Tag: practical philosophy

48

a daost-adjacent(?) principle for [utopian/humane] economy

One should only do what one is best at – even the best at

One should commit ones life to what one is the best at – one shouldn’t choose an occupation/career if one knows that someone else will be better than one at it.

If there is no profession that one can be the best at, one can still find something that one is the best at – whether this means opening a [unique] new path or performing a roll (better than anyone else could, due to your identity) in your community/family, in your unique position relative to your specific web of relations…*

Imagine this world, where things are only done by those who are best at them.**

Every individual going that path that fits them, as opposed to being forced down a path that fits the demands of capital/reality – thus equal opportunity for fulfillment of ones desire for life and meaning.

*Or if you want, think of this analytically and more generally in the typical way: as increasing the number of relata in the relational ‘best at’ predicate…

**All but the very best worker, i.e. the master of craft, replaced by machines [and of course apprentices…But do those apprentices simply learn the same craft in the hopes of becoming the best, or simply learn it because it’s what one feels one could do best in among all things one considers doing? Or does apprenticeship change its meaning, so that in every apprenticeship it is implicit that the end of the path is not doing the same as your master, but doing something at least slightly different, something that you will be better at than even the master?]?

February 11th,

a [quasi-]corollary occurred to me:

[whenever possible,] One should only give attention to something if there is no other person who is more interested in that thing…

Obviously, this has particularly weird consequences for mass-media/social media and cultural content.


47

a somewhat daoist practical principle:

Only do what you know how to do.

(If you don’t know how, then don’t try to do it – & therefore instead simply relax and let your intuition/instinct/body take control/act/be – i.e. acting without doing, without deciding/willing/forcing/planning)

to understand this principle,

a) consider what it means to know how to do something. E.g. taken radically/strictly it implies complete confidence in acting/performing the task exactly correctly/fittingly/suitably.

&

b) consider what happens when one stops, relaxes and trusts in ones unconscious/body to guide ones behaviour/movement

So this prescribes a radically un-compromising duality: If one doesn’t know exactly how to do something, one simply doesn’t do it. But in practise this just means that ones waits until one finds an easier/simpler thing to do – one which ones knows how to do – before maybe again rationally considering the harder task…

So I don’t think this excludes learning, in fact i think this is an idea about learning: until one knows something, in other words until one has learnt it, one doesn’t DO it in the strict/rational/willful sense, instead one just plays at it, without pretending that one has the exact model, plan and ability for it – without premature discipline.


Don’t push if you don’t know what you’re pushing towards – if you don’t know where you’re going…. We don’t know where we’re going.


 

 

entry 31

Philosophical training as the taming/tempering of the feeling of being convinced* by an argument:

Through a long process of repeatedly studying arguments, feeling convinced by them and then each time realising that there is an equally convincing (and rational) counter-argument, the threshold for being convinced gradually rises and one feels less and less convinced by rational arguments. At the end, only a perfect argument [, which has the character of direct, visual understanding,] elicits the feeling of being convinced.

That is maybe the central training/disciplining of rational thinking, and the central learning technique of philosophical training. It disciplines rationality in that it teaches one the limitations and pitfalls of rationality – of analysis by [logical] argumentation – it balances the radical ambitions of abstract analysis, instilling humility into the thinker who wants to attempt abstraction of the world – especially by means of argumentative analysis of ideas.

This practice leads to a gradual increase of the degree to which one is intuitively careful, skeptical and critical toward the tools of logical/abstract/rational analysis/argumentation themselves – a kind of meta-criticism or meta-criticalness. And, importantly, this resulting reflective skeptical stance toward rationalistic, abstract criticism somewhat ironically has the effect of gradually opening the mind, as it makes one slower to dismiss an idea that one has counter-arguments to! This is maybe the dialectic extreme/final limit/end of rationality.

