Philosophy as 'therapy'.
In another thread that I posted about philosophy as a way of life, I seem to have arrived at the conclusion that philosophy has perhaps it's greatest concern with existential questions. One member of TPF said something tantamount to becoming your own doctor with regards to ethics, or simply knowing how to guide yourself throughout life without too much strenuous effort on your decision making process. I state this in such a manner because I believe philosophy ought to be useful to a person. It is more often than not that we concern ourselves with philosophy because we feel some pangs of distress or angst in our daily lives, and hence-more often than not-we are attracted to teachers, for a variety of reasons.
A teacher has experience as a guide in learning a curriculum, I mean they've already been through the process of learning what a student would want to learn. They can direct ones attention towards the important issues that a person would want to learn.
But, before I go off on a tangent, I want to stipulate what has already been said in a more focused context. As we embark on our journey throughout the philosophers of history, we seek a historical account of something I don't yet know how to define. How would you describe the academic pursuit of philosophy rather than the intellectual or ethical import of learning about how life should be lived? I don't quite understand how to express myself better than to say that the criticism of one past philosopher of his or her predecessor is something that we don't do nowadays. Is this "historicism" or "dialectical materialism"? There's nothing to learn from these philosophers, as Wittgenstein would say!
I don't want to embark on a discussion about different methodologies of conducting philosophy because I have already aquatinted myself with Wittgenstein's notion of ethical behavior arising through action and behavior, such as everyday deeds and favors we do for another. These acts stand apart from the rote work of the "philistine" in some calculus of satisfying needs or even wants. I don't really care about the calculus or algorithm or economic incentive to behave a certain way. We guide or ought to guide ourselves by what we seem important in relation to our needs. One you got those needs sorted out, I don't really care to elaborate, that's your decision. It's not for philosophy to argue or even criticism with what makes you tick, be it a new home, car, or partner. Wittgenstein gave away his fortune after realizing this!
So, returning back to the point, when confronted with the important decisions or rather choices of how to live ones life, we resort to guides or teachers. Please keep in mind that these 'teachers' need not only be found in academia. They can he found posting in a blog or on YouTube ... This question about who best to go to for these existential concerns of an individual is the centerpiece of this thread. You won't find them in academia, as Wittgenstein thought!
I used to be attracted to the notion that psychologists were or still are the right people to listen to for said concerns. Wittgenstein once made a quote about this in regards to saying that even if the questions of philosophy had all been answered there would still be the problem of psychology that philosophy could not address, for the individual at least.
I find this problematic for two reasons, we are attracted to philosophy out of psychological reasons, which I outlined above. Without further confusions, how ought the individual address these stipulated existential concerns? Whom should one ask, and what to do in regards to them?
(Edited some typos and loose strands.)
A teacher has experience as a guide in learning a curriculum, I mean they've already been through the process of learning what a student would want to learn. They can direct ones attention towards the important issues that a person would want to learn.
But, before I go off on a tangent, I want to stipulate what has already been said in a more focused context. As we embark on our journey throughout the philosophers of history, we seek a historical account of something I don't yet know how to define. How would you describe the academic pursuit of philosophy rather than the intellectual or ethical import of learning about how life should be lived? I don't quite understand how to express myself better than to say that the criticism of one past philosopher of his or her predecessor is something that we don't do nowadays. Is this "historicism" or "dialectical materialism"? There's nothing to learn from these philosophers, as Wittgenstein would say!
I don't want to embark on a discussion about different methodologies of conducting philosophy because I have already aquatinted myself with Wittgenstein's notion of ethical behavior arising through action and behavior, such as everyday deeds and favors we do for another. These acts stand apart from the rote work of the "philistine" in some calculus of satisfying needs or even wants. I don't really care about the calculus or algorithm or economic incentive to behave a certain way. We guide or ought to guide ourselves by what we seem important in relation to our needs. One you got those needs sorted out, I don't really care to elaborate, that's your decision. It's not for philosophy to argue or even criticism with what makes you tick, be it a new home, car, or partner. Wittgenstein gave away his fortune after realizing this!
So, returning back to the point, when confronted with the important decisions or rather choices of how to live ones life, we resort to guides or teachers. Please keep in mind that these 'teachers' need not only be found in academia. They can he found posting in a blog or on YouTube ... This question about who best to go to for these existential concerns of an individual is the centerpiece of this thread. You won't find them in academia, as Wittgenstein thought!
I used to be attracted to the notion that psychologists were or still are the right people to listen to for said concerns. Wittgenstein once made a quote about this in regards to saying that even if the questions of philosophy had all been answered there would still be the problem of psychology that philosophy could not address, for the individual at least.
