Even if being at TPF is a little uncomfortable or annoying, I still think it's good to expose yourself to other perspectives. At the very least you are learning about the world and what to expect from others when you bring them philosophy.

To bad Guattari isn't around. I think he'd get off on the gig. — Joshs

I never read that book (I know the one you're talking about.) But if that book is like I've imagined it, you're probably right.

Along similar lines : Is it possible for a singular person to consider the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, the metaphysical and the real without integrating all of their personas? And what is the relationship between private integration and public? — csalisbury

That's a tough one. Maybe you can relate. I try to be a rounded and grounded personality. Given the sophistication of your posts, I imagine that you dress carefully, that the details matter. I think that (whatever our differences) there's a similar sense that we're at a play, and that others are perhaps more likely to forget that they are just posing, engaged in the role.

As far as private/public, I sometimes think I detect little clues in thinkers that hint at their more complex private views. Just imagine being famous and telling the whole truth.... Let's say that some part of you forgive or embraces yourself as a whole, darkness and light. Well that's a matter that must remain private, excepting the highest of friendships/relationships. And even these have their limits (have two people ever really lived in exactly the same world?)

Is there a difference between a collection of personas arrayed radially around a central topic as opposed to a series of personas taking different, though similar tacks? How would we understand the difference between the two approaches? — csalisbury

The radial situation might just be pragmatic. Or trying to write the same poem again from scratch, just a little better, including what has been learned in the meantime. The other approach reminds me of drama. Some themes have to be exaggerated perhaps in order to shine forth. So the writer yanks out a partial self, cranks up the volume, but then needs distance from he, the sane citizen, recognizes as excessive. That none of us are quite the sane citizens it is our duty to appear to be is another issue. Comedians are allowed to confess that for all of us.

Kierkegaard, as I'm sure you know, found he could only express his faith through a hodgepodge of various personas. & That's a whole question unto itself. What is the function of a persona? — csalisbury

That's a profound question. I think usually the persona is the self one is invested in constructing, maintaining, protecting. The mask just is the face. But something happens in human consciousness, for all of us I think, especially those who live in words. The 'true' self is made of words. But words are the infinite medium. Concept is the highest manifestation of religion some might say. So a single face and a single history are a sort of absurd vessel for the infinite voice. The mind inside is a theater crammed with voices. But one of those voices understands itself as a theater crammed with voices, commanding them like Prospero.

It's funny you mention faith. Coincidentally, that's something I'm interested in. It is complicated. — csalisbury

It's awkward to talk about. It's mostly that one expects to be misunderstood. I enjoy talking about these things, but they push all kinds of buttons in people. Have you seen Unforgiven? Eastwood is the mystic. Hackman is the scientist. Faith is just 'always being lucky' or feeling a kind of fate/luck that is ultimately beneath all reason or justification. Or that's one spin on one kind of faith.

What I’m trying to have edited isn’t my prose, but my philosophical axioms, principles, and definitions, the logical basis and framework of my philosophy. — TheGreatArcanum

Ah. Well I guess you are asking for a difficult thing. It sounds like you want a co-creator of the philosophy. Even if people were willing to do it, they'd be afraid that they wouldn't know how.

People usually respond the way this sushi guy does, with contempt and disbelief. — TheGreatArcanum

Well your philosophy directly clashes with the basic self-conceptions of other people. If you are right, then they are wrong about fundamental things. But the reverse is also true. One of the themes that I like to focus on is our drive to project ourselves and win recognition. Others were writing about this long before I was born, but it's something that's always fascinated me. I suffer/enjoy Kierkegaardian self-consciousness, let's say. Personality is mask. There's something absurd about being attached to a finite face and finite name. Something higher wants out, wants to indeed be rootless and continually transcend its last move.

I digress. But from my perspective the angst of selling yourself is profoundly educational. We learn most from rhetorical wounds scored fairly against us and from overhearing ourselves as we try to make ourselves understood to the stranger.

