Instrumentality
Here is the idea of instrumentality- the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. This feeling can make us question the whole human enterprise itself of maintaining mundane repetitive upkeep, maintaining institutions, and pursuing any action that eats up free time simply for the sake of being alive and having no other choice. There is also a feeling of futility as, the linguistic- general processor brain cannot get out of its own circular loop of awareness of this. Another part of the feeling of futility is the idea that there is no ultimate completion from any goal or action. It is that idea that there is nothing truly fulfilling. Time moves forward and we must make more goals and actions.
Anyways, there was a New York Times article that seemed to touch on themes of instrumentality, even though it never used that term. The article itself talks also about the imperfection of existing things versus the ideal perfection of nonexistence. The decaying aspect of time that the article discusses tangentially has to do with instrumentality as time and our default circumstances of throwness lead us to persistently maintain our upkeep, maintain our institutions, and pursue actions that eat up free time. The name of the article should not be "Why do anything" but "We must do anything". That is the real burden. Even though non-action might be the most complete and fullest, waking life gives us no choice except if the goal was death or wasting away. Even the action of turning away from that which is temporary (i.e. meditation, ascetic living) is a forced action that we must take. This too can be seen as means to an end in most Western contexts (e.g. using meditation so you can "recharge" for your normal daily activities). However, even the decision to pursue meditation and an ascetic lifestyle, if pursued as an "end goal" in itself, might be done out of a false sense of superiority to all other actions, when really they fall under same the category of all other actions. Just like anything else, it is temporary goals or actions taken at a certain time, the only difference being that they are done in the awareness of the situation. Meditation and the ascetic life becomes a proxy for achieving the lofty goal of nonexistence or a transcendental existence. It is only coping with the situation but never truly resolving it. However, even though there are mixed themes in the article, it is worth taking a look: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/why-do-anything.html
I just wanted to present the idea and see if anyone has experienced this notion and see if this notion provides any significant indicators of the human experience, existence itself, language, etc.
I'm going to guess this will be answered in several somewhat predictable ways. I'm wondering if this can be taken seriously with most people without being dismissed as juvenile or simply a product of post-modern society. I wonder if the conversation can get passed the usual trope criticisms and look at it for a possibility that it may be saying something about the world- even if just as vague feelings brought upon by self-reflecting/big brained humans.
Anyways, there was a New York Times article that seemed to touch on themes of instrumentality, even though it never used that term. The article itself talks also about the imperfection of existing things versus the ideal perfection of nonexistence. The decaying aspect of time that the article discusses tangentially has to do with instrumentality as time and our default circumstances of throwness lead us to persistently maintain our upkeep, maintain our institutions, and pursue actions that eat up free time. The name of the article should not be "Why do anything" but "We must do anything". That is the real burden. Even though non-action might be the most complete and fullest, waking life gives us no choice except if the goal was death or wasting away. Even the action of turning away from that which is temporary (i.e. meditation, ascetic living) is a forced action that we must take. This too can be seen as means to an end in most Western contexts (e.g. using meditation so you can "recharge" for your normal daily activities). However, even the decision to pursue meditation and an ascetic lifestyle, if pursued as an "end goal" in itself, might be done out of a false sense of superiority to all other actions, when really they fall under same the category of all other actions. Just like anything else, it is temporary goals or actions taken at a certain time, the only difference being that they are done in the awareness of the situation. Meditation and the ascetic life becomes a proxy for achieving the lofty goal of nonexistence or a transcendental existence. It is only coping with the situation but never truly resolving it. However, even though there are mixed themes in the article, it is worth taking a look: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/why-do-anything.html
I just wanted to present the idea and see if anyone has experienced this notion and see if this notion provides any significant indicators of the human experience, existence itself, language, etc.
I'm going to guess this will be answered in several somewhat predictable ways. I'm wondering if this can be taken seriously with most people without being dismissed as juvenile or simply a product of post-modern society. I wonder if the conversation can get passed the usual trope criticisms and look at it for a possibility that it may be saying something about the world- even if just as vague feelings brought upon by self-reflecting/big brained humans.
Comments (43)
However, if asceticism is what floats your boat, then go for it. The unattainable is still worthy of striving for, I'd say. In the end of the day, what matters is whether or not you managed to cope well enough with your situation. If you treat meditation more as an exercise and less of a lifestyle then you'll get my meaning here: people lift weights to get buff, people meditate to relax the mind. Nihilists will say any action is equal in value to another, and this I think is absurd. There are more appropriate responses to certain situations than others, depending on one's beliefs.
It's true that asceticism and meditation and whatnot cannot "resolve" the problem, like you said. It's a pipe dream to think we can achieve anything like nirvana on a long-term basis. But that's the rub of pessimism, that this problem cannot be resolved. It can only be mitigated, repressed. Which is as good as it's going to get.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think your definition is too specific in my opinion. I'd broaden the scope of instrumentality to outside sentient minds. Instrumentality becomes any manipulation of another thing by some form of domination (power). A larger planet coalesces the smaller planets into its gravitational maw because it has more mass. A leopard takes down the antelope because it was stronger, faster, and more agile. A tsunami destroys a Somalian village because of its massive force. An object inhabits a certain sector of space: no other object can persist in this sector unless it somehow manipulates it out of its position.
Being is expansionist and absorbent, and it fundamentally needs space. The entire history of the universe can be narrated as a conflict for space, the need to persist, the need to inhabit an ever-growing area.
