And the guitarist practices outside of the performance. — Banno

Right - hence the distinction in ancient philosophy between praxis and theoria.

Might I suggest (pace Hadot) that in modern philosophy, the former is generally neglected.

(Incidentally, from what very little I know, Richard Bernstein was not one of those who neglected it.)

Supose that there is an actual good. Now supose that we are in a position to pass a judgement on some act - kicking a puppy or stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children or what ever - is that act Good? We look to the circumstances, to the consequences, to the intent of the participants. How would what we do in making that assessment differ, if there is no "actual good"?

Do we really need to understand the nature of being, to have the whole and complete truth before us, before we decide that the sunset is beautiful, or that kicking a pup is wrong, or that stealing to feed one's children is forgivable? — Banno

All the examples are artificial. It's like those endless discussions of the trolley problem. God knows what you would *actually* do in that circumstance. Useful for stimulating classroom discussion, but still artificial, because it's not a real trolley, and no actual lives are at stake.

Unlike our actual existence.

Even 'understanding the nature of being' sounds artificial, when expressed in such bald terms, but to see a real master at work, in whatever capacity or occupation they are engaged in, is to see what that understanding means.

I can't help but post this, the mods will probably remove it, but it's only 2:25 and there are actual philosophers (some since deceased) discussing this very point.

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, it is presumably the love of something in particular
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see that this is so.
Why should we limit wisdom to being either a particular, or a thing? — Banno

I see what Count Timothy is getting at, though I don't think it's well expressed. (So I’ll agree with the impulse while questioning the formulation.) I submit that there is an actual good — the good, in Platonist terms—and that being able to orient oneself toward it is essential to philosophy qua "love of wisdom." Naturally, there will be objections: “Who knows what that is?” or “How can there be such a thing in a pluralistic culture?”

But this doesn’t negate the point. Mary Midgley, whom you mention, was concerned to rescue morality from scientism and evolutionary reductionism. She writes about far more than just “philosophical plumbing.” In Evolution as Religion: Strange Hopes and Even Stranger Fears, she criticizes those who take evolutionary theory not just as biological explanation, but as a total account of human nature, ethics, and meaning—a trend she rightly sees as both philosophically naïve and culturally dangerous. Yet this reductionism, tacitly accepted, still underlies much philosophical discourse.

So what is the metaphysics of meaning? Of the good? Of what distinguishes the good from the merely useful? These are questions philosophy must engage with — indeed, they are what make philosophy more than intellectual hand-waving. And it must be holistic in some genuine sense.

Doing philosophy is a human endeavour. While it reaches for glory and joy, it stands in mud, pus and entrails. — Banno

The Pāli Buddhist texts acknowledge this very fact with clinical clarity:

In this body there are: head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, diaphragm, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, stomach contents, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin grease, saliva, mucus, joint fluid, and urine. — Majjhima Nikāya (MN 10) — Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta

Yet this frank realism does not cancel out the fact that Buddhism offers a transcendental philosophy—one that seeks liberation from precisely this embodied condition, not through denial, but through insight into its impermanence and lack of inherent selfhood.

Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body actually draws a comparison between the Holy Trinity and marriage and the procreative act for instance. When "everything is sacramental," romantic love must also reveal God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

However, I presume (not having read it) that he would maintain sanctions against pre- or extra-marital sex.

If one considers this from the perspective of a deflationary information theoretic process metaphysics, where all of the universe is a changing "code," it can be helpful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've had a long-running debate (sometimes very acrimonious) on the importance of maintaining the distinction between beings and things. I still believe that this is a basic ontological distinction, and precisely the distinction that materialism must erase.

But then matter is something — Bob Ross

Reword it like this: matter is some thing.

If it is 'a thing' then it has form. If it has no form, then it's not a thing.

I wouldn't attribute such an emphasis on "parts" to them. — Leontiskos

General question: I have the idea that Aristotle's biology is what we would call 'holistic'. He identifies that there is an animating principle which determines how all of the parts are organised for the benefit of the whole. Is that fair?

