Bein' reasonable is thinking about our own thought and belief, including but not limited to statements thereof. That's the best place to start looking. After-all, if our notion of belief is not amenable to evolutionary progression it can - and ought - be dismissed out of hand as soon as we realize that it's not. — cs

I agree, but I think we need to add something. I'm not reasonable merely by thinking about my thinking. I have to meet some implicit standard. To put it dramatically, I am only reasonable when 'we' are thinking 'through' me. Earnest philosophy tries to avoid the distortion of its petty individual 'host.'

If the history of Philosophy merely represented various opinions in array, whether they be of God or of natural and spiritual things existent, it would be a most superfluous and tiresome science, no matter what advantage might be brought forward as derived from such thought-activity and learning. What can be more useless than to learn a string of bald opinions, and what more unimportant? — Hegel

And what isn't abstract? — Gus Lamarch

An attempt to make the minimum wage in the US exactly $15 per hour. Outlawing the sale of trans-fat in Sedona. An upper limit on credit card interest rates. And so on.

The concept of Overman is molded by my mind, to the most functional notion for me. If the Superman is inderteminate, make it the best concept you can, for yourself. — Gus Lamarch

But then we're back to ordinary reality. We are already consumers who are free to dream our own dreams.

es, even Nietzsche did this, and he confirmed, but his point was that to feel comfortable with it, and not attempt to change, is the greatest error that humanity ever did. Life is tragic, tough, but to not fight back, and feel that what you did was worth living, could only be the will of the "Last Man". — Gus Lamarch

Nietzsche was/is a highly complex personality.

I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.... I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand—it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. — Nietzsche

Maybe I am a clown!

Nietzsche was sometimes possessed by a kind of mystic passion. His madness was articulate. At other times he was a master of suspicion.

I take it that you like his mystic side more. All I can say is examine the vagueness of your mystic song. What exactly are you proposing? From my point of view, you are high on abstractions, high on the indeterminate promise of the superman.

I've no issue with this at face value. I agree. What I take issue with is the idea that that somehow applies to thought and belief that does not involve understanding a text. We're talking about all thought and belief and what they have in common at a basic level such that that content is capable of evolutionary progression...

Correlations. — cs

I think Derrida makes a strong case that speech is 'writing.' (He uses writing as a metaphor for a new concept.) He challenges the notion of meaning being simply and directly present to a subject. The pure subject and the pure meaning present to it are related concepts.

Here's a nice piece of Hegel.

In Scepticism, the entire unessentiality and unsubstantiality of this “other” becomes a reality for consciousness. Thought becomes thinking which wholly annihilates the being of the world with its manifold determinateness, and the negativity of free self-consciousness becomes aware of attaining, in these manifold forms which life assumes, real negativity.
...
By means of this self-conscious negation, self-consciousness procures for itself the certainty of its own freedom, brings about the experience of that freedom, and thereby raises it into the truth. What vanishes is what is determinate, the difference which, no matter what its nature or whence it comes, sets up to be fixed and unchangeable. The difference has nothing permanent in it, and must vanish before thought because to be differentiated just means not to have being in itself, but to have its essential nature solely in an other. Thinking, however, is the insight into this character of what is differentiated; it is the negative function in its simple, ultimate form.
...
It finds its freedom, at one time, in the form of elevation above all the whirling complexity and all the contingency of mere existence, and again, at another time, likewise confesses to falling back upon what is unessential, and to being taken up with that. ... It proclaims the nothingness of essential ethical principles, and makes those very truths the sinews of its own conduct. Its deeds and its words belie each other continually; and itself, too, has the doubled contradictory consciousness of immutability and sameness, and of utter contingency and non-identity with itself.... Its talk, in fact, is like a squabble among self-willed children, one of whom says A when the other says B, and again B, when the other says A, and who, through being in contradiction with themselves, procure the joy of remaining in contradiction with one another.
...
In Scepticism consciousness gets, in truth, to know itself as a consciousness containing contradiction within itself. From the experience of this proceeds a new attitude which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart. The want of intelligence which Scepticism manifests regarding itself is bound to vanish, because it is in fact one consciousness which possesses these two modes within it. This new attitude consequently is one which is aware of being the double consciousness of itself as self-liberating, unalterable, self-identical, and as utterly self-confounding, self-perverting; and this new attitude is the consciousness of this contradiction within itself. — Hegel

In his lectures on fine art, he offers the related position of Irony.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical. — Hegel

He continues with another portrait of the skeptic's/ironist's problem.

The next form of this negativity of irony is, on the one hand, the vanity of everything factual, moral, and of intrinsic worth, the nullity of everything objective and absolutely valid. If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow and empty and itself mere vanity.[53] But, on the other hand, the ego may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead become inadequate to itself, so that it now feels a craving for the solid and the substantial, for specific and essential interests. Out of this comes misfortune, and the contradiction that, on the one hand, the subject does want to penetrate into truth and longs for objectivity, but, on the other hand, cannot renounce his isolation and withdrawal into himself or tear himself free from this unsatisfied abstract inwardness. — Hegel

To me 'the solid and the substantial' is not only worldly recognition but also recognition by the rational community. The essence of the private ego is public. The substance of the 'individual' is language, intrinsically opened outward toward the ideal other. I add this to clarify what I mean by the ideal community. Humanism, reason, fraternity. The proud ego has to trade in false infinities for the genuine infinity of the species essence, though this species essence is itself mortal. But all of this is perhaps necessarily vague, and that's the problem. There are 10,000 humanisms.

For Kojève, the necessity of revolutionary violence follows from the ineffectiveness of persuasive speech. Already in his analysis of Bayle’s Encyclopedia (to which he indirectly refers in this letter to Strauss), Kojève demonstrates that the philosopher cannot overcome the plurality of particular opinions by means of persuasive speech alone – by the speech that pretends to be ‘true’ speech. [17] Indeed, throughout its history philosophy tried to operate by persuasion. It measured its effectiveness by the influence that it exercised on listeners or readers. But there is no evidence that is evident enough to compel readers to abandon their own opinions and begin to accept ‘evident speech’ as ‘true speech’. The hope that motivated philosophy for centuries – the hope to produce such an intense light of evidence that it would be impossible for anybody to reject this evidence, to turn one’s back to this light, to remain unpersuaded – this hope demonstrated itself as futile and ruinous for philosophy. As a result philosophy degenerated into literature; philosophy began to reproduce the plurality of opinions instead of overcoming it. — Groy

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/romantic-bureaucracy-2

The failure of persuasion brings us back to the pre-rational or post-rational evil patriarch --or possibly a fraternity that brutally fixes its doctrine. Is the judge in Blood Meridian still a philosopher? Or a post-philosophical prophet?

