Yea, you’re of course correct that there is no such thing as emotion-devoid logic. Logic is, I very strongly believe, strictly a tool via which our cherished emotions (e.g., sense of well-being) are safeguarded, embellished, and so forth. Hence, our emotive experience of being is primary and our logic (or even wisdom) secondary—thought the first is strongly dependent upon the second. Yet, even in this, merely so saying will not be enough to convince someone who deems logic to be the superlative faculty of intellect to which, ideally, all emotions (including those of desire and sense of satisfaction/comfort) then become subservient slaves of. So, while I agree with you, I still personally find the fine-tuning of logical arguments to be very worthwhile. Then again, there’s wisdom in how one best goes about conveying what one intends to convey, this again addressing the emotive aspects of what is expressed … and I’ve so far found myself direly lacking in this department. But I’m aiming to fail better next time around. :) — javra

All good points. What's interesting to me is that an investment in the superiority or priority of logic is still 'irrational' in a certain sense. We take our most fundamental criterion in a blindly passionate sort of way. Because what's so great about being logical? We can't use logic to justify this, since the authority of logic as a criterion is what's at stake. On the other hand, something like being logical is experienced as a self-justifying value. It's 'aesthetic' in some sense. How are logic textbooks written? With what authority? With an intuitive authority. Strip away everything where bias plays a role, and we all agree intuitively on the skeleton.

The problem with real language is ambiguity. We're never finished deciding what our non-trivial terms mean. One might say that reason is rhetoric, self-persuasive and other-persuasive. Or reason is rationalization. Of course we use these words pejoratively when describing speech that fails to persuade us. That it persuades others we chalk up to bias, weak-mindedness or lying, etc.

I understand the charm of fine-tuning arguments. Still, I think the most revolutionizing speech often involves a strong new metaphor --an analogically shifted paradigm, etc.

That's right, that's Heidegger's and the late Wittgenstein's point, or really context, of departure. — Janus

Ah yes, I love both those guys. Early Heidegger and late Wittgenstein. I've been experimenting with not referencing them, just to see what I could do in English and how the ideas sounded without being attached to great names. This is not some veiled criticism of your mentioning them, to be clear. I'm just taking this opportunity to share a thought. In passing (for context), I mention, for instance, that I no longer like the word Dasein being left untranslated. It becomes a technical term, an inside jargon --more metaphysics in the sense that the medium 'is' the message. Early Heidegger (as you may know) used terms like 'factic life' or 'life,' and Dasein can be translated as existence. Better to make it new in English, in my opinion. Phonemes matter. Direct access. Anything fancy and foreign betrays the quest for wakefulness, perhaps --at least in some sense.

I have been looking into a little known American philosopher named Buchler a bit lately, and I find his ideas very congenial with in line with what the way I have been thinking for some time: that knowing is not merely knowing that, but also knowing how and, further still, the wordless knowing of familiarity as well. He says that all our forms of activity involve judgement and he identifies three kinds of judgement: assertive judgement, active judgement and exhibitive judgement.

I can map these to knowing that, knowing how, and the knowing of familiarity; or even more clearly, judging that, judging how and the judging of familiarity. So when we do something that we know how to the doing of that involves that we continually make judgements (In an implicit or unconscious way) what to do. This kind of know-how can be explicated, though, if we want to. Exhibitive judgement involves the familiarity that cannot be made explicit like how to paint, or play music or make love (over and above the technical "know-how" dimensions of those activities). — Janus

Buchler sounds great. I've never heard of him, but this is my kind of theme. I like the idea of divided know-how into the kind that can and cannot be made explicit. I suppose the know-how of language is at the center of my contemplation lately. For me this can't be made explicit. We live on the surface of it, in a sense that I'm still finding words for. It's pretty much what I took from the OLP movement. Metaphysicians rip a few words out of context and strive for an explicit know-how, but in my view they rely on all the other words that still function in a sort concealment, as a necessary but dim background.

I don't think we need to go all the way back to the big bang to explain the rain satisfactorily. In my OP, I admitted that at some point, we run out of the ability to explain, and then we're left with brute existence. But we don't need to do that with experience. — Marchesk

Well, I can relate. But this satisfaction is pragmatic/emotional, as I see it. For the most part we react to threats and chase promises in nature. We want some things and avoid others. So prediction and control gets the job done.

So we at least agree on some kind of brute existence. So you think experience isn't a brute fact? I don't see how it isn't as a whole finally inexplicable.

For me it would be both creating new interpretations and new events, by word and deed respectively. Though one might say that speech is a sort of action, that disembodied thought is a useful fiction. I mean the thought as 'meaning' is a sound or a mark set forth or projected from a body, etc.

Also I mean the individual is only an individual in a potent sense as the threat/promise of a new way of saying/doing. Finally, the 'living world itself' is just the mess we're in. It's local, temporary individual life that we all already have before we can come up with theories that apply beyond our local, personal situation. We are thrown into these little lives. We don't choose our faces, our parents, the language(s) we learn as children. We find ourselves hurtling forward in a way we did not choose. Our thinking rips pieces of this flow out of their original context. We strive beyond the idiosyncratic. We strive against the entanglement, ambiguity, the swamping endless context....

Thoughts?

Why does the sun evaporate the water? You can invoke still other entities, still other projected necessities. Maybe we can go all the way back to the theorized big bang. At some point, however, these objects and their apparently necessary relationships are just here. They just happen to be the case. To be clear, 'God' explanations run into the same problem.

This isn't meant to be anti-science or anti-theology. I'm just trying to point at the limits of explanation. As I see it, it tends to be pragmatic and emotional. Certain ways of thinking about things make them easier to predict and control. Along the same lines, we like to tame the unfamiliar for emotional reasons by relating it to the familiar. On the other hand, we sometimes like to strip the familiar of its familiarity, for stimulation and the pleasure of wonder which we largely lose as we age.

Let's say, for instance, that you have a theory of everything that fits on a T-shirt. Unless that theory explains why it has the shape it has (which sounds absurd to me, like God not needing a creator), it's a mysterious brute fact. It's the mathematical structure that the quantifiable aspect of shared reality just happens to have. We are no less thrown into the world, having merely found some patterns in the way stuff moves.

