Freedom Revisited
An interesting point of entry to this contentious issue is the examination of the “I”, as in Descartes’s cogito. I’m not sure if we have examined it here in the forum, but this introduction will try to, once again, talk about the freedom – or the freedom of the will.
First off, I think, peculiarly, there’s too much focus put on actions/behavior when arguing about freedom v. determinism. More specifically, the most common subject of investigation is morality and ethics. One of my favorites: if we are determined to behave in a moral manner, then we really aren’t moral beings, we’re just programmed to behave like so. To be truly moral, we should have the freewill to behave morally or not morally. Something like that.
But Descartes actually demonstrated that there is, indeed, freedom in us. And it comes in the form of thinking, or rational thinking. How so? We can control our thinking. No, this is not a mind-blowing additional argument. His definition of thinking is what we already accept as rational thinking – deliberation which includes choices, course of action, speculation, trial and error, application of different scenarios to arrive at a decision. In other words – problem solving.
So, going back to the “I” of consciousness, it turns out that the “I” is not primordial or primitive in our view of the world. It is the “We”. The “I” came about later in our thinking. We could not have posited the “self” or the “I” without having the understanding of “we”. The plurality of existence which is embedded in our brain. So, experience, therefore, was not due to having the consciousness of self, but having the consciousness of the “we”. And we’ve somehow achieved freedom of thinking by arriving at the ”I” or the self. By differentiating ourself from the collective “we”.
Which brings us to the point Aristotle made about choice in his Nicomachean Ethics. We could only make a choice if thinking about the future. Deliberation is always future-oriented, as the past could not be undone and be deliberated again. Rational thinking, that is, freedom of thinking, is reserved for future decisions. And from this point on, we could say, freedom in thinking means there are possibilities to attend to and course of actions to be taken in the future.
Like I said, not mind-blowing. But if you’ve heard of the line “truth will set you free”, here’s a line borrowed from Aristotle:
unless he is more certain of his first principles than of the conclusion drawn from them he will only possess the knowledge in question accidentally.
Thinking is the springboard for actions. It's in the thinking that we achieve freedom.
First off, I think, peculiarly, there’s too much focus put on actions/behavior when arguing about freedom v. determinism. More specifically, the most common subject of investigation is morality and ethics. One of my favorites: if we are determined to behave in a moral manner, then we really aren’t moral beings, we’re just programmed to behave like so. To be truly moral, we should have the freewill to behave morally or not morally. Something like that.
But Descartes actually demonstrated that there is, indeed, freedom in us. And it comes in the form of thinking, or rational thinking. How so? We can control our thinking. No, this is not a mind-blowing additional argument. His definition of thinking is what we already accept as rational thinking – deliberation which includes choices, course of action, speculation, trial and error, application of different scenarios to arrive at a decision. In other words – problem solving.
So, going back to the “I” of consciousness, it turns out that the “I” is not primordial or primitive in our view of the world. It is the “We”. The “I” came about later in our thinking. We could not have posited the “self” or the “I” without having the understanding of “we”. The plurality of existence which is embedded in our brain. So, experience, therefore, was not due to having the consciousness of self, but having the consciousness of the “we”. And we’ve somehow achieved freedom of thinking by arriving at the ”I” or the self. By differentiating ourself from the collective “we”.
Which brings us to the point Aristotle made about choice in his Nicomachean Ethics. We could only make a choice if thinking about the future. Deliberation is always future-oriented, as the past could not be undone and be deliberated again. Rational thinking, that is, freedom of thinking, is reserved for future decisions. And from this point on, we could say, freedom in thinking means there are possibilities to attend to and course of actions to be taken in the future.
Like I said, not mind-blowing. But if you’ve heard of the line “truth will set you free”, here’s a line borrowed from Aristotle:
unless he is more certain of his first principles than of the conclusion drawn from them he will only possess the knowledge in question accidentally.
Thinking is the springboard for actions. It's in the thinking that we achieve freedom.
Comments (64)
Did Descartes actually demonstrate freedom, or did he rather posit that freedom was “...sensed within ourselves...”, and is hence “...self-evident and transparently clear...”?
Quoting L'éléphant
In Descartes, there are two ways of thinking, in which “...will has a wider scope than the intellect...”, so, yes, true enough.
Quoting L'éléphant
Except understanding itself presupposes a necessary singular subject, which couldn’t be any other that an “I”. “We” only indicates a multiplicity of singular subjects, doesn’t it?
Interesting topic, at any rate.
