Stating the Truth
There's a lot of stuff that philosophers do and and a lot of stuff that can be done with philosophy.
But one of the big appeals - one of the temptations you see thinker after thinker succumbing to - is the possibility of pronouncing the Truth. Of being the one who pronounces.
Truth, capital T, gets eviscerated by the postmoderns, but the gesture and drive lives on nontheless in their works. Derrida is emblematic here. More truth-shaking than anyone AND ALSO the most pronouncy person who ever lived.
Capital T truth is pronounced synoptically. Anything else that might be said will, inevitably, fall within the ambit of the truth pronounced - and so can be given its proper place.
Nietzsche already more or less said that but kept doing it anyway.
So what's going on here? What is happening? Why can't we stop?
But one of the big appeals - one of the temptations you see thinker after thinker succumbing to - is the possibility of pronouncing the Truth. Of being the one who pronounces.
Truth, capital T, gets eviscerated by the postmoderns, but the gesture and drive lives on nontheless in their works. Derrida is emblematic here. More truth-shaking than anyone AND ALSO the most pronouncy person who ever lived.
Capital T truth is pronounced synoptically. Anything else that might be said will, inevitably, fall within the ambit of the truth pronounced - and so can be given its proper place.
Nietzsche already more or less said that but kept doing it anyway.
So what's going on here? What is happening? Why can't we stop?
Comments (125)
Could it be - done right - that it is following the principle that ideas must be stated definitely enough so that they could be found wrong?
The worst thing of all is a mumbling, opaque, vagueness - an assertion which couldn't even be wrong as it does not put forward a clear enough claim. But if a claim is bold, then it makes itself open to the most direct counter-attack. Which is what you want if the aim of the game is intelligible discourse.
You're making all the world a falsifiable chess game. that sounds good for chess players who like science.
But that's not what i was asking about!
Isn't it the case that in so far as a philosopher has a coherent body of work, a coherent philosophy, he/she is attached to a theme? And that theme, being the current around which his/her individual ideas (little truths) flow, must, in order to be taken seriously, be their (big) "Truth". So pronouncing the truth becomes something like just asserting identity? Or do you mean a more explicit proselytizing that we fall into when we can't see beyond the boundaries of our own world view?
Human beings have the habit of creating models of the world, because it's useful. However, once established, the habit can go off on its own, with its own internal logic, not necessarily tethered to matters of survival (art for art's sake). But because it's a habit, it can be done blindly, obsessively, etc.
Indeed; all that is needed is that one stop.
Quoting csalisbury
I disagree with Banno. If I've understood csalisbury rightly, then "just stop" as advice is akin to "be less depressed" when one is overtaken by a deep sense of pessimism.
I hope you'll forgive the obscene gesture of portentously quoting Nietzsche but I've had the feeling you seem to be describing quite often and it always triggers me reflecting on the following aphorism:
And the cure is...
We wish to rob everyone of their autonomy, by speaking magic words.
Quoting Baden
My approach is semiotic. So as Baden notes, I wouldn't be defending naive realism. The self would be "revealed", as much as its world, by the process of inquiry.
Of course you could then see the self at the centre of my own inquiry as some kind of ideally rational self ... that you don't like ... for reasons of your own. Or of your "own". Ie: whatever ideal self you have in mind as articulating the proper worldview from "your" point of view.
Be that as it may, my response was simply that the right way to go about things is to "pronounce truth" - as that is then inviting falsification head on. It is saying, come have a go.
Problems only arise if claims are made in ways that are vague or otherwise unfalsifiable. So I am saying the philosophical inquiry has to take the form of a falsifiable chess game. Pronouncing truth is not in itself some kind of psychological flaw.
But Baden is right that people have to be wary about the degree to which they are also forming "a self" in coming to some clearly articulated world view.
(But isn't that a good thing - to actually also become some sort of definite self in life?)
The tension you describe is inevitable, it only shows that philosophy, as a somewhat-historical entity, has finally begun the audacious work of truly making a critique of rationality. This will uncover more than a few paradoxical aspects of our relation to reality, including that the popular epistemology is both absolutely indispensible and phenomenologically erroneous.
And since I usually poke Apokrisis for his vague walls of text, I have to say, Bravo. Two brilliant posts under 5000 characters. Sorry I was mean. :heart:
Philosophers are no longer seeking Truth as such but are more interested in different perspectives on stuff.
There are no Truths, just different views.
"There are no Truths, just different views."
But an aggregate of different views can be more accurate than a single one, which once again throws us back at the idea of an at least theoritically obtainable truth.
Is that so?
How odd.
Perhaps truth is much simpler than philosophers tend to claim. Perhaps there is nothing to say about Truth.
How could you possibly be so sure, if it is a work in process?
Even if this is so, we might still want to ask whether a particular philosopher got it right. For example, Was Meillassoux correct that post-Kantian philosophy left philosophy (at least the continental side) in a state of correlationism where the world appears to us as if there were dinosaurs living millions of years before humans evolved?
Was Kant right that what gives rise to our sensations is unknowable? Is it true that what we perceive is not what is the case?
At which point we're asking for a metaphysical truth about the world. If it's not the world, then it could be a truth about our condition or language use. Is it true that meaning is use? Is existentialism true? Is morality objective? Is consciousness subjective? We want to know the truths about these things, even if philosophers fail to convince us they got it entirely right.
But which, if any, of these are the Truth, as opposed to true?
Because the criteria would be different for each one? There is no one standard of justification that applies to all statements.
Well, it's how you determine whether a statement is true or not. Or, it's what makes a statement true.
The snow is white. Okay, so something makes that true or false.
"Determine"? "Decide" would be better. As in, the justification is why you decided to believe the statement.
But notice that both belief and justification are quite distinct from truth.
But not...
Quoting Marchesk
What makes "The snow is white" true is the snow being white. That's not a justification.
A justification would be "I see the snow, and it is white, therefore I believe "the snow is white" is true.
But this seems odd. You have a statement and then you have a state of affairs. The statement is true if the state of affairs is what the statement says it is.
State of affairs might be controversial, so substitute in actual, non-linquistic, intersubjective, empirical snow. That cold stuff that falls out of the sky on winter days that we ball up and throw at people which is usually white.
I'd say it's wise to not presume to know The Truth, but foolhardy to assume you know nothing of it.
I don;t see why. That is, I don't follow your comment. After all, I know what white is, and what snow is, and that s\now is indeed usually white, and if we both looked at some snow we may agree that it is white.
But what is a "state of affairs"? And why bother to introduce it?
Thought I'd look at wikipedia, and look at that illustration on the right. Time saving truth from falsehood and envy. All the answers in time, I think I'll reiterate.
Because statements about things like the color of snow or the location of cats is about things which aren't statements. And if those things are what the statements say they are, then the statements are true. So you have a condition in the world referenced correctly by the statement.
It's a general form of what constitutes a true empirical statement.
If I ask "what it the state of affairs that makes the statement "Snow is white" true?', is your answer that snow is white?
So "Snow is white" is a statement, and not a state of affairs, but that snow is white is a state of affairs, but not a statement?
This line of thinking is quite confused.
Can we get by without it? I think we can.
If so, then this would be a case where Wittgenstein was right about philosophers abusing language.
The intellect is the realm of partial truths and dismantled cuckoo clocks.
Do stuff that obstructs thought like mountain climbing.
It seems to me that there must be some need or desire -- and perhaps it's the sort of desire which is not fulfilled. It can be like thirst, in that the need is reoccurring, or it can be like anxiety, in which the desire is productive of itself -- where desire forms a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop, so the very act of declaring the Truth makes us desire to do so again, but more.
I imagine that the desire at play probably varies. With Plato you have a profound disappointment with the world as it is, especially the political world, and an attempt to make it better. With Aristotle, so it seems to me at least, he has an incurable curiosity. This psychologizes what is properly philosophical, and is of course very speculative on that count, but I only offer these as possibilities for answering your question (possibilities that are my best guesses, but I recognize how weak these sorts of claims are too).
I'm not sure if this is satisfactory, but it's my best first attempt at answering the question in the spirit you pose it.
