The theory of propositional meaning has been a major, possibly most singularly important, though neurotic, development in Western thought. On itself, it has surely demonstrated its validity, utility, and fecundity. Riddled as it is with self-created paradoxes and other problems, one may sometimes wonder whether what other fundamental perspectives compete.

In fact, as any theory explaining reality, it, too, is perfectly susceptible to comprehension within / reduction to another theory. Slowly, these alternative approaches are being uncovered, e.g. Habermas' view that propositional meaning is parasitic upon lifeworld discourse (?).

After just having read the preface to Irvin D Yalom's "Love's Executioner" (and finishing "When Nietzsche Wept", a few days ago), I feel convinced of his good heart, honesty, and the wisdom of what he has to say. The preface elegantly surveys the four existential givens, that form the assumptions underlying his psychotherapy:

• that death is inevitable
• that one is the author of one's one life (one has freedom)
• that one is existentially isolated (as distinguished, btw, from inter-/intra-personal isolation)
• that there is no ultimate meaning to life
  Furthermore, he describes how therapy always contains the crucial stage of making the patient aware of one's own responsibility (2), and then proceeds with the 'realy quarry': achieving change, which requires, in addition, an act of will. One must know what one feels, then wants, and then one must will to change (self/circumstances).

Very noticable is indeed Nietzsche's influence, when stated this way. After God's death (4), men must create their own values (2), amidst a world defined by suffering (1), and in an individual manner (3).

Personally, I can account for my formative encounters with (3) and (4). As long as I know, (3) has formed a key aspect of my thoughts. (4) is a new addition, of mainly the last few years, and together with (3) amount wo what one might call my quarter-life crisis. I don't really know what to think of (1), and as for (2), it might be key to solving my current situation, as Yalom points out.

But what I find really interesting, intellectually, at the moment, is the interplay between the existential question, which lives on the scale of the individual, and the political question, which lives mainly on the scale of society (though with crucial ties to questions of the individual's responsibility, etc). For me, at this moment, Nietzsche sure is a key connecting figure, then. For, through Yalom's words, I have now clearly come to understand Nietzsche as a key initial thinker on the individual's existential crisis; though at the same time, through Julia's course on nihilism and fascism, I have gained traction on political perspectives regarding him / these themes.

Obviously, and correctly, the first thing you're concerned with is the trolley dilemma. But I think that these two Critical Theory approaches may be more relevant:

• (Marx) Be wary of reification, because it is a perverse power relation between the individual and the system. The individual must be emancipated, and reification blocks this. In the self-driving car situation: such self-driving is a massive reification, which, though in first instance seems wonderful, also insidiously undermines the emancipation of the individual. "How?", you might ask, and being interested mainly in the driving ethics at the moment, and not in the economic and other large scale perverse tendencies of a society with self-driving card. We turn to Habermas:
• (Habermas) Ethics is an open-ended result of discourse. Discourse is, per nature, inclusive, open-ended, and understanding (resp. consensus, sometimes) seeking. However, on discourse, purposive-instrumental theory lives parasitically, and, importantly, flourishes. Purposive-instrumental theory is such that, although initially people gave rise to it for a specific goal, it chooses its goals itself. It is precisely the stuff that disallows re-definition of goals, because it is the recurrence of these goals, itself. What we should be aware of in the case of self-driving cars, is not so much a specific ethics, this way or that, and also not even so much reification as such, but the fact that this reification has a tendency to set its own goals, and disallow interference through discourse. The positive thing about Habermas' theory is that it gives us an approach: namely, we must somehow allow for discourse in the setting of self-driving cars, be it of humans, or cars, or a combination. In the case of humans, we see this discourse in society's shaping of traffic rules and local traffic situations: it is living and happening around us. In the case of the trolley-dilemma, it is the insight that the choice must be one based on discourse, and not instrumentality. Not just for the sake of the results of the choice, but for the possibility of an open-ended ethics discourse. Aspects of this discourse are: being able to blame someone, and by extension, the reasons that this person might have had. [...]

• One aspect of psychological health, is also a characteristic of a wise person: the avoidance of tunnel vision. That is, the avoidance of the association of concepts, or substantiation of the nature of concepts, to the point that it deteriorates the alignment of one's view of these concepts to other people's views. Or, in the first place not recognizing the existence of this distance. It seems one cannot overemphasize the vastness of the personal mind, as opposed to the thinness of social agreement, including language and culture. Certainly, it is a waste to live solely within the bounds of human conceptual agreement, if such a thing were even possible; also, paradoxically, the task of original thought and creation also seems so complicated as to have given rise to socially recognized vocations that do not fall to many; but given the extremes in these situations, taken together, it makes for a wise person to be able to judge these distances accordingly, and a healthy mind to be aware of the general realm of ideas at least as much as one is aware of one's one particular instantiation of these.
• A characteristic of society is the placement of roles. Certainly the reification and specification of roles play a central role in society's unhealthiness. However, they are also a fundamental and crucial mechanism for societal and personal well-being. By analogy, the social roles set up are really no more than the rules of traffic, if society itself is infrastructure. Morality and personal psychological efficacy are two distinct dimensions in the judgement of these roles.