Typically one highlights what one is responding to here and a quote button will appear. Then it becomes clear who you are speaking to and they get a notification. Of course you don't have to, but it will probably make the forum more enjoyable.

So there’s a kind of irony in a self-righteous call to action on the basis of the very faculty which the Dawkins of this world declare a religious delusion. — Wayfarer

That's a good point. A self-righteous self-declared accidental ape. Why should science or reason be holy or sacred under such assumptions? The position seems vaguely deterministic, too, so the self-righteousness is also questionable from that angle.

I like science well enough, but it does make for a pretty lame god and cure-all. Hitler's famous book has lots to say about men as animals. It even has lots to say about altruism. Suffice it to say that the man as ape metaphor isn't as scientific as it pretends (in my view). It projects one kind of discourse, trustworthy in its own context perhaps, as a quasi-reigious dominant discourse. It's not that man can be usefully understood for certain purposes as another animal that troubles me, but rather the self-subverting assertion that man is essentially an animal. Such a position ignores us as a god-chasing world-reshaping language users.

I think it's supposed to come off as a seductive humility. Those who deny that we are 'mere' animals are supposed to be sentimentalists or flakes. But of course this ignores the way we actually live and think and speak in terms of good and evil, wise and foolish. What do we do with animals (whether we should or not)? Factory farming, euthanasia when they are inconvenient or threatening, etc. It's no small thing to reduce man to another animal, another piece of programmed meat. Even if it's largely true.
That small(?) 'trans-animal' aspect or potential is not something we want to snuff out?

Moral ideas have their source in feeling, in living intuitions, in the living world itself. — Janus

I completely agree. For that reason I find 'mechanical' or dry, theoretical approaches to what we ought to do troubling. The individual as such is the possibility of rewriting any such tidy set of rules or concepts. This 'living world itself' is exactly the kind of phrase I like for trying to point out the context in which all our thinking-doing-feeling occurs. The idea of a 'thinking substance' strikes me as a fantasy that rips out language from the body and its context. Even the concept of the body is a ripping-out.

As I read Hegel, this is what the understanding does. It's the awful power that rips things out of their truth in the whole --a necessary evil, if you will. It's the kind of 'error' that makes life as we know it possible. We sew together the limbs and organs metaphysically and call it the living truth, but it's dead. It's not that we 'should' stop 'understanding' things (or that this is about what 'we' should do), but rather only about pointing out to whomever may find it useful that I at least see a jigsaw puzzle corpse where others claim a theology lives and breathes.

We can't possibly believe everything, so we must make some judgements, we don't need to make them with absolute certainty, but part of that process will be to reject some options. — Inter Alia

True. I would add that we largely find certain options already rejected. They are dead for us on impact. Ruled out. Right away we reach for a refutation, a defense. When a real choice is thrown at us, it's genuine burden. Being caught between two live options hurts. (At least when there is more risk involved than optimal versus not-quite-optimal pleasure attainment --which ice cream to buy. What I have in mind is, for instance, whether to abandon one's wife, quit one's job, hang oneself, etc.)

Surely not, but if not, why should it follow, from the fact that I use the word 'laptop' to mean a being which exists unperceived, that the thing actually exists unperceived? — PossibleAaran

Hi. I've enjoyed your posts and this thread as a whole. I just thought I'd chime in to stress that (in my view) ordinary language is not metaphysical. It's like one of Zizek's jokes about the progammer's not providing code for the insides of houses that the characters aren't allowed to go in. No need.

I'm skeptical about whether we can ever really pluck language out of the total context of action. It's like a surface that we don't think to check behind --most of the time. Then philosophers come along and plausibly fill in the gaps. But as they fill in one gap they themselves are gliding on the surface of all the words they take for granted to this. Our ignorance (inexplicit know-how) is massive, as I see it. And I only began to see it long after I had been immersed in it for many years.

As a first approximation, recall that old trick of repeating a word until its strangeness appears. We make these meaning-charged sounds, meaning-charged marks. But what is this meaning? It is just there. Whatever we pile on top of it is just more meaning. In my experience, this meaning is foggy. Here and there we can sharpen it. Certain poets used resonant objects (objective correlative) to damp this ambiguity. But that gives a crisp image that is all the more ambiguous in terms of feeling and intention.

As to philosophic justifications, while I hold deep empathy for pathos given outlooks that provide wisdom, I’ve come to believe that only logos can convince logos. This, then, does lead toward one of those dry, analytic forms of argumentation … at least this—I guess unfortunately—is the formal approach I’m taking in putting together whatever philosophy I’ve got. — javra

In my view, we work with a persuasive speech that is both logical and feeling-tinged. For instance, I might ask you what it is for logos to convince logos. What is this being convinced? Is this not something like a feeling about the way that sentences hang together? A good feeling that approves? (I realize that this stress on feeling drags along the specter of irrationalism. )

Condolences, and may things work out for the best. — javra

Thank you.

I’d use the word “happiness” for, to me, this concept encompasses that of pleasure. All the same, I like the way you’ve stated this. Hence, then, the supposed pinnacle of love—that of absolute, selfless love—is not an issue of duty but one of attraction toward a self-justifying highest (or deepest) happiness of personal being (by which I take for granted the love of other; interpreting one’s proximity to this pinnacle to be proportional to the degree—dwelling at least within individual moments—to which distinction between self and other fizzles away … be this relation one of romance or otherwise). Anyways, nicely worded. — javra

Beautifully written. I like how you mention that the distinction of the self and the other fizzles away. This is the stuff we live for, right? We are absorbed in the play. The theoretical mode vanishes. And the selflessness of the love is absorption in the object. Love poems as the true theology. If philosophy has no interest in that, fine --but then some other discourse becomes the highest discourse. It's nice to know things. It's nice to be correct and/or clever. But all of this is small in the face of love. It's also small in the face of terror and agony.