Bravo!
It is quite possible to speak truth -- provided one does not aspire to be God, and believe that to know truly, one must know exhaustively
Also, I don't think vocalizing your beliefs in that way necessarily implies they're unquestionably held. I'm sure Derrida would've been open to criticism about his personal theory
As usual, the missing words are being white “to us”. Truths are always ultimately psychological facts, not ontic ones, as they require that reality has the further thing of a point of view.
Nietzsche believed in the will to power as underlying all human motivation, and so also the will to truth. He described philosophy somewhere as being the most spiritual form of will to power.
There are ample examples in history of truth capital T being used to serve the ruling class, and wars being fought with ideas. So it's not that hard to see where he's coming from here.
He also believed in different human types, biologically determined more or less. If one is of the philosophical type, will to power would tend to manifest itself in this way... so a virus maybe, or maybe just the nature of the beast?
People want to know if a belief is true, there's nothing more natural. Does God exist? Does God not exist? Is one belief better than another, or are all beliefs purely subjective? Everyone one has a philosophy of life, you can't escape it. Even your ideas put forth a certain philosophy. It needs unpacked quite a bit, but I'm sure there is a philosophy about truth pronouncements in there somewhere. Once you put forth your philosophy, people want to know if it's true. Then they might ask if it's subjectively true or objectively true, and on and on it goes. That's how we discover.
I don't agree with the always part, but your overall point does raise a problem I still have with deflationary notions of truth.
We can all agree that snow looks white when we see white snow. We can also agree that science tells us pure snow reflects all visible light into our eyes, which is why we see white.
But in a philosophy discussion, the question we typically want answered is whether the snow is actually white.
As such:
Ontologically speaking, the snow is white is true if and only if there is real, mind-independent snow that has a property of being white in a way that snow appears white to us.
It's not good enough to go look and see that the snow is white, because appearances can be false. And on a scientific understanding of how vision works, the snow only appears to be white to us. The colored in world we see around us isn't how the world is, it's how it looks for conscious creatures with visual systems like ours.
Correct. So what better example of a psychological truth could be imagined?
Ever been a while on a sailboat? After a while you start being able to sense the wind shift direction before it does. Maybe it's something like that... ?
This relation is symmetrical. The world is also the world that appears coloured to such creatures as us.
True, but we could also apply this to various illusions.
The stick is bent in water is false even though the light being refracted by the water makes it appear bent. And thus begins the appearance/reality distinction.
Is the following statement about the picture below true or false?
The surface of A is a darker shade of gray than the surface of B.
False, they're the same shade, which I verified with my color picker: RGB( 126,126,126 ).
The truth in this case is different than what it appears to be to us.
Part of the issue can also be with the perceived meaning of the question. While it says shade, perhaps some interpret it to mean natural color (which excludes shadow).
However as long as there is a standard by which the meaning and truth of claims can be decided (such as verifying with a color picker), then there is no in-principle problem.
Well, I don't. I just state how things appear to me in the present moment. Probably because I take the problem of induction and the regress problem a bit too seriously.
"Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!"
-Max Stirner, "The Ego And His Own", p. 43.
Well OK. So here for example I would note that neurocognitive researchers don't actually talk much about conscious and unconscious. They talk about attentional and habitual, or voluntary and automatic.
They don't find a mentalistic jargon useful. They employ concepts that can be cashed out in terms of neurocognitive mechanisms, or behavioural criteria. So psychology - to the degree it is scientific - does restate "conscious and unconscious phenomena" in ways that make more sense to scientific inquiry.
Quoting tim wood
The psychology of the 1970s was indeed pretty dismal. Behaviourism had little to offer. Cognitive psychology was too wedded to computationalism. Neuroscience classes were run by the medical school and had little to say about functional architecture.
But a lot has changed. Evolutionary and social psychology have become big. So too, functional anatomy. Psychology has been put on a decent biological and developmental footing.
Maybe you are talking about psychology as therapy or something?
Really, it need not be like this. One might say "this is the way I see things, do you see them in the same way?", instead of pronouncing the truth This is quite different from what apokrisis expresses:
Quoting apokrisis
What apokrisis expresses is an aggressive form of self-assertion, the other an expression of insecure, uncertainty. Psychologically they represent two completely distinct, and somewhat opposed attitudes.
The confusion might be worse than it first seems:
Awareness of what is ontic (i.e., of what factually is in manners indifferent to subjective appraisals) precedes our understanding for the epistemological criterion of truth.
This is so because truth, as it’s commonly understood, is a relation between one or more points of view (the existence of which is itself an ontological position; i.e., is itself a judgement concerning a state of affairs) and that which these apprehend to be ontic, i.e. to factually be (aka, to be reality or real, but here not necessarily limited to semantics associated with materialistic realism).
The philosophical paradox emerges in that we thereby need to first philosophically know of an ontology, of some state of affairs in general, in order to then discern what particular truths are and, consequently, what is knowledge (this when knowledge is in any way contingent on the property of truth—don’t know what knowledge would be otherwise).
So ontology predates epistemology, but we need epistemic criteria by which to appraise and establish some ontology.
Is this chicken and egg conundrum between ontology and epistemology itself an inherent aspect of Truth? Don’t know. But it certainly isn’t a consciously intended falsehood.
The heck is capital-T Truth supposed to be anyway—other than a nifty synonym for that which factually is in manners indifferent to subjective appraisals? In which case why not just call it reality, or that which is real? And don’t we all then have a working model of what reality is, one which we sometimes attempt to enlighten others about in places such as these? Maybe it’s the lack of acknowledged fallibilism involved with many such affirmations.
Just passing through. Interesting stuff so far. Thought I might be able to stir up the waters a bit.
I think csal is talking about philosophical narrative as "Truth" and criticizing that.
I’m not big on Truth myself, by the way. It to me reeks of infallibilist mindsets—and the authoritarianism that too often accompanies them. All the same, I confidently uphold that there is a set of factual givens that occur in manners indifferent to subjective appraisals—a reality that we can ever-better approximate in our collective body of knowledge.
Agree, and that was more or less the point of some of us here. I don't see how the big T can be avoided with a coherent philosophical narrative even if it's not explicitly put as such.
"The stick is bent in water is false even though the light being refracted by the water makes it appear bent. "
That is just a question of unwrapping the event and attributing truth to the proper parts of the statement. There is nothing false about it, simply misleading to an average perceiver with average expectations. 'The portion of the stick outside of the water will appear, to an average homo sapien, misaligned in relation to the part submerged, because of the effect of refractation of fluids on the trajectory of photons' is a true statement, and the "onus" of it, so to speak, rest both on the shoulders of how the world is and how homo sapiens are.
Colour perception is not us "painting the world" with some palette that, by some miracle, we have access to. Its learning to use something of the world in an almost proto-linguistic fashion, taking pure data and turning it into a language which enriches our relation to the world.
"False, they're the same shade, which I verified with my color picker: RGB( 126,126,126 )."
To be fair, it is relatively easy to train yourself to spot this illusion. At this point my first reflex is just think they are identical before checking the colour code. Start by looking from both top and bottom rather than from the center.
But you are playing my game here. Colour ontology is exactly the best way to realize that Relationalism is The Truth. :heart:
So what you going to do?
Quoting javra
Drop this. The problem dissolves.
I think this may be more a mentall illness issue than a strictly philosophical one. I just know that I dont get any enjoyment from philosophy anymore. It feels more like a very tense and nervous imperative to organize thought into some arrangement of leakproof compartments.
Of course trying to think these things through in the abstract doesn't allways (mostly!) yield good results. But it's difficult to get out of that mindset, one question brings the next etc... and since I allready invested a large amout of time into thinking about it, I'd better come up with something good (sunk-cost fallacy)!
What helps for me is deciding to just start doing things, or allocating a maximum fixed amount of time thinking about higher abstractions. Some eastern practices or meditation can probably also be usefull to quiet the chattering monkey.
My point was that we have a distinction between appearance and reality because sometimes they differer. Which means that just looking to see that the snow is white isn't always good enough to determine the truth of the matter.