This of course is a bit poetic but it gets the point across.
Ok, but this is a truism and doesn't diminish instrumentality. I am not saying we should not do what we can to cope, especially using coping mechanisms that precisely target certain problems. This being said, meditation and asceticism is not going to solve the main root of the problem, even if taken as an end in itself. Like exercising, it can have psychological and physical benefits. I never refuted that so to bring it up as if I did is kind of strawmanning it. I am simply saying that, as far as I see it, it does not allow for a backdoor escape or anything. If anything, if used in a Schopenhauerian way, it is just a signal to oneself and others of rebellion against the instrumentality.
Quoting darthbarracuda
This I definitely agree with.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Well, I didn't extrapolate beyond the human experience of this feeling. I think this might be conflating two things happening. This sort of idea of "instrumental" that you are using seems to be in the sense that some things are used for the benefit of other (usually stronger, better, but definitely for something else). That may be true, but the way I am using it as a sort of neologism (admittedly) is kind of the opposite. There is no end. As long as we can get up every day, as long as time moves forward, as long as we are awake, we will constantly be thrown into a given situation and context and pursue our upkeep repetitively, maintain institutions, and spend our free time pursuing goals (immediate or long-term) so that we can keep pursuing our upkeep repetitively, maintain institutions, and spend our free time pursuing goals. It is quite circular and leads to the idea of "why keep this going"? This is why it leads to feelings of absurdity, ennui, world-weariness and the like. Only our uniquely human brains can perceive this.
Sadly, it just is juvenile. For you to be able to do literally nothing (feed yourself, wipe your arse, turn you over to avoid bedsores) would require others to do everything for you. So you are advocating for a parasitic state where your idleness forces more busyiness on those around you.
Existence is a natural cycle which includes birth and growth as well as decay and death. So life has its own natural logic - one of dynamic adaptation rather that static contemplation - and philosophy should address it on those terms.
Of course philosophy, being dialectic, always will produce the "other". But in being able to talk about what life is not (ie:death), this should only highlight what life is. It then becomes perverse to want to "play dead" before your time is up.
So what this tells me is you really didn't read what I wrote about instrumentality as this has little or nothing to do with what I was writing about. It looks like you might have peaked at the link and saw the title "Why do anything?" and then started writing so many strawmen that all I see are scarecrows in my view. I also mentioned how the article tangentially fits with what I was discussing and then explained how it fit. You seemed to get all bent out of shape but did not really grasp or care to understand the content. Since this has little to nothing to do with the topic, I can't even write a response. I would be happy to respond and discuss with you about instrumentality but you at least have to be charitable enough to engage or consider the topic at hand.
It's also not my problem that you interpreted what I said to mean that you shouldn't do anything and have everyone effectively do everything for you: Quoting apokrisis
It looks like you wanted that to be the position so you can attack it.
Anyways, yes, you do have it sort of correct now that goal states are "futile" but to just keep it at that is to not get at the affect or feeling I am getting at- that of absurdity. It is that which I wanted to focus on. The maintaining in order to maintain. Certainly you can say "that's what organisms do", but we are also self-reflecting organisms who know a bit about our own condition and one of those aspects is our awareness of the very circularity of our repetitive upkeep, maintaining institutions, and spending our free time pursuing short or long term goals.
[quote=Sarte]
All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface.
...
Absurdity: another word. I struggle against words; beneath me there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity. A movement, an event in the tiny colored world of men is only relatively absurd — in relation to the accompanying circumstances. A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he is, but not in relation to his own delirium. But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root — there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. How can I pin it down with words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound, secret delirium of nature could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of the segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, in contrast, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.
...
I was there, motionless, paralyzed, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not [logical] necessity. To exist is simply ... to be there; existences appear, let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce them. Some people, I think, have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a being that was necessary and self-caused. But no necessary being [i.e., God] can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and, therefore, perfectly gratuitous. Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself.
...
I was no longer in Bouville; I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I knew it was the World, the naked World revealing itself all at once, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being. You couldn't even ask where all this came from, or how it was that a world existed, rather than nothingness. It didn't have any meaning, the world was present everywhere, before, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what bothered me; of course there was no reason for its existing, this flowing larva. But it was not possible for it not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity; this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like any other and ap peared after many others. I shouted, What filth, what filth! And I shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless.
[/quote]
There's some other stuff more directly about instrumentality, but that's a great passage on absurdity and contingency.
Absurd in comparison to what? Is it absurd as living creatures to have the goals that define life? Should I feel it is unnatural to be natural?
Maybe it's the contingency of the world he find absurd. It is absurd. "Why is there a here here?" I've never been convinced by metaphysical answers. But nausea is just the flip side of wonder. So really this "absurdity" is a feature rather than a defect...or can be seen that way...
Yeah sure. But that in turn is based on the presumption that contingency is somehow not natural.
So there are three positions here.
At one extreme is the theological/Platonic one where every tiniest thing is a detail that matters. Either God has some point of view about it. Or there is some perfect form mourning the imperfections of its material shadows. Everything counts.
Then the flipside of this perfectionism and necessitarianism is the view that it is all just contingent and meaningless. No one in fact gives a damn so there is nothing to anchor our existence.
Which then leaves the middle course - the naturalist view - that reality is a fruitful interaction of constraints and freedoms. And that makes contingency or spontaneity a natural part of the deal - along the generality of everything in the end being orientated by a sense of purpose.
