Philosophy allows for the only pure agenda/affectuation. It is under the effort and context of philosophy, under the intention of it, that pure human relations can flourish. I am convinced it is only philosophy that can do this.
How do I know? Because I have tested and tasted every other alternative, and found only philosophy allows for the purest most truthful connections, willings, shared concerns and openness of thought, intention, strength and weakness… it is only by sharing the goal and intention of philosophizing that two people may enter into the most authentic and truthful relationship wherein anything might be shared openly, which is not to say carelessly of course, yet openly and without fear of false judgment.
Every single other human context I have experienced comes with a dark, deep backdrop of false judgment. May the conversation, ideas or admissions stray a bit too far from the “correct” paths and suddenly the relationship that seemed so authentic and real is instead, revealed to be based on falsehoods and hidden capitulations. Secrets. Yet it is philosophy that can (perhaps not required to, of course) remove all need for secrets, where I can be totally myself.
I have been, totally myself. With just two people on this planet, Fixed Cross and Parodites. Both of those relationships I had were pure, authentic, and I shared my honest self as in “bleed openly” which became a sort of creed for me. I did not do this to offend or confuse, or to brag, or to overwhelm, or to get laughter, I simply did it because it felt important. It became a natural off-shoot of my philosophizing, to be able to share my ‘social web’ with someone else in such a deep way. I also tried this with a few different females over the years, decades really, but that always ended in ruin. I am therefore convinced that philosophy runs deeper, much deeper, than does love.
Therefore I propose we re-think the definition of philosophy as truth-love. Instead, I think it should be focused on the meaning as truth-experience: Alethempeiria, combining the word for truth (reality, disclosure, not-forgetting) with the word for experience.
Going forward into the future, alethempeiria will be critical to replace (builds upon, pays homage to yet goes beyond, expands) philosophy. Why? Well because it clarifies and elevates to another level. Let me explain.
Every philosophical act thus-far, at least as far as I have observed and with very few exceptions (although there ARE exceptions, and these have built toward the revelation I now see and write about in this topic) has been partial, limited, and enacted under the impetus of some other intention, be that other intention psychological in nature, or social-instinctual (biological), or political-ideological. In any case and however we would wish to frame this context, truth (here under philosophy as wisdom, sophos) has rarely been pursued authentically and for its own sake. ‘Truth for its own sake’ is an unknown concept even within the pantheon of philosophy, now consider just how strange that is. If you doubt this is true then simply open a philosophical text, read a philosophical paper or have a conversation with any self-proclaimed “philosopher” today. This lack was certainly less tragic, less lethal in past centuries yet even there the error remains, it lingers, hidden behind the otherwise honest and well-meaning truth-seekings of even the most famous philosophers.
I have known a rare few people who indicate truth for its own sake as a part of their personality, integrated into who they are. These people are without exception extremely open-minded, humble, curious, and well-meaning. What does that remind you of? It reminds me of children, at least some children do possess those qualities to one degree or another, contrasted with adolescents and adults who almost never possess these, certainly not all together and consistently over many situations and contexts.
But the personality type is not my focus right now, and in fact the above-mentioned type does not elevate or rise into philosophy proper, not as far as I have seen, in fact it rises far more into poetry and other more aesthetic concerns. Music for example. Probably the visual arts too although I have not observed that specifically for myself. In any case, to intend toward philosophy itself, as discipline, as will, and putting in the hard work and time needed toward climbing that mountain I have noticed this base personality takes on variations. Again, that is not the point of this topic, but I think it should be noted.
A question arises as to why I have replaced sophos with aletheia. While sophos in the original meaning does indeed already include some aspect of reality or truth-adherence, for to be wise one must be able to successfully differentiate between truths and falsehoods, at least sufficiently so to the given context or challenges at hand, I do not believe this is enough to accurately or even sufficiently capture the critical importance of what is called philosophy. Truth for its own sake has been lost and does not even appear under the guise of ‘wisdom’, indeed it could be argued that in many instances adhering to truth for its own sake is decidedly unwise. Therefore wisdom must be replaced with truth itself, aletheia, which is intended to mean reality itself, everything, truth as such, existence, all. “Not-forgetting” as in a-lethe, lethe being the word for hiding, concealment, not known, or known but forgotten. All of that is opposed to produce aletheia, truth as disclosure. Truth as revelation of that which had been hidden, unknown, or lost.
Empeiria means experience, as in the basis for empiricism. It means direct experience, skill, acquired by direct reality-encounters. This represents an interesting blend of the down to earth with the otherwise far more abstract or conceptual aletheia. I want this contrast to be obvious, because I think it is in this contrast, this opposition which presents at times as such an impossibility and contradiction, producing so much tension and tectonic stress for example, where true alethempeiria is achieved. This is the context, the underlying potentiating dynamos and ethos of it.
___________ “Spirit is the power
to bestow
value.”
-Fixed Cross
“But even before you break through Pandemos into Ouranos, ie. even before you reach the
necessary height for gazing upon the Plotinian Monad, with your mind impregnated
by the protophanic harmedon or divine phallic Yod… these are, as I called
them before, living symbols- beings who are partially independent
from and partially dependent upon the human being and our
minds, with the perfect God at the end of this infinite
series alone being truly independent from the
finite conscious self…”
-Parodites
“It was not made to be art, it was made
for the sake of improvement by
passing on knowledge, and
it simply became art
in the process.”
-Abstract
Hmm hmm… with some caveats its true, yet… tis gonna be a bit of a wild card but… i disagree.
Embodied experience will be a much better vessel for transferring information, point, agenda and meaning.
Philosophy deals with abstract concepts. Something like a story however would allow the individual to experience them from a personal standpoint linking up the emotional half with the problem as well.
Of course optimally both need to be present. Logic and emotion both need to be present to complete an internalization circuit, it just happens that emotion will always carry more priority and seem more real due to its internalized and personalized nature.
So my addition would be that the delivery method for philosophy should not be raw logic and rationalism but i.e. philosophical example stories.
Because philosophy is such a high gain game the risk (shadow) is also very great.
Love of wisdom.
Is it wise to love truth above all else? (Nietzsche)
Must not be truth about something?
What is the truth about truth other than that it is true? Can it be purely for its own sake if it is about something other than itself? I think it’d be also always be for the sake of its subject.
Indeed in many case as a form of domination, mastery. To posit power as the subject of truth is a truthfulness.
Nietzsche loved truth as something alive, fickle and demanding, a woman, a question rather than an answer.
Aletheia: that which is disclosed. All-inclusiveness is not included in its definition, and may be precluded as “All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing.” (Heidegger)
So truth as disclosure, or truth as always even present all of reality?
Would full disclosure not be a collapse of the probability function.
To this topic: Is particular experience (empeiria) is the first clearing ground? Or must the clearing precede the experience?
How much of history, culture, religion, entertainment, politics, relationships, self-awareness, sophos is really little more than “philosophical example stories”? Read Socrates, I mean his “wisdom” is just so many stories upon stories, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with drama and tragedy of course, and look too for the modern person to fill his spare time with Netflix and HBO (I do).
Philosophy does not ONLY deal with abstract concepts, it deals with truth. And sometimes truth is raw, vivid and real; down to fucking earth, visceral and in your face. Hard, painful, alluring even. Emotional.
Those who split truth or reason/philosophizing off from emotions, are far away from the point of this topic. Yet I do wish them well and believe they will reach the summit in their own good time.
“Cosmosis” already showed this. Confirming what tectonics already described. For what is an emotion, but a truth-signal, a revelation of some scope of reality? Emotions and feelings are truths attempting to do something. And even under the ontological demand of “doing-something-as-such” qua structure itself. What does biology have to say to that? Not much, but that is only because it is subservient thereof.
Well yes, both should be present, and usually are present. And emotion will often compel more powerfully, that is its nature and rasion d’etre.
Notice the “seem more real” here. A question: at least taken from an evolutionary angle, why would emotions/feelings need to seem more real than stuff like thoughts, ideas, beliefs? What is ‘theory’ and why did even the old Greeks visage the greatest endeavour under the sun of truth as something they literally called a love of wisdom**?**
There are deep, deep earth-tectonic reconciliations that are yet to be made. Alethempeiria makes them. Or at least, indicates the direction they are already happening.
I merely said that an optimal delivery method for concepts would need to be something closer to human beings than philosophy because you might as well go with mathematics if you want to base everything on pure logic. Of course chances are that 99.99999999999% of humanity will never understand your message because it lacks every form of context.
The problem is that they really are not.
If they were usually or mostly present, we’d be not in a 20’000 year long cycle of repeating the past’s mistakes, stuck with perpetually destroying and rebuilding our societies. The fall of rome and the already festering and rotting state of today’s civilization clearly show that neither the logic nor the message sticks.
Because the brain does not treat all information the same way.
Your musings about a flower field on an sunny afternoon is not prioritized, stored, processed, understood or remembered the same way as that one time you were stabbed in the shoulder and barely escaped a pack of thugs with your life.
So you just want to amass all the random factoids you can, with no sense that some are more worthy of focus than others?
I’ma have to pass.
Next.
Oh. Copilot has this to say:
Short answer:
If you demand alētheia (unconcealment, truth-as-disclosure) apart from sophia (wisdom, the right orientation toward the good), you get truth without guidance, disclosure without discernment, and eventually violence masquerading as clarity.
Now the full, structured version—clean, triadic, and stable.
What “alētheia without sophia” does
Alētheia in the Greek sense is not “correct propositions” but the event of revealing—the lifting of a veil.
Sophia is the normative orientation—the capacity to rightly order what is revealed.
Demanding alētheia apart from sophia produces three predictable collapses:
Revelation without evaluation
Truth becomes mere exposure.
Anything that can be revealed must be revealed.
This is the logic of voyeurism, surveillance, and “radical transparency.”
• Alētheia says: “Here is what is.”
• Without sophia, nothing says: “Here is what ought to be revealed, and why.”
This is the same structural mistake as pursuing is without ought.
Disclosure becomes domination
When revelation is unmoored from wisdom, the one who reveals becomes the one who controls the frame.
Alētheia becomes a weapon:
• “I will expose you.”
• “I will force the truth into the open.”
• “I will drag what is hidden into the light whether it is good or not.”
This is the collapse of truth → power, the very thing Plato warns about in the Gorgias and Republic.
You get technē pretending to be sophia
In the absence of wisdom, technique steps in.
The question becomes not “What is good?” but “What works?”
This is the modern collapse:
• data without judgment
• facts without meaning
• disclosure without telos
Technē fills the vacuum left by sophia, and the result is a world where the capacity to reveal outruns the capacity to interpret.
How this maps to your triadic C‑Theory
Using your stable triad:
• Being / Is / Father / Alētheia
• Action / Ought / Spirit / Sophia
• Quality / Value / Son-Logos
Demanding alētheia apart from sophia is a forced separation of Being from Action, which collapses the Logos/Value pole:
Being without Action → static disclosure
Action without Being → arbitrary will
Logos/Value loses its grounding and becomes either sentiment or propaganda
This is exactly the modal-collapse risk you’ve been guarding against:
a unilateral pole trying to do triadic work.
What Plato would say (Theaetetus resonance)
Plato’s entire critique of the “bare perception = knowledge” thesis is that perception (aisthēsis) without logos collapses.
Alētheia without sophia is just the same mistake at a higher register:
• perception without account
• disclosure without orientation
• unconcealment without measure
It is the anti-theosis move: revelation without participation.
The non-obvious insight
Alētheia without sophia eventually destroys alētheia itself.
Because when revelation is not guided by wisdom, people learn to hide, distort, or weaponize what is revealed.
Truth becomes unsafe.
And once truth becomes unsafe, it becomes scarce.
Thus:
Truth pursued without wisdom annihilates the conditions for truth.
One precise follow-up
Would you like to explore how sophia without alētheia collapses, or how the two integrate in a triadic, non-collapsing structure?
I think this was Copilot calling bullshit. Because it really doesn’t sound like the person who is demanding pursuing alethia over sophia isn’t prioritizing, or doesn’t have their own concerns/cares… they’re just really effed up ones.
That is a very good observation. With so much to gain, it makes sense to think the risk would be commensurate. Or if not entirely then at least the risk along with some other things that act as natural barriers, like intention and skill and time investment (opportunity cost).
Yes, I see that risk along with those other things stands as the counter-pole or perhaps just the threshold needed to be achieved to catalyze philosophical success. There is probably an equation factoring in all such variables weighted in relation to one another, with the value of that total grouping acting as the limit of philosophical success for any given point in one’s life.
Interesting to think of it only in terms of risk, but I believe that would be a large error. Although we should probably analyze the risk factor by itself, since it seems more than the others to beg for being understood better.
Nietzsche didn’t think it was wise, and he was probably right about that.
But viewing the truth as subservient to wisdom would seem to indicate a low-tier understanding of what truth is. Truth, to me anyway, is quite literally everything. Everything that exists, all facts, all reality everywhere which includes the how and why behind all of it too. All individual things and all things taken together in groups and objects insofar as that represents how reality actually is, on all levels everywhere and at all times. From that point of view, wisdom can be seen as a relatively small component within the overall truth – yes wisdom is good, we ought to value it, but it can never take the place of truth.
Now in terms of love, sure, maybe. Maybe it makes sense to love wisdom more than the truth, after all we are living beings with needs, we are finite, limited, we must act to continue our survival if we want to keep existing. Therefore anything that works in favor of our survival should be valued as good for us, all other things being equal, and certainly wisdom already has that baked into it. Whereas truth itself, loving truth, may include that (well it does) but as you have pointed out it also includes many other things which are either irrelevant to our survival or even antithetical to our survival.
Would it make sense to love something that is antithetical to our own survival? Not from the point of view of our survival being the standard of value. Or at least, not if the threat were grave enough. But imagine that we also need to be aware of things that are threats, so we can counter them or avoid them. We must know a lot of bad things too, not only good things. That is probably why the garden of eden failed. How can one avoid bad things that would harm oneself if one has no knowledge of such things to begin with? And that goes back to wisdom of course, all of that can be included in what is wise at least insofar as the opportunity or maintenance costs are not unduly greater than the actual benefits we gain thereby.
I suppose that is the thing… cost vs benefit, like what you were talking about before. Wisdom is very much concerned with this, it must be. All of life is concerned with this, perhaps we could say that life itself is nothing but this very concern as such (although I would intuitively disagree unless this were really attempted to be fleshed out beyond a surface level interpretation). Truth also includes cost vs benefit, but then again truth also includes everything else too.
If wisdom is a part of truth, which it is, then I wonder to what extent truth-loving is already guided in practice by wisdom’s influence. After all, life itself is ‘a wisdom-process’ and that must be true for every life-form that is not an immediate and abject failure. If life (you, me, all of us) are a wisdom-process then even if we love truth as our highest value would it not also be the case that our truth-loving is already necessarily guided actively or at least behind the scenes by something like wise cost-benefit influences indicating which truths to love more, or first, or as priority to examine over other truths?
Perhaps the opposition between truth and wisdom is very much a false opposition. If so, then much of this discussion here can be realized in a higher paradigmatic reconciliation. And we are probably not even disagreeing so much as viewing the same thing from two different ‘sides’. One side looks like it looks to you, the other side looks like it looks to me, but in the end we are both gazing at the same thing. I am curious if this turns out to be correct.
Truth, again for me, is just everything that exists. So flying purple elephants are true too, but only as the idea we might have of them (as far as we know that is the only way in which they are true). Cows are true in that way but also in the way that they exist outside of the human mind. Or rather, to be technical about it, something exists out side of the human mind which we refer to as cows. We have some understanding as to what those things are, but of course a lot of that understanding is still filtered through our own subjectivity (getting to your later point above), so how do we know which parts of our understanding are only in our own subjectivity vs which are beyond it?
That is part of the process of understanding. I actually like an analogy from Ayn Rand here (bear with me), a person looking to the bottom of a shallow clear river sees the rocks at the bottom shimmering and moving. They know that is only an optical illusion of the light moving through the moving water, therefore the person concludes that their eyes are deceptive and do not give them accurate reality; however, that is only the first half of the truth, the second part is that their eyes DO give them accurate reality because the rocks shimmering and moving like that is precisely how they would appear when seen through moving water (and we already know this, because we know how the water causes this movement as an illusion). So greater knowledge repairs the errors or limits of lesser knowledge.
In the same way, understanding the limits of our own subjectivity and how knowledge appears to us through the filters of our subjectivity is simply one part of developing a greater understanding beyond those very limits. I understand that my understanding of what a cow is has already been filtered by how my senses perceive the cow and all past inherited ideas I have regarding cows which ideas I picked up from human culture here and there. It is not that all of those are wrong and should be discarded of course, but they should be properly categorized in terms of their accuracy or lack thereof regarding the issue of ‘what is a cow’. We can do that, we are doing that all the time – cataloguing and categorizing our understanding of things we already understand. That is basic cognition, at least for human beings. We do not typically act as if belief or ideas were black and white, true or false but we assign weights and values and these are constantly up for reinterpretation.
I know there is a category of truth out there which includes the sum total truth about the issue of ‘what is a cow’ even if I also know that I can only access part of that category, and likely I will never be able to access the entire category itself. For instance I will never know what is feels like to be a cow, and I will never know what a cow is understood as being or experienced as being from the perspective of a horse, or a squirrel. I will never have a complete grasp about the history of cows, how they evolved, what their biology is like, what their psychology is like, etc. I might get little bits of information about these but clearly I am lacking the majority of an understanding when it comes to most of those areas related to the issue of ‘what is a cow’.
In this case you are right, truth is about something. There is a truth about the cow. That truth can be visualized as the category of all truths pertaining to the issue of what is a cow, regardless of how much of that category we happen to know or be able to access or not. But there are layers here, which is easier perhaps to see when we think in terms of facts: it is a fact that cows exist, and there is a set of facts that describes what cows are. There is also a set of facts that describe how cows appear to be from our human perspective, and there is also another set of facts that describe the difference between how humans perceive or experience or know what cows are vs the rest of the category of ‘what is a cow’ that humans cannot or do not access. All of those facts are true, and some of them exist nested within others. Not all facts exist along a flat plane, sometimes they are categorically set within or beyond one another, like Russian dolls.
So “what is the truth about the truth other than that it is true?”, as far as we know that is enough in terms of a true description. But it serves as a basis for our mind, for conception itself. As Parodites said, truth is the concept of concepts; without it, we cannot even get off the ground. If you want to maximize subjective progress or development and truth itself is not your primary concern, you must still make truth itself a primary concern in order to do that. At least as far as I see it. Maybe I am wrong and it is possible to disregard truth itself entirely and just fall into oneself subjectively, lose the outside world and exist within one’s own mind entirely. Maybe that is what madness is, or genius. But I think even if that is the case, even if one deliberately devalues or ignores truth itself as an idea, truth itself is nonetheless still there, present, acting as a necessitating and necessary background for all of that subjective development and activity. Because after all, even the most relative subjectivity in existence still… exists. It exists in a way that is beyond itself, like all things do. That is why I find it so confusing when people posit subjectivity and objectivity as a black and white antithesis, because they are not; you can always trace the subjective into the more objective, if you try. Pick anything about yourself that is subjective, then start tracing the reasons for it being what it is. Call it X, whatever aspect of yourself you are thinking about stands in as a good example of subjectivity. Trace from where X comes, why is X the case, how did X comes about to be the case and how does X continue to exist as it does? And what does X represent or indicate about existence beyond itself and beyond the living subjectivity of which it is part? It seems to me that every subjective thing is, in a more final analysis, just one part of something that is far more objective (of truth itself).
Although here there is perhaps an issue as what Nietzsche pointed out with freedom, that even if free will doesn’t exist the idea of it still has value, it is still important to humans to believe they are free. Perhaps the same is the case for the idea of subjectivity-as-such (or the black and white opposition between subjectivity and objective truth)? But even if that is the case, it is still just one more example of a truth within the larger set of all truths. And we could value that truth for its own sake too, even if that appears to be at odds with the meaning of it (of a requirement of belief or affirmation regarding what is good or necessary for our own existence as such and such subjective beings). I believe there is a greater reconciliation to be found therein, effacing the black and white distinction that these may appear initially in terms of. I believe that not on faith but because I see it, I see the inter-mediary position between them. It would be interesting to explore that more if you want to.
That is an interesting interpretation, truth exists only for the sake of its subject. But I see truth as non-subjective, as simply existing. Like facts, or states of existence. Gravity for example, does not need any subjectivity to exist to understand it, gravity is what it is regardless. It is a fact that what we call gravity exists, and that fact is a fact whether humans know it or not. In that sense you can see that this fact does indeed exist purely for its own sake, even if it is about something else (about gravity, in this example).
Reality is what it is, it does not need to exist for the sake of any subjectivity (that we know of, maybe there is a higher God far above that sustains everything, a greater subjectivity in which all of reality is held, but even then there would therefore be other, equally greater truths which describe that situation and the how and why of that God-thing’s own existence not only in terms of its own subjectivity and that subjectivity which it sustains but also the more objective facts regarding its existence as such, how and why it is whatever it is and came to be, etc.). But the idea of truth for its own sake does have two meanings here, one is simply understanding that truth itself does not require subjective beings like humans to be what it is, that subjectivity or ‘wisdom’ are included within the truth but do not include the truth within themselves (entirely of course), but there is the other angle of meaning which involves how we value: Truth for its own sake can be an expression of valuing, how we value the idea of truth. Do we value truths only for how they affect us personally, or do we value them for their own sake of being what they are and regardless of their affect on us personally?
Obviously I prefer to value in the latter way, and I think all of science and philosophy is based on this approach. I doubt most of scientific and philosophic achievement was done under the valuing-intention of “how does this make my life personally better, how does this impact ME directly?” To me, viewing truth only in terms of what it can do for me personally would be a very selfish and small-sighted way of operating. I don’t think any philosopher could exist fully within such a mode of being, to have no real concern for what is true simply because it is true but only be concerned with whatever is good for oneself or how things impact oneself alone. Yet granted, we are subjective beings and that lens is always there, AND there is nothing wrong with valuing our own subjectivity and the wisdom involved in parsing truths in terms of that. Again, I see no real contradiction here between subjectivity and its wisdom on the one hand, and ‘valuing truth simply for its own sake regardless of how that impacts me or not’ on the other hand. Does this issue really need to be a black and white one? I really don’t think it is.
Sure, if you want to develop a form of power over something, including for yourself. Then power becomes your commanding value and you may end up using truths only in terms of how they expand your power or not. “To posit power as the subject of truth is a truthfulness” is very much something Nietzsche would have claimed with regard to his will to power. But how accurate is it? Power is one subject of truth, one of many possible subjects. Maybe from an evolutionary selective point of view, as how the universe develops, “power” as understood as the power to continue existing (self-valuing) can be seen as the subject of truth, for example truths could be seen as existing for the sake of subjects that self-value and everything in existence has come into existence only through that lens or requirement. If a thing lacks ‘power’ in this way, it does not exist, therefore it is not true anymore. If it existed in the past then it is true it existed in the past, but it no longer exists so it is no longer true in the present moment or context. But again, for me, truth is like a secondary reality, a metaphysical copy of existence that is simply a vast range of facts. Facts that exist in a way far closer to ‘ideas’ and philosophical Idealism. They exist, they are real, but they are not here or there, one place or another, they simply are. I view truth in that way, and then secondarily we can value or access that realm of “truth as such” however we want to. We can access it to achieve power or for the sake of our own subjectivity, or we can access it to achieve understanding of the natural world simply because we value that understanding even if it has no impact upon ourselves (or even if perhaps the knowledge is detrimental to ourselves). And probably for any number of other reasons too. So I separate truth itself, the domain of truth, as something fundamentally separate from how it is accessed and used by subjective beings. Maybe that gets more to the crux of our disagreement here, because it seems to me that you do not observe or think that such a thing exists as what I am describing as ‘a domain of truth itself’.
If that is so, then imagine this thought experiment: no subjective beings exist, none anywhere. No life forms, no material stuff. The universe is various other things, energies or whatever we want to conceptualize, but there are no subjectivities in existence; or, you can think of it in terms that yes there are some subjectivities in existence but only a limited number of them and their perspectives on existence are also very limited compared to the totality of all that exists. In these thought experiments, what is true? Is it not obvious that existence itself is far more than what a subjectivity experiences it as or thinks it is? Is it not obvious that even the greatest subjectivity must be anchored in existence by things far more objective than itself, and which if you trace it out will eventually leave itself and end up existing outside and far beyond that subjectivity, not dependent upon it at all? Oxygen for example. Just one simple example.
That is why it is hard for me to understand your position, or at least what seems to me like it is your position, that there is no such thing as truth itself beyond whatever subjectivities think it is. Maybe that is not your position, but I would like to understand better then what it is you think here.
That is true, and perhaps truth is like that. Or perhaps Nietzsche fell into his own subjectivity and mistook his own subjective lens for the truth itself. Did Nietzsche ever really prove or demonstrate that truth is like this, something alive, fickle and demanding like a woman? I remember from Thus Spoke Zarathustra he wrote about it in his very compelling aphoristic and poetic style there, he certainly achieved a description of what he thought about it. But does that go so far as to make a convincing argument or claim that it is actually true? Or was it just something interesting that Nietzsche wanted to be true, or thought would be an interesting way of looking at it? I am asking because I don’t know. I have never stopped to think about it before and to do so would take a lot of time that I don’t have right now because I want to finish responding to your total post. But let’s come back and explore that further, I am going to open a separate topic for it in Philosophy here so I don’t forget.
I was at a loss for a better old Greek word to use, aletheia was the closest I could find to my meaning. I do wish there were a better word for it, something that simply means truth itself as simply all that exists, reality, everything that is. But I have found that, very strangely, almost no one I have met and discussed this with seems to understand what I mean by that. Or they do not agree that is what truth is. To me this is very odd indeed, because it could not be more obvious and simple.
Maybe there is a better ancient Greek word I can use than aletheia, please let me know if you have any ideas. Ousia does not work, although I did consider ontos. Still, I do like aletheia in terms of a-lethe, a not-forgetting. I do not share Heidegger’s full interpretation of aletheia as merely the revealing act alone. I use it much more broadly.
“So truth as disclosure, or truth as always even present all of reality?” ← both of these at the same time gets closer to my meaning, although the latter is closest. For indeed there are hidden truths, we know this; because of the existence of many truths which are either unknown or hidden, not yet disclosed, aletheia must be seen beyond merely the disclosing or revealing. But by including the disclosing-revealing I do aim to capture something about truth, something maybe more essential to the human approach and valuing of truth rather than a flat purely objective view.
In a way, truth is always “known” even if no one knows it. Can that make sense? Truth is always known to itself, exists to itself, or it can be said to simply exist as such. No subjectivity is needed to understand a true thing for that thing to be true. And how I see it, this is already a kind of disclosing-revealing, even if no subjectivities are around to know it.
“Would full disclosure not be a collapse of the probability function.” ← yes perhaps. I have not thought about that very much yet. But I wonder if truths are so embedded absolutely in the metaphysical nature of existence that disclosing them always happens only in part, or partial to some other event or process that is far-reaching enough to be able to sustain said truth without total collapse of probability. Like passing one copy off from another, truth being purely metaphysical can be copied infinitely without degrading the original. Hence allusion here to simulation theory and all that other fun stuff we were talking about before.
Likewise it is interesting to me to consider how truth is already in a default state of disclosure with respect to itself, to other nearby truths and to the wider ‘truth as such’ or even some kind of imagined God-perspective be that a proper subjectivity or something else. But in terms of probability functions, that is a very interesting point you bring up because it implies a very weird idea that the more we disclose truths the more we are also collapsing-limiting the possibilities of what reality is or can be… although I am not sure truth really works like that, because again even if it did there would still be another layer of truth ‘above’ that which describes exactly how and why that is happening. So even if the truth that is collapsed collapses a probability function, there should be other more meta probability functions from which derivations (copies?) of the original can still subsist or be understood of in terms outside that of the collapsed version or specific reality-branch.
I don’t think I understand your question enough, can you clarify what you are asking? For me, experience here is indeed meant as direct, real world down to earth experience, raw, gritty, risky even (getting back to what you wrote earlier) and almost undeniable. Just there. That kind of unmediated encounter. Whitehead had this similar notion with interaction, if I remember correctly, and I think VO utilizes this idea in the same or very similar way as a foundation.
I have not analyzed this form of experience yet to see all of its particulars and such, because that was not really the point of me selecting the word. I selected it because it seemed closest to the meaning I was seeing, along with the word for truth, and I needed a word for both truth and experience to put together into a single word to create an extension of ‘philo-sophy’ which I believe both extends but also completes or goes beyond, heals the errors and limits of, philosophy. I think the philosophy of the future is or must be alethempeiria. That thing itself, what I am describing by using the word “alethempeiria” is the point and meaning of this topic, not so much analyzing and breaking down the specific meanings of the parts of the word itself and if I could perhaps have chosen better words for it. Not to say it isn’t good and useful to do that too, I am fine with that, so long as we keep our primary focus and context on the topic itself being that which is meant to be indicated, grasped and understood by the word. To me, words are just sign-posts to concepts or meanings, indicating portions of reality (truth). So while it is often interesting to analyze words themselves I usually remain focused on the meaning behind them. But I do think you have a point here asking about the nature of this particular experience, and I want to elaborate and explore that more so please clarify your question when you can
Well, you do sound as if you’ve grown up in the past year or so—all calm and all—, but I find it hard to believe: hence this post.
There’s really only one alternative, though. We’ll have to test and taste you to see if yours is really the alternative to that alternative.
I think it’s rather as follows. Only very few philosophers, if they are indeed exceptions, have stopped at the point where they thought they were pursuing truth for its own sake, had completely rid themselves of every dark, deep backdrop of false judgment, every partiality, limitation, and (evolutionary- and group-)psychological impetus—the cave, as Plato called it.
Ah yes, those picturesque, naïve philosophers of old… But what if those weren’t really all that naïve? What if that was their disguise, even as poetry had long been their disguise, and being a political academic is their disguise today? You may have misunderstood them as well as yourself.
“Wisdom” was what the philosophers called it when they were still in pursuit of the world beyond the cave. They subsequently kept the name, and the myth of the cave, not for theoretical but for practical reasons.
Taken in context, and I was wondering if anyone would pick up on this and ask for details, this is based on flourishing human relationships based on absolute truth, which you can think of as either non-judgment or radical acceptance, but also in terms of sharing in the truth. Valuing the truth deeply and sharing that as part of your connection. I already conditioned the statement to my own experience, and it includes pretty much what you would expect: friendship, love, colleagues. And then there are philosophers, the few I have known in my life. It is only in relationships with fellow philosophers that I have found what can be called “pure human relations”. At least that became my standard for it. Maybe other people have other standards, maybe they don’t mind the small-mindedness, the judgment or confusions, the deliberate errors, the lack of concern for the truth, the pettiness, the demanding nature, the passive aggression or whatever other things people commonly put up with or do in their human relationships. But for me, I have found something much more rewarding, and again it was only through philosophy this was achieved (in a stable way, mind you; I did of course find very potent and enjoyable experiences in relationships based on love, but because it lacked truth-concern these inevitably degraded over time and would have become a net loss had I not been able to philosophically integrate the experiences back within myself after the fact).
What is the “one alternative” you refer to? Drugs? Naw, I have tried that too. Not even close to philosophy. Certainly not in terms of the quality, content and value of human relationships that can be sustained with drugs as compared to with philosophy.
Could be that I am not drunk at the moment, or when I wrote the OP.
It was never my intention to claim that ridding oneself entirely of those things is even possible. If you think that is what I was getting at then you missed the point.
The pursuit of truth simply because it is true, and for no other reason. That is what I am talking about. And yes I am separating that from the pleasurability and what is probably deep authentic curiosity and work-effort of the philosophers, which probably drove them to do and write as they did. Granted I was a bit heavy-handed with the approach in the OP, which does tend to obscure the point here; but that point is merely a side-issue used to leverage the key point which is the importance of truth-experience replacing wisdom-love.
What are they hiding from? I can’t see it. I have no reason to think they were hiding from anything. Of course some of them wrote cryptically, disguising the truth such as for example aphoristically. There are multiple reasons for that, I have also disguised or hidden certain truths too, on multiple occasions although only because I believed those truths too harmful to the situation or discussion at hand, or generally too harmful or dangerous to disclose publicly. But that is only a very small portion of the overall philosophical work, and merely acts as reasonable and measured caution and good-will toward the reader. Not as any kind of example of “disguise”.
I was also not intending to call the old philosophers naive, and I don’t believe I did.
Your point therefore is supposed to be: well maybe the old philosophers didn’t very well example truth-love for its own sake, but they were just disguising that part of themselves by hiding behind their words and roles… um, what? I mean if you genuinely believe that then ok, but I see no reason to believe it or suppose it even makes any sense why they could conceal something like that, and you have not given any reason why we might suppose it either.
And again, I admit to being overly heavy-handed in the OP on this point. It is not the crucial point of this topic, in any case.
Yes, and in that sense you are right, they did seek truth for its own sake or at least the truth as such, although again if for no other reason than to remove their chains. I will stipulate that an authentic truth-love is not mutually exclusive to the desire to remove one’s chains. To them, it probably seemed very wise to seek that, after all who would not want to seek freedom from his own slavery?
But my point was also that the notion of wisdom also includes times when we should NOT pursue or adhere to truth for its own sake, for example if that truth is harmful or threatening to us in some way. This is a common theme in the modern world, people at their jobs or just in life generally often avoid admitting certain truths because of their own cognitive dissonance, or because they know it would cause some harm or risk to themselves. They are better off not knowing, as they see it. I am not making the case that the old philosophers were operating like that, I am making the case that the notion of wisdom itself (in terms of the sophos of philosophy) already includes this very kind of ‘acts of deliberately self-limiting one’s knowledge for the sake of some personal good or at least of avoidance of some personal bad’.
Do you agree with that, or not? And if not, then why not?
Of course. Reality is already in your face, it is very direct. Mythologizing or reifying the various cases of natural deceptions and clever disguises doesn’t belie the point. Even the shimmering rocks as seen through the river are showing you direct, unmediated reality-encounter. There is no “illusion” once you factor in the totality of the truth-context involved. Illusion only appears under guise of false limitation of purview, a lack of proper concern (for the truth).
Face value revelation is the starting point. When errors arise, you analyze them. You face them directly too, and apply your full arsenal to understand them, to raise and expand the context until the error is incorporated back into a larger paradigm. That is what truth-seeking is all about.
You brought up morality, that is a good addition to this discussion. Loving wisdom alone would not (necessarily) result in a proper understanding of good and bad, because to love wisdom also means to love that which has been useful, inherited or passed on or is part of the social context, or which is actually good for you personally and therefore may be at odds with truth-statements or questionings that could threaten or limit that. Wisdom is also a collective endeavor, socially-contextually embedded insofar at least as we are already social beings and depend on one another for our survival and thriving. But I will argue that a proper understanding of good and bad will necessarily arise from truth-experience, alethempeiria taken as the continuation and next step of philosophy, precisely because this understanding is rooted in the perfect junction between what is true and what is experienced. Good and bad are eminently personal subjective experiences, yet they are also eminently indicative of deep and powerful truth-contents. The only way to parse that supposed opposition, without falling into the subjective preference as happens often enough under the guise of valuing wisdom over the truth, certainly also at risk for similar enough reasons when factoring all of this under the lens of love, as in classical philosophical approaches for example, …the only way would be to instantiate the actual reality and process itself as your own active and intentional processes as such. That is what truth-experience is meant to be: a mirror and perfect representation of what actually exists, how things really are…
…and now you brought me to a new and very powerful insight, for which I must thank you: Alethempeiria is an example of self-valuing. Rather, it simply aims to make self-valuing itself the process of doing philosophy.
How can that last above statement make sense in opposition to the context of traditional wisdom vis a vis its meaning within philosophy?
Maybe opposition is not required. After all, one does not need to entirely oppose something to build upon it.
Truth-experience as a process and intention meant to replace and build upon the love of wisdom of classical philosophizing. Self-valuing? These are like a bisection of dimensions forming a critical point. Tectonically collapsed along ever-escalating lines into the center. If nothing else this serves as a test for the OP:
Alethempeiria: Direct encounter with reality, with the truth, this already supposes experience. Knowledge cannot exist outside of experience, the phenomenological category here is absolutely essential. Husserl did good work in this space, eidetic reduction for example. Not sure about his maths and such, but anyway.
Self-Valuing: Nature of reality, of all things, necessary interpretation-encounter done in terms of that which one is, valued accordingly; existence is not ‘flat’ but every instance of existence contained Being, beings, instances great or small of vortexes of valuation centered around a ‘self’, a center that directs and channels valuing (interpretations, encounters, ‘wills’) as such and for its own sake.
Really incredible to bring these two notions into close proximity like this. The resonance is absolutely astounding.
Alethempeiria aims to replace philosophy (the will under love, as loving wisdom) with what is otherwise aimed to be a perfect representation of how reality itself actually is, but as process, you might say as epistemology via empiricism which shares the root for experience with alethempeiria. Knowledge via experience, and no silly Kantian distinctions of supposed faculties here are needed. I get why he did that, but he lived a long time ago. It was time to move on already.
Philosophy tacitly does aim to make of itself a representation of how reality actually is and works, but I think this is too indirect, not realized enough in intention and even most philosophers probably don’t understand this about it. But truth is like that, a master concept and absolute final attractor point: it pulls everything in toward itself because it IS everything ALREADY. The ultimate gravity. If love is the gravity of the soul, as Abstract said, then truth is the gravity of all existence. Alethempeiria aims to use this insight to re-think the process of philosophizing, so we can prioritize what must be prioritized and form proper hierarchies of value all the way down from the top. Only by doing that can we really contextualize this, and the ‘cosmic ascension’ that implicitly and esoterically underlies all of the philosophical works and achievements. Spirit appears here–what? I suspect I have already lost most of you, which was not my intention. But it must be said, the furthest tectonic convergences and correspondences are not only not belied by philosophy but are indeed necessarily called upon and required by it. Anyone who does not at least intuitively grasp this fact is simply put, not capable of philosophy or at least not outside of some very narrow ranges with pre-determined limits and boundaries (functionalized ignorances).
The next steps:
How is self-valuing an example of alethempeiria?
How is alethempeiria an example of self-valuing?
Holy shit, that is fucking powerful.
I will leave it to you all to decide where we go from here. I can answer any questions you might have in the meantime. And I still want to convince you, the reader, of the importance of replacing and building upon philosophy with direct truth-experience and with its necessary component of adherence to truth as such and for its own sake. But maybe this is something that must be felt to be understood, or must be personally experienced at the limits of philosophy. Or at least at the limits of one’s self, subjectively-speaking at those thresholds where self and other become difficult to untangle or where self becomes not unstable per se but, maybe less predictable, less requisite to what otherwise had been well understood as important or critical ‘tasks at hand’ and the new variance here speaks to some other possibility not yet fully understood. In any case just read the OP since the primary impetus and argument is already in there.
Commentator in low voice: The male philosopher makes a colourful display and struts before the female, hoping she will select him. She responds encouragingly but multiple other males distract her with their own peculiar show of faux intellectual pride. The female loses interest, leaving the males to crap on each other.
Is this where muihammad steps in and rapes his 9 year old slaves? But I guess in your mind that is ok because it’s not as bad as a 3 year old (your words) ??
Stupid Islamotrash. Better stay away. This is truth space. You and your ilk are not welcome.
But what if those weren’t really all that naïve? What if that was their disguise, even as poetry had long been their disguise, and being a political academic is their disguise today? You may have misunderstood them as well as yourself.