There are so many misconceptions about the Gnostic gospels whether it be that of Thomas, Mary, Judas, Phillip - whichever. Because this material is tendentious, scholars are often inaccurate and contradictory on this material too, so you need to be very careful about what you assume from these texts. Why are you attracted to this material? — Tom Storm

I'm attracted to - or interested in - the text because it's rich. It's a particularly good text for eliciting reactions, and interpretation - like a good poem. It's hard to say what's interest and what's attraction, or what that differentiation means, but I've just found it's a good text to get people talking irl, and I imagine that will translate to the web too. The experience is definitely enhanced in certain ways when you know the background, just as it's enhanced in certain ways if you have a broad grasp on religion and mythology cross-culturally. There's so much you can bring to it. What do you make of the first couple parts?

Very cool - This is where I wish I wasn't bound to one language. I'd love to know the relation between what's being translated as 'All" in this text and what's being translated as 'all' in the buddhist texts. I like your reading - if you sync it with (2) it would be something like: seeking - disturbed - astonished - released from attachment. & that would fit with (1).

Of course, the idea of bitcoin (or any crypto) obviating state-based reserve currencies is a little pie-in-the-sky. At the same time, honestly who knows. Stuff is getting weirder every month.

For everyone thinking how cool it has been making a quick buck out of bitcoin, bitcoin is now using more electricity than the entire Netherlands combined.

Some more perspective: you can power 100,000 visa transactions with the energy used for one bitcoin transaction. — Benkei

This is definitely one of the major weak points of bitcoin. One thing that sometimes gets floated by apologists is - ok, yes, it's a lot of energy - but what's the cumulative energy cost of sustaining/maintaining the US Dollar as a reserve currency? There's a strong argument to be made that those processes also use more electricity than the entire Netherlands. Viscerally it doesn't feel strong enough to justify bitcoin's energy usage, but I also don't think it's all hot air. Visa's transactions use less energy, yes, but Visa is piggybacking on the existence of a secure reserve currency.

That's my favorite photo of him, for sure. It's hard to choose a poem - all his best are sort of long - but one I like a lot is A Man of Words -( In its entirety here, probably composed around the same time that photo was taken)

His case inspires interest
But little sympathy; it is smaller
Than at first appeared. Does the first nettle
Make any difference as what grows
Becomes a skit? Three sides enclosed,
The fourth open to a wash of the weather,
Exits and entrances, gestures theatrically meant
To punctuate like doubled-over weeds as
The garden fills up with snow?
Ah, but this would have been another, quite other
Entertainment, not the metallic taste
In my mouth as I look away, density black as gunpowder
In the angles where the grass writing goes on,
Rose-red in unexpected places like the pressure
Of fingers on a book suddenly snapped shut.

Those tangled versions of the truth are
Combed out, the snarls ripped out
And spread around. Behind the mask
Is still a continental appreciation
Of what is fine, rarely appears and when it does is already
Dying on the breeze that brought it to the threshold
Of speech. The story worn out from telling.
All diaries are alike, clear and cold, with
The outlook for continued cold. They are placed
Horizontal, parallel to the earth,
Like the unencumbering dead. Just time to reread this
And the past slips through your fingers, wishing you were there.

Simone Weil. The patron saint of outsiders — Nikolas

Seconded

Christianity, for sure, comes from strange philosophical categories of people living in bygone times. I enjoy Romans, but yeah, it's weird - just like the Armenian and Molinistic readings of it too, I imagine.

Well, one easy answer is not to worry about Romans.

Humanity, as it is currently structured - in thought, philosophy, technology, etc... - will never create an interstellar civilization. Many despise the vastness of space, but its name truly names what it is:

- Space!

This empty greatness, where, until now, we are the only gifted ones capable of experiencing existence, seems to me an ambition of negative egos; of minds out of balance and degeneracy.

We have already glimpsed the external too much. It's time to turn our gaze inwards again.. — Gus Lamarch

Imagine a vast space - a cavern. The cavern was constructed by a man in a daze. He spent a lot of time carving this cavern out. He was driven by forces he couldn't understand. Upon completing the cavern, he fell into a deep sleep. He woke up. On all the walls were written his favorite quotes. In a corner was a stack of books he loved. He had everything he needed. There was still a space, an opening, to crawl out of. He would tell everyone how good the quotes the were, how good the books, how calm the space. They had no interest. Which made him love the space all the more. The best quotes, the best books. Everything there. Of course they couldn't understand! Not everyone has the constitution to live in such spaces! Some of the books told of the experiences of others who built caverns. The best books! Intoxicated, he climbed back out of the cavern to tell others about these.

'These are books about why books in caverns, about caverns, are the best?' the others said, then turned away.

Why? It was bewildering. He went back to his cavern. Why did no one want to hear about how he had the best cavern? (but he didn't ask: if it was so good, why did he have to keep telling others about it? The forces he didn't understand, that led him to carve his cavern, were now leading him to....)

Thanks for taking the time to post this stuff. I'm realizing more and more , recently, that I tend to over-rely on the neatness of abstractions, so the historical detail is very welcome.

