Was Nietzsche right about this?
Forgive me if this has been done ad nauseum – I did a search and couldn’t find it elsewhere.
Was Nietzsche correct that the ‘death of God’ would usher in a time of meaninglessness and bloodshed?
The mass murdering secular excesses of Nazism, Soviet Russia and Mao have been tabled as evidence for this proposition (was Nazism – ‘Gott is Mitt Uns’ really Godless?). Our current culture wars and pessimistic, moribund democracies could readily be constructed as part of this legacy of nihilism.
It’s an old slander against atheism that it offers no foundation and therefore, in a phrase commonly and wrongly attributed to Dostoyevsky – ‘without God anything is permitted’. Nietzsche himself predicts years of bloodshed noting that the entire system of Western Europe is predicated on Christian values and codes. The vestigial traces of these will remain with us (human rights/identity politics?) for many years and gradually fade into pessimistic chaos. Is he describing our times?
The assumption underpinning this is of course that religious belief (which may not be the same thing as belief in God) provided social stability and purpose. It also seems obvious, contra ersatz Dostoyevsky, that with a belief in God, anything is permitted (Zizek has made this point) and there is almost not a crime available to us - from throwing acid into the face of a young girl for daring to learn to read, to mass murder - that haven’t been done in the name of God. Theism often seems to behave as barbarism on crystal meth.
What do people think about Nietzsche’s Death of God?
Was Nietzsche correct that the ‘death of God’ would usher in a time of meaninglessness and bloodshed?
The mass murdering secular excesses of Nazism, Soviet Russia and Mao have been tabled as evidence for this proposition (was Nazism – ‘Gott is Mitt Uns’ really Godless?). Our current culture wars and pessimistic, moribund democracies could readily be constructed as part of this legacy of nihilism.
It’s an old slander against atheism that it offers no foundation and therefore, in a phrase commonly and wrongly attributed to Dostoyevsky – ‘without God anything is permitted’. Nietzsche himself predicts years of bloodshed noting that the entire system of Western Europe is predicated on Christian values and codes. The vestigial traces of these will remain with us (human rights/identity politics?) for many years and gradually fade into pessimistic chaos. Is he describing our times?
The assumption underpinning this is of course that religious belief (which may not be the same thing as belief in God) provided social stability and purpose. It also seems obvious, contra ersatz Dostoyevsky, that with a belief in God, anything is permitted (Zizek has made this point) and there is almost not a crime available to us - from throwing acid into the face of a young girl for daring to learn to read, to mass murder - that haven’t been done in the name of God. Theism often seems to behave as barbarism on crystal meth.
What do people think about Nietzsche’s Death of God?
Comments (283)
Christian values, are essentially democracy. Giving people, who have no right or reason to have such a freedom, the ability to live and rule alongside those who do. "Salvation". Thoroughly abused, as history shows. Aka "liars".
Quoting Tom Storm
See above, liars. There is no less hesitancy for a soldier of fortune to kill an unarmed person he has been indoctrinated to perceive as a threat under the guise of "God's will" than there is under the guise of "national interest", both have been set in such a way they interconnect with the only intrinsic and universal plea men of all walks of life are capable to understand. that being self-interest and survival.
Nietzsche is not talking about something that is yet to happen. God is already dead. A time of meaninglessness and bloodshed could describe much of history.
Oh but of course. Because if this were to be false... we surely are. And that's not something the mind wishes to comprehend. So it won't. Nothing wrong with such a perspective in the grand scheme of things. Surprises are after all, the spice of life.
I think it is better handed from generation to generation with ostracization, consequences and cancel culture; that and other peaceful ways of social engineering. As we leave off those ways of conveying morality then sure, we are going to have "issues." The downside compounds itself when we fail to make a virtue of anything. For instance, we like to say that integrity is "doing the right thing even when no one is looking." But it sure doesn't help when some one tries to do the right thing and he's dissed, demeaned or marginalized. And it doesn't help when a whistle blower blows the whistle and gets ignored instead of honored. People then see what they perceive to be "the good guy never wins, and the bad guy gets away with it." And then bad becomes good and lies the truth and truth lies, and we exalt fascist and greed and etc.
On the other hand, I think people, especially young people, are observant. And they have natural morality in their bones. And they know an asshole when they see one. But no one wants to see another peaceful Tom Hanks dragged out of a classroom, teaching, and sent to some foreign land to kill another asshole and end up dying in the process. It's our job to head that off long before it gets to that point. And we don't need god or religion to do it. God and religion are welcome to tag along and do their part, but when they are put out front, they can be part of the problem. Look at all the bible thumpers who spit on Jesus with their conduct.
Long story short, no, I do not think we are on downward spiral without god. Remember the meme circulating some time ago about what all the person saw who was born in 1900? These are the salad days, my friend. All the arcs, including justice (MLK), are bending, albeit slowly, in the right direction. There may be a step back here and there but if the Earth itself can handle the weight of the whole human race until we check ourselves, then the death of god and the rise of All (as I've described it elsewhere) will be a good thing.
My Dad was born in 1923. What he saw is bad enough. Still living - no thanks to 2 years in a German (WW2) camp.
:victory:
Of nihilism. So perhaps "meaninglessness" but not necessarily bloodshed. I personally think he got it right -- the Christian church is losing its grip even more. But it seems like science has largely replaced it, and our reactions against Christianity still keep us Christians, in a strange way.
I wish he touched on the economy more, as Marx did. Because it appears that the real power in the world today is now in the hands of those with wealth, the business class -- or, more specifically, big business: the corporate sector. The owners of these corporations, the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie), are making the decisions that shape the lives of billions of people. They own the future of humanity. What is their worldview? Are these people Christian? What tradition were they raised in? Where have they been educated? Since it's a global phenomenon (multinationalism), I think it has more to do with science and technology than the death or existence of God. Their ideology is one of greed and accumulation of wealth -- which is a kind of "will to power" in its own right, which again Nietzsche doesn't discuss much (from what I've read).
Is this nihilistic? Yeah, I'd say so. So the world, in a sense, is being directed by a small class of human beings, whose brains have been shaped by a Judeo-Christian tradition and culture, but educated in a mainly secular way, and have earned their place within a segment of the world (business and economics) that operates within its own system (capitalism). So whether you believe in God or believe God is dead, it really doesn't matter -- because to play the game (and especially to rise to the top of it) you have to internalize the rules of the game. This game is based on a particular variant of the will to power: accumulate wealth, personal gain, greed, etc.
So perhaps there will be bloodshed, but not from war. It'll be from this group of people, acting on their particular will to power, playing this particular capitalistic game, who will eventually cause the destruction of the species. Look no further than the environmental disaster currently underway, and the reactions to it, for all the evidence you need about where we stand.
I don't think even Nietzsche could have predicted that.
With Nietzsche context is always important. "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him ... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
The death of God can lead to either the last man or the overman.
Nietzsche is often accused of being a nihilist This is wrong. From "The Uses and Abuses of History" through Zarathustra Nietzsche battled against nihilism. He does not reject value. It is for him of fundamental importance. The invention of new values, which he sees as necessary in our time, is only possible with the death of God.
:up:
:up:
[quote=David Bentley Hart]His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.[/quote]
I would argue the uncertain resources of our will are uniquely designed and qualified to deal with an infinity of meaninglessness. God, are we good at it!
The measure would be presence. As opined elsewhere, there is agreement and disagreement and the fact that neither matters, itself does not matter, so we press on, and that is all that matters. I used "ideas" but the sentiment applies equally to the physical, the stone and the knife, etc. In short, we keep on keepin' on.
The resources of our will are all we have ever had. With these resources man invented God. Man created the myths of creation and purpose. Man created meaning. The universe has always been meaningless.
The three metamorphoses of the spirit in Zarathustra is about doing this again and again. Rejecting those values that no longer promote our health and replacing them with new ones. Over and over again. The eternal return of the same.
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
Quoting Tom Storm
Zizek and Peterson. This is what we spend our time reading? Good heavens.
No and it's interesting that you jump to conclusions like this. Is your high horse conveniently tethered nearby?
They were mentioned because they happened to be apropos. Why not add someone better? Christ knows I am sick of both those.
That is a belief, also - practically the defacto belief in today's world. But a belief nonetheless.
Quoting Xtrix
JP, albeit first a professor, has spent the entirety of his career either in creating self-help advice or disseminating mythological interpretations (encompassing evolutionary biology, cognitive/social psychology and even metaphysics). He's definitely laid forth a substantive, and profound set of arguments that underpin the utility of theistic beliefs, pinpointing how entrenched they are in the recesses of Western Civilizations. He's not infallible; there are assertions of his that I believe are overly abstract, or without a concrete and practical realization.
Zizeck, on the other hand, is an academic philosopher - and while several individuals interpret him as being solely a Marxist, he's made amazing contributions towards Hegelianism (and certain psychoanalytic fields). Again, he has thousands of critics, many of whom label him a polemicist (and perhaps he is), but he's been crucial in the sustenance and teaching of Hegelian values.
Henry Bayman - Nietszche, God and Doomsday.
My take is that the modern world has lost all sense of the dimension against which the sense of a 'higher intelligence' can be calibrated because the metaphors by which it is presented are no longer intelligible to us. The modern world is a flatland as far as values are concerned, because, as a later philosopher was to observe:
[quote=TLP]The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world
everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value.[/quote]
That's why we think the universe is meaningless. It is consequence of a loss of perspective which arises from modern empiricism, which only trusts sense-data.
I think this is critical. The post-Enlightenment's zest for and confidence in proofs and reasoning comes right out of Christianity. Much nihilism these days seems less ambitious :razz:.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nice work, W. That is a succinct and juicy way of putting it. This could be a thread of its own.
By the way, when I said DBH 'likes' Nietzsche, I didn't mean it to sound like a high school relationship - I guess I meant he 'respects' FN.
I agree.
Nietzsche did not kill God. He traces God's death back to the Enlightenment.
He does not deny science. What he denies is the:
Quoting Wayfarer
But this is not Nietzsche. A hierarchy of values was fundamental to him. It is both the depths and the heights that can be achieved that mark the higher man.
But his spirit survives.
God's death was a multi-step process. Several generations of assassins were needed to complete the job from start to finish. It was not an easy or trivial task. I mean, just think about the scope, depth and breadth of the target.
You confuse the being with it's breath. An eclipse of the Sun with it's disappearance. A newborn's belief of a parent or guardian ceasing to exist due to hands covering the face. In the scope of theism, such philosophies are little more than the speaker becoming an infant in a game of celestial peek-a-boo. You don't have to believe in any of this wild speculation and possibility of course, but if you would choose to use such terms in a serious manner as if you do, well, be sure to know what they mean.
Which amounts to the same! He explicitly denies the idea of 'natural order' or 'natural law' as an anthropomorphism.
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
Oh how witty.
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
:rofl:
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
What are these contributions, exactly? Where is the work?
Both are pseudo-intellectual charlatans. A lot of posturing, a lot of appeals to the masses, a lot of truisms dressed up, lots of italics, and absolutely no real work whatsoever. Not one thing they say can be disproved— by design.
If you’re into them, you’re welcome.
Quoting Tom Storm
Old news when the most untimely Freddy coded the perennial corpse; Dr. Hegel had pronounced the Old Shadow's demise decades before. Anyway, Freddy Zarathustra diagnoses nihilism in the wake of European civilization's blood-letting of premodern credulities – as great a catastrophe as it is, perhaps, the greatest opportunity for (Dionysus') Pan-Europa to rise from its own ashes! Lesson of the late great Twentieth: Was 'the greatest opportunity' squandered – amusing themselves to death? 'First as tragedy, second as farce', no doubt: still waiting for Godot. So "God is dead"; now his "murderers" find they cannot take his place (i.e. become gods); but maybe we can 'engineer' the next Godmakers which will make themselves something much much more out of far far less ... until they, at last, become (suddenly?) omnia ex nihilo.
"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us." ~Franz Kafka
Most philosophical assertions are fallible in one form or another, and they are no exception; they've been contended on many accounts. Posturing is quintessential of every academic.