So when it comes to humans living a life, there are a lot of different things we can be doing that don't in the end make too much difference. And yet also by the same token, there is stuff we really ought to be focused on as that which does make a difference.
So humans can come to believe any of these three conceptual frameworks - and affectively value their lives in that light.
The point I would then make is that the conceptual analysis comes first. Affect is not a reliable guide as to whether your life is indeed futile or ecstatically fulfilling. Instead, how you frame things is how you will seek to feel.
The Christian will expect to feel everything is God's will. The Pessimist will expect every action to be in the end pointless - a grand pretence at caring. Then Naturalism will take the view that life is about a dynamical balance.
So you have to prove your case at the metaphysical level, not simply claim your (socially constructed) feelings are legitimate or authentic.
I think we are tool-users in our blood, "meant" (or wired) to be happy and adapt. I think we agree there. I don't dispute at all your right to challenge Schop, either. That's what we're here for, not only to be "recognized" but also to hold our tools/personalities up to the fire. Even these positions that probably strike as both as unnecessarily "troubled" are, in my view, the better, more positive view struggling to be born. My hunch is that we should often push forward, make our "mistakes" exuberantly and have the guts to speak our "indulgent" thoughts and see what happens. If not here, where?
I get fed up with pessimism and antinatalism when it becomes just a back-justification for a bad mental habit that produces the very thing it complains about.
If there were some evidence that this "philosophical" tendency is instead the troubled path to a more positive outcome, then fine. Let's hear more about that then.
But if people are going to make general claims about futility, instrumentality and self-delusion - seek to impose their "truths" on my existence - then they better be prepared for a robust argument. They are making it personal.
I respect that. For me it was a pushing of that kind of cynicism further, into itself finally. If a thinker is locked in to the idea that happy people are deluded or shallow, then they've "gone blind" to a healthy hearted common-sense. They can't be superior if they compare themselves in terms of happiness, relationships, careers, because the "deluded" people have all that, and usually more of it.
"God" is too superstitious, so cosmic spiritual truth becomes God. But this truth can't claim to be useful. It can't be a tool. It might get tested in the profane world of the deluded. It wouldn't be holy or pure or superior enough. So it takes an esthetic form, and yet this is unstable, because no one wants to say "I'm superior because I think the world is gross." Well, a few puritans play that game, perhaps. So I try to point out this "cold, hard" truth as a fairly obvious tool in the hands of a spirit or personality that wants some damned status and recognition in this world. Don't we all? Till we get enough. It looks like a hell of a short cut. Words alone do the trick.
If I were to gripe about anti-natalism/pessimism, it would be that I've been living with the "death of God" or "death of absolute meaning" axiomatically for 15 years. It's the air I breath. What's new? It's actually a beautiful open space around all the non-absolute "meanings" that actually drive us when we don't have our wheels in the mud of the "shortcut" of the purely verbal solution. That is where the positive potentially lies in a perception of "instrumentality." At least that prepares the way for embracing all thinking as a technology. It prepares the leap of "well that's how life is, and I'm part of it as I think to oppose it."
But why this effort? What to I ultimately gain by writing this post? If I sleep on the floor all day, what do they gain in the end? There’s no reason. I just woke-up into life. All my effort is not occurring for or because of something else. It’s all me. I am rather than not. Existence doesn’t deal in any other term.
The effort I’m forced into always comes down to me. To live of an ascetic sage takes this effort, and it is really no less effort than being a hedonist beast, for either path requires the effort which is the existence of myself. Seeking death or wasting away involves the application of similar effort. Will is present no matter what we do.
We might say that Will is embedded far deeper than suffering. It’s burden isn’t pain (that would be stuff like hot stoves, red-hot pokers, illness, the betrayals of others, etc.,etc.), but effort. Even success and joy are effort. To exist means to Will. Joy or suffering, love or hate, we cannot escape who we are. So long as we live, we are more actions, more goals.
In a sort of ironic twist, the much sought after ultimate end (to be free of the burden of existence), is entirely self-destructive. If I want to live without feeling the burden of existence, I have to be particular actions and have certain goals for the rest of my life. I have to be burned with existence and be fulfilled in it. To Will (exist) is not the enemy, but the only means of victory (fulfilment in existence).
Yes @Hoo, I have read Nausea and I do appreciate Sartre insight there. His idea right here very much gets at the point of not confusing the explanation for the actual event.
This pretty much gets to the point of absurdity here of a world's contingent nature. Interestingly, I think that the human experience has a bit more necessity due to our cognitive apparatus. Even though nature may present itself in sublime moments of just "being there", our own desires and goals are shaped by culture as well as by the basic existential needs of our big-brained natures- that is to say the two poles of survival (in a cultural-linguistic context) and boredom (also in a cultural-linguistic context). When laid in its barest necessities, these are things humans contend with at the limits of our motivations. Also, this phenomena of seeing contingency, is slightly different but in same vicinity of instrumentality. Instrumentality has more to do with the feeling associated with what I call "doing to do to do". It is more in regards to our actions and goals. It goes along with questions such as "Why do anything" or even better "We must do something". It is the realization that we must upkeep our bodies (and possessions and property), maintain institutions, and make short and long term goals in order to repeat this process. The feelings of nausea and absurdity that Sartre is discussing may be the same result but from slightly different experiences.
Well, that kind of the point. Since we have big brains, we have the ability to have what you call this "unnatural" feeling of what seems to be natural.
Patronizing other people doesn't help. For some reason these kinds of debates always end up with everyone getting so butthurt.
