Ah yes, I'm well aware. But what's that got to do with issue at hand?

I realize that we are antipodes on some vague attitude level. I find the theme of usurpation way too earnest. It's a brand name. Who cares? 'False usurpers'? Seriously? But our issue involves the 'usurpers' of philosophy itself and not just pragmatism.

Let's compare 'no unanswerable questions and no unquestionable answers' (an excellent phrase) to what I quoted from a review of Groundless Grounds.

In other words, reason as a ground-giving activity cannot ground itself, but arises out of our situation in a world that is always already "there" before the question of grounds or reasons can arise in the first place. — review

In 'my' view, 'language is received like the law.' It's just one part of a world or form of life that we inherit that I might call a set of unquestionable answers --- which make a limited questioning possible in the first place. As to 'no unquestionable answers,' I'd be surprised if you didn't support the censorship or banning of various 'thought criminals' (you know, racists or homophobes or ..) But then any sane or decent person almost by definition refuses to question or even tolerate the questioning of certain norms. Unquestionable answers. And I don't see how one manages unanswerable questions without some systematic filter that calls most questions nonsense (like some positivist). Why is there a here here? I'd argue that that is unanswerable in principle.

I'm being an uncharitable reader of a fine phrase. I realize that. I guess I'm making the background of our little disagreement more explicit. But I'll agree that we are both in the same big tent known as philosophy. But I'll drag in Beckett and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. And politics and theology...Where we draw line is a matter of context and particular purpose.

I agree that there has been progress in many ways. What's strange is perhaps the sense of the finitude of the world. We're all trapped down here with the same virus and the same global warming and other global threats.

I wrote:

Some thinkers have tried to justify the trauma of human existence in terms of the coming attainment of immortality or utopia through technology. The old-fashioned version of this is just Heaven, but intellectuals secularized it.... Christianity is transformed into a secular religion of earthly progress. It's already in Bacon's last utopian work and Descartes' 'lords and masters of nature.' History is a nightmare from which we shall awake... — me

You wrote:

Our forbears began roughly 2 million years ago, did their bit towards ending suffering and passed on the baton to the next generation and it in turn did the same and here we are, at the present moment, playing our part in this chain of lives with the express purpose of ending the pain and suffering that comes with living.

Pandemics, disasters, wars, etc. are a part of this journey as much as sprains, fractures and even deaths are part of a relay race; the person who began the race and the person in the middle of the run will not make it to the finish line but, with courage, determination and a little bit of luck, someone will. — TheMadFool

Key to your vision seems to be an identification with that last runner who finally makes it at the end and justification of history. But clearly we enjoy a pleasure in anticipation now. Part of the joy in art and science is the joy in the joy that others will take in it. And this works even if humanity never escapes but only reduces suffering sufficiently so that life is clearly worth it. That few commit suicide suggests that most of us act as if life is already worth the suffering, though admittedly it's taboo and uncomfortable to check out early.

Anyway, I don't reject the religion of progress but only enjoy talking about it from the outside, making it explicit to take a certain distance from it. What is this pleasure taken in distancing? Such transcendence seems basic to the pugnacious philosophical personality.

Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?
...
Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.
...
Like most philosophers, Kant worked to shore up the conventional beliefs of his time. Schopenhauer did the opposite. Accepting the arguments of Hume and Kant that the world is unknowable, he concluded that both the world and the individual subject that imagines it knows it are maya, dreamlike constructions with no basis in reality. ... Schopenhauer accepted the sceptical side of Kant's philosophy and turned it against him. Kant demonstrated that we are trapped in the world of phenomena and cannot know things in themselves. Schopenhauer went one step further and observed that we ourselves belong in the world of appearances. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer was ready to follow his thoughts wherever they led. Kant argued that unless we accept that we are autonomous, freely choosing selves we cannot make sense of our moral experience. Schopenhauer responded that our actual experience is not of freely choosing the way we live but of being driven along by our bodily needs - by fear, hunger and, above all, sex.
...
Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end. — Gray

Is John Gray right? If he's right, then he can't be right. He's one more dreamer. To me there's a kind of dark stand-up comedy in grim intellectualizing. I think Beckett had it right when he labelled Waiting For Godot a tragicomedy. What we have are speech acts which are ambiguous with respect to their earnestness. Derrida made a big deal of this in Limited Inc on page 106, with his own kind of serious joke against the serious/non-serious distinction. I think the OP is relatively earnest and its author fairly anti-Nietzschean. But I relate to the madness, irony, and endless ambiguity of Nietzsche.

We are never quite sure who we are or what exactly we mean. The words pour forth, speech acts that we are never done reinterpreting with...speech acts which we are never done reinterpreting...with ....

You might like this (and maybe already know about it).

On Rorty's account, modern epistemology is not only an attempt to legitimate our claim to knowledge of what is real, but also an attempt to legitimate philosophical reflection itself—a pressing task, on many accounts, once the advent of the so-called new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth century gradually gave content to a notion of knowledge obtained by the methodological interrogation of nature herself. Because the result of this kind of interrogation, theoretical empirical knowledge, is so obviously fruitful, and also carries with it seemingly uncontentious norms of progress, its mere presence poses a legitimation challenge to a form of thought, and claim to knowledge, that is distinct from it. Cartesian epistemology, in Rorty's picture, is designed to meet this challenge. It is sceptical in a fundamental way; sceptical doubts of a Cartesian sort, that is, doubts that can be raised about any set of empirical claims whatever, and so cannot be alleviated by experience, are tailor-made to preserve at once a domain and a job for philosophical reflection. Rorty's aim in PMN is to undermine the assumptions in light of which this double legitimation project makes sense. — link

And then from Rorty:

In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try. — Rorty

Cultural politics.

You might like these quotes.