In my highest moments, I invented poems. These poems were sometimes theses, codifications of the realization that was alive there in that moment. They were 'mystic truths,' and yet utterl carnal and of the flesh and of the world --pointing to nothing beyond the laughing flesh and this world. Why would they point away from paradise? Of course those moments are rare. The same statements mock their author if re-read in a low moment. Concept/metaphor alone is impotent. At best they can help to kindle a total, embodied situation. At worst they 'neurotically' prevent such a moment. (Julien Sorel in the early part of The Red and the Black comes to mind --a great novel.)

See, it is this very aesthetic that makes philosophical skepticism so wonderful a stance for me. Somehow always feel the strain in saying this from those who are Cartesian or else interpret skepticism from a Cartesian stance of “doubt”—now common fair culturally. Nevertheless, this (occasionally felt) experience of beauty in there being unending wonder and unending discoveries is to me part and parcel of what philosophical skepticism is all about. — javra

I completely agree. Whitman is a master of the beauty of this not-knowing and this letting-be. I guess that's the 'wisdom' aspect, though I don't want to use 'wisdom' in a smug way. The metaphor of the child comes to mind. Staying green and open. Not rusting into a know-it-all system-drunk fixity. What words won't eyes can. Here in this world I can meet eyes with someone beautiful and say something behind and around the words. I can't say what this saying is. Call me cunt-struck, but how do 'theologians' neglect this language of the eyes? How do folks dream that all can be made explicit? That our little nets of concepts get the job done? That our being here is neutralized by some 'explanation'?

We perceive an external world because there is one. — Marchesk

I agree. But I think everyone agrees. To deny such a world in conversation is nevertheless to try to say something true about a shared situation. This dimly understood but well and often employed sense of the shared situation is (in my view) the world behind the (more theoretical concepts of the ) world.

But we only want to say that something is brute when we have no further explanation. Quantum Mechanics can be said to be brute because physicists lack a means of explaining further, at least so far. — Marchesk

I guess this depends on what you take for an explanation. If I can take some concepts and numbers and build a reliable prediction machine, that's great. Is this an explanation? Obviously we want reliable prediction. No complaint there. But why is this explanation?

The same problem haunts theology, too, though. A certain system of concepts is used to predict the afterlife as a function of behavior and belief now, for instance, in the cruder cases. But that God is there in the first place is just as strange as the presence of quarks. Brute fact is arguably the result of examining the concept of explanation --and seeing its limits if not its nullity when it comes to our situation as a whole.

The process that allows sensory input to create cognition is not a physical thing. It doesn’t ‘exist’, because we’re at a single point in it at any given time. — Brianna Whitney

Interesting point, but doesn't this assume that time is like the real number line? What if existential time is deeper than mathematically conceived physics time? For us the future seems to penetrate the so-called present. And the so-called present drags along the past. To read this paragraph requires that you drag along what you've already read in anticipation of the period, for instance.

Yes, I like 'gherkin jerkin.' I had to look gherkin up, but I had a sense of what to expect. I think you nailed it in terms of the arrogance. If philosophers think they provide foundations, I think they don't. In some ways they make things worse, in that they pretend to provide foundations. In my view, we operate with a kind of basic know-how that we cannot make explicit. I'm not saying it's bad to try. I've tried myself, and that's how the darkness of this know-how became darkness visible. I agree that it's bigger than any discipline. It's just our human tendency to learn a few things and become smug.

Sometimes I think we cannot help doing theology. What seems to distinguish one person from another most of all is what they worship (and why they worship it; so maybe it's mostly all theology and psychology). — Janus

This is one of my basic beliefs, actually. Even here I'm selling a negative theology. Yes, it's what we worship. It's the shape of our 'god' that varies. What I like in Hegel is the idea of this shape evolving. What I don't like in Hegel is the exaggeration of the importance of concept. Art and music say what concept can't say. Images of the heroic human, the ideal love object, etc. Sounds that somehow mirror the complexity of human feeling. As far as theology and psychology goes, I also relate to that. In some ways philosophers (especially the ones I like) are theologians of theology itself. Theology itself is god. The substance-seeking subject is the only god worth worshipping. All other gods are (at least as mere concepts) flat objects for the dynamic, passionate subject. I suggest that we more or less explicitly worship the virtuous human, projected or not into the sky or onto some eroticized abstraction. (Justice, truth, science, ...)

Hello, and thanks for a reply — javra

My pleasure. Thanks for yours.

Philosophy, then, to me, is about the theories and discoveries which facilitate better experience of flow—at least in the long term, if not in the short. — javra

Yes, I relate to that.

As an apropos, when you say “anti-philosophical” I intuitively hear “anti-interest/love for wisdom (Sophia as she’s been called)”. While I do uphold that wisdom concerning life is not the truth of experience/life itself, that it is the map and not the terrain, I nevertheless deem wisdom of great value. At any rate, I take it you have something else in mind when you use the term(?). — javra

Actually we're more on the same page than it may appear. The philosophy with respect to which I am 'anti-' is just the bloodless stuff that wants to be a depersonalized armchair science. I wouldn't try to stop anyone from doing it that way, but I've come to find it fairly dry and insignificant. There's a world outside of me that contains me and I share it with others who are also in this world. I was just at the memorial of someone I've known for twenty years. I have their dog now. The world survived their passing. I and their dog are still here in the familiar surroundings. I and their dog will follow them into the void eventually, or so I expect.

As I see it, we want what might be called the true and the beautiful --to know it and to be it. I prefer that these words be understood vaguely. We sharpen these words in different ways. That's the drama, sometimes bloody. Wisdom I associate with truth and beauty. I want it. I sometimes feel that I have it. At other times life swells up with pain and I humbled again. The word is both good and perhaps the sound emitted by a kind of smug complacency. A luck that takes itself for granted. Same with (the words for) truth and beauty. And yet truth, beauty, wisdom 'themselves' as vague goals seem pretty stable. I think it's safe to say that most of us want to live truly and beautifully and die bravely. Anyway, I too deem wisdom of great value. It's up there with love not as a duty but as a self-justifying higher pleasure.

