Existentialism seems illogical to me.

Quoting SteveMinjares

they lacked the knowledge of the cosmos of the modern day

What like which app gives the better discount on fast food burgers? lol

Quoting SteveMinjares

It just seems to me the teachings revolve around fear, fear of losing ones own individuality and fear of mortality and fears of there own conscious awareness. Since I personally don’t carry those fears and struggles and I find the teachings hard to rationalize.

Reminds me of the ol' switcheroo where one sign says danger and the other says.. I don't know fluffy bunnies or cheeseburgers or whatever you happen to fancy.

Quoting SteveMinjares

To each there own I guess...

Yeah. Guesses are great. Acknowledgement is transcendental.

Quoting SteveMinjares

In the utmost respectful way possible I find Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy teaching in my personal opinion outdated. It was probably more applicable to that generation and culture of there time.

No. All of that was written by this philosophers and thinkers, can be applied today. It is not about culture or generation. They developed a very important theory: existentialism and the absurdity of living. Here we can debate a lot of how we can interpret this aspect. One of the elements I like is about Kierkegaard’s or Schopenhauer’s pessimism rationalist. The way I can see my life with zero motivations or fantasies, more realistic and yes, negativism. But this completely logic because there are plenty or arguments we can share about how acceptable this path of seeing our lives is so accurate.
Conclusion: Existentialism is logic and crucial. It was very important back in XIX century. Now is so developed with anti-natalism thoughts.

Reply to SteveMinjares Tell us, what do you think existentialism is? What are the actual tenets you find so unappealing? You seem to think it has something to do with meaning, but what?

Quoting SteveMinjares

Existentialism seems illogical and borderline to following the same principle thinking which you would find in conventional religious belief just omitting God from the picture.

There are many religious existentials who by no means 'omit God from the picture'. Or they may claim that God is not something which can be part of a picture. Gabriel Marcel is a splendid example, and I bet London to a brick you'd never read that name before this sentence. (Check this out. Kierkegaard is also worth understanding, although I don't have time to study him in depth. Emmanuel Levinas is another. There are plenty of religious existentialists.)

Quoting SteveMinjares

To each there own I guess.

'their'

Actually I should add a few points. 'Existentialism' is not a school or tradition or theory. It's a mood, an attitude, a type. It literally means 'grappling with the problems of existence', but as a product of late modernity, it also understands existence in a different way to the ancients or medievals. But existentialism as such doesn't imply any particular commitment to or against theism. It is trying to articulate a response to the problems of meaning and the nature of lived existence, at this place, at this time, without recourse to some scripted answer or dogmatic solution. It's very much parellel with impressionism in art and improvisation in music, which is why it is one of the paradigmatic movements of the 20th century.

The common trait of existentialism is to reject any system or logic anyway. It was to revolt against the domineering hegemony of Hegelianism and Kantianism, which were based on absolute spirit and reason.

It denies groups or societies, but focuses on individual's life, freedom and absurdity. It is about what life is, and how one should live. Existence is more essence than reason or logic, and predates them.

There are also different schools in Existentialism. Dostoyevsky and Kierkeggard's existentialism is based on God, and religion, whereas Satre, Camus and Heidegger are atheistic, and even deny they are existentialist.

Reply to Wayfarer

Completely agree with your argument, but why do you think existentialism is not a school or theory?
I think it could be because there are an important number of writers or thinkers involved in this attitude. Depending in which author we are speaking about, existentialism has different perspectives. Then, probably we can classify it in some academies.

Quoting Banno

Tell us, what do you think existentialism is? What are the actual tenets you find so unappealing? You seem to think it has something to do with meaning, but what?

Exactly.

