I'm not against metaphors. They impact and can suggest orientation for practice or knowledge. But they do not explain, define or clarify. They can be a hypothetical starting point for knowledge, never an end in themselves. — David Mo

Could you make a case for that assertion? Some thinkers have argued that analogy is the core of cognition.

One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view. — Hofstadter

What we call common sense—the body of widely accepted truths—is, just as Heidegger and Nabokov thought, a collection of dead metaphor. Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses—to cause tingles—has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage. After the scales are rubbed off a butterfly’s wing, you have transparency, but not beauty—formal structure without sensuous content. Once the freshness wears off the metaphor, you have plain, literal, transparent language—the sort of language which is ascribed not to any particular person but to ‘common sense’ or ‘reason’ or ‘intuition’ — Rorty

Philosophy has been largely based on an unnoticed ocular metaphor.

Since it is based on the visual metaphor, Kant's epistemology is not the antirepresentationalism proposed by Rorty. For Kant there is a mediation between the object out there and the mental eye, what is rejected by Rorty. He thinks, that we do not need mediation, since we are unmediately in (touch with) the world. As he says, "Pragmatists reply to ... arguments about the veil of appearances by saying that we need not model knowledge on vision. So there is no need to think of the sense organs or the mind as intervening between a mental eye and its object. Instead, pragmatists say, we can think of both as tools for manipulating the object. They reply to arguments about the distorting effect of language by saying that language is not a medium of representation. Rather, it is an exchange of marks and noises, carried out in order to achieve specific purposes. It cannot fail to represent accurately, for it never represented at all."

Sense organs, mind and language are for Rorty not representational instances, but only tools for coping with the reality. — link

https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TKno/TKnoBoro.htm

Not Eliade, please. — David Mo

I looked him up. He's not my cup of tea. I have no cure for mankind to sell. As an individual, I became confident enough in my atheism to eventually go back and enjoy religious myth as literature. I still relate more to young fiery atheists than thinkers like Eliade or the later Heidegger. I do like Campbell, Jung, Hesse, Schopenhauer, Nobby Brown, others.

What are superstitions but not myths? Myths about Jesus Christ, myths about the Aryan race, myths about the Nation, the Spirits... and so on. Myths are tales. They don't reason, they narrate and proclaim. If you refuse to analyze stories with reason, if you allow a story to be the fundamental source of thought and action, your story becomes a superstition.

I think we're talking empty. Perhaps if you propose a myth that can replace reason we can discuss the issue more specifically. — David Mo

Well myths do narrate at least, don't they? I'm hardly suggesting that myths alone will get us through life. This is a high tech society. We need organized, disciplined, technical knowledge...of course. We need longwinded prosy arguments in many situations.

I agree that taking a myth literally is superstition, almost by definition. I do wonder whether some people project a certain reading of myths on others. Was Euler a fool? How about J. S. Bach? Christianity has all kinds of more or less sophisticated interpretations. Wal-Mart fundamentalism is out there, of course, but so is negative theology.

Also myths don't replace reason. They are part of reason. We have lots of stories about heroes and villains, not all of them religious in the traditional sense. Plato's forms are a metaphor that caught on. His famous cave appears again in The Matrix. The appearance-reality distinction is taken for common sense, though in its extreme form it's a particular creation, a piece of oral and written culture.

Philosophy used to be understood as the pursuit of the eternal truth or at least something beyond the transitory affairs of life. — Wayfarer

As I've argued within this thread, it still is. As is science and math. This isn't to deny a change in mood and the move toward professionalization. Let's consider phrases like 'make history,' 'leave a mark.'
[quote="Wayfarer;373039"]Of course the word 'eternal' itself has become a cliche, emblazoned on ancient pillars standing in ruined temples, museum pieces, the kind of thing that post-modernism ridicules.[/quote]

I don't think 'eternal' has become a bad word. What is science after if not the eternal laws of the physical? Could Pythagoras ask for more than a TOE that would fit on a T-shirt? I'm wary of the term 'post-modernism.' It's too vague.

Put another way, the contingent is the conditioned, the dependent, that which is made, fabricated, compound, transitory, subject to decay. So the question is, is there anything which is not made, not fabricated, nor born, not subject to decay? — Wayfarer

Indeed. This is the dream of gods, forms, the transcendental subject, and so on. We can also consider how the stars must have affected early thinkers. A seemingly eternal pattern was hung above them in one sky over every human being. Mathematics also suggested something deathlessly reliable. And then the nature of man himself could be viewed as a being behind the becoming and perishing of generations. I've argued that knowledge is intrinsically the conquest of the transitory. Why do we bother?

This is an efficient sketch of the situation.

Anxiety for the future time, disposeth men to enquire into the causes of things: because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their best advantage. — Hobbes

Of course these days it's also a career, and one is rewarded in various ways for producing knowledge.

Nagel, in his essay Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, says that: — Wayfarer

It's also my impression that Plato is a religious figure. Socrates was obviously compelled by some sense of a spiritual mission. He was even a conspiracy theorist who couldn't resist arguing with experts and 'proving' that they didn't know anything, because they couldn't jump through his verbal hoops to his satisfaction. It be nice to read how some of them would have recorded or re-imagined the conversation.

The problem is, this way of thinking is now so associated with religious philosophies that we've been innoculated against it. It 'sounds religious' so we shy away from it, often reflexively; whatever we're seeking, it can't be that, must be found in another direction. — Wayfarer

Who is the target audience for this? The use of 'we' seems disingenuous here. Intellectual types who reject ordinary religion presumably do so because they'd rather go without certain comforts and cling to their epistemological standards. Note that I've already defended reinterpretations of religious myth, and I repeat that reincarnation strikes me as metaphorically true. To me the demand for a personal afterlife (the preservation of face, name, memories) even seems shallow in some sense, since the most important stuff is repeated in the next generation, with new names and faces. All high culture is 'religious,' I suggest, even as cultural-intellectual fashions involve a renaming of the same old human feelings and projects.