Otherwise, "The sun rises and sets" would be true just because it appears like the sun is moving through the sky, when we now know it is the Earth turning. As such, sometimes investigation has to go a bit deeper than just looking and seeing that something is the case.
Simply misleading could be simply deadly if one sees a mirage in the desert, mistaking it for an oasis. Anyway, my point is that there is a difference (at least sometimes) between how things appear and how they are. If the world looks colored, that doesn't mean it actually is colored, that's just how it appears to us.
If the white snow is actually something else made to look like snow in order to fool me, then "The snow is white" is a false statement.
:ok:
“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
-Nietzsche
I'm finding it difficult to enjoy philosophy as well. Well, not just philosophy, I think it might be related to general anhedonia. But when I read philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, I get this almost immediate and overwhelming ennui. It's absurd. It's like - yeah, this stuff is neat and all, but what's the point?
I get the same thing when reading stuff on the natural sciences. Neat! Anyway .... these galaxies are billions of light years away. I cannot comprehend that distance. I will never go there. I will never see anything more than vague pictures touched up in Photoshop. So....meh. Dinosaurs used to roam the Earth millions of years ago? Neat! Anyway...I need to pay my utilities. A capacitor discharges in approximately four time constants? Neat! etc, etc, whatever.
I think what's up is that any inquiry that isn't apathetic to a certain degree is inherently silly. It's silly to play dress-up with costumes (suits, dresses, lab coats, robes, etc). It's silly to send rockets to the moon. It's silly to dig up dinosaur bones. It's silly to find things interesting. It's silly to do a lot of things. But we'll still do it but it's with this absurd cultural momentum, this sense of importance. But it's all just silly. We're just passing the time, that's all.
It is no longer possible to take seriously the Socratic formula of reason leading to happiness. It has atrophied. The need for a system is a symptom of being a child, in a spiritual sense. Taking an interest in the world is a sign that one is a young soul.
I don't see any mental illness here. It just seems to me that philosophy has lost its magic on you. I had it backward for a long time, and thought philosophy was the product of mental illness, but, I am cured now.
Perhaps try to pick a point that you are deeply concerned with in regards to how it effects humanity or the planet in general, and then seek to find a solution to the equation.
Or perhaps try to pick a point that you are deeply concerned with in regards to how it effects you or a loved one, and then seek to find a solution to the equation.
Tldr: It is up to you to pick a point.
Yes, I understand your point. I'm raising a problem with it which I don't think you've addressed in your reply. With your colour picker results, you're also looking at something, except this time you're trusting your perception instead of subjecting it to the same level of doubt. Why is that?
You say that sometimes just looking isn't good enough, and I agree. This is a problem with 'naive' realism. But I ask, is looking ever good enough? Can you actually go any deeper, or is what seems to be a deeper layer actually just another illusion? How could you tell?
We can and do go deeper with science, which is a combination of reason, observation and testing. We can't see subatomic particles or radio waves. But we can infer them from instruments that detect them, or theories which form the best explanations we have for explaining the world.
And as far as perceptual illusions go, we have our other senses to help us. If the stick looks bent, we can feel that it's straight. We can then figure out that light is being refracted by the water.
We can also make tools that aid our senses, like microscopes and radios.
Quoting Sapientia
I trust the computer to give me accurate color information about what's displayed on the monitor as it's not subject to color illusions.
Quoting Sapientia
That's a possibility that's hard to entirely eliminate. Could we ever tell if we were inside a simulation? Maybe if we discovered some discrepancies, or the nature of simulations is structured in a way that physics tells us the universe is, or something.
But it doesn't even need to be simulation. If our best scientific theories tell us that time doesn't flow, and the universe is a hologram, then the world we perceive is to some extent an illusion. But we already knew that. A solid table isn't solid the way it looks or feels to us. This was a surprise, and there have been plenty of them.
The table is solid.
Is false under the old concept of solidness, in which tables weren't mostly empty space. It's false on the everyday notion of solidness the way "sunset" and "sunrise" are based on appearances and not the Earth's rotation.
And that's why saying that the truth is just a matter of looking when it comes to empirical claims is a bit suspect.
It's true that pure snow looks white to humans. But is it true that snow is white in the same way that snow is made up of water crystals?
Some people might naively say "The sky is blue on a clear sunny day" is an unassailable truth, but upon thinking about it for a moment, we realize the sky looks blue to us because we only see visible light and not all the other radiation in the atmosphere.
So when we say it's true that snow is white or the sky is blue, do we mean it's true that's how it appears to us, or it's true that both are colored that way regardless of whether anyone is looking?
But emergent properties, like us experiencing a solid table, are every bit as real as the underlying dynamics. What's the justification for saying that truth is only descriptions of things at their smallest level?
And even more important, it's these emergent properties that matters to us ultimately. Our everyday notion of solidness is that food doesn't fall through the table. We do not live at the subatomic level.
These are not just illusions like a mirage in the desert is, because they don't get us into trouble. That's the whole point of differentiating between illusions and what is real.
The fact that the sun rises and sets was enough for us for several millenia. It is true from our everyday perspective, and for the purposes we have. It's only when we go to space that another description really matters.
The problem is you're trying to get beyond perspective, and the utility truth has for us. Truth for truth sake...
What does truth have to do with utility or perspective?
I understand truth to be the way things are, regardless of whether it appears that way to us, we know it, or we care about it.
And that's how we typically use the word. He's not ready to face the truth, the other party is in denial about the environment, you're wrong about the distance Andromeda is from Earth.
Even if we did primarily mean utility or perspective for truth, we would need another word for the way things are.
Yeah the thing in itself… nevermind that there is no way of going beyond our senses, of going beyond appearences. Why do we need a concept for something we don't have access to and so cannot sensibily speak of?
He's not ready to face the truth, implies that there are consequences for him not facing it. Being in denial about the environment also has negative consequences… it ties back to ultility.
It is going to be appearances all the way down. But why talk of it as being just a series of illusions? I find it more accurate to see it as also a hierarchical series of selves.
So there is the everyday biological "me" that sees the colours. I see the same shade of grey because it is useful to make automatic visual compensations that "make sense" of the image as if it were a real set of surfaces of an object placed out in the sun and crossed by shadows. I am at that moment the kind of self who is seeking to understand the world in terms of an intelligible collection of physical objects. So I want to "see through" all accidental features of the occasion - facts about where the sun is and how the shade falls - so as to get right through to the most meaningful state of interpretance, the one where I am acting self-interestedly in a world composed of physical objects.
But then there can be other "me's" layered on top, adding further "world making". Language and culture produce the social me that reads the environment in terms of all its rules and customs. I relate to that structure - and in relating, become that type of self, that kind of point of view. I see that it is true that I am driving on the correct side of the road because there is a dotted white line to my right. I see I have done something wrong because someone is scowling at me. These are all social facts that are "true for me", and in being so, are constructing the "me" that would hold them as truths.
Then we can kick it up another level to the scientific me and the truths at that level of being. Again, the facts of a scientific viewpoint are merely a further configuration of appearances. They boil down to numbers on a dial. The colour picker informs me that the pixels at a set of coordinates is RGB( 126,126,126 ). And my scientifically-minded self accepts the objective truth of that.
So as I replied to @Banno, truth always boils down to a point of view. There is some "us" that informs the relation with the known world. It has its needs and reasons. And then it forms an idea of the shape that facts will take. What it experiences is some "appearance" - or rather less dismissively, an Umwelt.
An Unwelt is more than mere appearance as it is in fact an image of the world with us in it. There is no dualistic "us" that pre-exists its perceptions or truths. It is in coming to this state of interpretance, this particular habit of sense-making, that also forms the "us" that is the anchor for some definite point of view in regard to "a world".
This is the properly deflationary route to a theory of truth. Pragmatism results in Unwelts. We emerge as habits of sense making - which is a positive thing as that constructs an "us" that is acting on the world in some concrete fashion. It is not the negative thing of an endless hall of mirrors, a series of levels of illusion with no ultimate "truth of the world".