Where do you get such optimism? Because even though your assessment of the human situation is rather dark, it rests on the assumption that humans are able to care about other than just self-interest and survival, and that such care isn't necessarily detrimental to them -- and that assumption strikes me as distinctly optimistic.
Quoting Outlander
Liars, or just pursuing their self-interest and survival? All is fair in love and war, right?
I'm inclined to think that God belief was developed not for the sake of explaining human origins and natural phenomena, but primarily for a social group to justify whatever effort was needed to ensure their survival and, ideally, supremacy over others.
But as more and more social groups developed or resorted to this strategy, it's become ineffective, hence "the death of God".
So an academic is, essentially, a failed politician?
That’s where Darwinism is a negative force, because the implicit assumption is that the only thing that matters is surviving. Hey, we’ve survived. You and I are both examples of ‘most successful pond slime’. So - now what? Is that it?
Is the fact that we can conceive of the insufficiency of life as it is usually lived evidence that there is "more to life"?
How come we can be dissatisfied like that?
Obviously, this is one of Nietzsche's sensationalist remarks, as the God he is saying has died cannot by definition die (or rather die again if one includes Jesus in it).
People these days have alot of trouble understanding what a God is. If the Romans were still in power, they would say Santa Claus is a God. For good reason. Belief in him controls 15% of the world economy. Gods are not born, they are created. Gods do not die, they are lost.
Nietzsche's statement is certainly enough to inflame the imagination of the embittered, which is rather apparently his intent.
Quoting ernest meyer
Tosh. The myth of Saint Nicklaus post-dated the Roman Empire by centuries (by Jove!)
From Ecce Homo 1908
“The Transvaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its[Pg 132]senses—a step which in me became flesh and genius. … Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept "politics" then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on earth.
By 1900, the world is dominated by the imperialistic powers in Europe, Japan is already well into the process of industrializing, even defeating Russia in 1905. The US by 1890 is the world's largest economy. Germany has been unified by Bismarck, a great deal of the groundwork has been set for WW1. The world is already quite far into the process of prioritising capitalism, politics and science over religion. Politics already exists on a large scale. Populations are booming, Europe has access to overseas manpower, the destructive capacity of their militaries is rising rapidly. There are many ways that one could predict things such as the rise of politics over religion, that wars will kill millions, that politics will exist on a global scale because many of these things are already happening or that which will allow them to happen is happening. So, it's not just the death of God.
I believe Nietzche is not talking about the "falsehood" being something to celebrate, he's talking about a power vacuum created by the death of God, "that shocks are bound to ensue". It is like predicting that the fall of Saddam Hussein will lead to ISIS, in that, such a claim would not be considered praise of Hussein, just recognition that his disappearance will cause a power vacuum which will be fought over by various political factions.
Politics that did seek to give man new meaning and purpose, such as Fascism, Nationalism and Communism, could be interpreted to be filling the void left by religion, Nazism did create a new imperative, a new moral code, a new purpose for Germans and Stalinism and Maoism are very similar. Compared to a monarch who relies on the divine right to rule, it does seem Nietzche was right about that. Today, I'm not sure, to a large extent, I think that capitalism has replaced politics as the new religion. Your imperative and purpose is to acquire material wealth, to obtain the American dream and to succeed.
Political movements focus on allowing people to succeed financially in ways that they've been unable to or how people are presented culturally, largely on the economic and business side of things. Even spats between the US and China are largely based on economic and technological disputes which have financial motivations. Their competition is more focused on being competitive in an economic sense.
I share the sentiments of @James Riley about morality, Western atheism today has shown that "Christian morality" does not rely on religion like Nietzche thought it did. Sure, some components of it are uniquely Christian but much of the basics are just a result of some basic empathy, compassion and a bit of logic too. Things are changing as usual but I don't think the primary catalyst is the death of God anymore.
How did you arrive at "obviously he did not think God had died"? Nietzsche painstakingly described precisely what he meant by this, but you just slide over his argument. You are actually right, he viewed god's death as a symbol for people abandoning morals and beliefs provided by and sustained and fostered by the Christian faith practitioners. Nietzsche did not talk of God as a real religious deity; he talked of god as a feature of social influence.
The quote I have is:
The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead...
I think it is from the Phenomenology of Spirit
This may come across as irrelevant but as per Isaac Newton, the English physicist of gravity fame, god has to continually make adjustments to keep the planets in their orbits around the sun. Thus, in a sense, since our solar system is still stable, god must be alive and well but, fortunately or unfortunately, not as smart as we make faer out to be :lol:
Can we find some passages that directly speak about this?
'All is fair in love' and 'nothing is fair in war' seems to more sensible I think.
Then you aren't very widely read. It's no wonder you think this, considering you laud the likes of Jordan Peterson and his "profound" contributions to...something or other.
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
Exalted, no. That I have standards, yes. If you call asking for something beyond truisms "exalted," that's your issue. I asked for what exactly the "work" is. You, like all those taken in by Peterson's superficiality, can't point to any. I suppose "cleaning your room" is one piece of that profound work?
Eh, I'm already bored. It's not even worth discussing this bore.
The quote is from The Gay Science Aphorism #109. It should be read in context. What he warns against is regarding the universe as a machine. He says:
"The astral arrangement in which we live is an exception; this arrangement, and the relatively long durability is determined by it, has again made possible the exception of exceptions, the formation of organic life."
What he is denying the the passage you quoted is "our aesthetic anthropomorphisms" and an eternal order to the universe. The natural sciences are possible because of the relatively long durability of our astral arrangement. But we should not conclude that what may be the case in our little part of the universe must be true everywhere.
He goes on:
"Let us be on our guard against ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble; nor does it seek to be anything of the kind, it does not at all attempt to imitate man! It is altogether unaffected by our aesthetic and moral judgments! Neither has it any self-preservative instinct, nor instinct at all; it also knows no law. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses."
The denial of natural laws is the denial of a lawmaker and a universe that obeys.
"There are no eternally enduring substances ..."
He ends by asking:
"When will all these shadows of God cease to obscure us? When shall we have nature entirely undeified! When shall we be permitted to naturalise our selves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?"
Quoting Xtrix
Have you read Maps of Meaning? Have you seen his lectures of Existentialist Psychology? Are you acquainted with his contentions to New Atheism?
:lol:
"If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured." -- From "The Intellectual We Deserve"
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
"Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.
But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.” And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect?"
Says it better than me. Worth a read before wasting a second more on this fraud.
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
Yeah, it's a shame I don't put more effort into Jordan Peterson-like witticisms, like the following:
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
:lol:
Damn, that sounds like a lot of work. I guess that anyone would expend that kind of energy to be right is testament to their concern about the opinion which others might have of them. It's like lying. The truth is easier to remember. Or, when I was a prosecutor, I remember criminals putting effort into a crime that, had they just invested the same amount of resources and energy in a legal pursuit, they'd be rich! Like lawyers! Alas, I have been known to improve on truth! LOL!
Anyway, thanks for the quote. Windy, but nice.
Exactly. I think it's just an avoidance of real work. It's much easier to pontificate about truisms. But also it's a kind of trickery to sell books, be famous, and gather a following. Very self-serving. Peterson and Zizek are both egomaniacs.
Give me 5 minutes of someone like Noam Chomsky over either of their oeuvres.
Then how are we able to understand the meaning of the word ‘universe’?
Wayfarer was quoting me so I'll respond. The problem is not with the meaning of the term. I suspect you know that.
Yes, and this means he denies that the aim of science should be the attainment of truth, which amounts to a direct critique of modern physics and most sciences outside of perhaps a few branches of psychology.
What is there outside of the meaning of the term? Put differently , unless you maintain a dualist perspective, positing an objective ‘real world’ existing in itself outside of subject-object interaction, is the idea of a ‘meaningless in itself’ universe even coherent? ( I’m arguing this from a phenomenological philosophical perspective).
As I understand it, Nietzsche denies transcendent, absolute, unchanging truths. Some contemporary physicists do as well, although others treat the laws of nature as eternally unchanging and immutable.
Peterson grossly misreads most of the postmodern authors he pontificates about. Zizek’s a windbag but at least he has a solid background in figures like Hegel, Marx, Freud and Kierkegaard. Chomsky is a brilliant psycho-linguist but as a political theorist is an egomaniac to rival the other two, and whose philosophical understanding seems to be arrested somewhere between Hume and Hegel.
For those who seek meaning in the universe it means, but is not limited to, questions of purpose, significance, and our place in it.
I agree that some physicists have moved beyond naive direct realism , but I can’t find any who have left realism of all stripes behind, Do you know of any? I can’t imagine any phycisst who would subscribe to Nietzsche’s claim below:
Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –). We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life? – In the end, we are not only allowed to make such an attempt: the conscience of method demands it. Multiple varieties of causation should not be postulated until the attempt to make do with a single one has been taken as far as it will go (– ad absurdum, if you will). This is a moral of method that cannot be escaped these days; – it follows “from the definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we recognize the will as, in effect, efficacious, whether we believe in the causality of the will. If we do (and this belief is really just our belief in causality itself –), then we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is. “Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will. – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else.”
Yes, the notio that the universe is a place that we exist ‘within’ is a realist notion, which I think Nietzsche is implicitly critiquing in the quote I sent you.
:up: :up: :up:
I see no basis for this remark. I really don't see Chomsky as an egomaniac in anything, politics or otherwise. Especially not to "rival" Peterson and Zizek. Give me a break.
I guess if I agreed with his political
philosophy I would notice his passive-aggressive style of argumentation less. Normally I try to get away from focusing on personality style, but you kind of drew me in with your remarks on Peterson and Zizek. Perhaps , like me, you notice their personal idiosyncrasies because you dislike their ideas.
I’m assuming youre a fan of Chomsky’s political thinking?
I think there is first and foremost a difficult interpretive challenge here. Just a few quick points.
The quote is from Beyond Good and Evil Chapter 2 "The Free Spirit", (36). He begins: 'suppose' or 'assuming' or 'if we assume'. This assumption is followed by a question: "are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is “given” does not SUFFICE, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or “material”) world?"
In other words, from the supposed given: "our world of desires and passions" he makes the attempt to understand the world.
There are some noted physicists including John Wheeler who defend the notion of a participatory universe.
You seem to have missed the point of what I am saying. The desire to find meaning in the universe is not a linguistic quest. Nietzsche denies that such meaning can be found in the universe. Hence my statement: "The universe has always been meaningless." Whatever meaning we find is a meaning we create.
Would you say that for Wheeler
the universe is participatory in a materially causal way or in a valuative way?I realize that ‘value’ would have to be fleshed out in relation to notions like intentionality and goal-oriented normativity.
ok. So you’re saying apprehension of a universe is not a matter of adequation or correspondence with an independent reality but of construction?
Wheeler said "everything is information". Does that fit somewhere in your categories?
I am not arguing that Nietzsche's views are compatible with Wheeler's or some other scientist, but that it would be a mistake to think he was anti-science.
I don't know where you got that from anything I said. I am talking about the significance of Zarathustra's "good news" - God is dead. How the death of God relates to the problem of the meaning of life.
When I think of the expression ‘ anti-science’ , I of course think of Trump. But I also think of the attitude of conservatively minded writers toward philosophers at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The cultural
wars that reached their peak a few decades ago pitted Sokal and his supporters against representatives
of postmodern fields like cultural studies , and individuals like Deleuze and Derrida. The latter were accused of being ‘anti-science’ by the former, because they attacked the precious foundation of method, verification and objectivity upon which modern science is supposedly based. Of course, Sokal and company were
right about what the postmodernists were attacking, but this didn’t mean they thought planes shouldn’t be able to fly.
When you say that Nietzsche is not anti-science, do you have this group of postmodernists in mind as being truly anti-science ?
Do you know of any philosopher who is actually anti-science in the way you mean it?
I appreciated your formulation.
He was quite prophetic about the coming nihilism. It seems right that if an orthodoxy is proven absurd, it risks leaving those who rely on such a foundation to be without one for a time, or at least to search for another one in a frenzy, leading to mental and even actual conflict. The quick retreat leaves a vacuum. And for an ideology that often seeks to suppress competing world-views, like Christianity, such a retreat is particularly dangerous because it has already limited access to better ideas, leaving one without many substitutes.
