Wow, I just made myself conscious--for the first time--that things have me flirting with violence. It's not the kind or amount of violence that would get a movie "rated R for violence" or fill a horrible documentary or news report--it's just throwing reading material to the ground. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

This reminds me of a person who worried that insulting another person's grandfather's bad back might be taking things a little too far...

(Y)

I've never worked for anyone else for any length of time. I was hopeless at school because of a total lack of interest, so when I finished year 12 I had to take cleaning jobs, laboring jobs and the like. My first job I worked with a gang of Calabrians as a fettler on the Northern Sydney railway lines.

I couldn't stand full-time work, so I worked as a gardener for private residential clients. Then I taught myself how to build with wood and masonry and became a self-taught landscape designer and creator and carpenter/stonemason. I learned from books and took risks pushing myself to take on ever more ambitious projects which challenged my then current skill level. I am proud to be able to say that I have never come unstuck because of poor workmanship.

What I meant, though, was that we are made slaves in a sense by the very need to earn a living. We can gain a range of degrees of freedom within that necessary pursuit, depending on luck and talent; talent both for the work and for self-promotion. To be effective at the work or at promoting yourself you need to have discipline and application, which means you need to have motivation. I was motivated to the work because I enjoyed learning all the skills, and creating beautiful structures and environments, but I had almost no motivation to promote myself. I was always hated what I saw as excessive sales bullshit. I saw it at work in some of my colleagues; it disgusted me.

At one point in my life as a contractor/designer I had twelve employees in three teams. I hated it because most people are never satisfied no matter how much you pay them and those you employ as foremen or project managers seem to constantly do things the wrong way because their inflated egos make them highly resistant to the idea that they need any guidance, and hence they do not listen. Because I am a perfectionist and insist, at any cost, on delivering what I promise to my clients, I was forever paying workers to fix problems that would never have occurred if they had listened to my instructions. It drove me nuts. I was working 70-80 hours a week and making a lot of money nonetheless; but I chose to go back to just doing the work myself with casual labourers when I needed them.

So. slavery exits along a spectrum from being completely free (in the economic sense) to do whatever you want, all the way down to being literally forced to labour.

One of my best friends reads him too, I won't say "religiously", but with much enthusiasm. Personally, I find his writings on philosophy (which my friend, because of my interest in the subject, has several times recommended to me) to be quite basic and one-dimensional. His writings on collapse I have no interest in, because I believe none of us know, or can even adequately guess, what the future will bring, and I believe idle speculation worked up into conviction is never going to be helpful; it just generally seems to become a kind of fetish.

I find (John Michael Greer's) writings on philosophy (which my friend, because of my interest in the subject, has several times recommended to me) to be quite basic and one-dimensiona — Janus

you think? I find this essay insightful and quite profound, really:

I mentioned in last month’s post here that our familiar term “world” is a rounded-off version of the Old English weorold, “man-old,” the time or age of human beings. That bit of etymology conceals more than one important insight. As I noted last month, it reminds us that this thing we call “the world” isn’t something wholly outside ourselves, something we experience in a detached and objective way. It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us—and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience.

That point is astonishingly easy to forget. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve watched distinguished scientists admit with one breath that the things we experience around us aren’t real—they’re just representations constructed by our sense organs and brains, reacting to an unimaginable reality of probability waves in four-dimensional space-time—and then go on with the very next breath to forget all that, and act as though matter, energy, space, time, and physical objects exactly as we perceive them are real in the most pigheadedly literal sort of objective sense, as though the human mind has nothing to do with any of them except as a detached observer. What’s more, many of those same scientists proceed to make sweeping claims about what human beings can and can’t know and do, in blithe disregard of the fact that these very claims depend on the same notion of the objective reality of the world of experience that they’ve just disproved. — John Michael Greer

The Clenched Fist of Reason

(Mind you, I'm put off by the Druid regalia.)