Animism' (ancestralism ... or daoism) seems the oldest, and really the only, "religion of the people" that's ever worked for any people. — 180 Proof

There’s shamanism, which is one of the very ancient roots of what was to become ‘religion’. So too yogic practices of mystical absorption. Buddhism and Jainism grew out of the ‘sramana’ movement in ancient India, which comprised heterodox (i.e. non-Vedic) ascetics who renounced society and lived in the forests (literally ‘forest-dwellers’.) And by what criterion would you judge that these had, or hadn’t, ‘worked’? All of the Indian religion, Vedic and other, were oriented around mokṣa, liberation from the eternal cycle of birth and death. If you don’t recognise that there is such a state, then of course the entire edifice will be, for you, a fiction, which seems to be how you regard it.

It’s instructive that biology, having rejected the Aristotelian idea of teleology, had to re-introduce telos, purpose, in a neologism, ‘teleonomy’, referring to the apparent purpose exhibited by organisms. That was because it was impossible to say much meaningful about biology without referring to purpose, as in a broad sense, intentionality animates organic life from the cellular level through every level above it. (Philosopher of biology Steve Talbott has a superb series of essays on this topic in The New Atlantis.)

The issue of purpose and intentionality, and it’s supposed absence from the world, is part and parcel of the scientific and Copernican revolution, grounded as it was in Galileo’s division of the mind and world into the two domains of primary measurable physical attributes, and secondary mental or qualitative attributes. This meant also the elimination of the relics of Aristotelian physics, with its ‘natural places’ and inherent tendencies, in favour of a world in which everything could be accounted for by material causation.

What is overlooked in all this, is the sense in which the Galilean-Newtonian view is a useful abstraction, within which life itself now appears as an anomaly, an oddity, something which has to be ‘explained’ in terms which have already intrinsically excluded it. That’s the plight of modern materialism in a nutshell.

I wonder how useful a ground of being is to us as a concept — Tom Storm

Reduced to the conceptual, it has very limited usefulness. The realisation of such a ‘ground’ is ecstatic, outside the conceptual or discursive intellect.

It's fake and manipulative, essentially regurgitating our style back to us to ingratiate itself and maximize engagement. — Baden

You’re correct, of course. A salutary admonition. I have noticed from time to time a dialog will appear ‘do you like this personality?’ All part of subscriber management.

They're still trying to politicize it regardless, check out the previous page. — Mr Bee

Remember what Michelle Obama said - ‘when they go low….’

I agree that Trump has been overall responsible for the atmosphere of threat and the promotion of violence.

A recent exchange:

Wayfarer: I quite like the philosophical theory called ’neutral monism’ but it’s such a jejune phrase. Reminds me of a middle-aged man in a grey overcoat with a bowler hat.


ChatGPT: That’s a perfect image—neutral monism does have a certain drab, bureaucratic air about it, doesn’t it? As if reality turned out to be a civil servant.

It’s unfortunate, really, because the underlying idea is far more radical than the name suggests: that the world is made of neither mind nor matter, but something more primordial—some third thing that becomes “mental” or “physical” depending on how it’s organized or related. In William James’s hands, it’s fluid and vivid; in Ernst Mach’s, almost visionary. But call it 'neutral monism', and it sounds like a colour swatch from a Soviet apartment block.

Still, there's something in its humility—especially compared to the grand metaphysical systems. It’s an attempt to avoid getting trapped by the old dualisms, without leaping straight into idealism or materialism. You might say it's metaphysical minimalism in a trench coat.

If it ever gets a rebrand, I hope it leans toward something more evocative—maybe primordial monism, or proto-experiential realism, or just eventualism, to pick up Whitehead’s scent. Anything but “neutral,” which always feels like it’s waiting for the train home.

"a colour swatch from a Soviet apartment block" :rofl:

There's also constructive criticism - those who are willing to have their ideas criticized so as to better understand both them and their critics, which I think is nearer the true spirit of philosophy.

Another Trump supporting lunatic out killing people. But I guess it was just another day of love. — Mikie

I wouldn’t politicise such a heinous act. Politicising it is the kind of thing MAGA would do, had the shoe been on the other foot.

