Philosophy in everyday life
I don't want to repeat myself, as this topic has likely been discussed before. However, I'm interested in hearing about your experience with applying philosophy to your daily life.
?Ethics in Action: How do you personally resolve ethical contradictions that arise in your everyday life?
?Coping with Life's Challenges: Does your knowledge of philosophy help you deal with life's difficulties, losses, or existential anxiety?
?Balancing Depth and Superficiality: How do you find a balance between your philosophical mindset and the superficiality you encounter in others?
Does philosophical thinking change your approach to relationships, friendships, and love? If so, how?
?Ethics in Action: How do you personally resolve ethical contradictions that arise in your everyday life?
?Coping with Life's Challenges: Does your knowledge of philosophy help you deal with life's difficulties, losses, or existential anxiety?
?Balancing Depth and Superficiality: How do you find a balance between your philosophical mindset and the superficiality you encounter in others?
Does philosophical thinking change your approach to relationships, friendships, and love? If so, how?
Comments (86)
Of course, nothing prevents someone living that way, but I hope simply describing it reveals a potential line of critique.
I do not earn my living from philosophy and philosophizing in the literal sense. Unless, of course, you consider my regular work as a lawyer as philosophizing, when I use epistemology, rhetoric, axiology and ethics as an everyday applied tool.
In this sense, philosophy serves me very well.
But my question is more about everyday life: choosing a product in a store, interacting with my wife, raising children, talking at the table with friends. In my case, in everyday life I have to "step on my throat", keep quiet, not get into arguments, otherwise all attention instantly switches to such an argument, and my wife has no choice but to eventually agree with my views in everyday matters (but I do not want to suppress her). This is where this topic arose. How do you combine philosophy and everyday life in your case?
Exactly as I say: a duel life of earning money during the day in service to assumed and unexamined objectives, and then philosophy as a pass time activity.
The alternative view is that what is of critical philosophical importance is exactly that regular activity that is taken for granted. Not so that philosophy, however you define it, can serve that activity and make it more efficient, but rather asking the question of are those regular purposes justified to begin with.
If you're "earning a living" as you say somehow apart from philosophy, well presumably there is some sort of reason for doing it. If it's because that's "just what people do" (get educated, get a job, "live" in a normal sense for the society you are in) ... well does that constitute justification?
The reason philosophy is presented as a hobby or discipline like any other (which are defined precisely as serving a well defined objective assumed by the practitioners) is to maintain a sort of firewall between the tools of critical analysis, radically different points of view, as well as just pure madness, from affecting "normal life", for fear that critical scrutiny will lead to decisions, or the feeling that a decision should be made, which one disagrees with in the present (i.e. fear of a future self that is wiser, more learned, but unpredictable and therefore crazy).
However, there is of course no justification for maintaining such a firewall. If things can be placed under critical scrutiny, so too can the normal life that gave rise to such critical thinking capacity in the first place.
Naturally, by definition, the self before realizing such a critical capacity does not desire any scrutiny, if only due to having no familiarity with it.
Therefore, it is a very tense endeavour to really think about things including what exactly it is that you are doing.
I admit honestly. Often I deliberately reject any rational knowledge and make a decision simply on the basis of what I want (without explaining the reasons) without relieving myself of responsibility for such a decision. In the end, I am just a person. I believe that it is very important to allow myself this.
Assuming your ordinary habits are just (I do not say above they are unjust, only that it is the critical philosophical question to find out):
It is generally of little use to argue with someone who does not want to argue.
I very rarely argue with anyone outside some practical need in dealing with bureaucrats, as most people interpret arguing as conflict, which is not the point of philosophical analysis. Hence I argue here with people who presumably also want to argue.
Quoting Astorre
But if argue you must, why exactly does your wife have no choice but to accept your views?
If it is only because you are more practiced at arguing, then I would suggest a practical approach of not requiring your wife to accept your views but to bring your views to people who are able to scrutinize them, such as there are many on this forum.
Most people do not engage in analysis and view things intuitively.
Arguments can have subtle flaws that people may intuit there is something wrong with but cannot articulate, therefore to press the matter they "have no choice but to agree", but of course they don't feel good about that and are not convinced if they feel there is something wrong. They feel suppressed, as you say, more than having learned something.
To articulate what one intuits requires many years of intense study, to subject those articulations to critical scrutiny requires even more learning and practice.
Ive never paid much attention to philosophy, but I do find it interesting. I navigate most of life by intuition, rarely reflecting or theorizing and this works pretty well. Im at ease with being, to a significant degree, an expression of the values of my time.
Quoting Astorre
I lean toward relativism. I see morality as contingent, a code of conduct shaped by history and culture that pragmatically helps organize people and power relations. I can't think of a time I faced an ethical contradiction. I mostly just act. No doubt I sometimes make mistakes and poor choices, but I'm not losing sleep over it.
Quoting Astorre
I take things as they come and expect nothing. I've generally found negotiating life and other people to be fairly pleasant and straight forward. But I recognize that I have been lucky. If existential anxiety is understood as a fear of death or a festering over meaning in the face of lifes absurdity, I am largely untouched by this. I am at peace with the possibility of dying tomorrow, should it occur.
Quoting Astorre
Its often me whos the superficial one. I do tend to avoid theorists and people who insist on turning every conversation into a showcase of their reading. They are often dull and tend to narcissism. That said I find most people interesting and enjoy almost any kind of free flowing conversation. I don't divide the world of other people into the superficial and the profound, I'm more concerned with people who treat others respectfully.
