See what fruits come from simply accepting wittgenstein and david stove as your therapists and saviors . Be addled no more by the barbs of idle thought!

Philosophers should have to take five years off during which they neither talk to other philosophers or read their works. Then return.

One can isolate, artificially, this 'meta-philosophy' and start comparing it, as if a car-catalogue, to other 'meta-philosophies', but I think this is a doomed exercise from the start: if you disconnect the principles that animate the philosophy from the philosophy itself, you're just playing a shell-game. — StreetlightX

But isn't it the case that you set up the comparison between different meta-philosophies in this thread and the ones prior to this one? Could we not describe as car-cataloguey the distinction betwen philosophies that are cartographic and those that rely on tracing ? There's a depth hermeneutics to cartography/tracing that requires work (sussing out the implications of thought) but it's still, in the end, dependent on a firm criterion. What makes one criterion better than another?

The potency of car-catalogue as epithet derives from the well-known image of a boorish consumer so stripped of the ability to create values (castrated?) that he has to choose between a pre-existent set of 'minor differences' laid out easily for him.

To differentiate oneself from this sad-sack consumer it would be necessary to show that one is the source of one's own valuation rather than someone choosing from among a series of options based on pre-existing values one has adopted.

The sad-sack consumer, as we all know, stakes a lot on his choice, and will mock the taste of those who choose otherwise. Or, less sad-sack, more flashy-but-vapid: the business card scene in American Psycho.

Reliance on external values leads to venemous shut-downs. Theyre checks backed by the confidence of others. wonder if this is also tied to the pronouncy thing I'm addicted to. I like much of the same philosophy you like. But pronouncing and shaming seem like interrelated smokescreens. Valuation from within, rather than adoption of values from without, seems inherently persuasive; it talks to rather than tells. It no longer feels the passion for imitation, or 'you know, what theyre saying is this' -- "it is known"

The question then is not "how does this meta-philosophy compare to that meta-philosophy?", or "how do you compare between the two?", but does this approach to philosophy capture what seems to be its relevant aspects? Does it leave out anything of significance with respect to what it claims to capture? In other words: is this approach adequate to the very object it aims to specify? — StreetlightX

'what seems to be relevant' or 'of significance' , then, can be understood in by reference to the adequation of approach and object. Do we understand relevance and significance through this sort of adequation, or adequation through relevance and significance?

Is this a 'price' worthy paying? Maybe there's an argument somewhere that it isn't. And that would be interesting debate because it would be motivated by the object itself: philosophy as problem. The only thing not to do here is treat 'meta-philosophy' as a closed field in itself, which'll invariably lead you to the sort of clinical hysteria of Psuedonym's questions: but how do you know??; what's the meta-meta-philosophy that authorizes you to say that? And the meta-meta-meta-philosophy of that? It's a very sad game that needs to be headed off at the pass. — StreetlightX

I disagree, not because I think Pseudonym is 'right'. I disagree because I think he's right that the tone and presentation of these ideas, here and elsewhere, remains the same as the old tone and old presentation of old ideas. Present in that way, defend it that way - its fair.

Craftsmanship and mastery: yes, all day.

But another metaphor in the vein and tone of the car catalogue one:

Artisan at a public forum hawking his goods and shaming as lacking appreciation all those who won't buy. Those who will: Ah but i can see youre a man of taste: witness the vulgarity of the customer just before you- can you believe?


Alternative vision: the artisan who gets to know his customers and what they value and, since hes interested in them and his own work, shows them, on their terms, why his wares are of value.

This is cool, about halfway through. Thanks for this.

Yes, resigning oneself to the way things are is a coping skill? I mean, embracing depression entails that one accept or resign oneself to the cards dealt by fate. Is this a stipulative suggestion to think of coping in these terms or self-refuting? — Posty McPostface

I don't think it's self refuting. I think coping skills are meant to help you accept the way things are at a given moment, in order to ride things out - and that this, eventually, is meant to help you move past 'the way things are' in a broader sense. Like: You learn how to accept and deal with the variety of specific problems and how they trigger or exacerbate depression. As you learn this, it slowly gives you a sense of agency and control which helps you move onward out of your particular situation.