Quoting csalisbury
I get this. But as I am arguing, I understand the situation to be that we humans are now complex creatures composed of multiple levels of selfhood. We have as a minimum the three levels of being biological creatures with animal needs, social creatures dependent on a co-operative social structure, and rational creatures with a recently-developed interest in living a mechanistic, quantified, technological and mathematically-encoded lifestyle.
So there are levels of self produced by each of these levels of world-making. And the fit can be a little rough, especially given the accelerating pace of development. Thus we have to work a bit to create any sensible kind of balance when we are all projects in rapid progress, maybe never to be finished.
Is this where your meta-model of philosophy goes wrong, or goes right?
My argument is that how we see the world makes us the person who we are. And I grant that I have to be three kinds of person, in effect. So I would argue against your demands that metaphysics, in particular, should be so totalising as to include the kind of selves that are "feeling" or "poetic". Those kinds of selves are more about the cultural and animal creatures that we are. And even then, my complaint is Romanticism over-entangled the cultural and the animal. There is an advantage in being able to compartmentalise a lived life so that we can express our animal, social and rational selves in a more separated fashion.
The levels of selfhood that need to be constructed to be a complete modern person do have overlap. They do wash into each other. But also, paying attention to keeping them separate, defining their spheres of influence and their appropriate times of expression, can help create a balancing structure.
The totalising mistake would be to expect some kind of perfect integration of the psyche - the kind that would express itself fully in philosophy by elevating the affective and the poetic to the sphere of the rational. Or as is more the case, attempt to pull the rational back down to "their level".
It seems healthier to me to be able to compartmentalise to a degree. Balance is being able to switch between broad modes of self - animal, social and rational by turns, depending on the setting. The difficulties would arise when we try to identify as just the one self - the beast, the poet, the thinker - as if we ought be so centred and simple.
It doesn't have to be easy or perfect. But it is our reality as modern humans. We have unleashed the scientific and technological forces that are constructing a new level of human selfhood and the world that self sees. And that does create a lived polarity, a structural conflict, between the subjective self (that sits nearest the animal pole) and the objective self (that is way over the end of rationality).
But do we have to feel torn if we can construct the further super-self that sees that this is the game and the combination of selfhoods/world-makings that needs to be balanced within our psychologies?
The first step would have to be accepting that levels of selfhood is not a bad thing. It is not a failure to be hierarchically organised or stratified in this fashion. We can escape the strangling grip of rationality by making it one of the three things we can do well, in the appropriate context.
The mistake, in my view, is trying to identify yourself with just one of the three levels on which it has now become natural to live as a modern human. I like the idea of being able to exist as all three kinds of selves in a fairly full sense, while not getting too hung up on achieving a (rational, mechanical) degree of perfection on that score.
But the world - the world! - that's what's worth being interested in. I don't think its silly. I think its the way in which you relate to the world. I think it comes down to control, to trying to control the way the world affects you. If truth is a woman (#problematic) then im talking about the tradition of consigning it to the home and monitoring its relations with variables youre not open to considering.
& control stems from fear. and fear is of the world.
But that isn't true. We have the ability to infer what we can't sense by how it interacts with what we can perceive. We can also figure out which properties are perceiver-independent, because they don't vary and are not contingent upon being perceived.
Science, math and technology take us way beyond the senses.
No it doesn't take us beyond the senses. Scientific instruments are extentions of the senses. And math, like logic, doesn't directly inform us about the world. It serves to figure out the implication of certain theories.
And science is also about utility. It's about predictability, not truth. Any decent scientist will say that he is only trying to come up with models that can predict things, not models of how things really are. Of course some may derive metaphysics from that, but that is not science. Science needs to be falsifiable, i.e. being measurable, i.e being possibile to be sensed.
I'm not advocating romanticism, which, in its canonical, exemplary figures, is so self-conscious you could choke.
I'm not even advocating something else. I'm just fucking sad man, I'm unhappy, I'm lonely. If your thing makes you happy all the more power.
But I have the suspicion that what makes me unhappy is this drive to harmony, even if its a weird syncopated harmony in disharmony. Im bored and tired of my thoughts. I'm especially bored of dialectics. Have you seen 'get out'? I feel like im half-anaesthetized in the 'sunken place' with some weird dialectical sidekick who argues on my behalf, while i lay unconscious and hurt. Sad & mad.
According to whom? Prediction is only one part of science. Understanding the way things are is another.
I hear that and I'm sorry for it. And I don't expect to cure that with words here. The only insight I am offering is that the relief of that state has to recognise the complex situation we have collectively got ourselves into. I resolve it by compartmentalising life and not expecting to find myself in some kind of unified perfection.
Quoting csalisbury
I would question "happy" as a useful goal. Challenge, thrill, intensity, seem more at the heart of it. But all that against a backdrop of rest and control. We seek discomfort because we are too comfortable and comfort because we are too uncomfortable. As always, I would talk about what we can dynamically balance in practice. The natural goal of the mind is not to arrive at some fixed state but to maintain a state of adaptation in regards to the world.
Again, that is picking up on the argument that the self is what emerges as contrast to "the world".
Quoting csalisbury
Again, no words will just fix you if they are just more rationalisation. But my view is that the psychology of this is that we are formed by our habits. And habits can be changed just as they can be learned.
It sounds like you have clinical-strength depression. So as an established habit, this would be a neurobiological depth issue. And the conventional advice would be to start addressing the structure of your life to which it would be a state of adaptation. Positive psychology and other therapies can give you the tools for examining "the world" as you have imagined it, and to which your state would be an "adaptive" response.
So again, I couldn't possibly diagnose you from a few posts. But the primary symptom we are discussing here is the habit of rationalising - imposing dialectical structure on "the world". There is this other self within you that isn't shutting off when you find all its efforts pretty meaningless.
So what do you do? Do you stand back from that trained and educated aspect of your own personal history and label it as "not me". Just despise it as a wizened siamese twin. Or do you give it something to do, get it involved in some activities that seems useful and productive in a long-run fashion?
Maybe you should unlearn the habit? Maybe you should find it useful employment? These do seem the two contrasting ways to go. And both would seem valid.
What do you really think your situation is? That you can't be fixed or that you resist being fixed? Once you take on the identity of "the broken" then of course you don't actually desire the change that would be a change to that state of habit. And to the degree that you view a life to be perfectable - just happy in some untroubled and thoughtless fashion - you are going to argue that the goal is impossible anyway.
Habits are learnt by the accumulation of many tiny barely noticed steps. Habits can only be changed by the same thing. So a question is: do you know from experience the skill of changing a habit? Is that where you could use help and techniques.
Then the other question is what is the best we can expect? I think feeling adapted - properly embedded in a context, but also with sufficient creative freedoms - does it for most people for natural reasons. I think it helped me that I did compartmentalise my selves to a fair extent into their physical, social and rational modes. I pay enough attention to keep all three plates spinning.
As I am arguing, they can't be "well-integrated" because they are three spheres of being. They each need to be lived by their own lights to a reasonable extent.
But if the OP is about the particular symptom of an over-powering habit of rationalisation, which seems mired in meaningless rumination, then you do stand at a crossroads from which you need to shift. Either unlearn the habit as it exists for you, or give it something meaningful to do. Those seem the obvious answers.
So how would your day-to-day be different doing either of those things? What have other people actually done? That seems a useful conversation to have.
Yeah, I get it. Feels like your mind is bruised.
Quoting apokrisis
Apo, this doesn't make sense. To seek discomfort because things are "too comfortable" simply means to no longer be comfortable with your comfort. You seek discomfort (adventure) to escape the discomfort of excess comfort (boredom). So the pendulum swings between painful discomfort to boredom discomfort. Just as Schopenhauer observed.
Quoting apokrisis
I do not disagree with this, but we have to speak plainly here: the natural state of mind is not of comfort. That is not conducive to survival. The creatures that survive are those who are in a near-perpetual state of controlled anxiety.