Exactly what I'm getting at. "Philosophizing" I would say is exactly this process of starting to formulate justifications for things one had no need of before, and as soon as that process starts there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Now that you've formulated this philosophical foundation for acting on whim some or most of the time, the critical question is does this philosophy withstand critical scrutiny.
Once you do one critical scrutiny pass, perhaps you rectify or develop one aspect or another as well as encounter literature for and against the position, which results in a new iteration of the philosophy and the same question of whether this new version too can withstand critical scrutiny. If it has already been augmented or adjusted on first viewing, then it certainly stands to reason that further critical scrutiny will result in more adjustments.
After many years of this what "philosophy is" may become more apparent, in that pretty much any position at all results in a never ending series of insights, counter-arguments, rebuttals and so on.
However, the exercise is only interesting if it manifests in changes to "everyday life" to both reflect "actually believing it" when a view changes as well as testing philosophical conclusions in practice to see how it goes.
Have you ever felt the urge to take stock of your own paradigm?
Quoting Tom Storm
Thought experiment: You walk into a room where a stranger is about to commit suicide. What do you do?
:lol: :rofl: :up:
It happens a lot. Or did. I work in psychosocial services which assists people who are experiencing mental ill health and addiction (amongst other things). I have provided suicide interventions many times.
Why do I work in this area? I tend to value approaches which minimise suffering and promote flourishing. Part of me is a simple-minded utilitarian.
Quoting Astorre
I dont have a deliberate paradigm; I have more of a disposition. Im unsure what I think about many issues and tend to just intuit my way through them. Im open to many alternative approaches. I'm quite happy with 'I don't know' as an answer. I'd like to know more about phenomenology - but I lack time and find it hard to get a useful reading from complicated texts.
It would be difficult for me to assess in your place what exactly is minimizing suffering: letting someone commit suicide or letting someone live :grin:
The default position is that it is better to live. But there are situations where death might be preferable; terminal illness being an obvious example. Generally, people are quite relieved not to have completed their self-harm. They often recognize that their desperation was situational and could be overcome. People who are extremely serious about suicide don't generally tell others and just go do it.
So in that sense, right from the outset, I linked philosophy with the idea of spiritual awareness which implies a qualitative change in your way of being. Of course, though, I was to learn that it was much easier said than done - something that was to become clear in the years ahead.
Regardless, that was the mindset that I took to my rather late entry to university, where I studied philosophy, anthropology and comparative religion among other subjects. My aim was to discern how this idea of enlightenment (in the Asian rather than European sense) had been framed in various cultures and philosophies.
This culminated in an epiphany which of course is very hard to convey in words. But it had definite effects on my personality and way of being. Not that I 'became enlightened', which I was to learn is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but an awareness of a kind of compassionate energy that is at the centre of existence. That has always stayed with me at least to some extent, although often overgrown with weeds, to refer to the Biblical parable. But one (sometimes embarrasing) consequence that stayed with me, was the tendency to begin to shed a tear when considering something important or profound, even in the most quotidian of circumstances. I felt like the quinessential 'new age guy', except I learned that the 'gift of tears' really is a thing.
So - did I find much of this in philosophy? Not as an academic subject. As I attended an Anglo university, the curriculum was, on the one hand, 'Oxbridge' (Cambridge and Oxford) and on the other, cultural marxism (the Department was controversially split between them during that period). A philosophy lecturer in the Oxbridge department counselled me that I wouldn't find what I sought in his deparment, and I majored in comparative religion (important to understand this is *not* 'Divinity' or 'Biblical Studies'.)
At the time, the nearest thing I could find in Western culture to the enlightenment I was seeking was via the Gnostics. There had been a revival of interest in the subject, due to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codex, a set of ancient scrolls that had been discovered in the desert by a shepherd (a suitably Gnostic re-introduction to the world!) Also the perennial philosophical texts of East and West. They contain these kinds of veins of authentic wisdom, often interspersed with historical sediments and base rock.
So, as to whether this has all had consequences in daily life - yes, as outlined above. That has stayed with me. But also 'no' in that I came to the realisation that I was not capable of the kind of sagacious wisdom and detachment that those I had learned about exhibited. I was still very much, in Japanese Buddhist terminology, 'bombu: a foolish ordinary person inherently ignorant, deluded, and flawed by their passions and karmic shortcomings'.
Nevertheless I should point out to you one important philosophical scholar, whom I discovered later in my search. That is Pierre Hadot. He is well-known for books such as Philosophy as a Way of Life. Also I am now subscribed to a number of podcasts and substacks, very much concerned with practical philosophy, often Stoic in orientation. There's a big audience for this material in the apocalyptic times we live in.
So, yes, overall, philosophy in one form or another has become very much part of day-to-day life. That's what it must be about, to be meaningful.
How did you manage to connect all this with the people around you? Did they start listening to your wisdom, or on the contrary, moving away from you? Or did you manage to separate philosophy and interaction with others? Or surround yourself with people like you?
Quoting Wayfarer
Did you pursue this line very much? There was a significant Gnostic/Jung/Campbell nexus in the 1980's.
I contemplated it as a possible thesis subject, but in the end, I went with the American Transcendentalists (Emerson and Richard Bucke).
"Ethical contradictions" have yet to "arise" in (my) everyday life. However, when faced with a dilemma / tradeoff, I try to discern (mostly by habit) the lesser harmful alternative and choose that one.
No.
?
I try to regard them as persons Others in Levinas' sense (or I-You's as per Buber) aka "ends-in-themselves" / "fellow sufferers" before I judge that they are "superficial" (or anything else).
Only in so far as it makes my "approach" more reflective and much less instrumental.
