Serious Philosophy Discussion

[Phr3121]

Yeah, and since this isn't the Serious Physics Discussion thread, let's not do that. I don't want to delete posts that I know people put time into, but, from here on out, I'm going to be deleting science posts. Let's stick to philosophy. And when in doubt just remember: If you're posting numbers and equations then you're probably in the wrong thread. Boy, it's fun to be able to make rules against math and science

Well, physics and philosophy do intertwine. There is philosophy in there somewhere.
Yes, 2 of the 6 branches of philosophy: Aesthetics and Logic.

* Edit: Cleaned post #220 for you.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Funny enough, my first thought was, "No, it's a psychological question," but that would mean that psychology and science are distinct, which, I'm sure, would ruffle more than a few feathers. But then isn't that why there's the distinction between psychiatrists, who are trained in science and medicine, and psychologists, who are trained in therapy? It seems like psychiatry belongs in the science camp while psychology belongs in the philosophy camp.

What say you to that bit of rambling?

I'd say you're spot on with the distinction, but not the labels. Both psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, insofar as they are fundamentally therapists, are going to be caught in that unscientific psychological quagmire.

Experimental psychologists, cognitive scientists, and others are better suited to the scientific work.

I was just browsing my bookshelf for something on this, and I came across Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. The gist of the book is that there is a science of human happiness or well-being, in this case "positive psychology" (which I'll let slide this time because I <3 Haidt), and that the science in many places maps onto suppositions of various ancient philosophies.

At first I laughed because I'd stumbled on something that could make everyone in the thread happy, but then I frowned remembering a question Peterson has asked a few times - why should happiness be our goal? (I suspect Haidt has a good response to this, likely involving a broadening of "happiness," which I'm sure was only used to sell books to muggles. I will need to read it).

When I was 16 and started having panic attacks I went to a therapist and it was a colossal waste of time, primarily because the dude seemed like a hack. I love the idea of "talk therapy" and would love to be able to find a good therapist to talk shit out with, but it's hard for me to imagine finding someone who I wouldn't think was a buffoon

By the time I had broken up with my ex, she was seeing like 6 different quack therapists for her mind and body. What we should be doing as humans and where we can go wrong are serious subjects with deep personal consequences. I talk about it like a game because I have that privilege, but even when I take shots at Freud I remember how fucked up some his patients were. In fact I've almost been forced to conclude that we just don't see hysteria or neuroses like he did anymore in our day and age, and that's partly what accounts for his theories being so indigestible.

Now I'm starting to think that the reason that I'm confused is because this type of shit relies - or at least appears to rely - on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Much like it's difficult for me to walk in the shoes of someone who thinks that the is-ought "problem" is a problem, it's difficult for me to parse logic and reality the way that you seem to be parsing them here. Is-ought, analytic-synthetic, necessary-contingent, theory/practice, structure/content, logical/actual - how are these not all false dichotomies that just muddy the waters?

Either there's no such thing as a problem that's limited to the structure of an argument or you've yet to provide me with the example that can clarify for me what a problem that's limited to the structure of an argument looks like

Well yea, those are real dichotomies lol. But I may have used too strong language when I said the is-ought problem was a "strictly logical" problem. I should have said that it's best viewed from the perspective of logic, not that it exists in some other realm only. Logic would indeed be useless if it didn't manifest itself in law-like patterns in this here real world.

To use a simple informal example that's already (probably unintentionally) happened in this thread: it isn't valid to argue that a proposition is true because the majority of people believe it to be true. If your daughter or someone came to you repeatedly saying something like "I want to do this because everyone is doing it and that means it's the right thing to do," you'd have to sit down and explain to her that, in principle, everyone else doing something has no definitive bearing on it being right or wrong. Everyone else often does the wrong thing.

The basics of logic are just models of arguments that give you trustworthy conclusions, or not (you don't even need to go further than Aristotle for this). Hume's contribution via the is-ought divide was just that no facts by themselves can guarantee what you should do about them. It's an important prompt to not get swept away by persuasive facts without reflecting on what presupposed values are really driving the implications of those facts - in politics, science, economics, etc.

It also leads Hume to his moral sentimentalism, which plays a big role in my idea of how ethics work. Very briefly: the presupposed values I just mentioned aren't always derived from reason. That's a good thing to know, as Peterson would say.

Two things.

1) You want to know how you can guarantee-100%-no-chance-of-failure confuse me? Use math words. "Orthogonal"? I enjoy conversing with you, Caveat, but not enough to where I'm going to try to understand math words. I vowed the day I took the GRE and answered all of the math questions "666" because math is evil that I'd never again give a single fuck about math

2) Maybe "orthogonal" so threw me that I missed it, but how is this an answer to my question about where the "values can't be derived from facts" premise was coming from? I get that your "Bad Syllogism" is bad. What I'm not getting is what that has to do with, much less how it corroborates (assuming that's what you're taking it to be doing), the "values can't be derived from facts" premise. If it helps, I've never studied formal logic; I just rely on common sense when judging shit to be either smart shit or stupid shit.

Ah, the syllogisms are what I take to be derivations. The proper technical word would be deductions.

Now you can make an argument that our actual thought doesn't operate in this precise deductive way, which may or may not be true. We're probably better at inferring to good explanations than deducing (in fact, it's a miracle to me that we, as animals, can understand logic at all). It's just the way philosophical arguments are often evaluated, and how I thought Rand might like hers to be assessed given her other guiding principles.

If we're going to dig into Objectivism, then we need to establish some common ground, and there's no better ground than the ground of Rand's own words and formulations. Additionally, given how much time and energy went into the writing of Atlas Shrugged, and in particular the famous "This is John Galt speaking" radio address, that's always my first stop when it comes to Rand's words and formulations relevant to discussions of Objectivist ideas and principles.

On the "promotion of life" thing and its relevance to Rand's take on the is-ought "problem," the role of values in life, etc., here's an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged:

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action [...] To remain alive, he must think.

But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' [...] is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'

A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: Of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe - existence or nonexistence - and it pertains to a single class of entities - to living organisms [...] It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: The issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies [...] It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. [...] A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions of its encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: It acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

[...]

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic [...] Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform [...] Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: Rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice."

Then, for a non-fiction supplement to the above excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, I think that her essay "The Objectivist Ethics" from The Virtue of Selfishness is your best bet. Here are some bits from it:

"The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why? Is the concept of value, of 'good or evil,' an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from, and unsupported by any facts of reality—or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word 'metaphysical' to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts, and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity?

In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

[...]

Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God.

[...]

This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim [...] and the battle is only over the question or whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue.

[Here she rehearses, and even quotes from, the previously cited bit from Atlas Shrugged and then continues on from there...]

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action [...] What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival.

No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, including the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature—if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating—the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism’s life.

An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of 'value' is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of 'life.' To speak of 'value' as apart from 'life' is worse than a contradiction in terms.

[...]

