I do not think this does justice to Wittgenstein's nuanced account. — Banno

Agreed.

I'll throw my hat into the ring and agree outright with Davidson, Ido not think that a sceptic can sensibly posit a language that cannot be translated into our own. — Banno

That sounds right, and the issue here ('sensibly') is intelligibility.

I also find it ironic that Grayling views OC as "Wittgenstein's acceptance, at last, of philosophy's legitimacy as an enterprise". This also misses the point. I think it more likely W. begins his treatment with Moore's proposition of "This is a hand", for much the same reason that he begins PI with Augustine's view of language: because they are paradigm examples of errors made exclusively by philosophers. — Luke

I second that, and I also read OC somewhat in terms of trying to free errant philosophers from a 'picture' of inquiry and language. This picture is so dominant, so 'obvious', that criticisms of the picture tend to be understood by the enthralled in terms of that same picture that's being criticized. The toy skeptic takes a notion of language and the world for granted (as does all intelligible discourse, it seems.)

Sheesh, how many times does the same refutation have to be given before it gets some traction? — Bartricks

Excellent question!

And his way of coping with his underdog status was to be convinced he is of divine origin with special powers and special rights. — baker

Here's another perspective on that:

—The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dis may, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying,the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! — link

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm
<emph added>

I’ve always thought of Jung as part of the broader Gnostic tradition in Western culture — Wayfarer

That seems reasonable. Perhaps what makes Jung stand out is a self-consciousness about the process (or perhaps his lingo is just easier for us.) I found some relevant passages that I remember reading and being moved by many years ago.

The second way would be that of identification with the collective psyche. That would mean the symptom of "God-Almightiness" developed into a system; in other words, one would be the fortunate possessor of the absolute truth, that had yet to be discovered; of the conclusive knowledge, which would be the people's salvation. This attitude is not necessarily megalomania ("Grössenwahn") in a direct form, but the well-known milder form of having a prophetic mission. Weak minds which, as is so often the case, have correspondingly an undue share of vanity and misplaced naïveté at their disposal, run a considerable risk of succumbing to this temptation. The obtaining access to the collective psyche signifies a renewal of life for the individual, whether this renewal of life be felt as something pleasant or unpleasant. It would seem desirable to retain a hold upon this renewal: for one person, because it increases his feeling for life ("Lebensgefühl"); for another, because it promises a great accretion to his knowledge. Therefore both of them, not wishing to deprive themselves of the rich values that lie buried in the collective psyche, will endeavour by every means possible to retain their newly gained union with the primal cause of life. Identification appears to be the nearest way to it, for the merging of the persona in the collective psyche is a veritable lure to unite one's self with this "ocean of divinity," and, oblivious of the past, to become absorbed in it. This piece of mysticism belongs to every finer individual, just as the "yearning for the mother"—the looking back to the source whence one originated—is innate in every one.

As I have demonstrated explicitly before,[254] there is a special value and a special necessity hidden in the regressive longing—which, as is well-known, Freud conceives as "infantile fixation" or as "incest-wish." This necessity and longing is particularly emphasized in myths, where it is always the strongest and best of people, in other words, the hero, who[463] follows the regressive longing and deliberately runs into danger of letting himself be devoured by the monster of the maternal first cause. But he is a hero only because, instead of letting himself be finally devoured by the monster, he conquers it, and that not only once but several times. It is only through the conquest of the collective psyche that its true value can be attained, whether it be under the symbol of capture of treasure, of an invincible weapon, of a magical means of defence, or whatever else the myth devises as the most desirable possession. Hence whoever identifies himself with the collective psyche, also reaches the treasure which the dragon guards, but against his will and to his own great injury, by thus allowing himself (mythologically speaking) to be devoured by the monster and merged with it. — Jung

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48225/48225-h/48225-h.htm#Page_449

Merging with the monster sounds like 'individuation' or the assimilation of irrational and otherwise destructive forces.

I like 19th century philosophy, and again and again I find talk of something like 'spiritual 'maturity manifested through participation in intellectual and technical progress. I found it, for instance, in Hegel and Lange (the otherwise quite different 'History of Materialism' guy.) I think those were more optimistic times. Now there's as much fear about technology as there is hope, perhaps. Of course the need to transcend petty egoism is also found in religion.

On this religious front, it's been argued that personal immortality is antithetical to this as the supreme expression of egoism (in Feuerbach and Nietzsche.) We can understand this IMO in terms of a another quote:

From this standpoint, the conscious personality seems to be a more or less arbitrary excerpt of the collective psyche. It appears to consist of a number of universal basic human qualities of which it is à priori unconscious, and further of a series of impulses and forms which might just as well have been conscious, but were more or less arbitrarily repressed, in order to attain that excerpt of the collective psyche, which we call personality. The term persona is really an excellent one, for persona was originally the mask which an actor wore, that served to indicate the character in which he appeared. For if we really venture to undertake to decide what psychic material must be accounted personal and what impersonal, we shall soon reach a state of great perplexity; for, in truth, we must make the same assertion regarding the contents of the personality as we have already made with respect to the impersonal unconscious, that is to say that it is collective, whereas we can only concede individuality to the bounds of the persona, that is to the particular choice of personal elements, and that only to a very limited extent. — Jung

In other words, the self that's supposed to be immortal is mere persona or mask. It's the species that's (relatively) immortal, precisely through the generation and destruction of individuals (which can be viewed as cells in a larger organism.)