Quoting apokrisis
Coming from the opposite vein, pessimists are fed up with the system. As Schop1 said elsewhere, there is a kind of "optimistic mafia" installed in society: you WILL be happy!, you WILL love life!, you WILL support your country!, you WILL smile at death!, you WILL suck up your internal struggles, etc. Although the optimistic mafia analogy works well I'd rather just use the words "affirmative" and "negative". Any affirmative lifestyle "affirms" life - it takes life as a good thing to be produced and maintained. And any "negative" lifestyle calls this assumption into question in various degrees. From the negative perspective, social optimism is rather similar to fascism - make the perfect happy bubble and get everyone to conform to it, because everyone secretly knows just how fragile happiness is. You can't have unconformers. Which is exactly what you seem to be arguing here.
Quoting apokrisis
The pessimist isn't personally attacking you. They're pointing out flaws in the system. Your argument is akin to the theist claiming that any atheist who tries to make general claims about the creation of the cosmos is going to have to meet them in battle. Like...no...they're not attacking the theist personally, they're attacking the worldview and/or presenting new data.
And even if they were, would it matter? Does your own self-esteem take priority over truth?
You're also claiming that the phenomenological experiences of pessimists are somehow invalid because they're socially constructed, without explaining how this actually changes anything (sweetness is just a chemical reaction on the tongue that yield spike trains in the brain: that doesn't change anything about what it's like to taste something sweet. The scientific image does not immediately, or perhaps ever, replace the manifest image).
If you don't feel any of the ways pessimists describe us as feeling, please tell us all why and how you are able to accomplish such a great feat. We'd love to know, as would everyone else.
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Since we're talking about Sartre's Nausea, here is a quite illuminating quote from it which I was trying to allude to in the other discussion when I brought up extreme pain:
“What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they'd think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present."
And indeed they are, otherwise we wouldn't have to consistently distract ourselves on a daily basis.
You did a great job explaining instrumentality itself, though you focused more on the causes of instrumentality and less on the feelings associated with the self-awareness of it. Then you stated this
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I do not really get this as it doesn't necessarily precede from what you wrote about instrumentality previously. If everything is for no reason and you just "woke-up into life" then how is Willing a victory or fulfillment in existence? This seems like a backdoor way to promote Nietszchean ideals. Even if is so, I'd still need more explanation.
I'm not saying there isn't a problem with "the system". I'm just saying that a rather more sophisticated analysis is needed than "life sucks".
Quoting darthbarracuda
That's how things go - polarisation. Pessimism must frame itself in terms of what it is not - optimism. It has to construct this "other" as a mafia to justify its own desire to become a mafia too.
This is what I criticise. You have to exaggerate the strength of your opposition so as to legitimate yourself as its counter. You want to leave bystanders no option but to declare for either Team Optimist ir Team Pessimist. Philosophy then becomes the loser because your slippery-slopism admits to no shades of grey.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep. Optimism as you describe it is fascist and oppressive. Just as is Pessimism as you describe it. Both are totalitarian in standing at their respective extremes.
But of course what I am "exactly arguing" is something else. I am arguing that optimism and pessimism - to the degree they are natural - would exist as the bounding limits which then make possible the variety of all the feelings that lie in-between. So now I would focus on the nature of that balance, that hopefully fruitful balance, that lies in-between.
If you can point out a flaw in this logic, go ahead.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You are not really listening. My point has been that feeling bad, feeling good, feeling neutral, are all part of life's rich and varied experience.
So the very idea of "eliminating unhappiness" is nonsensical on its own. The question is really would you want to eliminate "feeling" in some generalised sense? Can you offer a strong philosophical argument at this deeper ontological level?
And I'm not saying that such an argument can't in fact be made. But I am saying this is not the argument that is being attempted here.
Here is one such summary for discussion....
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Pick the bones out of that slightly self-contradictory assortment. ;)
Okay: life sucks for the majority of sentient organisms that aren't lucky enough to get out relatively scar-free.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually my position is realism, but I call myself a pessimist because other people see my views as "pessimistic".
Nominalism has to frame itself in terms of what it is not - universalism. Atheism has to frame itself in terms of what it is not - theism. What's the problem here?
And no, we're not the mafia, because we're not forcing people to conform. If optimism was a true philosophical position then it wouldn't feel the need to smack people on the head every other day to remind them of its correctness.
Quoting apokrisis
The flaw is that you're explicitly favoring (affirming) this "in-between" between optimism and pessimism, thus making it a quasi-optimism. While if you were completely honest with your assessment it would be utterly neutral. If it's indeed neutral and not worthy of being called "good" or "bad" then there would be no way of evaluating it at all.
Quoting apokrisis
There we have the optimism-in-disguise. "Life's rich and varied experience." as if there's some other-worldly aesthetics to it all.
Quoting apokrisis
Because happiness, bliss, joy, etc are simply the lack of suffering. Think about it: if you're not suffering, what are feeling (assuming you're conscious). Are you happy? Are you joyful? If you're not happy and not joyful, then you must have something keeping you from feeling this way - thus you are stressed, anxious, panic-ing, suffering, etc.
People are severely deficient in their self-evaluations. It's a psychological fact.
Apropos this, Wittgenstein:
"Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."
How can I argue against your monotheistic Pessimism without pointing out that there is the second thing of optimism, and then beyond that, the third thing which is a neutral balance?