I'm not sure Descartes declared we had free will. He simply declared that which he was unable to doubt, in fact, that which arguably he had no control over, was that he thought, therefore he must be.
Quoting L'éléphant
An interesting point. Our brains are actually many cells working in tandem with different parts that do different functions. I still don't see how that necessitates freedom though. I suppose its what you mean by freedom. Some people mean that freedom is absolute power, unconstrained by things such as biology. I think very few people would say that's viable.
Another term of freedom might be the freedom of external dominance of your internal conclusions. So if I decide to watch TV, no one will come and shut if off or threaten me because they don't think I should. I tend to like this definition more, as it avoids the notion of freedom from determinism, and more about the levels of influence within deterministic systems.
But that is a spring board for you to decide. What does freedom mean to you?
So then the one thing we could deduce from it is that there was no understanding of self prior, since there was no understanding of singular subject. It's a primordial phenomenon that there was no "I" consciousness. It's hard to wrap one's head around it but that's what philosophers have posited.
Quoting Philosophim
No, he didn't. Not in the sense you're thinking. But he demonstrated in cogito that our thinking can be.
Quoting Philosophim
I am in the group that believes there is free will in thought. Like I said in my OP, we tend to focus on action -- that our actions are determined. But if these philosophers posit that thinking is the springboard to action, and that there's freewill in thinking, let's start there. Aristotle's insistence on deliberation as future-oriented thinking implies the freedom of the will. We think of possibilities, we think of different scenarios, and we think logically. For example, there are truths (principles) to discover. If we do not have that freedom in thought, we would never discover these principles. Apparently, he believed that we could.
You might want to read Arthur Schopenhauer's "Essay on the Freedom of the Will." Presents what I consider one of the best essays ever written on this topic. Does, however, presuppose the reader is familiar with some basic tenets of Immanuel Kant's philosophy.
Hah! Indeed. Thanks.
Here, I pasted a passage from the book:
esse = essence or nature
operari = action
EXACTLY!!!!!!!!! BRAVO!!!!!!!!!
I see. That is not my personal opinion myself, but I feel that "free will" is such an ambiguous term that it can mean different things to different people without issue. Still, a very nice post L'elephant!
Sadly, naturalism has some harsh words against freedom of thinking. To the followers of naturalism, freedom is only an illusion. Some of the reasons given are : it's only biological, it's a collection of nerves and cells, and it's physiological. Among them: Stephen Hawking and Alex Rosenberg.
But the placement (where freedom resides) of their contention is, to me, misplaced. To them, because of our biological constitution and the chemicals that come with it, we are only given the illusion that we have the freedom in thinking.
I think this is again the reductionist and mechanical views of metaphysics, which I disagree with.
Quoting L'éléphant
....from which the deduction of the self must have already been established, insofar as there must already be that to which the understanding of “we” belongs. Hence the presupposed necessary singular subject.
Quoting L'éléphant
Correct. Understanding, in and of itself, does not immediately give the self, but as soon as there is something understood, in this case “we”, a subject to which that something relates, is presupposed. Can’t have an understanding without that which understands. That the self to which understanding belongs, represented as “I”, is only a speculative metaphysical determination of pure reason.
Or so the story goes...
————-
“Freedom is transcendental”, Schopenhauer, 1839;
“There does exist freedom in the transcendental sense”, Kant, 1781.
S thought so, K thought so first. And everybody knows....first rules!!!
Just sayin’.....
While I haven't explained how we broke away from the collective awareness, the plurality, to self-consciousness, I'm telling you that there was no reasoning or deduction that went into it. Rational thinking of the "I" did not happen before when there was only the "we". When Descartes, for example, wrote the meditation, he wasn't starting from the beginning of self-awareness. Descartes, after all, was operating in the modern world, where our knowledge was already sophisticated and advance.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I admit we're both struggling and grappling with this idea that humans didn't begin thinking in the "I" tense. It's hard to understand that we didn't have this. What we did have in the primordial understanding of everything was the "we".
The only comparison I could think of is an animal which has every faculty of awareness -- the pack, the surrounding, where to get food, the hunt. Except, no self-awareness. If this animal sees its reflection, it would not think, "That's me". That animal could only think in terms of the pack, the many, its family.
I’m ok with that.
Quoting L'éléphant
While I’m hesitant to accept this, I won’t reject it either, without some proper argument to judge it by. I might go for rational thinking of “I” didn’t happen when there was only beings of similar kind, all running around the countryside and stuff, making babies, staying alive, before the advent of systemic pure thought. But when you say “we”, the inception of rational thinking must have occurred, if only as a conception of a discriminating relation between similarly existing things, as determined by one of them.