Nietzsche of course blew all of that up, but what does he replace it with? — Wayfarer

I don't think Nietzsche blew it all up. We can blame Galileo, Newton, etc. Nietzsche is a relatively late figure. In philosophy Bacon was already the beginning of the end. Once technology took off, the old religions no longer fit a no longer static world. Democritus had his revenge. (If I remember correctly, he was Bacon's favorite Greek philosopher.) In practical terms it was better to view nature as a machine without and indifferent to human motives. But then we have the romantic reaction to the disenchantment. We have nature versus spirit. We get Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, and other thinkers who embraced the permanent revolution in various ways. Nietzsche was in his best moments one of the great philosophers. In other moments he was terrible. Personally I identity more with Bacon or Hobbes, both of whom lived very much in the real world.

That's why it's important to be able to consider perspectives outside the Western. Otherwise you suffer from Westernitis, which is a very nasty condition. — Wayfarer

I'm not so sure that a Westerner can so easily escape being a Westerner. I've dabbled like many Westerners in wisdom from the East, but I suspect my dabbling has always been through a Western lens. Imported religion was popular with Kerouac & Ginsberg and that gang, to name just one. Were they the real thing? Or some kind of fusion? Why shouldn't Western religious traditions be just as rich and perhaps even more fitting? The cynical part of me thinks the imports have a certain appeal simply as exotic. 'This is not your grandpa's religion.' Yet when I actually met a Buddhist monk once, he reminded me of a Catholic priest.

And is Westernitis a nasty condition? Or are we just as delighted as we are anxious? 'Only a god can save us,' quoth Heidegger. Do we need saving? Of course we'll usually take more of what's good....

This I disagree with. As philosophers we might seek that eternal truth, but when all we find is the deficiencies of human knowledge we are deprived of that pleasure. Philosophy doesn't offer us that pleasure, it dispels the illusion that we might obtain it. — Metaphysician Undercover

The question ignored here is: why philosophy? If philosophy only breaks our hearts, then why is it preserved ? Why do we spread the heartbreaking virus and scorn an unexamined life as not worth living? Is this not a return of the crucified hero, who also is stapled to a T?

Why dispel illusions? And if no eternal truth can be obtained in the first place, is an illusion still an illusion? If so, with respect to what? When ordinary notions of illusion and reality get inflated to metaphysical entities, the utility of the distinction shrivels.

My position is that philosophy matters. Bacon defends it in these terms. The eyes, the feet, the hands and other organs in direct contact with the world resented having to carry the stomach around, not realizing that they all derived their might from the stomach. Similarly philosophy feeds all the more immediately practical discourses. Or (alternatively) is a general who helps the troops from behind the lines.

But I'm suggesting that seeing knowledge as evolving is seeing its timeless essence as evolution and change. — jjAmEs

Now you've gotten into the type of contradiction I warned about. Change requires time, it cannot be timeless. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think you're understanding me. 'Knowledge is unstable' is posited as something stable about knowledge. 'It's the nature or essence of knowledge to adapt.' Or, more generally, 'everything changes except change itself.' So flux itself (in the abstract) is made the static being that can be glimpsed lurking behind a becoming that is itself recast as a succession of pseudo-beings and their associated pseudo-knowledges. As one person suggested, Nietzsche is Plato turned upside down. But inversion is a simple transformation.

Do you not see the problem with your representation? If someone states "truth is impossible", then it's very clear that they are not presenting this as a truth. To represent this as if the person were stating what is believed to be a "truth", is an obvious a misinterpretation. It's a classic straw man. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that a charitable interpretation should take such a statement as a kind of exaggeration. At best they are hinting toward an attitude that I find congenial. 'Nothing is true!' It seems bold at first, but it's a bluff. It's a safe sophomoric slop, while admittedly showing a certain flexible worldly wisdom at the same time.

There's a difference between claiming that there is no such thing as truth, and claiming that we do not have direct access to truth. If Truth requires God, then claiming that we have no direct access to Truth still admits to a belief in God, because it is implied that there is a Truth (therefore God) which we do not have access to. Atheism implies that there is no such thing as Truth, when Truth requires God. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. I had this kind of thing in mind:

HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" ULTIMATELY BECAME A FABLE
THE HISTORY OF AN ERROR
1. The true world, attainable to the sage, the pious man and the man of virtue,—he lives in it, he is it.

(The most ancient form of the idea was relatively clever, simple, convincing. It was a paraphrase of the proposition "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world which is unattainable for the moment, is promised to the sage, to the pious man and to the man of virtue ("to the sinner who repents").

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more evasive,—It becomes a woman, it becomes Christian.)

3. The true world is unattainable, it cannot be proved, it cannot promise anything; but even as a thought, alone, it is a comfort, an obligation, a command.

(At bottom this is still the old sun; but seen through mist and scepticism: the idea has become sublime, pale, northern, Königsbergian.)[1]

4. The true world—is it unattainable? At all events it is unattained. And as unattained it is also unknown. Consequently it no longer comforts, nor saves, nor constrains: what could something unknown constrain us to?

(The grey of dawn. Reason stretches itself and yawns for the first time. The cock-crow of positivism.)

5. The "true world"—an idea that no longer serves any purpose, that no longer constrains one to anything,—a useless idea that has become quite superfluous, consequently an exploded idea: let us abolish it!