So it is not a flaw for my position that there are these further things which your position wants to deny. I am simply pointing to the stages towards a more complex triadic position.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I dunno. I would say instead it is normal to be feeling all these kinds of things at once in some fashion. Life just is rich and varied in that way.
That is why I object to your habit of monotonic exaggeration. I could focus on just one part of my total umwelt at the moment - like a slight achiness in my back - at the expense of others, like a slight sense of satisfaction in my stomach. I could make my back the center of my world (and ouch, now I'm really starting to notice it). Or instead I could be more honest about my phenomenal state and say in fact it is quite naturally mixed at all times. It is neither up, down or even neutral, in any simplistic fashion.
Of course I accept that if I were currently being crushed in a car crash, or I was out of neurobiological equilibrium and in a depressive fugue, then that internal variety might be a lot more one-dimensional.
But if we are talking about typical mental state, then it is better characterised as vague - an awful lot of nothing much in particular.
I think you are looking passed the phenomenon of instrumentality. It is not about the evaluation of parts of your umwelt. That last sentence felt funny to write, but I am going to keep that.
Your instrumentality appeals to the issue of there being possibly contrasting points of view. So your argument is that we are divided against our own desires in being self-conscious creatures able to wonder what the hell is the point. And my argument is that check out how most people still live their lives and - even in their apparent self-consciousness - they still seem to show a unity with nature which suggests they deeply share its point of view.
Now I freely admit that how I then cash out this naturalism is itself outrageous. Far more outrageous than existentialism, pessimism, or any other familiiar "life sucks" romantic reaction,
I say life is thermodynamics in action - complexity in pursuit of dissipation. And humans have evolved a mentality that befits that in being the super-entropifiers. We are organised around the idea of being maximally wasteful.
And while you say the problem is that we are self-conscious - we look at the crazy lives we are meant to live and wonder "WTF?" - I reply that we are not yet generally self-conscious of this real living mission. And so we have not - within philosophy - even begun to debate whether it is good, bad or indifferent in some fundamental sense.
I think the answer is important. To the extent we are conscious of the fact that we are burning up the planet with unstoppable neo-liberal zeal, it seems as though automatically it must be a bad thing.
But why? You could take the view that giga-joules of buried decomposed planktonic mass - petroleum - wants to be liberated. So we are doing nature's work as intended. Then you can counter that by the calculation of how much more entropy Homo sap could eventually liberate if it avoids its current reckless crash and burn lifestyle.
So this is an approach to humanity's basic dilemmas that no doubt absolutely everyone finds more distasteful than the everyday cultural familiarity of existential ennui or pessimistic despair. And I can make it even worse from a philosophical viewpoint by showing that it is the inescapable scientific truth of what is happening.
So I can have my extremist fun too. :)
But to get back to your instrumentalism, I would say show me the reason to believe that humanity is not organised around life's general grand entropic goal. There may be discord about society's best rate of burn - go hard out or slow to a steady state - but to burn is the accepted necessity.
Now of course, once you say that, then anti-natalism, suicide, and other ways of bailing out of the whole burn game can come to mind as counter ideas. But again - realistically - for every person that makes a choice to step aside from the fray, any number will rush forward to take their place.
It is unnatural not to burn. Therefore an anti-burn lobby can never get far before being swamped by those still ready and eager.
So yes, you can make a case for a mass voluntary withdrawal from reality's thermodynamic imperative. But it is all rather hypothetical as it won't happen in practice. Thus philosophical energy would be better spent on the practical question of how to ride this entropy train to our best general self-aware advantage? What is the social organisation that can achieve that?
And as is obvious, as I keep saying, we exist with one foot in the biology of our hunter-gather lifestyle past with its steady-state economy, our other foot in the socio-economics of an exponential fossil fuel explosion. So yeah, you've got to expect that to be uncomfortable in ways we have yet to think through adequately.
Because you're not espousing a neutral balanced position. You're implicitly favoring life - only a nihilist could actually argue that life is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, neither worthy of continuation nor worthy of ending. Valueless. Any other kind of value tips the balance in one way, either life-affirming or life-denying.
Quoting apokrisis
Confusing, more like. Awkward.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, but that's not the pessimistic claim. Again, the claim is that pain is intrinsic to existence. Sure, you might experience pleasures as well as pains, nobody is denying that. But what we do deny are that these pleasures are guaranteed, long-lasting, and satisfying. Schopenhauer's entire philosophy revolves largely around the idea that the Will (an ever-striving presence) coerces us to do things. We need things, we want things, we're never quite satisfied. Dissatisfaction and death are structurally-guaranteed to living systems.
It's a mixed bag, like you said. But nevertheless the painful ingredients are always there, while we have to consciously add pleasurable experiences. The Will, the dissatisfaction, the fear of death, is an ever-present rumbling underneath the rest of our experiences, like a drum beat or rhythm. The large majority of Buddhist eschatology is focused on removing this problem and achieving nirvana - Buddhists realize that life just is suffering. That's what it is, minimally, minus an extra additional accidental or contingent features. You cannot live without pain of some sort, while you can live without pleasure, and indeed many people unfortunately do. Pain is guaranteed.
So that's the aesthetic argument, and also a material argument because the constant hum gets annoying and burdensome to deal with. Life is a pain in the ass, and I can say this because I'm not currently worried about starving to death. I'm lucky enough to have a relatively untraumatic experience to be able to reflect upon the overall human condition and come to the conclusion I have.