I find this problematic for two reasons, we are attracted to philosophy out of psychological reasons, which I outlined above. Without further confusions, how ought the individual address these stipulated existential concerns? Whom should one ask, and what to do in regards to them?
(Edited some typos and loose strands.)
Comments (46)
Nevertheless I think what you ask is impossible without stipulating the often unique situations that make us attracted to one person over another. Therefore what I say about person X or Y being the correct person to listen to is unique to me. As Z or A is unique to you.
There are many schools of thought, each of them accentuating one aspect of the world as opposed to another aspect. I suppose that in my case, I've found it liberating to find that there is no such esoteric knowledge which is beyond the reach of a critical kind of common sense.
I suppose that one general generalization (yep I phrase it like this) is that one should not write more clearly than one thinks about an issue. One should ask those whom you are attracted to.
Hard question, but good one.
Initially, given the OP was becoming incoherent, I want to address this situation myself. I think, in my case, I have spent an inordinate amount of time addressing philosophy dialectically on a forum as perhaps you do.
I think of the issue axiologically (a personal meditation over ones values) as well as an even more important question of how one ought to reason reflexively about these relations [I] logically [/I]. Some people express this, in my astonishment, with attitudes, like cynicism, or optimism, nihilism, or even pessimism, which are rather illogical... Hmm.
Having thought to myself deeply about the existential logic of one's needs in relation to a world of wants (if one removes needs and wants what else is there??), I aquatinted myself with Stoicism. The recent revival of stoicism has been interesting to read about for many reasons. It encapsulates and gives a practical guide (literally by Epictetus called, the manual "Enchiridion" as to how to perceive our needs and wants). Using Stoic logic one finds a practical use of logic in how to perceive the world of needs and wants to describe ones situation relative to it. Stoics bring up the use of attributes, aversions, and disprefered needs and wants.
From this stipulation of logic, one (with adequate training and time spent studying it) learns to discern impermanent 'wants' from the more important concerns over what one should devote to controlling, be it dispreferred, non-attributes, like 'status' or 'fame' and so on. After one conducts this method of living in accordance with nature, as per Stoic logic, I would tend to think life becomes more enjoyable and if not happiness, then at least equanimity can be attained.
Unlearn self-immiserating habits. Study and practice philosophizing like yoga or a martial art – what Pierre Hadot calls a "spiritual exercise" as a "way of life". Reflectively reason towards (i.e. think) better, more probative, questions and inquiry. "Who do we ask?" Dead thinkers (i.e. history always is, never was); the living are just too distracted by their own biased confusions.
:death: :flower:
I see.
Ethically, I think I'd be inclined today (for it could change in the future) to a kind of gentle or sympathetic absurdism. That is, treat people reasonably well, given absurdity. Beyond that, I hesitate to attach myself to a school of ethics, I find the stipulations or teachings or conclusions to be too hard to attain. Perhaps it is an excuse for not being the best me that I can be. But I find comfort in absurdity, which is a good step.
That being said, I've found infinite wisdom in Chomsky and Schopenhauer. More so from the former, but the latter has been fantastic too.
I suppose that what concerns me are those questions that plague the philosophers specifically since its inception in "the West". What is the nature of the world? What is knowledge? Why existence? Why do things make sense sometime and yet often they don't? And so forth.
I find stoicism healthy. Better with a dash of humor, or several dashes. But when the focus in philosophy is one within ethics vs. metaphysics/epistemology, I fear that we may be speaking slightly different languages. Aside some specific questions or situations, ethics doesn't stimulate me to much discussion. Problems related to the nature of the world and mind do.
So, what to do? I hear crickets, and the echoes of eternity.
Yes, quite so. Quoting 180 Proof
This is interesting due to a couple of things I mentioned. In my mind, to 'reflectively reason towards' means a type of comparison of, values or means towards an end. In other words, the need to comparatively think about the need to evaluate or even examine ones relation towards a salience point is quite interesting in my view.
I mentioned in response to Manuel that this endeavor encourages a pragmatic use of evaluative or even a system of logic proposed (therapeutic) use of logic (like Stoicism).
Quoting 180 Proof
Yes, well none of them did it therapietically like Hadot.
Then, what is proposed in the realm of thought that Wittgenstein said as, philosophy as therapy?
From my readings of Hadot, I came to the conclusion that he advocated an active form of life in accordance to virtue...
Let's rephrase the question, then. What's so important about philosophy? When all the questions of philosophy are answered, what's left is psychology, no? Maybe another way of me saying this is to ask, what are you trying to rid yourself of by practicing philosophy?