It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us-and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience. — John Michael Greer

This seems to embody an elementary contradiction and confusion, though, insofar as Greer is saying that it is an objective fact that the whole story is being created "moment by moment in our minds", which as a purported fact is itself derived from and supported by the scientific understanding of perception, while at the same time he is saying that the whole scientific story does not reflect an objective reality. In other words what Greer is claiming "depends on the very notion of the objective reality of the world of experience that (Greer claims) they've just disproved".

I see no contradiction there, I think that is exactly how cognition works. There is an objective element or pole that is certainly quantifiable and predictable, hence, scientific prediction and analysis are possible. So it isn't denying the efficacy of science. But the whole activity is still underpinned by the human cognitive activities and the categories of the understanding (per Kant.)

What do you mean, though, in saying that it is 'underpinned by the human cognitive faculties" ? Are you talking about the brain? The idea that the brain is real and functions as we think it does "depend(s) on the same notion of the objective reality of the world of experience".
The same thing applies to the idea that it's "a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience." That story depends on the posit that biology, culture and individual life experience aree objectively real, causally efficacious things.

If you're not talking about the brain, biology, culture or experience, then what could you be talking about.

Incidentally, I also think that is how cognition occurs, but I grant the objective reality of those things and of the world that they exist in and reveal, whereas Greer seems to contradict himself in denying that objective reality.

I don't see any contradiction. There are objectively real things, but 'objects exist for subjects'? What Greer is suggesting, and I concur, is that scientists talk as though there are no subjects. What Is being questioned is the coherency of the notion of a 'mind-independent' reality in the normally assumed sense.

Well, I would say the subject is as much of an objective reality as the object is, but science does not concern itself with subjects since they are not empirically observable phenomena. The behavior of subjects is empirically observable and that is the only phenomena that science can go on, as in the case of psychology, to attempt to gain any sort of objective understanding of subjects.

Of course it is generally accepted that there is a reality which is independent of human minds; no other way of thinking about the world makes any sense. This is not to say that thinking about a mind-independent reality is itself totally independent of minds (to say that would obviously be absurd) but that our thinking is not exhaustively produced just by the human mind, (whether we think of that as the brain or something else) but also by real conditions prior to the mind, whatever those conditions might be. (We do not need to know exactly what those conditions are to know that they are real, by any reasonable definition of the word 'real').

I honestly cannot see why so many people seem to have such a problem with this very commonsense, and in truth pretty much inescapable, realization. It has no bearing on religion or spirituality at all, either way. As Peirce would have it we should not "pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts".

The Clenched Fist of Reason — Wayfarer

Just now I read many paragraphs. I'll have to finish later.

Very informative.

Thank you for that link.

At the risk of sending​ my own thread way out on an unrelated tangent, I will remind everybody that when the institution of slavery was still at the front of Westerners' conscious minds some thinkers said that wage labor costs less than maintaining slaves.

That seems to support the idea that wage labor is slavery in a different form.

That is quite an inspiring story you have there! (Y) Thanks for sharing that.

I learned from books and took risks pushing myself to take on ever more ambitious projects which challenged my then current skill level. — Janus

It's always a difficult thing to decide how ambitious you should be willing to go with the project compared to your skill level though :P It's not easy to decide. I've refused work before that I thought was "too out there" for me.

What I meant, though, was that we are made slaves in a sense by the very need to earn a living. — Janus

Hmm - I suppose so, but if we are slaves, who is our master then? Because our master wouldn't be society or something external to us, but rather our own drives - our own need to survive, our conatus. So to say we are slaves in this sense entails creating a division in the self. One side of the self (the passions, need for food, shelter, etc.) is divided from the self conceived as a purely rational will. Then we look back at ourselves so to speak, and say that the purely rational self is a slave to our biological drives.

But I think this divided self is a wound, and if this wound was healed, then we would conceive of our own self as in harmony with itself. Then there couldn't be any talk of bondage in this context, but rather of freedom.

