The philosophers of the past era have failed our generation

[onesteptwostep]

Many philosophers in the past helped commoners, and moreover elites how to understand the world and how to progress more into the future with it. The last of these philosophers was Hegel, someone who totalized reality and claimed that reality is simply humanity propelling itself into the most freest version of itself, that this 'spirit' or 'geist' or Absolute would even come to a manifestation where itself would be known to itself. A grand vision, (something a lot of the transhumanist singularity nuts would have a hardon for).

But come to the modern era, there is a certain disparity in which knowledge is seeded amongst the younger generation but are not living their lives fully. This is not because they lack the courage or work ethic or grit, but simply because there are economic forces which are beyond their immediate control. This simple sentence obliviates the philosophical work done by the existentialists. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Marx- the riling up of the 'will' and to 'rebel'. The will becomes shattered by the force of time, and more and more we come to the territory of Sartre, where the modern man is 'condemned to freedom'. There is a sense of pessimism and the ever growing sense of nihilism, of absurdity. Contemporary of Sartre, Camus is usually pointed to as someone who elaborates on this absurdism. We are evermore surrendering ourselves to what humanity has created, this "economy". What is freedom really? Cross out the freedom from Sartre's line and insert economy- and volia, it makes much more profound sense.

Hegel was a systemiser because he totalized life, ontology, with economic, or the life of the everyday. The later existentialists fail to address this problem, and moreso from Schopenhauer, who seemingly is the father of the pessimism that starts after Hegel. There is no union with ontology and economy after Hegel. The philosophy of the Right (political action) has been slowly disregarded, and now there is an evermore feeling that 'economy' is more valuable than 'humanity'.

There needs to be a coming back to a systematic understanding of reality and of life. We need not to hide under the slogan of 'do what you are most happy with', but rather proudly wear the lines of: 'we are happy to do what we must'.

No wonder the philosophers in the postmodern era have failed us. Their predecessors have failed them.

 

[DingusLord]

I have always naturally gravitated toward the cynical approaches to philosophy, religion, politics, and tradition. Perhaps also as a rebellion against my Christian upbringing. So I saw the post-modern practice of tearing down ideas to their components as a natural course. But as is the nature of deeper continuous cynicism, you begin to question your questions, and eventually your premises.

I have not turned away from seeking to live by rigorous logic. A lofty ideal which I'm sure you can relate. But with the advent of Jordan Peterson, and other personal discoveries. Much of that logic seems to recursively return to it's seemingly heuristic, ancient traditions. Showing quite often that humans are not the ideal: free floating consciousness, capable of tangentially nearing absolute objectivity and productivity of perspective. But a multi-layered being, that frankly screws everything up, with fantastic results. We are tethered, or perhaps more accurately rooted, and growing from an ancient path. From which we carry our plethora of instincts into this "modern" age.

Thus I posit that the tearing down of social structures and ideas, should be done with care. Don't tear down, tear apart. See their inner workings without having to live off their detritus.

 

[onesteptwostep]

Philosophically speaking Peterson is more leaning towards existentialism. He doesn't offer a system of reality, something that combines economics, politics and morality together. He simply wants the human to try and thrive on at the system we've created. He might chip away at the general pessimism and offer some hope, or some kind of guidance, but he has yet to articulate for what and for whom that energy should go towards. It would be a bit hasty nail him in the coffin, but I wouldn't be wrong to say that he's a materialistic dialectic humanist.

But I generally understand where you come from. Subcultures have backlashes and people simply grow up, see things from the perspective of the elder, older generation, and so on.

To dig more into the tunnel, it precisely is because of figures like Carl Jung and Freud, both from the 'linage', so to speak, of Nietzsche, Marx and Schopenhauer, that we've come across figures in today's age (like Peterson) who seem to speak more in riddles than in actual guiding truth.

The hope placed in science, and the progress human transparency would bring after the World Wars was just a reaction of general disgust and disillusionment at the travesty of human nature during the turmoil then. I think it's odd that, those who survived the war became more religious, while the people who were tangent to it became more hopeful.. on nothing too much significant. New ills replaced old ones, and so forth. The more we fight with our micro problems, the more macro the modern issues become, and so on.

