:rofl:

It's only ironic when the outcome is opposite to the intention because of the intention. — Vera Mont

I often found it ironic how those I knew in Buddhist, mediation circles would talk about shedding attachments and getting closer to enlightenment whilst simultaneously bonking each other stupid, investing in real estate and buying luxury cars.

In Christian circles this used to be called hypocrisy and I wonder if hypocrisy, when viewed from a particular perspective, is just irony as praxis.

Not to mention Barnaby and Sir Les' contribution to dick cheese...

But that doesn't cause me any doubts about my language. I guess I don't see the irony in this. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. — T Clark

I don't fully understand it but I think irony in philosophy might be the gap between our metaphysical system building and reality. All our systems being constructed from language and never quite making direct contact with the world. But this all sounds like postmodernism.

Apocryphal has Bill Bryson suggesting that 40% of Americans do understand irony. — Banno

Interesting. That comports to my personal experience of the Americans I know. :wink: Is it the other 60% who are susceptible to Donald Trump and don't realize he is an ironist and performance artist, a little like our own Sir Les Patterson?

Isn't her song famously about irony, without any examples of irony? Ironic... I don't know the song, just that observation.

I was taught (falsely perhaps) that in America the only people to understand irony and use it well in humour and art are the Jews. There is definitely a cultural aspect to its use. Irony is one of my favourite things.

Irony does feature in philosophy - from Socrates' ironic stance of 'knowing nothing' to Kierkegaard; On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, Rorty; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

Rorty developed his own word, 'ironism'. Wiki has this on it:

Rorty cited three conditions that constitute the ironist perspective and these show how the notion undercuts the rationality of conservative, reactionary, and totalitarian positions by maintaining the contingency of all beliefs.[1] These conditions are:

- She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

- She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

- Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty argues that Proust, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, and Nabokov, among others, all exemplify ironism to different extents. It is also said that ironism and liberalism are compatible, particularly if such liberalism has been altered by pragmatic reductionism.

But I'll say materialism is "winning" in my mind at the moment. And mostly for ethical reasons, rather than the usual debates. But I know materialists have done bad things, too, so.... ever and forever thinking back and forth. — Moliere

Wow. That sounds interesting, but perhaps this is not the thread for such a provocative statement.

OK, fair enough: I guess it depends on what is meant by "doing epoché". If it means simply not focusing on the metaphysical question concerning the independent reality of phenomena, I don't see how that could be so difficult. As I said I think scientists for the most part, ignore that question: "Shut up and calculate"; in any case the question certainly doesn't seem to be a necessary part of scientific practice.

If it were taken to mean something like a radical alteration of consciousness, as, for example, satori is understood to be in Zen Buddhism, where the independent reality of phenomena might be said to be no longer unreflectively presupposed, then that might be more of a challenge, and you would need to try for yourself. — Janus

I hear you and it is a fascinating matter - to me anyway. I have heard it argued that epoché is like some accounts of meditation or prayer. Do you think this is fair for some forms of epoché? You seem to be suggesting this in the second para above. I've often thought of meditation as an attempt to encounter the ineffable.

I'd say bad things are done by ideologues, and there are plenty of those on both sides. — Janus

Aren't there 'fine people' on both sides? (sorry)

Also bear in mind that the epoché and the transcendental reduction are not the same thing. — Janus

Good point.

I can't help you with that, mate; you won't know until you try, and if you are not prepared to try, then there is no point asking the question. It's like asking whether it is possible to understand QM, since it is so difficult and counter-intuitive; you won't know whether it is possible for you unless you attempt it. I'm not prepared to attempt QM, so I don't ask the question. — Janus

Hmmm. I actually think it is possible to ask questions just to get other's perspectives based on their experiences. :razz: Can I do epoché is not the question I was asking. I was wondering if others could here and whether it paid off for them (to use a crass expression).

Husserl's approach is not the only one, and has been modified and critiqued by other phenomenologists, notably Heidegger. Also bear in mind that theand the transcendental reduction are not the same thing. — Janus

Do you think there's a potential thread in epoché?

