UKH

Moving Gordon's thread hijack to where it should be:

Why.

I understand the intellectual challenge. I spent a delightful evening with a previous freeflyer consort, dissecting a couple of paragraphs of Wittgenstein and trying to understand it.

However, western philosophy has nothing useful to say whatsoever on how I should understand the real world, on how I should live my life, or on how I should understand the relationship between my emotions and my intellect. Western philosophy is, at best, a nice game of chess, not global thermonuclear war.

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, is more direct. My understanding of the world is an elaborate illusion: I should seek to reduce my thoughts to nothing, and try to see the world as it really is.

Gordon: NO. Get on with the book.

To answer (in massively broad strokes) Western philosophy addresses the big questions through individual experience. Eastern philosophy takes a more collectivist approach. But one size does not fit all and people are hugely variable. 

You want answers that will fit your individual experience? then you either have to put aside the concept of "self" or accept you'll have to work things out for yourself.

Disclaimer: all of the above may well be bollocks (people are hideously complicated) 😁

There seem to be a few ways that academics interpret Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For some, its last remark (quoted in the OP) suggests that - in common with Taoism & Buddhism - some of the deepest truths are unsayable. That's Ray Monk’s view, here, but not Marie McGinn’s:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054945 Wittgenstein (13:40 – 23:15)

The book is based on notes Wittgenstein made during his WWI service. They changed significantly after his experience of facing death at the Russian Front, according to these:

https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/try-youtube/ Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Great War and the Unsayable (from 32:20)

https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-personal-is-philosophical/ [...] For Wittgenstein, the arcane, technical problems of logic and metaphysics were entangled, from start to finish, with the problems of being alive. [...]

At least some Western (W) philosophy addresses questions of how to live a bit more directly:

https://fivebooks.com/category/philosophy/how-to-live/ [...] One criticism of modern philosophy is that it is divorced from the ultimate questions of how to live and navigate our world. Far from the original questions that dominated the ancient Greek mindset, philosophy became ivory-tower speculation. Here we try to redress the imbalance. [...]

It looks as though there are a few parallels between Eastern (E) & W philosophy*. This compares Buddhism & Stoicism, but selects only those insights on how best to live that fit with a naturalistic or “sceptical” outlook:

https://uk.bookshop.org/books/more-than-happiness-buddhist-and-stoic-wisdom... [...] In this synthesis of ancient wisdom, Macaro reframes the ‘good life’, and gets us to see the world as it really is and to question the value of the things we desire. The goal is more than happiness: living ethically and placing value on the right things in life.

This samples a greater range of E & W thought, but doesn’t seem to compare the two traditions:

https://fivebooks.com/book/how-to-live-a-good-life-a-guide-to-choosing-your...
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* https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nfrrz In Our Time: Schopenhauer (&, from 22:45, Indian thought)

https://philosophybites.com/2015/04/shaun-nichols-on-death-and-the-self.htm... (Buddhist views on the self &, from 01:00, those of Parfit & Hume)
 

Life's hard, then you die.

This is only true if you ignore thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Adam Smith (or if you only know the caricature versions of them). Thinkers like this - and others in their tradition, such as Max Weber and Bernard Williams - put the emotions at the centre of their attempts to understand human life, and have an enormous amount to teach you about “the real world”. Far more, I’d say, then “eastern” philosophy, in large measure because it was the “west” that went out and dominated the rest of the globe in recent history and imposed its political form, the modern nation state, on everyone else one way or the other. So reading the best theorists in the western tradition is hardly a waste of time. 

That's a very weird statement. Surely lots of western philosophy is all about the very foundations of how we understand the real world. What things exist? Do we have knowledge of the real world, or any knowledge at all? The whole of philosophy of science and philosophy of mind concern how we should understand the real world (but I suspect we have radically different notions of "real world" here).

There is no western ethics?

Sounds like you're referring directly to Hume!

That's alright if you believe it - I don't. If you assume an idealist position from the start (without adequate justification) you've just missed out most of western philosophy and of course you'll not learn anything from it. But that's a feature of your philosophical outlook, not a feature of western philosophy, which is generally pretty committed to an external world intelligible through cognition.

You can bin it all if you like, but you're missing out. Similarly, those who don't see that there is anything to be gained from examining the nature of consciousness from the inside are missing out - but sitting in a cave meditating is going to reveal absolutely nothing about the nature of the cosmos or the fundamental structure of reality. (Yeah I know idealists think it does, I don't). For that you need to go out and look at it, then you can see what a human being actually is and what type of world one inhabits.

Thanks very much for your detailed post! There’s a lot of interesting links which I’ll be working through next week (and probably after). Looking at your lists, it seems I could spread my wings a bit wider

Camus’ La Peste is a favourite albeit a bit dark!

That’s OK. I hope there’s something of interest among all those links ...

I’ve read a few things by Camus, but not that one (or The Fall), but the online descriptions seem promising – thanks for the tip!