Against Cynicism

Pfhorrest February 24, 2020 at 22:03 2250 views 5 comments

This thread is a continuation of the multi-thread project begun here.

I'm breaking my stated policy of waiting until the previous thread has fallen off the front page for a day, because the previous thread has long since devolved into an off-topic argument that isn't about that essay anymore.

In this thread we discuss the essay Against Cynicism, the last of my four opening "Against" essays before I begin elaborating on my own philosophy, in which I argue against a kind of skepticism I term "cynicism", including within it primarily justificationism, and two kinds of is/ought or fact/norm violations that I call "scientism" and "constructivism".

I'm looking for feedback both from people who are complete novices to philosophy, and from people very well-versed in philosophy. I'm not so much looking to debate the ideas themselves right now, especially the ones that have already been long-debated (though I'd be up for debating the truly new ones, if any, at a later time). But I am looking for constructive criticism in a number of ways:

- Is it clear what my views are, and my reasons for holding them? (Even if you don't agree with those views or my reasons for holding them.) Especially if you're a complete novice to philosophy.

- Are any of these views new to you? Even if I attribute them to someone else, I'd like to know if you'd never heard of them before.

- Are any of the views that I did not attribute to someone else actually views someone else has held before? Maybe I know of them and just forgot to mention them, or maybe I genuinely thought it was a new idea of my own, either way I'd like to know.

- If I did attribute a view to someone, or gave it a name, or otherwise made some factual claim about the history of philosophical thought, did I get any of that wrong?

- If a view I espouse has been held by someone previously, can you think of any great quotes by them that really encapsulate the idea? I'd love to include such quotes, but I'm terrible at remembering verbatim text, so I don't have many quotes that come straight to my own mind.

And of course, if you find simple spelling or grammar errors, or just think that something could be changed to read better (split a paragraph here, break this run-on sentence there, make this inline list of things bulleted instead, etc) please let me know about that too!

Comments (5)

god must be atheist February 24, 2020 at 23:40 #385792 0 likes

1. Broken\ link. "File not found. 404." Quoting Pfhorrest

essay Against Cynicism,

Pfhorrest February 25, 2020 at 03:20 #385816 0 likes

Reply to god must be atheist Whoops! Made a small typo: "cynicsm" instead of "cynicism". Fixed now. Thanks!

god must be atheist February 25, 2020 at 03:55 #385824 0 likes

I skimmed over your essay. I'll give a more thorough read later. It seems to me that you reason your preference well, supporting it with your rejection of nihilism, infinitism, etc. But it still remains, as it is put forth, a description of personal preference. It has not excluded cynicism with a logical reason, it has excluded cynicism with the aid of personal preferences. Which is interesting:
- if you become very famous, like a discovery that you are a long-lost royal, or else a movie star or a mass murderer
- to your family and close friends
- to your psychiatrist or workplace psychologist, who is examining you for fitness to fly to the moon
and possibly even back
- penultimately, to your own self. "The unexamined self is not worth much."

But as a no-name philosopher (I am not putting you down; we all use aliases here, so you could be Shlomo Einstein or Chris Russell or Jean-Paul Descartes for all I know) this is actually not a big deal. It seems important for you, which is fine, but I feel a bit gypped because the inherent reward of discovering your preferences for me is not big enough a payoff for the expense of mentally writhing my way through your essays.

The essays were well written, a bit dense, but that's better than being too airy. It takes time to get through, and it takes (for me at least) more than one reading to get it fully.

Pfhorrest February 25, 2020 at 04:06 #385825 0 likes

Reply to god must be atheist Thanks for the feedback again. I don't follow how you say I reason and support this position well, but then also don't give a logical reason. The reason I give against cynicism here is the entailment of nihilism, and I gave reasons against nihilism in the previous essay. So if those reasons against nihilism are good in that essay, and this essay is right that cynicism entails nihilism, then those reasons against nihilism are consequently reasons against cynicism.

Also, I know that this part so far is pretty boring and not very interesting, but this is all just laying the groundwork for the more interesting stuff to come later. I'm going to be arguing for things like "the universe is made of math", "everything is physical", "everything has a mind", the right way to do science and education, ethics, the nature of free will, anarcho-socialism, and meaning-of-life stuff, by the end, and all of it is going to depend on these basic early principles.

Or as I wrote in the first and last paragraphs of the Introduction page:

When laypeople think of philosophy, the first thing that comes to mind is often a vague "meaning of life" type of question. Besides that, people will most often think of big social questions regarding religion or politics, or perhaps more psychological questions about consciousness or free will. In these essays I will address all of those topics. But to do so I must first address more general topics about knowledge and reality, justice and morality, and even more abstract topics of art, math, and the very language we use to discuss any of this. And before even that, I must addressing the nature of philosophy itself, and the different possible ways of broadly approaching it.

...

That general philosophical view is the underlying reason I will give for all of my more specific philosophical views: everything that follows does so as necessary to conform to that broad general philosophy, rejecting any views that require either just taking someone's word on some question or else giving up all hope of ever answering such a question, settling on whatever views remain in the wake of that rejection. In the rest of the essays that follow, I will lay out more specifically what my positions are on a wide variety of particular philosophical topics, ranging from abstract matters concerning language, art, and math; through descriptive matters concerning reality and knowledge; through prescriptive matters concerning morality and justice; and finally on matters of empowerment and enlightenment, inspiring the pursuit of goodness and truth, practical action, and the meaning of life.

Pfhorrest February 27, 2020 at 02:43 #386533 0 likes

Based on feedback from these threads here, I have rearranged the first four essays of the Codex into a different order. This essay, Against Cynicism, is no longer the last essay, but now falls after Against Fideism, because it immediately addresses a bunch of objections that arise when people read that essay, and before Against Transcendentalism, which is now the last essay of this series of four.