In the statement “the true way”, either “true” is referencing a path that is regardless of what anybody might say or believe or, else, it is not. If it is, then the Tao that can’t be spoken which is inextricable from life and experience is—ahum—a “non-subjective actuality” (just made this term up, but I’m hoping it’s understood given my recent posts on this thread). If it is not, then the Tao is as subjective a reality as is one’s preference for ice-cream, no more metaphysically significant than the clothes one chooses to wear on any particular day. — javra

You have put your finger on the issue. I confess that I do indeed assume that others experience in rough outline what I experience. They enjoy a hot bath after working outside in the cold in about the same way. Vanilla ice cream tastes the same to them. Moreover there is a pre-theoretical sense of shared-world to which statements may or may not conform. As we conceptualize this shared-ness, we nevertheless debate whether these conceptualizations somehow conform to what they are supposed to be conceptualizing in the first place. It's a kind of logical space that makes impassioned debate possible. We can argue about norms (to put it in another way) only because there is always already a norm in place. The norm-already-there is what we appeal to (perhaps unwittingly) when try to install a new norm beside or on top of it. We take the very language we argue with for granted. We see it for the most part no more than fish see water. We may focus on one word's true meaning (the word true), but we do this as we take every other meaning use to argue about it for granted.

So I was suggesting the Tao as something prior to and making possible everything we might say about it. Its an odd thing to point at. "It is older than time." It is older and newer than anything and everything. It's the flow of experience or that raging experience itself that I assume without trying that my conversational partners also 'are.' But it's not something that I'd try to prove something about --no more than a love poem is a kind of proof. I do like non-subjective actuality. That suggests a priorness to the subject-object distinction. For me all distinctions are something that we know how to use without knowing how we know how to use them. 'Since no man knows aught of all he leaves....' Of course we know how to do things, but there's something like a massive ignorance that (in my view) we mostly ignore. Yet this same ignorance when experienced is wonder itself.

Seems to me the physical vs non physical question is a product of the philosophical heritage of object-subject dualism, a world 'out there' split off from and making contact with a subject. — Joshs

I relate to your general approach. You mention linguistic pragmatism elsewhere in your post. For that gets it right. Besides the subject-object dualism, there is also the tendency to think in terms of fixed categories. Sure, in some contexts we have a loose, functional mental-physical distinction. It gets the job done. We know well enough what is meant. But then as philosophers we are tempted to pluck out a rough distinction and do a sad kind of math with it.

'Define your terms,' someone said once. It sounds wise. But (or because) trying to do so opens up to us our fundamental ignorance, it only gets the job done by revealing its impossibility. We can't exhaustively and conclusively say what it is to say or for something to mean. It's that old game of looking up one word's definition in the dictionary and then looking up the words that the first word is defined in terms of, and so on. The system exists as a whole. One feels oneself into a language in a bodily way, in the context of words and actions, thoughts and feelings and 'sensations.' But all of this is already too abstract and misses the way the situation hangs together.

The subject-object distinction along with the mental-physical distinction is a tool we rely on. But I contend that we use such distinctions with a know-how that is largely invisible to us. We just can understand one another. We found ourselves this way.

ff0, I like your brain! — Oliver Purvis

Thanks. I like your OP. I've seen others resent the question, but to me it's a very philosophical question. I scratch out the word because lots of wisdom writing is found in literature, etc. It's found in rock lyrics, rap lyrics, comical TV shows. It's found in interviews with artists. I have, actually, read lots of the great philosophers. And some of them are heroes for me. But the dark side of foolosophy is the usual intellectual vanity that I myself have been guilty of, especially in my younger days --though the war is never finally won. In short, we can be seduced by nice little formulae and close our eyes and hearts to what doesn't fit these formulae. We can make too much of some trendy jargon. As I see it, we want to become good and beautiful people. We want to know and appreciate good and beautiful people. I suppose most of what I'm getting at is 'there' in a person who is good and beautiful without having read and parroted this or that famous thinker. Direct access! Life, experience, moral-aesthetic progress. Books are great but secondary. I suspect you already get and feel all of this in your own words --else you wouldn't have been so kind.

or so many years I have been fascinated by philosophical approaches to all manner of questions and on the whole this has enriched my intellectual life, provoked long and meaningful conversation with friends and helped me to tackle the trials and tribulations of everyday existence.
My question, I suppose, was more to do with where we find ourselves when the philosophy runs out. — Oliver Purvis

A good and deep question. For me the stoics among others come to mind. I don't want to die whining or biting my nails. I want to stand up straight and calmly see the void envelop me. There's a ridiculous movie, The Scorpion King, that nevertheless had some charming dialogue. Too tough guy heroes who are friends meet. "Live free," one says as they grasp one another's forearms. "Die well," says the other.

Live free. Die well.

It's not a bad four words. Why live free? Why die well? Because it feels right. Because it sounds right. For me that's the truth behind the epistemological 'posturing. ' Even this posturing feels right at the time for those invested in a certain notion of responsible, thorough 'rationality.' Indeed, my own position evolved from within a more stiff and earnest in-retrospect-posturing. To be sure, it sucks to suffer. It sucks to die except when the sucky suffering makes this the best alternative available. To suffer well and to die well is just a slight desuckification of the situation. And yet maybe the highest thing, too.

This place where philosophy runs out is also at the center of my interest. It strikes me also as the place where the 'real' philosophy begins. Where our little formulae become dust. There's a strange community in this place of death. Petty differences fall away. We love. We care. We fear. We know that we are terribly and wonderfully in something (the world) that envelops and overpowers us. A person might call it God, but slapping a friendly human face on it neutralizes the terror of it. It's that terror and mystery that we can stand against. Gallow's humor comes to mind. I can't say that I envy those who deny death and the limits of language, because there's a terrible beauty to be had where the philosophy runs out. On the other hand, there is sometimes the most profound agony there, as every possible comforting phrase becomes a lie in one's mouth. I understand suicide. It's not on my agenda, but I understand why sensitive and thoughtful individuals sometimes reach for a decisive act. They flee the indignity of being cast into this haunted house.