Reply to SteveMinjares

So I think one of the core ideas of Existentialism is the idea of "authenticity". By this we mean that we are a species that has justifications for things. We identify with values and reasons, yet we don't necessarily have to. Are you lazily filling a role, or are you doing it because this is something that aligns with your own attitudes? Are you letting others think for you or are you choosing to agree because this conforms with your constructed values? There is a difference. Other animals much of the time must react according to instinct. We need linguistically-based frameworks for understanding the world, and with this, we can self-reflect on what we are doing as we are doing it. We are a species that can hate the concept of work while knowing we must work to survive. No other animal has this self-reflective burden of knowing but still doing and having to justify each day's efforts with their own self-reflective capabilities.. We don't have to do anything but we usually don't like the consequences if we don't follow our self-imposed justifications.

Also there is the idea of "thrownness". When born into the world, there are givens that one must contend with.. The social structures, the physical and social arrangements that have developed long before our individual existence. One cannot change them easily and often one must navigate that which one has no control over. We cannot remake the world in our own image, yet we have imaginations that can wish the world was arranged in a different way. One of the frustrations of life is the fact that the world cannot/would never conform to our own needs, and thus we are constantly aware of the rupture between what we might have wished and what is reality.

I suppose I shouldn't expect better. Heidegger, as he claims, was not an existentialist. He was a crypto-existentialist. And so his work is not a useful source for understanding existentialism. Authenticity is a mode of anticipation. Anticipation is not a mode of existence. It is a hunger for not "there". If anything, existentialism is an angst over having this hunger, so clearly at odds with being real. The mantra is "existence precedes essence", being real takes precedence over being explained mechanistically or analytically.

Quoting javi2541997

Completely agree with your argument, but why do you think existentialism is not a school or theory?

Major part of existentialism is disagreement about what it is.

Quoting SteveMinjares

I feel they they lacked the knowledge of the cosmos of the modern day. I doubt that if they were alive today would maintain there philosophical convictions if they knew then what we know now about the Universe

Struck a chord in me, that. I'm going to go Aristotle on you and say a being's purpose is defined by what that being excels in. So, a lion, built-for-the-kill, must kill, that's the lion's purpose :fear: Likewise, as Aristotle thought humans are good, not the best of course, thinkers - they seek knowledge and do so rationally and, once upon a time, via revelation. The meat and potatoes of man's quest seems to be, if all goes well, understand the cosmos itself.

Thus, our (humanity's) purpose is to comprehend the universe in all its magnificent splendor however that might be interpreted - that's the meaning of life, of human life.

Existentialist philosophers were top-notch intellectuals in their own right and though their weltanschauungs were as limited as the prevailing paradigms and accumulated knowledge database were, it wasn't the case that this had escaped their notice. They did then what we do now - assume dominant ways of looking at the world and refer to what is known and come up with a coherent snapshot of what can be inferred and from that the ramifications, all this knowing full well that a time might come when they'll be ridiculed for their beliefs. Sometimes, ancient sages are the imbeciles of the present - an effect of gathering information, something we seem to be good at, just as Aristotle thought. Sometimes, past fools are modern visionaries - imagination, luck, and insight playing key roles.

Existentialism is what happens when systems of grasping reality and ordering our lives succumb to irresolvable aporia. Failing to grasp the crisis of mind and inure ourselves to familiar themes is no rebuttal. Or, as Nietzsche put it, the man of the future will witness the greatest wonders and enigmas of life and the universe, and just..., blink. Responsibility for the truth of it is personal, not mechanistic.

Few of you have actually bothered to read any existentialist texts, have you.

Seems to be a pattern on the forums of late.

Reply to SteveMinjares
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground can even be read as downright anti-rational.