The Bene-Gesserit of Frank Herbert's Dune call fear the "mind-killer". I think this is true in a very literal sense. Fear/anxiety/panic literally suffocates the mind and prevents it from thinking. This is helpful to an organism's survival, such as during fight-or-flight situations where thinking is only going to slow the organism down. However I think this also extends into the realm of abstract thinking. A human that thinks too much or too far is confronted with the strangulating hands of anxiety. Epicurus has already shown that death is not to be feared, and yet we continue to fear it anyway. We are quite literally not allowed to think beyond a certain perimeter without anxiety immediately slamming us down and choking the thoughts out of us.
I agree that a balanced lifestyle is recommended. But this also means a balance in terms of thinking. Too much thinking, too much seeing, will either kill or cripple you.
Always one to look on the bright side, hey? :grin:
I do a lot of strenuous and challenging things. If they actually hurt, I tend to stop. Likewise I enjoy the contrast of doing bugger all for extended periods. If that starts to feel uncomfortable, I tend to stop and find something challenging and strenuous.
So my pendulum swings, as much as I can manage it, away from what I am ceasing to enjoy. Then because I accept that life has to be lived - hedonism is an illusion - the focus would be on structuring my life so that it gives me the right general mix of the two on a habitual basis.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Such rubbish neuroscience. What kind of thinking - rationalisation - do animals do? What is the difference between anxiety and excitement exactly? What is the point of confusing the confusion of the unprepared with the clarity of acting on well-developed habit?
Quoting darthbarracuda
The brain is just so much more complicated and well-adapted than that. The response to moments of stress is not automatically a generalised panic attack. You are talking about what might be the eventual result of prolonged stress, not a normal healthy neurobiology as it was designed to function.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes. I was advocating a balance when it came to thinking. I think compartmentalisation in that regard - often seen as an unhealthy trait - is a useful trick to learn.
Start by stopping those negative thoughts. What good does Pessimism actually do you except as a comforting rationalisation for remaining in "a near-perpetual state of controlled anxiety"?
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
@csalisbury The thrust of what apo is saying is how I see it too. I tend to posit it in terms of irreconcilable drives, but his divisions are neat enough. We're not one "self" as in some kind of unified internal flow that deals in one particular way with the external environment, and the narrative that we are is just a necessary illusion that allows coherent functioning in each of the contexts mentioned above. So, there isn't an overarching harmony except in an acceptance of disharmony and no solution except a recognition of paradox. And then if you get that in the background, you can foster a kind of transient harmony moment to moment. But yes, you're framing philosophy and truth through a mood that probably has little or nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with your apparent depression, the cure for which (in so far as there is one) can't be thought through, and the trying to think through is more likely a symptom than any kind of route to a solution. Anyway, I've been through a lot of depression and obsessiveness and other lasting uncomfortable states of mind myself, and sustained relief has come only from disciplined cultivation of habit, as per apo's comments, and in particular a push towards being creative.
Given what you've said though, I'm interested in your answer to where do you see the boundary between philosophy and art. How do we distinguish between the two?
Why did you say that hedonism is an illusion, but then suggest that structuring life in such-and-such manner gives the "right general mix" (presumably for living an enjoyable life)? What is the point of your life? What does the general mix support that makes it right?
Epicurus et al have made it clear that directing one's efforts at obtaining pleasure is counter-productive. The seed of the pessimistic evaluation is already in this. Happiness is a byproduct of a struggle. Paradoxically we are most happy when we are not thinking about how happy we are.
Quoting apokrisis
Excitement isn't a fearful state of mind. The fight-or-flight response can only work if higher-level thinking is temporarily put on hold. You are not thinking about philosophy when running from a bear. It is fear that fuels the escape.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I agree that the response to irritation is not usually a generalized panic attack. My overall point was that anxiety/fear/panic is a very basic and very crude motivational scheme. It's old and it works. It's not intelligent. People fear stupid stuff all the time - for example, I have a fear of miller moths. They are harmless creatures and I rationally understand this, but I nevertheless have an intense fear of them.
It's not unreasonable, I think, to suggest that an organism in extreme situations will not react as gracefully as it may in normal situations. It becomes clunky, clumsy, awkward. One of these extreme situations is when an organism thinks about its mortality, or its capacity to suffer, or its fundamental identity, etc. It begins to have certain thoughts which I think can be appropriately called lethal. An organism with lethal thoughts is in a critical condition that jeopardizes its own survival. Fear sweeps in and suffocates the mind (ssshhhh), coaxing it into submission and back into the perimeter of "safe thoughts" where the organism is no longer a threat to itself. The mind is not the master here.
This idea of the mind being the way the body enslaves itself features prominently in the work of Metzinger (meh), the horror of Lovecraft and Ligotti and the philosophy of Zapffe.
I think it's the obverse: not taking an interest in the world is a sign that one is a jaded soul; disillusioned on account of entertaining naively unreasonable expectations or demands of trouble-free life.
And I just want to add that I base that conclusion on my own experience of depression and anxiety.
You can't just expect a "life of pleasure". It is personal growth and social connectedness that is what most folk actually report as rewarding. So right there, that includes meeting personal challenges and making various social sacrifices - the kinds of things you regard as part of the intolerable burden of existence.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Pfft. Hedonism is wrong minded as I said. You bloody well ought to be disappointed if you aim at it.
As for byproducts and paradoxes, this is all still just your choice of framing - your resistance to the notion that reality might be in fact complex and not simple.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Check out the neurobiology of the sympathetic nervous system some time. Arousal is arousal. Why do you think people pay so much to ride roller coasters or bungee off bridges?
And try giving a public lecture or doing a TV interview. Or playing a sports match in front of a crowd. You need to be shitting yourself with adrenaline to give a top performance - intellectually as well.
The research of course shows a U curve of arousal. There is a case of too much as well as too little. But peak performance requires excitement/fear. Step on to the stage and your heart ought to be pounding as if you were running from that bear.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Have you ever tried to unlearn the reaction? Do you believe people simply can't?
Quoting darthbarracuda
The fight/flight reflex is certainly usefully complex. It even includes a freeze mode. Just stopping paralysed can sometimes work as a last resort when an animal risks attack. So the circuitry to switch between modes of response exists.
But why are we discussing the wild extremes of life threatening moments? How much do they have to do with the everyday routine? Why can't you frame your arguments in the neurobiology of the normal? What is wrong with taking the typical rather than the atypical as the ground of the discussion?
You are pathologising your philosophy in short. You ought to examine why you have established that as your constant habit.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Gawd, it must be true then. :roll:
Because truth is presupposed in all thought, belief, and the statements which follow. The presupposition of truth is an elemental constituent of all thought and belief itself. It's necessary in order to even have thought and belief, and philosophy hasn't ever quite gotten thought and belief right to begin with.
That's why.
I understand this. A charitable interpretation of hedonism also recognizes this. What folk "report as rewarding" they are reporting what makes them feel good. Reward. Pleasure. etc.
Quoting apokrisis
Are you implying that I ought to read about the impersonal thing instead of just asking people what they feel? Or asking myself how I feel?
This just seems like a red herring. Of course there's adrenaline junkies. Of course people like being scared for entertainment. But it's not real, none of that is actually real. It's fun. These people are safe (ish). There is a harness. There were engineers who checked the rollercoaster for structural integrity. etc. The fear is kept in check.
Running from a bear that will maul you if it catches up with you is not fun. Fighting your friends in an online shooter game might be fun, but fighting enemy combatants in a firefight is not fun because it's really-real. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and we typically see these exceptions as unstable or dangerous (who actually likes being shot at?).
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I understand that not-too-much but not-too-little stress is necessary for peak performance. But as I said before, an organism in an extreme environment will not have this perfect balance. It is as if the organism was not meant to operate in these situations (just as we are not meant to operate in the vacuum of space). In fact sometimes people in extreme situations will stand there in shock, unable to comprehend what is happening and die where they stand instead of seeking shelter (Vesuvius). Or they go off running in a wild panic and get shot by the enemy instead of waiting in position (war).
Quoting apokrisis
What? My experience and the experience of many others would seem to contradict this. I would not give a good public lecture if I were shitting my pants in fear. Adrenaline might make me pumped up and excited but I may be too excited and stumble over my words. etc.
