So, I'll add, can you explain what "truly logical thinking" refers to? — Judaka

Normativity is what matters here.

Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. no person bears more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation modified)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/

My big point is that putting on the scientist's lab coat or the philosopher's toga is embracing a responsibility. Unlike mystics pontificating or thugs throwing dissenters in cells, we work together to synthesize better beliefs in a tradition of criticism and fallibility that does not hold any belief sacred --- except for the 'belief' in this rationality itself.

One of Kant’s revolutionary, revolutionizing ideas is that what distinguishes judgements and intentional actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is that they are things knowers-and-agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority: the authority to make oneself responsible, to commit oneself. Responsibility, authority, commitment — these are all normative notions. Unlike Cartesian subjectivity, Kantian subjectivity is not distinguished from physical objectivity ontologically, but deontologically. The overarching distinction is not between minds and bodies, but between facts and norms. Discursivity is the capacity autonomously to bind ourselves by norms in the form of concepts, rules that determine what we have committed ourselves to by applying them in judgement and the endorsement of 0practical maxims.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Some_Hegelian_Ideas_of_Note_for_Contempo.pdf

Hey now. That doesn't sound like disagreement. — plaque flag

It's not :). I don't think you have a misreading -- it's far more appropriate when talking about Hegel, from my perspective at least, to talk of readings, and only the ones which are way off are misreadings (things like "if you think about it Hegel is basically a Cartesian" or something very obviously wrong to anyone whose read the texts).

But notice how your reading of Hegel contrasts with my reading of Kant?

With Kant we cannot know anything about God. So we could not make the inference that we are baby-gods or anything of that sort. That claim could not be justified by a Kantian rationality, but it can be justified in a Hegelian rationality.

Brandom also interprets Hegel as grasping our escape from (loss of) nonhuman authority and trying to address how such autonomous creatures could generate their own norms which are nevertheless binding. Neurath's boat, I think : reason is a self-challenging self-editing authority. — plaque flag

This is another point of departure for Kant, if we take Brandom's interpretation as stated. Kant embraces human autonomy, but then argues that it's rational to continue believing in the old (compared to the drives of the Enlightenment) ways -- at least within the bounds of bare reason. But it's also a point of consonance because Kant is very interested in the possible grounds for autonomous moral agents to live in accord with norms of their own creation. It's a funny thing in Kant that Nietzsche exploits -- he lays the intellectual groundwork for a total rejection of traditional morality in the name of defending traditional morality from the acid of Scientific Reason :D.

And that's probably a big point of divergence between Kant and Hegel -- the place of reason for Kant is not a universal reason in Hegel's sense as much as it is divided into different powers of human judgment. It's universal in that it holds for all experience, but it's not universal in the sense that it holds for all reality. Which is sort of what I was saying before in saying we have an example of two rationalities from the history of philosophy -- Kant and Hegel disagreeing upon the proper place of logic with respect to inferences about the real. (OK I started with Descartes, but since we're talking Hegel now I'm using him)

The matrix itself must be atemporal. The denial of an aprior knowledge/structure is given as an apriori knowledge/structure. The earnest 'skeptic' is always (tacitly at least) an ontologist describing the unchanging 'Matrix' of our experience. Or so I claim (well, I strongly suspect it....) — plaque flag

The Matrix must be atemporal, but is there a matrix at all? I'd say that Hegel's philosophy is anti-Matrix. Another credit to Hegel is he's definitely a post-Cartesian. The rejoinder there is that his solution is worse than the original problem, but he's post-Cartesian.

But note I was still playing Hegel-interpreting-Kant there. There's a way in which Hegel's philosophy is entirely a priori, but it's very different from Kant's notion of synthetic a priori knowledge. Or, at least, so it seems to me.

Another Hegel passage from same section on Romantic Art (lots of great stuff in that section, so this is just a sample):

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1
Spiritual reconciliation is only to be apprehended and represented as an activity, a movement of the spirit, as a process in the course of which a struggle and a battle arises, and grief, death, the mournful sense of nullity, the torment of spirit and body enter as an essential feature. For just as God at first cuts himself off from finite reality, so finite man, who begins of himself outside the Kingdom of God, acquires the task of elevating himself to God, detaching himself from the finite, abolishing its nullity, and through this killing of his immediate reality becoming what God in his appearance as man has made objective as true reality. The infinite grief of this sacrifice of subjectivity’s very heart, as well as suffering and death, which were more or less excluded from the representations of classical art or rather appeared there as mere natural suffering, acquire their real necessity only in romantic art.
....