Although much of the secular world denies it, religion in many parts of the world bring a semblance of order and life. There is purpose because their needs are bare- and to some extent there is happiness, though at times there may be curiosity for more.

..when the boomers in the Western world go, the world is going to be an interesting place.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

How can we not be pessimistic? People like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were able to educate themselves like no other before them and the self-awareness that came with that manifested a bleak outlook yes. The thing common among most admired by modern philosophers despite all reductiveness and cynicism, is the persistence of man, and perhaps life itself. It is admirable.

We face an unprecedented level of self-awareness, now available to the masses if they so seek it. These philosophers are certainly better than no philosophers at all, and have done an adequate job at soothing the insanity of the world into a digestible bit. If you ask me one of the biggest detractors to philosophical progress is the fact that with this self-awareness mostly via shit media. That and the fact that the world is quite possibly so much darker than anyone can imagine. No one willing to go into or out of that darkness and bring it to light..

Nothing could've prepared the human race for this besides a fucking time traveler.

Believe me that there are probably many meta-religions that have formed. But what is their efficacy? What makes them sustainable? The fear of God or eternal suffering is waning. Pulling from traditions and tenets of past religions and psychological and sociological for community and individual wellbeing is one thing. Organizing and operating of a meaningful scale is another. on the premise of it being good for everyone isn't attractive enough.

There is definitely a "market" to be filled, but those are big shoes to wear. Large movements aren't a thing anymore. Everything is fracturing to greater degrees, and cooperation between these movements is almost impossible because of- well it's an assumption, but if cooperation did happen more often and succefully, I'd like to think things would be better.

 

[onesteptwostep]

Well simply, because; pessimism exists because of economy before humanity. It sure wasn't deliberate, but we should have done a bit of reflecting once in a while before several people hoarded up all the goodwill in the capitalist system.

The entire persistence of man is something that is premised with a disposition, that we are in a system of economics in which we must succeed. Humanity wrote the rules ourselves and the lot of us are losing at it. There shouldn't be a constant struggle, is what I'm trying to say. If we put the curse there, what makes it so that we can't pluck the error out?

Take your premise, for example: a bleak outlook. A bleak outlook of what? It's in the economic game that we're in. And on the persistence of man. Persistence despite all the economic hill, which we haven't the iota of strength to push it ourselves, unless we're Elon Musk or something? Nietzsche and Schopenhauer actually had nothing to due with progress, they were both reactions to things personal in their lives. Nietzsche just being forever angsty, not being able to father children nor find a place in the world, in terms of his personal spirituality, and Schopenhauer just simply reacting to Kant's thing-in-of-itself (and also never marrying). Schopenhauer eventually did find success due to his philosophy, so he was somewhat content, but for Nietzsche, his predecessor.. not much luck.

Empathy with such people is simply empathy, there is nothing to be gained from their pessimism. The only thing there is a short glow of knowing what you feared, only to cement yourself into it because it's all in "text".

Hegel is somewhat the opposite of that. Rationalized reality, married, and actually left Germany at its pinnacle of philosophical dominance. Germany later kinda went into the dark path but that's another story.

 

[Hadoblado]

I find it odd to think of it as their failure. Is this core to how you perceive the march of thought through generations? Very alien to me.

What do you mean by a "systematic understanding of reality and life". Does this have to come from philosophy? Aren't science, politics, and religion such systematic understandings?

 

[Black Rose]

What is the source of spiritual unhappiness? What is its solution?

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Replace Nietzsche and Schopenhauer with just about any scholar after the advent of mass publishing. I focused on them because of their call to fame and your references, I don't idealize them at all fyi. My point was that the way society is organizing itself now is not the way it organized itself before. You know, since Gutenberg and mass communications. First upper-class people had access to knowledge, then "middle" class, then everyone else.