The renaissance was a reaction by ancients modes of thought to rebelliousness in the northern reaches of Europe against them. Latin forms embellished extravagantly against the spartan barrenness of Lutherans. This set up a convoluted opposition between Latin symbolism and Protestant introspection, between reading the world as a crude and corrupt array of divine signs of an ineffable hereafter and a here and now embodied divine perfection in the knowable proportions of phenomena. You need a codebook of symbolism to understand the art of the rococo era, while phenomenal examination would extract the smells and pigments of the rose to analyze its components, and to draw conclusions about the nature of reality from this, rather than citing mythic meaning to it. But if the symbolic age ultimately succumbs to phenomenal analysis, and people have to throw away the codebook, phenomenology also succumbs to a strain between the actual entities and events in the world and the intellectual tools derived from the analysis. The rose may not represent blood or loyalty, or whatever, but it does not represent chemical and mathematical formulas either. In an important and highly pertinent sense, we have exchanged mythical superstition for a rationalist one. What occurs in the mind when this dilemma is recognized is a personal dynamic through which the terms of myth and analysis have their origin, and kinship. Superstition is superstition, whether it is a belief that myth and magic rule the world, or that the axioms of reason are self-evident, rather than a mere condition to our conviction in it. And, whether losing the codebook of mythic symbols or the contiguity of that conviction, the personal drama that ensues from that loss is no impertinence to our vital interest in understanding how the language or either that faith or that conviction is pursued.

It is a misunderstanding to read Hegel's phenomenology as rationalist. He was well aware of the shortcomings of Kant's thesis (as was Kant himself!) but his position, so hard fought to achieve and sustain, meant he had to be cagey about it. The undeniable fact of his work is that our humanity is central. Dehumanized reason is antithetical to any real appreciation of the phenomenon. Hegel was the first and founding existentialist.

Quoting SteveMinjares

In the utmost respectful way possible I find Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy teaching in my personal opinion outdated. It was probably more applicable to that generation and culture of there time.

You have not, I suspect, read Kant? to understand existentialists, one has to understand phenomenology, this requires Kant. Of course, existentialists are not rationalists, but, you could say, post rationalists, and in some ways in opposition to rationalism. To get this, you go from Kant, to Hegel to Kierkegaard to Husserl to Heidegger, and others along the way. Then the move can be made to post modern thinking like Derrida, and beyond.

If there are limits to reason it is perfectly rational to acknowledge them. Some will use this as a pretext for abandoning rigor, and even endorsing ideology, and this can motivate vilification of a serious exposition of the rational consequences of those limits. But if we arrive at the recognition of the limits of reason through a process of rigor we can recognize in each other the character of that recognition, however personal it is to each, is every whit as rigorous as the discipline we can recognize in each other there. And though that recognition is not itself a rational term, our recognition of the terms that commit us, each alone, to perform reasoning as if its limits were never operative or real are transformed by that recognition. The structure of reason may not seem to alter, but the terms do, suddenly, wholesale, and in the personal character of our participation in the moment of that change. It is because we can come to recognize, through each other, changes in our terms at least as rigorously rational as the rational functions performed along the way that we can come to think and to share our thoughts at all. It is hardly illogical to recognize this.

Quoting Wayfarer

improvisation in music,

Was around long, long before the 20th century, so not paradigmatic movement of the 20th C. Jazz maybe.

Reply to Janus that's what I meant. Serious French people in cafes smoking Gauloise, drinking black coffee, Django Reinhardt playing in the background.

Reply to Wayfarer The inventive harmonies in Jazz also have their roots in 19th century classical music and even earlier like late Beethoven, though, not in blues.

Reply to Janus Of course. But the connection between impressionism in art, jazz improv, and existentialism, is indelibly printed in my mind.

Actually I did a unit on Sartre as an undergraduate. I must confess I could literally not understand the first page of Being and Nothingness. Since then I've become more familiar with the jargon, and understand him a little better. I admire his fortitude during WWII, and his obvious intellectual integrity, but I can't say I like him, he's too close to nihilism. I've read a few articles by Gabriel Marcel, another existentialist of about the same vintage, who is more congenial to my outlook.

There are some convergences between existentialism and contemporary Zen Buddhism although they shouldn't be overstated. But one of the books on my 'must get around to reading' list is Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, Carl Olsen.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Hegel was the first and founding existentialist.