As you said, there is a right balance between the two that facilitates a smooth reaction. But I take issue with your equivocation of fear with excitement, adrenaline with panic. There is also very big difference between being confronted with fear but keeping it in check, and being overwhelmed by fear. For example, someone who successfully kills themselves may have successfully kept the fear of death in check, while someone who attempts to but can't bring themselves to accomplish the act may have been subdued.
Quoting apokrisis
No, but it points you in the direction of where I'm coming from.
Don’t follow you so far. Drop the part about a particular relation between sentience and reality and what alternative meaning remains for the word “truth”? Somehow came to believe that truth was an important thing for you as well (here thinking in relation to Trump and friends).
As for your question of what I’m going to do about the paradox I addressed, I’ll face the facts and pursue less trodden paths till I find something worthwhile. Since your question almost sounded sincere, here’s a crudely expressed working idea: truth (that which is true) is conformity to that which is ontic (such that to be true is to conform to that aspect of the ontic specified). This laconic phrase nicely accounts for all examples addressed by correspondence theory but doesn’t get limited by the latter—e.g. if the target as an aim is ontic, the arrow can then be stated to be true due to its path’s conformity to the ontic end it was intended for. Other examples can be given, like true to one's spouse (to the implicit yet ontic understanding held with one's spouse), and so on. At any rate, my given hunch doesn’t pre-judge any particular ontology as being true prior to accounting from what “true” is; it merely affirms that something ontic is—and the latter can only be rationally doubted via contradiction (e.g. there ontically is nothing ontic; hence, both A and not-A at the same time and in the same way). But it does require there being some sentience for truth to be.
If you have quibbles, would like to hear them.
Darth, am I hearing you right? All life that intends to live is cowardly? Including that which perseveres against what can nearly be insurmountable odds? There something in the way to this. At any rate, it’s not how I ascribe meaning to the desire to live, nor to what courage is all about. But maybe this isn’t at all what was intended in your last post after all.
As for philosophy, I hear even David Hume had to play billiards as a diversion every now and then. I’m imagining with a little bit of beer and a good amount of laughter. Maybe it’s not the best example, point being The Truth can and does a/wait with or without us philosophy interested people; life not so much. If we take a breather from philosophical topics they’ll still be there after we recharge our allegorical batteries, if we find we’re still interested in philosophical topics afterward.
Quoting javra
I can't see how you got "Drop a particular relation between sentience and reality" from "Drop truth, as a relation between one or more points of view".
With that level of misunderstanding, why continue?
Some of the most inspiring individuals were those who didn't care if they died in the process. Why do we admire these heroes? Because they were not afraid of death. Imagine this kind of radical detachment towards your own existence - does not everyone wish they could simply let go?
When we think about those who have died, we often think about them as resting peacefully. They are better off, even if at the immediate moment of their death we mourn. Why should we pity them? Secretly we are all jealous of the dead, and we regret our own inability to throw off our chains to join them. In my view, to love living is to be ignorant of the alternative.
The challenge is to transcend our own desires and ask why it is that we desire what we do. We are not the authors of our own desires. We desire things - but why? Why do we desire to live as opposed to die? Could desire be a form of manipulation, in the same way that pain and fear manipulate us into certain courses of action? This manipulation is what Ligotti alludes to when he describes the conspiracy against the human race. When Cioran calls life a state of non-suicide, he is illuminating the idea that suicide is a natural and rational course of action that is perpetually frustrated. The idea is that without repressive and oppressive mechanisms, a human might immediately kill themselves and be done with it without a second thought, and without vertigo, as if we were blinking, or tying our shoes.
“Our desires” are part of us as social beings in our society. It is not a form of manipulation, we desire things not because we are victims of commercials or brainwashing. For example innovations, desires to have a better product or service are reciprocal, shared by producers and customers. After been taken up by media and numerous experts, the desire starts looking as familiar and natural. If we want to transcendent, we need to escape or to stay alone, cutting off some social connections.
I’m surprised beyond belief that this needs to be stated. The conjunction used was “or”, as in “between X or Y […and...]”; not “and”, as in “between X and Y […and...]”. Not taking half a sentence to be a full sentence, but instead interpreting what you’ve quoted within the context of the full sentence I originally wrote is, well, just common sense grammar skills. The issue of charitability—or of the lack thereof—doesn’t even enter the picture.
Quoting Banno
Well said.
The person who said “It’s a good day to die” right before charging into a very perilous battle didn’t commit suicide on the spot due to his conviction. He struggled, endured, and fought. But those who live by not being afraid of death—be they aikido practitioners, samurai, of Native American tribes, firemen that run into burning buildings to save a life, or your run of the mill altruist (to list a few)—can all be said to give their life if needed for some less egotistic, greater good that they believe themselves a part of. Sometimes it’s spiritual; sometimes it isn’t, e.g. for the sake of humankind, the species, or some such.
The person who believes that death is in an instant get-out-of-suffering card can well construct their valid logical reasoning for pursuing death. But the premise is just as silly as that of it being “an instant beam me up to a suffering devoid heaven” premise. Death is both experientially and rationally the ultimate unknown. But we don’t like the unknown, do we; we feel antsy with unresolvable mystery; so we then impose a known truth upon it. By analogy: Dark energy and matter that composes most of the universe and most of us; phooey; we all know damn well that we’re made up of atomic billiard balls darn it (with nothing spooky or mysterious about it, to boot); and we certainly don’t have time for the unknown constituting most of what is physically real. Just so with the nature of death: an unknown what happens after a life takes its last breadth in this world? Horse manure. Right?
I’ll take the bull by the horns and acknowledge the unknown as being unknown. But to each their own, I guess.
Just one thing, though. Those who risk their own life without fear of personal death are not to be mistaken for those who are suicidal. Everyone from warriors to pacifists, they didn’t—and still don’t—go into some state of mind where the intention is to engage in self-murder.
Well, there is the ancient skeptical approach. To paraphrase, the awareness of leaky compartments leads to ataraxia, in which one suspends work on leakproof compartments. After which, the leaks are no longer bothersome.
Darn. That’s quite an accurate paraphrase. Giving credit where it’s due.
Btw, been working on better addressing the subject of skepticism, this since it’s such a big deal to so many. I think I’ve got global skepticism nailed down to three distinct and conflicting categories that I believe are comprehensive as a set. Here also paraphrased:
* the fourth category that’d naturally fit into this set would be positing infallibilism—where you posit instances of infallible truths and knowledge—such as that of “The Truth”—that you neither substantiate to be infallible nor even try to so substantiate, but insist are infallible all the same (likely on grounds that this is self-evident to you and because you don't give a shoot about all the evidence against it being infallible). However, this category wouldn’t be a distinct type of global skepticism.
Yea, thought I’d share. Maybe it’ll help to make better sense of this taboo topic of skepticism. If not I’m sure I’ll hear of it. I think it also better speaks to the issue of fallibilist accounts of the Truth v. infallibilist accounts.
Like this?
Hume, who was a global skeptic, believed in causation just as we all do (it’s why he was a stringent causal compatibilist, for example; he only illustrated how our knowledge of causation is inductive. This wasn’t an problem for him in terms of acknowledging causation, but it did make sense of things such as purported miracles not being outside the spectrum of ordinary causation. I distinctly remember his example of ice being given to someone who'd never seen it before in some desert; to them it would be a miracle, but it would still be bound bycausal processes--as the British (and we) know it to be. Same thing, he argued, with any so called miracle that occurred in the West). Kant, on the other hand, was not a global skeptic—not that I’ve so far heard of at any rate.
Part of the problem with skepticism is it’s commonly used current connotations: that of being dubious about. When addressing global skeptics such as Hume or many of the ancients, they weren’t dubious about things; at least not any more or any less than any self-proclaimed non-skeptic is. Tracing the word to its origins, in Ancient Greek where it was first used it literally meant to be thoughtfully inquisitive. It had absolutely nothing to do with being doubtful about things. For example, even Pyrrho—who’s reputed to have been quite extreme in his suspension of all beliefs—was not a dubious person. For instance, he held a firm, though obviously to him fallible (not infallible), conviction in how to best attain happiness; he had no doubts about it.