– [Paranoid/simplistic] conspiracy theorists lack this training & ability, whilst also being very open-minded [by natural pre-disposition], and thus their open minds are too easily and quickly filled/satisfied by [non-perfect] argumentation (maybe argumentation that is critical of some mainstream position and that suggests some non-mainstream idea) – their minds are quickly, suddenly filled by a huge, un-tempered feeling of convincedness – a feeling they aren’t trained to handle and have no reason to question.


*re. ‘the feeling of being convinced’: To me this is one of the most useful concepts and most important phenomenal/experiential elements of the practice of philosophy. In more detail, what I mean by this: I mean a feeling in the sense of the sort of phenomenon/experience that one also calls an intuition. And I mean a feeling that appears/happens at some point while one is studying/receiving an argument/line of reasoning: at some point, while studying an argument, one starts to feel convinced, or notices that one feels convinced. I’m suggesting a non-rational or irrational, intuitive component to the practice of studying, reading and judging arguments – which is of course at-odds with the normal view of the study and judgement of arguments being an entirely rational process that entirely corresponds to philosophical, abstract theories of logic/of the structure of arguments. Supporting this view that there is always a non-rational, intuitive component to the enterprise of logical analysis is a matter for a later entry.

entry 24

a key concept/lesson in [philosophical] ethics

the catastrophic confusion between 2 types of *should*:

type I: as in expressing an ideal

type II: as in expressing a concrete duty or prescription in a concrete, practical situation of action/decision

A person’s actual behaviour and decisions can only theoretically conform to the ideal, because in reality, they are restricted – by reality, i.e. by the constraints imposed both by the nature of the individual person and of the reality in which the person is acting.

When actions and ideals don’t fit each other, which they practically never do, then confusing these two types of *should* leads to disappointment on the level of personal morality, judgement and psychology, and to systemic error on the level of inter-personal judgement and abstract ethical theory.

 

Ideals are something to strive or long towards, guiding practical action, not precisely determining and judging it.* Ideals are something to think about speculatively or abstractly. Ideals can be as general as basic deontological principles such as a principle of dignity or human rights. They can also be less theoretical and pertain to specific behaviour or action, permitting or prohibiting a general action or inaction of more or less specificity, such as don’t do anything that causes harm to other lifeforms, or, even more specifically, something like never resort to physical violence in a moment of anger.

And on the other hand, there is actual action, which is always a particular external and internal behaviour, and always exists in a unique practical situation. Factors that restrict an agent’s ability to match action to ideal: awareness of facts and relations relavant to a behaviour/action; the actor’s physical, mental and personal faculties in the precise moment; the person’s economic, material, social means; the person’s position within structures and systems of culture, society, reality, etc….

– In German, some philosophers utilize the difference between the two verb forms ‘soll’ and ‘sollte’: one can use ‘soll’ to indicate a concrete duty/prescription and ‘sollte’ to indicate expression of an ideal. This can be helpful, but doesn’t stop the confusion, as it is systemic:

The confusion is a systemic and often over-looked feature of rationalistic ethics, and by ‘rationalistic’ ethics I mean abstracting and generalizing actions out from their real-world, practical, particular context to the degree where one can consider the action in a vacuum** to enable manageable analysis/discussion. In other words, the unfathomable complexity of a real human acting and behaving within the constraints of themself and the real world are systematically ignored to enable analysis.

And all this makes the relevance of analysis to practical life and morality very questionable. And indeed, when philosophers are discussing ethics, speculating about what one *should* do, they often fall into over-looking this difference and taking their abstract speculations as exactly relevant to practical life. And not just philosophers, but also normal people who live under mainstream rationalist ideology that says that one’s actions should be in line with rational principles of action and that cool-headed, rational calculation/speculation should ultimately judge action.

* In a moment of reflection, one can remind oneself of an ideal, calling it into mind or imagining it whilst questioning how ones concrete actions and decisions align with this ideal, and then trying to re-align ones concrete plans and judgements with the ideal. (This is of course an endlessly difficult practical aspect of life, not something for a philosopher to solve – although many so-called philosophers think they can)

** with a much reduced number of relata of the predicate, logically speaking