An interesting and nuanced response. I tend to find myself thinking there is no such thing as phenomenology - there are phenomenologies - which would be congruent with the fecund approach it takes to personal experience.

How does anyone really do/experience/say/be anything at all? Materialism is the only possible way to explain our lives, and we clearly do live ("some of us, anyway" scolding the eliminative materialists), therefore materialism is the explanation at least until something better comes along, but all these other explanations are bad for these reasons. — Moliere

Do you draw a distinction between physicalism or naturalism and materialism? And do you hold materialism as a 'tentative hypothesis' given our reality presents itself to us as material (even with some modest epoche it's hard to get away from this)?

Thanks Joshs, I'll have a read. Appreciated.

Ineffable means that which can't be put into words and I suspect this is meant to expose a language barrier impossible to break. — Agent Smith

Ironically ineffable seems to have fecund interpretations. One obvious and fun one is the notion that there are facts or truths residing in some Platonic realm, say, which are beyond human comprehension and therefore language. Hence the ineffable nature of spiritual truth or enlightenment. So, it's not so much a 'language barrier' as it is ultra-linguistic - apophatic mysticism. The fact that we can't demonstrate this suggest it may be better not to try to talk about it. The mystics might crib Wittgenstein and say, 'Don't talk, do' ( shut up and meditate!).

All other kinds of truth are 'meaningless.' — jasonm

Is 'meaningless' quite right? I've never been a big Truth guy (things work or they don't) but in life human beings create truths together which help build community and culture. Few really care if history, literature or morality do not build their 'truths' from verifiable constituents.

I recall an infamous Richard Rorty quote:

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.

If you doff your hat in the direction of empiricism do you think it is true that human beings can know the world and that our observations map directly on to reality? If you do, can you demonstrate this?

Those are amongst my questions too. It is enigmatic but not ineffable.

The epoché is simply the bracketing of the question about the reality of the external world, so as to focus on the phenomena as they seem to present themselves to us, so Banno's comment seems oddly inapt. — Janus

Is it even possible to achieve epoche? It sounds tricky and mystical.

Here's Dan Zahavi on epoche:

From: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-019-09463-y

By performing the epoché, by first bracketing or suspending our tacit belief in the absolute existence of the world, by no longer simply taking reality as the unquestioned point of departure, we start to pay attention to how and as what worldly objects are given to us. But, in doing so, in analysing how and as what any object presents itself to us, we also come to discover the intentional acts and experiential structures in relation to which any appearing object must necessarily be understood. We come to realize that reality is always revealed and examined from some perspective or another, and we thereby also come to appreciate our own subjective accomplishments and contributions and the intentionality that is at play in order for worldly objects to appear in the way they do and with the validity and meaning that they have.

When Husserl talks of the transcendental reduction, what he has in mind is precisely the systematic analysis of this correlation between subjectivity and world. This is an analysis that leads from the natural sphere back to (re-ducere) its transcendental foundation (Husserl 1960, 21). Both the epoché and the reduction can consequently be seen as elements in a philosophical reflection, the purpose of which is to liberate us from our natural dogmatism and make us aware of our own constitutive accomplishment, make us realize to what extent consciousness, reason, truth, and being are essentially interlinked (Husserl 1982, 340). In this way, we will eventually, according to Husserl, be able to accomplish our main, if not sole, concern as phenomenologists, namely to transform “the universal obviousness of the being of the world—for him [the phenomenologist] the greatest of all enigmas—into something intelligible” (Husserl 1970, 180).

Zahavi argues that phenomenology practised in psychology and the arts, and areas outside of philosophy generally ignore this transcendental expression of phenomenology.

Phenomenology is not science. — Banno

So it seems.

Thanks, makes sense.

. But in social interchange that involves a much more complex and specific set of ideas, such a politics , religion, philosophy or intimate personal engagement, we are constantly reminded that we are dealing with an other, that our expectations of their response to our communications frequently have to be adjusted , that there will be aspects of the relationship that will have to be less intimate than others, due to gaps in mutual understanding that will never be filled in — Joshs

These gaps in mutual understanding sound like they are almost insurmountable. Are there ways you recommend we manage gaps such as these, or perhaps some essay about this you can direct me to?