The idea of networks - and illicit meetings- feels exciting. I remember feeling, in a low-level way, that same sense of excitement when I got into psychedelics in high school and 'crossed the tracks', so to speak, going to places I never would have otherwise. Psychedelics still would have been fun but something about the hidden-world thing made it feel more intense, and exploratory - basically more meaningful. (I'm airbrushing a little; psychedelics have recenetly become re-respectable, but we were just as often just straight up drinking, doing street drugs etc)

At the same time, I can imagine when the 'illicit' thrill is a core component of your identity, it's maybe a better trade-off to lose the thrill in exchange for social recognition and security - as with those who become homeless because of a dissonance with the family they're raised in.

I want to also talk about the trans stuff, but I'll have to save it for the next one. Broadly my concern is that many people in their teens & 20s feel really confused about their bodies and identities, and that, of that set of confused people, only a small amount are trans (as you were saying.) I don't for a second doubt the reality of the trans experience, but I have reservations about it becoming a template for resolving identity issues in general. Obviously a very thorny issue in today's climate, so I'll have to think out how I want to to talk about it, before I dig in too deeply.

___

Unrelated, but I figured I'd throw it out there real quick. My favorite poet is John Ashbery. Do you know and/or like him? He's a bit older (born in '27) but also grew up gay in a small town, then went to the city. I guess he'd be the generation before you, but in the broad smear of time, he seems to have come of age in a world closer to world you came of age in than the world I did.

I beg to differ.. Within a short amount of time from when the Model T came out, I am pretty sure most people had a vehicle. What a crazy change from a literally horse-drawn society. Think about how much infrastructure related to horses was completely taken out from this shift. I get your point that things take longer to get to rural populations, and you can make an argument that it wasn't until post-WWII that truly the older system of horses was displaced (especially in places like Russian, etc) but still pretty dramatic shift in geography, time, place, etc. And of course, as you mentioned the Wright Brothers and the companies that followed for air technology. — schopenhauer1

That's an interesting historical question - did most people have a car shortly after the model t came out? My intuition tells me no, but it depends on your timeframe. Bracketed composing my post & did some quick internet sleuthing - it looks like you're right. The model-t was released in 1908 and by 1929 60% of families owned a car. It was a quick, dramatic shift.

You are right that there have been profound technological disruptions for a while. I still think that the rate at which this happens is telescoping, and that the automobile and the airplane are one stage in a progressive ramping up which has led, now, to the internet as an even more accelerated thing. Though it's also true that each generation (at least in recent history) feels like they're losing their mooring a bit, as things go on. Maybe I'm just (early 30s) getting into the very early stages of that. When I think of Gen-Zers (and young millennials) I think of a very open, supportive community that is simultaneously a slightly puritanical and vindictive community. But the hippies also said 'don't trust anyone over 30' (I think). It'll be interesting to see how it goes. On the whole I'm hopeful, at least tonight, but the pessimistic mood I wrote the OP in I feel just as often.

My parents were born in 1905 and 1906 (died in 2007 and 1993, respectively) and witnessed or experienced several transitions and major innovations: from horse power to motor power; the innovation of planes, radio, movies/talkies, refrigerators (vs. ice boxes), dial phones, television, computers, space flight, antibiotics, small pox, polio, mumps, measles, and chickenpox, scarlet fever; economic collapse and economic boom, 2 world wars, kitchen microwave ovens, cake mixes--and more!

They seem to have taken all these changes in stride. Now that I am an old man I wish I could talk with them again about what they thought of all these changes. I came of age in the 1960s (sort of; it took decades). Yes, the 60s were great. We were young, in college, healthy, reasonably happy, in and out of love, full of youthful arrogance, and all that. For gays living in backwater midwestern towns, the 1960s sexual revolution didn't begin until 1970. Yes, it was wonderful.

Before the Internet there was the very very big computer and in time the scrawny little personal computer. I was much taken with the idea of the HAL9000 computer in 2001 (the movie, not the year), then with the 1980s Macintosh computer--which of course had less computing power than my washing machine has (figuratively speaking). My old Mac Plus resides in its own chapel. Still an itsy-bitsy computer helped make the 1969 moon landing (Apollo 11). The Apollo 11 computer was novel in that it ran on silicon instead of vacuum tubes. I was 15 when Kennedy proposed landing a crew on the moon (and bringing them back, alive); I was 23 when it happened. Yes, it was as stirring as you might think it was.

My take on the Internet is that it actually is a great resource for information, while also being a big sewer pipe. I've never gotten into FaceBook, Twitter, TikTok, or most other social media. Too much of it Is drivel, or worse--a shit show.

BTW, the landing of the Perseverance ranks up there as an amazing feat. Lots of missions to mars ended in failure, but arriving in orbit, detaching the lander rocket from the space ship, then that rocket slowing down to a pause, hovering above the surface and lowering the rover to the surface, then detaching and getting the hell out of the way--hey, you witnessed a very very big deal. — Bitter Crank

Thank you for this!

I'm mentally diving back - I'm not gay, though I've had some drunken bi-sexual experiences. I didn't feel too weird after. I think part of that was knowing that gay-culture was pretty normal, at that time.

Growing up in the oughts, it was ok to have experiences, no matter your sexuality. That's actually something I like a lot in younger-millennial and gen-z culture. There's not a quick sorting based on that.