Not the first existentialist exactly, but a theorist whom proto-existentialists like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche reacted to.

Sartre of course rejected the term... do we allow him this luxury?

Quoting Janus

Was around long, long before the 20th century, so not paradigmatic movement of the 20th C. Jazz maybe.

I suspect that the first music made by early humans was improv.

Quoting Banno

Few of you have actually bothered to read any existentialist texts, have you.

What would you say people get most frequently get wrong in their understanding of existentialism? I 'read' a few existentialist texts and was never much the wiser.

Quoting Wayfarer

But one of the books on my 'must get around to reading' list is Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, Carl Olsen.

Sounds interesting; I might check that one out myself...but I already have too much to read.

Quoting Tom Storm

I suspect that the first music made by early humans was improv.

You know what? You just might be right! :up:

I was also thinking of the great composers, Bach Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt who were reputed to be amazingly skilled extemporizers. I have read that many pieces had a supplementary "movement" between or within the scripted movements called a cadenza, where the solo performer would improvize on harmonic themes from the other movements.

Reply to Janus Yes, and in the case of Chopin especially, anything written and now known is a codified version of something he generally performed with extravagant curlicues of innovation.

Reply to Tom Storm

Try Sartre's two tracts on imagination. You cannot distinguish Husserl's intentional object from the intentional act, image from imagining.

https://books.google.com/books?id=b-g_yf7kVeIC

Reply to Gary M Washburn Quoting Gary M Washburn

Try Sartre's two tracts on imagination. You cannot distinguish Husserl's intentional object from the intentional act, image from imagining.

Are you saying Sartre agrees with Husserl on this or differs from him?

I'm saying that Sartre produced rigorous philosophy, not just the impertinent fictions. I'll let you decide whether he agrees with Husserl or critiques him. I just wish people would stop citing what supports and omitting what repudiates their views. Existentialism needs revision, but it may make a lot more sense than the uncritical obeisance people pay to analysis. Language is a dynamic of familiarization, not information or definition. It's opposite is not gaps in knowledge, but a wholesale loss of familiarity, or alienation. Alienation is the bane of the current consensus, and passing it off with a glib or facile "illogical" is just not gonna cut it.

Reply to Gary M Washburn Quoting Gary M Washburn

Language is a dynamic of familiarization, not information or definition. It's opposite is not gaps in knowledge, but a wholesale loss of familiarity, or alienation. Alienation is the bane of the current consensus, and passing it off with a glib or facile "illogical" is just not gonna cut it.

I agree with you about language. I’ve been arguing the same thing on the ‘what is information’ thread. Biosemiotics is all the rage these days, but it’s hard to explain to its adherents why it shares with physicalistic materialism the problem of reductionism. I notice you’ve written a lot on temporality. That’s a central theme of my work, too.

Time is not a dimension. It is the qualification of dimensionality. Not an extension, but a revaluation of the character of extension, or the characterology of that revaluation. Where the existentialists went wrong is that they were caught between individualism and collectivism. The truth of it is that the only individualism is the act of loss, and the only extension of that loss is the response to it in recognition of its worth. The act of loss and the response of love (responsibility that the worth of the lost be recognized) is the engine of mind, not rational structures. No more than, say, our autonomic heart rhythm is anything more than a framework facilitating its autonomous role in slight adjustments to the second-by-second changing needs of the body, every cell in the body. It's a community in which each individual is far more effecting of the whole in contrariety to its autonomic functions than obedient to them. And how much does this have to be the case for agency to have a portal through which to break into the otherwise rigid framework of the causal nexus or systems of rational extension? Is the geometric modulus really axiomatic to the completion of space? That is, does a geometric ratio really extend, in the real world, as a constant without residue? How much residue would undo the axiom, if only enough to let the character of time slip through? What if the least residue is all the differing time ever really is? How much quantifiable extension does it take to give the qualifier a venue to become recognized? If logic can never outstrip its quantifier, time is a personal drama of the recognition of its worth. But neither one alone, nor the full collective count, can ever breach the gap between the act of loss and recognition of the worth of the lost that the personal drama of human discourse does with such apparent facile obliviousness to the strangeness of it. Time is change that occurs even in the face of a complete commitment to the conservation of it terms. Even bored out of our skulls, we are constantly re-characterizing what time is. Even when we are most burdened by time unchanging, we are exhibiting its being change.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Even bored out of our skulls, we are constantly re-characterizing what time is. Even when we are most burdened by time unchanging, we are exhibiting its being change.