"Expect the worst, Hope for the best"
I adopted this mindset around about the time I turned 30 and it has served me extremely well. It is a recognition of our innate optimistic biases alongside our attraction to negativity. When things do not go distasterously wrong I am pleased, but this does involve having to create rather horrific scenarios sometimes.
Think of it something like this when you wake up in the morning:
"I am not strapped to my bed with a torturer about to go to work on me for the next 24 hours. Life is GREAT! I am so lucky."
The hope for the best part is just leaning into dreaming about the impossible coming into fruitition -- then by sheer chance it might just happen! Something taken from Crowley where he says the biggest mistake any individual can make is to set achievable goals.
Everything else for me is something like the belief in creating the best version of myself I can as being the most sensible path forwards.
It is interesting to observe how each of those who spoke, possessing extensive knowledge in the field of philosophy and a long history of philosophizing, nevertheless in everyday life remains a simple person, with ordinary views, with simple desires and good intentions. Perhaps philosophy teaches us this?
To the extent philosophy "teaches" us anything about everyday life, it is that it serves to distracts us from it.
Yes e.g. Epicurus and/or Spinoza.
First comes daily life, then comes philosophy.
:fire:
:rofl:
That was funny and true.
Quoting Astorre
I think life difficulties are much more defined or informed by one's temperament more than what some intelligent person said back in the day.
You can gain perspective and even insight in philosophy, but I don't think it will change the way you face problems, not unlike thinking that studying psychology will let you read other people's minds (it won't).
But if you are interested in the questions and the discussions, then there is plenty of benefit in that. Your conclusions may differ from mine.
And if not, that's fine too.
Well said. A perspective people tend not to consider as they seem to attribute everything to learning and discernment.
Quoting Manuel
That's worth thinking about.
I briefly studied philosophy at university. My tutor once said something like, no one he had ever met was truly changed by philosophy; it only served to elaborate their preconceptions and biases.
I keep wondering if there are transformational understandings about time and self and being and truth and reality that would open up and utterly change one. Surely that's the promise of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger...
my interest in academic philosophy began with a visit to the Kant Museum in Kaliningrad (Königsberg) about 5 years ago. Although Kant was part of the curriculum back in university, to my shame I couldn't remember what he wrote about when I was in the museum, and thanks to the interactive whiteboard installed there I was hooked by what he wrote about.
Although psychology promised to teach what a person thinks on every corner (and this turned out to be exaggerated), studying Kant promised to teach how a person cognizes. Since then, I began to greedily absorb Kant, then Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Le Bon, and finally Heidegger, while studying academic sciences such as epistemology, axiology, rhetoric, ethics, where the ideas of different philosophers were presented in the form of a system.
What did this give me? First of all, the ability to evaluate judgments: for me it became easy to distinguish speculation from assertion, check them, separate them from emotions. This also affected my persuasion skills. The I-State relationship changed significantly: my ideas about the actions of the state acquired structure and clarity, which allowed me to predict the behavior of the state or the development of international relations with greater accuracy (as time has shown).
The skill of separating emotions from events, manipulation from facts, propaganda from events.
From the point of view of my own life: right now I am writing a paper on ontology, with my own approach to the I-others relationship, my own development, life and death, being and nothingness, time and space.
All this allows me to more accurately understand what I want, what I want from life, from work, from others, from raising my children, to understand why I make this choice and not another.
New difficulties arose because you begin to see a little wider. But along with this came the skill of letting go: allowing something to be as it is.
In relations with loved ones, it became easier for me to calm their existential anxieties, to help them cope with depression. But, as I wrote above, I had to step on my throat more often in communication. Otherwise, I feel like I'm suppressing them.
I think philosophy did not become the author of my portrait, but it added subtlety and detail to this portrait
There are lots of teens that pretend to be radicalized by Nietzche, most of the time it looks to be a fad. Heidegger often attracts a certain kind of person but ask them to articulate what it is and the meaning is very obscure.
Novels do similar things too. Not that it's impossible to have someone change the way you view things, it just looks to be very rare.
Which is curious, if true.
I'm pretty sure people can be 'radicalised' by philosophy. Ive certainly met those who 'converted' to idealism or became obsessed with Heideggers model of time, to the point where perpetually excited and they would talk about nothing else. And then there are those who abandoned their Islamic or Christian faith and became bores about secular philosophy instead.
You would think that if philosophy truly had the power to lift us beyond convention and common sense, it would amount to a profoundly mind-bending and transformative experience for many people.
That's the key isn't it? What's "many people"? If you have in mind people like us and people adjacent to us, then we are what, 5% of the population at very best?
One thing is passing interest: oh, I read Plato once or I saw this lecture on Heidegger. Another thing is to become a Platonist or a Heideggerian.
Most people - even in optimal conditions - don't care enough about these issues. Heck even interest in science is low for what I would like it to be, but philosophy today? That's tough.
It becomes more complicated if you pursue the analytic/continental tradition in which I think you do get cults. Some are mostly harmless, Wittgenstein - maybe Popper. Another thing is being a follower of Derrida or Lacan, that exists, is relatively small, but probably not good for thinking, imo.
But that's just how I see things.
Never thought about it. Im not sure if I should be concerned or amused by this figure,
Quoting Manuel
I wonder if there are some good stats on this. I mentioned philosophy at work a couple of times and people made it clear they thought it was bullshit. Mind you this is a crowd interested in critical theory so go figure.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, all the smart young kids of my era were cheerfully fixated with deconstruction in the 1980s. I never had the temperament to make it through the texts. They were so turgid and took time from women and booze.