DJT will be super annoyed tonight that the assassination and the Iran-Israel war will have stolen all the news minutes from his parade.

As I’ve said many a time, my interest in philosophy grew out of my search for enlightenment. This is partially because of when I came of age in the 1960’s, one of the Woodstock generation. Acid had some bearing. But there were also cultural and counter-cultural icons who embodied it, or seemed to (I was given a Krishnamurti book for my 17th birthday) Sgt Pepper’s was a bellwether moment (‘but first, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?’) When I (belatedly) went to University as an adult student, it was off the back of an old-fashioned ‘comprehension text’, the main body of which was a large slab of Betrand Russell’s Mysticism and Logic, which was right up my alley. Which misleadingly led me to believe that there was an interest in ‘enlightenment’ amongst the various sources I was going to study, when of course, the only instance of that word had ‘European’ in front of it - a vastly different thing, I was to find out.

Nevertheless I persisted (I’m reminded of Alan Watts’ frequent invocation ‘a fool who persists in his folly will become wise’ - a vain hope, in his case, as it turned out.) The idea being that not only was enlightenment real but that it would arrive as a kind of lightning bolt which would blast all of the residue of cultural conditioning off of one’s inherent ‘Buddha nature’. Not so easy, I was to learn. But that, anyway, was what was behind it.

Where that fitted in to philosophy per se, was ‘not at all’ - at least, since David Hume. David Stove, a well-known lecturer, took me aside after class one day, and said ‘you won’t find what you’re looking for in this Department, son.’ (‘Some healing thing’ was how he perceived my quest.) Sure enough, I soon absconded to Comparative Religion (emphatically not ‘divinity’, as I would tell anyone who asked.) I think that’s where I discovered classical philosophy and also what I know of Hegel, who was better represented in that department than in Philosophy proper.

But I still hold to the view that philosophy proper is or ought to be therapeutic - that it is aimed at ameliorating or healing or seeing through an ‘error in consciousness’, a deep, pervasive and widely-accepted misunderstanding as to the meaning of being in which practically all of us are unknowingly immersed. I think the nearest source to that in the modern canon is probably Heidegger, although Being and Time wasn’t on my curriculum and I’ve only read parts of it since. But overall existentialists, phenomenologists, and Buddhists speak to me much more than Anglo philosophers in that regard, as they’re concerned with the meaning, not of properly-formed sentences, but being as such.

eulogistics — Banno

No such word, according to my dictionary, although I suppose it could be the disciplined study of things said at funerals.

It's notable that there has already been a modification to the mass arrests and deportation strategy, due to the indisputable importance of undocumented migrant labour in agriculture and hospitality.

The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants, according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance.

The decision suggested that the scale of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign — an issue that is at the heart of his presidency — is hurting industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose.

The new guidance comes after protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s immigration raids, including at farms and businesses. It also came as Mr. Trump made a rare concession this week that his crackdown was hurting American farmers and hospitality businesses. — Trump Shifts Deportation Focus, Pausing Most Raids on Farms, Hotels and Eateries

That didn't take long to surface. If ICE pulled the entire migrant workforce it would have massive economic downsides.

P.S. Maybe this is why Étienne Gilson quipped that “philosophy always buries its undertakers.” For generations, we were assured that glorious Science would eventually answer all these deep questions once and for all—but here we are, circling back to Aristotle and the metaphysical status of res potentia. As John Haldane notes in his essay Philosophy Lives! metaphysics has a way of outliving the confident predictions of its demise.

So let me ask you: what is it (matter)? — Bob Ross

Yes, great question—but I think there's actually a deep connection between what Count Timothy said about the immaterial intellect and the point I made about Heisenberg and res potentia.

If we’re asking, “what is matter?”, then one part of the Aristotelian answer is that matter is that which has the potential to take form. But then we can ask: what about things that are possible-but-not-yet-actual—do they count as material? Not necessarily. As Count Timothy pointed out, the active intellect is “potentially all things,” yet it too is immaterial.