Why is "unlearning self-immiserating habits" so important?
You study a discipline using guided thinking. The viewpoint is already prepared for you.
Butting in, but isn't avoiding misery simply a good thing? If there's a discipline or hygiene or system of habits that at least reduces self-caused misery, does it need an excuse?
Could be that some philosophy is a self-immersating habit, while some of the rest is a cure for the first. Like bad music and good music, bad food and good food.
How do we tell good philosophy from bad philosophy? More philosophy?
Psychology is about what turns us on and what turns us off, our fears, our hopes, the way we approach issues and how we react to them with the objective of coming up with some theory that explains the findings of surveys, experiments, analysis, and so on.
Philosophy concerns itself with what should motivate/demotivate us, whether it's rational to fear, are our hopes realistic, is our approach to whatnot reasonable and what might count as an appropriate response?
So, yeah, philosophy is therapeutic since it informs a person on how to deal with reality in the most rational way possible; philosophy, despite being speculative in some respects, ensures that we don't lose touch with reality, something the non compos mentis are awkward at.
Not "more". We just refrain from
Quoting 180 Proof
... taking / seeking these paths of least cognitive effort (i.e. sophistry).
Quoting Shawn
Misery (e.g. frustration, harm, illness, deprivation, bereavement, fear-terror, betrayal, injustice, etc) is categorically disvalued. Agency (i.e. an agent's social, physical, cognitive and/or affective capabilities for reducing, or preventing an increase of, self or another's miser(ies)) is usually sub-optimized whenever agents are miserable. And I cannot think of anything more "important", or inescapable, than the sisyphusean task of optimizing agency; 'unlearning habits which more likely than not makes oneself miserable or more likely than not exposes one to potential miseries' seems the most direct, accessible, praxis (i.e. reflective exercise – like a martial art) which serves that purpose. Every human endeavor is enabled-constrained by agency, no?
Quoting TheMadFool
More precisely: philosophers contemplate how we ought not to think.
I want to disagree, I tried to disagree, but I can't help but agree! :up:
When one has "put it right" where does she go from there? Wittgenstein presents another notion of philosophy:
Such activity is not simply destructive, it is constructive and self-reflective.
As we see in the later Wittgenstein as opposed to the earlier, thinking straddles the saying and seeing distinction. Here he came to see the importance of conceptual seeing, "seeing as".
In this way too, philosophy can be regarded as therapeutic, but the goal is no longer to stop doing philosophy.
Good question. How do we tell good food from bad food? Good art from bad art? It's something like: makes you happier, more effective. But what is 'happy' and 'effective'? Something plays out beyond all the barks and tweets we make.
That's kind of a personal preference. How do you evaluate any of that?
If wisdom arises from experience over time then are we just concerned with knowledge or at a more fundamental level something akin to satisfaction or even survival? What do you think?
But what about reality needs so much explanation? Arent these thoughts counterproductive to living or achieving satisfaction? I mean, if happiness is what is commonly assumed as most important then, why do we flounder at it so much? Why can't they teach about this in academia?
Just out of curiosity, what would you say about self-immiseration or optimizing agency in regards to Stoicism?
Could you elaborate on this last part of "seeing as"? I haven't really read that much about it.
:smirk:
Stoicism is a practice for optimizing agency / reducing misery which (very basically) rationally cultivates virtues of "wisdom, justice, courage & temporance" by discerning in order to act on what one can control and otherwise accepting (developing apathy with regard, or indifference, to) what one cannot control. (As a long-time Epicurean-Spinozist, Epictetus & Seneca are also touchstones.) The Stoics propose "a way of life", not just "therapy".
But, the founders of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy explicitly attributed ancient Stoicism with their logic to their method of/and therapy.
This seems fascinating in how Stoic logic became a way of therapizing people, no?
The boring but honest answer is to just try it out. People go through phases and crazes, identifying with this or that heroic term or ism. Sometimes something sticks, and maybe 'it' has no name, doesn't need one, and is some vague fusion of all that's been tried.
I'm thinking satisfaction and consolation, not mere survival, but the former may inform the latter.
Seeing as is also called seeing an aspect. The best known example is the duck-rabbit. He does not think we first interpret it and then see it one way or the other, we simply see it as a duck or a rabbit.
Further, we can see it first one way and then the other.
Perception is not simple passive reception. There is a connection between perception and conception.
What is at issue is not some visual peculiarity, but the way we look at things and seeing connections. To see connections is not to make connections.
This is a topic that has gained a lot of interest.