I disagree, that economics is put over humanity. While it's certainly applied to subdue us, using this word in that way is not proper. Rather it is, 'utility' that is set over humanity. This is why virtue, which has little related to utility is a highly philosophized topic (is it still?) Among all the talk about what is useful/valuable for the economy and community, virtue is usually the last question posed. If you ask me, persistence is the one virtue most humans have (comparatively to animals.) Sure the Greeks pretty much nailed virtues, but in the face of an evolving climate and unique experiences virtues are challenged. It's only right that philosophers expand the tool kit and exhibit how they have done it for future generations. "Well no shit determination is a no-brainer virtue" Yeah, it's true, but it is the one virtue we can't live without, and that should be very well remembered. Maybe it is a bit overdone by now.

I mean bleak outlook as in the mentioned philosophers opinion on the "soul" of man and the future of it. You can interpret their philosohy explicitly tied to economics, and posit that their works would mean nothing in a balanced world (is that what you're saying?) but I don't believe that means their writing had no utility. They do trap people into certain modes of think I believe, but that would happen to anyone that grows dependent of texts.

I understand what you mean now. Not an avid philosopher, excessive reading bores me. I guess I'll look into Hegel

 

[Cognisant]

I don’t think people are spiritually suffering, they’re crushed between stagnant wages and the ever increasing cost of living, a reality that isn’t due to a reduction in productivity indeed productivity in general is higher than it’s ever been. The problem, the same problem that there’s always been, is that society is being optimized by the people in charge of it to benefit them at everyone else’s expense. We’re not going to fix this by protesting or voting, it’s not some puzzle we haven’t figured out, the fact is the people at the top of society’s hierarchy have no one to hold them accountable, no one except everyone and the way everyone holds them accountable is threatening them with instability and the resulting deposal.

@BurnedOut I’m not a Marxist I’m a Political Nihilist, we don’t need a revolution we need indiscriminate shootings and bombings and when the people in charge ask for our demands we’ll reply “get fucked” because we have no demands, just chaos for the sake of chaos.

And then suddenly, when society is anything but peaceful and stable, those unwilling or unable to appease the bloodthirsty public will be replaced by those that are and then things will be better.

The French have the right idea, roll out the guillotines, remind everyone who’s really in charge… NOBODY

 

[BurnedOut]

Bloody dialectical of Marx to think that communists won't arrogate power to themselves after being enshrined with leadership by the masses. @Cognisant, think of it. Marxism is one of the methods to cause absolute chaos. Look at Red Terror of Lenin or Reign of Terror of Stalin or Zhedong's Great Cultural Revolution.

 

[Daddy]

I can't blame the philosophers or economics or shitty systems of governance. I blame philosophy for not knowing how to be practical. People only turn to philosophy when their lives fall apart or they fail to achieve for some reason, but ironically, in the end, all this questioning won't really fix that; it'll just grant a greater understanding of the issues at hand; but when you are a sapient being concerned with "solutions", what use is wasting time on the complexities of problems that seemingly have no end?

But maybe I don't really blame philosophy either. It's a human flaw to be much more concerned with answers over problems (we want to solve problems, not dwell on them); but if you don't fully understand a problem, you are doomed to always create more problems with your solutions; yet if you go down the rabbit hole of seeing how complex things can be, you may lose your ability to come up with solutions altogether, so it's seen as impractical. And so it's somewhat of a paradox; how do you know how much effort, research, and time should go into understanding a problem when any solution will be imperfect anyway? Actually, that's become my philosophy, that I will err and will correct, that I will always implement imperfect solutions, and I will be in a constant struggle of readjusting and not regretting that I have to do that.

But then we're still left with the fact that philosophy is not practical. It needs to be. If it can learn how to be practical, to balance imperfect solutions with the complexities of its problems and project that to the masses so that they can find it useful, there is still some kind of hope that humanity as a whole can achieve a "Practical Philosopher King" status. We need to learn how to create imperfect solutions that create lesser problems that are easier to manage, rather than just replacing one problem with another. Philosophy should also be practical. And somebody smart should go do that.

TLDR; philosophers didn't fail. Philosophy failed for not knowing how to be practical.

 

[DingusLord]

..when the boomers in the Western world go, the world is going to be an interesting place.

I've had this precise thought, but only in regards to politics. What happens when the irony-poisoned come to power?

Thanks for explaining some holes in my understanding, and raising my perspective.