For Heidegger our bodies are made of matter but our consciousness comes from nothing. This and how it is connected to how we experience being Dasein (beingness IN time) was a mystery for him. — Gregory

That doesn't sound quite right to me. Perhaps you could find some quotes to support your interpretation?

Some people are turned off by Heidegger's modern work a-day German. — Gregory

I can only go by translations, but I find it hard to believe that B&T-and-after Heidegger was easy reading for the working class. I am aware that he could be brilliant with terminology, such as 'it worlds' or 'the world worlds' and so on. He had some early breakthroughs that only much later became well-known through Being and Time (just as the 'Blue' and 'Brown' books already contain many insights from Philosophical Investigations.)

Heidegger takes the path of repudiating the primacy of the theoretical attitude. For him, we are never in the position of experiencing the sensedata of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

For Heidegger, in contrast, the theoretical attitude is secondary, being predicated on the existence of a preconceptual understanding that is the basis on which we conduct our day-to-day life. We do not see sense-data, what we see – at least as students and lecturers – are, for example, chairs, desks, windows. There is no problem of the external world because we are always already in that world.

He gives the example of the lectern from which he is speaking. He doesn’t see brown surfaces, arranged in such and such a way, from which he infers the existence of a lectern; what he sees is the lectern ‘in one fell swoop’ as either too high or too low, as convenient to his purpose or not. He sees it as already something meaningful. No doubt a farmer from the Black Forest or a Negro from Senegal would see it somewhat differently, but for the young Heidegger and his audience it is simply part of the environment (Umwelt) in which they live, it has the character of a world (Welt). Further, in a neologism which is to become characteristic of his manner, he turns the noun into a verb – ‘es weltet’ – that is, ‘it worlds.’ — link

https://philosophynow.org/issues/32/Towards_the_Definition_of_Philosophy_by_Martin_Heidegger

Perhaps what I like most in Heidegger is his insistence that human being is being-in-the-world and being-with-others first and foremost. We aren't dreamers trapped in skulls, who need to figure out
how contact with the world and others is possible. The very language we express such theories in is radically dependent on the assumption of a world-with-others (which is not 'made' of something definitively ultimate.) Many of games that philosophers play (those that seem silly in retrospect) depend upon taking a massive 'pre-conceptual' background utterly for granted.

Yes, although there is an element of 'fake it till you make it'. Meaning can have a funny way of arriving when you are not expecting it. Sometimes it sits with you for a while before you recognise you have been transformed. — Tom Storm

That also makes sense. I think it was William James who said we are sad because we cry (and not the reverse.) Also the hands of the clock come to mind. Or you see and old photo and are surprised at how you used to look.

I found another nice Jung quote which I think fits with the OP, at least thematically. It's Jung paraphrasing/assimilating James

If this is so, one may certainly expect to meet the same[290] contrast between psychological temperaments outside the sphere of pathology. It is moreover easy to cull from literature numerous examples which bear witness to the actual existence of these two opposite types of mentality. Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I will give a few striking examples.

In my opinion, we owe the best observations on this subject to the philosophy of William James.[185] He lays down the principle that no matter what may be the temperament of a "professional philosopher," it is this temperament which he feels himself forced to express and to justify in his philosophy. And starting from this idea, which is altogether in accord with the spirit of psychoanalysis, divides philosophers into two classes: the "tender-minded," who are only interested in the inner life and spiritual things; and the "tough-minded," who lay most stress on material things and objective reality. We see that these two classes are actuated by exactly opposite tendencies of the libido: the "tender-minded" represent introversion, the "tough-minded" extroversion.

James says that the tender-minded are characterised by rationalism; they are men of principles and of systems, they aspire to dominate experience and to transcend it by abstract reasoning, by their logical deductions, and purely rational conceptions. They care little for facts, and the multiplicity of phenomena hardly embarrasses them at all: they forcibly fit data into their ideal constructions, and reduce everything to their a priori premises. This was the method of Hegel in settling beforehand the number of the planets. In the domain of mental pathology we again meet this kind of philosopher in paranoiacs, who, without being disquieted by the flat contradictions presented by experience, impose their delirious conceptions on the universe, and find means of interpreting everything, and according to Adler "arranging" everything, in conformity with their morbidly preconceived system.

The other traits which James depicts in this type follow[291] naturally from its fundamental character. The tender-minded man, he says, is intellectual, idealist, optimist, religious, partisan of free-will, a monist, and a dogmatist. All these qualities betray the almost exclusive concentration of the libido upon the intellectual life. This concentration upon the inner world of thought is nothing else than introversion. In so far as experience plays a rôle with these philosophers, it serves only as an allurement or fillip to abstraction, in response to the imperative need to fit forcibly all the chaos of the universe within well-defined limits, which are, in the last resort, the creation of a spirit obedient to its subjective values.

