots of individual brains in isolation. The human in isolation is an abstraction. Our basic state is a networked state, an interpersonal state.

I speculate that our dominant visual sense misleads us sometimes. We see gaps between brains and underestimate their interconnectedness. We see gaps between written words and ignore how interdependently they function.

Posty McPostface relaxing at home. — Banno

Posty is fun. Where is @Posty McPostface?

Perhaps it would be better to think of meaning as not being in one head or both, but as something that is constructed by folk as they make use of language in going about their lives. — Banno

This seems like a good approach. It does justice to our experience of a strange kind of shared space.

What are your views on death, and why? — outlier

I expect annihilation, for the usual reasons which I therefore won't go into (unless they come up.)

What is death good for? It scares us away from that in us which dies. It scares us into that in us which does not die, which is to say that in us which is also in those who survive and the children not yet born.

What is this part of us that lives in others too? It's what we bring alive when we read books. It's what our own ears and brains bring alive when we here a piano sonata. Somehow 'consciousness' can 'capture' its highest, brightest, and sweetness states of being in material reality, which is to say in the shape of public objects.

What is it in us that dies? Millions of specific memories involving specific faces and specific proper names. Obviously the skin and the face we wear. And surely to some degree we really are 'snowflakes' in our perception of this mysteriously shared reality. So maybe even that which is highest in us is never perfectly captured. I can't hear Mozart just as Mozart heard Mozart. I can't feel exactly what Hegel felt as he finally grasped the skeleton of his entire philosophy with what I expect was a profound joy.

In less glamorous terms (beyond artistic genius and world-historical personality), this sense that true virtue is distributed opens us up to others. We don't have time to be petty. Or rather we find ourselves not wanting to spend our limited time among others in small-hearted ways, cowardly ways. Death opens up the space around economic life. Money is good, very good. But our fear of poverty and the loss of respectability can also enslave and stifle us. Death pokes a hole in the certainty and dominance of all this so that it can breath.

Yes, because moral stances are simply individual's mental states, which aren't third-person observable. — Terrapin Station

Is that so clear? How does one distinguish between mental and non-mental in the first place? What is sensation? How do we learn to distinguish between dreams and the rest of experience?

Is a man with sight in a room with blind men able to comment on the color of things 'objectively'? Let's shift to light waves. If only 1 in 100 human beings could grasp calculus, then how science exists for them except as a minority of individuals who were eerily good at making predictions? One might say that their mathematical-conceptual system for building models is a strong way to perceive some strong but elusive notion of true-for-us, but certainly these entities (real numbers and functions) aren't the thing itself? We might say that the 'true-for-us' or the 'shared-world' manifests itself especially usefully through a certain mathematical-conceptual lens which reduces its ambitions to accomplish this reduced task spectacularly. --so spectacularly that its method has rippled outward into a metaphysics that is not part of the method itself. (?)

I am not sure exactly what you are driving at in this paragraph. I think what is of interest varies from person to person, and there is nothing wrong or regrettable in that. I do not see God as in any way apart from us. We are divine activities. (God holding us in being is identically us being held in being by God.) And, in mystical encounters, we become aware of this union. In the Eastern tradition, if is expressed in the central insight that Atman (the True Self) is Brahman (the Transcendent). We are all and only what God holds open to us. Still, we do not exhaust the reality that is God. — Dfpolis

Thanks for the answer. I can relate to what you wrote. I might tend toward a different terminology, but maybe we have a similar grasp of the idea of God in some more important and less explicit sense.

*What I was driving at in the passage you weren't sure about was the [potential] priority of something other than concept and propositional truth when it comes to religion. I can conceive an 'atheist' and a 'theist' being tuned in to the same hazy thing, merely with different words for it. The words they had for it would of course make it less hazy, but perhaps these words (themselves not crystalline) approach something still more elusive.

Our sentences cease being logical points and are reintroduced as interventions in life. Of course we don't want to give way to a shallow pragmatism of truth- Its true because I want it to be true! No instead, we want to get beyond just logic to a deeper source of truth. Truth should not be about control- the urge for the mind to control- to say once and for all "This is that!" — Jonah Tobias

Here is maybe one of the more interesting unresolved tensions in your theory. At first it seems radically pragmatic. But you are honest enough to grant that we don't consciously want a shallow pragmatism. Have you looked into William James? He investigated how our spiritual eros and a pragmatic epistemology might be made to work together.

Another approach would be to view spiritual traditions as still being about control. What they attempt to control would be our feelings. We want 'high' and beautiful feelings, and we can view certain sentences as tools for installing and maintaining these feelings (something like a conceptual 'music').

I realize I keep flipping back and forth between using truth in the representational sense and in the pragmatic sense... I'm not sure if this contradiction can or should be resolved. I think it further demonstrates the limits of thought. — Jonah Tobias

Now you are touching on what I am especially interested in lately!

This is what we tend to do. We use different models of what it means to exist or for something to be true. If we really think about them then we see that they don't fit together very nicely. That, to me, is maybe the heart of lots of 'artificial' problems. They aren't completely artificial, but they seem impractical, because somehow we get along without an exact theory of truth.