Husserl wrote that the grounding of logic and mathematics depends on an idealization of the object. In order for there to be an object with extension, duration and magnitiude there has to be some aspect which is countable, calculable, measurable, mathematizable.
And in order fro this to be the case , an object has to resist time , it has to be present to itself , self-identical over time. Only this way can things appear ‘in’ time, as if time were an empty container. But Husserl shows that there is nothing primordially self-identical in experience. In order to construct the notion of a real object that persists as itself ‘in’ time , we must forget, ignore , disregard the fact that we are inventing this self-sameness out of an experiencing that in actually is presenting us with senses , aspects, perspectives of the world that change to moment to moment. We decide to intercept all of these flowing changes as a single ‘this’ and not notice we have done so.

Not enduring is unendurable. Extension without change is a myth we create to make being bearable. To forfend loss. After all, or before after all, death is the completest term of the articulation of the worth of time. The trick is to reduce that completeness to the infinitesimal. But what if the infinitesimal is the most extensive term of time? Yup, Husserl spent a lifetime trying to eliminate it. He failed.

Quoting SteveMinjares

Existentialism seems illogical

Well, that's probably the main thing within your point: existentialist philosophy actually denies logical necessity and the Kantian-Hegelian domination in philosophy, for these have reduced Life to pure systematisations and inquiries concerning reason and necessity.
Shestov praises possibility against the sterility of pure rationality; Heidegger criticises the course of Western philosophy for its preference for the ontic research, made possible by the oblivion of Being due to the inflation of reason; Kierkegaard suggests returning to the absolute relation between the subject and the Absolute in the face of the reduction of men to mere rational immanent categories...
The thing is that Existentialism literally already opposes itself to the mastery of reason within Life from the very beginning.

From where does logic receive its terms? Once it has them it can only manipulate them reductively. That is, by dividing what is said in them between 'is' and 'is not' into ever more finely drawn categories. But the rules applied in this have no ultimate truth or "self-evidence" other than our ability to recognize in each other the honesty and discipline of judgement and respect for each other in that judgement. That is, there is no synthetic reason. This opens the way for some to just make stuff up, as logicians do routinely, and call it truth. But they have to rig the conditions in order to get away with this. Existence cannot be rigged. For instance, the law of contradiction is only true a priori under the auspices of pertinent quantifiers. Some are - none are, all are, one is not, and so forth. But this is truth by definition, a circular argument, and the subject and predicate are irrelevant. What "A is B" might really mean, logically, is a complete and total mystery. Unless, that is, the ultimate product of the reductive function logic always is is the complete transformation, even if only in the minutest nuance to our ability to sustain our commitment to it, of all terms. That revision of the terms of reason is a drama subterranean to the conventional laws of reason. But if it comes as product of keeping faith with that law it cannot be untruth. And if it is the only real source of terms, if it is the only valid synthesis, it is hardly illogical to put in the effort to understand it, even though that effort is fraught with error and misdirection. But nothing can be more conducive to error and misdirection than to apply a patently invalid standard as the measure of being reasonable. The fact of the matter is there is no validity in experience and there is no truth in logic. We cannot validly derive anything from experience without appealing to the rational, and logical extensions are only valid or invalid, there is no truth in logic. We need both, and we need each other, to do either. We need existentialism to be logical.