Progress is a fact. Even so, faith in progress is a superstition. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions. The growth of knowledge is real and - barring a worldwide catastrophe - it is now irreversible. Improvements in government and society are no less real, but they are temporary. Not only can they be lost, they are sure to be. History is not progress or decline, but recurring gain and loss. The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.
...
Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence. If humans differ from other animals, it is partly in the conflicts of their instincts. They crave security, but they are easily bored; they are peace-loving animals, but they have an itch for violence; they are drawn to thinking, but at the same time they hate and fear the unsettlement thinking brings. There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied. Luckily, as the history of philosophy testifies, humans have a gift for self-deception, and thrive in ignorance of their natures.
...
Neither in the ancient pagan world nor in any other culture has human history ever been thought to have an overarching significance. In Greece and Rome, it was a series of natural cycles of growth and decline. In India, it was a collective dream, endlessly repeated. The idea that history must make sense is just a Christian prejudice. If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself. Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds. — John Gray

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)

To some degree, yes, but with Rorty, for instance, that's not so clear. A certain grand role for philosophy is abandoned. I'm pro-philosophy, by the way, and I've suggested that anti-philosophy has simply been assimilated by philosophy. It's a big tent.

Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. — James

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm

That's a pretty radical move. It's a speech from the exit on the way out.

Perhaps if we view the human project as a relay race rather than an individual race, it'll make more sense. — TheMadFool

That seems to be the essence of Hegel, and the critics find it Panglossian.

Enlightenment thinkers rejected the religious interpretation of history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of progress—the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study of the history of civilization (Condorcet 1795; Montesquieu 1748). Vico's philosophy of history seeks to identify a foundational series of stages of human civilization. Different civilizations go through the same stages, because human nature is constant across history (Pompa 1990). Rousseau (1762a; 1762b) and Kant (1784–5; 1784–6) brought some of these assumptions about rationality and progress into their political philosophies, and Adam Smith embodies some of this optimism about the progressive effects of rationality in his account of the unfolding of the modern European economic system (1776). This effort to derive a fixed series of stages as a tool of interpretation of the history of civilization is repeated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it finds expression in Hegel's philosophy (discussed below), as well as Marx's materialist theory of the development of economic modes of production (Marx and Engels 1845–49; Marx and Engels 1848). — link

The 'religion' of progress seems to be our secular replacement for a religion involving afterlife.

Yes that was my point. But a decision to be childless will affect no future person. — schopenhauer1

I hear you, and I feel a certain relief in not having forced someone into this maze. A different personality might feel guilty for not giving a new soul the opportunity of this maze. I've known great ecstasy and terrible suffering. I can't make a final judgment on life, though 'in youth is pleasure' makes sense to me. I'm losing the highs and the lows. It's the self-important dreams of youth that help light up life. The path of the grim sage is a strange one, and its haunted by divine laughter. 'Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.' I experience my own dark lines as a kind of stand-up comedy. As long as I stick around to gripe, I'm still invested. The gloomy existentialist still hopes for a piece of tail. The ideological violence is the rattle of a peacock feather, a seductive virtual eye of quasi-renunciation and pseudo-transcendence.

Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; and now I know it.

'My Own Epitaph' John Gay

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kohelet-ecclesiastes-full-text

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Worstward Ho! (Beckett)

This vid can be interpreted as a parody of metaphysics (also Beckett):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXoq_H9BrTE

This is nice too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpgOcWZHEcY

This last one is insanely concentrated: life is a mouth that can't shut up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LDwfKxr-M

If humanity can realize the absurdity as a whole community and instead of forcing people into the work of life, slowly diminish that work for future generations by simply not having them. — schopenhauer1

Absurd in relation to what, though? Do you see the self-eating snake? For some it's aesthetically justified. For these the extinction is the ultimate threat and not the ultimate release.

What is this vague sense of something that should be there that would be all things from absurdity? What is the meaning that would rescue humanity from meaninglessness? Even God seems like a vague approximation and not the god-shaped hole itself. Against what background are the doings of man absurd? What's he seen that he likes better? If not simply a more user-friendly environment? A new and improved Garden Of Delights?


I thought you might like this.

..we are approaching a time when, in Moravec's words, 'almost all humans work to amuse other humans.' In rich countries, that time has already arrived. The old industries have been exported to the developing world. At home, new occupations have evolved, replacing those of the industrial era. Many of them satisfy needs that in the past were repressed or disguised. A thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques has sprung up. Beyond that, there is an enormous grey economy of illegal industries supplying drugs and sex. The function of this new economy, legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which - though it is busier than ever before - secretly suspects that it is useless. Industrialisation created the working class. Now it has made the working class obsolete. Unless it is cut short by ecological collapse, it will eventually do the same to nearly everyone. — John Gray

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)

Even religion and finding meaning falls under "entertainment" here. These survival/comfort/entertainment pursuits create the epiphenomenal organizations of societal institutions which we then become ensnared in to keep our personal pursuits of survival, comfort, and entertainment continuously going. Thus we become enmeshed in keeping this gargantuan meaningless system that uses its participants from its epiphenomenal need to maintain its power, control, and legitimacy, in order for people to pursue the basic human conditions of survival, comfort, and entertainment. — schopenhauer1

I really have and continue to endure this vision. It's one lens on reality among others. I'd just add that 'meaningless' only makes sense if 'meaning' is grasped as some trans-biological vague thing that perhaps cannot be specified. Personally I think time is involved here. All things are perishable, therefore all things are meaningless. That seems to be the implicit logic. It's as if that we future-oriented beings crave/suppose something like a point at infinity (an eternal God or his surrogate) in order to feel grounded in our doings.

To me this connects with even non-parents depending on the endurance of the cub-petting system. If I fantasize that I'm clever enough to contribute to human progress (be a scientist or an artist), then I need posterity as the ground of my project. If we all knew that an asteroid would wipe us out in a few months, that would radically change the human situation. We'd be cast into the Dionysian mode of living for the moment that people belch about insincerely otherwise. The argument against the vices in which we find our ecstasy is the future. All work and discipline is aimed at the stage of the future. We postpone enjoyment. I don't eat ice cream now because I want to be seen as attractive on the beach later. I study boring tech stuff now so I'll live in a nice condo later. Perhaps now more than ever our enjoyment is in being seen a certain way, in a virtuality of success. Happiness is the glamour of being envied. It's more important to look rich than to be rich, given a certain level of actual security. And so on. Kundera writes beautifully on this in Immortality.