I postulate (and the idea is not really mine) a kind of 'soft' operating system that we cannot make explicit. Or rather that we can't grab it exactly. Ponder if you get in the mood how elusive 'true for us and not just for me' really is. If I assert or deny a theory of truth, then I am saying that it is true not just for me but you also that truth is like X. But I don't think we usually even use the notion of truth we are attacking or defending as we present or attack that same notion. There is something so 'automatic' that we can't bring it into focus. It is too close for us to see it well. Moreover it is holistic. I picked 'macrosoft' to play on the idea of an operating system, the fuzziness or softness of this know-how or mysterious, initial intelligibility, and 'taking a big or wide view, grasping existence and meaning in language as a whole. I think our 'operating systems' grasp existence and language as a whole in a way that can be made more but not finally explicit, to sum things up.


Language or meaning is quite mysterious in its movements. We can make certain things about it explicit, but intelligibility is strange. What is the meaning of 'meaning'? This seems related to the question of what it means for something to be. Are there many many ways that we use the word 'exist'? I think so.

I mention all of this not to pretend I have the answers but exactly to light up the question (following Heidegger and others.) We swim in a kind of water that we rarely notice. We say things without being able to say exactly what it is to say.

I don't know how to quote like you guys do. lol Ok- so these are great replies Macrosoft. You've hit upon a central theme of this theory of truth. What is this truth we seek... this "truth not just for me" but "Truth for all of us"... Just like one god for all of us. One Belief system for all of us... can you tell I'm skeptical already? — Jonah Tobias

Ah yes, I see where you are coming from. For awhile I was working on a theory of authority-- of the structure that all claims to transpersonal truth have in common. They appeal to some entity (God, reason, science) that 'lifts' them from opinion and gives them authority over the 'officially' real.

The greatest thing we can say I think is some truth is so useful, its almost always useful for every being. — Jonah Tobias

Oh yes, I grasp your point here. I made a similar point just a moment ago in another thread about the value and authority of science. It predicts and controls public entities reliably, making it useful for just about everyone and therefore assuring its high status.

But again, what makes the statement quote above true and not just useful? Or is it just a useful way of looking at things, not truly a final pronouncement? Is it even a truth? Or the attempt to share a sense of freedom from an old paradigm?

Because the Truly- the Really- the emotionally meaningful is what guides the logic to begin with. — Jonah Tobias

I agree here. We can't ignore what you call the 'emotionally meaningful.' When we grasp existence as a whole (see it or conceptualize it as a whole), we do so from a thrown and needy position. While we have our reasons (ultimately emotional) for trying to filter out emotion from more 'local' mode of seeing, I think it's obvious that thinking is directed largely by feeling, that it is purposeful --an extension of action in its
desire to make things feel right.

Your mind must be balanced with your heart and your gut and your emotions and your spiritual sense. — Jonah Tobias

I agree. I wouldn't say that it's a matter of 'must' but rather that it's what we already do. We can become conscious however of ourselves as existence clarifying itself --during this same process or becoming of a clarified existence --or a more clarified existence without some terminus.

We're just animals. Like monkeys. Or turtles. — Jonah Tobias

There's much to be said for this, but I can't embrace the 'just' without reservations. Let's say that for your point it is useful here to ignore some radical differences between men and monkeys.

This organism now has an advantage! Now maybe "things to extend your tentacle towards" is what the organism "sees" every time a slight vibration up to a certain intensity is felt. And "things to extend your tentacle away from" is everything at a higher intensity than this. This type of knowledge isn't fool proof- mistakes will be made- but it does seem like it might give the organism an advantage. — Jonah Tobias

You might talk to @apokrisis about this. I personally think it's on the right track. Our primary mode of seeing the world seems to be in terms of significance and care. We see things in terms of what we should do about or with them. We have to switch into a theoretical mode to see them as 'just things,' and even this seeing fits into a larger purpose of trying to model reality (for scientific fame, to eventually cure cancer, etc.)

Really I start with the idea that the whole world is Becoming- constant flux- change- This is itself an assumption but we're always "thrown"- starting from some type of assumption and besides- this is what Science suggests. — Jonah Tobias

This is IMV one of the sketchier parts of your vision. I get it. It is plausible. But our primary and initial experience of the world (as far back as we can remember) is as a meaningful lifeworld. I grant that if we take an atoms-and-voids model of mind-independent reality for granted then indeed we must postulate some faculty that imposes this lifeworld on some mysterious 'flux' or 'thing-in-itself.' IMV, lots of your points don't really depend on this assumption.

I agree very much that we are thrown.

Action is first order- and knowledge is created in order to stamp upon the world of flux signposts to the actions we should take. — Jonah Tobias

I am quite sympathetic to this approach. Well said. Have you explored pragmatism?

My answer is that being doesn't arise. being is just the name for a certain type of becoming. — Jonah Tobias

I am sympathetic to this as well, but I might go further. I think language itself is a 'continuous' medium. In other words, meaning is distributed over paragraphs and across a kind of time that is not only the time of the clock. I we have phenomenological access to this if we can see a little around our throwness --encrusted understandings of language that keep us from really looking. We can't jam definite meaning into a single word like 'being' or 'becoming.' This actually jives with being (in this context) as a certain 'how' of becoming. But 'becoming' can only 'point' in some sense from within a given context (like yours, which is nice.)

*Anyone is invited to reply.

Assuming that science is the best way to predict and control nature as it is familiar to all of us, does this reduce philosophy to assisting such prediction and control? defending such prediction and control as the 'true' or only 'real' knowledge, so that philosophy is science's ideological bodyguard?

