/lit/ - Literature

Quietists generally tend to have the following characteristics:

>Religious pluralism. No religion is more right than any other. Religion is a way of seeing and talking about the world. Religions are not in competition with each other. Furthermore, Religion is not in competition with science; they are two different ways of describing reality. Religion does not make scientific claims. Quietists tend to agree that religions (i.e. religious institutions) are mostly bad, but Religion is not.

>An opposition to ‘theory’ in anything but science. Quietism is not anti-science, it is anti-scientism – scientism being the belief that if we lack a theory of something then we lack any understanding of it at all. Scientism tries to extend the scientific method into areas where it has no authority whatsoever, not realising that these areas are after a completely different form of understanding.

>A recognition of the danger and confusion that is skepticism/solipsism. You are not a ghost in a machine, or a disembodied consciousness. Your thoughts and feelings are not locked inside in your skull to which only you have privileged private access. You are a fully formed human body with passions and emotions. Other minds are knowable (but not through a theory!). This is what separates Quietism from postmodernism.

>Quietists emphasise the importance of the ethical dimension of life. Ethics cannot be ‘solved’ or summed up with a theory or some systematic way of approaching it (such as the Categorical Imperative or Utilitarianism). Ethical consideration should be recognised as complex and irreducible, and meaningful.

>Quietism does not fit neatly into any political ideology and Quietists differ on specific political issues. Some have described it as Conservative because of its somewhat traditional standards of beauty and opposition to the fetishisation of ‘progress’. Others have described it as liberal because of its tolerance. (not liberal-conservative)

List of Quietist philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, H. L. A. Hart, Peter Strawson, Bernard Williams, Peter Hacker, John McDowell, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, James Conant, Richard Rorty, and arguably Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

WHY AREN’T YOU A QUIETIST?

>>5746037
I would be a quietist, but as a quietist I don't fit into your neat little labels. And as a Bartelbyist I would prefer not to.

>>5746037
I don't think theories in philosophy are necessarily bad (I consider writing philosophy to be a subset of the art of writing, and one that can be concerned with theories as useful exercises).

I don't think religious institutions are mostly bad, you've got to look at the whole society you're considering.

I don't think other minds are knowable, but I think they are relatable (if that makes sense).


I agree with everything else.

So I guess I'm already almost a quietist.

>>5746065
Sorry, Bartlebyist*

>>5746036
>Wittgenstein is the father of Philosophical Quietism but it also often takes influence from Ordinary Language Philosophy,

I thought OLP was Vicky, too? No?

I suppose the primary maxim of Quietism would be Wittgenstein's proposition of "Whereof one cannot speak; thereof one must be silent".

I would go even further and say that whereof one cannot know, thereof one must be silent.

>>5746068
Since the revived interest in Wittgenstein's work, there's been a lot of talk about what exactly a theory is, because he hated them so much but didn't talk about them that much. Here is a good article that does a Wittgensteinian analysis of the concept of 'theory' (in relation to the art of Biography, but that shouldn't matter):
http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/download/pdf/24187.pdf

The point is that most religious institutions have fallen victim to scientism by seeing their own claims as a kind of science (and therefore in competition with science, so science must be wrong)

Yes.The philosopher Stanley Cavell distinguishes between Knowledge and Acknowledgement, the latter is with regard to other human beings. He considers skepticism to be a problem of ethics, not epistemology.

>>5746095
Pretty much, yes, but the so-called Ordinary Language Philosophers usually referred to the Oxford philosophers like Austin and Ryle (Wittgenstein was Cambridge). Ryle was friends with Wittgenstein but Austin (the second most important philosopher in this tradition) didn't even read Wittgenstein

>>5746108
You got me interested in this, thanks. Will read your link when I have the time.

>>5746098
Wittgenstein changed his mind about that quote but it still hints at an important truth. We CAN talk about aesthetics, ethics, religion, philosophy etc. but we have to talk about in the right way (non-scientific). Wittgenstein, throughout his whole life. emphasised the importance of the difference between saying and showing. Some truths (the most important, some would say) cannot be said, only shown. The deepest truths are unsayable. That could be said to be the Quietist maxim.