Rorty mentions this thinker as he discusses the shift from a concern with afterlife to a concern with the world our grandchildren will inherit. I wanted to find that original quote but found a passage relevant to this discuss instead.

The early text "Paradigms for a Metaphorology" explicates the idea of 'absolute metaphors', by way of examples from the history of ideas and philosophy. According to Blumenberg, metaphors of this kind, such as "the naked truth", are to be considered a fundamental aspect of philosophical discourse that cannot be replaced by concepts and reappropriated into the logicity of the 'actual'. The distinctness and meaning of these metaphors constitute the perception of reality as a whole, a necessary prerequisite for human orientation, thought and action.
...
Reflecting his studies of Husserl, Blumenberg's work concludes that in the last resort our potential scientific enlightenment finds its own subjective and anthropological limit in the fact that we are constantly falling back upon the imagery of our contemplations. — link

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

Perhaps much of philosophy involves dominant orienting metaphors whose effect is indirect. One does not quantify the effect of metaphors very easily, though one can compare forms of life in a loose way.

A recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality. The original French title of Whatever, Extension du domaine de la lutte (literally "broadening of the field of struggle"), alludes to economic competition extending into the search for relationships. As the book says, a free market has absolute winners and absolute losers, and the same applies to relationships in a society that does not value monogamy but rather exhorts people to seek the happiness that always eludes them through the path of sexual consumerism, in pursuit of narcissistic satisfaction. — link

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

I read his Platform first, which involves sex tourism and starts something like Camus' The Stranger.

His sci-fi The Possibility of an Island touches on something worth discussing, namely immortality. Some thinkers have tried to justify the trauma of human existence in terms of the coming attainment of immortality or utopia through technology. The old-fashioned version of this is just Heaven, but intellectuals secularized it. To me this is the gist of Hegel and the gang. Christianity is transformed into a secular religion of earthly progress. It's already in Bacon's last utopian work and Descartes' 'lords and masters of nature.' History is a nightmare from which we shall awake, one way or another --to utopia or a blessed extinction. John Gray writes some devastating lines on the still dominant religion of progress. Somehow or another we'll become The Federation. That's the secular dream. It justifies earthly suffering as a necessary prologue. All our errors are half-truths that accumulate to the genuine truth at/as the end of history.

The view that being a parent makes you an X type of person (put any description there), seems like a way to perpetuate the whole scheme of having more children in the first place. — schopenhauer1

All I intended was a rough generalization. I was thinking of others like myself, married but childless. I have more time for books, music, hobbies. I'm not old but I'm no longer young. To age without children has a certain flavor. I've always seen myself as a writer type, but I've dodged a fundamental human experience. Some of my peers have children. Others committed suicide directly or through heroin.

Houellebecq is fascinated by the sexual revolution and its consequences. These days some of us avoid the responsibility of raising children and do what we can to remain attractive and adventurously sexual into our 40s and beyond. (I'm not so adventurous these days, mostly because sex creates so much embarrassment. I'm too proud for the machinations, and it fouls up the peaceful vibe of monogamy. Too bad the holodeck isn't real yet.) Neotony is stretched to its limits. Instead of having children, one remains as childlike as possible in the positive sense. One is one's own child. One lives for one's own accomplishments and reputation rather than vicariously through the success of the child. In that sense, parents are no less narcissistic. Indeed, 'doing it for the children' is nice justification of household selfishness. Kids play a huge role in justificatory rhetoric, as I'm sure you know.

creating more people, creating the illusions that there is something more to work for. — schopenhauer1

I relate to your grim vision. But creating more people is creating genuine work. People love their children. They will work for and even die for their children. It's a grand system of cub-petting. Petting cubs justifies life and necessitates the justification of life as that same time. I'm joking but serious. The grim old sages saw all of this long ago. It's a snake swallowing its own tail, with no external justification.

It is aesthetically justified or aesthetically rejected. A few of us resist the urge to breed, but we are the exceptions. And we miss out on the basic justification of existence perhaps, cub-petting. The father sends forth his son like an arrow from the grave. The life of the child is the death of the parent and the purpose of the parent. The rest is vanity, entertainment, sex tourism. I'm 50% joking, but only 50%. Not that it matters or will put a dent in the circle of life. People will keep breeding. I assure you. And even the poor, the least secure, will keep breeding.

Do you know this author? He treats the declining birth rate in sophisticated nations. Many of us want to remain children rather than have them. I chose this path. This is the narcissistic path.

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

Here's something relevant too, I think.

The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens owning little or no property. The origin of the name is presumably linked with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property from which their military duties and voting privileges could be determined. For citizens with property valued 11,000 assēs or less, which was below the lowest census for military service, their children—proles (from Latin prōlēs, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring". The only contribution of a proletarius to the Roman society was seen in his ability to raise children, the future Roman citizens who can colonize new territories conquered by the Roman Republic and later by the Roman Empire. The citizens who had no property of significance were called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family."[2][note 1]

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

Therefore the sign does not function independently of what's in the box unless you characterize language as deception. — Metaphysician Undercover

You might find Derrida's treatment of Saussure fascinating on this issue. The concept of the sign itself breaks down upon close examination. It's one more potent but perishable tool that works well enough but won't function as some perfect center or foundation.

Also, here's W:

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
— Wittgenstein

This suggests that your interpretation of W is a bad reading. Of course we have uses for words that refer to some interior. But it all falls apart on close examination. It's already there, the whole collapse, in positing some distinct interior that is radically other. This interior could not interact with the complementary exterior. Dualism as a first approximation is not ridiculous, but taking a serviceable but rough and imperfect distinction as absolute just doesn't work. The fantasy of a divine geometry (constructing existence from a system of words deductively) is only that, a fantasy. And it scratches a religious itch. Self-caused. Self-justified. Self-known. Etc. A continuation of monotheism in another register.

The parable shows what's wrong with the common-sense paradigm. Wittgenstein is trying to show the fly the way out of the bottle. Basically the internal meaning versus external vehicle paradigm is useful for certain purposes but problematic when taken as absolute / foundational.