But notice how your reading of Hegel contrasts with my reading of Kant?

With Kant we cannot know anything about God. So we could not make the inference that we are baby-gods or anything of that sort. — Moliere

I'll readily say there's a big tonal gap between them. It should be stressed that all of Hegel's godstuff is (for me anyway) best understood figuratively. Rationalized theology just uses the old pictures to channel feeling and maybe to fool the authorities. I take Hegel to be a flaming humanist. Feuerbach offers a mostly demystified version.

Hegel’s philosophy thus represents, for Feuerbach,

the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost and wrecked, through philosophy … by identifying it with the negation of Christianity. (GPZ 297/34)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach

That claim could not be justified by a Kantian rationality, but it can be justified in a Hegelian rationality. — Moliere

Yes, which we'd maybe both explain in Hegelian terms. For the record, I'm a liquid rationalist. The lifeworld evolves ceaselessly, and our own conceptuality is part of that evolution.

Normativity is what matters here. — plaque flag

Is your thread basically just saying that to play tennis we need to abide by the rules of tennis?

One must subjugate themselves to the rules of philosophy to participate, I agree with that in principle.

The Matrix must be atemporal, but is there a matrix at all? I'd say that Hegel's philosophy is anti-Matrix. — Moliere

Ah but is there not an structure behind or above all of the ringing changes ?

The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm#III

Is your thread basically just saying that to play tennis we need to abide by the rules of tennis? — Judaka

So far you and I have just been unfolding the concept of philosophy. My thread is about the conditions of possibility for philosophy. In short, I claim there are certain assumptions that philosophers cannot deny without performative contradiction. Anything that makes 'tennis' possible cannot be doubted or challenged within this game of 'tennis' without absurdity.

For instance : communication is impossible.

Or : there is no world.

I mean I like Camus and Sartre in addition to Marx :D -- so I'd say no. The real is absurd if you ask me. Which is why we can interpret it in so many various ways. Note how this doesn't annul the real, though. The real is so real that even our categories cannot contain it, so the categories are not transcendental from my perspective -- I disbelieve there is a transcendental logic. And if we can cognize the absurd, which is the thing I think about and am uncertain of how to justify for others (so it's not quite philosophy yet, just opinion), that's a very clear refutation of Kant's philosophy.

I love Kant so it hurts me, but it's where the thinking takes me. Which is part of the philosophic spirit I'd say -- when reason is more powerful than you and forces you to think a new way.

But note I was still playing Hegel-interpreting-Kant there. There's a way in which Hegel's philosophy is entirely a priori, but it's very different from Kant's notion of synthetic a priori knowledge. Or, at least, so it seems to me. — Moliere

:up:

Kant seems to have pretty much dreamed up a meta-metaphysical 'psychology' from scratch. Hegel lets us just watch a 'system 'grow in the womb of trial and error, through various internal contradictions, stacking errors up into a spine, adding to its metacognitive vocabulary --- toward some overcoming of indirect realism.

everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well

To me consciousness is the just the being of the world from a perspective, but this world is only given perspectively. So far as we cautious philosophers can say. Mystics can say anything they want.

Anything that makes 'tennis' possible cannot be doubted or challenged with this game of 'tennis.' — plaque flag

I can agree with that.

The defining feature of philosophy for me is the universality of logic. We need to consider the greater repercussions beyond ourselves and beyond any single case. If I wouldn't be okay with my self-serving logic being used by others, then I must admit that I was wrong, stuff like that. If my logic doesn't best serve the group then it fails within the context of philosophy.

Yes, which we'd maybe both explain in Hegelian terms. For the record, I'm a liquid rationalist. The lifeworld evolves ceaselessly, and our own conceptuality is part of that evolution. — plaque flag

Here's where I think we actually disagree -- what I like from Kant's project is that there are limits to reason because I don't think human beings are rational. Even the philosopher is irrational, because the philosopher is a human being who loves rationality -- but as The Symposium points out the philosopher is only philosopher in that chase rather than when the chase is consummated. Today we might say when the chase is consummated that's when the philosopher becomes a scientist or a politician or a CEO -- anything more powerful and with authority. The philosopher's only authority is reason, and reason doesn't always speak the same to everyone.