Coping skills, in the context of therapy and psychiatry, usually are about handling irruptions of overwhelming emotion in non self-destructive ways.

The tension I think you're identifying comes about when also considering coping to mean something like: resigning oneself to the way things are.

I think these are two different senses of coping. The therapeutic idea is that gradually learning coping skills (gradually, because all skills are learned gradually) will aid you in breaking out of 'the way things are.'

tldr: you learn specific ways of coping with specific feelings in order that you eventually no longer have to cope with a general malaise and inertia.

Say what you will about Trump, his recent bombshell that he has, i quote, '100 pictures of comey and mueller hugging and kissing' is amazing.

I think part of the debate here stems from a higher-order language game that emerges organically when you try to characterize anything in opposition to another characterization. This inevitably creates a binary where one perspective is selected over and against another. Or at least a selection of one characterization against a multitude. So out of that emerges a language game (external to, tho in contact with) the object-level being discussed. The game of defending one view against another. The most obvious way to play this game is to do it in terms of truth. Philosophy is essentially this, not that. But this higher-order defense, in this case, replicates the same object-level logic its putting into question.

Another way to play the game of defense is to cast the recognition of ones view as right as an index of some indefinable element of worthiness (this worthiness can take a lot of forms: aesthetic sensibility, requisite experience, nobility of mind etc. The rhetorical use of prostitution, for example, sets up a pure/defiled distinction, casting the opponent as someone who uses something good for bad purposes, and so besmirches the good. Plus you run the risk of slut-shaming philosophy, which maybe is a willing agent in the exchange, and doesnt need or want protection from the john or pimp.)

In either case its a fair rhetorical move for ones opponent to say that the sketch of a non-absolute object-level is being anchored by a meta-level absolute.

I think the only way out of the impasse is to assert, on the meta-level, that a philosophy of valuation is itself a product of valuation. You have to jettison an essence of philosophy and say: I think this is the type of philosophy that is worthwhile. And this is where rhetoric, persuasion, poesy, politics and the rest come in. If you state that its a matter of valuation, then any recourse to essence is in bad faith while any immediate use of high/low distinctions is tautologous. The use of the latter, at this point, is just re-emphasizing, but with a praise/shame undercurrent, that you value what you value and that the other person doesn't

But none of that (persuasion, rhetoric, poesy, politics) is inherently cynical. If you value what you value, then all you're trying to do is get others to see what you see, feel what you feel, and so forth.

It's after finitude, for sure. — Marchesk

Well its after (following on @unenlightened's post) anything you can think. you just cant get there from here, thinking. tho youre fated to get there nonethless.)

Oh no I think its a thing worth talking about - I just mean the way in which its talkable about is outside of reason. Its inherently emotional. I *would* disagree with something like: 'Whereof one cannot provide a rational resting point, thereof one must be silent"

I'll check out your thread! I think you're right that a change in self-image is necessary, and also that apo is right in that this also requires a change in habits.

Rationality always works within a delimited field. Death is outside that. Its beyond rationality/irrationality.

Not for me. I think of clinical depression as something that descends upon an otherwise normal person, like any disease. Depression, for me, is tightly wrapped up with a broader shame issue. My depression waxes and wanes, but always alongside the other problems, as a symptom.

Yeah depression is definitely part of it. I feel weird being joyful in front of people. When it happens usually some other part of me kicks in and says 'tone it down man'

@apokrisis one last thing. The feeling I get when I try to play a normal role as a healthy adult male is a lot like the feeling of trying to tell something meaningful to a judgmental, mocking presence. I begin to feel like everything I'm saying is ridiculousness, and my words stop flowing, and I begin to feel like I'm bluffing in front of someone who's a master at reading tells. So all of a sudden what I actually feel and believe seems like a lie, and I feel this weird intense shame. (whatever you would infer about my dad here is probably eaxctly right)

Which, again, he knew. But it didn't help.