I must stress I don't get to this state often, yet it does happen periodically and I must accept my feelings during these times. Can it be written of as merely a hormonal imbalance or something similar? At the time, as bleak as it may sound, there is a striking sense of intlectual and philosophical clarity.
Of course, eventually it passes and the wheel keeps spinning. — Oliver Purvis

This is great stuff, man. I don't think it's any kind of sickliness. The daily business of the world just doesn't know what to do with the eerie thinking that contemplates its nullity. The best it can do is create yet another business (therapy, etc.) But individually the therapist himself goes home and surely, at times, feels an alienation from his work day pose. He gets a check for playing a certain role, wearing a certain face. If he his doubts, he has to tuck them away like we all do to keep the rent paid or the wife happy. If we don't know what the hell it is all about, we usually do know that we don't want it all to fall apart in the next month. So we play along. We do what one does. We react. Occasionally someone snaps and ties a noose or becomes violent toward others. Then it's someone's paycheck to clean up the mess. Generations come and go. Wise and unwise things are said and recorded. But the coming and going continues, largely ineffable, swamping our wise words. I connect this 'vision' with the striking clarity you mention. It's a clarity about our situation and the way that exceeds tidy sayings. 'Always the procreant urge of the world.' This vision makes me feel large and small at the same time. I can participate and assent to this vast machine I've been thrown into. I can be willing to look at it in its glory and filth. It opens up a deep connection to every other heroically awake person out there, no matter their preferred lingo.

*I bought an old typewriter lately, on which I write something like poetry. But it tries to tell the truth in a few well-chosen words.

Large this life that buries me.
Large this grave for dreams.

So, in the sense I’ve previously denoted, “the Tao which cannot be expressed” is, then, a reference to what is here taken to be objective reality. (It is not a mere whim of fancy or a fleeting emotion—though, I take it affirmed by Taoism that it can nevertheless be experienced and, in this sense, simultaneously both felt and cognized) — javra

Hi. I don't claim any authority on the Tao, but I'd like to provide another way of thinking of it. Instead of the 'still-too-theoretical' idea of objective reality, it might also be taken as the flowing situation in its fullness. It is the way it is like to be there. It includes finding ourselves in a language, in a body, in feelings and traditions. It is the place from which we theorize that makes theorizing possible. To speak the Tao would be to get behind what makes our speaking possible or to get behind our own speaking. It would be to make the situation (existence, etc.) smaller than the theoretical mind. For me this looks impossible, though I understand the urge to do so. It is perhaps this very urge that reveals the impossibility of its satisfaction. Trying to say what it is to be there and being sensitive and open to poetic failure is what, in my opinion, leads to statements that the true way cannot be spoken.

So I like thinking of the Tao that is indeed always already being experienced. It is known in one sense and unspeakable in another. Reality is not wholly conceptual, one might say. We can, however, create concepts for that which swamps mere conceptuality. We use negation to indicate presence.

Of course only philosophers would dream that life can be tied up with a final set concepts in the first place --that a nice little system could conquer the worry and business of being there. Perhaps the general shape of the goal is to get back to a state of flow. But the metaphysician perhaps want to get off the wheel altogether, to stop the flow. Even this apparently anti-philosophical point is an attempt at clarification. It wants to name the general shape of the human situation. It does at least point back to direct experience.

I think I can relate to your position in the post above. For lack of a better word, there's a kind of theoretical pose or sense of what one is about that makes for confusion. I think talk about the Tao is as you suggest not part of the usual metaphysical game. It's a way of pointing outside of it --outside of a way of using language.

Lots of philosophers want to do a kind of armchair science that's concerned with largely traditional entities. That's fine. Who am I to stop them? But this isn't the only way to practice 'philosophy.' It may even look artificial and bloodless from another perspective.

I know what you mean by that dogma. It's around. It exists. But would you not agree that it's pretty small in terms of the proportion of humans who embrace it? It's the theoretical vanity of a few philosophers. It's a particular ascetic religious practice that enjoys doing without anything 'iffy.' It's a kind of know-it-all-ism --betrayed in practice by those who espouse it. The woman we love is not an 'ape.' Our best friend is not an 'ape.' Nor do any of us see an ape in the mirror. It's a bogus position. Or it's bogus as an existential position. To see ourselves as mere apes is to negate this seeing. The metaphysical arrogance in such a statement subverts its pseudo-humility and pseudo-skepticism. It's a religious myth, in short, without the guts to understand itself as such. Or that's how I currently see it, for better or worse.

It is not we that are important because God chose us. It is he that is important because of us. We assign his value and his importance in our lives. Thus, assigning him his power over us. We subject ourselves willingly. — Abdul

I agree. And yet our will to worship and subject ourselves is something we do not choose. We are thrown in to this itch for the holy. So we might speak of the God behind all gods. But why not just call it life, then? We are thrown into loving and fearing, work and suffering, ecstasy and terror. To some degree (perhaps) religion is a reaction to this situation into which we are thrown. We impose an order. We insist that this order is not just our individual fantasy. But that too is part of the imposition of order --an escape from us all working out our salvation in different and other-opposing ways.

Exactly. We try to find the words. It's a pleasure or a spiritual practice to look for those words, to become more awake to the way we are there. That the final word eludes us in one more aspect of this wakefulness. We are awake to the gulf between our doing-being and our saying.

I feel you. What we take in our hand we cannot hold for long. We are always dying and being reborn. One love object fails. Another appears. Slowly, though, the ability to love and adapt recedes. This old vessel betrays us. I'm between youth and old age, in possession of a virility that believes finally in its coming death. That's a good place from which to write love poems --poems to the Her behind all hers.

I suppose one could use the word 'God' for what is bigger than us in our situation. But from this perspective the comforting theories about God are a kind of war against God, a denial of God, an escape from our dark origin and endpoint.

Yes indeed. That hope is dim. I waste no time on it. For lack of a better word, I experience the quest for clarity on these matters as a private 'spiritual' project, as a sort of 'rational' religious practice. It just feels good to occasionally find others who can more or less relate to one's private project. It also just feels good to share the words one finds for the situation. I don't know exactly what I want from such sharing. I suspect that overhearing one's self in public discourse helps keep the words 'honest.'

Emotional intelligence comes to mind. For instance, I know some people whom I truly respect who haven't read the so-called great philosophers. To me these people understand better than various others who can parrot the famous words. It's in their eyes. It's in their comportment. They have lived and suffered and managed to stay beautiful, aware, curious. They aren't bricked in by some favored little vocabulary or by some fantasy of themselves as a super-scientist with the one true system. When I think back on my own progress, it's usually been an escape from a vain attachment to this our that one-size-fits-all idea. Far be it from me to prohibit the kinds of philosophy I find less important.I just want to do it the way that feels right to be. (Oh sinful subjectivity...)