:cool: :up:
:lol:
At least most of that fad is behind us now.
Thats also the promise of psychologist George Kelly, the one who said that each of us walks around every moment of very day with our own personal construct system. You can think of it as a dynamical, constantly self-updating personal philosophy which doesnt need to be articulated verbally to oneself or others in order to guide every aspect of our lives and determines our success at coping with emotional, intellectual and ethical challenges.We dont need Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to do philosophy , since we are already formulating, testing and revising our own philosophical systems all the time. By the way, Kelly collapses these categories together. He gets rid of the separation between will, affect and cognition.
Quoting Tom Storm
The mysterious concept of temperament arises out of creating artificially separated categories out of learning , cognition and affectivity. This prompts us to dismiss a childs temper tantrum as the product of temperament rather than as their flailing attempts at making sense of social events that impact them.
Quoting Astorre
I don't resort to philosophical analysis for determining what is ethical. I find ethical theories post hoc attempts to describe why you act in instinctively ethical ways. To the extent a contradiction arises, I just weigh the two and try to figure out what is best. Quoting Astorre I don't. That's the purpose of religion. Quoting Astorre We can learn from everyone. I think it's a mistake to assume the philosophically minded offer more than those not so.
Quoting AstorreTo the extent being philosophical is synonymous with being even tempered, then I suppose it makes me not tempermental, but I don't think philosophy made me that way. I think that's just the way I am.
Cool. So can we think of temperament as habitual patterns of sense making? Im assuming you include in temperament peoples preferences for order, simplicity, chaos, or whatever
Quoting Joshs
Of course, but in most cases it often seems to take the contributions of others to promote a significant shift in our thinking. Although Im sure break through moments can also happen from life events. But what does it mean to read Wittgenstein or Heidegger and see the world radically anew? From what you say above, is it correct to think you might define philosophy as an act of sense making?
That's one of the key points of Saint Augustine's autobiography. In his thirties, after a very different sort of life, Augustine became a celibate, gave up his very promising career in the imperial circle, and gave away all his (not inconsiderable) wealth. Only then did he start producing all his influential philosophical texts; although obviously the ideas had been developed over time. It's not an uncommon motif, particularly in earlier philosophical biographies. It seems significantly less common in modern philosophy, although there are examples such as Pascal. It's a sort of "trope" in Eastern thought too, the life of the Buddha being a paradigmatic example. But, just because these are tropes and find their way into hagiography, doesn't mean they aren't real; we do have first hand biographical accounts as well.
There is a similar, but much more limited phenomenon within Marxism, the "Marxist conversion." Yet that tends to be a more limited awakening to a particular political outlook.
Yes, I was thinking about this kind of thing earlier. I was also considering the difference between attaining enlightenment (for want of a better term) and, in the case of Marxists or Muslims, being radicalised.
But I was thinking less ambitiously: more like an understanding about the nature of time, or a perspective offered by phenomenology, and how, even on a smaller scale, such realizations might completely recalibrate ones way of relating to the world and its problems. Not enlightenment, radicalisation, or conversion to a faith, but rather (damn, Ill have to use the phrase) a paradigm shift. Perhaps 'realization' is the better word.
I have a romantic notion of philosophy as potentially being able to provide this kind of psychological or experiential transformation, not just the lifeless pursuit of analysis and cold reasoning, but a new way of seeing that enlarges our experience in some way. Yet such a description feels rather tendentious, soft and poetic.
Quoting Tom Storm
We could say they are habits, but not blind or arbitrary habits. They are shaped by the needs of optimal anticipation of events, so to the extent that a particular pattern of interpreting events reproduces itself stably over time, it does this not because of some inertia, but to the extent that it is effective. Emotion crises arise as indications that the patterns we relied on are brining to fail us, and we either have to construct our world to a small and smaller circle of what we can cope with, or begin the process of re-organizing our system of constructs.
Quoting Tom Storm
All of our behaviors are acts of sense-making, questions we pose to the world that it may either confirm or invalidate. It is certainly true that other people provide rich resources that we can take average of in opening up promising new avenues of thought. But more important than the contributions of others is the audacity, persistence and ingenuity with which we tinker with our ideas. Nietzsche and Heidegger will do nothing for us if we are not prepared to rethink them in our own terms, relative to our own concerns and history. Because we must already be prepared to absorb the ideas than any great philosophy has to offer, 90% of the work has already been done before we are ever exposed to the likes of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Whenever someone claims that so and sos thinking had a life-changing effect on them, I suspect that scratching beneath the surface will reveal such a readiness to be transformed.
Yes. Good point.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, that likely to be accurate.
Thanks.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, one interesting thing is that back when the primary goal of philosophical education was existential transformation instead of intellectual specialization (i.e., for most of pre-modern though, and for much Eastern philosophy) it was also taught very differently. In order to achieve that sort of transformation, it was very much a sort of "lifestyle" education, with a heavy focus on asceticism, "spiritual exercises," and generally time for silence/contemplation (although not as much for the Cynics).
Whether this actually worked, or how exactly it worked is another question. The ancient sources are often idealized, and we might suspect that some of them are fictionalized (a few are satirical or slanderous). Obviously, it worked in a certain sense, in that life in the community was radically different as long as people stayed in it. From what I know, in-depth guides to practice don't really exist until the Middle Ages, when different monastic communities wanted to compare notes on methods. But by that point their role had already expanded significantly and so they were often dealing with populations that were less zealously committed to the project, or were putting other sorts of concerns first (charity, more general education, good old fashioned corruption, etc.).
https://iep.utm.edu/hadot/#SH5a
This kind of attitude is bubbling up through independent philosophers rather than academics although again John Vervaeke is both.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I hadn't thought of it in terms of existential transformation but I guess that works. There does seem to be a kind of bifurcation between the problem solvers and the dreamers - for want of better terms. And no doubt there's overlap.
