On what merit? That they get things done? I agree. But that's a pragmatic foundation, a vague foundation, an 'irrational' or inexplicit foundation. I trust my dentist. I don't believe in ghosts or afterlife. But I also don't pretend that various prediction and control technologies are 'highest' things.

It's a little ungenerous, but I'm tempted to parody scientism as the worship of dentistry. Can you sincerely tell me that your life as you experience it fits into the scientific paradigm? That what it is to love and be mortal and be thrown into a particular face and body are neatly arranged by the physicists and the biologist? This seems to me like a wild and questionable hope, the hope to reduce what it is to be to the publicly quantifiable, etc. Only the peer reviewed and intellectually respectable is real. Sure. Educated common sense is the true god.

To be clear, this is not some politically hopeful cultural criticism. I don't in the least pretend to be changing the world here. I don't have the time to waste on preaching this or that gospel in that kind of grand sense. Life and the world are bigger than me, not just bigger than science. I'm just trying to make some exciting conversation.

So in this philosophy, 'thought' is by its very nature conditioned, it is 'of the order of time'; whereas 'intelligence' is 'that which reads between the lines', i.e. it is insight, apprehension of the real meaning, so is of a different order to discursive thought. — Wayfarer

I like this. I've been trying to say something similar from a phenomenological angle. Experience isn't so neatly conceptual and machine-like. 'Between the lines' gets at this. I have in mind something like the poetic overflow of language, as well as the continuity of language with life.

To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together.

This reminds me (in a good way) of the flow of life. We rip apart this flow with our categories. But within this flow we aren't subjects looking at objects, etc., but the world itself worlding. We are doings-in-progress. But our quest for some certain system encourages us to build a castle of concepts in a way that ignores our unthematized know-how.

So, I take Hegel to actually be speaking about something much nearer to nous (and perhaps the 'active intellect' of Aristotle) than what we casually and habitually convey by the use of the general term 'thought'. So I have used the word 'reason' in that top example, because it conveys the idea that we're not simply talking of 'discursive thought' in the sense of an internal dialogue, but in terms of 'the intelligence which sees the meaning of things'. — Wayfarer

That's an interesting angle. From my related but different interest in reading between the lines, I find this quote from the preface of the PoS highly significant.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not. — Hegel

This is already OLP to some degree. The terms we use aren't fixed. He sees that we tend to glide on the mere surface of language. We take the chess pieces for granted. We don't ask why we understand the situation as a chess game in the first place.

In respect of his statement about 'orientals', he is plainly reflecting the prejudices of his age, but it's worth noting in passing, that from the 'oriental' viewpoint, the very clever and apparently autonomous Western individual, although democratically and economically free, may yet still be a 'slave to passion', as very few seek to live in the light of the kind of 'reason' that Hegel is speaking of; it is indeed 'the road less travelled'. — Wayfarer

Actually Hegel was very critical of a certain notion of freedom. I'll try to find the quote in P of History.

In such a time, a people, therefore, necessarily finds a satisfaction in the idea of virtue. Talk about virtue partly accompanies, partly replaces real virtue. On the other hand, pure universal Thought, being universal, is apt to bring the particular and unreflected – faith, confidence, custom – to reflection about itself and its immediate (simple and unreflected) existence. It thus shows up the limitation of unreflected life, partly by giving it reasons on hand by which to secede from its duties, partly by asking about reasons and the connection with universal thought. Then, in not finding the latter, it tries to shatter duty itself as without foundation.

Therewith appears the isolation of the individuals from each other and the whole, their aggressive selfishness and vanity, their seeking of advantage and satisfaction at the expense of the whole. For the inward principle of such isolation (not only produces the content but) the form of subjectivity – selfishness and corruption in the unbound passions and egotistic interests of men. — Hegel

Not the quote I had in mind, cuz only the intro was handy. But as I remember it, Hegel thought that freedom was built on a kind of discipline or socialization. We are 'free' to fulfill our better nature. Something like that!

What could be more ideological than claiming that the facts of the world are not subject to ideology?

Such absoluteness is the very hallmark of the ideal. — apokrisis

Exactly. We lust for the right angle, for the fixed simplified situation. But this leads us to ignore what doesn't fit that tempting picture.

Total agreement rules out any scope for differences of opinion, hence freedom and creativity. So that is why I would stress productive agreement - the kind of agreement that pragmatist philosophy would have in mind. — apokrisis

I think we basically agree here. I might phrase 'productive agreement' as a the friendly disagreement that wants to get something done together. But even outright war can inspire innovation. So there's that.

I like pragmatism. I think it describes pretty well the way we actually reason. We have projects. We want things. Sometimes it's a matter of getting these things, and sometimes it's a matter of clarifying these objects (well, situations) of desire. And let's throw in whatever I'm leaving out.

The foundation of productive agreement would be agreeing about what kind of differences don't in fact matter. — apokrisis

That seems like a foundation. It also seems foundational to clarify the goal.

Phenomenologically, we experience not only the "present" but also a retention of the past and a protention of the future that anchor us to the world. — darthbarracuda

Indeed. Well said. And this is naked for whomever just looks.

Hah. Philosophy in a nutshell - the act of productive disagreement. Everything said becomes the departure point of its own possible contradictions. :)

Whereas living a life as a social creature is mostly about productive agreements.... — apokrisis

I don't know. Seems like total agreement has no need for creative compromise.

Who said it's about answering questions? Again, this assumes that philosophy is a kind of science. We can also think of philosophy as a questioning that reveals our ignorance to us, a questioning that guards us against our tendency to be smug and complacent.

