It's not depressing, it's happy. And my avatar is from the cover of the Jethro Tull album, A Passion Play.

Getting in touch with your true self? If you're into that.

Your being a shit person might have something to do with it.

Rarely does the veil come off for people to speak with this kind of honesty, I guess. Remember that these sentences ^ are what underlie every 'philosophical' argument a shill wants to peddle. That's what it boils down to in the end.

That'll show 'em how above this conversation you are...

I can feel pain and think it's a good thing, and feel pleasure and think it's bad. I can also think that a less pleasurable state is preferable. It just depends on the context. — Marchesk

But what you think doesn't have to be so, if by 'think' you mean 'have the opinion that...' Certainly I can think 'this is great!' at my pain, but by so thinking I will have made it no better, or made it not bad somehow. If, on the other hand. by 'think' you mean something a bit more primal than opinion, like being affected by it positively, well, then, it wouldn't be pain if that were the case.

But this fascination is itself extrinsic, since it is possible for that fascination to disappear. Thus, it is only fascination 'insofar as...' whereas living well involves commitments that must be made in virtue of being alive, and in particular, pleasure and pain, which have intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, value: they are never good or bad 'insofar as...'.

The condition might be anything you like. For example, you might be compelled by metaphysical hypotheses about the basic structure of the world because you feel uneasy when you lack understanding of something, and so have a desire to understand, or feel as though you understand, everything. But if circumstances change and so does your psychological predisposition, so that you no longer feel uneasy in these circumstances, the corresponding metaphysical hypotheses will cease to be interesting. Or, you might have an interest in such questions because your intellectual tradition does, and you have independent interests in being a part of, or contributing to, that tradition. When that interest is lost, so will be the interest in the metaphysical hypotheses.

But the only way that living well can cease to be interesting to you is, I submit, to die, in which case philosophy already is out of the question anyway.

No, they don't. They find them interesting insofar as... Remove the condition following, and they lose their interest. Their interest is, in other words, derivative.

Put another way, it is possible to lose interest in such questions, while it is not possible to lose interest in living well, whatever one's opinions on the matter are. Thus, only an arbitrary opinion imbues such other questions with their (extrinsic) interest.

Because that's what matters. You can of course say philosophy is anything you like, but you have to make it something in order for it to have any substance. And the project of living well is one that concerns you by virtue of being alive, and so is of interest intrinsically. Other projects, such as 'knowledge of the universe,' or 'seeing how things hang together generally,' are only of extrinsic interest, that is, they are not interesting on their own terms, but only insofar as an arbitrary opinion decides to grant them interest relative to something else. So in Socratic fashion we're guided by the demands of life itself, as they're imposed in virtue of living (that is, the commitments we already find ourselves committed to in virtue of living, and so which we cannot claim to try to abandon without internal inconsistency).

Oh, brother. As if there's a class of people out there preserving philosophy in its pure form, free from psychologization and instrumental ends, and doing it for 'real.' Please, please, please, stop deluding yourselves. Your motives are not any less transparent or pure for being more boring and useless.

Maybe it's not 'hip', but if you want to talk about suffering, then fine, let's talk about poverty, let's talk about war, let's talk about cultural alienation, let's talk about disease, let's talk about systemic disenfranchisement, love lost, friends and family passing. — StreetlightX

Yeah, because you've got so much to say about that, I'm sure. I can't wait to listen to your wisdom on these topics. (This is sarcasm; I believe you have literally nothing to say about any of this, and never will).

The 'life's difficulties' you refer to seem to look suspiciously like the sort of 'life difficulties' espoused by angsty young men who, while perhaps really, honestly are struggling with psychic turmoil, aren't so much doing philosophy than inflecting their attempt to grapple with their issues through it's rhetoric. There's nothing wrong with that, but a spade is a spade is a spade.

Then may I retort that your 'more-than-human' sounds suspiciously like something not more than human, but the specific concerns of a grad student who read Nietzsche. Philosophy also puts us in touch with paychecks and conferences! LOL!

To use a technical term, it's a Stirnerian 'spook.' To believe that one has 'political agency' is implicitly to buy into the political framework in which one is trying to participate, and under the delusion that one can operate within.