(Bright daylight; breakfast; the return of common sense and of cheerfulness; Plato blushes for shame and all free-spirits kick up a shindy.)

6. We have suppressed the true world: what world survives? the apparent world perhaps?... Certainly not! In abolishing the true world we have also abolished the world of appearance!

(Noon; the moment of the shortest shadows; the end of the longest error; mankind's zenith; Incipit Zarathustra.)
— Nietzsche

While I can't join Nietzsche in his high noon ecstasy, he's good for seeing the roleplay from the outside .

'I, Plato am the Truth' becomes a half-skeptical religion of truth-at-a-distance. Personally I'd think of identifying (1) and (6) to get a circle. Nietzsche surely felt that he was the truth in his ecstatic moments.

So there are several meaningless neologisms, several semantic problems, and these render the entire paragraph completely non-sensical. — god must be atheist

The prose is terrible, but this is clearer.

By tacitly approaching reality through the lenses of this Nietzschean ontotheology, we increasingly come to understand and so to treat all entities as intrinsically-meaningless “resources” (Bestand) standing by for efficient and flexible optimization. It is (to cut a long story short) this nihilistic technologization of reality that Heidegger’s later thinking is dedicated to finding a path beyond.[23] For Heidegger, true art opens just such a path, one that can guide us beyond enframing’s ontological “commandeering of everything into assured availability” (PLT 84/GA5 72), as we will see in section 3.

First, however, we need to understand how subjectivism leads beyond itself into enframing. Put simply, subjectivism becomes enframing when the subject objectifies itself—that is, when the human subject, seeking to master and control all aspects of its objective reality, turns that impulse to control the world of objects back onto itself. If we remember that modern subjectivism designates the human subject’s quest to achieve total control over all objective aspects of reality, then we can see that late-modern enframing emerges historically out of subjectivism as subjectivism increasingly transforms the human subject itself into just another object to be controlled. Enframing, we could say, is subjectivism squared (or subjectivism applied back to the subject). For, the subjectivist impulse to master reality redoubles itself in enframing, even though enframing’s objectification of the subject dissolves the very subject/object division that initially drove the subject’s relentless efforts to master the objective world standing over against it (Thomson 2005). Subjectivism “somersaults beyond itself” in our late-modern age of “enframing” because the impulse to control everything intensifies and accelerates even as it breaks free of its modern moorings and circles back on the subject itself, turning the human subject into just one more object to be mastered and controlled—until the modern subject becomes just another late-modern entity to be efficiently optimized along with everything else. We are thus moving from modern subjectivism to the late-modern enframing of reality insofar as we understand and relate to all things, ourselves included, as nothing but intrinsically-meaningless “resources” standing by for endless optimization. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/#ModSubLatModEnfAes

Heidegger captures something about us, perhaps. Marx is probably helpful too. Our practical behavior is more abstract these days. Quality is quantified. Perhaps I make low-quality or ugly things because they sell when I'd prefer to make quality or beautiful things. Maybe our dreary practical situation is especially ugly in some way lately, but it's hard to imagine being saved entirely from unromantic compromise.

Heidegger reminds me of Wordsworth's famous sonnet.

Wordsworth gives a fatalistic view of the world, past and future. The words "late and soon" in the opening verse describe how the past and future are included in his characterization of mankind. The author knows the potential of humanity's "powers", but fears it is clouded by the mentality of "getting and spending." The "sordid boon" we have "given our hearts" is the materialistic progress of mankind. The detriment society has on the environment will proceed unchecked and relentless like the "winds that will be howling at all hours". The speaker complains that "the world" is too overwhelming for us to appreciate it, and that people are so concerned about time and money that they use up all their energy. These people want to accumulate material goods, so they see nothing in Nature that they can "own", and have sold their souls.[citation needed]

Unlike society, Wordsworth does not see nature as a commodity. The verse "Little we see in Nature that is ours", shows that coexisting is the relationship envisioned. We should be able to appreciate beautiful events like the moon shining over the ocean and the blowing of strong winds, but it is almost as if humans are on a different wavelength from Nature. The "little we see in Nature that is ours" exemplifies the removed sentiment man has for nature, being obsessed with materialism and other worldly objects. Wordsworth's Romanticism is best shown through his appreciation of nature in these lines and his woes for man and its opposition to nature. The relationship between Nature and man appears to be at the mercy of mankind because of the vulnerable way nature is described. The verse "This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon", gives the vision of a feminine creature opening herself to the heavens above. The phrase "sleeping flowers" might also describe how nature is being overrun unknowingly and is helpless.[citation needed]

The verse "I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn", reveals Wordsworth's perception of himself in society: a visionary romantic more in touch with nature than his contemporaries. — link

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

My choice is to seek clarity among the darkness, not to add more darkness to the darkness. — David Mo

Fair enough, but note the metaphor of light/darkness. I don't object to this making of clarity or light as hero. To the contrary. I'm just shining a light on our metaphorical/mythical framing of the project as the shining of a light.

If everyone - including myself - is so unstable that they can be what they are now and a thousand other things without any control, where is the sense of the world? What is my reason for trying to act in one way or another? — David Mo

To me this concern feeds in to identity as something that endures. An essence weathers many moments. You also mention control. I'm suggesting that we need orientation and control, with control guided by predictions. 'If I do X, then this happens. If I do Y, then this happens.' It seems to me that the imagination is largely for running simulations.

This is the impetus for any kind of necesity inside or outside this world. Laws of nature or immortal gods. May they bless us or may they crush us, but may they exist. — David Mo

Yes, we need some structure to exist. Even an unfriendly structure is a comfort if contrasted with chaos. Bad laws with the rule of law can be better than good laws that aren't enforced or respected.