What does one do with the elephant in the room, the "that which is seen" actuality? I mean, seeing as can be understood as taking the object before you "as" such that the qualia or, as Dennett put it, the phenomenon (sense impression sans the concept. See his argument about qualia) is not to be acknowledged at all, for all of the understanding's ability is bound up with the way a thing is taken up. In other words, because language is an essential part of an object's construction, what do we do with the obvious (I say) ability one has to, in the language constructed contextualized event, "understand" the what-is-not a concept as such? There is Kierkegaard's objection to Hegel in this, which is that Hegel talks about, spins arguments about, things as if they were inherently logical, but clearly, the actual is qualitatively different from the language: This pain in my knee is not language, even though language is what brings this pain to "light".
The basic idea is to find out how the world works and align one's thoughts/speech/deeds to those discoveries. "Be realistic," the philosopher says and that's both an advice and a warning. Heed it and a good life is almost guaranteed, fail to do so and a world of pain awaits you.
The reason "...we flounder..." is we're unrealistic, and part of the problem is our imagination which can, in a matter of minutes, create worlds upon worlds of what in religioius circles is known as a better place. These imaginary places are so appealing that we're eager beyond measure to defy the wisdom of the adage, one bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. We then begin to dwell in fantasy because the world is just too dull and miserable, relatively speaking; it goes without saying that such an existence is going to be fraught with danger and a whole lot of suffering.
How a thing is seen and how it is understood, although related, is not the same.
Quoting Constance
A mechanic might look at a bunch of parts and see how they are connected. She constructs the object both visually and in practice without the use of language.
Quoting Constance
Wittgenstein talks a great deal about pain. Toothache is his favorite example. Language does not bring the pain to light. It is an expression of pain. That someone is in pain may be obvious without uttering a word.
I think this needs some clarity. Seen and understood? Are these not synonyms?
Quoting Fooloso4
You mean, without the explicit use of language. Of course, I don't talk my way through walking down the street. But then, the ordinary course of my apprehending all that is around me is filled with narrative: I see a tree and "familiarity" of the seeing is not like that of a feral child/person (though, there is an issue about this). It is contextualized beneath the surface event.
Quoting Fooloso4
Certainly, but Wittgenstein notoriously refused to talk about ethics because it has this impossible metaethical dimension: the Good and the Bad, not as contingent constructions, but as presuppositionless phenomena. Nothing can be said to penetrate into its meaning. It is not a thing of parts, and I think this is right. But then, it does "speak", unlike, say, the color yellow. The metaethical bad speaks in terms of an injunction: don't bring this into the world!
When you look at the picture of the duck-rabbit what do you see? The picture does not change but what you see does. This is not a matter of understanding.
Quoting Constance
Right, but that contextualization need not be linguistic. The furniture builder and the arborist may see the tree differently. The contextualization is here not a matter of what is said but of what is done.
Quoting Constance
And yet, a great deal is now being said about Wittgenstein and ethics.
The early Wittgenstein was explicit in his identification of ethics and aesthetics. In his Lecture on Ethics he refers to his own experience of absolute value. Here again, he connects ethics to what is experienced. For the later Wittgenstein ethics as well as logic are no longer regarded as transcendental but part of a form of life. How one looks at things and what is seen when one changes the way they are looked at remains central. Just as the meaning of words is related to their use, the meaning of ethics is related to what we do, to how we live, to what is meaningful.
:fire:
Isn't it? I don't want to quibble about what the understanding "does" but it seems clear that to "see" a rabbit requires a rabbit concept. It doesn't mean that this concept is explicitly learned or that behind the acknowledging, there is some discursive "rabbit" interpretative process, but that the registering of rabbit in the moment of apprehension requires an underpinning of a language culture that talks about rabbits, what they do and look like and so on. even if one were a feral agency, the concept of rabbit would be an historical necessity to the recognition, concept here being exposure to the phonemes of "rabbit" paired with that fuzzy animal. To understand is more than what the optical part reveals, of course. I thought this was your thinking.
Quoting Fooloso4
Did you say the arborist's contextualization need not be linguistic? This is a scientist whose classificatory speciality is taxonomically complex. How is this not language? Of course, when she reaches for the ax she is not giving a lecture, and these are different matters. But I don't see it as, say, preconceptual, reaching for the ax, for the ax's familiarity is bound up with language in a conceptualized, socialized person.
The difference for me has to do with one thing language does that simply ready to hand cannot do: philosophy. What does it mean for spirit to posit soul and body, as Kierkegaard put it? To suspend one's cultural heritage in a qualitative leap of affirmation of one's existential condition? This is where "therapy" (the OP) is at its finality: to overcome the human condition altogether, if you will.
