Its mainly the indifference to having lived that is a conundrum to me. If my parents weren't to have conceived me, then there would be no loss there. However, if I die, it is therefore a tragedy. As I will not have memory of having lived, not being born and dying are identical states to me. Therefore, it shouldn't matter when or how I die. — JacobPhilosophy

I can relate. I connect this to the future-orientedness of human beings. We can imagine ourselves so far ahead in the future that all becomes absurd and unreal. Yet in general being future-oriented in a non-radical way is a sign of intelligence and prudence.

It's a good example of logic having a strange result. Because surely it matters right now to you, but you say it shouldn't. What backgrounded framework grounds that shouldn't? I relate to what you say, so I'm not immune to that framework. I'm just interested in whether we can take a certain distance from it, see it from the outside.

Though I yet maintain that there is some underlying reality that is signified. In a way it reminds me of a ruby metaphor: the same gem gets expressed, and conceptualized, via one of its many faces. — javra

To me that's a totally plausible and intuitive hypothesis or reported experience. I guess I lean toward the identification of thought and language. Since translation is common, that makes the idea of some language-intuitive content quite appealing and natural. How does one see that a translation is correct? That some bridge has been formed between different convention systems ? One defends a translation with a chain of signs.

What's interesting is that we can all more or less believe in the beetle (the ruby itself) while only ever being able to trade signs and gestures. The whole speech/writing thing in Derrida really shines on this forum. I have the impression (I believe) that you are a human being. You pass the Turing test. I 'know' that you have a 'soul.' I hope that I seem to have a soul and experience feelings and signifieds.

But technology is moving in the Blade Runner direction. If deciding whether textstreams were written by genuine minds or algorithms ever becomes difficult, that's going to mess with us. I haven't studied NLP closely, but I have studied deep learning generally. It's all statistics really. I don't know if the tech will ever get quite that good, but our crazy species may have thousands of years ahead of it, despite its recklessness. In 4013, we may convert an entire planet into a computer. We might agree that it's the best conversationalist ever without being sure that is has thoughts or feelings. (To be clear, I 'know' that we human beings have thoughts and feelings, without knowing exactly what I mean by saying that I know it.)

I offer this not to be contrary but only to keep things interesting by defending an opposing view. It's not for me about destroying the concept of consciousness but instead in recontextualizing it. The idea is (as I understand it) that we have certain conventions that give concepts identity. We have a repeatable or iterable code that can function in our absence. Others can stumble on our post here in 3 years and make of it what they will. Or maybe we'll return one day and not remember exactly what we meant. And we can always be quoted (perhaps by ourselves) in a new context, and the meaning of all the signs will drift or shift. I think we agree here, since we both accept that language is historical, etc.

Still, I've also often had a general image, or feeling, that I wanted to make tangible - not a picture perfect imagination, but a clear awareness of the impact I wanted the subject matter to convey. — javra

I can relate to that too. As a musician I slowly focused in on a certain emotion and style as the identity of the band. I guess this is more of the bidirectional theme.

Seems as though this goes without saying. Agreed. Then there's the case to be made of the artwork holding the artist as its principle audience. One knows, senses, when it came out at its best. The pleasure then is intrinsic, rather than being obtained from other's reaction.

Hmm, notice this is changing the thread's topic a bit - possibly a bit too much. But its good to relate about these things. — javra

That's a good point. In a way it's the artist's job to be the ideal audience. The ideal situation is that the artist has a more refined sensibility than the audience proper and that the artwork (difficult at first) extends the sensibilities and taste of its consumers. Vonnegut wrote that it takes seeing 1000 paintings to know a good painting from a bad one. I think I know what he meant (see his ruby).

In some ways, maybe the artist takes pleasure in the artwork already from the perspective of an ideal audience. To me this is like Feuerbach's idea that the species thinks through language and not primarily the individual. Despite being a once rebellious youth, I've come around to understand objectivity as the ideal of subjectivity. Even in my rebellion I was striving toward some 'iterable' and implicitly universal ideal. To me the notions of the true and good are loaded with some intuition of an ideal community, perhaps only virtual and to come. Even irony is tangled up with this. But it's also wandering off topic.

It is good to share this stuff. Feel free to link to any art you have online. I'll check it out.

From my research, most philosophers, most notably Socrates, conclude that death is not inherently bad, but also that life is worth living; These two premises are contradictory in my opinion. If something (life) is worth keeping, then surely the removal of said thing is inherently negative, no? — JacobPhilosophy

You make some good points. Let's recall that Socrates was an old man with a fixed self-image. Dying the way he did was one of the most interesting things he could do with the time he had left. It was a deed he could add to his words, a nice period. Imagine him sneaking off. He had a legacy to think of. Isn't it beautiful that a rational old man could walk calmly into the mystery/abyss/void?

More generally, let's assume that death is just non-existence. If life is good, then the movement from some positive value to a neutral zero is indeed a loss. (I agree with you.) Of course our judgment of whether a life is good (worth clinging to) depends on all kinds of things, but that's a different issue.

Have to ask, have you ever experienced concepts that are not communicable via the language(s) you speak? — javra

I relate to the experience of looking for the right words or deciding that a previous phrase wasn't quite right. 'How can I know what I think till I see what I write?'

A related side-issue is feeling misunderstood or not. If I share an idea, I hope for some different chain of signs from the listener that will convince me that the communication was successful. (You can see that I am enmeshed in the usual thinking in terms of consciousness and the transmission of private content, so the 'opposed' view is more of supplement than a replacement.)

Since I'm Romanian-American, as example, in Romanian there is no translation of "awareness" - as there is, for example, of "cat" ("pisica"). There is "conștință" - which stands for both consciousness and conscience - as well as "cognizență", which is fluidly translated into "cognizance" - but there's no term for "awareness". — javra

Saussure/Culler mention examples like this. Not only is the signifier arbitrary, but so is the signified. Different languages have different ways of breaking up or articulating reality. I find that fascinating.

These are my general musings on the subject, here given for disclosure. — javra

I like your musings. Some kind of bidirectional process makes sense. After all, we do have individual nervous systems. We experience something we call 'meaning.' I envy your perspective in which the problem of translation is concrete and not abstract.

Now that I think of it, to me many art forms are just this: the attempted communication of experiences, sometimes conceptual, that are not communicable via language. — javra

I think this intuitive view gets something right. But I'd like to add the notion of the artist discovering experiences by experimenting with the medium. I've worked in various media (music and visual art, for example) and personally I did not in general know where I was going or wanted to say. Instead I experienced a 'reactive' critical faculty that was or was not satisfied as I tried this or that, starting perhaps with vague general ideas. If all went well, I'd end up with shapes or sounds that felt good. These days I get my artistic fix from what I'm doing right now. I don't know what I'm going to write until I write it. Sometimes I'm delighted with a phrase. In retrospect it usually fits in with the clump I mentioned earlier. Another nice theme is the continuity of personality, the semi-fiction of a unifying self or signature. I never know exactly who I am. I drag a history behind me from which I project a vague project.

In my understanding of art, a good artist often (but maybe not always) can see his/her own work as if it were the work of a stranger. And this art always exists against and depends for its effect upon a background of other artworks and conventions.

For me the artist would share with others in the experience of the art afterward. But he or she would never know for sure that the experience/beetle was the same. Certain gestures and chains of signs would make the artist feel appreciated or misunderstood.


*Here's an excellent summary of the other link, presented with less potentially frustrating impishness : http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf

To me it's 17 pages of gold.