This is the problem I had in mind when I spoke about interaction with others. Many people are driven by prejudices. As Gadamer says, this is not bad, since it gives a person the very possibility of knowledge. But often these prejudices become reinforced concrete for their bearer. In this sense, I often have a contradiction in the relationship between me and others.
The question arises: Is it worth undermining their prejudice, although it does not stand up to criticism? This is exactly what I mean when I say that I am forced to "step on my own throat"
A very subtle definition for philosophy that you voiced: "therapy aimed at developing clarity of thinking."
Aint that the truth. Everyone has them but the wise are willlng to own up to it.
I agree with you. In this sense, philosophy is a dude who sits in your head and criticizes you. In psychology, this is called self-reflection (if I'm not mistaken). Education in general (including philosophy itself) teaches a person to be friends with this dude, and not shut his mouth =)
But at the same time it is difficult for a philosopher to stop in his criticism. The philosopher begins to ask - "What is "is"?", "What does "to be" mean?" And so on ad infinitum. As they said above - you can't put the genie back in the bottle =)))
One persons prejudice is anothers insight.
Quoting Astorre
I think its often called critical reflection or in nursing, teaching and social work, reflective practice.
But what is often forgotten here is that critical practice also acknowledges strengths: what works, what is possible given limitations and what is successful. Rather than pointing out a need for change or highlighting omissions or flaws, it can actually embolden and be an affirmation of your choices and approaches.
I think that the origin of the problem is not the contradictions, but the concept of ethics. The world, existence, everything is contradictory. We try to find consistencies, but just because our brain needs to simplify things to be able to get some understanding. I think there is no reason why the world should be consistent rather than contradictory. As a consequence, in my everyday life I try to find harmonizations between this naturally contradictory world and my personal need to make some sense of things, in order to live my humanity.
Quoting Astorre
Yes, I would even say that philosophy is my life, thats why I call it spirituality, following Hadots orientation. This does not mean that philosophy mitigates my difficulties. I dont think that using philosophy this way gives us an advantage. On the contrary, my philosophy tells me that this world, from a human point of view, is essentially evil and we just need to let our human nature exist at its best, which we dont know what it means, but we can try to explore.
Quoting Astorre
My perception is that superficiality is not just in uneducated people, but also in 99.99% of philosophers and intellectuals, which includes me of course. I think that what we need is some art of listening, which modern and contemporary philosophy doesnt teach us so much, because it is made of enormous efforts to define, understand, express, instead of listening. I think that Hadot has shown us that philosophy as a spiritual exercise meant, to a large degree, philosophy as an activity of listening, meditating, contemplating, rather than wanting to get in control of reality and being. This way I can better get, receive, the hidden philosophical language that comes from those people who are commonly considered, even by themselves, uneducated.
Quoting Astorre
Yes, definitely. On one side it makes me perceive a lot of people as shallow, tragic victims of mass standardization, on the other side my philosophical thinking is largely based on self criticism, which means that one thing that philosophy should teach me and itself is being silent, renouncing to think, to understand, to define, and being more open to what cannot be expressed by words, which is always the source of our words, thoughts and definitions.
Wittgestein said that Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. I disagree. I think that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must, if it is needed, force language, even make violence to language, make it contradictory, absurd, surreal, to make our best attempts to communicate all the same the incommunicable (which is everything in this world). In this context I think that whenever language looks consistent and clear, it is just a bad illusion, a clever trick that we have created to impose our dominion.
I'm quite content to be superficial, to be honest.
But I wonder if this inability to listen well has a contrapuntal echo in peoples inability to read well. I notice that when people read, they often recreate the writing in the light of their own values and interpretive frameworks. To some extent this is unavoidable, but perhaps there is a line where the reading and recreating becomes self-serving, distorting and blind to new ideas.
The opposite aspect could be worth positive consideration: fortunately wrong reading is unavoidable, so that life and creativity is possible. I am aware that this way we end up to total confusion, so it might be useful to keep it in a human context to avoid such confusion. This means that both understanding and misunderstanding could be managed in such ways to promote what we humans perceive as some kind of good, of progress, especially if it includes self-criticism.
So much for consistency and clarity. What a relief it is to dispense with them!
I think you and I might agree that there are degrees of misreading. If you came away from Das Kapital seeing it as a guide for trusting corporations and stock markets to solve all social problems, then we have likely crossed a line into uselessness.
:grin: That's really a nice one!
Philosophy unteaches us this.
Right? At least that is how the philosopher is born, when he sees through something that just a moment ago was solid and opaque. When he has unlearned what he thought he knew. And then philosophy unteaches us that, and we no longer see things nor do we see seeing things the same again.
Philosophy is the rational struggle to get back to being the simple person, with a clear simple view, able to be witnessed by and shared with any ordinary person. Philosophy teaches us that is no longer likely, try as we may to make a simpler understanding.
Quoting Astorre
Exactly, trying to put the genie back.
Weve leaned that weve been lost all along so the first thing we know is the question - where the hell am I?
But its not ad infinitum. Its just one small finite step at a time. To reach, ad inifinitum you have to stand still and not move at all. But I see progress in this.
I believe that philosophy takes a stand against common sense. Philosophy must question our most deeply rooted certainties. In that sense, philosophy is there to sadden us, as Deleuze would say, and make us realise our stupidity. Philosophy today has the task of teaching us counter-intuitive things.
