What is problematic in your observations is the suggestion that every description of a condition is a surrender of personal responsibility. The people making those observations did not put it that way.

That amounts to arguing there is such a mutual exclusivity as I described.

Regardless of the question of what is happening to people, there is the problem of assuming a premise that is the result of your argument. But there is no satisfaction in observing that sort of thing. I just bored myself by noticing that element.

You are not seeing something that exists. Any success you may have in arguing that it does not exist won't change the perception of those who have to look at it. You put that limit upon yourself, not upon other people.

Are you suggesting there is mutual exclusivity between encouraging people to help themselves and accepting that not all conditions can be addressed as a lack of self determination?

How do you know this?

Your experience is not similar to the people I have seen being overcome by depression. You advise developing a thicker upper lip. The assumption that everyone who suffers within it is not working hard to become free of it is to close your eyes in the presence of that suffering.

And that is okay. You can choose to share suffering or not. But if you decline to do so, resist the impulse to explain what it is.

Are you struggling with a certain passage?

When you write for yourself, you try to satisfy a demand that there is something that is hidden and you can bring into view.
Most of everything else are reactions to those kinds of expression.
They are tied together.
Noticing that does not give the observation a special place in line before other observations. I am just trying to figure out the border between proclamations and response.

What makes philosophers interesting is that they are writing for themselves.
Once you start writing for other people, you become boring.
As it has been and will forever be.

You say:

"Ontology is about things, epistemology is about a process; "objects" and "methods" is another pair of terms I sometimes use for this axis."

Your map comes up against some of the most disagreed things. Treating the matters as a premise is boring.

If I understand the proposition correctly, the reason why one might object to any part of it is already a part of the argument.

Why proceed in this way? Why not simply argue that such and such is true and let the chips fall where they may?

It may be worthwhile to look at the Strauss objection to Nietzsche claiming that "historicism" cancelled the specifically "human" as a measure of things. Strauss intended his argument to only indict Nietzsche but remains interesting if one looks at it more broadly. Is being human a part of a process or a quality that informs processes? Or something else not captured by either description?

The love part suggests a way to live as a lover. When you love someone, you make them stronger. You build them up. That is why all the Greek traditions put so much emphasis upon education and wrestling with opinions that a person does not share. You need your friends and your enemies.

I don't know about that book. I will check it out.
I am rereading Ethics presently. I am influenced by the various interpretations I have read. They help me understand more than I would in my tiny mind without help.
But the quality in the writing that is hard to make into a simple proposition is the urgency of his comments between propositions. That immediacy always struck me. I think it part of the message.

reply="Statilius;412814"]
Yes. But the examination of emotions and their relation to personal effectiveness needs to be included if one is to cite "intuition."
Edit: To be clear, the two kinds of knowledge, not the attributes.

This would be a good point to jump in with your chapter and verse.

I am confused. You want to talk about stuff and also control the discussion by assuming stuff that people still argue about is what you say it is.
I have run out of words.

Your response underlines how difficult it is to see the world through Spinoza's eyes.
The notion that we have just two tools when the world is made up of other stuff is still germane.

The soul refers to an agency of choices but also to what makes it possible to make them. The arguments about free will versus determinism are interesting up to some point but don't really struggle with why it is even a topic we talk about. When one walks around with one answer or another, what does it change?

Yes. A set of conditions that makes ones life possible but are not "your" conditions if you accept the premises of the explanation.

One has to give up the desire to connect our experiences to accept the grounds of experience.

It is a tough sell.

That is a really interesting observation.

The association of militias to an idea of being in a a location gets mixed up with misunderstandings of power and influence.

If I bring a gun into a Walmart, am I still in my hometown?

The whole shooting other people idea has not actually been a part of a set of rights as much as it has been a license to kill certain people.
If I am wrong about that, establishing the grounds of that wrongness should supersede other arguments.

It is interesting how the results of the "enlightenment" are claimed by one school of thought or another.
Perhaps you could start by saying what you think.
I don't have a particularly interesting point of view on this issue.
Maybe you do.

