This sort of thing makes me consider a particular inefficiency of bulletin boards. This thread, for example, seems like it could be a great launch point for a lot of people on this topic but it's still apt to fall off the bottom of the page eventually if enough people don't stay engaged with it. If we end up talking this book out at length, for like the next year, it's like we'll have shot off on a 90 degree angle to another continent and likely no one will have the patience to read through all of the correspondence - ie. it'll leave everyone behind.Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pm At any rate, if you'd like to take this material to another OP that is perfectly fine, and things may even get interesting.
From that perspective if we were to do a deep dive on Shestov I do think it might be good for us to split it off (there's an argumentative folder but I think there needs to be something similar for deep dives where people are doing in-depth study on some particular book or content.
Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pmIt's certainly is not that the things you mention about the pressures of modern life are not bad, they clearly can be awful, but the question goes existential, which means it is built into our being here; it is not the contingent facts about our daily miseries so much as the altogether inexplicable presence of misery at all, structured into the "nature of things." This is why I like the crucifix, a great symbol, not of religious dogma, but of the intensity of human suffering, Religion is about nothing if not human suffering. Being burned alive at the stake has to be the worst, though the Sicilian Bull is like worse.
I beat my head on this same issue for a long time because I found myself going through things where I had to fight tooth and nail not only to find reasons to stay alive but to find reasons not to morally decay or go dark because my life was under that much unrelenting pressure. What was worse is that this pressure wasn't pressure to succeed or pressure to make myself better, it was more like a maelstrom of idiots and narcissists trying to erase me from existence and thus it was like having my identity constantly sandblasted (I've really come to appreciate TheraminTrees discourses about this sort of cultural madness on Youtube where he gets into the darker and unfortunately societally profound and systemic problems).
What's incredibly gnarly about this is that we don't live in a reductive materialist universe. It's a place where spiritual phenomena happen. It's a place where you can have experiences, from rarely to semi-regularly, that would strongly suggest some form of very reserved/conservative idealism at the bottom of our reality and that ranges anywhere from glitches in material events to synchronicities not explainable by apophenia to all out contact with what seem to be deity-like beings albeit such encounters tend to be cryptic in their content. What you described above I think puts in perspective a real fear of God and why it makes sense even without a heaven or hell - ie. whatever this is seems to both love us infinitely and be willing to let almost anything imaginable happen to us while we're here.
Where that last part touches on nihilism - there are up sides and down sides. The up side - if you have reason to take seriously the idea that you're immortal and/or that you've been here before and will be here again - your forced to take accountability for your adulthood no matter how severe or bitter it is because you know that whatever deep moral, ethical, or developmental embarrassments you allow to happen on your watch are likely to come right back with you and there's no telling what sort of terrible cause and effect cascade those will cause especially if they clip you when you're too young to mount a full-range logical response to their occurrence. From that perspective, no matter how difficult my life ends up being, I want to live a long one - not out of fear of death but more out of fear of being in such a vulnerable position again (ie. childhood) where one has to wade through oceans of other people's misused power, perpetual gaslighting, all kinds of predators plotting and scheming on how they can hijack your future for their own purposes, it's an incredibly dangerous place to be.
I'll say a bit more about this later but - I think the Darwinian death race itself forces us to a place where any time in one's life where they have the luxury of boredom is an incalculable grace. The rest of the time it's running to the Red Queen's metronome.Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pmOn the other hand, there is that which Shestov claims will not be put out of mind, which is the realism that will forever haunt our desires to be at peace. Politicians and administrators will keep the trains running, but ideology, these are free floating institutions now.