I emailed like 20 professors from various respected universities around the country and even several from the local D3 college in my area and I got zero responses even despite offering to pay money. — TheGreatArcanum

Who needs professors though? Is there some validation to be had from academia? That's the tension in your position for me. If it's reason alone, then it's philosophy. If there's an appeal to rare experience, then most people will want to call it religion or mysticism.

You could always just pay a skilled writer to organize it so that it sings. That writer wouldn't even have to understand or agree with everything.

But...that way of looking at people (common/rare impotent/potent) leaves you liable to being dashed against the rocks, over and over. If you think most people are missing something, you won't blink an eye at flattering people just enough to carve a space where you can supply what they're missing. What do you think? — csalisbury

It's complicated. I guess it depends on how one values that missing thing. Obviously it's got to be talked about carefully. It's not far from madness in the emotional sphere. But is it really just rock and roll? Immigrant Song, Stairway to Heaven , Nativity in Black , Machine Gun? What does the scream of Hendrix's guitar mean in Machine Gun? It's not innocent, but it's not petty either. It's the magic of the king, the energy of the emperor. Patriarchal mystique perhaps.

Certainly science continuously progresses, but mainly nowadays in terms of utility and instrumental value/power. — Wayfarer

But perhaps that's its essence, for better or worse. Slapping the word 'gravity' on a pattern in measurements that we expect to persist doesn't really explain anything. Some want to puff up these patterns into a metaphysicks...so that they can club other metaphysicians over the head with their kind of (lifeless) Platonism.

IMV it's better to not worship our tools, or something like that. Worshiping human-like divinities (our own 'species essence') makes more sense, is more popular, and is probably the root of scientistic Platonism (the forms being those dead 'laws of nature').

But what I take it to mean, is that metaphysics, for Aristotle, served no other purpose; that the ability of the mind to contemplate the eternal verities was an end in itself. — Wayfarer

I agree, but perhaps the essence of Kantian style philosophy is the separation of religion and science. The truths of religion can be endlessly contemplated and enjoyed, but some wanted this kind of truth in its own box, both for its own sake and for the sake of natural science. Or that's one perspective.

can’t find anyone to read it and critique it who can give constructive feedback, unfortunately, I can’t even pay anyone to critique it. — TheGreatArcanum

I'm surprised that your money isn't talking. Are you ambivalent about being critiqued? What kind of money have you offered?

Thanks for the answers. I guess what I'm trying to specify is how much you associate rationality with mysticism. Clearly you are interested in concepts, so the truth as you see and value it has a conceptual aspect. So that leaves me trying to figure out where the mysticism comes in.

My take is that some 'internal' experiences are as rare as they are potent. So descriptions of that experience aren't going to mean much to most people. I'd say that people who really love Nietzsche (for example) have probably all found a mirror there for something that they suspect is missing in many others. It's a gleam in the eye. It's divine malice and golden laughter, etc.

I will be releasing a book with the next two years that will expound upon the truth in great detail, and if all goes as planned, it will change the world. — TheGreatArcanum

Would you say that you are still organizing that book? And that the ideas we see here will find their way into the final book?

Man has been living in darkness for long enough now, so it’s time that he poke his head outside the cave and see what he’s been missing. I am here to help make that happen. — TheGreatArcanum

That suggests to me that your perspective can indeed be communicated through concepts?

unfortunately, there are dark forces fighting against me, trying to steal their minds away from me and the truth, but they will not prevail because my mission comes from the highest of the high. — TheGreatArcanum

Do you understand the dark forces to have a grudge against your mission? Or are they ultimately well meaning people who just misunderstand the mission and accidentally oppose? Or ?

Thank you also for being open and answering my questions.