:up: :up:
Perhaps this point that you have expressed is not so neutral, so innocent, so positive. I have perceived several times, in philosophical discussions here and in other forums, that a topic that initially was interesting, becomes quickly lost in the myriad of objections, different perspectives, questioning, raising issues, scattering, dispersing. As a starting principle, I consider myself a supporter of criticism, comparison of different perspectives and widening of horizons. But more recently I am considering that this kind of work can be done easily, mechanically, it can be even done by a machine, systematically. The final result of this methodology of reasoning and discussing is an emptying out of any content, a fragmentation and pulverization of any content and topic. I dont think that philosophy can be proud of such results. This way philosophy becomes a destroying machine, permanently ready to demolish, pulverize and make devoid of content and interest any discussion, any topic, any thought.
I think that, starting from this point, we can better understand the deep point of the initial post of this thread: it contains a need to connect philosophy to life, to humanity, to us.
Perhaps a precise reason can be found behind this pulverizing job continuously done by philosophy. We can notice that criticism, questioning, teaching us counter-intuitive things, are activities based on understanding and knowing. In opposition to an initial situation of philosophy practiced as an experience, a spiritual experience, as Hadot has shown us, there has been a quick shift towards philosophy perceived as knowledge, awareness, understanding. It is from this conception that philosophy has turned into being criticism. As I said, I favour criticism, because it protects and vaccinates us from deception, contradictions, it reveals a lot of hidden bad mechanisms. But what shall we do once all mechanisms, bad and good ones, have been deconstructed, revealed and pulverized? This is a final effect of analytical philosophy, of enquiring about the smallest units of our reasoning, which is language, in a sense.
As I said, I liked a lot Ciceronianus joke
Quoting Ciceronianus
but it seems that, after all, there is something more serious at stake in appreciating too much consistency and clarity: consistency and clarity are obviously necessary and good, but they are also a symptom of philosophy fundamentally conceived as understanding rather than experiencing.
So, if it is true that philosophy must question our most deeply rooted certainties, what about the courage of challenging this deification, this sacredness of understanding, fanatically pursuing clarity and consistency as if they were our new secret Gods?
I think that this challenge is what is exactly hiddenly raised by the initial post: what about trying to reconnect philosophy to our so fragile, so vulnerable, so exposed to criticism humanity?
Now we understand that we should shun the road of asking what humanity is, what humanity means, otherwise we fall again into the mentality of worshipping our God named understanding. Understanding and criticism are necessary, but not as the primary ground and purpose of philosophy, but rather as medicines. Medicines are necessary, but you cant have breakfast or lunch by eating just medicines, just pills and capsules. We are humans and, as such, we live, or should live, primarily on food, not on medicines, otherwise medicines become the sickness to be healed from, rather than a healing tool.
In other words, I think that philosophy should face the challenge of appreciating subjectivity as something much more important than we usually think. Normally we think that subjectivity means limits, narrow horizons, being conditioned, being relative. This is true, this is what makes subjectivity fragile and vulnerable, but it seems to me that vulnerability and fragility can be rediscovered now as extremely positive and valuable elements, elements that probably we can learn a lot from women, this way understanding that all I have said has strong connections with philosophy as an activity that so far, symptomatically, has been practiced mainly by men.
It seems to me that varieties of (non-solipsistic) idealism speculate on the significance of "subjectivity".
Of course they do, but isnt this concern already just another way of deflecting towards this so strongly need of understanding and building strong and clear concepts? I think that a perspective that looks for objective concepts is the worst way of dealing with subjectivity. From an objective perspective, I am sure that the very existence of subjectivity can be radically questioned and I am happy with this. I am not even interested in finding any strong evidence of the existence of subjectivity. I think that now a correct way to talk about subjectivity is doing it from inside our subjectivity, our feeling of who and what we are. Obviously this opens a lot of difficulty in communication, because our traditional philosophical mind quickly feels again and again the need for some clarity, otherwise we can ask and ask again at any moment: what are we talking about? Well, I think we need some courage of diving into this different language, that is the language of art, of subjectivity, of poetry, a language that wants to escape from too much control, but is, instead, made of fragility and vulnerability. I think that, if we as philosophers are perpetually scared of diving into this, it works like a psychological wall that we keep to protect our refusal of acknowledging our vulnerability.
I think philosophers should have the courage to admit that they aren't poets or artists, and the wisdom to acknowledge that what poetry and art do is much better done by poets and artists than by philosophers.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Angelo, I like your posts. You should have started a new thread with that kind of thinking. They are well written.
My criticism to what you said about "Normally we think that subjectivity means limits, narrow horizons, being conditioned, being relative" is that, what philosophy tries to expose about subjectivity, which we all start with during the naive period, is the error in thinking when we mistake opinions as arguments. Subjectivity has a way of drawing an invalid conclusion from the available anecdotal accounts.
What philosophers, and the excellent posters in this forum, are trying to build is a solid foundation for the things that we claim to be true.
For me, the key task of philosophy today is to protect the subject, its fragility and vulnerability in a world where objectivity reigns supreme. Let me explain why I think so. At the junction of premodernity and modernity, as Nietzsche noted, "God died," and in his place came objectivity the ideal of the knowable, decomposable world. Science, born in the Enlightenment, gave us incredible tools for analysis, but philosophy, unlike other disciplines, did not become a "science" in the strict sense. It remained a space of questions, not final answers. And this is precisely its strength. However, today, when objectivity has reached its apogee from scientific discoveries to AI, which, although for now, as one of the participants rightly noted, "cleverly puts words together" and threatens to make many professions unnecessary the subject has found itself under attack. AI, being the pinnacle of the analytical approach, is capable of purifying judgments from subjectivity, but at the same time risks depriving us of our humanity. Isn't this a challenge for philosophy?