I bring them up because a lot of my time online (say from 20 to 40) was marked by debates with what I'd have to classify as cartoon/caricature atheists or rationalists and these were their heroes. While I don't disagree that they've made contributions to our understandings of biology (in Dawkins case) or certain kinds of philosophy (Dennett's case), they contributed to probably the most low-resolution version of atheism one could have. One of the things that caused me to give Harris much more respect was his Waking Up book and his admission that there's something still in the range of religious and mystical experience (technically the mystical experience itself) that's a tangible and useful thing - and he was debating this with Matt Dillahunty whose still very much in the early to mid 2000's cultural moment on this, questioning whether the fruits of meditation are a fantasy, etc.. Technically I'd say that people like Harris, and in a different way Peterson, got as much attention as they did simply for not being charicatures and having something complex to say. While I'm sure there are a lot of thinkers out there, current and historical, who have had much more depth and quality to them they're not something the common person makes contact with very easily out in the world and as far as the classic philosophers go I don't think Alain de Botton's 7 minute clips can do them justice (nor the way he tends to synchretize them into his own worldview). I have to hope that the aforementioned inaccessibility is changing. One thing I can say, watching my own arch of development, even to be where I'm at right now I left my friends in the dust and gained a lot of distance for better or worse from where many of them are at and it's ground that's not likely to be made up by many of them.Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pmSo, popular truths, Dennett, Dawkins, Darwinism; what strikes me about this discussion of yours is the need for grounding. Why not read some serious technical existential philosophy? Heidegger speaks to all of these in one way or another. Take Dennett, committed to a reductionist view on consciousness and its affairs, and Dawkins right behind him, and Darwin behind both: These are empirical theorists, not phenomenologists, and they put their thinking forth based on bold and groundless assumptions about how things are in the materialist model of the world.
Wasn't it Bertrand Russell who was most noted as stating the point that we effectively don't know what matter is? We know certain things about its behavior, what it does at a classical level, but past that we no nothing of it's intrinsic basis and what's vogue in our current era of cheap technological progress still being a thing is to throw that overboard and assume that it's a stupid question or that there's nothing intrinsic to worry about regarding matter - or ourselves.Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pmHeidegger (and Husserl, Kierkegaard, Kant, ..) will have nothing of this, for empirical observation begs the question regarding how such a model holds up when asking basic questions. What is needed here is the only reduction that upturns all common thinking, which is the phenomenological reduction. Physicality, material--these are vacuous terms when examined closely, and the natural sciences cannot begin to address ethics, for ethical matter are essentially unobservable (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics.
I think what will mug us any day of the week is that nature is so vast and counter intuitive that it seems like we're unlikely to stumble upon new truths about the outside world that don't come a posteriori, and having spent as much time as I did with Rudolph Steiner, Dion Fortune, etc. I don't see much coming from the subjective side other than better ways to internally govern ourselves or get ourselves acclimated to the idea that there's both more to life than matter and that we're in a bigger mystery than we could have ever imagined. From that perspective, and maybe akin to the goals of mysticism, it seems like philosophy is most often best served - at an individual level of interest - for shaking up our relationship to our own knowledge base, seeing how many degrees of freedom we have to navigate better than we are or with a lens on the world that fits better (based on our emotional and cognitive structures it's very difficult to move oneself from point A to point B without agreement coming from very deep levels and that takes a lot of information being fed into the system). The more public sides of philosophy, like moral and ethical philosophy, legal philosophy, philosophy of science, seem to - from my limited contact with them - be attempts at better governance of these systems or attempts to either build them better in reference to the realities on the ground or, in the case of philosophy of science, be a scout that can point out when things are in a rut, why they're in a rut, which pieces of information aren't uniting and why, etc..Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pmI often refer others to this because most haven't a clue as the nature of metaethical problems and Wittgenstein presents the case well, though I disagree with some things). Darwin's evolution is, of course, a plausible theory, and it would be foolish to oppose it, BUT: it is NOT philosophy; it is derivative of structures of consciousness which themselves demand examination. Empirical ideas are cast in language, e.g. Is it possible to separate language from objects in the world? Can we even discuss the world if the conditions of interpretation are absent from analysis?
Part my cursory glance around was to check in with thinkers who I knew and trusted, and it seems like Gray has had particularly positive things to say about him.Hereandnow wrote: ↑March 18th, 2020, 10:53 pmShestov is interesting, but Heidegger's Being and Time is life altering,to speak of life style, as is Kierkegaard, but like I said before, such works take time and patience. I read phenomenology, period, and have little to do with analytic philosophy, of which I have also read, and found very helpful, but unprofound. Phenomenology is profound. If you are interested in this kind of text, it runs at, as you say, a Bible study's pace. But everything else is most often chit chatty and tit for tat.