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between 'is' and 'ought.'

[...]

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.' Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction."

Ok cool, I think that captures most of what I need. A lot of it is uncontroversial insofar as it's a re-phrasing of Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Object away

Coming up, gotta sleep for now.

 

[Joe265]

Gotcha.



Funny enough, my first thought was, "No, it's a psychological question," but that would mean that psychology and science are distinct, which, I'm sure, would ruffle more than a few feathers. But then isn't that why there's the distinction between psychiatrists, who are trained in science and medicine, and psychologists, who are trained in therapy? It seems like psychiatry belongs in the science camp while psychology belongs in the philosophy camp.

What say you to that bit of rambling?



When I was 16 and started having panic attacks I went to a therapist and it was a colossal waste of time, primarily because the dude seemed like a hack. I love the idea of "talk therapy" and would love to be able to find a good therapist to talk shit out with, but it's hard for me to imagine finding someone who I wouldn't think was a buffoon



Now I'm starting to think that the reason that I'm confused is because this type of shit relies - or at least appears to rely - on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Much like it's difficult for me to walk in the shoes of someone who thinks that the is-ought "problem" is a problem, it's difficult for me to parse logic and reality the way that you seem to be parsing them here. Is-ought, analytic-synthetic, necessary-contingent, theory/practice, structure/content, logical/actual - how are these not all false dichotomies that just muddy the waters?

Either there's no such thing as a problem that's limited to the structure of an argument or you've yet to provide me with the example that can clarify for me what a problem that's limited to the structure of an argument looks like



Two things.

1) You want to know how you can guarantee-100%-no-chance-of-failure confuse me? Use math words. "Orthogonal"? I enjoy conversing with you, Caveat, but not enough to where I'm going to try to understand math words. I vowed the day I took the GRE and answered all of the math questions "666" because math is evil that I'd never again give a single fuck about math

2) Maybe "orthogonal" so threw me that I missed it, but how is this an answer to my question about where the "values can't be derived from facts" premise was coming from? I get that your "Bad Syllogism" is bad. What I'm not getting is what that has to do with, much less how it corroborates (assuming that's what you're taking it to be doing), the "values can't be derived from facts" premise. If it helps, I've never studied formal logic; I just rely on common sense when judging shit to be either smart shit or stupid shit.



If we're going to dig into Objectivism, then we need to establish some common ground, and there's no better ground than the ground of Rand's own words and formulations. Additionally, given how much time and energy went into the writing of Atlas Shrugged, and in particular the famous "This is John Galt speaking" radio address, that's always my first stop when it comes to Rand's words and formulations relevant to discussions of Objectivist ideas and principles.

On the "promotion of life" thing and its relevance to Rand's take on the is-ought "problem," the role of values in life, etc., here's an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged:

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action [...] To remain alive, he must think.

But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' [...] is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'

A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: Of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe - existence or nonexistence - and it pertains to a single class of entities - to living organisms [...] It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: The issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies [...] It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. [...] A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions of its encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: It acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

[...]

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic [...] Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform [...] Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: Rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice."

Then, for a non-fiction supplement to the above excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, I think that her essay "The Objectivist Ethics" from The Virtue of Selfishness is your best bet. Here are some bits from it:

"The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why? Is the concept of value, of 'good or evil,' an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from, and unsupported by any facts of reality—or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word 'metaphysical' to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts, and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity?

In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

[...]

Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God.

[...]

This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim [...] and the battle is only over the question or whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue.

[Here she rehearses, and even quotes from, the previously cited bit from Atlas Shrugged and then continues on from there...]

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action [...] What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival.

No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, including the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature—if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating—the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism’s life.

An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of 'value' is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of 'life.' To speak of 'value' as apart from 'life' is worse than a contradiction in terms.

[...]

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between 'is' and 'ought.'

[...]

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.' Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction."



Object away



All right, so, before I dig in here, I want to draw your attention to the edit that you made to this post.



On the basis of this edit, it seems that it's at least possible for you to judge someone/something that purports to be a "good" "philosopher"/"philosophy" as either a bad philosopher/philosophy or not a philosopher/philosophy properly so called. I'd like to apply some more pressure to you here because, well, that's just the kind of fun-loving guy that I am

In the interest of conducting a grammatical investigation of your position on philosophy, let's use your definition of philosophy, which, for our purposes here, we can formulate as: "Philosophy is the activity of reason which results in a happy life." If this is our definition of philosophy, then, to the extent that (to use a choice example) Jacques Derrida lived a miserable life and was torn apart by doubts and contradictions right up to his death*, wouldn't you have to conclude, based on your own terms and according to your own definition, that deconstruction is either bad philosophy (i.e., if you wish to grant to Derrida the sanction of reason and if you do not feel that withdrawing from deconstruction the banner of philosophy is warranted, surely you must at least deem his philosophy bad to the extent that it failed to result in his living a happy life) or not philosophy (i.e., if "philosophy" just means "the activity of reason which results in a happy life," and if Derrida's "activity" didn't result in a happy life, then surely you must conclude that his "activity" was not reasonable and, hence, not philosophy properly so called)? Why insist on moral neutrality at the expense of logical coherence? Why not just acknowledge the bad and the irrational when and as you come across it?

*For reference, I have in mind remarks of his from an interview conducted with him in 2004 mere weeks before his death (and which I cite in one of my critiques of poststructuralism), which include him admitting that, "it is true, I am at war with myself, and you have no idea to what extent, more than you can guess, and I say things that contradict each other, that are, let's say, in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live and that will make me die," and confessing that he sees life as this state of war, "a terrifying and painful war."







What have I been doing throughout this discussion of Stoicism if not considering it?



You're right, this is close to Rand's position. The difference is that plants and animals have no concept of "justification" and have no self-regard vis-à-vis liking or not liking themselves.



"A sense of non-importance of the individual" is a collection of words that'd make Rand's head explode



If I'm "stuck" on anything then it's on refuting false dichotomies. This an interesting point to consider, though, because I disagree with the proposition (and hence do not value the proposition) that "you can disagree with something and value it." In this case, we're talking about Stoicism: I disagree with the proposition that Stoicism provides a valid model of how one should comport oneself - which means that I do not value Stoicism as a model of how to comport oneself. To disagree with something implies an estimate of that something as not valuable.

Now, if you were to limit the alternatives to two - between, say, wallowing in miserable self-pity on the one hand and taking a Stoic stance on whatever it is that is causing you to wallow in miserable self-pity on the other - then I would agree that the latter would be preferable, which is to say that I'd be of the opinion that Stoicism would be valuable if it were the only alternative to wallowing in miserable self-pity because wallowing in miserable self-pity is of no value.

In any situation, assenting to something indicates a conferral of value on the something to which one is assenting and vice-versa. How is this not the case?



