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I also had the feeling we were talking at cross purposes 😂 Language really shows it's limits when considering these topics, it's incredibly easy to mangle a sentence and give a completely different idea.
Impressed that you correctly detected the influence of Harris on my thinking although I didn't read that text in particular. I'm only just getting into this subject as an amateur but it seems that you have studied it formally?
Formally as in have had a university publish books and articles that I've written on it? No, I'm afraid I have very little university education, I'm largely self-educated. I support people having the opportunity to go to college, but my life just didn't work out like that. I'm all libraries, discussions, book sales, book clubs, writing and IRL political organizing. I've had some articles published but most of my writing is in notebooks.
I won't bore you with bio details, but after sort of rejecting Harris's vulgar determinism, I eventually discovered Rick Roderick's lectures on Philosophy and Human Values. The video quality is pretty old, but as a survey of western Philosophy course, I found this extremely useful and compelling. His course on Neitzsche is also very good. His course on 20th century philosophy, its first episode, Masters of Suspicion is a passionate defense of the self, free will, as well as the validity of exploring these questions.
I'm currently pulling on a thread where I am spending a lot of time thinking about Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx, the short but famous formulation wherein Marx "turns Hegel on his head." Feuerbach's formulation of God that begins the process of turning Hegel's logic against Hegel's own conclusions, established god as the embodiment of humans own best qualities, and externalizing them as an unreachable other, and how it functions as a tool of repression and intellectual domination finds some common ground with Harris's antireligious atheism. But this thread leads us closer to a kind of humanism, whereas Harris's atheism leads us further away from it. Its like atheism's main disagreement with religion is that it believes that science and industry should be mechanism that alienates us from our selves and each other, not the church. Personally, I would prefer not to be alienated from myself or from other people by any extrinsic mechanism of repression; I'd rather throw it off entirely.
I don't think it's necessary to have a formal education in any subject, it's more of a shortcut in the best case. An open curiosity and some logic for mitigating the biases from our reasoning is probably sufficient.
Superficially that is the appeal of Harris, he is articulate and strong on logic but it will only carry an idea so far. His stance on atheism is a good example of limitations of a purely rational approach to living in the world. I agree with his point that we probably would be better off without religion but we still need some of the spiritual elements. I suppose he would argue that he obtains this from an introspective practice which make his blind spots all the more surprising, given his obvious expertise in the area of self awareness e.g. Waking Up app and book. There's some interesting insight on this point by the producers of Decoding the Gurus podcast where they recently mused the rise of fascism. One other podcast on the fringe of philosophy that I've found entertaining and informative is The Very Bad Wizards, it's run by scholars for fun but I first became aware of many of the basic philosophical tenets there.
Thanks for the links, appreciate it.
Great discussion, thanks for sharing your perspectives and sources as well! Good luck on your inquiries!