Perhaps the basic 'sin' of metaphysics is mistaking a useful but imperfect piece of social software as a magic foundation on which everything else can be supported. Instead the foundation is a swamp, an entire form of life that is ground by no particular piece of that form of life.

They are denying any and all “images” of God. — Pinprick

Not so. Consider some of the German philosophers from Hegel on. In particular, consider:

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

If my work contained only the second part, it would be perfectly just to accuse it of a negative tendency, to represent the proposition: Religion is nothing, is an absurdity, as its essential purport. But I by no means say (that were an easy task!): God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, &c. I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them,—not foreign, but native mysteries, the mysteries of human nature; I show that religion takes the apparent, the superficial in Nature and humanity for the essential, and hence conceives their true essence as a separate, special existence: that consequently, religion, in the definitions which it gives of God, e.g., of the Word of God,—at least in those definitions which are not negative in the sense above alluded to,—only defines or makes objective the true nature of the human word. The reproach that according to my book religion is an absurdity, a nullity, a pure illusion, would be well founded only if, according to it, that into which I resolve religion, which I prove to be its true object and substance, namely, man,—anthropology, were an absurdity, a nullity, a pure illusion. But so far from giving a trivial or even a subordinate significance to anthropology,—a significance which is assigned to it only just so long as a theology stands above it and in opposition to it,—I, on the contrary, while reducing theology to anthropology, exalt anthropology into theology, very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God; though, it is true, this human God was by a further process made a transcendental, imaginary God, remote from man. Hence it is obvious that I do not take the word anthropology in the sense of the Hegelian or of any [xiii]other philosophy, but in an infinitely higher and more general sense.

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion—and to speculative philosophy and theology also—than to open its eyes, or rather to turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, i.e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality. — Feuerbach

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47025/47025-h/47025-h.htm

This seems useful here.

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. — James

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

We can narrow this insight to just language. How much trust is built in to our asking of a question? We assume (not explicitly) that we are potentially overheard. The intelligibility of our discourse is radically taken for granted. It is automatic and not usually left to the conscious mind. It is like breathing. It is our form of life, or pre-theoretical and even deeply tacit understanding of being and the world. It is what we have already 'recklessly' assumed in our supposedly radically skeptical questioning.

I hope this thread continues. It's good stuff. In the meantime, here's James.

[A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. ... In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it ... It is no explanation of our concrete universe (James 1907, pp. 8–9)

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

How would we be able to communicate if we actually do have different beetles in each of our boxes? It must be that we all have similar beetles if we are able to communicate. — Harry Hindu

I think we can be more radical and forget the beetle. Even if we have a strong intuitive sense of 'the same beetle,' all that reality matters is the synchronization of practical activities. IMV, we don't even ever know exactly what we mean by the strings of marks and noises that we have been trained to employ. Of course we have some fuzzy experience of 'meaning,' but we are primarily coordinating social activity with such signs --and we only have to do that well enough to survive and reproduce. Metaphorically we are cyborgs. Linguistic conventions make us fully human, yet they belong to no individual. And they more external than internal, it seems, despite our useful notion of the soul or psyche.

Huh? I take Wittgenstein's "beetle" as an indication of the exact opposite to what you say. The only thing external, social, is the word "beetle". The important thing, what matters, is what's in the box, and this is internal, private. — Metaphysician Undercover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8

To me that's a radical misreading. The sign functions independently of what's in the box. That word 'beetle' is one fragment of a massive system of conventions that are as much about non-speech actions as speech actions. Since, by assumption, the private inside is inaccessible, it 'obviously' can play no role in grounding a 'meaning' that must be public and external to be a code, a language that one can learn and participate in.

I think you'll like this quote if you haven't seen it.

But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the world ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor. Ignorance of truth, and knowledge only of appearances, of temporality and contingency, of vanity alone – this vanity has enlarged its influence in philosophy, and it continues to do so and still holds the floor today.[14] It can indeed be said that, ever since philosophy first began to emerge in Germany, the condition of this science has never looked so bad, nor has such a view as this, such renunciation of rational cognition, attained such [a degree of] presumption and influence. This view has dragged on [into the present] from the period before our own, and it stands in stark contradiction to that worthier [gediegenern][104] feeling and new, substantial spirit [of today]. I salute and invoke this dawn of a worthier spirit, and I address myself to it alone when I declare that philosophy must have a content [Gehalt] and when I proceed to expound this content to you. But in doing so, I appeal to the spirit of youth in general, for youth is that fine time of life when one is not yet caught up in the system of the limited ends of necessity [Not] and is inherently [für sich] capable of the freedom of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it yet affected by the negative spirit of vanity, by purely critical drudgery with no content. A heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth, and it is in the realm of truth that philosophy is at home, which it [itself] constructs, and which we share in by studying it. Whatever is true, great, and divine in life is so by virtue of the Idea; the goal of philosophy is to grasp the Idea in its true shape and universality. Nature is confined to implementing reason only by necessity; but the realm of spirit is the realm of freedom. All that holds human life together, all that has value and validity, is spiritual in nature; and this realm of the spirit exists solely through the consciousness of truth and right, through the comprehension of Ideas.[15]

May I express the wish and hope that I shall manage to gain and merit your confidence on the path which we are about to take. But first of all, the one thing I shall venture to ask of you is this: that you bring with you a trust in science, faith in reason, and trust and faith in yourselves. The courage of truth and faith in the power of the spirit is the primary condition of philosophical study;[16] man should honor himself and consider himself worthy of the highest [things]. He cannot overestimate the greatness and power of the spirit; the closed essence of the universe contains no force which could withstand the courage of cognition; it must open up before it, and afford it the spectacle and enjoyment of its riches and its depths. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/1818/inaugural.htm

Note the triumphant optimism. I think this goes with a vision of history as a movement toward greatness and completion. IMV, this faith in progress was fundamental. History is a nightmare from which we shall awake. All the trauma and stupidity were supposed to be a ladder to some kind of Star Trek future. No more slavery, poverty, superstition, etc.