This is a little off-topic, is it not? — David Mo

Maybe. Maybe not. The whole game of subject-versus-object is situated in human existence with its fears and hopes. What problem is it intended to solve? Who or what is the philosopher trying to be?

There are optimistic and pessimistic myths. Cruel, submissive, rebellious or stupid. Some express the best human wishes and others the worst. They are usually the product of power societies and prescribe relationships of domination. What kind of wisdom can claim one thing and its opposite?

Myths are not bad science. Myths are ideology. They can suggest at best. They can never explain. — David Mo

What does explain? E = mc^2 ? How is the mere presentation of a pattern an explanation? Whatever its faults, pragmatism is shrewd for seeing explanation in the context of the rest of our activity. And instrumentalism as a philosophy of science sees us as tool-users to want to master our environment. Natural science helps us master the physical environment. The human sciences and religion have helped us master the social environment. What I have in mind is a holistic grasp of all the habits of a group of humans, including their verbal habits, as a total response to their precarious situation. The goal is not just an accurate staring at the given but rather successful practice. Phronesis.

Myths are ideology. — David Mo

Does anyone live without ideology? Without orienting myth? I doubt it. One popular ideology is that of being post-ideological. 'Ideology' is always applied ideologically. Enlightenment's favorite myth is the autonomous human being, who smells just like the God he has to kill and supersede. So our ideology involves the notion of being lifted up above the superstitions that kept us in a gape-mouthed, childlike state. So runs the myth, perhaps. And yet what is missed is that people identity with their gods. The king and the priest and righteous man were not cringing servants but rather sons acting in the name of the Father. Enlightenment just radicalizes the patriarchy of the word. Rationality becomes the Inner Light.

Explanation subsumes the contingent (individual) in the necessary (universal). — David Mo

For scientific explanation, this makes sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive-nomological_model

At the same time, reality is messier than that. We can't explain all the ways in which we use or all the meanings of 'explain.' If meaning is determined by context, then context is boundless. Though obviously we can use our marks and noises well enough to survive this long as a species and as individuals.

Of course, explanation has practical and emotional consequences. The former are evident: science is the most resilient example. The latter are less evident: contingency is anguishing. We have two options: we mitigate contingency with satisfying explanations or we face it. The former leads to positivism. The latter to existentialism. Take these words in a wide sense again, please. — David Mo

Why is contingency anguishing? I think it's fear of the future. So what we really want is protection against the future. Maybe it's a forecast. Maybe it's an afterlife. Desire, fear, time, knowledge. And time is especially futurity for desire and fear.

One way to escape time is to gaze on the forms, on the eternal structure of human cognition, on the essence of science or rationality, on the temporal structure of existence, etc.

Is the positivist just the existentialist who is too cool to talk about feelings ? Maybe not quite that, because the more famous existentialists tended to have their causes. So perhaps the positivist (not Comte but later types) is grimmer or meaner or more detached than that. Hobbes was mentioned earlier. He's a kind of positivist. 'If you monkeys don't want to die young and poor, then try this.' He names his book after a monster. (I relate to that monstrosity, to the degree that rational philosophy has the eyes of a dragon. Trying to see human nature and notions of good and evil from the outside is 'wicked,' in that it climbs if possible above every loyalty but one.)

when obliged to clarify what they understand by God they stray into a world of contradictions, negations and darkness. — David Mo

As another hyper-critical atheist, I agree that intellectualized theism tends to stray into contradictions, differences that make no difference, gestures toward ineffability, etc. At the same, I don't feel adoration for Maxwell's laws but only admiration for the ingenuity that made them possible. To me (non-human) 'Nature' is a 'stupid' machine. Why am I attached to being rational? Much of it is pragmatic. I don't want to eat bad food, waste my money, be taken in by the wishful thinking of others in ways that will harm me in the usual, animal ways. But it's also 'irrationally' a matter of style. You say you don't like gloom. But isn't a certain gloom natural enough now and then in a godless world? Along with a certain ecstasy? The species with all its new toys is on a wild ride, and yet its eyes still gleam with dreams of something beyond it all. Except for us critical types, and yet that too is a dream. I at least confess that I am biased toward my atheism and mitigated skepticism. It was not the result of some clean calculation. We don't choose our faces or the thinkers we respond to. I am the product of my environment, or so my environment has forced me to believe.

And on myths as bad science...myths and rituals are richer than that. And I suggest that the non-philosophically religious get something from it, something anti-gloom and optimistic. If all is made fair in the afterlife, then horror becomes a kind of illusion. For me, an atheist, it's no illusion. And death is the utter annihilation of the individual. At the same time, we can tune in while still alive to what is universally great in the human experience, which is basically all the highest forms of relating to others, both directly and through culture. Death loses its sting when we lose ourselves in love (including in the love of theory.) And, along these lines, reincarnation is metaphorically correct. So is 'he who seeks to save his life shall lose it.' What I'm getting at is that religious myths are suggestive and flexible enough to be read more or less literally. This interpretative continuum makes it hard to reduce all religious thought to bad philosophy or bad science. Much of it is wisdom writing, psychology and sociology in narrative form, etc. And then myths are just pre-rationally potent as incitements.

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

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

You might be inclined to say "ok well this person is smarter than me at math, but that doesn't make them right about race/sex/etc!" Except this person says that math stuff proves their opinions about race/sex/etc. And they give you a complicated argument involving lots of math that you can't really follow, that concludes that straight white cis men are objectively superior to people of other races, sexes, genders, and orientations. — Pfhorrest

First thing that occurs to me is that philosophy is appealing partly because it helps with just this kind of situation. I first liked it as a kind of super-science of authority. What's good? What's true? Pretty soon it's what if anything gives a person the right to answer those questions authoritatively?