Quoting Fooloso4
His own experience? But I don't see this in the lecture. I'll read it again. I don't think he ever dropped the religious, mysticality of ethics and aesthetics (in Culture and , not did he explicitly take on ethics. I always read him to be saying that metavalue (Tractatus) cannot be affirmed. Language games never undercuts this, but perhaps you know something I don't.
In Culture and Value he writes, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.
...... the good lies outside the space of facts. MS 107 196: 15.11.1929
This ws 1929, but I don't think he changed his mind. Added the language games concept, but maintained a healthy distance from putting ethics in theoretical play.
Wittgenstein' concern is with the fact that it happens, not why it happens. He does not attempt to explain. He is well aware of the pitfalls.
Quoting Constance
Wittgenstein often made use of imaginary tribes. Suppose there is a tribe that has never seen a duck or a rabbit, but has seen images of what we call a duck and a rabbit. When they look at an image that combines the two their experience would be the same as ours, seeing first the one image and then the other.
Quoting Constance
That is another aspect of it. A tribe that knew nothing of Christianity or Christian iconography would not look at a cross and see what Christians do. What we see is to some extent culturally conditioned. In some cases it is more a matter of context.
How we see the look on someone's face: is it a matter of understanding the expression? Babies react differently to smiles and sad faces, smiling in return or becoming upset. Adults may react to the look on someone's face as a smile or a smirk or a sneer. Is the response a matter of understanding? Does how we take it or understanding follow from how we respond or determine how we respond?
Quoting Constance
Yes, but arborist does more than classify. The arborist might see the tree and picture how it should be pruned. How the tree is to be pruned is not a matter of linguistic analysis, although such an analysis can be given.
Quoting Constance
Is there more to philosophy than what is said?
Quoting Constance
Is your question about what Kierkegaard means or about the terms? Whatever it is he might mean it may not be what someone else might mean.
Quoting Constance
For some this is meaningful, although perhaps in different ways. For others, a culturally embedded desire for some kind of transcendence.
Quoting Constance
What might this mean? To be more or less than human? To rebel against being human? To attempt to escape being human by leaping away? Therapy or denial? Perhaps the leap is to nowhere. Are such challenging questions part of or antithetical to philosophy?
Quoting Constance
There is a difference between maintaining an attitude of something mystical and his rejection of Kant's transcendental conditions.
Quoting Constance
Affirmed in what sense? See what he says about the world of the happy man.
Quoting Constance
Yes, I agree. It is not a matter of theory. As I said:
Quoting Fooloso4
This is not something I have looked at closely, but I think there is a connection between the rejection of a private language and a rejection of the solipsism of the Tractatus. Ethics for the latter Wittgenstein is not about the solipsistic world of the happy or unhappy man. Ethics is not private. It is about what we do and how we live.
Well, not quite the same, for if one grows up in a world where rabbits and ducks have an established presence, and are both brought into poetry, metaphor and irony, and there is a wealth of idiomatic playfulness, and they are witnessed, photographed, etc., then this makes a richer context of meaning. But the richness, the augmentative, and as Kierkegaard would put it, quantitative measure of things really isn't the interesting point, for me. When he talks about the qualitative movement, he refers to what today, by some, is called, pejoratively by Derrida, the metaphysics of presence. Only here does it get philosophically interesting. Here, I claim, really is an encounter with something that "possesses its own presupposition". One has to put away the arguments long enough to actually have such an encounter.
Quoting Fooloso4
I don't see the difference between cultural conditioned and context. The former is certainly the latter. Is the latter not the former? Can context be free of culture? By the time I am mature enough to ask this question, I am already thoroughly embedded.
Quoting Fooloso4
Interesting idea: If those very early years conditioning of a counter intuitive sort, and smiles were signs of disgust, e.g., associated with witnessed adult behavior that was negative and smiling, then the smile would have an altogether different meaning. Such things are not fixed, but contingent. It does seem that physical gestures are as arbitrary as language's signifiers. But what is not arbitrary is the mood, the pain or joy, the value experience, in its presence. Put aside the way language makes a thing sit still and be counted, and observe the presence of, say, love, or ice cream, or having one's arm twisted: What IS this presence?
There is no saying this (though one can refer to it just as much as any other thing) which is why I always thought Wittgenstein right and wrong. The "badness" of a twisted arm is "presented" to us and one cannot talk about pure givenness. (Big argument on this, I know.)