If the Stoic ideal is impossible then it's worse than nonsense and you yourself should condemn it based on your own terms and your own definition of philosophy. If the Stoic is doomed to live in failure, then happiness is beyond him, which means that his philosophy cannot result in his living a happy life, which means that Stoicism, on your terms and according to your own definition, is either bad philosophy or isn't philosophy at all. Either that or Stoics are deranged durfwads who've deluded themselves into thinking that the bad is the good and the good is the bad...like Kramer



Do I lack nuances or do you lack the ability/willingness to reduce philosophical outlooks to their fundamental presuppositions? In any event, my point with the Spartacus example was to demonstrate that, per Stoicism, the existence of a Spartacus is impossible - which means that, since Stoicism has no space within its philosophy for the existence of a Spartacus, and since Spartacus was a great and heroic individual, Stoicism is not an ideal philosophy.



Ha, I haven't read that but I did come across it once years ago and it's what flipped the switch in my movie brain and got me thinking about writing something on Rambo and Stoicism.



For someone like you, who appears to so loath black-and-white thinking, you couldn't have picked a more fitting example to use



How it can even seem implicit in anything that I've said that I think that "dead people go to some place" is inconceivable to me given my clear and explicit rejection as nonsense all such thinking. I most certainly am not arguing that dead people go anywhere.



First, it seems that I'll never stop having to reiterate: Preferring being alive to dying ≠ Being afraid of dying. I prefer steak to salmon. That doesn't mean that I'm afraid of salmon. Second, this line of argument goes back to what I was saying to Caveat in the context of the is-ought "problem": Saying that I can say x and you can say y doesn't mean that the concepts of right/wrong, good/bad, better/worse - in short, that the concept of objectivity - has no place in the discussion. You can hate being alive, but you ought to love it, and anyone who does say that he hates being alive (all things being equal) is, if not "wrong," then sure as shit "not right."

To quote a particularly pithy bit from Wittgenstein in On Certainty:

"In certain circumstances a man cannot make a mistake. ('Can' is here used logically, and the proposition does not mean that a man cannot say anything false in those circumstances.) If [a man] were to pronounce the opposite of those propositions which [are] certain, we should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented."

There you have it: Stoics are demented.

Spoiler

Spoiler

“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil”

I found this interesting because I always thought kids had a better instinct than adults as far as right and wrong. I actually think there is an automatic code, but it gets corrupted by social programming.

 

[Phr3121]

By the time I had broken up with my ex, she was seeing like 6 different quack therapists for her mind and body. What we should be doing as humans and where we can go wrong are serious subjects with deep personal consequences. I talk about it like a game because I have that privilege, but even when I take shots at Freud I remember how fucked up some his patients were. In fact I've almost been forced to conclude that we just don't see hysteria or neuroses like he did anymore in our day and age, and that's partly what accounts for his theories being so indigestible.

Freudian therapy always triggers flashbacks from Vietnam...

Don't put too much 'weight' on Freud, blames everything on either childhood trauma or sex. ...and yes, good therapists are hard to find. Psychiatrists rarely do therapy these days, patients are sent over to Psychologists. Strange.

"What we should be doing as humans and where we can go wrong are serious subjects with deep personal consequences."

Interesting statement. I would attribute that to 'free will', for humans are capable of so much good and so much evil. Why do they make one choice over another? Certainly good outweighs evil in the world. ...and does it come from God? Is life and history predetermined? The choice is still man's, but I know God knows the decision an individual will make. So, why does God not intervene to avoid bad things? Because 'free will' would be removed from the equation. Evil and good is inside all of us, the one you choose to feed is the one that comes out.

Again, I'm a Psychology major who loves military history, religion, and physics. Those of us who served in the military come out the other end with a different view of ourselves, others, and the world around us. For those who saw death up close in combat at a young age have walked away with a profound sense of what their life and human life are about. Therapy for me did not work, medication was not much better. On average, 23 U.S. veterans commit suicide a day. 365 days out of the year. That is more death than casualties from both Iraq and Afghanistan combined. What happened to my fellow soldiers and Marines? When did life become so cheap and troublesome. My refuge came in the form of 5 donkeys I rescued and adopted. These animals, and all animals, have a curing power not found in therapy and medication. Animals are free of sin from the day they ae born to the day they die. Man's IQ has become his downfall in the world. His "achilles' heel". The most destructive animal in the planet.

 

[French Canadian]

What have I been doing throughout this discussion of Stoicism if not considering it?



You're right, this is close to Rand's position. The difference is that plants and animals have no concept of "justification" and have no self-regard vis-à-vis liking or not liking themselves.



"A sense of non-importance of the individual" is a collection of words that'd make Rand's head explode



If I'm "stuck" on anything then it's on refuting false dichotomies. This an interesting point to consider, though, because I disagree with the proposition (and hence do not value the proposition) that "you can disagree with something and value it." In this case, we're talking about Stoicism: I disagree with the proposition that Stoicism provides a valid model of how one should comport oneself - which means that I do not value Stoicism as a model of how to comport oneself. To disagree with something implies an estimate of that something as not valuable.

Now, if you were to limit the alternatives to two - between, say, wallowing in miserable self-pity on the one hand and taking a Stoic stance on whatever it is that is causing you to wallow in miserable self-pity on the other - then I would agree that the latter would be preferable, which is to say that I'd be of the opinion that Stoicism would be valuable if it were the only alternative to wallowing in miserable self-pity because wallowing in miserable self-pity is of no value.

In any situation, assenting to something indicates a conferral of value on the something to which one is assenting and vice-versa. How is this not the case?



If the Stoic ideal is impossible then it's worse than nonsense and you yourself should condemn it based on your own terms and your own definition of philosophy. If the Stoic is doomed to live in failure, then happiness is beyond him, which means that his philosophy cannot result in his living a happy life, which means that Stoicism, on your terms and according to your own definition, is either bad philosophy or isn't philosophy at all. Either that or Stoics are deranged durfwads who've deluded themselves into thinking that the bad is the good and the good is the bad...like Kramer



Do I lack nuances or do you lack the ability/willingness to reduce philosophical outlooks to their fundamental presuppositions? In any event, my point with the Spartacus example was to demonstrate that, per Stoicism, the existence of a Spartacus is impossible - which means that, since Stoicism has no space within its philosophy for the existence of a Spartacus, and since Spartacus was a great and heroic individual, Stoicism is not an ideal philosophy.



Ha, I haven't read that but I did come across it once years ago and it's what flipped the switch in my movie brain and got me thinking about writing something on Rambo and Stoicism.



For someone like you, who appears to so loath black-and-white thinking, you couldn't have picked a more fitting example to use



How it can even seem implicit in anything that I've said that I think that "dead people go to some place" is inconceivable to me given my clear and explicit rejection as nonsense all such thinking. I most certainly am not arguing that dead people go anywhere.