Obviously we have an organic or animal nature which is the subject of the discipline of biology, but I think the emphasis on biology is exaggerated because of the role evolutionary theory plays in modern culture. — Wayfarer

I hear you, but I am pointing at something far less theoretical. I need to keep this body intact as a vessel for my soul. If a truck runs me over, then I can no longer pray or write love poems (perhaps the same thing). So I mean 'foundation' in the sense of the legs of a tall statue. I want to get behind or beneath all the arguments on the ideological level. This may be impossible, so I'm talking about a direction of thought.

I'm thinking of what we non-theoretically know. When the knife slips from our hands at the kitchen counter we move our feet. We don't want that blade in our feet. Embodiment as experience, not as theory.

But when a being evolves to that point, of being able to ask 'what am I', 'what does this mean', and so on, then at that precise instant, they're no longer simply a biological creature. And I imagined that threshold was crossed by h. sapiens - indeed it is what endows us with sapience. Tremendously unpopular view, I know. — Wayfarer

I pretty much agree. We experience the fact of reasoning. We swim in the fact of language. Within this fact we can indulge in the talk of origin, grinding our ideological ax. What interests me, though, is a wakefulness to the fact of our embodiment and of our swimming in this language. The medium is overlooked in our obsession with the message. That's fine for others. I like the idea of giving a voice to the medium --of simply describing the pre-theoretical situation.

The two - external and internal - interact all the time. It is my position, and I'm not the only one, that the best way of looking at the world for me, most of the time is as a weaving together of what's outside and what's inside. The Tao Te Ching talks about human action bringing the world into existence. That makes a lot of sense to me - in a very practical and down to earth way. — T Clark

I agree and relate. I might speak of a whole that we organize with categories internal and external. The way it all flows together is hard to articulate. We have words enough for most purposes, but it's hard to say what it is like to be there perfectly. Fail again. Fail better.

At its core, philosophy is the rational manifestation of humanity's religious nature. We want to know why we're here and where we're going, how we know what we know and the limits of this knowledge, whether there is a God and what happens after we die. Most crucially, we want and need to know how to live, because life is an eternal ambiguity with no simple algorithm. It is this latter observation that leads me to believe that philosophy is born from a certain helplessness, an anxiety in the face of moral ambiguity and spiritual discouragement. Hence why when we approach deep philosophical questions we usually do so in silence or with trepidation. And this is exactly what you see inside temples and churches, cathedrals and mosques, a deafening, breath-taking silence. — darthbarracuda

Well said. To me this describes the real stuff. I almost hate the word 'philosophy' for being too preciously or artificially understood. As you say, it is a 'rational' manifestation of the religious urge. The urge takes a shape that demands a kind of conceptual clarity. What is it to be rational? We have some sense of what it means. We forbid ourselves a kind of foolishness. We want our words to have a certain weight or objectivity or universality. We become sensitive to the way our narrative sticks or does not stick together.

I agree with you. I guess I was trying to express a kind of frustration, a sense that - occasionally - I find myself haunted by the possible pointlessness of existence. Very often I am intrigued and excited by many ideas, but now and then - after much reading, discussion and deep thought - I feel as though I am no further forward than before. Sure, I have a much better appreciation of the problems, but no concrete answers. — Oliver Purvis

Very well put, my friend. I very much relate. The 'real' problem seems to be that nothing lasts. Everything passes. Time conquers all. We can't get out of this machine that destroys its products, this devouring mother. Some do believe in a realm apart from all this. I could never really believe it. And maybe there is something seductive in our mortality. Maybe it's all more beautiful this way. We can't wrap our fingers around it. We can't drag it away from the chaos and hide it safely in some lair outside of time. This forces us to give ourselves to the dying moment. It forces some of us to give ourselves to the void.

In my view, we are future-oriented beings. We save money. We repress various urges. We set alarms. In short, we make long term plans and keep promises. And this is close to what makes us a human. Yet the abstract mind can see the ultimate futility of all plans. There is no future, or (apparently) no stable and ultimate future. So our best laid plans are haunted by absurdity. At least for those of us who can't believe in some hidden world where the usual rules do not apply. 'The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.' As an atheist, I read 'God' as reality here. One might say that philosophy begins with the perception of our eerie situation, of our absurdity, fragility, etc. But then 'philosophy' is maybe too dry a word, especially when it's so often steered toward a kind of meta-science, which is to say away from the felt individual situation. For some it is a kind of chess we play to forget the terrible questions. It can be a fleeing into cleverness or into a sort of earnest objective work that forgets that earnest objective work is haunted by an ultimate futility.

What is the point of philosophy? — Oliver Purvis

What is the point of being human? Some philosophy looks like (and maybe is) word games. On the other hands we are thinking, loving, fearing, aging beings who know that we and all we love must die. That everything is fragile and passing. Our first order of business is perhaps to make peace with this or to justify an early exit. These are the questions forced on us by love, fear, and pain.

What practical advantage does it give us as a species? — Oliver Purvis

What 'spiritual' advantage does it give you as an individual? Why not this question? Let's consider the shape of your question. What do you already assume? Seemingly a science-inspired yet ultimately metaphysical and value-driven vision of how this or that practice should be justified.

I love philosophy for getting behind the question. In our asking we already know too much. We have already constrained the answer in the categories and norms we drag along with our questioning.

Very few people seem to really try to understand the big philosophical issues beyond a superficial level and those that do seem to get drawn to different viewpoints depending on how they approach the problems. — Oliver Purvis

Is this so clear? Why not call those issues big that everyone is drawn to? Religion and politics are philosophical. Philosophy as a list of 'official philosophers' is a sometimes bad sometimes good mere piece of the philosophical conversation that we largely are with our bodies as well as our minds.