The first point was that thought, free thought, is in itself essentially concrete. This implies that it is alive, that it moves of itself. The infinite nature of spirit is its own process in itself, which means that it does not rest, that it is essentially productive and exists by producing. More precisely we can understand this movement as development; the concrete as active is essentially self-developing.
...
Customarily we have in regard to what is in itself the high opinion that it is what truly is. To get to know God and the world is to get to know them in themselves. What is in itself, however, is not yet the true but only the abstract; it is the seed of what truly is, the tendency, the being-in-itself of the true. It is something simple, something which, of course, contains in itself multiple qualities, but in the form of simplicity – a content which is still hidden.
...
The big difference consists in this: Man knows what he is, and only when he does so is he actually what he is. Without this, knowing reason is nothing, nor is freedom. Man is essentially reason; man and child, educated and uneducated, each is reason; or rather, the possibility of being reason is present in each, is given. Still, reason is of no use to the child, to the uneducated. It is only a possibility; and yet, not an empty but a real possibility, with its own orientation to fulfillment. Only the adult, the educated, knows through experience that he is what he is. The difference is simply that in the one case reason is present only as a tendency, only in itself, whereas in the other case it is so explicitly, beyond the form of possibility and posited in existence.

The whole difference in world-history is reducible to this difference. All men are rational, and the formal element in this rationality is human freedom; this is man’s nature, it belongs to his essence. Still, among many peoples slavery has existed, to some extent it still does, and people are satisfied with it. Orientals, for example, are men and as such free, and yet they are not free, because they have no consciousness of their freedom but are willing to accept every sort of religious and political despotism. The whole difference between Oriental peoples and those who are not subject to slavery is that the latter know that they are free, that to be free is proper to them.

The former are also in themselves free, but they do not exist as free. This, then, introduces an enormous difference into man’s world-historical situation, whether he is free merely in himself or whether he knows that it is his concept, his vocation, his nature, to be as a free individual.
— Hegel

As I read this, we evolve via self-consciousness. We discover ourselves as freedom. But this means we were potentially free all along.

Isn't a "heartbreak" physical? Why do we call it a "heartbreak" if not for the feeling in the chest we get when we contemplate a negative event? Is a "heartbreak" a feeling that you get as a result of some state of your body (it occurs after some state of your body and the feeling is a representation of some state of your body), or is the feeling and the state of your body the same thing that occurs in the same space and at the same moment? — Harry Hindu

I hear you. But do you yourself consider the first-person experience of heartbreak to be physical in the same way that an electron is physical? For me the whole situation is far messier than we might want it to be. I think there's something like a continuum. But even this is a tidying up of the mess of ordinary language. We don't hold these categories fixed. We just learn how to interact with others. We feel ourselves into a language and a way of moving and acting in a shared world. And this separation of language and action already does violence to the situation.

This isn't to say that we never should do so. I just find it illuminating to go back and look again at non-theoretical life. Joyce tried to catch this steam-of-consciousness in Ulysses. I suggest the situation is loaded with a dim know-how, with foggy half-meanings. Metaphysicians want to play a game of chess, so they are motivated to shut out this dark know-how and these half-meanings. They need fixed, strict categories like chess players need 64 squares and pieces with eternally fixed moves.

But I don't think experience is like that.

So we only find ourselves through the negotiations of actually living a life, not by chancing upon the right recipe in some philosophy text. — apokrisis

Well said. What may be usefully found in a philosophy text, though, is this kind of reminder about the limitations of any mere text.

To unpack that: we are born with "why"-asking machinery in our brains, and that machinery, which normally has a pragmatic point (is useful in life) just naturally tends to keep asking "why?" At which point it bumps up against the question of existence as a whole - why existence as a whole? — gurugeorge

I'm happy to find this thought discussed by someone else. Yes, it's when the 'why' targets existence as a whole that it reveals itself to be a lyrical why, a 'pseudo-question.'

But consider: normally, asking why depends on relative juxtaposition of things. Why this? Because that, because some other thing. But there's no "other thing" against which existence as a whole can be juxtaposed. Unless you posit it. And that's "God." If God is defined as self-existent, unmoved Mover, etc., then the why-series comes to an intellectually satisfying end. — gurugeorge

Right. Nature (the way things are) is a system of postulated necessary relationships. We can answer local why-questions in terms of these relationships. But the system as a whole must remain a brute fact. There is no object outside of the system to put the system into a necessary relation with.

But I don't see how a metaphysical God object brings the why-series to an end. Because that still leaves God as a brute fact. So we don't escape brute fact. A certain kind of believer can ignore this, because that image of God is emotionally satisfying. But logically we still have existence as brute fact. With a first cause we have only concentrated the unexplained at a point.

The problem is perhaps with the book chosen. For experts, the PoS seems to contain at leat the seed of everything. That's what I've read. But I usually only enjoyed reading Philosophy of History and the lectures and certain speeches he gave publicly. When he decided to, he could write clearly.

There is an age-old assumption that thinking distinguishes man from the beast. This we shall accept. What makes man nobler than the beast is what he possesses through thought. Whatever is human is so only to the extent that therein thought is active; no matter what its outward appearance may be, if it is human, thought makes it so. In this alone is man distinguished from the beast.

Still, insofar as thought is in this way the essential, the substantial, the active in man, it has to do with an infinite manifold and variety of objects. Thought will be at its best, however, when it is occupied only with what is best in man, with thought itself, where it wants only itself, has to do with itself alone. For, to be occupied with itself is to discover itself by creating itself;’ and this it can do only by manifesting itself. Thought is active only in producing itself; and it produces itself by its very own activity. It is not simply there; it exists only by being its own producer. What it thus produces is philosophy, and what we have to investigate is the series of such productions, the millennial work of thought in bringing itself forth, the voyage of discovery upon which thought embarks in order to discover itself. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroduction.htm

I'll grant that philosophy begat science, but I will not grant that science is an ideology. — Bitter Crank

Perhaps 'actual' science is not an ideology. But the word 'science' is IMV massively entangled in ideology. See the quote below.

