Nicely written and reasoned.

As Friedrich Nietszche foresaw, this portends nihilism, the sense that the Universe is meaningless, devoid of any purpose or value save what the individual ego is able to conjure or project. It was an intuition that the great Erwin Schrödinger was well aware of:

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.⁶ — Wayfarer

I have no significant commitments to any particular perspective except that my intuition and observations suggest (to me) that life is intrinsically meaningless. But we do generate contingent value and meaning collectively and individually through experience.

But it seems to me the role of emotion is the missing piece in many discussions. We are emotional creatures. It seems to me that our reasoning and preferences are shaped by our affective relationships with the world, and we then construct post hoc rationalizations.

The things science struggles with - delight, love, joy, purpose - are, needless to say, emotions and these are in the end what "cause" us to act and hold beliefs.

It also seems to me that philosophy and other intellectual endeavours are attempts by us to reconcile our emotional lives with the way things seem to be.

Hey, you brought Nietzsche to this discussion and went on in great detail. Sorry to trigger you. Take care. :wink:

Yes. Even sooner. Given the shorter I live, the less I have to relive.
— Tom Storm

Telling us you hate your life without telling us ... — DifferentiatingEgg

Huh? I was putting this from the potential perspective of a person experiencing suicidality to highlight how your point seems to work in reverse. This is not my view.

So this is just a conversation, right? I'm not having a go at you.

But, I'm more of the mind of dedication to intellectual integrity, and by that, I clear my mind and go in to see what Nietzsche says, I consider his words with extreme care to come from the angles he sets out in his philosophy and psychology. — DifferentiatingEgg

But none of this explains why Nietzsche? Why not Camus or Aristotle? Why philosophy? What is your frame of reference for selecting this particular perspective?

No, what I said, was Nietzsche's observation on history about how the Greeks overcame idolizing the notion of suicide... overcame the wisdom of Silenus. — DifferentiatingEgg

Nietzsche's capacity to mythologise ancient Greece to serve his rhetorical purposes may not be accurate to begin with and not really have much to offer someone with real problems, right?

My question remains: so what? What does this incredibly niche and abstruse notion have to do with whether someone wants to live or not? Dealing with suicide isn’t an academic exercise in writing a paper about how art transforms nihilism. Whether the Greeks transcended despair through some balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian is unlikely to matter to someone struggling with chronic anhedonia.

the audience Nietzsche weote for was selective. — DifferentiatingEgg

Which might also be a polite way of saying that only certain sensitive or bright people understand FN - a common tactic used to dismiss criticism.

But moving away from this -

Why should someone who is suicidal care for Nietzsche - can you make that case? I am interested. And the trick here, I think, is to explain what Nietzsche does in his work that makes it useful for this application. No quotes required.

If you contemplated Nietzsche's Heaviest Burden you would want to commit suicide? — DifferentiatingEgg

Yes. Even sooner. Given the shorter I live, the less I have to relive.

But frankly, I have no good reasons to accept this frame as anything more than amusing waffle.

Also cause you suck at understanding Nietzsche doesn't mean everyone does... and Kaufmann's understanding of Nietzsche is actually altered through the incipient reification of his project to move Nietzsche away from association with the Nazi. — DifferentiatingEgg

I have no idea what a sentence like this means. Sorry.

But if I suck at understanding Nietzsche, I have that in common with multitudes. There's also a good chance it won't help others navigate suicide.

What is a single basic point of Nietzsche's philosophy? — DifferentiatingEgg

Who would know? What do they say about him -easiest to read, hardest to understand? I certainly can’t make any sense out of him - even the Kaufmann translations of Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality, Beyond Good and Evil and others. Like any writer, his charms don’t work on everyone. How does one gain a useful reading? Perhaps if you have an aptitude for his work and study him at college? I’ve read enough to know that if I were contemplating suicide and all I had was Freddy, I’d probably go finish the job.

People often imagine they have a way out of the darkness. What they imagine would work for them doesn’t necessarily work for others. I’m not sure that pissing about with slave morality and other rococo notions are of any practical use. But I could be wrong.

Nicely put.

Yes. And predictably just her saying this kind of thing is enough to have made her a target for assassination. So the idea that it's just book burning that leads to murder is not correct. Say the wrong thing, write the wrong thing and some part of this religion is likely to try to kill you.

There would have been a time when burning a Bible would result in death or torture or imprisonment in the West. We now have a religion that has grown (predominantly) tolerant - modified by modernity and consistent exposure to secular ideas.

Some of my Islamic and apostate acquaintances argue that Muslims need to be exposed to as much book burning and blasphemous drawings and scantily clad women as possible in order to wear away the layers of antediluvian thinking. I guess they are taking the Quentin Crisp view of tolerance - that it comes out of exposure and boredom.

Irshad Manji, the Islamic commentator I quoted earlier puts it like this:

Muslims need to wake up. They also need to start drinking wine, embrace any and all homoerotic tendencies, write some poetry and for the most part free themselves from the fundamentalist chains they have created (for themselves and everyone else!).The Muslim world will only be free when bars fill the streets and women show off their natural, feminine beauty. Muslims need to grow up and stop expecting everyone to be mindless sheep before a 1,400-year-old oral tradition. Nakedness will free Dar-el-Islam!