It sounds more the case that we have to manage ourselves in relation to other people with different values and worldviews. Which is challenging when they, for instance, stack the Supreme Court and fire away at the rights of minorities. This seems to be when the rubber meets the road and, perhaps, it's when the ineffable becomes a gun. :worry:

If we assume that the fist personal vantage is a construct of the public narrative, we completely miss the fact that this public narrative is a narrative construed and interpreted slightly differently from your vantage than from mine. That there is a public discourse from which each of us acquire our own vantages only means that each of us are constantly exposed to an outside, an alterity or otherness. But this publicness is not the identical public for each of us. T — Joshs

I can see how this might work. But it's not much different than saying that we all have a unique take and perspective on life despite some overlaps (depending upon what community you hail from).

That we can participate in the ‘same’ language games and the ‘same’ cultural conventions means that my public and your public, while not identical, must be recognizable and interpretable to each other. — Joshs

Reasonable. How does this play out for us in terms of building 'community' or a shared moral framework? Surely there is some sense in which this must be almost impossible.

But the language they use is borrowed from the public realm, so if you to try to clarify, your are left with a feeling of wonder, puzzlement or suspension depending on your natural inclinations. — Richard B

Not a fan?

I know a smattering about it but have read some essays and seen some lectures on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and 2 or 3 by Dan Zavhi. It seems very interesting and some of it is quite seductive. I'd be interested to gain a better understanding, but life is short. @Joshs is a good advocate for the approach.

Do you think Wittgenstein is hard to follow for a lay reader? I have been unable to get through PI but I am fairly hopeless at philosophy. Early or later?

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language...

Phenomenology sets itself an impossible task. — Banno

Very interesting. Has there ever been a robust and critical thread on phenomenology here? I couldn't find anything useful. Seems to me there are so many intense personal takes on phenomenology that no two devotees seem to agree as to what it is and how it works. But if you're an 'analytic' guy, then this stuff is your traditional bête noire, right?

Are you going to capitulate to your self-doubt, or will you at least try to support something that makes sense given some common goals? — ToothyMaw

Not sure if that's for me or a rhetorical question. My position is very clear from my previous posts.

Agree completely. Well argued.

free speech absolutism (a title Elon Musk has given himself) is not an ideal, but places the considerable power of the press in undeserving hands, whose objective isn't to seek higher truths and dispense with ignorance, but is for their own personal gain and self-promotion. — Hanover

That's it in a nutshell.

If people I care about are hurt, what difference does it make whether it was something evil or just unfortunate? If a tornado kills 10 people, I care enough to act without blaming anyone. Why is 10 people being killed by a terrorist bomb different, at least in terms of the proper attitude required to make an effective response? — T Clark

Makes a big difference to me. Specific details aside - one's an act of nature which could not be prevented. The other was a cruel and deliberate act by a human, designed to harm others and therefore, for me, more difficult to come to terms with because of its malicious intent and the possibility of its prevention.

Would you rather throw your lot in with an ethic reached with reason and some basic assumptions that reduces suffering, or one that could allow all of the worst things imaginable? — ToothyMaw

You're making a classic error if you hold that that reason only supports views you like. :wink: Reason has been used to support views dreadful and good, from eugenics to concentration camps. And the choice is rarely between reducing suffering and the 'worst things'. The difference in ethical systems is in values, which are arrived at from a whole different vantage point. People seem to hold their values as self-evident.

That a society is stupid, ignorant, low IQ, backward mentally, uneducated, brainwashed, and just plain sociopath is not an excuse to promote relativism as an acceptable moral principle. Relativism is a dangerous moral view. — L'éléphant

Not wanting to promote relativism. :wink: As I said - I think my morality is better than theirs and would argue this based on the notion of the wellbeing or flourishing of conscious creatures. The point I am making is that we can imagine a culture that disagrees and chooses differently.

What metaphysical process do you have access to that can demonstrate why my values are better than theirs, other than already agreeing to my suppositions about wellbeing? As @Hanover says you need to believe in some transcendent guarantor of morality to do this definitively and then you also need to demonstrate that your version of transcendent is in agreement with your version of morality. How is that done?