The tough-minded man is positivist and empiricist. He regards only matters of fact. Experience is his master, his exclusive guide and inspiration. It is only empirical phenomena demonstrable in the outside world which count. Thought is merely a reaction to external experience. In the eyes of these philosophers principles are never of such value as facts; they can only reflect and describe the sequence of phenomena and cannot construct a system. Thus their theories are exposed to contradiction under the overwhelming accumulation of empirical material. Psychic reality for the positivist limits itself to the observation and experience of pleasure and pain; he does not go beyond that, nor does he recognise the rights of philosophical thought. Remaining on the ever-changing surface of the phenomenal world, he partakes himself of its instability; carried away in the chaotic tumult of the universe, he sees all its aspects, all its theoretical and practical possibilities, but he never arrives at the unity or the fixity of a settled system, which alone could satisfy the idealist or tender-minded. The positivist depreciates all values in reducing them to elements lower than themselves; he explains the higher by the lower, and dethrones it, by showing that it is "nothing but such another thing," which has no value in itself.

From these general characteristics, the others which James points out logically follow. The positivist is a sensualist, giving greater value to the specific realm of the[292] senses than to reflection which transcends it. He is a materialist and a pessimist, for he knows only too well the hopeless uncertainty of the course of things. He is irreligious, not being in a state to hold firmly to the realities of the inner world as opposed to the pressure of external facts; he is a determinist and fatalist, only able to show resignation; a pluralist, incapable of all synthesis; and finally a sceptic, as a last and inevitable consequence of all the rest.

The expressions, therefore, used by James, show clearly that the diversity of types is the result of a different localisation of the libido; this libido is the magic power in the depth of our being, which, following the personality, carries it sometimes towards internal life, and sometimes towards the objective world. James compares, for example, the religious subjectivism of the idealist, and the quasi-religious attitude of the contemporary empiricist: "Our esteem for facts has not neutralised in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout."[186]

A second parallel is furnished by Wilhelm Ostwald,[187] who divides "savants" and men of genius into classics and romantics. The latter are distinguished by their rapid reactions, their extremely prompt and abundant production of ideas and projects, some of which are badly digested and of doubtful value. They are admirable and brilliant masters, loving to teach, of a contagious ardour and enthusiasm, which attracts many pupils, and makes them founders of schools, exercising great personal influence. Herein our type of extroversion is easily recognised. The classics of Ostwald are, on the contrary, slow to react; they produce with much difficulty, are little capable of teaching or of exercising direct personal influence, and lacking enthusiasm are paralysed by their own severe criticism, living apart and absorbed in themselves, making scarcely any disciples, but[293] producing works of finished perfection which often bring them posthumous fame. All these characteristics correspond to introversion. — Jung

I find this to be a rich passage. The recognition that 'our scientific temper is devout' stands out for me. It's also hard not to think of this forum as one reads the passage.

That sounds like a tough but meaningful job. I have some personal experience with addiction and mental illness (a troubled in-law, who didn't make it.) I like the phrase 'stop talking about their problems and start doing something meaningful.' And I suppose they have to feel its meaning, whatever it is. I also get the caution about sounding reductive. It's too easy to talk about people as if they were lab rats or puzzles.

Here's what I'd consider an off-putting Heidegger quote:

What about this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way don't we just concede it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words. Against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing—what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs reveals itself here? With this reflection on our contemporary existence as one determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy. In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It only requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing?

II. The Elaboration of the Question
The elaboration of the question of the nothing must bring us to the point where an answer becomes possible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear. The nothing is conceded. With a studied indifference science abandons it as what “there is not.” All the same, we shall try to ask about the nothing. What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing—asking what and how it, the nothing, is—turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object. Accordingly, every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” this or that. With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd. — Heidegger

http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/heideggerm-what-is-metaphysics.pdf

I think some of Heidegger is first-rate, but I can imagine a person reading this and saying 'nevermind.'
Where is it leading?

Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects
of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further
in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose
in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history. Only because the
nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings
overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and
evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the revelation of the nothing—does the
“why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite
way inquire into grounds, and ground them. — Heidegger

I'm sure we can talk endlessly about the Nothing, and I have been struck by wonder now and then, that the world exists, against the background of something like nothingness. But the idea that the 'why?' is driven only by wonder seems silly. Why is the baby crying? Is that wonder or the desire to solve a problem? Also a rhetorical objection: why oppose sober science to foolish philosophy? Fortunately Heidegger wasn't always like this. I have some of his early stuff that's solid all the way through (which is not to say that he never struck gold in his later stuff, which I mostly know only through secondary sources.)

FWIW (not much to some, surely) here's what I'd consider an old-timey version of a Wittgensteinian-flavored insight about our 'extimate' minds. Or rather our little piece of the one geist.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due, not to the nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.