What I'd be most curious to hear about, from your perspective, is how cultural-shifts shifted your own experience. There was a kind of taboo element to homosexuality. It seems like that used to be expended in the 'secret' place of gay hookups - is some of that lost now? [advanced question: how do you think about trans sexuality? you don't have to answer that.)

Yeah, I feel like Dostoevsky is a really good touchstone here. In some ways Crime & Punishment is trying to stage something similar: 'what if you were a kid brought up on Napoleanism?' Or the 'underground man' who the introduction cautions us to think of as, roughly, 'a type who we must assume must exists in times such as these.' To blend back with @schopenhauer1's post, there is definitely a perennial human drama going on (though one has to wonder how this enacted itself in hunter-gatherer times, over millennia without the introduction of new technology.)

In terms of fan-fiction, that definitely seems like a new (forum-based?) subculture. It's interesting that Fifty Shades got so big. At the same time, in another way, classic literature was often already fan-fiction - If you read Early Milton, this is clearly a young dude who's play-acting a writer of Epics. And then there's Dante writing The Divine Comedy, where Virgil makes an appearance and guides him. There's some fan-fiction-y elements to both of these as well.

Yeah, I think the history of the world is probably a history of disorienting technological shifts. At the same time - So, though it's a commonplace to say the pace of these shifts is ramping up, it's also true. The Wright Brother's first flight was in 1903; We landed on the moon in 1969. I think there's a profound shift with the internet. A car is not all that different from a horse-drawn carriage. And even in 1860 you'd be familiar with the idea of an engine. It's a carriage with an engine and no horses. The person born in the 1860s would have been severely wowed if they found a way to stick around for the birth of the interstate system, but before that it folds pretty neatly into the city/rural difference. If you see movies at that time, the car, qua wowing-thing is usually tied to the city. It's a symbol of citiness, kind of at the same level of jazz. I don't think it hits the same thing, personally, but I do take your point. I just think it's happening faster now.

I'm enjoying the mix, trying to do a chapter/section of each a day. My first time reading Crowds & Power besides a desultory flipping-through the first pages a long time ago. I like how clean and readable the prose is - it goes down really easy. Eliade's Shamanism is much denser - some technical/academic philosophy of religion discussion gluing together a shit ton of hyper-detailed anthropological case studies (much, much baggier and far-flung than The Sacred and the Profane.) Doesn't go down so easy, but it's really fascinating.

The Taoist Body - Kristofer Schipper
Crowds and Power - Elias Canetti
The Dispossessed - Ursula K LeGuin (so-so, making myself continue. Kind of like a left-libertarian Ayn Rand book, though the prose and characters are better, all in all.)
Shamanism - Mircea Eliade
Sabbaths Wendell Berry ( reading one poem each Sunday morning)

It really does work best if you just smoke a little and vibe out to it. The General Structure of Everything will still be there when you come back to it. Elias Canetti, in his general-structure-of -everything (-human) book, Crowds & Power, wrote of 'crowd-crystals' - little organizations of people around whom crowds can spontaneously form. 'crowd-crystals' always remain the same, sometimes activate crowds (in the presence of a stimulus), sometimes remain dormant.

I think there's probably Everything-crystals of thought too, thoughts that pop up saying 'hey, doesn't this remind you of that huge, other thing?' At that point you can entertain them, and get schlupped out of what you're doing back to compulsively describing the Everything Structure, or you can say 'I hear you, but I'm gonna let that go for now. I've done a lot of describing it lately, and I don't need to right at this moment'

I think philosophy is weird in a way fishing isn't, in that fishing doesn't have a professed aim it manifestly fails at, and has for thousands of years. This is maybe the most salient feature of philosophy, and periodically gets noticed and lamented even by philosophers themselves (who have professional and cognitive incentives not to notice).

It's also clear why one would think that fishing catches you fish. It's not clear why one would think that the methods of philosophy can unlock general features of the universe – on reflection the idea seems somewhat insane. That's why it's interesting to think about why people might have been led to believe in the methods. — Snakes Alive

I think part of what makes this tricky is that philosophy is much closer to conversation than fishing. What we're doing here, talking about philosophy's place, could plausibly be talked about as philosophy-like, philosophy-ish. More concretely, getting at intuitions: I think if you showed a regular person this conversation, and told them this was a 'philosophical conversation' they'd go 'yeah, seems like it.' It may be something totally different than philosophy, but it's harder to draw that line. On the other hand, a fisherman talking about why fishing is bad is, in talking about it, manifestly not doing fishing.

I think the only way to coherently describe philosophy as a certain practice in the way you're suggesting would be to pinpoint an essence - some cluster of certain sufficiently identifying characteristics - in order that one can identify it when it presents itself irl. The only other option would be to do it historically, by lineage - say, what Plato did was philosophy, and anything deriving from that is philosophy is well. You can then use historical documents, textual analysis etc to say whether or not a particular thing is philosophy (that is, traces back to Plato.)

It seems possible that there's a weaker stance to take here - at certain thresholds of development, most civilizations secrete philosophical-type talk. It's part of the general culture, like a million other things (humor, dance, religion, flirtation, ritual, exchange, feasts etc) and that, as with all those things, there grow over time specialized, eventually rigidifying, ways of channeling and structuring that thing.