In this situation, I'd attack the phrase 'objectively superior.' Isn't superior a value judgment? If one defines superiority in terms of terms of a statistic, then of course a case can be made (if one chooses just the right statistic) that this or that group is 'superior.' But if we generalize this and include other arbitrary and perhaps fuzzier metrics, then much of what humans do is make cases for the superiority of this or that group. Nonracists are better than racists because... The examined life is better than the unexamined life (which is not even worth living) because...

Can any system of reasons protect us individually from occasionally fearing that we may have it all wrong? Or a big piece of it wrong? Perhaps our acceptance of our mortality is even connected to an attachment to Kundera's not-so-unbearable lightness of being (less unbearable with time and jadedness.) I don't know if Democritus laughed as much as he was thought to, but the notion that it's atoms and voids beneath our passions, dreams, and violence is comforting. No one is wrong or right or confused for long. Though it's fun to be puffed up in the meantime.

f I put on my Heidegger hat, I say that we can only break enframing by means of a radical antihumanist shift. Only a God can save us, because only a God can subordinate mankind in the way necessary for an antihumanist (thus post-technological) turn in society to occur. We are not post-Gestell until we are posthumanist, and this cannot occur in terms of a philosophy that smuggles in the old enlightenment conceits - and this is precisely where most contemporary attempts fail.

Thought? — Pneumenon

What comes to my mind is that our crazy times make us nostalgic for a past we've only lived imaginatively. To what degree is the later Heidegger a newfangled romantic?

In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism[7] and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism. — link

To me a case could be made that only humanism could save us. And even then I can imagine wars between different flavors of global humanism.

And then there's the issue of whether we actually need saving. Do we hate our times or love them? Do we regret being born? Most of us can imagine a better world, of course. But what would saving be but some kind of end of history? Which would also be a kind of death.

Yes that, but also I mean that culture itself is not any kind of unity in the sense of being organically complete like an organism is thought to be. It is more like a shifting river. — Janus

Ah, well I agree that organism is not a perfect metaphor then. For me the main idea is that our beliefs are entangled in a kind of system. We meet each new claim with years of sedimented experience.

If such a maximalist concept of explanation is adopted, nothing is an explanation. — David Mo

I agree with that criticism. My most considered view is that the meaning of 'explanation' depends on context. Even then that meaning is strictly determinate (for reasons that Derrida is famous for presenting.)

Metaphors don't explain. They suggest. Obviously, religion is the opposite to explanation because reduces the known to unknown. It is a pseudo-explanantion because uses the form of an explanation, not its clearing power. — David Mo

I find the situation more complicated. Although I'm an atheist (which I mentioned to be excused from the expected bias), I think that religious myth has a metaphysical function among other functions. I do like your notion that explanation connects the unknown to the known, or the unfamiliar to the familiar. But I think we find that in analogy, metaphor, and myth.

The creation myth is one example. If one believes that a human-like creator is responsible for all that is, then an unknown cause or the (psycho-)logical impossibility of a cause is replaced with a human-like intention. A total darkness is made user-friendly and familiar. For believers, God is not unknown, or not primarily unknown. God is what makes sense and what makes the world makes sense.

What is the 'clearing power' of explanation? For me there are roughly two kinds of power to be had, practical and emotional, which can be emphasized respectively in the directions of technology and religion. (This is an oversimplification, of course, but perhaps it clarifies.)

Recognizing that one's own knowledge, and human knowledge in general, is deficient, is not to see knowledge in terms of timeless truths, but to see knowledge and principles as changing and evolving. — Metaphysician Undercover

Indeed. But I'm suggesting that seeing knowledge as evolving is seeing its timeless essence as evolution and change. So a skeptic in this sense ultimately believes that knowledge won't achieve some kind of perfection, stop changing, etc.

Or to make this more concrete: we have some Kantians in this thread and also some mystics. The Kantians 'know' that the mystics can't really have access to metaphysical truths but only to the meta-metaphysical truth that such access is impossible. The mystics simply ignore this. I'm more a Kantian personally, but one could argue that the metametaphysical belief is still just a metaphysical belief that puffs itself up.

In the same way, I think it's fair to say that the atheist has a certain bias toward atheism just as the theist has a bias toward theism. People find arguments (largely) after the fact. As I read your position, you'd probably reject those who make claims of direct access to Truth, since your basic position seems to be that we are stuck at a certain distance from this object of our longing. The Monet effect. But I'd guess that you don't like truth-scorning pragmatism (because you include metaphysics in your handle.)

In my experience, there's a spectrum that runs from mysticism/religion all the way to intense pragmatism and even irrationalism. In between we get critical metaphysics, scientism, etc. And people don't much move from these positions but only get better at defending and presenting them. (Maybe I'm joining the skeptic here, saying that the essence of the mind is to stay put when it a certain existential problem is mostly solved.)