And maybe the essence of 'pomo' is a loss of hope or faith. We fear that our technology will be what kills us and perhaps already enslaves us. We see that somehow we are still as vulnerable and clumsy as manatees. The internet is largely used for porn. We don't know the difference between professional wrestling and politics. And so on. This is us. The same old warmonkey.

Others have made excellent points already. The main idea is that thought is external-social-alien and not internal-private-familiar. Or (at least) that thought or mind is more like the first and less like the second than we tend to suppose. Wittgenstein's beetle is a powerful indicator of this, but the idea goes back further. In Feuerbach it's already emphasized, albeit in a jargon appropriate to the spirit of the time.

This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason as a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18). — link

Along with this is the idea that the notion of self doesn't make sense without the notion of others in a shared world. It's all of a piece, the entire system of distinctions. This system makes all questioning possible in the first place. Don't questions and answers presuppose a reality shared with others that make them meaningful?

E.g. à la Witty's "private language argument", etc. — 180 Proof

Indeed, that's what I had in mind. Also Derrida's related take:

Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver, or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one, it is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability, in the absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined "subject." This implies that there is no such thing as a code-organon of iterability-which could be structurally secret. The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code, making it into a network [une grille] that is communicable, transmittable, decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general. To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. — Derrida

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

What all the 'private spiritual substance' perspectives tend to ignore is the radical dependence of this 'foundational' subject on convention or the social. Dreyfus might call it the 'who of everyday dasein.' But Saussure was on to it before that. Feuerbach wrote his dissertation on it (or something close.) And so on.

I've been reading this article on Yorck (which is generally great) and stumbled upon something that seems relevant to the OP. Since Yorck influenced Heidegger, this is not surprising, but perhaps of value. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck/#PsyLif

According to Yorck, in Ancient Greece consciousness displayed a particular configuration of the primacy of cognition. For the Greeks, the stance of consciousness towards the world is pure looking. It is through looking that reality is understood. Affectivity (feeling) and volition are not countenanced as functions that disclose the world as such.[18] Truth lies in the beholding eye alone; contemplation, theoria, and intuition take centre stage.

It is as if the clear-sighted eye is expressed in words. On the basis of this condition of consciousness, the function of looking [Anschauung], ocularity [Okularität], becomes the organ of all free work of the mind, particularly of philosophy. (ST, p. 30)

Yorck finds evidence for the prevalence of ocularity or the aesthetic attitude, which is centred on plasticity [Gestaltlichkeit], in Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, among others.

Form and content constitute the aesthetic dichotomy which governs Greek thought in its entirety, the result of the liberation of ocularity from all other sensuality, the aesthetic liberation, which strikes a chord in everyone who has entered the threshold of Greek life. Looking is the essential comportment; hence, Gestalt or Form [qualifies as] ousia or substance.[19] (ST, p. 31)

That Greek metaphysics seeks the unchangeable and impassable is the result of the relative suppression of feeling and willing that is latent in all cognition, which abstracts from feeling and temporality, as well as objects of human desire (ST, p. 42). Put differently, the structural timelessness of thought as such is intensified in metaphysical thought where it becomes “absolute” (ST, p. 42). Yorck emphasizes that “negation of temporality” marks “the decisive metaphysical step” (ST, p. 66). Metaphysics constitutes the counter-move against the feeling of temporality (that everything passes away), as well as the liberation from the dependence on objects desired by the will. According to Yorck, the escape from temporality and attachment determines the entire metaphysical tradition up to and including Hegel (because even Hegel “ontologizes” life) (ST, p. 83). — link

This is helpful too.

Next, Yorck also claims that “time originates in feeling” (ST, p. 135). But as feeling is non-projective, it follows that, originally, “temporality” is not “objective”[13] (ST, 146). Yorck distinguishes between the feeling of transitoriness, i.e., that everything passes away [Vergänglichkeitsgefühl] (ST, p. 33), and the feeling or awareness of one's own mortality [Sterblichkeitsgefühl][14] (ST, p. 90). Acquiescence into one's own mortality constitutes the opposite pole to self-affirmation, “self-renunciation” [Selbsthingabe] (ST, p. 14), which is thus distinct from and even antithetical to the ethical impetus in philosophy and science. Yorck argues that the inversion of volitional and cognitive projection in feeling and its concentration in pure, passive interiority amounts to a “religious comportment” and the feeling of dependency (ST, 121). To the extent that the religious concentration of life in interiority is inversely related to projective representation, Yorck understands religious life in terms of its “freedom from the world” or Weltfreiheit (ST, p. 81 & 112). Psychologically, freedom from the world is the precondition for the consciousness of a world-transcendent God, or the consciousness of transcendence (ST, p. 105). Yorck only hints at the projection sui generis involved in transcendence. But it is a projection that has no cognitive or volitional content, such that God is intended without becoming “an object,” and willing becomes a “non-willing,” albeit without loss of energy (ST, 104).

Drawing on Dilthey and Schleiermacher, Yorck argues that immediate and indubitable reality of life is exclusively “guaranteed” through volition and affectivity alone. Yorck writes: “That which opposes me or that which I feel, I call real,” because I cannot doubt what resists my will or affects my personal life, whereas it is always possible to doubt objects neutrally represented in space outside me (ST, p. 89). What is thought and grasped as an unchanging, stable and self-same object in the space of thought does not affect me or solicit a desire. For Yorck, cognition, in abstraction from feeling and volition, is the realm of pure “phenomenality,” which is always open to doubt in virtue of its being merely represented or thought (ST, p. 88). Because “the category of reality is a predicate of feeling and willing” alone (ST, p. 128), Yorck concludes that it is an “utterly uncritical” and self-contradictory undertaking to attempt to prove “the reality of the world” by means of the understanding (ST, p. 129). What Yorck writes to Dilthey in a more general vein is also applicable to this particular problem: — link

Freedom from the world is something like a willingness to die. As Hobbes noted, we seek resources and power as a way to increase our security. Worldliness is a swelling assimilation of wealth, reputation, allies, etc. The denial of time is a denial of death. To participate in eternity is to become one with the undying and therefore undead. There is some overlap here with the metaphilosophy thread. Some philosophy is useless in its connection to transcendence, which makes it a kind of renunciation. Anti-metaphysical philosophy that accepts time is like this perhaps. But metaphysics is a different kind of renunciation too. And Heidegger had modes with fit with this, I think.