Quoting Tom Storm

I suspect that the first music made by early humans was improv.

I wish I could attend some of those concerts. I imagine that they scared themselves.

..., and the first great art form was spitting at our hands...

Reply to Gary M Washburn Quoting Gary M Washburn

The fact of the matter is there is no validity in experience and there is no truth in logic. We cannot validly derive anything from experience without appealing to the rational, and logical extensions are only valid or invalid, there is no truth in logic.

It’s certainly the case that there is no validity to experience if by validity we mean formal logical validity. But there can be a pragmatic validity or pragmatic rationality , which simply amounts to discovering that subsequent events are inferentially compatible with our prior anticipations . Our expectations have then been validated, but not in a formal logical sense.

Bit of crib, aint it? I mean, this simply elides the dependence between reason and experience. Pretending it all happens by some ineffable means, so long as we make no effort to understand it, doesn't make it invulnerable to inquiry. The worst bet to make is when you're on a roll. Or, the sword aint fallen yet, but that doesn't mean it wont. I suppose you're referencing Hume. His history of England is great fun, best jokes in the notes. But patterns of experience are a dangerous standard to the user. Like the soldier (Baldric, in Blackadder iv) who put his name on a bullet thinking he would be safe in the trenches with that in his pocket. But it's not what you think you are, but what you know you do not deserve to be that determines the worth of your ideas. Theatetus concludes that knowledge is true perception plus a coherent explanation, Socrates, however, says that knowing that you do not know, knowing what it means that yo do not know, is the essence of knowledge, and truth.

Reply to Gary M Washburn Quoting Gary M Washburn

this simply elides the dependence between reason and experience. Pretending it all happens by some ineffable means, so long as we make no effort to understand it, doesn't make it invulnerable to inquiry. T

There is more than one way to understand reason and rationality, as Husserl showed. The motive force behind his phenomenology is the striving for fulfillment of unity. Intentionality mnaifests this at all levels of constitution via associative synthesis , which is based on the linking of the new with the past on the basis of similarity, concordance, commonality , harmony. This is how reason manifests itself in his model.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

it's not what you think you are, but what you know you do not deserve to be that determines the worth of your ideas.

I would say it is the usefulness of your ideas in making sense of new events concoedanrly with previous expectations that determines the worth of your ideas.

"unity" "concordance"! Listen to yourself! These are quantifiers! Worth is qualifying. Meaning is qualification. Language is its intimation. We resort to quantifiers because because reason is reductive. The only way to reach the synthetic term is the exhaustion of analysis. But so exhausted, all terms alter. though, again, if only in the dynamic nuances of our sustaining our convictions. It is precisely through our effort to be consistent that all terms change. Because time is the intimation of the moment of its worth.

Reply to Gary M Washburn Quoting Gary M Washburn

unity" "concordance"! Listen to yourself! These are quantifiers! Worth is qualifying. Meaning is qualification. Language is its intimation. We resort to quantifiers because because reason is reductive. The only way to reach the synthetic term is the exhaustion of analysis.

These are only quantifiers if they refer to a quantifiable quality , something with an aspect that can be counted and measured. But in the hands of phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty , and Nietzsche, intimacy of relation from one moment to the next is not subject to measurement and quantification.
If an event is like a previous one , if they share a dimension of similarity , than by implication they also differ from one another. This is how experience can continue in a thematic direction as continuing to be the same differently. One could even say that the entire world as it is experienced is reinvented from scratch as a new quality every moment, that I am reinvented from
scratch every moment , that my history is reinvented from
scratch every moment , and yet maintain that to experience is to recognize , on the basis of similarity and difference, the new in relation to the old. Absolute qualitative difference is no no experience at all.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

It is precisely through our effort to be consistent that all terms change

Terms are always changing.That is the precondition for Husserlian intentionality , Heidegger’s Dasein , Derrida’s difference and Nietzsche’s value systems. The aim is not to stop change but to move through change more aggressively, consistently , to embrace the new fluidly. As heidegger puts it, authentic being is directed toward one’s ownmost possibilities of being. Derrida celebrates
the multiplication of differences. Absolute , unassimilable novelty isnt change at all, but stagnation, just as is quantifiable change.