How can philosophy become a practice that protects this fragility?
you emphasize the importance of a solid foundation. Is it possible to build a foundation that includes subjectivity as an integral part of truth?
Finally, I want to ask you all a question that has become central to me: does philosophy make you happier? What role does it play in your daily life - does it criticize your beliefs, or does it inspire you by connecting you to your humanity. What kind of people does philosophy make us in a world where objectivity is increasingly dominant?
E.g. chattal slavery, the industrial revolution, mechanized "total" war, the administrative state, mass media, bourgeois nihilism, etc have, I think, alienated / atomized / reified / de-humanized most of the "developed world" even before the advent of "AI". This is an autopsy, not a diagnosis read Marx and Nietzsche, Bergson and Heidegger, Marcel and Adorno, et al.
Thinking clearly about what comes next what can emerge from 'the loss of subjectivity', or dis-enchanted world aka "desert of the real" the problematics of 'the posthuman condition' (i.e. post-subjectivity) seems to me philosophy's principle "challenge".
From practice to theory: read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile, David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity and Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound.
If only objectivity (the state of being objective) was dominant! Then there would be less bias, prejudice, favoritism, etc. in the world. That would make ME happy. Would it make you sad?
One of the things I like about analytic philosophy and OLP, by the way, is their emphasis on care in defining terms and using language.
As you know from reading Pierre Hadot, there were ancient schools of philosophy that taught ways of living that promoted what they considered happiness. They were founded on reason, though, following from in the case of the Stoics compliance with the Universal Reason they thought was the generative force of the Universe.
In this context, we are strongly tempted to discuss about the mechanisms triggered by the words we read, by the logic instantly triggered by the rules of language and of thinking. Somebody writes a post, like throwing a stone, which triggers a lot of mechanisms intrinsic to those stones, and we debate about these stones, thinking that we are debating about objectivity, reality, while actually we are completely loosing sight of the incommunicable, of which our words are just a translation, which as such will never be faithful to what it translates.
In this context, the problem is not the forum, but the phenomenon of communication itself, even when I try to communicate with myself.
If language is not the author, but is always an instrument for authors, why does philosophy, especially analytical philosophy, concentrate so much on language, this way loosing sight of authors?
We can object that language is what we have, what we can work on. This is true, but it becomes an excuse to completely forget that there are always authors, so that we concentrate just in the mechanisms triggered by language. Shouldnt philosophy face this challenge of taking into consideration the inexpressible author, without whom no language would exist in this world? I think that this is the problem, the trick, the illusion: we think that what we have and what we can work on is just the product, the outcome, that is language, so we think that the most effective way to reach the author is by working on language, but I think that it is quite evident that language contains in itself a strong tendency to attract our entire attention towards itself, making us forget too much the importance of the inexpressible author.
I think that, at this point, an essential tool to reach the author, is our subjectivity: I must try to reach the author of a message by using my subjectivity, my humanity, my being another author, like the author of the message I am reading and interpreting. I can understand a lot about the other author because I can find in myself, as an another author, a lot of similarities. If I ignore myself as an author and the other author as well, and I reflect just on the mechanisms and logics contained in the produced object, that is the message, the language, how can I expect any good understanding between me and the other author?
I agree that this ideal of a direct contact author-to author, peer-to-peer, is exposed to a lot of misunderstanding, criticism, lack of reliability, but isnt the activity of enclosing, encapsulating our analysis just around language and logic, even worse, even less faithful to what we should try to understand?
This means that the relationship author-to-author should be studied as a fundamental positive methodology of understanding things, instead of being just considered a limit of subjectivity, so that it gets completely ignored, with the result that philosophy and other disciplines have concentrated their studies on objective languages, logics, structures and mechanisms. I think that my subjectivity, my being an author, should be used as a fundamental dictionary to interpret and translate the messages I receive, while currently, in philosophy, we use just objective dictionaries that make us forget the presence, the existence, of both authors, which is me and the other person.
Well, feel free to send me messages without using words, then, or incoherently and without explanation, so I'll understand. I'm waiting. I'll let you know when I receive them.
Subjectivity will always occupy an important place in philosophy. Note that I emphasized errors in thinking, not the depravity of subjectivity. In fact, intersubjectivity, which is the idea that when we all share a common perspective, then it becomes a valid principle in philosophical arguments.
For example, colors are, in fact, intersubjectivity reports of what humans see when they look at objects in the presence of lighting. While in physics, colors are wavelengths with different lengths, in the macro world, we see colors or red, yellow, orange, white, pink, etc. So, depending on what you're arguing for, philosophically, the admission of colors is valid one.
Quoting Astorre
I didn't come to participate in philosophical discussions to be 'happier', rather to be more at peace in what the world is, what was it in the past, what was it now, and what it will be in the future.
Yes, in fact, I learned to be self-critical in my beliefs in the practical sense and to connect more with my humanity.
I would say that it is important for objectivity to occupy an dominant place when it comes to science and technology. Imagine medicine -- we have had major improvements in saving the patients' lives in chronic and acute diseases in just a matter of less than a decade. But we haven't really lost major subjectivity when it comes to politics, historical accounts, interpersonal relations, family relations, and preferences in tastes. We are very much influenced by heavy marketing, by heavy social media, and internal impulses beyond our control.