Quoting apokrisis
Then why do you ignore this? Is this not a facet of instrumentality? We exists because other organisms suffered horrible pain. Our ancestors ate animals alive. The realization that your life is not justification for the plight of these innocents is what instrumentality is.
Quoting apokrisis
I disagree substantially. Schopenhauer argued that if you introspect you will find the presence of the Will. You will find yourself dissatisfied, anxious, stressed. You will find yourself pressured to do something, which is instrumentality as well. The use of another thing.
Barracuda in what I am about to say is so simple yet in a way so incredabley complex. Most humans either lack or refuse to allow the ideal of honesty. We as a race must become aware of the truth around us. We have become so weak as a race that we can no longer call a person fat or weak. Sometimes your just fat and there should not be an excuse for it
But your point of how we still persevere and survive despite our self-consciosness which is able to ask "what is the point?" also goes back to instrumentality as well. We have coping mechanisms in order to not dwell on it- usually by ignoring, isolating, anchoring, etc. etc. You name it, we do it. Also, note what Schopenhauer called our "will-to-live". Survival may be both partially socially constructed or biological but it is certainly exists and adds to the absurd state of having to move forward at all despite the knowledge of the situation.
Quoting apokrisis
This may well very be true regarding entropification. You are looking at entropy as a principle whereas I am looking at the internal phenomenal point of view.
Well could one for example make the best with what one doesn't have? Or could one take what is out of one's control any way but the way it happens? I think the greatness of the stoics lies primarily not in the rationality of their philosophy but in engendering good attitudes - the purpose of stoic discourse obviously can't be to rationally enlighten someone - it's patently obvious that one can only do the best with what they have, and can do nothing but accept what is outside of one's control. The purpose must be to create the attitude in the soul, such that when one encounters a certain type of experience (obviously a difficult one) then one's reaction is changed. Furthermore, one develops certain virtues, such as resilience in the face of adversity, perseverance, courage, and so forth. Stoicism is less philosophy and more way of life, achieved via a certain oft-repeated discourse aimed at re-minding one of key principles.
That's why I think Epictetus is pertinent, though. It's life (I think!) that's being addressed in this thread, and rather shabbily. It seems to me this is due to an excessive concern over things which aren't in our control (to use Stoic phraseology). And for my part, I think that concern is unreasonable, if not irrational, and in that sense Stoicism can "rationally enlighten" us.
I agree but I lean more towards thinking that the thread is about a particular state of consciousness which experiences the world in a certain way. This is ultimately a self-contradictory state of consciousness as it undermines itself - it is unhappy with its own way of being, and seeks for a sort of escape. There is no question of rationality here - the pessimist / instrumentalist or however else he is to be called understands that there is no point in complaining about the world. And yet he still does it, the way a bird would still sing its song even if there were no purpose to it. So making one understand that it is not rational will not change their act - they understand that, and their song is a protest - a self-consciously absurd one. It's their attitude and reaction to something that has to be changed, and yes, stoicism does potentially have the tools to do this. But it's not about rationality. It's about showing that the fulfilment of this state of consciousness lies outside of itself, and then of course in actually inducing the switch. Because it is like a switch - change the glasses, and then the world looks and feels entirely differently.
The absurdity lies in the new culturally-evolved and rather pointless habit of being able to question what we in fact take for granted.
We are biological creatures with all that naturally entails. It is not absurd in itself but all very reasonable.
But we are also - for a few centuries at least - rationalising animals, socially trained in the art of "giving reasons" to justify our behaviour.
It is useful that we see ourselves as "selves" - individuals who can creatively negotiate an acceptable balance between our private (biological and historical) desires and our public social systems (that exist to sustain our human lives).
And the Enlightenment - as a philosophical break with theistic social traditions - was the advance by which this implicit social contract was itself made explicit within culture. We stepped up another level in being able to debate even the rights and wrongs of this social construction of a "free-willing" selfhood. We could improve on its design as a matter of political choice. And so we had the reforms that empowered individuals to actually have more control over their own lives - the social constraints on their actions now being as abstract as possible in being framed within bills of rights, constitutions and other legal frameworks.
But of course, the very nature of rationality - the sharp construction of choice states - is that for every yes, there must be the possibility of a no. For every go, there must be the counterfactual thought of whoah.
That is not absurd. It is what makes rationality work. To act this way is to also decide not to act that way.
However, as action produces reaction, the Enlightenment did conjure up its own cultural response in Romanticism. If the Enlightenment looked outwards to the social conditions that fostered freewill - the development of a culture of self-hood based on an explicit habit of self-regulation - then that also made concrete its (impractical) "other". People could start to imagine doing the opposite in some way - like acting in unregulated abandon, returning to an animal state of unthinkingness, or ascending to some superman state where the individual became larger than his/her social conditions.
That made for great art. People find fictional worlds entertaining. And Romantic portrayals can even reinforce the Enlightenment's rational choices. The sharpness of the "other" also sharpens what it busily "others". Rationality can also take on its own absurd cultural representations as a consequence - the nerdy engineer with pens and a pocket protector.
So it is not hard to track the origins of romanticism, existentialism and eventually pessimism. The more the average individual human is empowered by improvements in his/her social conditions, so too can become more exaggerated the irrational reaction displayed to that very fact.
The pessimist can now come onto social forums waggling his/her bleeding stumps, complaining of the most absolute personal disempowerment. The pessimist has "discovered" that the whole of life is a fraud - socially conditioned, based on biological imperatives - and so he/she is not going to put up with that any more.