To cut to the chase, Hume was tied into many an ancient Academic in his skepticism, a mindset which does not in any way rely upon the presence of doubt. This may be hard to be believe for some, but historical records attests to this form of skepticism being a different thing than that of a dubious disposition. Kantian skepticism (don’t know of the extent to which Kant might have used this term himself) is however tied into Cartesian notions of skepticism, for which doubt is quintessential. Though, again, Kant to my knowledge was not a global skeptic. His skepticism was particular to a set of gives; in this case, what things in themselves actually are.
Maybe this is novel to some. :grin: Know all too well it's not to others. :cool: Anyways, was just shooting the breeze. Didn't intend to make a thing out of it unless there's a need or an interest.
--------
At any rate, thanks for bringing up possible discrepancies. Its among the best things that a philosophy forum has to offer: others' perspectives.
Certainly describes my attitude toward work some days.
Quoting Marchesk
I picked this lyric up from my stay in boot camp (was in the army reserves for a while a whiles back, to be precise): “If it don’t make money, it don’t make sense.” OK, to be fair and put it in context, the song was about it not making any sense to kill, harm others, or otherwise engage in criminal activity just for the hoot of it (because without these activities making you any money … ) Ethics from another corner of the world. What can one say.
Still, it reminds me that there’s something to be said about work.
Placing this on a philosophy forum I sort’a feel that there might be a shark frenzy of argumentation soon to unfold. Hopeful the humor intended is just understood.
But yea, work. Man, one of the funnier t-shirts I came across as of late simply read in all places till there was no more space, “work, work, work, work, work, work, work”. I instantly got it. But, yes, work does “make money”.
(Late night humor of a SNL “Deep thoughts by Jack Handy” variety. That said, unless there'll be a need for me to reply to my previous posts, I'll be away for a while)
I think I'm on board with what both you and apo have been saying. The nuts and bolts of of realizing that kind of change are another matter tho. so, yes, in the meantime I'd love to take a stab at this:
I think ( faintly echoing Deleuze) that philosophizing means understanding how concepts interact. Its understanding both the intricacy of particular concepts and the conceptual space in which they're nestled. Proper concepts are all loaded, hyper-implicate. So the way they relate to other concepts - and the relation of these relations to other relations and so forth - requires some broader background sense of conceptual space. So you have to have some feeling for how toying with one aspect of a concept ripples and affects the other concepts. Its almost aesthetic but not quite - its a sort of understanding of how making this or that philosophical move has ramifications for the other concepts, and the whole web. Most bad philosophy involves advancing certain claims while being unaware of the broader conceptual consequences.
like: making some conceptual claim
in one particular argument --- then, later, making use of other concepts youve implicitly shaken in your earlier argument with no awareness of how that argument, if taken seriously, compromises those concepts. (crude atheism is a great example of this. Husserl on psychologism is a great example of forcing ppl to confront this kind of confusion)
Something on the border of logic and art.
Art, imo, is just conveying something felt urgently by whatever means necessary. At essence: Producing an effect that best transmits how you yourself have been affected. The trick is the stuff we most need to convey is very simple, and anything stated simply is already cliche, or advertisement. So there's a necessary element of destruction and disruption just to clear a space and get through. Art involves an intutive sense of how to both effect this necessary destruction and how to make use of the cleared space. (also obv it requires technical knowhow to make that all work)
Echoing Wittgenstein here, I suspect you might best confront your issues in working through the question "What more do I want?" and understanding the nature of your felt need.
In any case, really glad to see you feel like you're making progress! :up:
Yes, well put, art is an act of disruption achieved through the use of intuition and technical ability (in the mode of communication used), and its success lies in effecting some affect. Philosophy is more about creating concepts and relationships between them that form a stable pattern that inevitably is beholden to ideas like truth and logic etc. as these are considered to be the roots of stability of such patterns. And so philosophies insofar as they are built to last are inevitably big Ts, more or less stable patterns of concepts, competing with other big Ts in meta-conceptual space whereas art doesn't need to be conceptualized at all. In fact, good art is the most efficient way to disrupt layers of conceptualization and problematize them in order to allow for change and development and avoid stagnation. Philosophy can do this too, but it's more about laboriously replacing one pattern of concepts with another. So, art is anti-big T in an important way—it aims at its best to directly shake up our truths, to get us to rethink them without having to play on truthy territory, so to speak, so, I don't know, but maybe one cure for philosophical big T ennui is a trip to the art gallery or some creative exercise in that area.
Another way of putting it that just occurred to me is that to do good philosophy you really have to know what you're doing whereas to do good art, you don't, you just have to be what you're doing.
As I said I've been thinking about you post. I do indeed identify as 'broken' in some ill-defined way. &, irl, I usually feel like its immediately apparent to other people. I'm told by others it isn't, at least at first. But I have an internal self-image that's always playing in my head that makes me feel ridiculous when I try to do normal social things. Its not that I don't know how to do them; its that I feel...prohibited? Or that to assert myself, or speak and act like someone worthy of respect, is to assert something morally and aesthetically distasteful. (I like Mishima bc this is his big theme. A sharp awareness of beauty and draw toward it, combined with the feeling that oneself is not beautiful....leading finally to a hatred of beauty)
So in social situations one of three things happens
(1) I try premptively to side with those would mock or disparage me. Self-deprecating humor, but laid on really thick. And sort of being a caricature of a 'weird' person. I think this makes me feel like I have control over the situation. it allows me to manage and direct the mockery.
(2) If I feel smarter than the other person, or people, i take a cynical, ironic tone. Not overt assholishness, but a kind of quiet mockery and undercutting of anything discussed seriously. This is also a kind of form of control bc it wards away the possibility of any intimacy (intimacy in the broadest sense.)
(3) bona fide dissociation. A deep feeling of fogginess, a sluggishness of thought and action, total lack of spontaneity. It feels a little like being stoned or sedated. The function of this I think is to dull the impact of the shame and humilation I feel.
In all three scenarios tho I'm shutting off any form of actual emotion connection. I'm bracketting my emotional needs. But the thing is these all only work as stopgap measures, to protect against temporary social pain. At this point tho theyve so calcified that theyre all I do to the point where its hard to figure out what I actually am besides these defenses.
And thats where you get resentment. I hate feeling like I can't respect myself, and I hate my defenses (tho for a while I liked the ironic, cynical one) but the reflexive feeling is that the presence of other people is what activates these defenses. So in a twisted way I hate them for making me abase myself. Its a fucked up logic: I project onto other people the negative self-image I have of myself, I imagine them seeing me like that, so then I feel humiliated, and humiliate myself, then blame them for feeling the way I do.
And this makes plenty of space for a fetishization of philosophy, and a can't-be-touched persona on a philosophy forum. Thoughts and concepts felt like they offer d total control, and if since thats all I really could control, then systems become a kind of fetish. A thing I could turn over in my head at home, untouchable by the world and feel safe.
(The bonus with the continental approach is you get a side of aristocratic sneer as part of the deal. Zizek in particular is the master of a particular form of rhetoric that is so sneery and shaming that you enjoy siding with him and feeling part of the club. Its easy to be seduced by this when youre young. And, as with all strong voices, its easy to let it infect your own voice)
But anyway, after a while the fun stopped . Its an addiction. The world got fuzzier and fuzzier and reduced to what I could make of it philosophically. To the point where major life events would be happening and I'd be only half-there, thinking about how I could analyze this and fit it into my philosophical preoccupations, or weaponize it argumentatively. Its not a good thing. I read some author somewhere recounting being at the hospital while his wife was in labor, and how he was thinking of kafka (i.e thinking of himself as a writer in the constellation of literary writers) like this was a neat detail and it made me feel really bad, especially bc I can remember myself thinking stuff like that was neat, instead of very sad.
Anyway long story short: all these habits developed in school, when I was a weird-looking overprotected precocious kid. Strictly survival. You bully yourself so you wont get bullied for real anymore.
The thing is I'm pretty normal & nomal-looking now. Like you suggested the defenses and habits id developed lost their use loooong ago.