And for the record, I am an ex-rationalist who still loves rationality. But I've come around to the idea that reason has its limits.

The real is absurd if you ask me. Which is why we can interpret it in so many various ways. — Moliere

:up:
Just to be clear, I'd also say the real is $\infty$. It's absurd too, at least in an important sense. I might really be Schlegel's transcendental buffoon, an ironic transrational mystic, just playing the white pieces for a change. For years I mostly played the pragmatist / ironist, so it's fun to turn the board around and defend the castle of rationality, be a 'conservative.'

Even the philosopher is irrational, because the philosopher is a human being who loves rationality -- but as The Symposium points out the philosopher is only philosopher in that chase rather than when the chase is consummated. — Moliere

A big theme in Kojeve too, the seeker versus the one who has found. This is why I lean on the word ontologist as a little more precise for my purpose. Our ontologist doesn't typically claim to be finished or certain. The project is to 'rationally' (and so fallibly) articulate the basic structure of reality. The ontologist is possessed by this 'scientific' ambition, is, as you say, in love with philosophy. But the ontologist exists indeed by merely being on the way. The intention is foundation and existence enough, though this intention is part of what's clarified along the way.

The defining feature of philosophy for me is the universality of logic. We need to consider the greater repercussions beyond ourselves and beyond any single case. If I wouldn't be okay with my self-serving logic being used by others, then I must admit that I was wrong, stuff like that. If my logic doesn't best serve the group then it fails within the context of philosophy. — Judaka

:up:

Exactly. And I go on to say that we need there to be a world for us to be right or wrong about for this project to make sense. As obvious as this is, many philosophers bury us in so much illusion that they can hardly make sense of how the philosophical conversation is possible. It's sort of like hey guys you gotta keep the lamp plugged in to play checkers.

Here's where I think we actually disagree -- what I like from Kant's project is that there are limits to reason because I don't think human beings are rational. — Moliere

Oh I very much agree that we are mostly savages ! I am extremely tempted by psychologism. It's only because it's paradoxical that I don't wallow in it. I find myself engaing in it all the time, as I think we almost have to do ---model one another as machines to be manipulated. I need the clerk to cash my check, like pulling a lever.

If we are not rational, then we cannot trust our judgment that we are not rational. I tend to think of free will as a sentimental illusion, but under the jesusbeard candycoating is the idea of responsibility, including that of keeping our story straight. So there seems to be a genuine tension between conceiving ourselves as dignified rational beings and mere primates whose beliefs are the mere outputs of goomachines. The classic challenge to relativistic irrationalism is finding a way to say that nazis are bad without universal criteria. Do we just contingently not like them and that's it ? Something like determinism with respect to our beliefs (we are just programmed by our environment in a highly complicated way that includes feedback) seems to undermine or demystify democracy, etc. So we go back to Thrasymachus. Power is knowledge.

Another credit to Hegel is he's definitely a post-Cartesian. The rejoinder there is that his solution is worse than the original problem, but he's post-Cartesian. — Moliere

To me his genius move was to take methodological solipsism to the species level. This was implicit in Kant and Descartes because the assumption was that we all had the same kind of soul or subjectivity. But we were stuck in little bubbles. Once we are all in the same bubble, the outside of that bubble loses its meaning and necessity.

And for the record, I am an ex-rationalist who still loves rationality. But I've come around to the idea that reason has its limits. — Moliere

:up:
I very much agree there's much more to life than this game with concepts. And there's even more to be done with concepts that 'ontology.'

Yup! If the fascists won the war we'd be singing the same praises we sing to democracy -- the new society finally cleansed of the dirty people from the old times (something like the USA's narrative with respect to Native Americans -- we brought them technology and science and reason and God!)

But I don't think of us as mere primates. I think of us as creatures with an ecological niche that happens to include language as an important part of that niche. And if I'm right about language it's basically the most important part of our ecological niche -- it's only because fewer of us have to die to change our ways that we are building the anthropocene (which, in turn, we are becoming aware of, will destroy us if we don't change). (OK this last paragraph is rambly in comparison to your question, but I wanted to include it anyways)

Yup! If the fascists won the war we'd be singing the same praises we sing to democracy -- the new society finally cleansed of the dirty people from the old times (something like the USA's narrative with respect to Native Americans -- we brought them technology and science and reason and God!) — Moliere

Yes. Now we optionally start walking on 'the dark side of God.' Tangent (?), but did you ever look at Blood Meridian ? Dark dark beauty.