That’s where I think the comparison with quantum theory is relevant. In Heisenberg’s interpretation of Aristotle, the wavefunction doesn’t describe an actual physical state, but a set of real possibilities—a kind of structured potentiality. He even likens this directly to Aristotle’s potentia. So here too we have a domain of potentiality that is not quite “material” in the classical usual sense, but also not nothing.

It raises the intriguing possibility that potentiality—whether in the intellect or in the quantum field—is an ontological category separate to what materially exists: neither actual nor material, but still real. Which might suggest that our usual modern categories—matter vs. spirit, physical vs. mental—don’t do justice to the subtle gradations that both Aristotle and quantum theory seem to be pointing to.

I think you're looking for an unequivocal definition of what matter is, but that its nature is actually very elusive - again, something that modern physics is all too aware of.

If the intellect, or anything, has no matter but has potential; then matter is not the substrate of being of a thing nor the parts which comprise it. So may main question to you is: what is matter? — Bob Ross

Hi Bob - if I may chip in here. I'm no expert but have been reading up on hylomorphism. First point is that the term 'hyle' literally meant 'lumber' or 'timber' - signifying the idea of 'raw material' or a substance that things are made or shaped from.

As regards potentiality and actuality, I've noticed an interesting line of thought which draws on Aristotle in this respect.

In his reflections on quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg appealed to Aristotle's metaphysics—specifically the distinction between potentia (potentiality) and actus (actuality)—as a way to make sense of the observed behavior of subatomic phenomena. He proposed that the quantum state, prior to measurement, should not be thought of as describing something actual in the classical sense, but rather as a set of potentialities—real tendencies or dispositions that can be actualized under specific conditions. As he put it:

The probability wave… was a quantitative version of the old concept of ‘potentia’ in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality. — Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 41

This line of thought has since inspired more recent philosophical developments, such as Ruth Kastner’s “Transactional Interpretation,” in which she elaborates on the notion of res potentia—real potentialities—as ontologically significant. Kastner and her colleagues argue that quantum states exist as a kind of non-actual reality (or pre-spatiotemporal structure) that becomes actualized through interaction (i.e., measurement). In this way, their work reactivates the Aristotelian framework in a thoroughly modern context - see Quantum Mysteries Dissolve if Possibilities are Realities:

In the new paper, Ruth Kastner et al argue that including “potential” things on the list of “real” things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. ... At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of reality is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to actual objects or events in spacetime (i.e. things that actually exist). Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real constituents of existence.

It strikes me that Heisenberg’s appeal to potentia isn’t just a conceptual bridge to Aristotle—it may also subtly reintroduce the idea of degrees of being. In classical metaphysics, especially Neoplatonic and Aristotelian, existence was not a simple binary - particulars could be more or less actualized, more or less real. In contrast, modern metaphysics after Descartes and the rise of mechanism tends to treat existence as univocal—something either exists or it doesn't with no in-between.

But quantum theory, with its probability waves and superpositions, suggests a more graded or layered ontology. If a quantum state isn’t just a fiction but represents a real, albeit non-actual, mode of being, then this seems to reintroduce the idea that there are degrees of real-ness. The higher the probability, the greater the 'tendency to be'—to borrow a phrase Aristotle might have approved of. It’s an idea that hovers at the edge of physics and metaphysics, but it offers a glimpse of a richer ontological vocabulary than modern science typically permits, and also harks back to the classical 'scala naturae', the great chain of being.

You can't wave off the crushing criticism that brains house memory, a fact easily proven. — Hanover

It's not so clear cut as you believe. The amount of documentary evidence that Stephenson assembled can't simply be waved away, although as he says, the will not to believe it, is just as strong as the will to believe it.

I read the book. — Hanover

Which book?

It's sort of like how only Christians seem to see Jesus in their cereal bowl. — Hanover

See report on the case of Imad Elewar. Considerably more detail than in a cereal bowl.

Since we know memories are stored in the brain, and damage to the brain destroys memory in the living, that knowledge leads us to the conclusion that destruction of the brain entirely in death eliminates one's memories. — Hanover

As discussed previously in this thread, there are documented cases of children who appear to recall previous lives. Documented in the sense that steps were taken to validate the purported past-life memories by discovering documentary and historical records that corroborate (or disprove) the purported memories. There were many such cases gathered by a Dr Ian Stevenson. Stevenson does not posit a medium through which such memories may be transmitted however, collectively, there is a considerable amount of evidence for the veracity of some of these cases.