But I sorta get your point. Maybe I’m over-analyzing.
If I've come across an explanation I will post it here.
Maybe you could start a thread on that. lol. How did we achieve self-awareness when there was none before. I'm guessing evolution and language development. But still, I'm not sure about that either.
They cannot assert that we do not have freedom in thinking because their conclusion is begging the question.
It is a good approach to an analysis of the self. The self is fashioned after a model of plurality, witnessed in the world of others. This idea has a history and I think it was Herbert Mead who is most famous for it. So when I observe myself, my behavior, feelings my own thoughts, I am working within a structure of social organized affairs: I AM the "other" of a conversation, as I witness myself.
This makes sense, but it does lead to a deeper issue, which is the digression toward the determinative self, the final self that is not the social model, but the one experiencing the social model. Here is where you approach Descartes: the cogito says "I think" and this is supposed to be the end of the line, the definitive self that is not epistemically assailable. The "we" is an empirical concept, and internalized model; Descartes cogito is not contingent like this. Of course, "I am" is an empirical concept, too! So we can see where Descartes has his limitations; but then again, it can be argued that this "I am" is existential, a true presence "behind" the utterance, which is called for since the transcendental ego does show up: Even if "I am" is an empirical social construction, "who" is this actual witness that can stand apart from the role playing?
Quoting L'éléphant
The illusion? What do you mean? What question is begged? Not that I disagree, but how do you frame this?
Yes, thanks for reference on Mead. I didn't know he wrote extensively on this subject -- the development of sense of self. So, to him, from my cursory reading about him, the development of the "I" came about when we developed language.
Quoting Constance
I made two posts in this thread about the critics who argue against the idea that we have freedom in thinking. The naturalists, or followers of naturalism, argue that we don't have freedom in thinking, like Descartes, Aristotle, and Schopenhauer implied or directly wrote about. Instead, it is only an illusion brought about by our biology, the nerves and cells and chemicals in our brain. When we think, we think in such a way that our thoughts are produced by the environmental stimuli acting on our nerves and cells and make us believe that it is our own voluntary thinking from which our thoughts are produced.
And I said this is question begging coming from the naturalists because they started off by claiming because of our nerves, cells, and chemicals, our thoughts are only produced by nerves, cells, and chemicals.
A determinist will argue that the principle of causality has no exception, notwithstanding the weirdness of quantum physics; and here, physics do know either, but they certainly don't deny effects have causes. This is an apodictic impossibility, that is, one cannot even imagine a spontaneous event (natural events presupposing this, so they are not the true ground of determinacy)--- that is how strong causality is. But the rub of determinism: We don't really know the nature of this intuition behind ex nihilo nihil fit. We call it causality and we acknowledge the apodicticity (trying to imagine an object moving by itself), but this is not an empirical concept, and so it is not contingent, its justification is not derived from something else, some logical argument. It is its "own presupposition". That is, it is a given, this, call it a "pure intuition" that cannot be spoken really. This make the determinist's position indeterminate, for intuitions as intuitions have no
Then there is freedom, a very rare event, for most of our lives are lived thoughtlessly, like when I drive a car and open a bottle: all automatic, spontaneous events, these fluid movements we go through without question or intrusion from analysis. If you ask me, those guys who stole the car, got drunk and killed ten people on the highway were anything but free in their actions. Even as they began their adventure of debauchery, and reviewed the law, the consequences, the danger, this was not sufficient for freedom, for the struggle to decide was a matter contained within the inner tensions between possible actions. Had their been more motivation on the side of care rather than carelessness, they wouldn't have done it. So why was there stronger motivation to do it? There must be in that entangled personal world of each a very extensive causal analysis, so complex untouchable by analysis, really.
Then what is "real" freedom? Real freedom lies within the mechanism of withdrawal, I can be argued, for when I turn the key to the ignition, and nothing happens, I withdraw from the engagement. There is the moment of indecision, of "indeterminacy" that is instantly filled with possibilities regarding the battery, the engine, who to call, and so on. But to fail to fill this indeterminacy with possibilities, herein lies freedom, for there is an absence of the sufficient cause putting effect in motion. The question is, how is this indeterminacy possible? It should not be possible. You can call it a mere illusion of indeterminacy, and insist that the moment before ideas are set in motion is always already filled, just not explicitly, yet. But then, Real freedom stands apart from any motivation. There may be in the background emerging potentialities, but there is no "standing in" and one of these.