I know my warped self-image and my current habits are kind of a mutually sustaining mobius strip. I do think I have the capacity to break out of it buts its so engrained its hard to figure out how
Yeah! I like this distillation. @John Doe this is the heart of what I found dissatisfactory in my account. My discussion of art focused on the conditions of possibility, and felt like it was describing to intentional a process, whereas its the being - the creative flow, or trance - which is whats essential. Of course thats the thing where theres not much you can say about it.
Edit: The issue is that depression often keeps on nagging even if you move on with a new identity of sorts about yourself
But it isn't only depression is it?
Sounds a fair deal of anxiety and social anxiety lumped in there too.
I started a thread about identifying too closely with depression. I find it helpful to dissociate myself from that identity from time to time when things go my way. You can give it a try too if that helps set the stage for reorganizing your self esteem/perception.
Hey csal. I may be wrong here, but could it just be the case that you've been faced with a reality check, so to speak? I mean, it sounds like you may just be experiencing what it's like to be suddenly overcome by the fact that you hold false belief somewhere along the line.
Is the imperative to root these out?
OK. I'm no therapist. But let's take this as the core complaint you are presenting with. And it is certainly a recognisable condition.
Some of us are good at these kinds of argumentative skills. They come naturally. But they can put us at a distance from our own lives and societies. And maybe also we need a well defined subject matter to apply them to. Inquiry has to have some point so that it can move towards a definite end. All that energy ought to have a purpose so that it feels well connected to a goal of value.
But before even worrying about that, an actual therapist would say check your mental health foundations. Maybe this rather intellectualised complaint - feeling troubled by a habit of being argumentative - will disappear as an issue if you first focus on getting the basics sorted.
What does that mean? It starts with the body and physical condition. Strength training, good diet and sufficient sleep. If you are going to turn a new leaf by constructing a better set of habits, then hit the gym, understand nutrition and don't compromise on shut eye. These are all routines to build.
There is a lot of new research to confirm this. Modern life is dreadful on these three scores. Your diet, for instance, affects your gut bacteria and that links straight to your brain and moods. Start feeling physically terrific and the other stuff starts to recede as anything to worry about.
Then of course, after physical health comes the quality of your social relationships. Again, fixing these might require the building of new sets of habits. It might or might not be an issue for you. However again, I think it is true that you want to build from the ground up. If you are going to make a difference in terms of changing habits, fixing the basics could be 80 percent of the answer.
After that would come what you do with your argumentative skills. Do you lock them away in the cupboard? Do you find them something useful to do?
I agree. There is the problem of over-analysing life. It has its destructive possibilities. But also, for some of us it is what we are good at. Would we really want to give it away?
I think the answers here would be highly individual. It would be more something for you to discover. Which is unlike the general therapeutic advice - the promise that you will get big and immediate returns from focusing on developing the routines for a healthy body and satisfying social engagement.
Quoting csalisbury
Here this touches on how we understand the facts of the human condition. My argument is the familiar one from symbolic interactionism and positive psychology.
You look to be talking about the mask we have to present to society so that we become predictable and interpretable beings within that society. We are actors in a running social drama. And so we must present the self that speaks to some intelligible role. Others read that mask and act according to its "truth". Both sides have to do the work that makes the mediating sign a correct framing of the self~other relation.
Looking at it in this fashion should create a distanced third person view of what you are doing. You are describing the situation very personally. The mask you employ is a tactic to deal with an unease in social relations but then it traps you in the restricted space of actions it legitimates.
Everyone struggles with this to some degree or other. My daughter sounds very similar in that she is super-empathetic and socially aware, which then rebounds on her because she judges herself the way everyone else in public ought to be judging her, when in reality most people barely even notice what you are doing except to the degree it might trouble their ability to predict your impact on their personal sphere of concern.
I think it is striking how much people don't actually notice the elaborate "you" that you mean to project to the world. And if you are in fact operating from a sophisticated self-image, this is a good reason for feeling no one really gets you.
One example from my own voyage of discovery. When I was 14, I got it into my head not to wear my school jersey because my mum didn't want to splash out on buying the "cool" school blazer. I also thought the rough wool was too scratchy.
So then the winter term comes on. Ice on the puddles. Cold wind at the bus stop. But I'm still not bending and wearing that jersey. It is not that I've said any of this to anyone, let alone my mother. Outwardly, I am just a hardy kid not feeling the cold. But I've constructed a silent act of rebellion with no graceful exit to it - even if any morning I could have simply pulled on the jersey.
So I go the whole winter like that. I'm talking an Auckland winter where its mild. A jersey would be enough. But still, I'm the only person in the entire school. Yet no one appears to notice the fact. Not even my group of friends. There is a comment or two - especially because on the worst days I have to actively demonstrate I'm not cold by standing out in the wind at the bus stop, not huddling by the wall with the rest. However it is a fact attracting no interest or concern. It only when the annual class photo has to be taken, and someone has to go borrow a jersey for me so I don't spoil the symmetry of the picture, that it finally gets any kind of official attention among my peers. Along the lines, "now you mention it, that was a bit odd."
So it is an example of how most stuff washes over people. They are on the lookout for the easy to read signs with everyday meanings. I learnt that on the whole, you remain invisible when you think your weirdness is in plain sight. Most people have no need to analyse other people too closely. As a rule, nothing is ever a big a deal as you are going to think it would have to be.
Quoting csalisbury
The three options would all have reasonably naturalistic explanations.
1) Being weird and self-deprecating is to choose the social route of submitting. Abase before the group so as to be accepted on that score. And that is just evolutionary biology. Social species use signals of submission to allow them to fit into hierarchical social structures. So while you might see the strategy as some horrible personal mistake, it is also pretty natural in its logic. There is less reason to beat yourself up about it on that score.
2) Being mocking and cynical is to display a more dominating posture. Again, the natural dynamic of hierarchical organisation demands this polarisation of roles. One must gracefully dominate, the other gracefully submit, so relations run smooth.
Again it is deeply natural behaviour - logical in a systems sense. It is only with self-conscious humans that we would note ourselves falling into those contrasting roles and so ask the question of which one we truly are.
3) Withdrawal is also a natural response. It is fairly hardwired and so not some weird choice you made.
So you are accusing yourself of shutting off from emotional connection as if that were letting your better self down. But I think it is just social reality. We are tied to interacting through a system of social masks. That is just the way the game has to work - semiotically. There has to be some face we present that makes us part of a predictable and interpretable social environment. And then that has to continue the good old games of dominance and submission on which social organisation depends.
So the conflict is between a romantic cultural ideal of how we should be - honest, true and naked in our interactions with each other - versus the evolutionary reality that we are creatures formed within semiotic systems that demand a natural hierarchical organisation.
We can kick against this evolutionary determinism. But don't expect to defeat it. It exists for good natural reason.
Quoting csalisbury
This is what good therapy could tackle. No doubt your life story could explain why shame would be a central issue. There would talk in your past that framed things for you in this way. And it would take talk to get that out in the open, examine it rationally, start to put in place the habits of counter-talk that you would employ to talk it back down whenever it arises.
As long as we identify with anything as part of our "self", it is not going to change. If we can "other" it, then we can replace it as a set of framing habits.
But again, this bit would be very particular to your personal story. And starting with exercise, diet, sleep and relationships is likely to be the most general answer to fixing depression.
I'd like to add though that I think emotional connection is probably very important in any therapeutic proces. Usually these kind of things are not something you can only reason yourself out of.
The emotional connection between mother and baby for instance has been shown to be an important factor in how mentally stable a person is later in life. A mother apparently can attune to a babies emotions by making faces, holding the baby... and thereby sort of prerationally learn a baby to regulate his or her emotions.
A lot of therapist will probably also begrudgingly admit that the most important factor in therapy is just letting the patient talk and relating, giving emotional feedback etc...
So what I'm suggesting is that rational understanding, a healthy diet and sport will all no doubt help, but that will possibly not be enough. Develloping intimate friendships and relations where you feel you let your social guard down and open up emotionally, would seem to be a key ingredient.
This would need to be face to face interactions too, since emotions are not or not easily communicated over text, which is interesting and also a bit sad in times where more and more is happing at a distance over the net.