Following on that David Foster Wallace, with whom I had a long love affair, is, imo, an example of someone who gets the destructive/creative dialectic but struggles to acess the creative flow (imo). So you have this sense of total control: he wants to tell you exactly hows he destroying, and then creating. He wants to make sure there's no room left for misinterpretation, or mockery. And how this plays out is a a kind of solipsistic trap where the dialectic of destruction and creation becomes the content itself, and the actual moment of creation is lost. Not that he didn't know this; he did. and thats why his books are so sad, and frustrating. And ultimately something that isnt quite Art (except for the one story about the boy on the diving board) in the same way very good seducers aren't actual emotional partners.

Another way of putting it that just occurred to me is that to do good philosophy you really have to know what you're doing whereas to do good art, you don't, you just have to be what you're doing. — Baden

Yeah! I like this distillation. @John Doe this is the heart of what I found dissatisfactory in my account. My discussion of art focused on the conditions of possibility, and felt like it was describing to intentional a process, whereas its the being - the creative flow, or trance - which is whats essential. Of course thats the thing where theres not much you can say about it.

@apokrisis

As I said I've been thinking about you post. I do indeed identify as 'broken' in some ill-defined way. &, irl, I usually feel like its immediately apparent to other people. I'm told by others it isn't, at least at first. But I have an internal self-image that's always playing in my head that makes me feel ridiculous when I try to do normal social things. Its not that I don't know how to do them; its that I feel...prohibited? Or that to assert myself, or speak and act like someone worthy of respect, is to assert something morally and aesthetically distasteful. (I like Mishima bc this is his big theme. A sharp awareness of beauty and draw toward it, combined with the feeling that oneself is not beautiful....leading finally to a hatred of beauty)

So in social situations one of three things happens

(1) I try premptively to side with those would mock or disparage me. Self-deprecating humor, but laid on really thick. And sort of being a caricature of a 'weird' person. I think this makes me feel like I have control over the situation. it allows me to manage and direct the mockery.


(2) If I feel smarter than the other person, or people, i take a cynical, ironic tone. Not overt assholishness, but a kind of quiet mockery and undercutting of anything discussed seriously. This is also a kind of form of control bc it wards away the possibility of any intimacy (intimacy in the broadest sense.)

(3) bona fide dissociation. A deep feeling of fogginess, a sluggishness of thought and action, total lack of spontaneity. It feels a little like being stoned or sedated. The function of this I think is to dull the impact of the shame and humilation I feel.


In all three scenarios tho I'm shutting off any form of actual emotion connection. I'm bracketting my emotional needs. But the thing is these all only work as stopgap measures, to protect against temporary social pain. At this point tho theyve so calcified that theyre all I do to the point where its hard to figure out what I actually am besides these defenses.

And thats where you get resentment. I hate feeling like I can't respect myself, and I hate my defenses (tho for a while I liked the ironic, cynical one) but the reflexive feeling is that the presence of other people is what activates these defenses. So in a twisted way I hate them for making me abase myself. Its a fucked up logic: I project onto other people the negative self-image I have of myself, I imagine them seeing me like that, so then I feel humiliated, and humiliate myself, then blame them for feeling the way I do.


And this makes plenty of space for a fetishization of philosophy, and a can't-be-touched persona on a philosophy forum. Thoughts and concepts felt like they offer d total control, and if since thats all I really could control, then systems become a kind of fetish. A thing I could turn over in my head at home, untouchable by the world and feel safe.