There's the other difficulty that when we speak of freedom, we need a standard of freedom. When you extend the meaning of slavery too much, so that there's always a degree of slavery, then we've destroyed the very meaning of the word. It's much like a bird thinking that air resistance is what stops it from flying faster, and if only there was no more resistance from the air it would finally be free to fly as it wants - but of course the truth is that precisely if there was no resistance from the air, the bird would not be free to fly - flying would become impossible.

These are some of the reasons why I think it's difficult to talk about the need to earn a living, or the need to survive, as a form of slavery.

To be effective at the work or at promoting yourself you need to have discipline and application, which means you need to have motivation. I was motivated to the work because I enjoyed learning all the skills, and creating beautiful structures and environments, but I had almost no motivation to promote myself — Janus

Yes, I agree - the selling element is very important. Getting yourself out there gets you to some of the work, but if you need to grow and get bigger selling plays a crucial role. From what I see in my part of the world, business owners tend to focus mostly on recruiting and sales, and relatively little on the actual work, which is a bit strange. I'm also like you and very much of a perfectionist, so I've always been a bit "afraid" of hiring anyone to pass on work to them, because I know there's very few people who actually make sure the work is perfect, especially if they're not working for themselves.

Because I am a perfectionist and insist, at any cost, on delivering what I promise to my clients, I was forever paying workers to fix problems that would never have occurred if they had listened to my instructions. — Janus

Yes that does seem to be a very big problem. Quality always seems to tend to decrease when more people get involved. To a certain extent, in order to grow you need to sacrifice quality and just accept that a certain % of clients will be left with subpar work (and then seek to minimise that). That seems to be in the nature of industrialisation as well, where a certain batch of the products are assumed to end up faulty anyhows (for the sake of producing "in bulk")

I can't help but laugh at this. You are saying that autonomy of the individual is garbage, as well as science. How does one express themselves for you to listen without autonomy? How do you listen to non-human life and the Earth without organizing that knowledge (science is organized knowledge) into something meaningful to even talk about for others to listen? You dictating what I can talk about is contradictory to your goal of listening, and thinking that such-and-such topic is "garbage" is subjective. Maybe others don't think that and you need to listen to that.

How do you expect to change people who aren't nice, into people who are without manipulating them? How do you expect self-centered people to listen to others without manipulating them - without giving them their right to express their self-centeredness and you listen and be nice? You are simply talking about how you'd like it to be and not everyone feels the same, which means that you'd have to limit what it is that they do or think that YOU don't like in favor of what YOU do like.

Also I like to listen to others except when they become nonsensical or hypocritical. After that, it becomes a waste of my time to listen to them. Once they insult my intelligence with what they say, being nice isn't part of my response. — Harry Hindu

Science can continue outside of our present spiritual and intellectual structure, just like religion has continued after the Enlightenment.

People expressed themselves before "I think therefore I am" and the Enlightenment emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. Personal expression does not depend on those things.

How do you listen to non-human life? Go for a quiet walk outside. That's just one way.

The rest of your post is a bunch of straw men at best.

I think that this whole Enlightenment/modernist project of autonomous individual subjects​ objectifying things and using reason to manipulate, control and dominate the world needs to now be rejected. Being more in concert with and having greater respect for the non-human world, and employing empathy, compassion, intuition, cooperation, etc. for a change are alternatives I have offered. Unless you can show us an existing spiritual and intellectual plane that frees us from the former--I am now convinced it doesn't exist, I have said (see the part about how Christopher Lasch, postmodernism, the Zapatistas, etc. weren't enough)--and gives us a healthier framework, there is going to, like I said, have to be a complete rupture and departure. Or, if you are happy with the trajectory we are on then tell us something we haven't already heard ad nauseum (the world is more peaceful; the world is safer; life expectancy is greater; etc.) about why we should stay on it.

I would say the subject is as much of an objective reality as the object is, — Janus

The point is, the subject is never an object of perception. We never know the subject as something 'in the world' - it's rather more that the world is something 'in the subject'. ('Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge.' Schopenhauer, 1)

We cannot see the seer - it's like the hand attempting to grasp itself. That might sound trite, but it really isn't, because what we don't see is the very act of seeing. Our seeing is the conditioned consequence of whole chain (of dependent origination, along one axis, and adaptive necessity, along another.) The 'act of seeing' brings all that together, into the subjective unity of consciousness, which is what designates things as "real" or "unreal".