A biological species is both identical with and distinct from the individual organisms that make it up. The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed. Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself (i.e., constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and destruction of these individual persons. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

Yeah it's a grandiose way of saying it, a little contaminated maybe the ecstasy of a fresh insight, but I think it has good bones.

Nice quote. Or as Jordan Peterson might frame it - 'first clean up your room.' — Tom Storm

Yes, that would be something like the very first step. I also recall J P talking about a craving for responsibility in alienated young men, which seems even more to the point. The 'attitude' that Jung mentions seems flexibly vague and hints perhaps at connection with something bigger than one's boring little self (called 'God' or 'the right side of history' or 'scientific progress' or ...)

I would like to see Hegel's language and that of Heideggers from comparison with High Middle German. This might reveal their ideas better, if only that they may be critiuedt — Gregory

FWIW, Hegel's lectures are pretty clear. He also gave some great public speeches.

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

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

He rejects the reduction of spirituality/religion to mere feeling. , and he rejects with disgust the idea that the height of philosophy is some kind of complacent skepticism/relativism/etc. Note his insistence on the 'comprehension of ideas' (AKA 'the labor of the concept'). Even if his themes make the mouths of mystics water, his method was 'rational.'

Hi, all. I read a decent chunk of Jung in my 20s, having first checked out Freud, and as a somewhat newly confirmed atheist who didn't like woo-woo but still found good stuff in Jung. I wasn't sure how his work would seem to me now, years later, so I checked out an online text and found this quote:

Just as primitive man was able, with the aid of religious and philosophical symbol, to free himself from his original state, so, too, the neurotic can shake off his illness in a similar way. It is hardly necessary for me to say, that I do not mean by this, that the belief in a religious or philosophical dogma should be thrust upon the patient; I mean simply that he has to reassume that psychological attitude which, in an earlier civilisation, was characterised by the living belief in a religious or philosophical dogma. But the religious-philosophical attitude does not necessarily correspond to the belief in a dogma. A dogma is a transitory intellectual formulation; it is the result of the religious-philosophical attitude, and is dependent upon time and circumstances. This attitude is itself an achievement of civilization; it is a function that is exceedingly valuable from a biological point of view, for it gives rise to the incentives that force human beings to do creative work for the benefit of a future age, and, if necessary, to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the species.

Thus the human being attains the same sense of unity and totality, the same confidence, the same capacity for self-sacrifice in his conscious existence that belongs unconsciously and instinctively to wild animals. Every reduction, every digression from the course that has been laid down for the development of civilisation does nothing more than turn the human being into a crippled animal; it never makes a so-called natural man of him. My numerous successes and failures in the course of my analytic practice have convinced me of the invariable correctness of this psychological orientation. We do not help the neurotic patient by freeing him from the demand made by civilisation; we can only help him[225] by inducing him to take an active part in the strenuous task of carrying on the development of civilisation. The suffering which he undergoes in performing this duty takes the place of his neurosis. But, whereas the neurosis and the complaints that accompany it are never followed by the delicious feeling of good work well done, of duty fearlessly performed, the suffering that comes from useful work, and from victory over real difficulties, brings with it those moments of peace and satisfaction which give the human being the priceless feeling that he has really lived his life. — Jung

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48225/48225-h/48225-h.htm

You can find this kind of talk in Freud too. I like such passages for offering a glimpse into the big-picture stance of a thinker on existence and society. I added emphasis to some words that stuck out for me. That 'religious-philosophical' attitude is IMO related somehow to getting over our default infantile egoism ('negative narcissism',etc.) I think Jung is correct in looking behind dogma (mere surface phenomena) to something vaguer but more alive.

Thanks! FWIW, I think B does recognize the 'objectivity' of morals but just won't grok an impersonal source like... just-all-of-us (including ancestors from whom we inherit). As you say, this should hardly be a surprise. But B's apparent tiny-soul-in-the-box Catesianism seems to resist the notion that to be human is largely to be enmeshed in the same patterns, linguistic and otherwise, with other humans. I think B (and many others) see the individual as primary rather than secondary. But what is reason if not [among other things] a kind of humility that acknowledges the frailty of every individual mind?

Humans enforce, discuss , and modify human norms. I don't think this is controversial. Just read the latest WaPo. Because things are prescribed and proscribed, you say there must be a prescriber-proscriber. I'm not thrilled with this logical leap, but it's plausible. I suggest that we, collectively, participate in enforcing, discussing, and modifying human norms. What, after all, is democracy? What is this philosophy forum? One type of norm is that applied to judgment making. Roughly (that's how language is, this isn't mathematics) we call someone 'rational' or 'reasonable' if they conform to those norms.