Part of the throughline of what I was talking about with the fishermen is that this stuff seems to crop up pretty organically. A fisherman, like anyone is likely to have spontaenous philosophy-ish questions (as I did before I studied any formal philosophy)

Now, the guy who got into Hume's thing that I was talking about, got into it because a guy he went to high school with became a philosophy phd. To go back to your point, it *is* likely that if our society valued bird augury more, he'd have been more likely to know someone who became a recognized bird augurist, and to bring snippets of bird augury he'd learn back into the general shared-conversational space you could call 'shooting the shit.'

I think that is a fair point.

But I also think that people talking about stuff, the way we are, is philosophical-ish. And that this is just part of what we do, in a way that can't be neatly separated from other aspects of what we do. It's a hazy thing that also veers into other areas - aesthetics, general meta-discussion of anything (since, of course, fisherman can 'pop out' of the complex, hyper-internally-differentiated practice fishing, to then talk, from a meta-perspective, about a unified thing called fishing, without that being philosophy), formal argumentation, mythic/narrative framing etc. I think philosophy is probably a loose, baggy thing that sits loosely with those things, as those other things might loosely include philosophy as a partial ingredient.

In that regard OLP, from what I understand, sees first and foremost a reaction to a particular formation of a practice that could be understood anthropologically, and that brought together a bunch of different currents.

On another anthropological, or sociological, or just general human note, I think there is a tendency to devalue one's own stepping stones. Part of growing older is looking back at what you thought was super important, perhaps embarrassingly valorized, and downplay it, now that you're a little more stable, a little wiser. You can imagine an old trader talking to a wild-eyed 20 year old who just got into bitcoin or pennystocks.

I have said this in another post about "ought", but any force of "normativity" does not come from OLP's claims to descriptions of our ordinary criteria for apologizing; it comes from apologizing itself. — Antony Nickles

For sure, I get that. The 'normativity' in my post is about, like : The implicit criterion according to which one selects good approaches to philosophical conversation.

I wouldn't think it was that weird, if he just did it once in a while, and maybe to try to get someone to stop fishing. I don't really discuss philosophy anymore except in threads like this about this very topic (and even then, I think I haven't commented here in like half a year), and I don't really read it anymore or talk about it anywhere else. — Snakes Alive

Yeah, that's fair. I tend to get on here for the sake of arguing. I think there is something to the idea: 'leaving philosophy' is a canonical move in the anthropologicaly observable practice called philosophy.' You see that happen all the time. But you see that in every field, too. Part of what I was drawing attention to is that there is something different in kind from posting on a philosophy forum about the worthlessness of philosophy, and posting on a fishing forum about why fishing is bogus.

Parting thought (which implicates me as much as anyone)- Imagine there was a fishing forum and there was a fisherman who would get on and his general thing was like: fishing actually isn't all that important.

What's the ingenuous reaction to a guy doing that? It's funny to think about.

Of course. But I think being good at fishing is a real and useful skill, whereas being 'good at philosophy' doesn't really entail being good at anything, unless you're on the job market in philosophy. — Snakes Alive

True, but orthogonal. I'm not saying philosophy is more useful than being good at fishing, I don't think it is. I'm saying that fishermen often get philosophical, naturally, in a way that philosophers don't tend to get naturally fish-y (pace Izaak Walton.) Midnight, a few beers down, smoke break on the porch. The philosopher isn't going to talk about fishing unless he's already into it accidentally. The fisherman is likely to wax philosophical.

I actually do think philosophy is losing its popular prestige — Snakes Alive

I don't think this is actually true. I don't have data, but anecdotally there is a proliferation of Secret Wisdom Through The Ages books and videos with Plato and so forth that people are super into these days. People are definitely skeptical of like, academic philosophers, as part of a broader distrust of elites, but that's another beast.

It depends on the social context. One reason I don't have to be nudged away from, say, flat-earth theory, is because I grew up in a context in which the reasons it was inadequate were obvious enough that trying to adopt it would be a huge affront to my ability to make it through the day (I would need to make sense of how my plane trips worked). You could imagine a world in which we just know enough about the way our own language and cognitive faculties work, and this was such an ambient part of an ordinary person's knowledge, that the idea of adopting philosophy would look as silly as adopting flat-earthism or bird augury. — Snakes Alive

Yeah, maybe. Not compelling to me, but there's not much more I can say besides that.

True story, I knew a fisherman who had just gotten into the Hume is/ought gap. He would keep bringing it up, in the wrong contexts. It's a funny story (maybe) but it gets at the heart of what I'm saying. Being post-philosophy means having-already-gone through philosophy. It's very easy when everyone around you is highly-educated to realize tweets about the supposed importance of a philosopher are dumb (they are) and to think that fisherman are rightfully free from it, or whatever, with fisherman wisdom. The truth is that, if you're a fisherman, all that really means is that you're good at fishing. Outside of that, you're a dude like you and me, and sometimes you think of stuff but don't know how to make sense of it. There's an important perspective shift. A real life fisherman isn't someone who lives his life as an inversion of stultified academy stuff. He's someone who lives his life and is aware of the academy., and takes a stance toward it. Often that stance is - man, they're talking about some stuff that intrigues me. and every now and then I'l take a stab at it.