Must bringing certain presuppositions and unclarified notions to light within the fundamental approach of 'scientistic' metaphysics be interpreted as 'just trying to sneak in religion'? Or does such a bringing-to-light seek to avoid a kind of thoughtless religion that hasn't clarified its own existential investment in what can be reduced not only to 'knowledge is power' but to 'public power as knowledge.' I'm no saint. I worship the dollar and the belly too. I obey the clock that tells me anyone's and no one's time. But I can't pretend that inventing aspirin or cell phones or predicting eclipses or extinctions exhausts the meaning of being human, nor do I think this meaning is utterly subjective. Some of this shared meaning makes prediction and control possible/intelligible in the first place.

For instance, is the 'wrongness' of torturing kittens really less publicly accessible than the redness of human blood? If a few humans don't 'see' this wrongness, then are also literally blind humans who don't see the redness of blood. Logic itself seems to have a certain for-everyone nature that isn't trivial to explain. I'm not trying to answer a question here but raise a question where the complexity of the issue might otherwise be swept under the rug. What makes an object public? To what degree is language part of this and itself a kind of public object?

That we don't need for practical purposes to investigate this much is granted. That we wouldn't want to use our technologically provided leisure to think beyond what provides this leisure is more complicated. Thanks to science, we don't have to obsess over prediction and control all the time. Nor must we identity the most public experiences with the most real or most significantly real --if we even care much about the game of calling this or that 'real.'

There does not seem to be any other method that reveals actuality as opposed to mere imagination. Or to put it another way; there does not seem to be any other method to test imagination. — Janus

You didn't answer my question. Do you think science is deeper than prediction and control? IMV, saying that it 'reveals actuality' is already non-scientific metaphysics and goes beyond...prediction and control.

You write 'testing imagination.' And what is this imagination tested against? A public sense of reality, itself somewhat mysterious, I'd say. I can't make sense of testing a model against the 'thing itself.' We (roughly) fit models to measurements. What is it to make a measurement? What is it like to read a thermometer or count spider eggs? What is 'inter-subjectivity' really? We don't know exactly, but we know enough to get things done. This fuzzy know-how makes science possible in the first place. In some sense, science seems like a clarification of one aspect of this know-how.

The reason science is supreme when it comes to predicting and controlling public entities is because that is what makes science science, one might say. Any explicit method that reliably does so would seem to qualify. Science deals with what is public, not with what is real, I would say, except to the degree that the public and the real are identified. Once we see how our notion of the scientific real is largely just a matter of publicity (did we all just see that? can we do it like that again?), it's not so hard to understand that other kinds of differently public entities might also be investigated non-arbitrarily. IMV, this is what we are doing right now, investigating semi-public ideas, non-trivially possible because we speak the same langauge (and what are the depths of sharing a language?)

They are taking about the kind of intentionality a person has. So, I see the spiritual realm as the intentional realm. — Dfpolis

I like this approach to the spiritual. It exists 'within.'

While it does not belong to the realm of physical objects, it can be and is an object of knowledge and reflection. — Dfpolis

Right. And the 'object' of this knowledge and reflection might just be a 'how' of living, a way that cannot be fully formalized or publicly confirmed like the reading of a thermometer.

Where we might differ is that I don't see how God apart from this 'how' is central. I'm not saying that it's not of interest, but just not of primary interest. For instance, I could say that I'm 'not a theist,' but that would be to distance myself from 'external' conceptions of God. I could just as easily call myself a theist and specify that 'God' is experienced 'subjectively, ' with 'God' being a mere name among other possible names for an important mode of being or the 'who' of that mode of being or a symbol for that mode of being (Christ).

The animalistic philosophy of truth takes truth away from the idea that our reason can play god- take a question from our own thrownness and apply it to the entirety of reality itself- and instead teaches that our reason can make us better animals. Reality Itself- God or spirituality- is not to be delimited by the mind. It reaches us from beyond our concepts. — Jonah Tobias

I like this. I would just say that 'it' appears to us largely but not only through our concepts. Can we grasp the 'absolute' with concept alone? I'd say not. But what is left over? I'd say feeling and sensation. On the other hand, these concepts of feeling and sensation don't perfectly point at the real situation, which is something like a living unity of concept, emotion, and sensation artificially broken into this trinity for certain purposes.

For most spiritual traditions teach that god must be approached not as something to be conquered dissected and pinned down with the intellect- but rather the intellect and the ego can be an obstacle. Spirituality is something to obey rather than understand and control. Something beyond us, bigger than us, that we must do our best to surrender to. — Jonah Tobias

I like the ego and intellect as possible obstacles, but I think you are wading into hot water with 'something to obey,' even if I have a sense of what you mean. A generous interpretation (that doesn't assume that you are sneaking in a Law intuitively/esoterically given) is that we attune ourselves to the way or learn to move with a kind of music. We do by 'not doing' or by getting out of the way of some kind of know-how that is already there but mostly choked down by a need to make everything explicit and certain.

Maybe this is related: I think the 'spiritual' is mostly a matter of feeling. Any concept of God or gods or dominant abstract principles is just a toy for the mind without the feeling that lights it up as a value.

Life must be seen as an art- again especially like the art of fighting. There is no right or wrong way- just a million different styles of varying quality. We're always inside of a perspective gaining feedback from the world- self learning and hopefully improving our style. The urge to step outside of life and see things as they really are is illusory. Only a particular life can see. The world itself is constant change- not thought or vision or anything like that. — Jonah Tobias

I think this is one of your central passages, and I tend to agree. On the other hand, I think it's reasonable to try to give an account of that urge to 'see things as they really are.' Aren't you yourself trying to see things as they really are by calling other attempts to satisfy that urge illusory? Don't get me wrong. I agree with you in spirit, let's say.

