Hi Diebert (sometimes I think of you privately as "Deebs", I wonder what you make of that). I'm doing OK, thanks - my life is not problem-free but other than that it is open and flexible. Right now, I'm just doing a bit of travelling on the Australian mainland, visiting family and friends.
At Dennis's suggestion, and as implied by you at the end of your bus analogy, here's a fifth sense of "absolute" as used on this forum:
- 5. [of experience] direct and unconditioned.
The end of your analogy actually reads: "In the existential ride, the most important thing is always the bus; the absolute nature of us experiencing (so I guess #3)".
And this does seem to be a core recognition and recommendation of the house philosophy: that the fundamental truth of reality is that "experience is happening", and to strip away the cognitive biases through which we filter that experience, and instead to experience "directly". The putative nature of the cognitive biases (beliefs in free will, in "objective" reality, in God and religion, in the impossibility of absolute truth, etc) are detailed in WOTI, as are the putative correctives, and, perhaps if bluerap had been interested in answering Alex's question, "How will you
speak about this? How will you prove and demonstrate that it is what you say it is?", he might have told Alex that David already speaks of this, proves and demonstrates it, in WOTI.
I think then that to fully critique the house philosophy, one would have to methodically critique WOTI, and perhaps some day I'll do that (a while back I posted a critique of the final chapter, but, aside from an incomplete and unpublished critique of the proof of causality in WOTI, that's as far as I've already gone in writing). For now, I'll just make this observation: the brute fact of experiences happening might be more fundamental or ultimate than the nature of those experiences, but the nature of those experiences is, it seems to me, more
important than the fact that they are happening, because of the fact that they can be pleasurable or painful in nature.
I agree with Alex that the house philosophy is reactionary: I think it reacts against that which is painful in the world, including, as Dennis's contributions make clear, lack of authenticity. The quotes that James has just offered (on intolerance of pain) are interesting in this respect too. I think a useful way to approach a full critique of WOTI, and the house philosophy in general, would be from the perspective of it being a system of pain management: to view it as a way of reducing e.g. the pain of having a free will, and the personal responsibility that comes with that freedom, of reducing the pain of having to "fit in" and live a conventional, limited/mediocre life, of reducing the pain of broken romances, of reducing the pain of loss and broken attachments in general, and, ultimately, of reducing to zero
all pain altogether (or rather, by its terms, all suffering, since it distinguishes between the two).
From this perspective, the ultimate truth of the house philosophy might be seen not just as "experiences are happening and can be perceived directly", but also as "life is suffering, which can be avoided".
This could be the launching point for a dialogue, because I don't think anyone would argue that there is
not suffering in life, nor that it would
not be preferable to avoid that suffering. A dialogue might, though, take place on the
extent to which there is suffering in life, the extent to which suffering
is avoidable, the extent to which the house philosophy
succeeds in eliminating suffering, the extent to which suffering is
unavoidable in the achieving of higher goals (most superficially, those leading to pleasure), and, most broadly, the extent to which we
ought to focus philosophy in the first place on avoiding suffering, to the exclusion of all else that might be valued
positively.
Again, just my two cents.