The concept of human freedom rests with this indeterminacy. Probably the most pure form of this is seen in the concept of kriya yoga. But in our daily affairs, when we stand in conscious wonder about what we do, who we are, why we exist and so on, we are free of motivation. Doe this make us a spontaneous cause? Not exactly. But the freedom that can stand apart from the motivation to act, think, etc. conceives of possibilities from a stand point of diminished determination. But causality is apodictic, and there can be no room for "diminished determinism". Therein lies the issue.
I didn't proof read. Left off here above:
.....have no argument, no justification, no explanation. We cannot say we really understand such things at all, for they are givens, in the fabric of the world. Transcendental.
I don't think this is the "thinking" we're talking about in this thread. I gave examples of Descartes, Aristotle, and Schopenhauer's idea of freedom in thinking. It is rational thinking. And we don't always think rationally, of course, such as in your example above. The point of freedom in thinking is, we do have it at our disposal if we are so inclined. There is deliberation, there is decision, and there is future possibilities. That's what they mean.
Quoting Constance
Yes, this is more like it. But spontaneity is not the idea here. We could be spontaneous and still be unthinking and undeliberative. We're after rational thinking.
You wrote, "The naturalists, or followers of naturalism, argue that we don't have freedom in thinking, like Descartes, Aristotle, and Schopenhauer implied or directly wrote about. Instead, it is only an illusion brought about by our biology, the nerves and cells and chemicals in our brain."
If this is where the issue begins, then this whole affair of biology has to be understood at a more basic level, where the true argument of this "naturalism" lies. Naturalism is grounded in the apodicticity of the principle of causality. I mean, no one is going argue that decision making is a "natural" affair without understanding what it is in naturalism that decides things in the matter of human freedom. Nature is in turn what, exactly, that makes the case? It is this underlying causality that rules the determination of all natural events. Otherwise, naturalism simply begs the question: why is there no freedom in a natural world.
So you see, if you're talking about nature, the brain and neural transmissions along axonal fibers and on and on, and freedom, the matter instantly turns to causality. What else? Talk to a naturalist about reason, then. This will be a reductionist position: all reasoned thought is reducible brain functions. Then you are back to causality. The fight of freedom contra determinacy has its final argument here.
I move from this, on to an analysis you are ignoring, for reasons I cannot understand. Perhaps it is because it is unfamiliar. The argument presented above is grounded in a phenomenological method of thinking. The fluid continuity the lived life of a person is mostly the kind of think in which freedom doesn't even step in, for we don't usually freely act. Most of what we do is rote behavior. When it DOES become a matter of freedom, it is the kind of thing I described.
to say we "have it," that is, the freedom of thinking, if we are so inclined, simply begs the naturalist question. How is being so inclined make it free? Just the opposite, one would argue, for "being inclined" to do something would make the inclination the prime mover, not the agent who is so moved.
Well put. The 'self' depends upon an 'other,' and language ('interior monologue') depends on a tribal language.
Quoting Constance
Okay, you got one thing right -- causality. But did you read what Schopenhauer wrote (I posted a passage in this thread). See where the necessity lies -- not in the thinking.
As to the definition of the naturalism as a philosophical view, please read up on the definition. I think you're missing the main point of naturalism. Yes, it is nature - but I want you to think in terms of philosophical argument.
Why must it be 'one' experiencing the model? What if the singularity of the ghost of the soul is part of a contingent and inherited model inspired by the perceived unity of its containing body? 'One is one around here.' 'One' can imagine a society where each body is understood to host several or seven souls, one for each day of the week, each learning to ignore what's not its concern on its six days off per week. It may be something like the unity of 'reason' that's projected on the body which is given a soul for its little prison palace.
I speculate that this 'one' is just reason or language, which is a unified system of concepts and a communal possession. The softwhere is one.
I think you are on to something, though the word 'real' is perhaps unnecessary. As I see it, one task of the philosopher is to reveal so-called necessity as a congealed and disguised contingency which hides in plain sight. 'That which is ontically nearest is ontologically farthest.' Trapped in the illusion of necessity, deviation is not yet even conceivable. Possibility languishes unborn. Along these lines, the philosopher has an intensity of withdrawal that allows the too obvious to finally become questionable.
What I gave you was a philosophical argument. The thoughts I presented issue from a phenomenological perspective on freedom, which takes the matter into the structure of the given experience of the free act. Acts are not free when they are practiced and done without explicit intention, like typing these words. So where does the issue of freedom in experience even arise at all? is the first question.