There are many "philosophers" that simply don't like the answers science provides. — Harry Hindu

I don't think 'science' even tries to answer the most profound questions. Moreover, I don't see how science can provide its own foundation. Engineering and medicine earn our trust more or less by giving us what we want. But the idea of eternal, universal truth sounds pretty theological to me. In short, its foundation looks to be largely pragmatic or 'irrational.' We keep doing what scratches the itch. By putting philosopher in quotes, you are (as I see it) linking the heroic 'payload' of the words science and philosophy in an ideological way --as if the 'deepest' kind of talk humans are capable of is the defense/worship of science.

I dunno. I think it can do a damn good job of it in the hands of a self-proclaimed scientist like Nietzsche, or via the emprico-scientific syntheses of Merleau-Ponty. Science itself, shorn of scientism and recognizing itself to be ideology alongside other cultural products, can return to its original task as a branch of philosophy as it was for the Greeks. — Joshs

Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I don't know MP, but I know Nietzsche well and have a fondness for early Heidegger (pre B&T) who comes to mind as I read that passage.

I do have some bias toward the individual quasi-religious function of philosophy. We look for words that allow us to live and die with a kind of nobility. The social question is part of this. But life is short, and an individual may come around to seeing that he probably won't put much of a dent in the world's thinking. The situation becomes especially personal. 'I' can't, ultimately, change that many hearts and minds. I can of course adopt as a spiritual goal a certain world-improving role. But even here one might decide that the effort is best or more authentically spent 'locally.'

Well, if I were to say that some experience is an 'illusion', I wouldn't mean that the experience 'isn't one that I can build on'. What I would mean is that the thing which I experience does not exist unperceived. If I say that the bent stick I perceive is an illusion, what I mean is that the bent stick doesn't exist unperceived. And to add to this that 'what really exists is an unbent stick', is to add that an unbent stick exists unperceived. That's what I would mean by those words, at any rate. I certainly wouldn't mean anything merely pragmatic. — PossibleAaran

Right. But my point is that this way of talking about things ('exists unperceived') is (to my mind) something like an artificial game that rests on 'pragmatic' foundations. Why not doubt this theoretical framework itself? What is this framework parasitic upon? Do you assume some kind of Newtonian space? With time as a separate dimension running continuously? What does it mean that something is there, apart from all human purpose? Is it some kind of 'matter' that just endures there in 3-space? And maybe it blinks out when we turn our eyes away? But this assumes the correctness, meaningfulness, and stability of this 3-space and a certain mathematical notion of time.

In a way I'm being skeptical myself here, but about the framework rather than about the objects. I'm skeptical about the usual version of the epistemological game. For me it's as artificial as chess. What's wrong with being artificial? Nothing, really. But I have 'aesthetic' reasons for wanting to get closer to the lived situation, which you may or may not share. I want to be 'objective' in a non-theoretical sense, which is to say that I want theory to be closer to non-philosophical life.

We might well conclude that we can't trust our eyes or that materialism might not encompass all there is, I'd entirely agree, but it's a very big leap from that to "the inherent trust that modern culture places in naturalism is something certainly deserving of scepticism." and "Naturalism has far too easy a time these days...". — Inter Alia

I agree. There's no necessary leap there, as far as I can see. I do however reject materialism in the name of a sort of higher materialism. Why? Because these 'isms' are all too theoretical in a particular sense. Materialism is 'theological' and theology is 'mechanical.' I'm coming from a phenomenological perspective here. I like early Heidegger, for instance. For me the game tends to operate on a falsely depersonalized level. We want to be rational, etc., and yet cultural criticism is fairly nakedly a 'religious' kind of thinking. It's roughly politics at a higher level of abstraction. What I don't see enough of for me own taste is an awareness of how personal or 'existential' this kind of talk really is.

Maybe people feel it's too off topic, but the question was "what is Skepticism?" and I'd say the simple answer would be it is exactly that quality that virtually every single human already displays, no-one is 100% certain of anything, deep down. Which means what we're really talking about is "are people skeptical enough?", as revealed by the two quotes I've cited above. To answer this we must first answer "enough for what?". — Inter Alia

Yeah, I agree completely. 'Enough for what?' For me the general structure is a more or less vague idea of what humans ought to be which is projected outward rhetorically. 'Be more like this, more like me.' I don't pretend to escape this structure myself. We impose our own value-driven vision of the shared world rhetorically. To be reasonable is to take that ubiquitous skepticism into account and to wrestle against.

The important question about the problem of other minds vis-à-vis
the ‘divide’ hence becomes the following: is it an epistemological problem that might
be solved (even if only probabilistically), or is it an ontological one that needs to be
dissolved and/or shown to be untenable via phenomenological descriptions and
transcendental arguments? — Joshs

Good point. I vote that it's an ontological one that 'needs to be dissolved.' Or rather it's dissolved as soon as a thinker differently understands his goal as thinker. The 'problem' is pretty artificial to begin. The game is not questioned from a high and wide enough angle. It's as if there was a passionate argument about some basketball game on TV. Engrossed in the contest, we don't think the possibility of changing the channel. The method or theme is taken as a given. But that 'first wrong step' is perhaps precisely where we should be looking. That method is 'how' that hides from us in the 'what' that it conceals as much as it reveals.

I'm looking at Kaufmann's translation, and it's almost unrecognizably different. I did not expect there to be such difference even at the outset. — tim wood

Yeah. I like Kaufmann's better. I was hoping not to have to type out the quotes.

Perhaps we can agree to undertake a hermeneutics of this text, in the original sense of "taking counsel with," to approach its meaning. — tim wood

Right. But I'd personally put stress on what we can make of it for ourselves here in now in our own lives. I've never gotten around to learning German, so I feel disqualified from understanding myself as a scholar who should aim at figuring out what he really meant. For me our English paraphrases/interpretations are central.

I think your remark is to the point, if a little anticipatory. I'm not sure we have to re-live the history of philosophy; we merely have to accommodate it - know it - to move beyond it. In particular, Hegel seems to be presenting a dynamic model of the workings of thinking, which dynamism itself will stand in for the particulars of that thinking. Indeed the particulars become quaint details as the dynamism grinds them up in its dialectic teeth. — tim wood

You're right. I'm jumping ahead. But I like your response here. This is already the kind of thing I have in mind. Something like our own thinking against the background of a difficult influence.

I agree that we have a dynamic model here. I also don't think we have to relive the thinking of philosophy. What I was getting at is not that exactly but rather that empty generalities or summations only make sense against a background of how they were arrived at. If we attach predicates to life or God or truth or whatever and call it a day, we often haven't accomplished much. We have to elaborate. The philosophy gets done or has its content in this elaboration. It's not that prefaces are impossible or non-philosophical in an extreme sense. It's more like the difference between a 20 page summary and the 200 pages that 'derive' these summarizing 20. In short, we do not have lossless compression.

I propose a rule of sorts. That our discussion at least at the first be directed toward what we read. Already we see that will be problematic. But if we don't use our best sense of the text as it unfolds to us as an aiming device, the who knows where our efforts will land?

Unfortunately, Hegel doesn't seem so easily parsable. I propose we deal with that by regarding much of his verbiage as flourish and rhetoric, a fat that warrants trimming. — tim wood

I can live with that rule, but then I'd probably want to jump around more. There is lots of fat and verbiage that I'd want to skip. On the other hand, I have accumulated a nice set of passages that really mean something to me. Starting with the first paragraph was perhaps a misstep. I couldn't help jumping ahead.

“Nonsubjective actuality”, for example, doesn’t yet seem to me to be proper terminology for this concept—again, the concept of “a reality that is perfectly indifferent to personal preferences and opinions regarding what is or what ought to be”. — javra

What I like about this is its focus on emotion. It's the idea of something that will not be moved with tears, prayers, flattery. It is the real that resists. It is the tree that has fallen across the road. We have to be clever and push it or drag it out of the way. This isn't metaphysical 'reality.' Instead it's a pain in the ass, a bone in the throat of our project.

I think we can also get a better picture of doubt this way. Two friends are trying to get to a party, let's say. Romantic opportunities await. But how to move the tree? They spend time and stress on doubt because the fear wasting even more time and stress on a plan that will not work. The thinking is structured by the goal in the future (the tree out of the way, but really the promising possibility of the party around the bonfire, and everyone's going to be there.) But back to the first point. They don't ask the tree nicely to move. They've accepted the end of animism. The world is not their parents when they were children. Importantly, the attack the tree problem without some explicit theory of materialism. Their imaginations run simulations. They exchange words to compare, persuade, etc.

What does not having an ideology look like. — Inter Alia

If I can interrupt and answer with a sincere joke, I think not having an ideology looks like corpse.

So the question is not can they be trusted, but can anything else be trusted more? — Inter Alia

And maybe there's also the question of what we are trusting in the first place in order to manufacture theoretical doubt. For instance, the idea of some inaccessible reality. Or the very language that such doubts and questions are expressed. Or that someone is out there listening, placed in a sufficiently shared reality to understand the question/theory as relating to a shared situation.

When I look at the stick immersed in water my instincts urge me to believe that it is bent, before I learn that it isn't. — PossibleAaran

But why is the bent stick the illusion and the unbent stick the reality? I suggest because the unbent stick is what figures in the total practical context. Optical illusions are illusions, it seems to me, because they aren't something we can generally build on. We are future oriented beings. We make plans. It's in terms of these plans that we care about seeing a situation 'accurately' (usefully, enjoyably). If we weren't future-oriented beings who work and suffer now to avoid more work and more suffering later, we might not bother with doubt. In my view, recalling that care and projects are at the center of human life clarifies epistemological issues.

Right. What does it mean symbolically when a God becomes man?

The consciousness of the divine love, or what is the same thing, the contemplation of God as human, is the mystery of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is nothing else than the practical, material manifestation of the human nature of God. God did not become man for his own sake; the need, the want of man – a want which still exists in the religious sentiment – was the cause of the Incarnation. God became man out of mercy: thus he was in himself already a human God before he became an actual man; for human want, human misery, went to his heart. The Incarnation was a tear of the divine compassion, and hence it was only the visible advent of a Being having human feelings, and therefore essentially human.

If in the Incarnation we stop short at the fact of God becoming man, it certainly appears a surprising inexplicable, marvellous event. But the incarnate God is only the apparent manifestation of deified man; for the descent of God to man is necessarily preceded by the exaltation of man to God. Man was already in God, was already God himself, before God became man, i.e., showed himself as man.
...
That which is mysterious and incomprehensible, i.e., contradictory, in the proposition, “God is or becomes a man,” arises only from the mingling or confusion of the idea or definitions of the universal, unlimited, metaphysical being with the idea of the religious God, i.e., the conditions of the understanding, with the conditions of the heart, the emotive nature; a confusion which is the greatest hindrance to the correct knowledge of religion.
— Feuerbach

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec04.htm

Thanks for the kind response. Rereading my post, I see that I liked the opportunity of stressing the tonal, interpersonal element of conversation. That's part of my pet theme of the medium/message relationship. When I was younger and more 'theological,' I ignored this. I forced experience to conform to the System, not the System to conform (as well it could manage) to experience in its fullness.