"Last Man" is the second concept developed on the same book, and it is the antithesis of his superior, more evolved being, the Übermensch. According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves, with lives of pacifism and comfortableness, with no more distinction between ruler and ruled, strong over weak or supreme over the mediocre. Social conflict and challenges are minimized and every individual lives equally and in "superficial" harmony.

With characteristics like "equality", acceptance of the status quo, decadece, hedonism, comfortableness, nihilism, etc. I can only say, with regret, that we are going straightfoward towards the latter. — Gus Lamarch

I love Nietzsche, but let's add to this picture. What do we do with our modern comfort? We watch TV and movies full of violence and drama. We have our cake and eat it too. And even Nietzsche did this. When was he violent?The last man might just be a reader of Nietzsche who still obeys the traffic lights and pays taxes. Or are we to read Nietzsche as a thug?

It's hard if not impossible to create new values.

Nietzsche, on his works, never fully explained the concept of "Übermensch". He left it open to interpretations, because neither he, as a human to be surpassed, could fully comprehend it. — Gus Lamarch

Perhaps it is human nature to be haunted by the superman, what humans might become. We are endlessly transgressive. Our wicked hearts crave the beyond.

See remark above about triangularity. — Wayfarer

That remark isn't conclusive for me. We have the concept of the triangle and various images of it. All of this is still quite human.

Conversely, however, the limit works the other way. Both sides will never lose their Home games.
Something is missing from both sides. — Valentinus

Well said. I like to think of enduring stereoscopic ambiguity. But this is also a pleasure.

Zizek is the philosopher of our inability to commit to either. Neurosis is freedom. — absoluteaspiration

Well then I guess I agree with him there. I've read a fair amount of Zizek & always liked him. But I've also read his critics, who are sometimes right and sometimes just nasty and intentionally blind. I also think his live performance is great. He's an artist. He's just so lovably human.

I think we share some insights. At the same time we are coming from different favorite influences. Which is interesting. So thanks for the conversation so far, and I look forward to more.

Zizek probably thinks Derrida is too feminine. — absoluteaspiration

I've mostly wrestled with early Derrida, and I find him patricidal. The purple velvet sportcoat is the costume of an assassin. It does make sense that anyone who insists on action will read the ironist or anyone who muddies the water as passive. And the ironist can read Mr. Action as cutting the knot in impatience. I don't come down on either side, but maybe that's me coming down on a side after all.

The feminine subject thus has an opening to reject boundaries placed on her by Master figures in the form of social roles or biological natures. — absoluteaspiration

This 'feminine subject' is of fundamental importance. I connect 'her' to Kojeve's / Hegel's skeptic.

But this skepticism also troubles the revolutionary project. If the practical world doesn't determine my value, I don't have to risk my life to prove myself. I can be the king queen of my theoretical realm. And I can even question whether the practical realm has some fixed nature or center.

Because femininity locates the transcendence of nature in the terms supplied by the world, not as moral principles insisting from beyond it, femininity is pure subjectivity that does not rely on the perception of external objects such as "principles". — absoluteaspiration

Men are the dreamers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Women

Because castration anxiety is experienced as ambient noise in femininity while it constitutes the foremost experience of masculinity, masculinity is a paper tiger that has been contingently cut out from the radicalism immanent in the feminine subject. Since we can never actually access the noumenal, men are constitutionally terrified of being "unmanned" somehow. — absoluteaspiration

It's as if masculinity just is fear of castration and a certain ecstasy that comes from the feeling of 'direct access.' Is there a masculine mystique? I think so. Zizek, Lacan,the thinkers I like,...all project it. It's like a violence that cuts through illusion and pettiness. How do intellectuals earn their place in the canon? Their ideas are potent, of course, but there is also a swagger and style at times. We often judge the art in the context of the lifestyle of the artist.

Zizek would say that men who promote "feminine"-centrism are often disseminating patriarchal ideas by putting women on a pedestal. — absoluteaspiration

I agree. But it's complex. Sometimes philosophers are singing about a bearded witch. The ironist is a queen of kings. By accepting castration (no solid identity), 'she' has no sacred principle to protect. What was Stirner? A clown, yes, but a fascinating clown. And Marx was troubled by Stirner, while Engels was initially seduced. The king is seriousness and (from one perspective) ultimately worships War as god.

Also, if I can be a straight male chauvinist for a moment, there is nothing hotter than a woman doing manly things. Just watch the video of the Primal Father in contemporary media that I will link somewhere. Sometimes I wonder whether the men who want women to be women are all gay. Since when do boys actually want girls to do girly shit? That's just surreal! — absoluteaspiration

This is a deep issue. I speculate that on some deep level that everyone is bisexual. And then our conscious sexuality surfaces in various ways. I can imagine a straight man being attracted to girls being girly as simply a disavowed enjoyment of those girly things. The straight man can be a tourist in that world without sacrificing a certain fantasy of himself that he sees as his central or core self. Personally I'm identified with the masculine role, which I also connect to the role of the philosopher or truth-teller. A man faces reality. A man fights the monsters. I can take some intellectual distance from that, but that distance doesn't free me from a gut-level sense of what it means to be a (straight) man. It may be that a certain kind of sublimated homoeroticism is tied up with a person's performance of masculinity. What do they strive to find when they look in the mirror? And don't people fight duels or their modern equivalent to live up to that beloved image?

He also says God is the figure of the ultimate criminal. — absoluteaspiration

This is also in Stirner. The institution of the Law is the greatest and most perfect of crimes. That's why the philosopher, seer of the deepest structures, is a patriarch. Yet being constrained by a universal reason (and not just killing whoever disagrees) leads to a patricidal fraternity. Each brother has that evil father as his shadow, and he must sacrifice that shadow to participate in a community that exceeds him. In Feuerbachian terms, we must endure the painful truth that the limits of the individual are not the limits of the species. Moreover the self-defined anarchist father depends on a language that is not his own. He cannot be his own foundation. He was a cyborg from birth.

He goes as far as to say that God died with Christ on the cross. Therefore, he believes that Christ was God even more literally than Christians do. — absoluteaspiration

Yes, I relate to that view. An atheistic humanity believes seriously in the incarnation. The shift from theism to humanism 'is' the incarnation.

What's wrong is its cowardice in not going far enough with all these qualities to the point of rejecting worldly injustice with the sublime master it claims to worship. — absoluteaspiration

Have you ever looked in Kojeve? His interpretation of the master/slave dialectic is great. The basic idea is that many famous philosophical positions are just rationalizations of cowardice. We are afraid to challenge the worldly master, so we invent theoretical freedoms and/or theological masters of those masters.