But you seem fixated on a single personality. Since you can't find a single human, you invoke God, without saying which God, and without noticing that God explains nothing. It may be that you identify 'God' and 'Reason.' In itself, that's not even a bad idea. It's been done pretty well before. As far as I can tell, it only works if 'God' and 'Reason' and the human community are fused together into some kind of humanism. Individual thinkers are like cells in a 'species brain' through which God/Humanity develops and progressively knows itself, until eventually this very idea appears in an evolving conversation that finally grasps its own essence. It doesn't pay the bills, but it offers various thrills. My own view is a reduced version of this. I don't foresee some 'end of history' or final realization, but I do see how individuals are mostly not individual at all. Instead we mostly cough up the same words in the same situations. It's against this knee-jerk background that an occasional innovation can make sense at all. It's because of our shared cognitive 'knee-jerk' responses to letters that I can confidently expect this to make at least some kind of rough sense for you.

I'm pretty sure this isn't the kind of response you want, but it's a charitable if errant interpretation of

Morality is subjective, but also external to our own subjectivity.

I care about reason but not so much about Reason, so I'll leave you to it.

I am simply concerned that people are intimidated and afraid of German culture. Mysticism is usually seen as a great thing but if it's in Heidegger suddenly it's bad..? — Gregory

Is mysticism really seen as such a great thing in philosophers? by philosophers?

Heidegger is not just resented for his swastika but also for his style, and probably more for his style: it's not that strange for clever people to do wicked or stupid things, but folks hate to have their time wasted with twisted, indulgent prose. I like some of Heidegger's early work, but I don't like the mystic stuff or the ethical stuff. He's very good on a few important issues (basically where he intersects with Wittgenstein.) But you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Have you looked at The Jargon of Authenticity?

The rhetoric function of using the apparent archaism of language to uncover the true meaning of words directly relates to a philosophical conception of truth as something that has to be rediscovered after being ‘buried’ by modernity (as Dasein needed to be retraced from the wrong tracks of ontology in Being and Time). Concepts of authenticity are marked precisely by such lines of argument, by rhetorics of return and rediscovery. It is the political aspect of such ideas that interested Adorno, the functions that such reasoning fulfils. — link

https://epochemagazine.org/26/revisiting-adornos-jargon-of-authenticity-1964/
https://www.arasite.org/adjarg.html

Some sense of the 'aura' communicated by the jargon of authenticity may also
contribute to understanding how it supports the fascist state. The aura is
partially communicated by the fact that the words employed by the jargon don't
have any specific conceptual content, but create the impression that something
meaningful is being said just because these words are being used. The 'aura'
created by the use of this language is specifically the impression that
something of the speaker's very 'essence' or 'being,' something of the
speaker's very self, is conveyed through his or her words. Once this
impression has been conveyed, that is sufficient to satisfy credibility demands
regardless of the actual conceptual content of the speech. But it is the very
lack of specific conceptual content that causes the aura of an authentic self
associated with these words to submit to decay. The individual is robbed of
his or her individuality by the jargon. The speaking subject is virtually
eradicated since the language used to convey the speaker's 'self' is itself
empty of specific content (15-16).

Adorno begins his direct attack on Heidegger from this point. Heidegger's
speech about existence (the Da) in terms of immanence and the immediacy of
life, with its theological undertones, essentially 'whisks away' the boundary
between the natural and the supernatural. Transcendence is tamed and brought
into close reach for everyone. This bringing of transcendence close to home
via a widely disseminated form of speech imposes a generic 'person' upon
everyone using the speech, a mass-consumption person not unlike the
'interchangeable persons' posited in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of
Enlightenment. The jargon itself disseminates the very 'they-self' that
Heidegger condemned in Being and Time. The jargon's political and economic
functions consist in the fact that by it the 'formal gesture of autonomy
replaces the content of autonomy' (18). Adherence to a mass, socially imposed
self creates the illusion of participation in a homogenous middle class by the
lower and working classes. The language implies a social contract without
actually providing one, and masks the fact that it has done this by the very
act of forbidding specific content to be attached to the notion of the self.
Doing so, according to Adorno's account of Heidegger, would reduce
existentialism to 'anthropology, sociology, psychology' (28).
— link

https://lists.srcf.net/pipermail/theory-frankfurt-school/2003-May/002345.html


Also I really don't think there's a fear of German culture. Instead there's a rational concern about racism rearing its ugly head. Personally I don't like talking about the average IQ etc. of various peoples. I think it's intellectually and morally suspect. Even if there are such differences according to some hypothetically sensible metric, let's just leave it alone. I don't see any good coming from it, and we've already seen as a species the bad that comes of that kind of talk.

You don't show something to 'be' part of a community by showing that it was 'created' by a community. But anyway, our minds are not created by, or dependent upon, a community. I mean, how could any community of minds ever arise if minds themselves have to be created by communities? — Bartricks

I'll trust the appropriate scientists to figure that out, but it's not as if we don't see have other social primates to look at. I recommend Monkey Thieves. Fun show! What we can do is look at recorded history and watch, for instance, the development of physics or philosophy. I think Hegel had a great metaphor. Individual thinkers come and go and contribute to a conversation that was here before them and will remain after they are gone. Metaphorically they are the brain cells of a larger thinker, a 'species-essence' thinker learning to know itself better and better.