>>5746036
>>5746037

What a stupid and false dichotomy.

>>5746125
>dichotomy
You're not a Quietist

>>5746124
So I can better understand what you're getting at, what is a truth that can be shown but not said?

I wonder if there's a difference between what's described in these posts
>>5746036
>>5746037

and these:
>>5746098
>>5746124

When I read the former two, they don't sound like abdications in the way the latter two do. But maybe I'm just failing to follow ideas through to their conclusions; and/or thanks to Western conditioning/self-indulgence, perceiving as a duty what would actually be sacrilege/violence.

>>5746036
>>5746037
>Quietists emphasise the importance of the ethical dimension of life

>>5746150
max pls

>>5746124
> Some truths (the most important, some would say) cannot be said, only shown. The deepest truths are unsayable.

This somehow reminds me of Pascal (spirit of geometry, spirit of finesse).

>>5746036
>In contemporary philosophy there are two major metaphilosophical standpoints: Naturalism and Quietism.

In contemporary english-speaking philosophy maybe. Why is it so fucking hard for you people?

And then you wonder why your philsophy is not popular.

>>5746138
This is a trivial example, but the resemblance between two family members. You see the mother and her daughter, for example, the resemblance between them is not a third thing you see. It shows itself.

Now imagine someone comes along and can't see the resemblance. What do you say to them? The resemblance itself cannot be said, but you can HINT at it, by saying "look at the eyes, look at the nose" etc. and then the person will (or maybe not) see the resemblance in a flash. But none of the things you actually pointed at was itself the resemblance.

Now, going from not seeing the resemblance to seeing it, what has changed? Nothing in the world has changed, the two people look the same as they did when you couldn't see it. Surely nothing in your mind changed because that image would be exactly the same before and after the change. What changed was the WAY you see it, and the connection showed itself to you. Your understanding has changed even though you have collected no new information or knowledge. This is what Wittgenstein called "the understanding that consists in seeing connections"

Like I said, that is a trivial example, but this is the same kind of understanding we have of art and people and philosophy. Seeing things in a particular WAY until everything clicks and becomes CLEAR. Philosophical puzzlement clouds this clarity.

Philosophical Investigation Part 2 section xi (I think?) talks about this in relation to his famous example of the duck-rabbit image

>>5746132

And neither was Wittgenstein.

>>5746165
I see now. I see some connections with Gestalt theory as well.

>>5746159
Continental Postmodernist's stock critiques of analytic "knowledge" and science and so forth is completely dodged by Wittgenstein because he didn't have a representationalist view of language or a correspondence theory of truth. Postmodernists just go on endlessly about these.

>>5746037
I never understand how you can produce knowledge without a theory.

I think that quietists misunderstand the idea of a theory and hence they misunderstand the value of philosophy.

For example a big problem of Wittgenstein is that he had no historical understanding of the development of philosophy and that is why he was so opposed to it.

Also their solution of solipsism and skepticism is pretty meh when compared to the solutions of Hegel.

>>5746179
Yeah, the duck-rabbit is a Gestalt image

>>5746170
Quietism was the name given to him. It's like saying Kant wasn't Kantian

>>5746036
You do realise that "Quietism" is the very sort of that "Quietism" warns against?

>>5746182
Quietist philosophy doesn't seek knowledge, it seeks understanding. And they don't say philosophy isn't valuable, just that it should be done in the right way (and if so, is very valuable indeed)

>>5746180
I'm not sure you really have an understanding of what post-modernism is and also of how the continental philosophers who created the wave of it actually differ from it.

The fact that Wittgenstein dodges a particular critique it does not mean that their position is not different and an alternative.

Also there are other currents which, while they have no interest or space to actively talk about metaphilosophy, still have a different position.

Historicist approaches for example are neither quietists nor naturalists.
Phenomenological approaches are the same.
Neo-scholastics is the same.

And I can continue still.