To me the problem is in what we ask of distinctions like physical and non-physical. We have vague but functional idea of the meaning of this distinction. But the tendency is to push it too far, ask too much of it. My heartbreak is 'non-physical,' at least compared to the kitchen cabinet door that I don't want to hit my head on. Whatever the hell 'meaning' is is non-physical compared to the ink on the page of the book. But it's not clear what the various -isms are really up to when they feature this or that concept or pair of concepts as a sort of safely static entity on which to build some dry picture of reality.

Ok. A question. I think you and I will agree "T Clark is an idiot" is an insult, an ad hominem attack. Ok? Now, what about "In my opinion T Clark is an idiot?" Is that an insult, an ad hominem attack?

How about this - "Gay people should all be locked up. They're disgusting" vs. "In my opinion, gay people should all be locked up. I think they're disgusting." Are those different statements in any significant way? In those cases, and in the case of my post you were responding to, the writers were using "in my opinion" to avoid taking responsibility for their words. In my opinion, that is. — T Clark

I agree with you on that point. There's no escape from responsibility in 'in my opinion.' You're right that I was taking you out of context. That was jerky of me.

Quite so. Though most, nearly all, Atheists are Materialists, believing that the physical world is all of reality, being an Atheist doesn't definitionally require being a Materialist. There are probably non-Materialist Atheists at these forums. — Michael Ossipoff

I must disagree here. Not everyone is so theoretical! Some people just don't go to church, don't pray, don't expect help from secret sources. They won't show up on argumentative forums. They don't care enough. Most people do not pick some "ism" to wear and defend. We are the strange ones. We are the word-mongering intellectually vain theological poets.

Does a human person know that it's beautiful? And secondly, could there be a higher form of being that observes and apprehends a beautiful quality in us which we are incapable of seeing? — Noble Dust

I say yes. We 'look down' on ourselves. As we age we become more sophisticated, more sensitive to all the different ways that humans can be beautiful. And we can look 'down' on our younger selves with a mixture of contempt and longing. As cultures we age too, and so we can look back/down in a similar way. Sometimes we can see the past of ourselves or our culture as a stronger, more beautiful kind of living. Then we strive to undo the false learning, etc., that cut us off from this stronger beauty.

*Feuerbach pays quite a bit of attention to this issue. The Incarnation is a symbolic confession for him that (the hu-)man is the God or supreme value for (the hu-)man.

If you say "T Clark is an idiot" or if you say "In my opinion, T Clark is an idiot," you've said the same thing. — T Clark

If I may interject, not exactly! In my opinion, 'in my opinion' is often added to stress that one is well aware that others may disagree. I suggest that it's about tone. Along the same lines, 'in my view' suggests an openness to other views. Whereas bluntly stated opinions may suggest a certain combativeness or contempt for disagreement. But I know what you mean, otherwise. Of course it's just some forum-goers opinion, especially when we indulge in metaphysical niceties and talk about talk about talk....(in my opinion).

Ah, yes, Jung. I read lots of Jung at one time. Great stuff.

What I like especially is the idea of errors accumulating to become truth. We become richer and more complex as we age. Our notions of ourselves and of reality evolve in a way that we can recall our older notions and see them from the outside. We transcend and include.

So we can see certain positions/perspectives that we once had in others, and we can anticipate where those positions/perspectives might lead them. This is not to say that I believe in just one 'sequence' of positions (actually a continuum). Life is huge.

Denying the experience of choice amounts to a denial of the ‘I’, or a denial of consciousness. Subjectively, this is a philosophical impasse; I can deconstruct myself no further – if ‘I’ am not conscious, ‘I’ am nothing. To escape from my despair I must choose to accept the reality of my experience of choice; the alternative can only lead to an unfulfilling process of circular reasoning. If my goal is genuinely to escape from my depression by philosophical means I must make this choice, thereby removing the cognitive block to my natural ways of thinking and being. The alternative, considered as an abstract concept, can be fascinating and informative but pragmatically it just doesn’t work. — Oliver Purvis

I like this. It reminds me of https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Vocation_of_Man/Part_1

According to the one, I am wholly independent of Nature and of any law which I do not impose upon myself; according to the other, I am but a strictly determined link in the chain of Nature. Whether such a freedom as I have desired be at all conceivable, and, if so, whether there be not grounds which, on complete and thorough investigation, may compel me to accept it as a reality, and to ascribe it to myself, and whereby the result of my former conclusions might thus be refuted;—this is now the question.
...
Which of these two opinions shall I adopt? Am I free and independent?—or am I nothing in myself, and merely the manifestation of a foreign power? It is clear to me that neither of the two doctrines is sufficiently supported. For the first, there is no other recommendation than its mere conceivableness; for the latter, I extend a proposition which is perfectly true in its own place, beyond its proper and natural boundary.
...
The system of freedom satisfies my heart; the opposite system destroys and annihilates it. To stand, cold and unmoved, amid the current of events, a passive mirror of fugitive and passing forms,—this existence is insupportable to me; I scorn and detest it. I will love;—I will lose myself in sympathy;—I will know the joy and the grief of life. I myself am the highest object of this sympathy; and the only mode in which I can satisfy its requirements is by my actions. I will do all for the best;—I will rejoice when I have done right, I will grieve when I have done wrong; and even this sorrow shall be sweet to me, for it is a mark of sympathy,—a pledge of future amendment. In love only is life;—without it is death and annihilation.