Buddhism recognizes that Egos are all along the continuum at different places. — Gregory

I really like this. This is also in Blake, who talked of mental states. An ego can move from state to state. In a way the states are realler than the egos. The stairway or wheel is what is most real. The egos are useful fictions that tie together a journey from state to state.

I'm glad you liked it. I like sharing fascinating quotes.

This part stands out for me, despite its arguably awkward English translation.

‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remoteness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so characterized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its character of possibly being certain. — link

The theoretical mode can take itself for granted. One thing I like about Heidegger (and this is already in Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity, far more enjoyable readable than B&T) is the theme of how much we tend to take for granted in an inquiry. We think we are starting from the beginning, being neutral. But really we are loaded and stinking with the spirit of the time, the gossip of our generation, which is to say all that is 'obvious' in our form of life. It's so obvious that it's not even a conscious assumption. It's the prejudice that we don't even know we have. It's the water that we swim in. Gadamer developed some of these ideas with a likable clarity and patience in Truth and Method.

Some quotes!

In Heidegger’s early thinking, particularly the lectures from the early 1920s (‘The Hermeneutics of Facticity’), hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which the investigation of the basic structures of factical existence is to be pursued—not as that which constitutes a ‘theory’ of textual interpretation nor a method of ‘scientific’ understanding, but rather as that which allows the self-disclosure of the structure of understanding as such. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, and that had been viewed in terms of the interpretative interdependence, within any meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the whole, was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to ‘the things themselves’—‘die Sachen selbst’). Thus, to take a simple example, if we wish to understand some particular artwork, we already need to have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding—a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness—of this basic ontological mode of understanding—is essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already familiar (the structure that is present in every event of understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger’s thinking, as just such a ‘laying bare’. — link

In the context of what I wrote above, we don't pretend to be neutral blank slates. We 'lay bare' our starting point. We excavate the standpoint we already have. We dig our biases which are always already there. We are only fully human by being acculturated, which is to say biased, trained. We are blinded by our own eyes, since culture makes thinking possible in the first place.

One might respond to Gadamer’s emphasis on our prior hermeneutic involvement, whether in the experience of art or elsewhere, that such involvement cannot but remain subjective simply on the grounds that it is always determined by our particular dispositions to experience things in certain ways rather than others—our involvement, one might say, is thus always based on subjective prejudice. Such an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic tendency towards subjectivism that Gadamer rejects, but Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.

Gadamer’s positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the hermeneutic circle. — link

I'll stop there, but I hope you find this interesting too.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/

Oh, yes. Meta's misguided reading has been pointed out before. — Banno

In a way it's not surprising. Wittgenstein hurts. Or rather his insights are threatening to those invested in a certain game and self-image. I suspect that these days that I'm biased in the other direction (expressing vague insights informally and suspicious of the idea of The Method that will churn out The Exact and Final Truth.)

Myself, I however am also of the general opinion that most concepts - or, at least, those which are most important - do however reference concrete existents, for lack of better terms, this in reference to what's going on within (again, as I term it, in reference to each of our own intra-subjective reality). — javra

I hear you, and I guess I think something like that too. I emphasize the other stuff because that's what's counter-intuitive, what surprised me in my favorite thinkers.

It's also a given to me that language is inter-subjective, rather than what I'd term intra-subjective (as would be one's private awareness of a flashing insight, for example) - and, hence, that linguistic meaning is largely social and historical. — javra

Right. We agree. It's not about a denial of intra-subjective meaning (the beetle) but only about making vivid how radically social -historical -conventional language is. Culler's little book on Saussure really impressed me. And Limited Inc by Derrida (and Sarl/Searle, really) is quite a journey, quite a combat. The role of the subject / consciousness /intention is just huge in philosophy, something like a 'theological' center. I gotta link to this, in case you're interested: http://lab404.com/misc/ltdinc.pdf

Thank you for the candid reply. — javra

My pleasure, and thanks for yours.

You come from nothing. Then you posit yourself. Then you posit the world. Then you come to realize through contemplation that you and everything are the Forms. — Gregory

I think I know what you mean, more or less, and I agree. Let me put it in my words. Perhaps you'll relate.

The intelligible order of the world (the system of things) is simultaneously a system of forms which are also known as concepts. As I understand the metaphysical parts of these thinkers (to oversimplify), objects are concepts are objects are concepts. 'Mind' is the structure of the world. This bleeds readily into the realization that the subject is an effect of language. The distinction of me versus not-me is one more part of the concept system. The true subject is also just the object. And the true subject is simultaneously the form or structure of the world and the concept system (system of forms and distinctions) of the transcendental subject.

The empirical ego is just one more piece of the world. The metaphysical subject is not really a subject anymore, though we're tempted to think of it that way because the concept is generated from the empirical ego. We know that the world is the dream of the brain. But then we realize that the brain is the dream of ...the brain? No. The dream is just being itself, which has a certain intelligible structure, which we call 'conceptual' in a bias toward the subjective roots of the realization. William James saw things something like this:

http://fair-use.org/william-james/essays-in-radical-empiricism/does-consciousness-exist

*As I said, I ended up finding myself more interested in the spiritual-political guts of these thinkers. The conceptual journey that we've both discussed is fascinating but a little bloodless in the end. For the most part we are locked into ordinary modes of talking. Metaphysical flights are a little like candy, except they are often connected to the spiritual-political guts that really move the millions. So it's something like theology versus a more embodied low-brow but passionate religious practice. Hegel didn't like the idea of some dark space that mind could never touch. He was a fiery humanity. Nothing could be hidden from the philosopher. Such an idea offended him. We were gods or God and in time we could fully discover our own glory. Fichte was OK with an infinite project. As long as we had a direction, it was OK if the journey was endless. We get closer forever, just like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, .... gets closer to 0 without ever touching it.

I don't know Buddhism all that well, but from what I know I do see the relationship. I see the dream system. The self is not some sharp, distinct thing. The dream tissue is 'organic.' Everything makes sense only in terms of everything else. Holism. All is one and one is all. It is an outsideless shape, unless one counts some vague notion of nothingness that is really just pure being, being with no qualities, the point at infinity of abstraction.

Though not new to me, I find this to be an interesting take. — javra

I like this idea too, and I find it taking different forms throughout the history of philosophy.

More specifically, in your view, is it a valid position to affirm that the English linguistic percept of "awareness" is in itself what manifests the occurrence of awareness - such that the term does not reference anything that can occur in the term's absence?

If yes, this would naturally entail that language-less beings are devoid of sentience due to their lacking of awareness - to include not only lesser animals but young toddlers as well - for none such hold a linguistically framed concept of "awareness". — javra

Personally I wouldn't claim so definite and radical. I don't deny some kind of beetle in the box. Or the kind of experience that tempts us to ground everything in the subject instead of the social software.The Turing test seems to fit in here. Is my textstream on this site generated by a neural network? Is yours? When I pet my cat, I 'know' that she has some kind of inner life. But what do I mean when I say that I know this? What do I mean exactly by awareness that isn't linguistic? Even if I believe in it, which I do more or less, I'm never quite sure what I believe in. All I can do is churn out more signs. About which I can also only churn out more signs. The ghost of exact meaning is supposed by some to haunt all of this sign shuttling. I relate to the ghost of inexact meaning, the what-it-is-like of 'grasping' (hand metaphor) a concept. So for me it's not about a denial of consciousness outside language.