"Practical Philosopher King"

An interesting thought arises that a committee or board would not be nearly as efficacious as an individual. Nor inspire the masses much. In the same sense as a president or Roman Praetor/Emperor.
This yearning for an individual (or committee, bleh!) seems to be a want for a second coming of Christ in a sense. But this time he would speak to us about our times, and chastise our modern pharisees. I think there is a serious lack of competent leaders, or at least ones who know how to put on a show. We're just churning the political machines of the last century. Let's shake things up like Cog expressed.

 

[BurnedOut]

We are evermore surrendering ourselves to what humanity has created, this "economy". What is freedom really? Cross out the freedom from Sartre's line and insert economy- and volia, it makes much more profound sense.

What did you expect the ultimate realization of mankind to be? Some kind of utopia? You ought to be kidding me. Are you getting mad at the philosophers for forecasting the betterment of human beings in the future in vain?

Humanity had already surrendered to the economy when agriculture was established. To a very great extent Marxist historians are correct - the economic interactions since the conception of concept of wealth have greatly determined the history of mankind. The capitalism you are talking about always existed in some manner or the other but in order to understand how capitalism has always existed, we have to tweak its epistemological origins to something broader - the concept of more and less, that is ability to use quantitative attributions which are so primitive in nature that even dogs and several other animals possess it. Anyway, the point here is that the future philosophers have more and more levels of self-awareness and that is only natural because of automatic discovery of information.

With growing amounts of population accoupled with leaps in science, I believe that there was already a reckoning among modern philosophers regarding the saddening state of mankind. However, if you unwind the clock back to when self-reflection became a de facto mode of engendering philosophical inspirations, you will find no difference in the amount of nihilism and pessimism expected. And rather than analyzing the causes of such a pessimism so ardently, we can try to understand the fact that we tend to remember negative events more than the positive events. Such a bias is bound to evoke growing amounts of pessimism if self-reflection is the primary mode of analytical thoughts simply because there are more negative events to recall. Stretch this notion out on a timeline and consider the extents of human memory, viola! There is virtually no difference between the amount of nihilism a philosopher of the earlier times would express and the amount of nihilism a philosopher in the modern era would express. However due to growing modes of transmission of information on a mass scale, the negativity is felt much more prominently but its amount should theoretically be the same.

Bottomline is that we feel that the world is going to shit because we hear it much more often with greater amounts of instant social proofing than before. That may explain why people living in war torn areas feel that their lives are vibrant and why we dread our lives which are much more comfortable and luxurious than theirs.

 

[BurnedOut]

I blame philosophy for not knowing how to be practical. People only turn to philosophy when their lives fall apart or they fail to achieve for some reason, but ironically, in the end, all this questioning won't really fix that; it'll just grant a greater understanding of the issues at hand; but when you are a sapient being concerned with "solutions", what use is wasting time on the complexities of problems that seemingly have no end?

There ought to be a space carved out for expressing frustrations and ramblings and ideas in a structured but not necessarily coherent manner. Philosophy can impact practicality to a great extent by defining various dimensions of it which can then be adopted or rejected (at will?). Philosophy is also a result of differential perception of information. The diversity among us produces various canvases of reality which can be tied by using the faculty of thinking which explores causality and ties several narratives together to be (usually) accepted or neglected.

I too believe that much of philosophy is rambling but I respect it nevertheless because it produces a breed of information of its own kind which proves to be useful in real life at some point or another, for example, the idea of libertarianism ties in well with democracy and also utilitarianism whose mass acceptance led to accelerated scientific output by the region.

 

[onesteptwostep]

I can't blame the philosophers or economics or shitty systems of governance. I blame philosophy for not knowing how to be practical. People only turn to philosophy when their lives fall apart or they fail to achieve for some reason, but ironically, in the end, all this questioning won't really fix that; it'll just grant a greater understanding of the issues at hand; but when you are a sapient being concerned with "solutions", what use is wasting time on the complexities of problems that seemingly have no end?