Conservatives like the fact that he pisses off "libtards" — absoluteaspiration

This seems like the motive of many. It's even on the bumper stickers.

I can't prove what Trumpists really think, but don't you think that if conservatives were genuinely politically engaged, then they would at least make an effort to find out whether Fox News talking points match the facts rather than judging them solely by the criterion of whether or not they piss off liberals? — absoluteaspiration

I think you give people too much credit here. People only abandon their basic myths when they are forced too. Those identified with reason, like us, are an elitist minority. Tribal thinking solves the short-term problem of 'who are we?' for otherwise mentally slothful people. And the outgroup is as important as the ingroup for identity.

We should consider why people would want to piss off liberals. I think there is a matriarchal vibe, even if it's massively exaggerated.

This is just the thing. There is no matriarchy. Ergo, they hate the truth. They claim to love it, of course, but they are clearly lying. — absoluteaspiration

I think they are more deceived than lying. Tho some of the thought leaders are probably self-conscious sophists who cynically manage their dupes. At the same time I think there are people who call themselves leftist who also have bumper-sticker simplemindedness. We just grow up around certain prejudices and take them for granted until, for various reasons, we are willing to face the complexities.

The patriarchal fantasy is women enjoying giving pleasure to men. With his usual tact, he illustrates this with the example of porn, where the man is an objectified tool and the primary content is the woman's pleasure. It is this pleasure of the subordinate which titillates the exploiter. — absoluteaspiration

I think this is right. At least it corresponds to my intuition. The 'woman' takes pleasure in worship or service. As a pet theory, I suggest that maybe this is connected to the egoistic man projecting his repressed desire to submit and believe on the woman. If we think of the man as self-assertion, endlessly critical and unmasking, then the fantasized woman has the ecstasy that the man qua man denies himself. In Sartrean terms, the woman is man's disavowed flight from his own freedom.

But I think this connects to being possessed by the Cause. If the 'male' fantasy is autonomy and self-definition, it is also being dominated by female beauty. The beautiful woman is a 'phallus,' the mystical object. To be in love or dominated by the beauty of a woman is OK because she is of a different order than a rival, male ego. Something like that.

Masculinity is the substance, femininity is the void and "transgender" is loosely the real antinomy, the inability to commit to either of them. The rise in sublimity from masculinity to transgender is the radical negativity operative in the return of the repressed. Meanwhile, the desublimation from transgender to masculinity is a form of speciation, a move towards positive substance. — absoluteaspiration

This sounds right to me, and echos what I meant by the tongued mouth.

The Rational Being is confronted by neighbors with immensely greater worldly might than his own, money, health, wealth, and so on, or he feels on the point of being blown away by a natural disaster like a storm. But with the dynamic antinomies in mind, he feels the supernatural weight of moral principles that transcend the order of the natural world. Thus he is enabled to think of natural might as insignificant and sacrifices his material body to uphold the moral law. In para-Freudian terms, a man acts as though the world is lawful (castration anxiety), but there is an exception to this rule whose existence is ambiguous. — absoluteaspiration

This is different way of saying the kind of thing I find in Kojeve's Hegel and something I mostly agree with. We can talk about a symbolic reality that has enough weight or force that man can risk his life for it, perhaps to impose it on the world or just to sacrifice his life as a gesture.

Comparing the immovable object with actual infinity, the Rational Being sizes up sensuous reality, responds, "Is that all?" and sacrifices oneself rather than bending before natural might. — absoluteaspiration

This is good stuff.

I don't want to shut down that conversation but I still don't see what any of it has to do with the OP of this thread, and never have. — Pfhorrest

I'll defer continuing on that tangent until we find a better place.

@creativesoul
Perhaps we can continue on that old meaning thread you started long ago.

But, a circle is a circle in all possible worlds, whether h. sapiens has evolved to understand it or not. And when we do understand it, then we understand something that is in no way 'founded in biology'; we've evolved beyond the exigencies of biology at that point (to become, in Greek terms, 'the rational animal', which is a difference that makes a difference - an ontological difference, I claim.) — Wayfarer

As far as circles being independent of humans, I don't see an easy way to prove that. How can we see around our own eyes?

That appeal to biology is a reasonable guess, it seems to me. Why doesn't my cat talk to me in English? Her brain is built not for it. It's possible that she understands everything I say and chooses not to talk.

What does 'within' mean? Within what? What is the ontological status of ideas? That suits 'naturalised epistemology' very well, because evolution gives rise to brain gives rise to mind. — Wayfarer

I believe I already indicated that we can also start from concepts and understand the 'within' of the 'subject' as a theoretical fiction or sign among signs. The mental/physical distinction should not IMO be taken as an absolute, despite its utility and familiarity.

It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept. It is by means of such a concept that a word signifies, an

Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality 2 .

This seems more or less right to me. I see Fido as a dog. I agree with Heidegger and others that much of our understanding is far more automatic than this. But at the theoretical level we can speak of the dog we saw on our walk and not specify Fido. We understand classes.

Whether universals exist is another matter. I say that they exist in a sense - but you will find, modern thinking has no scale along which that expression is intelligible. For us, things either exist, or they don't. — Wayfarer

I'd say beware of generalizations like 'modern thinking.' Who are the most famous philosophers of the 20th century? And what did they worry about? Heidegger obsessed about the meaning of being.

Let's back up in order to bring Heidegger's central concern into better view. (The ‘way in’ to Being and Time that I am about to present follows Gelven 1989 6–7.) Consider some philosophical problems that will be familiar from introductory metaphysics classes: Does the table that I think I see before me exist? Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity distinct from body, exist? These questions have the following form: does x (where x = some particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that we already know what ‘to exist’ means. We typically don't even notice this presupposition. But Heidegger does, which is why he raises the more fundamental question: what does ‘to exist’ mean? This is one way of asking what Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, and Being and Time is an investigation into that question. — SEP

Completely agree. Compare that with this claim by Jacques Maritain - that 'what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.' Which I think is a precise characterisation of most modern empiricism. The 'rational subject' is bracketed out by the initial 'grand abstraction' of science, which purports to deal with 'ideal objects'; and then having been bracketed out, is forgotten about. — Wayfarer

Yeah I do think that can happen with thinkers. They ignore the lifeworld that grounds science. This is possible because fundamental concepts are so 'public' and 'automatic' that they are perhaps ignored as uncontroversial. We have to already share a world in order to make observations and present intelligible hypotheses. So in some sense philosophy is more difficult or ambitious than physical science, which contributes perhaps to its results being endlessly disputable. Working technology is overpowering, and perhaps it's not materialism but really just being dazzled by technology that obscures other forms of being.