BTW, I in part ask because a) the concept of "awareness" can of course only be linguistically conveyed and because, b) given the wide array of possible denotations that can be applied to the term "consciousness" - while it is conceivable given some such denotations that awareness can occur sans consciousness (e.g., an ant can be so claimed to be devoid of a consciousness while yet aware of stimuli) - denoting consciousness as something that can occur in the absence of awareness makes the term "consciousness" utterly nonsensical. And our own awareness - via which we perceive just as much as we cognize intuitions and introspections - seems to me to be the pivotal "beetle".

So, to sum: in your view, is it a valid possibility that awareness cannot occur in the absence of language? — javra

You make some good points. 'My' position is like a clump of hair in the drain. It's a bundle of stolen and vague insights. 'Consciousness' is a sign that we employ with a mostly tacit know-how. To be sure, we can do our best to find some approximation of context-independent meaning for it. Or we can try yet again for the perfect technical /metaphysical jargon that starts with everyday blurry meanings and is sharpened into effectiveness.

Are we articulating -- necessarily imperfectly and incompletely -- a mostly blind know-how when we do so? We never lose the ability to make rough sense of someone using the word 'incorrectly' or against our careful theoretical judgments. To me any sign/concept is part of an 'organic' system of conventions that we can never dominate or make completely explicit. I can't prove that metaphysically. If I'm right, I can never prove I'm right. The whole vision of metaphysical certainty is built on a certain vision of how meaning and language work. Perhaps this is why Wittgenstein wrote PI in such a strange style.

I agree that certain attempts at fixing the meaning of 'consciousness' lead to absurdities or nonsense. But to me this is a local effect generated from fragile local semi-fixed and semi-exact meanings. The sign is alive and well and valuable in our language, no matter its slipperiness or the slipperiness of all signs for that within us that would catch them in an iron glove.

I hope my answer is somehow helpful or at least not boring.

To be frank, I relate our disagreement to theism/atheism disagreements. IMV certain philosophers have made strong cases against traditional metaphysical assumptions/paradigms. But we're not rigorously logical beings, and even a certain notion of rigorous logic depends on a demolished picture of language.

I do think certain vague insights can come into half-focus. One such insight is that we never know exactly what we mean. We emit various chains of signs and use them to gesture toward some never-to-shared-interior that is supposed to ground everything. Of course we have a vague sense of what 'soul' or 'consciousness' means, but excellent thinkers have long ago pointed out the limits of what functions like a dogmatic quasi-theological concept.

What would strengthen your case from my point of view is some chain of signs that demonstrates to me that you've actually absorbed the critics I have in mind. I have the sense that you are more or less shutting out ahead of time what could change your mind.


http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf

There are zero reasons, for the child's sake, to take this risk. To 'be' unborn is the ultimate peace, why disturb it? — Inyenzi

Even as a non-parent the reasons for the child's sake are obvious. If one sees existence as likely to be a net good, then the parent is giving the gift of life to a new being. It's true that this is always the 'gift' of a certain amount of suffering too. So we're back to a seemingly subjective evaluation of expected value of a existence in particular circumstances. We have rich happy parents who have considered carefully versus poor unhappy parents who just haven't mastered contraception.

'Ultimate peace' is a safe zero, but people will gamble if the expected value is positive, especially if their instincts drive their reasoning toward optimism. To not see this is IMV to tune out a kind of common sense. Question it, of course, but be aware of it. Account for it.

They don't understand what I mean by the repetition and how it relates to any act and behavior we perform in our survival — schopenhauer1

I'm guessing this is about boredom, but many of us don't count boredom as a big issue. To me it's aging, disease, accidents, and crime/injustice that speak against existence. I can think of many experiences that I'd love to repeat again and again.

I meet you half way. I talked about 'poor people' reproducing, the prolific proles. Their children are cast into the world in an inferior position, owning nothing, starting as wage slaves, if even that.

The main difference in our views is that it's obvious to me that some lives are better than nonexistence, at least for certain stretches. I do note that people tend to reproduce before they face the grim reality of aging. So they don't even know what they are forcing on their children. They don't even know all that life is yet, but they more or less blindly obey the prime directive. We're still here after all of these centuries.

I agree that non-existence is the safe choice, the clean choice. I'm not a parent. To some degree it's because I was conscious of the moral burden. It's an implicit judgment on the world, on my own dysfunctional working class childhood. But if I had been rich and secure when younger, I might have had children. Just about anyone would have to confess that a risk is involved. A child could always be terribly unhappy, suffer a disease, etc. So it's a question (for many) of expected value. And it's indeed a heavy thing to summon another mortal consciousness into this strange world.

I don't object to anti-natalism. I do think it's somewhat futile at this time. We aren't essentially rational creatures. And even the poor people I sometimes pity are often happier than me, since we tend to comfort ourselves with inaccurate visions of our talent, etc.

Here's a problem for your perspective. Most people would decline a clean and painless exit from the world. To be sure, some people do commit suicide. And suicide rates would increase if it was made cleaner and easier and less taboo. But I suggest that most would choose to live. And that's an argument for uncertain life's positive expected value. The more philosophical argument against pessimism is simply to insist that value judgments aren't objective.

Have you seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive_(1993_film) ? Look what some people will do in the short term for an attachment to the apparent promise of a future known to be uncertain. This is why I'm in the tragicomic camp. Life is horrible in many ways but we are mostly in love with it, we poor curious masochists.

If there is a language "game" then there are rules to follow when referring to certain things. When people use language incorrectly, or in the wrong contexts, like talking as if you were Elvis Presley and claiming that you are, and acting like you are, then we typically think those people delusional or insane. — Harry Hindu

Exactly. I just say that 'thinking they are insane' is pretty much just having certain chains of signs in our internal monologue. Or we say it out loud and lock people up for their own safety. To me the big idea is that we are radically conventional/cultural/social animals. If we notice that thinking is largely just chains of signs that we only sometimes speak out loud, then we can start to get some distance from the assumption of some ideal thought content that only uses words as a vehicle. I think we focus too much on ideally constative utterances when it's more about speech acts as a kind of activity for manipulating the environment, sometimes by coordinating work or enforcing norms.

We say that we know what we mean when we can find other chains of signs that do pretty much the same job. But I suggest that it's more about an assured knowhow than a grasp of language-independent essences.

If we can't say that what everyone experiences is different or not, then it can be safely said that we each have or own private language. — Harry Hindu

I think that inference only makes sense if one clings to consciousness-grounded paradigm that is exploded by the beetle-in-the-box example. The whole habit of trying to ground everything in consciousness deserves rethinking when it comes to language. As I see it, there are certain biases or prejudices that are so automatic that we don't even notice them and find the questioning of them absurd at first. I suggest that it makes as much sense to ground the subject/consciousness in language as it does to ground language in the subject/consciousness. The whole philosophical discourse of consciousness occurs within public sign-systems. The subject is an effect of language, not as a body, of course, but as a concept, as one more sign that only makes sense in a system of signs.

If you haven't seen this, you might find it interesting.

http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf

we do not want people to tell us how similar philosophy is throughout all of (its) history, but how dissimilar. — Pussycat

IMV the story of philosophy demonstrates discontinuity. Compare Dewey and Plotinus. Philosophy looks roughly like big-picture thinking. Just as humans vary considerably in their fundamental visions of the world, so do the specialists who carefully articulate and argue for such views.

