I didn't "double check" your posts. I got curious about what you have said, so I looked at your profile to see your other comment threads and found that.

To assert that "life is good" -- not just my life, your life, or a millipede's life but Life- — Bitter Crank

There is a philosophically technical term for this used in all British universities. It is called bollocks.
Some might say that Ben & Jerry's Ice cream is good in itself and they would be wrong too.

It only take one dissenting voice to prove my case, which is true regardless of that voice.

Why create the problem of finding goods in the first place, if no problem needs to be given in the first place — schopenhauer1

The problem of finding 'goods' (not merely physical/material goods, but also emotional/spiritual) is inherent to life itself. Without the goods, there is nothingness. Where there is nothingness, there is a void and depression emerges. Life itself is the void and is the possibility. Part of the problem of life is simply the fact that we have too much freedom to think and dream but are physically, financially, emotionally etc constrained on those dreams. If you don't find the goods, you don't survive. I think the problem is a a given to life, not that the problem has the option to be given. It is just there, given to everyone.

Reading Nietzsche's thought as 'nihilistic' is probably the worst misinterpretation of his philosophy you can make. The whole point of his philosophy was to overcome nihilism, by an affirmation of life and desire. This does not mean a giving preference to the good in life over the bad, but embracing it in all its shades of feeling and valuation.

Not a problem. I was joking. And I'm not always consistent, for worse or better.

Sure, but philosophy cannot give you what you seek; only faith can; so, at best philosophy can prepare you for faith. For that to happen you need to give up the idea that the kinds of "answers" you are after can be acquired by philosophical thought and also the idea that salvation is dependent on some particular metaphysics or other.. — Janus

I generally agree with you on this. But this lands you in either of two categories. Would you say you're more of a religious skeptic of the likes of Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Hamann or a mystic of the likes of Berdyaev, Eckhart, Boheme, etc.?

Both paths affirm the limitation of reason (and philosophy). I think the former emphasises faith much more, while the latter emphasises non-discursive knowledge (or learned ignorance) more.

A very quick answer: I'm not sure about this distinction, because I see the non-discursive knowledge of the mystic to be in the form of intuitive feeling. This experience gets interpreted (obviously quite differently and yet with commonalities across different cultures) to become a form of non-discursive discourse; and that's where the faith comes in.

I'm not sure about this distinction, because I see the non-discursive knowledge of the mystic to be in the form of intuitive feeling. This experience gets interpreted (obviously quite differently and yet with commonalities across different cultures) to become a form of non-discursive discourse; and that's where the faith comes in. — Janus

Yes, I see. However, from this description, you clearly land in the second camp, not in the first.

So, you see the first camp as denying the possibility of mystical knowledge and/or revelation? Is this a denial just of gnostic experience? I've never been really clear on the distinction between gnostic experience and revelation.

So, you see the first camp as denying the possibility of mystical knowledge and/or revelation? — Janus

Yes. Think of it like a religious David Hume, instead of an atheist David Hume. So they would take Scripture on faith, and would deny that mystical experience can offer knowledge. Basically a religious Pyrrhonist.

I've never been really clear on the distinction between gnostic experience and revelation. — Janus

The mystics would say that mystical experiences reveal knowledge - so it acts as a revelation itself, along with Scripture. The religious skeptic would say that mystical experiences are to be treated with suspicion and cannot be converted to knowledge - we don't gain additional knowledge by means of these experiences.

So they would take Scripture on faith, and would deny that mystical experience can offer knowledge. — Agustino

Would they not then be taking the mystical experiences of others on faith; and yet not having faith in their own mystical experiences (assuming that they have mystical experiences). If they don't have such experiences of their own, then this attitude would seem to be sensible enough.

:-x I should be at work!

I'm not sure about this distinction, because I see the non-discursive knowledge of the mystic to be in the form of intuitive feeling. This experience gets interpreted (obviously quite differently and yet with commonalities across different cultures) to become a form of non-discursive discourse; and that's where the faith comes in. — Janus

This is a discussion that Janus and I have been having for months, on and off, for
example:

I see the attempt to speak about " forms of knowledge the ancients possessed that we have lost" as being mired in the inevitable difficulty that what we could be speaking about could be nothing other than the simple revelation of life itself that happens to the individual. — Janus

I think lived experience, whether quotidian or mystical, is, as it is lived, prior to any interpretation of it, or any ideas which are developed out of it. You can say as much as you want about it, but what you say will never be living in the sense that living itself is. — Janus

So that exchange included a Biblical quotation, to the effect that the attempt to articulate 'philosophical spirituality' is basically a 'boundary violation' - that any 'mystical experiences' are as it were totally innocent of any philosophical elaboration, and are essentially private and subjective.