I am not following your logic. If everything that exists is the substance of God, the modes are not a subset of something existing under a different set of conditions.
I would appreciate a chapter and verse citation of the Ethics to claim otherwise.

Your questions go in many directions. I am just another fool on the internet.
One way to think about it is how difficult it is to connect our experiences in the inside out form of our tiny minds to what is happening to other people. That was the template for thinkers like Foucault. Such thinkers did not provide an answer to your questions but did explain why they could not.

reply="Shawn;411160"]
You presented the idea that punishment is an elective on some level. It could be not selected.

All the serious attempts to advance that idea keep coming up against the problem of equality in opportunity and treatment under bodies of Law.

I am all for advancing the discussion but reject the notion it is not something we have been struggling with for a long time.

Is there a better gathering of people who feel like they do have a choice?

Is that theater completely separated from the options people have in dire circumstances?

If you wake up and cannot feed your family, that is life.

When someone does something wrong, we feel as though they should be punished. — Shawn

Who is this we? And what is wrong? And this desire to punish, is that the only reason it happens?

Life punishes us. The choices we make come back to us hard and fast. It is a luxury if one can buffer the results. But nobody rides free.

Yes, other people. But who are these other people?
It is fun to be on the winning team and imagine all the crappy stuff that happens to others.

What does another point of view look like?

The past self is absolutely restricted. However, going forward from this point in time, I am free to make my choices and improve upon myself, no matter how desperate my situation is, such that the person I will be in the future will be a product of my own choices, and so I am capable of giving myself a better life simply by making the choices which make me a better person. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is pretty much the song I sing to rise up each day. But all these other factors crop up. I do see the effective result of accepting the world upon the terms I make for it. But there are other things that do not care about any of that.

We should not take our new experiences for granted. Nobody gave them to us. That is what many old farts were trying to say.

I am not sure what this brings to the party but if someone has an experience that does not fit into available narratives, then the discomfiture becomes a thing. Not so much because of one's experiences but a reluctance to add new things to what is being experienced.
The history of Taoism is helpful in this regard. Most of the literature is devoted to how it gets talked about in unhelpful ways.

Your question about happiness is interesting. I read Spinoza as speaking as a happy person. He certainly resisted the dour premises of many of his contemporaries. He lived his life on his terms even though it exiled him from many associations. He found his own associations.

The distance between the Tractatus and the Investigations is worth noting. Who else has gone so far from one point of view to another?

And if the points of view are very far apart, how will that be understood?

From a psychological perspective, the way that forms of life are presented is done with a kind of rigor that is rare. The frame is used more often than the reasoning that brought it into being.

One element that is mentioned in most "mystical" narratives is that you are alone while learning the ropes. Or you are alone afterwards.

Anyway, a lot of emphasis upon taking your experience as your experience without being in a rush to say what they are about. A silence.

I have no idea about what it all means. But that stopping for a beat is interesting. I can compare that with other events.

I don't think the anticipation is bad.
But, as you say, it is wrapped up in how we understand ourselves as humans.
For myself, the matter of what is practiced and preserved is not directly proportional to what I am able to state is the case or not.
Your results may vary.

My friend was saying that the: "fear comes from the fact, that I won't ever experience anything after I die" is an anticipation of the future. We anticipate all sorts of things in the course of our lives. He wasn't trying to say the fear is misplaced or stupid. But we do make it like other things when it is not. How we deal with the anticipation changes outcomes. It is not an answer but a set of helpful complications.

I encourage you to read Unomuno's The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. He gives full expression to what you are talking about. I have a different view but it doesn't come from overcoming his arguments.

I am also afraid.

I have lost a number of dear friends in the last few years and it is weird how they still live inside me.
Years ago, one of those friends said to me something like this:

"Once you pass the boundary, you won't be able to regret it happening because, uh, you are dead. So don't compare it to all those times when you experience regret. A bad decision at work. A sinful indulgence. A petty demand for a stupid thing. When you get rid of all the false comparisons, then you can slow down and stop rushing toward the the end you despise."

Similarly, the Greeks did not know the emotion of guilt.

This is not true. Most of the plays deal with guilt. Plato's Republic chooses culpability over freedom from it.
You really have no idea what you are talking about.