Can't difference be shared? If the paradigms of reason just don't quite cut it, isn't difference more "primordial"? And if so, contrariety is more foundational than contradiction. That is, we are more potently contrary to the inadequacies of reason if we discover that contrariety in contrariety to each other. In doing so we become a community in contrariety. But, naturally, that community only extends in dissipation of the moment of it, its worth is lost, and we are set upon a new dialectic of reduction and intimation. That is, we may never agree, but the terms of our discourse fully emerge.

We know we do not teach children to speak. Trying to only makes a hash of it. And when the child does speak he or she is already made him or herself native to that language. Language is only born fully grown. It is intimated, not taught or learned. A second language is never the same, and multilingual people are notoriously inarticulate.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

A second language is never the same, and multilingual people are notoriously inarticulate.

Vladimir Nabokov notwithstanding. It's an interesting claim. Where did you crib it from?

Quoting Joshs

The aim is not to stop change but to move through change more aggressively, consistently , to embrace the new fluidly.

For what reason?

@Gary M Washburn

Sure, the argument is only valid because we mark it as so; but so what?

If we mark it as so, the the argument is valid!

Sure, these are only quantifiers if we so choose; but so what?

If we mark it as valuable, then it is of value!

You state the obvious as if it were hidden.

Reply to Tom Storm

Quoting Joshs

The aim is not to stop change but to move through change more aggressively, consistently , to embrace the new fluidly.

Quoting Tom Storm

For what reason?

To stay one step ahead of the bill collector. Who says philosophy isn’t practical?

Also , because I’m assuming it is the human condition that we find ourselves always already in motion. The world around us will never be the same from one moment to the next. If we cannot find ways, channels of construing this flow such that it makes recognizable sense to us in its endless new variations , then our experience will be one of stagnation. stuckness , constriction of possibilities , withdrawal and depression.
So my referring to aggressive experiential change is another way of conveying the idea of richly intimate change, for instance in flow experiences. If the balance of novelty and familiarity is too skewed in the direction of novelty, then in fact one cannot change , because one cannot even fully absorb what one is encountering. A fog of chaotic , confused incidentals doesn’t amount to much substantive experience at all.

Reply to Banno
So what? it's an argument that serves as long as all are in agreement, I suppose, but it aint much of a response to a different view. Maybe my views are flawed, but "So what?" doesn't add or detract.

Reply to Tom Storm

Not him. Am I wrong? It's just something I've noticed over the years, and maybe why there are so few good translators. Don't recall ever finding anything pertinent in Nabokov. I suppose learning two or more languages as an infant is almost the same, but not thereafter. The introduction to the world, and to a facile ease of speaking one's native tongue, is a one-time deal. And no, it aint "wired-in" either.

Reply to Gary M Washburn Quoting Gary M Washburn

If the paradigms of reason just don't quite cut it, isn't difference more "primordial"? And if so, contrariety is more foundational than contradiction. That is, we are more potently contrary to the inadequacies of reason if we discover that contrariety in contrariety to each other. In doing so we become a community in contrariety. But, naturally, that community only extends in dissipation of the moment of it, its worth is lost, and we are set upon a new dialectic of reduction and intimation. That is, we may never agree, but the terms of our discourse fully emerge

I certainly agree that difference is primordial. This sounds a bit like Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, a community of differences in which the whole never commands or encompasses
the many.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

it's an argument that serves as long as all are in agreement...

My favourite Existentialist Comic:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/58

Camus and Sartre's disagreement is, for de Beauvoir, an entertainment.