(The bonus with the continental approach is you get a side of aristocratic sneer as part of the deal. Zizek in particular is the master of a particular form of rhetoric that is so sneery and shaming that you enjoy siding with him and feeling part of the club. Its easy to be seduced by this when youre young. And, as with all strong voices, its easy to let it infect your own voice)

But anyway, after a while the fun stopped . Its an addiction. The world got fuzzier and fuzzier and reduced to what I could make of it philosophically. To the point where major life events would be happening and I'd be only half-there, thinking about how I could analyze this and fit it into my philosophical preoccupations, or weaponize it argumentatively. Its not a good thing. I read some author somewhere recounting being at the hospital while his wife was in labor, and how he was thinking of kafka (i.e thinking of himself as a writer in the constellation of literary writers) like this was a neat detail and it made me feel really bad, especially bc I can remember myself thinking stuff like that was neat, instead of very sad.


Anyway long story short: all these habits developed in school, when I was a weird-looking overprotected precocious kid. Strictly survival. You bully yourself so you wont get bullied for real anymore.

The thing is I'm pretty normal & nomal-looking now. Like you suggested the defenses and habits id developed lost their use loooong ago.

I know my warped self-image and my current habits are kind of a mutually sustaining mobius strip. I do think I have the capacity to break out of it buts its so engrained its hard to figure out how

thats really unsatisfactory to me but its a start

Given what you've said though, I'm interested in your answer to where do you see the boundary between philosophy and art. How do we distinguish between the two? — Baden

I think I'm on board with what both you and apo have been saying. The nuts and bolts of of realizing that kind of change are another matter tho. so, yes, in the meantime I'd love to take a stab at this:

I think ( faintly echoing Deleuze) that philosophizing means understanding how concepts interact. Its understanding both the intricacy of particular concepts and the conceptual space in which they're nestled. Proper concepts are all loaded, hyper-implicate. So the way they relate to other concepts - and the relation of these relations to other relations and so forth - requires some broader background sense of conceptual space. So you have to have some feeling for how toying with one aspect of a concept ripples and affects the other concepts. Its almost aesthetic but not quite - its a sort of understanding of how making this or that philosophical move has ramifications for the other concepts, and the whole web. Most bad philosophy involves advancing certain claims while being unaware of the broader conceptual consequences.

like: making some conceptual claim
in one particular argument --- then, later, making use of other concepts youve implicitly shaken in your earlier argument with no awareness of how that argument, if taken seriously, compromises those concepts. (crude atheism is a great example of this. Husserl on psychologism is a great example of forcing ppl to confront this kind of confusion)

Something on the border of logic and art.

Art, imo, is just conveying something felt urgently by whatever means necessary. At essence: Producing an effect that best transmits how you yourself have been affected. The trick is the stuff we most need to convey is very simple, and anything stated simply is already cliche, or advertisement. So there's a necessary element of destruction and disruption just to clear a space and get through. Art involves an intutive sense of how to both effect this necessary destruction and how to make use of the cleared space. (also obv it requires technical knowhow to make that all work)

hey thank you. I've been mulling over your post for a while and still am.

I wonder if there's two separate emotions or states that have been lumped under a single word. I think there's a type of pride that is something like identification with a covetable virtue or characteristic because its covetable. And then there's another pride that is something like the ability to stand in front of oneself or others without concealing onself - kinda like the opposite of what Levinas identifies (correctly imo) as the essence of shame. Or maybe its that all good things also have a distorted shadow version of themselves, so you'd have authentic pride as well as 'sinful' pride. (Feel like sin's ok as a concept if you think of it a state of being inimical to true flourishing, rather than a shameful stain. Tho Of course its been cast as the latter by those in power for a long time)

It's pride that one is basking in, not joy, and the higher the pride, the deeper the shame. Basking in ones strength, beauty, goodness, superiority, and then to have this challenged or brought into question transforms it to shame. The greater the pride, the deeper the shame. — All sight

I think this is right, Pride/Shame, 'sinful' pride anyway.