But maybe I don't really blame philosophy either. It's a human flaw to be much more concerned with answers over problems (we want to solve problems, not dwell on them); but if you don't fully understand a problem, you are doomed to always create more problems with your solutions; yet if you go down the rabbit hole of seeing how complex things can be, you may lose your ability to come up with solutions altogether, so it's seen as impractical. And so it's somewhat of a paradox; how do you know how much effort, research, and time should go into understanding a problem when any solution will be imperfect anyway? Actually, that's become my philosophy, that I will err and will correct, that I will always implement imperfect solutions, and I will be in a constant struggle of readjusting and not regretting that I have to do that.

But then we're still left with the fact that philosophy is not practical. It needs to be. If it can learn how to be practical, to balance imperfect solutions with the complexities of its problems and project that to the masses so that they can find it useful, there is still some kind of hope that humanity as a whole can achieve a "Practical Philosopher King" status. We need to learn how to create imperfect solutions that create lesser problems that are easier to manage, rather than just replacing one problem with another. Philosophy should also be practical. And somebody smart should go do that.

TLDR; philosophers didn't fail. Philosophy failed for not knowing how to be practical.

Philosophy isn't something that's meant to be practical.

Let's review how you phrase this: practicality. Practicality for what? I think it wouldn't be wrong to guess that the practicality points to a winning at the economic system, and thus fulfill what it means to succeed in life today. We're still using the mode of economicality and suggesting that philosophy isn't practical for that economicality. What I'm proposing is that the philosophy behind the current economicality is flawed in itself.

The reason modern philosophy is impractical is because postmodern philosophy doesn't engage with systems but with text. Take the logical positivists for example. They believed that philosophical problems could all be figured out if we crack the human language, because it is language itself that causes all these issues in life. But that isn't the case is it? Even a little pondering at the issue would suggest that it isn't language that brings our diverse current ills, but a sense of disunity and lack of direction. Even Wittgenstein, a positivist forerunner, had to muse himself on the profundity beyond non-logical systems such as Catholicism. It goes same with the various existentialists after Hegel. Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, all these people pursued inane things about the self which never gave us practicality but simply elaboration on things we already know, but simply just difficult to express clearly. What really replaced these philosophers? We know that authoritarianism ran amok during Heidegger's time, and during Sartre's a sense of breaking with tradition, and the development of subcultures (the 60's Age of Aquarius for example).

The real foci of the era after World War 2 was economy, not any kind of general notion regarding humanity, and the philosophers during this era never addressed this but went on other, tangent pursuits which really never got at the heart of what humanity should devote themselves to. Beyond the developing culture, and whatever ideals some people took to heart during the 50s and onward, but propelling ideal was about wealth and economy.

 

[onesteptwostep]

We are evermore surrendering ourselves to what humanity has created, this "economy". What is freedom really? Cross out the freedom from Sartre's line and insert economy- and volia, it makes much more profound sense.

What did you expect the ultimate realization of mankind to be? Some kind of utopia? You ought to be kidding me. Are you getting mad at the philosophers for forecasting the betterment of human beings in the future in vain?

Humanity had already surrendered to the economy when agriculture was established. To a very great extent Marxist historians are correct - the economic interactions since the conception of concept of wealth have greatly determined the history of mankind. The capitalism you are talking about always existed in some manner or the other but in order to understand how capitalism has always existed, we have to tweak its epistemological origins to something broader - the concept of more and less, that is ability to use quantitative attributions which are so primitive in nature that even dogs and several other animals possess it. Anyway, the point here is that the future philosophers have more and more levels of self-awareness and that is only natural because of automatic discovery of information.

With growing amounts of population accoupled with leaps in science, I believe that there was already a reckoning among modern philosophers regarding the saddening state of mankind. However, if you unwind the clock back to when self-reflection became a de facto mode of engendering philosophical inspirations, you will find no difference in the amount of nihilism and pessimism expected. And rather than analyzing the causes of such a pessimism so ardently, we can try to understand the fact that we tend to remember negative events more than the positive events. Such a bias is bound to evoke growing amounts of pessimism if self-reflection is the primary mode of analytical thoughts simply because there are more negative events to recall. Stretch this notion out on a timeline and consider the extents of human memory, viola! There is virtually no difference between the amount of nihilism a philosopher of the earlier times would express and the amount of nihilism a philosopher in the modern era would express. However due to growing modes of transmission of information on a mass scale, the negativity is felt much more prominently but its amount should theoretically be the same.

