all great thinkers are traps

The trap is that they promise a key to the exit, but this promise is the trap.
The greater the thinker, the greater the labyrynth (how the hell do you spell that word) and it lures you to think and to do all sorts of stuff, but it does not release you from the itchy feeling that lured you tp this thinker in the first place; the feeling that there is something to be found out about life.
The only thing that separates a great thinker from you (I’m talking to myself in the first place) is that he hads managed to disguise his personal itchy feeling in literary style, and actually wrote a pretty good book.
Therefore, I feel I may conclude that there are no great thinkers, there are only decent writers. This woud at least be a way to get out of the various traps these writers have placed; to see them for their actual accomplishments, not for their effects and illusions.

thanks for, I don’t know, reading, I guess.
Jake

Could you cite some specific examples? What great thinkers? How do they lure people into a trap? Do you draw a distinction between, say, Locke and Nietsche, or Aquinus and William James? They are quite differant, you know. Could you be more specific, please.

Is it really the case the Eisnstein merely wrote better than other physicist of his time? I don’t think that he was a particularly accomplished writer. He was, however, a great thinker, and his ideas, not the way they were expressed, were what garnered him fame.

And I may be wrong, but I believe it is said that Sartre is the only philosopher to win the Nobel prize. Wouldn’t it be the case that more had won if what you say is true?

Yes, I didn’t mean scientists, but philosophers. And poets, in as far as they are thinkers. Anyone who proposes a meaning or an essence.
The noble prize is just another prize awarded by people. I don’t think it can be used as a standard. Also because it is relatively new.

But what if they don’t (just) promise it, but present it?

I used to be uncertain about this too, but then I’d just pronounce it in the Greek: then it becomes clear that it’s not “Labirunthos”, but “Laburinthos”.

Is this feeling what leads all those interested in philosophy to such thinkers? I believe you might have inserted your parenthesis - “(I’m talking to myself in the first place)” - at this point already.

If you mean Literature, then Russell and Camus were awarded one too. And Bergson, I think.

If philosophers are traps, do you think that philosophy too is some sort of quicksand ?

Good post.

I get your point.

It would appear that “great thinkers”, especially those who are so busy thinking in puzzles that they forget to feel, indeed that they forget to live their one and only very life to its balanced completeness, are doing precisely that: thinking to avoid feeling their “painful” feelings and the associated difficult realities of whole life.

These are the ones who would suck you into their own private trap, their own personal paradigmic denial cult, so that if you buy into it, they “justify” their thinking-addiction coping mechanism through having proselytized you.

That you have been left feeling unfulfilled by a descent into their hell hole speaks heavenly in your favor.

They’re coming out of the god damn walls!

(sorry Jake, I couldn’t come up with a better response)

Hello Jakob:

— The trap is that they promise a key to the exit, but this promise is the trap.
The greater the thinker, the greater the labyrynth (how the hell do you spell that word) and it lures you to think and to do all sorts of stuff, but it does not release you from the itchy feeling that lured you tp this thinker in the first place; the feeling that there is something to be found out about life.
O- Are we talking about great thinkers or great religions here, or is it perhaps they are both the same when taken as “promises” or “a” key?

— The only thing that separates a great thinker from you (I’m talking to myself in the first place) is that he hads managed to disguise his personal itchy feeling in literary style, and actually wrote a pretty good book.
Therefore, I feel I may conclude that there are no great thinkers, there are only decent writers.
O- But isn’t just that process of disguise and stylization which one could call indeed his prowess as a thinker? Just asking…

— This woud at least be a way to get out of the various traps these writers have placed; to see them for their actual accomplishments, not for their effects and illusions.
O- But where were these illusions? In the books of these great thinkers or in the mind of the reader predisposed to fall in traps of his own desire, for meaning, for greatness, that a genius exist? Socrates’ opponents got mad and often they took him as educator, as an expert on this or that other subject of the discussion…yet he only knew that he knew nothing. He made an invitation into an examination, but in those early dialogues, at least, the matters were left in aporia.

Some years ago, maybe two years ago, there was a commercial in american television of a couple of kids sitting on a rainbow. One asks about what if the rainbow did not exist…or something like that…the rainbow opens up and let’s that kid fall into an abyss, while the other kid is just fine up in the rainbow. There are many points which could be made, but I will mark only one. In my opinion the kid will not fall forever and will eventually land on another rainbow or a cloud, or a bridge or a mountain…whatever the thing under his feet he can and will always have the possibility to doubt that and just as soon will he start to believe wholeheartly in another thing.

Great thinkers don’t write to satisfy little men.

Perhaps each great thinker spends a lifetime unknowingly trying to understand 'one piece of the ‘puzzle’ of human existance … later eloquently postulating his/her position as complete ‘truth’ … the illusion that this ‘one piece’ represents the entire puzzle.

Marx wrote "“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”

Philosophical writings can be a filler of the void within, but it seems that many times all they do is end up stretching out that void and eventually falling out, leaving one feeling even more isolated from any semblance of “truth or comfort.”

Thus the soul wanders ever after to find the philosophical writings that will close the gap, squeeze to destroy the hole and create the whole.

Maybe the true philosopher, as opposed to the one who just reads others (like myself), uses philosophy to destroy any assumptions he finds detestable and builds the world around his own stones. But this takes some strength - stength to believe and not to yield.

:frowning:

Jakob, you sound betrayed and somewhat depressed by the realization that a particular religious/philosophical writing was unable to ease your philosophical “itch”. I hope it cheers you up somewhat to hear me say that I think this depth of perception is what made you a welcome contributor to my thread. Easing your itch however is something I say you have to do yourself.

In my view that life is a reaction to the void the trap is already set. It is the void. I suggest that at sometime along our line of evolution a better thinker came up with the notion of trying to fill the void, tried and gave the effort to the mass of average thinkers. Each successive generation of better thinkers realized that their inherited effort to fill the void could not and thus they tried but always failed to modify it so that it could fill the void. The consequences of these efforts are the present variety of ways we try to fill the void which include our religious/philosophical reaction to the void. Average thinkers don’t question them but better thinkers are always trying to improve our inheritances with the same results. So I suggest we need a generation of “great thinkers” who realize the void can not be filled and that the ideal reaction to the void is to reach out to the limits of our capacities, to others and to God, to become what we are capable of being.

Thanks for the responses.
Sabrina, thanks. Coping mechanism, yes; Instead of a key, something to justify the entrapment.

Sauwelios: A key to what? Does it get you out of something you were actually in, or does the prison come with the discovery of the key?
A key is, in any case, the suggestion of a door. That is a very powerful and dangerous suggestion. I wonder if you are prepared to think this through.

Lucious; quicksand is deadly isnt it? That’s one step too far; movies and radio shows can kill, books as far as I know can’t. (they can move to kill, but anything can do that to an unbalanced person)

Someone; Well… thanks, anyway.

Omar; The Bible would count as a trap as well, if that’s what you mean.
And yes, the trap is in the style, the style is the art.
Maybe you’re right about the kid, but I would think he falls to the earth and has a real life there.

Impious; I suppose you implied I am a little man and you a big one.
I rather liked your ‘my Zarathustra.’ Add a little more spice and I might one day think of you as a trap.

Pilgrim; I completely agree with that.

Nothingness - I rather think that the true philosopher, who actually destroys assumtions builds new ones, is the trap. The lesser thinker, who fails to fill the void in the reader does not entrap him.

DEB; I think that a new generation of thinkers would ideally be occupied with practical, sobering thought. Philosophy and religion have been nothing short of hysterical the past ages.
Reaching out to ones full potential is good, but to what end? What are we capable of being if we don’t have ground to stand on?

Jakob wrote:

Very interesting, though it seems more like you have issue, that you apparently didnt get the truth you wanted or where looking for. It may be the case ‘Great thinkers’ have no truth or anything other than a manipulating writing style/orating style. However, in the case your describing, you represent you have the ‘feeling’ there is a truth. (your belief has brought you there) You also believe that someone else has at least this feeling and moreover the ‘Great thinker’ may even be saying he/she has the overall solution. If its as simple as this, then we may say you dont understand their solution or at very least are not persuaded and from that we may not infer they are manipulators but just we are unsatisfied or disappointed. But of course its not as simple as this. You appear to be saying you now have the ‘truth’ this then, gives you the ability to see past the ‘trap’ that ‘Great thinkers’ present. Which of course they dont have the ‘truth’ Thats great, however with this form of skepticism you implied, we can only be left to think your ‘truth’ is undermined aswell, and further that, we may not say there is truth, but say we cannot know any form of truth.

Jakob, I suggest we are not now but could be on solid biological “ground”. Reaching out th the limits of our capacities, to others and to God is natural biological activity that we begin at conception and by it every one of us replicates the life of humanity. Now, as I said to Sauwelios in his thread “The Meaning of Existence”, “The ‘whither’ of…(this) ideal reaction to the void is the ‘situation’ of self-realization; but the why, neither the reason, the cause and the purpose”, “to what end?”, we do not know. It is a mystery, unlike the “whither” of “the unnatural religious/philosophically motivated activity of trying to fill the void” that clearly separates us from our “ground”; and we know ends and will end in self-destruction. So, we don’t know before we start, the “end” of self-realization. At least by becoming what (we are) capable of being we enable the possibility of discovering why.

Given our history Jakob, I think you will know what I mean when I say we have this choice. We can continue to pick the rose and suffer death by the thousand cuts of its ‘thorns’ or we can simply “reach out…” and smell the rose; and possibly discover why.

Maybe the great thinker shows you that you are imprisoned or, at least, explains to you the nature of the prison you’re in.

Well, you were the one who introduced the symbol of the key. I was rather thinking of the following:

“According to another version, Ariadne did not give him a ball of thread, but a luminous crown which she had received as a wedding gift from Dionysus. It was by the light of this crown that Theseus was able to find his way in the dark Labyrinth.”
http://www.winshop.com.au/annew/CoronaBorealis.html

Zara: I certainly don’t have ‘the’ truth, although I do have reached, once again, a truth. But this truth is incommunicable, it is private, intimate, even.
Holding this truths hand I can think properly, in accordance with my own nature. This truth, then, is self knowledge. From this it should be clear that no other thinker could ever present a truth to me. He can suggest, they all can suggest. But that is the danger with a great thinker / writer; he suggests that truth is interpersonal.

DEB; I like the roses metaphor. And I agree that we cannot precisely know what we will accomplish before we accomplish it. But I have certain purposes, certain goals, which are at the limit of my potential as I conveice it. They are well defined goals, and even if I don’t know how I will turn out I know that I certainly have a definite idea of how they will turn out - if I succeed. So the question is: do we focus on the thing we aim to create, or on ourself?

Sauwelios: The great thinker suggest (as you do) that I am imprisonned - thereby trying to imprison me in his fable of liberation. When it makes for a good story I am tempted to buy into it. But both religion and philosophy are without substance, as they never lead to tangible results, only to more and more branches of the idea of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ and distract from tangible reality, which, to a creative mind, is freedom.

“I think that a new generation of thinkers would ideally be occupied with practical, sobering thought.”

Wow! …

Homosapiens survived the ice age … dinosaurs did not.

Perhaps “hegemony” is simply a ‘morphed’ rendition of ‘dinosaurs’ …

I would agree that he becomes a trap to others.

Indeed to a degree.