Schopenhauer, of course, gives a clear account of what determinism says. Writing about deliberating over future actions, he considers:
I also can run out of the gate, into the wide world, and never return. All of this is strictly up to me, in this I have complete freedom. But still I shall do none of these things now, but with just as free a will I shall go home to my wife............. This is exactly as if water spoke to itself: I can make waves (yes! in the sea during a storm), I can rush down hill (yes! in the river bed)- I can plunge down foaming and gushing (yes! in the waterfall), I can rise freely as stream of water into the air (yes! in the fountain), I can, finally, boil away and disappear (yes! at a certain temperature); but I am doing none of these things now, and am voluntarily remaining quiet and clear water in the reflecting pond. (F, 43)
That is, we are no more free than a flowing water to determine our future. Rorty put it like this, in the context of the epistemic relationship with the world: I no more have "knowledge" of the affairs around me in the traditional sense than a car's dent has knowledge of the offending guardrail. Thinking like this (Rorty's pragmatist position; and he was no naturalist at the level of ontology and epistemology analysis) entirely undermines talk about will and decision making (It also undoes any attempt to validate science's knowledge claims. That is, at this basic level of analysis. Otherwise, science is just fine, as analytic philosophers, inspired by grandfather Kant long ago).
But then there is Schopenhauer's "higher view":
[i]the empirical character, like the whole man, is a mere appearance as an object of experience, and hence bound to the forms of all appearance ) time, space, and causality and subject to their laws. On the other hand, the condition and the basis of this whole appearance is his intelligible character, i.e. his will as thing in itself. It is to the will in this capacity that freedom, and to be sure even absolute freedom, that is, independence of the law of causality (as a mere form of appearances), properly belongs. (F,
97)[/i]
Yes, we are now in the world of noumena. How do we account for this? If I may depart from Schopenhauer on this, the problem lies in the radical distance Kant puts between our empirical selves and our noumenal selves, the latter being some impossible postulate. If you want to look closer into the anatomy of a free act, the only route is through phenomenology. Freedom reveals itself in the analysis Time and the event of pulling away from the seamless flow of determined actions. For this see what I wrote earlier.
:fire: Perhaps nothing is necessary. Reality is overrated. Why is the film industry a multi-billion dollar enterprise?
Well, you throw me off a bit with "soul" talk. But consider an adjacent idea: you are suggesting a body of dividedness rather than unity; or rather, the unity of any given occasion is a singularity that comes and goes. Right now I may be an accountant doing my job; later I am a parent instructing my children; and so on. Is this what you have in mind? This has been called the "fractal self" based on the observation that there is no perceivable singular self beyond all the various different selves we are in different contexts.
On the point that there must be "one" experiencing: Approach this apophatically: I am this abiding self in all that I can conceive. I think of myself as a parent, teacher, friend, and so on, but there is an position of being apart from all these can be. I may be a teacher, but I can withdraw from this and stand away from it, and in this it has no claim of me. It seems that whatever I think of, I can position myself apart from it, in an act of reflection. This reflective self is always NOT the role being played. But cannot be observed or even conceived.
Yes! I conditionally agree with this. I mean, this is a very tempting idea, especially when we examine the community nature of language, history, education and the structured self this produces. How can one think or have identity at all if one is not IN an historical context? Language itself is historical. And even the Buddhist Madhyamika concept of no self chimes in. But there are other features of our world that will not allow for this, depending, of course, on how one defines the self.
Why would the Madhyamika take this view? Go deep into a meditative state, and all that one is in the world is intentionally annihilated. Time is annihilated, if things go well, for what is time if not the passage of events, and if these are nullified then time is nullified (putting aside a physicist's take on this. Here, it is "stream of consciousness' time, foundational time, that is presupposed by empirical concepts). And the constructs of language and culture are suspended. NOT, however, that these are not in the underpinnings of the "nothingness" of a deep meditative state. After all, in this state one is not reduced to an infantile mentality. The constructed self is there, maintained in the "I am" position. But there is no mistaking the experienced vacuity, the nothingness of experience that sits before your awareness.
Who are you now? Neither baker nor candlestick maker. The empirical self suspended. Now the matter becomes, not analytic, but revelatory. One doesn't have to meditate for this: Just take yourself out of contextual relations with the world. Stand in a meadow and clear the mind, with more or less success. Argument ends here. Affirming the self in the openness of things is a radical move. An Emersonian move (see his little book called Nature). A Husserlian move (see his epoche). Tough to argue, though. But it can be approached phonologically in the analysis of the structure of experience. If you want to go there, it does get interesting. Let me know.