As a description of the way people actually behave, that sounds accurate to me. As a prescription for the correct way we should behave, I have objections. We do foreclose avenues of discourse irrationally, but we shouldn't; conversely, we should foreclose some avenues of discourse for good reasons, but nevertheless we irrationally don't. — Pfhorrest

I hear you, but I guess my point is that the strong philosophical dream of rationally justifying everything seems dead to me. I'm also invested in universal rationality, enlightenment humanism, etc. It's something we strive toward. I sympathize with those see the dream of perfect sanity as one more flavor of madness.

Those various answers suggest to me that the question you're talking about presumes that "here" was created with conscious intent (that we're trying to discern), which it appears not to have been. — Pfhorrest

No, I'm an atheist. To me it's a more abstract point, the necessity of contingency. All explanation (I have argued before) is intra-worldly. The world as a whole 'must be' a brute fact. From this perspective, theologians and meta-physicians do what they can to evade this. They sweep the contingency under the rug.

It's possible that our views are actually close, despite our tonal habits. I think that maybe 'what is there a here?' is wisely described as (sometimes) no more than a lyrical grunt. I relate in an important way to the 'empty questions' approach. I even relate to the philosophy-as-meta-engineering paradigm. All words are just tools for a clever animal, and this tool metaphor itself is one more tool. To me, thought, this is post-philosophical pragmatism. The insight cuts against the attachment to a certain earnest and hyper-rational style. Philosophers are just poet-engineers, offering their software on the market. You and I are two more characters on the great stage of fools who take more pleasure than others in articulating our verbal response to lives we were thrown into. Along these lines, 'pious' philosophies that demarcate Science from non-science are the sad shadows of technology that just does or does not work reliably. Stuff people buy, stuff people win wars with. We are confectioners. But I can only say this with a certain irony, because I'm invested in the game nevertheless.

The only way out is to let thoughts about masks arise and pass away, without giving them to much credence, one way or another. — csalisbury

I agree. I could be lying to myself, but I feel something like an internal equilibrium. I'm more or less at peace with myself despite certain eccentricities and excesses and concerned instead about the world, making a living, affording a certain privacy and security, and (maybe the biggest ) the biological reality of aging. I'm healthy now, but I know what's coming. My old man is in a wheelchair from a stroke. I think I'd prefer a clean and certain death at a certain fixed time sufficiently far away to the smoky maze in which the Minotaur lurks somewhere or another. Married aging couple and all that that implies.

Scared kid & monster for me too. — csalisbury

I understand myself to understand myself as suffering/enjoying a wider band of consciousness than the average person. This is the listening to the internal kid / monster. Where id was ego shall be. I read Freud's last book as I was becoming a complete atheist, and even passionate caring about such things at 19 was connected to a strange childhood (dysfunctional working class family but also a certain recognized-by-others potential connected to reading comprehension.) How does imagination fit into all of this? I only started noticing that I was poor as signs of aging set in. The world was an interruption of my dreams, poetic and erotic.

I don't want to presume too much, but it seems to me that we're both susceptible to what the psychologists describe as 'splitting' where most important things in our lives are either hyper-valorized or largely devalued. — csalisbury

I see them as something that causes me pain that and any fleeting dionysian delight is purchased at too dear a cost...

I also understand that you may very well be perfectly aware of all the above and simply feel that the highs and lows are worth pursuing for their own sake. — csalisbury

I've been living a controlled, responsible life for almost a decade now. I get nostalgic at times for dionysion delights. But I transformed myself from a musician/artist/writer who worked menial jobs into a ideal student and then a teacher. And I maintained a solid marriage. It's all pretty good, but now that I'm in a more worldly-conforming phase, I resent my younger self for not taking care of business, owning some stuff, etc. I learned some stuff, grew up in some ways, but I'm getting old. The time would have passed in any case, of course. I'm thinking of buying some tiny piece of land and starting with a tiny house. But mostly because I'm more grizzly as I age. It's more of a flight from annoying stimuli than an exciting adventure. A new artistic friendship would be great for me, but I pickier and more irritable these days, and I sometimes think that's all behind me.

A related theme: I connect 'spiritual aging' to becoming aware of how small one is and how big the world is. True greatness is rare indeed. A person perhaps judges their ability more accurately with time. They may peace with being fairly talented, perhaps, but no genius. But they then pride themselves on processing that truth and congratulate themselves for realism. It's fun to feel like a genius though, and I sometimes envy that naive spirit that writes manifestos. We see it on this forum from time to time. The old cynic is a bit of vampire. I sometimes think that maybe I could write some good fiction, but I also think that the world is stuffed with great fiction. The religion of art doesn't burn as brightly. And people are just so thirsty for recognition. I'm sure that such a thirst is still in me, but it's up against a distaste for the neediness of that pose. I like the idea of leaving marks behind anonymously. There's some weird purification or sublimation in that, which I oppose to the 'incestuous' support-your-local-artist vibe of local artists (friends kind-heartedly flattering one another ---playing mom for one another.) And speaking with one's proper name in public seems entangled with a necessary in-authenticity. The self has to be sold to a vague public-at-large, which connects to tribal polarization, preaching and posing for the choir, when the impish thrill for me is challenging all complacency and identification. This wicked sublimated ideological violence is definitely entangled with being a 'true' philosopher for me. (Hence the sociopath metaphor.)

I hope you find some of this interesting. Somehow it's all entangled for me. Sublimated intellectual 'violence' is like a relatively safe version of or substitute for more visceral dionysion enjoyments. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. Be safe in a nice marriage with health insurance and log in to the orgy-porgy holodeck where all the nasty consequences of unleashing the id are avoided. But I was born too soon. The Federation may not arrive, of course.

Perhaps you are missing the subtle machismo in pessimism. It's all about gazing at the abyss, the terrible truth. The pessimist faces the black dragon of the ugliest and most profound truth. From his perspective (the abstract pessimist), your criticism is involved in comforting self-deceit.

As you may know, Nietzsche thought that noble natures were slow to admit they were suffering in the first place. Because suffering is something that happens to losers. But self-deceit and an flattering misperception of status are also associated with losers. I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, for instance. (Candace Owens on victim culture. She has a point, but...)

I can't play the cards of the pessimist, but there's some genuine profundity in the position. It's not this or that institution that's all fucked up. It's the wheel of life itself. It's Buddhism without the incense. Maybe it has two feet in the grave when just one would do.

But how does all of this connect to the glory of war? And young men running at machine guns?

Nice. I'll just add that for me, in a certain dark mood, that there's maybe a sick love affair with 'The Dark Truth.' It's like self-Crucifixion, self-mutilation, some kind of role play. 'Only the damned are grand.' But at some point a person just really wants the pain and horror to stop. One fears that the holy truth is just a black-fire-thought-crime virus that should be cast into the memory hole.