If the soldier charges a machine gun nest, he answers certain questions with an action. To marry. To kill in anger. To steal. To sacrifice. To lie. This is lived philosophy, the living of the answers to the big issues. No doubt some are more articulate and more invested in being articulate than others, but this too is an implicit decision about the relative value of having the impressive words on hand.

If you are questioning the vanity of philosophy as a sort of would-be science, then I can sympathize. For me the great philosophers are fascinating personalities. They were born. They suffered, worked, thought, etc. They scribbled their better thoughts and died. I can find a 'use' for them that itself is not easily put into words. I try to put this use into words at times and thereby add to the genre, join the conversation. The danger is that the conversation becomes too precious and distant, and outsiders rightly suspect that (often enough) nothing important/living is being said. The boys are just being as clever as possible for one another. (And this too may partake in that.)

I wonder whether we will ever make real progress, actually solving some of the big issues so that certain schools of though can be laid to rest permanently. — Oliver Purvis

But what if this is like certain great poems or symphonies being laid to rest permanently? Why must philosophy be understood as a kind of ultimate science? Why not rather just a sequence of individuals sharing their wrestling with the fact of having been born into a particular place and time and language?

Do you want a quasi-mathematical theorem about the meaning of life? Does such a thing make sense? Or is the whole approach flawed? Do we ever conquer life with words? Words help, sure. But life is bigger than our words for it.

I am free when I have a consciousness of this my feeling. — Hegel

Is it not better to say that naming the feeling can increase the feeling or focus the feeling? If there is a urge toward freedom, it may be that this urge only determines its object as freedom after misinterpreting its object as the dominance of others, for instance.

To seek a law-giving object-god for instance might be an earlier expression of this urge. But this leads to dissonance in the feeling. The seeking, thinking mind is more god than the static god it tries to worship. Any substance that is not the substance-seeking subject himself is flat. But the substance-seeking subject in this substance seeking becomes less idiosyncratic, less pettily and yet more grandly egoistic. There are some massively 'Satanic' passages in Hegel. All that is alien and threatening is assimilated and overcome. A massive possession is promised. A triumphal homecoming. Suffering is justified as the price that potential god must pay to become god proper, god in the flesh self-knowing.

I've personally been move 'religiously' by Hegel-like interpretations of reality. Yet in other moods it's all just fine talk. Maybe even the finest of talk, but still just talk. Because the feeling has to be there. The ideas without the feeling are dead, even if they help kindle the feeling.

E.g Being-toward-death is teleological in that this way of being in the world is such that it is explicitly makes sense of itself in terms of the end that it anticipates. — bloodninja

Nice. In other words we know that our lives won't last. And we live in this knowing and shape our sense of what life is all about in the context of mortality. We can take this back to Ecclesiastes.

No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.

...

I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives. I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem[a] as well—the delights of a man’s heart. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
and this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
Wisdom and Folly Are Meaningless
Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
and also madness and folly.
What more can the king’s successor do
than what has already been done?
I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
just as light is better than darkness.
The wise have eyes in their heads,
while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
that the same fate overtakes them both.
Then I said to myself,

“The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself,
“This too is meaningless.”
For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die!
— Ecclesiastes

So perhaps every social human notion/nature is threatened by individually experienced mortality. In some sense individuality is this distance from what one thinks. We enter the world and find disagreement. We die before the world as a whole has figured it out.


This line from Shakespeare resonates more and more for me. We know how to do what we have to do for the most part, but how deeply do we know any entity apart from the squishy network of this doing? One word we define with still others. Apart from the doing that makes us feel better, it's all fog. Souls and quarks and the physical and the material and blah blah blah. A play of shadows.

"Since no man knows aught of all he leaves, what is it to leave betimes?"

This brand of teleology is not uncommon in my experience. I have listened to sermons where it is explained that the central drive of people is worship; all things that humans pursue are in essence an act of worship. If this worship is not of god, it is a perversion of our built-in nature. This claim has the same quality to it as saying all things are hedonistic in that it is unfalsifiable. — ProbablyTrue

You're right that it smells unfalsifiable. But I'm really more interested in describing. I look around and talk to people and they all hold something 'sacred' in a peculiar sense. They put energy into goals that are 'merely' symbolic. A 'failed' painter whom no one pays might obsess over a canvas that he knows no one will ever see. He chases something there. A writer for the right word searches. Participants on philosophy forums have a directedness, a momentum.The political person has a notion of the way things should be. I suppose I was using 'god' as a word for the common core of this less animal object of interest.

The desire to worship reminds me of the desire to love. One might say that the desire to worship is the desire to be in love, the desire to find something in the world so true and beautiful that cognitive dissonance is obliterated. The dizzy compass needle is glad for the strong magnetic field. No doubt there is danger here, too.

That's a beautiful passage. I love Hegel, and that's Hegel really getting down in it, spitting it out. That's THE Hegelian vision for me. It all adds up to a consciousness of freedom. But the errors and struggle were necessary. The truth is a palace built from lies.

Where I can't follow Hegel is his insistence on the concept, the concept, the concept. "...in feeling, I find myself confined and not free." I call bullshit. In great and high feeling I find everything I'm looking for. A conceptual freedom is literally worthless without its accompanying feeling. It is from this state of feeling that one can view the slaughter-bench of history as a necessary dissonance in the music as well as the condition of possibility for a rich conceptual self-consciousness that supports and reinforces the high sweet feeling.

In short, Hegel is basically 'right.' I agree with his basic historical vision. But he doesn't give feeling its due. To be fair, I think he experienced his philosophy with religious feeling. But some the details are so tediously worked out that a different passion seemed to dominate in those moments, a sort of chess-playing passion.

So the very abilities we have to determine what is or isn't the case in the objective world are innate to the intelligence, which is able to reflect the order that is found in nature. That is the sense in which it is 'transcendent' - it is the faculty by which we make sense of the world, but the source of which is not itself amongst the objects of analysis (except for nowadays it is widely assumed, falsely in my view, that such abilities have a biological origin.) — Wayfarer

Would you not agree that our intelligence is widely and correctly assumed to have a biological foundation? When it comes to beliefs concerning origins, I think there is extreme variety out there. I assume you have a certain band of intellectuals in mind. But does anyone listen to philosophers? I think there is a fair amount of not-knowing and not-caring about origins. On the other hand, we deeply care about our biological foundation. A dead man as far as the living man knows does not write love poems. The body is in this sense a vessel. Along these lines, the physical becomes important as what threatens or sustains the body. In my view, the mere theoretical interest in the physical as a source of truth is already 'theological' or ideological or religious in its drive. It's a claim on the sacred, on that which one dies for, one might say.