I just think that we keep trying in philosophy to describe what is -- for us and not just me. And we try to say what this 'for us' means for us and not just for me. If we say such a thing is impossible (seeing from outside of our historical /existential situation), we are trying to say that it is impossible for us and not just me. We strive to transcend this limited/time-bound viewpoint and grasp eternal or context-independent truth even in our denial of our ability to do so.

Now picture the simplest amoeba- moving towards things and away- and as it gets complex and evolves it turns eventually into a human being, ducking under branches and jumping over rocks and emitting complex sounds and making sophisticated movements. And in correlation to this sophisticated actor is an internal world just as sophisticated. But what started out not seeking the nature of reality but rather- seeking how the organism could change itself to better thrive in the world- why should all the complication convince us this has changed? — Jonah Tobias

This does seem to be a useful perspective. But is it true? And if it is true, then would it not be true in its own way of not being true in the old-fashioned way? One way to prevent this idea and avoid that difficultly is to simply present it as a suggestion: 'Let's try thinking of ourselves in some situations as complex organisms who fundamentally use language to manage our reality, including our social reality. Representation would be a secondary and derivative purpose, ultimately part of organizing action socially.

By merely suggesting trying this for particular purposes, you avoid appealing to the same representationalism that you are putting in question or outright denying. Btw, I think representationalism gets something right. We do seek a true-for-us or not-just-true-for-me, from my perspective. We just get into trouble when we try to make it explicit --which is not to say that we shouldn't try but only to reveal the question: can we make it explicit? If this is hard, why is this hard? How does it relate to the flow of meaning? Etc.

Hi. I think you presented lots of potent ideas in a way that fits them together nicely [with some stuff that I can't yet make sense of.] .As I see it, it's not so much a new theory of truth as simply a paraphrase of a strain of post-Nietzschean or neopragmatist thought. IMV, this isn't a bad thing. It's hard to bring on an intellectual revolution. It takes long enough just to catch up with the conversation. For what it's worth, I do think you're grabbing some fundamental issues intelligently (though not at all non-controversially.) I hope to engage with specific passages later.

Of course. Of course. But surely you embrace some kind of duty to defend your ideas or the desire to promote them persuasively, at least within certain limits. As far as I can tell so far, you have a different sense of 'the cat is on the mat' than others. For instance, on how this statement is supposed to be made true, etc.

Sounds good, but that leaves us with 'it is what it is.' No, not even that. What does it mean for something to be? What do we mean when we say 'is'? If this seems a trivial question, that may just an indicator of our complacency.

Even 'the cat is on the mat' leads to endless debates about whether the cat is really on the mat or rather that just our seeing of the cat is on the seeing of the mat. And then what does 'cat' mean? Or rather how does 'cat' mean? We have a rough sense or picture of a cat along with the word, but I'd say that these rough senses (employed constantly) aren't quite right if one demands total explicitness. They are otherwise quite right practically, in that we have all the clarity that we usually need to keep the machine running (less theoretical life and its business.)

That also sounds like some explanations of the hermeneutic circle. Is it the same thing? — frank

I'm no expert, but I'd say that they are related. (I can't guarantee that this isn't a misreading on my part.)

As I understand the circle, we have to start with a vague initial understanding of what we are questioning in order to ask our question in the first place. As we specify what it is we are asking about (the nature of truth, for instance), then right away we are forced to deal with other concepts related to the concept of truth. Do we have a perfectly clear grasp of these concepts? Probably not. And maybe the meanings of these related concepts themselves depends on our unclarified concept of truth. We seem stuck. But as we run around the circle, back and forth from concept to concept, the circle as a whole becomes illuminated and clarified, also clarifying the individual concepts via their place in this circle. IMV this does not mean we ever attain perfect clarity about truth or any of the related concepts. It only means more clarity.

I love the hermeneutic circle as a holist insight. It strikes me as a description of what we actually do without usually being conscious of it. Hegel's dialectic would seem to be part of moving around in this circle, increasing its circumference, since his dialectic is creative. Of course clarification is also creative. (more meaning, brighter meaning). Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are emphasizing different aspects of the same process, of course doing so as a part of that same process, allowing the process to become 'self-conscious.'

In general, if I don't agree with what someone is saying, and especially if in addition I think that they're saying things that are incoherent, I feel that they don't communicate well, etc. it's not going to work to assume that the fault is mine rather than theirs, especially not over some extended period of time. — Terrapin Station

Sure, I can relate to that. But this prioritization of agreement/disagreement over a sure grasp of what is being said is not my own preference. As Hegel would say, we find nothing quite right. We just assimilate what is good into the rest of what we know. We blend two wrong perspectives together to get a less wrong perspective.

Anecdotally, I've had a love/hate relationship with Heidegger. I would sometimes want to vomit at the way he expressed himself (or was translated in some works.) I'd write him off. I especially hated and still hate 'Being.' But again and again other thinkers who were clear and important to me referred back to Heidegger (like Rorty who writes quite clearly). So again and again I returned. Finally I found my way in, and his work from the mid 1920s is some of my very favorite philosophy. Will it appeal to those with very different initial concerns? Perhaps not. What we expect from philosophy opens or closes the worth of various philosophers for us, it seems to me. On the other hand, some philosophers can persuade us to grasp philosophy itself a new way.