And if rationality is not essentially public, thus is private, and rationality is grounded in “conceptual capacities”, then conceptual capacities are equally private. — Mww

I suggest that rationality is essentially public, while strangely being grounded in individual conceptual capacities. It's a shared dream, if you like, but calling it rational emphasizes its sharedness --or potential or ideal sharedness. For me there's nothing mystical in this. It just acknowledges what we are doing as philosophers, which is something like negotiating the real. One could joke that we are cyborgs, at least if language is understood as an external technology that is sewn into our 'consciousness.' But this 'external' technology is how we talk about or create an interior where the meaning of words lives in some imagined purity. It's not that traditional concepts become useless, since we need them in order to criticize them, but only that they aren't experienced as absolutes.

I agree that formal concepts are 'not private' in that they're not the creation of individual minds. In that sense, they're 'public', although it is a strange way of expressing it. 'True for all observers' would suffice. — Wayfarer

Calling concepts 'true for all observers' doesn't seem quite right. Statements made possible by concepts might be viewed as true for all observers.

While my expression may sound strange, what exactly do you mean by 'all observers'? Presumably you mean those not yet born. An infinite or ideal subject seems to be implied, which is to say a concept of the human mind in general or rationality.

Or maybe you meant the important point is that conception isn’t private, and thereby conception is essentially public. — Mww

Yes, this is more like what I was getting at. I'm influenced by thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida. While it's an overstatement, I think there's truth in the notion that language speaks the subject.

And if rationality is not essentially public, thus is private, and rationality is grounded in “conceptual capacities”, then conceptual capacities are equally private. Which is why your “concept is essentially public and social” is false, or at least needs clarification. — Mww

How could it be false or need clarification if rationality is private? If rationality is private, it's true because I think it is. I offer that playfully, only to emphasize my point.

I'll try to offer to better response later, when I'll have more time. At the moment I'd say roughly that we are stuck with (at least) two incompatible perspectives. We can try to build the world up as the dream of a private subject or we can derive the subject from system of concepts that are no longer simply concepts for just that reason. Because we know in an obvious, practical sense that 'consciousness' depends on the brain, we are tempted to start with the subject and move toward inter-subjectivity, etc. Yet a close investigation of this 'subject' suggests that it's more like a voice without a pure interior.

I see myself as trying to point out what tends to be overlooked. I don't have a final, settled theory and, indeed, don't think one is possible, given the nature of language.

[Direction is not a factor in forming a sequence.] — sandman

The informal talk of 'flipping the bits along the diagonal' is just handy way of describing a function not on the list, $f : N \to \{0,1\}$. You have yet to show that you know enough about math to lecture me about sequences.

[A well known mathematician, whose name escapes me, when asked to define mathematics replied "a manipulation of symbols". I was impressed by such a concise and accurate description.] — sandman

Formalism is one way to think of things. It has its problems, but so do perhaps all -isms that try to tell the final truth. Math is only interesting, it seems to me, because of its practical and/or intuitive appeal. Even if we think of it from a distance as a system of dead symbols, we then have to reason intuitively about that system. In the same way a chess player has an intuitive grasp of what is going on, even as, importantly, a computer can check the legality of moves. This doesn't mean that kings and knights exist in some magical realm. But it's safe to talk about chess players sharing intuitions that make playing the game possible. This is just sufficiently intersubjective concepts, not unlike us talking now in a shared language.

Here's a great book:

https://www.amazon.com/Analysis-History-Undergraduate-Texts-Mathematics/dp/0387770313

Practice and intuition came before a relatively settled foundation. The real numbers are at the center of both practice and intuition. While you have focused on Cantor, the nature of the real numbers as theoretical entities is just as strange and philosophically questionable. Why aren't you railing against the 'superstition' that 2 has a square root? Have you ever seen it? It's a theoretical construction.

And Cantor's motivations or philosophy or theology, whatever one thinks of it, doesn't stick to his ideas. Unless you are also ready to call Newtonian physics a scam too,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

Because these issues fascinate you, it's possible that you'll end up a mathematician. I was disturbed by Cantor once too, but I kept on thinking and reading and eventually got some formal education in the discipline. I suggest a book like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Introduction-Mathematics-Third-Chapman/dp/1439835985

The meaning of any and all things meaningful consists entirely of the correlations being drawn. — creativesoul

What is the gong-tormented sea? Is there a clear distinction between the metaphorical and the literal? What part does sound play in meaning? Or feeling? The 'correlations' approach seems oversimplified. What exactly is a correlation in this context?

Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'

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

Not a good start. I'll overlook it for now. — creativesoul

Thank you, your majesty.

But in case it wasn't clear, you asked me why I quoted the words. And that's because I was referring to the words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction

(I'm sure you are aware of use/mention. Just giving you a little of your own condescension.)

But thanks for noting the picture. I like her face.

My criterion for "just right" includes a basis borne of universal criteria. — creativesoul

This is a theme I like. Universal criteria. And that's why the philosopher isn't exactly or simply the solitary ego. Whim or mere opinion is no interest, correct? Correct thinking isn't 'just me' thinking. It let's the thoughts evolve as they 'must.' I don't mean anything mystical. I'm just trying to analyze what we vaguely mean by universal criteria or being reasonable.

We already know how to be reasonable, so it's just a matter of bringing what we mean to a greater vividness, focusing.

All thought and belief consists of mental correlations drawn between different things. — creativesoul

The idea of the purely mental, however, is itself a product of language. It's a distinction within language. The notion of the mental depends on the useful fiction of the isolated ego. This supposedly isolated ego can speak to itself that 'I think therefore I am,' ignoring that its language is not its own.

To be clear, I understand what people mean by the mental and by meaning that can be translated. These concepts are useful but shouldn't perhaps be used as unquestioned foundations.

Why quote the terms? — creativesoul

I quote the words that we already know how to use.

I'm using those two terms as a namesake for the same referent. That referent is prior to language. That referent is an integral element within all thought and belief, those existentially dependent upon language use notwithstanding. — creativesoul

OK. So the referent of 'thought' and 'belief' is prior to language, to words? That's plausible, but it depends on how one further specifies the nature of thought and belief. For obvious reasons it's difficult to talk about non-linguistic thought and belief. We can interpret actions as manifestations of belief.
But I'd be slow to drag 'thought' or 'belief' far from their ordinary usage.

"God did it" doesn't work any more than "Aliens did it" any more than "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" did it... — creativesoul

I think you are arguing against one of your own pet demons here. This has nothing to do with anything I've said.