First, it seems that I'll never stop having to reiterate: Preferring being alive to dying ≠ Being afraid of dying. I prefer steak to salmon. That doesn't mean that I'm afraid of salmon. Second, this line of argument goes back to what I was saying to Caveat in the context of the is-ought "problem": Saying that I can say x and you can say y doesn't mean that the concepts of right/wrong, good/bad, better/worse - in short, that the concept of objectivity - has no place in the discussion. You can hate being alive, but you ought to love it, and anyone who does say that he hates being alive (all things being equal) is, if not "wrong," then sure as shit "not right."

To quote a particularly pithy bit from Wittgenstein in On Certainty:

"In certain circumstances a man cannot make a mistake. ('Can' is here used logically, and the proposition does not mean that a man cannot say anything false in those circumstances.) If [a man] were to pronounce the opposite of those propositions which [are] certain, we should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented."

There you have it: Stoics are demented.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Why couldn't a sense of non-importance arise when you objectively look at the world and your place in it ? Are objectivists profoundly subjective in their ethics ? Meaning that we cannot go beyond our subjectivity to rise to objectivity.

I think you misunderstand the stoic claim about the model of virtue. They are not saying us, stoics, are only happy if we reach this ideal. Then, your point is : well you can't reach it so you guys fail. They are saying : it is the model for ANY human being to be happy. So the failure is not particular to the Stoics. If you have an easier model, you just wouldn't be truly happy and fail as well.

How is the existence of Spartacus impossible for a Stoic ?

It is the fact that some people hate life, but people ought to love life. Gotcha. I don't know where you got that ought though.

Stoics would say : it is the fact that everyone dies, so everyone should be happy it is so.

As for your steak vs salmon : you didn't just say you preferred life to death, you said that life is great and death is shit. Passing from great to shit should at least make you uneasy. You should at least feel some apprehension towards death and the fact that you know for sure that one day this greatness will end and you will be shit.

I said you were pushing for a life after death because it felt to me like you said that living is great and that being dead is shit. To me, death is just nothing. You become like a rock. Being a rock is neither shit nor great.

As for valuing something you disagree with : you can take some points without the whole and remodel them. See for example hundreds of philosophers that re use and re actualize concepts. If you haven't read Gadamer, you should.

Edit: was derrida aiming to live a happy life ? To me using reason without that aim is not true philosophy. I don't consider scientists to be philosophers, though they use reason, because they have no aim of using their truth to change their life in a better way. (Some may do, I don't want to use a sweeping statement here, but when they do I think they to it qua philosophers). You also seem to go way too far in this issue. My stance was clear from the start : painting in one stroke while philosophies as irrational and anti reason (especially when Kant is a rationalist) serves the purpose of easily discrediting them. That is it. Look no further than that. It is une idée claire et distincte.

You could have seized the occasion to confront me with my earlier definition of pure philosophy though

Edit2: I am also against Stoicism, though I appreciate some points and admire it. I just don't think you address the main problem (at least in your answers to me, I don't read everything) which is it's anchoring in a religious view of nature as good God.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

As for your steak vs salmon : you didn't just say you preferred life to death, you said that life is great and death is shit. Passing from great to shit should at least make you uneasy. You should at least feel some apprehension towards death and the fact that you know for sure that one day this greatness will end and you will be shit.

I said you were pushing for a life after death because it felt to me like you said that living is great and that being dead is shit. To me, death is just nothing. You become like a rock. Being a rock is neither shit nor great.

I'm with Bullitt here, personally. Maybe the fear of death was at one point based in ideas about that state being painful, but the real shitty part about it is not being alive anymore.

What separates the state you were in before you were born from the state you will be in when you die is the experience of life. Losing life to return to non-existence is, to me, shit. Though I wouldn't expect that to hold anywhere and everywhere.


Also, I wasn't going to interject until you said "qua". This is now officially a philosophy thread

 

[French Canadian]

Why couldn't a sense of non-importance arise when you objectively look at the world and your place in it ? Are objectivists profoundly subjective in their ethics ? Meaning that we cannot go beyond our subjectivity to rise to objectivity.

I think you misunderstand the stoic claim about the model of virtue. They are not saying us, stoics, are only happy if we reach this ideal. Then, your point is : well you can't reach it so you guys fail. They are saying : it is the model for ANY human being to be happy. So the failure is not particular to the Stoics. If you have an easier model, you just wouldn't be truly happy and fail as well.

How is the existence of Spartacus impossible for a Stoic ?

It is the fact that some people hate life, but people ought to love life. Gotcha.

Stoics would say : it is the fact that everyone dies, so everyone should be happy it is so.

As for your steak vs salmon : you didn't just say you preferred life to death, you said that life is great and death is shit. Passing from great to shit should at least make you uneasy. You should at least feel some apprehension towards death and the fact that you know for sure that one day this greatness will end and you will be shit.

I said you were pushing for a life after death because it felt to me like you said that living is great and that being dead is shit. To me, death is just nothing. You become like a rock. Being a rock is neither shit nor great.

As for valuing something you disagree with : you can take some points without the whole and remodel them. See for example

I'm with Bullitt here, personally. Maybe the fear of death was at one point based in ideas about that state being painful, but the real shitty part about it is not being alive anymore.

What separates the state you were in before you were born from the state you will be in when you die is the experience of life. Losing life to return to non-existence is, to me, shit. Though I wouldn't expect that to hold anywhere and everywhere.


Also, I wasn't going to interject until you said "qua". This is now officially a philosophy thread

I think if you think it is shit you will unhappy thinking about it and most probably scared of passing from great to shit. I think a living being can Express sadness towards death (and think it is shit) but death is not shit per se (more Latin for you, I have to make my Latin classes useful). It is merely a judgement exercised by a living conscious being.

Edit for a Nietzsche quote that I like incoming....
"Judgements of value about life, for or against it, can in the end never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of considerations only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are meaningless."

 

[French Canadian]

I'd say you're spot on with the distinction, but not the labels. Both psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, insofar as they are fundamentally therapists, are going to be caught in that unscientific psychological quagmire.

Experimental psychologists, cognitive scientists, and others are better suited to the scientific work.

I was just browsing my bookshelf for something on this, and I came across Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. The gist of the book is that there is a science of human happiness or well-being, in this case "positive psychology" (which I'll let slide this time because I <3 Haidt), and that the science in many places maps onto suppositions of various ancient philosophies.

At first I laughed because I'd stumbled on something that could make everyone in the thread happy, but then I frowned remembering a question Peterson has asked a few times - why should happiness be our goal? (I suspect Haidt has a good response to this, likely involving a broadening of "happiness," which I'm sure was only used to sell books to muggles. I will need to read it).



By the time I had broken up with my ex, she was seeing like 6 different quack therapists for her mind and body. What we should be doing as humans and where we can go wrong are serious subjects with deep personal consequences. I talk about it like a game because I have that privilege, but even when I take shots at Freud I remember how fucked up some his patients were. In fact I've almost been forced to conclude that we just don't see hysteria or neuroses like he did anymore in our day and age, and that's partly what accounts for his theories being so indigestible.