Well, you have it a little backwards. It's not that everything is natural, but that everything is artificial. Read your Gnostics!

Teleology is just pure *snif sniff* ideology *tugs shirt* and so on and so on.

What would that look like today, and what sort of values would foster that kind of community? Is this the kind of commitment Jesus demanded of his disciples? Leave your normal life and practice philosophy instead? — Marchesk

The models we get from the ancient philosophers are people who, just by living, outraged and inspired people. Many were killed by the state, exiled from their homes, or were banned from teaching. The Cyrenaics made up a portion of these. They did as they pleased; in the words of Aristippus, the difference between a philosopher and an ordinary person is that if the laws were abolished tomorrow, the philosopher's behavior wouldn't change. There is a kind of height of character. They were not political radicals, in the banal sense, but possessed of a deeper personal power and contentment. How true this idealized picture is to real life, who knows. But the end of philosophy on this picture is not excellent theories, but excellent people. The important thing is that when these people come together to learn, they see their learning not as a 'job,' but a lifestyle. How well this extends to theoretical disciplines not like ethics, who knows -- but in a way, that itself perhaps speaks to the inferiority of those disciplines to ethics (!).

Also, it seems you think the Cyrenaics figured out most of the interesting philosophical problems, so how would contemporary philosophers improve upon that, in your view? — Marchesk

Well, problems cease to be interesting once you solve them. And life has no end of problems. And if the project of philosophy is living well, it can't be 'accomplished' so long as you're still living.

Having met and discussed philosophy with a number of philosophy professors, that has not been my experience of them. Some of them come off as arrogant and not very insightful. But then, almost everyone discussing philosophy on the internet comes off that way. Again, because they are not serious about the subject, and do not genuinely care about it.

I've never had much of an eye or head for architecture, but brutalist buildings have always struck me as beautiful. I especially like when weather staining is incorporated into their design. There's a brutalist-looking library in Chicago that is fringed to look like a bookshelf, with natural staining between the pages. It's really gorgeous.

What is uninteresting depends on your taste. So statements to that effect are arbitrary and no better than statements to the contrary.

A funny thing is, though, that the topics that SX lists have only an external criterion of significance. That is, if someone doesn't care about them, nothing in the world can make them intrinsically interesting.

Suffering, however, is intrinsically interesting, because it affects you in a way you can't ignore. So you are already dealing with the problem of suffering by being alive, which doesn't require being a continental philosopher, like caring about 'the embodying of bodies' does, since the latter is an intellectual game whose 'sense,' if it can be said to have any, arises only in the context of academic journal articles and white boy graduate students trying to get into 'that cute creative chick with the glasses (also white, or white-bred)' pants.

'Hurr hurr you care about suffering? Read some zizek instead, that's really interesting!' Yeah, I guess if you're the kind of person who 'totally fell in love with Amsterdam' when you visited it. It all just makes me want to eat a bullet, more than usual. I've just found SX totally fucking insufferable lately.

One year closer to the end of the world. Cross fingers.

This again...

I don't know, SX. To say that suffering is a minor issue, while claiming that a set of academic issues circumscribed by a tradition of philosophy roughly originating in the 1920s in Western Europe is the far more interesting fare, seems dubious to me. Much of what you list seems like 'play' to me -- you can sell books about it, but life's difficulties go on whether you read them or not, and life stays pretty much the same no matter what position you take on them. They exist in academia, but there is more to life than academia, and suffering exists beyond it as well, whereas 'how individuation occurs' does not. And please, don't respond to this saying that it does. Please.

[In other words, your 'wider world of philosophy' is actually quite insular, and you are blind to this because you spend large portions of your life reading about that insular tradition.]

So what the hell does it mean to live well then? We might live moment by moment, but we're constantly thinking about the past and the future, and we make choices based on that. — Marchesk

The kind of mastery attributed to the sage in my tradition is one of lack of superstition, adaptability, and enjoyment. Most thinking about the past and future is not helpful,and where it is it is because that thinking is in the present. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow unclear. Our aiming at tomorrow itself comes from a mastery within the moment. The sage naturally secures the future without having to worry about it by his momentary mastery.