In case you find it useful, I think B&T Heidegger is not so young. We can go back much farther. He started as a Catholic philosopher. But eventually Luther was one on his heroes. I thought you might like this quote:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/moth.12447

For Heidegger, despite Husserl’s methodological breakthrough, Husserl’s fundamental (i.e., ‘prefigured’) connection to both ‘Cartesian psychology’ and ‘Kantian epistemology’ gives to transcendental phenomenology a ‘fatal determination.’ Whatever (presumptively) one takes religious experience to be, Heidegger does not accept a call ‘to the things themselves’ if den Sachen here means entities ‘encountered as characteristic of a possible region for science’, which, of course, presupposes a theoretical approach to the phenomena under examination, theoretical ‘knowing.’ If Heidegger is correct, this approach to the phenomena of religious life leads to distortion [Verdrehen]. Heidegger claims: ‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remoteness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so characterized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its character of possibly being certain.’ Hence, within the onto‐theo‐logical tradition of Western metaphysics, theology—as the science of God in quest of the certainty that belongs to knowing—already has its remoteness from the being taken to be the supreme being among beings.
...
The philosophy of religion articulated as Christian theology, whether Roman Catholic patristic tradition or later Protestant theology, of course, has a long history of rationalist efforts to arrive at ‘deductive certitude’ and empiricist attempts to garner ‘inductive adequacy’ concerning the existence of God, thereby to secure a proper relation of faith and understanding. These endeavors have relied upon the presumed, manifest, or demonstrated capacity of the faculty of reason, the faculty of sensibility, or the two in combination, all engaged in a theoretical comportment of ‘knowing.’
— link

I like this seeing of the obsession with certainty from the outside. The theoretical mode prioritizes certainty. At what cost? Before long intelligent people earnestly argue that there really is a world and that they are really in it. Such a strange game makes sense to them. It is even virtuous. 'I know less than you, and that's a good thing, because my standards for what for it certain are higher.'

The defensible version of this (the 'real' version or just the version I actually like) is 'negative capability' as described by Keats. But that's 'existential' or 'literary' and not a bloodless game of artificial doubt. It's instead a game of agony and ecstasy that involves never quite knowing who one is.

I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. — Keats

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html

I'm probably adding to Keats, but what I have in mind is the ability to endure not having a justification. Life is experienced as a risk, an experiment. Not just empirically (I don't know what will happen) but theoretically and morally (I'm not even sure what should happen. It's not clear who the hero is. I could be terribly wrong. I could be the villain or the fool of the piece. )

The end of this article is sad and disturbing as it yanks the teeth out of the concept it's supposed to explore. https://qz.com/938847/john-keats-theory-of-negative-capability-can-help-you-cultivate-a-creative-mindset/

It's a good example of the endless banalization of what is essentially creepy/numinous/exciting.

IOW life is meaningful if and only if someone finds it meaningful. There is no more that there could conceivably be to "meaning" than someone finding meaning in something. There are awful, dread- and angst-ridden states of mind in which everything seems meaningless, and so to a person in such a state of mind everything is meaningless, because the meaning lies in the state of mind. I expect that Schopie et al found themselves all too often in that state of mind. I've been there too. But I've also been in the opposite state of mind, the kind that religious folks and magical thinkers call a "religious" or "mystical" experience, which to me for a lot of my life was a common and thereby sort of "mundane" albeit still awesome experience, unlike the existential angst which only ever really hit me in force last year. — Pfhorrest

I agree with this. Life is justified or rejected on the level of feeling. We always speak from some mood. And I know what you mean (I think) by 'mystical' or joyful/transcendent experience. And I've walked through the black fires of hell. The world can seem like a screeching idiotic meat-grinder, 'a tale told by an idiot, etc.' Pangloss wants to ignore the suffering vision and others want to ignore that the garden of delights is also down here in the meat grinder. The temptation is to elevate a mood to a metaphysical principle, while the alternative is to understand it all as dialogue within a play. Different states of mind being each spout their own metaphysics.

It's a clever meme that it's YOUR fault and thus the system is sound, the system is good, it is just your "malfunctioning" view. — schopenhauer1

I agree, but then the system is also just relatively happy people protecting their relative happiness. IMV we are a fairly selfish species. We don't want our party interrupted. We don't think of the homeless as we initiate sex with a new partner or open our latest package from Amazon. We just don't generally feel the suffering or the pleasure of others. So 'suffering is your problem' is not just metaphysics but simply us all being in different bodies at different levels of health in different environments.

Sensual delights become repetitive, all of it. — schopenhauer1

I'd like to find this out the hard way. To me what sucks is getting old and the scarcity in cruelty involved in ecstatic experiences. Plug me up to a soma-drip and a variety of lucid dreams (many of them sexual, with exactly the partner I'd choose) and I doubt I'd get bored. One just varies the dreams. I'd even agree to an hour of intense pain every week for a life or virtual life like that. I'd know rationally that non-existence was painless, but I'd avoid it if possible to keep the orgy-porgy going.

One of the reasons we learn to die is because we are forced to do so by aging. Our stupid bodies slowly fail us, and we slowly learn to let go. Another reason is a perception of the cruelty and injustice in the world, though I think that maybe it's only personal suffering that tenderizes us and makes us aware of and disturbed by the suffering of strangers.

It doesn't matter how many countries you go to, how many sexual adventures you have, foods you taste, mountains you climb, how many new books you read, people you know, products you produce, things you learn, or new experiences you purport to have. It is all repetitive again and again. It is all the fishbowl. — schopenhauer1

But it does matter. The whole system of envy and resentment is based on the perception that others are having a better time. Give people a variety of good experiences with lots of novelty. Give them health, beauty, self-esteem. Minimize their frustration and humiliation. They'll be happy. Maybe in thousands of years they'll get bored. Who knows? I'll be the guinea pig, but no one will let me. The hard part is fooling a body that is meant to reproduce and die. Perhaps we'll invent VR so good that we'll only come out to maintain the machines reluctantly.

Great addition!

Philosophy's only job there is to clarify how to conduct such an investigation. — Pfhorrest

So you exclude the quasi-religious function from philosophy? I take a more holist view. To me a person's philosophy is tied up with their self-image and self-esteem. The philosopher is religious in a new self-critical way. 'Reason' or rationality becomes a sort of holy ghost. That myths must subject themselves to criticism becomes a dominant myth. If philosophy is only practical meta-engineering, that's a cool idea but leaves out all the juicy stuff that people die for.

So I guess I thought, "I'm going to make some philoso-pants that fit people like me". Sure, it's just pants that are the same length in both legs as this pair are in one leg, and the same width in both legs as that other pair are in the opposite leg, so I'm just stitching together aspects of pairs of pants that already exist, but on the whole I've not found any pair that fits right in every way, so I thought I should make some.

But now that I have, it seems, most people like their skinny jeans or their high-waters or their weird lopsided pants that are too tight on one side and too short on the other or vice-versa, and nobody wants my pants... or I don't know how to let the people who would want them know that they exist now. — Pfhorrest

I like this description. I relate. I agree with Schopenhauer that philosophers are especially irritable. No one out there gets it just right. But I have this sense of the pugnaciousness of strong minds. We take pleasure in locating the error, aesthetic or logical, in all other claims to the throne --which are just fashion choices to the worldly cynic who looks at bank accounts, fame, armies.

I think I prefer the improvised clash of personalities to writing a book because it shows the philosopher in an embattled social context. We see their manners, who they find to insane to talk to, how they respond to unforeseen objections. So I appreciate you meeting my initially challenging tone with sincere and eloquent responses.

But I realized after a decade of writer's block and then a year of trying to write fiction (that turned into just a 60,000-word outline) that I absolutely suck at writing dialogue, and would make more progress if I just described my views and those I'm against in my own natural voice. — Pfhorrest

I relate to this too. I'd like to write fiction. I believe that I should write fiction. But spouting conversational (post-)philosophy is what comes natural. Yet with my wife I improvise voices and characters all the time. But it's all un-self-conscious play. If only I'd somehow be offered money ahead of time, then I'd have the motivation. Or if I were young and single. I was a musician once, and I loved the music but it was also tied up with some kind of sexual display. Seduction/intimidation.