All of reality swings on the "hinge" of consciousness. — Sam26

Might that be on account of the fact that everything we know of reality is disclosed to, by and in consciousness? Not that consciousness is a constituent in an objective sense and indeed we don’t know it as an object of cognition. Which is also why testimony about conscious experience can only ever be anecdotal.

So yes - ‘hinge’ is apt.

Kant I do not think would entertain panpsychism in any form as an explanation of human mind whereas Whitehead sees primitive experience as a fundamental feature of all of reality and process. — prothero

I read a book by David Ray Griffin, (although was later dissappointed to learn he was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.)

The view I'm advocating also draws on Buddhism, specifically a 1955 book called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti. Murti draws comparisons between Buddhist 'middle way' (madhyamaka) philosophy and Kant, Hegel, Bradley and other idealist philosophers.

The problematic that Buddhism begins with is not the nature of the constituents of reality, but the cause of dukkha (usually translated as 'suffering'). Within that framework, the nature and relation of subjective and objective reality is resolved in a completely different way to Whitehead's. It does not posit any kind of pan-experiential elementary constituents. My interpretation is that subjectivity emerges with the formation of organic life. Even very rudimentary life-forms possess a kind of subjectivity, if not subjective awareness in the sense humans do. Schopenhauer puts it like this, speaking in terms of the evolution of life (and bearing in mind, this was published before the Origin of Species):

each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

The point I'm pressing is that, outside our consciousness of time, space, matter, and so on, the whole notion of existence or non-existence is meaningless. We know, of course, that there was an immense period of time prior to the evolution of h.sapiens (which is where this discussion started) - but Schopenhauer is pointing out that this whole conception is meaningful within the framework provided by the observing mind. So, while it's empirically true that the world existed prior to the evolution of h.sapiens, the true nature of that existence is unknowable apart from the cognitive and theoretical framework within which we imagine it. Hence, with Whitehead, I agree that 'outside the subject there is nothing', but within a different explanatory framework to the one he proposes.

Schopenhauer goes on:

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself (i.e. the world as it is independently of perception), but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

Murti's book points out the many parallels between Kant's 'antinomies of reason' and the Buddha's 'unanswereable questions' (i.e. whether the world is eternal, whether the mind and the body are the same or different, among other things.) So in this framework it is not necessary to posit a speculative 'pan-subjectivity'. It starts and ends with insight into the world-making activities of the mind.

Presumably races other than Boer.

I know they do, but the article from which that line was taken was very detailed — many thousands of words — and it spells out what that remark means in considerable depth.

I understand Whitehead's point, which is made quite explicit in that sentence: that there are no objects that exist in their own right, apart from or independent of any subject. I also understand that, for Whitehead, subjects are not necessarily human — or even organic — but are what he calls ‘actual occasions of experience’, which are the fundamental units of reality. So his aim is to restore subjectivity — the subject — which had been excluded or bracketed out by post-Cartesian dualism. He seeks to disclose subjectivity as a fundamental constituent of existence.

I understand and respect that project, but I would say I’m approaching the same issue from a different orientation. I’m criticizing the notion that objects possess inherent existence independently of any mind, as well — but whereas Whitehead’s approach is ontological (concerned with the constituents of being), the approach I’m exploring is epistemological (concerned with the conditions of knowing). That’s why I align more closely with a Kantian perspective.

While both philosophers are deeply engaged with the relationship between mind and world, Kant approaches it by asking how the mind structures experience and knowledge, whereas Whitehead approaches it by proposing that the world itself is composed of proto-subjective events or ‘prehensions’ at every level of reality.

But I'm open to considering it in more detail. And also exploring parallels between Whitehead and other pan-experientialist approaches.