Quoting Fooloso4
I guess I agree with this. as long as it understood that language's relation to that which it is about does not relate apart from what the thing yields descriptively, pragmatically, or whatever is there. Language is always about the world. But there is a question begged here: What is language? I believe language is, just like the pruning of a tree, pragmatic. To say it is more than this is to open up what is NOT language. Love is not language, nor is a twisted arm, nor is desire or yearning, the Good or the divine or the horror.
Quoting Fooloso4
But what is said? In the saying there is more than what is acknowledged; hence, the question.
Quoting Fooloso4
Is this an important part of it? Take it as a matter of the openness of ideas, which was available to Kierkegaard is ways we obviously share. Then there is my own receptive possibilities, indeterminate, but pressing for understanding. What happens in each of us will never be pinned, and there is a lot of philosophy on this, but the pinning never was about this kind of agreement. Ask better: is what Kierkegaard meant, what Kierkegaard meant? Such questions' analyses throw a wet blanket over all answers. It is, in my thoughts, a red herring that keeps philosophers busy exercising their talents.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, I know this. But I am unwilling to throw the matter like confetti into the air. I am taken by Husserl's epoche and the French theological thinking that sees an apophatic, theological turn in this. Michel Henry, for example. There is a lot of Kierkegaard in this, and Husserl provides the "method". I think this is where philosophy finds its end, in both sense of the term.
Quoting Fooloso4
This question is literally too big to answer. But then: yes, I think being human, comprising all of the institutions and history and evolved concerns and interests, is inherently something to overcome. I think the essential Buddhism and/or Hinduism right. And philosophy leads only to this.
Not a popular idea at the water cooler in the philosophy department.
Quoting Fooloso4
Kant's transcendental conditions? Where he went wrong is here: noumena is meant to be all inclusive, subsuming phenomena, just as eternity subsumes finitude; therefore, to say we are bound to the latter and the former is untouchable is a logical error. My cat IS noumenal as it sits here on the couch.
To make sense of this is difficult, however. After all, to "see" a thing AS noumenal--what could this mean? But I don't mean to argue this. It would be like arguing Buddhism. Yes, I am saying there is a revelatory dimension to this.
Quoting Fooloso4
The latter Witt is not as interesting. I think the private/public discussion not to be close enough to the core question. Why does Witt say in his Lecture that ethical claims are absolutes, value claims absent from the great book of facts. What is it that is absolute? It is value. "In (the world), there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.”
This matter goes to metaethical Good and Bad. I will only discuss it if you are so inclined.
I am not sure how you get from the duck-rabbit to the metaphysics of presence in a single paragraph.
Quoting Constance
Culture is more general, context more specific. Within the same culture there are different contexts. How I see the man in a trenchcoat watching children at the playground might be influenced by reports that there is a pedophile in the area.
Quoting Constance
The baby reaction seems to be hardwired.
Quoting Constance
The badness is not presented to us. That seems to be an odd way of talking as if removed from the immediacy of what is happening. A twisted arm hurts. Pain is bad.
Quoting Constance
You made the connection between philosophy and language. What the words might mean to someone
and what he means when he uses the words are not only an important part of it but an essential part.
Quoting Constance
Are ideas to be so open that they can mean anything and everything?
Quoting Constance
Does this mean that it is not, as you suggested, a matter of suspending one's cultural heritage?
Quoting Constance
The transcendental conditions of the Tractatus are not about where you think Kant went wrong.
Quoting Constance
Should we take this to mean you do not find it as interesting?
Quoting Constance
Perhaps the assumption of a core question is symptomatic of the problem. The later Wittgenstein does not attempt to ground things theoretically or absolutely. I think it worth considering whether the notion of epistemological 'hinges' in On Certainty finds its correlate in ethical 'hinges'. For example, murder is wrong. So too, the metaphor of the river and the appeal to relativity theory or the absence of an absolute, fixed ground. In other words, the recognition that ethical standards change over time.
The metaphysics of presence is what is denied by your position, and mine mostly, that seeing a duck, and taking up what is before one AS a duck is contextual, contingent, deferential, a thing of parts. The metaphysics of presence takes something to be its own presupposition, with no need to rely on anything but its own presence to affirm that it is.
Quoting Fooloso4
I suppose. One could say within the same context there are different cultures. Say the context is murder. Different cultures have different views.
Quoting Fooloso4
One would think. But there are societies where family structures of mother, father, brother sister are very confused by our standard. Hard to say really what an infant would do if natural fixtures like smiling were turned on their head at that age. Marx thought we were utterly malleable, could take on any conditioning, and Skinner thought fathers and mothers were conditioned role playing.