I have vague dreams of maybe meeting someone, or several someones, who agree with the overall aim of my project, who might like to collaboratively work on turning it into a narrative again, someday. But I have no idea how to go about that. — Pfhorrest

I relate to this, in terms of both art and philosophy. But I find myself becoming more isolated somehow from that possibility and more at peace with the isolation. I was in bands with close friends for about a decade, and it's deeply satisfying to share the sense of making something great with true friends. And we were so immersed in it that we just ignored the fact that we were poor and irresponsible. Some became addicts and others became parents. I became neither and went to grad school.

But I am nostalgic at times for an era that can't be repeated. Some of those nights were so grand. The friendship, the music, the drugs. Dionysian mysteries, the 'truth' in rock'n'roll lyrics.

Not at all, really. I was having passionate arguments on the internet in the days before pseudonymity was a widespread norm, so it was all under my real name, and back when I was a teenage no less. UseNet archives and what remains of old mid-90s early web forums are full of records of my views from the time, and it's never hurt me.. — Pfhorrest

I'm glad it's never come back on you. I don't like having a proper legal name stamped on me like a penned animal. It's a toe tag. I think Derrida felt something like this, given his writing on the signature. Limited Inc is one of my favorite texts. It has a certain embarrassing nudity. It's not unlike one of the better clashes on this forum. 'Sarl' is the enemy or status quo dragon, intellectual complacence incarnate. 'Sec' is the impish knight trying to force a rich and unruly consciousness on Dad who has it all figured out in his sleepy deafness and blindness. As others have written, there's something like a (admittedly vague) 'experience of language' beneath it all. Phenomenology is dangerously close to mysticism in some ways, but perhaps anything that isn't a publicly useful/reliable machine is suspect.

the reasons to close off those topics should be readily apparent the more "indecent" or "insane" such topics of conversation are; and the "insanity" or "indecency" of people who insist on trying to force the conversation there anyway lies in their inability to understand the obvious good reasons not to go there as readily as other people do. — Pfhorrest

I guess I'm saying that those 'obvious good reasons' are not explicit reasons. You seem to suggest that arguments have been made, and they need only be remembered. I'm suggesting that we are trained into a culture like animals, and that conscious deliberation is the tip of an iceberg. This is the old idea that we are creatures of our time, and that our most dominant ideas are assumptions we don't even notice. They are the water the fish swim in, invisible to the well-adjusted fish.

Really, much of my whole philosophical project consists of giving the reasons to foreclose certain large swaths of clearly unworkable ways to investigate things, showing how a bunch of different ways of trying to investigate things boil down to those two clearly unworkable ways and so should be foreclosed along with them, showing how a bunch of proposed answers to various philosophical questions are tantamount those those ways of trying to investigate things, showing what's still left after all of that has been foreclosed, and then letting the sciences take it from there, using those not-insane-or-indecent approaches still left to do the actual hard work of figuring things out. — Pfhorrest

I mostly relate to this. I'm guessing that I'm a little more cynical about metaphysical systems and maybe irrationally attached to a more informal/literary style. I see us as myth-making myth-structured engineers. That's why the 'wheel of life' and other religious notions are philosophical to me. The idea of some purified separate discipline (pure philosophy) looks like one more myth to me. This is examined in 'The White Mythology' (Derrida).

It reminds me of a joke I modified decades ago. "What is the answer to this question?" someone asked me, and supposedly their 'correct' answer was that "What" is the answer to that question; but I say instead, "This is the answer to that question." The moral of the story is: Ask an empty question, get an empty answer. — Pfhorrest

I like that. But 'why is there a here here' is not empty in some simple way. What does it all mean? That's a vague request IMV for something like an orienting myth or metaphor. For some, the world is created as a test. Many secular thinkers rely on a notion of progress. There is a here here so that we have a world to improve for our grandchildren. Or perhaps the world is a stage on which we learn to let it all go. We learn how to die on a road to transcendence.

But I do see the nullity of the question (as in W's TLP). It's as if we are just clever animals who really just want to push the right button. And religious and metaphysical phrases can go in the ear and transform pain into pleasure, confusion into a calm sense of being oriented (we have an arrow to follow toward the horizon, a clear image of the hero to emulate.)

If you're agreeing that we all experience the same colors, then I don't understand why you disagree with me about a "private" language. If we all experience the same colors, then it seems to me that we all share the same language of the mind. — Harry Hindu

We can never know if we see the same colors. It's intuitively plausible, and an argument can be made for it, but it's unnecessary. Generations come and go without knowing whether they use 'green' to refer to the same quale. Or whether anyone ever has the same signified for 'toothache.'

In order to learn a language, you have to already understand the concept of object permanence, (ie realism) - that there are things in the world that are outside of your experience and that language can be about those things. — Harry Hindu

How does one even come to understand language-use without first understanding the concept of communication? It seems to me that you need to be able to understand communication for you to understand when some sound you hear is someone is communicating with you as opposed to a glass breaking, a wave crashing or the wind blowing. — Harry Hindu

I see what you mean, but I just approach it differently. Instead of dwelling on the understanding of an individual subject (which is inaccessible by definition), I think it's better to focus on individuals being trained into a form of life. By the time we can reason about such things, we are already deeply enmeshed in a world shared with others. We 'understand' some language as a whole. We know our way around a certain way of life. We say and do the right things within the social order. To be sure we have something we call private experience.

But (and I think we agree) speech is directed at a shared world. You like the language of causality for this. I like to think of a shared software that makes the reasoning individual possible. We know that we have separate brains, so we can worry about reducing this 'virtuality software' to the scientific image. At the same time the scientific image we construct is part of the virtuality of language. The individual thinks via an inherited system of signs, and IMV there is no sharp separation between thought and action. 'How are you?' is as much like raising a paw as it is asking a question. And words like 'physical' and 'mental' have no deep and final meaning out of all contexts, tho philosophers do what they can to establish one.

Communicating doesn't consist of making "the right sounds", it consists of understanding.... In this way we won't be inclined to say that similar things are the same, and we'll have some rigorous logical principles to approach the issue.. — Metaphysician Undercover

To me this is a default view that some of the more recent philosophers have successfully challenged. Our so-called 'rigorous logical principles' are perhaps reducible to making the right sounds and simply conforming to norms that are mostly tacit.

We each have something different in our boxes which we call a "beetle". The "language-game" might be entirely external, as Wittgenstein implies, but this does not indicate that it's not the case that what's important is what's in the box. — Metaphysician Undercover

The quote is explicit about what's in the box cancelling out. But W's view is of course less important than the issue itself. Perhaps most of us would grant that the beetle is what's important. But upon close examination the whole idea of the inside opposed to an outside comes apart.

--We never know exactly what we mean.
--What exactly do you mean when you say we never know exactly what we mean?
--I'll never know, but I can come up with more phrases for the same vague insight.

On pseudo-public but technically private places like internet forums, I prefer technological solutions that empower individuals to not engage with them, rather than outright exclusion of them. — Pfhorrest

I like that, but I should have been clearer. I'm suggesting that being civilized or sane means that lots of issues are and must be 'dead' for us. They are 'irrationally' foreclosed. We inherit certain norms of decency and intelligibility that make discussing norms possible in the first place. In simpler terms I'm suggesting that open-minded-ness has its limits. To be sane is to be deaf and blind in a good way.