With Hegel it was always the PoS that people praised just as B&T is the Heidegger work most talked about. But I found my way in to both thinkers by starting with briefer, clearer writings. I am not at all done grasping their visions as a whole, but I have grasped them sufficiently to be very glad that I kept wrestling with their strangeness. I'd be surprised if you don't have some favorite thinkers who were difficult at first. Is there not some kind of leap of faith that we take which motivates us to push through? As I said, it was other people who were clearly not fools who kept me from writing off thinkers when I was strongly tempted to. Of course it is ultimately very much your business whether you bother with Hegel. Hell, maybe he will just continue to bore you. I really don't know how it is for other people. I just have a vague sense that we are roughly alike which can sometimes be misleading.

There's a way to show that one is thinking and communicating clearly and coherently even though some material, some vocabulary, some ideas might be unfamiliar. — Terrapin Station

I agree, and sometimes the same philosophers do a better job of this at some times than at others. I still maintain that the most revolutionary thinking must almost by definition look like nonsense at first.

*I promise to stop trying to talk you into liking Hegel. It's been fun trying.

Yeah, that's not something I at all agree with. (Which probably should be obvious given what I was asking for.) — Terrapin Station

I understand that you may be getting tired of my longwinded responses, so I leave this here just in case a part of you is still a little curious. And of course it's your business if you want to write Hegel off as a windbag, and all of us Hegel lovers as confused , pretentious fools.

That said, here goes one pretentious windbag in defense of another pretentious windbag:

For me the whole approach of one looking for something one already agrees with seems questionable. I'd say that we learn to think differently and more comprehensively from philosophers. They aren't sets of propositions to be graded like an algebra quiz, nor should we expect theorems from them in terms of our own axioms. We must learn their language and grasp them as a whole, just as we grasp who our friends our as a whole to make sense of their individual utterances.

Any philosopher able to our expand our thinking significantly would almost have to appear strange to us in proportion to their potency. The more deeply they challenge our basic approach or grasp of the situation, the less initially intelligible they will be, since they are talking to us from outside of what we take for granted, with words that we can only interpret in terms of this same taken-for-granted.

Because they are initially unintelligible and challenging, we are on the lookout to save ourselves the trouble of understanding them. Since humans often do just talk confused nonsense (a nonsense that stems from mental sloth), we are tempted to throw challenging thinkers in the same bin as the mentally slothful. Couple this with the snottiness of youth that takes such difficult thinkers for its hero and condescends to others in a jargon that it itself only half-understands (without the modesty to admit this), and it becomes even easier to call the whole thing a scam.

We can argue to ourselves that anything valuable must also be easily digestible. But I'd say that ideas being easily digestible depends on them already fitting into a fixed paradigm or pre-theoretical grasp of the situation. Extending this, intellectual revolutions would be trivial affairs, and one might wonder why humankind didn't almost instantaneously leap to the educated common sense of 2018. If you answer that it takes time for technology to develop, for languages to evolve, for wars that expand more enlightened political ideas/ideals over the globe, etc., etc., then you are already Hegelian. Asking Hegel to be compressed into a one-liner is the kind of approach that Hegel opens his first book criticizing. Asking for one of his ideas out of context is more reasonable, but expecting a valuable idea to 'live' in one pithy proposition assumes something about meaning and language that thinkers like Hegel challenge.

How about "short, clear,to the point, that I'd agree with/that I'd think is not constructed in a way that suggests beliefs that are misconceived if not outright wrong"? — Terrapin Station

OK, I will try once more, and perhaps what is not there will be illuminating in its conspicuous absence.

It is impossible to be short, clear, and to the point and significantly meaningful. — kinda-sorta-impossibly-short-Hegel

-if you want to basically try to sell his merits to me- — Terrapin Station

I do indeed, because I both sympathize with the skepticism/resistance and think Hegel is worth with trouble --and because I love the opportunity to paraphrase. Paraphrasing strives for a jargon-independent global comprehension IMV.

. I could pick all of the problems apart, or even just one at a time, which is what I typically do when I'm trying to encourage focus, and then you'd be an apologist for what I'm picking apart in maybe an even longer post, and then I'd have additional problems with that, and then you'd be an apologist for it in another really long post, and I'd have additional problems with that, and it would just never end. — Terrapin Station

You yourself just waxed Hegelian there. This is the 'dialectical' process that Hegel is trying to point out. I start with an assertion that is not quite right. You locate what is not quite right. I try to patch the hole with more detail, more context. Repeat. What is happening as we move through time? We work together to build an account of existence that increases in complexity and becomes more adequate, to some degree by taking account-giving itself into account as an essential part of what is. This would be the dialectical process become 'self-conscious,' or the philosopher grokking that debate is productive. 'Spirit' or 'mind' is dynamic and synthetic. Instead of viewing spirit or mind as a set of truths, we can view spirit or mind (or existence) as a self-elaborating process. Substance is caught up in or as a living subject.

This is already implicit in the 'impossibility' of a summary that precedes dialectical elaboration or development in time (or development as a kind of historical or conceptual time.). The kind of truth that Hegel is concerned with (truths about mankind, history, philosophy, religion) are created in the very pursuit of those truths. The comprehensive or more comprehensive truth is a stairway of 'lies' or 'partial truths' or 'errors.' Today's so-called truth is not the refutation of yesterday's lies but rather their harmonizing synthesis. 'Spirit' assimilates otherness. From this perspective you are doing exactly this as you try to make sense of some of these suspicious ideas and work them into your living system/personality. And we can also think of a larger human who is composed of individual humans who come and go, catching up with the conversation and contributing to it, only to pass away. [What I leave out here is something that Hegel finds important, action, especially war. For Hegel thought is not independent of work and fighting in the real world. Contradictions are not only conceptual but existential. Humans also clarify what they are in terms of what they want (the recognition by others of their freedom and value.) The phenomenology is an idealize history of this evolving self-consciousness. The only way to understand it is to repeat the journey. The 'result' is this journey as it understands itself as the end of the journey (philosophy understands only what has already happened.)]