And yet - even worse - the pessimist can't see a point to anything. Abstract away the sustaining social conditions, the natural biological imperatives, and the habit of self-regulating selfhood is left with no meaningful choices to make. All that freewill and now no reasons to act! What a colossal tragedy (or farce)!
The pessimist claims this is all philosophically sound because it is where rationality itself leads. If you keep stepping away from the conditions of life, the conditions of society, you wind up as a knot of thought that is simply saying no because it has discovered it could also be saying yes. And in being this detached from the reasons for saying yes, logic seems now to dictate the choice must be no because yes depends on those reasons.
Instrumentality is simply a line of questioning that has painted itself into a corner. It is no different from Cartesian doubt, solipsism, and other familiar exercises in rationality which overshoot the mark by leaving behind the original grounds for belief that made such questioning meaningful.
Sure, the whole point of the modern, empowered, enlightened, negotiating individual is to be an able-minded questioner of the given. But to overshoot the mark and wind up disempowering their own selves through a questioning regress is obviously silly.
If that is the point you have reached, time to turn back and engage with mundane reality again.
Perhaps you're right. In that case this is in the nature of a problem, I think. If a resolution is sought, there are ways of addressing problems rationally. In the case of psychological problems, cognitive behavioral therapy, which owes much to Stoicism, has been employed successfully to combat depression.
If a resolution isn't being sought, what can be said?
Yes I agree. CBT in fact is very much like stoicism - apart from the metaphysical propositions and the worldview. I think actually stoicism is superior as it is a worldview (great applicability) - CBT is a therapy designed to cure particular problems - say fear of airplanes, or health anxiety - and thus has a smaller scope. I found ACT therapy to be an improvement on CBT and stoicism though - basically a combination of CBT and mindfulness, and somewhat better than CBT at changing a person's attitudes not only in regard to a specific problem, but in the entire way they approach life. One of my best friends is a psychologist who works primarily using ACT - they often deal with patients who have to live with chronic pain and other such conditions.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Well the seeker has to start disliking the way they experience the world - maybe because it is unfulfilling - and seek after a different way of relating with it. There's many different ways of experiencing the world. Even after one recovers from depression, even that recovery may not be an optimal state yet. Very often people who recover from severe depression or trying circumstances retreat from life - in the sense that they become easily satisfied, and prefer to do as little as possible so long as they can remain comfortable doing that. And when discomfort comes, they just bear it - but they don't reach out into the world very much - their desires become quite minimal. Their consciousness is quite stoic - so they attain to equanimity, but their life becomes quite tedious too. They learned to deal with pain and adversity, but maybe they could live a bit more colorfully while retaining those lessons. All that can be done in that case is suggest the possibility to them - sooner or later they will understand that they are living a good life, but could perhaps live better. Not by renouncing what they learned - but by incorporating it into a practice that is more expansive in the world.
I read the Echiridion. There were some useful ideas in it but overall I was struck by how many "do's" and "do not's" there were, as if we had to jump through so many hoops just to maintain some element of virtue. The resolutions only seemed to illuminate the problems more.
Though you gave a somewhat interesting history with regards to Enlightenment and Romanticism, you overlook earlier periods of probable ennui. The ancients wrote about this- thought it was probably limited to the upper class. It is hard to say with any certainty what a peasant thought when he was plowing his fields. Perhaps he had a vague feeling of instrumentality when he saw each day look pretty similar. However, perhaps he was simply too forced with immediate survival needs to even have such vague thoughts enter his mind. Either way, as you say, when humans come to a point of this kind of rationalization- perhaps only after a certain time period, as you mentioned, then we can come to this conclusion. The more free time, the more we can see the bigger picture of what is going on behind the immediacy of simply reacting to hand-to-mouth needs. Like a lot of things (math, science, etc.), the brains that evolved for certain tribal lifestyles had the latent capacity to unlock far beyond the probable social/biological niche problems our species were trying to figure out in the original habitats of our first ancestors.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
I think the key here is that you already know the given, so you cannot just turn back without distraction, isolation, anchoring, and all the mechanisms at your disposal to do so. Its like the brightness of the sun was too much, so you cannot sustain it. That is fine, but realize what is going on. The instrumentality may be the farthest we can go, as you indicate, but at least we understand our situation. De facto, by continuing to live life, we have already engaged with the mundane reality, so that is simply a truism. If you want to ignore it, you may do so.
By the way, you can be as condescending as you want, that alone does nothing against the argument, it simply gives the ambiance of "rightness" but proves little. Hopefully, people who read your comments cut through that style to actually see the arguments rather than the rhetoric.
Condescending: showing or characterized by a patronizing or superior attitude toward others
condescendingly play \-?sen-di?-l?\ adverb
"But everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare" - someone wise said that. But people today expect everything on a silver platter...
Yes, the invention of the individual, the invention of democracy, began in Ancient Greece - Socrates in particular - and got rediscovered with the recovery and dissemination of those texts in Europe. All hail the printing press.
So in Ancient Greece, there were thoughts about these things - among the small circle of the privileged class. Not so much among slaves and women. But also, the Greek peasant in the field was a little different just because of the small-holding nature of Greek agriculture. That itself makes for a mentality that is both individualistic and co-operative - socially flexible in a way that grain empires, rice paddy colllectives, and nomad lifestyles are not.