Are you denying that prescriptions require prescribers? — Bartricks

I am saying that there's a kind of anonymity in mores, a 'big other.' It doesn't have to be a particular single mind. These things are somewhat fuzzy. Everyone watches everyone else and gets a sense of what to do and what not to do. Who gets praised and for what? Who gets blamed and for what? These are very much things we pay attention to. Isn't gossip a big chunk of human conversation?

Are you denying that the prescriber whose prescriptions constitute moral prescriptions is external to all of us? Which one? — Bartricks

We are the prescriber and proscriber, collectively. We all do our part. We react largely as we have been trained to react. But we can also put a little pressure on current norms to nudge them this way or that way (some much more than others.) This is like the internet being distributed over lots of computers. Any single computer is replaceable, but the protocols would be harder to replace. We might talk about the ontology of conventions here, in terms of shared habits of reaction. Most of these habits can't even be questioned, perhaps, because they aren't yet noticed.

There are human laws, and there are moral norms, and they are not equivalent. We can and do make moral judgements about human laws - "this law is just" and so on - but when we do so we are not judging that human laws are human laws, but rather that some conform to and others flout moral norms. — Bartricks

It's true that norms != laws, though clearly they are related. In a complex democracy, individuals will disagree. Some groups will thing some laws unjust, etc. We aren't the Borg, and we aren't a pile of anarchists.

The most powerful and dominant norms hardly ever come up, because questioning them is considered monstrous. It's the norms we take for granted that allow us to discuss less settled norms.

But again, you don't even offer any support for your clearly false claim. What argument do you have in support of the apparently false claim that minds can't exist outside of communities? — Bartricks

If a mind knows a language, it embodies a community, carries the product of a community (its norms and conventions) within it, and uses these as the material and motive of its reasoning.

It's obviously true. Just imagine that everyone apart from you has just fallen down dead. Okay - are you still a mind and can you still reason? Yes and yes. — Bartricks

I mentioned Crusoe already. I think you are missing the point. Even if everyone but me drops dead, the me that remains was formed by interaction with others. I think in English, a language which is many centuries old, encrusted with the trial-and-error of millions of long dead speakers. What I am, beyond the meat I have in common with less talkative animals, is largely cultural, conventional. Even if it's just 'marks on my brain,' those marks (patterns, habits, etc.) are the product of centuries of humans interacting. But forget literary culture. I didn't invent toilets or hot-water heaters. I couldn't make the t-shirt I am wearing. My point is something like: show me a human being that wasn't trained into community who nevertheless somehow cares about being reasonable or scientific (or that can use language at all.) To be a human in the full sense is to absorb mores and a language, however crudely.

So the individual mind is primary. You can have a mind without a community, — Bartricks

I think it's false that you can have a reasoning mind without community.

But anyway, you're just making wild and incoherent assertions, not showing how anything you say is implied by self-evident truths of reason. — Bartricks

IMO, my assertions are not wild and not even original. It's just 20th century philosophy. You can find similar ideas in linguistics and sociology.

Their central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process, meaning is embedded in society.

from the actual book:

…a social world [is] a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner analogous to the reality of the natural world… In early phases of socialization the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations… The objective reality of institutions is not diminished if the individual does not understand their purpose or their mode of operation… He must ‘go out’ and learn about them, just as he must learn about nature… — link

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


But I have also given examples of conventions, to point out what we sometimes take for granted, which is that we are utterly embedded in and dependent upon conventions (which no single mind is typically responsible for) that allow us to discuss the fact in the first place.

Once more: the norms of any community are themselves subject to moral assessment. Therefore, they are not constitutive of moral norms. — Bartricks

I don't think it's that strange that human communities can reflect on current conventions and change them. Just follow the news, especially culture-war stuff, and you can watch as the words of a specialized subgroup becomes mainstream, while other words become taboo. Is it not strange that you are confident that you can deduce God from morality while not allowing human communities to reflect on their current moral standards? Millions of brains/minds form a larger and more complex system than any particular brain/mind. The individual mind gets its power in the first place primarily from networking (I mean cultural inheritance, talking with others, etc.) If individuals can reflect on and edit the norms that are in their control ('should I eat meat? recycle? buy fast fashion?'), then naturally they can get together to criticize norms-in-common. Isn't that largely what philosophyis? One way to understand philosophy is as a kind of meta-science. What is rationality? What is science? What are the norms of reasoning? Clearly current norms are always already in place, but they aren't frozen or untouchable.

You don't seem to have an objection to the argument, but just an unfounded psychological thesis about my motives. — Bartricks

That was not aimed as a criticism toward you but just a point that rationality has a moral component.

So, what it would take for morality really to exist, is for there to exist external norms and values. And what it would take for those to exist, is for there to exist an external prescriber and valuer. Not us or some group of us - the former are not external and the latter is not itself a mind. And furthermore, it is clear that any groups 'norms' are themselves subject to moral evaluation and are therefore not constitutive of moral norms. — Bartricks

I don't think you've made a strong case against us being the source of our own norms. The individual mind is secondary to the community mind inasmuch as we think with shared, inherited 'software' (language and other conventional practices.) Yes, you can live alone on a mountain for 10 years and write manifestos, but that's you taking your tribal training with you...and preparing something that's hopefully intelligible to and valuable for that tribe when you come back. It's as if you are saying that conventions imply God, simply because the noun 'prescription' suggests the verb 'prescribe.'