Can anyone link the essay mentioned by OP? Or a synopsis of it. — Forgottenticket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology

I've been interested in the rhetorical mechanics of the mystical position for a long time. Really I could probably improvise a handful of types who appear on forums. To me all of them have their value. There's something lovably old school about the mystic. 'I, Plato, am the Truth.' It's the boldest claim. It goes for pure authority/truth without mediation. The mystic bluntly tells people that they just don't get it, that they are locked out of the secret (by a lack of faith or a cowardly conformity or...?) Why don't we get it? Are we locked out? Are you here to win us over? Enjoy your superiority? Look for the few others who are chosen ?

there is a difference between transient mystical states and permanent mystical states. all of the greatest philosophers and scientists of all time experienced a constant mystical state of consciousness. If one does not have this experience, it is possible to become pretty good, like wittgenstein good, or Heidegger good, but not Plato good, or better than that. — TheGreatArcanum

So did you begin to have a mystical experience and it has continued unabated? I ask sincerely. I am curious. Maybe it really is different from my experiences.

you guys are all wasting your time. mysticism seems irrational until you become a mystic yourself. there are preconditions for becoming one though. but after you’re initiated, there is a direct and constant experience of spirit, or rather, the soul; once you experience it, all other philosophies besides mysticism become laughably irrelevant. you share a body with God all day long yet you deny Gods existence and call yourselves “rational;” and there is rich humor to be found it that. — TheGreatArcanum

I can dig it. But I think a person can get high on Nietzsche, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida,.... When a person is plugged in to what-you-may-call-it, there's a creation explosion of concepts. I've been there a few times. I've scribbled out manifestos of THE philosophy. When I come down, I usually still find value in the ideas but not the same supreme value.

For me these 'mystic' states were tangled up with iconoclasm. The 'illusions' and limitations of mundane thinking and even perhaps mundane morality are 'seen through.' Writing at the moment from a calm state of mind, I suggest that feeling is the heart of this experience. The apparently revolutionary thoughts vary, while the wide-eyed possession of whatever this Truth happens to be... actually lives in the blood.

I consider myself a pragmatist and view 'axioms' as merely 'assertions which may contextually work up to a point'..
This is in accordance with the spirit of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem' and a view of 'truth' as 'that which is good or useful to believe'. In addition, since language is. the currency of thought, and currency involves social agreement for its 'value' then philosophy which ignores those linguietic and social (paradigmatic) issues is vacuous. — fresco

Welcome to the forum. I like seeing a fiery pragmatist join the mix.

In that sense phenomenology, Nietzschean polemics, post structuralism , hermeneutics and pragmatism carry forward the tradition of mathemtics as the language of ultimate precision, but via a new type of discourse. — Joshs

I see what you mean. Our pragmatic, mundane ways of talking are cheap models, good enough for government work. But this is a stretched metaphor! Actual applied math is going nowhere. I think only someone who doesn't have their hands in the numbers would use that metaphor.

All that differentiates it from philosophy in any trans-historical sense is that it is more 'pragmatic'. And what does that mean? It uses a vocabulary that is less comprehensively self-examining. — Joshs

Is that really the gist of 'pragmatic'? Why would people trust scientists more on certain issues? Certainly not because they are less comprehensively self-examining. They are reliable prophets and good at making stuff that gives us what we want.

If the distinction between philosophy and science is illusory or merely a useful fiction, then fine. But we can accuse any distinction of being a useful fiction. Unless the utility vanishes, the distinction won't either.

I skimmed the paper. It's well written, and (FWIW ) I get the impression that you know what you are talking about. It is indeed thick with Heidegger and Derrida.

The paper does live at a high level abstraction. It'd be nice to hear how you'd apply your ideas to contemporary AI, just as Dreyfus once did.

Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalised (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality. — Wiki

It seems that Dreyfus was right. Or that Heidegger/Wittgenstein were right. Or that Hegel was right. Or that some 'idealist' was right....

Awesome. I'll check it out. I respect that you offer an answer to the question (which I think is fair.)

This doesnt make the concept of an object 'false', it makes it a notion that doesn't fully understand the dynamics of its structuration with respect to the phenomenal unfolding of experience. — Joshs

Let's zoom in on this. When will we know that we have fully understood such a glorious thing as 'the dynamics of its structuration with respect to the phenomenal unfolding of experience'? Why would we need to know? This too would be scooped up in our directed doings. Or/also it would be the old metaphysickal seduction. The 'cool' teacher can wow his young students. They can slap some pseudo-scientific jargon on their preferences.