Well yea, those are real dichotomies lol. But I may have used too strong language when I said the is-ought problem was a "strictly logical" problem. I should have said that it's best viewed from the perspective of logic, not that it exists in some other realm only. Logic would indeed be useless if it didn't manifest itself in law-like patterns in this here real world.

To use a simple informal example that's already (probably unintentionally) happened in this thread: it isn't valid to argue that a proposition is true because the majority of people believe it to be true. If your daughter or someone came to you repeatedly saying something like "I want to do this because everyone is doing it and that means it's the right thing to do," you'd have to sit down and explain to her that, in principle, everyone else doing something has no definitive bearing on it being right or wrong. Everyone else often does the wrong thing.

The basics of logic are just models of arguments that give you trustworthy conclusions, or not (you don't even need to go further than Aristotle for this). Hume's contribution via the is-ought divide was just that no facts by themselves can guarantee what you should do about them. It's an important prompt to not get swept away by persuasive facts without reflecting on what presupposed values are really driving the implications of those facts - in politics, science, economics, etc.

It also leads Hume to his moral sentimentalism, which plays a big role in my idea of how ethics work. Very briefly: the presupposed values I just mentioned aren't always derived from reason. That's a good thing to know, as Peterson would say.



Ah, the syllogisms are what I take to be derivations. The proper technical word would be deductions.

Now you can make an argument that our actual thought doesn't operate in this precise deductive way, which may or may not be true. We're probably better at inferring to good explanations than deducing (in fact, it's a miracle to me that we, as animals, can understand logic at all). It's just the way philosophical arguments are often evaluated, and how I thought Rand might like hers to be assessed given her other guiding principles.



Ok cool, I think that captures most of what I need. A lot of it is uncontroversial insofar as it's a re-phrasing of Aristotelian virtue ethics.



Coming up, gotta sleep for now.

Isn't there a direct opposition with Aristotle insofar as for Aristotle, the goal is not survival of the organism AT ALL. Book III, chapter 12 : "if the end concerning courage is the same, death and injuries will be painful to the courageous man, who will suffer them : he will endure them nonetheless, because it is noble to act this way, or shameful to evade it. The more his virtue is complete, the more he is happy, the more the thought of death will be painful to him ; because life is especially worth living for such a man, it is him that death will rob of the greatest gods, and he fully knows it : all of this will not not affect him. But he will nonetheless be courageous, and maybe even more so, because he prefers the noble works of wars than all the great goods which we talked about".

The central focus of the ethics of Aristotle does not seem to me to be mere survival. Courage, an essential virtue, goes directly against that.
I also wonder if there is a differentiation of phronesis and sophia in Rands ethics : it is another essential theme of Aristotle.
And let us not forget the Platonic apotheosis at the end of the Ethics (X, 6-8), which a lot of commentators ignore. (I recommend "Aristotle and other Platonists" by Lloyd Gerson and his chapter on Ethics. I must say the title of his book made me laugh).

I also wonder how would eudaimonia not be the end of human life ?

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

^ yes, and that was a part of my objection when I sketched it out

Just want to review a few things before I commit to that position.

 

[French Canadian]

^ yes, and that was a part of my objection when I sketched it out

Just want to review a few things before I commit to that position.

I dont remember every sherdog name but if you were the prof that liked Gadamer I'd like to remind you about the Gadamer chapter about Aristotle (II, 2, b) About the importance of the differentiation between metaphysics which in my very superficial reading of the objectivist post, seemed to be deemed non important. The objectivist points seem to me easy points, made a million times by different philosophers without the raffinement of the ages.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Object away

Alright, see what you make of this.

Rand needs her guiding principle to have 3 qualities in order for it to match her claims as a foundation of Objectivist ethics. First, there needs to be an ethical standard that is separate from the whims of the subject. Second, the subject must be free to act in accordance with the standard, or against it. Third, there must be a reasonable defense of the fundamental nature of the standard.

Let's take a look at the reasoning behind Aristotle's virtue ethics. Every art or inquiry, action or pursuit, is aimed at some good - yet we can always ask why it is we pursue that good. In order to avoid an infinite regress of "why?" we would like there to be some foundational good that provides the basis for all others: the fundamental answer to all the whys. This answer would have the special property of being "good in itself" and hence pursued for its own sake, never for the sake of some superior good (ex. since honour is an acknowledgment of virtue, virtue would be the superior good).

In Rand's formulation, as @French Canadian pointed out above, life itself is the ultimate goal. "An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil." Aristotle's conception, by contrast, is not just about the maintenance of life, but about a well-executed function. This theoretical difference manifests in practical recommendations. To bum off of FC's post again, Rand cannot allow the choice to end one's own life to be made rationally, because it goes against the ultimate goal. For Aristotle, the injunction to function well via the use of reason in virtuous behaviour allows potentially for opposition to life itself.

Aristotle's answer is a better response to the string of whys. One could always ask Rand: "but why should I act to further my own life?" whereas Aristotle can answer: "in order to pursue excellence". Life without the opportunity to pursue such excellence seems open to being rationally undesirable. The pursuit of happiness/flourishing requires no further justification, unlike the pursuit of life.

This conclusion is a little bit ironic given how much pontificating Rand does about the unique nature of humans. Plants are forced to act in the name of continuing life all the time. Animals can be capable of some deliberation - possibly enough to differentiate between those that "function well" vs. those that don't (good dog!) - but lack the degrees of freedom that we have. It's only because of our rational nature that we can demand a better justification of our actions than what would suffice for plants; only because we're able to identify our values that we can transcend a blind defense of our lives when the circumstances call for it.

To bring things full circle - it looks like the is-ought gap is what bites Rand in the ass here, despite her dismissal. That the capacity to make decisions emerged from a desire to sustain life does not mean that sustaining of life is the goal of every decision. Hume 101.

I dont remember every sherdog name but if you were the prof that liked Gadamer I'd like to remind you about the Gadamer chapter about Aristotle (II, 2, b) About the importance of the differentiation between metaphysics which in my very superficial reading of the objectivist post, seemed to be deemed non important. The objectivist points seem to me easy points, made a million times by different philosophers without the raffinement of the ages.

Lol, no I'm not a prof (a guest lecturer at best).

I believe that was @Spoken you were conversing with in the other thread.

 

[French Canadian]

Alright, see what you make of this.

Rand needs her guiding principle to have 3 qualities in order for it to match her claims as a foundation of Objectivist ethics. First, there needs to be an ethical standard that is separate from the whims of the subject. Second, the subject must be free to act in accordance with the standard, or against it. Third, there must be a reasonable defense of the fundamental nature of the standard.

Let's take a look at the reasoning behind Aristotle's virtue ethics. Every art or inquiry, action or pursuit, is aimed at some good - yet we can always ask why it is we pursue that good. In order to avoid an infinite regress of "why?" we would like there to be some foundational good that provides the basis for all others: the fundamental answer to all the whys. This answer would have the special property of being "good in itself" and hence pursued for its own sake, never for the sake of some superior good (ex. since honour is an acknowledgment of virtue, virtue would be the superior good).