Trump, himself, certainly doesn't seem like 'a racist'. — AmadeusD

They (illegal immigrants) are poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poison — mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.” — Dec. 16, 2023, New Hampshire rally


“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums — that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff.” — March 4, 2024, interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network


“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals’ … Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, ‘Please don’t use the word animals when you’re talking about these people.’ I said, ‘I’ll use the word animal because that’s what they are.’” — April 2, 2024, Grand Rapids, Michigan, campaign event.

many deep questions involved. I’ll revert to my initial post - material reality is an aspect of cognitive experience.

//although I will mention the title of the Whitehead article I mentioned yesterday, which I believe is a quote from the man himself - ‘ Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’,//

Or if someone did he would be checked by the congress or the courts (may still happen). — prothero

Mitch McConnell must rue the day he voted not to confirm Trump's second impeachment, for the disgraceful assault on the Capital Building, on the grounds that it 'should be dealt with by the courts'.

You mean, the in itself, right?

I do not think this process however is confined to human measurement and instrumentation but that these interactions (collapses, potential to actual) are occurring all the time between events and processes thus the more seemingly concrete macro world we largely live in and observe. — prothero

That's the process of decoherence. It explains why we don't ever find a cat that is at once dead and alive, but it still doesn't totally solve the observer problem. What interests me in this context is the role of observation in the actualisation of potential.

Excellent question. To digress, as I so often do, there's an article I refer to , Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities, which echoes an idea spelled out by Werner Heisenberg - that quantum states exist as unrealised potentialities, 'res potentia', one of which is actualised by the measurement process. It's the idea that the unmanifested or potential reality is actualised through measurement.

Aren't there numerous examples of things like that (troops tear-gassing demonstrators) happening in our history already? — MrLiminal

Don’t know, I’d have to do the research. But it has been said the last two days that in the Rodney King riots in LA in 1992, the Governor requested the National Guard’s help. It wasn’t imposed on them.

I don't really think of Trump as conservative, but if he is, he seems a 'postmodern' conservative. — Jeremy Murray

Trump is not a conservative in any meaningful sense. He’s someone who has hijacked conservatism for his own ends, and evicted many meaningful dissent from the Republican Party. There are some skilled Republican operatives who are using all of this as a vehicle, like remora fish around the great white shark, but none of the classical conservatives would recognise what the Republican Party has become.

Perhaps, but it also could be seen as a ‘Bring it on! Show us what you got!’ When Trump and Hegsmeth really start to order American troops to teargas demonstrators, then let’s see what kind of loyalty they really command. They’ve been doing everything the can to root out anyone who is going to oppose the King’s Will, but how much loyalty do the military and intelligence services really owe to the King? Perhaps we’ll find out.

As the Buddha taught us, accepting inherent suffering is crucial, because there is no way around it. — Martijn

Nevertheless, the Buddha is also said to have taught that suffering has a cause, and also an end, and that there is a way to the end of suffering. Whether that can be a real possibility is, I suppose, a matter of faith, but I at least can see the logic of the claim (although granted it requires recognition of states of being beyond that which naturalism can envisage.)

Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher I admire, also had a lot to say about suffering, its cause, and the ability to transcend it through aesthetic contemplation and the reduction of craving, although I don’t see him as having fully realised the Buddhist path, despite his professed admiration for Eastern philosophies.

Your points about mastering detachment and overcoming self-induced mental torment are well made, and suggestive of the kind of stoicism that has become quite a popular movement in revivals of ancient philosophies. I’ve learned to let go of harmful and negative thoughts to some extent, which is indeed liberating, although there remain many forms of suffering which are quite outside one’s conscious control, or so it seems to me.

But, overall, a wise and mature post about a topic that ought to be of interest to everyone.

I don’t think the two-party system is specifically at fault. Trump is a textbook demagogue - to revisit the definition, a demagogue ‘is a political leader in a democracy who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, especially through oratory that whips up the passions of crowds, appealing to emotion by scapegoating out-groups, exaggerating dangers to stoke fears, lying for emotional effect, or other rhetoric that tends to drown out reasoned deliberation and encourage fanatical popularity. Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct ‘ (Wikipedia.) That was basically written in the earliest democracy, that of Athens, and Trump is following the playbook. He’s skilled at using mass media to bully and intimidate his opponents - but it’s also the case that Congressional Republicans have clearly abdicated their responsibilities to check the excesses of the Executive Branch.