Attacks on science and correspondence are like attacks on dad for not actually being God but only a reliable, imperfect dad. It's not the the stoner son is talking nonsense. He's just mostly arguing against his own misunderstandings of pop. Pop never promised him a rose garden. To be fairer, I have seen some scientism. Some thinkers go too far in the other direction.

Heidegger is a great philosopher. But like many great philosophers he emphasizes one important theme at the expense of other important themes.

FWIW, the 'co-construction of a self-transforming universe' is something I understand pretty well. I've argued for that myself in more metaphysical moods. We can even call that the 'speculative' truth.

...everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.

The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realised and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite. As subject it is pure and simple negativity, and just on that account a process of splitting up what is simple and undifferentiated, a process of duplicating and setting factors in opposition, which [process] in turn is the negation of this indifferent diversity and of the opposition of factors it entails. True reality is merely this process of reinstating self-identity, of reflecting into its own self in and from its other, and is not an original and primal unity as such, not an immediate unity as such. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves.
...
What has been said may also be expressed by saying that reason is purposive activity. — Hegel

Note the repetition in our 'speculative truth' of metaphysics at its most grandiose. And what was Hegel concerned with? Basically religion. Philosophy is just religion done scientifically for Hegel.
Now maybe we have a twist where history never goes anywhere to die but just keeps leaping into the unknown. And I find it plausible that 'forms of life' are neither predictable nor stable.

Note also the for-dummies version: reason is activity with a purpose. It is a directed doing. Is that what's left when the holy smoke clears?

It's not that the speculative truth of Heidegger/Hegel can't be defended. But it's a questionable leap from phenomenology to newfangled Hegel. If we criticize artificial constructions with even more grandiose artificial constructions, ...

Finally I admit that this is largely a matter of taste or fashion. Maybe I've put my velvet sportcoat in the closet for now and grabbed my Carharrt chore coat for some variety.

Note for wearers of the chore coat who are curious about Heidegger:
Ontology : Hermeneutics of Facticity is a genuine pleasure to read. It's short, focused on the good stuff, and beautifully translated.
https://books.google.com/books?id=I9vsCQAAQBAJ

If it [metaphysics] is a science, how comes it that it cannot, like other sciences, obtain universal and permanent recognition ? If not, how can it maintain its pretensions, and keep the human mind in suspense with hopes, never ceasing, yet never fulfilled? Whether then we demonstrate our knowledge or our ignorance in this field, we must come once for all to a definite conclusion respecting the nature of this so-called science, which cannot possibly remain on its present footing.

It seems almost ridiculous, while every other science is continually advancing, that in this, which pretends to be Wisdom incarnate, for whose oracle every one inquires, we should constantly move round the same spot, without gaining a single step. And so its followers having melted away, we do not find men confident of their ability to shine in other sciences venturing their reputation here, where everybody, however ignorant in other matters, may deliver a final verdict, as in this domain there is as yet no standard weight and measure to distinguish sound knowledge from shallow talk. — Kant

http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/kant_materials/prolegomena2.htm

In short, this is an old theme. And Kant was already reacting against it, basically defending a place for philosophy as a kind of metaphysics squared, proof against metaphysicks of the first power. And later thinkers can generalize Kantian approaches and out-Kant them. And so on forever, to the limits of the number of books a human can plausibly pose as having mastered. But then people turned away from metaphysicks to some degree because they were busy and mortal in the first place.

If anyone has not read this bitchy response of Kant to one of his early reviewers, I recommend it. Kant comes off as lovably human.
http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/kant_materials/prolegomena9.htm#specimen

A taste:

My reviewer speaks like a man who is conscious of important and superior insight which he keeps hidden; for I am aware of nothing recent with respect to metaphysics that could justify his tone. But he should not withhold his discoveries from the world, for there are doubtless many who, like myself, have not been able to find in all the fine things that have for long past been written in this department, anything that has advanced the science by so much as a finger-breadth; we find indeed the giving a new point to definitions, the supplying of lame proofs with new crutches, the adding to the crazy-quilt of metaphysics fresh patches or changing its pattern; but all this is not what the world requires. The world is tired of metaphysical assertions; it wants the possibility of the science, the sources from which certainty therein can be derived, and certain criteria by which it may distinguish the dialectical illusion of pure reason from truth. To this the critic seems to possess a key, otherwise he would never have spoken out in such a high tone. — bitchy Kant

a distinction between genuine problems (which are interesting to people outside of philosophy departments) and spurious problems due to philosophical inbreeding. — Izat So