In Rand's formulation, as @French Canadian pointed out above, life itself is the ultimate goal. "An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil." Aristotle's conception, by contrast, is not just about the maintenance of life, but about a well-executed function. This theoretical difference manifests in practical recommendations. To bum off of FC's post again, Rand cannot allow the choice to end one's own life to be made rationally, because it goes against the ultimate goal. For Aristotle, the injunction to function well via the use of reason in virtuous behaviour allows potentially for opposition to life itself.

Aristotle's answer is a better response to the string of whys. One could always ask Rand: "but why should I act to further my own life?" whereas Aristotle can answer: "in order to pursue excellence". Life without the opportunity to pursue such excellence seems open to being rationally undesirable. The pursuit of happiness/flourishing requires no further justification, unlike the pursuit of life.

This conclusion is a little bit ironic given how much pontificating Rand does about the unique nature of humans. Plants are forced to act in the name of continuing life all the time. Animals can be capable of some deliberation - possibly enough to differentiate between those that "function well" vs. those that don't - but lack the degrees of freedom that we have. It's only because of our rational nature that we can demand a better justification of our actions than what would suffice for plants; only because we're able to identify our values that we can transcend a blind defense of our lives when the circumstances call for it.

To bring things full circle - it looks like the is-ought gap is what bites Rand in the ass here, despite her dismissal. That the capacity to make decisions emerged from a desire to sustain life does not mean that sustaining of life is the goal of every decision. Hume 101.



Lol, no I'm not a prof (a guest lecturer at best).

I believe that was @Spoken you were conversing with in the other thread.

How do you feel about the fact that ancients knew so much and seemed to pierced through questions we still have ? That a good reading of Aristotle's ethics answers to today's debate about ethics ?

Just curious.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Interesting statement. I would attribute that to 'free will', for humans are capable of so much good and so much evil. Why do they make one choice over another? Certainly good outweighs evil in the world. ...and does it come from God? Is life and history predetermined? The choice is still man's, but I know God knows the decision an individual will make. So, why does God not intervene to avoid bad things? Because 'free will' would be removed from the equation. Evil and good is inside all of us, the one you choose to feed is the one that comes out.

We'll definitely have to get more into free will at some point. Lots of philosophical baggage around that one.

Those of us who served in the military come out the other end with a different view of ourselves, others, and the world around us. For those who saw death up close in combat at a young age have walked away with a profound sense of what their life and human life are about. Therapy for me did not work, medication was not much better. On average, 23 U.S. veterans commit suicide a day. 365 days out of the year. That is more death than casualties from both Iraq and Afghanistan combined. What happened to my fellow soldiers and Marines? When did life become so cheap and troublesome. My refuge came in the form of 5 donkeys I rescued and adopted. These animals, and all animals, have a curing power not found in therapy and medication. Animals are free of sin from the day they ae born to the day they die. Man's IQ has become his downfall in the world. His "achilles' heel". The most destructive animal in the planet.

Hespect. Those are some great questions, and good directions from which to address the experience and consequences of trauma.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

How do you feel about the fact that ancients knew so much and seemed to pierced through questions we still have ? That a good reading of Aristotle's ethics answers to today's debate about ethics ?

Just curious.

Honestly I grabbed Nicomachean Ethics off the shelf at a bookstore maybe 5 years ago when I first started to read philosophy, and it really rattled me. I don't know if I expected the translation from Greek to be like hieroglyphics or something, but the language was so close to the exact conversations I'd been having (many on here actually, but elsewhere too) that it was stunning. That's a ridiculous length of time for a text to remain so eminently communicable.

Drawing again on one of @Bullitt68's favourite distinctions: I think the ancients that I'm familiar with did some fantastic logical/structural work, and that our mission today is to use our expertise in gathering empirical details to fill out and/or criticize those structures.

I admit a source text from back then is not typically what I'd reach for to read. A new book that takes that source text and fills it out with stuff we know today - I'm down for that anytime.

 

[Bullitt68]

I was just browsing my bookshelf for something on this, and I came across Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis.

I read that last year-ish. Thought it was pretty good.

I frowned remembering a question Peterson has asked a few times - why should happiness be our goal?

That's a disingenuous question on Peterson's part since one of his biggest arguments is to strive to "tilt the world away from Hell in the direction of Heaven" or something to that effect. The question that he poses to Haidt is a question that he could/should pose equally to himself.

By the time I had broken up with my ex, she was seeing like 6 different quack therapists for her mind and body.

Hehe, it sounds like our exes were "spiritual sisters." Mine was the same, only by the time we hooked up her time spent in therapy was behind her. Instead of me being with someone in therapy, I was with someone who had spent time in therapy previously...and thought that that qualified her to analyze everything I thought, said, and did to tell me what everything that I thought, said, and did really meant. On top of which, on at least four separate occasions I pointed out a less-than-desirable behavior pattern or personality trait which elicited from her the response, "That's what my therapist used to say." Clearly, based on the self-awareness attained and the changes wrought, that therapy was time and money well-spent.

Well yea, those are real dichotomies lol.

Seriously, take a gander at this critique of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy and this critique of the necessary-contingent dichotomy.

Hume's contribution via the is-ought divide was just that no facts by themselves can guarantee what you should do about them.

You remember in Die Hard when John McClane is on the roof talking to 911 dispatch and that haughty female dispatcher is telling him that 911 is for emergency calls only and McClane just shrieks in exasperation, "No fucking shit, lady, do I sound like I'm ordering a pizza?!" That's how any rational person should respond to this "contribution" of Hume's.

Humans aren't robots "programmed" by facts, you say? We have to analyze facts, think shit through, and choose how we move through life? No fucking shit, Hume.

I found this interesting because I always thought kids had a better instinct than adults as far as right and wrong. I actually think there is an automatic code, but it gets corrupted by social programming.

I'm with you on the corruption thing - the more time you spend on Earth, the more situations you find yourself having to navigate, the more opportunities for you to fuck up your moral compass - but I don't subscribe to the notion of there being an automatic code.

Why couldn't a sense of non-importance arise when you objectively look at the world and your place in it ?

I think that what I've been saying, particularly in conversation with Caveat, relating to the Objectivist ethics already serves as an indirect answer to this question. If you want a direct answer, then give me a "for instance" where you think "a sense of non-importance" arises.

How is the existence of Spartacus impossible for a Stoic ?

Scenario: An individual is born a slave and grows up mentally and physically abused.
Stoic advice: Be happy about it (aka Serenity Now).

If all individuals born into slavery went the Stoic route, a Spartacus would never emerge because Spartacus emerged on the basis of his unhappiness with being a slave.

It is the fact that some people hate life, but people ought to love life. Gotcha. I don't know where you got that ought though.

See my conversation with Caveat.