What we need is knowledge of what all thought and belief consists of. — creativesoul

We already have it. We already are it. But I support the project of articulating our tacit know-how.

Then, and only then, can we determine what the particular thought belief is about. — creativesoul

I don't think this is obvious. Instead, I think it's more like the hermeneutic circle.

"One's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. "

And how can we generalize thought and belief without seeing what particular thoughts and beliefs ar about? We are already in life, in the world, successfully transplanting hands, planning trips to Mars, curing HIV. Philosophy is late on the scene, merely increase self-consciousness, allowing us to make clear to ourselves what we are already doing and already know. Or that's one approach.

What you have yet to have done is offer a bare minimum criterion for what counts as thought and belief. Such a standard/criterion is the device we use to determine whether or not some situation counts as a case of thought and belief. — creativesoul

But do we really use some device to understand 'thought' or 'belief' in ordinary language? What if an investigation of thought leads to the conclusion that no device constructed by this or that philosopher can ever get it just right?

After all, any investigation of the notions of thought or belief must already use these words and their naive meanings. We use the supposedly broken thing in order to fix it, proving that it wasn't so broken.

I don't have The Fragile Absolute, but I have thought about Marxism-meets-Christianity. What do you think of this review? I'll respond to it. We can get to understand one another over time, I think, by talking about intersections of our interest/understanding.

This is the reviewer paraphrasing Zizek, or claiming to.

First, it makes no sense to speak of a relative truth that doesn't apply universally. For a claim to be considered true, it must, by definition, be presumed to be universally valid for everyone. If others reject the validity of a claim that I believe to be true, that's because they are mistaken, not because they hold a different subject position or come from a different culture. Second, talk of respecting difference or otherness fetishizes empty abstractions and is effectively meaningless, mere grandstanding rhetoric. In practice, respecting another's belief or practice requires us to take it seriously enough to judge whether it is true or false, right or wrong. — review

That sounds right. I suspect there is contempt in the apparently compassionate tolerance of what is false to us. 'Some people aren't even worth arguing with.' This reminds of the ironist. 'Let the inferiors think they have faces & identities. They need training wheels. '

Žižek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the status of belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: "today, we believe more than ever" (6). The catch is that contemporary believers are confused and fail to recognize the extent or the nature of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to "religious matters" (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's oft-cited formula of cynical reason - "I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it ... " - Žižek adds a final clause: " ... because I don't know what I believe" — review

This sounds right, too. And I'd add that humanists tend to ignore their own foundation in universal reason. It's the water they swim in. Finally there is perhaps no sharp line between the metaphorical and the literal. The quote above focuses on embodied beliefs that hide beneath a layer of conscious cynicism. 'Because I know that capitalism (or some other X) is bad and have the right bumper sticker, I can keep on playing my small role in perpetuating what I 'know' is bad. ' Zizek's work is itself one of the fun ways we can spend our free time, once we get home from our jobs. And his books are on sale next to The Power of Now or 12 Rules for Life. The product is identity, or ways of (consciously) being.

A failure to comprehend how belief externalizes itself in material practices led "Enlightenment critics [to] misread 'primitive' myths" (6). By imposing their model of "literal direct belief" on people from tribal cultures, these critics regarded the myths as simply ignorant or naïve (6) — review

I think this is also true, especially after reading The Masks of God. Even today's supposed believers in God and afterlife mostly live just like everyone else. Grand narrative beliefs are not like believing that the cat is on the mat. All kinds of profound myths have a quasi-philosophical content. Its just that relying more on imagery adds an often desirable ambiguity and suggestiveness.

Žižek, it's worth noting, frequently uses postmodern as a term of abuse. When he does so, typically, it's to signal his opposition to the postmodernists' tendency to place their directly held beliefs at a remove. And who might these postmodernists be? Žižek's examples include: Deconstructionists whose skepticism requires the positing of "an Other who 'really believes'"; ironists who incessantly place their remarks within scare quotes and (borrowing from Umberto Eco) self-conscious lovers who say things like, "As the poets would have put it, I love you" (6). Such phenomena, which Žižek treats as symptoms of disavowed, displaced, or suspended belief, are a major target of Žižek's analysis in The Puppet and the Dwarf. One of Žižek's signature critical moves is to make explicit the underlying presuppositions, the disavowed beliefs, and the obscene fantasies that secretly support our consciously held positions and intentional acts. Although the aforementioned postmodernists pride themselves on being self-reflexive, Žižek pinpoints their blind spot: an anti-foundationalism that resists positing a conceptual totality on the grounds that such thinking risks becoming totalitarian. As a result of their principled anti-foundationalism (which functions as a kind of disavowed foundationalism or, for more canny thinkers, foundationalism under erasure) the postmodernists neglect to take into account the consequences of their epistemological skepticism and self-conscious irony. One particularly detrimental consequence is the general undermining of truth claims in an intellectual climate in which directly asserted beliefs are too readily judged as equivalent forms of dogmatism. — review

This is fascinating, but it's also much like the grumpy, traditional response to pomo. It's not so far from Jordan Peterson. Those who are serious about ironic distance are failing at their own project, like Stirner in his weaker moments. The anti-foundationalism I've been exposed to is more about an awareness of the futility of forging an explicit foundation. And we don't need such a foundation, since our being-in-the-world and being-in-language already is our dark foundation. We are already intelligible to one another. The explicit foundationalist is often some version of the father, attempting to fix an image of reason and normalize a discourse in his own favor. If it's pomo to say so, then we're all pomo to the degree that we see the rationalizations of others take the form of reason. That's the ordinary madness of philosophers. Their 'delusions' are abstract.

But I run the risk like we all do of seeming deluded to others or to myself a moment later.

This culturalization of belief - the transformation of our beliefs into cultural lifestyles - has dire ideological consequences. It depoliticizes us, as we are conditioned to tolerate or respect other lifestyles rather than to disagree and debate with others who hold beliefs that we consider to be mistaken. As a result, most contemporary forms of spirituality are complicit with the exploitative socioeconomic status quo. — review

As cleverly as this is articulated, it basically complains about freedom. If church and state are separated, then religion is one more lifestyle choice. One might say that our living religion, the one we will kill and die for, is our attachment to individual liberty. Freedom leads to pluralism leads to it being difficult to achieve a politically effective consensus. And then the culture war obscures the class war. As far as complicity goes, most if not all people are complicit in the exploitative status quo. That doesn't mean I don't hope we'll do better. Or that I'm against the quote above. I just think we are attached to our freedom and to some vision of a better society that such freedom quietly opposes.