The pride you're talking about is very very conscious of the threat of shame. The virtues identified with are used as a sort of protective amulet. Or like an internal song you sing to yourself to stave off anxiety. Singing real loudly is a sign that you're particularly susceptible to what should happen if the song is muted, or amulet is lost.

Prideful people have a background awareness of a shame-inducing gaze that never quite turns off. It's a gaze that demands that, at any given moment, there must be someone subjected to it. Putting others down (i.e. shaming them) is like offering up a sacrificial victim to the gaze, buying you a little more time, and temporarily reinforcing your belief in the power of your amulet, or song : It must be working, since the gaze took someone else.

I understand what you're saying. But the bone in the throat is that its one of the selves - the superself? - that is neatly setting things in triadic harmony (or harmonically understood disharmony). And that self thrives - gorges itself - on word and concepts arranged neatly. It appeals to itself until it finds satisfaction. But the catch is it doesn't find satisfaction. It finds something that it recognizes as checking the boxes (its own boxes) for 'satisfying' and, unsatisfied itself, appeals endlessly to others, asking it to recognize the detente as satisfactory.

I'm not advocating romanticism, which, in its canonical, exemplary figures, is so self-conscious you could choke.

I'm not even advocating something else. I'm just fucking sad man, I'm unhappy, I'm lonely. If your thing makes you happy all the more power.

But I have the suspicion that what makes me unhappy is this drive to harmony, even if its a weird syncopated harmony in disharmony. Im bored and tired of my thoughts. I'm especially bored of dialectics. Have you seen 'get out'? I feel like im half-anaesthetized in the 'sunken place' with some weird dialectical sidekick who argues on my behalf, while i lay unconscious and hurt. Sad & mad.

Yeah I have a general anhedonia as well. Or at least the inability to sustain enjoyment of anything for more than a few days. I have some kind of inner (thought/mood) record and there's a big old scratch and inevitably it starts skipping and the song is lost.

But the world - the world! - that's what's worth being interested in. I don't think its silly. I think its the way in which you relate to the world. I think it comes down to control, to trying to control the way the world affects you. If truth is a woman (#problematic) then im talking about the tradition of consigning it to the home and monitoring its relations with variables youre not open to considering.

& control stems from fear. and fear is of the world.

yeah, sorry, my post was (contextually) nonsense.

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I think I'm talking about a compulsion, along the lines that @John Doe & @Moliere mentioned. Something kinda like a blend of OCD and an addiction. Its probably a confusion, on my part, to identify this with Grand Metaphysics in general. It's probably more likely that Grand Metaphysics can be harmful for certain personalities, myself included. Sam Beckett has a quote somewhere in his Three Novels about a progressively constricting spiral that bends the parts of the soul hungry for the outside and freedom inward. And I think its Schelling (or maybe Zizek on Schelling) who uses the metaphor of some kind of trap or knot that gets tighter the more you struggl against it.

I think this may be more a mentall illness issue than a strictly philosophical one. I just know that I dont get any enjoyment from philosophy anymore. It feels more like a very tense and nervous imperative to organize thought into some arrangement of leakproof compartments.

yeah and heres a poll: whos ever actually seen a person die?

actually seen it?


and how it progresses?


death *is* an otherness, But dying isnt. it involves others.


I dont like this OP. its [absolute otherness] for the person who reflects on it. its the rarest oriental toy for the resident orientalist.

the point, @apokrisis, is that -

Well no. You're mixing up levels. You're casting the debate in implicitly gladitorial terms. Tho thats not a bad image: the gladiator who thinks he can bring even the ampitheater into his control - drops the sword, says Truths etc.

You're making all the world a falsifiable chess game. that sounds good for chess players who like science.

