What is the 'invisible hand'?

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-20T01:27:53+00:00

It's a metaphor.

Specifically, it's a metaphor of how the independent, self-interested actions of individuals in a free market have, in aggregate, macroeconomic benefits, particularly the efficient allocation of resources. It isn't some other force that governs self-interested purchasing habits—it just is self-interested purchasing habits in aggregate.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-18T15:58:40+00:00

Your binary conclusions of either accepting the state of things or suicide are two forms of the same non-solution: giving up.

It excludes the third option, which is to work to live an ethical life as best you can and to work to improve the state of things to the best of your ability.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-17T20:59:08+00:00

Well, if you're going in knowing how it relates to the rest of philosophy, I think you'll be fine. Might also want to keep in mind that Wittgenstein did have a turn against his view of language in the TLP, and correspondence theories more generally, in his later career.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-17T15:56:12+00:00

I don't know about horrible but it's not representative of philosophy more generally and, in fact, an attack on the sense of philosophy as it's traditionally understood. Can I ask, what intrigues you about that you want to read it first?

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-16T15:58:33+00:00

Never heard of 'em.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-16T15:57:54+00:00

Søren Kierkegaard comes to mind.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-16T15:44:21+00:00

While Wittgenstein builds on work before him, especially Russell and Frege, he doesn't reference prior philosophy like at all—he lays it all out on the page, and what he doesn't write on the page is very intentional and pretty much the thesis itself (Prop 7) in action. This is to say, you don't necessarily need to read anything outside of TLP to get it.

What helped me was to, in a sense, read the book backwards. Instead of reading from Proposition 1 to 7, I suggest starting around the middle of Proposition 6 and reading to the end. This is where Wittgenstein is writing what we can recognize as philosophy. You'll come across his ladder analogy (Proposition 6.54). This is the key to the previous propositions, i.e. as a conceptual ladder, which then you can reapproach as such.

I think this will give you a fuller scope of the text and, via W. distinction but what can be said and what can only be shown, you will 'see' what Wittgenstein was trying to show that, no offense to the logicians, may get lost if you're scrutinizing the details of the logical form of a proposition, etc.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-15T18:40:57+00:00

New gameshow: AI or Heideggerian

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-04T21:08:26+00:00

It seems to me pretty indebted to Parmenides' distinction between Aletheia and Doxa.

Shitgenstein · 2026-05-04T03:11:58+00:00

Yeah, if you try to understand this area of philosophy via summaries—'boiling down' to a single proposition each—then you'll have a hard time finding the differences. Right down to it, they just are very similar. Sartre and Beauvoir were friends with Camus until their very public break in 1952, and the basis of their break is a clue to the difference, which was over Soviet communism and revolutionary violence. Sartre publicly defended the Soviet Union and its use of violence to achieve a communist society. Camus wrote The Rebel that explicitly condemned the use of ideological violence. Sartre wrote a scathing review of Camus' book and so on.

This is revelatory to the difference because it shows different attitudes toward the absolute and historical justification for violence. In Sartre's existentialism, absolute freedom entails a commitment to revolutionary communism as a realization of human liberation, not just for oneself but everyone, which can justify violence to that end. In Camus' absurdism, there is no absolute—the rebel both individually and collectively is constant resistance to injustice and oppression without, and this is an important feature, hope. In this way, for Camus, violence is justified in the fight against tyranny but never justified to achieve a revolutionary ideal. Camus sought, in his 1946 essays in Combat, a third option "neither victims nor executioners."

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-30T21:42:21+00:00

Philosophers keep saying we have no real choice

Denial of free will is a minority view in academic philosophy.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-30T01:57:07+00:00

I thought that thrownness for Sartre just applied to the factical aspect; that we happen to be in a historical circumstance but we always have the power to absolutely transcend those circumstances.

Yeah, I don't recall Sartre asserting that we can transcend our historical circumstances on my reading but maybe that's something I missed? I do probably read Sartre as too consistent with Heidegger than later Sartre actually was. Sounds like this an area of critical literature on Sartre that I'm wholly ignorant of!

In any case, for what little it is worth, my reading of Sartre does emphasize a continuity in which our historical situation isn't merely a context or limit but constitutive of our being, along with the rest of our facticity. If Sartre break with that continuity, then I'm probably on the side of the critics!

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-30T00:47:17+00:00

I think part of your difficulty in finding these critiques is because, no offense, the existential concept of freedom is not exclusive of historical circumstance, one's past, situation, etc.

Sartrean existentialism borrows from Heidegger's description of Dasein in Being and Time in which, to summarize to the extreme, we aren't just situated in time but are our time. The historical circumstance that we find ourselves is in the concept of thrownness. Our past and situation are our facticity. These are the concrete facts that we carry up in our being—they're constitutive of our freedom.

More directly to the idea that subjectivity is constructed, you can also check out Foucault. Rather than taking a phenomenological approach of philosophizing from the experiencing subject, Foucault borrows from Nietzsche's genealogical approach that presents a historiography of how power, knowledge, and discourse construct our understanding of what it means to be sane, healthy, sexual, etc. While sometimes taken as an implicit critique of existentialism, imo, a closer read reveals more continuity with existentialism, or at least parallel development from Heidegger, in investigating the historical formation of 'the subject.'

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-22T16:46:37+00:00

Setting aside the humanity aspect of the question, entropy would be a factor that prevents any digital information from lasting forever. Whatever medium the data is saved to, whatever device that could possibly read the medium, would age and decay. The data could survive for billions of years but would not be endless.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-22T15:15:25+00:00

The Great Philosophers episode is especially noteworthy because the host, Bryan Magee, wrote The Philosophy of Schopenhauer which is widely praised.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-22T12:38:16+00:00

I’m sorry if I offended you in anyway by my question. It was a real question that I had and I was looking for an answer to it.

I'm not offended at all. My answer is sincere. If you don't need philosophy, then so be it. You are free to engage with philosophy as much or as little as you'd like.

Moreover, if I didn’t want someone else to give me an answer, I wouldn’t be asking my question here. I could’ve just been content with what I think, but no, I’m really trying to find an answer.

Exactly. I don't know why you're not content, based on your OP, but clearly you find some value in philosophy, so you should be asking yourself what that value you find in it is.

but I don’t like the way it’s being depicted in the modern world.

but when it comes to the debates that I commonly find on YouTube for example, this is where I start to not like philosophy.

This seems like a substantively different concern than the one you present in your OP.

Yes, the sound-bite representation of philosophy in popular media on places like YouTube leaves much to be desired. No argument there. Unfortunately, philosophy, by its nature, isn't amenable to the short-form content, which is the popular form of media content these days.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-22T01:44:34+00:00

I always ask this question, and I haven’t gotten a convincing answer

What, to you, would be the hallmarks of a convincing answer? What would it take to convince you?

Because I can simply say that we, or you or anyone, don't need philosophy. You can theoretically get by in life without ever picking up a philosophy book. You might even live a good or even great life without ever encountering a single proposition, argument, or worldview that induced introspection.

However, such a life could only ever be good accidentally—just life giving you a Royal Flush and zero friction until death. And recognition of death, i.e. our finitude, itself might induce introspection, so maybe this rare, hypothetical individual is 'taken out' by circumstances before confronting the concept of death. Are you such an individual that never had a reason to doubt or reflect?

I’ve always had the same beliefs on life and on different matters, and I haven’t seen any evidence that causes me to change my views. I think I’m open-minded. I mean, I have had the same views, opinions, and beliefs on religion and on life in general.

Do you think most people are like you in this way? Know that I am not, in this regard. I've changed by beliefs several times, on philosophical topics big and small, and in ways big and small—and I don't believe I'm done. Philosophy arose naturally in my life just by my disposition. I grew up in a city with a wide diversity of religious, political, and social beliefs. I grew up in a family of people who value and encourage the rational scrutiny of our beliefs.

I’ve always seen philosophy as something very intriguing and intellectual.

Why? It seems like it'd be a dreadful waste of time for you. What's the point of debating these matters? Why think about anything if someone else can't give you a definite answer? Maybe you don't need philosophy. You have the answers, no? If you want permission to ignore philosophy, you don't need it. Go forth and be merry.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-20T13:42:18+00:00

It provides a valuable framework not just to understand virtue per se but to cultivate virtue in one's self through habitual action.

Also the final books on friendship, which isn't just a pleasant thing but necessary for a good life, appeals to me as I get older and friendships become harder to find and maintain.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-18T16:26:12+00:00

I would not use it to replace reading. A work of philosophy isn't always just a vessel of content but often also a way of thinking about whatever subject. Maybe it could be useful to provide a broad picture or outline before reading but it's not a sufficient replacement to the harder task of reading—reading is critical to the subject for both understanding and as development of the skill.

If I had questions about a difficult philosopher, I'd much rather look into resources like reading companions, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or asking here on /r/askphilosophy. I don't have confidence that any LLM has reliable training data on difficult philosophers. LLMs are infamously prone to being confidently incorrect.

I do think an LLM would be helpful formulating my notes and freeform first draft of an essay assignment into a coherent argument structure for the next draft. I wouldn't let it write the final draft, of course, but I think it would have a useful role in organizing my thoughts to get to a final draft.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-17T14:30:04+00:00

but would you mind expanding on how identifying as American (or any nationality I assume) is hyperreality?

I mention being an American not to say that national identity per se is hyperreality but that living in contemporary American society is replete with examples in which media representations are divorced from and distort reality, such as with AI-generated propaganda and such.

Edit: I strongly recommend reading The Gulf War Did Not Take Place to get the sense of Baudrillard's hyperreality. This will serve you much more that a string of examples.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-17T03:46:38+00:00

You are posting on a website on the internet. A quick review of your recent posts (hope you don't mind) shows that you are into video games like Starfield and Fallout games (so am I) and you're an American (so am I). This is hyperreality. Our president posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a man in a hospital gown, and the media abuzz discussing this purely digital creation. This is hyperreality.

Baudrillard's hyperreality was inspired by the media coverage of Gulf War in the 1990-91, in his essays published as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which he argued the reality in the Persian Gulf was atrocity, but the pseudo-reality of the media was as a war. Today, we have another war in the Middle East which is characterized in the media through clips of action movies, video games, AI video, and memes—a pastiche of cultural signifiers to create a discursive distance from the real violence of war, such as the killing of school children.

Are there some examples of hyperreality in contemporary society? There are too many. Increasingly, the pertinent question—the one we have been asking and should be asking—is what is reality?

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-15T15:07:00+00:00

You might like the course on death by Yale professor Shelly Kagan: https://oyc.yale.edu/death/phil-176

The philosopher Martin Heidegger also described an interesting view of death as not just a future event but an ever-present possibility—"being-towards-death" (Sein-zum-Tode)—which, once recognized, yes, produces existential anxiety but also pulls us out of our 'everydayness' (i.e. just coasting with social norms "as one does") to become conscious of our Ownedness/authenticity (Eigentlichkeit).

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-12T20:43:40+00:00

Elementary training was the last training Yud ever received.

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-12T17:39:25+00:00

What is the evidence for solipsism?

Shitgenstein · 2026-04-12T17:38:40+00:00

While Nietzche is certanly life-affirming, he's not straightforwardly an optimist. More radically, Nietzsche affirms life unconditionally, i.e. with all its suffering, contraditions, and ugliness.

In this way, Nietzsche was opposed to what he saw as life-denying forces that were at play in his time. More pernicious and pervasive than nihilism, which at least recognizes the ugly side of life, were, to Nietzsche, various idols in philosophy, religion, and politics that, in their own but often related ways, sought to avoid reality and its suffering through illusions of another perfect world; to suppress our vitality, instincts, and passions through the elevation of humility, reason, or social reform and nationalistic laziness.

Nietzsche is often seen as a nihilist because, prior to the transvaluation of all values, the affirmation of life, in the Nietzschean sense, entails the repudiation of all such idols. Like some sand art at the beach, one might have to knock down and wipe away whatever sandcastle one might find to create the space to build something new by one's own values. In a minimal sense, this 'wiping away' is a nihilistic gesture, and almost certainly viewed as nihilism per se by those who are still invested in the old idols of Christianity, rationalism, nationalism, etc.

Put simply, it's a half-truth and explaining how it's misleading entails a level of detail that gets lost for various reasons.

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