My own view is that the answer is obvious: Platonic ideals just are ideas of ideas. I have a pretty good idea of what a horse is. I can imagine the idea of a perfect horse, and I can also imagine that my ideas of such a perfection might themselves contain some imperfections, as judged by people who know more about horses than I do. — tim wood

I agree.

I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of rationality, in the sense that is in play in the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom. Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality. — McDowell

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

The important point, for me, is that concept isn't private. Concept is essentially public and social. What obscures this is its dependence on particular human beings as its 'host.' The mature, rational human being has learned to live in a humanized life-world. A chair is seen automatically as something to sit on. A sidewalk is seen automatically as something to walk on. Of course we also learn about justice, fairness, appropriateness.

The more perfect-exact forms are mathematical, like the perfect circle. These seem less local, less cultural than other forms/concepts and presumably have their foundation in our biology.

A last point is that forms/concepts structure philosophy itself. So while we know that concepts are 'only in our heads,' they also make such judgment possible. We have heads (as heads) because of concepts. So in some sense concepts/forms are prior to the mental/physical distinction as the condition of its possibility.

I don't know if you'll read all this, but thanks again. Real life beckons once more. — absoluteaspiration

It was a pleasure to read. Some of the stuff I didn't respond to, but only because I couldn't find my way into it. Feel free to elaborate or paraphrase and maybe I'll get at your meaning.

I really should point out that according to Zizek, the subject inside Plato's Cave is essentially masculine and the subject outside it is essentially feminine regardless of biological sex. These are two different subjectivities. — absoluteaspiration

Perhaps you can say more about this. I recall Zizek writing that 'men' think they know who they are, whereas women know that they don't know who they. Also is Derrida's Spurs the 'man' (a mode of personality and not a biological sex) identifies his face with his mask. His mask is his face. The woman knows that she is faceless, that she is nothing but a system of masks concealing a void.

Often the thinkers I like take the side of the woman, the goddess. Her sons are the masks that think they are faces. The philosopher or analyst is like a woman who wears the right mask for the task at hand.

The manly man relies on others to tell him what to do and feels like a failure if he doesn't obey, but he chooses the people or ideas that he is determined to obey and switches these all the time based on what he himself wants. — absoluteaspiration

Interesting. There are lots of ways to use these symbols, but I tend to associate the father or the king with the role of masculinity. The penis is a crown. The maximally masculine position is something like the mad emperor who no longer bothers to justify his will in terms of the universal. The sublimated version of this is prophet who claims to be God on earth, or his primary representative. He disdains reason as an inferior faculty and claims direct access. Stirner is something like this, in that critical reason is ladder that reaches the end of ideological history, an awareness of the structure of the game of masters that allows for an ideal (and only ideal) mastery of mastery.

But the ironic master still craves recognition. The divine ego is actually 'only' a string of signs that an intrinsically public. The subject is only substantial in terms of something trans-subjective. The 'evil' path leads back to philosophy, science, and art. The father (direct access) is let go as a personal myth and possibly understood as the truth of humanism. That the species (or universal reason) has no god but itself.

For once, Zizek actually agrees that immediacy is a myth. His formulation is something like, there is a void of ambiguity traversing the world of ideas, splitting each idea from within: — absoluteaspiration

This reminds me of Derrida. Immediacy is a dream of eternity within the medium of time/concept. Or man is time trying to climb or slip out of itself. Static, eternal truth is a version of god. If we can get it, we participate in that frozen god. Our flesh is a vessel of that ideal chandelier.

But the incarnation myth is all about god being flesh and caught up in time. I read Derrida as one more thinker of the incarnation, just like the humanist Feuerbach.

When you lose all hope, you spend your time giggling at word games of infinite complexity. — absoluteaspiration

Losing all hope is like losing all fear. The 'all' is important here. As mortals living decent lives (at least I'm relatively lucky), I have all kinds of little, mortal hopes and fears.

But the philosophical self has the seriousness of a child at play. I guess I'm talking about an old conflict, that goes back to Marx versus Stirner. The serious political thinker must read the ironist as an irresponsible child. But the ironist can also read the serious political thinker as lost in the illusion that he has a face. The ironist can learn to parrot the politician, can write his part in a play, just as Shakespeare wrote both villians and heroes while therefore transcending both. So the ironist can mock himself and is not simply the ironist.

For the ironist, the 'religion as opiate' or 'infinite jest as opiate' is itself one more opiate, one more flight from our facelessness and complicity. We can also talk of thinkers who identity with the good and thinkers who experience themselves as neutral, as evil as they are good.

Zizek thinks we should give up that notion entirely for all the reasons I've been going on about. — absoluteaspiration

I get that. But what of the gap between 'is and 'ought'? The philosopher sees through the noise and transcends trivial, local identities. At least relatively so. Others mostly don't. I'm not against shoulds, but I'm less interested in them than I used to be. All those people in groups are on fire with a clump of shoulds.

I don't believe that they believe it. If they had faith in their Cause, they wouldn't be so consistently wrong about every single detail. But they clearly only care about winning arguments out of pure spite, not being authentic. — absoluteaspiration

Some of them may secretly be self-conscious thugs muddying the water. Others are clearly sincere. I've explored them on reddit. And many choose Trump as a stand against something they perceive as a matriarchy, a culture of not of the guilty but the sick. I'm on the left, but I can see it from the outside, the parts of it I don't like. Anyway, the Trumpians are our neighbors. So what does that mean?

he's terrified that liberals are out to get him. — absoluteaspiration

Exactly, and liberals are (some of them) trying to install a new type of man. Clinton was viewed as a castrating witch?

If you believe Zizek's theory, we love the Neighbor to save ourselves. — absoluteaspiration

Well I think there's wisdom in that. It's also just sophisticated Christianity. The notion of loving the neighbor is indeed profound. We meet 'in' reason or science or Christ by negating (falling out of love with) our own idiosyncracies. While one can stress forgiving/tolerating otherness, which is important, another thing to consider is our endless human vanity. We don't want the genius of others to penetrate us. We'd prefer that our personal limits be the limits of the species.

I think we save and/or sophisticating ourselves by letting ourselves die, by walking through the fire. We save our life by losing it. I am the neighbor and the neighbor is me. But this insight comes at a cost. And it's not obvious to me, anyway, how to get the right politics out of it.

Are you proposing a fourth? — absoluteaspiration

I think of what I'm doing an phenomenology. Mostly I want to point out what we already know without knowing that we know it. The stuff that is too close is farthest away. And the self-consciousness I have in mind actually dissolves that so-called self into embodied language. IMV, progress in philosophy is moral progress, though the morality is not one of innocence but rather the wisdom of the serpent. But all this metaphor is intended as metaphor. 'I' am one piece of the metaphysical-metaphorical species describing its own operation and nature.