Is this similar to Bird Augury? Yes, in some ways. But is there an OLP of bird augury? Brass tacks, if we drop any pretense, if someone who comes to you with hume stuff, you're going to recognize someone who is at an early stage of a path of thought you've gone down, and is confused. Imagine: 'no man, this is just some superstition shit, you don't need to get into that'. Ok, maybe. But really think about that. Imagine someone told you back in the day that the stuff you were getting into was bogus. Imagine you didn't work through this stuff, but were nudged away from it. Good anthropologically, maybe. But would you feel as confident saying its hokum? I think it's important to be clear here - think about it - you can say its hokum confidently - can the fisherman? What's the difference?

The point is that many fisherman really do take a step down that path. This is what I mean by landed vs aspirational.

Hmm, I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying that philosophy comes from the 'landed' esoteric tradition, and it's not possible to shake it off? — Snakes Alive

Yeah, i was being a little oblique. I should probably check myself here, recall the thread I'm on, and remember I don't know all that much about OLP. Ok, this is my best stab in broad terms at what I've been hinting at:

The element I was thinking of, drawing on landed vs aspirational, is that (today, anyway) landed classes tend to downplay the things they've got. Someone (secure psychologically) who's coming from old money probably isn't going to boast about their wealth. But they will definitely notice when someone else, who doesn't have it, is acting like they do. How they express disapproval is often subtle, in a rarefied register. I think a disavowal of philosophy often works in similar ways. You might not overtly champion Hegel or Quine or whomever, per se, but you're still going to register when someone is making a philosophical faux pas.

Ok, easing into the concrete. So you can imagine witnessing regular people debating the meaning of words, while also thinking that they're not quite getting at the shit Austin, say, is getting at. The conversation isn't reaching that level. I believe you have a background in linguistics, so this is tricky. Clearly there are things about language that a professional can see, that a typical language user won't. I think for the point of my post, that can be bracketed (though I welcome a correction here.) But the idea is this:

You can talk to a fisherman about life shit and they will have a lot to say, right? (& yeah, this is classic liberal wisdom-of-the-working-man pap that has been around since at least Wordsworth. Nevertheless it's true, I spend a lot of time talking to fishermen & fisherman get heady if you give them the space to) A lot of what they're saying is going to, occasionally, take a philosophical flavor; the tuned-in philosophy brain will take this stuff into a mental vestibule, without letting it into the main room. You understand what they're saying, but you see the mistakes they're making.

So what's happening? Here you can take the historical or anthropological perspective and kind of break down what's going on. They are doing an anthropologically known activity that you are not, or are no longer, doing. Ok. But fold it back on itself. A martian anthropologist, or whatever. What's happening when you're recognizing, from your post-philosophy anthropological perspective, what they're doing? You listen and nod, but for a canny observer, who knows how you act in other situations, it's clear you're not expressing real agreement. For the martian anthropologist, this looks a lot like someone who, idk, is familar with olympic-level athletics, tolerantly observing a sub-olympic performance. Advanced biometrics and the deal's sealed - this is someone simply tolerating a performance they know is lacking.

Anthropologically, that's all you've got. This isn't as good as that, and these value judgments are part and parcel of sociological differentiation. The only way out* is to introduce some normative idea of why an Austin is doing something different. I want to really focus on this - because even the fact of meta-cognitive illusion etc only matters from a normative perspective. It doesn't necessarily have to be a philosophically normative perspective, but it is going to be normative. There's no reason why being confused on an object level is worse than having a clear meta-perspective, unless you bring in a normative dimension. The 'puzzle' in my earlier post is to explain why OLP is a better approach than, say, german idealism (or, more to the point, the fisherman going off on his thoughts) without using philosophical resources. I think this is actually very hard.

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* well not quite. another way is to just say: yes, I judge others for the sake of differentiating myself from them, and that's the only reason I'm doing it. But that seems unappealing.

I think those reccs are good &, listen, I don't want to duel you over who's read more on these subjects, but my feeling is we've both read a lot of history and anthropology. I appreciate that perspective and think it's a good one. I'm coming at this from a different angle, but I don't want to push it either. As a student of anthropology and sociology, you're familiar with the dynamic of landed vs aspirational classes ( the way in which the landed color the aspirational.) I'm talking about something like that.

@Snakes Alive @Antony Nickles Part of me wants to say that, if we're in the rubble, it's a good vibe to go into it just being like - what do you think of this, or that? Why do you think that? etc I understand that there's a valuable scholarly angle here - & for those who are tuned that way, there's a lot to discuss reading over the existent literature. But in this rubble, I think it's as legit to just be like, ok, what's up for you? This is how I think of this term, what do you think of it? etc There are exceptions, like if you're getting into nuts-and-bolts linguistics stuff. But basically, if philosophy crumbles into ruins, then there's nothing wrong with just shooting the shit to figure stuff out. All traditions organically become sophisticated, and will probably be as sophisticated as an arcane literature - it's just that, in today's rubble, the esoteric/exoteric divide is less clear, no one can be sure who has the right credentials.

Obviously this is a very legible approach (i.e. you can name what it's thrust is, and approach it thusly) that is easy to break down. But it's hard to to consistently, coherently come at it in a way that doesn't mess up the foundations you're coming from. I think it's a trickier puzzle than it seems at first glance.