Quoting Fooloso4
It is the immediacy I have in mind: The pain is immediate, and the twisted arm is incidental. I don't know what pain is, is my point; and I don't know what it is in an extraordinary way: I certainly know the pain, but I can't put the badness of the pain in any totality, that is, context, of usual knowledge, for I can't "see" the badness of the pain. I mean to say, there is something that attends the occasion of pain that is not observable, like a star's light or a mountain's height. the pain exceeds the properties of plain facts.
Quoting Fooloso4
But then there is that whole issue about authorial intent. Kierkegaard's intent, of course, is as plain as mine when I read him. But when I read him, it is my "intent" that receives and understands and interprets. Once I take up meaning, meaning is localized. Not that I cannot speak to others about it, for clearly I can, as did Kierkegaard, but the public world is a tip of the iceberg.
Quoting Fooloso4
But are they so closed they can only mean one thing? My thought is that single ideas are fluid, indeterminate., yet pragmatically functional. I say, look at the rabbit; you look and we are communicatively satisfied. Yet, the occasion is simplistic. Rabbits in my world share with and differ from yours.
Quoting Fooloso4
It means familiarity is suspended, though it is a difficult matter to pin, because when one "does" the phenomenological reduction, all that would otherwise claim the event loses footing. Odd as it sounds, the "presence" of phenomena becomes more deeply manifest.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, not exactly. But both draw a line between what can be meaningfully said and what cannot, and the line separates where logic can and cannot go. Where I think Kant went wrong is clear to me. As to Witt's Tractatus, it is, I say, prohibitive of the same, or close to the same (only analysis can tell) kinds of discussion.
Quoting Fooloso4
But such things changing over time, the relativity of ethical judgments, these are not the core issues. Not is meaning yielded out of language games. Metaethics is the foundational issue in ethics. Here I refer you to Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong for the view I oppose. No wait; that's rude if you haven't read it. I can defend my thinking if you wish to go into it.
What does the metaphysics of presence have to do with seeing the duck-rabbit? What is a duck-rabbit's own presence?
Quoting Constance
Right. Seeing is not simply passive reception. What does this have to do with the metaphysics of presence?
Quoting Constance
My intent is to understand the author, to resist imposing the understanding I bring to the text when trying to understand the text. It is never a completed task but one that can begin.
Quoting Constance
Words have definition, but the boundaries, depending on the word, may be more or less elastic. The term 'geist' it can be translated as spirit or mind or ghost, but when Hegel uses the term we are bound to misunderstand him if we intend Casper the friendly ghost.
Quoting Constance
The practice itself is part of your cultural heritage.
Quoting Constance
Language games need to be viewed within a form of life. A form of life included but is not reducible to language.
Quoting Constance
The later Wittgenstein eschewed theory. Ethics does not require a theoretical foundation. That is exactly the kind of philosophical assumption he wants to overcome.
Passive reception is misleading. The real question is, once a typical perceptual encounter has been analytically exhausted in terms of all possible predicative aspects, is there not an existential residuum that remains, and can this be acknowledged a such?
Quoting Fooloso4
Then I claim you will be disappointed. I suspect the matter goes like this: In trivial matters, like analytic constructions or simple facts like the moonlight being reflected sunlight, agreement is easy, and it is likely there is in my mind a strong analog to what is in my interlocutor's mind as we discuss this or that. This is evidenced by ready agreement and pragmatic contingencies being worked out free of disagreement. I may not have access to the other's world, but agreement makes a compelling case for sameness, and the incidental (yet constitutive if Derrida, or his predecessor, Saussure, have it right) affairs that attend my affirmation would be similar as well. If we talk about numbers succeeding one another, the other's "regionalized" associative matrix about numbers and their sequences would well line up. Agreement here is not absolute, and just because we agree that modus ponens is correct, it doesn't mean we live in parallel worlds on the matter of the terms and their logic. It does mean analogical agreement.
But understanding complex affairs is a very different matter. Interpretations bound with systems of meaning that are only accessible subjectively are brought into play. The first paragraph of, say, Moby Dick, nay, the very concept of being Ishmael, is massively indeterminate in its connotative meanings (to educated readers) in communicative practice. Kierkegaard? The point is that even if you think you've got it, because you've read Plato in the Greek, and the many many dated references, and Hegel and, well, everything Kierkegaard has read, you will still stand outside what K has in mind. Why is K a Christian? Have you experienced his "long nights of dark inwardness"?
I will not say that your effort understand the author is for naught at all, but that in the end, you will have understood mostly yourself and your own advanced understanding.