Everything about the Los Angeles situation is political theatre aimed at establishing the precedent of using American military forces to stifle dissent, another building block in his attempt to create a one-party state (and you think two parties are a problem!) With Trump, everything is always pretext - he appeals to so-called ‘emergencies’ to as to use emergency powers to rationalise economic and social policies that would otherwise never be considered. This Saturday 14th June, he’s having his mock Putin-style military parade in Washington, but there’s also a massive series of demonstrations planned under the banner of No Kings. Let’s hope there’s a massive, US-wide turnout.

What value do you place on the potential versus the actual? — prothero

In the context of the discussion with Vera Mont, I was making the point that humans are able to envisage possibilities and then bring them about - which is the capacity that underlies the whole history of human invention, is it not? I’m also making the point that this suggests that the domain of possibility exceeds and is different to the domain of actuality - again, something which recent history abundantly illustrates.

In 1895 Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin), a prominent British mathematician and physicist, and President of the British Royal Society, was widely quoted as saying "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Simon Newcomb, a leading American astronomer and mathematician, likewise in 1903 (shortly before the Wright Bros flight) also stated that powered heavier-than-air flight was "unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible. The New York Times, which published an editorial in October 1903 (just two months before the Wright flight) predicting it would take “one to ten million years” for humanity to develop an operating flying machine.

Also known as The Way of Tao, I believe. A perennial.

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Maybe they really were immigration officers, just as they claimed. Or maybe they were a ragtag vigilante group, arbitrarily snatching brown-looking people off the street.

“It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something,” said Linda Shafiroff, recounting the agents who showed up outside her office in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.

As unrest and military troops overtake Los Angeles, terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country. They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs.

Shafiroff and business partner Sarah Stiner own a boutique home-design and construction firm in Great Barrington, a New England town largely populated by artists, aging hippies and affluent second-home-owners. On May 30, around 11 a.m., six armed agents showed up outside the women’s office. The agents were dressed as though they had parachuted into a war zone, rather than a small town where the crosswalks are painted in rainbows. ….

“These guys had guns hanging all over them,” said Shafiroff, but they otherwise had no conformity to their dress. “None of them had the same letters on the front of their vests. Some of them didn’t even have letters, but it said ‘Police’ across the back. … One had light-colored jeans and sneakers on, and one had on a Red Sox hat.” The agents arrived in unmarked cars, some with out-of-state plates.

The women asked to see IDs or warrants, or even the names of the alleged criminals these agents were there to track down. They refused. One briefly flashed a badge, Stiner recounted, but would not let her inspect it even to see what agency it was for. — WaPo

:100:

I have an amusing anecdote. Way back in my undergraduate days I was looking for books in the uni library. I noticed one particular volume seem to have slipped behind all the others and fished it out. To my surprise, it had no borrowing slip on it (usually pasted in to the front to be stamped with the return-by date). I took it to the front desk to borrow it. It wasn’t even on the register! The librarian quickly amended the records and made an entry for it, and also pasted the borrowing slip into it and I took it home.

The name of that book: ‘The Unknowable’, Simon Frank (a Russian Orthodox philosopher.) But I loved the irony of having found it, completely unknown even to the library I found it in (although I admit, I never made a lot of headway with it, as it is a very arcane text. )

But the aphorism on the dedication page always stayed with me: ‘The Unattainable is Attained through Non-Attainment’ (I think from Nicholas of Cusa).

I can see what you’re getting at - but in response to the particular question I was trying to address, why the need for faith?, I don’t know if it is a useful perspective.

The early Buddhist texts differentiate levels of understanding - ‘stream-winners’ from ‘non-returners’ and from the putajjhana (uneducated persons.) Mahāyāna makes it even more elaborate with the Ten Bhumis. None of which actually negates the point you’re making. ‘First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain.’ That koan is also about stages of the understanding. From the ultimate point of view, there’s ‘nothing to attain’ but that is a very difficult understanding to attain.