Bottomline is that we feel that the world is going to shit because we hear it much more often with greater amounts of instant social proofing than before. That may explain why people living in war torn areas feel that their lives are vibrant and why we dread our lives which are much more comfortable and luxurious than theirs.

I think it would be better if I showed you a short run down of philosophical history.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes who began his philosophy that men are only able to trust their rationality, or reason, and doubted anything that his five senses relayed to him. The philosophers on the other side, the empiricists (such as David Hume) believed that humans are not able to understand the world through rationality at all, but only simply through the senses, and moreover, that we are born with a 'blank slate'. These two European philosophical factions debated with themselves over a course of two centuries, and philosophers took to one side, either with the rationalists or the empiricists. But enter Kant in the 18th century: Kant was very disturbed by David Hume's attack on causality, (his claim that things do not happen because of cause and effect), and developed what's known as the transcendentalism. Basically, Kant suggested that reality does not exist as we perceive it, but exists fundamentally as something else, which he labeled 'thing-it-of-itself'. This reality we perceive are simply due to our categorizing objects in a plane which we superimpose our sense of space and time, which allow us to percept objects. Basically, true reality is hidden away from human perception, and that the reality we perceive is simply representation itself. Kant developed his 12 categories to find the hard limit of human knowledge and perception, and basically, the thing-in-of-itself was one of the things he rationalized, alongside with God and morality and other things.

Basically Kant more or less ended the philosophical debate between rationalists and empiricists, and soon German philosophers expanded on Kant's philosophy and expanded his thought to encompass all areas of life: economy, politics, theology, morality, and so on. Hegel was the greatest exponent of Kant's works, and it is through Hegel that we somewhat receive a blueprint for civilization and the course of its ascendance to maximal freedom.

The philosophical after Hegel was basically, in short, the existentialists: people generally did not pursue after Hegel because his work was thought to be too complete and massive. Generally, philosophers after him hated his systemization of reality and life: Schopenhauer was one, as with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It is generally because of this dropping of the ball, that philosophers after the existentialists bore the intellectual fruits of today. Most postmodernist philosophers deal one way or another with existentials, generally not engaging with the unity of politics, economy, theology and morality. This is why we often feel like philosophy today does not offer us something practical or meaningful.

The general point I'm making is that we went off into the wrong path after Hegel. After the existentialists, the postmodernists, like the logical positivists, structuralists, post-structuralists, all gave us nothing to go forwards in humanity with.

This is the general gists of what I'm trying to explain in this topic.

 

[Black Rose]

Meaning beyond God is supposed to be solved by the ubermensch. It's a hard problem because with God meaning is objective/nonrelative. What is supposed to replace it if the replacement is arbitrary? The problem is to advance beyond the arbitrary to the significant. How? What foundation do we start with?

Meaning would be found in a person's head. A brain scan could find a mathematical basis behind the meaning. This could lead to benefits of increasing the meaning in people's lives. A neurological meaning mechanism stimulator. The world would be changed.

 

[sushi]

got to thank Marx for inventing communism

 

[BurnedOut]

@onesteptwostep The point I am trying to make is that I personally don't believe that philosophers have failed us. The justification for your negative outlook is economics but if you consider it under ceteris parabus, I don't think your points are valid. We certainly did not go off on a wrong path after Hegel. Positivism is a great philosophy. Pragmatism improves on it even more. Positivism greatly influenced mankind at one point in time, the 1900s were rife with positivists and science itself is form of Positivism. Pragmatism is a beautiful philosophy as well. Read some bits of it and you will be impressed by its practical considerations. Structuralism and post-structuralism are groundbreaking conceptions in philosophies which expose our general ignorance. Do you think these theories have failed us in any manner? No. I think they have the potential to better mankind in the future.