I hope you're not tired of this debate because I finally found time for it. — absoluteaspiration

I love talking about this stuff. Your post was deep and ambitious. Just my kind of talk.

Zizek least of all. His motto is "Don't act. Just think!" The world can't be "fixed" by creating totalized utopias. — absoluteaspiration

Right. That's one of the complexities of Zizek. And yet what is the Cause but world-fixing? I'm not against the Cause. I just find it indeterminate.

Zizek doesn't believe in progress, only the fight itself. — absoluteaspiration

Belief in the fight itself seems to require that the world remain imperfect. Otherwise the identity dissolves with the antagonist upon success. I suspect that the wicked human heart will always find a new antagonist, a new injustice.

The "good" community comes from comradeship in the same Cause of universal emancipation. — absoluteaspiration

That's the ideal community I'm talking about. What is implied in any discussion of what we ought to do? And the notion of truth itself is tied up with unbiasedness, the absence of merely personal distortion. How does this apply to this very discussion? We are meeting 'in reason,' since we are both identified with articulating our positions in a way that assimilates criticism.

Here's another quote that applies.

There is a sharp cleavage, then, between the universal but mythico-practical attitude and the 'theoretical', which by every previous standard is unpractical, the attitude of thaumazein [Gr. = to wonder], to which the great men of Greek philosophy's first culminating period, Plato and Aristotle, trace the origin of philosophy. Men are gripped by a passion for observing and knowing the world, a passion that turns from all practical interests and in the closed circle of its own knowing activities, in the time devoted to this sort of investigation, accomplishes and wants to accomplish only pure theoria36. In other words, man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher. More than that, from this point forward his life gains a sensitivity for motives which are possible only to this attitude, for novel goals and methods of thought, in the framework of which philosophy finally comes into being and man becomes philosopher.
...
With an attitude such as this, man observes first of all the variety of nations, his own and others, each with its own environing world, which with its traditions, its gods and demigods, with its mythical powers, constitutes for each nation the self-evident, real world. In the face of this extraordinary contrast there arises the distinction between the represented and the real world, and a new question is raised concerning the truth - not everyday truth bound as it is to tradition but a truth that for all those who are not blinded by attachment to tradition is identical and universally valid, a truth in itself. Thus it is proper to the theoretical attitude of the philosopher that he is more and more predetermined to devote his whole future life, in the sense of a universal life, to the task of theoria, to build theoretical knowledge upon theoretical knowledge in infinitum. — Husserl

The open-ness toward infinity seems important here. And, perhaps more important, the distance that philosophy enjoys from local gods.

Only with the Greeks, however, do we find a universal ('cosmological') vital interest in the essentially new form of a purely 'theoretical' attitude.27 This is true, too, of the communal form in which the interest works itself out, the corresponding, essentially new attitude of the philosophers and the scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.). These are the men who, not isolated but with each other and for each other, i.e., bound together in a common interpersonal endeavor, strive for and carry into effect theoria and only theoria. These are the ones whose growth and constant improvement ultimately, as the circle of cooperators extends and the generations of investigators succeed each other, become a will oriented in the direction of an infinite and completely universal task. The theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks. — Husserl

It's the interpersonality that seems crucial here, along with a distance from immersion in the practical world.

How are we, then, to characterize the essentially primitive attitude, the fundamental historical mode of human existence?30 The answer: on the basis of generation men naturally live in communities - in a family, a race, a nation - and these communities are in themselves more or less abundantly subdivided into particular social units. Now, life on the level of nature is characterized as a naïvely direct living immersed in the world, in the world that in a certain sense is constantly there consciously as a universal horizon but is not, merely by that fact, thematic. Thematic is that toward which man's attention is turned. Being genuinely alive is always having one's attention turned to this or that, turned to something as to an end or a means, as relevant or irrelevant, interesting or indifferent, private or public, to something that is in daily demand or to something that is startlingly new. All this belongs to the world horizon, but there is need of special motives if the one who is caught up in such a life in the world is to transform himself and it to come to the point where he somehow makes this world itself his theme, where he conceives an enduring interest in it. — Husserl

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

'Could be' applies to so many things. That's the 'problem.' While some skeptics may be so in the mode of scientism (and not so skeptical after all), others acknowledge various possibilities as possibilities and reason as well as they can about which they should take seriously.

Returning to the OP, I'm a big fan of anti-realism. A Thing of This World is a favorite text in its ability to organize anti-realism as a narrative from Kant to Derrida. Presumably Krauss would hate it. The identification of reason with natural science is problematic, especially since phenomenology (for instance) is reasonable and seeks to articulate what makes science possible in the first place.

First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in ever-new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other forms of culture already present in prescientific man, in his artefacts, his agriculture, his architecture, etc. All manifest classes of cultural products along with the proper methods for insuring their successful production. Still, they have a transitory existence in their environing world. Scientific achievements, on the other hand, once the method of insuring their successful creation has been attained, have an entirely different mode of being, an entirely different temporality. They do not wear out, they are imperishable. Repeated creation does not produce something similar, at best something similarly useful. Rather, no matter how many times the same person or any number of persons repeat these achievements, they remain exactly identical, identical in sense and in value. Persons united together in actual mutual understanding can only experience what their respective fellows have produced in the same manner as identical with what they have produced themselves.24 In a word, what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal.

What is more, however, whatever validity or truth has been gained in this way serves as material for the production of higher-level idealities; and this goes on and on. Now, in the developed theoretical interest, each interest receives ahead of time the sense of a merely relative goal; it becomes a transition to constantly new, higher-level goals in an infinity preindicated as science's universal field of endeavor, its 'domain'. Thus science designates the idea of an infinity of tasks, of which at any time a finite number have already been accomplished and are retained in their enduring validity. These constitute at the same time the fund of premises for an endless horizon of tasks united into one all-embracing task.

Here, however, an important supplementary remark should be made. In science the ideality of what is produced in any particular instance means more than the mere capacity for repetition based on a sense that has been guaranteed as identical; the idea of truth in the scientific sense is set apart (and of this we have still to speak) from the truth proper to pre-scientific life. Scientific truth claims to be unconditioned truth, which involves infinity, giving to each factually guaranteed truth a merely relative character, making it only an approach oriented, in fact, toward the infinite horizon, wherein the truth in itself is, so to speak, looked on as an infinitely distant point.25 By the same token this infinity belongs also to what in the scientific sense 'really is'. A fortiori, there is infinity involved in 'universal' validity for 'everyone', as the subject of whatever rational foundations are to be secured; nor is this any longer everyone in the finite sense the term has in prescientific life.26 — Husserl

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html

I'm interested in that 'everyone,' not only in relation to physical science, but also in relation to philosophy and every 'reasonable' discourse. Far from just harping about 'reason, reason, reason,' it's the infinite clarification of what we even mean by 'reason' that fascinates me. As Husserl and others have noted, it involves time and it involves an 'infinite' subject. But such things can't be essentially hidden or private but mere unnoticed as too close to us and therefore potentially clarified as 'obvious.' While Heidegger is especially known for this, the idea is older than that, naturally.