That seems solid to me. Like anything it can be taken too far or interpreted crudely. Nevertheless, I think we have a rough sense of the difference between inbreeding and relevance. I've read papers that were clever enough but basically repeated old ideas in whatever terminology was fashionable.

Great link. I've looked at that paper before. Good stuff!

Incidentally I used to love making strategy games. One of them involved a king that could indeed move twice in a row. Other pieces could move again after every capture, and they could capture friendly pieces as part of a blitzkrieg. I ended up with so many ideas like this that I never did settle on a game and try to market it. Add it to the shelf with all of the other ideas I'll never find time for. Life is too short.

I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.

Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so
original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it’s possible at
all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a
pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an
as-structured experience. — Joshs

Great quote. I agree, and it's great to point out that pure color or pure tone are constructions. But we can also defend the utility of such choices. They weren't a madman's ravings. They were presumably inspired by noticing that humans have eyes and ears. Let experts jump in, but even a non-expert like myself can pretty safely assume that the brain synthesizes messages from the sense-organs into the world as we experience it.

[EDIT]
Those who started talking in terms of pure sensation were self-consciously analyzing 'being-in-the-world' with a particular purpose in mind. They didn't need to emphasize 'being-in-the-world.' I'm not saying that they noticed everything that Heidegger pointed out in his works, but I am saying that they had some version of pre-theoretical experience. They knew that their constructions were artificial. They came up with them in the first place.

To point to a moment of experience and say 'object' is to do violence to this dynamism at the heart of meaning by attempting to freeze what was mobile, and thus actively significant and relevant, and make it inert , dead, meaningless. — Joshs

This ignores why we evolved to do such a thing in the first place. Such 'violence' is necessary for our survival and sanity. Who's willing to deny that our thinking is an organization of chaos? Some philosophers want to call the organizing concepts 'real' and others want to call the chaos 'real.' Still others prefer to call the mundane organized chaos 'real.' Yet others question the importance of the game of deciding what is 'real' in some lusted-after context-independent sense of 'real.'

The penultimate perspective is great for practical life. The last perspective is good for chatting with philosophers.

.

Indeed. Our awareness of differences is heightened during conflict between opposing moral thought/belief. That is particularly the case when they've been held for a long time period. In these situations it is also often the case that there are innumerable other beliefs connected to them in some important way. Conviction of the moral variety can take hold. Righteous indignation can result, on both sides... — creativesoul

I agree. I suggest that consciousness is 'summoned' to interruptions of otherwise smooth, automatic, habitual know-how. This is an old idea, but I think it's solid.

If our breathing comes to our attention, we can control it. But we breath also when we don't think about our breathing.

Be careful here. Not all intellectual talk is to be shunned simply because it is intellectual talk. Your post, for instance... plenty intellectual without fancy words. I like it. — creativesoul

I agree that intellectual talk shouldn't be shunned just 'cuz. It's a fairly innocent pleasure even when nothing is at stake. And actually I have dabbled in trying to frame a relativism that didn't eat itself. It's like a chess problem.

As a matter or morality or taste, though, I like being able to downshift into real talk. We've probably all met a few people who can't switch off the video game and speak usefully about the real world that sooner or later we end up having to deal with.

The morality one first adopts, and later comes to question, is (largely)relative to the situations they are born into and live through(take part in). — creativesoul

I agree. I don't remember being potty trained, and I don't need a theoretical justification for the wrongness of hurting cats when I walk at night. Or of covering my mouth when I cough. So I'd say that within a culture the conscious moral discussion is focused on difficult cases where the gut-level principles of a culture clash.

In case it helps, I gathered together a few quotes that all hammer on the right nail. Looking at the thread, I think others are also seeing it my way.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.
...
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
...
What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.
...
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
...
When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.
...
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
...
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
...