>>5746190
What is the difference for you between knowledge and understanding?

>>5746223
I'm not that anon, but you can have knowledge of a concept but no understanding of that concept. Personally I'd relate it back to the Hegelian concept of tarrying with an idea and living with it to fully understand it, rather than just knowing the gist of things to get by.

Not to suggest that Hegel was a quietist, though.

>>5746217
Derrida, who I think it could be said was a quintessential postmodernist, for a large part of his life was committed to the view that to understand a person was to do violence against them. Quietism couldn't be further from that.

And Quietism is the only metaphilosophical view that explicitly holds philosophy to be therapeutic. That's the key word really. That philosophical problems are pseudo-problems and require dissolution and not solution.

>>5746223
Knowledge concerns facts and information, understanding is how we think of them (or see them)

>>5746279
>Derrida, who I think it could be said was a quintessential postmodernist
>quintessential
>postmodernist

I sense some deep irony here.

>>5746295
Good quip. You know what I mean.

>>5746279
So you're saying that all of non-Anglophone philosophy is Derrida.

How about you read more to overcome your insularity?

>>5746223
Check out G.E. Moore he wrote about the differences with knowledge and understanding in his "Proof of an Existing World". GEM was also very involved in Witt's life, a few generations younger than him.

>>5746321

Are you sure you're not confusing G.E. Moore with G.E.M. Anscombe? Both knew Wittgenstein, but Moore was about fifteen years older than him.

>>5746316
That's not what I said and you know it

>>5746304
Not really. People use the word "post-modernism" on /lit as if it referred to a perfectly identifiable entity, but rarely bother to define or at least explain what it is, and even more rarely explain why a given philosopher can be considered post-modernist or not.

I have seen 20+ thread about "postmodernist" but I still have little idea of what it actually is (beyond the meme).

>>5746343
Postmodernism, in philosophy, generally refers to Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes. If anyone denies that these are postmodernists then they don't know what the word means or they themselves are just being needlessly skeptical and paux-maux themselves.

>>5746260
I do agree with that distinction but I was suspecting something more along the lines of "knowledge is justified, understanding is inter-subjectively discursive"

>>5746279
Derrida for example wasn't a postmodernism and had a lot of problems with it. For example he retained essential to keep at the center tradition. Also his view of violence is much more sophisticated than that of many postmodernism which have inherited the idea of violence = coercion = bad of the liberal tradition, while he has a more nietzschean position. Violence is both bad and good.

>Knowledge concerns facts and information, understanding is how we think of them (or see them)

I think you are giving too much credit and too little credit to the sciences.

I don't think that any discipline should retreat from claiming knowledge. Not even art. Art has a knowledge that is on par with that of science. On the other hand one should not, or better cannot think, of science as producing only facts and information.

Also how would you define a theory if not as an application of our understanding?

dissolve: are there experiences that transcend my own

>>5746180
What about Deleuze and Guattari? I would say the both of them are anti-philosophy in a similar way w/r/t your claim on Quietists.

>>5746375
Lacan is certainly not a postmodernist. He is a full modernist.

>>5746382
>Derrida was not a postmodernist
>this is what postmodernists actually believe

>>5746458
Postmodernism is not compatible with the idea of tradition in any possible interpretation of it.

>>5746037
Because I'm an Augustinian.

>>5746375
>Lacan
>Postmodernist
He had a fucking hardon for the hard sciences and objective knowledge, he can't be a postmodernist, you dumbfuck

>>5746375
There seems to be a circle here.
>postmodernism is those 4 guys
>if someones denies one of those guys is postmodernist they don't know what the word mean

So the label has no other definition than "those four guys out there" ? Did they form some kind of school ? I mean Epicureanism is named after a guy, but it has general defining traits and isn't just a list of philosophers.

I think OP makes quietism more restrictive than it is.

Quietism is simply the end of philosophy. Jhana/Zazen of Buddhism and Zen, Wu-Wei of Taoism, and the Greek Cynic/Pyrrhonic states of Ataraxia or Apatheia all lead to it.