Conscious Realism.

Of course it is generally accepted that there is a reality which is independent of human minds; no other way of thinking about the world makes any sense. — Janus

In one way, that is true, but in another way it isn't. You're imagining the world outside yourself, with mind 'here', 'inside', and the world 'out there' independently of 'the mind'. But all of this is also taking place in the mind. THE mind is not your mind or my mind - it is the faculty of understanding that exists in every rational sentient being.

I think that this whole Enlightenment/modernist project of autonomous individual subjects​ objectifying things and using reason to manipulate, control and dominate the world needs to now be rejected. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I think, 'understood' rather than rejected - it has to be seen through, transcended. But now that I see what you're getting at, I completely concur with what you're saying. I too have been studying this same point all along.

The point is, the subject is never an object of perception. We never know the subject as something 'in the world' - it's rather more that the world is something 'in the subject'. ('Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge.' Schopenhauer, 1) — Wayfarer

Well, I would say that's just one way of interpreting the situation. We don't "know" the subject as an object at all. "The subject" is really nothing more than the idea of a knower. And subjects are certainly "in the world"; they always find themselves in a world with others. As Heidegger points out 'being in the world' is the essence of the being of Dasein; Heidegger actually wants to get away altogether from the whole misleading notion of there being a subject in any substantive sense. In any case the world is certainly not something "in the subject"; that idea seems to make no sense at all except in the very limited sense that, looked at from one very artificial point of view or at times of psychological stress, we are all capable of having the subjective impression of inhabiting our own 'little worlds'.

In one way, that is true, but in another way it isn't. You're imagining the world outside yourself, with mind 'here', 'inside', and the world 'out there' independently of 'the mind'. But all of this is also taking place in the mind. THE mind is not your mind or my mind - it is the faculty of understanding that exists in every rational sentient being. — Wayfarer

We experience the world constantly as "being outside ourselves" in the sense of being beyond the boundaries of our bodies. The idea that the world is "taking place inside the mind" I find quite unintelligible when I think about it; and all the more so the more I think about it. Whose mind is it taking place inside of ? What is "the mind" if it is not "your mind or my mind"? I would say the only possible answer to that would be something like "God's mind". But I also think that such answers have value only in an allusive, analogical, poetic, sense; and not in any intelligible propositional sense. Looked at as a discursive claim the idea is meaningless to me; whereas the idea of certain things (ideas, feeling, volitions and so on, but certainly not the world) being inside my mind or your mind is perfectly intelligible in accordance with my experience, phenomenologically considered. I would say "the faculty of understanding that exists in every rational being" is nothing more than a more or less helpful concept.

because what we don't see is the very act of seeing. Our seeing is the conditioned consequence of whole chain (of dependent origination, along one axis, and adaptive necessity, along another.) The 'act of seeing' brings all that together, into the subjective unity of consciousness, which is what designates things as "real" or "unreal". — Wayfarer

We don't see the workings of our brains or the 'insides' of our bodies either. The origination of our being, of our thinking, of our feeling, of our seeing is an ineliminable mystery to us. We simply cannot conceptualize such an "origin" in any discursive way at all. Ideas like the "act of seeing" "brings it all together" "subjective unity of consciousness" and so on, all seem hopelessly vague and liable to mislead us into various kinds of substantialist reifications, in my view. It's far better to rest in unknowing when it comes to ideas that purport to go beyond our common-sense understandings of the world, beyond the everyday notions that make perfect sense to us. On the other hand, those more abstruse notions may be good and useful for the creative imagination if we take care not to indulge in hypostatization.

Fair enough!