If the subjugation of a minority resulted in a preferred form of order, would you declare it moral? — Hanover

This old thing? :wink: No I wouldn't, but I am the product of values and presuppositions associated with Christianity, liberalism and assorted Western enculturations. My moral views would be not much different to the average Anglican here in Australia, despite my not being a Christian. I doubt most of us ever travel far from our cultural, familial roots.

But, and this is the real point, I can well imagine a culture that does regularly kill children for sport and people think it enjoyable or good. Ditto for almost any unspeakable act - slavery being a good example. And I can well imagine a culture that has set itself up around values and concomitant practices you and I find abhorrent. There are small examples all over the world, in history and now, from child soldiers to child labor. We can argue against such things and hope to end them, but what we are doing is advocating for our values as superior, based on a set of principles or rules. And sure, I believe I can defend my values against others, but I would, wouldn't I? Wouldn't you?

So what is value? Value is the strange stuff of the world, a given dimension of existence. Then, see the above. — Constance

So? What do you do with all this 'analysis' apart from going around and around in circles?

I remain unconvinced that value is anything more than an understandable and mundane attempt by humans to rate objects, people or matters in terms of usefulness. Some of it is arbitrary, some of it transitory, some of it survivability. :wink: If you wish to call needing to make choices and act a process of transcendence that's fine, but I'm on a different bus.

My intuition tells me it's best to presuppose that the world is real and there are other people/creatures who share this reality with me and we must work out together ways of living/acting that are least harmful to overall wellbeing. Unfortunately this means taking for granted any manner of things you might well call a construction or artifice.

There's no question that philosophy can commit itself to analysis (analysis paralysis?) and to intense and deep speculative acts such as you have listed. But why? What are the results? You and I are not Kant and we're going to make any breakthroughs.

I hear you. I'd privilege the first one over the second, but rewrite it as - a set of rules used to help keep us safe, implemented with minimal judgement and dogmatism. I'm not interested in people's personal codes - I'm more concerned in how we can justly, morally collaborate with others in a shared approach.

However, since the phrase "there is always more that can be said" also implies that everything cannot be said, the ineffable is also implied. — Metaphysician Undercover

Maybe this is a little silly but just because a lot may be said 'about' a subject doesn't mean it is actually being spoken of. Sound and fury...? Talking to a priest friend of mine yesterday about God he made the following comment - 'We can fill many books and many thousands of hours in talk of god without ever making contact with the subject. We are just talking to ourselves - the nature of god remains ineffable.'

Do you have a basic description of irony in the postmodern context?

It could if God made himself apparent. But that probably won't happen. — ToothyMaw

Perhaps god needs to host a show on Fox News.

we could come the closest to having some sort of objective moral project short of throwing our lot in with God. — ToothyMaw

The problem with theistic morality is that it provides no objective basis for right and wrong. Religious people find it almost impossible to agree with each other about morality. Take abortion; the role of women; stem cell research, homosexuality; capital punishment; participation in wars; taxation - you name the issue, they disagree about it - often within the same sect of a given religion. Because in the end, all morality, whether theistic or secular is based on the subjective preferences of the person, their interpretation of scripture or philosophy.

I agree that we don't have access to transcendental moral truths, but we cannot rule them out, which is the point of my OP. — ToothyMaw

I hear you, but I rule them out anyway since there is no way we can demonstrate 1) what they are or 2) if they exist. We have no choice but to be pragmatic - for me humans create morality to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order.

To me this means we know the right thing to do from our hearts, from inside. — T Clark

Sounds similar to Christianity where preachers will often say that morality is 'written on the human heart' by god. In other words, we already know what is right and wrong. I've worked with too many hard core criminals to accept this, but I do think in general people inherit moral tendencies - and we are certainly immersed in a moral culture from birth, so it may be hard to escape that process of socialization or even be aware that it exists.