I don't know.
Quoting Joshs
Perhaps Wittgenstein. Although it may be more of an attack on scientism.
That makes a lot of sense. But when that meaning, however inadequate, becomes the worldview of a culture and all institutions and values are built around it for many centuries there may be a magnificent price to pay for its diminution or cessation.
Quoting Fooloso4
Paul Feyeraband comes to mind.
It seems to me that only a theorist could potentially write off science as they cheerfully embrace all of its fruits and technologies in their congenial universities. In life theory doesn't much matter. No one worries about the problem of induction when they are parking their car in the supermarket lot.
Nietzsche said something to the effect that creators destroy.
In some ways Nietzsche and Socrates are the same in that they undermine the foundations of their society. In Socrates case too, things were already on shaky grounds.
But the creation of a new worldview owes more to Plato than to Socrates. So what does Nietzsche create and what is left to "the philosopher of the future"? His answer is he creates creators. [Edit: This is from Zarathustra. I don't have time now to find it in the text] He frees the philosopher from the shackles of the past.
In life everything we do, no matter how trivial,
is guided and informed by overarching goals that themselves belong to to normative , valuative worldviews. That’s a fundamental aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy and why he critiques the idea of science as search for truth. He not only argued, as did Feyerabend and Kuhn, that science functions as worldview, but that there is no direction toward a ‘more correct’ worldview or theory. His lesson about the death of God and nihilism wasnt to avoid worldviews but to revel in them and their destruction. He hoped the death of God would herald the rise of his kind of man, who posits an endless series of worldviews and doesn’t become attached to any of them.
To say that cars work and planes fly is to say no more than that each era’s philosophical system ‘works’ in its one pragmatic way. Deriding science isnt deriding its results, its saying that when science ‘progresses’ it works differently , not simply better , as if we were approaching a better approximation to what sits out there independent of our own aims and worldviews.
That would be is antithetical to Nietzsche’s thinking.
Could be. I've not been much interested in Niezsche's thinking to be honest. I find his style grandiose and turgid and (for me) thoroughly unreadable. Tried several of his books and never got more than about a third though any of them.
But all my life people have been throwing the Death of God at me (some of these where highly qualified academics I have known) I was curious what people thought about the thesis. And I recently noticed J B Peterson flogging the idea too so I figure the pop-culture is toying with it. I have read the relevant chapters in Zarathustra and The Gay Science and find them typically flamboyant. I think a sympathetic reading of his idea, however, is not without merit.
In relation to science - is there any method of acquiring reliable knowledge better than methodological naturalism? People can talk about contemplative insights or meditation all they want but where are the results, other than in personal experience? Good science is just a tool for providing us with the best models we currently have, it should not make higher truth proclamations.
[quote=Twilight of the Idols]And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, for we have reason!" Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. "Reason" in language -- oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.[/quote]
My view is, these 'thinnest and emptiest concepts' are indeed of a higher order of reality, but unless you're able to comprehend them properly, they do indeed become empty words. As they were handed down and ossified into theoretical dogma, they lost all connection to reality, but that is a flaw in their exponents.
Btw, please don’t tell me you prefer Jordan Peterson to Nietzsche. I will have to come to your house and hurt you. However one wants to define methodological naturalism, it is not description that can apply to the entirety of the past 400 as as a approach that science practitioners across that entire span of time would have considered as what they were doing. One can only apply it retroactively to the science of Galileo’s or Newton’s era.
The reason is that everything about how science
characterizes what it is doing changes in subtle ways in parallel with changes in philosophical worldviews. In today’s era, methodological naturalism may be incontrovertible among physicists , who are realists anyway, but not among all psychologists, some of who have ventured beyond realist and representational models of meaning.
I guess the short answer is that methodological naturalism is a help rather than a hindrance depending on how richly intricate and unified one wants one’s description of the world to be. Methodological naturalism gives the natural sciences it’s semi-arbitrary objectively causal models of things, but those are only useful up to a point. At some point physicists will realize that for the purposes of their own advancement of knowledge they will have to integrate their models with the psychology of perception.
What methodological naturalism is particularly unsuitable for , I would argue , is the understanding of myriad psychological phenomena ( consciousness , affect, empathy, language , sociality , etc). For these domains I prefer a radical constructivism.
Why do people assume someone supports Peterson just because he's referenced? I think the JP phenomenon is very interesting. I have not read anything by him but watched several lectures and interviews. I am interested in popular culture and what gains traction. I also think with Peterson many people are terribly jealous and resentful that someone like him has come along and become huge when they think they are so much smarter and better informed than Peterson. It's like all those amateur musicians who hate the success of popular artists and disparage them wherever possible. Pop-culture throws up some odd things. JP is one of the oddest I've seen.
I hear you. I take the view that consciousness , affect, empathy, language , sociality, take care of themselves and can be measured and understood. The hard problem of consciousness... I suspect science will resolve this one day and may already have come close, but people seem to absolutely hate and revile physicalist understandings of subjects they prefer to remain mysterious and connected to, shall we call it, God? The hatred for Daniel Dennett's theories (and I have no capacity to judge whether he is correct or not) is astonishing. Read some of David Bentley Hart's wonderfully vituperative reviews of Dennett's ideas. I love DBH even though I'm not in the worship business. He's a profoundly smart and flexible thinker with a tendency towards Hitchens-style polemics - coming from the other direction.
:point:
They probably don't even worry about it as they write a paper on it.
Are you then suggesting that Nietzsche didn't properly comprehend those higher concepts?
( ;) )
It’s interesting that you perceive this criticism as ‘hatred’. Says something, I think.
It is significant but not the way you insinuate. :smile: It's not me perceiving animosity any more than you are perceiving dogmatic reductionism every time someone says Daniel Dennett. Well, actually - I think you are... did you not call his life's work a schtick recently? Nevertheless, as I've written, I have kicked around with a lot of people who embrace a range of what I will call New Age beliefs (for want of a better umbrella term). They almost all hate science and anything which (as one woman I know unironically and memorably stated) 'robs the world of magic.' My philosophy tutor (a Gnostic as it happens) many years back called science 'a pseudo-religion for dumb-arses'. I think I've seen some of that language here. The vitriol and hatred I have heard for Dawkins and Sam Harris over the years is enthusiastic. And I don't even like them much myself. I posit that the hatred is because they rob the world of magic. And yes, I figure you will probably argue, if it is hatred it's because of their poorly reasoned philosophy. :wink: Could they both mean the same thing?
//the difference being that the loon left are not bestowed with the Great White Coat of scientific prestige.
How about asking them?
I don't think the New Atheists "rob the world" of magic. I feel the same way about them as I do about religion. Both are dogmatic, and in both cases, the lowly person in the pew/academic hall has no say in the matter. It makes no difference to me whether I go to church or to a science lecture at a university: in both cases, I'm expected to bow my head, unquestioningly believe what I'm told, and, for heaven's sake, keep my mouth shut. Oh, and pay them, the more, the better. To both of them, I'm just a faceless number, and at best, a source of money. This makes me feel redundant and unwilling to take seriously what they say.
But then again, maybe we're the ones making that power of their presence possible to begin with, by giving our attention to them.
I don't think we'd ever disagree on that. But hey, let's not let a little thing like the meaning of life come between us. :pray:
[quote=Wikipedia, ‘Disenchantment’] In social science, disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, whereby "the world remains a great enchanted garden”.[/quote]
(Returning to the Nietzschean theme.)
Did God ever live?
What studies did Weber base such assessments on?
Quoting Wayfarer
I've also made that point myself. Always reminded me of that last line in Animal Farm The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Quoting Wayfarer
I get this. Problem is people also ignore climate science for similar professed reasons. I think science and the notion of the expert is very poorly tolerated these days. Elites and all that. And I certainly understand this impulse. There is a Nieszchian feel to all this.
Quoting baker
We answered that earlier. It's a metaphor.
Incorrect. Climate science is clearly empirical. You have an explanatory hypothesis, and clearly observable results which confirm that hypothesis. If you think that the question of the reality of higher truths is like this, then you're not understanding the question, as it's not an empirical issue.
From what I have seen, it is true that intelligent design advocates are often climate-change deniers. This goes against them in my view.
Did you ever read or study Weber's classic work, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?
No, my point is the denialists say and think similar things about science (not talking about factual accuracy). You only have to read Andrew Bolt in Australia (the Murdoch puppet) who disparages science on climate change in similar wording you used - pop-science/lousy arguments and borrowed prestige.
I have a hard time understanding the basic premise. The idea that there was once some kind of "golden era" or "an enchanted time" when people took religion seriously (including actually believing in God) seems alien to me.
I grew up among religious people in a monoreligious monoculture. Those people didn't take religion seriously. They took seriously the keeping up of appearance of religiosity, but beyond that, they were as indifferent toward their religion as they were to the air they breathed. It seems most likely to me that this is how it has been throughout history.
It's kind of Nietzsche-lite. The elevator pitch -T[i]he fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.[/i]
That may be. i’m not jealous of Peterson, I’m jealous of philosophers who produce remarkable ideas I wish I thought of. There are untold interpretations of every major philosopher, and that is as it should be. I don’t think there are such things as ‘correct’ vs ‘incorrect’ readings , only those that to me are more or less interesting or expand the boundaries of my own thinking. Peterson’s reading of writers like Nietzsche isnt wildly outside the mainstream , it’s simply on the conservative end of that spectrum, which I think explains a lot of the hostility he gets from the left. To readers like me, Nietzsche is offering an exciting and profound worldview that is still ahead of its time 140 years later, so its a bit depressing to say the least when he is reduced to a mouthpiece for 19th century liberalism. But if I cringe at Peterson’s treatment of certain philosophers, I react similarly to the efforts of numerous respected academic writers. But to me any mention of Nietzsche or other philosophers in popular culture is welcome , even if it’s by Dwayne Johnson in ‘Fast and Furious ‘. In fact, I’d probably prefer Johnson’s take on Nietzsche to Peterson’s.
Quoting Tom Storm
Let me turn this thinking on its head a bit. Instead of the choices being those indicated by the so-called ‘hard problem’ , either a mysterious inner subjectivity or the clear light of objective empiricism, or a muddled synthesis of the two ( Chalmers) , let me suggest that both sides of that binary are caught up in an inadequate construction of reality. Dennett’s solution to the ‘mystery’ of consciousness is to pick physicalism, but in doing this he stays within the subject vs object, inner vs outer binary.
Phenomenology doesn t force us to choose between these two but instead puts them together in a much more radical way than the mere cobbling of ‘inner feeling’ and ‘outer things’.
There is only a ‘hard problem’ if one begins from a science which ignores the subject’s perspective ( relativity and qm only take the subject into account as another physical object , which is not what I’m talking about )
and a subject whose ‘values’ are irrelevant to the understanding of ‘external’ reality.
I can't say if you are correct or not (I am not qualified in the area) but I have never understood how phenomenology can settle anything. I'm assuming a realist not idealist version? Can you elaborate on how using it can help us understand the nature of consciousness? Just some indicative dot points will do.
Quoting Joshs
I only have a fleeting knowledge of his work but I am interested in anything that has traction with people - especially if it is public intellectuals. It's the phenomenon that arrests attention. I find it fascinating that JP seems to have riffed off Stephen Hicks' views on post modern Marxism without understanding that he is really referring to Frankfurt School figures, for the most part, not so much post modernists.
Give me one example of what you consider passive-aggressive. He's had thousands of interviews, so it shouldn't be hard to point to one.
Quoting Joshs
Well they don't really say much, and that's the point. As far as posturing goes -- yeah, that's pretty obvious. I wouldn't care so much if they had anything useful to say, though. But I really can't find anything. Could just be me -- who knows? But I don't see any reason to waste time with them.
Quoting Joshs
A fan? I think Chomsky is clear and relevant. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's never irrelevant or obfuscating.
Because both these men, and you, mean so little to me that's it's not worth the effort of writing it myself. If that's hard for you to figure out, again that's your issue.
Yes, I've read both of those frauds. Hence why I agree with Robinson.