What I was thinking with the OPs question is that, if one is a hedonist, how might one go about having as much pleasure as they can with as little suffering? — Marchesk

I don't think that question has a straightforward answer, because people's constitutions are very different, and so what is good advice for one person will be bad for another. This is why philosophy cannot coherently be a self-help guide. What it can do is attack the roots underlying error and inconsistency, insofar as one commits themselves to them.

So for example, a hedonist might ask themselves if habitual drug use will bring them the most enjoyment, but then they might calculate that the negative consequences would make it not worth becoming addicted. — Marchesk

I agree that you can make a decision about whether to use drugs from a hedonist standpoint, but I disagree that you can do it by calculating. Again, it has to do with a kind of momentary mastery -- whether one can 'smell' a bad idea or not. And acquiring that kind of bodily taste is what living well involves.

So one could instead focus on maximizing the time spent experiencing such pleasures.

No -- time doesn't rack up either. We live within a moment.

I don't think it's about a mean, either. I really don't see anything inherently wrong with indulgence that classical virtue ethicists would be appalled at: hedonism includes, but isn't limited to, raunchy or sensual hedonism. It's just that no matter how you slice it, it's not about 'scoring points.' It should be obvious, but some ethicists do treat life as if it had a scoreboard, which is the only thing I can see that would make the notion of 'maximization' make sense here.

↪The Great Whatever Obviously not from a strictly logical standpoint, but let's be charitable, shall we, and take the phenomenological approach here, and realize that if something is good then that something is something that we want to be maximized. — darthbarracuda

Not if it's something that doesn't make sense to maximize. You can maximize the profits of a business because there's some quantitative measurement of profit, and a time during which it has to be accumulated. Pleasure isn't like that. For instance, if I live for three years, and I have a hot shower every day, then that may make life better at the time of the showers, but it doesn't mean that, at 'the end of life,' I will have lived 'better' than someone who only took one once every two days because I 'racked up more pleasure.' Pleasure does not 'rack up' -- it is good insofar as it is pleasant, which is precisely insofar as it's being experienced, now. We live on a razor's edge in the moment and always act in that moment, not across a span of time where we have to 'accumulate' the best results.

Because 'X is good' does not imply 'X should be maximized.'

The difference is, with the low pleasures, hunger will always be there to spice the food. Appreciation of music is a sort of frivolity by comparison, so the qualities that make it impressive are likewise frivolous. There is no bodily need to enjoy music that presses down on you torturously. I say this as someone who used to spend a good portion of his life devouring and loving music, and who just doesn't care too much for it anymore. Yet I still care about filling my stomach, because I have no choice.

To be a hedonist means to believe that pleasure and pain are the only good/bad (respectively). So it makes sense that a hedonist would want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. — darthbarracuda

No, that simply doesn't follow, since the position says nothing about maximization, and doesn't even say whether the notion is coherent.

Sleep is a pleasure and it is time to get on with it. — Bitter Crank

It is. In some ways it might be the most complete and sublime of 'earthly' pleasures, since when it sets in it has an all-encompassing character, something like bliss.

Generally I think the 'low' pleasures benefit from the fact that, even though they do not increase in complexity or sublimity over time like the 'high' pleasures do, the body forgets them as soon as they're done, making them rise afresh each time they're experienced. A warm shower in the morning doesn't stop feeling good. Unless, of course, you're hitting the hard shit that makes you blow out your fuses, like heroin.

Whereas with the 'high' pleasures, they can genuinely peter out over time, and not as a result of simple bodily exhaustion. It is possible, through too fine an appreciation of music, to cease to enjoy music that you once loved, because your palette becomes too discriminating for it. Many people take a sort od aesthetic pride in this kind of devaluation.

I don't think the point of ethics is to provide a self-help guide for specific ways you should live your life. The classical hedonists made very different life choices and had very different personalities, if the doxography can be believed.

Again, the demand that a philosophy tell you what to do specifically with your life does not make sense -- a "do" cannot be derived from a "should," so it's not possible for a philosophy to dictate what you do. Only your actually doing it can do that.

Of course, the problem is that if your philosophy is bad, what you decide to do will be self-contradictory on its own terms. In the Socratic tradition, the focus moves away from 'evil' to ignorance. By removing our ignorance about what is good, we ipso facto remove our temptations and inclinations to do things that, by the very standards we couch them in, make no sense or don't work. If something is actually bad, understanding why it's bad will destroy the temptation to do it.