But coldly and insolently does the opposite system advance, and turn this love into a mockery. If I listen to it, I am not, and I cannot act. The object of my deepest attachment is a phantom of the brain,—a palpable and gross delusion. Not I, but a foreign and to me wholly unknown power, acts in me; and it is a matter of indifference to me how this power unfolds itself. I stand abashed with my warm affections, and my virtuous will, and blush for what I know to be best and purest in my nature, for the sake of which alone I would exist, as for a ridiculous folly. What is holiest in me is given as a prey to scorn.
... — Fichte

Even if the reality is deterministic, the experience of consciousness-as-revelation is one in which changing situations are encountered, assessed and acted upon with relative freedom and with (potentially) anti-entropic behaviour. Short of possessing truly godlike powers of omnipotence, we are all in the same boat; we think, we act, we consider our choices to be successes or failures based on the results they bring. If all this occurs with absolute deterministic inevitability, it is far beyond our ken to truly comprehend the situation as such. — Oliver Purvis

Good point. And the abstract idea of determinism is swamped by the burden of having a choice to make, by the experience of 'illusory' freedom. We act on uncertain knowledge not only of consequences but also of what we actually want. Will this really make us happy? We find out about ourselves via experiment just as we find out about our non-selves, our environment.

For an individual to arrive at the conclusion that consciousness is deterministic and that therefore freedom and choice are illusions is to choose to reject the existence of choice. It is not surprising that holding such a contradictory view about oneself should cause some distress. This is not to say that the conclusion is wrong, but that it is simply not a valid perspective for a conscious being. The experience of choice is part and parcel of consciousness-as-revelation. To experience – to be – consciousness-as-revelation is to experience the sense of ownership of conscious states as they develop according to changing circumstances; the sense of ownership is the basis of the ‘I’, the phenomenon of subjectivity by means of which all experience is possible. Any mental event involving discrimination, however deterministic in absolute terms, is therefore experienced as an aspect of the self, the ‘I’; it is intended. — Oliver Purvis

Well said. As I see it, we make sense of the world in terms of postulated necessary relationships. A objects 'nature' is the way it fits in to these relationships. If I put a match to gasoline, flames with spring up. The sun will rise when the app on the iphone says it will. If I swallow bleach, I'll get sick..

For the most part we have something like a desired future possessing our present-tense body like a ghost. Our behavior makes sense forward. Imagine a film of a human doing something complex and strange. It might only make sense at the end, when we see that he ends up with something that all humans value. While the theoretical mode can contemplate objects as fully present with certain subject independent qualities, the living mode (that we usually don't think to find words for) understands objects as 'too heavy' for this or that purpose for instance. Or this jacket doesn't fit right. So the world is loaded with qualities that are invisible to the theoretical mind, since they are functions of a passing purpose and an intensely local and intimate situation.

As long as the philosopher understands himself half-consciously as a sort of scientist, he'll ignore the kind of reality that he actually lives in and obsess over epistemological issues. And epistemology demands an unrealistic picture of language as a set of crisp essences. Objects too have to be considered in there most public modes. Their living qualities (appropriatenesses for passing purposes like too-heavy, too-sweet, too-tight, etc.) are ignored for the quantifiable. Phenomenology was arguably a way to transition to paying attention to lived life within the glamor of the idea of philosophy as science. Philosophy becomes descriptive, poetic.

That seems plausible. Isn't this idea in the Vedanta, too? If memory serves, there's an old idea of God playing hide-and-go-seek with himself. In any case, it's a beautiful idea. And this idea is IMV far more important than its source.

Still, relying on the Ancient Greek concept of Logos: logic, reasoning, ratios and rationing (or, partitioning this from that; appropriating relations between; proportionality; etc.), rationalizing, and language itself—among other concepts—were all interlinked in the concept of Logos. Are all interlinked, I’d say. Our inability to get behind language—which you’ve previously mentioned—is then, from certain vantages, one and the same with our inability to get behind the logos within which we dwell and of which we are in large part composed … and—like the fish’s lack of awareness of the water within which it swims, which you’ve addressed—quite often of which we can’t help but be utterly unaware of. IMO, due to our inability to get behind all the logos that is, we in some ways then cannot ever get to the pure, non-linguistic, being that is—for which we as beings use logos to address. — javra

Yes. Very well put. I follow you well here. We can't behind the logos completely. I think 'factic life' is a one name of this impossible target --the fantasy of the unmediated. Moment zero, unstained by the past, unstained by the inherited pre-interpretaion through which we always already are forced to peer through as if through stained glass. Unmediated being, the smooth untrodden snow, a sort of holy virgin of uncontaminated truth.

That perspective briefly mentioned, logic then—in the form of the principles of thought being consistently applied—then serves as our common, human, universal language—or common meta-language if one prefers. (For my part, the particulars of formal logic then follow suit, but are not as universal as the principles of thought themselves.) — javra

Right. And we can agree on the basic structures when we filter out all the usual content about which we are biased. But plug in the word 'God' or 'virtue' or 'science' or 'rationality' and the stain of history is there, including personal history. The words we care about are wet.

To cut to the chase, what I’m here trying to make the case for is this: imo, the optimal metaphor would be one that consists of a logical expression readily accessible to all—such that the meaning holds the potential to become commonly understood by (as extremely overreaching an ideal as this is) all people. Since all people share the aesthetic for consistency in what is and what is deemed to be—otherwise said, all are subjects to the principle of noncontradiction—all could then in principle come to understand such logos-bound expressions.

… or so I’m currently thinking. And waxing a bit too poetic at that, I imagine. (Heck, not all poetic verse is good even from the vantage of its author.) But I trust that some of this can come across in a comprehensible manner—though maybe not to everyone. — javra

I mostly agree. I do speculate that some metaphors will only speak to certain types of people. For instance, some don't give a damn about Nietzsche's poetry of solitude. It speaks to me. He also writes that the spirit is a stomach. That too speaks to me. But others don't like the idea of consumption,that life is a bloody maw in some sense, digesting experience, turning disaster into opportunity. The spirit must instead be a sort of diamond apart from the 'filth' of time-trapped flesh. So we might speak of esoteric metaphors, of 'passwords.'