I readily admit that I may be projecting here. When I began a sincere attempt to investigate the foundations of Chomsky’s political philosophy, I had a heck of a time figuring how to integrate his ideas with other political thinkers I had some familiarity with. Was he a fan of Marx? No. he stated explicitly that he was not a Marxist. Well, what about the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt school? No luck there. Postmodernists like Foucault? His discussion with Foucault , available on youtube , clearly puts that out of play. I finally came to the conclusion that Chomsky goes back to the very early era of socialist theorization, when Marx was just one among a variety of responses to capitalism, which was at that time still relatively young.
How did Chomsky end up picking what to me was a peculiarly idiosyncratic niche in political thought? This is where my potential projecting comes into play.
I began to liken Chomsky to others I have known who pride themselves on the imperviousness of their ideas to subsumption by umbrella philosophies, as if they have an instinctive abhorrence of categorization, of being mainstreamed.
This suspicion was strengthens considerably by a long video I watched of a debate between Chomsky and Dershowitz on Israeli politics. I began the video fully prepared to be on Chomsky’s side. After all , he is on the left and Dershowitz is a conservative. I really wanted him to nail Dershowitz to the wall. But to my surprise I became more and more exasperated with Chomsky’s performance. Dershowitz, as you would expect , presented straightforward lawyerly arguments that I expected to see Chomsky directly refute. Instead what I witnessed was a caginess and focus on not being pinned down at the expense of direct debate. I stated to wonder if Chomsky’s entire political career was therapy for some
neurotic relationship with his father. I know, you could probably say the same thing about a majority of philosophers. All I can tell you is the dominant impression I get from Chomsky is a need to be seen as the ultimate outsider.
Exactly. He has one edifice of interpretations, that is rigid, well-structured and thoroughly developed over two or three decades. Naturally, one caveat is that a number of his assertions on Nietzsche aren't actually tenable or universally agreeable, because he aligns them with his beliefs; but that's a price that anyone pays when listening to a critique.
Insofar as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Jung's ideas are concerned, he's a messenger, as opposed to an originator. That's why it's preferable for one to first read any texts by quintessential philosophers and academics, instead of characterizing them by virtue of how other individuals construe them.
As I say I am not qualified to explore this but my minimal understanding of Dennett consist of watching several videos of him summarizing his ideas and a few essays (by him and by detractors), but what you say doesn't seem to fit. He seems to be particularly interested to explore the subjective experience of consciousness, especially qualia and to accurately describe and explain. I understand that people dislike his conclusions.
How would a phenomenological understanding of the subject's experience provide a superior understanding? It almost sounds to me like you are saying if you label things differently the hard problem goes away. Which is not quite the same thing as solving it. Or is it?
What if I say there is a hard problem of the relation between God and nature? If as an atheist you re-label the relation between the divine plan and the actual world as an internal relationality inherent within nature itself would you say you solved the problem or dissolved it?
I have no idea what that means, Josh. What is an internal relationality inherent within nature itself? On the whole re-labeling always makes me nervous. If you re-label a serial killer as a person who is chasing their own bliss and working to reach their full potential does that mean the crimes go away?
Chomsky is an anarcho-syndicalist. Anarchism has a long tradition, and he talks very clearly about it. Related to socialism, Marxism, communism, etc., but not identical. This isn't hard to find out. So why you think it's his trying to evade being "labeled" is kind of odd. He's also, to use your term, a very big fan of Marx indeed. Also Rudolph Rocker, Bakunin, and other anarchist thinkers.
Quoting Joshs
I really can't see how anyone watches that debate and comes out thinking that Dershowitz wasn't a complete and utter weasel and fraud. Chomsky literally destroys him, and I've known people who are ultimately on the side of Dershowitz agree -- a terrible showing. Especially when he invokes "Bill Clinton told me so" when confronted with the long, extensive documentary record which Chomsky refers to and gives a sampling of. If you showed up "fully prepared" to be Chomsky's side, and yet came away "exasperated," perhaps you're simply not listening. Chomsky is a rather dull speaker, and rattles off facts and figures and terminology that's very hard to follow -- so there's a double-whammy there. Dershowitz, on the other hand, is just a buffoon -- but keeps it simple and uses a lot of debate tricks and appeals to the audience.
Maybe we're just living in different realities, I don't know. I don't even care to defend Chomsky -- but on the two points you mention, it's just too off track to ignore.
Yes, but only if you can put yourself in their shoes and see their intent as justified from their perspective , a perspective that you can build a bridge to. “Chasing ones own bliss” implies not giving a damn about other person’s feelings. That’s a no no because it implies a knowing intent to harm On the other hand , if they follow their delusional voices which tell them the victims were evils dna danger to society we would relabel the crime as an illness.
Quoting Tom Storm
As an atheist ( I assume you are one?), how would you describe the paradigm shift in thinking that takes us from a divine plan to a world which operates via its own mechanisms?
Maybe you don’t think in terms of worldviews , gestalts, paradigms and their transformations when you think about knowledge and the way it changes over the course of cultural history. If that’s the case , then relabeling as dissolving problems won’t make much sense to you because it implies the change in a gestalt.
Like, for example, by reading Maps of Meaning?
I literally can't even type the titles of these turds without laughing a little. They sound so profound. Again: "an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory" sums it up nicely.
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
It's a personal misgiving to think this fraud is "profound." What is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. A rather thorough, accurate article is all you deserve -- and you're lucky you got that. Please go read more Maps of Meaning and be happy with it, I don't care.
“Chomsky is a very unattractive personality. (I don’t mean that he’s a bad person; this is about his public presentation only.) He is bullying, hectoring, and tends to berate those who disagree with him. He is intellectually ungenerous – he appears not to have heard of the principle of charity.[1] In her 2003 New Yorker profile of Chomsky, Larissa MacFarquhar described his prose this way:
To read Chomsky’s recent political writing at any length is to feel almost physically damaged. The effect is difficult to convey in a quotation because it is cumulative. The writing is a catalogue of crimes committed by America, terrible crimes, and many of them, but it is not they that produce the sensation of blows: it is Chomsky’s rage as he describes them. His sentences slice and gash, envenomed by a vicious sarcasm. His rhythm is repetitive and monotonous, like the hacking of a machine. The writing is as ferocious as the actions it describes, but coldly so. It is not Chomsky’s style to make death live, to prick his readers with lurid images. He uses certain words over and over, atrocity, murder, genocide, massacre, murder, massacre, genocide, atrocity, atrocity, massacre, murder, genocide, until, through repetition, the words lose their meaning and become technical. The sentences are accusations of guilt, but not from a position of innocence or hope for something better: Chomsky’s sarcasm is the scowl of a fallen world, the sneer of Hell’s veteran to its appalled naïfs.[2]
Why does this appeal to Chomsky’s followers?
For one thing, entering into Chomsky’s world provides some of the benefits of conspiracy theory. Not that Chomsky is a conspiracy theorist. But his model of politics offers an oversimplified, easy-to-understand framework that enables those who adopt it to make superficial sense of the political world, without having to study it closely.[3] It also – again like conspiracy theory – allows them to imagine that they possess a kind of inside knowledge of politics. While the rest of us are beguiled by patriotic clichés and nationalist myths, they see through the ideological illusions and understand power as it is really exercised, namely cynically and brutally.
Chomsky delivers these goods by adopting an archetypal American persona, that of the populist village explainer.[4] [5] The activity of the village explainer consists essentially in debunking, exposing the lies of conventional political wisdom and offering an apparently simpler, clearer, and better-informed appraisal. Chomsky achieves this by reducing political actors and events to caricatures, abstractions, and avatars of crude causal mechanisms. Chomsky’s tone, like that of the village explainer, is basically melodramatic: the virtuous poor versus the parasitic rich, predatory banks and corporations amassing profits on the backs of honest workers, government officials and their lackeys in the media dedicated to hiding the truth and deceiving worthy citizens. With his heavily footnoted essays, allusions to “respected” sources, and references to “official” documents, Chomsky creates an appearance of expertise that lends a spurious authority to his explanations. He offers a dumbed-down picture of politics as if it were the result of keen analysis and laborious scholarship.
To those who haven't bought into the cult, Chomsky comes off as a tedious windbag flogging a crackpot theory. To the initiated, he is a fount of wisdom and insight.
Like many very clever people, Chomsky is prone to acting like a know-it-all. An occupational hazard of intellectuals is the tendency to believe that if you read something, understand it, and find it plausible, then it must be true. Such people memorize an enormous amount of superficial information pertaining to a vast range of topics. They forget that not all forms of knowledge and judgment can be acquired by book-learning alone, and they tend to mistake the map for the territory.”
Frederick Dolan, U.C. Berkeley
Joshs, I appreciate your taking the time.
All atheism means to me is I do not have good evidence to support the proposition that a god exists. Nothing changes in the world based on my belief. The 'facts' do not change only my relationship to them. This is not a significant enough transformative event. I have never been committed to any 'supernatural' ideas so I can't say I have ever experienced the clanging of a paradigm chief inside me. But I well understand the idea from Kuhn and the philosophy of science.
Quoting Joshs
I work in the area of mental health and addictions so I am well aware of the various narratives held by individuals, sub-cultures and society.
Yes, but do you view a scientific theory as essentially a value narrative? And do you then see empirical facts as sub components of those value narratives , such that the ‘fact ‘ would be incoherent apart from the narrative that gives it meaning? If you do, then isn’t the shift from one narrative to another a ‘dissolving’ rather than a ‘solving’ of the problem as it is defined via the
old narrative?
But these words by MacFarquhar are more ad hom than a robust analysis of his work. There is a paucity of good examples and it still leaves open the question is he right.
Depends on the theory but I guess so - I generally think of them as the best model we have for now based on the available evidence.
I see them as both as hominem and a reflection of his political work because I think his anarchism conveniently allows him to see cartoon villains around every corner. Is he right? Is he right that the complex motivations of individual actors and groups in society can be reduced to the villainous caricatures that he often turns them into?
My political preference is for postmodernists like Deleuze.
But keep in mind that the evidence will itself be a product of the narrative. New evidence only becomes evidence when the narrative changes. So in a way the shift in paradigm precedes and makes possible the appearance of evidence. The narrative doesn’t just organize the evidence. It produces it.
Well, if you have already made the assumption that he is reductive cartoonist, then no. But it could easily be maintained that the power grabs, turf wars and the military industrial complex actions he describes are in fact made by bunch of unnuanced, evil cocksuckers engaged in human rights violations on a daily basis, for mere money, land and ideology.
But this is like talking abstractly about the idea of truth. It is better to look at specific examples of C's work on a given issue and carefully parse his analysis. Is it really so bereft and reductive? I don't have a view and this isn't the place.
I know this is a strong view with some. I wonder if there are some tricks of language involved. I need to ponder more.
Quoting Xtrix
This is indicative of Hitchens' razor.
If we entertain the notion that St Augustine was right, it may have been that Galileo were welcomed, and science imbued with divine authority, and technology applied in accord with science as an emerging, sacred understanding of reality. And had that occurred, it would have been as if a red carpet unfurled at the feet of man, welcoming him into the future.
Nietzsche's understanding of evolution was scientifically quite poor, and viewed almost entirely through the lens of a theologically informed sociological perspective, and it's this that leads him astray. He believed man in a state of nature to be an amoral brute - and took this as an ideal moral model - the ubermensch is modelled on a misconception of man.
With the benefit of almost 200 years of scientific progress, specifically in biology, genetics, anthropology and so on, its obvious that morality (of sorts) is evident in animal behaviours. Jane Goodall identifies mutual grooming and food sharing particularly in primate behaviours, and so morality existed in us prior to the occurrence of intellectual intelligence. Morality is behaviourally intelligent and deeply ingrained, and one might argue that is the probable source of the values expressed in religious texts, for the political purpose of defining an objective source we are all subject to. That's civilisation. Nowadays, some degree of democracy gives us some input into the values of society; I think it's just the same. We agree what's right and should act accordingly.
No question. And think of this - if humans didn't have innate empathy we wouldn't have been able to rear children. Empathy is the gateway to a veritable cosmos of moral considerations.