Well, I am taken aback again. If you've read Heidegger, then you have a perspective.
The intensity of withdrawal? Not many would talk like this around here. This withdrawal is a radical concept lying not in the everydayness of things, nor in the discoveries of science, but at the fringe of intelligible thought itself: metaphysics. But this that languishes unborn, this nostalgia should not be historically conceived. It is immanent in presence, in the metaphysical presence, but not in the negative sense; a positive one, for apophatically a person can discover things most extraordinary about the lived actuality of what has been called nunc stans. In other words, there is that "childhood sense of adventure" Kierkegaard talks about in The Concept of Anxiety that inspired Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics and the "nothing" which is this foundational nothing we encounter when we pull back for affairs. There is something to the nothing, but here, one has left analysis. Now the matter turns of the revelatory.
Don't you think the plurality of existence, the manifold I, the we, is embedded between the manifolds of brains and physical worlds? Aren't all creatures, from ants, crickets, and squirrels, to people, giraffes, and green whales situated between these two worlds? And are their and our bodies not just the essence of their being?
Without determined process, we can't have free will in the first place. Processes in our brain and the outside physical world develop determined, like us in between. Does that make us non-free? No. If we are that determined bodily (i.e., that body) process there is nothing that makes us s puppet with strings attached. We are tied with uncuttable strings to brain and outside world, and both are necessary for us to exist, to walk, talk, sleep, dream, sing, and even philosophize. Only when we are forced, our free will can be imparted.
Agreed. Is there something sociopathic-shamanic about the philosopher? A controlled touch of madness?
Quoting Constance
'Fringe' sounds right on it.
Quoting Constance
I was thinking not of nostalgia but of a withdrawal of conformity sufficient unto the day to see the Right way as merely the tribe's way. I think of dogs trained by wireless leashes.
Quoting Constance
Intriguing. Do philosophers (the 'special' kind) refuse to crow up? (Peter Pun asks Windy.)
Quoting Constance
Perhaps analysis computes with the metaphors provided by revelation once they've cooled and congealed?
Intriguing. I am attached (at least on this forum) to that which gives itself at least partially to language. I am inclined to respect the revelatory or disclosive or inventive aspects of what is called thinking.
I don't think you are quite following me, though you make some good related points with which I agree. Try to imagine the so-called unity of individual consciousness or of the metaphysical subject as a prejudice or an invention that's been so successful that it's become too obvious almost to question. If there is a genuine unity on the scene, it is perhaps that of 'reason' or the system of interdependent concepts which is a community's primary property. In other words, the unity is that of the softwhere, which is (so runs my speculation) projected onto the visually singular skull. Invoking Heidegger's 'one' as conceived by Dreyfus, we end up with 'one is one around here.' Those who find less or more than one ghost in their mud are mad.
Oh we love love our fantasies. I'm mostly with Blake and Vico myself. We secrete the reel world chew gather, poetically. We undergo self help noses, each of us a stuff where developer. Keep your ice built for very tails or a mouse itch in a puddle. The shoe mud go on, wither or not flu ossify nose rats wheel.
Well, that does put a damper on going to the state fair, and everything else, really. What survives? The question insinuates itself into every corner of existence, into language itself, then the self itself. At this point, you're either mentally ill, or you're enlightened. If you believe there is such a thing as the latter, and I do, though it is difficult, this is forced into analysis and you end up reading things that further alienate, or, rationalize alienation, and you end up thinking people are just lost and understand nothing....and you're right!
That wireless leash sounds like Foucault's panopticon society, in which everybody is the keeper, even ourselves.
Quoting lll
Reading them, one gets the impression that they want very much to leave this world. Who could blame them? It is an awful place. Very good to me, relatively speaking, but so awful this tonnage of suffering that history is made of. One day, you're a ballerina, the next Putin has drops a bridge on you.
Suffering and happiness, these are the stuff of the only meaningful philosophical issues. Value and metavalue. All things yield to this. Put a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds. What is THAT doing in existence? Here is Kierkegaard:
One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?
Quoting lll
That is clearly what happens, if there is anything such as revelation. Irony plays against, metaphors play with something else in language, but whether there is an inroad to existence that is NOT language is the big question. Ask Derrida. Can language ever really touch the world? If not, what is this horrible tennis elbow experience? It ain't language....but it IS there. Oh my. Are we not steeped in metaphysics in the most obvious, intuitive way? Right before our very noses?