The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. — Hegel

Since it is necessary the world doesn't care, we cannot ever close possible events off to a particular expectation we have. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I agree that it's logically possible that I could walk across Lake Michigan. I think the tension here is between the machine-likeness of the argument for this otherwise counter-intuitive claim and what makes it counter-intuitive, our rough and ready sense of nature's regularity and our learned trust for those with the algorithms and strange lingo who apparently make the jets fly and the cell phones ring. We don't and can't really believe that anything is possible IMV except in some theoretical sense. Or I'm trying to point out the gulf for most of us between our abstraction realization that science isn't deductively grounded and the way we live and talk in every other context.

When immortality is promised, it's some sort of certainty attached to the actual outcome. You will live some sort of (after)life. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'll grant that there's a difference logically between possible and certain resurrection, and it may that M was mostly interested in the possibility as an object of thought to elaborate his notion of justice. He may 'actually' believe in plain old death without resurrection. By 'actually' I just mean to sincerely expect annihilation, head-space possibilities having no place in the guts.

I don't object to defenses of a possible afterlife by the way. I don't find it to be sincerely expect-able, but many seem to.

He's not using machine like logic to deny nature is machine like. Quite the opposite, he's saying it is only/necessarily machine like, so we can never substitute in a rule or idea which would give a definite promised outcome. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm not sure we really disagree on this issue, but maybe we aren't using the same terms. I underlined what were two compatible thoughts in terms of my jargon. I'd say that the vision of nature as a machine is precisely a set of rules that describe our expectations ('promised outcomes'). I agree they aren't deductively secured.

and settled opinion that transcends traditional culturally ingrained beliefs (which can never be shared globally) seems to be possible only with the benefit of science. — Janus

It at least seems possible (if a little scary) that the globe could fall under the control of a specific community which makes its way of being and seeing dominant. Unless one accepts the idea of a trule 'neutral' culture (an idea I can't make sense of), this would just be a traditional culture with a history and a direction in terms of that history.

As far as science goes, I do see your point, but I think it's complex. If the core of science is prediction and control, then these are so valuable to us as embodied beings that most would be tempted on those terms alone perhaps to weave the language that science uses to achieve these things into the rest of their culture. We can also consider war and population. A high-tech culture will at least be capable of sustaining a greater population density, leading to wars that are likely to be won technologically. My question is whether science is essentially deeper than this. It is of course connected to various ideals. We tend to favor the kind of lingo that gets us what we want. If 'electron' talk gives us cell-phones and angels only give a few people nice feelings, then electrons are real and angels are fantasies.

IMV we even see a kind of pre-science in some of the sophists. Talk is cheap --or actually expensive if you hire a pro. Talk itself is instrumentalized. Part of the scientific spirit seems to be instrumental in this sense. It is a 'god' with real power, that reliably answers prayers with pain pills and contact lenses. On the other hand, most people don't defend science in terms of its brute practical relevance. It is not a tool but a window to the universally real. What is our interest in this universally real beyond knowledge as power? I'm not saying that I am a stranger to this interest but only interested in clarifying it.

I just worried about how you were seemingly equating what is an out and out materialist argument (the possibility of resurrection occurring through states) with speculation and some sort of faith style argument. — TheWillowOfDarkness

M is very technical, very precise in his thinking. But so were the theologians, right? A machine-like technique (presumed for that reason trustworthy) is applied to deliver results that violate what one might call the existential aspect of the scientific worldview --nature is a blind machine that doesn't care about us and we actually just die, vanish, fizzle out.

To say that anything can happen at any time can be defended with machine-like logic. Hume's critique of induction is convincing in theory. But just about everyone deeply believes in the uniformity of nature, mostly pre-theoretically. The only issue is sorting out false alarms or getting more accuracy, with an occasional revolution that allows us to predict and manipulate new kinds of things (discovery of radioactivity, for instance.) So M uses machine-like logic to deny that nature is 'truly' machine-like. And yet he needs nature to be mostly machine-like to make the fossil argument. We only trust that the world is older than mankind because we employ models whose trustworthiness is founded on our belief in nature's regularity.

While his machine-like arguments are fascinating, he is ultimately attacking the idea of nature as the familiar kind of machine in order to deny the certainty of death. He uses a different language, but so did apophatic theologians and mystics. I like negative theology and certain mystics, so I don't point out the similarity as I see it as an accusation. Recall that M was invoked against my 'ontological holism,' which prompted me to say: 'Hey, wait a minute, Meillassoux is stranger than that.'

Gotta work for a living, so check in with you lovely people later....

His point, since it is about necessary Being (to contextualise it to Heideggarian), is that Being is not "for us" at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But I don't find this necessary being to beyond clarification.

In a world in which it is guaranteed anything is possible, then we can hold out that death or injustice might be overcome. Not in the sense it must be, as detailed within what might be ferried as "faith based thinking," but in the sense that finitude doesn't doom us to death or injustice. Just because we die and injustice occurs, we don't have to take them as necessary. Something we can always be certain about, since the non existing God of contingency (death might be overcome, justice might occur) is necessary. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, I get that, and well said. But there is a practical contradiction here. We don't live this merely theoretical possibility. It's not unlike an agnostic who might indeed admit the possibility of a God and live just like his explicitly atheist neighbor. For me our actions largely reveal what we significantly believe. In theoretical games we adopt 'partial' personalities. We put on a kind of hat that transforms us. We make a big deal out of difference that make no difference (a pragmatic critique.) And this is why many don't find philosophy interesting, because it pretends to wring its hands in many cases.

