That we have the illusion is not itself an illusion. — Janus

That's a great way of putting it. (And we see again how binaries like illusion/reality can rapidly become so equivocal as to be unhelpful. "Are illusions real?" "Well, yes and no . . . stipulate how you want to use the terms!")

I doubt whether a complete account of the world we encounter is possible — Janus

I kind of do too, but it feels important to hold it up as a desideratum. Even unreachable goals can be motivating, and express something aspirational about the overall human project of knowledge.

life is being, but it is not merely being in the sense of sheer mere existence. — Janus

"Life is meaningless" is surely a mood everyone has felt at some time. How can we fall into such a mood? (other than reading Sartre's Nausea :smile: ). Usually by noticing, often with horror, that the values we hold, and organize our lives around, cannot be discovered in the world in the same way we discover what Heidegger called (in Manheim's translation) "essents" -- rocks and birds and math problems and everything else that has being but not being-there-for-us (Dasein, more or less). But as you say, living as a human is more than that, or at least so some of us believe.

I kind of do too, but it feels important to hold it up as a desideratum. Even unreachable goals can be motivating, and express something aspirational about the overall human project of knowledge. — J

Totally agree. I'm with Peirce on the idea of metaphysical and scientific truth as something asymptotically approached by the community of enquirers.

"Life is meaningless" is surely a mood everyone has felt at some time. How can we fall into such a mood? (other than reading Sartre's Nausea :smile: ). Usually by noticing, often with horror, that the values we hold, and organize our lives around, cannot be discovered in the world in the same way we discover what Heidegger called (in Manheim's translation) "essents" -- rocks and birds and math problems and everything else that has being but not being-there-for-us (Dasein, more or less). But as you say, living as a human is more than that, or at least so some of us believe. — J

Right, Heidegger captures that mood nicely in his idea of Vorhandenheit translated as 'present-at-hand" in its contrast with Zuhandenheit, translated as 'ready-to-hand. When we are dealing seamlessly with the world the ready to hand becomes transparent, and the meaning of things is found in their use as "affordances". The hammer and nails "disappear" when we are in that 'flow' state, and it's when something goes wrong and we suddenly become aware of the hammer as just a brute object, a bare existent, without meaning other than to be analyzed into its components, that we fall into a state of "rootlessness" (my word, not Heidegger's) wherein things become meaningless objects.

As a musician you would be aware of that meaningful flow state. Meaning is found in feeling, if we attempt analyze it, it disappears. For me, to live fully is to live a life of intense feeling, with the intellectual concerns informed by, not separate to, that life. I tried reading Nausea once—I wasn't able to get far with it. On the other hand I love Camus' works, which are explicitly about finding the deepest meaning without the need for transcendence.

I tried reading Nausea once—I wasn't able to get far with it. — Janus

It isn't very good, as a work of art. But it does capture that "draining life of meaning" feeling.

For me, to live fully is to live a life of intense feeling, with the intellectual concerns informed by, not separate to, that life. — Janus

It's a problem for philosophers, isn't it? We tend to overdevelop the intellect, maybe especially in the moral sphere. You can read volumes and volumes about ethics and never find a discussion of what compassion is, and why it's central to our lives.