Here is maybe the most famous of the metaphysical texts:

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



This article looks good, too, since I'm not sure you'll find an English translation. (I found one once but can't remember where,)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/#StarPoinJenaWiss

It's not only the emphasis on "practical" behavior which is novel, as overlooked as that has been in academic philosophy - but a way in which to analyze it without invoking the use of traditional concepts (I.e., "phenomenologically"). This is why people unjustly accuse Heidegger of being a charlatan, as he had to essentially invent words in order to discuss the topic. — Xtrix

I agree. Heidegger had a good reasons for inventing his jargon. I especially like the young Heidegger, https://www.scribd.com/doc/93511246/Van-Buren-The-Young-Heidegger-1994 The first draft of Being and Time is a condensed eye-opening classic https://www.amazon.com/Concept-Time-Contemporary-European-Thinkers/dp/144110562X.

I link to these for anyone skeptical but curious about Heidegger. I couldn't make up my mind whether he was a charlatan till I read some of his pre- Being and Time work. The man could and did write quite clearly and directly, especially in lectures.

Have you checked out Groundless Grounds? It's a great synthesis of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. I suppose holism and know-how are two of the most liberating themes. The liberation is freedom from a bad philosophy of merely playing with words (metaphysical quagmire with not even a political-emotional payload, for instance).

I can't remember how much Durant goes into it, but he does end the book with American pragmatism. To me it seems that the professionalization of philosophy is the key issue. Personally I think scholars like Lee Braver are great.

I suppose I view strong philosophy as a kind of pre-science with indirect effects. At the very least it's a part of the conversation that we use when building our public-facing identities. As I see it, all of us here in this thread are comfortably within philosophy. And I count Paul Graham's essay as philosophy. At the same time, I understand the criticism of this or that philosopher as irrelevant or uninteresting. And then lots of forum philosophy strikes me as inferior to common sense. So I understand the frustration with language games that hardly pretend to be relevant. But that is as old as William James and surely much older.

Not long ago I picked up another copy of one of my first philosophy books, The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. It's still a great book. I mention this because I think just about any intelligent person with the required intermediate literacy would have trouble setting this book down, at least if they hadn't been exposed to the great philosophers already.

Is it literature or science or history? To me it's the story of grand personalities embedded in histories doing a kind of pre-science or framework-deep hypothesizing/myth-making.IMV philosophy is connected with seeing dominant norms from the outside. That makes it dangerous and/or useless at times.

No matter how you phrase it, you cannot make prediction into explanation. — Metaphysician Undercover

To be clear, I understand that we have some vague notion of genuine explanation. I think that if we analyze that concept, it cashes out in prediction-control and a kind of emotional satisfaction involving at least the linking of the unfamiliar to the familiar. IMV the familiar itself is unexplained and reality as a whole is inexplicable in principle --given that parts are explained in terms of systematic wholes that include them. The whole or totality of what is has nothing outside it to work as an explanation for it. This suggests to me that the big dream of philosophy is long dead. Humans are metaphor-soaked button-pushers, and their decisions are made in twilight.

We never anticipate tragedy and suffering before they arise. — Michael Lee

Great video, and I love Camus and his attitude. I recovered recently from what was probably COVID-19. Since I wasn't hospitalized or rich, I didn't get a test. In any case, I was as sick as I've been in many years. I could hardly get out of bed, so I kept up with the news. The unpleasant symptoms and the folly of human beings (from which I do not exempt myself) took me to some dark places. It was only because loved one's depended on me that I was afraid to disappear.

Don't get me wrong.I didn't want to drown in my own lungs. I didn't want more stupid pain. But nonexistence was appealing. I'm young enough to still have dreams but old enough for those dreams to be no longer large or important enough to tie me desperately to this earth. A person slowly faces their smallness in the scheme of things as they age, which perhaps you know. The dead are soon forgotten, for the living are charged with all the usual greed and fear that the dead once were.

Camus and the video try to be positive. And maybe there's even a Christian message (in the best sense) in the suggestion that a plague can shake us from our hard-heartedness and dollar-chasing games of status. At the same time, as humans we take great pleasure in our projects. We live in the future. And I think we do anticipate tragedy and suffering to some degree, if reluctantly, in order to dodge them. The video suggests a kind of sensualism or seizing the moment as a way to live with the truth of our absurd vulnerability. I can relate to that, but in dark moments it's one more bogus comfort. Our going on looks like irrational instinct. 'The poor keep breeding more slaves.' The proles are prolific. I'm not saying it's wrong. I just thought of us crowded in cities, many living with no savings, no property. A massive, fragile system. So collectively I agree that we refuse to anticipate tragedy and suffering. Now that I'm physically healthy, I coming to terms with the social vibe of the world, trapped at home but lucky enough to work online at least.

Strange times.

Whatever allows any of this to show up, that's essentially being. Any understanding of it -- and we all have an understanding, theoretical or "pre-theoretical." Therefore, everything that shows up within this understanding (whether pre-theoretically, or theoretically as in "interpretation" or a "system of beliefs") -- behavior, science, customs, a shared worldview, morality, a class system, gender norms, etc., is going to make sense within this context. In the Greek world, for example, "saints and sinners" wouldn't have made any sense. In the Medieval world, they certainly did. So an understanding of being is arguably as fundamental to culture as religion or language is. — Xtrix

That's how I understand it, too. This reminded me of the quotes from the Dilthey/Yorck letters that Heidegger used in the intro of the first draft of Being and Time. I can't easily quote those, but this is close:

Together with Dilthey, Yorck was the first philosopher to elaborate the specific concept of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] as a defining characteristic in the ontology of human beings. In particular, Yorck emphasized the generic difference between the ontic and the historical, i.e., the difference between what is seen or conceptualized (and aesthetically contemplated) as permanent nature, or essence, or idea, and the felt historical rhythm of life, i.e., life's immersion in and belonging to the overarching and always changing waves of history. In contradistinction to Dilthey's epistemological endeavors to clarify the foundations of the historical sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences, Yorck aimed exclusively at the ontology of historical life, particularly the historical band (syndesmos) and effective connection (virtuality) that unites generational life. Based on the primacy of historical life, Yorck adopted a decidedly anti-metaphysical stance, rejecting all claims of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. — link

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

As Dreyfus emphasizes (and you mention), understandings of beings aren't necessarily explicit. And perhaps the most crucial understandings are completely tacit. We can find a little of this in Hegel.