 

[onesteptwostep]

@onesteptwostep The point I am trying to make is that I personally don't believe that philosophers have failed us. The justification for your negative outlook is economics but if you consider it under ceteris parabus, I don't think your points are valid. We certainly did not go off on a wrong path after Hegel. Positivism is a great philosophy. Pragmatism improves on it even more. Positivism greatly influenced mankind at one point in time, the 1900s were rife with positivists and science itself is form of Positivism. Pragmatism is a beautiful philosophy as well. Read some bits of it and you will be impressed by its practical considerations. Structuralism and post-structuralism are groundbreaking conceptions in philosophies which expose our general ignorance. Do you think these theories have failed us in any manner? No. I think they have the potential to better mankind in the future.

View attachment 5685

Why do you think philosophers after Hegel did not fail? What do philosophers after Hegel address that benefits us beyond the economics on which we are bound? Postmodern philosophy is in a nutshell don't ask don't question. It's self-defeating most of the time and when they are not, they're tautological. Your chart even shows us this. Anti-epistemological, and 'primacy of the text'. These notions don't serve humanity, only to entertain us with musings. They are not sincere inquires.

 

[BurnedOut]

@onesteptwostep This is a transition phase in philosophy or at least that is what I am believing currently. The post World War II and Cold War era has exposed one of the greatest foible of mankind and that is the reluctance to think pragmatically, thinking locally and thinking of self fitting in the whole than the whole encompassing the self. The philosophical movement that is currently taking place had a massive bearing on civil rights movements especially the breakthroughs in queer movements and feminist movements. The whole thing is what is keeping forums like these beating as well. People are still fighting to keep the internet decentralized, there is the new notion of decentralized banking coming up due to cryptocurrency, there's concepts of AR and personalized advertisement. The new advancements seem not so great because of the constant advertising that we are experiencing at a much personalized scale (I don't like it, I find it very intrusive but most people seem to love it). The world is certainly turning globally local to a good extent and now we have AI to tailor our individual lives but still sync with the global values. Social justice is another emerging thing, gender equality is increasing, the concept of 'welfare state' gets more and more powerful by each legislation and people are much more aware of concepts of class and the accompanying discrimination. There are still a few revolutions left to happen.

Of course, I might be wrong or I am reading into the philosophy's bearings on reality a little too much or all this is just cyclical in nature.

 

[scorpiomover]

Many philosophers in the past helped commoners, and moreover elites how to understand the world and how to progress more into the future with it. But come to the modern era, there is a certain disparity in which knowledge is seeded amongst the younger generation but are not living their lives fully. This is not because they lack the courage or work ethic or grit, but simply because there are economic forces which are beyond their immediate control.

That sounds like Marxism. Marxists usually say that the poor are only poor because the capitalists have made the system such as to give the poor a major disadvantage that keeps them down.

This simple sentence obliviates the philosophical work done by the existentialists. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Marx- the riling up of the 'will' and to 'rebel'.

Schopenhauer is famous for his concept of making everything about "the will", as if willpower was the main factor in real life outcomes. Schopenhauer's view was that those with a lot of willpower get what they want out of life. In Schopenhauer's view, the solution to most problems was simply to be extremely willful.

Marx applied Schopenhauer's theory to the problems of the working classes. Marx's view was that individually, one poor factory worker wouldn't have the power and resources to defeat one rich factory owner. But collectively, all the workers can have more power between them all, than the factory owner. Power to the People.

Nietzsche applied Schopenhauer's theory to the middle classes and the upper classes.

If Nietzsche wanted to travel to the Amazon and become a heroic adventurer, his mum would probably tell him that he could be risking his life, when he could just stay home and enjoy being part of a wealthy family that could afford anything he wanted easily.

For many young men, the benefits of growing up wealthy and privileged became a gilded cage. Life was dull and unexciting. There were no great achievements, no discovering a whole new country, no heroism.

To Nietzsche, the solution was simply to not care about what family or society said, and be fully committed to your exciting life. Be willful. Make it happen or die trying. If you die trying, at least you died living your dreams.

Nietzsche saw the compassion of modern morality as holding people back, as it gave wealthy families a justification to worry that young rich men were dreaming beyond their capacity and not wrapping them up in cotton wool would result in them taking unnecessary risks which would cause many of them to die needlessly.