But that's not what i was asking about!

imagine doing dialectical tricks on your deathbed hooooly

i think you're right. my moms dead and my dad may as well be. the joke is there's no punchline and there's no one to register how clever you are. So being clever is garbage. its a sad kid trying to impress himself with how neat he can arrange rocks, or cans. get the clever part to shut the fuck up fo a minute and whats left is all there is. if it's atrocious, so be it

I ask this sincerely. it seems like a virus of the mind, one with which I've been infected, and im really just tired of it. It doesnt care for its host, or others, and seems to have no raison d'etre of its own.

By which standard would we be measuring our internal ethical rules and external judgments that allow us to change our internal moral compass or decide not to? — Benkei

you already answered the question in (5)

The point that life involves a sort of striving is well-made.

There remains a logical issue here. The more schopenhauer1 shows that the Will is like entropy, the less the Will involves intent.

And yet, intent would appear to be intrinsic to will.

So the more @schopenhauer1 shows the Will to be like entropy, the less the Will is like the sort of will we usually talk about. — Banno

I disagree with almost everything Schopenhauer1 says, usually, but I don't agree with this criticism. You can even translate this easily into the OLP atmosphere. We're all familiar with wanting something we try not to want, I imagine. Something deeper than us works through us. "the best-laid plans of mice and men.' I'm skeptical of anyone claims that their life has worked like: intended something with full conscious awareness of intending it- and then the rest followed

I think maybe the conversation is foundering on 'will' which has been nicely domesticated in one quarter, has been assigned another function by others

@schopenhauer1 Not sure if someone has brought this up already - the thread grew quickly, so I've only skimmed the conversation so far - but I think there's one very significant difference between Schop's system and Entropy as (necessary, but purposeless) telos. With Entropy and heat death, you have something akin to the will cancelling itself out globally, long-run, by amping up locally (negentropy). The self-defeat of the will, in the entropy/heat death model, is baked into the very existence of something like a will. Poetically: the will wills so that it may not longer will. The million masks of the one thing, are work the one thing does to stop being that that thing.

Whereas, with Schop (correct me if I'm wrong here, it's been a long time since I read WWR) but the will is kind of a constant ontological source, eternally self-renewing. It's only through the (non?)heroic attempts of individuals to snuff out the will that it can quiet itself.

If this is a fair characterization, I think these two ways-of-looking-at-things are deeply different.

The world can stand more, a lot more, people with their needs and sensible wants met but it can't stand the economic arrangement that enables the number of suburban McMansion SUV yatch parties to be sustained or grow. — fdrake

I feel like the only solution would be a different form of status symbol. It seems, unfortunately, like a need for legible social hierarchy is built deeply into us, and conspicuous consumption is the most legible game in town.

But then you probably can't just make a new system of status symbols out of whole cloth because any official, public system would immediately generate a shadow-system where buying into the official system would, at a certain level, be considered low-status.

Feel like the saddest part of the human condition is that, no matter where you're at socially, you're not really there. You're smeared somewhere between the level you're trying to differentiate yourself from, and another higher level, the existence of which is potentially humiliating, if people you care about ascend to it and you remain. So there's an endless restlessness where you're never on absolutely firm social ground. And that gets externalized in yachts and all that. I don't even think most of the yachtiest people care that much about yachts. The yachts are more like a firm stare at another.

I think that's also part of the deal with stuff like what's revealed in the panama papers. Its partially about protecting your wealth, but also at a certain level, its like - how much wealth do you need? I think its more that the only way people can feel secure that they're elite is to be part of exclusionary second-world. The highest status symbol is a kind of secret handshake and access (to whatever)

I think the french know that though - their excesses are the continental equivalent of knowing wryness that characterizes many anglo philosophers. They're both having fun in different, equally exclusionary, ways.

hard to disentangle 'reality' from 'the world' tho I agree there's a distinction. It just goes beyond Sellars into mysticism.

An aspiring stoic who's a cynic is as good a candidate as any for studying 'pomo' philosophy. Helps you separate the wheat from the chaff. The sad thing is there's lots of good wheat you can't get elsewhere but there's soooo much chaff.