In philosophy, I never try to understand the intentions of another. That sounds too abstract, good for the classroom perhaps.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes. Sounds like the above. But I go much further it seems. I think of Virginia Woolf: A single line spoken, then the dramatic affair is revealed inwardly. Language made public is the tip of an iceberg.
Quoting Fooloso4
This is a difficult matter for me to discuss. The reduction removes cultural heritage. If taken to its logical and existential end, it is revelatory. And matters like how cultures carry meanings, and how these meanings are constructed differently, fall away. I think getting to this point is the purpose of philosophy.
Quoting Fooloso4
Fine. But what is that-which-is-not-reduced?
Quoting Fooloso4
Which is why I don't think about Wittgenstein very much. But it is not theory I am interested in. I am with Kierkegaard in that I think there really is this qualitative leap. Kierkegaard confesses he is no knight of faith. Frankly, I don't think he understood himself all that well because his "positing of spirit" is over intellectualized (the curse of genius is you can't keep yourself from endlessly expressing your genius. Addictive). However, his analysis of time in the Concept of Anxiety is eye opening, but did he really understand the eternal present? I think a meditating Buddhist or Hindu just might.
A real question. Your real question. Not the real question.
Quoting Constance
This has not been my experience. It remains my understanding, but the more closely and attentively I read and the more I am helped by other more advanced readers, the more I learn and the more my understanding is altered.
Quoting Constance
The problem of the author's intention should not close you off to listening to the author. Listening cannot take place when the reader assumes that the author cannot be understood, when the reader assumes that the real questions are the ones she asks, that there are foundations that must be built on rather than toppled.
Quoting Constance
Quite the opposite. It is a matter of practice, of allowing a text to open up, of learning to read a text on its own terms.
Quoting Constance
The practice itself is cultural heritage.
Quoting Constance
Or perhaps it is being captivated by a picture of liberation. The dream of being free of presuppositions
Quoting Constance
The activities of life. The experiences of life. Being alive.
Quoting Constance
Based on what you said about the inability to understand an author, perhaps you have misunderstood his intent. Or do you think authors write without intent? But it looks like you think you understand him better than he understood himself.
But I do think there is a real question, but is IS a question, not an answer: an openness at the level of basic questions. I think there is a real answer, too, but its substance lies in intuitions that are alien to familiar thought.
Quoting Fooloso4
As I see it, what is shared and what is hidden can be very close, as is illustrated by, say, the politician, who spends so many hours in the public conversation that there little room for truly private thoughts and experiences. Such conversation tends to be factual, statistical, perfunctory, programmatic, and so on. Step away from this agreement, and the world can become very alien, which is a motif of Moby Dick, which I mentioned earlier. This is the beginning of what I would cll enlightenment.
Quoting Fooloso4
Or listening occurs when the reader observes a failing of understanding within, and the ideas presented address this. And I disagree, in a qualified way, about "foundations": Reading others builds foundations, clearly, but in philosophy, these foundations reveal their own finitude, if you will. I mean, the question always remains open in all lines of inquiry when basic questions come to light. One is made to simply continue thinking and resign oneself to the building enterprise, or put it down and allow philosophical insight to do its job, which is disillusionment in foundations. This, I argue, is what Hindus had in mind with jnana yoga, an exercise in apophatic philosophy. After all, it is not ideas we are trying to understand here; it is the world.
Quoting Fooloso4
Put it like this and what you end up with is "on its own terms" which sounds apart from your terms. I am saying all "terms" find their mark only in what receives them. Is philosophical knowledge to be treated like information?
Quoting Fooloso4
It is discovered IN cultural heritage, true. You could say I am an historical construct made of this heritage and I am inclined to agree. But then: there are two selves, the one so constructed and the one that second guesses all of this in philosophy, and the basic level. This latter self, I argue, is discovered apophatically. As to its nature, it is Other than culture; it is the existential grounding of ethics.
Quoting Fooloso4
But the confirmation lies in embedded in ordinary experience. There is the metaethical argument, the phenomenological reduction argument (reduction to presence, givenness), the argument based on a general materialism, and others.
Being free of presuppositions acknowledged as a given within the context of inquiry into basic questions.
Quoting Fooloso4
But language gives you these utterances. Is there something language gives you that is not language?
Quoting Fooloso4
That is not impossible, to understand what someone writes better than they understand it. Kierkegaard admitted as much when he described the knight of faith as someone beyond his own powers to live in faith beyond principle.
I want to say that when we look closely at the process of understanding something, it is one's personal resources that are in play. My ability to draw on my interpretive assets gives me the "intent" and when I see things set well together in a given interpretation, I call this right. My position seems to be that the more ideas lack objective prima facie clarity, the less authorial intent is authoritative.