But I don't think of us as mere primates. I think of us as creatures with an ecological niche that happens to include language as an important part of that niche. And if I'm right about language it's basically the most important part of our ecological niche -- it's only because fewer of us have to die to change our ways that we are building the anthropocene (which, in turn, we are becoming aware of, will destroy us if we don't change) — Moliere

:up:
Yes, I agree that language is the killer app, a sort of extra dimension of our environment --a timebinding cultural web that we endlessly enrich (Popper's World 3, Husserl's sediment, Heidegger's One.)

I walked with ye olde serpent Rorty for a number of years. Still love the guy, though I try to catch the little rat in my foundation trap. You may know all this too well, but: He presents something like a vision endless decentralized unjustified experiment with vocabularies grasped more as teeth or ladders than pictures of reality. We also just cling to democracy for no reason at all. No deeper justification. A frank ethnocentrism. We contingently arrived here and 'irrationally' should try to protect what we like about this place. Yet he ends up celebrating the same old ideal communication community. I like Derrida too. But I tend to think the wild thinkers can only wander so far. They'll all boot out the nazi. Or any tyrant that'd shut 'em up (excepting some hard left thinkers perhaps, like maybe even my beloved Kojeve if had been given the power.)

Yes. Now we optionally start walking on 'the dark side of God.' Tangent (?), but did you ever look at Blood Meridian ? Dark dark beauty. — plaque flag

Nope. I haven't broached Cormac McCarthy because it just seemed way too dark for me. I have enough dark thoughts to occupy my mind! :D

I like Derrida too. But I tend to think the wild thinkers can only wonder so far. — plaque flag

My experience of reading Derrida is trippy. Over time I started as a hate-reader and became a lover. I still need to complete the trilogy, though -- writing and difference is the one I haven't done the homework on yet. But I tend to interpret him as an uber-rationalist rather than a wild thinker, which is the point of this story.

I've mostly studied the earliest Derrida phonocentrism-targeting stuff, focussing on passages like these:

The voice is heard ( understood ) ­ ... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many -- -since it is the condition of the very idea of truth --- but I shall elsewhere show in what it does delude itself. This illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. Within the closure of this experience, the word is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity--- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility -- as the experience of "being."
...
Declaration of principle, pious wish and historical violence of a speech dreaming its full self-presence, living itself as its own resumption; self-proclaimed language, auto-production of a speech declared alive, capable, Socrates said, of helping itself, a logos which believes itself to be its own father, being lifted thus above written discourse, infans (speechless) and infirm at not being able to respond when one questions it and which, since its "parent is [always] needed" must therefore be born out of a primary gap and a primary expatriation, condemning it to wandering and blindness, to mourning. Self-proclaimed language but actually speech, deluded into believing itself completely alive, and violent, for it is not "capable of protect [ing] or defend [ing] [itself]" except through expelling the other, and especially its own other, throwing it outside and below, under the name of writing. — Of Gram

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

This notion of the son who would be his own father is also in Joyce, and Derrida studied Ulysses.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Is Derrida trying to climb out of metaphysics ?
Is metaphysics trying to climb out of writing?
Is Derrida trying to climb out of trying to climb out ?
Does a regard for metaphysics still haunt this trying to climb out of trying to climb out ? So that silence or mystic babble in a black forest hut is the best one can do ?

The thrown project says : I am the history from which I'm trying to awake. The living past in my spiritual flesh. The living past leaps ahead. The living past is my pair of eyes lost.

Sartre is worthy too.

I am my past in the mode of no longer being it.
I am my future in the mode of not being able to be it.

Speech dreams of being/becoming pure spontaneous autonomous ideality, ejecting/denying its dependence on and determination by what came before (its having been thrown?) [its enabling context] as its shadow writing. As someone else noted (random internet blog), there's some Sartre in Derrida, and we know young Derrida loved Sartre as one of his teenaged or precocious preteen heros (can't remember the bio well enough on this point.)
Man is a futile passion to be god, and Speech quests for the purity of a impossible flying nakedness. Writing represents of course deferral, ambiguity, negative elements that only signify structurally, pointing pointlessly to one another and never to the thing itself.

Derrida knew as well as anyone (White Mythology) that philosophy was oracular, mythical, metaphorical --and then that metaphoricity functioned metaphysically in such a statement and became thereby undecidable as the enabling center of a structure. I'm riffing a bit on beloved Derridean themes, but I can't help but glean 'positive' ontological theses from the work. He reminds me of a sunnier Nietzsche, and maybe he's sunnier because there was a place for him in the world.