I see a skill as something a human being can acquire or not. — Tom Storm

:up:

You got me thinking very basic.
I think now as the most useful skills:
Being, awareness, action, and relating. — Yohan

Sure, those are good mentions. I tried to limit myself to activities we aren't born knowing how to do. It's easy to take reading for granted because we are trained to do it as children. I actually can't remember not being able to read, though I know that there was such a time. To be sure, we can become better at all of the things you mentioned, just as we can become better at reading.

If you are claiming - and you seem to be suggesting this - that the externality of moral prescriptions and values is illusory and that they are in fact prescriptions and values that we ourselves are issuing, then you are denying the reality of morality, not its need of a god. — Bartricks

Even an atheist, if not playing with words, sees the reality of social mores. This is practical reality, the place where we all actually start (in a shared world, with a shared language, already trained 'into' some community.) Some actions will land you in prison. Others will win friends, open doors.

As I hinted earlier, even being reasonable involves following rules about how one ought to make judgments. One ought to transcend one's biases. One ought to acknowledge (reasonable) criticism and adapt one's judgments accordingly.

Thus, moral norms and values are composed of the prescribing and proscribing and valuing activity of an external mind. — Bartricks

I agree with you about something like an 'external' mind, but that's the community, or something like what Hubert Dreyfus calls the 'who of everyday Dasein' (interpreting Heidegger.)

They surely are: my mind is mine, yours is yours. I am not part you and you part me. I am entirely me and not in any way you, and vice versa. — Bartricks

Sure, we use the words 'mine' and 'yours' like that. But human minds have evolved for human cooperation, in particular for learning and using at least one language.

I do not understand what you are saying here. I am simply noting that morality is composed of prescriptions and values and that prescriptions and values require a prescriber and valuer respectively. — Bartricks

I'm surprised you don't see what I'm getting at, considering this quote:

Thus, though morality is subjective - which means 'made of a subject's subjective states' - it is also external to us. Moral norms and values are norms and values we are aware of, but not creating. Morality is subjective, but also external to our own subjectivity.

Thus, moral norms and values are composed of the prescribing and proscribing and valuing activity of an external mind. And for reasons that I will leave for later discussion, that mind will be the mind of God. — Bartricks

You yourself see that morality is 'external.' As far as I can tell, you only cling to subjectivity (paradoxically?) because you want a single personality to be responsible for prescriptions and proscriptions (a divine personality.) But do we really need a God to come to a consensus about avoiding incest and stopping at red lights? One doesn't sleep with one's mother. One stops at red lights. One uses forks for eating. One covers one's mouth when coughing. And so on.

Yes, with the interesting exception of systems of notation, as investigated by Goodman (along with the varieties of vagueness) in Languages of Art. — bongo fury

I need to get around to Goodman. But if you mean the exception of formal languages, then I agree. Of course there's still the 'problem' of how formal languages connect to the practical world. What do I do with the value of an integral? Perhaps I buy a certain amount of paint, implying some kind of rough connection between moves in a symbolic game and the amount of pain that one should by is one is rational and/or prudent.

However, it is manifest to reason that only subjects of experience - minds - can issue prescriptions or proscribe anything. And similarly only a mind can value anything. Prescribing, proscribing, valuing and disvaluing, are the sole preserve of minds, as much as thinking and intending are.

From this simple rational truth we get to the subjectivist conclusion: morality is made of a subject's prescriptions, proscriptions, and values. — Bartricks

Minds aren't 'really' individual though. A trained/educated mind is running public 'software.' (Of course we are individual enough to occasionally introduce updates.) You seem to be appealing to a transpersonal rationality (a sort of morality of judgment-making) to deny the possibility of what you are doing as you are doing it.

You do raise a nice issue, but let's consider a different example.

'I have a few errands to run first.' Why might I say that instead of 'I have two errands to run.'?

Well the person I'm talking to might have no need for the distinction between 2 or 3 or 4, or whatever we vaguely include in a few, which might vary by context, especially if we allow humor in the mix. Did Jay-Z actually have 99 problems? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Problems . An exact number can actually function as a symbol for a large number.

The larger issue is about purpose and social context. What's the right tool for the job?

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became
fluid.
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I
distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself;
though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.
98. But if someone were to say "So logic too is an empirical science" he would be wrong. Yet this is
right: the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at
another as a rule of testing.
99. And the bank of that river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an
imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or
deposited.

152. I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them
subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that
anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility. — Fooloso4

:up: :up: :up:

Amazing selection of Witt quotes. [Emphasis added.]

I believe "Levels" will clear up a lot of the vagueness. — Don Wade

I have enjoyed your posts. It seems that they help explain vagueness. I'm personally coming largely from Wittgenstein's analysis of pain. What is pain? We all think we know it intimately. That's part of its grammar. But the meaning of 'pain' can't depend on anything private.

