That’s not what he said. He said he felt he had philosophical and scientific rank etc. Anyway, I certainly don’t think that feeling is far from the truth. His statement reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_vYz4nQUcs 3:17-4:56 (Note that it should say “can only be attained” instead of “can only be used” (and “Thinking” instead of “the Thinking”).)
Now compare what perpetualburn said with what Heidegger says about “direct dialogue”:
“He [Sauwelios] is able to refine your [Fixed Cross’s] position, and you, in turn,are able to build back off of that.”
Thus in a quite recent Facebook discussion in which both Fixed Cross and myself participated (the third participant was a loyal defender of the status quo), I said:
::
It’s obviously not true that Thales only had his mind as a tool. He also had his senses, and the tools of modern science are basically just tools that amplify the senses (e.g., microscopes and telescopes). Now I was aware that there’s another challenger than history to the premises of philosophy–namely the exact sciences–, but contrary to the challenge of history, I don’t take that challenge seriously. I think it’s very naive to think that “a chemistry lab [can] help [us] figure out what all this stuff is actually made of”. For all their high-tech tools, modern scientists seem to have lost their mind. Daniel Dennett, for example, does not even seem to understand the problem of qualia! It makes me suspect that he is himself a mindless zombie.
Against quantum mechanics, I pose quale organics. Mystical? I think it’s the opposite–although, even if we retain the notion of a universal human nature, we must say that it points to “a humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily.” (Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre, page 87.) It seems that only the fewest have the courage to see human nature, indeed nature as a whole, for what it is. Nietzsche, by the way, rigorously used so-called “scientific” method to establish the nature of nature, as I wrote in that thread I linked to:
“I think Nietzsche beats modern ‘scientific’ man at his own game by arriving at the doctrine of the will to power out of ‘the conscience of method’ (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 36). The instincts and taste of modern times, according to him, ‘would even rather bear with the absolute coincidentiality, indeed the mechanistic nonsensicality of all occurrences, than with the theory of a power-will transpiring in all occurrences.’ (Genealogy of Morals, Second Treatise, section 12.) Nietzsche conquers the modern conquest of nature by arguing convincingly that the nature of nature is conquest.”
The conquest of nature was originally understood as the conquest of non-sense and chance, of coincidence. But coincidence is now–with Nietzsche–seen as the coinciding, the clashing, of wills to power. But even more than most human beings, most other beings are hardly aware of what they really are. As Aldous Huxley puts it: “[In The Tibetan Book of the Dead,] the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Clear Light of the Void, and even from lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality–anything!” (The Doors of Perception.)
But the philosopher’s cruel nature impels him to realize the true nature, not only of himself, but of all other people as well–and also of all beasts, all plants–all “things”… Apparently they want to be ruled, rather than having to rule themselves, take responsibility themselves. The philosopher takes the responsibility for the existence of all beings, for his whole universe. He first makes them truly exist: for the unexamined life is not only not worth living, it does not even exist… But examining existence in this way means finding it to be alive–alive and kicking. This is why it suffices for the eternal recurrence to be a myth. A myth is something positive: you don’t mythologize what you don’t deem worthy of monumentalizing. What matters is that the philosopher deems his whole universe worthy of being eternalized. […]