Just adding a little more background to the OP.

The notion of an “ideal communication community” functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the “unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding. Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly realized (which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative action within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberal-democratic societies.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jurgen-Habermas/Philosophy-and-social-theory

Yes. So we have to avoid both typical mistakes. The world is not our dream, for we are flesh in the world, or 'subjectivity' could have no sense in our talk. But we only know our world, strangely, through this same flesh. — plaque flag

And that which only exists dependent on what we think, I shall call a dream, a myth, an idea, or an image.
— unenlightened

Yes. So we have to avoid both typical mistakes. The world is not our dream, for we are flesh in the world, or 'subjectivity' could have no sense in our talk. But we only know our world, strangely, through this same flesh. — plaque flag

With Kant we cannot know anything about God. So we could not make the inference that we are baby-gods or anything of that sort. That claim could not be justified by a Kantian rationality, but it can be justified in a Hegelian rationality. — Moliere

Forgive me, the thread moves fast, and my Hegel rather Vaguel. But when God is introduced, reality is turned on its head. This world of flesh becomes the dream, and rationality and morality becomes the real.

As little gods, we become the architects of our fate, and time sees the realisation of our plans and ideas and dreams within the great dream which is God's Creation. And our nightmares. For little gods it is all-important to think happy thoughts. But then, talk of the real has to start to look like this: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1980/evidence-of-consciousness-surviving-the-body/p28

Or else we relegate ideas to mere infectious memes. Flesh or spirit – is it possible not to choose? I'm reminded of Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye.

Forgive me, the thread moves fast, and my Hegel rather Vaguel. But when God is introduced, reality is turned on its head. This world of flesh becomes the dream, and rationality and morality becomes the real. — unenlightened

To me Feuerbach is maybe the key figure here. God is roughly the projection of the species essence. You and I as individuals are small next to the infinity of the species. We are little tentacles of a giant squidlike beast with billions of such tentacles, linked through language in a kind of species-mind. One of philosophy's fundamental assumptions is the translatability of meaning ---which is to say the idea of idea itself as a flame that leaps from candle to candle, expression to expression. We both love Cantor, so I know you know what I mean.

Idea may depend on embodiment and may even be 'body' as a kind of aspect of flesh, but it's the freest and most 'contagious' part of our flesh. We are the supremely networked being --- so that private language is an oxymoron. The irreducibility of assertion hints also at a shared mind. If I trust the boy who cries wolf, I see the world through his eyes, thanks to 'ideality.' The whole tribe sees through the eyes of all its members at once. Feuerbach sees that 'Reason' has the attributes of God --- disembodied and yet subjective. But (as I've stressed in several threads) independence from any particular body is not independence from all bodies. This is where the fantasy of the independent object sneaks in.

Given that we are futural beings for whom imagined futures determine interpretation of the past and bodily action in the present, rationality and morality [hopefully] become the real in a good sense. How can I understand your own speech act except as an optimistic normative imposition ? Benevolent caution ? A push in the right direction ?

Kant embraces human autonomy, but then argues that it's rational to continue believing in the old (….) ways -- at least within the bounds of bare reason. — Moliere

What is bare reason?

….the place of reason for Kant is not a universal reason in Hegel's sense. It's universal in that it holds for all experience, but it's not universal in the sense that it holds for all reality. — Moliere

Place of reason. Is that supposed to indicate a condition wherein the faculty of reason is suited to be employed? So Kant's place of reason means it is suitable for employment universally with respect to all experience, but not suitable for employment universally with respect to all reality?

So what grounds a universal reason in Hegel’s sense, such that its place is both with respect to all experience and with all reality? And if all reality is a possible experience, and in Kant there is a place for reason with respect to possible experience, isn’t that synonymous with Hegel’s sense of a universal reason?
————-

“….. in the expectation that there may perhaps be conceptions which relate à priori to objects.…we form to ourselves…the idea of a science of pure understanding and rational cognition, by means of which we may cogitate objects entirely à priori. A science of this kind….must be called transcendental logic, because it has….to do with the laws of understanding and reason…..only in an à priori relation to objects.