Whereas I am seeking to understand classical metaphysics which I think provides a real philosophical argument against materialism, and a genuine alternative conception of knowledge, not simply a 'mystical experience'. It is not only 'a feeling' or 'the intuition of a lived experience', but is an insight based on the fundamental platonist argument that numbers, universals, conventions, scientific laws, logic and language are real, but not material. This has been elaborated through the classical philosophical tradition.

The mystics would say that mystical experiences reveal knowledge - so it acts as a revelation itself, along with Scripture. — Agustino

I am reading Jacques Maritain The Degrees of Knowledge - this preserves the ancient sense of the 'hierarchy of knowledge' from the lower level of sensory perception, through scientific and mathematical knowledge, to metaphysical insight, and finally to mystical enlightenment. This is what 'philosophy' used to mean. And I don't think I am at all inclined towards Catholicism, as such - it's simply that this particular philosophical tradition is nearly the only one in which the Western form of the perennial philosophy is preserved, lived and practiced (the other being the Orthodox tradition, of which David Bentley Hart is a contemporary exponent.)

The whole point of his philosophy was to overcome nihilism, by an affirmation of life and desire. — Joshs

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me why Nietzsche's philosophy of the ubermensch and the Will to Power doesn't culminate in fascism, something for which I think there is ample historical evidence.

Another is that, at the bottom of all experiences is an emptiness that must be filled yet again. This is often equated to the suffering described in Buddhism. It is a striving that is never yielding, yet we must find contents to content us and entertain us. Why create this problem of survival on one hand and finding the best way to fill our time on the other in the first place? All this energy running about again and again. How about let sleeping dogs lie? No need to make people put energy forth to maintain themselves.

If there are a need for goods, that means we are lacking those goods to begin with. So we need to find goods as we go about life to fulfill the cup that perpetually needs to be filled, to be emptied yet again (the emptiness at the bottom of endeavors) to be fulfilled yet again. It is an absurdity.

Thinking about this. The empty suffering experience that pushes us to continually seek more, novel experiences. Perhaps this is where the animal in us meshes the man in us. The animal seeks more and more experience, the and man in us is never fully satisfied by these experiences.

I think historically having a lot of children was essential due to the high infant mortality rate and the need for these children to care for parents, I took the tour of the Guinness Factory in downtown Dublin a few years ago, along the way they mentioned that the founder's wife had 21 children, but half of them died prior to maturity, those that did live went on to carry the business through the next generation.

Somebody recently did a post with a Buddhist Monk who immolated himself, with no expression of feeling the flames. It is amazing what some can do by sheer force of will.

Imagine if Stephen Hawking's parents known that their son would have a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and they practiced antinatalism, then we would not have one of the brightest minds of our generation

Would they not then be taking the mystical experiences of others on faith — Janus

They would be accepting that others, and even themselves, have mystical experiences. What they would deny is that those experiences yield knowledge. Remember the skeptical method as drawn out in Outlines of Pyrrhonism and similar works. It is to set different experiences against each other to show that they are contradictory to each other and hence knowledge in those regards is not possible.

So the skeptic would say that people do have mystical experiences. But an experience can be interpreted in contradictory ways, and therefore knowledge is impossible. For example, the same experience can be interpreted as sent by God to reveal truth, or sent by the devil to deceive. The same mystic can have an experience indicating absorption into God, and another indicating that there is a difference between God's essence and his essence. Etc. Thus no mystical knowledge is possible.

Let's take a look at the ending of Montaigne's chapter "On prognostications" from his Essays. He takes a look at something that is close to a mystical experience, but not quite - namely Socrates' daemon.

The daemon of Socrates was perhaps a certain thrust of the will which presented itself to him without waiting for rational argument. It is likely that in a soul like his (well purified and prepared by the continual exercise of wisdom and virtue) such inclinations, albeit bold and undigested, were nevertheless important and worthy to be followed. Everyone can sense in himself some ghost of such agitations, of a prompt, vehement, fortuitous opinion. It is open to me to allow them some authority, to me who allow little enough to human wisdom. And I have had some – equally weak in reason yet violent in persuasion or dissuasion but which were more common in the case of Socrates – by which I have allowed myself to be carried away so usefully and so successfully, that they could have been judged to contain something of divine inspiration.

Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (pp. 45-46). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

So the skeptic may even act on those impulses, and use them in his life, but he will not claim that they yield knowledge. So even while using them, he will remain skeptical that they are things he knows.

The mystic, on the other hand, will claim certainty and knowledge as a result of those experiences.