As for your steak vs salmon : you didn't just say you preferred life to death, you said that life is great and death is shit. Passing from great to shit should at least make you uneasy. You should at least feel some apprehension towards death and the fact that you know for sure that one day this greatness will end and you will be shit.

I said you were pushing for a life after death because it felt to me like you said that living is great and that being dead is shit. To me, death is just nothing. You become like a rock. Being a rock is neither shit nor great.

Caveat took the baton from me on this point and I'm with him on what he had to say.

As for valuing something you disagree with : you can take some points without the whole and remodel them.

"Tak[ing] some points without the whole" means that what it is that you value are the points that you're taking, not the philosophy on the whole, which you're not taking. So, in point of fact, you don't value that with which you disagree: You value the parts that you agree with from the whole with which you disagree.

You also seem to go way too far in this issue. My stance was clear from the start : painting in one stroke while philosophies as irrational and anti reason (especially when Kant is a rationalist) serves the purpose of easily discrediting them.

I know your stance perfectly well. That's why it was so easy to demonstrate its incoherence. If you have a definition of good philosophy, and if something exists which does not satisfy that definition, then it is by definition bad. You agree with that...yet you refuse to ever actually call anything bad. That's silly. Hence the question that I put to you: Why insist on moral neutrality at the expense of logical coherence?

You can't have your cake and eat it. If bad stuff exists, and if bad stuff should not be preferred to good stuff (otherwise what sense do "good" and "bad" even have here?), then you're accepting the premise that bad stuff ought to be discredited in favor of good stuff. You accept my position "theoretically" yet disavow it "practically" because you think that not pronouncing moral judgments is a mark of a good moral character when, in reality, it marks the evasion of moral responsibility. Hence that big thing of Rand's that I cited previously re: "Judge and be prepared to be judged."

You say I go too far, I say you don't go far enough. At loggerheads once again. Like Batman and The Joker, I think that you and I are destined to do this forever

Alright, see what you make of this.

I think that it'd be a sound critique of Rand if it actually applied to Rand. But it doesn't.

In Rand's formulation, as @French Canadian pointed out above, life itself is the ultimate goal. "An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil." Aristotle's conception, by contrast, is not just about the maintenance of life, but about a well-executed function.

In your words, you say that Rand says that life is "the ultimate goal"; in Rand's own words, she says that life is one's "standard of value." That's an important distinction to make (if I was the source of confusion on that point, my apologies). You quoted it at one point but I think that you dropped it somewhere along the way to this post:

Promoting life is the baseline, the bare minimum, while, in an Aristotelian vein, eudaimonia, or "flourishing," is the height to which we should aspire (hence my characterization of Objectivism as a perfectionist philosophy).

Aristotle's conception doesn't contrast with Rand's. Life isn't the ultimate goal, it's the basic, the baseline, the fundamental goal - the ultimate goal for Rand is the same as the ultimate goal for Aristotle: Eudaimonia, or flourishing - not merely life but life lived to its fullest.

Here are bits from Rand elaborating on this point, once again taken from Atlas Shrugged:

"The work of building a path [is] a living sum, so that no day [is] left to die behind […] [Instead,] each day acquire(s) its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow [...] The straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails, and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end [...] Man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum."

"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it [whereas] the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory. Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."

Rand cannot allow the choice to end one's own life to be made rationally, because it goes against the ultimate goal.

This is false.

Aristotle's answer is a better response to the string of whys. One could always ask Rand: "but why should I act to further my own life?" whereas Aristotle can answer: "in order to pursue excellence".

That Aristotelian "answer" doesn't actually answer anything. If you go that route, you still end up in the same place: "One should act to further one's life." "Why should one act to further one's life?" "In order to pursue excellence." "Why should one pursue excellence?" "..."

Regardless, though, I think that you're expecting/demanding too much from philosophy. There's no philosophy, nor is there a philosophical argument, that can "program" people to think/do certain things. There will always be - and there must be - the possibility that individuals will choose not to further their own lives. You - and Hume in the form of the is-ought "problem" - seem to be expecting/demanding something more from philosophy to force people to further their own lives, pursue excellence, what have you. It's the age-old problem of being able to bring horses to water but being unable to force them to drink.

To arrogantly quote from my own work:

"A skeptic may have recourse at this point to what is commonly referred to as the 'is-ought gap' and claim, following David Hume, that what one ought to do does not automatically follow from what is the case—or, translating this Humean dilemma into Kantian terms, as often happens, what is the case does not automatically generate an imperative. But this ethical 'problem' is yet another pseudo-problem. Hume was wrong (as was Kant after him) to implicitly shift the terms of 'ought' to (an unconditional) 'must.' This, in effect, betrays a desire for ethics to be taken out of our (human) hands, for choice (and responsibility) to be removed from the equation."

The point of the Objectivist ethics is to clarify that the notion of a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms, that if you bring a horse to water then your job is done, and that if a horse that you've brought to water doesn't drink then it's not a mark against you, against ethics, against philosophy, or against human nature.

 

[French Canadian]

I think that what I've been saying, particularly in conversation with Caveat, relating to the Objectivist ethics already serves as an indirect answer to this question. If you want a direct answer, then give me a "for instance" where you think "a sense of non-importance" arises.



Scenario: An individual is born a slave and grows up mentally and physically abused.
Stoic advice: Be happy about it (aka Serenity Now).

If all individuals born into slavery went the Stoic route, a Spartacus would never emerge because Spartacus emerged on the basis of his unhappiness with being a slave.



See my conversation with Caveat.



Caveat took the baton from me on this point and I'm with him on what he had to say.



"Tak[ing] some points without the whole" means that what it is that you value are the points that you're taking, not the philosophy on the whole, which you're not taking. So, in point of fact, you don't value that with which you disagree: You value the parts that you agree with from the whole with which you disagree.



I know your stance perfectly well. That's why it was so easy to demonstrate its incoherence. If you have a definition of good philosophy, and if something exists which does not satisfy that definition, then it is by definition bad. You agree with that...yet you refuse to ever actually call anything bad. That's silly. Hence the question that I put to you: Why insist on moral neutrality at the expense of logical coherence?

You can't have your cake and eat it. If bad stuff exists, and if bad stuff should not be preferred to good stuff (otherwise what sense do "good" and "bad" even have here?), then you're accepting the premise that bad stuff ought to be discredited in favor of good stuff. You accept my position "theoretically" yet disavow it "practically" because you think that not pronouncing moral judgments is a mark of a good moral character when, in reality, it marks the evasion of moral responsibility. Hence that big thing of Rand's that I cited previously re: "Judge and be prepared to be judged."

You say I go too far, I say you don't go far enough. At loggerheads once again. Like Batman and The Joker, I think that you and I are destined to do this forever



I think that it'd be a sound critique of Rand if it actually applied to Rand. But it doesn't.