I don't know it this is the answer, but I understand the principle. Letting them remain murderous custodians of an ancient and unexamined faith is probably not going to end well either.

Misogyny and racism have been endemic to the human race throughout history. They aren't exactly a unique product of the West. They are, for instance, present in most of the classics of non-western literature to some degree. But there is also plenty of value there as well.

Anyhow, that's an incredibly broad "guilt by (loose) association" critique. You could just as well argue in favor of it because it was the dominant mode of education for the elite when slavery was abolished, universal education funded, child labor ended, and women's suffrage passed, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think my point is not unreasonable. But I am not saying a classical education leads to these things. Nor am I saying that it is merely a Western problem. I'm just saying that the idea that a classical education will improve society is not necessarily the case, given the status of classical education during periods when we were doing our worst.

Perhaps we only began to appreciate diversity and comprehend that more people were worthy of inclusion as citizens when classical education began to wane.

That said, I am not against a classical education, nor am I against the trend of people reading more "great books". I just wouldn't go mistaking it for a way out of our problems just yet. At the very least, I would prefer people to quote Homer for their parables rather than George Lucas.

Good news! — BC

Maybe. It might just amount to set dressing for a new production of right-wing authoritarianism. Remember too that classical education was king when colonisation, slavery and institutionalised misogyny and racism were key instruments of power.

To the extent you're correct that the shift towards liberal arts is really just a move toward religion, then that might be a rightward shift, but I don't consider a college program centered on the great works of Western civilization particularly consistent with a Bible based religious college. — Hanover

You may be right and I'm not agreeing with the OP per say. I'm saying that there seems to be a cultural shift and renewed interest in Western civilisation and the intellectual tradition more broadly. So perhaps there's a trickle down effect. The idea that we need to make the West great again seems to echo Make America Great Again. It seems to me that there's a plethora of nostalgia projects available, in populist and patrician flavours.

Here in Australia, Tony Abbot a former right-wing Prime Minister, even got into the act. He joined the board of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a private foundation dedicated to promoting a "new golden age" through the study of great books and Western thought. This enterprise is largely motivated by an opposition to identity politics, multiculturalism and contemporary teaching methods. This is attractive to evangelicals and other theists because it venerates tradition and respects the Bible and religion.

The issue, as I see it, is the role of the sacred and how far someone will go to defend it.

My view is that Muslims in the West should obey the laws. Killing people for apostasy or blasphemy is against our values and laws. We allow people to burn flags and holy books if that's their thing.

Are you a theist?

Do YOU believe people should be punished for burning holy books? — flannel jesus

No. But my perspective is that of a privileged, secular, decadent Westerner - the product of his times.

How can we bridge the gap between Western and Islamic perspectives?

You personally believe that? — flannel jesus

No. I am not a theist.

Your logic is impeccable.

Why punish someone for burning a quran but not punish someone for farting in public? — flannel jesus

This is the key to this entire discussion. For a devout believer, there is an enormous difference in magnitude between blasphemy and all other crimes or misdemeanours. The issue you are questioning is how can one particular brand of religion hold a book to be so sacred that its desecration would be punishable by death? The Quran is the literal, perfect, unchangeable and final revelation of God. It supersedes all other religious works and is more sacred than any human life. To burn it is to disrespect God himself. For those who don't have a notion of the sacred and the inviolable this can be hard to process.

:up: I can't deal with punk or heavy metal but I see the relevance.

It doesn’t seem surprising, given the range of hugely popular nostalgia-driven projects offered by figures like Jordan Peterson, Dr Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. Isn’t there a recurring trope that since modernity the West has lost its way, thanks to humanism, scientism and post-Enlightenment decadence (particularly the dreaded post-modernism), and that we need to reacquaint ourselves with 'proper thinking' though the classical Western tradition and its values?

This idea also informs many commentators and podcasters, like Douglas Murray and Dennis Prager, Bishop Barron, Michael Knowles, etc, and even the MAGA movement, which is influenced by variations of this framing. Not hard to see how people are wanting to rediscover the roots of Western thinking and find their way back onto the 'correct ' road. I am assuming that this trend is often connected to conservative thinking.

Burning the Koran is a reckless provocation. Given that Islam is a religion where fundamentalism enacts and endorses violent retaliation for perceived slights and blasphemy, it's not hard to imagine the reaction.

Remember the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that republished the Danish cartoons of Mohammad? Twelve people were killed including eight journalists. For satire.

The question isn't about burning the Koran, it is about freedom of expression and to what extent any type of criticism of a religion might be taken as blasphemy punishable by death.

One of my favourite Muslim commentators, Irshad Manji thinks the West need to play a role in potential change:

I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?