But men do not at certain epochs, merely philosophize in general, for there is a definite Philosophy which arises among a people, and the definite character of the standpoint of thought is the same character which permeates all the other historical sides of the spirit of the people, which is most intimately related to them, and which constitutes their foundation. The particular form of a Philosophy is thus contemporaneous with a particular constitution of the people amongst whom it makes its appearance, with their institutions and forms of government, their morality, their social life and the capabilities, customs and enjoyments of the same; it is so with their attempts and achievements in art and science, with their religions, warfares and external relationships...
...
The Philosophy which is essential within Christianity could not be found in Rome, for all the various forms of the whole are only the expression of one and the same determinate character. Hence political history, forms of government, art and religion are not related to Philosophy as its causes, nor, on the other hand, is Philosophy the ground of their existence - one and all have the same common root, the spirit of the time. It is one determinate existence, one determinate character which permeates all sides and manifests itself in politics and in all else as in different elements; it is a condition which hangs together in all its parts, and the various parts of which contain nothing which is really inconsistent, however diverse and accidental they may appear to be, and however much they may seem to contradict one another. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintrob.htm#B1a

To me the 'spirit of [a] time' is something like its understanding of being.

But if Philosophy does not stand above its time in content, it does so in form, because, as the thought and knowledge of that which is the substantial spirit of its time, it makes that spirit its object. — Hegel

To me this gels with phenomenology as a making explicit of what is tacitly already dominant.

On the issue of this thread, I continue to think that science is really about power (knowledge is power power is knowledge). We are lords and masters of nature. We feel it and do it without necessarily ever thinking it or confessing it. We know to the degree that we can do. The rest is maybe politics (its own kind of manipulation.) Is this true? To me it's the spirit of the times, manifested in the relative status of different occupations.

I think you are missing the big picture. At some points lots of thinkers abandoned theological curiosities and looked toward worldly power.

For they made me see that it is possible to achieve knowledge which would be very useful for life and that, in place of the speculative philosophy that is taught in the Schools, it is possible to find a practical philosophy by which, knowing the forces of actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we should be able to use them in the same way for all the applications for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature. — Descartes

Let's make prediction a little more worldly. Algorithms can help salesmen choose which customers are more likely to buy. Prediction is one piece of squeezing what we want from our environments. In the real world we are forced to make decisions. Generations come and go without permanent metaphysical satisfaction. There's a semi-satisfaction in grasping the futility of the vague metaphysical project.

But some people are satisfied with prediction, as explanation, and this is evident in the attitude that some have toward quantum physics. They think that because physicists can predict certain behaviours, they therefore understand the phenomena which they are predicting. — Metaphysician Undercover

'I think I can safely say that no­body un­der­stands quan­tum me­chan­ics.' (Feynman)
http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/quantum/style_a/botline.html

What's interesting about QM is that a satisfying intuitive grasp is not necessary to use the theory. In my view, the generations come and go without individuals understanding exactly what they mean by this or that word. We inherit technology (sometimes just the conventions of language) and use it more or less successfully. A few of us (philosophers) are especially semantically itchy, and some of us pretend to have finally grasped fully the nature of things --to be more than engineers tinkering.

To me there's something like a spectrum that runs from pious theory to worldly practice. We also find this in philosophy, with certain anti-philosophers at the center of the philosophical tradition. The genre has expanded to include its most potent critics.

Prediction is not explanation at all. People have been predicting that the sun will come up tomorrow, for a very long time now, most of that time without any real explanation of why it should. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that we have some vague higher notion of genuine explanation. But to me this is a kind of itch that is never actually scratched or scratch-able.

There is more than one theory of explanation, but take this one for example:

For the explanans to successfully explain the explanandum several conditions must be met. First, “the explanandum must be a logical consequence of the explanans” and “the sentences constituting the explanans must be true” (Hempel, 1965, p. 248). That is, the explanation should take the form of a sound deductive argument in which the explanandum follows as a conclusion from the premises in the explanans. This is the “deductive” component of the model. Second, the explanans must contain at least one “law of nature” and this must be an essential premise in the derivation in the sense that the derivation of the explanandum would not be valid if this premise were removed. This is the “nomological” component of the model—“nomological” being a philosophical term of art which, suppressing some niceties, means (roughly) “lawful”. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/#DNMod

The obvious question is why is nature that way? We end up accepting various structures as 'true for no reason' or 'just the way things are.' One way to understand a certain kind of metaphysician is as a denier of such brute contingency. Crude religion just creates a person as an explanation. All things are 'ultimately' explained by the will of God. The metaphysical attempt perhaps involves some kind of self-transparent principle. The mystical version is some kind of intuition that transcends reason. To me all of these are dodges, though I understand that humans are satisfied emotionally thereby and that this is semi-secretly the point.

If there is no object your “belief” is referring to, then you don’t have an actual belief. You can have beliefs about the premises leading up to the conclusion that there is no God (Theists haven’t provided evidence, it isn’t logical, etc.), but that isn’t the same thing. So, my question would be ”What is the object of the belief in the above definition of Atheism?” — Pinprick

I think atheists are typically denying a vague but typical image of God. It's like not believing that Mr. X has money in the bank. It's not a particular bank. It's the vague idea of lots of money in the bank. And I can believe that Mr. X is not in fact in such a situation. Yes it's all a bit vague, and so is much of our human communication. It's as if we employ only as much detail as necessary for reasons of economy.