To be clear, I like After Finitude and his other works. As a matter or personal judgement/taste, I nevertheless find Heidegger far more significant, though with a particular phase of Heidegger's work in mind (the 5 years or so leading up to Being and Time.) I have not yet been able to enjoy his later work and maybe never will, but I continue to tune in to The Concept of Time and find it revolutionary (as you may know, it's the first draft of Being and Time, only 100 pages long so that one can quickly scan the vision as a whole, which I find illuminating with my holist preferences.)

Surely "the walk matches the talk" only when there is settled opinion? — Janus

While I understand why you might say that, I don't think it's so simple. I will grant that the walk matching the talk might require some stable sense of what kind of walk is appropriate. I may have a settled opinion that kindness is best whenever possible. I might talk about open-mindedness loudly and proudly (or more consistently quietly and modestly) . And maybe I do indeed act kindly and open-mindedly. Does that count as a settled opinion? Perhaps it does.

But I don't think you're objecting to the possibility of that kind of settled opinion.

Understanding what it is to repeat an experiment, to measure and to predict just are instances of understanding science I would say. So it is really not a matter of science being unintelligible without these understandings or abilities, but of there being no science without them. — Janus

Honestly I just can't see an important difference. Science is intelligible/understandable as science even for those who don't know math. The get the gist of it without being able to do it. And even getting this gist depends on getting a far more basic gist of moving around in the world and speaking even the simplest kind of language. We might ask about the intersubjectivity involved in these basic skills. Somehow we very comfortably experience our sensations in terms of public objects. I'm not sure that a problem-free explicit account of this worldliness can be given, and really I think that it can't be. Witness the endless debate, each side sniffing out what's fishy in the other's jargon.

But phenomenology is not science, in fact according to Husserl it specifically brackets the concerns of science to focus on the subjective nature of experience; on the "what it is like'. So, I think phenomenology is properly descriptive, and although description is of course part of science it is the mere beginning of it. — Janus

Hmm. Well I'd say of course literature is not lower-case science. Recall the context. If we think of uppercase Science as existence clarifying itself simultaneously in the realm of science proper, literature, and philosophy (in terms of a description of what is) then phenomenology is even Science itself. On the other hand this '-logy' is problematic in its focus on words, concept. The self-clarification of existence is arguably as much a matter of feeling and sensation as it is of concept. 'Science' in this widest sense is....Christ? That's mostly a joke, but I think we start to touch on myths and religious traditions. The left Hegelians (some of them) understand the incarnation in terms of mankind's increased mastery over nature along with his increased consciousness of his own freedom and 'divinity.' -a fairly Satanic rendering of the incarnation. This reminds me of Hegel's notion that his absolute philosophy was absolute religion 'fixed' or 'improve' by a shift from pictoral thinking to 'pure' concept. Personally I think metaphor stays with us and that 'pure' concept might be dependent on impure concept.

*And for all who read this, I consider this a thought experiment. I am just creatively feeling my way along the conversation, exploring possibilities. I mention this because 'Science' is going to push some buttons these days. I'm less interested in various culture wars (in terms of being a participant) than I think some people are --and I think less interested in what things are called, as long as we have a mutual sense that we are talking about the same thing.

Philosophical systems are generally systems of opinion which purport to plug as many holes as possible; and I don't think it is arguable that philosophy, or humans generally, outside of science, or absent the benefit of science, move towards any coherence, i.e. settled opinion. — Janus

I wouldn't personally identity coherence with settled opinion. I'd think more in terms of the walk matching the talk. Or of a life on earth that makes more sense. It [this life] isn't jarring. The system purrs. If there are contradictions (as I think there must be whenever we demand a certain explicitness) then they aren't dominant or incapacitating or the cause of much distress.

Sure, but the difference is that science is not about anyone's opinion; whereas literature and philosophy most certainly are predominately about people's opinions.

That is the divide along which the contrast between objectivity and subjectivity runs. — Janus

In Heideggarian jargon, we might say that science is exactly about Anyone's opinions. The time of science is the time of the clock. Of course I love science and work in science, and indeed it is far more objective in some important sense. But I wouldn't be so fast to charge literature with utter subjectivity. I'd say it's phenomenological in some ways. We might say that science is grounded on entities that are already publicly and explicitly revealed. For instance, it is not at all the case that most people know enough calculus to really do science, but we all understand what it is to repeat an experiment. We understand what it is to measure. We understand what it is to predict something definite so that correctness or incorrectness is sufficiently clear. This requires the use of language and a basic knowhow for getting around in the world. Science would not be intelligible without this knowhow. Science asks for the bare minimum of phenomenological revelation. Literary greatness is elitist phenomenologically --as well as being dangerously non-neutral along those lines. But there is inter-subjectivity available there, perhaps no more mysterious and unjustied than that in the perception of furniture, except for this 'elitism' or diminished accessibility. In more mundane terms, people agree that certain TV shows are great (high art.) They perceive something in common, an elusive greatness. Perhaps we could say that science is grounded in the most reliable kind of intersubjectivit, and that there is something like a continuum.