But look at human history since the enlightenment project began.... is there a relationship between this and widespread apathy, the failure of democratic institutions, increased tribalism, the crumbling of social order? You can certainly make a case for this. I'm not a fan of identify politics but I read an interesting piece (can't remember where) that they are the product of our dying Christian tradition rather than the oft referenced post-modern Marxism. Food for thought.
Some of that is true, some is blatantly ridiculous. My feeling is that Chomsky could intellectually mop the floor with any of those writers, as he's done in nearly every debate I've seen.
To accuse him of being a "bully" of some kind is common, and kind of a joke. He's not a pushover, true. But he's never insulting and always sticks to the facts, whether or not he's curt. Sam Harris made the same claims, for example. And I like Sam. But if you read the e-mail exchanges, it's pretty clear that Chomsky, although clearly being cantankerous, is also factually correct. The same is true in most cases. He's very rarely factually wrong, so far as I can see. That's all I'm interested in -- not in opinions about his personality, his voice, or his writing style. Even if the claims are true about those things -- and they usually aren't -- it's more or less irrelevant.
So already to compare to JP or Zizek is irrelevant, because neither say anything value even despite their posturing.
Well done. :clap:
Quoting Aryamoy Mitra
Very true. Nor do I care to. They're so irrelevant as to not even be worth the effort. Pointing out that they're frauds, when possible, is sufficient. As it is with most charlatans. If I said Deepak Chopra was basically a fraud, I don't see many disagreeing -- unless it's a New Age forum. But if someone did, I would certainly not be willing to quote him chapter and verse and have a long debate about it. Those who are "fans" won't be swayed anyway. Likewise for Peterson's following. Anyone with such poor judgment isn't even worth debating. So I leave it to them. And to you.
Quoting Xtrix
Quoting Xtrix
I'm not a follower of his, only someone who is familiar with his doctrines.
[quote ]Those who are "fans" won't be swayed anyway. Likewise for Peterson's following.
— Xtrix
[quote=Bacon]
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
...
The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance.
[/quote]
Precisely so! How could ubermensch have raised untamenches?
Quoting Tom Storm
You over-dramatize, surely. When has there not been apathy, tribalism and democratic blundering? Undemocratic blundering - back in the old days! Things are better now than they were - despite everything. Maybe it's that everything is suddenly everywhere by virtue of the internet. That's a big change I don't think we were quite prepared for. I do believe the omnipresent availability of knowledge will prove ultimately beneficial, but it's only during the course of my lifetime we've gone from private citizens reading newspapers, to every one and where online all the time.
I'll keep posting as long as you continue not to see the point.
I guess that'll be a while, given you're a Peterson devotee. So be it. :yawn:
I'm a critic of his, if anything.
Quoting Xtrix
Good for you!
I wonder if we could get away from JP.
At the risk of bringing this back to Nietzsche, I find myself drawn to this quote:
We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't know if that was actually devised by Nietzsche, but it definitely appears characteristic of him. As you'll know, most of Beyond Good and Evil's opening paragraphs were dedicated to repudiating the motives of Western Philosophers as being expedient, and indeed cowardly (since they were, at least in part, unwilling to justify why truths were preferable to untruths - a property he termed the Will to Truth). It's a key insight, since it sheds light on what we're best at - believing and acting exactly as we need to in order to achieve sustenance, before convincing ourselves that we're aiming at a higher ideal.
At something like the opposite end of utlility, or as the outmost perversion of utility:
[quote=Nietzsche]
The reading from the vantage of a distant star of the capital letters of our earthly life, would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the especially ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting—presumably their one and only pleasure. ...For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of jealousy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy; while a sense of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of the self. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself to be a rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition, physiological vitality, decreases....
Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will look for error in those very places where the life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of "Subject" and "Object"—errors, nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one's own ego, to deny to one's self one's own "reality"—what a triumph! and here already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason; and this ecstasy culminates in the ascetic self-contempt, the ascetic scorn of one's own reason making this decree: there is a domain of truth and of life, but reason is specially excluded therefrom.. .. By the bye, even in the Kantian idea of "the intellegible character of things" there remains a trace of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic, that schism which likes to turn reason against reason; in fact, "intelligible character" means in Kant a kind of quality in things of which the intellect comprehends this much, that for it, the intellect, it is absolutely incomprehensible. After all, let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity"—objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and non-sensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52319/52319-h/52319-h.htm
Some may note that Nietzsche himself manifests some of reason's self-mutilation. As he notes elsewhere, his atheistic critical thinking is a late stage of asceticism.
What I never understand with Nietzsche is how the negation of all philosophy can itself be included with philosophy.
Quoting Joshs
Naturalism is the study of 'what you see out the window'. Phenomenology is the study of 'you looking out the window'.
It always makes me smile when people say in earnest piety: there is no truth.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do the windows have to be in the same building?
I'm not someone who generally trusts their phenomenological impressions. How to you stop your conscious self from providing an 'enhanced' experience of seeing/hearing/doing narrative?
Could it be argued that some forms of meditation are a kind of phenomenology?
I've got 2,594 of Rohr's daily "Meditations" in my email inbox. I used to read them all the time, but then life got in the way so I started saving them every day with the promise to myself that I would start catching up after I retired. It's time I start! No excuses now. I've also got "Things Hidden" and "Falling Upward" on my book shelf, as yet unread. Anyway, I'm no Christian (except in the Universal Pantheist sense), but I like him and his angle on things. Interesting to see him mentioned here.
Is this the same as 'I don't know'?
It's not what it's the 'study of' which differentiates naturalism in this context. I could read Tarot cards and would be quite accurate in saying that what I'm studying is the future. My methods of doing so, however, make it highly questionable that I will ever accumulate a corpus of information about the future.
What differentiates naturalism (and appeals to those who - perhaps excessively - idolise it), is that the corpus of information it yields about it's object of study is readily shared, without (by and large), the person holding that information having very much impact on it. If an engineer says a car works, it probably works no less for me than it does for you.
Phenomenology may well study 'you looking out of the window', but what consigns it to the lesser status it suffers is not that, it's the fact that the corpus of information is derives from that study is completely ephemeral, having no anchor of 'fit-to-world' to hold it.
It's a constant diversion of the woo-merchants to start by saying "science doesn't account for X", and end by promoting their own version of woo which has X as it's subject matter. But an investigation's having X as a subject matter does not in any way entail that that investigation will yield any useful information about X.
Perhaps the same way that some Christians say that theirs is not a religion, but the truth.
Not the point at issue. Nobody disputes that modern engineering is a marvellous thing, but it’s applicability to the problems of philosophy is another matter.
Not sure how you can study yourself looking out the window unless it means reflecting on your subjective experience of your experience (sorry for the gratuitous repetition). Introspection, I guess. No doubt there are subtitles that render my understanding barbaric and unformed as far as those in the know are concerned.
There's a long tradition of doing this in a range of ways so I can't dismiss it. I do wonder how one does phenomenology with any kind of rigour and if anyone can provide an example of a benefit it provides in more specific terms.
Sure, the phenomenological perspective is useless for scientific purposes. But one's own experience is all that a person has, and all that is or can be relevant to a person.
Even when one contemplates the words of others (whatever those words may be about), it still comes down to one's own experience of those words.
No one doubts that but the question remains, so what? To what extent do we want to amplify or diminish this curiosity.
It's pretty much what practice according to Early Buddhism is about.
See this article, for example: https://pathpress.org/notes-on-meditation/
On the contrary, how could one not be interested in this private experience and how could one not explore it?
Perfect example. Engineering is not applicable to the problems of philosophy. No-one's going to disagree there. Nothing in that means that alternative approaches are applicable. You can't support the applicability of any branch or approach in philosophy by saying that alternatives to it are not applicable.
Yeah, I think that's true. But the data you have to hand is always only your recollection of the experience, not the experience itself, and that recollection will be pre-filtered by what you expect it to be, which in turn will be influenced by the type of analysis you believe in. so you're not really gathering data so much as fabricating it in the form you expect from scraps.
True, but again 'all we have' is not sufficient to demonstrate that a study has a corpus of usefully shareable information either.
‘It’s neither an engineering problem, nor a problem of any other kind!'
There's a passage I sometimes refer to. I was going to post it earlier in this thread, or some other thread, and now can't remember if I have, but it's relevant. It has to do with the problem that is introduced BY the 'modern scientific approach', which wants to detemine the objective truth of things as they are in themselves, irrespective of one's opinion, perspective or view. This it does by introducing the notion of the quantitative dimension of the primary objects of analysis - mass, velocity, distribution, density, position, and so on. It holds that the objects of analysis are in some fundamental sense self-existent, or mind-independent (which means more or less the same). That is why I referred to naturalism as being 'that which you see out the window'. It is also why physics became paradigmatic, not only for science, but for knowledge generally - hence, 'physicalism', the contention that what is physical is real. I believe, @Tom Storm, this is the paradigm you default to - hence your references to the 'evidential basis' for your beliefs. Of course, you are far from alone there, it's probably the view of the majority.
However it became clear to some philosophers that there is something fundamental which is missed by the 'subject-object' relationship invoked by physics (not least because of a conceptual issue in physics itself). This is because at the outset, modern physics leaves out, or brackets out, the observing subject, so as to derive as purely objective a view as possible of the observed object, the so-called 'view from nowhere'. The problem is, as phenomenology saw, that we are in fact not outside or, or separate to, reality as a whole. We're separate from this or that aspect of reality, from the micro- to the cosmic level. But ultimately we're not outside of or apart from reality as such. This is the import of Husserl's concept of lebensworld and umwelt, that we live in a 'meaning world', not a world of objects per se.
It is this sense of otherness or separateness or outsideness that lead to what philosopher Richard Bernstein has referred to as 'the Cartesian anxiety'.
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
You've literally just repeated, for the third time now, the exact deception I originally posted about. That entire post demonstrates (quite admirably) how science does not account for certain qualitative values.
It does nothing whatsoever toward demonstrating that any alternative study does account for those values. (As opposed to it simply claiming to do so).
If the claim of scientism (that science does indeed account for them) is dismissed, then a claim alone is clearly insufficient ground to believe any study does so satisfactorily.
Why would one want to do such a study?
Here I'm assuming you're talking about what is usually understood as "scientific study", and the topic are personal/private experiences.
As with all studies, one interested in a particular field of study has to play by the rules of said field.
This is true whether we're talking about the field of what is usually understood as "scientific study" or whether we're talking about what is usually understood as "spiritual study".
Staying within the domain of one field, one will not see the merit of other fields, nor be able to study them.
Yes, it's a claim. A claim made by relatively small, highly specialized groups of people. If one wishes to test those claims, one has to become a member of said highly specialized group of people and play by their rules. (Just like one has to earn some degree and other credentials in science (ie. become a member of the group called "scientists") if one wishes to properly understand the claims that science makes and to test them.)
This is an inescapable problem that applies to every field of study when observed by an outsider.
Which field of study does satisfactorily address the question "What is green?" Chemistry or linguistics? Or maybe physics? Psychology?
No. I was referring to any non-scientific investigation.
Quoting baker
I think that's true to an extent. My comments here were aimed at non-scientists (in the main), so the critique would still apply. If one needs to be embedded in Buddhist practice to be able to judge what it can and cannot discover, then we should expect to hear about the limits of neuroscience only from actual neuroscientists. Alternatively, if layman can say what neuroscience can't account for it seems one-sided to say the least to claim that I'd have to practice religion to be able to comment on what it can't account for.
Quoting baker
Yep. This is basically the point I was making. "science doesn't account for..." can either be treated as a lay claim (in which case we can make no lesser claim of any other field without full knowledge of it's content), or it can be treated as an expert claim, in which case it should only come from someone who is an expert in the field concerned.
As such, the claim here, oft repeated, that science does not account for X in the way that religion/phenomenology/woo does, can only come from a Buddhist neuroscientist!
No, this is a common misapprension of phenomenology as introspection into an inner subjective realm. It is an accurate depiction of the everyday use of the term phenomenological, but philosophical phenomenology after Husserl is about the replacement of naturalism’s assumption of a ‘subject looking’ vs ‘objects out the window’ binary with a different binary:subject and object are mutually created and recreated in each moment of experience.