In your words, you say that Rand says that life is "the ultimate goal"; in Rand's own words, she says that life is one's "standard of value." That's an important distinction to make (if I was the source of confusion on that point, my apologies). You quoted it at one point but I think that you dropped it somewhere along the way to this post:



Aristotle's conception doesn't contrast with Rand's. Life isn't the ultimate goal, it's the basic, the baseline, the fundamental goal - the ultimate goal for Rand is the same as the ultimate goal for Aristotle: Eudaimonia, or flourishing - not merely life but life lived to its fullest.

Here are bits from Rand elaborating on this point, once again taken from Atlas Shrugged:

"The work of building a path [is] a living sum, so that no day [is] left to die behind […] [Instead,] each day acquire(s) its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow [...] The straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails, and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end [...] Man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum."

"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it [whereas] the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory. Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."



This is false.



That Aristotelian "answer" doesn't actually answer anything. If you go that route, you still end up in the same place: "One should act to further one's life." "Why should one act to further one's life?" "In order to pursue excellence." "Why should one pursue excellence?" "..."

Regardless, though, I think that you're expecting/demanding too much from philosophy. There's no philosophy, nor is there a philosophical argument, that can "program" people to think/do certain things. There will always be - and there must be - the possibility that individuals will choose not to further their own lives. You - and Hume in the form of the is-ought "problem" - seem to be expecting/demanding something more from philosophy to force people to further their own lives, pursue excellence, what have you. It's the age-old problem of being able to bring horses to water but being unable to force them to drink.

To arrogantly quote from my own work:

"A skeptic may have recourse at this point to what is commonly referred to as the 'is-ought gap' and claim, following David Hume, that what one ought to do does not automatically follow from what is the case—or, translating this Humean dilemma into Kantian terms, as often happens, what is the case does not automatically generate an imperative. But this ethical 'problem' is yet another pseudo-problem. Hume was wrong (as was Kant after him) to implicitly shift the terms of 'ought' to (an unconditional) 'must.' This, in effect, betrays a desire for ethics to be taken out of our (human) hands, for choice (and responsibility) to be removed from the equation."

The point of the Objectivist ethics is to clarify that the notion of a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms, that if you bring a horse to water then your job is done, and that if a horse that you've brought to water doesn't drink then it's not a mark against you, against ethics, against philosophy, or against human nature.

That's one way : valuing certain points I agree with and disagree with the whole. There's also when you engage in a conversation with someone with an opposite view, still disagree with him at the end of the day, but think "wow, that co conversation was enlightening".

I am just playing with the idea of non-importance, but what would you say if someone sacrifices himself for other people ? Also, how does that make sense in Randian ethics (see the chapters about courage in Aristotle NE III) ? The Stoic answer is simple: I want to survive, the I can be replaced by they. They want to survive. The sense of non-importance makes me willing to sacrifice.

The existence of Spartacus is perfectly possible in Stoic ethics. What I think you mean is that his existence would not come out of the Stoic ethics. I am not aware of the biography of Spartacus, but I know his rebellion didn't amount to much. He won one battle, then the Romans took him seriously and killed him. Maybe he'd have been better off working on his happiness (I insist on working because your use of language is deceiving. It makes it seem like you can easily be happy about everything when in fact it is a long process : see the manual with advices for beginners and the progressing).
The more serious point is : how can we achieve anything if we just sit around and work on being happy about that ? There could be two ways (which are closely linked) of conceiving this: 1. The theater analogy (everyone has a role in life, maybe your role is to be a slave rebel), play your role the best you can. 2. Their determinism (along with the refutation of the Lazy Argument by Cicero).


No you don't understand my point. I will reconstruct your critique and correct me if I am wrong in thinking that is what you think I think : Irrationality is a word with a bad connotation. It is used to characterize irrational philosophies. I think the intent in characterizing them as irrational is to put them in a bad light. Yet, irrational philosophies do exist and irrationality is bad, so I should just accept the label and get over with it.

My point is not that. It is that irrationality is hastily used to characterize opposing philosophies when in fact they are not irrational : see Kant for example. In the same way that faith was used to characterize the whole of medieval philosophy. I am against such oversimplifications when they are used with the intent of shining a bad light.


That Aristotelian "answer" doesn't actually answer anything. If you go that route, you still end up in the same place: "One should act to further one's life." "Why should one act to further one's life?" "In order to pursue excellence." "Why should one pursue excellence?" "..."

Re-read Aristotle's book I. The first questions is what is the highest good ? Not why to further one's life. It is how to achieve it : by being virtuous. So the answer to "why should one be virtuous?" Is pretty straightforward: to achieve the highest good.

 

[Phlog]

I don't understand what you are trying to get at. I believe death is nothing : not shit, not great.

I was explaining why people perceive, or feel what they imagine death to be like. How our brain architecture leads to it, regardless of whether we understand death is a cessation or not.

The deep problem is that being a rational and preaent human requires that you feel and know mutually exclusive things at once. Some people choose what they know over what they feel, some people prefer what they feel.

To say nothing of knowledge which can be both contradictory and also entirely true.

The binary is a fallacy.

Edit: Reading what you have posted above makes my point seem more relevant to TT

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Re-read Aristotle's book I. The first questions is what is the highest good ? Not why to further one's life. It is how to achieve it : by being virtuous. So the answer to "why should one be virtuous?" Is pretty straightforward: to achieve the highest good.

I actually have a slight quibble with this, but it could be just semantic.

Eudaimonia is supposed to be the backstopping answer to why you would do anything. It isn't distinct from the good the way it would be for Plato, so there isn't any further justification required.

Continuing life isn't an ultimate goal because you live to do other things. It doesn't make sense to question eudaimonia in the same way - it's the reason you do everything else. Goodness is inherent.

 

[JonesBones]

“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil”

I found this interesting because I always thought kids had a better instinct than adults as far as right and wrong. I actually think there is an automatic code, but it gets corrupted by social programming.

Kids don't lie. Usually. I mean they say what they think. They think outside their heads. We may think a person is fat. They say it and point it out. Because it is factual. Just like there is a cat on the couch. It isn't worth mentioning by an adult but for a kid it is. I think kids have to learn skepticism too. They kinda have a will to believe. They have power too. I was reading Chesterson recently and he said that infancy conforms to none, all things conform to it. We reduce ourselves to a child to talk to it. We do the same with our pets and other lower forms of intelligence. Maybe a higher one is reducing themselves to us.

 

[Joe265]

Kids don't lie. Usually. I mean they say what they think. They think outside their heads. We may think a person is fat. They say it and point it out. Because it is factual. Just like there is a cat on the couch. It isn't worth mentioning by an adult but for a kid it is. I think kids have to learn skepticism too. They kinda have a will to believe. They have power too. I was reading Chesterson recently and he said that infancy conforms to none, all things conform to it. We reduce ourselves to a child to talk to it.

Children have a connection to greater truth based on the idea that your identity is actually in the “heart”, not the mind. We somehow call this “being down to earth”.