I’m reading through Dermot Moran’s Introduction to Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences — Wayfarer

Awesome. I've read that recently and thought it was great.

Modern psychology is a very confused discipline. — Wayfarer

Even if that's true (I can't say), humans do apply the scientific method to the human mind. From the hammer-and-nails pragmatic point of view, we might think of campaign managers and advertisement professionals applying and developing a know-how.

So as much as I enjoy these exchanges, and I really do, I have made a promise to myself to log off until I hit the 20,000 word mark, which is going to probably take the rest of April, so I’ll bid adieu for now. — Wayfarer

Understood. Good luck!

I've read and enjoyed some Fichte. I'm more interested in the spiritual guts of his theory than the metaphysical justifications. In Fichte and Hegel I find an intense humanism, a religion of Progress and self-consciousness.

To subject all irrational nature to himself, to rule over it unreservedly and according to his own laws, is the ultimate end of man; which ultimate end is perfectly unattainable, and must continue to be so, unless he were to cease to be man, and become God. It is a part of the idea of man that his ultimate end must be unattainable; the way to it endless. Hence it is not the vocation of man to attain this end. But he may and should constantly approach nearer to it; and thus the unceasing approximation to this end is his true vocation as man; i.e. as a rational but finite, as a sensuous but free being. If, as we are surely entitled to do, we call this complete harmony with one’s self perfection, in the highest meaning of the word; then perfection is the highest unattainable end of man, whilst eternal perfecting is his vocation. He exists, that he may become ever morally better himself, and make all around him physically, and, if he be considered as a member of society, morally better also, and thus augment his own happiness without limit.
...
Rousseau would not transplant men back into a State of Nature with respect to spiritual culture, but only with respect to independence of the desires of sense. And it is certainly true, that as man approaches nearer to the highest end of his existence, it must constantly become easier for him to satisfy his sensual wants; that his physical existence must cost him less labour and care; that the fruitfulness of the soil must increase, the climate become milder; an innumerable multitude of new discoveries and inventions be made to diversify and facilitate the means of subsistence; that further, as Reason extends her dominion, the wants of man will constantly diminish in strength, not as in a rude State of Nature in which he is ignorant of the delights of life, but because he can bear their deprivation; he will be ever equally ready to enjoy the best with relish, when it can be enjoyed without violation of duty, and to endure the want of everything which he cannot obtain with honour. Is this state considered ideal? in which respect it is unattainable like every other Ideal State, then it is identical with the golden age of sensual enjoyment without physical labour which the old poets describe. Thus what Rousseau, under the name of the State of Nature, and these poets under the title of the Golden Age, place behind us, lies actually before us. (It may be remarked in passing, that it is a phenomenon of frequent occurrence, particularly in past ages, that what we shall become is pictured as something which we already have been; and that what we have to attain is represented as something which we have formerly lost: a phenomenon which has its proper foundation in human nature, and which I shall explain on a suitable occasion.)

Rousseau forgot that humanity can and ought to approach nearer to this state only by care, toil, and struggle. Nature is rude and savage without the hand of man: and it should be so, that thereby man may be forced to leave his natural state of inactivity, and elaborate her stores; that thereby he himself, instead of a mere product of Nature, may become a free reasonable being. He does most certainly leave it; he plucks at all hazards the apple of knowledge, for the impulse is indestructibly implanted within him, to be like God. — Fichte

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Vocation_of_the_Scholar/Lecture_5

And of course Hegel thought that humans could never overestimate the glory of the human mind and its ability to know God (rough paraphrase.)

There is no valid reason to suggest that ‘spectacle’ is a particularly feminine tactic: men have been employing it since ancient times, including Greek theatre and rhetoric. The idea that men are wholly rational beings is ignorant of the irrationality of men over thousands of years of patriarchal dominance, not to mention the ‘spectacle’ they’ve employed in order to gain or hold onto the illusion of power throughout — Possibility

I agree. The whole game of feminine/masculine is a mess. But I try to meet others in terms of how I think they are playing the game.

Ultimately, we are separate and distinct, but the very same thing which separates us, the medium, we can manipulate and use as a tool to unite us. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't see us as ultimately separate and distinct. To me the self as a concept depends on a community, and the reverse. To be human is to be social, to be one among others.

But what I was really trying to get at is that you can't make mind into an object. You can't get outside it. You can't, as it were, consider reason 'from the outside', because to consider reason requires the use of reason. So theories about the nature of mind founder in some fundamental way, because we can't make mind an object. — Wayfarer

I relate to this, though I prefer 'language' to 'mind.' The isolated subject is a problematic concept, although useful for certain purposes. Philosophy looks like reason/language trying to articulate its own nature. I agree that it's not like a physical object and with criticisms of naive ontologies that identity the 'physical' and the 'real,' as if these weren't staggeringly complex concepts.

But the 'nature of mind' is not amongst the objects of science; rationality is what makes science possible in the first place. Whereas, we foolishly believe that science 'explains' reason in terms of adaptation. See the problem? This is basically very much like Husserl's criticism of naturalism, if I understand it correctly. — Wayfarer

This is a great issue. Science does concern itself with the nature of mind, though. What about psychology? Where I can agree is that we have conceptual frameworks that make science possible which depend on a kind of pre-science (folk philosophy of science at least).

I'm quite interested in the concept of explanation. When is something explained? We are often satisfied with prediction and control. We also like the unfamiliar to be related to the familiar. But explanation in some grand or ideal sense of the whole of existence looks impossible to me, for scientists and metaphysicians. The most that seems possible is deriving everything from a brute fact that is true for no reason. The child asking why-why-why is able to discover this.

I think we agree in a criticism of the complacency of a certain kind of scientism.

Mostly, it's about control. — Wayfarer

Right, so the metaphysical naturalists are old fashioned metaphysicians --relatively pious compared to the dominant bottom-line hammer-and-nails post-ideological pragmatism that is perhaps the dominant spirit these days.