Authors in the first group expect from physics the true vision of things-in-themselves that religious myth and philosophical speculation have hitherto been unable to supply. Their explanation makes no sense unless (i) there is, 'beneath the sense appearances revealed to us by our perceptions, [...] a reality different from these appearances' and (ii) we know 'the nature of the elements which constitute' that reality (p 7). Thus, physical theory cannot explain — link

It occurs to me that this argument itself seems metaphysical, or at least meta-metaphysical is some quasi-Kantian sense..which supports the quote from Quine. It is hard indeed to get that desired-by-some clean separation of metaphysics from what it threatens to 'contaminate.'
https://youtu.be/UneS2Uwc6xw?t=58

Even 'skeptics' find themselves asserting timeless truths about human cognition. — jjAmEs

I found this on the instrumentalism Wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Kant apparently presumed that the human mind, rather than a phenomenon itself that had evolved, had been predetermined and set forth upon the formation of humankind. In any event, the mind also was the veil of appearance that scientific methods could never lift. — link

What did Kant make of the brain? Was his philosophy only as stable as the human brain? Did it have a kind of timeless spiritual substance as its foundation? To which the brain is only empirically and uncertainly related? Is pure reason brain independent? Can pure reason prove its own stability to itself? Or if time is just its own creation or mode of revelation, what then?

Duhem resolutely sides with the latter. His rejection of the former rests on his understanding of 'explanation' ('explication' in French), which he expresses as follows: 'To explain, explicare, is to divest reality from the appearances which enfold it like veils, in order to see the reality face to face' (pp 3–4). — link

What's interesting here is the metaphor of stripping reality naked, of unveiling or unmasking it.

Duhem instead assigns to physical theories a more modest but autonomous and readily attainable aim: 'A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, derived from a small number of principles, whose purpose is to represent a set of experimental laws as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible (Duhem 1914, p. 24)". — link

Perhaps those with more physics training can correct me if I am wrong. But it's my impression that laws of nature (patterns expected in measurements) tend to be 'timeless' or invariant. So finding patterns persistent patterns in observations is like seeing 'behind' or 'through' change to the the structure that persists in it. In this sense, Duhem's metaphor of divestment remains active, which helps explain why we tend to talk in terms of scientific explanation, despite the plausibility of certain objections.

If science doesn't explain, what does explain? Do religious myths explain? Are they to some degree a kind of science of human nature, expressed in metaphors? I'm tempted to contrast equations with metaphors, though I don't see how equations evade being organized in a largely metaphorical body of thought when connected to the world and their application.

If Hadot is right, then philosophy has at times been more about a way of life that included knowledge rather than a quasi-scientific endeavor. Pragmatic instrumentalism actually returns to this centrality of life, but usually with a worldly, irreligious spirit. An individual, eclectic reader --who is not terribly interested in adopting and defending this or that -ism -- can get 'spiritual insight' from one author and worldly metacognition from another. To me it seems plausible that philosophy is a gallery of metaphors, linked logically, with a range of applications. In another thread someone asks if philosophy is dead. Strange question! Is reading Pascal really comparable to reading a physics textbook?

Right, although the "entirety of our culture" is itself piecemeal... — Janus

Do you mean that we hardly share a single culture these days? If so, I agree.

I'm glad someone else liked that quote. 'As simply, completely, and exactly as possible' means also perhaps as economically or efficiently as possible.

I found another quote that may add to this thread, with the theme of holism.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections - the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement - especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle? — Quine

https://coursys.sfu.ca/2015fa-phil-880-g1/pages/quine1/view

To me this is one of those things that's obvious when pointed out. We meet the world not piecemeal but with the entirely of our culture.

Here's a nice quote regarding the relationship between something like Kantianism and science. It's a long, illuminating footnote from the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism#cite_note-Torretti-Duhem-3

Roberto Torretti, The Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 242–43: "Like Whewell and Mach, Duhem was a practicing scientist who devoted an important part of his adult life to the history and philosophy of physics. ... His philosophy is contained in La théorie physique: son objet, sa structure [The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory] (1906), which may well be, to this day, the best overall book on the subject. Its main theses, although quite novel when first put forward, have in the meantime become commonplace, so I shall review them summarily without detailed argument, just to associate them with his name. But first I ought to say that neither in the first nor in the second (1914) edition of his book did Duhem take into account—or even so much as mention—the deep changes that were then taking place in physics. Still, the subsequent success and current entrenchment of Duhem's ideas are due above all to their remarkable agreement with—and the light they throw on—the practice of mathematical physics in the twentieth century. In the first part of La théorie physique, Duhem contrasts two opinions concerning the aim of physical theory. For some authors, it ought to furnish 'the explanation of a set of experimentally established laws', while for others it is 'an abstract system whose aim is to summarize and logically classify a set of experimental laws, without pretending to explain these laws' (Duhem 1914, p. 3). Duhem resolutely sides with the latter. His rejection of the former rests on his understanding of 'explanation' ('explication' in French), which he expresses as follows: 'To explain, explicare, is to divest reality from the appearances which enfold it like veils, in order to see the reality face to face' (pp 3–4). Authors in the first group expect from physics the true vision of things-in-themselves that religious myth and philosophical speculation have hitherto been unable to supply. Their explanation makes no sense unless (i) there is, 'beneath the sense appearances revealed to us by our perceptions, [...] a reality different from these appearances' and (ii) we know 'the nature of the elements which constitute' that reality (p 7). Thus, physical theory cannot explain—in the stated sense—the laws established by experiment unless it depends on metaphysics and thus remains subject to the interminable disputes of metaphysicians. Worse still, the teachings of no metaphysical school are sufficiently detailed and precise to account for all of the elements of physical theory (p 18). Duhem instead assigns to physical theories a more modest but autonomous and readily attainable aim: 'A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, derived from a small number of principles, whose purpose is to represent a set of experimental laws as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible (Duhem 1914, p. 24)". — link

As philosophers we might seek that eternal truth, but when all we find is the deficiencies of human knowledge we are deprived of that pleasure. Philosophy doesn't offer us that pleasure, it dispels the illusion that we might obtain it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps, but does it not offer us nevertheless the pleasure of being wised up about our situation? If it didn't put us in a superior position, why would we spread it, cultivate it, pride ourselves on its study?