But I generally agree. A metaphor can become literalized for a culture. 'Love is the only law. ' This, for instance, would institute a way of holding any particular law as an imperfect approximation of some foggy ideal law. With this notion comes 'the letter killeth, but the spirt giveth life.' And then maybe we have implicit metaphors, such as the physicist as priest who connects us to inhuman really real reality.

Because there are infinitely-many such systems, it's hardly surprising that there's this one. ...one that is the way this one is. There are also infinitely-many other ones, which are infinitely-many different ways. — Michael Ossipoff

But why isn't all the more surprising that there are infinitely many? One of the anti-metaphysical axes I like to grind is a sort of smugness that I feel in the 'nothing here to see, folks' approach. I don't mean to accuse you personally of smugness. I'm just talking about a kind of stubborn resistance to confessing any sort of experience of wonder (or terror) at finding oneself alive and mortal. It's fine of course if others disagree. They can think me irrational and I can think that they are in the same kind of smug, complacent mode that I am often in myself.

From my point of view, there's a kind of pasting over of this wonder-terror by very plausible sciency sounding phrases. But I personally can't buy it. I do believe, of course, that humans can (for a long time even) remain un-freaked-out. It's not exactly convenient or practical to be freaked-out by existence all the time. But I suspect that most of us experience moments from time to time when all of the impressive words fall away and we stand before the roaring of the there that we are and the there that we are surrounded by. We are thrown into a drama that we don't remember choosing. Thrown into a face and language. Thrown into relationships with particular human beings, each of them also thrown. All of us mortal. All of us improvising, keeping the ship afloat or occasionally scuttling it to do away with the drama.

This is where religion/philosophy as the non-cute stuff really kicks in. Your theoretical vision of the world is interesting enough, but surely you live in a world of people and objects. By no means am I trying to censor you. I'm just pointing at the gap between our creative theoretical fictions and the vivid world of people and objects we actually live in, work in, suffer in, enjoy ourselves in.

You apparently can decipher him, and that's admirable. — tim wood

Only some of him! But some of these passages are glorious. His 'feel' is grand, lofty.

On my bedside table these past several years is Kaufmann's translation of the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology. — tim wood

I have this book. It's one of my favorite Hegel books. We could definitely start a conversation about this preface, to make what we can of it. I feel good about my interpretation of much of it.

I suspect that outside of academia you find few to engage in discussion about him or his ideas. — tim wood

I think I have the cure for this situation, and it applies to Heidegger and others too. In my view, it's best to just present some stirring idea in English. Out of respect one can mention that it was influenced by Hegel. But really we can just play with the idea as its stands in English. The idea is more important than its possible source, no? Along these lines, I decided to drop the word Dasein, because I don't want the burden of playing the responsible scholar. I want to talk about ideas that live for me, that square with my direct experience of life.

I harbor the suspicion that sometime someone will "distill" Hegel into radically shorter and more accessible language. — tim wood

Kojeve! His lectures are beautifully translated. That book is what really turned me on to Hegel. Of course it's as much Kojeve as it is Hegel. But that's not a bad thing.

It's true nature is the entire cycle of its being, revealed in what Hegel calls a dialectic of being, the initial, or prior, phases of which are overcome in sublation into the next phase, as the seed becomes shoot becomes a flower becomes rotting compost, and so on. - This dialectical process, happening in whichever however many ways (but not the schoolboy's thesis-antithesis-synthesis) being applied to being itself. If you want to "get into" the preface, I'll try to keep up. — tim wood

Yeah. That sounds spot on. I love the blossom-bud metaphor. Reality evolves to know itself dialectically. It becomes itself in this knowing of itself. It unfolds. It gains in richness and complexity in a sort of war with itself. Great stuff. Yes, we should get into the preface. We could quote the Baille translation via cut and paste and discuss passages.

Maybe, but explanations of God are a largely Atheist topic. — Michael Ossipoff

In my experience, there is here and there a metaphysical theist on philosophy forums. I was trying to make clear that my mention of the limits of scientific explanation wasn't some covert introduction of some other kind of explanation. Indeed, both kinds of explanation have the same shape in my view. Objects are understood within a nexus of necessary relationships. The 'supernatural' is just a different understanding of the natural insofar as one does a kind of science.

I don't take sides really on the theist versus atheist debate. I can find interesting uses for the word 'God.' Still, I don't believe in an afterlife. So that gives my perspective an atheistic feel. That is arguably the real issue: is this all there is? A brief embodiment? I think yes. But I don't claim to have some 'proof.' I can emit 'reasons' for this belief. I can cough up words.

Many Theists don't regard God as an element of metaphysics. Metaphysics is about explanations, and things discussable and describable.Many Theists don't assert to you about God. — Michael Ossipoff

Those are probably the kind I'd get along with best. I do live the old King James. I vote for whoever has the best English poetry.

Assertion and proof are meaningful only in logic, mathematics, physics and (limitedly) in metaphysics.. — Michael Ossipoff

You're preaching to the choir. Life is bigger than that which permits of some tidy, settled method. We might even drag the word 'God' in for this largeness of life that dwarfs our systems. But I'm not attached to this or that word. Life is bigger than our words.

Speaking of "Creation", in regards to religion, is anthropomorphic. — Michael Ossipoff

In my view, it's all anthropomorphic. We only really give a damn about the human-like. We can do without the human body (sort of) in a Deity. But take away human virtues and we have only a machine, a pathetic patch over our ignorance.