It is just scribbles and sounds that children learn to imitate. Using language is a behavior, and just like all other behaviors we learn to interpret them. — Harry Hindu

I agree that language is a behavior, a skill with using sounds and scribbles. So the issue is the nature of this skill. Note that you again invoke 'we.' To learn to use these sounds and scribbles is to manifest and develop a participation in the 'we' of the community. For Dreyfus this is the 'one,' and in 'one uses a fork this way' or as 'one says thank you when a favor is done for one. (This is the 'who' of everyday existence.) I also agree with Peirce when he says something like rationality is ultimately ethical. A scientific hypothesis is future oriented from the perspective of a community. 'If one does X in context Y, then one should expect Z.'

But yes it can in the sense that we can reproduce digital or alphabet-based text or speech or music indefinitely. Puzzling, certainly, when we look closer at the fuzzy boundaries of the characters, phonemes, notes and tones. — bongo fury

This touches the issue of the signified versus the signifier. I agree that digital copying is especially impressive. We tend not to lose a single bit. But the meaning of bits (the signified) seems to remain somewhat vague. What we mean by vague in different contexts (however easy it is to encode v-a-g-u-e) is itself vague. One reason for this IMO is that meaning is 'out there' and not 'in here.' There are fuzzy conventions for using words in the contexts of also-conventional actions. No one has to have an exact idea in mind as long as they have the rough skill to get by in the world.

We take it for granted, but how about reading?

Can you imagine being illiterate in 2021? It'd be easier to not be able to drive, not able to cook, etc.

Vagueness also seems to be an integral part of our thinking even though we believe we are being precise. So, is vagueness itself a philosophy? — Don Wade

I agree that vagueness (and/or ambiguity) is integral to our thinking. Look up a word in the dictionary and you get other words, which you can then look up, and get still other words. Without a rough sense of what basic words mean (including words like 'mean') you can't get anywhere. And this point ignores the intrinsic limitations of dictionaries. A market is perhaps a good metaphor for language. The sounds and scribbles have various somewhat predictable effects when used skillfully, without, however, even becoming perfectly clear.

Heidegger, Peirce, and Wittgenstein seem relevant here.

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite i.e. non-vague… [W]herever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague because no man’s interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man’s. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue and thought mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language.

( from “Critical Philosophy and the Philosophy of Common-Sense”)
— C S P

Yet the obviousness and self-assurance of the average ways in which things have been interpreted, are such that while the particular Dasein drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter. — Heidegger

I came upon this link too, which I recommend to those interested in Heidegger:

https://epochemagazine.org/15/pulling-the-normative-threads-of-heideggers-das-man/

I also found another relevant quote:

Most of human sentences are in fact aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which one has unfortunately left trailing in the previous sentence. Now I believe this to be absolutely inherent in the relation between the symbolism of language (that is, an exact symbolism) and the brain processes that it stands for. It is not possible to get rid of ambiguity in our statements, because that would press symbolism beyond its capabilities. And it is not possible to get rid of ambiguity because the number of responses that the brain could make never has a sharp edge because the thing is not a digital machine. So we have to work with the ambiguities. And nearly all discussions about Turing’s theorem or about poetry always come back to the central point about ambiguity. One of my fellow mathematicians, William Empson, who did mathematics with me at Cambridge, turned to poetry and at once published a book called Seven Types of Ambiguity–it is still a kind of minor bible, but a bible written by a mathematician, never forget that.

Ambiguity, multivalence, the fact that language simply cannot be regarded as a clear and final exposition of what it says, is central both to science, and, of course, to literature. — Brownowski

https://www.waggish.org/2011/jacob-bronowski-william-empson-wittgenstein-and-ambiguity/

Well the cards might as well be numbers. We can translate everything about poker into numbers. But I agree that there is something subjective. With p-values, 0.05 is conventionally used as a threshold, but there's nothing magical about 0.5.

I like to thing of these things in terms of automating decisions. If you programming/designing quality control in a factory...or if you were to write a cheating-detection program for chess.com..you seemingly have to decide on some boundary or on many boundaries, despite the ineradicable possibility of error.

Informally I agree with you. But more formally it's not clear that no pattern exists in 3478907834617856 simply because one is not obvious.

I like the standard test of significance approach better. Assume that the numbers are generated by a discrete uniform distribution and then calculate the chance of a sample that extreme. More exactly we could let f(sample) = #_of_different_digits and see that f(sample) = 1 is a rare, extreme value: only 1/10^9 samples give f(sample) = 1. That makes our assumption (intuitively) less likely, though admittedly still possible.

For our pragmatic purposes, there is a heap or a bald person. And we can be looser or more precise about the matter to the degree we might agree that a less vague, or even more vague, definition is useful.

And this would be a positive feature. Language would seize up if it had to be exact beyond the point that exactitude is useful. In semiotics, meaningfulness is measured as the differences that make a difference. — apokrisis

:up: :up: :up: