In one sense, finding out what is the truth is to pass and see what happens or not. However, if the truth is supposed to relate to our responses while we live, those expectations are not just preferences but frames for our decisions and experience. As a result, they lead to different experiences of what is needed or not. An operating manual for ethical decisions.

It is difficult to approach the question because any view that connects life and death is not replaceable by some principle that keeps them separate. If it was that easy, we would just do that.

Edit to add:

As an example, consider Nietzsche presenting the idea of Eternal Recurrence as the the antithesis to the Christian view that there are two worlds we inhabit at the same time. If there is only one world, then we should adjust our expectations. That Nietzsche still uses the eternal reference is odd.

What is he trying to say?

Whatever experience one might one want to have there is this other thing.It does not care about you as a project of nurture.
So, how does one frame that element? It is connected your choices. But you don't own them.
Getting small like Socrates.

I don't see the matter as a difference between mind and body. The brain is a meat machine that is clearly involved with "generating" consciousness. That doesn't explain anything by itself. The conditions that make the experience possible must be connected to the unfolding of the world beyond the horizon of any particular organism but it is very difficult to explore how that works.
When we consider what might be universal in regards to our existence, we get further away from the problems given to it. I think that is why Spinoza said we can only experience events as determined.

This end is a personal condition. Something that will happen no matter what tricky moves I might make.
So, on one level, it is odd to make it about the world. The world seems content to have me pass.

I think Maslow captured some of the spirit to make ourselves better.
The Gay Science part of the story is important. When confronted with so many dour elements, how does one continue the discussion in a way that helps people? Or oneself?

Competition happens within certain constraints. It is either a part of some plan that is made or not. Your model suggests it changes as a function of some underlying condition outside of the context of the choices that are made.

What if those choices are an adequate measure of the choices made?

Our gifts are closely connected to our deficits. That is reason enough to be skeptical of our understanding of what other people are going through.
Why aren't they doing what I did to survive?
There must be something wrong with them.

Each of us is sharply delineated by what we struggled to get past. So, it is a real skill and nothing to look down upon.
But there is no need to mythologize what is yours no matter what happens.We are stuck with ourselves. Other people are getting more interesting all the time.

Well, the people who introduced the Tao talked a lot about how difficult it was to talk about. What was that all about?

Your question has many angles of view. Nietzsche introduced many ideas of process that are not necessarily dependent upon any system of the world he argued for. But that doesn't mean we can strip him for parts. He is calling for engagement that is difficult to muster.

He often spoke of being in the way. The "trans-valuation" is not only a part of his thinking but those who don't put it that way. Creating models to bring something into view.

If this moral imperative is accepted as necessary, there can only be two groups. One calls for the suicide of the species while the other does not. The only people who would consider the argument take the work of parenting seriously. If the only people taking responsibility for reproduction do not reproduce, the only people having children will be those who decline to agree with the principle.

Without the power to change behavior, the whole idea is a dream.

Agreement to a code can be forced or not. I understand that your argument is an appeal to voluntary acceptance of a condition or truth about a condition.

But the idea of responsibility is based upon what people should do or not. It is authoritative by default, for better and worse.

What are morals and ethics outside of the circumstances you object to?
My responses may be circular in the way you describe. But you are calling for the end of human beings. Should that be ultimately decided by those human beings agreeing to a moral code where the cessation is required?
How is that less authoritarian than whatever you oppose?

I understand your position to be that our form of life as humans should come to an end because it involves bringing suffering to sequential generations. We are responsible for their suffering by giving birth to them.

Whatever merit that argument has in pointing out what is in each of our control or not, it has no room to distinguish different ways to be a parent or promote institutions that build up those new people. Standing outside of those concerns is its own kind of irresponsibility. If the most important matter becomes proving that all reproduction is ultimately guilty of inflicting risk to future generations, it cannot be important that one family nourishes what another spoils or that education builds up or breaks down persons.

And those issues are what is important to those who bring new people into the world.

Is the choice necessarily a presumption? Much generation happens without a lot of consideration. Some happens with care and the responsibility to do what one can to help.

Your position does not distinguish between different forms of life in this regard. We are all just bunnies fucking in order for the species to survive whatever is above them in the food chain.

From one point of the view, the syllogism is not confirming an identity. The thinker is the one who thinks. Without that, you would not care if you existed or not. The experience is given to you, an event that keeps repeating; The event appears as something happening to you. We happen to ourselves.

Descartes uses the two "I"s in very different ways. "I" am something relentless that keeps showing up each day. "I" also think some things are closer to what is true than others.

That is why he considers his position a direct proof of God. He cannot be the ranch where these disparate events occur.

My life has been good and bad. I am keenly aware that my child's existence is surrounded by all kinds of peril.
I approached the choice with strong feelings of fear and trepidation, both for myself, my wife, and my child. I would not characterize the experience as doing something because I should on the basis of my experience. It was done more in spite of those perceptions. Maybe that is even worse from your point of view.
Love hurts. Caring puts one at risk. I am all for treating parenting more seriously as a culture to counter those who embark upon it with barely a thought or concern, but the idea that one could boycott it like a brand of cheese seems presumptuous to me. The idea is not going to change people's behavior.

Well, the procreated tend to support their appearance upon the scene.I appreciate that I have had a shot at the deal.
My child is a man now. I don't know what he will choose. The future belongs to him.

Philosophy is as also about what is known well, maybe too well.
Familiarity breeds contempt. We are easily bored. The individual points of view require a lot of work.
I hear the call to wrestle with oneself.

Nietzsche had a lot of chips on his shoulders. Jung did not draw the boundaries around himself the same way. They both saw themselves as bridges but across different rivers.

The difference between them as sets of experiences is large. Jung was a doctor who treated people as well he could imagine was possible. Nietzsche was knight errant who often misplaced his horse.

Human nature keeps returning like a pesky relative.

I haven't read your thread yet on Jung's shadow. I will check it out.

In my remarks, I was considering your question: "is the idea of human nature still a fundamental part of philosophy or has it been superseded by a more important agenda?" Jung is cartographer of that nature as well a healer who wants to promote the end of the civil war we find ourselves in. This work is philosophical in that we have to improve our conditions to understand them. The effort to know oneself and be honest with your self and others is an activity that involves its own end and purposes.

The call to lead an examined life is either about this energy or it is not. I read the following from Jung's On the Nature of the Psyche (108) as a vote for the energy existing:

This is not the place to discuss the possible reasons for the present attitude to sex. It is sufficient to point out that sexuality seems to the strongest and most fundamental instinct, standing out as the instinct above all others. On the other hand, I must also emphasize that the spiritual principle does not, strictly speaking, conflict with instinct as such but only with blind instinctuality, which really amounts to an unjustified preponderance of the instinctual nature or the spiritual. The spiritual appears in the psyche also as an instinct, indeed as a real passion a "consuming fire" as Nietzsche once expressed it. It is not derived from any other instinct, as the psychologists of instinct would have us believe, but is a principle sui generis, a specific and necessary form of spiritual power. — Carl Jung

One element in Jung's writings that I haven't seen observed enough is the primacy of personal experience. To hear an agent, you must give them agency. Listening is only possible with respect.
What are the requirements of witnessing?

We either have a good idea about what is going on or not.
It is just like a novel that includes you but compares your point of view with a baseline of the real that does not care what you think.
It is important not to be a fool in this regard.

After being exposed to various ideas, some children start comparing them and asking questions themselves. Any curriculum developed by whoever is going to either feed that fire or put everything into coffins.
We are not blank slates.

I am not sure how the agency of a Creator relates to the list of what is permitted. Since you are asking similar questions, maybe you are not sure either.
In the end, we each have to decide for ourselves what that requires. If you want to be responsible about what happens in a certain way, you will make sure to be in the place where it comes down.

Saying: "you didn't have a chance" is interesting.

Are all rules wrong or only some of them?

It seems a simple enough question until one gets mixed up with one's own life.

Derived form nihilism, positive nihilism is atheistic and it agrees that the world is a place that’s chaotic and void of meanings, so any kind of social development or progress is just an illusion. — xinye

This suggests that Nietzsche was advocating for nihilism. Much of his work ventures to describe why it is happening rather than promote a proposition in the style of Aquinas.

From that point of view, it has multiplicities of meanings developed over a long time. The situation is not so chaotic that one has to throw up one's arms in surrender to the task of deciding what limits to observe or disregard. Nietzsche argued to support orders of rank in some breaths and asked you to tear down the walls of Jericho in others.

Your results may vary.

Why are we so inclined to frequently judge and criticize others, especially those in our vicinity? — philosophience wordpress com

So many of the people around me make decisions upon bases that presume a lot of things that are either wildly incorrect or is just annoyingly imprecise.
Regardless of how well I may be or not be at judging matters, my presence as one who judges is equally objectionable.

The words used in the question are interesting.
The "it" is a worthless pronoun, aiming at something off the stage.
The "is" suggests that what can be found of value can be summed up as a condition of the moment.
Studying is something one does or not. It is not like something one chooses to do at the expense of another activity. Lots of people work and study at the same time.
If "Philosophy" is something you can take up or not, then it is not the demand for attention it purports to be. It becomes a pretended emergency.

I am disturbed by my impending demise too. I agree we have some degrees of freedom to live with it or not. In saying we cannot comfort ourselves, I did not mean we could not look for it elsewhere. It is up to a person to try to find happiness but that one cannot give it to oneself through some kind of alchemy.

You might be interested in Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life. He focuses upon the desire for a life rather than the fear of it ending. There are great passages of anger at the situation in the book. Noted as a response to your response that many different emotions are involved.

For myself, I am interested in how the fear of something i won't experience relates to moments I will. When I am afraid of doing things wrong at work, I have to start and keep working despite those feelings. The expectation of death is not that sort of adaptation. To respond the same way would be to hurry things up.

Slowing down experience is at least a protest to the inevitable.

Fear comes with the equipment. You are alive because of all the ways fear stopped you from from doing life ending stuff. Your ancestors honed this package down to you to on a cellular level. Each one of us is dangerous because of processes one cannot escape regardless of luck of birth or station in life.

Where there is a greater degree of freedom is the matter of expectation in life. Each day we wake up is not death. Whatever we make of that won't matter to what won't be there to witness when we are gone.

So, a lot of the anxiety about death involves agonizing about what we cannot witness. And that flashlight is its own thing, whichever way you want to point the thing.

We all want comfort. But how and whether that happens or not is, by definition, something we cannot give ourselves.

I don't know how to argue for or against the will in terms of metaphysical reality. — Caldwell

Maybe we are not in a good position to connect our experience of what is caused with the pursuit of a better life. Spinoza is posing some of the question in reverse. Everything that happens is necessary. The pursuit of change is neither discounted or proved by such an observation. That isn't an argument against Aquinas and Augustine so much as a challenge to them.

Show where one thing ends and another begins.

At the bottom of all this, there is the question of a shared reality. Most discussions of this kind are poleaxed on whether we only "share" what is some kind of sharing operation or there is something else, a third thing if you will, that connects our perceptions and rational analysis of things to what is actually happening.

The notion that some agent is wrestling with you as you think is interesting and difficult to reflect upon. Socrates' saying "maybe I have gotten this all wrong" is not a withdrawal from his previous arguments. You only have yourself to try things with. How does one describe the territory?

"It is impossible for the One to be Being or a self-aware Creator God." — Gus Lamarch

Please cite where you read this in Plotinus.
The Enneads refer to all kinds of arguments, much like Aquinas did in his writing. I am not sure which argument is being referred to here.

The fortunes of the empire that ruled Europe came to an end and was replaced by a succession of other systems. That the new emerging states or principalities formed in image of their ancestors is not a proof of some continuous idea but a testimony to a lack of imagination on the part of those who grew up in the absence of imperial demands.

One way to look at it is that Death is the language of privilege through nobility and honor. The code of Bushido combines the acceptance of death with the freedom to fulfill obligations and desired outcomes. Swearing till death do we part creates a structure in society.

The idea of a an equal life has more to do with leveling the differences between people. The Christian idea of a reality of souls that is what it is whatever roles people play in society is a clear expression of this principle.

But we were talking about what you said first. You were wondering about how the language about race became a thing.
Do you renounce that part or want to argue for something from that point of view?

What is "here"? What is a "point"?

You can't argue that race issues are a collection of opinions as you have done while also wondering if we can perceive what is real or not.