I am the evil and scorned antinatalist and pessimist that you all revile.. pleased to see everyone in good form here. I thought I'd make an appearance to add some perspective from the antinatalist side. Carry on with your circle jerking, if you must, but keep in mind several things. — schopenhauer1

I do not revile your opinions, but I must say this in advance of my dissection of your argument as I take it that there is a slight stab in my direction that perhaps requires some elucidation. To be 'emotional' is ambiguous, but the ontology of emotions enable existence to have substance and whilst perhaps the state is a neuro-psychological experience, it nevertheless provides us with a unique and intuitive process that coordinates a response to and relationship with the external world; it gives meaning to experience and is foundational to empathy and thus ultimately moral consciousness.

But there is an ambiguity in our understanding of the sentiment. The first and broadly understood - i.e. the boo friggidy hoo my life is shit emotions - is only bad insofar as the individual does not actively engage in making those circumstances better and if they are able to articulate it, then they are able to improve it. I am not fond of this type of emotion, it is too static, defeatist and unchanging for my taste.

The other, however, the this situation is unbearable and it needs to stop emotion is, to me, extremely important. Martha Nussbaum' account of compassion and emotion and her use of her own personal experiences as part of her thesis exemplifies how important such sentiments are, her and another favourite of mine Raimond Gaita' object-directedness through personal experience in books like The Philosophers Dog or Romulus, My Father. It is what makes us humane and to understand love or to be loving. As Nussbaum claims, our lack of emotions or appropriate emotional responses actually show that our response to and actions with the world can be hindered and thus our first and primary focus should be about articulating and correctly understanding ourselves.

When I was studying my PhD, my supervisor was so profoundly controlling in his attempt to dissuade my use of a similar methodology (he was a Marxist) that he referred to mine as being 'too feminine' and claimed that anything without a strict, clear, black and white reality was too 'emotional' and thus lacked legitimacy. I dropped out because at the time I thought he may be right.

He could not have been more wrong. Compassion and the passion for things like human rights, justice, righteousness and where I feel an inherent disdain for crimes against humanity, for the abuse of women and children, the lack of inequality, they are not a weakness but a strength. To use my own personal experience to exemplify this strength is comparatively what makes the OP sensible in his approach. So, you can call it 'circle jerking' but really, you are being the jerk here.

You can say as a society, the de facto non-intentional, yet emergent goal is to perpetuate social institutions by using individuals as inadvertent vehicles in which to enact another life of socially derived survival, comfort-seeking, and entertainment-seeking activities (which in turn strengthens social institutions, and so on). — schopenhauer1

Erich Fromm wrote: "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” Our motivation or will to happiness and the experience of euphoria is identified and conditional with external objects or an implicit target to make the experience intelligible. A study of children in Romanian orphanages in the 1990's shows that the inhumane and extremely minimal contact with adults where no affection or emotion had ever been experienced actually alters the brain. We can give food, shelter, all the necessities to 'live' but that is not where 'life' manifests. The cognitive mechanisms that affect emotional expressions is modelled during developmental stages by characterising psychological content and sometimes this content is unconscious and not clearly understood and so projected incorrectly or what we refer to as mental health concerns like hysteria or sociopathy. How we express that needn't be violent or highly visible; a sociopath who has shut-off completely can still appear to live a normal life.

Are you implying that love - and again, not that sentiment of a mushy romance but think of 'brotherly love' when I say it or the capacity to give love (emotion/compassion) - as a Will that drives us, are you suggesting the endeavour to reach happiness by regulating and correctly applying our emotions and by being passionate against injustice or bad things happening to others, that contains no 'purpose'? As you say:

So humans need to be born so that they can learn to not make as many mistakes? — schopenhauer1

Humans don't need to be born at this stage; I openly told a woman at work who said that she spent $50,000 on IVF treatment that she was an idiot. We have more than enough children being born for the wrong reasons that need our attention (love, compassion, empathy, they are emotions that connect us) and why I myself do not wish to give birth but will (in the future) adopt a child. There is no 'black and white, strict, clear' reality here; IVF treatment and anti-natalism are two extremes and what we need is to apply ourselves with more humanity, compassion and knowledge that modifies our recalcitrant emotions and project it correctly to the external world, to direct the implicit and subjective experience to - as Searl said - direction of fit.

Thinking that life is a sewer is the flip side of thinking that life is good. It's a simplified version of a complex matter. One could criticize my view as some sort of nit-witted la la land puff piece, I suppose. I would hope not. I don't deny that "good life" has problems. Life just is problematic, even if it is good. There are bad people in this good life. There are difficult diseases in good life. It isn't perfection of niceness that makes life good, it's existence-at-all that makes life good. — Bitter Crank

I'm really enjoying this thread, although I am getting in late. I have a hard time discussing things with you. Our backgrounds and attitudes are similar. I often find myself wanting to say something only to find you've already said it.