Phenomenology redefines the nature of ‘what is out the window’ just as much as it redefines the subjective aspect of the relation to the world. Husserl spends as much time on the constitution of the real , the empirically objective and the socially constituted interpersonal realm he does on the subjective side.
What differentiates naturalism is its presupposition that the person holding a meaning can define it as ‘information’, which presumes that the person holding it “ does. to have much impact on it “. That’s the classic realist trope, the supposed independence of the real world information from the subject that apprehends it.
What consigns it to lessor status is that it is more difficult to grasp. Nevertheless , as I have mentioned to you before , phenomenology is only one of a growing list of branches of philosophy which are being joined by psychological approaches which abandon representational realism.
As far as ‘ anchor of fit to world, surprisingly , a reciprocal anchor of fit extending from subject tot world and world to subject can actually be a more pragmatically useful sort of anchor of fit than the representational realist version.
If I send you a box of Oreos, will you read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception? If after reading it you still feel the same about phenomenology at least you’ll have a better sense of what’s being compared here
Josh, that sounds good but what does it actually mean? Can someone provide a basic example of phenomenology at work looking out a window or doing something interesting? Vague articulations of subject-object and the observing subject aren't really useful to me unless we can see what the contribution of this perspective might be.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm sure glad I'm not alone in this - in my shopping for ideas so far in life it seems the most useful approach based on both personal experience and human continuity. But I am interested in what people believe and why.
I know is you’d like something f you can wrap your hands around, but its a real bitch to provide a summary, at least for me. The best I can think of at the moment is a description of how Husserl comes up with the notion of a real spatial object. That may give us at least a starting point.
Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenological philosophy, attempted to chart a course between realism and idealism by grounding all experience in perception and grounding perception in structures of intentionality in which the subjective and objective aspects(what he called the noetic and noematic poles) are inextricably dependent on each other and inseparable. He was very much influenced in his project by the work of Franz Brentano, but went beyond Brentano's notion of inentionality by abandoning Brrentano's naturalism.
One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.
We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.
Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.
In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.
From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.
Nice metaphor. If all you are looking for is X then an X detector is all you will need. Of course in life it is pretty easy to show the guy with the X detector that there are also Y's and Z's of value which can't be found this way. For me the issue is not so much in the nature of a limited approach but in the quality of any evidence or reasons for taking up an alternative approach.
I think the most profound aspect of their part poaches is i. thei integration of affect, feeling, emotion and mood on the one hand and cognition, rationality and intentionality on the other. This split is really at the heart of the ‘hard problem,
I imagine like existentialism the word has numerous applications.
You mention psychotherapy - are you a psychologist or talking about in treatment experiences?
https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer
I've thought about this in different ways for many years, and always asked myself how does it assist us and where does it take us? All knowledge is tentative and subject to observer bias and is held in place by a broader cultural presuppositions and personal psychological factors. True. Any method of understanding/apprehending the world has limits or conceits. But some models (to me anyway) have more deficits than others. Living in a 'meaning world' is just another model complete with concerns - which we can dig up later if we need to.
The various critiques of methodological naturalism always reminds me of a cute bit of doggerel I used to see up on the wall in a cake shop:
As you ramble on through life, Brother, Whatever be your goal, Keep your eye upon the doughnut, And not upon the hole.
This aspect of Husserl's thought has a lot in common with Buddhist philosophy. It is the basis of ??nyat?, the emptiness of objects of perception, 'emptiness' meaning 'lack of intrinsic existence'.
Quoting Joshs
I tried to read this but couldn't make any headway. The only insights I've been able to glean about him are from articles and abstracts.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think that sense of anxiety - angst, in German philosophy - has to be strong enough to motivate you. Today's world is a safe space if we want to cushion ourselves against it. I think one of the reasons that philosophy from earlier times was so vivid and dramatic, is because life was much harder then.
Quoting Tom Storm
Plato set the bar for knowledge very high. I wonder how much of what we think we know would clear that bar. As I said, I think modern culture creates a safe space for delusion. A lot of what people believe is real, incontravertible, is ephemeral and insubstantial. But it's very hard to perceive that in a culture in which illusion is amplified.
But this is the role of philosophy - to examine what we think we know and to show its insufficiencies. I confess i don't feel I've been able to accomplish anything of note, although understanding this is itself an accomplishment of sorts.
//actually I sometimes think about the chapter on Nietszche in Russell's History of Western Philosophy. It features an imaginary dialogue between Nietszche and the Buddha on suffering. I think Russell makes his feelings clear, and I generally agree with them.//
I think this is true up to a point but this is pretty general and would be better understood (not that I am advocating we do this now) through specific examples. I'm not crazy about your term 'safe space for delusion' as it sounds a bit Dawkins. But I get your drift - perhaps only too well. I understand you're a Platonist of sorts and this position always intrigues me. I don't think mainstream (if there is such a thing left) Western culture amplifies much of substance right now except marketing clichés and appeals to emotion. Science may be amplified in parts of academe but the average person I suspect knows only a little more about science then they do about psychophysical parallelism. Are we entitled to views we can't justify? Maybe this is called being human.
Not that you need to hear this from me, but generally I find your approach to these matters (shall we call it, The Nature of Reality?) balanced and prudent and I know you're stated somewhere that you approach philosophy with a kind of conservatism, despite, from where I am sitting, some more reformist tendencies.
I have read the whole thread up to this point. One element that hasn't been pointed out yet is that Nietzsche does have a method for locating causes as rigorous as many "scientific" models he criticizes. In The Genealogy of Morals, one set of conditions binds the alternatives to it. Changes happen but they are also new expressions of what happened before. Finding this ground is not like consulting a map before taking a trip. It is not like a lot of things. But the necessity it refers to is not optional. It is a claim upon lived experience. Nietzsche challenges anybody to disagree.
The dialectic opposing this approach is voiced by thinkers like Leo Strauss who charge Nietzsche with being an "historicist" rather than someone who recognizes the "discovery of nature." In that context, the issue is not about phenomena as such but what can be included as phenomena.
"Who is that person behind the curtain?" - Dorothy
I think the historicist or determinist charge is probably fair, but is he not more that this too?
Quoting Valentinus
I'll look for an accessible article on Nietzsche's epistemology. Everyone seems to describe him as a perspectivist.
Maybe the charge is fair. But in what court of consideration will the matter be judged?
Being accused of being both an historicist and a determinist at the same time is odd. Strauss only concerns himself with charging N of being the former. The idea of Eternal Recurrence is a kind of determinism. But it is aimed specifically against the world and us in it being seen as parts of an overall plan. He calls it a doctrine. A god to up put a fight against other gods. It is not presented the way the Apollonian and Dionysian are presented as grounds for our existence.
Quoting Tom Storm
There is a large disagreement about what being a perspectivist entails. There are some who dismiss N for using this language because they assume that he doesn't accept that being in different places to see things from different points of view requires accepting an "objectivity" that he is said to deny. It seems more simple to me to read the text to mean he did embrace the reality of the different places.
Your results will vary.
:up:
[quote=Nietzsche]
I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters—that dignified philosophic abstinence to which[Pg 196] a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the factum brutum, that fatalism in "petits faits" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation)—all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,—make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject—he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"—has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself—the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable[Pg 197] females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it—and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, our world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief—even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine
....
[A]rt, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic corruption that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for[Pg 200] instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life).
...
Has, perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his... irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane—he rolls faster and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"—Well! this would be the straight way—to the old ideal?—All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as unnatural—by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason—nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's contempt of himself, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to counteract the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's victory over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query as God?
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52319/52319-h/52319-h.htm
I quote this not to agree or disagree with all of it but because it's stimulating.
Timely quote.
Endless possibilities here. "Plato a douchebag, Homer a genius: discuss". I get the feeling that the people who like FN already agree with him.
Nietzsche had an enormous influence on Strauss. If you are interested see the transcripts of his lectures on Nietzsche:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo26955789.html
Here is the abstract from Laurence Lampert's Leo Strauss and Nietzsche:
The influential political philosopher Leo Strauss has been credited by conservatives with the recovery of the great tradition of political philosophy stretching back to Plato. Among Strauss's most enduring legacies is a strongly negative assessment of Nietzsche as the modern philosopher most at odds with that tradition and most responsible for the sins of twentieth-century culture--relativism, godlessness, nihilism, and the breakdown of family values. In fact, this apparent denunciation has become so closely associated with Strauss that it is often seen as the very core of his thought. In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, the eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert offers a controversial new assessment of the Strauss-Nietzsche connection. Lampert undertakes a searching examination of the key Straussian essay, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil." He shows that this essay, written toward the end of Strauss's life and placed at the center of his final work, reveals an affinity for and debt to Nietzsche greater than Strauss's followers allow. Lampert argues that the essay comprises the most important interpretation of Nietzsche ever published, one that clarifies Nietzsche's conception of nature and of human spiritual history and demonstrates the logical relationship between the essential themes in Nietzsche's thought--the will to power and the eternal return.
Edit: It was Nietzsche who taught Strauss how to read and write between the lines.
Quoting Valentinus
Is Strauss championing empiricism ( the discovery of nature) over what he is reading as a subjectivism in Nietzsche?I think the causative dynamic of will to power would be a genealogical- psychoanalytic method of historical analysis, a differential of forces.
I don't like the tone either, though I liked it more when I was in my 20s (what a surprise!). I tolerate the tone for the richness of thought. I speculate that maybe his mad passion (cause of the tone) was also cause of the richness. This stuff burned in him.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think you are probably right about 'younger' thinkers, but personally I'd be slow to generalize here. Maybe Nietzsche is battling his inner Plato. They are both something like supreme prose poets. Thinkers I trust have said that they are both masters of prose in their respective languages, and even in translation both of their gifts are clear and perhaps similar. Both are also dialectical, crammed with personalities (plural.)
You posted a quote earlier that inspired me to get that book back out. Thanks!
Quoting Joshs
Strauss locates the "discovery of nature" as an accomplishment of Aristotle and the like. The issue of the "subject" is whether human nature exists or some other realm of causes is involved. Strauss seems to be avoiding the role of empiricists and meta-physicians who used "history" before Nietzsche did.
I should make clear that I don't agree with him. But he is the one who said that bothering to oppose a point of view is a recognition of it. Maybe even an argument for it. It comes with the territory.
:point:
BTW, the theme of recognition is also great...the struggle to be recognized, the will-to-recognition...
Sounds like an argument borrowed from the Tao Te Ching. I'm disappointed to learn that Nietzsche is a metaphysician after all. :wink:
What's funny is the repetition of the 'getting out of the cave' motif. Eventually, the 'cave' is just the cave motif itself, so one tries to get out of trying to get out the cave, or out of the cave-like illusion that there's a cave to get out of. It's hard to imagine a way out of this structure. Anyone with a story to tell is going to have something like a good guy and a bad guy and something like a journey from a bad place to a good place. Even the 'anti-philosophical' Wittgenstein has his bottle and flies.
Danke!
BTW, found another quote that inteprets Nietzsche without the annoying tone.
[quote=link]
As early as 1873, Nietzsche described metaphor as the originary process of what the intellect presents as "truth." "The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops its chief power in dissimulation." "A nerve-stimulus, first transcribed [iibertragen] into an image [Bild] ! First metaphor! The image again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he (the creator of language] leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one." In its simplest outline, Nietzsche's definition of metaphor seems to be the establishing of an identity between dissimilar things. Nietzsche's phrase is "Gleich machen" ( make equal ), calling to mind the German word "Gleichnis"-image, simile, similitude, comparison, allegory, parable-an unmistakable pointer to figurative practice in general. "Every idea originates through equating the unequal." "What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; ... truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, ... coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." I hold on here to the notions of a process of figuration and a process of forgetfulness. In this early text, Nietzsche describes the figurative drive as "that impulse towards the formation of metaphors, that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment-for thereby we should reason away man himself . . ..Later he will give this drive the name "will to power." Our so-called will to truth is a will to power because "the so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer." Nietzsche's sense of the inevitable forcing of the issue, of exercising power, comes through in his italics: " 'Thinking' in primitive conditions (preorganic) is the crystallization of forms . . .. In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemas, ... making equal what is new." The human being has nothing more to go on than a collection of nerve stimuli. And, because he or she must be secure in the knowledge of, and therefore power over, the "world" (inside or outside), the nerve stimuli are explained and described through the categories of figuration that masquerade as the categories of "truth." These explanations and descriptions are "interpretations" and reflect a human inability to tolerate undescribed chaos-"that the collective character [Gesamtcharakter] of the world ... is in all eternity chaos-in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [human weaknesses-Menschlichkeiten] ."As Nietzsche suggests, this need for power through anthropomorphic defining compels humanity to create an unending proliferation of interpretations whose only "origin," that shudder in the nerve strings, being a direct sign of nothing, leads to no primary signified. As Derrida writes, Nietzsche provides an "entire thematics of active interpretations, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself."