First & foremost, a formal thing: I apologize for coming into your thread headfirst and missing the whole. What sucks about forum discussions is once it veers into 3+ pages (much less 15+ pages) it reaches a point where you simply can't catch up on what's already being said. Snakes Alive is someone I follow, so to speak, and I saw his posts here and dove in, in media res, responding solely to that post. I'll cop to not having read the OP, initially, but I've just gone back and read it. It's refreshingly well-presented. Not that I don't support whoever is coming onto a philosophy forum and opening up a conversation, regardless of their skill-level - but the OP in this thread has a lot more meat and is, brass tacks, on another level.

I won't quibble here, as I think the gist of what you are trying to point out is relevant. It is hard to avoid the dismissive nature of OLP (Moore, Austin to an extent) when it does not take the effort to account for the legitimate concerns of traditional skeptical philosophy (Cavell does a better job of this). And I agree with looking past philosophical theories to connect them to a motivation. That it is doing more than making a claim; it is a person taking a stance, and it reflects on that person. Cavell will discuss this as "living your skepticism". I would also point out (as I did above regarding a kayak) that when we are making claims about the criteria of our expressions (and actions), we are at the same time making claims about the ways we live in the world--not just discussing language, nor just speculating without any of the value of truth. — Antony Nickles

That's a good point. The implicit throughline in my above posts is that there's a place for deep personal values/approaches to the world etc; and that that place is not philosophy; and that OLP did a service by severing philosophy from those impulses.

But I think you (& OLP?) are correct in pointing out that that's not quite it- there's a lot to learn about how & what we value by looking at how we talk. & There's also something fun (even creatively joyful) in sussing out our implicit criteria.

From a very different angle, my feeling is that the first-generation, ingenuous postmodern thinkers also do this in their culture studies, but that most of that aspect of their work has been drowned out by their second-generation interpreters. Going back one generation, Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project is in the same spirit. In pop culture, I think there was a move in this direction with Carlin & his heirs. Or, to be fair, Lenny Bruce -->Carlin-->Next generation. Obviously it's a little looser, but there's something OLP-y about Seinfeld, for example, at least if you squint.

I would advocate looking at it a bit more dispassionately – people trying confusedly to express themselves is fine, but we also want things that are actually real, work, and so on. — Snakes Alive

Yeah, exactly, that's what I was trying to get at in my first post. The need to confusedly express one's deepest feelings and desires is natural, even laudable; but philosophy isn't a good vehicle for that.

I just watched part1, and I'm reminded of ideas about control and stability being inversely related. The more control humans have the more unstable humanity becomes, and this is just the way the world is. — unenlightened

I wonder which way the cause flows, or if that question is even valid here. I know that I'm more tempted by forms of control (including addiction, which is a kind of control because it simplifies) when I'm feeling more unstable, but I guess it could also be an mc escher hand thing. Like, I'm also more unstable when I'm engaging in addictive behaviors. Maybe Mao and his wife has a similar dynamic with the youth of their nation during the cultural revolution.

Did you know Muammar Gaddafi wrote a book of short stories? One of those stories is called Suicide of the Astronaut. It's an interesting look into a dictator's mind. Part of clinging to power is not knowing what else to do.

Thanks for the link, I had't heard anything about the new series.

Watched the first three last night. I like it a lot. (the rest of this will sound critical, but its from a place of love, I'm into this series)

I've gone back and forth on Adam Curtis, but where I've landed is something like: you can count on him for really good history-entertainment (amazing stoned, highly recommend, it's like if don delillo were a warm bath)

I trust his facts to be right, but I think you have to take his narrative/framing approach as an aesthetic device.If you're willing to temporarily suspend your disbelief, it's a thrill, but once you've watched 3 or 4 of his movies, you realize he's going to tell the same story, and use the same emotional cues to create a massively over-simplified story, with a radiohead paranoia tone. Again, I love it aesthetically, and love learning the facts themselves, but his framing is ...it's weird, it's doing the same thing he's always getting conspiratorial about.

--

By the early 21st century, millions had grown accustomed to chaos. There was a growing feeling that nothing had any meaning. The world had lost hope. But in 2021, A filmmaker from BBC offered a way of understanding reality. HIs claim was that, by sifting video fragments from the past 100 years, we could trace the patterns of power through the century . This new narrative would give us a full understanding. But this was just a fantasy [shot of people dancing, set to a different song than what they were dancing to originally]

Yeah, that's right. But I think his mono-causal model is a bit oversimple. It's more just that we lack certain metacognitive abilities having to do with how language and inquiry work, and by dint of having extremely specific intellectual concerns and a certain personality and cognitive disposition, you can sort of start to notice this by accident. Trying to express your fantasies and desires, and maintain the omnipotence of the intelligence, can be part of that, but sometimes it's something more banal – simple confusion, and so on. — Snakes Alive

That makes sense. As someone who, in my teens and 20s, had (unconscious) power/control fantasies about philosophy, and only painfully shed them, that's the narrative I gravitate toward - but it makes sense that that's only one path to it. (Incidentally, I think it's interesting how, initially, the shedding of those fantasies constitute a last gasp of those fantasies. There's a weird moment where you're ready to shed them, but still want the shedding to take place according to those old rhythms. That's kind of where the conversation went last time we talked on here. I think we're both past that now, you may have already been then, but it's something I'm curious to understand better at some point. There's probably some old myth that captures it well, but none come to mind immediately.)