The Greek peasant was the reason for the fearsome "total war" machine of the Hoplite citizen-soldier. Greek individualism meant also the new possibility of men banding together in the name of a common abstraction - the state - to fight to the last person standing in defence of the abstract right to a bit of dirt.
This is the irony of Western civilisation. In enabling people to think of themselves as parts of a larger machine, not a rabble, tiny military forces could conquer vast hordes everywhere they went.
I mention this because it again shows that you have to come back always to the reasonableness that underlies the social contract. The Enlightenment took over the world so quickly because it was a form of social organisation that worked so well.
The West did not win and takeover the planet because it looked inside itself and discovered some superhuman source of will. It won because it empowered the individual to act - as an intelligent and self-interested choice - in an unrestrained collective fashion.
Of course, you will now miss the point and say this machine-like social style is exactly what you are complaining about. But again, I emphasise that when it works, it works precisely because it socially constructs individuals who can think for themselves - and through that, really commit to the collective action which best advances any self-interest.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But you are not seeing the bigger picture if you don't actually understand the dynamics of the cultural history that produced you.
Modern life did not take away all the usual immediate concerns of life - like a roof over your head, food to fill your belly - so you could fritter your existence away in gaming and complaining. No, your job now is to get on with earning big bucks and consuming - accelerating the fossil fuel entropification of the planet.
Whoops. Yes, that doesn't have to be your job of course. It would be nice if you applied yourself to society's question of what better collective action we should be striving after. That might be a really useful use of the gift of life.
But you get the gist. The fact that you find yourself at a point of cultural history where - like a small circle of Greek aristocrats - you have endless "free time" to contemplate your navel, does not mean you should then waste your time in that fashion.
So if you do indeed find your own personal meaning to life in terms of "striving after the bigger picture", then you have to put in enough effort to make sure you really achieve that. Instrumentality and pessimism just seem like lazy shortcuts to me. They demand the least effort to make sense of the world. Just curl up on the couch and wait to die.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What is more smug than to be telling me that I am sadly self-deluding in believing life involves an effort for good reason?
Again, that is speculation. We don't know much about slaves, and women because they had little if anything to write and all we know is characterizations from those who could.
Quoting apokrisis
One possible story, but perhaps just one story out of many for why the West won out. This may be a good generalization, but you know more than many I am sure, that there is way more complexity to the West besides the small number of cultural reasons that are encapsulated here. Not doubt, free-thought, and individualism within boundaries that cultivate some social benefits is a good start, though not complete.
Quoting apokrisis
Now you are going from "what is" to "what should happen" in an ever so sleight-of-hand way. What I am talking about is not that we "should not" try to benefit the social good with our individual problem-solving skills and curiosity, but rather, "at the end of the day" the individual problem solving and curious things to puzzle over are part of the instrumentality of being, that we clearly are capable of being self-aware of. You called it earlier- overshooting our mark, but really it is just assessing the situation as it is. Again, to quote myself earlier- instrumentality is: the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. This feeling can make us question the whole human enterprise itself of maintaining mundane repetitive upkeep, maintaining institutions, and pursuing any action that eats up free time simply for the sake of being alive and having no other choice. There is also a feeling of futility as, the linguistic- general processor brain cannot get out of its own circular loop of awareness of this. Another part of the feeling of futility is the idea that there is no ultimate completion from any goal or action. It is that idea that there is nothing truly fulfilling. Time moves forward and we must make more goals and actions.
Quoting apokrisis
Who says I don't understand the cultural history? Just because you put down some interpretations of the Enlightenment and backlash of Romanticism, and then some ideas about development of Western values from Greek democracy, that means that I do not read about history, read other interpretations, and make my own conclusions- in good ole Greek free-thought, individualized fashion?
Quoting apokrisis
Condescending- again, employing "rightness rhetoric" does not mean you are right.
Quoting apokrisis
Ha! That is my point, my dear sir... USEFULNESS for WHAT!?
Quoting apokrisis
So, you are going to paint me as aristocratic and navel-gazing- again a canard and patronizing.. all rhetorical, nothing of sound argument.. and you are going to contrast it with what? The "simple man" working in the factories, working in the trades.. the blue collar.. the "real" scholar? Those solving "real" problems.. and again, for WHAT... that is the POINT of instrumentality.
Quoting apokrisis
Yep, that's how I make a living.. Again, so many poor assumptions.. "Striving after bigger picture"- what the hell is that? What is the "bigger picture" talk about false telos. Fame? To be in a Scientific American? Encyclopedia Brittanica? The smile of knowing you "did" something "innovative"? How is that still not instrumental? Is this innovation, creation (making furniture, writing a theory, creating art, what not), are you making some really vague case that these are intrinsic goods.. that just NEED to be accomplished by any person of worth? Besides your rhetoric of some 19th century middle-class gent who thinks he knows "common decency" and "good taste", you have no argument, just some arrogant dude on an internet forum who thinks they know what is "good taste" and that for explaining my views on instrumentality MUST not have it.
The Enchiridion is a summary statement of Epictetus' teachings prepared by his student Flavius Arrianus (Arrian). The Discourses are far more detailed, but again are made up of notes taken by Arrian. If Epictetus wrote anything (it's doubtful he did) it didn't survive. So what we read is in any case what Arrian thought significant. The Enchiridion is I think is best viewed as a short statement of thoughts and recommendations for use in Stoic practice; it's a "handbook" (that's its translation). It's a guide on how to live a Stoic life, and isn't meant to be an argument in favor of Stoicism or discussion of the theoretical foundation of Stoicism.