The point is, the subject is never an object of perception. We never know the subject as something 'in the world' - it's rather more that the world is something 'in the subject'. ('Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge.' Schopenhauer, 1) — Wayfarer

How is the world "in the subject"? :s If the world is in the subject, then I should expect to have some degree of control over it no? Afterall, one thing that distinguishes my body from the rest of the world is the control I have over it. Control is one of the factors I take into account in distinguishing myself from other things. But I have no control over when the sun rises, and the like. Therefore they aren't "in me".

Take a dream. In a dream my environment is in my control to a greater deal than in the real world. That's one of the key factors that enables me to understand that I am dreaming while I'm actually dreaming. If I really concentrate in a dream, I can change the environment, I can take charge of it.

We cannot see the seer - it's like the hand attempting to grasp itself. That might sound trite, but it really isn't, because what we don't see is the very act of seeing. — Wayfarer

If you're just saying that we don't see the conditions that make sight possible, sure. But this doesn't help us very much...

And subjects are certainly "in the world"; they always find themselves in a world with others. As Heidegger points out 'being in the world' is the essence of the being of Dasein; Heidegger actually wants to get away altogether from the whole misleading notion of there being a subject in any substantive sense — Janus

I definitely agree with this. Maybe Heidegger does have a point against substance metaphysics of the non-Spinozist kind >:) (although to be fair Spinoza's use of substance is deceiving...)

If the world is in the subject, then I should expect to have some degree of control over it no? — Agustino

Do you have any control over your digestive or metabolic processes?

When we see ourselves as a being in the world, then that itself is a representation. Where does that occur? What is the nature of that representation? For further elaboration, see the paragraph I referred to, with which you're surely familiar.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always presupposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge. — Schopenhauer

When we see ourselves as a being in the world, then that itself is a representation. — Wayfarer

You seem to be conflating the primordial experience with its representation. Being in the world is an experience, the essential human experience, and 'being in the world' is its representation. In this quite different context this distinction echoes the 'use/mention' distinction.

This may also be understood in terms of Heidegger's 'zuhanden/vorhanden' ('ready-to-hand' and 'present at hand', respectively) distinction.The "present at hand" (mention) is secondary to and derivative of the "ready to hand" (use). The present at hand consist in abstractions the ready to hand is concrete. Schopenhauer's analysis is a hopelessly abstract and thus derivative and attenuated (and hence misleading) "present at hand" exercise.

I definitely agree with this. Maybe Heidegger does have a point against substance metaphysics of the non-Spinozist kind >:) (although to be fair Spinoza's use of substance is deceiving...) — Agustino

Yes, Heidegger is more against dualistic metaphysics than monistic metaphysics. There are profound problems with monism too, though. Perhaps Spinoza can be saved from these problems by interpreting him as a thinker of non-dualism rather than as a thinker of monism.

I don't know if such an interpretation could be consistently applied to Spinoza's philosophy; that is a problem for the specialist scholars. :)

Do you have any control over your digestive or metabolic processes? — Wayfarer

Yes, actually we do have quite a bit of control over our digestive and metabolic processes. It's true that we don't have absolute control, but we can influence them. Some people, through meditative practices, can influence them to a greater degree than others - like this guy.



Schopenhauer is confused. To wit:

"This proves that the whole of the material world with its bodies in space, extended and, by means of time, having causal relations with one another, and everything attached to this - all this is not something existing independently of our mind, but something that has its fundamental presuppositions in our brain-functions, by means of which and in which alone is such an objective order of things possible. For time, space, and causality, on which all those real and objective events rest, are themselves nothing more than functions of the brain; so that, therefore, this unchangeable order of things, affording the criterion and the clue to their empirical reality, itself comes from the brain, and has its credentials from that alone"

Schopenhauer also states that consciousness is to the brain like digestion is to the stomach. Now let's take the bolded sentence out:

For time, space, and causality, on which all those real and objective events rest, are themselves nothing more than functions of the brain

So time, space and causality are functions of the brain - and the brain is located in space, time and causality :s

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always presupposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject — Wayfarer

The subject-object divide is derivative though and learned. It's not given in experience but arrived at through a particular interpretation and way of relating to being. So Schopenhauer is reasoning backwards.