No, because I don't think philosophy has a good track record as therapy either. My position, and I've expressed it here before, is that philosophy ought to be exited, and viewed from the outside anthropologically. We should look at philosophy as a practice that we are no longer 'natives' of, and that we do not engage in, but that we do seek to try to understand, much like an anthropologist might for a foreign culture.

Philosophy, in other words, is something certain human beings in certain cultural situations do – and it isn't what it claims to be, and doesn't work, and so there isn't that much good reason to actually practice it, not even for therapeutic reasons. But looking at it and understanding why people do it, and what cognitive factors drive it, is interesting in understanding how human inquiry works. — Snakes Alive

I don't think philosophy is good therapy, but I do think it can do some work at helping inoculate you to bad arguments. I guess it depends on where you're at. I read someone who made the argument that a lot of cringe-worthy internet atheists are posting in Baptist basements. If you read them in a Unitarian living room, they sound ridiculous - but maybe for them that kind of sheer, almost drag, intensity is a necessary step in their decoupling from a rough abusive-religious situation..

If you grow up in a milieu of reasonable, stolid, middle-class people you can take a lot for granted. For someone else, in an emotionally volatile atmosphere where people use choppy arguments only to the extent it gives them emotional leverage, it may be helpful to sort of gravitate toward the goofy pure philosophy vision as a way to get some breathing room. Then, hopefully, a second exit, later.

@Snakes Alive

Yeah, I didn't want to suggest it was just a matter of emotion. I think the pull toward 'discovery' is also part of the same nebula of things I'm talking about with values, modes of awareness and so forth. But I take your point - you're focusing more on the 'how' than the 'why.' — csalisbury

At the same time, I think the how and the why are pretty criss-crossed - isn't that Lazerowtiz's thing? A kind of wish-fulillment in words? I think there may be something about abstract language-use in particular (especially when you're proficient in it) that makes it harder to 'pop out' to a meta-level, and reflect on what you're doing.

I don't think there's any one reason people make these sorts of claims – emotional issues is probably a big one, but not the only one. Other people probably really think they're 'discovering' things while doing it. The point is just that philosophy takes place in a confused register where the conversation goes back and forth, but as far as inquiry goes, nothing is really happening. It's like watching a cat try to catch a laser light, or something.

So it's not just that people are too emotionally invested, and don't want to admit they're just trying to use words in nonstandard ways. It's more that language is the medium in which philosophy takes place, and there's some lack of meta-cognitive awareness of what goes on when we use it, in general. But sadly, I think philosophy itself is also not a great medium for giving people these meta-cognitive skills. Any understanding of the destructive portion of OLP has to start with the recognition that philosophy, objectively, doesn't work. That is, it is not what it claims to be – a form of effective inquiry. — Snakes Alive

Yeah, I didn't want to suggest it was just a matter of emotion. I think the pull toward 'discovery' is also part of the same nebula of things I'm talking about with values, modes of awareness and so forth. But I take your point - you're focusing more on the 'how' than the 'why.'

I don't think there's much point in trying to convince people. While OLP is good, it relies on a certain psychological leap that it never figured out how to instill in other people. Lazerowitz said it was a matter of 'clicking,' or like seeing through a magic-eye painting. Much of OLP was, and I think should still be seen, as destructive to philosophy, and is a matter of 'seeing through' it. People who are invested in philosophy as part of their identity have a predisposition not to listen, and even someone who wants to listen has no guarantee it will 'click.' That's the major shortcoming of the method – no one figured out how to make someone see that initial insight. Philosophy is, in some sense, stupid or defective, but we're cognitively disposed to fall into its traps.

The thing that did it for me was Malcolm's 'Moore and Ordinary Language,' which contains something like the OLP 'master argument' in the allegory of the animal, and the argument over whether it's a fox or a wolf.

Suppose we're going through the forest and we hear rustling, so we go to investigate. We look beyond and in a clearing there's an animal. We are close enough to see it perfectly clearly. You say it's a wolf, and I say it's a fox. When you protest, I ask, how can that possibly be a wolf? It looks and acts like a fox – it has all the features typically associated with a fox. But you protest, and say 'I grant you that – it has all the characteristics of what we would normally call a fox. Nevertheless, it is a wolf.'

The idea is that here you're doing philosophy, in insisting that a fox is a wolf. The point is to consider – what sense is there in saying that a creature that has all the characteristics of what is normally called a fox, not a fox? Yet this is precisely what the philosopher spends the great majority of his time doing. — Snakes Alive

I haven't read much OLP (some Austin, basically, and that a while ago) but I've picked up some of the flavor of their thought, which has become more palatable the older I get. That's the disclaimer, since I want to engage with your post here, & am aware I have some domain-specific limitations.