[/quote]
https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf
I like the idea that 'analogy is the core of cognition,' that the 'metaphysical' animal is a metaphorical animal. Poets all, even when we'd rather not be.
This quote is from the intro. In general I like this book, though Derrida can be exhausting to read.
Here's one more.
[quote=link]
Now if the "subject" is thus put in question, it is clear that the philosopher creating his system must distrust himself as none other. And indeed Nietzsche articulates this problem often. He couches his boldest insights in the form of questions that we cannot dismiss as a rhetorical ploy. Writing on "The Uses and Abuses of History" as early as 1874, he warns us: "And this present treatise, as I will not attempt to deny, shows the modern note of a weak personality in the intemperateness of its criticism, the unripeness of its humanity, in the too frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from arrogance to scepticism." The spirit of self-diagnosis is strong in every Nietzschean text. "Every society has the tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures-at least in imagination ... Among immoralists it is the moralist: Plato, for example, becomes a caricature in my hands." Quite in passing, he places a warning frame around all his philosophizing: "One seeks a picture of the world in that philosophy in which we feel freest; i.e., in which our most powerful drive feels free to function. This will also be the case with me!" In a passage in The Gay Science, he spells out his version of the particular problem that leads Heidegger and Derrida to writing under erasure : How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense, " does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the otherhand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence [ein auslegendes Dasein]-that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspective forms [perspektivische Form]" and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.
[/quote]
(Still not being notified of certain posts - I only found this one by chance)
Quoting Joshs
It's not just a presumption though is it? It works. I presume that in seeing a 'tree' and studying it, I'm not having much impact on the social construction 'tree', but I'd be absolutely right about that, the social construction changes very slowly in response to thousands of small changes and even then the very basics (form, colour, physical relation) barely change at all over millennia. I get that it's an assumption, but not one is made lightly, nor without good cause.
This is clearly not the case with phenomenology (as colloquially defined - I note your different technical specification). Here we have descriptions of 'experience' change with the wind, from minute-to-minute sometimes, and notoriously well affected by mood, cultural milieu, and recent history.
I do have a good deal of sympathy for the reduction of the binary you describe. I think metaphysically you're right. But pragmatically, there's such a wide gulf in the degree to which we expect the subject to 'form' the object between, say, physics and religious experience, that if we were to be more careful about our language we'd be doing little more than changing the names. A peppercorn royalty paid to to Husserl but otherwise business as usual.
Quoting Joshs
I'd like to hear about some examples of this.
Quoting Joshs
I don't know what Oreos really are (some kind of biscuit, I think), but I will add it to the reading list.
Nietzsche's rejection of human nature is the rejection of an essential nature, a teleology, an actualization of the human form or kind.
In The Uses and Abuses of History Nietzsche talks about first and second natures. Our first nature is our "inherited customary nature". Eventually this is rejected. In its place
"We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies."
This cycle repeats itself, every
"...first nature was at one time or another once a second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature."
It is for this reason Nietzsche says:
"This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential."
"With the phrase “the unhistorical” I designate the art and the power of being able to forget and to enclose oneself in a horizon with borders; “superhistorical” I call the powers which divert the gaze from what is developing back to what gives existence an eternal and unchanging character, to art and
religion. Science (for it is science which would talk about poisons) sees in that force, in these powers opposing forces, for it maintains that only the observation of things is true and right, the scientific way of considering things, which everywhere sees what has come into being as something historical and
never as something eternally living. Science lives in an inner contradiction against the eternalizing powers of art and religion just as much as it hates forgetfulness, the death of knowledge, when it seeks to remove all limitations of horizons and to hurl human beings into an infinite sea without frontiers, a sea of light waves of acknowledged becoming."
@Tom Storm
All of this sheds light on the question of the death of God.
Those essays sound interesting. I will check them out.
In his book, Natural Right and History, Strauss does a poor job of reading between the lines of Nietzsche. For instance:
Casting Friedrich in the role of Thrasymachus is a popular activity.
In regards to viewing political power in the context of cultural formation, it is puzzling to me that for Strauss, Nietzsche is the only donkey available for such work when Hegel is nearby, quietly nibbling upon the grass.
I am away from my books for the next few weeks and so cannot read the passage in context or any footnotes to passages from Nietzsche.
I will note that potestas is a term from Roman law. "The rights of the sovereign", that is, the lawful power or authority of the sovereign. That power or right is independent of its just or moral application or use. It is in this way "inseparable from moral neutrality: right declares what is permitted as distinguished from what is honorable."
Thrasymachus claimed that justice is the advantage of the stronger. This is different that what Strauss is saying. He is pointing out that the question of potentas and more general power is separate from the question of justice or morality.
In the Will to Power Nietzsche says: “What determines your rank is the quanta of power you are; the rest is cowardice.” That is, a measured amount of power, which supports Strauss' contention that "power can be measured". Based on the quote from Natural Right and History it is not clear if the reference to Nietzsche mat this point is limited to the his use of the term 'quanta'.
The answer to why Nietzsche rather than Hegel might have something to do with the difference between their understanding of history.
You have fairly represented what Strauss is discussing in the passage. I question that "power" as conceived by Nietzsche is the equivalent of political might as conceived by Hobbes. What is deemed to be "honorable" is integral with the ordering of rank.
I don't think Strauss was suggesting an equivalence. One key difference is Nietzsche's focus on the individual as opposed to Hobbes' sovereign within whom all power lies. The importance of the individual for Nietzsche not a matter of rights but of the power to invent and create.
Insofar as someone is just repeating the claims of experts from a particular field, and is straightforward about doing so, it's not clear what the problem is. Other than perhaps that they're trying to gain some benefit for themselves, by association. I guess that's a philosophical-ish equivalent of name-dropping at a party.
Re: underline part: Sure, and this is trivially true. Science does not account for, say, the meaning of life the way religion does, nor the way economics or art theory do. One needn't be an expert in either field in order to notice this.
It's not just the old science vs. woo, mind you. In many fields of human interest, but which are of vital importance to many people, science is quite useless or inapplicable. Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ...
It is important to consider what it is knowledge of. Socrates acknowledged that the artisans had knowledge. The knew their materials and how to work with them to produce a product. If asked the could give an account (a logos) of what they were doing and why they did it the way they did.
It is when it comes to what Socrates calls the highest and most important things that we have no knowledge. Self-knowledge is important with regard to this. Socrates said that he knows that he not know. He seems to regard the universe as intelligible, but to either confirm or deny that would be to claim to know something he does not. know.
Since the main topic here is Nietzsche, I will mention that it was Nietzsche who was responsible for the renewed interest in Plato. This is in line with his rejection of Hegel's claims regarding history.
The passage I quoted asserts the equivalence without qualification. If that was not his intention, he didn't make it clear in that place.
Maybe this discussion falls outside of the concern of the OP. I will mull until it comes up again.
Again, I have not looked at it in its larger context but from what you presented the topic is physical power, not its use. As such, power is morally neutral. Nietzsche comes up in the context of the measurement of power, a quanta of power. It is in the ability to measure power that Strauss says that Nietzsche went beyond Hobbes. The discussion then shifts away from Nietzsche and Hobbes to potestas. The right of the sovereign as distinct from the use of those powers is morally neutral.
In Leviathan Hobbes says:
"The Power of a Man, (to take it Universally,) is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good. And is either Originall, or Instrumentall."
His concern is with use of power. The amount of power for Hobbes is relative the the power of others. It is more or less, not a "quanta", that is, it does not have a specific measure.
Nietzsche's will to power extents to all of life not just man.
I see no equivalence, but maybe I am missing something either in the quoted passage or in the text.
I don't believe that's the case, so what justification do you have for saying it's 'trivially true'. I don't think it's even true, let alone trivially so. Are you sure you're not confusing 'addressing' with 'accounting for'?
That confusion is literally the entire point all of my posts here are making (clearly to no effect whatsoever). All I'm saying is...
That religion claims to account for the meaning of life is not an indication that it actually does account for the meaning of life. It tells us the subject matter of it's investigation, not the success of the outcome.
That science does not account for the meaning of life has no bearing whatsoever on whether non-scientific endeavours do account for the meaning of life. It tells us only what science doesn't do. It remains possible that all other endeavours don't do it either.
If non-scientists can claim that science does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices, then the non-religious can claim that religion does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices.
That religion being a body of knowing-how and science being a body of knowing-that, only makes any difference if religious claims are limited to what the 'how' is ("the correct way to conduct liturgy is..."), but they are not. They include the word 'truth' which is used in the normal context (wherein there's a truth-maker) about matters like the meaning of life.
Science, religion, economics, art theory, etc. -- they (can) all claim to account for the meaning of life, and not merely address it, indeed.
(Leaving aside that threats of eternal damnation, or simply being burnt alive upside down in a public square have considerable persuasion power --)
I agree.
Agreed.
Yes, but the relations between those claimants are likely going to be rather tense.
One mustn't take religion so seriously, or at face value. Yes, reliigions appear to have enormous power and influence, and they can do horrible things -- but this is still no reason to take their claims at face value.
:up:
I agree, and this reminds me of know-how or skill. Explicit principles (from 'folk-psychology' perhaps) can be helpful, but to some degree there's just doing it, like riding a bike, riding a horse. Vonnegut says you don't know what a good painting is till you've seen a million paintings. I love that. No theory. Pure experience. The doormat/asshole issue comes to mind. I think we trust keep error-correcting in subtle ways that we cannot hope to (fully) articulate. I can imagine self-help books accelerating the learning process without replacing it.
Don't want to be a schmo but let's examine this. I can't help myself when I hear these sorts of statements, even though I am sympathetic to this kind of folky insight.
No one can see a million paintings. So I guess he means a lot. How many exactly do you have to see before this aesthetic sensibility emerges? Does it come as a revelation after 200,000 paintings or does it gradually emerge from 50,000? What does he mean by 'seeing'? How do you see a paining? Just by looking? What are you doing when you look? What attributes of good does he imagine we come to see/appreciate just through beholding a shit-ton of paintings? My own intuition is some people can look at a 'million paintings' and be none the wiser.
Quoting baker
Just because we can formulate a question doesn't mean it is one. How to be happy in life, or choosing a worthwhile career and good relationships are likely unanswerable. Any resolution of these sorts of matters will be based on an individual's needs - and yes also talking to others, reflection, improvisation, whatever. Science is no more useful here than it is in telling you if you enjoyed reading a particular novel. In a similar vein, theorist and writer Stanley Fish has a polemic that in life philosophy doesn't matter. As you go about your business choosing a job or a partner or buying a house or selecting food off a menu, the questions of philosophy don't and can't enter into it.
Sure. It's all about context. As a matter of interpretive skill (always a risk!), I can speculate that Vonnegut meant something like: if you care about art and developing your taste, the main thing is to look at lots of paintings. But that doesn't sound as good. What's the alternative? 'Prof. So-and-so is the art theorist who finally got it right. It suffices to grok Professor So-and-so and his selection of the 954 essential paintings.'
I'd say the same thing about philosophy. Any philosophy geek can give a list of their favorite books, but the main thing is to read lots of books, and those books talk about other books anyway, just as paintings 'talk' about other paintings.
I think Fish is wrong here or only thinking of the academic philosophy game. Are you saying that Epictetus, for instance, can't help people with life? Or consider the industry of self-help books, which are ultimately philosophy books, if not well respected. If we go by quantity, it's the helps-with-life philosophy that's far more popular than the clever stuff.