I disbelieve there is a transcendental logic. — Moliere

Which is not to disbelieve in the pure thought that there may be conceptions which relate a priori to objects, but only disbelieve in the relating the conceptions to the objects, or, which is the same thing, disbelieve in cognizing objects entirely a priori given their antecedent conceptions.

Without a Kantian transcendental logic, how do space and time, purely transcendental conceptions, relate entirely a priori to objects? Apparently, Hegel has a way, himself a transcendental philosopher, so I’m led to think. Or at least a German idealist in some strict sense.

Hegel: the categories define what it is to be an object in general, such that it can be given, separating the immanent from the transcendent;
Kant: the categories define** the conditions for knowing what an object in general is, its being already given, separating experience from illusion.
(**not really, but for the sake of consistency…..)

So….it’s fine to disbelieve in Kantian transcendental logic, which presupposes a fair understanding of what it is, but how is Hegel’s logic any less transcendental?

Rhetorical. Again…..I just had nothing better to do.

As little gods, we become the architects of our fate, and time sees the realisation of our plans and ideas and dreams within the great dream which is God's Creation. And our nightmares. For little gods it is all-important to think happy thoughts. But then, talk of the real has to start to look like this: — unenlightened

As far as I can tell, your concern is that theological metaphors might lead to superstitious denials of personal death. FWIW, I think that the case in that thread for afterlife is pure sophistry, classic death-evading delusion. It's also just shallow for a philosopher to care so much about personal immortality. Our lives are ego-transcending in principle, directed toward an ideal community. This face on me, which is not so ugly, is also not so irreplaceable or important. What's worthwhile in me is pretty much what's worthwhile in everybody else.

We can't completely ignore tho the creative aspect of individuality. I may bring the tribe a gift that only I can bring. But even here I'm probably adjacent in the space of personality to others who'll bring an adjacent gift (in gift space) if I fail.

FWIW, I'm such a practiced atheist at this point that I can safely enjoy the symbols and tales that mystified my adolescence. That may be part of the charm for philosophers like Hegel --to handle those coals that once seemed so hot like tinker toys. Or to reframe that evil magic, now with both bare feet in the mud shit broken glass and flowers.

If you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

Or else we relegate ideas to mere infectious memes. Flesh or spirit – is it possible not to choose? I'm reminded of Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye. — unenlightened

Nice link. New to me.

As far as I can tell, your concern is that theological metaphors might lead to superstitious denials of personal death — plaque flag

No, I think that is rather an evasion of my point. Think Plato's cave, since you seem to have an allergic reaction to religion. The scientific turn has had huge success, but at the cost of neglecting if not reducing to mere physics, subjectivity, rationality, and morality. For Plato, that world is analogised as the cave wall, a realm of shadows that is the illusory world of matter and bodies, as distinct from the real world of forms, the concern of the philosopher. Your project, as I understand it through many threads, is to marry the two worlds. I am pointing out a problem that Plato had and that you inherit. with or without gods or afterlife.

Whatever rationality is going to be in the scheme of things, if you want a monism, it is going to be problematic.

I take ontology in in this context to be “critical” or “scientific” in its intention, as opposed to relatively irresponsible myth-making. Granted that we put on the heroic robes of the “scientific” (critical) philosopher, as opposed to the mystic who denigrates dialectic as a means to truth, what have we already assumed in so doing ? — plaque flag

You already have assumed both the body, and a moral and rational robe. And these garments cannot then be reduced to bodily functions, on pain of ceasing to be fundamental and disappearing into epiphenomena. So it looks like you need a non-physical realm, of forms, if not of gods and angels.

Or else this whole thread amounts to no more than 'we have to talk in language, get used to it.' And that certainly does not rule out afterlives and much else, except procedurally and dictatorially.

Think Plato's cave, since you seem to have an allergic reaction to religion. — unenlightened

I don't know about that. I think we agree that philosophy is mythic and oracular. It's all religion in that sense. But is it a private esoteric brutal religion or a self-consciously open self-modifying religion ?

Humanism is an optimistic transformation of Christianity. I'm a bit of a pessimistic gnostic describing it from the outside to some degree, not exactly not a transrational mystic myself. The myth of the creator god publicly executed on a cross as an enemy of god (of himself) is sublime. It's a deep truth if properly understood. Humanism is the (recognition of ) Incarnation. The ideal communication community is Christ in a world that mostly belongs to Moloch. All that is beautiful and holy is hopelessly entangled with all that is cruel and disgusting. The cross is the matrix is the devouring mother.