And how can we trust that our knowledge is deficient if knowledge of such deficiency is a part of that knowledge? It's hard to avoid positive claims and still do philosophy. Even 'skeptics' find themselves asserting timeless truths about human cognition.

He forgot about someone who had already claimed the priority of praxis over theoretical knowledge: Marx. — David Mo

Marx is a good mention. Dewey even briefly touches on priority of theoretical knowledge and its relationship to class. The elite man is (or was) a man of theoretical leisure, a leisure made possible by slaves, inherited wealth, etc.

If we take the basic idea of pragmatism that objective reality is limited to that which we manipulate, how is resistance to our manipulation understood? It seems that praxis has to take into account reality's potential of adversity. I think pragmatism lacks some dialectics. It conceives of science as an ongoing success, rather than a contradiction between success and failure. That is the objective reality that escapes pragmatic optimism. And this is the subject's emergence. — David Mo

I like your themes. I do think pragmatism is (at its best) more sophisticated than your description of it, though---which is not to say that it's a last word or doesn't have problems.

My basic intuition has always been that there are real ideas - real, not because there in someone’s mind, as we are naturally inclined to believe nowadays, but real in the domain of pure intelligibility. I think Plato intuited that but it’s a very difficult thing to grasp. — Wayfarer

But I can’t help but feel there’s some hidden wellspring of vitality which is missed by those criticisms. — Wayfarer

Perhaps the timelessness or eternity of such a realm is what seduces. How are knowledge and time connected? In general, philosophers especially have sought imperishable knowledge. They have gazed at and described structures which are constantly present for those with eyes to see. Their descriptions are poetic acts that have given others these eyes to see. Even this way of looking at philosophical knowledge is itself caught up in that mission --in the articulation of the timeless essence of philosophy as the articulation of timeless essences.

In that sense philosophy is something like theory as religion.

The view which isolates knowledge, contemplation, liking, interest, value, or whatever from action is itself a survival of the notion that there are beings which can exist and be known apart from active connection with other things.

When man finds he is not a little god in his active powers and accomplishments, he retains his former conceit by hugging to his bosom the notion that nevertheless in some realm, be it knowledge or esthetic contemplation, he is still outside of and detached from the ongoing sweep of interacting and changing events; and being there alone and irresponsible save to himself, is as a god. — Dewey

Philosophy offers us the pleasure of stepping out of time with all its risks and rottenness.

Since Dewey wrote in English, he should have his own say.

The office of physical science is to discover those properties and relations of things in virtue of which they are capable of being used as instrumentalities; physical science makes claim to disclose not the inner nature of things but only those connections of things with one another that determine outcomes and hence can be used as means. The intrinsic nature of events is revealed in experience as the immediately felt qualities of things. The intimate coordination and even fusion of these qualities with the regularities that form the objects of knowledge, in the proper sense of the word "knowledge," characterizes intelligently directed experience, as distinct from mere casual and uncritical experience.

This conception of the instrumental nature of the objects of scientific knowing forms the pivot upon which further discussion turns. That character of everyday experience which has been most systematically ignored by philosophy is the extent to which it is saturated with the results of social intercourse and communication. Because this factor has been denied, meanings have either been denied all objective validity, or have been treated as miraculous extra-natural intrusions. If, however, language, for example, is recognized as the instrument of social cooperation and mutual participation, continuity is established between natural events (animal sound, cries, etc.) and the origin and development of meanings. Mind is seen to be a function of social interactions, and to be a genuine character of natural events when these attain the stage of widest and most complex interaction with one another. Ability to respond to meanings and to employ them, instead of reacting merely to physical contacts, makes the difference between man and other animals; it is the agency for elevating man into the realm of what is usually called the ideal and spiritual. In other words, the social participation affected by communication, through language and other tools, is the naturalistic link which does away with the often alleged necessity of dividing the objects of experience into two worlds, one physical and one ideal. — Dewey

Later in Experience and Nature, we get:

The distinctively intellectual attitude which marks scientific inquiry was generated in efforts at controlling persons and things so that consequences, issues, outcomes would be more stable and assured. The first step away from oppression by immediate things and events was taken when man employed tools and appliances, for manipulating things so as to render them contributory to desired objects. In responding to things not in their immediate qualities but for the sake of ulterior results, immediate qualities are dimmed, while those features which are signs, indices of something else, are distinguished. A thing is more significantly what it makes possible than what it immediately is. The very conception of cognitive meaning, intellectual significance, is that things in their immediacy are subordinated to what they portend and give evidence of. An intellectual sign denotes that a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to some thing that may come in consequence of it. Intellectual meanings may themselves be appropriated, enjoyed and appreciated; but the character of intellectual meaning is instrumental.
...
In principle the step is taken whenever objects are so reduced from their status of complete objects as to be treated as signs or indications of other objects. Enter upon this road and the time is sure to come when the appropriate object-of-knowledge is stripped of all that is immediate and qualitative, of all that is final, self-sufficient. Then it becomes an anatomized epitome of just and only those traits which are of indicative or instrumental import. — Dewey

https://archive.org/stream/experienceandnat029343mbp/experienceandnat029343mbp_djvu.txt

As I read him, we (or certain philosophers) have tended to take these constantly present 'handles' or 'signs' as the 'real' being of the object.