So, please - you, @Tom Storm, @Joshs - do continue... !

Which is the more completed moment? When you suddenly realize what you thought to be a friend, even a lover, is a betrayer, or when the stranger you meet in a land strange to you suddenly shows himself to be a welcoming friend?

When a child is born i is a unique presence in the universe untested of its boundless capacity to intimate the worth of it. It's parents, however, are bound to a life of putting boundaries upon it. That is, upon the intimation of the worth of time. The infant struggles to reconcile that boundlessness with that boundedness. That reconciliation, initially, can only be wholesale. Once boundless, but become forever bounded. That transformation is the intimation. I do not mean "closeness". And I do not mean change that we can anticipate or pursue. I mean change as complete as the awakening of language in childhood, always completest at its inception, and always tempered differences we discipline each other in.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Don't recall ever finding anything pertinent in Nabokov.

Does this not make an assumption that you have a talent for identifying pertinence? If we don't see something is it because it is not there, or because we are unable to apprehend it? I ask myself this daily.

Quoting Joshs

The world around us will never be the same from one moment to the next.

I've never found this to be particularly true to my experience. But I don't live in Afghanistan...

Quoting Joshs

So my referring to aggressive experiential change is another way of conveying the idea of richly intimate change, for instance in flow experiences. If the balance of novelty and familiarity is too skewed in the direction of novelty, then in fact one cannot change , because one cannot even fully absorb what one is encountering. A fog of chaotic , confused incidentals doesn’t amount to much substantive experience at all.

Sorry Josh your wording is a bit unclear to me here. It sounds like you are essentially saying, go with the flow but with some qualifier?

Reply to Tom Storm

Quoting Tom Storm

The world around us will never be the same from one moment to the next.
— Joshs

I've never found this to be particularly true to my experience. But I don't live in Afghanistan...

I’m talking about a very subtle phenomenon. But notice your perceptual world as an example. There isn’t a single object you can pay attention to right now that will appear exactly the
same when you turn your attention back to it a minute from now. Everything that goes into your perception of it, your bodily stance as anger of view , the lighting , the color , and also your affective attitude, all these subtly change. It doesn’t seem to have much relevance in such a small time frame , but becomes much more
significant when we compare greater stretches of time.

Quoting Tom Storm

It sounds like you are essentially saying, go with the flow but with some qualifier?

I guess what I’m saying is that there will not be much of a flow to go with , or at least not as a reliably regular part of one’s life, if one doesn’t take active steps to explore different ways of construing situations in response to feelings of stuckness , puzzlement and anxiety. A relentlessly experimental attitude toward
one’s presuppositions, especially when they no longer seem to be useful ( which is what negative feelings warn us of) , can help us to orchestrate the preconditions for confident, joyful flow. Flow doesn’t just drop into our lap , it’s a certain attitude toward a situation that we have to work to achieve.

Reply to Tom Storm
Some things really do just have to be left to personal discretion. How I spend my study time is one of them. Just answering your inquiry. No, Nabokov was no influence. Sorry if that troubles you, but there it is...

Quoting Gary M Washburn

No, Nabokov was no influence. Sorry if that troubles you, but there it is...

Interesting that you assume I care about Nabakov. I was more interested in the justification of your somewhat lofty pronouncement/s. So are you saying you often operate by discretion? Is this a reliable pathway to truth?

Reply to Tom Storm

So why bring him up? I don't waste a lot of time on fiction, not even Sartre's. I've tried to write some, but I'm not at all happy with the results. It feels like pulling a fast one on the reader, and a thinker should speak for himself. I assumed there must be something in Nabokov you thought resembled my views, and maybe that he was an influence. The only influence I feel comfortable with is Plato, but, unfortunately, the literature is dead against me. Lofty? Maybe, but only if I don't have the goods to back it up. But these discussions preclude prolixity. We look at each other's mind through a keyhole and expect to grasp the horizon.