Yeah? I straight up do that in my philosophy, grounding the meaning of questions in what an answer to them would look like (which for descriptive questions basically is positivism, not quite, though descriptive questions are not the only questions). Questions that can't have answers are thereby meaningless. — Pfhorrest

OK, fair enough. But surely you see how convenient that is. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is all of this...here? What I have in mind is (for instance) presented in Sartre's Nausea. If the big questions are excluded as meaningless, isn't that a little fishy?

That's the big objection. But the little objection would be questions that seem answerable in principle for which we don't have answers. How can humans achieve immortality? What social order maximizes happiness? I relate to pragmatism. I think we trust technology that works reliably, and all the romance of science depends on this: if it's gear, it's here. But calling the rest meaningless seems problematic. The rest (like philosophy) is gear that may or may not work. The user dies before he's quite sure.

All of those authors and fields can say philosophical things, and philosophy can say things relevant to them, but that doesn't make everything they do philosophical, or philosophy so broad as to encompass all that they do. It sounds like you've read something of my Codex since you know the catchphrase, but in case I just posted it somewhere around here, I go into more detail on where and why I would draw the lines at the start of my essay on metaphilosophy, explicitly distinguishing it from (among other things) religion/theology and art/literature. — Pfhorrest

To be clear, I never said that everything they do is philosophical. I'm just saying that I don't think there's a sharp boundary. You can draw one as others have, of course, but I'm in a different camp. There was a time when I wanted to write my own work of philosophy, but I realized that (to me) it was more natural to gossip on the margins. All of 'my' better ideas are already out there. I guess it would still be nice to have the discipline to type up a system, but it's hard enough to find people who care about the famous books that already do that, let alone my necessarily repetitive contribution. I now think the way to go is a screenplay. I say embed philosophy within a narrative. Steppenwolf, Nausea, Immortality. For me it's somewhat about avoiding the pseudo-scientific pose and embracing what I see as the truth: that our philosophies are idealized / crystallized versions of our own glorious selves. It takes guts to market your thoughts non-anonymously. What keeps me from doing it is a more general feeling about shaping one message for an abstract public. Don't you feel forced to compromise or self-censor?Isn't one constrained to keep it all a little dry and vague in that situation? (I say that, and yet I know that people have fiery political debates on Facebook, under their own names, which I'd hate for the same reason I don't have tattoos.)

“heaven” is as much (if not more so) a matter of our internal states as external ones — Pfhorrest

We agree, and I think most people would agree. That's the genius and mischief of drugs. Just push that button directly and the rest of the world falls into place --until it all falls apart.

the solution isn’t some weird new kind of sex, it’s the restoration of your libido. — Pfhorrest

I agree with this too. It's largely about libido. A person can 'fall out of love with life.' This is what I meant by my Tiger King inspired notion of the cub-petting system. Life is aesthetically justified, especially perhaps (at least for many) by the profound joys of parenthood (which I've heard plenty about but never experienced.) Then there's sexuality, connected to the 'immortality' of the species in the same way, and art-science-culture, which arguably is a sublimation of the others.

Of course we should consider that frustrated libido could be a torment. Imagine the plight of a homosexual in a violently homophobic society. Or just the plight of an overweight and unattractive girl in high school. Or even the plight of the old lecher who is finally falling apart. Aging sucks, and the old are too ugly and useless to us to excite much pity.


It makes sense to me that pessimism is related to Buddhism and 'spiritual' renunciations of worldliness in general. 'Thou shalt enjoy.' 'Thou shalt consume.' There's a pill for the malfunctioning soul. 'It's not our problem, it's yours.' So here's advice and maybe a pill. I'm no better in this regard. I've been around desperate people and mostly I just clutched my valuables and guarded my own fragile happiness. I've regurgitated my philosophers to those with more chance of pulling through, but my strategy is more about meeting pessimism or despair half-way. The world is disgusting and absurd. That's not an illusion. But there are nice things too. I'm not necessarily correct when I give advice from my fragile happiness to their despair. It's just what people do when they are less troubled than those they are talking with, which is reach for the platitudes or profundities or black humor and demonstrate concern --which is stuff that may not help at all, since it's all deeper than mere thoughts.

Mind you that I was sick lately (probably our famous virus itself). It was bad, but I had enough energy to read the news and see the world through that lens of suffering and impotence. To me it's a reminder that the bright philosophy that we tend to think of as a cause is perhaps more of an effect. Which I guess supports the notion that anti-natalism is the flower of suffering. In general we might say that humans vote for eternal recurrence simply by being immersed in the life cycle, happy monkeys who don't think to question and object to the system as a whole but only various obstacles. There's an industry devoted to the sanctity of the obstacle course itself (books and pills and conversations). And Beckett and Kafka and other dark comedians are a special slice of that, right on the edge of sanity, ambiguous.

The Black Dragon & The Good Fire are childhood ways of navigating a tough space. They do good work, for us as kids, but they eventually have to go. — csalisbury

This is interesting. I agree that people have various obsolete traumatic-childhood-induced strategies that they'd be better off letting go of. They could be 'fitter, happier, more productive.' And I confess to being one more human that never grew up.

But (and this 'could' be my immaturity) I have my doubts about the notion of the truly grown-up or enlightened human being. Clearly some people are relatively well adjusted for certain relatively desirable environments. And it makes sense that certain techniques or strains of advice should help transform a less mature and adjusted individual into a more mature and adjusted individual --according to certain standards that maybe we've all inherited in their vagueness. I think of some nice member of the meritocratic upper-middle class. Or perhaps a hard-working nurse who is also a good mother. The main thing is perhaps that they are satisfied and community oriented? I imagine that we imagine them voting for Democrats.

And then perhaps its only a sociopathic excessive something that sees all that from the outside and conjures up their blind dependence on the system in which they are embedded. Is Beckett's art for the sickly and the decadent? Granted that I'm an immature sociopath on some level (which is sincere if also playful), are not the classics themselves crammed with this same creepiness? Think of all the banned books. Slowly this creepy consciousness is mainstreamed as entertainment for the sophisticated. We are mature enough now for Huck Finn, Ulysses, Naked Lunch,...

Do you see what I'm getting at? Is the norm of the mature adult a kind of shadow cast by an ecstatic and anguished consciousness? Is this transgressive consciousness a necessary supplement? Is our high-tech simulation of sex and violence essential to the way we live now? One more drug that keeps the machine greased? I am a temporarily embarrassed Caesar. Maybe the difference between me and the average dude down the street is the perverse pleasure I take in spiritual graffiti. But then just about everyone is on Facebook (which I'm too cool for) blasting away their political-religious meme-treats. Is the only difference a sort of extra serious or investment in self-justifying self-accusing poetry?I guess I'm confessing and yet minimizing my sociopathy. I'm playing at being the madman who knows he mad, a exiled king among those who don't. But we know this is bullshit, too, and congratulate ourselves for knowing it? How similar or dissimilar are our masks? I'm still trying to figure it out.

[All of this reveals as it conceals and the reverse. It's public facing and yet as sincere as 'they' will let it be, the bastards.]

I'm enjoying this conversation and think I mostly understand you. But this stuff is complex, so please forgive any misunderstanding.

Correct me if I am wrong:

I think we agree that character/mask is a sort of trauma-generated or trauma-responsive 'fiction' (which must be put in quotes since it's not clear what 'non-fiction' is here.