Instrumentalism is one alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

The empirical basis of the distinction between the apparent and the non-apparent thus lies in the need for inference. When we take the outstandingly evident as evidence, its status is subordinate to that of unperceived things. For the nonce, it is a way of establishing some- thing more fundamental than it is itself with respect to the object of inquiry. If we conceive of the world of immediately apparent things as an emergence of peaks of mountains which are submerged except as to their peaks or endings, and as a world of initial climbings whose subsequent career emerges above the surface only here and there and by fits and starts; and if we give attention to the fact that any ability of control whatever depends upon ability to unite these disparate appearances into a serial history, and then give due attention to the fact that connection into a consecutive history can be effected only by means of a scheme of constant relationships (a condition met by the mathematical-logical-mechanical objects of physics), we shall have no difficulty in seeing why it is that the immediate things from which we start lend themselves to interpretation as signs or appearances of the objects of physics; while we also recognize that it is only with respect to the function of instituting connection that the objects of physics can be said to be more "real." In the total situation in which they function, they are means to weaving together otherwise disconnected beginnings and endings into a consecutive history. Underlying "reality" and surface "appearance" in this connection have a meaning fixed by the function of inquiry, not an intrinsic metaphysical meaning. — Dewey

The only perfectly consistent expression of 'is' is found in mathematics and logic. Otherwise it's just a useful approximation. — Wayfarer

As I read your 'approximation,' it implies something like an essence that is being approximated. 'Even though we don't know exactly what we are talking about, that something is determinate nevertheless.' But why should the sound/mark 'is' have some fixed, exact meaning? In general we use words together and not alone, and in non-theoretical situation.

Dewey's approach seems solid -- and reminds me of Heidegger, who was mentioned earlier.

Opposing narrow-minded positions that would accord full ontological status only to certain, typically the most stable or reliable, aspects of experience, Dewey argues for a position that recognizes the real significance of the multifarious richness of human experience.

Dewey offered a fuller statement of his metaphysics in 1925, with the publication of one of his most significant philosophical works, Experience and Nature. In the introductory chapter, Dewey stresses a familiar theme from his earlier writings: that previous metaphysicians, guided by unavowed biases for those aspects of experience that are relatively stable and secure, have illicitly reified these biases into narrow ontological presumptions, such as the temporal identity of substance, or the ultimate reality of forms or essences. Dewey finds this procedure so pervasive in the history of thought that he calls it simply the philosophic fallacy, and signals his intention to eschew the disastrous consequences of this approach by offering a descriptive account of all of the various generic features of human experience, whatever their character.

Dewey begins with the observation that the world as we experience it both individually and collectively is an admixture of the precarious, the transitory and contingent aspect of things, and the stable, the patterned regularity of natural processes that allows for prediction and human intervention. Honest metaphysical description must take into account both of these elements of experience. Dewey endeavors to do this by an event ontology. The world, rather than being comprised of things or, in more traditional terms, substances, is comprised of happenings or occurrences that admit of both episodic uniqueness and general, structured order. Intrinsically events have an ineffable qualitative character by which they are immediately enjoyed or suffered, thus providing the basis for experienced value and aesthetic appreciation. Extrinsically events are connected to one another by patterns of change and development; any given event arises out of determinant prior conditions and leads to probable consequences. The patterns of these temporal processes is the proper subject matter of human knowledge--we know the world in terms of causal laws and mathematical relationships--but the instrumental value of understanding and controlling them should not blind us to the immediate, qualitative aspect of events; indeed, the value of scientific understanding is most significantly realized in the facility it affords for controlling the circumstances under which immediate enjoyments may be realized. — IEP

https://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/

but rather by training themselves to respond to stimulation (internal and external) with appropriate activity. Most of which, in humans uniquely, involves manipulation of, or preparation to manipulate, actual, external, symbols.

...What we mistakenly theorise as the presence of actual, internal ones. — bongo fury

That sounds right. We are trained to employ the language as a whole. Afterwards we can argue about what 'subject' or 'justice' or 'being' mean. But this is us trying to make our training explicit by coughing up yet more words that aren't rigorously defined. Have we reason to think that it's a finite task? In the meantime we have to live, which means that we just rely on our training and muddle through, occasionally clarifying this or that blockage in the flow of our conversations or readings. Perhaps our training is the only foundation we can hope for.

Derrida is on par with Zizek in my view -- a completely incoherent waste of time. — Xtrix

Hi. For you and anyone who hates Derrida's style, here's an interpreter they might find more palatable. The interpreted essay is linked in a comment above.
http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf

I can understand the frustration with Zizek as writer, though he's great in interviews.

yet appear to make sense by spitting out streams of words and pretending they have full control of them. — I like sushi

I agree that we don't have full control of our steams of words.

We don’t know what time is, what gravity is, nor what a bloody chair is. — I like sushi

I agree that we don't (exactly) know WTF we are talking about when we use words like chair or gravity or time.

Nor is the approach of Derrida much use here as he’d only mock the situation and ask ‘does existence exist?’ or some other flatulence. — I like sushi

What's strange is an attack (?) on Derrida in a post that uses one of his key ideas --that authorial intention does not control meaning. I don't ever know 'absolutely' WTF I am talking about. I drive nails somehow with the hammer of language. Somehow I bark the right-enough sounds and scratch the right-enough symbols and survive decade after decade in a high-tech society.

For a writing to be a writing it must continue to "act" and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written "in his name. " One could repeat at this point the analysis outlined above this time with regard to the addressee. The situation of the writer and of the underwriter [du souscripteur: the signatory, trans. ] is, concerning the written text, basically the same as that of the reader. This essential drift [derive] bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority, orphaned and separated at birth from the assistance of its father, is precisely what Plato condemns in the Phaedrus. If Plato's gesture is, as I believe, the philosophical movement par excellence, one can measure what is at stake here. — Derrida

http://lab404.com/misc/ltdinc.pdf