I mean that we're actively asking the question "what does 'X is immoral?' mean?" and trying to answer it. That's what meta-ethics is.

And in answer you give another sentence: it means, 'I disapprove of X.' But what does that mean? Recall that you chastised the moral realist for trying to push the question back rather than resolve it. What makes the anti-realist's answer any different? In addition, it has the vice of being empirically false. Even if unilluminating the moral realist at least doesn't express gross semantic ignorance in saying that 'murder is wrong' means that murder is wrong, rather than something else.

Because we're questioning it. If we were questioning the meaning of "X approves of Y" then the meaning of "X approves of Y" would be questionable.

But there is no reason to question moral claims over claims of approval. The reason one is questioned and not the other is to satisfy metaphysical prejudices that cannot allow for moral facts to be real. Thus a problem is created where there is none.

I don't understand this.

Competent speakers of English understand what 'X is immoral' means. It means that X is immoral. The subjectivist must deny this, and say that it instead means something else.

The meaning of a sentence isn't simply to be understood only as what follows from combining the (most prominent) dictionary-definition of its component words. Language doesn't work like that.

I didn't say it was. However, contrary to your claim, 'you didn't take out the trash' doesn't sometimes mean, something else. One can imply something else by exploiting the meaning of the sentence; but that doesn't mean the sentence means whatever you want it to imply in any context.

And the statement "X is immoral" is used to express one's disapproval, to report on one's disapproval, to prohibit behaviour, and/or to report on a rule.

No, it is not. For those purposes, we have sentences of the form, 'I disapprove of X.' A statement 'X is immoral' is used to say that X is immoral.

The problem is when one then says that this rule is non-constructed or that moral properties are something other than the traditional empirical properties that we're familiar with. — Michael

What is 'ordinary?' Everyone is perfectly familiar with moral properties, at least as much as the supposedly more real empirical properties the subjectivist tries to replace them with. So it is impossible not to be prescriptive here, because if the subjectivist looks to how the language is actually used, he will notice that people use sentences like 'X is immoral' and mean that X is immoral, not something else. So moral properties are mysterious? We understand 'traditional, empirical' properties better? Says who? Ah, says the subjectivist. But why should we listen to him? Again, because he has a certain metaphysical agenda.

Once you adopt realism you attempt to subtract the empirical use of language from the meaning of the phrase, but as the meaning of the phrase is its empirical use there's nothing meaningful left. — Michael

Except the objectivist is honest about how people use the phrase, whereas the subjectivist makes up other meanings to suit his philosophical agenda.

We're discussing what it means for X to be immoral. Obviously to engage in any (successful) discussion on what a claim means there must be some common understood language else we'd never get anywhere. So for the sake of argument I'm assuming – reasonably, I would say – that we all understand and agree on the meaning of "X approves of Y". But we can't say this about the meaning of "X is immoral" because the meaning of "X is immoral" is the very thing being questioned. The subjectivist has made an attempt to translate this claim into one that is presumably understood and agreed upon. Can the realist make such an attempt? — Michael

This makes no sense. We have to have a common understood language, yes. We call this language English. That same language that lets us understand what "X approves of Y" means lets us understand what "X is immoral" means. What do you mean, that meaning is the very thing being questioned? Why is it more questionable than "X approves of Y?" The subjectivist has taken one sentence and given another, which doesn't even mean the same thing, and which is just as mysterious as the first. So how is that an account? How does it help? What light does it shed on anything? If knowing English is what it takes to understand English sentences, where does the subjectivist get off saying no one can understand the English sentences he thinks are problematic because of his metaphysical prejudices?

It can mean either. Which one it means in this context depends on what you're trying to do with the claim.

No, it can't mean either. That is not what those English words mean. I claim that 'You didn't take out the trash' means that the addressee didn't take out the trash, not that it means something else. One can of course use the meaning of the words to imply something that is not strictly said by the sentence.