>>5746386
this

Dissolve how language works

but you have to use language to do that

and language is what we see isn't it

I see computers, tables, cars, people

it's discourse, and it's self-recursive and it's strange and you basically can't escape it

>>5746473
any one know who painted this?

>>5746603
the best part about reaching the end is that you get to start all over again

>>5746329

>>5746159 points out you are speaking entirely about anglophone philosophy

you reply >>5746180 that wittgenstein sidestepped all of non-anglophone philosophy which you equate entirely with postmodernism and derrida here >>5746279

>>5746479
It's not even that. Lacan is way too early to be a post-modernist.

>>5748011
just like life

Absolutely restrictive definitions of everything OP.

We learn more about you and your opinions than about anything or anyone you mention.

Useless thread.

>>5748346

Overrated post.

>>5746182
>For example a big problem of Wittgenstein is that he had no historical understanding of the development of philosophy and that is why he was so opposed to it.

If you can give me source on this id love it sense i feel that about him alreaxy

>>5746036
>In contemporary philosophy there are two major metaphilosophical standpoints: Naturalism and Quietism.
No they're not

>>5748405
Ray Monk's biography

>>5746182
>For example a big problem of Wittgenstein is that he had no historical understanding of the development of philosophy and that is why he was so opposed to it.
How does this affect his philosophy?

>>5746036
So what do you call it when you "hold that philosophical problems are pseudo-problems that arise out of linguistic and conceptual confusions", but you don't "decry the over-reverence of science and theory in the modern age"?

>>5746037
>Religions are not in competition with each other. Furthermore, Religion is not in competition with science; they are two different ways of describing reality.

So do they feel the same way about astrology?

>>5746124
>Religious pluralism
>danger and confusion that is skepticism/solipsism
>emphasise the importance of the ethical dimension of life.

>the deepest turths are unsayable

Was Buddha the original quietist? I mean, he seemed pretty quiet in the stories, that seems to check out.

How does Based Oakeshott fit into this puzzle?

>>5748543
This.

>>5748574
In that he thinks that a lot of the the pseudo-problems arise from the formal structure of of language. Only in the investigations he see language as a form of life and he never really reaches to see philosophy as the product of a form of life.
He almost never sees philosophy as our culture, as the core of the "European Mind" but in a very DFW way he feels that philosophizing is stepping out of the community.

A more historical perspective on philosophy, maybe if he could read and understand Heidegger or Gadamer, would have brought you to positions very similar to those of Derrida.

>>5749682
>he feels that philosophizing is stepping out of the community
It's the opposite. A form of life can only be understood from the inside. The problem with philosophy is that it takes concepts out of the language game and thereby strip it of its meaning.

The history of philosophy really doesn't affect Witty's work at all because it's so technical. He analyzes under our feet whereas I feel continental philosophers look way over our heads.

>>5749968
>It's the opposite. A form of life can only be understood from the inside. The problem with philosophy is that it takes concepts out of the language game and thereby strip it of its meaning.

That's exactly what I said.
But I don't believe that, I think like heidegger that philosophy doesn't take the concepts out of the language game, but IS the language game.

Western culture IS the philosophical tradition. And the philosophical tradition is the house we live in. Doing philosophy is, and that is the point of commonality of Derrida and Habermas, how you are really European.

>>5749978
Honestly, I quite like Heidegger but I think he and Wittgenstein echo one another on a lot of things, only Wittgenstein, for me, is better because the focus is on language and he doesn't introduce confusing metaphorical terms; he tries to bring us back to the ordinary.

I don't see how your last point has anything to do with, or is anything in argument against, Wittgenstein. You seem to think that he hated philosophy or something. He didn't. He just thought he'd figured it out.

>>5750116
Ah he did quite hate philosophy in a certain way. After all he stated that his best students are the ones that quit it to become miners.

But seriously: my difference is that I don't see philosophical problems as a disease to be cured from, but I see them as a form of health. Philosophical inquiry, for me, is not contrasted to real life. So the therapeutic approach reserves no appeal for me.