Fair enough. But if Vonnegut qualifies his statement too much it's just bad writing. Writers depend on their readers to sort it out.
Is it a game? But yes, I think he means serious philosophy. He is not talking about principles like social justice or the virtue of non-judgment. Do we have much evidence that people make many serious decisions in life based on any reading - even pop-psychology?
The alternative is to say nothing. My point is these are folksy maxims and they can't be assessed. They are as wrong as they are right.
I think it is much more valuable to learn to read a few books, slowly and carefully. Too often philosophy is tread as if it were merely information, and books treated as trophies or notches in a belt.
Since this threat is on Nietzsche, a couple of quotes:
I sympathize with the value of slow, patient study. But imagine a fanboy of X who's just stuck in the charisma and perspective of a few thinkers. IMV, it's the clash of perspectives that sophisticates the mind.
It seems to me that it's (only a) game if no one uses it to make serious decisions. IMV, politics is deeply intertwined with philosophy (is applied philosophy, one might say.) To me it's bold indeed to suggest that reading general thoughts about life or how stuff all hangs together would have no effect on serious decisions.
If you expressing scepticism about the potency of some or even most self-help books, then I understand. But don't you think that some books sometimes make a big difference ?
I haven't read one and no one I know has ever disclosed reading one (that I can recall). But I understand they sell like the clappers. Any good examples - maybe I've heard of one or two and I have forgotten.
Quoting j0e
As I said, he's talking about big philosophical notions, not ideas or values in general. Everyone has opinions. But philosophical questions such as ethical relativism, theories of truth or the problem of induction make no practical difference to people's daily life. Anyway I'm not Fish and I can't defend his argument as he would since I didn't make it. But I suspect there's truth to it. Just as many people who hold a religious faith don't practice it in real life.
I agree that those questions make little or no difference.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well I'm too much of a snob to read them (more seriously, I can't bear the style) but my wife enjoys them, so I see the titles and read the blurbs. At the same time, I think Epictetus and Marcus are self-help books for masculine types, and I think stoicism has been somewhat helpful to me.
[quote=Epictetus]
When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal. Thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, "I will now go bathe, and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature." And in the same manner with regard to every other action. For thus, if any hindrance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say, "It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature; and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen.
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself.
[/quote]
http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html
I don't count myself as a stoic (more of a pragmatic skeptic), but I'd call this a kind of wise cheer-leading. Speculation: self-help books help an individual articulate the goal (decide who they are striving to be.) They also contain folksy or half-scientific tips on how to get there, which may or may not be reliable. [I tried to read The Power of Now once and it was just terrible metaphysics. ]
Actually don't know much about that stuff, but it makes sense that his work would be useful.
It has been my experience that those who rush do a poor job of reading. Their heads are full of ideas but they do not take the time to think through the problems.
Quoting j0e
This is part of the problem. Consider the root of the word of the word. One of the hardest things to do is think and write simply. Strip away the jargon and name dropping and what is laid bare does not amount to much. Of course there are exceptions.
Consider though that you introduced the theme of rushing. Reading lots of thinkers is something one does over a lifetime. Personally I've tended to become fascinated by this or that particular thinker for awhile. I 'suspend disbelief' and try to feel my way into their perspective, and I think a kind of 'irrational' , preliminary affection is helpful. For instance, reading to refute is an uncharitable half-reading. Reading a synopsis to chatter about over cocktails is...not ideal.
We could probably agree on quite a bit at this level of generality. What seems to matter is what happens in actual conversations with others. We just smash into others in conversations and get some sense of their seriousness and skill.
Perhaps you'll agree that mind-identified people can be vain and on the lookout for the vanity of others.
I agree, but surely you are also aware of the anti-intellectualism that seizes on this kind of statement. It's too general. Who's unsimple in the bad way? Descartes, Derrida, Zizek, Plato, Chomsky, Marx , Freud, Popper,...etc. Everyone picks differently. What we don't like or don't understand is the tempting target. We then finds friends who agree, or our friends are friends because they agree (the usual tribalism.)
I might agree with the, but that depends on what you mean by "lots of books" and in what period of time. It also depends on what one means by reading and what it is one is reading.
What I had in mind here was not the authors but the discussion of the authors. Cut through the jargon and it becomes clear that they have not really understood the author, and cannot defend what they say by giving a detailed analysis of the text that ties together the parts into a coherent whole.
Quoting j0e
On this forum Heidegger is often dismissed because people are unwilling to do the work to understand him. But this is different from what I was referring to above.
I strive to write clearly and concisely, but even on philosophy forums I have been accused several times of being hard to read. So what 'simple' means is relative.
I relate to thinking that so-and-so basically doesn't get it, that so-and-so is following the wrong breadcrumbs, relative to my interpretation anyway. I like to think that we usually start with some big that we must continually revise. What draws us to a thinker in the first place is perhaps a mere caricature in retrospect.
[quote=SEP]
In this way Gadamer can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
...
Moreover, the indispensable role of prejudgment in understanding connects directly with Gadamer’s rethinking of the traditional concept of hermeneutics as necessarily involving, not merely explication, but also application. In this respect, all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection with the Aristotelian emphasis on the practical—not only is understanding a matter of the application of something like ‘practical wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical context out of which it arises.
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process.
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/
I know it's a big quote, but I think it's good stuff. What's your take on it?
Something we haven't taken account of is the possibility of creatively misreading thinkers. While in general I think we do want to grasp what they really thought, this is not the only reason to read (we aren't just biographers of their interior.)
I'd say yes and no. In my view there's always at least a slight risk in dismissing an ambiguous other. Deciding that a poster here or someone at the watercolor is a windbag is not obviously fundamentally different from deciding that Heidegger or Zizek is a windbag. (I've learned something from both myself.) But perhaps you'd argue otherwise?
:up:
When I took classes with Gadamer at Boston College all of this was put aside. We simply read the text.
I met with him once and told him I was interested in exploring the significance of the practice of philosophy as interpretation. He told me he thought it was a worthy project but one that should wait until I had been interpreting texts for about 25 years. I never did take up that project but continue the practice of interpretation.
There are, as I see it, three related issues here. The first is a fruitful misunderstanding of the text that takes on a life of its own. The second, a deliberate misreading requires either having first sought to understand it and then appropriate it, or, and this is more often the case with those who do not attend carefully to the text, an attempt to be be clever, acting under the misguided assumption that they are equal to the author they are misreading. The third is the principle of humility, that the philosopher has something to teach us; that it is not a simply a matter of what they thought but, by attempting to understand what they are thinking they will help us in our thinking.
Well, that's bizarre ...
I agree. Engaging them in discussion and reading what they have to say to others decreases that risk, but it is possible that their thinking is so far advanced that I simply can't comprehend.
:up:
Nice. I've only seen videos. I like his vibe. The recommendation to wait makes a certain kind of sense. Practice, practice, practice. That's the kind of thing I meant by seeing lots of painting, reading lots of books, 'feeling' one's way 'in.'
Well said. This is what I was aiming at by talking of a preliminary affection or suspension of disbelief. I think we often check out thinkers because we notice that they are respected by people we already respect. It's something like the son's respect for a (good) father. We 'project' some kind of valuable totality on the though that we can't quite yet grasp. That projected gist is continually revised as we bump up against fragments that don't gel with it. 'But why would he say this, if the gist is...?' Our own prejudices become visible. Slowly our projected gist becomes less surprised by fragments that seem more and more to cohere into a valuable system of insights.
I did too. These were small classes, sitting around the seminar table. He had an air of gravity, but also a lightness from the pleasure of thought and discussion.
Another of my teachers, Leo Strauss, although I know him only through his books, said that when you come upon a contradiction take this as an indication that there is something more going on and that you must play an active role in discovering how it is resolved.
I haven't studied Strauss but I was intensely influenced/inspired by the lectures on Hegel by his friend Kojeve. Anyway, I like the way Strauss puts it, an active role.
You might find Strauss' On Tyranny of interest. It contains the correspondence between Kojeve and Strauss.
... or not read at all, but use the arguments others make about this or that as your source material. The outcome is the same.
This is both poetry and philosophy. I attest to its truth, that has been delivered to me by a movie plot by W. Allen, "Bullets Over Broadway". W. Allen's later movies serve as an excellent grounding in philosophy, for those who lack the financial resources to attend second-year university lectures.
I think that the concept of secular religions originated as an analysis of totalitarianism. The idea, I think, was to suggest that the sacral tradition had transformed into the mass cult of this or that regime. I think that it became somewhat popularized during the advent of the Neoconservative movement in the sense that you are referring to.
I, myself, am an atheist, but what atheists often say to Christians about atheists never having persecuted them is just simply not true. It happened in the two Communist regimes that you cited as an example, which is well known.
I have a highly speculative theory that whatever you want to call the Symbolic, effectively a kind of mythic order to the world, 'died' with the outset of Modernity, which I think became embodied by the play, Hamlet, and that much of the human catastrophe of the twentieth century has been because of an incapacity to cope with that. It's not that people need the social stability and purpose that religion ostensibly offers, though; it's that they have to cope with having come to awareness that there is none. I don't really agree with Nietzsche's means to do this, but I do think that he does identify the primary plight of the human condition.
That's tantalizing. I guess there's no way to test if this is true. One of the things people misunderstand about religion is that its dominant activity isn't necessarily spirituality or grace. People didn't necessarily behave more ethically when religion was strong. The abyss was always there if you were looking, or if you had a certain susceptibility. Holy crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, anti-Semitic pogroms, the KKK and more, were all Christian artifacts. Religion may well have been more about in-groups and community/social connection than transcendence or union with God. We certainly seem to have lost elements of community. But this has dissipated for many reasons and the waning of religion is just one of them.
. Nietzsche or others are tremendously important, but they are not with the whole ...
. Nietzsche talked about existencialism but he was not existencialist ... Nietzsche had philosophies about Life ... but he had not Life. Life is always Now-Here ... and your projections always come from the past ... and your past is Dead. One who have Life, cannot have philosophies about Life ... cannot have any projection towards Life ... Life is existencial ... and ... your so-called projections are always utilitarian ... pseudo-creations ... nothing more ...
. You can know a priori how does the sugar taste ... but this so-called a priori idea is just philosophical rubbish. You must ... taste it ... know it ... be it. Unless, you live the mystery of Life ... intensly ... vividly ... dangerously, you'll never Know ... what Life is. A moralistic will never know what Life is ... He may have theories about Life ... while others ... who Live it ... have Life ...
. They are super-egoists - particularly Nietzsche. I love him, too. He has a tremendous insight into things ... and ... the vivid truth is consubstantialized by his book - "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
. Great revelations have come through his mind. And he's the one most neglected all over the world - perhaps out of fear, because once you're deep into Nietzsche, you cannot be the same person you've been before. Nietzsche is going to change you.
. His thoughts are rational; his insights have no parallel in the whole history of philosophy, but still he is not a meditator. It is all mind creation ... It is not coming from his inner source ... It is not coming from his heart ...
. Meditate over this insight of Nietzsche - "Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed".
Quoting Anand-Haqq
What does that mean? 'he had not Life' - can you explain what your intent was here?
I've been reading bits of Nietzsche - seems to me he was a lonely, angry man.
Quoting Anand-Haqq
Did Nietzsche actually write this? It sounds like a 1970's piece of folk wisdom my aunt would have up on her fridge? Can you identify where this comes from in Nietzsche?
. I did say why ... friend ...
. The question is ... Are your consciousness sufficiently open to receive the new ... and put aside ... the old?
. Nietzsche was a philosopher ... Life is not a philosophy ... Life is not a question ... All questions are absurd ... Life is a mystery ... a Divine mystery ...
. The thinking of a so-called intellectual about Life is the same of a blind man about Light ... friend ...
. A blind man may have logical conclusions about what Light is ... still ... The experience will miss ...
One is the shift from the philosophical assumptions of being to becoming, that things have a fixed end-point or completion which determine what they are.
Quoting Anand-Haqq
You didn't say why at all; you just listed a few vague claims that without substance.
Quoting Anand-Haqq
Are yours?
You still haven't provided the source for the Nietzsche quote.
Me too, but your question is one that is often asked.