I am definitely a 'scared kid' but also a 'scared little monster' who sees itself in a world crowded with other scared little monsters. I don't mind confessing this radical vulnerability, and I loved how Bukowski wrote about how terrifying he found life. I think this was a recurring but not constant experience for him, as it is for me. I connect it to a furious attachment to life and its pleasures and perhaps to a child's untamed and ridiculous infinite desires. Have you read Suetonius ? I feel plugged in to the monstrousness in those lives, while actually living a decent life. I like good manners, hate noise. I'm a troll who will play by the rules if the other trolls will leave me alone. I'm relatively taciturn for my circle, and the more sweet and social wife is an important part of keeping me connected to this circle. But, perhaps like many of the taciturn, I am capable of intense/manic relationships and simply saving myself for genuine opportunity -- which I might be aging out of or becoming too eccentric for.

Maybe the 'secret doctrine' line was misleading. It's (for instance) between the lines in Hobbes. To me the full truth of human consciousness can almost obviously not be fit into public conversation. A certain type of philosopher is a bit of sociopath (or the reverse). There's a violence in taking a certain distance for the norms of a community. What is the wicked pleasure taken in seeing today's sacred norms as contingent?

The absurdity comes from the repetition of human affairs- it all comes back to surviving, maintaining comfort, entertainment in some cultural context. We know what it is, we have seen it billions of times, yet we want more people to be born to experience this same thing. — schopenhauer1

OK, but what's the problem with repetition? Heaven sounds repetitive. I think I'd be pretty if I lived in an almost ideal world and never aged or got sick. Brave New World. I'll chew my sex-hormone gum and go to the feelies. I'd look forward to a different pneumatic girl every weekend (which is really a repetition). Occasionally one of us would die by accident, and we'd pity them. So we'd cook up another semi-immortal in the test tubes. (This is better than the Brave New World situation, but similar.)

What I think you are neglecting is the genuine joy to be had in sex, drugs, music, good weather. Life has its profound joys, but they come at a cost. And to me aging and disease and scarcity are a big part of that --so the utopian dreams aren't completely absurd. They just ignore how difficult the political problem is and how greedy and aggressive the human being is. We also take pleasure in the suffering and humiliation of others. As Schopenhauer saw, we are the demons who run hell as well as its prisoners. But we also run Sensual Adventureland for one another. A young, rich, and beautiful person in the 21st century has plenty to stick around for. As they age, things may change. But some are born to sweet delight, however fragile and temporary.

Talking about the fire is one thing; going to the fire is another. Here, I'm talking about the fire. — csalisbury

I know what you mean. I can only talk about the black dragon when he's not around. When he's around, the futility and obscenity of talk is palpable and paralyzing. That's the black fire.

But you maybe you mean the good fire.

Ecstasy comes into play, that's a sure sign a protective force (a psychological Daemon) has taken over and is showing a movie of Things Are Now At The Level of The Rarest Stuff. That's always a hoodwink. — csalisbury

I'm not sure I understand you. I do think that we humans are deeply invested in various performances. In this space we have no choice but to be self-conscious and perform. More than most perhaps, you and I work this self-consciousness into our performance. I do think that the rarest stuff is mostly found in unbearably tender places that can only be talked about (if at all) in whispers. Or in very rare friendships and perhaps under the influence. Maybe some of us have a 'secret doctrine.' And all public-facing doctrines are all the more suspect and shallow in the light of this. But 'doctrine' implies something too articulated and stable.

But I'm down with protective forces and characters in general as trauma-generated 'illusions' or hoodwinks. 'Truth' and madness are dangerously familiar here. The 'sane' monkey rides the network of norms, and all that Nietzschean stuff about lies that keep us alive comes to mind.

Ah yes, I understand that view. I've playfully summarized it as a system of cub-petting. Life is justified by the joys of parenting, but parenting generations the lives that must be justified in the first place. On the level of pure concept, I don't see how a decision for or against the system is possible.

Since we are semi-conscious animals, breeding is only occasionally a conscious decision. But many do consciously affirm the net value of life (expected value > 0 ) and then have children. Are they wrong? I don't think it's a 'mathematical' question.

Your needs and wants require others to work. Their needs and wants require you to work. I don't just mean in the economic sense, though that can be literally taken that way. — schopenhauer1

Right. We're social animals. We exist in and through and for one another. Maybe even bitter Schopenhauer-style philosophers contribute to the survival of the species. We create the strange and fascinating 'imploding' conceptual art of maximum distancing. Isn't this connected to God on the cross somehow? Hasn't religion also seen the world as run by Satan? Or a breeding pen ?

According to Buddhist tradition, after several years of mendicancy, meditation, and asceticism, he awakened to understand the mechanism which keeps people trapped in the cycle of rebirth. — link

What if all the gooey stuff has been added on? and the insight was pessimist with a goal of detachment and transcendence? How old is this recognition of absurdity and what keeps it going? The dream machine. I've harped on cub-petting, but it's just as much as system of lust and ambition. Lust is directly connected to reproduction, while ambition can be associated with sublimated parenthood and the cruel joy of being superior in status. A pile of dogs, all tying to climb to the top and evade death through puppies.

But you haven't addressed the comic pleasure we take in putting it like this.

Natural selection would be the explanation as to how we all have the same beetles in our box. Natural selections "selected" the beetles (colors, sounds, etc,) that the brain uses to interpret the world. So what would cause us to become separated? There needs to be a causal explanation as to why we would all have different beetles. — Harry Hindu

I think we probably do see the same colors, etc., for reasons you've mentioned. But I think it misses the point of Wittgenstein in the passage quoted. Language can't depend on what is radically private. The most obvious thing to consider is how our actions are synchronized.

To work what is radically private by assumption into causal explanations seems like a bad way to go. It's inaccessible and uncheckable by definition. Whatever it is, it can't play an important role.

Nice! But what about Marxism then? They say they can predict human nature and the process of history through sociology, psychology, and mathematics — Gregory

To me some of Marx's writings are great. If you ignore the neo-religious element, you get a powerful kind of anti-philosophy that calls out the battle of phrases for being only that. Beneath all our ideologies, we are animals in a physical environment that doesn't care about our feelings. Humans still have to work to survive, and the organization of work seems like a key thing to look at when trying to make sense of why people say what they say when they say it.

To make this more concrete, let's just consider what it means that our species has achieved a state of permanent revolution with respect to technology. We are constantly changing the ways we adapt to our physical environment, and this forces endless political/religious/cultural adjustments. For a long time now the world has not been some fixed thing that we can adapt to as a community. We've also been forced by technology (which aids an increased population) into a global framework. So humans have no world government but are locked into global interdependence anyway. Knowledge continually becomes obsolete. Yesterday's norms are taboos tomorrow.

The real fire means you don't where the center is, and you're talking to one another without any one having a landline to it. — csalisbury

I like this line. Perhaps you'll agree that it itself is a landline. The state of truth is an abyss, but the abyss recognized as such functions as a foundation. 'I know that no one really knows (and that's enough for my performance of the hero).'

The world is mucky, chaotic, mean. Many - if not most - people seem drawn to philosophy to get away from the world. The level of explanation seems sturdier, safer, clearer than what you've experienced in life. — csalisbury

I like this too. I think we can extend this to the human situation in general. The philosopher is maybe an amplified version of this, a self-proclaimed expert who holds himself to higher epistemological standards, an elitist on a restricted diet. But we should also add the anxiety of influence to the stew, because philosophy is also a genre of creative writing. The philosopher is often a mix of the prophet and scientist, tho working on the level of pre-science or super-science.