As I see it, nonconformity is only ever partial if it's at all intelligible. I agree with Rorty and others that metaphors are mad, essentially senseless until assimilated by a mutating dance. Is Hooligans Wink a work of madness? It takes us back to Vico's divine men, poets without distance from their ghost-gushing imaginations, living therefore a thunder-hunted world of fairy tails. The proximity of madness and enlightenment reminds me Cambell's talk of the shaman as an ambiguous figure, a sort of necessary evil for the tribe, the one who forays beyond the fence, a bastard John Snow, secretly a king (unacknowledged legislator of moon kind.)
Reminds me of Nietzsche's vision of all the life-hating old men and their blasphemies against the river that ever runs over (life.) On the flip there's an imperial lust for cultural conquest and a polymorphously preverse lust for 'this meal over flush.' It may be philosopher of immanence are some of 'em erotomaniacal messengers whose shine is the quest young murk or the muted pose thorn.
I agree, and yet insist that qualia are alogical, elusive, paradoxical. So we must talk of objects. Bridges dropped on ballerinas is beautiful, the sentence of course and not the situation.
Beautiful quote ! Reminds me of Dostoevsky and Sartre.
Also of this:
This is the knotty child who questions Everything with that most terrible of questions. Why is there a here here? Why did me mud wake up ? Who drags me from the void to make me march and pretend? There is beauty in the horror, for the lad is a sacred victim of the gods who hide in gore. The nihilist is christ on the cross as he doubts the fondness of his too far father.
One of my versions of that is the smell of 'garbage juice' which the trucks leave behind in the early morning. How ineffable that spell ! Feuerbach stressed sensation as that which eludes our nets. What is this whole in my morning donut? What is this gap twixt my chew front thief ? A reference offer (our ever rinse over, a river runs over).
I don't think you're agreeing with Schopenhauer. The freedom is in thinking, according to him. Our actions then becomes caused by our thinking. So, what conclusion could you form about this? The necessity is in our action, but freedom is in our thinking. Determinism is misplaced here. The ocean example is to point to you that one could think about an action, but chooses not to act on it.
It does make you wonder. A Korean man nailed himself to a cross, somehow, imitating Christ. Easy enough to call him mad, but the real question to me is, what was going on in his mind to give him that kind of conviction? It must have been an extraordinary thing. Me? I wonder if the oatmeal cookies will be done in time for dessert. Forget the "truth" (Maybe truth is a woman, Nietzsche wrote) and its antiseptic
pathology. Nietzsche really liked Emerson, a Unitarian minister, for a good reason: He took the soul to such heights and revealed something of what the age of reason buried deep: a fathomless and impossible affirmation: "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
All this insipid philosophical bickering over God occludes the unspeakable presence of the world, which can be powerful, profound, beautiful, like those first few minutes of Mahler's 9th. Or Barber's Summer Knoxville 1915. This is where one should live. I dare say.
Christs finest moment is his cry of dereliction. Was he a nihilist for the moment only, or did it follow him to his death? Then, the withdrawal of God was the moment he became a human being. You want to be there at the foot of the cross screaming up, Oh, so now you get it. It takes a jolt.
Only the damned are grand, and it's when daddy glows away that baby gets to rare that groan of thorns.
Quoting Constance
The incarnation is completed exactly then, whiff no more got in the sky leftover.
Quoting Constance
Yes. The moral of the sorry is gory.
Oh, this is Wilfred Owen. I didn't recognize. I taught WWI British poetry once to high school students (in India, no less). I did not teach this one. He and Siegfried Sassoon. Bloody mess to read. Some of the imagery was simply too much to bear.
I want the next misses in a puddle in a two please bikini, aloof in sheets coding, eternally farting years old (every tug has its toy.) Born in scene, upon scum, I prey with my wait paint which is wet point. (I like the idea of a prophetic protagonist explaining his peach humpediment, symbolizing philosophy's struggle to master its own treacherous medium.)
First bumped into it in an anthology as a teen. Some of his lines are as good as any I know.
That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one.
Nietzsche is dear to me, for exactly what you sketch above.
[quote=Nietzsche]
The recluse does not believe that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse's verdict...
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
I wonder if you've seen this more obscure passage:
[quote=Hegel]
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
...
God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1
Ah, thank you for tolerating my playfulness and wetting for the point to try. I'm studying Chimes Joys lately.
Sounds like an adventure.
I'm also aloft in cheeps clothing.