I think that 5-10 years ago I would have definitely and unequivocally answered this question - "Yes, I would be happy with objectivity!" Objectivity is consistent, precise, unbiased, does not depend on mood, health, origin or phase of the moon. I would say that objectivity is my guide, like a flashlight that helps not to get lost. It would be so great if many of my loved ones more often gave an objective assessment of what is happening. We would simply have no ground for conflict! Isn't that right? Pure, like a child's tear, objective aspiration for truth, logic, not clouded by anything. However, today, my answer to this question sounds completely different. Objectivity is a very good tool for some phenomena or things. It is good for cognition and accurate in forecasts. It clearly makes our lives easier and has allowed us to achieve the fact that we just sit at our computer screens and communicate in the same language at distances of several tens of thousands of kilometers. At the same time, an objective answer to the question, for example: "Why do you live?" Does not exist. Or rather, answering this question objectively, it turns out that there is no objective basis for believing that our life or life in general is necessary (if you have an objective answer to this question, please share). Objectivity is consistent, but empty, emasculated, not directed toward anything or into anything. Today I am convinced that if mistakes did not exist, then we would probably never have happened in this world.
Another example that I always give as an example is sports. The very possibility of competition in the greatest number of disciplines lies in the possibility of error. Subjectivity - that is, our bias and fallibility, but at the same time managing to survive - is it not delightful? Isn't a painting beautiful with its curvature of brushstrokes, a song with technical errors of the performer, and a philosophical text with a bunch of biases of the author?
Perhaps we are talking about two different but equally important roles. The objectivity you write about is an indispensable foundation for building a fair and just society, for science and for understanding the world. It is the 'skeleton' of civilization. But what fills this skeleton with life, meaning, art and love - that is, everything that is worth living for - is by its nature subjective.
Is it not the case that the ideal is not the dominance of one over the other, but a harmonious balance? We strive for objectivity in our judgments of facts so as not to be biased, but at the same time we value and cherish subjectivity in our experience, because it is what makes us human
You raise soem important quesions. I have never understood what the idea of objectivity means. Surely an odd term that simply means that anything which agrees with your biases are true and things which don't are false?
Perhaps for starters, we could take the matter of abortion. What objectively do we make of this matter? Show me how it might work.
A very interesting question, despite its simplicity. Here is what Wikipedia says:
If we proceed from these premises, we can assume that abortion:
1. Objectively - does not matter (what difference does it make what rational beings do there)
2. Subjectively - depends on the point of view
3. Intersubjectively - bad (since it is the deprivation of a person's life) or from the position of other groups good if the woman herself decided so.
The question arises - what is so good about subjectivity if everything depends on the point of view? In my opinion, subjectivity is good because it wants something (to allow/prohibit abortions, to find the "truth", to act), while objectivity is simply empty and indifferent
Quoting Astorre
I think point 1 is, at best, contestable. Whether abortion is objectively murder depends on how one describes the process and what one counts as a life. Isnt this ultimately a values question? Its surely a contentious and open issue.
We also need a more developed notion of what it means for something to be objective. Objectivity seems to be the product of contingent factors. For example, if someone supports abortion, it is objectively the case that they support abortion, but that is different from saying abortion itself is objectively right or wrong. Which I guess might lead us to notions of objective morality or moral realism.
Your questions are good and involuntarily lead to the idea that "Objectivity" as such is essentially a subjective idea from the point of view of epistemology (I will not touch on ontology now). It is not found in the world as a ready-made fact, it does not "lie" somewhere in nature. It was invented by people. Moreover, the idea of ??objectivity was formed within subjective experience: in response to the need to separate personal desires from knowledge, to distinguish truth from illusion, to agree on something outside of individual whim.
In essence, Objectivism is a subjective belief in the possibility of going beyond subjectivity.
It turned out funny.
Now if we rethink my message about the critique of objectivity, it turns out like this: "Have we not become too carried away by the idea of ??objective truth, having forgotten about the subject and the subjective?"
As for the objectivity of abortion, I think it looks consistent. Outside of a person, it is objectively indifferent whether an abortion is murder or not, since objectivity is indifferent to life or death. Can ethics be objective? I have serious doubts about that.
Just thought I'd note that the definitions you're referring to are those used in epistemology and metaphysics. You might find those applied to ethics are a trifle different.
Subjectivity in ethics, as I understand it, treats moral assertions as expressions of opinion; nothing more.
Okay. Let's assume that this is true. Then what is objectivity in ethics? Does objective ethics exist?
Yes, I think so.
My take, in sum:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/857773
Quoting Astorre
This only a subjective statement ...
Quoting Astorre
Genetic fallacy.
... just like all logico-mathematical and empirical knowledge.
Re: morality/legality "abortion"
(2022)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/694450
@Tom Storm
My understanding is, very simply put, objectivity in ethics is the view that moral claims aren't merely personal beliefs and opinions, but their value and validity may be determined regardless of personal preferences. For a more sophisticated and complete discussion see 180 Proof's post or do some research.
Why not? If you do have a reason to live, then surely having that reason is a fact about you? Your reason may of course also be said to be subjective, in that it will not necessarily apply to everyone.
There are logical facts, and facts determined by observation, and even facts which may not be determinable by us at all, such as whether a god or gods exist, or the facts about the actual genesis of the Universe (about which we can only theorize). There are also, presumably, countless facts of history which can never be determined, even in principle.
Of course indeterminable facts as such cannot be of much use to us, but noting that there are such facts may be useful in establishing plausible worldviews.
Quoting 180 Proof
:up: :up: :up: