If there is no subjective-objective dichotomy, then what is there? I think that you are just confusing some of the readers. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’ are useful terms if you accept the limitations and the context.
Let’s say that philosophy is entirely about language… why bother with it at all ? You might as well forget about it and go on to the stuff that is not about language.
Philosophically naive, beneath you … much too “black-or-white”.
One’s mouth does not intentionally lie, yet lies spew from it. A person repeats the lies he was taught, speaking for the one who prompted the thought, being the mouthpiece. To be a “liar” is to be one who promotes lies in general, not merely one who has repeated or even invented one lie. Just like “intent”, there is no hard line between how much, how often, or where it began and where it was pronounced.
If you repeat something that was designed as a deception by anyone, you are telling the lie, aka “lying”. Who initiated the lie is another issue, seldom resolved and thus used in scapegoating and blame shifting, hiding the liar even more. But the one who is speaking the lie, is the one who IS lying, regardless of who had lied to him.
And again, when one knows that he is biased, he also knows that his beliefs are tainted, distorted (else he wouldn’t claim to be biased). If he speaks his known to be distortions, he is intentionally doing so, thus “intentionally distorting the truth”, “intentionally lying”.
Hello Faust,
Long time no see. Look me up if you pass by Dallas. I was curious by this post. Not sure if I was helped by it…
Can anyone really “decide” on “God”? I think that “God” is such a wide term, used for things that are so different that it boggles my mind. What I think the term atheist defines is how one might react to the more defined conceptualizations of “God”. Being a believer might not be as consequential as you might think either. Reminds me of that “God’s not dead” movie where the villain made the comfortable generalization that philosophy and philosophers, had demonstrated that “God” is dead, almost as if philosophy=the death of God and yet that is so far from the truth. I heard once that a little philosophy made you an atheist while a lot of philosophy made you a theist. What does that mean? My guess is that this is what Nietzsche meant by the metamorphosis, the camel, the lion and finally the child. This bifurcation ahead may simply miss the possibility that it is a circle to which we return again and again without a final decision ever becoming possible. So you never can decide, but the label hides you from decision and it becomes what you think, what you believe that you are rather than what one has made.
Don’t think that even the belief in a God can help you. It just places the question at a new plateau without resolving anything.
Again I question if this is so clear cut. wasn’t Newton a believer in God? Isn’t mathematics, the lingua franca of science also considered as the language of God, at least by some? Would it be impossible to believe that doing science was the same as a revelation through his language?
Yet, even political scientists, like Plato and Cicero wrote tracts that were solely concerned with the Nature of Divinity, which brings us to the first section then: Is the decision between being a theist or an atheist marked by our political understandings?
Straight our of Nietzsche.
Even better: Master three, so that you can see the process.
Just the Bible? I would the Koran to their reading list. Philosophy is about being well-traveled.
It certainly shouldn’t Faust.
Omar! I thought you were dead.
I think many people seem to have decided on God and I am willing to take them at their word. I cannot peer into their hearts, but there is usually a distinct difference between philosophers who believe in some god and those that don’t. Are they just yanking our chains? I don’t know why they would.
I agree. Best to keep it simple, if you can. But you gotta go with what seems right.
General advice, which this list was meant to be, may not apply to every case. Scientific geniuses don’t need my advice at all. To be scientists, at least.
Ummm, I dunno. But I didn’t tie the two together in 1).
Yup.
I have heard that somewhere before.
There’s more to add, of course. I doubt that most posters here have read the last cereal box they opened.
Jimmy - over the years, I have come to like you. But on this one, you’re a mess.
And not a hot one.
You are hereby sentenced to reading the entire first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil. Report back only when you can paraphrase from memory. Failure is not an option.
Godspeed.
Until someone can show me that they have some sense of logical rationality, I am seriously not interested in their recommended authors, especially one so infamous for naive, childlike, narrow mindedness.
So you have no argument against my argument.
Nice to see you back, but it seems … same ole, same ole …
Let’s have fun anyway. 
This is too binary for my taste. Yes, on some level there needs to be intention, but one need not be aware of it. Can you really not look back on some of the things you said when you were younger and not find examples where you were telling untruths, and really, on some level you knew they were not true (about yourself, like, Oh, I am not angry or I have no issues with women or you really look nice in that). We are not these pure monads aware of all our motivations, short cuts, and find ways to quickly rationalize to ourselves, before the decision really even fully comes into consciousness why it is, well, sort of also true that we think X, or that one could potentially say Y, so we say X or Y when in fact on the other hand we either
Moreno - what is not too “binary” for your taste?
Jimmy - I responded, you ignored. My patience for that sort of thing is greater than the amount of time I have to devote to ILP at this stage in my life. If my probation officer knew I was even here…
There is no good reason to conflate bias with lying. There’s a reason why they aren’t synonyms. The concepts aren’t similar.