Its 'methodical shallowness' was a stroke of genius (Galileo and the chandelier, his hand on his wrist.) . Forget 'why' things move and describe how they move. This may encourage a forgetfulness of how they are more generally present for us, but it's so practically effective that I'm not about to complain. I'm only hesitating to identify objectivity with science without further consideration.

but only if you think the practice of system-building that aspires to grand syntheses is really a worthwhile endeavour apart form whatever aesthetic value it may create. — Janus

I am suspicious of the value of a certain kind of system-building, but then I also think we move toward coherence 'automatically.' So perhaps the issue is whether we think we can get this coherence in an ideal 'object language' constructed from within the wider context of the 'metalanguage.' This 'metalanguage' would be our full range of speaking and listening intelligibly. If we find this 'full range' untrustworthy for various reasons, we might try to restrict ourselves to an object language where ordinary words are given fixed meanings and neologisms are built from these fixed meanings as if from bricks. Of course I think this approach is not terribly promising and mostly argue against it.

I don't think a conception of literature as a kind of overarching science is really supportable, because literature, unlike science, is a phenomenological exercise on the affective and/or descriptive, rather than the analytic, side; — Janus

I don't have literature alone in mind as that kind of 'Science.' Instead I might say that we 'live' this 'Science' already as we make sense of our existence in terms of literature, philosophy, and science simultaneously. While careers split us up in specialties, we operate as entire personalities in all realms at once, though of course with different intensities of care and its attendant skill.

Meillassoux's position is pretty understandable in the context of radical contingency. Since he holds any logically possible state can occur, including ones which violate what would seem to be established rules of reality, there is no limit to possible events except a logical contradiction.

Resurrection is not a logical contradiction. Tomorrow, the bodies in a graveyard might blink to the surface and be reconstituted as living. All it involves is a movement of bodies and a change in their status. Since there is no correlationist rule which constrains the behaviour of finite states, it's possible dead bodies could reappear living tomorrow. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, I do grant that he makes a clever argument for that. My objection would be that this is finally like 'maybe we are all brains in a vat.' After all his anti-faith talk in AF, he presents the same old object of faith--a denial of mortality and 'real' injustice. Personal death and the crude unfairness existing in life if not illusions are at least possibly all fixable, according to a creative argument that depends on Cantorian mathematics. Recall that Cantor caused a war in the foundations of math once. This is not the solidest of foundations. And his arguments are generally pretty delicate, fragile, even on the edge of sophistic.

Moreover he dodges 'Heideggarian' concerns about how mathematics exists for us. There is also the problem of meaning beneath any adoption of arguments.

He calls his God the non-existence of God (to oversimplify). Don't get me wrong. He's fascinating.

Personally I think it's a mess — Terrapin Station

I respect that, and appreciate your sincere answer.

ust for one example, "the "self-consciousness of his essential being"? First off, essentialism is muddle-headed in general. — Terrapin Station

IMV, if I can be equally honest, this is you reading your concerns into what for me is pretty clear. His essential being is the most important aspect of his being. It's more about value in this context. You do touch on some of my own reservations about Hegel. He opposed himself to religion based on feeling alone and needed concepts to be clearer than I think they really are. And then there is this way of looking at it:

It is self-evident that owing to the needs of the “system” he very often had to resort to those forced constructions about which his pigmy opponents make such a terrible fuss even today. But these constructions are only the frame and scaffolding of his work. If one does not loiter here needlessly, but presses on farther into the immense building, one finds innumerable treasures which today still possess undiminished value. With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions. — Engels

Secondly, what does "self" add there that "consciousness" without the "self" modifier wouldn't do just as well? And what is "consciousness of his being" saying, really, anyway? It seems like a needlessly rococo way of just talking about consciousness or awareness period. — Terrapin Station

As Hegel himself stresses in his preface, the 'naked result' is worthless. IMV, his portrait of the historical evolution of self-consciousness is central. And this is already in his critique of prefaces (bare results compared to bare results.) Consciousness is like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill, becoming bigger and more complex, more aware, for instance, of its own role in what it perceives. Error, for Hegel, is necessary. The truth is not ignorance of error but made of error. It is an unfinished syntheses of errors that each try to fix the preceding error. He interpreted the history of philosophy philosophically not as some random scattering of idiosyncratic worldviews but as an essentially connected thinking spanning generations that finally (in Hegel, for instance) became conscious of itself as this sort of thing. One might say that he 'unflattened' time, or saw through a simple vision of time as being space-like. I have the sense that lots of Hegel is 'common sense' for us now. A more qualified individual might be able to make a case that he even popularized a certain conception of Progress.


This is one take on that:

But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits. — Engels

Note that Engels is already changing Hegel here. For Hegel, the process does attain some kind of stable self-consciousness (or that's a common understanding of his view.) The Left-Hegelians took this or that aspect of Hegel and ran with it. Feuerbach kept some of it and fused it with the sensual and the emotional, becoming something like a Nietzsche-before-Nietzsche critic of philosophy as still-too-metaphysical. 'The true religion is no religion. The true philosophy is no philosophy.' And for Feuerbach concepts had to address what was non-conceptual, philosophy what was resistant in man to philosophy.

I don't want to spend time and the thousands of words it would take to address the whole thing in that way, but it all has problems in that vein. — Terrapin Station

I still maintain that you are losing the forest in the trees here. IMV, you are zooming in on individual phrases you find objectionable in terms of AP concerns that didn't exist then (linguistic self-consciousness exploded in 20th cent. philosophy it seems, for AP and cont. philosophy). You do not at all respond to the big picture of Hegel's motives or thrust or direction (either to approve or disapprove.) You have every right to respond as you see fit, but I do think it's an uncharitable reading.