I believe that life is good. Unequivocally. I have been unhappy much of my life, but I never for a second didn't love the world and feel like I belong here. I like to think that the world and I have been evolving together for 3.5 billion years. How could I possibly not belong here.

I have been surprised how many people on this forum are despairing or depressed. Cynical. They'll say something deeply despairing and I'll think they are joking only to figure out as the discussion goes on that they are serious. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. This kind of thinking draws certain kinds of people and they tend toward that affliction. I find myself wanting to hug people and tell them things will be ok.

The mutual love between two people and the desire to build a life together, a real desire and not some superficial one, is this family planning. The motivation or will is amplified by understanding that love is a choice that is mutually shared, whereas most think relationships are solely sexual pleasure and economics rather than love. The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life. — TimeLine

Pretty arrogant. For you to tell people what their life means. For you to claim that most people's desire for love and acceptance is "solely for sexual pleasure and economics rather than love." Arrogant and wrong.

Starting with such a bold claim does not endear readers to take you seriously. — charleton

Can't you see that BC believes it? Are you saying he should hide his thoughts and feelings so you won't be put off?

Pretty arrogant. For you to tell people what their life means. For you to claim that most people's desire for love and acceptance is "solely for sexual pleasure and economics rather than love." Arrogant and wrong. — T Clark

Pretty arrogant of you not to explain why a relationship based solely on sexual pleasure and economics is morally good.

It means nothing. "good" is a judgement relationship between an observer and a thing.
It a value. — charleton

Do you really believe that discussions of value have no place in philosophy? Pretty much all philosophy talks about is values and opinions. There is no bottom. Any issue can be taken down and down and down. You'll never find the end. Except when you appeal to values.

There is a philosophically technical term for this used in all British universities. It is called bollocks.

Some might say that Ben & Jerry's Ice cream is good in itself and they would be wrong too.

It only take one dissenting voice to prove my case, which is true regardless of that voice. — charleton

You may think that the assertion 'life in itself is good' is bollocks or bullshit or whatever term you like. There are many who, for various reasons, don't agree that life is good. I can't tell whether your objection is that "life is not good' or that 'life in itself is good' is poorly stated.

If you would, please clarify your view.

Pretty arrogant of you not to explain why a relationship based solely on sexual pleasure and economics is morally good. — TimeLine

What I said was "Pretty arrogant. For you to tell people what their life means. For you to claim that most people's desire for love and acceptance is "solely for sexual pleasure and economics rather than love." Arrogant and wrong."

I respect the high standards you have set for your own loving relationships. I hope you find what you're looking for. Your arrogance shows when you pontificate about how others should live their lives. And also in how you mischaracterize their motivations. Just because people don't hold out for the things you find important, that doesn't mean they seek love "solely for sexual pleasure and economics."

I openly told a woman at work who said that she spent $50,000 on IVF treatment that she was an idiot. — TimeLine

No doubt she found your assessment quite helpful and refreshingly frank.

No doubt she found your assessment quite helpful. — Bitter Crank

The reaction was not as bad as when I said the same to someone who spent that much on a wedding.

For a wedding, I would tend to agree. Many weddings seem to be less a celebration of an important event and more an occasion for extremely conspicuous consumption.

Just because people don't hold out for the things you find important, that doesn't mean they seek love "solely for sexual pleasure and economics." — T Clark

Whilst I appreciate that you point out aspects to content that ultimately draw focus away from the overall argument - whether intentional or not - I think it is you projecting what you find 'important' and that since this is contrary to what I said, it is you that is actually being arrogant.

The reaction was not as bad as when I said the same to someone who spent that much on a wedding. — TimeLine

Juicy details, please. Did the bride punch you out?

There may be reasons why one would assert that life is good, or that the universe is meaningless, and that can be analyzed. There is a difference between asserting the universe is meaningless and finding this freedom, and asserting that the universe is meaningless and blowing one's brains out.. — Bitter Crank

I might want to make the case that it isn't just a statement of value that life is good. I think it is built into us that we feel life is good. Thinking otherwise goes against human nature. To speak at a crude level, it has evolutionary value.

On the other hand, I might not want to make that argument.

Whilst I appreciate that you point out aspects to content that ultimately draw focus away from the overall argument - whether intentional or not - I think it is you projecting what you find 'important' and that since this is contrary to what I said, it is you that is actually being arrogant. — TimeLine

Here, I'll try to say it better without the judgment. In my experience, which is substantial, the claim that most people's desire for love and acceptance is "solely for sexual pleasure and economics rather than love," is wrong. It is certainly uncharitable.

It only take one dissenting voice to prove my case, which is true regardless of that voice. — charleton

Are you saying that just because you don't believe life is good it isn't? Or are you saying that you don't believe your life is good.