Well put. Even to think is to splash in chirps and barks the 'meaning' of which we did not assign but only adapted to you as we might learn to use a knife and spoon. The noise 'mommy' and the light switch, tools for a body to touch in its dance with the world.
I don't though those musical references well (I do love music), but I agree that the bickering occludes raging beauty and terror. I think of Job's visit by the whirlwind.
https://biblehub.com/bsb/job/39.htm
As others have noted this is an amoral or transmoral God drunk on the beauty and madness and terror of his creation. This is a world behind the film of all the boring self-righteous posturing and lecturing inflicted upon Job by those to desperate for the installation therein of cosmic justice to be obliterated by its beauty. We like to cover it over with a slab of the fog of the blob of our blab. Yet this glorious vision too is the flap of a glob of a grab of our gab, another both dump flu of as it.
But that choice we make is still bound to what the understanding can conceive, and this makes something like "independence of the law of causality" just an apodictic impossibility. I don't think naturalists will be moved one bit by this; they will simply say, transcendental will??? You must be mad. They will pull out Occam's razor, or insist the facts do not support such an idea, and dismiss it.
I am for demonstrating freedom, first. Where does it show up in the world that we can even talk about it? It shows up in judgment, the kind of judgment that responds to a break in the well being of affairs, like the car not starting, or the hammer's head flying off. Prior to this kind of break, freedom can in no way be seen. My fingers may be busy typing these words, but it is not a "free" act that is doing it. In fact, it would be a disaster to in interpose my "freedom," that is, my conscious awareness, between the fingers and action. I wouldn't be able to type second guessing every movement. Most of life is lived like this, an unconscious process. Foucault asked, are we not being ventriloquized by history? I always thought tis fascinating: how can one see where automatic systems end, and "I" begins? For my "will" is a question begging concept: will is always will to do something, and this is impossible without something that is not will, namely, a value, a motivation that creates to desire that makes one want, need. A will without this is nonsense. A will to.....will? No motivation, no will.
Kant is maddening on this. Talking about a "good will" that responds dutifully to rationally conceived obligations that may NOT have desire behind them. This disembodied rational will is a pure fiction, just like the categories (which make sense analytically, yes. But to treat them as an actuality??)
So for me, at any rate, this break in our affairs shows where freedom is to be found. It gets, frankly, a bit weird from here, and I'll make is brief: Take this simple break, the hammer head flying off, and there you are in the middle of a suddenly dissociated action. But, you are no longer in the "spell," the pragmatic spell, I would argue, of the carrying forth. You are no longer "carried". Most, of course, move directly to an examination of remedies. But take the idea of freedom to its philosophical conception, and it is not a hammered, it is the question about the world as such. We, at this most basic level, are in, and ARE indeterminacy. No matter where the critical gaze goes, it will always meet with indeterminacy; in time, space, identity, ontology, aesthetics, and on and on, indeterminacy. Our freedom lies here, in the radical withdrawal from, not a hammer's use or a car's ignition, but ALL THINGS.
(Obviously, all I say here is derivative, with my own take on things applied. We all stand on the shoulders of others.)
This can be argued about, if you have the desire to do so.
:fire:
:ok: How true. It just dawned on me that you're unequivocally right, no strings attached. We can actually think anything, absolutely anything at all. Even consider the situation when we don't possess free will - we can mull over all the options in our head, even conduct simulations as best as we can with all options on the table. Making a choice is a different matter (we maybe constrained), thinking about all possible choices is a different story (we're free as a bird).
Non-action, as Schopenhauer indicated, is also a decision.
I can think whatever the hell I want. That's freedom, oui?
Suppose determinism is true. Even in this case, I can ponder upon all options available and even simulate (in my mind) making any choice whatsoever; you know, if I do this, then that, then that, and so on. Determinism will mean the actual choice you make is not yours, that's all. However, being able to contemplate all pathways when you reach a choice node is freedom (of will) in thinking (at least).
No idea what you mean?
Let me put it this way: Is there a difference between someone who can't mull over available options and someone who can? Which do you think is (more) determined or, conversely, more free?
There seems to be a clear difference between considering choices and making them.
This is an incorrect way of looking at it. We have freedom in thinking, but it doesn't mean everyone recognizes it. If someone can't mull over available options, then there's something wrong with him.
Muchas gracias amigo! This is what you've been saying and I'm only trying to figure out how exactly.
Here's a list you might wanna turn over in your head
1. Can't think (stone)
2. Can think but not about options (stoney)
3. Can think about options (neither stone nor stoney)
Quoting L'éléphant
You mean s/he's mentally ill?