We don't want to get stuck on anti-scientism, since scientism is not a sufficiently interesting philosophical position.

What’s wrong with looking for a rational model of existence? — leo

Nothing. But what do we mean by 'rational'?

I said ideas, but not necessarily ideas expressed in a language, you might call it imagination or spiritual experiences, — leo

Once a person starts talking about 'ideas' that aren't expressed in language, they seem to be leaving reason and logic behind. And that's fine. But it doesn't persuade those attached to clarity who therefore prefer to confess just not knowing where there is a here here and why it is the way it seems to be. And thinking about thinking suggests to me that perhaps it's a necessary blind spot, though obvious we act on useful hypotheses which themselves depend for their intelligibility on tacit know-how and being 'in' a language and a world. I'm quite fascinated by the lifeworld or groundless ground that makes science possible in the first place, which I don't expect science but rather philosophy to articulate.

The ideas I’m presenting offer an alternative to the materialist view that is itself metaphysical, — leo

Fair enough, but I'm not defending the materialism.

Maybe you simply do not recognize the metaphysical assumptions of mainstream science. — leo

I recognize some of them. Maybe no one has articulated all of them. Lately I've been trying to articulate the notion of reason itself. That's why I asked you what it meant to you to seek recognition for your ideas as reasonable. I'm trying to point out the tension in your notion of private experience (ideas that aren't in language) and the claim on universal, human reason.

In contrast, technology just works. And (ideally if not actually) science is falsifiable. This does not, in my book, make it a replacement for philosophy. It's like the Cantor issue I've been discussing. A person can make use of Cantor's math without adopting his mysticism of the infinite. There are far more than two positions.

Yes, those metaphysical beliefs clearly do play a role in mathematical proofs because they are entrenched in the axioms, as foundational support for those axioms. And Cantor is a good example. What is at issue here is how we conceive of an "object". — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that a community's embrace of a set of axioms manifests among other things something like metaphysical preferences or basic intuitions. But this is obvious. And where are the mathematicians that deny it? You and @sandman might as well complain about the rules of chess for not conforming to your metaphysical preferences.

Anti-Cantor cranks are fencing with their own shadows. To be a mathematician it suffices to prove things using 'the rules.' One can think of it as a game with symbols. One can also, to be sure, think that one is doing the True Metaphysics. One can, as I do, think of it as working within a system that strives imperfectly to articulate and accord with intuitions of space, quantity, and algorithm. Imperfectly! I like non-mainstream versions of mathematics. They are fascinating. No need for dogmatism or a fixed position. And that's also how I enjoy philosophy.

So to me the idea that mathematicians are true believers is in general ridiculous, and, in my experience, most online anti-Cantorism is purveyed by those who seemingly can't even play the game agnostically. That would take work, serious interest, and not just self-inflating online conspiracy theory.

I said ideas, but not necessarily ideas expressed in a language, you might call it imagination or spiritual experiences, sometimes we experience things that are so different from anything else that we see it either as a connection to another dimension or plane of existence, or as us being able to freely create experiences that aren’t simply combinations of other experiences. — leo

I'm reading Masks of God, so I'm not allergic to these other planes of existence. I do object, however, to presenting them as a kind of alternative physics. Joseph Campbell takes a good approach in my view. He tries to mediate these experiences without forgetting the demands of reason.

Of course you are free to argue a metaphysical position, but this argumentative approach pays a suspicious tribute to reason, as if you want to have your cake and eat it too. What does it mean that you want your theory recognized as rational?

Here is a paper that questions the 'diagonal argument'. — sandman

It's not a good paper. And Cantor was definitely sophisticated enough to see what he is supposed to have missed. The author is instead failing to see.

When JFK was assassinated, the general population could not accept that an ordinary individual could remove a popular public figure, so some thought it must be a conspiracy. I was never an advocate for that. Tragedies don't discriminate. — sandman

What you still refuse to see is the proof is solid in the same way that a game of chess is legal. All of the moves are according to the rules. It does not prove something metaphysical about reality. Or at least the rules are agnostic about their 'real world' meaning.

Speaking more personally (indulging in a real-world interpretation), I experience its intuitive content this way. If someone claimed to have a way/algorithm to list all infinite sequences of bits, I'd know they were wrong. I would just flip bits along the diagonal and have a sequence they didn't include on their list.

Nausea is a great little novel. There are lots of great passages in Being and Nothingness. And his Baudelaire is fascinating. To me Sartre is fascinating personality. And sometimes he just nails down the eeriness of the human experience in just the right words.

I like the 'how I see' framed as the self. The self is like the distortion of the world, its bentness. It's like those old windows one sometimes sees. The glass isn't perfect.

I also like forethought and hindsight as themes. Time is central. As others have said, man 'is' time. ANd perhaps it's all in your experience of this very sentence, as you anticipate the ending that will inform your experience of the beginning. Bennington's book on Derrida brought this kind of 'reading time' to my attention. 'I think therefore I am,' is one more sentence caught up in 'primordial' time.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking. — Sartre

And this one is funny.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically. — Sartre

Simplified spoken: if very improbable things happen over and over again the probability of these things caused by randomness tends to zero, which could be some statistical proof for us to exist not random, i.e. "created". — Pippen

I don't think it's good argument for creationism, for all kinds of reasons. But let's assume that it is. What kind of creator do you have in mind? Is it one from the holy books that offers an afterlife to believers? How do you get from no-randomness to just the kind of god you'd prefer? Probably the one you happened to be exposed to as a child?

That's why these arguments always look suspicious. Isn't it still legal to be religious? But those with that craving often feel the need to justify it with questionable logic. I get it. The night is dark and full of terrors. If this weren't a philosophy forum, I wouldn't bother you with my criticisms. But it is a forum, so presumably you want some feedback and can take it.

It's almost as if philosophy and not mathematics, were the true universal language, no? — Wallows

If we mix philosophy, politics, and religion, then yeah. Tho math is clearly useful, it's something that many only do because they have to. We like our dreams. We like characters.