I'm not trying to start a religious debate. I don't debate religion. I'm just clarifying that many Theists don't believe in a God that is an element of metaphysics or needs a creator. — Michael Ossipoff

You aren't hurting my feelings, and we don't have to debate religion if you don't want to. But I don't see why debating religion should be a bad thing. For me philosophy is something like the religion of those who like to think of themselves as 'rational,' a word with a rich and slippery meaning. We are invested in our highest ideas. They are sacred, etc. Call it philosophy or religion or whatever. We have words that sustain our sense of sanity and worth.

We needn't debate it. (..and let's not). But do you think that the discussable, describable subject called metaphysics describes all of Reality, or that you could understand or know all of Reality? Maybe it would be more modest to not make such an assumption. — Michael Ossipoff

Hell no. I'm an anti-metaphysician. Perhaps my fundamental theme at the moment is the gap between life as it is lived and the small 'piece' of it that we can make explicit and rational. As far as modesty goes, that's a tricky issue. One can be immodestly 'modest.' The real conversation is going to happen or not according to whether we have the guts to say something stirring, even if we might change our minds about it. We've got to take risks, clash, be distinct personalities.

Some might imagine themselves as doing a kind of science here. I don't see it that way. But I recognize their right to project any kind of minimally civil personality they wish. That keeps things fresh. To me this is a place of wild and often impressively articulate conversation.

Yes, the fundamental existence of the Materialist's objectively-existent physical universe is a brute-fact.

But no, we don't need that brute-fact. There's no particular reason to believe in it. There's no particualr reason to believe that our physical universe is other than a complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypothetics. ...one of infinitely many such complex abstract logical systems. — Michael Ossipoff

Let's say our physical universe is such a system. Why is it specifically the way that it is? Why is it here in the first place?

I completely agree with you that our language itself isn't metaphysically loaded. I think ordinary language is far less precise than most philosophers suppose that it is and doesn't have 'build in' views on philosophical issues. I think Bertrand Russell saw this clearly. I do think, though, that most non-philosophers believe that Realism is true, at least implicitly. — PossibleAaran

Yes, I agree that non-philosophers accept realism as a true, in a sort of unconscious way. Indeed, I think we all think some kind of 'primordial' realism is true. In our Humean studies we can play with other ideas, but everywhere else the pre-theoretical sense of a shared world is primary. We can only bother to communicate from this half-conscious half-conceptual assumption. We can only bother to debate about what is the case because there is a sort of shared space about which statements can be true or false. Or that's how I see it. Thanks for your reply.

I confess that I may read all of these guys idiosyncratically.

It's been awhile since I've read Wittgenstein. I had what I'd call a sort of insight or click about ordinary language, and this intuitive sense has always been more important to me than the sources I associate with its inspiration. That's one of the reasons I've thought about not dropping the names of influences, because I don't want to drag along the implication of some argument from authority. I like the idea of just sharing ideas in my own English and defending them as words that ring true to my own direct experience.

I've read lots of Heidegger lately. His pre-B&T texts and Kisiel's impressive Genesis. That's a strong influence, but I have my own ax to grind. The medium-message theme is key for me. The how of our grasping is overlooked in our focus on the what that is grasped. But this receding 'how' of our grasping constrains the 'what' that appears. Along the same lines, our questions are always loaded in ways that we don't notice. One might say that the goal is to get behind the past --as much as possible. We can't get completely behind the past. The past makes our questioning possible. But we open up our future (as I see it) by getting behind the past, since the past constrains the question that opens the future. That sort of thing. I'm still looking for the best words.

Whoa. It’s getting feely. — Brianna Whitney

Indeed. I've definitely tried to stir up some feely foolosophy. For me that's foolosophy at its best: life and death, love and loss, a brave and/or wise response to having been born here.

I opine that existential time is not a mathematical continuum. If it were, then the present would have 'measure zero.' But then how could you read this sentence? Note how the meaning of the beginning blends with an anticipation of the meaning to come. Physics time is not human or existential or lived time. For us the future dominates, wearing a dress made from the rags of the past. Through us the future carves up the present. This body is the tool through which space is carved into the shape of a desired future. And this still-being-born future has a shape influenced by the past from memory. Just think of our inherited language. We name ourselves and what ought to be in a tongue we did not choose, in a tongue that developed over generations of suffering and insight.

Good points. Hegel is amazingly clear in some texts and annoying obscure in others. My current view, however, is that he did have a grudge against 'mystical' or feeling-based approaches to the 'absolute.'
Of course it's asking for trouble to bring him up, because he wrote so much and with such varying levels of accessibility.

Here's a potent passage:

By this elevation of the spirit to itself the spirit wins in itself its objectivity, which hitherto it had to seek in the external and sensuous character of existence, and in this unification with itself it senses and knows itself. This spiritual elevation is the fundamental principle of romantic art. Bound up with it at once is the essential point that at this final stage of art the beauty of the classical ideal, and therefore beauty in its very own shape and its most adequate content, is no longer the ultimate thing. For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.

But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier [on pp. 435-6, 505-6], does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.
— Hegel

In my view, this image of this infinity would be something like one of those paintings of Christ with his hand raised in a sign. He knows that he is one with the absolute. So for me there is still the charged sensual image of an ideal human. Not just concept but embodied passionate concept. Yes, the inner life is central. But spiritual joy (in my view) expresses itself in terms of images and poems and philosophy. The Word remains important, but I don't know if it ever pulls away from image altogether. The labor of the concept does intensify and sustain the power of the image. It steers this power away from confusion. But the image also drives the labor of the concept to equal it in sublimity.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity. — Hegel

I adore that quote. I've had that kind of 'manic' insight. It doesn't completely go away, but whether it's there in the fullness of feeling is something that varies.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1