But I have a hunch that what's going on is something like:

In the the fox/wolf conversation, the 'wolf' guy has all sorts of complicated stuff attached to wolves- values, emotions, modes of awareness. For whatever reason, he's at a point in his life where all these things have gotten attached to championing wolfness, whenever possible (and through the exercise of an intricate structure of axioms and inferences which serves that purpose). For the pro-wolf guy, if the fox can't be called a wolf, then all those values and emotions are in jeopardy. In defending the wolfness of the fox, he's trying to defend all these things. I think the impulse to defend those things is good and fundamental to being human, but the way in which that impulse is attempting to be realized suggests a deep confusion.

If I understand OLP correctly, the move to look at what's actually happening in philosophical discussion is right - people are talking about words and how they're used. A lot of the animus toward OLP seems to stem from a feeling that it's trivializing those values and emotions and modes of awareness. But values are borne out in action, not discussion; And emotions, or different ways of attuning to the world, are borne out in activities that do that kind of attuning. The 'click' can only happen if you're also willing to give up the (implicit) idea that living-well (in accordance with your values, say) means simply verbally laying claim to the right kind of thing, or discussing the world in a certain way.

Some of the tone of (early to mid 20th century) analytic philosophy I've read veers into being hammily scotch-and-a-cigar-in-the-drawing-room. There's a wry irony in Quine, or Davidson, say. That's bothered me in the past, but there's a case to be made that it stems from a refreshing self-awareness of the actual stakes, which are the stakes of talking about words over scotch and a cigar.

I think the worst thing the left could do would be cheerlead this, then drift away when the fallout happens. — csalisbury

What is the next step, rather than dropping this when it stops trending?

I think there's like

(1) the early guys, at wallstreet bets, who knew the whole structure of the thing
(2) the hedgefunds
(3) the late adopters.

I think the people who point to this as a sort of popping, neon symptom of the immanent crisis in the heart of capitalism etc etc are right, but also it's going to fuck up a shit load of regular people.

& that's not a value-judgment, in any way, on the traders. I'm on board with Wall Street Bets.

But I think an interesting question is to what degree people understand their role in the living-out-of-the-immanent-crisis-at-the-heart-of-capitalism.

There's no way around the fact that the structure of this thing is:

short squeeze -> profit -> bagholders.

Regular people are going to get fucked. If they knew that going in, & if they bought it as a show of solidarity, then right on. If they didn't, it quickly becomes more complicated. I think most didn't buy in for that reason.

The bagholders are going to be people who signed up on the wsb fuck-the-hedgefund-energy. They will be confused at the stock's value goes down. They already are.

i think the real leftist question is how to continue this energy, when most people are bagholders. I haven't seen many people talking about that.

I think the worst thing the left could do would be cheerlead this, then drift away when the fallout happens. I don't want to be cynical, but... let's see where this thread is in a few months.

I don't believe you to be someone who posts in good faith, I wouldn't believe your answer. But I will leave you alone from here.

Looking at the video you linked, the secret service agent clearly had his gun drawn and hanging out of the door for quite a while before he fired. We cannot see his mouth or hear properly through the noise, but it's likely that he was verbally warning them (But I mean, come on; if you break into a secure federal government compound and start climbing over barricades, you should know you're liable for getting shot, right?). — VagabondSpectre

Yeah, it's totally unambiguous. It's a tragedy she was so callously manipulated to get her to this point - and that the police outside slickened the sense of invincibility by allowing her and others to get so far inside with little pushback, as though nothing bad could happen, allowing the dream-like trance of the q-anon 'storm' narrative to carry them --so that even a secret service agent (i think?) with a gun, in the capitol, pointing it at you as you jump through a barricade, into the rotunda, doesn't seem like a danger- but there's a line. There is a point at which an adult - especially an adult over 30 - has to bear responsibility for going this far. It's a mess, and its sad.

I'm not sure what your motives or intentions are. I don't think you're trolling, exactly, but I don't think you're not-trolling either. I think the thrill of throwing rhetorical flashbangs into the narratives of others can yield a certain dopamine hit, and I think that thrill can take on its own momentum and leave you in a half-serious commitment to counter-narratives that sustain your capacity to keep getting those flashbang-throwing hits. Of course nothing I'm going to say is going to sway you one way or the other, but I imagine every now and again - in the shower, cooking dinner, waiting in line somewhere - some thought floats through your mind about the niche you've carved in the discourse ecosystem (what sort of things you say in order to get people to talk to you) and what led you to set up shop in that way. It becomes progressively harder to survive outside the niche you've carved as time goes on. There was a smart guy I worked with who was like that - he both believed and didn't believe what he was saying, but because he'd stuck to it for so long, there was no way for him to get out of it, and he'd oscillate between flashbangs and bids at trying out a different way - but he'd carved himself so deep, there was no way out of it. At a certain point, all you have left is negative attention vs no attention. Be careful.

And then you have gold very high also. Which isn't actually good sign for the economy. — ssu

Right.

Bitcoin, functionally, is a gold-type asset. It seems, more and more, like prudent, cautious, institutional money agrees with you: the economy is in a dicey place. Bitcoin's gone up a good bit since this thread was last active, mostly because of institutional hoovering-up of what's available on exchanges. But on a macroscale that might be a bad sign.

The modelling element either reveals something kept from view or it does not. I don't know how to approach that side of things. It is easy to become what one opposes. — Valentinus

Very much so. My go-to is if someone tells you they have the answer, they don't. & If you think you have the answer, then you no longer do (if you ever did)