Such views (god or no-god, mind or no-mind) seem to me like expressions of an energy or libido or status anxiety or god-shaped-hole that is minimally bodily. We can fall in love with ideas. That these ideas are theistic or materialistic may be secondary. Poets are senators.

Who says being in the world is primary (other than Heidegger)? — T Clark

What's fascinating is that even an attempt like Heidegger's to get under the usual metaphysical fumes can begin to smell like one more fume.This is perhaps because a proper and moreover famous name is tied to 'being-in-the-world' and so on. This over-determines the concept and threatens to drain the words of their original power. If we really are being in the world, then it's away from the book we must look. But books that point away from books are fascinating. It's hard not to write a book about such a book. And now that's one more book we need to read to justify looking away from the cooked books.

In short, I relate to your 'who says?" reaction and at the same time defend the primality of being in the world. My defense fits with your critique elsewhere in the thread of exaggerated skepticism. We aren't bodiless computers in an air-conditioned room searching for perfect string of symbols. We have to eat and breath and excrete just to survive as bodies. We have to interact as babies and children to learn language and become more or less fully human in an emotional sense long before we can indulge in epistemological niceties and pretend to pretend that the world isn't really there. Our world, the world our bodies and hearts live in, has to be in pretty good shape already (as the result of work and suffering) for us to soar with the strange and long words of the metaphysicians. Is this something I need to prove? Ah, but if this isn't 'obvious' to my conversational partners, how I can hope to relate to those who know neither work nor suffering? Those do can doubt the existence of the hammer as it smashes their thumb? Those for whom the eyes of the beloved are an illusion?

Being designed, in a loose sense, means that you were created for some purpose, or at the very least you are not an accident. Most theology would tell you that purpose is to worship/serve god. — ProbablyTrue

This is fascinating. Perhaps thinkers who deny or ignore god are worshipping and serving god as they understand god. Perhaps 'god' is a word for what is highest in human experience.

Let's say one think one is just here accidentally. Even in this situation he or she can (and does?) reach toward what is high and good. The complications arise (in my view) because people can associate opposed concepts with the highest. For some the worship of god has involved hurting strangers. For the others the saving of strangers. For still others a movement away from the social into solitary ecstasies. In short, 'to serve/worship god' can be interpreted as a description of the god-chasing human. To be clear, this 'god-chasing' may include the attempt to articulate a perfect atheism, etc. 'God' is just the 'eerie' or specifically human object of desire, wrapped in thousands of different concepts (the hair on the core), some not yet invented.

That's a good question. The 'animal' foundation seems pretty fixed. A certain kind of food is reliably good for a human, while various poisons are reliably bad. The emotional or basic social foundation also seems pretty fixed, if already less so. It feels good to love and be loved, to trust and be trusted. It doesn't feel good to hurt the innocent. But that's perhaps already my adulthood speaking, an adaptation to the changeable world I've found. As a boy I shot snakes for no good reason. I am ashamed now to have been pointlessly cruel. Did it feel right then? Even then it felt evil, but experimenting with evil felt right in some way.

That serpentine digression aside, I suppose technology and language are where the human is especially unfixed. These bodies are terribly important to us. Bad digestion changes who I am. And then language is how I decide specifically to enlarge and sharpen the pre-interpretation that I inherited 'blindly' as the simple truth.


*On the OP. It occurs to me that some thinkers especially want to deny the existence of human nature in order to 'ground' radical freedom. (Sartre). But why not just assert radical freedom? Isn't it really a matter of power? How is some nature binding exactly? As nature it would already be automatic and hence not up for debate.

But human power is finite, so the radical freedom is 'just' an ideological or theological freedom. It just means that I can sleep with lots of women perhaps (or with men in a society that forbids it) and be unashamed on my death bed. Or I can spit on those who spit on me, trade contempt for contempt.

I sometimes wonder whether that is because it is (perhaps even unconsciously?) felt that their ontological status has some implications for religious belief, and most especially belief in an afterlife. — Janus

Good point. I think it's fair to look toward the realm of values here. What it is to think and feel is already whatever it is to think and feel. The abstract concepts we paste on experience (concepts like experience) do matter to us. But does anyone else feel a distance from the usual metaphysical game of slapping on mere categories? This goes in box A. That goes in box B. This returns to your mention of afterlife. What we want is more life, better life. Maybe we can deny death with the right set of categories. Maybe we'll settle for a sense of righteousness and innocence while we're still here. Maybe we will even settle for the mere hope that eventually humans will live correctly, as we see fit.

the majority of people on here don't think there is a "human nature" — bloodninja

Hi. In my view the notion of the human is a nature of the human. We can only have this discussion because some pre-interpretation of the word 'human' is in play. So for me the issue looks to be how fixed and/or articulated this notion/nature is.

I think the virtues and vices are grounded in how our cultures are organised, and how they function. Is this arbitrary? Not really. However, I think it does entail that I am a cultural relativist. — bloodninja

I suspect you would also agree that how cultures are organized is 'grounded' in our vices and virtues. It looks all of piece, however unstable around the edges (just like the notion/nature of the human and perhaps with this notion/nature.)

If there is no human nature to ground ethical theory, then what other ethical position is left but cultural relativism? — bloodninja

I have nothing against cultural relativism. But what about the usual option of being non- or just barely theoretical on these matters? Clearly I like and have been exposed to fancy theoretical positions (I'm here after all), but more and more I see the gap between the high talk and the low walk. That walk is 'low' not in its being guilty or inferior but rather in that this walk (which includes ordinary conversation) is down in the messy all-of-the-piece that resists our neat categorizations. We can't say what we know. Not all of it. Making it explicit is a fascinating goal, but perhaps that should include an analysis of this drive toward explicitness. Is it a philosophical prejudice that only that that can be made explicit is fully real?