What are the truth conditions for the claim "X is immoral" under moral realism? If you don't know what those truth conditions are then you don't know what it means for the claim to be true. — Michael

What are the truth conditions of "X approves of Y?" How are those any less mysterious than the truth conditions of the sentence this is supposedly translated from?

They don't just mean that. But that's exactly the point I've been making.

They don't mean that at all. A claim about murder is a claim about murder, not about oneself. Of course one may in saying murder is wrong imply something about oneself, even purposefully; but we can do that with any language, without saying that the language itself literally says or means that. I would say that someone who doesn't understand that claims about murder are claims about murder, rather than the speaker, doesn't know how to speak English -- and so the anti-realist of the stripe you are describing is forced to pretend not to know their own languages because of metaphysical prejudices about purported problems with the reality of moral properties (which his supposed solution does not actual solve anyway).

Moral claims mean a lot of things – do a lot of things.

But meaning and doing are different. If I say, 'you didn't take out the garbage,' one thing I can do with such a statement is imply that I don't like someone. But that is not what the sentence means. It means that the addressee didn't take out the garbage.

Sure, but the difference is that the realist can't make sense of his truth-conditions whereas the non-realist can. The subjectivist can say that the statement "X is immoral" is true if the speaker doesn't approve of X, and so we know what "X is immoral" means; it means that the speaker doesn't approve of X. But what can the realist say? — Michael

But then you just have the problem of, when do you know someone approves of something? Certainly the non-realist makes no more sense here than the realist. (That is to say, moral claims are not made any more intelligible by translating them into another medium whose truth conditions are not any more transparent than the original). There's also the fact that semantically, things like 'X is wrong' just don't mean the same thing as 'I don't approve of X;' and if an anti-realist must claim this to satisfy his metaphysical prejudices (that is, commit himself to an empirical semantic error), then that is so much the worse for his position.

I don't see how the truth conditions of moral statements are any more problematic than those of any other kind of claim. If that's a problem for the realist, then it's a problem for anyone who believes in truth conditions about anything.

Those are good points. The context is hedonism and TGW's comments on it. So the good is pleasure and the bad is pain. Therefore living well must have something to do with obtaining more pleasure while minimizing pain. — Marchesk

A correction here: the kind of hedonism I defend doesn't say that the maximization of pleasure or the minimization of pain are good, because this assumes that pain and pleasure can be quantified, and usually that they are are fungible over time or between persons, which they are not.

I would like to suggest that people do what they do because they are habituated in certain ways and have certain predispositions they don't understand. If anything, the 'shoulds' are epiphenomena that retroactively justify these predispositions and inclinations.

In addition, the 'shoulds' are philosophically uninteresting, because in principle they can't lead anywhere. Trying to argue that people actually do use them to lead somewhere isn't so relevant for a philosophical defense of a certain kind of ethics.

Assuming that what I'm going to do isn't influenced by what I think I should do. Which it is, for everyone but sociopaths. — Marchesk

I think this is not a realistic view of human psychology, but okay. The wider point is that you can't derive a 'do' from a 'should.' People do what they more or less have to, not what they abstractly feel they ought to.

Sure it is, otherwise, what's the point in having ethics? That we don't always live up to our ethical standards is a different matter. — Marchesk

To know what the good is, and to live well. If you can't imagine a way for that to happen that's not on the model of a command, then that's your failing.

But it can and it does, otherwise I'd just do whatever the hell I wanted all the time without consideration for what's right. But I don't do that., and neither do most people. — Marchesk

But you literally do. People do whatever they do, whether it's 'right' or 'wrong;' that's just a tautology. There is no other standard for what you do than, whatever you want, or more accurately whatever you do. That is not a moral injunction of some sort ('do whatever you want'), but just a plain fact.

Thanks, I would appreciate it if you would paint that on walls and make me famous.

Sure only actually doing it will in the end decide, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't have goals for which to strive, and deciding on those goals is an enterprise of thought, not of doing. — Agustino

I don't think it's necessary. These are my own Cyrenaic biases showing, but I think a good praxis can be one that doesn't make any use of abstract goals. Rather, acting toward the future is itself a kind of moment-by-moment mastery. In any case, it's not the job of an ethical doctrine to tell what to do: as I've argued, I don't think this demand even makes sense. Nothing can tell you what to do, only doing something can make you do something.