Lying, s . Nothing in between. Fully conscoius of what one is doing, Unconscious of what one is doing. And then if you take that into what I wrote after perhaps it will make more sense. I think we can lie to ourselves first, as the saying goes. As one example. I think we can say we didn’t come to the dinner because we weren’t feeling great and even believe this is why when we are saying it,in the mode of believing what we are saying, when in fact we didn’t go because her husband is an ass.
I get your objection, at least I think I do. To lie is to knowingly tell an untruth. But we are not simple creatures. We hide things from ourselves, sometimes extremely well, sometimes partially.
I think it makes perfect sense to say
I realized later I had been lying to him.
A binary, self as monad schema makes this impossible. Self as having several subpersonalities, blind spots in relation to itself, ways focusing on what is convenient, PR aimed internally, etc. all make it possible to lie without knowing it. It is not a perfect not knowing and/or part of you does not know it. Parts of yourself you are not identifying with in the moment or longer do know, or they would be able to shape the lie.
Either some of this rings a bell or it will seem like gibberish. I meet a lot of people who think they are transparent to themselves, a single unified whole and always know their own motives, so they cannot possibly (they think, I would say) perform an act like lying without being fully conscoius of it.
I envy them this experience of themselves. Must be nice.
But Moreno, they are not all hard cases. Besides, Jimmy has entirely missed my point. To argue with you over this would be to argue a point I have not made. WE all have prejudices and more importantly, we all share some of the same prejudices as a race. I am not trying to account for all bias. Never was.
Hello Faust
Rumors are exaggerating. I just got older.
Is there a difference? You made the point that all philosophies originate on a moral foundation. So, could it be that God is a means to an (moral) end? Maybe there is no other difference than the route that we take to pursue our social goals. I would also say that abstraction brings you closer to a belief that even if it is not in God then it is still religious in basis. We live through this belief (unfounded) about “things” that contain, if you will, an identity. Many that have gleefully abandoned their belief in “God” still retain this belief in themselves as something that is more than the sum of the parts, circumstance and time, which is essential to any morality. So while one can afford God being dead, one finds a way to allow for the exception of the self.
I think it is worth looking into, and if it is, then belief in God just seems to be an extrapolation from beliefs held more dearly than that of a bearded man (or beast) in the sky.
=D>
omar - I don’t think I have ever made the point that all philosophy rests upon a moral foundation. I have agreed with Nietzsche that to truly understand a philosopher, you have to take a look at the morality his philosophy supports.
I think gods are born of many factors, including human brain architecture and the need for social order. And language. God is part of a very powerful narrative. Any god worth its salt is.
Yeah, after Nietzsche it became terrifying to hold morals as a philosopher - perhaps nihilism is simply the fear Nietzsche inspires. It is wiser to go back to the Greeks and talk about the morals of a good life.
A morality that has to be built in the consciousness that it’s subjective is very hard to sustain, so the ideals we live up to now are purely materialistic, evident; but this in a way of projecting the image of it. So we get technologically enhanced forms of the most expensive women to represent god, or the guiding passion. I begin to think the goddess of sex might have been the first one always to emerge. The morning star. God is dead, long live the goddess… it’s kind of what went down.
If no movie except the silliest possible one ever did justice to the opening chords of Jimi Hendrixes All Along the Watchtower, it is because they represent in a nutshell all of which has come to go down since the overpowering of European hegemony; a militant paganism with a force that had never before been unleashed in the history of man. Which is then followed by a gibberish of improvised self-satisfactions. Life sets forth beginnings and we try to make an end. But some men set an end so that life can make a beginning. These are called prophets if they become famous.
Why am I saying all this to you, Faust.
How is this going to help anyone go about their day?
But then you admit to being “biased”. 
… let’s just drop it.
Jimmy - Of course I admit that. Else I’d be lying.
Jake - as I have said, the greeks were politicians. But so were the tribal leaders of the Old Testament. Perhaps truly honest moral thinking is only possible now, after Hume, after Nietzsche and after the West has achieved such opulent wealth and so many bachelor’s degrees.
Hey Faust
I always read Nietzsche as a man looking for the primal forces that are camouflaged behind the philosophical discourse.
“Having long kept a strict eye on the philosophers, and having looked between their
lines, I say to myself… most of a philosopher’s conscious thinking is secretly guided
and channeled into particular tracks by his instincts. Behind all logic, too, and its
apparent tyranny of movement there are value judgments, or to speak more
clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a particular kind of life.”
Therefore I think that he follows a process of reverse-engineering: Morality fuels philosophy just as instincts fuel morality.
As far as God, I would agree that God is the emergent trait of a combination of factors.