Jesse Prinz argues that all moral values depend on emotional dispositions , and these are subjective and relative. Therefore, moral realism is impossible. He does, however, believe it is possible to determine one moral position as being objectively better than another on the basis of non-moral meta-empirical values such as consistency, universalizability and effects on well-being. — Joshs

I know this is a brief summary but this seems similar to my position. This latter point also resembles Sam Harris on morality.

As I see it, morals mostly express human values, not facts. Morals are not true or false, they work or they don't. Where do those values come from? I think some are inborn and some are learned. — T Clark

I think this is reasonable.

That morals must work is indisputable, but that some are inborn, or tied to human nature, and others learned, says little about whether or not those morals are justified. That is mostly what I am concerned with. — ToothyMaw

Isn't the point that TC is arguing there are no moral facts, just ideas which work or don't in context? This means justification is moot and context dependent, for we do not have access to some transcendental realm of moral truths.

Interesting. Outside of examples, do you have a working definition (in a few sentences) for irony? Have you read Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity?

Of course, the trick is to avoid the hangover by never sobering up, but I think that course comes with its own horrendous set of constraints and rigours. — Janus

There are some drinkers (about 20% as I understand it) who do not get hangovers. I was one of those. I could drink an entire bottle of whisky over dinner and be bright as a new pin next morning. That's why I stopped. If you don't get warnings, it can be hard to know how to act. But it makes me ponder the ineffable nature of hangovers - something about a headache and queasiness; but those are just words, right? :razz:

I think there is historic evidence that Jesus existed, but not that anything miraculous ever happened in his proximity. — TiredThinker

There's no good evidence that 'Jesus' existed, but many scholars would say there was likely a teacher or two who may have inspired a range of myths that contributed to the Jesus stories.

I think one area left out of your discussion is the notion that religious works were not intended to be read as positive texts; they were metaphor and allegory. I grey up in the Baptist tradition in urban Australia (not to be confused with Southern Baptists) and we were taught that the Bible is a collection of myths and allegories which aim at spiritual truths through an interpretive process. No one would ever have dreamed of saying Adam and Eve or Noah or Moses or all the events depicted were real. I certainly heard the same message from some of the rabbis I have known.

I don't imagine most Buddhists would consider Jesus supernatural. — TiredThinker

I have known Buddhists who view Jesus as a bodhisattva.

Also Buddhism has been around maybe a few thousand years before the bible claims humans existed? — TiredThinker

No, Buddhism is around 600 BCE. Fundamentalists think creation is 6 to 10,000 years old.

The "is everything linguistically expressible" issue boils down to "can reality itself be in principle made equivalent to words". — javra

I think this is a fair and obvious question. My intuition says it's unlikely. Of course there's a lot hiding in those words 'everything' and 'reality'.

The attempted justification is that we agreed to use "red" for red; but we didn't get nay such choice. — Banno

Agreement is a bad word. It's more of a social requirement or convention.

I can get that, but you speak as though you’re forced to partake. — javra

Projection. Just an observation on my part. :wink: @Banno is convincing me that it matters.

As to this issue, I’d phrase it in more blunt terms: does one find that reality is - or else can in principle be made - equivalent to words?

If so, then everything that is can be expressible via words. If not, then some things of which we can be aware of will not be accurately expressible via words.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I so far don't see it. — javra

Not sure how one goes about answering this question. My intuition is that words are like crude building blocks we use to make (describe) our reality. We don't use them consistently and many of our problems arise from definitional confusions, misuse of words and subjective interpretations.

Besides, there’s a lot more to meaning and its conveyance than words: I can verbally tell you anything about my state of being but if my body posture and mannerisms express otherwise, what will you make out of my words? — javra

Indeed. Is it not the case that most human communication is non verbal? But isn't this also a set of signs and signifiers we can interpret - or we wouldn't be able to read people as well as we often do. Having worked with pretty tough prisoners, I know that nice words like, "How are you, Mate? " can mean, 'I'm going to smash you.' And based on reading the incongruent body language, I know to move away or duck.

Do you think that this notion of ineffable for some is a gateway to transcendence - a path for theists, idealists and assorted wacky metaphysicians to find solace?

Kate Bush fan... — Banno

Ah.. she's the classic film buff that work is based on the 1948 movie.