At one and the same time, everything can make so much sense, yet make no sense at all

The absurdity of learning words that encompass the sense of everything, whilst at the same time understanding that a word cannot at all make sense of everything. It faces one with the paradox of meaning

Ik heb inderdaad een zwak begrip van menselijke capaciteit, als het gaat om functioneel bijdragen aan eigen en gemeenschappelijk welzijn, sociaal en politiek. Dit betekent niet dat ik de mens meteen afschrijf, maar dat voor mij het concept van verantwoordelijkheid niet zo'n grote rol zal kunnen innemen. Zo vind ik niet dat mensen daadwerkelijk verantwoordelijk te houden zijn. Ik zie ook problemen met groeps-verantwoordelijkheid. Ik wil deze zwakte niet enkel toeschrijven aan motivatie, of gebrek daaraan, en ook niet slechts aan capaciteit. Het is ook in eerste instantie niet heel relevant waaraan ik het toeschrijf, ik weet alleen wel dat men er niet verantwoordelijk voor kan worden gehouden. Deze ogenschijnlijk illogische situatie is nu eenmaal de situatie waarin de mens zich verkeert. Nu heeft verantwoordelijk natuurlijk wel zijn instrumentaliteit, sterker, verantwoordelijk gehouden kunnen worden is exact dat: instrumenteel kunnen denken en handelen.

Vanaf een brug en hoogte gezien, zijn de bomen niet zozeer die dingen meer die groeien uit natuurlijke drang, en met vormen die ons oneigen zijn, maar tartten ze ons met het overtreffen van onze eigen verlangens omhoog te gaan, veelvuldig te zijn, onze vleugels breed te spreiden.

It is hard to grasp the scale of things.

Humans are incredibly powerful in mastering things that are relatively predictable. Advance in technology is immense, but one should not overlook the fact that this mastering is enabled, pretty much singlehandedly, by the predictability of nature. In this sense, all of scientific and technological advance, the totality of which has so radically has changed society and the way in which we relate to the world, really is not so much of a wonder, and a direct consequence, of the far more wondrous, yet retrospectively smaller, intellectual steps that uncovered this predictability. I'm thinking here of just a few key insights, methodological (doubt, induction, ?) and conceptual (causation, composition, ?).

One is in a state of hubris, when one thinks that our current knowledge of the world is advanced; for as much knowledge as we have in the natural sciences, we lack it in all other disciplines. Psychology is often the scape goat, blamed for its incompetence. But this is only because of its logical aspirations to a natural science; logical, because it is so easily seen how that would work, yet, it does not. But the state of psychology is a manifestation of a larger truth: wherever the object of study is not an obviously predictable and isolatable thing, as is the case with any field of knowledge worth consideration when tasked with questions as to society, politics and human endeavor in general, mastery of the subject is severely lacking. This is not to paint a grim picture, but just to give a sense for the state of advancement what we're in: pretty much complete mastery of all clearly identifiable local aspects of nature, and not much more than a divided clue as to anything that appears on the general horizon of human endeavor.

Such is the scale of things.

When defining mathematical boundary cases, such as the question whether 1 or 2 are prime numbers, or what something ^0 should be, or /0, or the intersection or union of an empty family of sets, etc, one is confronted with the decision what such an operation should actually be taken to 'mean', even though one initially had the idea he/she already knew what the operation 'meant', and was just wondering to what answer these boundary questions would *compute.

At this point, then, one wonders what the entire point is again, to define one out of many possible operations. And it is, of course, a decision based on nothing so much mathematical, as it is on a desire or intended result. Which result is intended, one then asks? Why, it's describing impressions, and this has always been the case. Nothing new is under the sun: mathematics is and remains our best attempt at the simplest, most elegant, yet internally coherent, description of (the abstract nature of) reality.

And it is true, that when thinking of mathematics purely as this cognitively efficacious description of reality, that the problem of the relation between mind and reality is seen as more basic, elementary, or first, than the problem of the relation between distinct minds. Mathematics, then, is indeed firsly viewed in a Kantian / intuitionistic manner, or, hugely dependent on a mode of thought, beit personal or human or ...; and only secondly, as a description of the world *as it is, or, with the perspective that reality is shared perception, as a description of this shared perception, which is reality.

It is after this insight that one can remark that, as so far as mathematics had been succesfully applied to our shared world, and has the tendency to be able to be shared indefinitely, with other people, and future people, indeed mathematics 'gets at' inherent intersubjective structure. ... Can we learn anything from this?

• To achieve consensus is an extremely interesting dynamics, folding politics and knowledge into each other to form (something resembling) understanding. But an entirely different beast is the transformation of understanding, or consensus, into collective action.
• To be clear though, the drive for collective action surely must be understanding.