So the philosophies of Schopenhauer, Marx and Nietzsche follow the same philosophical attitude, that if you are committed that you'll achieve your goals, no matter the consequences, then you'll get what you want and be happy, and if everyone does that, then everyone will get what they want and everyone can be rich and happy.

The will becomes shattered by the force of time,

But this would mean that the will is strongest in the young, and weakest in the old. That would contradict your claim that it was the young who aren't getting what they want.

and more and more we come to the territory of Sartre, where the modern man is 'condemned to freedom'. There is a sense of pessimism and the ever growing sense of nihilism, of absurdity. Contemporary of Sartre, Camus is usually pointed to as someone who elaborates on this absurdism.

The problem with getting whatever you want, is that only gives you the opportunity to do the things you want. It doesn't say which of the things you want, are actually good for you. So more and more, people were free to choose the things that harmed them.

But since being rich and having the freedom to choose whatever you want, was seen as the solution to being harmed, then having less of that, would mean more suffering, and having more of that, would also mean more suffering.

So reality itself seemed to be almost like a prison where you were damned if you did have wealth, power and freedom of choice, and damned if you didn't. Hence the notion of being "condemned", and the notion that the whole question and goal is absurd.

We are evermore surrendering ourselves to what humanity has created, this "economy". What is freedom really? Cross out the freedom from Sartre's line and insert economy- and volia, it makes much more profound sense.

If you blame the problems of society on the economic system, then that makes sense. But it also means you're supportive of Marx's views, when Marx agreed with Schopenhauer that all that matters is the will to succeed, and so Marx would probably have viewed the absurdism of Sartre and Camus as a poor excuse for not having the will to succeed.

Hegel was a systemiser because he totalized life, ontology, with economic, or the life of the everyday. The later existentialists fail to address this problem, and moreso from Schopenhauer, who seemingly is the father of the pessimism that starts after Hegel. There is no union with ontology and economy after Hegel. The philosophy of the Right (political action) has been slowly disregarded, and now there is an evermore feeling that 'economy' is more valuable than 'humanity'.

There needs to be a coming back to a systematic understanding of reality and of life. We need not to hide under the slogan of 'do what you are most happy with', but rather proudly wear the lines of: 'we are happy to do what we must'.

No wonder the philosophers in the postmodern era have failed us. Their predecessors have failed them.

Schopenhauer, Marx and Nietzsche only say that you CAN have whatever you want, not whether it's good for you. Schopenhauer used to read the Upanishads. In his view, doing meditative contemplation for hours on end, and exercising self-restraint regularly, was necessary to know what was good for you, and to be able to stop yourself from doing what was bad for you.

Kant and Hegel would have also said that you can't improve if you don't make the mental effort to understand the world or don't have the self-control and discipline to stick to your conclusions.

So whether you follow Kant, Hegel, Schopenhaur, Marx or Nietzsche, their philosophies were conditional on people making a lot of mental effort and developing self-restraint and discipline to do what you knew was good for you and not do what you knew was bad for you, no matter how much you wanted it. Those were two factors that were usually in short supply in the general population.

In summary, it all comes down to the serenity prayer:

G-d, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.

Kant & Hegel attempted to provide the first. By studying what can happen, you find it easier to accept what cannot.

Schopenhauer, Marx and Neitzsche embraced the second. By having the belief that you can make anything happen if you want it badly enough, people would have the courage to change the things they could change.

Neither philosophy addressed the problem of how to get people to develop the "wisdom to tell the difference", when both approaches acknowledged that without that wisdom, both approaches would not make things much better in the long run.

 

[Daddy]

Wait, so what's the problem then? I think I read this whole thread wrong.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

I believe that it's a issue of pragmatism. The vast majority of todays philosophy deals in ideals. I THINK onestep doesn't like this because the ideals are already tired and beaten or explore irrelevant and counterproductive avenues.

I personally think that most of what reaches the budding philosopher is trash or goes over their head, regardless of which philosopher. What is of value from the referred philosophers is probably underappreciated because of how ubiquitous their ideas are by now.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Besides Nietzsche, Marx, or Sartre there are 1 000 s of other philosophers many of which would arguably be more important.

People ought to remember these guys were growing up back when the world was different. They did not even have dishwashers.