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
...
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
...
What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
— Wittgenstein

<emphasis added>

The 'environment' or 'background' or 'form of life' is 'most powerful' because it's a 'vision' of the world we act on and speak from without even being able to 'debate' it first. It's the stuff that we don't know we know. It's our deepest form of belief, except that 'belief' suggests unconscious propositions. I can't doubt my ability to use the word 'hand,' since I need that ability before I even get started.

The last quote makes clear that what's being said is conceptually easy but emotionally difficult. The night is dark and full of terrors. It's not easy to accept a 'blind' embeddedness that makes our little torch of artificial constructions possible in the first place. 'Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing....'

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy." — Wittgenstein

We already know how to use the word 'know.' But that doesn't mean that such knowledge is propositional. It's instead the kind of knowledge that makes propositions possible.

We'd 'all agree' that the tree was a tree. That's why it's so weird to say 'I know that that's a tree,' and that's why Wittgenstein has to explain that they are being philosophical (in his pejorative sense) instead of watching a baby learn to talk.

The moral relativist cannot commit to principle, he has to view all principles as simultaneously right and wrong. The moment he commits to a principle, he becomes absolutist. The morality of the relativist is a phantasm. — Merkwurdichliebe

I agree, to the degree that I understand this yanked out of context. There's a popular game where a thinker pretends to have no perspectives or all perspectives at the same time. In my view, that's finally a bogus position. And if we drop out of the fantasy land of intellectual talk, this becomes extremely obvious. We don't thrive in this society long enough to learn fancy words unless we've been deeply trained on some fundamental things that we have never even bothered to question. I don't have to remind myself not to play with my poop. And that's a second point I should sneak in. Lots of morality is automatic, and it's arguably this automatic stuff that's decisive.

That tradition becomes the incidental victim is the great tragedy of all progress (philosophy included). — Merkwurdichliebe

Good point. And my dig at the Hegelian hippo is an attack on the idea that tradition can be transcended and included in its full vitality. It can't! Most of us just can't walk around as if we are in God's creation anymore. The night was dark and full of terrors. If it still is, then the nature of that darkness has nevertheless changed. And my image of what to strive for has changed in an acceptance of my mortality. One can't 'transcend and include' the after-life or the certainty that a human-like God created the world for our benefit as a kind of game show with infinite stakes. It's either/or. And I remember believing in God as a child, but that memory is faint and ineffective.

Their fascination is part of what makes them so convincing. These guys are original geniuses, the like of which we have never seen in our lifetimes. — Merkwurdichliebe

Bingo! That's what I meant about the newer stuff largely being more style than substance. It's not easy to be that creative, and the low hanging fruit has been plucked already.

That is a near perfect assessment of their intention. The consequences did not turn out so optimal. Nevertheless, the consequence of empiricism was not as detrimental as the that of Marxist or Hegelian thought, which produced ideologies that resulted in the worst travesties in history. — Merkwurdichliebe

I'm glad we agree on the empiricists were really about. I also agree that Marx and Hegel are dangerous. What's a little sad about Marx is that he was a great anti-metaphysician in The German Ideology. But yet again the anti-metaphysician is transformed into a positive system, by others if he doesn't do it himself. It's one thing to note the 'force' of the concrete-economic situation on human consciousness and another to think one can see the future this way.

Democracy only monetizes the individual, as a quantity or numerical unit in relation to the whole, it does not factor in the qualitative importance of the unique value of each individual in itself. — Merkwurdichliebe

I definitely empathize with this. Taken to extremes, we get some of the scarier moments of the 20th century. At the same time our free society seems aimed at letting ten thousand different flowers bloom. When it comes to politics, I take off my hat. That's a supreme challenge. One of the things I like about stoics & epicureans & various other strains of philosophy is the distance it allows the individual from the madness and trouble of the passing day. It's not that a person must tune out but rather that they can. Some measure of transcendence seems almost necessary to a strong personality. It's like a battle against total absorption in the moment's fury, a quest for cool-headedness.