I often work with politicians and bureaucrats and find the enterprise fairly disgusting. I understand the attractions of an authoritarian and technocratic state like Singapore. The streets are clean and safe. Just don’t talk about human rights. Seems to me the era of neoliberalism is ending and a new bunch of corporate elite are in charge. There guys don’t fuck around with niceties. Surprising it hasn’t come sooner. The left has become a cultural left of identity politics and has surrendered its reformist left origins. Class is dead, Rorty seemed to be onto this 30 years ago.

To see what others who are interested think and why. I said “little” interest not no interest.

Could be. It would be fair to say I take very little interest in politics,

:up: I don't know anything about US politics, I just know what I don't like. :wink:

Nick Land?

Appreciate your work, your sense of balance and fairness. Take care.

I think it’s a problematic word, yes. Does supernatural mean anything? Is the supernatural unnatural?

I think that’s a common view, but I also think that's a way to determine whether particular conscious creatures are present. I personally question the notion that if something is man made it is not “natural “.

If you were parachuted into a completely natural environment with no artifacts and minimal clothing, I suggest you would find survival extremely difficult (depending of course on the specific nature of the environment, rainforest probably being easier to survive than tundra or desert.) But our 'separateness' from nature seems perfectly obvious to me - we live in buildings, insulated by clothing, travelling in vehicles, none of which are naturally-occuring. — Wayfarer

I'm never really sure what counts as nature in these discussions. I would tend to count buildings and machines as a part of nature too, since we made them and they are expressions of human interaction with our environment, just like a bird's nest or beaver's dam. I know some people prefer to see human activity as a disruption of nature and that nature is that which is without human influence. Of course the idea of nature is a human conceptual construction in the first place so there's that..

:up:

Do you think it's as hopeless in the US as many think? Are the President and his billionaire boys' club staging a nascent fascist coup in America? If so, will the constitution hold or will it be brushed aside?

Not sure any of this helps my sense making efforts. But it takes all sorts, right?

What do you value in Nietzsche - as far as living your life is concerned?

Nothign to apologize for at all. I enjoy your contributions greatly.

I'm not following, I'm afraid.

To accept our loathing of mankind to overcome the loathing of mankind.

Most people prefer presenting their loathing of mankind as "evil" which must be objectly disregarded... — DifferentiatingEgg

Huh? Who do you think is a misanthropist? Nietzsche or the rest of us?

Thanks guys but I am asking specifically about why this resonates.

The idea that we find ourselves somehow limited by social conditioning and seek to overcome that stage of psychological development by, in a sense, surpassing ourselves. — Nemo2124

I'm not sure that resonates with me or what it even means.

By the way, to quote just highlight what the other person has written and click on the quote option that comes up. The quote will show up below.

Perhaps it's the ultimate self-improvement guide and in this day and age, we're constantly being challenged to improve ourselves to conform to media stereotypes, for example. — Nemo2124

But it still seems predicated on notions of improvement, on the idea that you are not good enough, that you ought to transcend yourself. Why?

I'm curious what a good example of such Nietzschean self-overcoming actually looks like. As someone who enjoys the half-arsed and the mediocre more than anything, the idea of working at reinvention, shedding patterns, behaviours and beliefs, seems tedious and possibly unrealistic.

Sure, but that's the approach - what about the book's content you find particularly interesting? When you say, "I think Nietzsche is becoming more-and-more relevant..." I'm interest in which ideas and why?

Can you say some more about what specifically you get from reading Zarathustra and what you think is important about the work?

:up:

The ‘faculty of reason’ is a perfectly intelligible expression, and the idea that humans alone possess it fully developed, and some animals only in very rudimentary forms, ought hardly need to be stated. — Wayfarer

I am familiar with this common argument and it has always left me somewhat cold. I don't have anything devastating against this view just some random thoughts. And yes, I'll be using reason.

Your wording seems very biased when you write things like "fully developed" and "very rudimentary forms" Surely that's a contingent viewpoint based on a series of assumptions?

This view is entirely predicated on us identifying ourselves as special - humans seem to have an innate ability to determine that we are favoured creatures of gods, and better/smarter than everything else on the planet. Is this not also one of our great blind spots - putting ourselves at the centre? Our reasoning is often indistinguishable from monomania. Perhaps this is why we have worked very hard to destroy the world and its wildlife. Reasoning often takes us to oblivion.

Is the line between us and animals so special because we have atom bombs and iPhones? Are our more complex adaptations and affectations a sign of superiority or really a kind of deficit?

It might even be argued that our particular brand of reasoning makes us inferior to animals who have and can find and do everything they need much more simply and elegantly than humans. They need no internet, no space programs, no Vogue magazine, schools or social media to thrive and live in harmony with nature. I'm not convinced that complexity equals superiority.

Our reasoning produces some useful and remarkable things (to us), but much reasoning is weak and bias ridden, and poorly inferred and dependent upon heuristics and simplifications. Humans have epic limitations on using reason which suggest we are simple and confused. (Yes, I know, this is your cue for something about higher actualization.)

Isn't one of the key arguments in Evan Thompson's Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2007) that consciousness is enactive? That is, it arises from dynamic interactions between the body and the world rather than being an intrinsic property or essentialist trait? This isn’t my area, but that sounds fascinating and I wonder what this says about animals.

:up: